Lisandro E. Claudio. Taming People's Power: The EDSA Revolutions and Their Contradictions. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2013, 240p.

Abstract

Taming People's Power: The EDSA Revolutions and Their ContradictionsLISANDRO E. CLAUDIOQuezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2013, 240p.People is the foundationalist myth of the ruling Aquino which began with the presidency of Corazon (Cory) C. Aquino who replaced the fallen dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos in 1986 and which continues under the presidency of her son, Benigno (Noynoy) S. Aquino, III, which will end in mid-2016. The Aquinos and their yellow crowd elite supporters claim legitimacy based on a divinely sanctioned popular uprising against an evil dictator re-establishing a righteous democracy. People power also gained international prominence as one of the first televised revolutions, with the plucky Cory Aquino defeating the wily dictator Marcos, leading to a heroic transition to democracy. That this piece of political folklore has lost appeal for most Filipinos who remain poor and are now often disillusioned with this once new political order is evidenced by the dwindling crowds at the annual celebration of power. The themselves seem to have abandoned the idea of people power.No recent book captures the ambiguous legacy of better than the work of the young Ateneo historian Lisandro E. Claudio. What Claudio has done in this book is quite extraordinary. He systematically distinguishes two formations, the official, yellow narrative and the anti-people National Democratic discourse of the communist left (later in the study it becomes evident that he analyzes a third discursive alternative as well: the subaltern perspective of laborers on the Aquino-Cojuangco owned Hacienda Luisita). Claudio then examines how these discourses are literally monumentalized and the message this political architecture is trying to convey. These material commemorations of the anti-Marcos struggle culminating in the mass uprising against Marcos that he examines are, on the one hand, the quasi-official of the Shrine of Mary Queen of Peace, popularly known as the Our Lady EDSA shrine and the Bantayog ng mga Bayani (Monument of Heroes) of the left.Beyond this Claudio then undertakes an ambitious and revealing case study of how people power is viewed in Hacienda Luisita, the great plantation of the landlord-politician Aquino- Cojuangco dynasty. But he also shows how the role of the communist left is viewed ambivalently by the sugar plantation workers, many of whom were caught up in violence initiated by the strike breaking landlords but also instrumentalized by the left.The book is well written in a sophisticated, but intelligible post-modern style, with key theoretical insights effectively used to clarify Claudio's discursive approach to recent Philippine history. The result is a study full of more insights about recent Philippine politics than any other I have read in past decade. Claudio constructs a theoretical framework for the book drawn from memory studies to reconstruct the people narrative. He invokes Foucault's regime of truth, a provisional . . . product of the capillary movement of knowledge-power-but may nevertheless coalesce into identifiable discursive formations (pp. 5-6). Not a mere top-down ideology like the authoritarian developmentalist one of the Marcos era, the mainstream discourse was created by the Church hierarchy, middle class activists, big business, and traditional politicians. But Claudio is not content with just analyzing the official story which deemphasizes the role played by ordinary Filipinos who overthrew Marcos in favor of the Godgiven- miracle explanation of EDSA (the major Manila street after which people power is often known in the Philippines). …