Schiphol, homeward bound. Amsterdam airport is a million times more congenial for the blogger than crowded rip-off Heathrow, where Internet access is via a stand-up console and it is impossible to have more than one window open at any time.
Anyway, Randy David ponders the possibility, even the likelihood, of a middle-class coup against the flailing president in today's column. He starts from the assumption that the current situation "is not politically sustainable" and goes on to argue that "sheer hunger will not spark a social revolution. For it is not hunger alone that grips the poor; they are also seized by a paralyzing helplessness that takes away the volatility from their anger." I agree with that.
David reckons the greatest threat to Gloria will come from the middle class:
"in the final analysis, it is not the poor who pose a threat to Gloria, but rather the educated and the middle class who voted for her. They had set aside their deep doubts about her capacity to turn the country around, and supported her on the belief that an opposition win would spell a sure catastrophe. But now that she is safely President, they are not about to make it easy for her."
It is true that revolutions have typically been led by intellectuals (such as teachers) and an exasperated, squeezed petit bourgeoisie, rather than by oppressed workers or peasants. Still, it seems to me that there is one important difference between the situation in, say, Russia in 1917 and that in the Philippines today. Thanks to globalization, the Philippine middle-class no longer has to either put up with the current situation or try to change it. It has an attractive third option: leave. The balikbayan alternative is critical to understanding why the current rotten system persists, because many of the people who might be capable of changing it are in San Francisco or Milan. Ironically, their remittances to their families actually keep the current system afloat, by staving off a foreign exchange crisis. No wonder the political class continually praises the overseas Filipino worker.
Still, if Randy David is right and Gloria's "natural allies" are about to to turn against her (he says that "the question is not whether she will last, but how long?") what can we expect in her place?
This description of Germany in the early 20th century rang a few bells with me:
In the twenty-five years before the 1914 the Mittelstand (often described as the the losers in the proicess of modernization) had come under increasing economic pressure of large-scale corporate business from above and the increasing social pressure of organized labour from below. This had already produced a move towards a right-wing radicalism -- militant, anti-semitic, nationalistic -- in Mittelstand politics. In post-war Germany, with its political instability, scenes of violemnce and inflation, the Mittelstand felt additionally threatened by the crumbling of familiar landmarks and accepted values and by insecurity about its future." [Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: parallel lives, p. 74]
The Philippines is not going to take such a radical course as Germany in the 1920s, but many of the features that Bullock talks about ("the crumbling of familiar landmarks and accepted values and ... insecurity about its future") are already among us, making some form of "right-wing radicalism" attractive to a desperate middle class. Stand up Ping Lacson and Bayani Fernando -- your time is at hand.
Comments