Revolution “from the Middle”: Class Power, Democracy, and Middle-Class Narratives in the Philippines, Venezuela, and Ecuador

by Celso M. Villegas

M.A. Brown University, 2005 B.A. Connecticut College, 2003

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Sociology at Brown University

Providence, Rhode Island May 2012

Copyright © 2012

Celso M. Villegas

This dissertation by Celso M. Villegas is accepted in its present form by the Department of Sociology as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Date ______Jose Itzigsohn, Chair

Date ______Patrick Heller, Reader

Date ______James Mahoney, Reader

Date ______Richard Snyder, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date ______Peter M. Weber, Ph.D Dean of the Graduate School

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CELSO M. VILLEGAS Department of Sociology, Ralston House Kenyon College Gambier, Ohio 43022 (740) 427-5794 [email protected]

Research Interests

Democracy and Development Political regimes, political economy, Latin America, Philippines Political Sociology Class formation, middle-class politics Comparative-Historical Methods Temporality, methods of causal inference

Academic Appointments______

2011- Present. Kenyon College Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in International Studies Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology

Education

2012. Brown University, Ph.D. Sociology

Dissertation: “Revolution from the Middle: Class Power, Democracy, and Middle-Class Narratives in the Philippines, Venezuela, and Ecuador” Committee: José Itzigsohn (chair), Patrick Heller, James Mahoney, Richard Snyder

2005. Brown University, M.A. Sociology

Thesis: “The Clash of Citizenships: Structure, History, and Societal Reaction in Peru, Bolivia, and Venezuela, 1980-2005” Advisor: James Mahoney Reader: René Antonio Mayorga

2003. Connecticut College, B.A. Sociology (minor Government) With distinction, summa cum laude

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Additional Training

2006. Institute for Qualitative Research Methods (IQRM), Arizona State University. Intensive training in qualitative methods – case selection, fuzzy-set social science, causal inference, process tracing, historiography, archival research

Publications

2010. “Revolution 'from the Middle': Historical Events, Narrative, and the Making of the Middle Class in the Contemporary Developing World.” Political Power and Social Theory, 21: 301-314.

2007. (with James Mahoney). “Historical Enquiry in Comparative Politics” in The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics, Susan Stokes and Carles Boix, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Presented Papers

2011. “Comparative History and Middle-Class Formation: New Narrative Directions.” Presented at the annual meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society, February 2011.

2009. “Reason for Pasyon: From „Revolution‟ to „Middle-Class Values‟ in the Philippines, 1970s-2005.” Presented at the 2nd annual Boston University Conference on East Asia, February 2009.

2008. “Revolution from the Middle: Middle-Class Consciousness and Revolution in Venezuela and Ecuador.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the New England Council for Latin American Studies, October 2008.

2008. “Time-Sensitivity and Comparative-Historical Methods: Temporality and the Techniques of the late “Second Wave.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, August 2008.

2008. “Middle-Class Formation and Revolution in Ecuador, 1970s-2006.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, March 2008.

2007. “Of Miracles and Middle Forces: The Social Construction of Middle-Class Consciousness in the Philippines, 1970s-2006.” Paper presented at the Third World Studies Center, University of the Philippines-Diliman, Octoboer 2007.

2007. “Distinction and Democracy: Towards a Theory of Middle-Class Formation in Latin America in the Post-Third Wave.” Paper presented at the XVI Latin American Studies Association Congress, August 2007.

2006. “Red Atlantis: Path Dependence and the Ironies of the Native American Reservation System, 1871-2005.” Roundtable paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, August 2006.

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Manuscripts under Review or in Progress

“Comparative History and Middle-Class Formation: New Narrative Directions” [in progress]

“Time-Sensitivity and Comparative-Historical Methods: Temporality and the Techniques of the late “Second Wave” [in progress]

“Reason for Pasyon: Transforming Revolution from Popular Discourse to „Middle-Class Values‟ in the Philippines” [in progress]

Teaching

Instructor Brown University, Department of Sociology SOC0111 - “Social Change, Dictatorship, and Democracy.” Summer '09-'11 SOC1870B - “Seminar in Contemporary Political Sociology.” Spring '10

Writing Consultant Roth Writing Center, Connecticut College, January 2001 – May 2003

Teaching Interests Political Economy of Development Political Sociology Latin American Politics and Society Comparative-Historical Analysis Sociological Theory (Classic, Contemporary) Class and Class Formation

Research Experience

Visiting Researcher May-August 2008. Centro de Estudios de Desarrollo (CENDES), Universidad Central de Venezuela

January-April 2008. Programa de Estudios Políticos, Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, Sede Ecuador (FLACSO-Ecuador)

June-October 2007. Third World Studies Center (TWSC), University of the Philippines- Diliman

Research Assistant Summer 2003, 2004-2005. For James Mahoney. Book project, Colonialism and Development: Spanish America in Comparative Perspective.

Summer 2002. For Nina Crespo. Various Projects, Department of Linguistics, Pontifica Universidad Católica de Valparaíso.

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Awards, Fellowships, and Grants

2011-2013. Kenyon Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in International Studies 2007-2008. Brown University Graduate School Manning II Dissertation Fellowship 2004. Tinker Foundation Predissertation Travel Grant 2003-2004. Brown University Graduate School University Fellowship 2003. University of Notre Dame Minority Graduate Fellowship (declined) 2003. Pi Sigma Alpha 2002. Phi Beta Kappa 2002. Connecticut College Winthrop Scholar 1999. Connecticut College Lawrence Scholar

Language Proficiency

English (fluent) Spanish (ACTFL rating of Advanced High) Tagalog (basic comprehension)

Professional Activity

Professional Memberships American Sociological Society Section on Comparative and Historical Sociology Section on Political Sociology Section on Teaching and Learning

American Political Science Association Latin American Studies Association

Panel Organizer 2008. (with Andrea Maldonado) “Perspectives on the Middle Class: Past, Present, and Future.” meeting of the New England Council of Latin American Studies, Providence, RI, October 8, 2008.

Conference/Meeting Organizer 2007. (co-organizer) Third Annual Inter-Ivy Sociological Symposium (IISS), Brown University

2006-2007. (co-organizer) Brown University Graduate Workshop on Latin American Politics, Culture, and Society (PCS)

Departmental Service 2006-2007. Graduate Student Liaison, Department of Sociology Solomon Center for Teaching and Learning

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Personal

Full Name: Celso Miguel Luis Moreto Villegas Nickname: Oslec Date of Birth: November 8, 1980 City of Birth: Manila, Philippines Ethnicity: Filipino Citizenship: United States of America

References

José Itzigsohn Associate Professor, Department of Sociology Brown University Box 1916 Providence, RI 02912 (401) 863-2528 [email protected]

Patrick Heller Associate Professor, Department of Sociology Brown University Box 1916 Providence, RI 02912 (401) 863-7465 [email protected]

James Mahoney Associate Professor, Departments of Sociology and Political Science Northwestern University Scott Hall 601 University Place Evanston, IL 60208 (847) 491-2626 [email protected]

Richard Snyder Professor, Department of Political Science Brown University Box 1844 Providence, RI 02912 (401) 863-1578 [email protected]

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PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This dissertation is about the relationship between the middle class and democracy in the developing world. It argues that the balance of class power in the Philippines, Venezuela, and Ecuador expresses its influence on democracy through the stories told about the middle class – the narratives of the middle class’ origins, its purpose, and its future.

This project began as an observation in February 2005 when middle-class protesters in Quito, Ecuador forced out populist president Lucio Gutierrez. I was taking a course on states and social movements in the Andes with Rene Mayorga, a visiting scholar from Bolivia. The soon-to-be-called Rebelión de los Forajidos was a serendipitous pedagogical moment, and Rene compared it to the indigenous protests in

Bolivia that forced out Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada in 2003, and the 2002 protests that temporarily forced out Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. Perhaps I was a bad student because I do not recall the specifics of the class discussion, but I do remember posing to Rene that

Los Forajidos were similar to the protesters during People Power 2 or EDSA 2 who forced Joseph “Erap” Estrada from power (as it turns out, they were not). Later that semester, the Watson Institute hosted a conference on democracy in the Andes where I remember being preoccupied after a presentation on La Rebelión Forajida. When did these protests go from People Power to Rich People's Power, or was there any difference?

The idea to focus on the middle class came from an offhand comment from

Richard Snyder that there was a dearth of studies on the middle class in Latin America. I

ix remember Richard whipping out his copy of Collier and Collier's Shaping the Political

Arena (which he “[uses] every day”) and zeroing in on the single citation the Colliers used to define the middle class: John J. Johnson's 1958 text, The Emergence of the Middle

Sectors. Between 1958 and whenever it was Richard and I spoke, there had to have been something. But Richard was correct – if anything, Latin Americanists had avoided, even rejected the study of the middle class since many of the military dictatorships during the

1960s and 1970s were undergirded by middle-class support.

With my first real sense of scholarly agency, I set off on a very long, sometimes arduous, and sometimes joyous adventure. The joyous parts were direct contributions from a long list of wonderful people who supported me and my ideas through their advice and their willingness to listen to me talk nonsense. I should thank and apologize to my committee first. My chair Jose Itzigsohn was there from the very beginning. I remember him waving off one of my too-long answers my first day of class in graduate school, and it seems that I needed Jose to stop me from being my own worst enemy. He has defended and encouraged my work when I needed it the most, and pushed me in the right direction when I had no direction to go. He deserves my deepest thanks.

Long debates and discussions-for-discussion's-sake with Patrick Heller fed my contrarian side and helped me develop my humanist one, too. I “love” civil society as much as I “hate” it, and I will always hold dear all the great conversations we've had.

James Mahoney guided me closely in my first few years at Brown. He opened opportunities to me, showed me first-hand how comparative-historical research was done, and despite being so far away, was always close. Last but not least, Richard Snyder lent me endless hours of his attention and saw something important in this project. I want to

x thank him not only for that, but for being my model for how professors should interact with their students – I have consciously and unconsciously copied his style during my own office hours. To my committee, I apologize this project took so long, but I could not have had any more patient and vigorous support from any four people in the world.

My colleagues in Brown Sociology were a strong support system. Jen Darrah-

Okike, Julie Fennell, Esther Hernandez-Medina, Adriana Lopez Ramirez, Holly Reed, and Laura Senier were the best sisters I could ever have. Aaron Katz, Brian Mayer, and

Daniel Schensul, in loving contrast, were consummate big brothers. Jen Costanza, Julia

Drew, Chris Gibson, Sukriti Issar, Daniela Villacres, and Myung-Ji Yang were colleagues and collaborators in all things, curricular and extracurricular. Carrie Spearin was the best informal counselor, provider of candy, and go-between. She came through for me more times than I can count. And Paul Gilbert and Kristie Peterson provided me perspective and friendship. I also want to thank Muriel Bessette, Karl Dominey, and Joan Picard for all their hard work and unflagging encouragement over the years – and for letting me distract them from time to time.

My field research spanned two continents, three countries, and 18 months. I was supported by a Brown Graduate School Manning II Fellowship and by a group of encouraging and thoughtful people I am happy to call both family and colleagues. In the

Philippines, the entire Villegas family subsidized my work. Much love and thanks to all my aunts and cousins who never asked me about my project, but were proud of me, nonetheless. My father, Celso P. Villegas, was a positive influence on me and gave me more support than he realizes. Special thanks goes to Tita Beck for housing me while I

“roughed it” and to Geoffrey “Jhomby” Tobe who worked tirelessly to help me get where

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I needed to go. I was also a Visiting Research Fellow at the Third World Studies Center,

University of the Philippines – Diliman (TWSC-UP). Many thanks to the center's director,

Teresa S. Tadem, and to the support and research staff, especially Mara Baviera and

Sharon Quinsaat. Mara helped me find two wonderful research assistants, Jeoffrey Abalos and Faiva Cimatu without whom I could not have completed my work.

In Ecuador, I was fortunate to have an affiliation with the Facultad

Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, Sede Ecuador (FLACSO-Ecuador) where Carlos de la Torre provided much-needed mentorship and criticism. Giulianna Zambrano was an indispensable research assistant. I was fortunate to have met the 2007-2008 Fulbright

Award cohort with whom I would explore Quito and beyond – thank you for letting me be the unofficial “Fulbright Parasite.” Finally, the family of Honorary Consul of the

Philippines Nieves Federer shared their home with me and let me into their lives. My

“host brother” Daniel and his family were a source of true joy.

In Venezuela, I worked with the Centro de Estúdios de Desarrollo, Universidad

Central de Venezuela (CENDES-UCV). Nelly Arenas welcomed me and pointed me in the right direction. I was lucky to share the home and lives of the Ramos family while I was in Caracas. Luchy and Pablo Ramos were great teachers and providers, and their children and extended family showed me how generous and wonderful Venezuelans can be.

This dissertation is dedicated to the memory of Marcel Federer, Tita Nieves' husband, and founder of the eponymous Embutidos Federer in Quito, Ecuador. Marcel was a Swiss émigré who settled in Quito in the 1960s. He was generous soul who ferried senior citizens in his bus to do their daily activities and was a source of strength and

xii humor for his family. His contributions to the community around Guapulo parish were truly magnanimous. Marcel and Tita Nieves were also thoroughly anti-Correa and pro-

Gutierrez which made for lively conversations at the dinner table (which was always well-supplied with the best meats in all of Ecuador). Marcel passed away this year and I regret not having written him a long-hand letter – the kind which he enjoyed reading as he ate his Swiss dark chocolate at the end of dinner. Though not written in pen, this dissertation is for all the food he served, the swear words he taught, and all the moments in my life I was lucky to be in his presence.

To all these people and to all those I did not mention, thank you from the bottom of my heart. Of course, all the errors contained in this dissertation are mine alone.

Celso M. “Oslec” Villegas

May 2011

Providence, RI

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1 - Introduction ….. 1

CHAPTER 2 - Theoretical Framework …50

CHAPTER 3 - The Origins and Consequences of Revolution from the Middle in the Philippines, 1983-2006 …92

CHAPTER 4 - La Clase Media en Positivo? Contested Narrative and Hyperolarization in Venezuela, 1970s-2007 ….153

CHAPTER 5 - “¡Hay Clase Media!” Ascendant Outlaws and Middle-Class Plebiscitarianism in Ecuaodr, 1970s-2008 …192

CHAPTER 6 - Conclusion: Wither Revolution “from the Middle?” …225

BIBLIOGRAPHY …258

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LIST OF TABLES

Table 1. Various Opinions of Self-Identified Middle Class Respondents in Venezuela …175

Table 2. Population 12 or older, economically active by occupational group in Quito, Guayaquil, and Ecuador in 1974 …201

Table 3. Summary of Main Findings …228

Table 4. Case Scores for Revolution “from the Middle” and Non-Revolution …239

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. Explanatory, Intervening, and Outcome Variables …26

Figure 2. Classification and Conceptualization of Outcomes …40

Figure 3. Causal Argument Arrayed as a Path-Dependent Sequence …47

Figure 4. Caricature of EDSA protesters. Sunday Times Magazine (3/9/86) …122

Figure 5. Signs from the Museum Exhibition, “Prohibido Olvidar,” Centro Cultural Metropolitana, Quito. …213

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CHAPTER 1 – INTRODUCTION

Democracy and Revolutions “from the Middle”

At the end of the Third Wave of Democracy (roughly 1974 to the early 2000s), many developing world countries faced a multivalent hollowing out of their ostensibly- democratic regimes, resulting in weakened party systems, impassible executive- legislative relations, and antagonism between states and societies. Three countries – the

Philippines, Venezuela, and Ecuador – faced these challenges through massive, middle- class protests. In 2001, protesters in the Philippines clamored for the resignation of impeached populist president Joseph “Erap” Estrada. These claims reached a fever pitch when pro-Estrada senators blocked a key piece of evidence in the trial, sending hundreds of thousands more into the streets in what would be called People Power 2 or EDSA 2 – an explicit evocation of the People Power movement that helped remove dictator

Ferdinand Marcos in 1986.1 And indeed, the same elite players in the drama of 1986 –

Manila Archbishop Jaime Cardinal Sin, former presidents Corazon Aquino, putschist- turned-president Fidel Ramos, among others -- celebrated on stage with Vice-President

Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo as she was sworn in to take Estrada's place. In fact, despite the effervescence of middle-class protest in the Philippines since 1986, the power of

1 EDSA is the nickname for the Epifiano de los Santos Freeway in Manila, a major north-south thoroughfare linking Manila proper with Quezon City to the North, and the gathering-place of protesters in 1986 and 2001. I will use both “People Power 2” and “EDSA 2” interchangeably in my dissertation. The “2” in EDSA 2 can either be read as dos or two. 1 oligarchic families and the Catholic Church stays in place.

In 2002, Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez Frias fired executives in the state- owned oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA), ostensibly to reform its management. In the eyes of Chavez opponents, however, the firings were an egregious intervention in the most “meritocratic” of Venezuelan state institutions. An unlikely alliance of labor – the Confederacion de Trabajadores de Venezuela (CTV) – and capital

– the Federación de Cámaras y Asociaciones de Comercio y Producción de Venezuela

(FEDECAMARAS) – organized a massive protest on April 9, and as violence escalated, military elements supporting the protesters forced Chavez to leave the presidential palace on April 11, installing FEDECAMARAS head Pedro Carmona Estanga as interim president. Two days later, pro-Chavez protesters from poor neighborhoods of Caracas, along with the Presidential Guard, returned Chavez to power. However in subsequent years, Venezuela has been divided between anti-Chavez and pro-Chavez forces which see each other as implacable enemies who do not play by the rules of the democratic game.

Finally in Ecuador, elected as a left-leaning populist with the support of Ecuador's indigenous movement, Lucio Gutierrez had embraced neoliberalism and allied with right- wing elements to reorganize the Supreme Court, ostensibly to drop the charges against former ousted populist president Abdala Bucaram. Protests began in late 2004, but by

April of 2005, the heavily-choreographed return of Bucaram from exile sparked a tremendous popular response from the middle-class residents of Quito, Ecuador's capital city. In a “defense” of Quito, protesters blocked Gutierrez supporters from the city and attempted to thwart Gutierrez from leaving the country by gathering on the airport tarmac. On April 20th, 2005, in an emergency session outside of the Congress, opposition

2 lawmakers voted 60-2 to declare Gutierrez had vacated the presidency. In the following presidential election, Ecuadorians elected another populist: US-trained economist Rafael

Correa. Correa has attacked the foundations of electoral democracy through plebiscitary rule, supported and directly influenced by a radical middle class, popularly known as la clase media forajida (the outlaw middle class).

The middle class at these events have been the most vociferous critics of the politics of neopopulists, old oligarchs, and the “masses” alike; couching their protests in terms of “revolution,” “rebellion,” and “renovation.” By in large, these protests have been successful at their immediate goals, but seem to have an deleterious or ambiguous effect on democracy in their countries – in some places electoral democracy reigns, but oligarchic rule dominates; in others social and political polarization weaken democratic institutions; and still in others middle classes reject liberal democracy for unfamiliar political projects. This presents an empirical puzzle since scholars, pundits, protesters, and politicians alike have at times regarded “the middle class” as the bulwark for democracy or its worst enemy. It is not enough to claim that these middle classes and the democracies in which they live are all different. Instead, this dissertation instead explores this empirical puzzle with intent to develop an effective theoretical explanation for the relationship between these massive, middle class protests and the functioning and quality of democracy in their wake.

This project argues that these protests are moments of middle-class formation. For the most part, scholars have studied these latter-day revolutions as breaks in the continuity of political regimes versus moments in the construction of social classes.

Events like EDSA 2 in the Philippines, 11 de Abril (11-A) in Venezuela, and La Rebelion

3 de los Forajidos in Ecuador have been studied as “democratic revolutions” (Thompson

2004), or as presidential “interruptions” (Valenzuela 2004), either way emphasizing their effects on political-institutional development. However, these protests are also prime moments to study societal reaction to class as scholars, pundits, and activists alike lay bare what they see are the divisions that forced such drastic measures to be taken against presidents and dictators. Second, these protests were massive and profound enough to be understood as historic, and as such as these events can be considered milestones in the political action of the middle class. Finally, because these events have such ambiguous effects on democratic institutions despite their democratic rhetoric, it makes sense to explore them as moments where “the middle class” is locating its place in the order of legitimate politics and why this particular form of extrainstitutional politics is

“democratic” while others – even elections – are not. Furthermore, it behooves us to specify these ambiguous effects on democracy, not necessarily on regime type but on the constraints the legacy of these revolts placed on democratic deepening. For all these reasons, these “revolutions from the middle” provide a lens into the relationship between democracy and the middle class, the formation of the middle class as a self-conscious historical actor, and the “technique” of revolution as a mode of middle-class politics.

This project goes beyond the “class in itself/for itself” model, and instead analyzes and compares the shifting definitions and meanings behind being “middle class” across time – from roughly the 1970s to the early 21st century – and across cases these three cases. It makes these comparisons to recover the notion of historical agency in the study of the middle class, focusing on how, why, and to what degree certain middle classes have seen themselves (and have been seen) as explicitly “revolutionary” and/or

4 “democratic” at specific historical junctures and others have not; and what implications that perception may have on the functioning of democratic rule. To do so, this dissertation proposes that changes in political economy cannot alone predict nor explain class consciousness – nor alone can patterns of status-seeking and distinction, nor can struggles over political discourse. Instead, at their intersection, these inputs contribute to the elaboration of middle-class narratives – or stories about the middle class‟ past, present, and future, produced and reproduced in the media, in academic literature, and in the published accounts of self-styled “middle class” people. By looking at the historical variations within and between these narratives, this dissertation can compare and analyze the process of middle-class formation across these cases, as well as the perceived role of the middle class in their national narratives of democracy over time.

This project defines revolutions “from the middle”as a particular type of historical event when would-be hegemonic or counterhegemonic actors make sense of ruptures in the balance of class power by evoking the middle class. In the narratives they tell about the event, these actors imbue the middle class with historical agency – an agency that makes the middle class the key actor in the “proper” functioning of democracy. However, revolutions from the middle are fraught with contingency – constant causes and antecedent conditions inform but do not dictate their results. As we shall see for the

Philippines, Venezuela, and Ecuador, these revolutions from the middle lead to particular configurations of political and social power which have had constraining effects on the advancement of democracy.

This project finds that the balance of class power is in part predicated on the construction of middle-class narratives. As is well-known in comparative-historical

5 research, the balance of class power affects regime type. For would-be ruling classes, constructing a middle-class narrative is therefore an essential task in validating their vision of a “democratic” regime, whatever that may be. The variations in the three cases studied here reveal various potential qualities of the process of middle-class formation in the developing world, and the variations in the quality or type of narrative construction process inform consequences for democracy. As it plays out in the Philippines,

Venezuela, and Ecuador, middle-class narratives do not have a linear relationship with economic development – while there are similar patterns between the cases in terms of the structural origins of their middle classes, culture and contingent events affect the timing of narrative construction as well as its particular content. Chapter 2 elaborates this project's theoretical framework, showing how a narrative approach to class formation connects the balance of class power, the accumulation of “symbolic power” (Bourdieu

1986; Loveman 2005), and the linguistic expression of “the middle class” (see Wahrman

1997, among others). The central tenet of this approach is to treat middle-class protests as

“historical events” (Sewell 1998), which force narrative-makers to assess the role and definition of the middle class during those events.

In contrast to the vast majority of the literature, this project does not measure the effects of these revolutions from the middle on regime type; but rather it focuses on and conceptualizes the types of constraints to democratic deepening. A constraint to deepening is differentiated from regime type insofar as it can be conceived as a social and/or political impediment that makes it difficult for a country‟s democratic regime to move from a “diminished subtype” of democracy (Collier and Levitsky 1997) to polyarchy and beyond. In the case of the Philippines, Venezuela, and Ecuador, the

6 constraints they face impede their movement from electoral democracies – characterized by regular and typically competitive and free elections – to more complete or advanced types of democratic regimes, like liberal democracy (see Schedler 1998). They do so by limiting or opposing the range of political challenges to existing configurations of class power, but they do so in particular ways.

For example, for the Philippines (Chapter 3) the origin of the middle-class narrative was not in fact at EDSA 2, but at the first EDSA Revolutions in 1986 against

Ferdinand Marcos. The stories of the first EDSA defined oligarchic families and the

Catholic Church as part of the “middle forces,” which not only helped them re-establish hegemonic power, but also would serve as the central constraint to the advancement of democracy: the elite‟s oligarchic hegemonic veto invalidates elections and reduces the influence of movements from below, particularly evident in the EDSA 2 protests and in the weakness of white-collar challenges to the existing class narrative. In Venezuela

(Chapter 4), anti-Chavez forces were unable to permanently remove Chavez from power during the 11-A protests. This has led to increasing political brinkmanship on the part of both Chavez and his opponents, which is best described as hyperpolarized plebiscitarianism. Pro- and anti-Chavez forces ascribe diametrically-opposed motivations to the middle class, and with no narrative to define the political center, Venezuelan politics is fraught with Manichean discourse surrounding Chavez‟s domineering populist style which smothers the best democratic intentions of both sides. In Ecuador (Chapter

5), the process of middle-class narrative construction emerged from the victory of

Quiteño forajido protesters, and as such the story of the forajidos developed in radical opposition to the existing balance of class power. In a country long riven by regional and

7 racial cleavages, and with elites poorly managing their own hegemonic power, the middle-class narrative took on transformative overtones which were then reflected in the populism of Rafael Correa as well as the makeup of his top bureaucrats. The result, however, has been a middle-class plebiscitarianism where the interests of these forajido technocrats have been emphasized over the interests of their erstwhile allies – other civil society movements, particularly the indigenous movement.

This study concludes with a discussion of the general implications of revolutions from the middle and proposes possible expansions of this project, both in empirical and theoretical contexts. It focuses on a few key points: how a focus on revolutions from the middle and class narrative in general adds to our understanding of the causal processes of both democratization and class formation, how a focus on constraints to democratic deepening reveals and could advance past the limitations of formal-institutional measures of democratic practice, and what implications the study has on other latter-day transitions by “revolution” in the developing world.

Literature Review

Arguably Aristotle was the first to suggest that there was some link between the middle class and democratic rule. Since that first ancient assertion, the literature has clustered around three theoretical strands – the Optimist, Pessimist, and Rationalist views. From its origins in Modernization theory in the 1950s, the Optimist view argues that the middle class is a sufficient condition for democracy in the developing world, that is, with the rapid changes in occupational structures and income inequality from industrialization, a

8 middle class emerges that will inherently and eventually lead their country to political modernity, i.e. democracy. They make this claim in two ways. First, some scholars make

Aristotelean “size” arguments: the larger the middle-income segment of the population, the more democratic a country is or will be (e.g. Lipset 1959; Barro 2000; Easterly 2001).

Second, some authors argue for a “rising” middle class or “middle sector” – a group of occupations with no consciousness, but with a tendency to act in politically- similar ways (e.g. Johnson 1958; Kimura 2003; Cai 2005). Their mere presence, the

Optimists argue, is a harbinger for an eventual turn to democracy. John J. Johnson's

Political Change in Latin America: The Emergence of the Middle Sectors (1958), remains a seminal text in theorizing the middle class‟ relationship to democracy in the region.

While his “middle sectors” –white-collar government employees, captains of commerce and industry, and “professional men, teachers, and high-level government bureaucrats”

(Johnson 1958: ix) – “do not fulfill the central condition of a class [as] their members have no common background of experience” (Johnson 1958: 3), they demonstrated a

“continuity of common interests” (Johnson 1958: 5) that thrust them into influential political roles.

But the crux of Johnson‟ argument lies in his more-or-less comparative-historical analysis of Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil – five nations, which, in his words “[will] set the pattern of tomorrow for the present feudally held Dominican

Republics, the social retarded Paraguays, the poverty stricken Haitis, and the strife-torn

Venezuelas…” (1958: viii). He argues that the mid-19th century saw the change in emphasis from political solutions to Latin America‟s backwardness to economic ones – the rapid and dramatic shift to an obsessive focus on “the economic sphere, for the

9 leading powers of the world were those most advanced commercially and industrially”

(Johnson 1958: 27). “[Acutely made] aware of the backwardness of their homelands” vis-

à-vis Western Europe and the United States (Johnson 1958: 42), middle sector groups assiduously pushed for educational reform, legal rationalization, and political liberalism – all in opposition with the neo-feudal agrarian, Hispanic cultures, politics, and economies of their respective nations.

Both variants of the Optimist strand argue that the operative mechanism here is the middle class‟ inherent moderation – it does not resort to violence and prefers negotiation – derived from a teleological comparison with middle classes in the developed world. The Optimist‟s middle class turns to protest to shake off the shackles of authoritarian rule to bring about a “modern” democratic order (e.g. Fukuyama 1998). The problem with the Optimist view is that no work has been done that explains how a moderate, democratic class consciousness is possible from a group of middle-income individuals or from a set of occupations that have been argued to theoretically have no class consciousness at all. Furthermore, this perspective is blind to the many times the middle class has actively rejected democratic rule in favor of authoritarianism. For related reasons, the Optimist perspective cannot explain the middle-class protests in which this project is interested: in cases like the Philippines and Ecuador, the protesters claimed to ply the waters between oligarchy and populism, but forced the ouster of democratically-elected presidents with their effects on democracy negative or ambiguous.

By contrast, the scholars taking the Pessimist point of view argue that the middle class is neither a sufficient nor necessary condition for democracy: it arrives despite or in spite of the middle class. Born of the observations of military coups, especially in Latin

10 America during the 1960s and 1970s, the Pessimist point of view points out that the middle class has either actively supported or has tacitly accepted dictatorship over democracy. They argue that he middle class is an appendage of developmental states

(Nun 1967; Karl 1997; Jones 1998) – bureaucrats, white-collar workers in state-run industries, over-professionalized militaries (esp. Huntington 1957). For Samuel

Huntington “the creation of a middle class, like economic growth, is often a highly destabilizing event” (1968: 289). He argued that an urban, intellectual middle-class could form the core of extremist parties and possibly arouse peasant support for revolution

(Huntington 1968: 290). Reforms would not satiate this middle class intelligentsia: “The urban middle class wants national dignity, a sense of progress, a national purpose, and the opportunity for fulfillment through participation in the overall reconstruction of society.

These are utopian goals” (Huntington 1968: 371).

By contrast, for authors like José Nun and David Martin Jones, these utopian goals are the ideological (by)products of hegemonic, developmental states (Nun 1967), manifested in East Asia as the discourse of “Asian Values” (Jones 1998). For Nun and

Jones, the middle class does the dirty work of the state elite, reinforcing and justifying the lack of democracy for the sake of state-led development. For Nun, the middle class has

“no horizons of its own” (Nun 1967: 61). Regardless if one agrees more with Huntington or Nun and Jones, the Pessimist perspective diminishes the democratic potential of the developing world middle class.

However, the middle-class politics highlighted in this dissertation cannot be satisfactorily explained using the Pessimist perspective. First, middle class protesters in the Philippines and Ecuador saw themselves explicitly as independent of the oligarchy

11 (Abueva, ed. 2001; Bustamante 2005), infirming the elite hegemony thesis – at least in word. No work has been done to determine if that is the case. Secondly, while the quality of democracy post-protest in these countries is diminished; these protesters were not calling for an end to democracy, but for its reform (see Thompson 2007). In that sense,

Huntington might have been correct to point out the “utopian goals” of the middle class cause it to be an inherently-destabilizing force, though this does not explain why in the

Philippines and Ecuador their projects were explicitly “middle class,” while in Venezuela, the protesters‟ “utopian goals” were not articulated as middle-class goals as such.

But most egregiously, the Pessimist view is conceptually-destructive – it has encouraged scholars to ignore the middle class. Other classes and groups, they insinuate, are of more interest in their potential to bring about democracy. As it turned out for the study of the middle class in Latin America, the pessimist perspective nearly eliminated the middle class from the scholarly gaze. As Brian Owensby points out as a result of this pessimism that

Great strides have been taken to recover the lives and experiences of rural and urban elites, peasants, workers, and the poor [in the existing literature]. But social and political relations have come to be represented in terms of polar opposites: employers and workers, elites and masses, rich and poor, capital and labor, oppressors and oppressed. In the process the middle class has been thought to have „no political horizons of its own‟ (Owensby 1999: 6)

To be glib, if the middle class was no longer the savior of developing world democracies and embodied nothing of theoretical interest, goes the argument, then why study it at all

(see also Parker 1998: ix, 5)? All in all, the Pessimist view is an ineffective framework to understand middle-class formation and democracy.

More recent analyses on the middle class and democracy in the developing world

12 take a Rationalist perspective. In the most general sense, the Rationalist view sees the middle class as a necessary, but insufficient condition for democracy. There are two main approaches. The first is based on new institutional economics. Studies in this vein attempt to formally model democratic outcomes for both developed and developing countries, arguing that classes will prefer particular political institutions based on how they distribute economic resources, that is, how well they maximize their income. These studies begin with two-player, game-theoretic models that pit the economic interests of the “rich” or “elite” with the “poor,” centering around the elite choice to set particular tax rates, the corresponding response from the poor to revolt or acquiesce, and then the elite choice to open the system or repress. In regards to the middle class in this vein, it appears as a late addition to formal models, usually characterized as a group whose income is between the group incomes for the “poor” and the “rich” or “elite” (Boix 2003: 47;

Acemoglu and Robinson 2005: 259). When introduced to the two-player game, the middle class obviously adds complexity – it can ally with the “rich” or ally with “poor,” all in service of maximizing its income. As such, the critical moments of revolt, repression, and concession become much more complex: various studies have suggested that with the middle class, the elite can now choose to open the system to only the middle class and exclude or repress the poor, producing a limited democracy (Boix 2003: 47;

Acemoglu and Robinson 2005: 38, 256-258, 262-266); the elite can repress both the middle class and the poor (Boix 2003: 48-49); or the middle class and the poor can ally to impose full democracy onto the rich (Boix 2003: 47-49; Acemoglu and Robinson 2005:

258, 267-273).2 These outcomes are dependent mainly on the size of the class, as relative

2 Boix adds the possibility that the poor can use the middle class to achieve a left-wing dictatorship 13 to the definition of the median voter; (Acemoglu and Robinson 2005: 257-258, 282, 285) or gradations of its income relative to the poor and elite (Boix 2003: 50-52).

But in terms of what the middle class‟ preferences are for democracy, the economic-institutional vein does not make particularly strong statements on that point.

Acemoglu and Robinson depict the positive influence of the middle class as it provides significant new options for elites faced with a restless poor population – in every possible combination of alliances and choices, the middle class opens the political system

(Acemoglu and Robinson 2005: 258). They conclude that the middle class most importantly acts as a “buffer” between a repression-seeking elite and a revolting poor

(Acemoglu and Robinson 2005: 39, 285), but do not make a claim about its “inherent” preferences – the middle class exists as a product not of political identity, but as a conceptual economic placeholder.3 Boix, on the other hand, goes a bit further: “Given their position in the income scale, middle-class individuals prefer a restrictive democracy… to either a regime controlled by the wealthy or a universal suffrage system”

(2003: 47), but this, of course, relies on the relative strength of the poor and elite. By and large, this perspective suggests that the middle class seeks some sort of third way between full democracy and total repression, one that includes itself but does not necessarily include the poor.

The second Rationalist approach is the left-Weberian tradition in comparative- historical social science. While Chapter 2 will elaborate on the left-Weberian approach in

(2003: 48-49). 3 It is interesting to note that they end their chapter on the middle class, essentially echoing Lipset and distantly addressing Aristotle: “There is, of course, a natural caveat here: if the middle class becomes too rich, then it becomes indistinguishable from the rich and, therefore, will not be able to play the critical role of buffer between the rich and the poor” (Acemoglu and Robinson 2005: 285). 14 more detail, we can say quickly that it pays attention to historical context and contingency, introduces the complexity of contradictory class locations (Wright 1985) and recognizes the state as an independent actor (e.g. Evans et al. 1985). Studies in this vein argues that classes rise and fall, relative to the growth of the developmental state and see class politics tied inexorably to the haphazard nature of state-driven capitalist accumulation in the semiperiphery (e.g. Koo 1991; Rueschemeyer et al. 1992; Robison, ed. 1996). But, far from assuming that developmental dependency will lead to authoritarianism, the left-Weberians introduce a significant amount of rational agency on the part of the state and the various classes that inhabit developing countries – the rub is that this agency depends on their relative political strength. In other words, depending on who is stronger at particular historical junctures, the middle class will ally with other subordinate classes (the working class, the peasantry) to push through democracy or social democracy, or ally with elites (landed classes, capitalists) to establish dictatorships

(see esp. Moore 1966; Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens 1992).

These Rationalist approaches resemble their Pessimist and Optimist forebears, but instead of arguing that the middle class is moderate or is backwards-looking, the

Rationalists claim the middle class is a self-serving, calculating actor which will choose democracy or dictatorship depending on the strength of its allies above and below it. The conclusion is that the middle class has “fickle” preferences towards democracy. But, in terms of analytical scope, the rationalist position seems able to explain both the cases that confirm the Optimist and Pessimist positions, but it too suffers from problematic theoretical implications. To accept the rationalist point of view, scholars must accept that the middle class makes conscious, calculated decisions based on their economic interests

15 about whether or not to support democracy. The class alliances that they must make are seen as the logical consequence of the structural conditions at hand.

This is where Rationalists are inconsistent. First, for analytical purposes, they create a middle class based essentially on their revealed preferences. In other words, action and definition, choices and consequences are tautological; the middle class, in effect, is defined by their preferences, never makes “mistakes” in its alliances, and its choices are its preferences. If middle-class protesters in the Philippines, Venezuela, and

Ecuador wanted more democracy, it would be irrelevant to the Rationalist insofar as their actions weakened institutional democracy. Awkward preferences like protesting to

“preserve democracy” or to “reform” it are subsumed in a dichotomous variable of support/no support for democracy. This, of course, does not necessarily mean they do or do not want democracy in the first place (Green and Shapiro 1994: 34-36). What we are left with is a particularly simple picture of the middle class; for what it makes up in breadth, the rationalist position gives up in depth. Second, we cannot actually glean what middle class preferences are in the Rationalist perspective. That is, it is not the middle class that contains an inherent democratic or authoritarian tendency: it is the tendencies of the classes above and below them that determine the interests of the middle class.

While this is a step away from essentializing the developing world middle class, it empties out the concept of class interest into a simple rational calculation. The only important interest for any class is their inclusion in political-economic redistribution, and in that sense, we do not get a nuanced framework from which to analyze middle-class formation.

16 Anti-Definitions, Definitions, and a Compromise

Thus, if this project is interested in middle-class formation, it should follow that it needs a definition of “the middle class.” However, there are relevant parallels between how existing literature approaches the definition of the middle class and the theoretical tensions E.P. Thompson identified in The Making of the English Working Class (1963).

Thompson was equally perturbed by Stalinists who viewed class consciousness as a matter of the quantity of the working class and by structural functionalists who denied that classes did not exist at all. He wrote:

There is today an every-present temptation to supposed that class is a thing. This was not Marx's meaning, in his own historical writing, yet the error vitiates much latter day “Marxist” writing. “It,” the working class, is assumed to have a real existence, which can be defined almost mathematically – so many men who stand in a certain relation to the means of production. Once this is assumed it becomes possible to deduce the class- consciousness which “it” ought to have (but seldom does have) if “it” was properly aware of its own position and real interests... But a similar error is committed daily on the side of the ideological divide. In one form, this is a plain negative. Since the crude notion of class attributed to Marx can be faulted without difficulty, it is assumed that any notion of class is a pejorative theoretical construct, imposed upon the evidence. It is denied that class has happened at all. In another form, and by a curious inversion, it is possible to pass from a dynamic to a static view of class. “It” – the working class – exists, and can be defined with some accuracy as a component of the social structure. Class consciousness, however, is a bad thing, invented by displaced intellectuals, since everything which disturbs the harmonious co- existence of groups performing different “social roles”... is to be deplored... (Thompson 1963: 10)

For Thompson, class “happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships,” based in part by the experience of men and women who might share the same position in the relations of production (1963: 9-10). “Class is defined by consciousness,” in Sewell's distillation (1986: 53) and as such, Thompson “radically shifted the problematic of class formation by pushing to the fore the question of how this awareness came about historically” (Sewell 1986: 54). The experiences of men and

17 women – political, economic, cultural – all matter in how they see their membership as part of a class.

In contrast, the study of the middle class and democracy in the developing world has either ignored or opposed the idea that the middle class should be understood as an historical happening. There is a tendency to think of the middle class as two separate ontological “entities” (for lack of a better word): one structural, the other ideal or ideological. Recall that Johnson's seminal definition of the “middle sectors” declared that these sectors “do not fulfill the central condition of a class [as] their members have no common background of experience” (Johnson 1958: 3), and yet still, they demonstrated a

“continuity of common interests” (Johnson 1958: 5). Collier and Collier borrow

Johnson's definition for the “middle forces” for their masterwork, Shaping the Political

Arena, but they also ambiguously add that they also use the term “middle class” in the

“narrower sense” (1991 [2002]: 785). Other structurally-based “middle sector” approaches recognize the dual nature of the middle class as an ideological construction and as a structural phenomenon – a “western ideal,” as Hattori and Funatsu argue for East

Asia (2003: 140) – but stop short and treat them as independent or only vaguely related.

This project proposes a compromise. Since this project posits that class power affects the process of middle-class narrative construction, it is necessary to take classes as structural phenomenon seriously. As such, each empirical chapter will first present a

“structural history” of the balance of class power, leading up to the key protest in each case. The purpose of these sections is to identify the central socioeconomic cleavages between dominant and subordinate classes. As such, this project borrows the Collier and

Collier definition of “middle sector”: “Members of a broad range of occupational groups 18 that stand between the working class [or other subordinate classes] and the economic elite” (1991[2002]: 785). The definition is broad enough to capture the variations between cases.

However, the primary approach cleaves close to Thompson – it thinks about class as historical and experienced. It presents middle-class narratives as evidence – literally a record of events – of that experience. It therefore rejects the premise that ideal expressions of “the middle class” are simply ideas.4 We should be able to trace the content of the narrative backwards and determine its origins in material, cultural, and political experience. To do so, each empirical chapter uses “process tracing” (Bennett and

George 2004: ch. 10) to produce a theoretically-driven “analytic explanation” (Bennett and George 2004: 211; see also Bates, et al. 1996) of the origins of the middle-class narrative in each case. As a matter of theory, the middle-class narrative is the operating definition of the middle class for that case. In practice, both the “structural history” and the “narrative history” work together to present a complete analysis.

The Comparative-Historical Method: Case Selection and Data

While statistical and ethnographic methods might provide useful and complimentary insights into middle-class protest in the Philippines, Venezuela, and Ecuador, this dissertation uses comparative-historical analysis to trace the historical transformation of middle-class narratives and their relationship to democracy. This dissertation is primarily interested in concept formation, theory specification, and hypothesis generation – three area in which comparative-historical analysis has been most effective (Mahoney and

4 This point will be elaborated further in Chapter 2. Suffice it to say for now that this is a statement of method more than a statement of theory. 19 Rueschemeyer 2003; Mahoney 2003). Concept formation, theory specification, and hypothesis generation are iterative processes and therefore require iterative techniques.

This project utilizes within- and between-case analysis in order to provide “checks” on causal inferences and to generate robust, historically-grounded theories and hypotheses

(Skocpol and Somers 1979; Paige 1999). Given the untested nature of the theories in play, comparative-historical analysis is best suited for this dissertation. And following the long tradition of comparative-historical research, this project focuses on the country as the unit of analysis.

Strange as though it might seem to group two Latin American countries with an

Asian one – their distant Spanish colonial pasts notwithstanding -- the Philippines,

Venezuela, and Ecuador are comparable cases because they each experienced at least one large popular uprising whose core was made of “the middle class” which unseated the sitting government by forcing institutional actors (legislatures, judiciaries, militaries) to act “uninstitutionally” – militaries withdrawing support or carrying out a coup, or supreme courts and congresses declaring presidencies “vacant” usually with weak constitutional justification. In addition, thirty years earlier, the Philippines, Venezuela, and Ecuador began assertive projects of state-led economic modernization – the nationalization of key industries, the construction of physical infrastructure, and the proliferation of state agencies to oversee these projects. But by the 1980s, a global economic decline contributed to arresting these projects of state-led development, and in the 1990s, all three countries continued a relative decline in their economic fortunes while dabbling in neoliberal economic policies – these factors contributing to the rise of populism and the protests that developed in response.

20 Focusing on these cases as pairs, this dissertation can provide an interlocking justification for selecting them as units of analysis for the effects of the construction of middle-class narratives on class power and constraints to democracy. Looking at the

Philippines and Ecuador, it becomes fairly clear that while both have had nearly no history of effective political parties, and both have cyclical crises of hegemony, they differ in their concentration of elite and state power across national territory. In Ecuador, this manifests itself as a conflict primarily between the port city of Guayaquil and the national capital Quito, but also through its long history of unequal citizenship for the indigenous population in the highlands and the Amazon lowlands. In the Philippines, while regional caciques manage small clientelistic fiefdoms, the hegemonic bloc of the capitalist class and the Catholic Church can exert significant national support through the

Philippine's dense and extensive civil society networks (see Hedman 2006). This pairing allows this dissertation to infer the types of middle-class discourses that develop in contexts of hegemonic instability. Where we would expect these cases to display a similar balance of class power, regionalism may produce significant variations.

Comparing the Philippines and Venezuela helps to examine class power and middle-class narratives by exploring two far more comprehensive hegemonic projects than in Ecuador, but varying in terms of the political stability they engendered. The

Philippines and Venezuela inhabit two extremes on the pole of national hegemonic power.

While the Philippines has had a national application of hegemonic power, it has been haphazard and unstable in comparison to Venezuela's Puntofijismo, the iconic image of party system stability and effective corporatist state-labor relations. In contrast, the

Philippine dominant groups of oligarchic families and the Catholic Church seemed to

21 persist in power, despite political instability. We should expect to see significant variation between cases located at extremes on one possible explanatory variable.

Finally, comparing Venezuela and Ecuador, this dissertation can show combined effects of the dynamics of regional power and the degree of hegemonic strength on middle-class consciousness. Venezuela and Ecuador are both oil states, and both nationlized their oil industries in the early 70s, and built up a large bureaucratic class to man the new apparatuses of the state. But, as mentioned repeatedly before, the means by which these two countries expanded the state and the degree to which their hegemonic blocs were able to use this opportunity to achieve political power were vastly different.

While Puntofijismo channeled state revenues from oil through its labor pact and helped to consolidate the political party machinery over the country's regions, oil wealth in Ecuador served to leverage the power of Quito against Guayaquil, finally giving the capital an independent source of revenue and slightly more capacity to act without the consent of the coastal capitalist elites. Where we might expect nationalized industry to affect class formation, we have to take into account the effects of regionalism.

While not an exhaustive sampling developing world countries, nor of all countries who may have had a revolution from the middle, the Philippines, Venezuela, and Ecuador serve as representative cases for other countries in their region undergoing similar social upheavals. The Philippines is not entirely unique among East Asian countries which in the post-Third Wave era have experienced popular protests from among the middle class.

Thailand and Indonesia come to mind, each dealing with different patterns of protest against different class power contexts (see Hedman 2004). Reaching further back, the

Philippines and South Korea transitioned to democracy in the mid-1980s, their dictatorial

22 regimes – the latter bureaucratic-authoritarian, the former sultanistic – fell to middle-class protests (see Villegas and Yang 2011). Ultimately, this study chooses the Philippines as it has significant similarities and important differences with Ecuador and Venezuela in terms of its class and political dynamics, and because it was arguably the “first” of many revolutions from the middle: the term “People Power” originates from the EDSA protests.

Thus in a way, the Philippines is the “English case” for this study – an early revolution, with some extended influence on the act of popular revolt in the latter part of the 20th century and beyond. This study hopes that the refinement of its concepts and theoretical assertions will allow scholars studying other East Asian countries to challenge the optimist, pessimist, and rationalist paradigms when looking at the relationship between the middle class and democracy.

Similarly, the conclusions we can draw from Venezuela and Ecuador suggest ways in which we should conceptualize and theorize similar events in other Latin American countries. Other middle-class protests would be a prime target: the 1992 protests in Brazil against Fernando Collor de Mello and the 2001 protests in Argentina that effected a chain of resignations from the presidency come to mind. And certainly scholars cannot ignore the possible similarities between 11-A and Los Forajidos with the middle-class protests that precipitated military coups throughout the region in the 1960s and 1970s. That being said, Venezuela and Ecuador provide a unique opportunity to compare two relatively contemporaneous cases with similar ambiguous outcomes for democracy. As Maxwell

Cameron (2009) has suggested, scholars should look beyond “good” and “bad” when analyzing latter-day left-populism in Latin America: this project is one way in which to do that.

23 The data for this dissertation come from both primary and secondary sources. The primary source materials are representations and descriptions of the middle class in the print media (newspapers and magazines with national circulation), digital media (blogs, social movement websites, accessed from the fall of 2006 to the fall of 2010), political statements, and academic publications. The bulk of these data coalesce around analyses, retrospectives, personal accounts, and remembrances of the protests in question. While some of these materials could be considered secondary sources, the theoretical approach of this dissertation allows it to view academic writing, for instance, at a different ontological level as an example of historically-situated discourse. The secondary sources for this dissertation are various histories and analyses done on the cases, acquired for their authority and collected with an eye towards exhausting existing materials (Mahoney and Villegas 2008). Data were collected over a two-and-a-half year period in multiple archives and libraries in the Philippines, Venezuela, and Ecuador, as well as locations in the United States.

The limitations of these data do not pose a significant risk to the validity of the findings presented here. One possible criticism might be that the data sources used here are essentially elite-produced, or given the importance of historical events and protests, histories written by the winners. While elite bias is important, this project is specifically oriented towards exploring dominant public narratives, not uncovering the “lost voices” of middle class or other people (no offense to them). Elite bias in fact is a necessary point of explanation for this project and will be taken up explicitly. A second possible criticism is that the data are not organized in a quantitative database or presented in an otherwise

“formal” way (see Franzosi 2004). While a quantitative database of narratives would

24 allow for other techniques to be used – like content analysis – no work has been done on these cases in regards to their middle-class narratives, so we are not clear on the importance of what to look for, that is, what concepts might be important. This project could be seen as a stepping stone or impetus for the development of “databased” approaches to the subject.

Preliminary Causal Argument

The independent, intervening, and outcome variables are arrayed in Figure 1. This project presents sets of causes and outcomes here as “variables,” though as defined, some of these variables do not as yet have concrete attributes. While this may appear haphazard, the theory-building and theory-testing tasks of this project are not incompatible with its task of defining its causal and historical arguments – that is, the best way to develop theoretical assertions and specify concepts is to carry out a systematic comparative- historical analysis of the Philippines, Venezuela, and Ecuador, weighing the evidence and arraying it against our theoretical assertions about the middle class and narrative. Thus, this project is at once a project of conceptual refinement – seeing where theory and empirics meet – and one that looks at historical patterns to test causal assertions.

25

Independent Variables: Structural and Cultural Antecedent Conditions

Two distinct sets of explanatory variables are at work in determining the type of constraints to democratic deepening. The theoretical underpinnings to some of these will be elaborated in Chapter 2, but for now, a general overview will suffice for an understanding of this project‟s causal argument. The first set of variables surround the social, cultural, and political conditions prior to revolutions from the middle in the

Philippines, Venezuela, and Ecuador. Their causal relationship to the outcome is best described as “antecedent conditions,” (Collier and Collier 1999 [2002]: 30; Mahoney

2001: 7) insofar as they delimit but do not determine subsequent historical events.

26 The first two of those variables deal with “classic” variables in comparative- historical analysis, and serve as baseline conditions for analysis: (1) the cleavages in the existing balance of power and (2) the structural development of the middle sectors. A focus on the cleavages in the balance of class power cuts across multiple research paradigms in sociology and political science (see Lipset and Rokkan 1967; Moore 1966).

The broad conception of cleavage and balance is that the relationship between classes and classes and the state “shape, constrain, and empower actors in predictable ways”

(Mahoney 2003: 151), but can break down and reveal rifts between definable interests.

Like other comparative-historical work before it, this project sees the balance of class power as a network or constellation of social classes who derive their capacity to rule from their socioeconomic base (agrarian, industrial, etc.), which previous work in this tradition has affirmed has been affected by the timing and context of capitalist development (see for instance Rueschemeyer et al. 1992: 57- 63; Moore 1966; Paige

1997; among others). Relatedly, the development of the middle forces has also been tied to the advance of industrial capitalism in the developing world, as mentioned in the literature review.

If we were to look only at these variables, this study would probably fall into either the optimist, pessimist, or rationalist paradigms. Indeed, the “structural history” of class power in the Philippines, Venezuela, and Ecuador produced particular political configurations before their revolutions from the middle which suggest one of those three paradigms would be appropriate. In the Philippines, the Marcos regime had splintered the cohesion of an agrarian landowning class which had dominated politics since the end of

American colonial rule, while the middle class remained politically-inert; in Venezuela,

27 an economic downturn starting in the late 1970s eroded the influence of a strong, two- party state which had balanced labor and industrial interests, where the middle class had served as the cultural and structural basis of rule; and in Ecuador, distinct regional economic patterns had historically divided commercial and industrial elites on the coast from their agrarian (and later state-based) counterparts in the sierra, and the middle class were non-factors in national politics. One could argue that such configurations are all that we need to study. However, if the “historical event” of the middle class is to be taken seriously as a theoretical point, we have to place these structural variables to the side – but within reach – to test that assertion. Thus, this project asserts that such “structural” variables – at the least – inform future conditions or are formed by cultural ones. It is a broad causal hypothesis of this project that the process of middle-class formation has effects on political power that can reconfigure and perhaps determine these balances of class power, but only through close case study can we definitively say structural variables are not “in the last instance” the only things we should study.

The last of the antecedent conditions is the quality of existing class narratives.

Elaborated in more detail in Chapter 2, the quality of existing narratives depicts the ways in which social classes are represented in public discourse, focusing specifically on the putative historical agency of said social classes. Narratives can help to reinforce particular combinations of class power as hegemonic tools (Ewick and Sibley 2004).

Specifically, this project is interested in the quality of the middle-class public narrative: how did it depict the middle class‟ role in history? Suffice it to say for now that pre- existing narratives serve as both structuring conditions for new narratives, as well as a methodological baseline to examine narrative change over time. If narratives do shift

28 after revolutions from the middle, we should be able to measure that difference by keeping these early narratives in mind.

Revolutions “from the Middle”as an Independent Variable

The second set of explanatory variables describes an event which this study conceptualizes as a revolution “from the middle.” Comparative-historical work has long tradition in conceptualizing revolutions, whether they be social, political, economic, or all those three (see Goldstone 2003 for a summary). But borrowing from Marx, scholars still turn to what are best called “directional” labels for revolutions – “from below” and “from above” (Moore 1966; Trimberger 1976) are the classic labels, deployed alongside more defined concepts, but perhaps better at quickly capturing the vector of revolutionary change. When this project refers to a revolution “from the middle,” it follows this tradition of directional labeling, and it does so only because a more semantically- appropriate label – revolution “of the middle” – would split too many hairs and I fear would be more confusing that definitive.5 But that is not to say such revolutions do not have significant consequences outside of the “middle” itself: indeed the causal argument arrayed here proposes that revolutions from the middle – when antecedent conditions have been taken into equal account – have long-term effects on social and political

5 When Barrington Moore defined the English, French, and U.S. paths to modernity in Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966), he candidly refused to develop a rigorous definition for what he could no better describe as “bourgeois revolutions culminating in Western democracy” (1966: 410), which he famously summarized in “strong agreement with the Marxists” that if there were “no bourgeoisie” there would be “no democracy” (1966: 418). Moore provided more admonitions and cautions than definitions. He decided on “bourgeois revolution”, but only after explaining that “the central difficulty is that such expressions as bourgeois revolution and peasant revolution lump together indiscriminately those who make revolution and its beneficiaries” (428). “Consistent terminology imposes the invention of new terms that, I fear,” he wrote, “would only add to the confusion.” (429)

29 dynamics which can ultimately constrain democratic deepening.

The thread that links the left-Weberian, symbolic power, and linguistic aspects of this study is the idea that historical events weigh heavily on storytellers as they describe the middle class, affecting the degree of agency they imbue the middle class as an historical actor. That events are important is one thing, but there may be certain events have a more significant impact on middle-class narrative agency than others. There may be key transformational moments that resonate across multiple structures whose outcome or whose ultimate effect is to suddenly bring the middle class into a narrative state of historical agency, which in theory is tantamount to class formation. The three protests that motivated this study are potentially three of these key moments that alter the way in which middle classes are spoken about in public discussion. EDSA1, EDSA 2, 11 de

Abril, and Los Forajidos were also clearly moments where the middle class was seen as acting directly on democracy, however defined. It was clear in the initial sweep of these cases that the role of the middle class was scrutinized by observers, but to what degree that scrutiny translated into a transformation of the middle class public narrative is the very question this project seeks to answer.

While such struggles occur in multiple ways and perhaps constantly in developing world countries, the revolutions from the middle that have occurred throughout the developing world in recent years are a particular form of this struggle to generate a middle-class public narrative. They are sudden, rapid, and dramatic moments that produce profound effects across multiple structures – “historical events” (Sewell 1996) – ones that, if successful, shift the fundamental perceptions of the social order towards the middle class as protagonist in not only their own class' history but in the history of

30 democracy in their country. In a very literal sense, the middle class “happens” during these revolutions from the middle.

For an event to be a revolution from the middle, it must score positive on four key necessary conditions. First, storytellers must attempt to make sense of the rupture in the balance of class power by evoking the middle class. To be sure, massive protests occur without explicit evocations of the middle class in how their narrative retellings, and conversely there may be moments where the discussion of the middle class comes to a fever pitch, but does not correspond to a rupture in the balance of class power. It is the task of this study to determine to what degree the public discussion of the role of the middle class during these events evinced a change or transformation of the public narrative. As stated many times before, in all three cases there is preliminary evidence for a conjuncture of an intensification of public discussion about the middle class and a breakdown (however ephemeral) of the existing political order.

A second necessary, but not sufficient condition for a revolution from the middle is that in the retelling of the occurrences that made up the event, the middle class has been given clear historical agency. When abstracted to the level of public debate, it should be clear that the recounting of events indisputably contains the middle class as a central social actor in altering politics. Specifically, storytellers must attribute the cause of the event to the middle class' ability affect the pattern of history. Following the symbolic power dimension of the theoretical framework, this is essentially a recounting of a middle-class “victory” during the protests. Relatedly, the “failure” of the opposition should provoke narratives that diminish their historical agency.

Third, a revolution from the middle must marks a significant change in the

31 meaning of the term “middle class” or “la clase media,” especially in its conceptual relationship to “democracy.” In the context of the cases studied here, a revolution from the middle serves as a moment of “domestication” of the middle class-democracy metanarrative. While those three, individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions describe a revolution from the middle, there is still room for the content of the narratives

– the specific plots, characterizations, and themes – to vary between cases. Using focused, cross-case comparisons of the cases can inform some of the variations in the content of the middle class narratives, beyond their change through these revolutions.

Finally, since revolutions from the middle disrupt existing structures and create new middle-class narratives, this implies some degree of breakdown in the operation of

“regular” politics in which structures would dictate the outcomes of these sequences.

However, in revolutions from the middle, structure simply informs narrative outcomes. In other words, revolutions from the middle are contingent events. Political configurations may inform which storytellers try to make sense of the breakdown of structures in middle-class terms, but at the onset of these revolutions, a configurational analysis of class power could not predict the winners or losers, nor could they necessarily shape the narratives by themselves. As we shall see for EDSA, 11-A, and Los Forajidos, the actual events that took place were fraught with contingency and chance, with events seemingly spiraling out of the control of any one group to control – that is, until the dust had settled and winners and losers have been sorted out and a new narrative of those events emerges.

Intervening Variable: The New Middle-Class Narrative

Once we do have our winners, however, the specific qualities of the narrative they

32 construct is analytically-distinct from the fact that there is a new narrative. Although after a revolution from the middle there emerge new definitions and narratives of an agential middle class, we still need to focus on the effects on the specific qualities of those definitions and the ways those narratives relate the middle class to democracy. Looking at the new middle class narrative as an intervening variable allows this study to tease out the aftermath of revolutions from the middle on the balance of class power. That is, the forces that emerge victorious from revolutions from the middle will have to comprehend not just the revolution itself, but historical antecedents as they write and deploy the new narrative.

Essentially, class narratives become projected across historical time, political and social progress is now measured by the “clock” – if you will – of the middle class. As a result, the definition and ultimate goals of this new historically-protagonistic middle class – as represented in the narrative – are central points of analysis.

This project argues that how the new narratives define the middle class and its specific relationship to democracy have an effect on the resulting order (or reordering) of the balance of class power. Exactly what that relationship is, other than it being causally- precedent, is predicated upon antecedent socioeconomic conditions and existing narratives, and the events surrounding the revolution from the middle itself. Since middle-classness now has cache, however, to gain political and social power after the revolution from the middle, these narratives may reconfigure the balance of class forces to reflect the importance of the middle class and in doing so, generate new or reinforce old configurations of class power through the middle-class narrative. That is, the middle class becomes the lynchpin for defining what constitutes who has legitimate political power in a country‟s democratic politics. Or better put, political decisions – especially

33 ones dealing with the grand questions about “democracy” – become framed as working for or against middle-class interests, interests that are tied to the class‟ definitional integrity. Chapter 2 delves into the theory behind this point more closely, but suffice it to say that middle-class narratives that link the class to democracy have had powerful effects in the United States, Britain, and as this study argues, the Philippines, Venezuela, and Ecuador, and the developing world writ-large.

As an analytical concept, the key points of focus on the new narrative are (1) the definition of the middle class and (2) the relationship between the middle class and democracy. First, as stated earlier in this chapter, there is a space between the structural emergence of the middle class and its social comprehension. This project assumes that – theoretically – the definition of who makes up the middle class in these post- revolutionary narratives will not necessarily be just white-collar workers or bureaucrats or the “middle sectors,” more broadly. There is a possibility that other classes could be encapsulated in these new definitions, so as to render the “middle class” a much larger category in public discourse. Relatedly, separations between certain fractions of the middle sectors are entirely plausible. Furthermore, the nature of the boundaries between the middle class and other classes – why the narrative states certain classes are not part of

“the middle class” – are worth close analysis. Why a class is in or out or, put another way, the criteria by which individuals are considered to be middle class or not may have constraining effects on the relationship between classes and their political power since they may invalidate the political claims of those “out” of the newly-agential middle class category.

Second, we want to tease out exactly how the narrative relates the middle class to

34 democracy. By definition, an agential narrative of the middle class makes the middle class out to be a key actor in advancing history. However, since this study is interested in the relationship between the middle class and democracy, it is important to analyze these post-revolutionary narratives for how they connect the middle class and democracy. That is, what role does the middle class play in the advancement of democratic politics in that country? For now, we can break this down into two, general variations: that of protagonist and antagonist. A protagonistic relationship would mean that the middle class is seen in its public narrative to be a force which advances the country towards democracy or more democratic political forms, attitudes, etc. An antagonistic relationship would suggest the middle class is seen as a force which impedes the country on its way to democracy. Within and between those extremes would be country-specific details which situate the middle class in a broader history of political development.

The Conclusion (chapter 6) deals with this variable again, recapitulating its importance as a causal variable in its own right and not simply a window onto class hegemony or power politics. This is necessary insofar as scholars studying class politics should not dismiss the qualities of the narratives which make up the array of hegemonic tools available to dominant classes. To reduce all hegemonic tools as having the same effect covers over the importance of the middle-class narrative on the self-conception of all social classes, and the peculiar – and powerful – history of the middle class narrative as a global construct. Furthermore, this study will argue that the middle-class narrative is of central historical importance in certain cases – EDSA, 11-A, and Los Forajidos certainly changed the way Filipinos, Venezuelans, and Ecuadorians engaged both political and class history. This project would argue in cases throughout the developing

35 world where so-called middle classes begin to agitate for political change, scholars should take seriously the nature of that middle class‟ narrative both as an historical and as a causal event.

Dependent Variable: Constraints to Democratic Deepening

The main reason why this study chooses as its dependent variable “constraints to democratic deepening” over regime type is that current measures of regime type are inadequate for capturing the variations between the political and social dynamics of democratic politics in the Philippines, Venezuela, and Ecuador. Perhaps taking to heart

(or chastened by) the recommendations laid out by Collier and Levitsky (1997) in their seminal piece “Democracy with Adjectives,” scholars classifying and defining the institutional qualities of democratic regimes in the developing world have been careful to avoid conceptual stretching as they define democracies in their cases. While this move has seemingly reigned in definitions of democracy and made scholars think actively about their schemes, it has overemphasized the political-institutional dimension – parties, party systems, executive-parliamentary relations, for the most part – or focused too heavily on styles of politics, particularly populism, which has turned the study of latter- day democratic regimes into a narrow enterprise of not changing the definition of democracy, but lamenting its demise.

Scholars have tended to explain the failings of latter-day democracies as instances of contemporary “demand overload” (see Huntington 1968). They argue that weak parties compounded with tense executive-legislative relations make political representation nearly impossible (e.g. Linz and Valenzuela, eds. 1994; Coppedge 1998; Mainwaring and

36 Scully, eds. 1999; Bejerano, Mainwaring, and Pizarro forthcoming). As a result, demands from below cannot be effectively channeled, resulting in street politics. In Latin America, this has led to a long list of interrupted presidencies (Valenzuela 2004), and for other countries, like the Philippines, the weakness of parties and the difficulties of presidentialism have also led to similar instabilities (Montinola 1999; Hutchcroft and

Rocamora 2003). Events like EDSA 2, 11-A, and Los Forajidos have been studied as

“democratic revolutions” (Thompson 2004), or as presidential “interruptions”

(Valenzuela 2004), either way emphasizing their effects on political-institutional development.

So how have scholars classified this general condition with developing-world democracies? The choice is often presented as an opposition between a “representative democracy” or full “liberal democracy” of parties and elections and a “diminished subtype” (Collier and Levitsky 1997) – some form of democracy missing part of the procedural minimum. But far from avoiding conceptual stretching, these diminished subtypes are often by themselves too vaguely defined or too broadly applied. O‟Donnell applied the term “delegative democracy” – a conditions wherein the conditions for polyarchy are met, but formal institutions remain weak for some time – in 1994 to cases as broad as Korea, the Philippines, Bolivia, and “many postcommunist countries” (1994:

56). Other authors take terms like “illiberal democracy” to mean anything less than the ideal-typical liberal democracy of the Global North – and to suggest quite blatantly that those deficiencies are insurmountable (Zakaria 1997). Scholars who have emphasized the rise of populism as an impediment to liberal democracy have grouped together Morales‟

Bolivia, Chavez‟s Venezuela, and Fujimori‟s Peru (see for instance Weyland 2003, among

37 others), while calls to distinguish their types of populism have gone largely unheeded

(see Ellner 2004; Cameron 2009). And scholars like Hartlyn (2002) and McCoy (2004) who try to place cases somewhere between authoritarianism and democracy settle for what seem to be terms with their hands thrown up in scholarly defeat: “hybrid regimes” and the “gray zone.”

Despite all that messiness, this study does agree with the political-institutionalists that somewhere in that mix is the “right” term for democracies in the Philippines,

Venezuela, and Ecuador; that by procedural metrics their democratic regimes are lacking.

Borrowing Schedler's (1998) broad terminology, these regimes would belong to the set of

“electoral democracies” where elections are regular and generally fair, but the countries lack the full exercise of civil liberties and/or the extension of state power to enforce the democratic rules is haphazard (see O‟Donnell 1998). But that being said, is regime type the most appropriate metric to measure the differences between these cases?

This study believes that the vagueness of regime type in this case makes it a less- valid measure of political dynamics in these cases. Instead, it offers up a specific variant of the concept of democratic deepening as its dependent measure: constraint to democratic deepening. “Democratic deepening” in the political-institutional sense is best understood as the movement from electoral democracy or other diminished subtypes of democracy towards more “complete” forms. Schedler argues that scholars should shy away from the term “consolidation” and rather adopt “deepening” when talking about this qualititative shift in regime type (1998). However, scholars like Heller suggest a more encompassing definition. He defines “posttransition democratic deepening as a process under which the formal [institutional], effective [i.e. “robust civil society and a capable

38 state”], and substantive [i.e. redistributive] dimensions of democracy become mutually reinforcing” (Heller 2000: 485).6 Heller later asserts that deepening that “historically conditioned dynamic relations among broadly constituted social actors drive not only the making of democracy, but also [its] deepening…” (2000: 487). While Heller‟s approach does not solve problems of regime type definitions, viewing deepening as essentially a processes contested by states, classes, and civil society allows us to understand political dynamics in countries where the multiple dimensions of democracy have not as yet advanced significantly.

To that end, this project conceptualizes the types of constraints to democratic deepening in the Philippines, Venezuela, and Ecuador by the interactive qualities between formal institutions, class power dynamics, and civil society contestation – it labels them oligarchic hegemonic veto for the Philippines, hyperpolarized plebiscitarianism for

Venezuela, and middle-class plebiscitarianism for Ecuador (Figure 2). To begin, it is best to conceive of these three distinct outcomes in each of these cases as occupying positions in overlapping fields or sets of constraints. The two main fields are the field of class power constraints and the field of political-institutional constraints. The field of class- power wherein one or more social classes unduly impedes the political and social influence of other classes, typically subordinate ones. The second field is the political- institutional one wherein there is a distorted and imbalanced relationship between key institutions like legislatures, executives, armies, etc. If we were to place the outcomes in these fields, we would say that the oligarchical hegemonic veto in the Philippines belongs to the field of class power constraints, while Venezuela‟s hyperpolarized plebiscitarianism

6 For contrasting, but approaches similar in spirit, see Tilly (2000), Waisman (1999), Houtzager (2003), and Fatton (1995). 39 belongs to the field of political-institutional constraints. Ecuador‟s middle-class plebiscitarianism belongs to both the class power and political-institutional constraint fields (Figure 2). It should be noted that these outcomes are not the only possible constraints located in these fields – there are conceivably many more. But these constraints are specific to these cases: they are the main impediments to democratic deepening for at least the Philippines, Venezuela, and Ecuador, but not necessarily the only types of impediments possible. These constraints can be measured by a close inspection of the influence of class power over political institutions, the relationship between the institutions themselves, and the reaction of those configurations to demands from civil society to deepen democracy.

The first type, oligarchic hegemonic veto, describes a constraint to deepening wherein democratic institutions and civil society are vehicles for protecting the

40 hegemonic power of traditional elite groups. Oligarchic hegemonic veto is a class-power constraint primarily because for the most part, the oligarchs let the democratic system run its course – either they co-opt or absorb new elites who win elections, or they lose and must find ways to protect their influence over politics. This prevents movements from below from applying effective pressure to deepen democracy. Oligarchic groups dominate legislatures and executive branches, and while fractions of this oligarchy often find themselves in conflict, the tendency of the system is to trend towards their stability in power. This never devolves into eliminating democratic institutions, but it does go as far as validating extrainstitutional politics like protests as being “more” democratic than elections. As hegemony is never fully complete or thoroughgoing (see Gramsci 1971), challenges from below surface and challenge the power of these elites. In response, these oligarchs invalidate and diminish the claims of these responses. In the Philippines, this manifests itself as the post-EDSA resurgence of the oligarchic power elite network, which had initially been constructed by landed elites during late American colonial rule (Go

1999; Anderson 1988). A good example of this were the EDSA 2 protests against Joseph

Estrada, who threatened by not only by temporarily displacing elite networks in government, but also by representing the demands of the urban poor. In addition, white- collar protest has been ineffective at garnering the same support for similar causes. As

Chapter 3 will show, this oligarchic hegemonic veto is tied directly into the post-EDSA middle-class narrative which extols the democratic virtues of “revolutionary” protest of the “middle class” – defined as including the oligarchs and the Catholic Church.

Hyperpolarized plebiscitarianism is a political-institutional constraint to democratic deepening which concentrates political power into the executive branch. It

41 rules by decree and plebiscitary voting, diminishing the influence of legislatures and lacking appropriate oversight for executive decisions. But hyperpolarized plebiscitarianism also exhibits an escalating polarization between the executive and his opponents, wherein claims to deepen from below become swallowed up by opposing sides, effectively squelching them. Demands for deepening are lost not because partisans ignore then, but because their claimants are seen as agents for the other side. While social polarization may precipitate this, it is evident that it is not the interests of a powerful dominant class or classes which prevent deepening – this study's metric for a class-power constraint – but rather the political machinations between political elites. Both sides claim to be the most “democratic,” but neither side trusts the regular sequence of electoral politics. Venezuela since 2002 is the archetypical example of this type of constraint to deepening, with Hugo Chavez's increasing reliance on decree and plebiscite in opposition to “coup-plotting” opponents, who in turn see Chavez's embodiment of the demands of the urban poor to be simply a gateway to authoritarianism. Chapter 4 will claim that this is the direct result of the lack of a definable middle class with determinate political proclivities. The absence of an effective middle-class democratic narrative permits both sides to escalate their polarization.

Finally, middle-class plebiscitarianism is one possible hybrid of political- institutional and class-power constraints to democratization. This constraint features the plebiscitary features of hyperpolarized plebiscitarianism, but the middle class – however constituted – forms the basis of the executive's policy decisions. In other words, the class in power is the middle class and their preferred method of rule is through decree and plebiscitary voting. In contrast to a hegemonic veto, this constraint does not have the

42 capacity to mobilize large segments of civil society – in fact, civil society forces outside of or opposed to the middle class remain formidable challengers. However, their interests are pushed aside for the sake of carrying out democratic politics in the name of a vanguard middle class. Ecuador after 2005 exemplifies this. Forajido protesters became radical middle-class bureaucrats, led by el ministro forajido himself, Rafael Correa.

While ostensibly claiming that its plebiscitary politics are for the good of all Ecuadorians,

Correa and his technocratic advisers have enacted policies and institutions that diminish the influence of non-forajido civil society, namely the indigenous movement. Chapter 5 will claim this outcome was the result of a peculiarly regional middle-class narrative that saw the class as a transcendant, antipolitical, and radical force.

To be clear, all three countries have constraints that could be typified as mostly class-based or mostly political-institutional; certainly it would be absurd to claim that the only political or social problems in the Philippines, Venezuela, and Ecuador were these three constraints. But what this project is contending is that the main constraints to deepening are the ones highlighted here as outcomes. In addition, political-institutional and class-power constraints are not opposites; the oligarchic hegemonic veto is not the diametric opposite of hyperpolarized plebiscitarianism. To be sure, hyperpolarized presidentialism in Venezuela appears to align with Gramsci's description of an “organic crisis” which for him is the absence of effective hegemony. However, it is best to think of all these cases as occupying the lower rungs on a ladder of effective hegemony in general, with the Philippines higher on the ladder than Venezuela or Ecuador, but certainly not immune to regular hegemonic crises.

43 Path Dependence as an Organizing Framework

Based on the theoretical and historical patterns proposed here, this project presents a preliminary causal argument for the Philippines, Venezuela, and Ecuador as a variation of a path-dependent sequence. In the most general sense, this project proposes that revolutions from the middle were contingent events which ultimately resulted in particular constraints to democratic deepening. As such, this general causal argument follows Mahoney‟s definition of path dependence – “…historical sequences in which contingent events set into motion institutional patterns or event chains that have deterministic properties (2000: 507). However, following Mahoney‟s call for scholars to be explicit about the temporal structure of their proposed causal arguments (Mahoney

2000: 538; 2003: 12), this project presents slight, but noticeable variations on the

“standard” path-dependence framework. It should be noted that unlike other studies which emphasize their path-dependent framework (e.g. Collier and Collier 2003;

Mahoney 1999), this study sees path dependence as a means to an end: this project is interested in developing a theory of class formation and key concepts in the definition and effects of revolutions from the middle. As such, it approaches path dependence as a framework that informs its causal assertions, but not as its central argumentative point.

Path dependence is a rigorous framework for comparative-historical analysis because it forces scholars to make explicit their claims about how the structure of time affects their proposed outcomes. Refined through explicit methodological work over the past three decades (see David 1985; Collier and Collier 1999 [2002]; Mahoney 2001;

Pierson 2001; Thelen 2003), path-dependent analysis has evolved past early notions that reduced it to “history matters” to an identifiable series of concepts which focus on the

44 self-reinforcing legacies of contingent choices. That being said, path dependence is still many things to many people. However, none of the major definitions of path dependence are mutually-exclusive. As such, the study of path dependence has at once featured increasing rigor as well as increasing creativity and flexibility.

Generally, path dependent analyses begin with an analysis of “antecedent conditions” – the extant structural or institutional conditions that define and delimit agential choices (Collier and Collier 1999 [2002]: 30; Mahoney 2001: 7). That is, antecedent conditions describe the range of social and political action of major actors in the analysis. Given the range of options arrayed before them from the antecedent conditions, actors make contingent, generative choices during “critical junctures,” the lynchpin of path-dependent analyses. Mahoney suggests that critical junctures are contingent events insofar as their outcomes are unpredictable – theory is unable to

“predict or explain, either deterministically or probabilistically, the occurrence of a specific outcome” (2000: 513). Those actor choices generate particular institutional or simply structural configurations which are exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to roll back because they perpetuate themselves through various types of “lock-in” or “positive feedback” mechanisms (Pierson 2000; see also Mahoney 2000: 515-526). These new self-reinforcing sequences are often met by other “reactive sequences” – causally- independent chains of events which react to extant self-reinforcing configurations, usually prompted by different actors who seek to challenge existing institutions

(Mahoney 2001: 10). Finally, such reactions produce a “legacy” or “heritage” (Collier and Collier 1999 [2002]: 33-39; Mahoney 2001: 10-11l), where patterns settle on a new institutional configuration.

45 A path dependence framework for this study would allow it to begin making causal claims, based on the temporal structuring of events and the causal sequencing of variables. Figure 3 arrays the proposed causal and explanatory variables in a path- dependent framework (Figure 3). First, the set of independent variables containing the existing balance of class power, the structural development of the middle class, and existing class narratives remain “Antecedent Conditions” insofar as they act as contouring factors for the rest of the path-dependent sequence. The “revolution from the middle” becomes the “Critical Juncture” as it is a contingent moment which is informed by, but not dictated by its antecedent conditions. The critical juncture gives way to an

“Institutional Production” phase where the qualities of the new middle-class narrative gain currency. Finally, the dependent variable of constraints to democratic deepening can be broken down into two path dependence concepts. The “Legacy” is the three variants of constraint in the three cases: oligarchic hegemonic veto, and hyperpolarized or middle- class plebiscitarianism. These are revealed through the “Reactive Sequence” of civil society challenges to the would-be hegemonic bloc – in other words, one of the indicators of the dependent variable serves as a separate historical-causal component of the sequence as a whole.

46

A few things are worth noting here. Though path dependence offers a framework for causal analysis, this project does not assign equal expositionary weight in the empirical chapters on each component in this sequence. Nor does it assume that the exposition of any one component in one case requires or deserves an equally-detailed or emphasized point in another. This is not a signal of intellectual laziness or haphazard methods – certain causal moments require deeper exposition, either because for that case the demands of the theoretical and conceptual formation tasks of this project take precedence or because this project undertakes a novel interpretation of historical materials which require a deeper explanation and restructuring. For example, the exposition of the antecedent conditions for each case in this project carry far more expository weight, as a key portion of the argument is that structural factors by themselves do not explain the qualities of middle-class narratives. In addition, to elevate certain historical moments to deep scrutiny when they do not weigh as heavily for the

47 case is an exercise in overstatement. In methodological terms, this project privileges judicious use of analytic narrative over heavy-handed causal inferences by the presence or absence of mutually-exclusive variables (or component processes of path dependence) across cases, or “nominal comparison” (Mahoney 1999: 1157).

Mahoney suggests that comparative-historical work using a combination of nominal comparison and narrative analysis helps to show “how [causal patterns appear] valid even assessed in light of great historical detail], but leaves the researcher without tools to measure probabilistic outcomes and lead to “dry, mechanical stories in which the same causal pattern operates in case after case” (1999: 1170). This is at best an overstatement: yes, while a good methodologist must make the case for the weight of variables and causes in the overall argument, a good craftsman should not approach each causal point or each causal node in every case with the same mechanical exposition for the sake of filling space. Close case knowledge means not overthinking or over-analyzing events with little or less relevance to the case for the sake of the causal framework – certain variables and certain moments in each case‟s history are crucial points of knowledge for the sake of understanding middle-class formation and democracy. Path dependence is but only one metric by which scholars can weigh that importance, while the other I think is more intangible: I hope that the reader will agree that this approach does not sacrifice good writing on the altar of rigor, nor is it sacrificing rigor in the attempt to write a compelling narrative.

Summary and the Dissertation to Come

This study looks at the relationship between middle class formation and democracy in the

48 Philippines, Venezuela, and Ecuador. It does so by comparative-historical analysis of middle-class narratives surrounding key protests in these countries – EDSA in the

Philippines (Chapter 3), 11-A in Venezuela (Chapter 4), and La Revolución de los

Forajidos in Ecuador (Chapter 5). While existing literature would either see the middle class as democracy‟s savior, its worst enemy, or a scheming rational actor, this project theorizes that the middle class emerges from processes of class formation – processes formed and directed by the struggles for democracy itself. This project broadly argues that middle-class formation through revolutions from the middle creates particular constraints to a country‟s democratic deepening. The goal of this project is to now turn to the cases and detail the three paths these countries took to their outcomes, with the ultimate intent to develop portable concepts and hypotheses for other cases.

The next chapter (Chapter 2) explores the theoretical underpinnings for a narrative approach to middle-class formation. It sets up a framework for this theory through critique of the left-Weberian, symbolic power, and linguistic paradigms in the study of middle-class formation. It posits that narrative serves as the key theoretical linkages between each paradigm, as well as what induces each one‟s best features.

49 CHAPTER 2 – THEORETIACL FRAMEWORK

E.P. Thompson's assertions that “classes are made,” that they “happen in human relationships,” and that they “are events that occur in history” seems to have evaded the study of middle-class formation. The difficulty is that up until now, relating the middle class to democracy has relied on a few key assumptions. The most prevalent is that “the middle class” is operationalized as some sort of socioeconomic strata, determined by its income or a set of occupations. As Marx suggested in the Eighteenth Brumaire, “men make history,” but as he suggested elsewhere, they must view “[their goals] and [their] historical action [as] prefigured in the most clear and ineluctable way in [their] own life- situation…” (1971: 134-135). While was referring to the bourgeoisie and the proletariat whom he saw as harbingers for new modes of production, he suggested that these two classes became “conscious” insofar as they realized that they were, in their conception, ahead of their time and chose revolution to bring about a future in which they were the central players. But, as E.P. Thompson suggests in The Making of the English Working

Class (1963), there is a “logic, but no law” behind any set of occupations – the traditional understanding of what constitutes a class – arriving at their own self-awareness, let alone a self-awareness of being a “class” specifically, a particularly acute for scholars studying the middle class. Thus, this chapter is concerned with developing a theoretical framework to view middle-class formation as an historical process and explore how it might relate in theory to democracy.

50

This chapter constructs a theoretical framework that focuses on the comparative- historical development of middle-class narratives and their relationship to the broader narrative construction of democracy. “Narrativity” is the idea that “we come to know, understand, and make sense of the social world” and “constitute our social identities” through the stories well tell of ourselves and the groups we belong (Somers 1992: 600).

Narrative's conventions – plot, theme, morals, and characters – connects people and groups to existing social structures, but under certain circumstances they can also be subversive (Polletta 2006), and as this work will argue, transformative as well. The resulting framework sees the relationship between the middle class and democracy in the developing world as driven by symbolic dynamics as much as political-economic one, operating under two dynamics. The first dynamics is that of a classification struggle over the meaning of the term “the middle class” (Bourdieu 1990; 1992). Far from an independent or benign process, defining “the middle class” requires reclassifying socioeconomic, ethnic, and gender inequalities, transforming some and reinforcing others, with implications for particular balances of objective class power. But beyond the task of classification, the agency and protagonism of “the middle class” is at stake as scholars, activists, pundits, and even the state attempt to construct narratives about the origins and future of their country's democracy. In other words, we are looking at the historical development of the “histories” of the middle class. Thus, we can follow Marx and Thompson far more closely by comparatively analyzing the historical development of not only the meaning of the term “middle class,” but how much historical agency “the

51 middle class” has in the stories that link it to the political and economic development of their countries.

In what follows, this chapter will present a theoretical framework for the comparative-historical analysis of middle-class narratives as they relate to democratic development in the developing world. After a brief discussion of the epistemological and methodological implications of narrativity, this chapter will compare and contrast a narrative-based framework against three major approaches towards the study of social class and democracy – the left-Weberian, the symbolic power approach, and the linguistic turn. The goal of these comparisons is not to dismiss these three competitors outright, but rather to demonstrate how a narrative approach is not only compatible with them individually, but also connects each of their most useful theoretical assertions. In other words, narrativity can bridge theoretical gaps between material and cultural paradigms that scholars have not yet effectively combined to study both middle-class formation and democracy. The framework we erect in this chapter can better assist us in determining the quality of the process of middle-class narrative formation in our three cases.

Narrative Theory

For scholars who tout “narrativity” or a narrative approach, the telling and retelling of stories is construed as an “epistemological other” that is perhaps unfairly relegated to the periphery of post-positivist social science, modern historiography, and even postmodern analyses (Somers 1994: 606; Somers 1996; Somers and Gibson 1994; Ortner 1991;

52

Polletta 2006: 186-194).

The contemporary sociological study of narrative owes much to developments in other fields such as literary criticism, psychology, history, and philosophy (e.g. Carr

1985; Polkinghorne 1988; White 1987). It suggests that the social world is inherently

“storied”: that human beings (and institutions) constitute themselves and understand society at large through the creation, telling, and retelling of particular sequences of important events. These stories are not mere representations or interpretations of the social world per se, but rather as Somers puts it “social ontologies” and “social epistemologies” (Somers 1992: 600) through which people both create and understand their milieu. Polletta concurs, citing psychologist Jerome Bruner: “narrative is a distinctive way not just of representing reality but of apprehending it” (2006: 11). Somers writes, “It matters... not whether we are social scientists or subjects of historical research, but that we come to be who we are (however ephemeral, multiple, and changing) by our location (usually unconsciously) in social narratives and networks of relations that are rarely of our own making.” (1992: 600, emphasis in the original)

All narratives contain a “plot” - a deliberate, temporal, and causal ordering of people, places, and events. This makes narratives easily distinguishable from other forms of discourse like frames or ideologies (broadly speaking) as they contain “a beginning- middle-end structure that describes some sort of change or development...” (Steinmetz

1992: 490; see also Polletta 2005). Narratives are deliberate because all narrative-makers

“selectively appropriate” (Somers 1992; 1994) what they deem as essential elements to

53 their story. This is in part because there are a multitude of people, places and episodes that could contribute to a story. However, more important, narrative-makers pick and choose certain story elements in an attempt to produce a plot with a theme or moral, and often with an understanding of the social context under which they are recounting said story. In any case, in telling a story, narrative-makers retain and acquire characteristics that are story-relevant. “The hero,” “the villain,” and “the victim” are some recurring basic characterizations, but we can also speak somewhat more abstractly of “agents” – that is, entities with a capacity to act upon the world and a key concept in the Marx-

Thompson vision of class consciousness. Carr writes “a community in this sense exists by virtue of a story which is articulated and accepted, which typically concerns the group's origins and its destiny, and which interprets what is happening now in the light of these two temporal poles” (1985: 128). In this sense, narratives turn people into characters, places into settings, and events into episodes. As Polkinghorne puts it,

The narrative explanation... answers such a question by configuring a set of events into a storylike causal nexus. The temporal explanation of why one does something focuses on the events in an individual's life history that have an effect on a particular action, including the projected future goals the action is to achieve. It accepts complex sets of events, including reflective decisions, and explains an event by tracing its intrinsic relations to other events and locating it in its historical context. Thus, narratives exhibit an explanation instead of demonstrating it (Polkinghorne 1988: 21, emphasis in the original)

Somers renders this as the difference between saying “I am 40 years old; I should buy life insurance” – a categorical explanation – and “I felt out of breath last week; I really should start thinking about life insurance” – a narrative one (1992: 601).

Narrativity also requires attention to the narrative-makers themselves. Narrative-

54 makers adjust the content of their stories based on the context of the act of speaking – be it an interview, a small crowd, people of the same social class, the citizenry, or “history” itself. Narrative-makers are both constrained and enabled by their audiences and the institutional context in which they operate (Polletta 2005: ch. 4 and 5; Ewick and Sibley

1995: 205-211). Taken together, the story and the act of storytelling constitute our social selves in narrative theory. Philosopher David Carr posits that stories, the act of storytelling, the storyteller, and the audience to be what gives our selves even our communities a sense of coherence, and as such provides us with a sense of belonging and a sense of self (1986: 128). That our social relationships are based in the stories we tell about ourselves, the places we work, the countries in which we live, and a myriad other connections between our individual selves and others is a significant departure from the analytical-methodological view of narrative in comparative-historical social science.

Storytelling as explanation and constitution of social life makes more sense if we think of three possible reasons for why someone or some institution may produce a narrative. First, narrative-makers tell stories to help themselves or others comprehend particularly strange or uncommon occurrences or ruptures in the predicted patterns of daily life – “to reduce the anxiety produced by the unfamiliar,” to “comprehend changes that shatter our routines and threaten our sense of self” (Polletta 2005: 12), and by extension the groups we belong. A break in that predicted pattern or a revelation about the past requires “editing” so to speak, to square new events, new people, and new places into an ongoing existential narrative. For example, work in medical sociology shows how

55 sufferers of chronic illness often reformulate their personal narratives to demonstrate how their life choices led them to their current condition (see esp. Williams 1984). Even in our intimate relationships do we tell stories and reformulate the ones we had been telling so as to make sense of their beginnings, and especially their conclusions (e.g. Vaughan

1990). In a macrosociological sense, coming to grips with “historical events” as Sewell understands them requires new stories as the old ones may fail to fully explain the rapid and extensive ruptures across multiple social structures. In his account of Assembly debate after the fall of the Bastille at the start of the French Revolution, Sewell describes a process of storytelling among deputies that sought to exonerate the violent behavior of the Parisian crowds; a debate which resulted in equating revolution with popular violence

– a narrative association which for Sewell shows how these deputies “invented” the idea of a revolution from below (1996: 856-860).

Second, narrativity may reinforce a particular pattern of expected behavior. Ewick and Sibley argue that stories and storytelling reproduce hegemony as mechanisms of social control, by colonizing the ways in which we are capable of recounting events, and in their very telling and creation “[reproducing], without exposing, the connections of the specific story and persons to the structure of relations and institutions that made [that] story plausible” (1995: 213-214; see also Paige 1997: 339-343). The hegemonic capacity of stories and storytelling emerges from the presence of what Polletta calls “kernel stories” and Somers calls “metanarratives.” These larger stories provide a ready-made cast of actors, locations, and events which follow a prescribed plot from which narrative-

56 makers can draw. In doing so, they unwittingly reinforce the social patterns those metanarratives hold together by taking those pre-structured plots as given (Ewick and

Sibley 1995: 214). In other words, we are less likely to question the origins or social bases of those kernel stories as we are to use them as shortcuts in our own storytelling. To be sure, such a process is never so thorough as to decimate new interpretations or meanings. In fact, scholars have shown a strong degree of dialog between hegemonic narrative-makers and their stories and those seeking to subvert them (Steinberg 1989;

1992). Nevertheless, when these preexisting stories are retold, both the story itself and the act of storytelling reproduce the social structures inherent in that kernel.

Finally, stories may be told to engender social change. In contrast to the taken-for- granted aspects of kernel stories, subversive stories are often deeply ironic – they question existing hegemonic tales to uncover the taken-for-granted connections between actors and their position in social structures (Ewick and Sibley 1995: 217-222). In addition, they often contain significant ambiguity insofar as multiple groups can interpret any one story as a call for change without necessarily sharing the same interests (Polletta

2005: 19). Scholars suggest a variety of reasons for what constitutes an effective subversive story, but they agree that effective stories capitalize on unexpected juxtaposition of characters and events in which “characters defy expectations but do so in ways that point to generalizable normative conclusions” (Polletta 2006: 126). Polletta suggests this is best done through literary techniques – changes in tense, pauses, ellipses

(2006: 178) – while Ewick and Sibley emphasize the social characteristics of the story

57 and the storyteller (1996: 119-221). Either way, the key to subversive narratives seems to be the ways in which characters are construed as agents in what was previously assumed to be stories without agency. Since narrativity is constituent of self and social relations, making a subversive narrative is tantamount to imbuing one's self or one's group with agency against a backdrop of otherwise unquestioned structures.

Narrativity and the Left-Weberian Tradition

One of the central questions of comparative historical sociology – and arguably all of classical social theory – is the nature of modernization and its effects on the social condition. To answer that question, scholars have adopted what is commonly known as the “left-Weberian” perspective. The left-Weberian perspective or tradition in comparative-historical analysis is less of a school of thought than a common analytical tendency that makes some key assumptions about how classes and states interact. The main presumption of a left-Weberian analysis is that social and political actors reflect to some degree the existing socioeconomic cleavages in a given society. Differentiating themselves from a strictly Marxist perspective, left-Weberians take a multiplicity of social classes to be a given, where no one class can dominate the others in the political, economic, and social realms without carefully-crafted cross-class alliances (esp.

Rueschemeyer et al. 1992; Collier and Collier 2002; Slater 2010) and/or fairly destructive moments of revolutionary conflict (Moore 1966; Skocpol 1979; Paige 1997; Foran 2005).

In addition, left-Weberians suggest the state has clearly independent interests apart from

58 would-be dominant class coalitions, and in certain circumstances, can itself dominate and create classes and structure the nature of coalition building (Evans et al. 1985; Davis

2004; Kohli 2004). Finally, left-Weberians – especially latter-day works – explicitly emphasize the importance of long-run historical patterns, focusing on “critical junctures” and (Mahoney 1999) during which time these alliances or revolutions cement path- dependent institutional outcomes.1

Narrative theory has not been foreign to the left-Weberian tradition. Scholars have been generally willing to introduce narrative into the analysis of working-class formation and even dominant class formation. Spurred by Katznelson and Zolberg's edited volume

(1986) on working-class formation in Europe and the United States, Somers (1992) and

Steinmetz (1992) both argued that narrative retellings of class identity and social action are the essential components to effective class consciousness. In their theoretical interrogation, they both identified the key role of “public narratives” (Somers 1992: 604) or “collective” or “social narratives” (Steinmetz 1992: 490) – stories that are told about social groups – and their interaction with other types of narratives: individual, analytical, or even metanarratives. For both of them, working-class formation was the product of successful narrative formation, that is, when working class stories provided the kernel for individual experiences with social structure. In an analysis of coffee elite narratives in

1 It seems unfair to group what amount to be the last fifty or so years of contemporary comparative historical social science into this grouping, especially given the individual nuances between works in this tradition. Other authors (Adams, Clemens, and Orloff 2005b) have generalized about the tradition in similar fashion, though this chapter will not be leveling epistemological and methodological critiques to the left- Weberian tradition. 59

Central America as a compliment to his balance-of-class power analysis, Paige similarly finds that narratives contribute to the class consciousness of dominant coffee planters and processors, but finds additionally that narratives can also “[convert] real events into an ideologically mystified story” (1997: 342) where they invert the objective social reality of planter-dominated Central America into one where coffee magnates carefully usher their countries and subordinates into modernity.

But in contrast to the willingness to incorporate narrative into analyses of working-class formation, left-Weberian analyses have been surprisingly opposed to, or unwilling, to accept a nuanced approach for middle-class formation, especially in the developing world context. Universally, left-Weberians have approached the developing world middle class as having variable interests. They are “kingmakers” so to speak, joining either subordinate or elite classes in key class coalitions. In addition, middle classes in the developing world are nearly universally seen to be closely related to late and rapid state-led development, and oftentimes will stay quiescent in the face of nondemocratic and repressive forms of government. Essentially, the left-Weberian approach views the middle class as essentially a rational actor with unfixed or perhaps underdeveloped interests.

The quintessential left-Weberian text on democracy and development,

Rueschemeyer et al.'s Capitalist Development and Democracy, advances this theoretically-limited view of middle-class formation. Rueschemeyer et al. (RSS) argue that “the great heterogeneity of the middle classes made for diversity in their class

60 interests” (1992: 185).They suggest that the ultimate goal of the middle classes vis-à-vis democracy was to “effect their own inclusion” and would act with expediency, rather than on principle (1992: 275). In other words, three factors – their social location

(between elites and the working class), their fragmentedness, and their means-ends rationality – give them no clear-cut preference for democracy at all.2 This is a strange claim, considering that RSS have a useful concept of the “social construction of class interests” (Rueschemeyer et al. ch. 2) but do not extend it to the middle class, when they do so readily to explain variations in the interests of the working class. We can only assume, but not infer that the middle class’ preferences towards democracy have been formed not by a simple rational attempt at determining the easiest way for their own political inclusion, but instead by the nature of how they came to share the attitudes towards full democracy, restricted democracy, or authoritarianism as their allies. On the other hand, RSS do recognize that “perceptions of threat on the part of dominant classes are not simply reflections of objective conditions but rather symbolic constructs arising out of particular historical conjunctures” (1992: 287), but go only as far as saying political parties engender this assertion, and then only for the elites. On these counts, RSS do not explain the entire story – though they show the consequences of their alliances on democracy, they do not provide a clear enough picture of how and why those alliances came about in the first place (see also Przeworksi 1980).

2 In the late 1960s, Luis Ratinoff suggested that “class situations” were more determinant of the middle classes “progressive or conservative action” (1967: 91) but left the question open as to how to study them. 61

Latter-day works in the left-Weberian tradition also remain unwilling to conceive of the middle class as anything beyond a structural condition, so to speak, despite their willingness to incorporate newer theoretical approaches to address the weaknesses of a strict balance-of-class power view. Chief among these newer theoretical adaptations are moves towards “symbolic power” (which will be discussed in depth later), hegemony, and governmentality. Slater's (2009a; 2009b) analysis of authoritarian persistence and democratic revolt in Southeast Asia draws from Etzioni's (1966?) notions of coercive, renumerative, and symbolic power, focusing on the role of communal elites and their claims over the readings of national history. However, Slater still sees the middle class in

Southeast Asia as group which needs to be convinced or won over. Authors like Yang

(2005) and RSS (1992) have used Gramsci to explain the middle class' propensity to support dictatorship in Korea and working class German's support for the Nazi party, respectively focusing on the state and its ability to occupy the trenches of civil society. In both texts, the middle class remains closely tied to the state and broadly unwilling to act

“on its own,” since its interests are dictated by the state.

Left-Weberian adopters of Bourdieu on the other hand look to explain the contradictory characteristics of the middle class as a product of a modernizing state and adherence to nationalism and religion – many times to the detriment of other classes and/or to a deeper democratization. In Davis' (2004) comparative study of middle classes in developmental states, she argues that the Korean state used the hard-working middle peasant as an example for its then-unruly capitalist class, projecting middle-peasant work

62 ethic as a nationalist symbol – an example of Bourdieu's concept of the projection of state symbolic power (Bourdieu 1989; also see Loveman 2005). Fernandes and Heller (2006) look at the Indian “New Middle Class” as an aspiring hegemonic agent engaged in an ongoing classification struggle (Bourdieu 1992) to define its position through an active distinction of its daily habits from those of lower classes, that is, “class-in-practice” to turn a phrase from Marx. In a similar vein, Robison and Goodman (1996) address the political proclivities of what they call “the new rich in Asia” as driven strongly by state- led development and patterns of privileged consumption.

The problem with the newer Bourdieusian strands of left-Weberian analysis is that they have focused on developmental states that are quite exceptional in relation to the rest of the semiperiphery – relatively capable, relatively well-embedded in their societies, and relatively successful. It is possible that the state exerts an exceptional influence on middle-class formation in its attempts to advance industry and maintain order, but it remains to be seen how less effective states – and certainly less stable ones – compare in their ability to manage the cultural and structural production of the middle class.

Furthermore, class formation in these studies proceeds relatively smoothly, if not rapidly, from the onset of the developmental regime – that is, if the regime is an effective one overall. To a certain degree, it seems as if the study of the middle class in the left-

Weberian tradition suffers from what Adams, et al. (2005) identify as a retreat towards

“incomplete modernization” to explain variations between cases.

While a portion of these weaknesses can be remedied through better case selection

63

– i.e. looking at cases of middle class formation outside of capable developmental states

(which this work does), narrative theory can help modify the left-Weberian approach to the middle class by redirecting its focus towards moments of explicit class consciousness linked to the interpretation of historical change. Taking a page from Somers' (1992) and

Steinmetz's (1992) work, the nature middle-class formation can be better uncovered by locating historical moments when “middle class” became a salient political identity in various narratives, and then understanding the balance-of-class-and-state power that informed the content of those stories.3

A variety of analytical options then become available. First, we can play close scrutiny to the storyteller, locating their position in social networks and “objective” class alignments; and then closely interrogate the content of the narrative to understand how they describe the middle class in their retelling of events. The main task here would be to investigate why the balance-of-class power at the time might have influenced the storyteller's use of “the middle class” as character in their story. In the view of narrative theory, such evocations of the middle class in narrative form are means by which narrative-makers create and affirm its existence amid particular social contexts. The payoff would be to comprehend how or why certain actors saw the nature of class coalitions, and how evoking “the middle class” might have aided their interests one way or another. So for example, when we look at how Rafael Correa in Ecuador claims to be a middle-class protester, we can ask why he tells that particular story, to whom is he telling

3 I use the terms balance of class power and balance of class and state power interchangeably... I should probably change that. 64 it, and who might be receptive to it. Similarly, if we want to understand why the

Philippine middle-class narrative after EDSA defines oligarchs as middle class, we can work backwards to determine the political justifications for it.

Like Somers and Steinmetz, this project is especially interested in analyzing narratives that speak about “the middle class” as a social entity beyond any one individual; and on the “generalization” of the middle class narrative so that it begins to inform personal narratives or other narratives on the same ontological level. This study prefers Somers' term “public narrative” over Steinmetz' “collective narrative” to describe the nature of middle-class narrative discourse. While Steinmetz thinks of class formation through narrative as a linking of personal (“ethno-narrative) and collective narratives, emphasizing collective identity as lived experience; Somers' definition of public narrative allows for more flexibility. For her, a public narrative is “attached... to a structural formation larger than the single individual, to intersubjective networks or institutions, however local or grand, micro or macro...” (1992: 604). With this definition, we can interrogate narrative-makers, storytelling contexts, and the stories themselves vis-a-vis particular positions in the balance of class power and focus not simply on whether or not a storyteller calls themselves or their group “middle class,” but about how different narrative-makers from different class locations might talk about the middle class. This allows us to trace the public discussion, apart from (though related to) the individual discussion of middle classness. And as it turns out, much of the data collected for this study speaks of the middle class in the third person – “the middle class did” or “the

65 middle class wants” – with narrative-makers from different objective social classes opining on the particular role of the middle class in democratic development. What this suggests is that “the middle class” might be less a class to woo into one's political coalition than a means by which particular coalitions formed around a common (though very generalized) identity. This is certainly the case in the Philippines with the middle class narrative after EDSA defining the middle class as including oligarchic families and the Catholic Church. Again, by choosing Somers' definition over Steinmetz's, this study is not interested in uncovering the lost voices of middle-class people, but rather the greater public conception of the class vis-a-vis the particular balances of power at the time.

But perhaps the most intriguing amplification of left-Weberian analysis by narrative theory comes in a close scrutiny of how narrative-makers recount historical events. Because narrative theory emphasizes the selective use and interpretation of historical events in stories, we should pay much closer attention to how narrative-makers speaking of differing social locations speaking about the middle class use past events to describe their political present and predict the future. In a sense, we should be looking for how narrative-makers place the middle class in the flow of history itself. But why? First, left-Weberians have noted that particularly jarring historical circumstances affect future historical patterns (Mahoney 1999; Pierson 2004). From path dependence to sequence analysis (Griffin 1994, Abbott 2000), left-Weberians have theorized that the order in which events occur affects causal outcomes. What they have failed to systematically study, however, is how actors during these moments come to grips with and justify such

66 radical changes to their lives – in essence, how actors apprehend the shift in the balance of class power as a moment of social construction. Again, left-Weberians have emphasized rational choices, threat perception, and political coalitions, but not how actors selectively appropriate particular events in their stories and how such narrative resequencing affects the agency and protagonism of certain social classes – in our case, the middle class.

As mentioned previously, creating historical subjects with the ability to act on history itself requires a careful manipulation of stories. Such stories require some sort of break with existing metanarratives, which in turn support particular configurations of class power. Historical events of certain magnitudes may cause ruptures in these configurations, leading either to a desperate elite attempts to maintain the narratives that perpetuated the past or to counternarratives that can potentially invigorate new social actors. Despite some ambiguities, Sewell provides a definition for the nature of these

“historical events”: “(1) a ramified sequence of occurrences that (2) is recognized by contemporaries, and that (3) results in a durable transformation of structures (1994: 844)

Mahoney suggests that these events serve as “initial event[s] that [set] into motion” a contingent chain reaction of subsequent events, or “reactive sequence” (2000: 527).

Either way, narrative theory suggests that the stories told to comprehend these breaks have significant effects on the ontological perspective of narrative-makers. As Polletta mentions, events that break previous social patterns – patterns that previously helped to define the social location of the storyteller – produce moments of reassessment and

67 perhaps a resequencing of events in stories to include and explain the rupture. As the previous balance of class power breaks down, new social actors may emerge through the stories told of those breakdowns. Or, in contrast, old actors may find ways to co-opt or challenge the development of those narratives, depending on how severe that break from the past actually was. We shall see that in the Philippines, the oligarchic families and the

Catholic Church had to work very hard to insert themselves into the new middle class narrative after EDSA; while in Ecuador, political elites eventually were not capable of swaying the narrative – perhaps only swaying it against them!

What does this mean for middle-class formation in the developing world? First, we have to pay close attention to how historical events not only break structural patterns, but how they affect the nature of the discussion of the middle class. Significant ruptures may produce new stories about the middle class and may either grant it new capacity over history itself or diminish it. The success or failure of actions seen as historical events – particular legislation, political strategies, or of particular protests – may influence the story produced afterwards, either justifying the agency of the classes involved (if successful) or forcing narrative-makers to reassess the ability of a class to effect change.

This suggests that middle-class formation may be linked less to the overall development of class fractions than the success or failure of moments where agents seen as “middle class” were able to move previously immoveable structures. Second, the implication is that where left-Weberians have traditionally seen the ambivalence of the middle class towards democracy at certain points in time as the result of their haphazard class

68 formation, it is alternatively plausible that such ambivalence is a characteristic of the oftentimes historically-punctuated and quite reversible process of class formation, seen over time. In addition successes in action breed stories about historical agents, and failures produce stories about historical weakness. Either way, the middle-class may appear to change horses midstream only when the plans of agents who evoke their existence go awry or unpredictably well. That is not to say that a middle classes do not develop “ambivalent” outlooks towards democracy, but rather we need to carefully parse out what are actually ambivalent attitudes and what are classes in the midst of reversal or progress in their own histories of formation.

The theoretical payoff here is the basic frame for this project. With narrative, now the left-Weberian perspective can operate on two related ontological levels; the first being the typical level for comparative-historical analysis that is focused on the causal sequence of historical events, the second being how actors themselves comprehended those events and arrayed them into stories that made sense of both sudden change and stasis.

Furthermore, we can ground the macro-level analysis which left-Weberians have innovated with a micro-level analysis linked through a close attention to historical sequences and their narrative interpretation. This move is similar to the one we posited in the introduction regarding the definition of the middle class – one story structural, the other a process tracing of the narrative itself. Doing so allows us to move past the simplistic rational actor models used to describe middle class politics in the developing world to one that focuses on the creation of historical agents. In summary, the

69 combination of the left-Weberian approach and narrative theory produces a fruitful set of theoretical guidelines by which this study can interrogate middle-class formation.

Looking beyond the basic premises of a balance-of-class power analysis, this framework introduces the public narrative and focuses on the relationship between the development of these narratives and the political-economic circumstances that surround them.

Narrativity and Symbolic Power

That particular events can cause ruptures in structures, which then potentially lead to new storied identities and comprehensions of the balance of class power is all well and good, but who or what allows these stories to be told goes beyond class power itself. For a story to be accepted as “the truth” or more importantly “self-evident,” agents must somehow be able to convince others that their interpretation of history is the “correct” one. In

Venezuela, for example, neither side can agree on what exactly transpired at 11-A, and this spills over into the definition of the middle class.

As mentioned earlier, scholars have turned to what can broadly be called the

“symbolic power approach” to address the shortcomings of previous work. The emergence of Bourdieusian approaches to middle-class formation in the developing world is bearing informative findings in this regard. That states and possibly other authorities have the capacity to create or destroy groups because they accumulate symbolic capital – that is, “the power to constitute the given” (Bourdieu 1989, 1992) suggests that a study of middle class formation in the developing world requires a close

70 attention to the battles over the ability to constitute social identity – to name, to describe, to count, to map.

It is useful to understand how this plays out at the ethnographic level. Scholars in history and anthropology use symbolic power to refocus the discussion of middle-class formation – and developing world democracy implicitly – away from an analysis of classes in relations of production, but rather in relations of consumption. In other words, in buying and consuming certain products in certain ways, the middle class marks its social position which gives them the cache to diminish the social positions of other who do not do the same. As many recent case studies of middle class groups in the developing world suggest, occupation is less a marker of class identity than what one buys, how they show it off, and how they use the very practice of consumption to mark themselves off from other classes. As O’Daugherty (1997) describes for mid-1990s Brazil, the middle class responded to wild inflation by spending as much money as they could, as quickly as they could, but for high-end clothing, trips to the U.S., and other markers of status.

Fernandes argues for India the new middle class is oriented towards profligate spending, but its illiberal tendencies center around protecting its status from upwardly-mobile lower castes, especially in the realm of education (2006), and similarly Mazarrella argues that the post-Independence image of the Nehru bureacrat as the core of the Indian middle class has given way to an image based less on occupation and more on patterns of consumption and Right-wing religious devotion (see also Hansen 1998). Leichty (2000) makes similar claims for Nepal. That classes are marked off from each other in relative

71 fashion by their habits and practices – that is, their “habitus” – their systemic understanding of the differences between a group of people and other groups which

“produces practices and representations which are available for classification” (1989: 19)

This suggests a significantly different approach to the study of class formation than a tabulation of occupations.

As changes in the economy or political conditions interrupt or alter the daily habits of people, to either change or maintain those practices requires explicitly defining what those practices are and why they are particular to one group versus another. That is, if a set of practices are seen to be “middle class,” all of the practices excluded from that definition make up the characteristics of other classes. Essentially, it is a conflict over the accepted definition of a particular group, which inexorably defines other groups in the process. “Classification struggles” therefore are conflicts over how particular constellations of habits and practices get expressed through a unifying political discourse

– for this work's purposes, the discourses surrounding a “middle class” identity. In a classification struggle, actors have agency through “[jettisoning] the old political vocabulary, or… [preserving] the orthodox political vision by keeping those words designed to describe the social world (Bourdieu 1989: 21). In other words, classes, like other objects in the social world

… can be perceived and expressed in a variety of ways, since they always include a degree of indeterminacy and vagueness, and thereby, a certain degree of semantic elasticity. Indeed, even the most constant combinations of properties are always based on statistical connections between interchangeable characteristics; furthermore they are subject to variations in time so that their meaning, insofar as it depends on the future, is

72

itself held in suspense and relatively indeterminate (Bourdieu 1989: 20)

“Obviously,” Bourdieu writes, “the construction of groups cannot be a construction ex nihilo. It has all the more chance of succeeding the more it is founded in reality…”

(1989: 23). That is, in creating political discourse to represent the middle class, agents draw directly from the lived reality – the habits, practices, and other unconscious workings of life -- of whom they want to represent. The content for that political vocabulary is drawn from these regularly unspoken, unconscious distinctions between the daily practices between groups. Bourdieu argues these distinctions lie in the habitus.

These traits can include occupation, dress, eating habits, spatial location, etc. – discernible patterns of behavior that people can use to distinguish themselves, defining a group by what it “does” or what it “does not” do. “Every group is the site of a struggle to impose a legitimate principle of group construction,” Bourdieu writes, “and every distribution of properties, whether it concerns sex or age, education or wealth, may serve as a basis for specifically political divisions or struggles” (Bourdieu 1991: 130)

But while every distinction can potentially lead to political divisions, the ability to create the values associated with such distinctions is limited to those with a particular type of capital – “symbolic capital” – and for our purposes, symbolic power. “Indeed, any attempt to institute a new division must reckon with the resistance of those who, occupying a dominant position in the space thus divided, have and interest in perpetuating a doxic relation to the social world which leads to the acceptance of established divisions as natural or to their symbolic denial through the affirmation of a 73 higher unity (national, familial, etc)” (Bourdieu 1991: 130) These holders of symbolic power, “[f]inding nothing for which to reproach the social world as it stands, they endeavor to impose universally, through a discourse permeated by the simplicity and transparency of common sense, the feeling of obviousness and leaving things as they are, they attempt to undermine politics in a neutralization or, even better, of negation, which seeks to restore the doxa to its original state of innocence and which, being oriented towards the naturalization of the social order, always borrows the language of nature”

(Bourdieu 1991: 131). In other words, they claim the world is as they say, that such claims are simply describing the natural order of things, and that challenges to their interpretation are challenges to the very essence of society itself. While Etzioni (1966) suggests that symbolic power is one of three types of power – the other two being renumerative and coercive – Loveman argues, “symbolic power is a sort of metapower that accrues to the carriers of [other] specific forms of power to the extent that their particular basis of power is recognized as legitimate” (2005: 1656).

The symbolic power of a social class or even a state is not a given; it must be acquired. Granted that the application of state symbolic power can produce transformative, but sometimes disastrous results, states must acquire this power to change their territory, usually through acquiring the power to make legible and systematically understandable the people and places they wish to control (Scott 1998). “Symbolic power is incrementally accumulated in modern states as... their administrative activities are recognized as legitimate” (Loveman 2005: 1657). Census-taking and map-making – two

74 administrative tasks states take in order to establish “political and administrative control over a given territory (Loveman 2005: 1658) – often require “hard-won battles with existing secular and religious authorities and with local populations” to establish the

“boundaries and nature of state involvement in particular areas of social life” (Loveman

2005: 1658). The development of the nation-state is heavily tied to the ability of states and social movements to influence the teaching of particular forms of nationalism, oftentimes blocked or contained by various actors with different degrees of symbolic power (Itzigsohn and vom Hau 2006; vom Hau 2010).

Class formation is intimately tied to processes of symbolic power accumulation.

As previously mentioned, scholars have emphasized the ability of states to classes, essentially imbuing their political interests with the interests of the state itself (e.g. Yang

2005; Nun 1967). That the interests of the state go unquestioned by the middle class suggests in part the effective application of symbolic power to constitute the “natural” order of political activity for the class. In his study of democratizing social movements in

Southeast Asia, Slater (2009) posits that certain elite groups – “communal elites” – retain the ability to make emotive appeals to religion and nationalism by virtue of their symbolic power. For Slater, this symbolic power is the product of specific historical circumstances such as the presence of national religions, the role of the elite in fighting for independence, and whether or not they were complicit in creating authoritarian regimes (2009: 210-212).

The origins of symbolic power and their relationship to narratives – stories that

75 theoretically affirm and constitute “the given” – are two topics relevant to this study. For a middle-class narrative to avoid a Venezuela and go unchallenged – or at least challenged with no threat to the authors – would require that narrative to be symbolically- powerful. The obvious question here is, do middle-class narratives constitute symbolic power or are they possible because of it? On the one hand, having symbolic power allows a story or narrative to be accepted as given. We can conceive of metanarratives as

“symbolically-powered,” that is, the kernel stories on which other stories are based achieve their unquestioned status because their narrative-makers (and perhaps the settings in which they are told) are considered legitimate. To tell a legitimate story requires referencing existing metanarratives which affirms the symbolic power inhered in said metanarrative. On the other hand, narratives can be subversive and as Ewick and Sibley argue, inherently ironic in that they challenge the basis by which previous metanarratives claim their legitimacy. Counternarratives can break down symbolic power by breaking down the contradictions in the metanarratives that influence storytelling. To this line of questioning, we can turn to the adapted left-Weberian framework posited earlier, focusing on the relative class locations of narrative-makers and the moments they intend to explain in their stories.

But, like the left-Weberian perspective, the symbolic power approach is most effectively amplified through an emphasis on historical events and their narrative retelling. Returning to Slater's (2009) analysis of democratic mobilization in Southeast

Asia, he argues that communal elites acquire nationalistic and religious symbolic power

76 through their actions during key historical conjunctures. In the Philippines, Slater argues, communal elites claimed their legitimacy on the basis of a blending of the political autonomy of the Catholic Church and the nationalist credentials of its political elite

(2009: 230). These communal elites participated in the anti-Spanish uprisings of the late

19th century and rejected the Marcos regime earned them symbolic power, catalyzed by the assassination of opposition leader Benigno Aquino in 1983. Drawing from religious symbolism that equated Aquino's death with that of the suffering of Christ and with the martyrdom of nationalist hero Jose Rizal, the communal elites were capable of turning

Marcos' advantage in coercive and remunerative power against him by emphasizing nationalist credentials and religious morality as the central validation for political power.

While Slater does not explicitly deal with narrative, he does mention that there were two cultural “scripts” available – a nationalist one and a religious one (2009: 231) which he suggests allowed communal elites to elicit an emotional, unifying response from Filipinos of all social classes.

We can easily transpose the idea of nationalist and religious scripts to the idea of metanarratives, in the sense that reorderings of historical events in narrative form follow closely the frameworks laid down in the nationalist and religious storylines – frameworks nearly exclusively wielded by Slater's communal elite. But the importance of participating in actual events and their narrative retelling seems to underlie his analysis.

Across his cases, Slater identifies nationalist communal elites who participated in successful struggles of independence. Ably removing the colonial powers generates

77 symbolic power vis-a-vis other groups who might challenge that interpretation.

Communal elites in the Philippines and Vietnam who fought against colonial rule retained symbolic power as the only arbiters of the nationalist storyline. In Burma, both students and the military lay claim to freedom fighter Aung San's legacy, his victories against the Japanese cited by the military and his victories against the British central to the students (Slater 2009: 241-242). In short, the essence of symbolic power is rooted in the legitimate claims over the ownership of historical events, in which participating or leading them generates this cache. Referencing our discussion above, successful participation in historical events endows groups agency over history – their stories reflect their capacity to have affected the flow of history once before, and in Slater's cases, the legitimacy to do it again. So the fact that protesters successfully remove Ferdinand

Marcos in the Philippines and Lucio Gutierrez in Ecuador, but they fail to do so in

Venezuela against Hugo Chávez serves as a key event that must be interpreted.

But this is a minor quibble with Slater; ultimately we agree that historical circumstances – sometimes contingent, sometimes informed by structural conditions – affects which groups are present at certain turning points in history. Given our discussion of symbolic power, we can amend Somers' definition of a public narrative. It is useful to conceive of public narratives as stories that attach symbolic power to certain groups by virtue of their agency in historical events. A middle-class public narrative, therefore, is one that attaches symbolic power to the middle class. Therefore, claiming membership in, speaking on behalf of, or evoking the middle class provides some sort of cache for the

78 storyteller vis-a-vis their audience on the basis of past events, reinterpreted to show that the middle class is a central figure in the progress of history itself. The implication here is that cloaked in the mantle of the middle class, narrative-makers can make particular justifications of their actions based on how they interpret the role of the middle class on political and social circumstances. As posited previously, a class coalition between oligarchic elites and white-collar workers may become palatable if both groups claim they are acting in the best interests of “the middle class,” in tune with that class' role in the flow of historical events. If history is written by the victors, then perhaps we can also say that symbolic power is the prize of victory.

Narrativity and the Linguistic Turn

If the left-Weberian perspective represents the primacy of structure in a discussion of class formation and democratic politics, then on the opposite side of the spectrum are scholars who see the language of politics as central. Recent historiographies have taken a post-structuralist view of class, suggesting that language – literally the term “middle class” – is prefigurative of social relations – it delimits the ideological space for constructions of class. They argue that “a degree of freedom which in fact exists in the space between social reality and its representation” (Wahrman 1995: 6). According to this perspective, class must be understood as an idiomatic expression that in and of itself shapes the way actors see their own reality. Part of the meaning of the expression “middle class” is how it impacts the nature of politics-at-large. In speaking of the language of

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English Chartism, Gareth Stedman Jones writes:

A political movement is not simply a manifestation of distress and pain, its existence is distinguished by a shared conviction articulating a political solution to distress and a political diagnosis of its causes. To be successful, that is, to embed itself in the assumptions of the masses of people, a particular political vocabulary must convey a practicable hope of a general alternative and a believable means of realizing it, such that potential recruits can think within its terms. It must be sufficiently broad and appropriate to enable its adherents to inhabit its language in confronting day to day problems of political and social experience, to elaborate tactics and slogans upon its basis, and to resist the attempts of opposing movements to encroach upon, reinterpret or replace it (Stedman Jones 1983: 96)

The efficacy of the term “middle class” to describe a social condition is predicated on its ability to “persuade its constituency to interpret their distress or discontent within the terms of its political language” (Stedman Jones 1983: 96).

Following Stedman Jones closely, Wahrman (1995), Maza (1997), and Parker

(1998) all take up the poststructuralist challenge and present fairly distinct stories of middle-class formation in fairly different contexts and argue that the uniqueness of class language precludes any real theoretical model to explain “middle classness.” But their conclusions about how the middle class is discursively constructed reveal a key insight: that these languages of class meet and are regulated at the level of politics – compatible with Bourdieu's dynamics of the social space and the genesis of groups (1992).These poststructuralists suggest that without the term “middle class,” one cannot actually call themselves “middle class.” But they go further and suggest that all classes – the middle class included – “are products of the mind” in the words of Parker (1998: 9). For these authors, class-based language is not the product of the material experiences of a class, but

80 in fact defines what those material experiences are in the first place. As Maza puts it, a linguistic perspective on class releases the middle class from “the procrustean bed of modern sociology [!]” (1997: 209). Or as Asad puts it, “Historical languages of class, although never static, have their distinctive morphologies and functionalities. The languages of class employed in nineteenth-century Britain are not replicated in twentieth century Egypt… Historical languages constitute classes, they do not merely justify groups already in place according to universal economic structures” (1987: 606fn1, emphasis in the original). However, this does not fully reject the notion that the middle class is entirely “made up” – if class formation is a political struggle, agents acting on behalf of the middle class might attempt to change or adapt discourse for its identity rather than the other way around (see Steinberg 1999; 1998).

Here it is useful to turn to Laclau's work on the discursive construction of populist movements. Laclau centers his argument about the construction of “the people” in populist movements around one demand in an equivalential chain acting as a symbolic placeholder for all the demands in that chain. “...[Any] popular identity needs to be condensed around some signifiers (words, images) which refer to the equivalential chain as a totality,” Laclau writes (2006: 96). But for Laclau, this is not a process of abstraction or a search for some sort of conceptual similarity between demands; it is instead “a performative operation constituting the chain as such” (2006: 97). Reflecting on the semantic role of terms like “justice”, “equality”, and “freedom” -- “democracy” surely fits here – Laclau says:

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It would be a waste of time trying to give a positive definition of “order” or “justice” -- that is, to ascribe to them a conceptual content, however minimal it might be. The semantic role of these terms is not to express any positive content but... to function as the names of a fullness which is constituently absent (Laclau 2006: 96)

In other words, populist demands for “democracy” or “workers' rights” lose their capacity to be strictly abstracted or reducible into some theoretical notion of democracy or workers' rights, because they must exist as “empty signifiers” to bind together a myriad of unfulfilled demands and set them in opposition to the regime (Laclau 2006: 98). The more heterogeneous and the more plural these unfulfilled demands in the chain, the more

“empty” the signifier becomes, which for Laclau is not a reflection of populism's ideological incoherence, but rather a political necessity -- “they are inscribed in the very nature of the political” (2006: 99).4

On its face, thinking about “the middle class” as an empty signifier can satisfactorily frame Wahrman's England, Mazza's France, and Parker's Peru stories, but seems deficient in explaining the shifts over time between “middle class” being an oppositional label or one that support the status quo. Laclau complicates his model by asking what occurs when a signifier is caught between the hegemonic discourses and populist ones. In this case, the signifier is not specifically “empty”, but “floating”, that is, a term like “middle class” can at one period in time represent populist demands, while in others it can reinforce the hegemonic ones, as the different stories in Ecuador and the

4 Laclau conceives of “heterogeneity” as “deficient being” or “failed uniticy”, or in other words, the absence of effective and hegemonic being in society (2006: 223-224). 82

Philippines will respectfully show. This requires a reconstruction of what Laclau calls

“internal frontiers” or the “regimes of equivalences” that govern the relationships between demands, and as an example, he describes how right-wing populism developed in the United States out of the signifiers of the New Deal coalition (2004: 132-138).

th Thinking about “the middle class” as a floating signifier can explain how late 18 century

British politicians could construct a middle class that represented the balance and

th moderation of rural life, while their 19 century counterparts could shift the term to describe the motor forces of urban development and democratization. It can also explain how the genteel demands of white-collar clerks in Lima could latch onto recently- imported terms like “la clase media,” or how the Philippine Catholic Church can take the term “middle forces” from the left and imbue it with new meanings.

But here is where the poststructuralist perspective runs aground. For these authors, “middle class” floats between equivalential chains because of historical circumstances and the term achieves fixity when political agents apprehend these breaks and produces discourses which in turn are constitutive of social classes themselves. While social classes owe much to the discourses that surround them, to bracket power and structure and then claim the primacy of language is a just a thought experiment, not a theory. Political structures are one way in which states and elites redistribute material goods. If languages of class alter the ways these redistributions take place, we should see conflicts over who gets what, how much, and on what basis they can make those claims.

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To wit, the political implications of the languages of class return us to the balance of symbolic power. Second, languages of class may exert considerable limits on social and political actors, but the linguistic turn has been reticent in developing a theory of how class languages change over time. Some (Stedman Jones, Parker) have demonstrated the stability of class language over time, while others (Wahrman, Maza) suggest class language is epiphenomenal and fairly unpredictable. A careful understanding of the balance-of-class-and-state power as well as the balance of symbolic power – in comparative perspective – can help to specify the conditions under which class language changes or stays the same.

Still, we should be cautious about erring too far to the side of political economy when correcting for the weaknesses of the linguistic approach, both for theoretical and methodological reasons. How languages of class are employed and who they purport to represent are not simply cultural overlays on structural phenomenon. As discussed previously, narratives complicate the formation of classes and the political alignments they purport to belong by affirming the importance of certain relationships over others and certain events over others. From here it is not difficult to assume that there is a possibility that class language exerts a constraining force on the ways political and social actors choose to represent their situations. First, there would clearly be situations where languages of class may change while social structures – “objective” social structures – may not. That is not to say that languages of class are the product of the machinations of insidious developmental states and oligarchic elites, but rather that even for states and

84 elites, the languages of the middle class they promote over others may fundamentally alter how they see their own society, or at the very least, constrain how they interact with their subjects. In narrative terms, this is the promulgation of a specific metanarrative which limits the available vocabulary for describing the lived experience. In other words, to get at how middle class people were understood before, during, and after EDSA, 11 de

Abril, and La Rebelión de los Forajidos, the most effective starting point would be to determine the meanings behind the term “middle class” in each case and try to reconstruct a history of class language across these cases to compare. This is a simple extension of the task laid out earlier – analyzing the origins of public narratives given the balance of class power and the accumulation of symbolic power.

But there is still a vagueness in the way languages of class supposedly operate and what they actually represent which adds a further complication to the framework. Authors in the linguistic perspective understand the term “the middle class” or “la clase media” as idioms or idiomatic expressions that are representative of a set of concepts, dispositions, or political attitudes. In that sense, these authors echo Bourdieu's emphasis on the social dynamics of the classification of groups. But just like Bourdieu, these authors overemphasize the dynamics of classification and meaning as if social actors, to make sense of their world, act vigorously to place practices, dispositions, people, objects, and historical events into familiar or legitimate categories. Or, put in another way, they purport that social change is categorical change, quite literally. While this makes sense in light of symbolic power, actors do not only make sense of the social world by noting

85 categorical distinctions but also by reinterpreting the pattern of historical events relevant to their experiences. Therefore, the key to overcoming these shortcomings is again narrative theory's emphasis on the interpretation and reinterpretation of historical events in public narratives. Both Wahrman and Maza draw from political speeches – specifically debates – as evidence for the fleeting and unpredictable nature of middle class language in England and France, respectively. But what they miss in their interpretation of their sources is that these debates take a narrative form. Evoking the middle class in

Parliament or in the National Assembly is arguably less an issue of the uniqueness of the language as it is the creation of an historical actor given particular political configurations. When for instance the British Parliament debated the virtues of the

Reform Bill of 1834, that the middle class had not existed in political language until after the passage of the Bill is not as remarkable as the fact that the narrative produced forever linked the British middle class to the Bill itself, and then subsequent narratives reordered historical events to make explicit that they were central in lobbying for it. For our sakes in this project, this means that the term “middle class” is not an isolated phrase --- it always exists in a causal nexus – it has a role to play in a story and we shouldn’t simply look at terms in isolation.

Furthermore, scholars focused on the term “middle class” oftentimes miss the narrative content inherent in its evocation, specifically its metanarrative connotations with “democracy.” This is particularly important when theorizing about middle-class discourse in the developing world. As Parker notes, the idea of social class as a

86 distinction did not appear in Latin America until the rise of working-class movements in the early 20th century (1998: ch. 2). Through various forms of adaptation (Parker's evidence included), the empty signifiers of social class become filled with meanings adapted to the local context. However, the perennial “common sense” understanding that the middle class is somehow good for democracy suggests that not only do new meanings get imbued into empty terms, but that they carry with them a certain metanarrative baggage. In this sense, the Optimist perspective mentioned in the Introduction can be thought of as a specific metanarrative – of the rise of a middle class and its democratic potential – which in and of itself had an effect on developing world middle-class discourse. Both Wahrman (1997) and Adamovsky (2003) argue that this middle-class metanarrative certainly had to be exported to the developing world at some point – for

Wahrman, it was the postwar period, for Adamovsky, the turn of the century. Maza bases her entire project on the “myth” that the French middle class was the central actor in a long, democratic drama. So, there seems to be a close connection between empty- signifier middle-class language and larger metanarratives that link the middle class to democracy.

As authors like Go (1999) and Garcia-Canclini (2000) argue, institutions upon their importation to the developing world produce not some form of “incomplete modernization,” but rather very specific forms of adaptation – Go calls this

“domestication,” Garcia-Canclini calls this “hybridization.” Essentially they are the same thing: a managed blend of foreign institutions with local social conditions. That

87 democracy in its institutional form is domesticated or hybridized is not a new revelation

(Avritzer 1998; Schaeffer 1998), that despite this, the dominance of the liberal democratic vision of democracy persists (e.g. Zakaria 1997; cf. Maxwell 2009) is also not groundbreaking. But that “the middle class” can simultaneously be an empty signifier, adapted to local conditions, and also carry some degree of cultural baggage has not been explored systematically by current scholarship.5 When it comes to the relationship between the middle class and democracy, this adds an additional layer of complications.

It is entirely plausible that middle-class formation in the developing world is influenced by what this study will call the “middle class-democracy metanarrative.” Middle-class formation could be influenced by the kernel of the metanarrative, that a middle class brings about or somehow improves democracy, alongside the influences of the balance of class power, the accumulation of symbolic power, and based on the interpretation of historical events in public narratives. As much as the specific meaning behind the term

“middle class” may change given different circumstances, the narratives that imbue the middle class with historical agency may link closely with their role in the development of democratic governance. The process of middle-class formation, therefore, is in part the process by which that metanarrative is domesticated or hybridized to local conditions.

This suggests, in part, that middle-class narratives play to some degree with international or “theoretical” audiences beyond the domestic; telling stories about the middle class is

5 To be sure, the work in anthropology mentioned above does talk about the relationship between local understandings of middle classness with foreign ones in the context of the developing world, but does not explicitly relate it to democracy, nor does it suggest that such terms are simultaneously empty, adapted, and full of baggage. 88 essentially adding to the debate over the role of the middle class in democratic development on a global scale. This study registers strong agreement with the Optimists in that “the middle class” – or rather evoking it in narrative – is a statement about

Modernity, an implicit (or even explicit) comparison between how things are and how they ought to be, in opposition with and in close approximation to the role of the middle class in the developed world. The task in this dissertation is to determine how or why someone might deploy a middle class narrative that posits it as a positive force for democracy: who are they, what are their intentions, and by extension, who might not be a positive force for democracy in their eyes.

To conclude, to limit class language to simple categorical metonyms in this way ignores the Thompson-Marx dictum under which this chapter operates: that classes constitute themselves when they are seen as historical agents with a sense of their past, present, and future. Categorization through symbolic power nor through the linguistically-oriented authors' approach does not imply this particular understanding of historical causation as intrinsic to class formation. Put another way, categorization only really makes sense as a motivation when what it represents is placed into time, conceptual or historical. For example, the defense “this is something we’ve always done” or “that’s the way it’s always been” justifies the meaning of a class category by placing an action attributed to that class in a temporal context. Similarly, categories exist in relation to the future – by saying that a class will necessarily need to act in a particular way to preserve its way of life or to fulfill a destiny. But like the symbolic power

89 perspective, an approach that focuses on classificatory schemes in synchronic time lacks an effective means to effectively understand both change over time and the historical comprehension of the namers and the named.

The Dissertation From Here

Each empirical chapter will be structured to address the components to this theoretical framework. First, a chapter will explore the “structural” history of a country to uncover its balance of class power. Armed with that, we can make reasonable statements about the class position of certain actors using the middle-class narrative and even ask why they might evoke “the middle class” versus other groups or cleavages. Having arrayed the players, the second portion of the chapter will process-trace the narrative’s origins, picking up on the use of language and terms, as well as identifying key symbolic distinctions in the narrative and determining their origin. The last portion of each chapter will deal with the effects of that process of narrative construction on democracy in the country in question.

Armed with this theoretical framework, we can view the Philippines, Venezuela, and Ecuador and better understand the origins of their middle class narratives. The following two chapters will elaborate the Philippine case. Chapter 3 will detail the changes in the middle-class narrative surrounding the events of the first EDSA revolution in 1986, then move to the events surrounding the second EDSA in 2001 and shortly thereafter. For the Philippines, the balance of class power between opposition groups to

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Marcos becomes a salient feature in determining the content of the middle-class narrative in that country. Chapter 4 moves the study to Venezuela, focusing on the long-term effects of state-dominated middle-class formation and the resulting failure of the 11 de

Abril protests. Chapter 5 focuses on Ecuador. The absence of a clear balance of power – either by classes or the state – produced a very specific vision of the middle class rooted in regional distinctions as much as others. Finally, Chapter 6 will take the conclusions drawn from the theoretical exploration of the cases and will develop the concept of a revolution from the middle from these findings.

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CHAPTER 3 – THE ORIGINS AND CONSEQUENCES OF REVOLUTION FROM THE MIDDLE IN THE PHILIPPINES, 1970s-2006

“... the coining of people power gives the incident at EDSA a ring of deliberateness, of premeditation, when we know that EDSA's resonance of meaning comes initially from the blithe unexpectedness of it, like fast rain. The term people power comes after the fact, and like all late entrances... it is slightly suspicious, the way all words arouse distrust, being the unoriginal sin” (Apostol National Midweek mar 25 1987)

The specific term “middle class” has been present in Philippine discourse since at least the late Spanish colonial period and the early 20th century. If we take witness to the

Philippine revolution Pio Valenzuela‟s 1950 biography verbatim, he recounts explicitly indicating to Jose Rizal of the “middle class” support of the Katipunan, an early revolutionary society in the late 19th century (Valenzuela 1950). Doeppers notes that after

World War I, Manila newspapers frequently discussed the “middle class” (Doeppers

1984). Australian scholar Mark Turner notes that “[while] in Manila and other large urban centers the term 'middle class' regularly features in the everyday speech of that class, in the media and in academia, this is a relatively recent phenomenon. It occurred far less often when I first arrived... in 1975” (1995: 88). In other words, public discussion about the middle class in the Philippines is as old as the idea of the Philippine nation itself. But the association between the middle class and democracy in the Philippines, I argue, is a far more recent phenomenon – something that Turner's observation about academic and media writing about the middle class reflects. So this chapter turns to the

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task of interrogating the “vocabulary of middleness” in the Philippines, as Turner puts it

(1995: 97).

The Philippines is such an intriguing case of middle class formation because despite two middle-class protests -- People Power/EDSA 1 in 1986 against dictator

Ferdinand Marcos, and People Power 2/EDSA 2 against populist Joseph Estrada -- the balance of class forces that underlie Philippine politics and society remained unchanged and were arguably reinforced – the various branches of elite oligarchic families and the

Catholic Church hold sway over a deeply venal electoral democracy, while working- class, peasant, (and ironically) white-collar movements from below have marginal influence.1 In other words, People Power neither amounted to a victory of the middle class for democracy nor was it a fundamentally transformative revolution, political or otherwise. And yet, the idea of that EDSA was the middle class' crowning moment in

Philippine history remains an indelible public image. So the question here is what led to this public understanding of the Philippine middle class as a revolutionary and democratic agent, and relatedly, how has that public understanding affected democratic rule?

Following a narrative-focused approach to comparative-historical analysis, this chapter argues that the idea of a revolutionary and democratic middle class in the

Philippines is the product of three factors that coalesced around the first People Power in

1986. The first factor was a political alliance between oligarchic families opposed to

Marcos and the Catholic Church in the form of the “moderate opposition.” Ultimately,

1 Granted the first People Power was an instance of regime change, many scholars have argued that it was a return to a social and political status quo pre-Marcos (Anderson 1989) or a part of a larger historical cycle of hegemonic crisis (Hedman 2006). More on this later in the chapter.

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that alliance would claim the mantle of the middle class to support their vision of a post-

Marcos Philippines. The second was a challenge to that alliance by the Communist Party of the Philippines for leadership of the opposition movement. While the challenge failed, the interface between the moderates and the Left through the Catholic Church would bring class-based language to the moderate political lexicon. Finally, People Power itself served as a critical juncture, in so far as a series of highly contingent events resulted in the absence of the Left at EDSA and Marcos‟ ouster through protest and not elections.

The result of these three factors was a remembrance of EDSA in narrative accounts that heavily featured a middle class whose definition included oligarchic families and the

Catholic Church, whose prime mode of engagement with politics was outside of institutions, and whose destiny was to bring about and ensure democratic rule – all post- hoc constructions. In a nutshell, EDSA made the middle class in the Philippines

“democratic,” not the other way around.

However, the middle class narrative formed at EDSA has had demonstrable negative effects on the functioning of Philippine democracy – it has served to enshrine and amplify the negative tendencies of an already-perverted liberal democratic regime, or in other words, it directly caused the oligarchic hegemonic veto as a constraint to democratic deepening. The ironic consequences of the revolution from the middle at

EDSA have allowed the very same oligarchic families and the Catholic Church to insulate themselves from challenges to their political power and relatedly, diminish the influence of protest from below. EDSA 2 best demonstrates this: in removing Estrada from power, the coalition of the Church and oligarchic families were buffered from criticism by an extensive public discussion that argued the essential “middle-classness”

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of the protests made them inherently democratic. This is built on an essential misreading of the motive forces of both EDSAs, mistaking the outcome – middle-class protest – with its cause – the political machinations of Church and elite. Additionally, emboldened by the victories at both EDSAs, white-collar, “objectively” middle-class groups have internalized and drawn from the middle-class narrative in attempts to spark their own political movements but with little staying power in terms of participation and political influence. Left-wing working class movements also find their political influence diminished because the symbolic power of the middle-class narrative legitimates the task and technique of “revolution” for the middle class, while delegitimizing the working class' claims to revolutionary action.

Antecedent Conditions: Colonialism, Development and the Balance of Power

There is considerable scholarly consensus that the political-economic legacies of colonial development weigh heavy on the state of contemporary politics in the Philippines (e.g.

Anderson 1988; Wuerfel 1988; Abinales and Amoroso 2005; McCoy 1993, among others). While scholarship may disagree about the specific effects of both Spanish and

American colonial rule, a broad view of the existing literature suggests that such effects are complimentary insofar as they contribute to the power and influence of landed oligarchic families and the Catholic Church. This chapter builds, therefore, on the work of Hedman (2006) and Slater (2009) who both argue in different ways for conceiving of

Philippine politics and society as dominated by these two groups. What it adds, however, is that these two groups were central in influencing the post-EDSA middle class

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narrative, and their political power is reinforced and insulated by the very idea of the middle class they helped to create.

For 333 years the Philippines were under Spanish rule (1565-1898). With no intention to be dismissive of a period with profound effects for the Philippines or to discount the interaction between them, the relevant effect of Spanish colonial rule for this chapter's argument was the deep hegemonic penetration of the Catholic Church into

Philippine society. Serving not only as pastoral agents but as colonial administrators, the

Church hierarchy wielded intense influence over daily lives of Filipinos from birth to death. Even though American colonial rule forced the sale of Church lands in an effort to break up its temporal power, the Church continued to exert a strong institutional influence through parochial schools – especially elite Catholic universities – and parish networks. To be sure, while the Catholic hierarchy has historically sought to maintain its political and social influence, the advent of Liberation Theology sent thousands of nuns and priests into the countryside to establish Christian Base Communities. These more progressive clergy at times worked closely with the Communists and the New People's

Army and would play just as an important role in developing the narrative of the middle class as their more conservative higher-ups. Point being, the Catholic Church has had a thorough historical presence in the Philippines and would be a central actor in the EDSA drama and the subsequent transformation of the idea of the middle class.

Following Spanish colonization, for 48 years the Philippines were one of a handful US colonies (1898-1946). As with Spanish rule, American colonial influence was deep and varied. Furthermore, American neocolonial influence during the Cold War constrained – and arguably continues to constrain – domestic politics. The Philippine-

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American War (1898-1902) was a brutal precursor to colonization and effectively united the disparate archipelago. “Had it not been for William McKinley, one might almost say, the Philippines in the early twentieth century could have fractured into three weak, caudillo-ridden states with the internal politics of nineteenth-century Venezuela or

Ecuador” (Anderson 1988: 9-10). That being said, the relevant contribution of American rule was a political system modeled after the American one, which was quickly captured by landed families. Allowing “the emerging indigenous ruling class to share in the exercise of power” (Fast 1986: 70), landed oligarchic families “domesticated” democratic political institutions (Go 1999), resulting in a deeply venal and clientelist system where these elites buy votes for favors and use the levers of the state to protect their landed interests and enrich themselves (see also Hutchcroft and Rocamora 2005; Wuerfel

1988).2

A few points are worth nothing. First, it is worth noting that while the Church as an institution has deep roots in the Philippines, syncretic and popular forms of

Catholicism have provided a series of tropes to counterhegemonic discourse from below.

Ileto's seminal study (1986) of revolutionary discourse among peasant movements reveals how movements from below saw their actions as reflections of the pasyón narrative – the story of Jesus Christ's martyrdom and resurrection. Pasyón tropes like martyrdom, purity through prayer and fasting, and the emulation of the suffering Christ appear to blend with both the nationalist or razón narrative proffered by the Church and the oligarchic elite and from the Maoist revolutionary narrative that would emerge in the

2 I should also hasten to add that American rule and the early systematic educational reforms under American rule, English is a widely used language. Insofar as the instances of the term “middle class” appear in English – even when storytellers write in Tagalog – the language itself has had an effect. 97

50s and 60s, so much so that Ileto remarked in 1985 that “[now] it is ex-Party Chairman

[Jose Maria] Sison who speaks of martyrs and [Manila Archbishop Jaime] Cardinal Sin who weeps after reciting a funeral homily... (Ileto 1985 [1998]: 176).3 These images do also contend with a more “secular” middle-class narrative as we shall see later.

Second, this study prefers the concept “oligarchic families” over landed oligarchy, landed elites, or landed or capitalist classes. Indeed, recent scholarship has argued that the

Catholic Church and the landed oligarchic familial elite do not constitute classes per se, so this presents some complications for a balance-of-class power model. Hedman prefers to refer to call them members of a dominant bloc in the Gramscian sense, in that they do not simply derive their power from their positions in the relations of production, but also provide “intellectual leadership” and have imprinted their “identity and interests... on the institutions and practices of liberal democracy in the Philippines” (2006: 21). Slater creates a new concept – “communal elites” – to break free from class-centric (that is, location in the relations of production) approach that he argues is uninformative of these groups' social composition and related political interests (2009: 206). For both, the

Church and oligarchic families derive their political and social influence through cultural mechanisms – for Hedman it is their colonization of civil society, for Slater it is their historically-derived symbolic power.

While there is significant merit in explaining the Philippine oligarchy's hegemony through cultural means, the main mechanisms of their reproduction – political and economic dynasties – remain remarkably stable and the best means by which to conceptualize them. The means of entry into the Philippine elite have varied over the past

3 See also Ileto (1993 [1998]) regarding discourse about the “unfinished revolution.”

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century – from sugar-growing, to capitalist enterprise, to bureaucratic cronyism, to movie stardom most recently. All told, each of those entry points have led to what Case (2003) suggests is a variation of C. Wright Mills' power elite: “...the interlock between elites that extends across formal organizations, while driven by mutually beneficial exchanges of political and corporate resources, turns also on affective sentiments involving kinship, friendship, ethnic affiliations, and shared religious outlooks” (2003: 249). In the case of the Philippines, rising elites have routinely been able to convert their various

Bourdieusian capitals into others, most notably turning economic power into coerced or paid-off votes for political office, which they then use to form alliances with other elites – through business dealings, politics, or marriage – use the levers of the state to extract rents for themselves, and most importantly, use those new networks and access to pass that influence on to their families (see especially McCoy ed. 2009). For example, second-

, third-, and fourth-generation politicians have formed upwards of 60% of the Philippine

House of Representatives since 1987 (Coronel 2007: 60). The crises of hegemony that

Hedman (2006) describes in her work routinely involve overreaching executives (like

Marcos) who sought to empower their own family networks over those of others.

Because of their disparate origins, myths like the razón nationalist narrative provide not only symbolic power as a matter of exercisable power, but also a point of singular origin – imagined as it might be. The razón narrative depicts Philippine elite as the leaders of an enlightened revolt against Spanish rule, spearheaded by a set of

European-educated intellectuals called the ilustrados. Slater (2009) argues that the oligarchic elite are able to capitalize on this particular nationalist narrative to motivate democratic protest. It is entirely plausible, however, to view elite oligarchic families as

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bound together by the nationalist narrative since most of the time their individual family interests may divide them. As much as it is their collective capacity to draw on the story of their leadership of the Philippine Revolution, it makes much more sense that they themselves are just as influenced by the story as their followers – as the martyrdom of

Marcos opponent Ninoy Aquino will demonstrate.

Still, in purely political-economic terms, a powerful landed oligarchy and a peripheral position in the world system for most of the 20th century resulted in an archetypical agrarian “backwardsness” in the Philippines – even though certain economic conditions placed the Philippines well ahead of its Asian neighbors at midcentury. For example, “the Philippines began the postwar period with the highest level of urbanization

(27.5% in 1950) in Southeast Asia. This compared with 24.3% in Malaysia, 12.9% in

Indonesia, and 10.5% in Thailand,” Balisacan, Medalla, and Pernia note, but “during the

1950s and 1960s... the pace of Philippine urbanization slowed down... and was actually slower than that in the other Southeast Asian countries (1994: 17). While Balisacan et al. attribute this slowdown to an antiseptic “sluggish structural change” (1994: 17), Fast

(1986) approaches this and many other economic weaknesses to dependent development.

While the Philippine experience with import substitution in the late 1940s and early

1950s generated some industrial diversification, like other ISI programs in the developing world, industrial policy was superficial and driven by export interests abroad. As Fast notes, by 1970 sugar, lumber, and copper remained central revenue-generating exports,

“44.1 percent to the USA and 39.9 percent to Japan” (1986: 88). He goes on: “The rural ruling class was able to exploit these ties to develop its own position throughout the postwar period while maintaining the predominance of rural production (1986: 88). In

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addition, he notes polarizing ownership patterns in the countryside whereby “the rural masses... bore the weight of this system...”:

By the middle of the 1960s an estimated 50 percent of the land was owned by 0.5 percent of the population: in the Pampanga area of central Luzon, scene of the most intensive production of rice, 90 percent of the land was worked by share-croppers or exploited tenants; in the main sugar- growing area, northern Negros, 65 percent of the land was so worked. By contrast in the less fertile and more mountainous parts of the country, such as those of the southern islands, the rate fell to 10 percent (Fast 1986: 88)

At the same time, while “by the end of the 1960s 60 percent of the population still lived in the rural areas...” (Fast 1986: 88), Manila accounted for nearly a third of the urban population by 1970s (Pernia 1976: 17). “The singularity of metropolitan Manila, “ Pernia writes, “can be accounted for by the fact that close to two-thirds of the country's manufacturing activity is concentrated in this area, in addition to government offices, major educational institutions, and so forth” (1976: 17). As such, “this 'metro bias' has fostered an apparent contradiction, namely, that the country has been urbanizing rapidly and yet is predominantly rural and [would] continue to do so for some time” (Pernia

1976: 28fn21). Despite this, landed oligarchic families would also adapt as their economic interests diversified beyond landholding and primary product exports (Hedman

2006: 37-39; see also Hilig 2003).4

The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) would develop in the context of this dependent economic development. A former university lecturer, Jose Maria Sison or

“Amando Guerrero,” would justify the creation of the CPP in 1968 out of what he claimed were the failed strategies of the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP). Explicitly

Maoist, riding on the global wave of student protest that year, and hard-line in both

4 Again, Case (2003) proposes that this diversification is best understood as a form of “elite interlock” a la C. Wright Mills. 101

ideology and internal ethics for its own members, the CPP proved a more dynamic and attractive entity than the PKP (Weekeley 2006: 28-32). Gathering a new cohort of activist students, Sison set about to radicalize the various “sectors” of Philippine society, most notably the oppressed peasantry which would form the core of the “basic forces” and convince sympathetic bourgeois elements in the cities – the “middle forces” – to support armed revolution. The main strategy laid out by Sison was to organize and radicalize the peasantry into an armed revolutionary force – what would become the New People's

Army (NPA) – which in Maoist fashion would surround the cities from the countryside.

Though uneven, the growth of the NPA through the 1970s and early 1980s would prove to be the most significant armed threat to Marcos' regime – an observation not lost on either Marcos or his more moderate opposition.

Martial Law

Into this conflict stepped Ferdinand Marcos. According to one recent history of the

Philippines, Marcos represented “the greatest dominance of state over society the

Philippines has ever seen” (Abinales and Amoroso 2005: 205). Following a 1969 reelection campaign that took from public coffers between $50 and $200 million and that featured an unprecedented amount of electoral violence (see Abinales and Amoroso

2005: 204; Thompson 1996: 34-35), Marcos began his term under significant ill-will from the traditional elites, a Communist Party mobilizing for “parliamentary struggle,” and a surge of violently-met student protests – the “First Quarter Storm.” An unlikely alliance of opposition elites and radical elements worked to discredit Marcos.

Immediately threatened, Marcos began to explore options for extending his rule

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(Thompson 1996: 36). After a bombing at an opposition party rally and the attempted assassination of his secretary of defense (purportedly both at the hands of communist rebels), Marcos suspended the writ of habeas corpus and declared martial law on

September 22, 1972. Marcos turned the Philippine state into his own personal fiefdom, all purportedly to create a “New Society” under his tutelage.

Encouraging technocratic initiatives, Marcos oversaw the creation of powerful bureaucracies overseeing key industries. At the same time, Marcos created business monopolies for his close friends, allowing him, his wife, and his cronies to siphon off millions of dollars from the state. He reshuffled the military's top brass to ensure loyalty to him, infamously appointing “his cousin and former chauffeur, Major Fabian Ver” to general and eventually to the chief of staff of the armed forces (Thompson 1996: 54-55).

To curry favor with the United States, Marcos assured the Americans that their two military bases were “safe with him (although at a higher rent)” (Thompson 1996: 47), exploiting American foreign policy to fund his military to purportedly defend his regime against communist incursions. To give his regime an air of legitimacy, he created a rubber-stamp legislature and a single political party; all while repressing all other parties, and jailing opposition leaders. Thompson identifies these maneuvers as patently sultanistic – that is, all to support a type of “personal rule without ideological or institutional constraints” (Thompson 1996: 50; Chehabi and Linz 1998).

Marcos's rule generated a diverse opposition. On the right, disaffected mid-level military officers from the Philippine Military Academy class of 1971 formed the Reform the Armed Forces Movement, planning in the early 1980s for the possibility of a military coup against Ver and Marcos (see McCoy 1999; Thompson 1996: 8). Positioning

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themselves in the middle were the “moderate opposition” (or in some circles “traditional opposition”) – the scions of the oligarchic elite who had not joined ranks with Marcos, led by multiple figures, but most notably former senator Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino. By in large, this faction sought a return to electoral democracy and to head off the growing influence of the left. The Church, for its part, had been split by internal divisions within the clerical hierarchy leaving them in a state of “critical collaboration” with Marcos

(Youngblood 1988). Various attempts at alliances – public and secret – resulted in furtive and disorganized attempts at both playing by Marcos' rules and trying to foment revolution.5 Split along ideological lines – chiefly over the necessity of violence to remove Marcos – the opposition remained disunited for the better part of Martial Law.

On balance, however, martial law appears to have done nothing in terms of deep economic or social structural change in the Philippines. An over-reliance on export crops

– despite a price spike in major exports in 1974 – would only provide fleeting economic benefits. Agriculture still accounted for 71% of all GDP by 1986 (Abinales and Amoroso

2005: 211-212). While the early martial law period saw unprecedented GDP growth of about 6% and on average from 1970-1979 real GNP growth of 6.2%, growth became negative in 1984 and 1985 (Kimura 2003: 267). In terms of the occupational structure,

Kimura estimates that “the share of professionals and technicians, administrators, executives, and managers, and clerical workers making up the new and marginal middle classes remained almost unchanged, fluctuating around the 11 percent figure” of all employed persons by occupation” (2003: 268). “By 1980, the real wages of skilled and unskilled workers in Manila had fallen less to half their 1962 level...”, write Abinales and

5 See for instance the Light a Fire Movement, as described by Thompson (1996: 83-88).

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Amoroso (2005: 215). Unemployment was estimated at 24% in 1982, and the purchasing power of the peso in 1985 had fallen to less than a third of its value in 1978 (Philippine

Yearbook 1985: 691).

Dictatorship and the Middle Sectors: Inconclusive Evidence

Given all that, it is hard to accept the arguments that middle-sector groups supported

Marcos because they benefited economically under his regime. There is some support for the thesis that middle-sector groups were quiescent, but again, given economic data it makes little sense to think it was because of Marcos' prowess at economic policy. It is useful to quickly run through these arguments if only to provide a check against what this chapter asserts in contrast. Can the relationship between the middle class and democracy in the Philippines be determined just by a reading of socioeconomic indicators? The short answer is no.

Despite the generally-unmoving political economy, the increase in industrial production and urbanization did in fact diversify the occupational structure in the

Philippines, but not by much. Kimura (2003) argues most explicitly in this vein. Building on Rivera's (2000) more rationalist study of the middle class' propensity for switching sides, Kimura contrasts his project as one that “sheds light on the middle-class people in general who had previously been apolitical and suddenly became actively involved in the democratization struggle that arose in the aftermath of the Aquino assassination” (2003:

265). He defines three distinct types of middle classes in the Philippines based on occupation and prestige: a “new middle class” of “professional and technical workers..., and wage- and salary-earning administrators, executives, and managers...”; a “marginal

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middle class” of “wage- and salary-earning clerical workers”; and an “old middle class” of “nonprofessional, nontechnical self-employed workers other than those in the informal sector and the primary industries, as well as employers outside primary industries ...”

(Kimura 2003: 265). Arguing that the middle class first appeared in the Philippines at the end of American rule in 1946, Kimura demonstrates through occupation and employment statistics that all three middle-class groups accounted for 9.4 percent of the workforce in

1956..., 11.5 per cent in 1965,” and “almost remained unchanged, fluctuating around the

11 percent figure” by 1985 (2003: 267, 268). By 1995, Kimura indicates that the total sat at 11% (2003: 269).

I interpret those data alongside economic indicators during Martial Law as indicating a distinct lack of middle class growth in the Philippines over the past half- century, and as such, giving little credence to the argument that the middle class supported Marcos because they benefited economically from his rule. If in fact the middle class acted on its own to produce EDSA, the motivations lay somewhere outside the bounds of pure economic interests.

The Contagious Revolt of the Middle Forces: The Aquino Assassination and the

Birth of the Moderate Opposition

The EDSA Revolution left an indelible mark on Philippine history – a mark that reveals the middle class as a revolutionary force. For example, newspaper columnist Asuncion

David Maramba writes, “No great discovery this, and sorry for the cliché but the Middle is the hope of democracy…” (Maramba 1991: 21). Columnist Manuel Quezon III writes,

“[EDSA] was the apotheosis of the middle class” (Manila Times 2/25/96). And, with

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some caveats, sociologist and public intellectual Randy David states, “…based on the

Philippine experience… people power is best associated with the middle classes…”

(David 2001: 242, emphasis in the original). Who are the middle classes? As many authors would argue, they are synonymous with the “middle forces” – the nickname of the moderate opposition to Marcos made up of the Catholic Church, oligarchic families, and white-collar workers. How did this definition come about?

The previous sections allow us to conclude that the origin of the revolutionary middle class narrative in the Philippines cannot be derived solely from a reading of the balance-of-class power. Marcos had effectively divided elite families and the Catholic

Church; and the middle sectors seemed to have suffered quiescently. While it is plausible to argue that these middle sectors had finally had enough in 1986, a close examination of the events leading up to EDSA reveals that political cleavages, symbolic power, and discursive adaptation at work, operating through narratives. The first of three necessary conditions for the revolutionary middle-class narrative in the Philippines was an historical event in and of itself – the assassination of Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino. The assassination would touch off a series of ruptures in the Marcos regime and catalyze oligarchic families, the Catholic Church, and white-collar workers to political activism.

By itself, however, the assassination and its immediate effects did not transform the middle class narrative into one that linked the class with democracy and revolution; more would be necessary. Still, by examining the events, political alliances, and public discourse surrounding the assassination and its aftermath, we can see the process of middle-class formation through narrative beginning to take shape.

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On August 21, 1983, Aquino was shot and killed as he alighted from his airplane after an exile in the United States. Though he denied it, Marcos (or Marcos' wife Imelda) was resoundingly assumed to have ordered the killing. As the son of a landed political family, Aquino's death resonated with fence-sitting elites. His death for his country evoked the martyrdom of late Spanish era elites from whom these families claimed descent, especially national hero Jose Rizal. His death also evoked tropes of the martyrdom off Jesus Christ, which resonated among the Catholic populace, and shocked the Catholic hierarchy out of its “critical collaboration” with Marcos. The Church and the oligarchic families would form common cause over the assassination, and while various splits between leading personalities would make unity difficult until the 1985 snap presidential election and the nomination of Aquino's widow Corazón as the moderate's presidential candidate, these two groups sought essentially the same thing: Marcos' resignation, the call for elections to replace him, all done through nonviolent means. The slogan “Marcos Resign!” encapsulated the demands of this opposition group.

Aquino's funeral procession a few days after his assassination drew massive crowds. It also catalyzed public outrage, especially among white-collar workers who took to the streets in remarkable numbers. Thompson cites a statistic that between Aquino's death and September 30 of that year, “165 rallies, marches, and other demonstrations took place” (1996: 116). Emboldened, an opposition press emerged to fill the media silence, and with access to copy machines at work, white-collar workers were able to disseminate plans for rallies and other protest events among themselves through “xerox journalism” and through the “mosquito press” as well as spread reports from foreign newspapers about the progress of their activities, circumventing Marcos' control over the

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major media. For instance, publisher Eugenia Apostol's Mr. and Ms. – a lifestyle magazine – sold an estimated 750,000 copies of its first Special Edition, covering the

Aquino assassination.6 Organizations such as Justice for Aquino Justice for All (JAJA) and the August Twenty-First Movement (ATOM) formed from these protesters appealed to the outrage and habitus of this new political demographic. From boycotts, to protest jogs, to marches and masses held in Aquino's memory, the new white-collar protesters became an important force in opposition to Marcos.

For the Left and the realigned moderate opposition, the protests presented a tactical opportunity. The oligarchic families and the Catholic Church were the immediate beneficiaries, capitalizing on Aquino's status as a nationalist and pseudo-religious martyr to increase their support for Marcos to resign and for a return to electoral democracy (see

Ileto 1993 [1998], Slater 2009: PAGE). On the other hand, for the CPP which had been gaining ground in recruitment in both the city and countryside, the protests were a complication (Weekley 2001: ch. 3 and 4). Seeking to “Oust Marcos” through revolution, the newly-mobilized white-collar workers seemed a prime constituency to radicalize, but their sympathy for Aquino and loyalty to the Church's nonviolent approach made their recruitment difficult. In addition, the CPP's advantages on the ground did not “translate into commensurate power at the decision-making level of political alliances” (Weekley

2001: 128).

6 Apostol would also be central in launching the Philippine Daily Inquirer as a mainstream counterweight to the Marcos-controlled newspapers. Estela, Chit. Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism podcast: Eugenia Apostol, 2/2/2006. Accessed online 8/11/2007 <>

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As such, both sides attempted to appeal to these white-collar workers through the flourishing opposition media to bolster their ranks. As such, both produced distinct descriptions of what purpose “the middle class” would serve in the movement. Certain incipient patterns were present, based on the ideological slant of the media in question.

And while they agreed that white-collar workers had been mobilized, both sides used different language to describe movement participants and their participation. On one hand, press oriented towards the moderate opposition clearly understood not only that by virtue of different class markers that these protests were different, but were unique in the recent history of protest in the Philippines. For example, a caption to a photo of a rally at

Ugarte Field in Makati in the October 13-16, 1983 issue of Malaya read, “This time, only a few wore sneakers. Most of the participants in the Makati rally last Sept. 16 were in office garb, but like their blue collar worker counterparts, their clamor was the same:

Justice for Aquino.” The accompanying article asks, “Workers have always been mainstays in rallies, but white collar ones? Impossible, one might say, but that is exactly what happened in Makati last week.” A column by C. M. Salubsob in the same issue notes:

… many observers, especially veteran activists of the late Sixties and early Seventies see in this phenomenon a significant, even momentous development. The massive demonstrations during the First Quarter Storm... were joined mainly by aroused students, with support from the workers and the urban poor. But the upper and middle classes were conspicuously absent from those mass actions. Now, it is entirely different. The people of the upper and middle classes in our society – those who kept quiet and were willing to give to the present leadership “the benefit of the doubt” when it imposed martial law – have suddenly been awakened by the assassination of Ninoy Aquino, and are now moved to express their pent-up anger and frustrations against the decade-long suppression of their democratic rights, especially their right to know the truth (Salubsob Malaya 10/13-16/1983)

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Salubsob would also note the “deceptively festive air and the high spirits of the executives and their employees dressed in the prescribed attire of Ayala Avenue.” Here we can see some characteristics of the moderate narrative of these protests. First, as mentioned before, distinctions about appearance seem to have informed the understanding of class here, but not simply distinctions in and of themselves – with an eye to past protests, these observers understood these well-dressed protesters to be historically extraordinary. Second, the moderate press in general was enamored with the creativity and spontaneity of these new protests, insofar as turning protests into

On the other hand, left-oriented documents focused on placing these protests in the context of class struggle in the Philippines and the possibility of radicalizing these newly-active middle-class elements. For example, members of the Le Monde faction of the CPP – a group of party intellectuals tasked with developing new united front strategies and who had been weakly influential in party circles approached these protests through the lens of class. The two “Plaridel Papers” were products of the Le Monde group and their attempts to theorize new configurations for a popular front against Marcos

(Weekley 2001: 132). First published in the underground church newsletter Ichyths and then later in a booklet, “Plaridel Papers #1” was not an internal document circulated only for CPP cadres, but an attempt to reason with moderates. The document described the

Makati protest events thusly:

The current protest movement has another impressive characteristic, and that is, the open participation of sectors of the middle class who, till now, had been politically-inactive: white collar employees, professionals and businessmen. Their largely spontaneous activity, most dramatically

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demonstrated in the Makati area, supports the contention that, finally, the protest movement includes all sectors of Philippine society7

For the authors of the Plaridel Papers, the history of protest against Marcos was the Left's history – they had been the only ones challenging Marcos effectively, they thought. The new protesting “middle class” would push the Philippines towards a “revolutionary situation.”

However, studies of the demographic makeup of the Makati protests and the protests in the three years to follow are sparse. The one study that did attempt to measure participation in the protests in Makati concluded that “the Makati office workers in the sample who joined in protest actions cut across the categories of social, economic, and demographic variables; hence the absence of statistical relationships [between participation and SES]” (Banzon Bautista 1984: 13).8 In addition, while “70 percent of the respondents were within the ages of 17 to 30 in 1972” furthered the journalistic contention that these were grown-up student activists, “[about] half of those who claimed they took part in mass actions at an earlier time did so quite infrequently while one-third seldom joined...” and “...86 percent were not members of any political organization then”

(Banzon Bautista 1984: 7). “What these suggest,” The study continues, “is that despite some kind of experience with the protest movement prior to Aquino's assassination, the sample office workers were generally not the regular student activists of the 70s...”

(Banzon Bautista 1984: 7). So, there is some demographic evidence to suggest that the

7 Plaridel Papers #1, p. 2.

8 “I would argue that even if a large enough sample of non-participants were included, the pattern of insignificant relationships between participation during the specific period after August 1983 and before the summer months of 1984, on one hand, and the SES variables, on the other, would still prevail” (Banzon Bautista 1984: 14). Banzon Bautista did find a significant relationship between SES and sustained participation in the protest movement (1984: 16). 112

observations of the time were true: the new white-collar protesters were simply not the same people who protested in the 70s.

Looking at how these and other sources described the “middle class” – a residual category determined by their physical appearance, dress, and habits – how they described the techniques of protest (jogs, boycotts, etc.), and the structural origin of these new protesters, can we argue for parsimony and say that the process of class formation here is simply Bourdieusian, or rather, the deployment of symbolic power through distinction?

On its face, the evidence seems to suggest that distinction from observations of habitus drives the ways in which both sides defined who made up the “middle class.” We could also assume that day protests and boycotts of luxury goods and banks suggest a class coming to self-understanding “through itself” (Heller and Fernandes 2006). As suggested in the theoretical framework for this project, however, such distinctions are often couched in narrative terms, as is the case here. Drawing a distinction with worker and student protests, observers certainly told stories of distinction, but understanding that those protests were protests of the past and that these new techniques from this newly-active middle class were a surprising rupture from those old patterns. Thus, while Bourdieusian processes were at work in the immediate aftermath of the Aquino assassination, they make clearer sense when understood as distinction-making through storytelling, i.e. through narrative.

Winning Over the Middle Forces: The Church, the Left, and the Appropriation of

Class Language

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Still, political alliances, symbolic power, and incipient class narratives still do not explain how the vocabulary of class – that is, the term “middle class” and “middle forces” – became catchall descriptions of the moderate opposition; a group which in 1983 was seeking to recruit the middle class rather than be defined by it. Here we must turn to the work of the Catholic Church and the Philippine Left as adapters of the terminology that would describe the moderates as being “the middle forces.” The process takes place in the context of many furtive attempts to form a broad front between the moderate and left opposition to Marcos from 1983 to 1985. While the alliance would never crystallize – the final attempt was a united front called BAYAN (Bagong Alyansang Makabayan, or New

Patriotic Alliance) – the interactions between the Left and the moderates through the intellectual and organizational work of the Catholic Church would bring leftist discourse about the middle class to “the middle.”

It is worth noting that while previous research – and popular memory – attribute a

“martyrdom effect” to Aquino that both catalyzed popular outrage and realigned the

Church and oligarchic families into a temporary conciliation with the left, Aquino's death may have been a very central factor towards a left-center alliance against Marcos because of his own intransigence towards working with Sison and the CPP. As Thompson notes,

Aquino had felt slighted by the CPP and Sison himself insofar as “the communists had... become his competitors for power” and had taken advantage of his support for Marcos in the early 1970s (1996: 82). Thompson recounts that...

...[in] mid-1979 Aquino's jailers recorded him as saying, “I would like to be the alternative. If there is no alternative the people will go to the communists. I think the Sison line now is hit Aquino by propaganda. I do not trust the communists. I have been dealing with them for 20 years. If you turn your back they will poke a knife. Traitors (Thompson 1996: 82) 114

With the Communist-inspired unrest in Central America and the Iranian Revolution in mind, Aquino sought a way to safeguard a transition where the CPP would not play a central role. A few months before he was to return to the Philippines in 1983, Aquino wrote to fellow opposition Senator Eva Estrada Kalaw, detailing possible scenarios for a democratic transition. If the US could not be turned to pressure Marcos, Aquino foresaw a scenario where Marcos died in office, was succeeded by his wife Imelda, who in turn would be ousted by Marcos‟ military head, General Fabian Ver. At that juncture, Aquino speculated,

… the CPP/NPA will benefit from the massive disenchantment of our people. As in Nicaragua, the middle class will radicalize towards the left not right and overnight the CPP/NPA will be awash with funds and supplies. This will bring us to the brink of a civil war not unlike what is now unfolding in El Salvador9

Aquino here reflected the thinking of the moderate opposition to Marcos in regards to middle-class politics – the most amenable solution to transition would be a negotiated settlement with Marcos, reflected after his assassination as the difference between

“ousting” Marcos as the left wanted, or to “reconcile” with him, as he wanted. But in addition, it is clear that Aquino wanted to avoid a situation where the CPP gained the upper hand, going as far as begrudgingly “[enlisting] the help of the US Government through [diplomat Michael H.] Armacost and our friends in Washington” to pressure

Marcos to engage in a “sincere” dialogue with the opposition.”10 It makes some sense

9 Ibid. 10 Aquino, Ninoy. “The Key is Sincerity.” Letter to Eva Estrada Kalaw, 2/21/1983. 115

then that Aquino's death – in and of itself – helped to advance a left-center alliance against Marcos.

Nevertheless, on-the-ground the collaboration between NDF cadres and moderates would produce a significant amount of intellectual and tactical exchange.

Serving as interlocutors between more radical elements on the left and sympathetic moderates, both the Church's formal institutions and its activist clergy became a means by which more radical ideas could be legitimized. First indirectly, as Kimura (2003) notes, many of the early cause-oriented groups like ATOM and JAJA were formed from student and alumni networks from elite Catholic high schools and universities like

Ateneo and La Salle (see also Hedman 2006: 96). JAJA in particular had a social democratic and radical wing and formed a close association with the CPP after the

Aquino assassination (Thompson 1996: 122).11 Second, while the influential Catholic

Bishops' Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) was concerned about hemorrhaging priests and nuns to the CPP throughout Martial Law (Hedman 2006: 99), the activist clergy served as key actors.

For instance, published out of the Jesuit-run elite Ateneo University, but exhibiting an activist streak, the journal Pulso would recount the details of seminars and forums overwhelmingly oriented towards dialog with Marxism. With the possibility of a formal alliance now on the table, Pulso demonstrated openness on the part of church intellectuals to serve as the conduits for a “spiritualized” leftism. For example, in its first volume published in 1984, Pulso recounted how twenty Jesuit priests held a ten-day

11 Former senator Jose Diokno was sympathetic to the communists, but by 1985 he with many other leaders in the moderate opposition rejected an alliance with the CPP (Thompson 1996: 132). 116

seminar on “social analysis” in 1981 where they sought to “focus on the actual practice of social analysis and the needs of groups using such analysis... groups intensely engaged in the effort for social change” (Pulso, Appendix B 1984, 75). What was interesting about this seminar was the explicit discussion of how to incorporate the insights of Marxist analysis into a theological message for social change, or, as one point in the discussion suggested, “the possibility of a Christian revision of Marxism” (85). In its next issue,

Pulso featured articles and debates over the compatibility of violence with Christian thinking in an “explicitly Christian point of view while engaging in dialog with representatives of other traditions; and [doing so] without dogmatism, sloganeering, or artificial harmonization of contrasting positions” (1984: 97).12 (Paragraph from Carroll on middle class)

But as it would turn out, the aggregate effect of the radical clergy, public discussions, and overall interface through the Church would be a process more akin to sanitation or co-optation – radical language began to take on more “moderate” meanings.

The most evident example is the adaptation of the leftist term “middle forces” to describe wholesale the moderate opposition. As mentioned earlier, used in CPP documents to describe “national and petty bourgeoisie” who must be “won over”, the term “middle forces” can be traced to Mao Zedong's writings.13 In the view of the CPP, the middle

12 Compare this with the radicalizing role of Catholic clergy in Nicaragua (Foran 2005: 69-70) 13 Guerrero, Amando. “Our Urgent Tasks.” Originally published in Rebolusyon (6/1/1976), accessible online < http://www.philippinerevolution.net/cgi-bin/cpp/pdocs.pl?id=out_e;page=01> Accessed October 22, 2007. See also “Rectify Errors and Rebuild the Party!” (1968) and “Summing Up Our Experiences After Three Years” (1972). See also Mao Zedong, “Current Problems of Tactics in the Anti-Japanese United Front” (1940) and ““Stalin‟s Place in History,” April 5, 1956. In discussing Stalin‟s strategies against “middle-of-the-road social and political forces”, Mao writes, “Our experience teaches us that the main blow of the revolution should be directed at the chief enemy and to isolate him, whereas with the middle forces, a policy of both uniting with them and struggling against them should be adopted…” 117

forces were nothing but an appendage to their planned revolution. However, just a month before the BAYAN split, the elite-funded Church hierarchy mouthpiece news magazine

Veritas published an opinion piece entitled “The Dilemma of the Middle Forces” in which the author assigns to the middle forces the difficult task of “figuring out how they can keep their money, their jewelry, their stocks, their real property, not to mention their lifestyle out of the reaches of anarchy, revolution, or dictatorship”, but ultimately

“Centrist” and of “the Center” (Maramba Veritas 7/28/85 [1991]). In part an ironic outcome, given that activist clergy formed the intellectual conduits for moderate activists and the left, this display of acceptance of the “middle forces” by the hierarchy as a term to describe the moderate's way-of-thinking and being signaled a significant shift in the way class language was deployed.

Perhaps the culmination of this process was precipitated by the failure of the

BAYAN alliance itself. Both left and moderate representatives met to discuss power- sharing within the organization, but could not find an agreement. The moderate representatives left and formed Bansang Nagkaisa sa Diwa at Layunin (BANDILA, A

Nation United in Spirit and Purpose). BANDILA's first declaration of principles described the group as being “of the middle forces,” “social democratic,” and driven by its “love of God” (Sunday Times Magazine 5/15/85). As it would turn out, BANDILA would be one of the first groups to mobilize to the EDSA highway at the call of Manila

Archbishop Jaime Cardinal Sin, precipitating the EDSA Revolution. In sum, BANDILA serves as an archetypical example of how the process of discursive adaptation helped to associate the moderate opposition with the middle class.

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To conclude, we so far have seen how political alliances (and their failure), the deployment of symbolic power, and discursive adaptation develop the idea of the middle class in the pre-EDSA Philippines. The obvious question here is whether or not this is enough – is this not a middle class both in and for itself? True, by late 1985 it was clear that the “middle forces” served as shorthand for the moderate opposition: that moderates consisted not only of white-collar workers, but also oligarchic families opposed to

Marcos and the Catholic Church. If we assume that, then we can argue for an historically- grounded definition of the middle class in the Philippines, but we still cannot make the claim that this middle class was the vanguard for democracy, per se; nor can we say at all that this middle class was revolutionary historical actor. True, the moderates preferred an electoral solution over a revolutionary one, but a glance over existing public discussion suggests that even up to the days before the EDSA Revolution, there was still doubt that the “middle class” would succeed against Marcos. As one columnist wrote, the rich have agency, as do the poor: “with literally nothing to lose, the poor are more blessed in that they carry their whole selves in potentia.” But the middle class

...have no potential at all. They have nothing in potentia. They are simply impotent. Having literally little and being literally determined by what little they have, they live constantly in fear of having the little they have swept away. They live perpetually in fear of any maelstrom; of any storm from whatever source (Salanga Philippine Panorama, 2/16/1986)

“Spineless, then, is how the middle class may be perceived by rich and poor alike,” he continues. They possess a “sense of quiet often mistaken as a desire for peace and non- violence.” This statement does not suggest the moderates were feckless, but that the idea of the “middle class” as an actor with agency was in doubt. The point ultimately is that another historical event would be necessary to crystallize the image of the democratic, 119

revolutionary middle class, again turning our analysis back to the importance of events and narratives.

The [New] History of the Burgis: The EDSA Critical Juncture and the Middle-Class

Narrative

If narratives are causal assessments of historical events, the particular contingent events that surrounded the EDSA revolution in February of 1986 formed the basis of the new middle class narrative in the Philippines. Under pressure from a now-vigorous protest movement and a guerrilla insurgency in the countryside, Marcos declared on a U.S. TV interview that he would hold snap presidential elections in 1986. As a result of a failed political alliance and the strength of their military strategy, the CPP decided to boycott the elections entirely. Mobilizing its extensive civil society network, the landed-capitalist class and the Catholic Church supported poll-watching organizations and pit Ninoy

Aquino's wife, Corazón against Marcos. After significant polling irregularities, Marcos declared himself the winner of the election with 52% of the ballots while Aquino claimed she won with a 53% of the votes. On February 22, disloyal military officers committed a tactical error in an attempted coup against Marcos, prompting Archbishop of Manila

Jaime Cardinal Sin to call for the people to protect the rebellious soldiers by gathering on the Epifiano de los Santos (EDSA) highway in Manila. Marcos refused to disperse the protesters by force, and as the week wore on, the US removed their support, and he fled the country ending 20 years of rule.

From a narrative perspective, those contingent events contributed heavily to the subsequent class narrative. First, the absence of the Left at EDSA allowed storytellers to

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claim a victory for moderate forces over Marcos, but Marcos' dramatic and sudden ouster gave credence to the idea that EDSA was a moderate-led revolution. Second, the definition of “the middle class” came to include the Church and oligarchic families, remaking the boundaries of social class to emphasize political moderation and Catholic piety and in essence making themselves and their supporters “the middle class.”The narrative that developed from these events had to place the middle-class social idioms into historical time and above all, provide an explanation for why People Power occurred.

Part of the difficulty of this new history was to make People Power a product of “the middle class” and its historical experience, explain how People Power as an event would inform the future of the class, all while making “common sense” the new boundaries of social class. Furthermore, because People Power was political change outside of institutional means, the moderate, democratic middle class had to become revolutionaries in order to justify their particular form of revolutionary change.

Remembering the role of the middle class became more pronounced in recollections of EDSA and Philippine history, more broadly. The History of the Burgis

(1987), a popular coffee table book which Cullinane has described as “describing the middle class to itself” (1990) is a smoking gun in this respect. Burgis is a Tagalog term of derision for the upper class, but this book, “Written by burgis for the burgis,” its authors write, “[is of the] conviction that, if the burgis were/are a part of the problem, more of them now are trying to be part of the solution” (Francisco and Cariola 1987: 8).14 They define the burgis to be comprised of the “middle and upper classes” – “landowners large and small, medium and large entrepreneurs (including the Catholic hierarchy),

14 Its companion term, ang masa (literally “the masses”), would also find itself appropriated by populist politicians in the early 2000s, most notably Joseph “Erap” Estrada. 121

professionals and salary earners – usually college educated and Roman Catholic”

(Francisco and Arriola 1987: 9).15 That broad definition reflects both a willingness to include elites into the middle class as much as a projection of the middle class as an elite force.

In an epilogue about EDSA, the authors write:

Over the week-end [of the EDSA revolution] the burgis came pouring out of [gated communities] New Alabang, BF Homes, Bel-Air, Greenhills, Wack-Wack, Valle Verde, White Plains, and New Manila in their jogging outfits and Cory T-shirts, with thermos jugs of coffee and bags of sandwiches, folding chairs, hats, fans, umbrellas, and cameras. They laughed at themselves, for they looked more like they were going on a picnic than joining a revolution ...

Observers could not help but call it the awakening of the burgis, seeing that the crowd at EDSA was a predominantly urban, middle-class, church- going one. Some likened it to a 'homecoming of Ateneo, Assumption, and La Salle.' It did not escape their attention that the inauguration of Cory Aquino at the Club Filipino – venerable headquarters of elite gatherings – the workers and the urban poor who had helped man the barricades were nowhere to be seen (Francisco and Cariola 1987: 197-198; see also Image 1)

Figure 4. Caricature of EDSA protesters. Sunday Times Magazine (3/9/86)

15 See also “Is Burgis Power for Real?” San Juan, Thelma Sioson. 1986. Sunday Times Magazine, March 9, 1986. 122

And it would be obvious in other post-EDSA texts that the new vision of a middle-class democracy brought about by revolution would be a clear reflection of hegemonic bloc's power. The Church's role, for instance, would be to pair with the middle class as arbiter of social justice. In a post-EDSA discussion, Cornell-trained sociologist and Jesuit priest

John Carroll states:

This experience suggests a two-pronged strategy for social change: pressure from below, from the disadvantaged groups organized to promote their rightful claim to equality and participation; and support for this claim on the part of the more socially-aware members of the middle and upper classes, and in particular on the part of the churchmen, the mass media people, and others who can exert moral leadership or influence public opinion

As Church, university, and as middle class, many of us are in key positions for building the ideological basis for change as many of us helped build the ideological basis for the overthrow of Marcos. Can we delegitimate the present social order, as we delegitimated the past political order? Can we show that a society like ours, with the distribution of income which we have and its disastrous human consequences, is living in sin just as truly as a man cohabitating with another man's wife is living in sin?(Carroll 1986: 141)

In other words, the vanguardism of the middle class defined here as being borne of both

Church and university. What is telling about Carroll's questions is that it reinforces the idea that the Left had lost the chance to build the “ideological basis” for the newly- democratic Philippines. Even Pulso with its sympathy for leftist ideology would get in on the act. In its first issue post-EDSA, Pulso's articles consistently noted the revolutionary potential of the Church and downplayed and even mocked the role of the organized left.

“The left had to go along with the popular tide – despite previous negative criticisms of

Aquino. Some made him a 'martyr' of the 'struggle' despite his expressed stand against violence; sneered at the 'yellow confetti' revolution as a middle-class pastime” (Quevedo

1986: 349).

Furthermore, the middle-class narrative that emerged from EDSA linked the history of protest in the Philippines through the razón nationalist narrative, suggesting

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that EDSA was part of the “unfinished revolution” set in motion by the ilustrados in the late 19th century.16 History of the Burgis provides another telling series of historical restructurings. Tracing the origins of the burgis to the Spanish colonial prinicipalia and then the ilustrado elite, the authors fully place the burgis within the razón narrative. The authors locate the origins of the middle class to the postwar period in the Philippines, but

“like the elite they aspired to join, the middle class had imbibed the colonial values and conservative views which kept the power structure in place” (Francisco and Cariola 1987:

154). The continue: “Perhaps their saving grace was that they struggled to send their children to high school and college, thus giving rise to a new intelligentsia” (Francisco and Cariola 1987: 154). While the authors parse out the origins of the middle class here, they suggest that the student movement of the late 60s and 1970s was burgis children

“[rejecting] their privileged lifestyle as contemptuously 'burgis'” (Francisco and Cariola

1987: 155). In their epilogue on EDSA, the authors do note that the protests of 1983-1985 were indeed distinct from those of the past, but the telling sign is that EDSA marks a moment of renewal for the burgis possibility of enlightened rule. They take note that

...[T]he Aquino government is unlike previous elite leaderships. Corazón Aquino is not a traditional politician... She is a shining symbol of honesty and sincerity where there was only corruption and deceit, an unassailable moral force in a society rent apart by the callousness and self-interest of the few. No other president has so totally captured the imagination and affection of Filipinos, or elicited such adulation and goodwill all over the world. The Filipino's faith in himself and pride in his nation have never been so real. Because of all this, the Aquino government has a historic opportunity to bring about basic, lasting change (Francisco and Cariola 1987: 198)

A few things are worth noting here. First, as in the previous exploration of Church discourse post-EDSA, the borders of what constituted the middle class began to gravitate

16 See Ileto (1993) on the uses of “the unfinished revolution” in political discourse in the Philippines.

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less towards material wealth or occupation per se, but towards a concept of “middle-class values” which allowed the daughter of oligarchs to be considered just as middle-class as a white-collar worker, insofar as she exhibited certain personality traits in her politics that evinced her morality. Indeed, it was less a similar structural origin that linked the middle sectors, oligarchic families, and the Church together. As an observation on the historical dynamics of pro- and anti-Marcos forces go, idea that similar “morals” held the dissimilar groups together explains away much of the horse-trading and side-switching that occurred before Ninoy Aquino's assassination. Second, that the government by the burgis was not simply government for the burgis, but for the rest of the Philippines again reinforces the idea of this amalgamation of the middle class, oligarchic elites, and the

Catholic Church as being the vanguard for political and social change – not the Left.

To conclude, the crystallization of the post-EDSA revolutionary middle-class narrative required a series of contingent events to animate a rupture worthy of narrative assessment. In the breach left behind by the events at EDSA, storytellers rationalized the absence of the left and the presence of “the middle forces” and the supposedly new-style presidency of Cory Aquino. Their observations, however, capped an ongoing process of political alliance-making, classification struggles, and discursive adaptation that had already begun to shift the meaning of the middle class towards whomever formed the moderate opposition. Relevant counterfactuals to this situation would be (1) if EDSA had not taken place and an electoral solution had been found to remove Marcos from power or (2) if EDSA had failed and Marcos had crushed the rebellion. Electoral solutions to dictatorships do not necessarily produce images of revolution – in fact, the very idea of a pacted transition comes from elites wanting to avoid an extrainstitutional solution to

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authoritarian exit. Ecuador and Venezuela provide interesting counterexamples to transitions without “revolution.” The second counterfactual we can reduce for the sake of comparison to “what would happen if EDSA had failed?” Here we can compare EDSA to

Venezuela's 11-de-Abril to come to a conclusion. Suffice it to say for now that pacted transitions in Ecuador and in Venezuela especially tamp down on class-based narratives of social change, and that success in these revolutions from the middle produce far more positive assessments of the middle class' role in democratic change than failures do.

“EDSA 2: A Middle-Class Coup?” The Oligarchic Hegemonic Veto in Action

One conclusion we can immediately draw from the way in which the post-EDSA middle class narrative was formed is that political and social cleavages, the struggle over symbolic power, and discursive adaptation all partially explain the ultimate outcome, though a significant amount of contingency propelled the process forward from the beginning to its very end. That is, a particular combination of the theoretical processes described in Chapter 2 produced the idea of the middle class in post-EDSA Philippines.

This section approaches the middle-class narrative from the other direction, so to speak.

What appears to have happened in the Philippines in subsequent years is that the middle- class narrative has developed a life of its own, existing outside of the particular coalitions and contexts that produced it and in fact, reinforcing the Philippine's balance of class power in the process. In other words, the middle-class narrative has served to insulate the alliance of oligarchic families and the Catholic Church from challenges to their political power and ironically has limited the appeal of white-collar protest aimed at those elites.

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The most glaring example of this is the EDSA 2/People Power 2 protests in 2001 that removed democratically-elected president Joseph Estrada.

Estrada won the presidential elections in 1998 with around 40% of the popular vote. Doronilla writes “though strictly a minority president, Estrada – and his partisans – could not… be stopped from claiming that he had won by a „landslide‟, in the effort to build the myth that he had an indestructible electoral mandate” (2001: 5). “Erap,” as he wanted to be known,17 campaigned on the slogan Erap para sa masahirap, literally translated as “Erap for the poor.” His electoral vehicle, Pwersa ng Masa, literally Force of the Masses, again reflected his apparent empathy for the poor. And, just like populists around the world, Estrada claimed he would redistribute the national wealth to benefit the poor (Weekley 2000), but in practice, his major poverty alleviation program‟s budget

“was… largely a pork barrel…” (Balisacan 2001: 100).

But Estrada‟s most effective populist appeal came through his leverage of his own charisma to identify himself with the downtrodden and to contrast himself with the established elites. His populist appeal derived largely from his film career; as Hedman

(2001) describes, Estrada usually played hardscrabble underdogs and gained notoriety as the Philippine film industry began to reach large audiences in the 1960s and 1970s.

Estrada continued to promote his film role as the defender of the downtrodden into his presidency, shipping around his films to poor neighborhoods. As Abueva (2001) would note in a defense of EDSA 2: “He mobilized his masa supporters by portraying the calls for his resignation and his impeachment as a conspiracy of the rich against him and the poor, led by the Makati Business Club” (2001: 92).

17 “Erap” is the reverse spelling of the tagalog slang word pare, meaning “Buddy.”

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In October of 2000, Ilocos Sur Governor Luis “Chavit” Singson implicated

Estrada in a complex gambling and money laundering scheme involving an illegal numbers game, jueteng. In November on the force of that accusation, Estrada was impeached for graft, betraying the public trust, and defying the Constitution. All the while, protesters began to gather at the Senate and millions watched the trial on television or heard it on the radio. And then on January 21st, 2001, then curtain fell on Estrada. Four days earlier, eleven senators voted 11-10 to leave unopened a sealed envelope containing bank documents, possibly tying Estrada to the jueteng payoff. As the prosecution walked out in disgust, and the senate president resigned in protest, the hundreds of thousands of people camped outside the Senate and at the EDSA Shine clamored for Estrada to step down. The recognizable faces of the first EDSA Revolution – Corazón Aquino, Jaime

Cardinal Sin, Fidel Ramos, among others – stirred up the crowd, calling upon Estrada to step down as was his moral obligation in the face of this new “People Power,” or “EDSA

2.” For his part, Estrada refused, but as the protests continued to both swell and grow more fervent over the course of the next few days, the military removed its support from his government. Estrada left the presidential palace. Chief Justice of the Supreme Court,

Hilario Davide declared the presidency “vacant,” allowing Vice-President Gloria

Macapagal-Arroyo to assume the remainder of Estrada‟s term.18

Foreign Criticism of EDSA 2 and the Middle-Class Narrative

18 Philippine presidents serve one, six-year term. Estrada’s term would have ended in 2004. Though Arroyo assumed the remainder of Estrada’s term, she was eligible to run for president in the 2004 elections, which she won, but not without serious charges of vote-tampering, which will be discussed below. 128

To be clear, the same alliance that had brought down Marcos had again come together to oust Estrada: unsympathetic oligarchic elites and the Catholic Church mobilized followers to pressure him to step down (Hedman 2006). While participants and sympathizers celebrated the fall of Estrada through this new People Power, foreign observers began to question the validity of EDSA 2 as a democratic transition and its effects on the political stability of the Philippines. One piece that would be a lightning rod for criticism, Anthony Spaeth‟s piece in Time titled “Oops, We Did it Again”, speculated that it was a conspiracy of “Manila‟s business aristocracy”, the “landed gentry” as typified by Corazón Aquino, and the Catholic Church:

In the mid-'80s, the Elite and the Church banded together to help organize Manila's masses against Marcos, a moment of triumph they have never forgotten. The fact that a high percentage of Filipinos loved Estrada was exasperating. Even more inconvenient was his grip on the Senate, which seemed to ensure that he would stay in power. The solution: to bring hundreds of thousands of Filipinos onto Manila's streets19

“People Power,” he concluded “has become an acceptable term for a troubling phenomenon: one that used to known as mob rule.” Jim Mann of the L.A. Times contrasted EDSA 2 with previous forms of People Power around the world: “Now, by contrast, we are witnessing the use of people power against a leader who was the winner of a legitimate democratic election.” He continues, “No matter how understandable it was, this outbreak of people power doesn‟t seem like an advance for the cause of democracy; quite the opposite.”20 And William Overholt stated, “It is either being called

19 Spaeth, Anthony. “Oops, We Did it Again,” Time 1/29/01. 20 Mann, Jim. “A Risky Move by Filipinos,” Los Angeles Times, 1/24/01. 129

mob rule or mob rule as a cover for a well-planned coup… but either way, it‟s not democracy.”21

These three particular pieces appeared as foils for many authors who wanted to defend their actions at this second EDSA. Why was foreign criticism taken so seriously?

In the larger political-economic context of the period, the late 1990s in Asia saw the precipitous rise of the “Asian Tigers” and their domino-like decline during the Asian

Financial Crisis of 1998. The Philippines had failed in its attempts to match Thailand,

Singapore, Taiwan, and Malaysia in terms of economic growth, but had a more significant history with democratic rule than those four nations. If anything, defenders of

EDSA 2 advanced the idea of the Philippines as further along in political development.

This sort of defense of a unique democracy appeared in many defenses of EDSA 2. When asked if there would be a People Power III, former President Corazón Aquino responded,

“With two political revolutions in just 15 years, is Philippine democracy sustainable? My answer is, more than ever because we had those two revolutions in just 15 years” suggesting that period renewal of the EDSA 2 type was absolutely necessary.

But not only did EDSA 2 face criticism from abroad, but from Estrada's supporters as well. One incident put the events at EDSA 2 into stark contrast and revealed that in a Gramscian sense that elite hegemony was incomplete. On May 1, 2001 a counterrevolt featured personages loyal to Estrada – Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago,

21 As cited in Mydans, Seth. “‟People Power II‟ Doesn‟t Give Filipinos the Same Glow,” New York Times, 2/5/01. Printed in the International Edition under the title, “Expecting Praise, Filipinos Are Criticized for Ouster.” See also these responses: Doronilla, Amando. “Edsa II Worries Western Media (part 2),” Philippine Daily Inquirer, 1/31/01; Quezon, Manolo III. “The Puzzling Filipino,” Philippines Free Press, 2/10/01. Responses also went out against former Malaysian Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew, who also suggested that EDSA 2 was unconstitutional and therefore undemocractc. See Doronilla, “Edsa II Worries Western Media (part 1)” Philippine Daily Inquirer, 1/29/01; and Almario, Manuel. “Gloria‟s Mandate from the People,” Philippine Graphic 2/5/01. 130

Estrada‟s spiritual advisor and head of the charismatic El Shaddai movement Mike

Velarde, and former coup leader Gregorio Honasan – as well as hundreds of thousands of

Estrada‟s lower-class and underclass supporters who had been the bulk of his electoral support in his various stabs at public office. These estimated 500,000 protesters also gathered at the EDSA Shrine, they also claimed that the Arroyo presidency was illegitimate, but most shockingly, 50,000 of them stormed the presidential palace and had to be subdued by military force (Doronilla 2001: ch. 17). “EDSA 3,” as it would be called, made violently apparent the great class disparity between its participants and those of EDSA 2 – it affirmed many foreign observations that EDSA Dos was really “rich

People‟s Power” and again moved pundits and scholars alike to firmly delineate between the organized, non-violent crowd of EDSA 2 and the unthinking masses of EDSA 3.

Doronilla suggests that Estrada supporters protesting his arrest on charges of economic plunder had initially gathered more or less spontaneously, and only after a mass had formed did personages loyal to Estrada appear to ride the popular wave (2001: 222). He notes that 70 to 75% of the crowd consisted of followers of Iglesia ni Cristo, an evangelical sect, motivated largely by pastoral suggestion and non-stop coverage on their television station, Net 25 (Doronilla 2001: 223-224). However, Doronilla notes that the popular perception was that the crowd was “reportedly hakot” – “collected, delivered, paid, and fed” (2001: 222).22

The main defenses against the validity of EDSA 3 demonstrated an obvious

Bourdieusian processes of patronizing distinction-making. Abueva warns “that the

22 A palace source informed me that the difference between the EDSA 3 crowd and the crowd that would support, then mourn presidential candidate Fernando Poe, Jr. in 2004 was that the EDSA 3 crowd was reportedly paid more handsomely (personal communication). 131

nation‟s legions of poor people, once sufficiently empowered, may finally rise against a society and political system they judge to be hopelessly unjust and oppressive” (2001:

96). Ibana (2003) notes EDSA Tres “was not a product of deliberate processes of discourse and educational programs but by an emotional identification with a folk hero who promised to emancipate them from their wretched situation” and in fact “[the poor‟s] frustration from actually having access to the opportunities of social participation… led to [EDSA 3]” (2003: 21, 22). And, David (2001) suggests that EDSA Tres should not be

“associated with the underprivileged classes of Philippine society” for “[any] crowd has the potential of being transformed into a mob if subjected to the same rabble-rousing and inflammatory speeches that the EDSA shrine protesters went through” (David 2001:

178). In all these explanations for EDSA 3, the contrasts and the ongoing classification struggle are clear – the half a million urban poor were “raw material for the ambitions of cynical politicians and media icons, or warm bodies for military power grabs disguised as people power” (David 2001: 179).23

What is important for this study is that the responses to these criticisms would invariably circle back to the middle class – that is, EDSA 2 was a middle-class revolt and therefore democratic. Again, just like in the first EDSA, a focus on the habitus of the protesters appeared, but now armed with a history of how the middle class had acted in the past, the defensive storytelling of the events during EDSA 2 could be even more confirmatory. The very name of the event evoked the continuity of the intent and style of the protests from the first EDSA. A few emblematic examples of how the middle-class

23 Or as Ibana (2003) suggests similarly “It will not be surprising to find out that the constituencies of political figures that emerged from the military establishment will come from the camp of the inarticulate” (2003: 22). 132

narrative was redeployed demonstrate how the storytellers saw the Philippine middle class as not only fulfilling its narrative duty in Philippine history, but in the world at large.

For example, in two reflections on EDSA 2, sociologist Cynthia Bautista shows while the middle class was numerically important at EDSA 2, membership in the middle class is predicated on values that can be acquired through education. In her piece “The

Middle Classes: A Natural Constituency for Democracy”24:

…because of their higher levels of education, the middle classes are less dependent on systems of patronage. They also show greater appreciation of the rule of law and higher ethical standards for public service. As such, they are a natural constituency for democratic politics25

And in an edited volume Between Fires, compiled explicitly as a defense of EDSA 2 from foreign and domestic criticism, Bautista writes:

Regardless of economic position, the middle classes were unified by a common moral sensibility. They espoused clear-cut ethical standards of right and wrong based on universal principles…

Principles that come with a “modern sensibility… [,] imbibed through humanist education, attained formally through schools and universities or achieved in the practice of ideologically motivated social movements”.26 Constructing the middle class in this way allows entry points into middle-classness that transcend being rich or poor, and as such, disarm the Manichean class divide purported by both the foreign media and the pro-

Estrada forces.

24 Cited as Bautista, Cynthia B. 2001. “The Middle Classes: A Natural Constituency for Democracy,” in People Power 2: Lessons and Hopes. Thelma Sioson San Juan, ed. Pasig: ABS-CBN Publishing, p. 249. 25 Ibid. p. 188. 26 Bautista, “Revenge of the Elite,” p 13. 133

One of the most recognized symbols of EDSA 2 was the cellular phone – “it was,” in Uy-Tioco‟s assessment “a revolution by cell phone.”27 Emphasizing the cellular phone and text messaging could achieve two things: (1) help to combat the “mob” image by showing participants in EDSA 2 were in constant communication and coordination and (2) that as opposed to a “step backwards” for democracy, the use of new technology in social movement tactics could actually show how advanced Filipinos were in using them.28 But what did this specific technology have to do with being middle class? It appeared that among representations of the middle class in the post-EDSA 2 period, the primary users of cell phone text messaging were middle-class people, and as such, helped to generate the image of a technologically-ascendant class. Bautista writes,

the images on television were those of clean-cut participants in black mourning attire, many of whom carried cellular phones… In addition, the vanguardless, decentralized and spontaneous uprising was coordinated trough messages transmitted by numerous but interlocking texting networks and electronic discussion groups, technology available mainly to the upper and middle classes29

Images, she claims, that make EDSA 2 almost stereotypically middle class. In contrast, without technology one columnist wrote, the EDSA 3 crowd “reminded us of the crowd

27 Uy-Tioco, Cecilia Alessandra. 2003. “The Cell Phone and Edsa 2: The Role of a Communication Technology in Ousting a President,” Paper presented at the 4th Critical Themes in Media Studies Conference, New School University, October 11, 2003, New York, NY. 28 The best critique of the cell phone fetishism during EDSA 2 comes from Rafael, “The Cell Phone and the Crowd”. Social movements specialist Charles Tilly picked up on the role of the cell phone at EDSA 2, but did not attach a class criticism to its use. Tilly, Charles. 2003. “Social Movements Enter the Twenty-first Century,” paper presented at the conference on Contentious Politics and the Economic Opportunity Structure: Mediterranean Perpsectives, University of Crete, Rehimno, 17-18 October 2003. 29 Banzon-Bautista. “‟Revenge of the Elites on the Masses‟” in Between Fires, p. 7. Doronilla in the introduction to the volume says that Bautista‟s study “is most helpful in amplifying the middle class, the class credited for the mass mobilization for People Power 2, bringing forward our knowledge of what the middle class is” 134

that took over the Bastille during the French Revolution, howling for the blood of the aristocrats and intellectuals”.30 Instead,

The EDSA 2 crowd, on the other hand, comprised of the texters, the cell phone owners belonging to the lower and middle classes. They were made up of the professionals who were glued to their TV sets during the weeks of the impeachment hearings and the students who followed the hearings through their text messages

Emphasizing the cellular phone at EDSA celebrated how it “facilitated the communication and cooperation between groups normally located at the ends of the ideological divide…” (2003: 11). In a critique of this “communication fetish,” Rafael argues that the EDSA 2 crowd “believed they could master their relationship to the masses of people with whom they regularly shared Manila‟s crowded streets and utilize the power of crowds to speak to the state” (Rafael 2003: 399). The cell phone precipitated

“telecommunicative fantasies… predicated on the putative „voicelessness‟ of the masses”

(Rafael 2003: 400). “In short,” he writes “the middle class invests the crowd with the power of the cell phone: the power to transmit their wish for a moral community” (Rafael

2003: 412). Seen in contrast to mass “voicelessness,” the cell phone served as symbol of distinction between the middle class and its mass opponents.

But according to these representations, EDSA 2 confirmed that these “middle- class values” (1) still existed and (2) could form the core of a transformative ideology and reach beyond “class.” In the Epilogue to the coffee table text People Power 2: Lessons and Hopes, we learn that:

[i]ronically, the so-called EDSA 3 happened even as the country‟s intelligentsia and upper and middle classes were trying to consolidate the lessons from People Power 2. The poor, their ranks

30 Romero, Jose V. “Convergence of the Middle Forces, I” Manila Times, 9/6/01. 135

multiplied by worsening poverty, economic disparity, chronic corruption, and bad governance, had opened the wounds of society yet again…

… But there were some heartening developments: [People Power 2] brought to the fore the potential of civil society for influencing the country‟s governance; reaffirmed the existence of the middle class and the values it cherishes; raised the hope that disparate classes could come together for the common good31

And as yet another author argued, is it, in fact, the “critical role” of the middle class to mediate between “the elite and the poorest of the poor” for

Without the mediation of the middle classes through the institutions of civil society, the tension between our traditional lifeworld and our modernizing social systems are bound to intensify in our daily lives32

And, of course, ultimately the intellectual justification for EDSA 2 was that it was fully democratic, in line with the historical trajectory of Philippine politics from the first

EDSA and earlier:

Those who toppled Mr. Estrada from the office of the presidency are heirs of the great revolutionary tradition of the middle classes at the turn of the 20th century. It was then that the so- called Illustrados, children of Filipino middle-class families, were emancipated from the anonymous masses by virtue of their social participation in the processes of European modernization that eventually reached the shores of colonial countries like the Philippines (Ibana 2003: 18)

Ibana goes on to say “although the Philippine middle classes had a checkered history of collaboration with foreign domination, their revolutionary potentials can be discerned if we take a closer look at our recent history,” that is, the student protests in 1970 known as the “first quarter storm,” People Power in 1986 and, of course, EDSA 2 (Ibana 2003: 19).

Bautista makes a similar observation about the importance of the “First Quarter Storm” to

31 Epilogue. San Juan, Thelma Sioson, ed. 2001. People Power 2: Lessons and Hopes. Pasig: ABS- CBN Publishing, p. 249. 32 Ibaña, “Lifeworlds,” p. 23 136

imbuing the middle class with a “modern” outlook.33 Ultimately the intellectual justification for EDSA 2 was that it was fully democratic, in line with the historical trajectory of Philippine politics from the first EDSA. In name, “EDSA Dos” or “People

Power 2” implied the distinct linkage between the histories of popular protest. As

Mydans astutely observes, the responses of those who would justify the revolt vis-à-vis democratic practices gravitated towards one point: “Democratic institutions in the

Philippines are not functioning as they should, they said, requiring periodic course corrections from a vigilant public”.34

How do all these retellings and analyses of EDSA 2 demonstrate an insulation of elite interests? First, again, it is important to reiterate that the motive forces behind EDSA

2 were oligarchic families opposed to Estrada and the Catholic Church. Estrada's replacement, Vice-President Arroyo, was herself the daughter of a former president and scions of Pampanga province. While white-collar workers, students, and public intellectuals all participated eventually, the beneficiaries at least in the most immediate sense were already-established political families. Indeed, the 2001 congressional elections brought back more traditional political families into the seats of power: “of the

214 members of the 12th House, half belong to established political clans” – an increase of about 25% from the previous House, elected when Estrada came to power in 1998.35

Ironically, Estrada was eventually charged with economic plunder – a crime punishable by death in the Philippines – but placed under house arrest, then given a pardon by

Arroyo in 2007. At that point it is fairly clear that EDSA 2 had not necessarily improved

33 Bautista, “Revolt of the Elite” p. 13.

34 Mydans, “Expecting Praise” 35 Datinguinoo, Vinia M. and Avigail Olarte. 2001. “Political Clans Make a Comeback,” PCIJ Special Reports, accessed 3/20/2006 < http://www.pcij.org/stories/2001/clans.html> 137

the prospects for a deeper democracy, and certainly cast a shadow on the protest in the first place.

But the main reason why the narrative was insulating was that touting the role of the middle class during EDSA 2 was the immediate response from intellectuals, activists, and participants writ large who could not necessarily count themselves among the pedigrees of the Philippines' oligarchic families. We could reasonably argue that evoking the role of the middle class as a way in which these public intellectuals justified their own participation in a protest with deeply-ambiguous effects for the consolidation of democracy in the Philippines. Evoking the historical role of the middle class in Philippine democracy and world history – as the harbingers of democratic rule through “revolution”

– suggest in part that the question raised in Estrada's election, namely “what about the poor?,” could be ignored if not approached in a way that was seen appropriate by the middle class.

As this chapter has shown, the representations of the middle class in relation to

Estrada‟s ouster, EDSA 2, and EDSA 3 reveal the image of a class destined to bring about democracy through its moral purity. These representations said they fulfilled their role as “naturally inclined” toward democracy when they formed the core of the anti-

Estrada forces – both in leadership and in populating the crowd at EDSA 2. However, if we view the “middle class” image that emerged from EDSA 2 as a justification, given the political and discursive context, we can see how storytellers selectively appropriated and interpreted those events to produce a particular image. What may lie underneath are deeper themes in Philippine revolutionary discourse that had to be transformed to make them palatable for foreign audiences. Only by converting the “collective outpouring of

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spontaneous energy” into the righteous anger of an inherently-revolutionary class could the perceived irrationality of the protest be transformed into both particularly Filipino and justifiably democratic.

What becomes evident if we probe the post-EDSA middle-class narratives is a transformation of the imagery of the pasyón, a stylized story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ which has had significant material force in Philippine revolutionary movements since the turn of the century.36 The main themes of the pasyón are generating freedom or kalayaan through emptying one‟s self – cleaning the loób, or

“inside”. Doing so would allow one to have damay or empathy for their countrymen. For revolutionary movements of the past, education, money, and family connections had to be eschewed for they would sully the loob and leave the individual unable to see or think clearly. Having a clear loób meant one could act as ilaw or a beacon or light for others.

These sentiments are often dismissed as part of the “little tradition” of revolution, of the peasants and of the poor. But, as Ileto shows, they made their appearance again during the Aquino assassination in 1983 when there was damay for Aquino and others through mourning his death.37

What the transformations of the middle-class consciousness at EDSA 2 did, however, is to take those “irrational” sentiments and make them into explicitly rational ones – if there was anything that EDSA 2 added to the middle-class narrative it was this distinction between the rational and irrational. The suffering middle class was this new empathetic class, and others could join in its democratic revolution if they accepted its

36 See Ileto, Raynaldo. 1979. Paston and Revolution. Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840-1910. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press. 37 Ileto, Reynaldo. 1998. “The Past in the Present: Mourning the Martyr Ninoy,” in Filipinos and their Revolution. Event, Discourse, and Historiograhy. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press. 139

values. But, to reach the state of a clear loob, the pattern was reversed: the middle class through its education would allow it to see clearly – running counter to the impressions of turn-of-the-century revolutionaries. It was therefore the middle class having been “shown the light” through education that would lead the way, “to educate” coincidentally coming from the Latin educare, or, to bring into the light. The permeable barrier of middle-class values then has deep historical roots, and it is the discursive combination of the Western modernization discourse and this particularly Filipino concept of asceticism that produced the image of the middle class as the Philippine‟s own Weberian Calvinists.

Pointing this out makes understanding that permeable barrier of class significantly less antiseptic – as a matter of social distinction and theories of social distinction, it seems easy to explain, but when placed in historical context, it makes much more. So then what of the poor?

Clearly, the poor must produce their own leaders if they are to become an enduring and constructive political force in our nation‟s life. They must create their own symbols, rid themselves of the weight of their bitterness, turn their backs on the patrons who promised them redemption but robbed them of their will to self-reliance, organize themselves, and fight for their children rather than for the politicians who habitually use them. Until then, they will remain raw material for the ambitious of cynical politicians and media icons, or warm bodies for military power grabs disguised as people power38

In that statement, all the elements are there: without the “weight of their bitterness” their loób would be calm, leading them to kalayaan – “self-reliance.” Otherwise, politicians can play with their minds and lead them to revolutions that are not for their own freedom.

By appropriating revolutionary discourse through the image of the suffering, but rational middle class, the anti-Estrada forces could then take aim at their two main opponents: the

38 David, Randolf S. 2001. “Erap: A Diary of Disenchantment,” in Between Fires, p. 179.

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Western press and its condescension and the pro-Estrada forces and their EDSA 3. They could claim the rationality of the middle class to show how EDSA 2 was in line with

“democratic bourgeois revolutions” in the West and diminish the “irrational” masa- backed EDSA 3. They could use its role as the font of Filipino values to justify EDSA 2 as a uniquely Filipino democratic course correction. Relatedly, the defense of EDSA 2 through middle class narratives also suggested that the Philippines had “skipped steps” in its political development – now that the Philippines has had its middle-class revolution, it could expect (1) a new role for the middle class in democratic politics, and (2) a more vibrant and consolidated democracy.

Quo Vadis, Middle Forces: The Demobilizing Effects of the Revolution from the

Middle

However, the idea that the revolution from the middle at EDSA and EDSA 2 served as openings for a new type of politics where the middle-class could agitate their upper class leaders for a deeper democracy was founded on a significant misreading of the motive forces of both events. To be sure, “objectively” middle class” people had participated, but the major influences on their participation was the oligarchic families-Catholic Church alliance, with the “middle class” as their screen to push their agenda. Absent the motivating influence of the elites, could the middle-class narrative itself be used by middle-class people to foment the change they sought:? The short answer in the case of the Philippines has been “no”: appealing to “the middle class” has appeared to have been mostly an exercise in frustration for avowedly middle-class movement organizers.

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The return to electoral democracy did more to reinstate the rule of oligarchic interests who had lost their access to the state during the Marcos period, which scholars have suggested had a demobilizing effect on middle class protesters. Boudreau argues

“[u]pper and middle class mobilization during Marcos' last three years had subsided

[after People Power], and activists from this strata generally returned to individual economic activity and lent little political or material support to collective actions” (1996:

71). The social movement networks that characterized the moderate anti-Marcos movement lost leadership to the new bureaucracy of the Aquino government and became unable to manage agglomerated single-issue groups that had swelled their ranks

(Boudreau 1996: 81; see also Kimura 1990; Abinales 2004: 68-69). This trend would continue through the next decade – in an iteration of the International Social Survey

Project on government in 1996, roughly half of self-identified middle-class respondents approved of public protest demonstrations, but 91.92% had not attended one in the past five years (ISSP 1996).

A reading of relevant narratives post-EDSA reveals is that framing movement participation as a “middle class” habit, so to speak. While movement leaders worried about their flagging membership, they affirmed particular notions of middle-class protest

– its styles, its techniques, its overall qualities. Alfredo Bengson, tapped to become

Aquino's Minister of Health, lamented in a keynote speech to BANDILA's second national congress that “impostors, pretenders and fakes” and the “loss of Cory Aquino” had weakened the middle forces, and went on ask

What is happening to the middle ground? Have we become less creative, or less courageous, or both? Where are the bright, fresh attacks and approaches that marked the pre-February Revolution protest movement – the thinking which created yellow confetti, Peso for Cory, Cory-vans, 142

xerox journalism? Where have all the earnest activists of the middle gone? (National Midweek Nov 19 1986)

He continued, “Too much action has moved into the corridors of power. Too much reliance is being placed on backroom meetings and audiences with the President.” He implored: “Let us go back to our popular roots” (National Midweek Nov 19 1986).

Writing a just a few months later on the organization ATOM, National Midweek observed similarly that “After almost a year, the upper middle-class crowds that had put

Corazón Aquino in the presidency are nowhere to be found” (National Midweek Feb 18

1987). “Among all the organizations formed by 'the middle forces,' only ATOM can claim it is still meeting weekly”.

For these movements, EDSA had created a revolutionary middle class whose protest-based politics were seen as an evolution of Philippine democracy. Having achieved their destiny at EDSA – a destiny which could be linked back to their elite forebears in colonial times – they served as a reminder that lower class politics were shrill and unruly, while their politics were truly revolutionary, truly moral, and truly democratic. The literal absence of middle-class protest after Corazón Aquino's election – while attributable to various movement-structural factors – caused significant consternation insofar as the middle class was thought to be reneging on their role as the revolutionary agents of democracy. “What it all amounts to,” one commentator wrote “is that there is a growing belief among many of its officials that the government can pretty much do what it wants, with hardly a protest from the freedom-loving middle class, which in contrast to peasants and workers, want too little too late” (Teodoro Midweek mar 18 1987).

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Years later during the run-up to EDSA 2, activists attempted again to use the historical legacy of the middle forces to garner support for protests against Estrada. In

March 2000, a group claiming to bear the legacy of the original EDSA‟s “middle forces” attempted to sway public opinion towards reform and not ouster, though with weak results. The Silent Protest Movement (thereafter “SPM”) appeared on the front page of the Philippine Daily Inquirer on March 30th in a story titled, “Middle Forces Coming

Together to Oust Estrada.”39 At a meeting to discuss the plight of Sister Christine Tan – a

Catholic nun who had run afoul of Estrada by revealing inconsistencies in a sweepstakes program – an apparently loose coalition of organizations claimed the mantle of the

“middle forces”, a term which had been passed down through the Communist Left to the moderate Marcos opposition in the early 1980s. “The emerging movements,” the authors wrote, “refer to the campaign initiated by the middle class [at the EDSA Revolution] to put a stop to the alleged corruption, cronyism, and nepotism in the Estrada administration.” Their self-proclaimed spokesman was Jose Luis “Linggoy” Alcuaz who claimed that “100 multisectoral groups” were part of these new middle forces. The

SPM‟s symbol: a sticker with white exclamation points on a black background – “‟a silent and subtle‟ expression of protest.”

As a discursive ploy, the SPM‟s claim to the “middle forces” mantle evoked memories of the original EDSA‟s “middle forces.” What was telling for Asuncion David

Maramba was that these new middle forces “may be growing desperate; but this middle is also sober” in that it did not call for Estrada‟s ouster, but simply for “reform”.40 It would

39 Herrera, Christine, Andrea H. Trinidad, Pia Lee-Brago, and Rocky Narenzo. “Middle Forces Coming Together to Oust Estrada,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, 3/30/00. 40 Maramba, Ascuncion David. “The Middle Forces – Desperate but Sober,” Philippine Daily Inquirer 4/1/00 144

seem then that the SPM was closely following the image of the middle class produced from the EDSA Revolution – one defined by its political moderation. However, while being part of the middle class and the middle forces at the original EDSA indicated one‟s political moderation, the legacy of the middle forces at the original EDSA was their role in helping force Marcos from power, so it was difficult to dislodge the use of the term from the public narratives that had been built around it...41

This attempt to claim moderation and “reform” against the pre-existing public narrative of the “revolutionary” middle forces was only part of the problem: the movement seemed to be running on passion alone, with a weak organizational structure and with only Alcuaz as its visible “leader.” As such, it became even more difficult to articulate a message other than the renewed novelty of the “middle forces.” The

Philippines Free Press followed the SPM closely over the next month. Writing for the

Free Press, Manuel Quezon III remarked “what was meant to be a small, private dialogue rapidly mushroomed into one of those electric, pseudo-clandestine meetings that made the participants recall an earlier time, when the middle class began to question the legitimacy of the New Society.”42 Still, for an optimistic Quezon, the guerrilla tactics and disorganization of the “exclamation point movement” would make it difficult for Estrada to fight back:

In a sense the absence of publicly proclaimed leaders for the exclamation point movement means that the President will be reduced to shadowboxing. How can he beat a phantom opponent? How can he win against a movement so shadowy and yet so popular? How can he possibly get at an enemy that hasn‟t made its real composition clear?

41 See also Avendano, Christine and Juliet L. Javellana. “Gloria to Consult Middle Forces,” Philippine Daily Inquirer 4/18/00. Arroyo went to speak with the Trade Union Congress of the Philippines, “multisectoral groups in the Visayas, and would go to Mindanao to meet with bishops there.” When asked if she would meet with the SPM, she noted that they “did not have a broad consensus”. 42 Quezon, Manuel III. “War of Exclamation,” Philippines Free Press, 4/15/00. 145

A three-day noise barrage scheduled for April 7th to the 9th was poorly attended.

According to Alcuaz, “tactical errors” had prevented its success, most notably (1) public perception that the “noise barrage was masterminded by the upper class”43 and (2) that

“most of the group‟s members „have yet to be comfortable with their militant [Leftist] guests‟”.44 Those “militant guests” were groups like BAYAN, Kilusang Mayo Uno, and

Akbayan, which were calling aggressively for Estrada‟s ouster, which made Quezon remark again in the Philippines Free Press,

At the rate things are going, the exclamation point people are going to turn into the dunce cap brigade. Already failed at one stunt – a three-day noise barrage – now it seems Linggoy Alcuaz and company are going to look to the Left for clues as to how to motivate the people. Bad move. To go to the Left for advice of this nature would be like approaching [bowtie-wearing charismatic leader] Mike Velarde for fashion tips or [comedian and TV host] German Moreno for method acting lessons45

On April 28th both the SPM and the Left called for a noise barrage which the SPM apparently called “Enap op Erap” (Enough of Erap)46 and the Left called “Orkestrang

Bayan” (The People‟s Orchestra). That barrage was far more successful, primarily due to the Left. BAYAN Secretary General Teodoro Casiño stated that the barrage “confirmed that moderates and radicals opposed to the Estrada administration had come together…” and that “this is the Makati crowd and the basic sectors, the political opposition, and the mass movement all coming together.”47 The problem was, however, that the SPM did not

43 Aning, Jerome. “Middle Forces Regroup for Enap on Erap,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, 4/28/00; David, Rina Jimenez. “Enap op Erap,” Philippine Daily Inquirer, 4/28/00 44 Sapsa, James Payawal. “Question Mark,” Philippines Free Press, 4/22/00. 45 “Towards Disaster,” Philippines Free Press 4/22/00. 46 “Enap op Erap” is a mocking play on the Filipino pronunciation of the letters “p” and “f” which are often interchanged in speech. 47 “Decibels Up in New Noise Barrage,” Philippine Daily Inquirer 4/29/00. 146

officially commit its members to participate in it, and then supposedly dropped Alcuaz as its spokesperson.48 A now disappointed Quezon remarked

But look at Linggoy Alcuaz, now the disowned ex-spokesman for the retarded exclamation point gang. This year‟s May Day, the rather more successful anti-Estrada protests were resumed under the auspices of radical groups. Alcuaz has almost single- handedly given them command of the opposition… And if the reaction of the exclamation point people is any guide, this shift has left the middle class quaking in its boots49

“The middle class has now joined the wealthy in political paralysis,” Quezon concluded. Finally, Arroyo‟s vote-padding scandal during the summer of 2005 her declaration of a State of Emergency the following year also demonstrate the weakness of the middle-class narrative in mobilizing the middle class. Arroyo was technically elected to the presidency for the first time in 2004, narrowly beating Estrada ally and fellow popular movie star Fernando Poe, Jr. However, in the summer of 2005, audio tapes surfaced with Arroyo allegedly asking election commissioner Virgilio Garcillano to pad her vote totals. Rallies and denunciations came quickly in what would be called the

“Hello, Garci” scandal, and Corazón Aquino and Fernando Poe‟s wife Susan Roces led rallies in Makati, but the Congress failed to impeach Arroyo on a technicality.50 Arroyo‟s popularity dropped precipitously, and then against the backdrop of the 20th anniversary of

People Power on February 24th, 2006, Arroyo issued Proclamation 1017, declaring a

State of Emergency and authorizing the government to mobilize the army “to prevent or suppress all forms of lawless violence as well as any act of insurrection or rebellion…”

(Arroyo 2/24/2006). Opposition lawmakers were arrested, the opposition media hassled,

48 Ibid.

49 Quezon, Manuel III. “Dumb and Dumber,” Philippines Free Press 5/14/00. 50 The audio clip of Arroyo saying “Hello, Garci” became a popular ringtone for cell phones. Audio clips of the conversation can be found on the blog of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism along with ringtones < http://pcij.org/blog/wp-files/ringtones.php>. 147

and protesters dispersed with force as the government claimed an alliance of the extreme

Left and Right-Wing military adventurists was planning to take over the country (Arroyo

2/24/2006).

Though Cory Aquino herself rallied in Makati, and cell phones texted back and forth, militant protesters in Makati were quickly dispersed as the government kept a vigilant eye for assembling crowds (Ager 2/26/2006; Torres and Ortiz 2/26/2006).51

Despite the moral indignation of the State of Emergency, especially its martial-law overtones and its desecration of the People Power anniversary, no vast popular uprising occurred. In the words of one columnist, the absence of an EDSA-type protest in response to the State of Emergency revealed civil society had lost the brazen attitude of the masses, comparing their lack of gumption to a stampede of mostly poor people at a television station that killed 200 people the month prior (de Quiros 3/01/2006)

Perhaps the most infamous of these attempts to rally “the middle class” against

Arroyo were the “Starbucks Protests” of March 2006 organized by the Black and White

Movement, an anti-Arroyo group. Focusing on patrons of Starbucks because it was the middle class' “natural hangout,” the Black and White Movement sought out a way to demonstrate its displeasure with Proclamation 1017. The Movement told participants to wear black and then follow these instructions:

Defiant coffee lovers are being asked to queue up at the counter individually for their drinks... After getting their purchases, students, business executives and professionals are asked to sit or just stand around for at least 30 minutes. When a cue is given, the caffeine- loving protesters will leave en masse, at which point everyone is asked to give a simultaneous “thumbs down”: sign before peacefully dispersing and proceeding to the next gimmick place (Philippine Daily Inquirer 3/3/06).

51 Multiple personal sources in the Philippines mention that cell phone messages now circulate more detrius than fact nowadays – political jokes, rumors, and little else. 148

The image of black-clad Starbucks patrons making no speeches and holding no signs did not spark a significant or even noticeable spike in middle-class protest against Arroyo

(see image xxx). These types of approaches towards the protest potential of the middle class seemed to fall flat as the narrative of their abilities comes into contact with the reality of the political forces that composed “the middle class” in the first place.

In sum, the narrative of the middle class in the Philippines seems to be an ineffective tool for the objectively middle class to generate sentiment for protests. Calling upon the revolutionary history of the middle class does nothing to foment revolution.

This is consequential insofar as it adds to how the middle-class narrative insulates elite interests: by providing a popular myth for the creation of social movement frames, the narrative tricks social movements into approaching the middle class as the sole agent at

EDSA and EDSA 2 and as such, the target audience for appeals to for political participation. In fact, the narrative limits the perspective of social movements to overemphasize the role of the middle class which they have seen as white-collar workers like themselves.

Conclusion

This chapter has attempted to demonstrate that the narrative of a revolutionary, democratic middle class in the Philippines is the product of the very protest that middle class was supposed to have precipitated: The EDSA or People Power Revolution in 1986.

Focusing on the balance of class power and its subsequent political cleavages, the battle over symbolic power and the naming of groups, as well as processes of discursive

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adaptation we can see how the Catholic Church and oligarchic families opposed to

Ferdinand Marcos were able to fend off the Philippine left, recruit white-collar workers to their cause, and rename themselves as “the middle forces.” However, what essentially crystallizes this process of class formation are the contingent events of EDSA itself, where the absence of the Left and the ouster of Marcos through protest allows the middle forces to remember EDSA as the “apotheosis” of their existence. The key point here is that these processes are linked together theoretically and empirically through narratives and storytelling.

Before this project moves on to Venezuela and Ecuador, it is best to reassess how the various aspects of the theoretical framework “held up” in the case of the Philippines, if anything to provide key causal comparison between potential variables in the remaining two cases. The left-Weberian balance of class power model seems by itself inadequate to explain middle-class formation in and of itself in the Philippines. Economic data do not provide enough convincing evidence that peaks and troughs in the economy bolster or remove middle-class support for democracy nor dictatorship. As for the key actors – the oligarchic families and the Catholic Church – political alliances and cultural factors like nationalist narratives seem to explain the case the better, though we could reasonably argue that those are tweaks to the framework rather than outright rejections of it. That is not to say that we can or should discard the balance of class power model for

Venezuela and Ecuador – it is entirely plausible that social class in and of itself may be a better determinate for middle-class formation in those two cases than in the Philippine case.

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The role of classification struggles and the historical acquisition and deployment of symbolic power have a clear effect in the Philippine case, as habitus and narrative combine to help define the middle class. As discussed earlier, by itself a Bourdieusuan approach would be too reductionist insofar as descriptions of social and political distinctions before, during, and after EDSA were all set in narrative form, e.g. “we're not workers or students who had protested before; we must be middle class.” This seems, on its face, to be a fairly superficial correction to a classification approach, but it seems to suggest that as complex as the realm of habitus is; the plotted, temporal aspect of narratives plays an important role in making those distinctions in the first place. It would therefore behoove us to pay attention to how distinctions are couched in temporal terms in the next two cases, as well as the particular combination of deriving middle-classness by residual categories made from comparing past protest participants.

Did language matter in the Philippines? In short, yes, very much so. The term “the middle forces” and “middle class” itself came to have new meaning as they became floating signifiers in the context of the shifting political alliances of the pre-EDSA protest period. The criticism we leveled towards a purely discursive approach for this analysis was that as much as the term might have defined a class both for itself and in itself prior to EDSA, it did not necessarily link the middle class to democracy, nor to revolution.

This is admittedly a high standard, but it is necessary to keep the project focused on the relationship between the middle class and democracy. The fact that “the middle forces” remains a term that describes the protesting EDSA moderates truly demonstrates why we should pay close attention to how and why class terms shift their meaning.

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And now to narrative. A narrative approach to class formation in the Philippine case seemed to bear fruit for a few key reasons. First, focusing on the timing of changes in the middle class narrative highlighted the importance of contingency in the Philippine story. Seeing those contingent events as historical events shows how lets us interpret why narrative changed in the way they did. While we discussed this possibility in Chapter 2, the Philippine case seems to demonstrate in a very strong way why focusing on narratives captures moments of contingency well. Second, narrative did a good job of allowing us to combine the three other aspects of the theoretical framework together. By providing a theoretical link, we were able to demonstrate that political cleavages, symbolic power, and discursive adaptation could operate to a certain degree in the Philippine case.

To conclude, the Philippine middle class narrative seems much less transformative, laudatory, and revolutionary after a close inspection of its origins, and yet, by the criteria set in Chapter 2, it is still a “revolution from the middle” because it linked the middle class to democracy and advanced it as an historical agent. It because of that ambiguity that we can still celebrate the efforts and courage of the hundreds of thousands of protesters who bravely opposed Marcos' tanks and wanted a government free from blatant corruption in the case of Estrada. Compared to dictatorship, a little democracy – however flawed – is better than no democracy at all. And, the fact that social movements still deploy the discourse of the middle class despite its failings suggest that there may be a possibility in the future that the narrative gets rewritten again; contingent events may be the key, but by their very nature are uncontrollable.

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CHAPTER 4 – LA CLASE MEDIA EN POSITIVO? CONTESTED NARRATIVE AND HYPERPOLARIZATION IN VENEZUELA, 1970s-2007

“We're in Apocalyptic times, there's no middle ground. Either you are with God or you are with the Devil [–] and we are with God” (Chávez as quoted in Roberts 2003: 70)

Now we turn to Venezuela, the contested nature of its middle-class narrative, and its relationship to the polarization which characterizes its contemporary politics. Venezuelan democracy is socially-polarized, divided between the old Punto Fijo historical bloc of parties, business, and labor and Chávez's new coalition of an authoritative (perhaps authoritarian) state and the urban poor. As a result, the tenor of its politics has changed from a stable “partyarchy” (Coppedge 1998) dominated by corporatist political parties to a “grey zone” (McCoy 2009) regime that sits somewhere between representative democracy and authoritarian rule. While some authors cautiously laud Chávez's

“Bolivarian Revolution” as a transformative pro-poor nationalist project, others find

Chávez to be an authoritarian populist demagogue intent on staying in power indefinitely.

This chapter argues that the process of middle-class formation in Venezuela is a central component to that change, especially if we pay close attention to the role of historical events and narrative formation. In particular, the 11-de-Abril (11-A) protests in

2002 were the watershed moment. In contrast to EDSA and the Rebelión de los Forajidos, the 11-A protests failed to remove Chávez from power. The resulting middle-class narrative after 11-A fails to take on the same sort of laudatory, agential characteristics present in the post-EDSA Philippine story of the middle class and post-Forajido Ecuador.

In fact, Venezuela emerges from 11-A with a middle-class narrative that is contested: pro-

153 and anti-Chávez forces disagree over the role of “la clase media” in contemporary

Venezuelan democracy, vacillating between describing them as feckless or chastising them for supporting one side or the other.

The deeper consequence of this particular narrative condition is that it has made the idea of an inclusive and democratic middle class unavailable or incomprehensible for either side. By denying an agential and democratic middle-class narrative, both sides transform “the middle class” into a cudgel to claim how anti-democratic their opponents are. This prevents both anti- and pro-Chávez forces from developing a more inclusive political discourse, encouraging further polarization, and perhaps increasing the possibility of more extra-institutional and anti-democratic politics in the future. In other words, if the result of the Philippine revolution from the middle was a co-opted middle- class narrative in which elites wrote themselves into middle-class history to consolidate an oligarchic democracy; then the comparable process in Venezuela resulted in a failure on either side to establish a hegemonic idea of a democratic middle class. With neither side capable of defining themselves as “middle class” without blowback, neither side sees the other as fully “democratic.” The resulting constraint to democratization features both hyperpolarization and plebiscitary politics.

The cause for these conditions again lies in the relationship between structure, historical events, and narrative. Despite clear and significant structural development of a middle class in Venezuela – primarily technicians, managers, bureaucrats, and service sector workers – “la clase media” has never crystallized a public narrative that makes them an agent in democratic change. First, as a variety of studies have already argued, the political pact between the parties AD (Acción Democratica) and COPEI (Comite de

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Organizacion Political Electoral Independiente) and the social pact between AD and the main labor union, CTV (Confederación de Trabajadores de Venezuela) formed the core of a hegemonic bloc that would ensure thirty years of political stability, but by ignoring and crowding out voices from the left and from marginalized classes. The ideological framework for their rule was policlasismo, literally “polyclassism,” which denied that social class was a relevant political cleavage in a modern Venezuela. For the middle-class narrative, however, policlasismo and a rapidly-expanding bureaucracy produced a notion of a parasitic, gauche, state-dependent middle class – a national symbol of the excesses of

Venezuelan prosperity. Second, the 11-A protests were an historical event that could have advanced the notion of a revolutionary, democratic middle class – had the protests succeeded. Instead, the failure of the 11-A protests left a permanent stain on any future renderings of the middle-class narrative. Anti-Chávez forces have had to explain middle class politics in light of the failure of the coup, while pro-Chávez forces can recall the role of the middle class in an undemocratic maneuver.

This chapter will advance this argument by first addressing the changing balance of class power during the 30 years of Punto Fijo democracy, from 1958 to 1998. It will argue that the history of objective middle class formation demonstrates a close relationship between economic indicators and political preferences. However, the second section will show that the close association between the middle class and Punto Fijo made the middle class a symbol of the decadence and corruption. The third section will elaborate further on 11-A and its effect as an historical event on the contested middle- class narrative, and will explore counterfactual possibilities for the narrative had the protests and coup succeeded. Finally, the last section will explore how “la clase media”

155 contributes to the disintegration of Venezuelan democracy, exploring in particular the pro-Chávez organization, La Clase Media en Positivo (The Positive Middle Class).

Antecedent Conditions: Class Power, Party Pacts, and the Oil State

What follows is a brief summary of socioeconomic trends in relation to the balance of class power from the early 20th century up until Chávez's election in 1998. In comparison to the other two cases in this study, the quality of politics and the balance of class power in Venezuela prior to 11-A were remarkably different. As mentioned above, the AD-

COPEI-CTV alliance was capable of combining both coercion and consent through corporatist political participation and distributing oil rents. The economic basis for their social pact in petroleum exports required the development of a large managerial, technical and service class. The expansion of those occupational sectors passed oil rents to the public. As such, Venezuela's middle class became the main beneficiaries and most ardent supporters of this party-dominated democracy – a democracy that eventually became incapable of dealing with the growing social polarization of post-oil boom

Venezuela. The election of populist Hugo Chávez in 1998 capped an accelerating breakdown in the terms of elite hegemony in Venezuela, and the Venezuelan middle class is caught in the middle.

For much of its history prior to 1958, Venezuela had either been subject to the competing interests of would-be caudillo rulers (the Gran Libertador Simón Bolivar included), heading either feckless semi-democratic regimes or military dictatorships.

However, with the development of the oil industry starting in 1908, the balance of class power began to shift significantly in favor of a stronger state and subordinate classes. In

156 contrast to the Philippines and Ecuador, export agriculture in Venezuela experienced a precipitous decline through the early part of the 20th century in part due to the economic benefits of petroleum exports. The result, as Karl (1987) argues was that “agrarian interests lost the chance to make an autonomous political impact;” particularly on the political mobilization of the peasantry and on challenges to the new “triple alliance” of foreign interests, the state, and the national oil bourgeoisie (1987: 68-69; see also

Rueschemeyer et al. 1992: 192). Furthermore, by 1961 only 37% of Venezuelans lived in rural areas – a precipitous drop from the 71% that lived in rural areas in 1936 (Karl 1987:

70).

Given that, the balance of class power conflicts that arose in the 1930s and 1940s were centered around middle- and working-class incorporation. Karl notes the following:

The most important social phenomenon resulting from the introduction and consolidation of the oil enclave economy was the emergence of a middle class composed primarily of propertied and salaried small artisans and white-collar workers in the service sector. Their numbers were complemented by a rapidly expanding state bureaucracy that swelled from 13,000 to 56,000 in fifteen years, fueled by the leap in oil revenues. This middle class continued to increase following the death of Gomez, rising from 37 percent to 54 percent of the nonagricultural workforce between 1936 and 1950 (Karl 1987: 70)

Buxton elaborates: “In this respect, the middle class did not emerge from capital and investment activities but from the growing demand for lawyers, bankers, accountants, and teachers” (2000: 9). By 1950, this middle class actually outnumbered the country's working class and as such, “politics assumed a decidedly middle-class character” (Karl

1987: 71). However, authors such as Collier and Collier (2002) and Rueschemeyer et al.

(1992) argue that the 1930s and 1940s are best characterized by the growing radicalization of the working class through AD – then a radical party led by student activists. The death of longtime dictator Juan Vicente Gomez in 1935 ushered in a period of intense popular mobilization among leftist and left-leaning organizations. By 1945, 157

AD had come to dominate a bulk of Venezuela's peasant, obrero and empleado unions

(Rueschemeyer et al 1992: 192; Collier and Collier 2002: 257-262). A three-year radical regime lasting from 1945-1948 saw the rule of AD at the head of a populist alliance of workers, students, and peasants which took power by military coup. The three-year

Trienio however would end as AD would alienate its moderate and conservative opponents, exclude its military allies from policy making, and precipitate another coup

(Rueschemeyer et al. 1992: 192; Collier and Collier 2002: 270). The coup leader, Marcos

Pérez Jíménez, would rule for the next six years, courting support from the U.S. as a strongman anticommunist.

The lesson learned among would-be ruling elites during this period was that naked domination would be insufficient, regardless of the size and diversity of the elite's social support. Time in exile helped to mature and moderate AD cadres, especially the party's intellectual leader, Romulo Betancourt. In late 1957 and early 1958, AD, COPEI and the Union Republicana Democratica (URD) began crafting a series of political agreements to share power in the event of a democratic opening. Following the end of the

Pérez Jiménez dictatorship in 1958, these agreements would form the basis of Venezuelan partidocracia, or rule nearly exclusively by political parties. In these deals, AD had to assure its allies it would respect their political interests. “Thus,” Crisp writes, “a great deal of effort was put into winning the allegiance of a wide variety of actors…”

Agreements reached early in the democratic era and before, including the Pact of Punto Fijo [power-sharing], the minimum government program [which preserved capitalist interests], the Pact of Owner-Worker Conciliation [establishing peak bargaining], agreements with the armed forces, and the Law of Ecclesiastical Patronage, all indicated the desire to guarantee the existence and basic interest of powerful minorities (Crisp 1996: 35)

Second, AD dominated the CTV leadership, capturing a plurality of delegates at CTV

158 congresses since from 1959 onward, driving out leftist and Communist unions from the

CTV, and making the “Institutional Pact” with other political parties to share executive seats on the CTV board (Ellner 1993: see especially Table 2, 53-54). AD governments over time also marginalized smaller worker confederations from tripartite commissions

(Ellner 1993: 113). In turn, the CTV endeared itself to AD by controlling rank-and-file worker movements and avoid major strikes for the sake of labor peace and national development, and were an important political bloc within the AD, especially when it came to nominating presidential candidates (Ellner 1989: 99). While the intent of these moves was to secure the interests of the minority elites and ensure labor peace, the effect was to largely demobilize radical and dissenting groups, especially the Communist Party of Venezuela (McCoy and Smith 1995: 122; Schuyler 1996: 20; Myers 2006: 15). The labor movement, the informal sector, and even the small indigenous peasantry all were deeply colonized by the political parties. Puntofijismo would rely on dense power elite networks at the very top between parties, bureaucrats, and the labor aristocracy while extending rigid corporatist ties to subordinate classes (see Ray 1969). Eventually, the

Punto Fijo alliance simplified into a partyarchy (Coppedge 1998) or partidocracia (Rey

1991) where AD and COPEI served as catchall, multiclass parties in the electoral arena, but also as vehicles for elites to access state rents in the form of upper level bureaucratic jobs and/or positions in the party hierarchy.

The stability of politics, coupled with the boom in oil prices, produced an expansion of the state, not only in its interventionist capacities, but also in its ranks of its lower-tier technical and bureaucratic staff. In 1972, the 4th National Congress of COPEI and Independent Social Christian Professionals and Technicians declared “it is necessary

159 that the professional, the technician, and the scientist, with the passion of a creator... but with a maestro's mastery, undertake the fundamental work of the development of

Venezuela” (1972: 31). Both AD and COPEI governments through the late 1970s ensured that a strong technical class would man the ever-growing state apparatus. Roberts notes

Total government expenditures increased 150 percent between 1970 and 1981, while the public sector share of GDP ballooned from 14.6 percent in the early 1970s to 37.6 percent in 1978... By the mid-1970s, public funds accounted for nearly 90 percent of industrial investments. Public sector employment also swelled, from only 6.7 percent of the workforce in 1950 to 19.1 percent in 1971 and 24.4 percent in 1981 (Roberts 2008: 46- 47)

Portillo notes the rise in employment among those with high school and college degrees from 1975 to 1980: “21.64% to 28.87% for the high school level and 4.55% to 6.50% for the superior level” (1994: 14). “These levels of instruction,” he argues “correspond to a majority of groups of professionals, technical managers, and executives that are fundamental agents of the middle class” (1994: 14). The benefits of economic growth and state jobs would endear this technical-bureaucratic middle class to AD and COPEI governments. By 1973, the vast majority of Venezuelans considered themselves to be middle class – 57.3 percent, according to the VENEVOTE survey (Baloyra 1977: 56).

The political attitudes of this self-identifying middle class tended to support the role of bureaucrats in government and the effectiveness of the current political party leadership.

“...[S]tudents, the middle class, and professional people form a relatively stable cluster...: they believe the bureaucracy to be capable, think government would not improve without politicians, are most likely to vote null in elections, and have a greater sense of political efficacy” (Baloyra 1977: 58). It should be noted that the growth of technical, managerial, and service occupations that made up the Venezuelan middle class did not take place in the oil industry itself, but rather because of it. Briceno Leon states that “in 1960 the

160 government had 28,000 employees, and the petroleum industry had 40,000; in 1998 the government had 1,390,000 employees... and the petroleum industry had the same 40,000”

(2005: 6). He continues: “Public sector employment and free education were the great sources of the Venezuelan middle class, and... both came from petroleum revenues, not petroleum related employment” (Briceno Leon 2005: 6).

But by the early 1980s, Venezuela dealt with the sharp drop in oil prices with haphazard economic reforms. The COPEI government of Luis Herrera Campins (1979-

1984) had been aware that an overreliance on oil as well as significant spending on social programs would strain the Venezuelan state. However, Herrera Campins “found it politically impossible to effect a proportionate reduction in public spending” in tune with the reduction in oil prices (McCoy and Smith 1995: 127). Despite the mini-boom in oil prices between 1978 and 1981, Herrera Campins had the misfortune to preside over an eight-year contraction of the Venezuelan economy – “by 1985, real GDP was 25 percent lower than it had been just seven years earlier” (Naim 1993: 24). With domestic investment decreasing, capital flight increasing, and the threat of a major currency crisis drawing nearer, on “Black Friday” February 28, 1983, AD president Herrera Campins established a new exchange rate agency, Regimen de Cambios Diferenciales (RECADI).

According to Hellinger, “with devaluation, the economic bubble was pricked” (1991:

127):

Imports and gross investments plunged 50 percent. The real gross domestic product fell 5.6 percent. Construction declined by 13.3 percent in 1983 and 34.4 percent in 1984. Official rates of unemployment in the urban sector (80 percent of the work force) rose from 7.8 percent to 14.3 percent over these two years, while real wages fell 7.2 percent and 7.6 percent respectively… (Hellner 1991: 127)

According to Naim, “People believed the problem, if any, lay on the spending side and

161 not in the size and composition of public revenues” (1993: 38). Thus, throughout the

1980s, the economic regime of the state revolved around postponing and denying the debt crisis through generally unsound fiscal and monetary policies. While growth increased in again in 1988, the rest of the 1980s were largely an economic disaster.

A turn to neoliberal reform to resolve these economic problems would prove to be socially-disastrous, revealing significant cracks in Punto Fijo hegemony. After a fractious internal election in which the AD revealed signs of significant disunity (Ellner 1989: 102-

4), Former president Carlos Andres Pérez won the presidency in 1988 with 52.91 percent of the national vote (Karl 1997: 175). “Notwithstanding,” Karl writes, “Pérez lacked a 50 percent congressional majority and a unified party, and any thoughts of ruling by decree were therefore ruled out” (1997: 179). Adopting an orthodox neoliberal shock model,

Pérez agreed to eliminate nontariff barriers, reduce tariffs, increase the interest rate, reduce the deficit, eliminate RECADI, lift price controls, cut public services, increase the domestic price for petroleum, and freeze employment in the public sector (Karl 1997:

180). In the government, this reform was known as el Gran Viraje, and true, it was a

“180-degree shift in economic policy” (Karl 1997: 180).

Attempted neoliberalism would finally break the already-weakened social pact between the Punto Fijo parties and Venezuelan society. On February 27th, 1989, bus and van drivers in Caracas, the capital and largest city, railed against a 30 percent increase in fares while gas prices doubled. Looting, arson, and road blockades broke out not only

Caracas, but in other cities in Venezuela (Hellinger 1991: 192-3). Just two weeks in office, Pérez resorted to a State of Emergency and called in the military to squelch the riots (Karl 1997: 180). “By the time the violence ended on March 5,” Hellinger writes,

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“no one could doubt the ferocity of the official response.” (1991: 193). Conservative estimates put the death toll at 287, but some NGOs and foreign press estimates say more than 1,000 people had died (Ellner 1989: 105; Hellinger 1991: 193; McCoy and Smith

1995: 133). The “Caracazo,” as it would come to be known, accelerated what was a slow decline of AD-COPEI-CTV hegemony into a rapid descent, marking the old parties as clearly incapable of managing social discontent.

A large part of the declining influence of Puntofijismo came from how the economic downturn fundamentally altered the Venezuelan class structure. Per capita social spending declined to “40 percent below the 1980 level in 1993, including real cuts of greater than 40 percent in education programs, 70 percent in housing and urban development, 37 percent in health care, and 56 percent in social development and participation” (Roberts 2003: 59). Roberts cites government poverty statistics that show that in 1989, “the poverty rate increased from 42 to 62 percent of the population, while those living in extreme poverty more than doubled, from 14 to 30 percent...” (2003: 59).

According to a 1995 study conducted by research firm Fundacresa, the relative size of the middle class had shrunk from 14% in 1982 to 13% in 1990 and 11% in 1995, while the total percentage of people living in “relative” and “critical” poverty was 81.58%

(Pimentel Primicia 12/23/97).1 Informality came to dominate the lower tiers of the economy. Compiling data from ECLAC, Portes and Hoffman calculate the percentage of informal workers in Venezuela grew from 34.2 percent in 1990 to 40.6 percent in 1994

(2003: 59).

Chávez's rise to power makes sense in the context of the breakdown of Punto Fijo

1 Class was calculated by the occupation of the head of the household, “mother culture,” and the quality of the place of residence (Pimentel Primicia 12/23/97). 163 hegemony, the Caracazo, and increasing social inequality. In 1992, led by then-Lt. Col.

Hugo Chávez, junior officers in the Venezuelan army launched two unsuccessful coup attempts against Pérez with the intent to assassinate him and assume the presidency. The

February 4th and November 27th coups were eventually put down by forces loyal to Pérez and their leaders put in jail (Levine 2002: 264; Norden 1996: 78). The coups themselves were tacitly accepted across all social strata (McCoy and Smith 1995: 135), and when

Chávez gave a speech after his arrest, he apologized the Venezuelan people for failing on their behalf – something unheard of in Venezuelan politics up till that time. His capture catapulted him to the national fore.

Chávez came to power amidst a political atmosphere that was already rejecting the Punto Fijo parties. Pérez was dogged with charges of corruption and eventually was impeached in 1993. In the 1994 elections, former COPEI president Rafael Caldera won a

30 percent plurality of the vote under an electoral vehicle named Convergencia, effectively ending the years of AD-COPEI dominance in the presidency. Chávez was at first a dark horse candidate during the 1998 elections, but built up significant support among those dissatisfied with the old political parties to win with 56 percent of the popular vote. According to Buxton, “at no point was a class based strategy devised that focused solely on the numerically dominant poor” (2000: 27). In fact,

As a result of this mutliclass positioning it is inevitable to find that he made different and contradictory appeals to his supporters. This was most clearly observable in the language and style deployed when addressing different audiences. When touring the shantytowns or los barrios, Chávez commonly wore his military uniform, used colloquial terms in fiery anti-party speeches, promised improved distribution and sought direct contact with the people. Alternatively, when meeting with the private sector or addressing predominantly middle class audiences, the tone was moderated, private sector interests recognized and the military uniform exchanged for a suit and tie (Buxton 2000: 27).

Still, the general approach of his populism set up el pueblo venezolano against la

164 oligarquia, promising that he was fulfilling the popular revolutionary intentions of Simon

Bolivar and railing against United States' imperialist intentions on Venezuela.2

In terms of economic policy, Chávez was certainly not a neoliberal, but neither was he a full-blow statist-Leftist – at least in this early period. In comparison to neopopulist leaders in the region, Chávez “displayed greater respect for democracy..., stressed the deepening of democracy..., and was free of the technocratic vision embraced by [Peru's Alberto] Fujimori...” (Ellner and Hellinger 2003: 218). In fact, probably the most distinct policy shifts in his early presidency was to elevate the role of the Armed

Forces in social policy. Chávez pardoned many of his accomplices from the 1992 coups and installed many more in key bureaucratic positions throughout the government and giving the military “a visible role in his public works campaign Plan Bolívar 2000, but stopped short of outright military control over the government (McCoy 1999: 74). Levine states: “it has become clear that Hugo Chávez is not simply a military man in search of occasional allies, but rather is a man of the left who happens to be in the military”

(Levine 2002: 264). At the end of his first year in office, public support for Chávez's policies had dropped – going from 91.9% to 76.8% – but still remained very high (Gil

Yepes 2006: 253). However, by December of 2001, support for his policies dropped to below 40% (Gil Yepes 2006: 253). Given all that, it is difficult to conclude that Chávez pursued polarizing, anti-democratic policies in his early years as president, per se. As we shall discuss below, only when Chávez started to attack the power elite networks left behind from the Punto Fijo period did polarization become more evident.

2 After his victory in the recall elections of 2004, Chávez grew more hostile to U.S. policy. In response to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice‟s comments on his “unconstructive” attitude in U.S.- Venezuelan relations, Chávez responded on a television broadcast that “Rice couldn‟t stop talking about him because she wanted to marry him” and called her a “political illiterate” (Ellsworth 3/22/2005). 165

To conclude this section, it is worth exploring the claim that many authors make that Chávez received significant support from the middle class in his 1998 election to the presidency, only to lose it later on. According to McCoy, “Chávez ... received broad electoral support--not just from the marginalized sectors, but also from parts of the middle class and business leaders” (1999: 76) Briceno Leon declares “In the first election in 1998, Chávez had broad support from the middle class...” (2005: 17). Hawkins concurs that Chavismo “...has never derived serious electoral support from upper-income groups... relying instead on significant middle class support that has gradually vanished...” (2003: 1138). If middle class people did indeed vote for Chávez as these authors argue, it insinuates that the class had come to fully reject the Punto Fijo model and sought a political outsider – a significant about-face in light of their overwhelming support of the bureaucracy (of which they formed a part) and of political parties thirty years prior. And this would make sense, given that the economic conditions of the middle class had deteriorated through the 1980s and 1990s. To a certain degree as well, a vote for

Chávez in 1998 and then taking to the streets in 2002 would suggest that this middle class had somewhat fickle interests and no clear-cut preference for democracy.

Given all that, data on middle-class voting preferences are spotty and much of the literature – if not all – that makes the middle-class support claim does not provide concrete evidence to support that point. Studies that explicitly examine voting behavior, however, provide some quite counterintuitive evidence. Canache (2006) analyzes public opinion surveys carried out in Caracas and Maracaibo, the two largest cities in Venezuela, in 1995 and 1998. Stratifying the sample population to three economic tiers – “lower”

(39.8 percent of respondents), “middle” (38.5%) and “upper” (21.7%) – she finds that

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44% of “middle” respondents expected to vote for Chávez in the 1998 elections (2006:

46). However, she also finds that 47% of “upper” strata respondents were also intending to vote for Chávez (Canache 2006: 46).3 What this data suggest is that Chávez achieved significant cross-class support in 1998 that reached simply beyond the poor and even beyond the middle class. In that sense, there may not have been that much difference in terms of class voting from previous presidential elections. Indeed, Lupu (2010) traces

Chávez's electoral support from 1998 to 2006 among lower, middle, and upper income groups and finds that respondents in the middle income group have actually been more attracted to Chávez over time. He speculates, for example, that “Chávez's 2006 campaign promise to nationalize utilities... likely attracted middle-class voters who stood to gain from lower utility bills” (Lupu 2010: 26). In addition, he finds “no evidence that the poor have ever been more likely to vote for Chávez than to pursue either of their alternative options on Election Day – cast a ballot for the opposition or stay home” (Lupu 2010: 26), and only the very wealthy “are consistently less likely to support Chávez” (Lupu 2010:

26).

If Lupu is right that Chávez's support is increasingly middle class and not reliably from the poor, then why is Venezuelan politics so polarized? On this point, this study has to register strong agreement with Lupu that the role of structural factors “should not be overstated” (2010: 27). That is not to say that this study denies clear evidence of social polarization, but rather that cultural factors must play a strong role in framing Venezuelan politics as increasingly polarized even if Chávez's most consistent support seems to come from among middle-income voters (though not the majority of his support). Indeed, we

3 Her main argument, however, is that “the urban poor... provided Hugo Chávez with his strongest base of electoral support”: 55% of respondents in the “lower” strata intended to vote for him in the 1998 elections (Canache 2006: 46). 167 can conclude that a balance-of-class power model to understand Venezuelan politics and the role of the middle class in Venezuelan democracy is insufficient to explain middle- class formation. We need to uncover the reasons why winning over middle-income voters does not improve Chávez‟s standing with the opposition, so we should look closely at the ways in which “the middle class” is construed to be a valid political actor.

Critical Juncture and Institutional Reproduction: From 11-A to La Clase Media en

Positivo

To investigate middle-class formation in Venezuela further, we should look closely at the quality of the public narrative after 11-A and work through its structural, symbolic, and linguistic origins. In 2002, Chávez sought to dislodge old regime supporters in charge of the state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, SA (PVDSA). On April 6th, Chávez fired seven high-level executives, with the intent to replace them with his supporters. The CTV and the peak business association FEDECAMARAS (Venezuelan Chambers of

Commerce) agreed to call a general strike on April 9th to protest the firings. The next day, both parties agreed to extend the strike, and on April 11th (the eponymous 11-A) thousands poured into the streets of Caracas. Shot were fired onto the crowds by unknown assailants, killing 17 people, and giving the military an excuse to blame and arrest Chávez. Accounts disagree over whether Chávez had left the presidential palace either by force or by his own will. Installed by a splinter group of the military,

FEDECAMARAS president Pedro Carmona assumed the presidency, and dissolved both

Congress and the Supreme Court. Media coverage, which had been vociferous up till

Chávez‟s absence, grew silent with Carmona's antidemocratic moves in power. But

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Carmona‟s government was unstable and met with opposition from the military and labor supporters when they saw him abrogate democratic guarantees. As Carmona‟s government crumbled from within the palace, thousands of pro-Chávez demonstrators filled the streets calling for Chávez‟s return. In the face of massive popular upheavals the other way, Carmona abdicated, was arrested, and Chávez returned to the presidency.

This study characterizes the post 11-A middle-class narrative in Venezuela as contested. In the Venezuelan context, neither pro- nor anti-Chávez forces have been able to claim that the middle class is entirely on their side. There are various ways in which this contestation takes place. First, in the immediate aftermath of 11-A, the government established a fact-finding commission to produce a report on the events of 11-A. In their testimony for the commission, pro-Chávez forces were quick to call the protests part of a conspiracy to effect a coup. According to Cannon, Chavistas explicitly called the protesters “middle class” (2002: 298). Chávez's defense minister Jose Vicente Rangel put it thusly: “Here they deliberately and calculatingly pushed through a conspiracy in which economic sectors, social sectors of the middle class were used, which then induced sectors of the Armed Forces to act on the dawn of the 11th [of April] (Rangel, as cited in

Rodriguez, ed. 2002: 38). In response however, anti-Chávez participants, pundits, and scholars denied the class-based dimension of the 11 de Abril protest. As Cannon points out, they preferred to call their protests the product of “civil society” (2002; see also

Hernandez 2004). For example, former director of PDVSA Guaicaipuro Lameda argued that “civil society... which in the last year had been growing in size, had a single motivation: petition the Government to change direction...” (Lameda as cited in

Rodriguez, ed. 2002: 42).

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When anti-Chávez storytellers did try to come to grips with the role of the middle class in Venezuelan history, the narratives described a feckless, oblivious, and politically- immature middle class. As one lamenting opinion writer put it:

The Venezuelan middle class shows that it has few clear ideas about the kind of social order it wants. It has... some idea of the outer shell of a social order, but no firm concept about its contents... It discovers only today that in Venezuela there is no Rule of Law, when in the slums they never had it; it discovers only today that there is poverty (because it is directly affected)... In a word: the Venezuelan middle class has been insensitive to social problems, as if those problems were never going to affect it. And, in doing so it has spawned its own antagonist: the Chávez regime (Dessiato El Nacional 5/16/2004)

Or, as a letter to the editor read in 2003:

This reality shows that the middle class lacks a sense of political culture, perhaps for remaining for decades in constant apathy before national reality. Such apathy translates into the risk of political freefall for the middle class because they support any discourse against Chávez, without analyzing from whom it came, or what greater damage it can do to the country... The middle class in political freefall has to wake up in the face of opposition political discourses, to analyze which deserve validation and support and which do not (El Nacional 9/15/2003)

And on Chávez's side, various movements have attempted to claim the mantle of the middle class for Chávez's revolutionary project. The most famous (or infamous) of these groups is La Clase Media en Positivo (The Positive Middle Class).The branch in

Carabobo argues on their website that its “fundamental objective” of CMP is the

“incorporation of the middle class into the process of social, political, and economic change expressed in the constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and with it, to contribute its strength and its knowledge to raising the level of the classes least favored”.4

When contrasted against the revolutionary, agential narratives of the Philippine middle class after EDSA and after la Rebelión Forajida in Ecuador, the contested narrative in Venezuela is a different animal. With both sides divided over to what degree

4 << http://es.geocities.com/clasemediaenpositivocarabobo/>> accessed 5/31/2007 170 they can be called middle class, the political potential of the middle class, and whether or not it even makes “logical sense” for the middle class to support Chávez, we see a significantly less defined narrative. This is hardly the story of an independent, anti-elite middle class that we shall see in Ecuador and is also fairly far from the narrative in the

Philippines that defines the middle class as including oligarchic elites. Working backwards, we can trace the origins of the contested narrative to three points: (1) middle class memories of the Punto Fijo period, (2) Chávez's alienation of the members of the

Punto Fijo pact, and (3) the failure of anti-Chávez forces at 11-A. Collectively, these causes have prevented the development of an agential, revolutionary middle class narrative to take root.

The Middle Class and the Material and Ideological Base of Puntofijismo

Multiple authors have written on the seamy side of Venezuela's Punto Fijo democracy, which for all its offerings of political stability and social peace, provided such peace by denying the existence of social conflict (esp. Coronil and Skurski 1991). Politically and structurally, this was possible through the AD-led political incorporation of both workers and peasants into a “radical populist” settlement, which produced a “multiclass integrative party system” (Collier and Collier 2002). Parsed out, the pacted transition from the Perez Jimenez regime to the AD-COPEI party system was built on early land reform that removed the peasantry as a source for both reactionary regional politics and for armed rebellion (Hellinger 1991: 107), the AD-CTV linkage which “deprived... guerillas of working class support” (Collier and Collier 2002: 631), and the initially-deep penetration of party politics into the barrios of Caracas, absorbing the peasants streaming

171 into the cities as a result of land reform. As Rey noted in a 1969 study, “ the “barrio dwellers‟ sense of a „class struggle‟ is relatively weak” (1969: 157).

In truth, it was not just the barrio dwellers whose sense of class struggle was relatively weak: the discursive expression of Punto Fijo democracy was policlasismo, an ideology that held that all social classes could govern in peaceful cooperation towards national goals. As Lacabana puts it, “In Venezuela during the 1970s... subordinate sectors also gained their incorporation into the political system and the state as part of the dominant sectors' construction of hegemony in a social environment in which predominated a polyclass imaginary [un imaginario policlasista]: Venezuela as a country of consensus, without social or racial discrimination” (2006: 326). The idea of a polyclass society arguably originates with Romulo Betacourt's interpretation of Venezuelan nationalism, which situated the state as the prime actor in modernization, but in which incomplete modernization led by foreign capitalists needed to be confronted by

Venezuelan society as a whole (Soteldo 2000: 17). In other words, the ideological basis for Punto Fijo hegemony was the discursive denial of any one class' dominance over the others. Materially, AD and COPEI governments were careful to ensure their policlasista base by utilizing oil revenues to pay off their constituencies (Buxton 2001: 14)

The problem with policlasismo in terms of middle-class formation was that over time, the resulting in a middle-class culture emphasized social distinction through profligate spending. In other words, as much as the political elites wanted to tout the equality of classes in a modern Venezuela, class dynamics emphasized Bourdieusian processes of distinction instead. In the late 1960s, the Venezuelan government pegged the dollar-bolivar exchange rate at 1:4.30. This artificially high rate of exchange helped to

172 define an era of decadence that is remembered in present-day narratives in ambiguous tones. The ethos of this period was encapsulated in the phrase “ta'barato, dame dos” (It's so cheap, give me two). In part this purchasing ethos suggested that achieving a higher class status in Venezuela meant being able to purchase at will. Marquez recalls this period:

A collective dream of unlimited wealth and modernization emerged; for many Venezuelans in all strata of society, the notion of progress involved the chance to travel at least as far as Miami, which became a mecca of consumerism... We laughed about ourselves, the “ta'baratos”, people from the lower middle to upper classes who went crazy in Miami's malls repeating, “It's so cheap, give me two” (Marquez 2003: 198-199)

The caracazo, the economic downturn of the 1980s and 1990s, and the history of a middle-class “golden age” all added to the image of an economically- and socially- insecure middle class in the 1990s. The effects of the “ta'baratos” on the public narrative of the middle class into the 1990s were a collective understanding that the Venezuelan middle class had become culturally-dominant, but that the economic downturns of the

1980s and 1990s had caused a longing for a past to which it was impossible to return.

Indeed, in 1996, only 29% of Venezuelans considered themselves middle class a precipitous drop in class confidence (Table 1). Author Pablo Antilliano argues:

In the strictest cultural sense the middle class has been an invasive class, its values have invaded the other classes, which, for their benefit or their disgrace, intimately imitate their powerful values. In other words: nowadays we are all middle class... During the last 90 years, the cultural industry – oriented towards the values of the middle class – has made of the press, radio, and television a consistent instrument of homogenization and massification of all of humanity... (El Nacional 11/12/1995)

But he points out that “the 21st century does not seem to bring good news for the middle class”. He argues that the definitive advantages that the middle class held – public sector jobs, public policies that benefited them exclusively, and education – have all been disseminated to the poor and to “a good portion of the hinterland”. After noting the

173 cultural changes brought about by allowing women to work in the office and the factory, he argues that “the reign of the individual over the collective” has acted as the “deadly venom” (veneno mortal) for spreading middle-class values. “The middle class as we knew it,” he concludes, “seems to have its days numbered.” (El Nacional 11/12/1995). A few years later, another author humorously observed that “the United Nations, Green

Space [sic], and other animal rights movements have classified the Venezuelan middle class as a species in danger of extinction, together with the Orinoco caiman...” (El

Nacional 4/19/1997). In a broader sense, this perception of the middle class, of its rise during the 1970s, but inability to live in the 21st century, indicates on one side a sense of disgust at the crassness of middle-class life, but at the same time, an admission that the material well-being of the middle class was also declining. But in short, the mid-1990s hardly demonstrated an agential middle-class narrative; the economic downturns of the previous decade and a half emasculated the middle class instead, both in material and ideological realms. The relevant narrative by the mid-1990s depicted the middle class as made by the state, a symbol of a past, which in retrospect had ill-prepared the class for being on its own.

Between the Caracazo and Chávez's election, however, political discourse and claim-making began to change, especially among the middle class. First, the 1990s saw the rise of the language of “civil society” in Venezuelan political discourse. As Crisp,

Levine, and Rey (1994) observed: “A visitor arriving in Venezuela in the early 1990s after an absence of several decades would have difficulty recognizing the prevailing political discourse. New and hitherto unknown terms provide reference points for

“legitimate” politics... There are calls for openness and “transparency” in politics and

174 administration. One hears constant reference to “civil society,” a phrase unknown ten years ago...” (Crisp, Levine, and Rey 1994: 151). Lopez Maya notes that middle-class protest began to emerge around NIMBY issues, especially security (1999). Self-identified middle class people became more willing to take to the streets – 47% were willing to take part in a protest in 2000, up from 19% seven year prior (Table 1). Organizations borne from neighborhood associations would play an important role in passing decentralization laws in 1988 (Garcia-Guadilla 2003: 183). “Civil society” would grow slowly during the

1990s, but alongside the media, “became sui generis political actors seeking to influence and direct the public administration, even while not directly competing for power”

(Salamanca 2006: 93).

Table 1. Various Opinions of Self-Identified Middle Class Respondents in Venezuela 1973 1983 1993 1996 2000 % of 59 63 55 29 65 Respondents Identifying as Middle Class vs. Working Class % Family 19 45 43 -- -- Economic Situation Worse Than 1 Year Ago % Willing to -- -- 19 -- 47 Protest Source: Heath 2008

The question here is what made these middle class people protest against Chávez in 2002? Granted “by the first quarter of 2002, Chávez's approval rating had fallen below

40%” (Hawkins 2003: 1142), but a sudden drop in popularity does not necessarily explain why the middle class turned against him. Recall as well that Chávez had noticeable middle class (middle-income segment) support in his 1998 election as well as his 2000 reelection (Lupu 2010: 19). The answer lies in the ways in which Chávez

175 alienated the remnants of the Punto Fijo alliance, leading them to mobilize the incipient

“civil society” in the name of defending their “way of life.”

Prelude to the Critical Juncture: Chávez Alienates the Opposition

While Hillman characterizes Chávez as having an “apparent desire to punish everyone who prospered during Punto Fijo democracy...” (2006: 124), it is perhaps less bombastic to suggest that Chávez sought ways to eliminate the Punto Fijo political-economic-labor networks which would stand as veto points for his own agenda. As soon as he was elected, Chávez followed through on his promise to call a Constituent Assembly to write a new constitution. As legal wrangling by AD and COPEI to stop the Assembly vote failed, Chávez collected even more popular support for the plan (McCoy 1999: 73). His electoral coalition garnered 44.33 percent of the vote and by the calculation system used,

80 seats in the Assembly. The nearest challengers were the Movimiento al Socialismo

(MAS), a leftist party with 21 seats and AD with 30 (Molina 2002: 227). Assured of a comfortable majority, Chávez rammed through reforms, drafting 350 new articles

(Corrales 2000 :41) – this was the effective end of AD and COPEI as serious electoral threats. Chávez next targeted the CTV leadership and its sources of rents. He succeeded eliminated the union subsidies that the CTV had managed to keep through 1980s (Ellner

2001: 22), but failed to remove its top leaders in a 2000 referendum (Ellner 2003: 172).

And finally, Chávez got caught in an escalating war of words and policies with

FEDECAMARAS in 2001, pushing through 49 laws without popular (or business) consultation, precipitating a call for a national strike by FEDECAMARAS in December of 2001, which led directly into Chávez's firing of PDVSA executives in April of 2002. It

176 should be noted that through the Punto Fijo era, FEDECAMARAS was a junior partner to the close relationship between the two parties, labor, and the state (Salgado 1987), making their ascension to the leadership of the anti-Chávez alliance much more remarkable. In fact, in his “apparent desire” to destroy the last remnants of the Punto Fijo pact, Chávez had unwittingly raised the profile of capital and allied it with labor.

As for “civil society,” their main problem with Chávez reflected their antipathies towards his populist rhetoric, a fear of another Caracazo, and the growing popular organization of Chávez's followers in Circulos Bolivarianos (Bolivarian Circles). In a theoretical sense, “civil society” opposed the political mobilization of the majority poor by trying to devalue that political capital through reclassifying poor people's politics as inappropriate for democracy. Over time, as Coronil and Skurski (1991) as well as Cannon

(2002) point out, “as modernization processes developed, concepts of civilization, race, and social and economic domination became intertwined with class divisions” (Cannon

2002: 288) – class divisions which would violently had already violently expressed themselves by the end of the 1980s during the Caracazo riots of 1989. The rise of neighborhood associations to the caracazo reflected to some degree middle-class fears of being overrun by the hordes of the poor. For his part, Chávez's rhetoric only reinforced middle-class fears about the country being run by the uneducated and emotional: “...the image is projected of a pueblo being easily manipulated and incapable of thinking rationally” (Cannon 2008: 45). For Chávez, the Circulos Bolivarianos were a means to expand popular participation to a population that had not been effectively organized, while the opposition saw them as indoctrinators at best, and armed thugs at worst

177

(Garcia-Guadilla 2003: 192).5 Perhaps the best encapsulation of this sentiment comes from anti-Chávez journalist Francisco Bautista who declared in the midst of the 11-A protests, “We are not afraid. The middle and professional classes are not scared by announcements that they [the poor] will come down from the hills if Chávez leaves

[office]; nor by saying that the chavistas are waiting for us armed in Miraflores [the presidential palace], will stop us from fighting... not even the ghost of the circulos haunting us will be able to get us to leave” (El Nacional 5/12/2002). Ironically, that is exactly what happened.

In any case, by April of 2002, Chávez had succeeded in turning public support away from him and towards business and “civil society”: in a survey of satisfaction with social sectors, 80.8% of respondents had a positive view of “Commerce” and 74.8% had a positive view of “industrialists” – up from 68.9 and 67.9 two years prior (Gil Yepes

2003: 256). 87.3% of respondents held positive views of“civil society” (Gil Yepes 2003:

256). For what its worth, “labor unions” polled only at 42.3% while political parties polled only 29.4% positive opinions (Gil Yepes 2003: 256). So on the eve of 11-A, the remnants of Puntofijismo had managed to forge a strange alliance. With AD and COPEI emasculated, leadership of the bloc fell to capital (FEDECAMARAS) with labor (CTV) again a junior partner. “Civil society” supported them from below, fearful of the threat of dark-skinned poor invading their neighborhoods.

In summary, the discursive and political origins of the anti-Chávez “middle class” lie in large part with Chávez himself. By attacking the political-business-labor networks of the old Punto Fijo alliance, Chávez diminished the role of the old parties, but elevated

5 Hawkins and Hansen (2006) find that the Circulos Bolivarianos had clientelistic tendencies and did not enhance plural political participation. 178

FEDECAMARAS to political prominence, with the CTV and “civil society” forming the base of the movement. In mobilizing the Circulos Bolivarianos, Chávez activated deep- seated fears among a middle-class movement that had developed in part as a response to fears of mob violence. There is certainly a Bourdieusian dynamic at work here, a classification struggle in relation to the Bolivarian Circles which served as the political other for “civil society” to better comprehend itself. While we do not see the same sort of class-identification-by-residual-category logic as we did in the Philippines after the

Aquino assassination, we still do see middle-class people deploying symbolic capital to elevate themselves above the Circulos. However, what is still absent is a public narrative that link the middle class to agential democratic change. As we shall see below, contingent events prevented this narrative from taking hold.

A Failed Revolution from the Middle: From Aborted to Contested Middle-Class

Narratives

The actual events surrounding 11-A are a matter of debate between chavista and anti-

Chávez forces, especially whether or not the events amounted to a coup, whether or not

Chávez voluntarily left office, and who fired shots at protesters. The ambiguities of 11-A make it difficult for either side to make a claim that their actions during that time were fully democratic or even simply nonviolent. In regards to middle-class formation, this debate extends to the role that “la clase media” had played: both sides debated and presented histories of the event where “the middle class” played different roles. However, we cannot reduce the contested nature of the post 11-A narrative to political polarization in and of itself. Evidence shows that there was an incipient ascendant narrative – much

179 like the one after La Rebelion Forajida in Ecuador – as protests against Chávez picked up in early 2002 until the 12th of April when Chávez returned to Miraflores. The failure of

11-A to fully dislodge Chávez from power prevented it from advancing to a full ascendant narrative because without a “victory,” there was no class-advancing event to plot.

The incipient ascendant narrative resembles the stories about the middle class at

EDSA or during La Rebelion de los Forajidos. The main explanation that developed was that the middle class was reacting to Chávez's threats to their way of life. Looking at reports and opinion pieces in the Caracas-based national daily El Nacional we can develop an effective sense of the various laudatory narratives that emerged about the middle class.6 The middle class appeared in the pages of El Nacional in early 2002 as an ascendant, democratic force. For example, according to a report in El Nacional, “A good part of the middle class decided to go out to the streets. It left the comfort of their homes and apartments, abandoned the comfort of their circumscribed family lives, the kids, school, the shopping mall, the car, work, cable TV, and they launched themselves into public space” (El Nacional 2/17/2002). This year of prior protest helped to “produce in sectors of the middle class a strong feeling of power and confidence, of being in the majority” (El Nacional 2/17/2002). This was all in response not only exclusionary discourse from Chávez, but a rejection of the old politics: “The middle class, entre comillas and in theory, is reclaiming their right of political participation, arguing, but in an atypical context, that the political parties have been devastated and are illegitimate,

6 El National has been a “gold standard” source for scholars performing both text-based and other forms of analysis (e.g. Bolivar 2001, Base de Datos “El Bravo Pueblo” 2008). It is usually considered the more moderate of the two major dailies – the other, El Universal, tends to lean right. However, a series of business deals at the beginning of the neoliberal period put the paper in the hands in anti-Chávez ownership and this has been reflected in its editorial content (Salgado 2006: PAGE). 180 interest groups are disorganized...” (El Nacional 2/17/2002). Another narrative thread would develop the idea of the middle class' education and rationality as a key dimension of its willingness to take the streets. For example, trying to make sense of reports of middle-class protests one author writes, “as [we] have seen in countless other articles published in this newspaper [El Nacional], the intelligent middle class, the hundreds of men and women whose standard of living has permitted us to make use of the benefits of the comprehension of this environment...” (El Nacional 2/20/2002).

But as FEDECAMARAS leader Pedro Carmona assumed the presidency and began to issue anti-democratic decrees such as the dissolution of the National Assembly and the Supreme Court, the media narrative already began to sway away from an

“ascendant” view of the middle class, towards a story that suggested their relationship to democracy was ambiguous. One strand argued that Chávez was their fault, hearkening back to previous themes of a class as yet unfit or unprepared to act on its own. “The hope of change, which the majority of the middle class placed in President Chávez, dissipated rapidly upon observing [his] corruption...” (El Nacional 4/12/2002). After seeing celebratory protests in the upper-middle class neighborhood of El Cafetal after Carmona's installation as interim president, one observer wrote, “the middle class of the neighborhood admitted to assuming two things: these are their streets and the reality that the Government is their fault, the result of their past negligence, their lack of culture and political consciousness” (El Nacional 4/12/2002).

This ambiguity set the stage for pro-Chávez forces to challenge anti-Chávez accounts of 11-A, especially in regard to the role of class conflict. Circling back to the beginning of this section, the contested nature of the narrative begins in earnest as pro-

181 and anti-Chávez forces attempt to come to grips with the events during the 11-A protests.

In these early debates, we can clearly see the ways in which both sides deployed class language to support their version of events. Cannon's (2002) account of the debate in the public sphere over who or what groups led the 11-A centers around the class-based narratives of the Chavistas and the class-absent narratives of the anti-Chávez forces. He cites an official report of the events that takes issue with the “An elementary error of those involved in the coup was to try to identify themselves as 'civil society' when in effect they were part caraqueno society and the middle class” (Asamblea Nacional as cited in Cannon 2002: 298). For Cannon, the absence of class language and the elevation of “sociedad civil” as the catchall moniker for the protesters indicates an intention on the part of the anti-Chávez forces to deny social conflict – at least conflict based on class

(2002: 298). To a degree, Cannon is right if we look solely at testimony during the government's truth commission.

However, anti-Chávez forces did still talk about the middle class, but albeit in far less laudatory terms as they did in the run-up to 11-A. As mentioned earlier, narratives outside of Chavista circles routinely centered around the middle class' fickleness and fecklessness – regrets combined with shame over the class' political weakness. In a

“eulogy” for the middle class written in a news magazine in September of 2002, one author writes:

For the middle class, they perceive what is above them and below them with a fearful mystery. For the middle class, the rich and the poor are disproportionate, living with hubris, in the vertigo of values, they have no consistency, their sons are adulterers and don't know how to sew a button back on their shirts, something very useful and sensible. They [the middle class] know nothing of the realities of the rich and the poor, but rather they know the skittish distance they keep from someone with a good name and a good reputation... (Montoya Question 9/2002)

And in the accompanying “vituperation,” he continues:

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On the 11th of April part of the middle class marched excitedly with the bourgeoisie and the same old nests of corruption. All because the government has managed to only scare up the ghost that scares [the middle class] the most: a whiff of leftist discourse. That same leftism the middle class has embraced in other more intemperate eras... but in this phase of its schizophrenia it would rather fear and denigrate it. That explains that sea of ex- leftists that are now more reactionary than the most conservative bourgeoisie. The conservative bourgeois knows up to what point he should express himself, because he has material resources more effective than signs at his disposal. The middle class has only signs and for that reason it expresses itself hysterically... On the 12th of April, it woke up for a little when it saw the plutocrats in Miraflores were abandoning it without ceremony. [But] not even 72 hours went by when the middle class went back to thinking that the bourgeoisie respected it because they had something in common (Montoya Question 9/2002)

In short, the middle class was acting not out of deliberate, thoughtful action, but emotion.

The emphasis on emotions and lack of political conviction is similar to the laments of white-collar workers in the Philippines in 2005 as they failed to removed President Gloria

Macapagal Arroyo through protests. To sum up, the origins of the middle class narrative in Venezuela lie not only in structural and symbolic factors, but also in comprehending historical events.

“The Middle Class” As Fighting Words: Hyperpolarized Plebiscitarianism

In the aftermath of 11-A, starker lines were drawn between opposing social and political coalitions. On one side, a fractious coalition of new political parties, organized labor, and capital opposed to Chávez. The other features Chávez at the head of a populist coalition of sympathetic left-wing organizations and the urban poor. Chávez has grown bolder in his public policy in the wake of 11-A – his series of Bolivarian Missions starting in 2003 have alleviated poverty, and brought basic foodstuffs, healthcare, and education to poor neighborhoods (Sánchez 2006). However, his plebiscitary rule (O'Donnell 1999) trends authoritarian: he has tamped down on opposition media, removed term limits, increased the role of the military in social policy, and has ruled by decree despite having large

183 majorities in the National Assembly. Opposed to this centralization of power, the opposition has been only partially effective in challenging Chávez at the polls – defeating a constitutional referendum in 2006, but losing by large margins in others. Despite this, they have grown increasingly powerful at the regional and municipal level. And, despite

Chávez's attacks on the media, newspapers, radio, and television stations consistently toe an anti-Chávez editorial line. Scholarship also seems divided: some argue that

Venezuelan politics is polarized to the point that it threatens liberal democracy (e.g.

McCoy 2006; Corrales and Penfold-Becerra 2007, among others); while others are more sanguine but sympathetic to Chávez's project (e.g. Cannon 2008; Ellner 2007, among others). While literature attributes this polarization to Chávez as a figure (e.g. Hawkins

2003), Chávez's rhetoric (Zuquete 2008), socioeconomic polarization (Roberts 2003) or increasing social distance (Coker 2009), this chapter argues that the contested middle- class narrative exacerbates existing polarizing tensions. Debating the role of the middle class in contemporary Venezuelan democracy has significant consequences on how anti-

Chávez and pro-Chávez forces attempt to build support for their political projects.

However, both sides have taken to denigrating each others' middle-class supporters.

Observers resoundingly agree that “the middle class” is in the opposition camp.

However, unlike the Philippines and Ecuador, Chavistas can challenge the inherent democratic capacity of the “oligarchic” middle class by leaning on the failure of the 11-A protests and calling them an appendage of the old hegemonic bloc. As discussed above,

Chavistas used the term “middle class” as a cudgel against class-denying accounts of the

11-A protests. Those types of claims are a reaction to a reaction of sorts, an attempt on the part of Chavistas to reinforce the idea that 11-A was a counterrevolution by a

184 backwards oligarchy and its dependent classes. But in addition, Chavista attacks take the form of rejections of the political usefulness of the middle class. Much like the narrative laments of the anti-Chávez writers, these attacks describe the middle class as having no political agency. However, the attacks are often quite pointed. For example, this writer recalls interacting with his middle-class anti-Chávez neighbors and rants:

Their obsessive hatred of President Chávez leads them to ignore the most elementary facts[.] They live in a virtual bubble, fed by the thoroughly coup-plotting “falsimedia” [anti-Chávez media] [.] Although they read, hear and see on the news from the same falsimedia that there's climate change, massive blackouts in “developed countries,” that because of climate change drinking water is more and more scarce, thousands of plant and animal species are disappearing because of our greedy consumerist lifestyle, that oil is starting to decline – they insist that socialism and Chávez are to blame for everything that happens on our planet

…

If the Mayans end up being right and in 2012 the Earth kicks us out, I do not doubt that the stupid and alienated middle class, instead of trying to take shelter, will dedicate itself to shouting and insulting until they're hoarse that “the prophesy is Chávez's fault”(Mujica 1/23/10)

These commentaries reduce Chávez's middle class opponents to implacable foes. This is a middle class that cannot be “won over,” to borrow the words of Philippine leftists, because they are unwilling to challenge their own assumptions about their political realities. Implicitly, if they cannot be won over, they are unneeded for the Bolivarian

Revolution.

Those kinds of commentaries exist in tension with a concerted effort on the part of

Chávez and certain Chavista social movements to mobilize middle class support for his project. The first and most prominent was La Clase Media en Positivo (CMP), which from 2003 to 2009, served as part advertisement, part social movement for the

“revolutionary process.” The forerunners to the group developed in wake of 11-A in the form of protests by self-styled pro-Chávez middle class citizens. Umbrella organizations

185 like La Federacion de Sociedades Civiles de Clase Media con El Proceso Bolivariano

(Federation of Middle-Class Civil Societies with the Bolivarian Process) started to meet in late 2002. These and other explicitly middle class and pro-Chávez groups began to carry out counterprotests as the opposition was planning a general strike. State-run television station VTV captured a march by these protesters in December 2002. The report describes these protesters as living in hostile territory among the anti-Chávez middle class, but that they are now taking up the task of defending the Revolution:

Each day more and more middle class people lose their fear and go out to express support for the democratic government of Hugo Chávez. This is done at great risk and amid threats from their neighbors. Their commitment to the process of change led by President Chávez to build a better Venezuela is becoming stronger (MS/VTV 12/16/02)7

The first CMP cells would appear in late 2002 as well, starting in Caracas. By early 2003, chapters of CMP began to open across Venezuela organized by state, with major cities like Caracas opening multiple chapters or integrating already-existing Redes Bolivarianos or Circulos Bolivarianos in middle-class neighborhoods. CMP events that were advertised on aporrea.org ranged from meetings and food drives to marches and “cultural events.” By 2004, CMP had developed a youth wing to mobilize middle-class youth in the universities for social service (Un Asunto Joven 2004). It is unclear whether or not La

Clase Media en Positivo was a grassroots or astroturf organization. Its head coordinator in 2002, Titina Azuaje, would eventually serve as Chávez's Minister of Tourism, and its quick expansion seems to have been very well coordinated. Suffice it to say, CMP became the most visible sign of middle-class support for Chávez.

CMP served as a political tool for Chávez – it allowed him to simultaneously

7 “Bolivarianos de Clase Media en El Hatillo Saliero en Apoyo al Gobierno y Enfrentaron a Las Hordas de La Lagunita” <> Accessed May 25, 2011. 186 claim middle-class support while rejecting and diminishing the kind of “middle class” that was supporting his opponents. Chávez recognized CMP publicly in at least two different cadenas (televised speeches). In one, Chávez spells out the goals of CMP at least in relation to political mobilization:

La Clase Media en Positivo has been born, that if it's not multitudinous, will become multitudinous, but with organization, the middle class responding from its own heart facing the drowning lie one and a million times repeated by the media campaign that the middle class in its entirety is the enemy or adversary of this constitutional process, of revolutionary changes (Chávez 2003: 195).

In a press release in 2008, Chávez again made the case to the middle class in general:

I call on the Venezuelan people to reflect, for them not to be afraid, especially the middle class, for if a majority comes to support the constitutional amendment, it will increase the country's development which has benefited many, and among them the vast majority of the middle class...

… we know that the middle class isn't homogenous and there is a sector that is a progressive middle class which is with us; but we know there have been flaws in our discourse to that sector...

Although it is still too early to talk about [the presidential elections in] 2012 politically, from that perspective, no one should fear, and I call on these intellectuals, businessmen, [and] workers who have something to contribute to continue in the development of the country (ABN 12/14/08)

What Chávez insinuates here is that there are in fact two different middle classes in Venezuela: one that is for the revolution, and the other that is against it. CMP of course is the pro-Chávez middle class, the one that is not being convinced that all its neighbors are anti-Chavistas by the “falsimedia.” The very name of the organization – Clase Media en Positivo – implies that there's a “negative” middle class. Again, while this move allows Chávez to display middle-class support, the rhetoric still polarizes. However, CMP would face multiple challenges to its role organizationally in the revolution and in terms of its validity as a representation of middle-class support for Chávez. First, anti-Chávez attacks on the CMP centered on the implausibility of a middle class supporting Chávez and on the political aspirations of the groups' leadership. In a review of Terminator 3, in which the titular Terminator had switched sides once again, he was described as having “jumped the fence to the 'Clase Media en Positivo'” (El Nacional

187

8/26/2003). Additionally, CMP serves as a symbol of the new boliburguesia or “Bolivarian Bourgeoisie.” The Boliburguesia are seen to be living a life of excess and privilege from their positions in the state or Chávez's party, advocating for socialism in their discourse, but acting like a consuming capitalist in practice.8 But second, a pro- Chávez middle class also meets with disdain from within Chavista ranks. Arguing that these pro-Chávez middle class are either insincere or turncoats, they challenge the value of middle-class allies:

I do not understand the professional middle class in Venezuela. “Socialism isn't social democracy, nor is it consumer capitalism with handouts to the most needy. They [the middle class] have never read the fine print, as the merchants say. “It's not they're fault,” the intellectuals say.... It is up to the working class and the peasants, whom we identify as the only revolutionary classes (Brito 12/13/07)9

In other words, beset from the left and the right, the pro-Chávez middle class finds no haven in the political discourse of contemporary Venezuelan politics.

This chapter concludes that the contested nature of the middle-class narrative in

Venezuela after the 11-A protests has the potential to exacerbate political tensions in

Venezuela. With both sides unwilling to accept that “la clase media” can viably participate in either of their political projects, neither are “winning over” a middle class, but rather alienating themselves from each other. By denying the possibility of a middle class that could act both independently and democratically, both sides actively reject a middle ground. This is a reflection of just how polarized Venezuela‟s politics are.

Thinking about the Philippine narrative is instructive: Philippine elites were able to create a hegemonic coalition by redefining themselves and their interests as the interests of “the middle forces.” For Venezuela, the middle-class narrative cannot be deployed by either

8 RCTV and Venevision reporters often wait for a government official or deputy to proclaim something about socialism, at which point they ask the official about their car, clothes, and lifestyle and ask if such a life of luxury is compatible with socialism. These “gotcha” moments are replayed as bumpers or in advertising montages. 9 <> 188 side without significant reservations about its veracity. If either side wishes to develop a hegemonic coalition with middle-class support, they may have to construct a less

Manichean narrative of the middle class, reject class (a la policlasismo), or be willing to escalate the war of words that claiming middle class support would entail.

Conclusion

Thinking about the causes and contexts that produced the middle-class narrative in

Venezuela in comparative perspective, we can identify the relative importance of short- run political causes and longer-run symbolic and material ones, and parse them out in relation to this project's theoretical perspective. Like the Philippines, political cleavages mattered , with Chávez providing the impetus for political polarization. But, unlike the

Philippines during the EDSA period, it was the conflict between Chavista and anti-

Chávez forces that drove much of the classificatory and narrative maneuvers in

Venezuela. To be sure, the tension between the Left and moderates in the Philippines under Marcos did inform the post-EDSA narrative, but these groups were competing with each other against Marcos. As such, the conflict took less of a zero-sum character which was necessary in the Philippine case to transfer class language from the Left to the moderates.

But did 11-A mark a transformative moment in middle-class formation?

According to the Venezuelan narrative, the middle class remained the child of state-led petroleum politics, whose suffering through the 80s and 90s led to no new independent impulses on their part, but still represented them as impulsive. Their support for Chávez before their opposition to him reinforced the idea of the fickle middle class – which while

189 seemingly in line with Rationalist interpretations of middle-class politics – served the narrative purpose of branding them as leaderless and virtually child-like, and in that sense, similar to their lower class counterparts. Part of a coalition that represented and emphasized the social order of policlasismo, their Chavista opponents countered loudly with the language of class conflict.

As a further indication of the contestedness of the Venezuelan middle-class narrative, the pro-Chávez attempt to create the “Clase Media en Positivo” and its attendant attempt to inject class into middle-class discourse on their behalf is met with considerable skepticism from within Chavista ranks and from the opposition. Despite the downturns of the 80s and the 90s, there was no advocacy, no identifiable independent

“middle classness” that appeared to challenge the details of the narrative. By the time the language did appear, it was forever linked to the nondemocratic aspects of 11-

A.Venezuela then becomes a “negative case” of eventful middle-class formation insofar as the revolution from the middle led to political context where evoking a revolutionary, democratic middle class was politically impossible. The anti-Chávez protests of April

11th, 2002 did not produce a singular, hegemonic narrative; but instead left the role of the middle class in Venezuelan democracy up for debate, and as such, the characteristics of the middle class itself. In contrast, the representations of the middle class during and after

Los Forajidos in Ecuador marked both a subjective and objective break with past perceptions of the middle class. While both the Venezuelan and Ecuadorian middle class narratives emphasized the class' origins as new bureaucrats and state employees from the oil boom of the 1970s, by the 1990s the Ecuadorian narrative began to shift markedly away from the story of passive products of state-led development. While in both

190 countries the economic downturns of the 80s and 90s, coupled with an anti-establishment sentiment produced anti-politics discourses, intervening historical events provided effective reference points for shifting the narrative. However, because of the political dynamics of regionalism in Ecuador, there is a far different outcome in terms of middle- class narrative.

191

CHAPTER 5 – “¡HAY CLASE MEDIA!” ASCENDANT OUTLAWS AND MIDDLE-CLASS PLEBISCITARIANISM IN ECUADOR, 1970s-2010

The last empirical case of middle-class narrative construction deals with La Rebelión de los Forajidos (lit. The Outlaws' Rebellion) in Ecuador and how the narrative formed the basis of the populist project of President Rafael Correa. Compared to the Philippines' co- opted narrative, and Venezuela's contested one, Ecuador demonstrated from 2005 to 2008 an “ascendant” narrative that rapidly elevated “la clase media” to political prominence as a class taking up an historical role as anti-oligarchic, democratic, and potentially revolutionary. However, despite those more laudatory aspects of the narrative, it was profoundly regional (Quito-centric), and it reproduced and relied on racist tropes. More ambiguously, the narrative borrowed from populist discourses both domestic and foreign which were reflected in Correa's own populist rhetoric. Correa‟s rule has been characterized by significant political restructuring, with Correa as plebiscitary ruler at the head of a technocratic elite seeking to reform Ecuadorian politics and society, but blocking out the interests of the indigenous movement and other civil society groups along the way.

Nevertheless, Ecuador provides a strong contrast to the Philippines and

Venezuela: the breakthrough here was that for observers and participants in La Rebelión, despite their polyvalent forms of organization and multiplicity of interests, the forajidos were resoundingly middle class in origin – and this was the first time “the middle class” had been attributed with positive agency in regards to Ecuadorian democracy. In the

192 context of sustained political instability in Ecuador, a middle class capable of destabilizing political institutions added yet another actor to a field of historically- raucous political agents which already included the military, populist leaders, bourgeois elites, and the indigenous movement. The question here is how and why those discussing and remembering the forajidos would make that determination: what drove them to tell the story of los forajidos as a story of an agential and radical middle class? And how did that image of an agential middle class produce a plebiscitarianism that was middle-class in character?

The short answer is that for all its “newness,” this narrative is the product of a 25- year history of a complex socioeconomic and sociopolitical disequilibrium. Specifically, the middle-class narrative is the product of an ongoing hegemonic crisis precipitated by the expansion of the state during military rule (1972-1979). There are three main causal factors precipitated by the rapid growth of the Ecuadorian state: (1) oil revenues grew the middle sectors, but also exposed them (and the rest of the country) to global market forces; (2) state expansion threw off the delicate political-economic balance between the port city of Guayaquil and the capital, Quito; and (3) state expansion activated and accelerated the political mobilization of Ecuador‟s indigenous peoples.

In concert those factors served as long-run causes for an ever-accelerating political instability in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when protests removed populist president Abdalá Bucaram in 1997 and neoliberal president Jamil Mahuad in 2000. These two protests helped to increase popular mobilization beyond what elites could control, effectively exposing the structures of power from below. Precipitated by the return of

Bucaram from exile and absent indigenous protesters, la Rebelión catalyzed discontent

193 among Quito‟s middle class. Those previously-mentioned factors expressed themselves in the structural origins of los forajidos (Quiteño middle sectors), the symbolic distinctions that define them (costa/sierra, indigenous/non-indigenous, among others), and in language they used (antipolitical discourse). But like the Philippines and Venezuela, those factors by themselves were not enough to construct a middle-class narrative: historical events catalyzed those factors into a particular story. When recounting Lucio Gutierrez's ouster, narrative-makers made it a point to describe themselves and the protests in which they took part as a “defense” of Quito, as utilizing different techniques from indigenous protest, but also as taking part in a “superior” form of political engagement because of their middle class origins.

Subsequently, los forajidos and their middle classness would be central to the populist project of Rafael Correa. As much as Correa and his plan for a “Revolucion

Ciudadana” (Citizen's Revolution) conform to previous models of populist rule in

Ecuador and Latin America as a whole – top down, co-optive, and anti-liberal (De La

Torre 2009; Conaghan and De La Torre 2008) – Correa's rise to power is best understood as the interactive product of middle-class formation and Ecuadorian realpolitik in two ways. First, if populists incarnate the people they purport to lead (De La Torre 1996,

2010), then Rafael Correa was more than simply just an incarnation of the Ecuadorian pueblo – he was los forajidos incarnate. This is evident in the narratives he tells about himself: of his middle-class origins, as a protester against Gutierrez, and as a radical intellectual. Second, Correa and his movement Alianza Pais place a high symbolic and electoral value on middle class support, to the detriment other social actors like the indigenous movement. This is most evident in the public support for the 2008 Constituent

194

Assembly which observers agreed was impelled by the middle class; in Correa's public policy which has privileged bureaucrats, intellectuals, and white-collar workers; and in the postmortem assessments of Correa's electoral support following the 2011 constitutional referendum. In other words, there is ample evidence that Correa's plebiscitary rule is a middle-class project, built on the new validity of the middle class as a political actor in Ecuador.

Antecedent Conditions: Oligarchic Democracy, Political Equilibrium, and Populism

Buffeted on the peaks and troughs of its agricultural and petroleum exports, Ecuador has experienced economic and political instability for much of its life as an independent nation. As Schodt puts it, “Political instability has been a characteristic feature. One government has followed another as if on some sort of political merry-go-round, driven by recurrent economic crises and constantly shifting political alliances” (1987: 12).1 That being said, the balance of class power in Ecuador prior to 1973 rested on a division between agro-exporters on the coast and large landowners in the sierra. The coast, dominated by the port city of Guayaquil, began to benefit from the exportation of primary products: first cacao, then bananas. “By the 1880s Ecuador supplied about two thirds of the world's cacao” (Pineo 1996: 20) and between 1880-1889, cacao accounted for 68% of all Ecuadorian exports, mostly going to France and the United States by the end of the century (Pineo 1996: 21-22). Alongside cacao exports were other industries, particularly banking which would fund not only local exporters, but loan to the Ecuadorian state as well (Henderson 2005). World War I and plant diseases hurt the cacao industry for two

1 Pineo suggests in passing that “part of the problem was that Ecuador's economy could not create enough positions suitable by the sons of the well-to-do (and the nations's thin middle class)...” driving “many frustrated young men” to “revolutions as a sort of job application” (1996: 36), though this observation seems more facetious than accurate. 195 decades until the rapid growth of banana exports following World War II, ultimately making Ecuador the world's top exporter of that crop (Striffler 2002).

The result of this export economy was the rise of an agro-exporter bourgeoisie in many ways similar to the sugar exporting oligarchic families in the Philippines, but with some key differences. Much like the Philippines, Guayaquil-based agro-exporters

“practiced endogeny” with the end of increasing family land holdings (Larrea and North

1998: 915). In both countries, these landholding dynasties were in part reflected in longstanding political dynasties. The best example for Ecuador would be the Guayaquil- based Noboa family, which has produced multiple mayors, presidents and presidential candidates. Indeed, “by the late 1960s,” Larrea and North write, 10 Guayaquil-based

'business empires', interlinked through family networks... controlled the principal financial, commercial..., and communication enterprises of coastal Ecuador” (1998: 918).

However, unlike the Philippines, these agro-exporter elites were capable of forming (at times) programmatic political parties that have represented both regional and class interests. Most notable was the Liberal Party, various factions of which led the 1895

“Revolución Liberal” against landholding elites from the Sierra region who had dominated politics since independence.

Those Sierra elites originated from wholly different economic stock than their coastal counterparts. Holdovers from Spanish rule where they produced textiles for export to other colonies, serrano elites were latifundistas who extracted labor from indigenous peasants through a debt peonage system (el concertaje), while the Catholic

Church provided the ideological underpinnings (Clark 1994; see also Cushner 1982).

While the Liberal Revolution weakened the temporal power of the Catholic Church and

196 alleviated the burden of tribute payments from indigenous peasants to the state by 1857

(Van Aken 1981), these latifundistas were able to weather these Liberal assaults on their political power, as well as progressive military coups and civil wars through the early part of the 20th century.

It is during these first decades of the 20th century that public discussion about “la clase media” first began to emerge surrounding the lifestyles and social roles of the growing number of Quiteño bureaucrats. Liberal governments had started the process of bureaucratization to better manage their expanding use of the state. Although their interests were ultimately oriented towards expanding coastal agro-exports, the expansion of the state began to rapidly transform Quito from its quaint status as the former capital of a colonial backwater to the administrative center of an aspiring modern nation (Kingman

2006). Kingman notes that “the growth of the middle sectors is notorious in the case of

Quito, so much so that it started to be seen as a 'ciudad burocrática' [bureaucratic city]”

(2006: 89fn37). These rapid changes pitted the rising social aspirations of these bureaucrats with the staid conservatism of the sierra landholding elite. The first avowedly sociological analysis of Ecuadorian society, Alfredo Espinosa Tamayo's Psicologia y

Sociologia del Pueblo Ecuatoriano (1918) described the middle class as an unruly element in what should be a harmonious society:

[House parties amongst] the middle and inferior classes and amongst the people, under the influence of alcohol, become disgusting orgies, of which many times the events do not come out well-reported, thusly producing scandals and quarrels in which clubs and punches play a principal role (Espinosa 1918: 93)

Duran (2000) notes a particular lack of self-esteem on the part of these new bureaucrats that developed out of this realization of their low status (30-31). For their part, these bureaucrats did employ class language to describe their situation: paid like the proletariat,

197 their status as representatives of the state required a certain level of consumption which their salaries could not match. A pair of commentaries written by self-described middle class bureaucrats in 1920 offers a window into this attitude. The first, written by an anonymous author, titled “El Proletario de Clase Media” (The Middle-Class Proletarian) makes a case that their “hard-pressed situation for the need to maintain a standard of decency [“la presentacion decente,” emphasis in the original], he is touching the boundaries of the proletariat” (El Dia 6/19/1920, as cited in Ibarra 2008: 40 and Duran

2000). The second, written in a mocking, sarcastic tone by “Un Futre” (a dandy) simply titled “La Clase Media” describes the conditions for a status-seeking bureaucrat so occupied by outward appearances that he has neglected to purchase “underwear! Oh

Underwear! Let‟s not dwell on this point, because tears would pour like water from our own faucets; that is spontaneously and abundantly” (El Dia 6/20/1920, as cited in Duran

2000: 77; and Ibarra 2008: 40). In this sense, Quito's new bureaucratic middle class in the

1920s shares much in common with the white-collar workers around the same time in

Peru who sought to distinguish themselves as empleados (literally employees, but connoted as white-collar workers) against what they saw as the low status of obreros

(workers) by equating “la clase media” with being gente decente or “decent people,” i.e. the upper class (Parker 1998). The major difference here is that Ecuador's fight over the empleado/obrero distinction through class language originates from state bureaucrats whereas white-collar workers in Lima's private businesses led the charge in Peru (Parker

1998).

To conclude this section, we can sum up the conflicts between costa and sierra during the late 19th and early 20th century as a struggle over whether or not the state

198 would be used to promote one political-economic model over the other. In that sense, the politics of this period resemble the political tensions in the antebellum United States, as per Barrington Moore's reading of American history (1966). A few caveats are necessary.

First, coastal and sierra elites did collectively benefit from state projects during this period, especially the Quito-Guayaquil railway, not only for its economic benefits, but for its symbolism that Ecuador was becoming a modern country (Clark 1988). Second, these elites, “can be characterized as „corporativist‟” as opposed to hegemonic (in the

Gramscian sense) (Crain 1990: 45). That is, both coastal and sierra elites “were fearful of the consequences of mass participation in national politics” and as such chose not to mobilize lower classes for electoral support (Crain 1990: 46).

The problem was, however, that lower-class demands for political participation and incorporation into the body politic would increase, especially among what Cueva

(1982) calls the “subproletariat” and among empleados and university students in Quito

(de la Torre 1994). To avert a hegemonic crisis from the emergence of subordinate classes, both coastal and sierra elites begrudgingly accepted a populist solution – specifically, they backed recurring bouts of populism under five-time president Jose

Maria Velasco Ibarra (1934-1935, 1944-1947, 1952-1956, 1960-1961, 1968-1972). Ibarra would cast a long shadow on Ecuadorian politics, identifying himself with mi chusma

(my rabble), declaring himself dictator four times, and only completing the full mandate of his presidencies once (1952-1956). Still, Velasco Ibarra‟s populism served as a means by which lower classes could participate in politics (see De La Torre 1994). So thus, the balance between the socioeconomic and political interests of coastal and sierra elites remained even, despite the fact that the country had frequent bouts of political instability.

199

The Expansion of the State and Sociopolitical Destabilization

On February 15, 1972, a military junta headed by General Guillermo Rodriguez Lara deposed – for the last time – President Velasco Ibarra, anticipating the election of another populist to the presidency, Assad Bucaram (Abadala's uncle). Inspired in part by the

Peruvian military junta under Juan Velasco Alvarado, Rodriguez sought to bring “social justice” to the excluded classes saluting them “as an armed citizen and as a citizen of your middle class…” (El Comercio 2/17/1972).

Oil would lift the fortunes of the military regime. Discovered in Ecuador's eastern

Amazonian region in 1968 and nationalized nearly immediately after the junta came to power, oil production came under the auspices of the state-owned oil company, la

Corporacion Estatal Petrolera Ecuadoriana (CEPE, later Petroecuador), created by executive decree in June of 1972. Bypassing the commercial interests on the coast, the

Ecuadorian state – seated in Quito – began to catch up in economic influence with

Guayaquil.2 With a new source of income, government spending increased rapidly: from

$724 million in 1973 to $1,118 million in 1974 (Banco Central 2001: 206, in real dollars for the year 2000). “Petroleum... shifted the regional balance of power from the coast towards the sierra, strengthened the power of the state, and increased its independence from domestic economic elites” (Schodt 1987: 14). However, though oil gave the central state a new economic base, it remained hamstrung to the global price of oil, with heavy borrowing weakening its financial position and weakening its capacity to fully dislodge

2 With oil, the military regime (1972-1979) was able to expand the state with an explosion in oil production. 1971, total petroleum production in Ecuador reached 11,035,000 barrels. By 1972, the figure had jumped to 38,930,000 and the next year, Ecuador produced over 87 million barrels of oil (Banco Central 1995: 210). 200

regional oligarchs (Conaghan 1988). While growth during the 1970s – along with the

absence of democracy – allowed the state to made inroads against regional economic

powers, the drastic drop in oil prices in the 1980s weakened the power of all presidents to

enact centralizing projects, further state expansion, and redistributive policies. On

balance, however, the expansion of the state disrupted existing patterns of politics to

nearly preclude a “governable” country years later. As mentioned above, the expansion

of the state affected three main areas – the middle sectors, the political-economic balance

between coast and sierra, and the political mobilization of the indigenous peasantry.

Effects on Middle Sectors

As mentioned earlier, state-led development under military rule accelerated the growth of

the bureaucracy which continued even despite economic retrenchment during the 1980s

and 1990s. In 1974, managers, administrators, and functionaries were the smallest

occupational group in Ecuador. However over 83% of these workers resided in either

Quito or Guayaquil (Table 1). The number of white-collar bureaucrats – “the number of

government employees swelled fivefold from 100,000 to 500,000 [from the 1970s to the

1990s]” (Gerlach 2003: 37).

Table 2. Population 12 or older, economically active by occupational group in Quito, Guayaquil, and Ecuador in 1974 Quito Guayaquil Ecuador Quito+Guayaquil as Percentage of National Total

Professionals, 28,458 29,638 103,782 55.97% technicians, and people in related occupations

Managers, 6,200 5,840 14,401 83.60% administrators,

201 and functionaries

Office workers 29,574 26,207 90,034 61.95% and people in related occupations

Commercialists, 30,194 54,969 194,725 43.73% vendors, and people in related occupations

Agriculturalists, 1,798 3,212 49,508 10.12% cattlemen, fishermen, hunters, forest workers, and people in related occupations

Transport drivers 11,904 13,870 51,737 49.82% and people in related occupations

Artisans and 54,498 55,991 220,277 50.16% Workers

Other Artisans and 5,518 9,782 24,220 63.17% Workers

Other, unclassified 5,208 9,563 27,226 54.25% workers and day laborers

Workers in 43,276 42,194 142,450 60.00% personal services and related occupations

Others 2,294 1,898 6,155 68.11%

Unidentifiable 186 730 1,672 54.78% Occupations

New Workers 1,612 n/d 12,132 --

Source: INEC Censo 1974

The legacy of state intervention in the 1970s would linger into the “lost decade”

of the 1980s even as future regimes would attempt austerity measures to combat inflation

and rising national debt. Post-military governments would have to deal with the declining

202 fortunes of oil. After a fractious attempt at left-leaning state projects during the administrations of presidents Jaime Roldós Aguilera and Oswaldo Hurtado (1979-1984),

PSC President León Febres Cordero (1984-1988) – an admitted admirer of Reagan and

Thatcher – attempted the first set of austerity measures. However, as César Montúfar points out:

…the application of “febrescorderist” neoliberalism reproduced the old state-centric matrix that characterized the previous developmental period. Febres Cordero “state- ified” Ecuadorian neoliberalism; or in other words, he put into selective practice the same state-centric matrix that functioned in Ecuadorian politics between 1950 and 1984 (Montúfar 2000: 13)

Still, while the application of neoliberalism in Ecuador was far from pure, subsequent governments were also hamstrung by heavy borrowing and the fluctuations in the price of oil, requiring further application of austerity measures – perhaps the most drastic being dollarization in 2000 under president Jamil Mahuád intended to stem explosive inflation and devaluation of the sucre.

The effect of these attempted retrenchments and economic downturns started to impact government workers in drastic ways. According to Rinne and Sánchez-Páramo,

Though the number of public employees increased only slightly between 1998 and 2005, government salary expenses fluctuated sharply the first years after dollarization [in 2000], increasing from less than 5 percent of GDP in 2000 to 8 percent of GDP in 2003 – equivalent to an increase in current expenditure from 25 percent of total expenditures in 2000 to 45 percent since 2002. Since then salary expenses have stabilized around this level. The 1998-1999 fiscal crisis fueled inflation and a decline of over 70 percent in real value of base salaries between 1997 and 1999 (Rinne and Sánchez-Páramo 2008: 361)

While the bureaucracy grew, it became apparent that the economic downturns of the 80s and 90s were forcing other middle sector Ecuadorians to emigrate. Ecuadorians primarily began to emigrate in droves for lack of economic opportunities. Joksich and

Pribilsky note that “in just two years (1999 and 2000) more than 267,000 Ecuadorians

203 emigrated (net) and remittances increased to more than $1.41 billion in 2001 from an estimated $643 million in 1997 (2002: 76). While they argue that this new explosion of emigration finds people of all socioeconomic statuses traveling to the United States and

Europe (Spain especially), authors like Ramirez and Ramirez (2003) argue that the vast bulk of the new emigration from Ecuador came from middle-income and middle-sector groups from sierra provinces. The patterns of remittances and emigration also changed significantly. While in previous decades, business networks offered connected

Guayaquilenos the opportunity to emigrate, push factors in Ecuador have overwhelmingly sent emigrants from highland provinces like Azuay, Canar, and Loja

(Joksich 2002). The National Statistical Institute estimated in 2008 that 1, 571, 450

Ecuadorians had emigrated since the 1970s.3 INEC Director Byron Villacís “made clear that contrary to popular belief, the majority of the emigrants are not poor, but they had belonged to the middle class in Ecuador” (Hoy 3/24/2008).

Effects on Regionalism

With the expansion of the state, Quito shed its image of an economically-reactionary region, and became the organizational and symbolic center of an interventionist state, much to the ire of coastal agro-export elites. Politically, the increasing power of the central state in Quito would shift the dynamics of the regional political cleavages. Now unbeholden to the costa for tax revenues, the state could act independently from domestic economic interests (though not independently from international economic forces). The cleavage between costa and sierra switched from a conflict between two different

3 According to the World Bank, Ecuador‟s 2009 population was 13,625,069 > accessed 6/4/2011. 204 political economies to one that pit an interventionist, independent state and an increasingly conservative and sometimes secessionist coastal region. Whereas the coast was the home of liberalism in the early 20th century, it would become the home of

Ecuador‟s conservative political parties, most notably the Partido Social Cristiano (PSC,

Social Christian Party) which wields tremendous influence in Guayaquil and on the coast, but has little support in the sierra. Towards the end of the 1990s, calls for autonomy and even secession became more prominent (see Eaton 2011).

Political and economic regionalism would be reinforced by cultural distinctions as well. Regionalism from the seventies until the nineties conflated race, masculinity, and class so as to render the distinctions between Guayaquil and Quito as occupying opposing locations on black-white/indigenous-white, masculine-feminine, and popular-elite dichotomies. Andrade suggests there are “two radically different strands of mestizo

Ecuadorianness,” one where people from the coast are “somehow contaminated by blackness” (monos, or monkeys) and people from the highlands are construed as being indigenous (2002: 65). This is despite the fact that both cities are economic hubs that have mainly mestizo populations and significant migration between both cities (Andrade

2002: 67). Andrade also suggests that masculinity is what binds both racial and class distinctions into a discourse that conflates virility with the “political culture” of the coast and of the working classes, which in response, elites must perform acts of masculine affirmation to justify their rule. Those these distinctions do not hold hard and fast, political theater allows both followers and leaders to reaffirm them. The political performances of masculinity by Guayaquil mayor and former president Leon Febres

Cordero and former mayor of Quito and ousted president Jamil Mahuad, for example,

205 reinforce regional notions of masculine, authoritative, and temperamental costeños; and effeminate, hypocritical, and elitist serranos.

Effects on Indigenous Mobilization

Indigenous mobilization was an unintended consequence of state expansion. In the early

20th century, Liberal attempts to break up sierra landholdings sought to create a class of smallholders from indigenous peasants (Crain 1990). For the most part, highland indigenous people – mostly of Quichua descent – found little reason to interact with the state, but when they did, they were able to capitalize on the state‟s language of

“stewarding the Indians” by approaching the state as supplicants manipulating the state‟s obligations to them (Clark 2005). Much like its Peruvian counterpart, the military regime attempted at once to extol the virtues of indigineity while attempting to incorporate them into the regime as campesinos (see for instance El Comercio 2/17/1972).

The modern indigenous movement can trace its roots to environmental organizing in Ecuador's Amazonian region against transnational and state oil conglomerates (Gerlach

2003) and in response to military regime agrarian reform in the sierra (Zamosc 1994).

Building on both internal and transnational networks, indigenous activists from different regional umbrella organizations formed the Confederacion de Nacionalidades Indigenas de Ecuador (Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador, CONAIE) (Yashar

2005; Zamozc 1994). The indigenous movement‟s virulent opposition to neoliberal reform – or as Yashar (2005) describes it, “the neoliberal citizenship regime” – comes not simply as a critique of political economy, but also as a critique of the Ecuadorian nation as only addressing individual and not collective rights, and a critique of Ecuadorian

206 perceptions race as too binary. CONAIE has had significant success in mobilizing paralyzing strikes and marches throughout the 1990s, and through its political wing,

Pachakuti-Nuevo Pais, it successfully elected representatives to the Ecuadorian Congress in the late 1990s.

To summarize, state expansion following the nationalization of oil produced a growing, but afflicted bureaucratic middle sector; intensified regionalism where there was once a tense conciliation between the coast and the sierra; and inadvertently provided an enemy for the developing indigenous movement. These factors are all important “set up” conditions, so to speak, for the slow-motion collapse of representative democracy in the late 1990s. While the troubles of the Ecuadorian economy and its political system precipitated by the expansion of the state can give us some insight into the events preceding La Rebelión de los Forajidos, structural conditions can only tell part of the story, and perhaps only a very small part. For instance, recent studies have argued that during years of negative GDP growth or high inflation from the 1970s to the 21st century,

Ecuador has been politically stable (Long and Iligori 2007; Long 2008). In other words, the structural conditions that supposedly promote instability remain remarkably stable and it suggests that even if there were an economic basis for hegemonic consent, other factors may play a stronger role in fomenting instability. Understanding these more conjunctural factors improves our understanding of the narrative and symbolic stock from which storytellers during and after la Rebelión Forajida created the notion of a revolutionary and democratic middle class.

Proximate Antecedents: Liberalism, Instability and Los Forajidos

207

To be clear about what happened in Ecuador in April of 2005, it bears pointing out that there are multiple discourses that could be worthy of a dissertation by themselves. First is the Quito-centric discourse that claimed Gutierrez had, in the words of a street chant at that time, “con Quito te metiste, Lucio te jodiste” (“Lucio, when you messed with Quito, you fucked yourself”).4 Second, is the discourse of ciudadania (citizenship) which expressed itself in ways like protesters having their national identification numbers printed on their t-shirts, or reading out one‟s number before speaking, essentially new ways of expressing the validity of one‟s statements as a citizen. While each deserves its own independent study, this paper looks at the discourse that linked “the middle class” to those protests, which ultimately is linked in the same conceptual network as Quiteñism and ciudadania. What is clear, however, is that thousands of self-styled middle class

“forajidos” (outlaws) rallied under the slogan “Que Se Vaya Todos” (loosely, “Kick „em all out”), directed not only at populist president Lucio Gutierrez, but at the political establishment writ large. Envisioning their protest as figuratively “throwing out the trash,” these middle-class protesters established their credentials as belonging neither to parties, to the elite, nor to the masses, but squarely in a realm where their previously- ignored political interests were seen as “clean” (Paltán 2005).

The three distal causes from the previous section – the haphazard growth of the middle sectors, the new regional realignment, and the rise of the indigenous movement – would interact with an increasingly unstable experiment in representative democracy.

While Ecuador never returned to authoritarian rule, it became quite clear towards the end of the 1990s that electoral mandates meant less and less as Ecuador would have seven

4 Arguably, the “Marcha Blanca” (white march) in Guayaquil on January 26th, 2005 was the first large protest event against Gutierrez. 208 different presidents in nine years, 1997-2006. Each of those factors would work in different ways to essentially weaken and delegitimize elite hegemony.

In 1979, Ecuador was the first military dictatorship in Latin America to transition to democracy. As Isaacs recounts (1991), three years of careful study of voting and representation systems, consultations among politicians, and two draft constitutions later,

Ecuador held a two-round presidential election where left-leaning Jaime Roldós Aguilera emerged victorious.5 However, the democratic project was flawed from the start. Ecuador did not have programmatic political parties that represented different social cleavages, but instead weak ones that were either nascent programmatic ones, or regionally-based populist ones (Conaghan and Espinal 1998: 562). Coupled with Ecuador‟s overreliance on oil exports and the increasing political presence of the indigenous movement, democracy without effective representation was doomed to fail.

The perennial populist solution returned in the 1990s, but with a new face.

Ecuadorian populism took on neoliberal economic policies, joining the region's neopopulist trend. Presidents Abadalá Bucaram (1997-1998) and Lucio Gutierrez (2004-

2005) campaigned with promises to the poor, but once in power, either maintained or intensified austerity measures. Bucaram would be deposed after nine months in the presidency for “mental incompetence,” in part because he was to adopt a fairly draconian set of austerity measures. Bucaram was sent into exile in Panama and his return in 2004 would help precipitate la Rebelión de los Forajidos.

For their part, the indigenous movement themselves successfully removed a neoliberal president, former Quito mayor Jamil Mahuad in 2000. In the following

5 Roldós would later die in a plane crash, elevating his vice-president Oswaldo Hurtado to the presidency to finish out his term. 209 elections, they supported Lucio Gutierrez – a colonel who had joined common cause with the movement in 2000. Gutierrez was elected to the presidency and could count on the votes from Pachakutik, the indigenous political party.. Soon after, however, he declared himself “the best friend of George W. Bush” and signed a widely-derided free trade agreement with the United States. The indigenous movement abandoned him, and without support in congress, Gutierrez turned to the conservative political parties.

What becomes clear by the late 1990s and early 2000s is that Ecuador in a very

Gramscian sense has lacked some form of effective hegemony – neither coercion nor consent seemed to be present, and if they were, they did not last long enough in combination to produce a long-lasting rule. In this sense, Ecuador in the latter part of the

20th century is as antipodal as can be from Venezuela until the collapse of the Punto Fijo system. In comparison to the Philippines where hegemonic crises occur with some regularity and are solved by oligarchic hegemonic veto, Ecuador still remains more unstable. The dramatic fluctuations in cacao, bananas, and oil prices seem to make the material bases for hegemony nearly impossible, while Ecuador's distinct regional tensions have served to diminish the possibilities for lasting political solutions. These instabilities made the Ecuadorian state vulnerable from below. Now it would take an effective contingent event to take advantage of this hegemonic opening.

Critical Juncture and the New Middle Class Narrative

Knowing the political-economic and discursive contexts that preceded la Rebelión de los forajidos goes a long way in suggesting the raw details by which the stories of the event could be written. However, the actual occurrences between April 14th and April 16nd of

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2005 in the city of Quito crystallize these distinct contexts through the narrative of “la clase media.” Three immediate events were key to the development of the middle-class discourse during that time.6 First is the agreed-upon immediate cause of the April protests: Gutierrez‟s stacking of the Supreme Court with loyal judges in December of

2004. Second was the return of deposed populist president Abadalá Bucaram on April 2nd,

2005, with the support of Gutierrez. The last three events in sequence were central moments for storytellers who used them as tools by which to derive the middle-classness of this uprising: the “-azo” (“cacerolazo,” “mochilazo”) appended protest events throughout Quito, the “defense of the city” from Gutierrez's supporters, and his actual deposition by a hastily-gathered Congress, egged on by crowds who chanted a borrowed slogan from the Argentine protests of 2001 – “Que se vayan todos” (loosely, “kick 'em all out”). Each of those moments was interpreted as a particularly middle-class event, and when taken collectively, they make up a larger narrative of the Rebelión forajida that gives the middle class agency in Ecuador's long and uneven history of democracy.

How did Ecuadorian scholars, pundits, and the forajidos themselves identify their class origins? Why was this protest “ascendant?” Here to fill “the space between reality and its representation” in the words of Wahrman (1995), the process of class formation required an assessment of recent history to square the events of April with the political- economic and discursive context. That is, events required a new narrative. With this historical hindsight, the vision of the middle class that emerged from the Rebelión would be remarkably distinct from previous protests and even in Ecuadorian history. First, as participant and public intellectual Franklin Ramírez Gallegos writes: “April‟s insurrection

6 There are many good available chronologies of the Rebelión, but perhaps the most accessible for the non-specialist is Ramírez Gallegos (2005: Anexo 1, 102-109). 211 starred middle sectors without organizational or party ties, which were progressively added to by popular sectors and militants of social and political organizations that were more or less radical” (2005a: 70). Ramírez Gallegos describes how this protest was distinctly different from labor strikes as it occurred mainly at night and represented by symbols like backpacks and pots – markers of education and the family life of middle- class people (2005a: 78). He writes argues in another piece that la Rebelión confirms that protest is now an exercise in expressing one‟s sovereignty, a way of controlling elites

(2005b).

Multiple authors and observers remarked on the “creativity” of these protests, partly driven by the fact that among the ranks of the forajidos were the materially- comfortable, but creative and educated middle class. Juan Francisco Morales, a member of the group Ciudadanos por la Democracia recalls his experience as such:

Then, since February, I could see many of my relatives, first cousins, second cousins, third cousins, morally and socially-organized families; writers, musicians; university graduates, that is to say, the thinking class of Ecuador. Naturally, I carried out an analysis of the social composition of the marchers, of the immortal forajidos, and upon seeing so many of my relatives as much as my school and university comrades, I could appreciate, in effect, that it was the upper middle class that mobilized, not for economic pretenses, but rather to rescue human dignity; people absolutely honest, hard-working, honorable, clamoring for a rule of law in which liberty is not conceived of as a demand, but rather that the dignity of a person as a condition to exercise liberty limited[,] from my point of view[,] in these past 25 years by economic elites and politicians, without any exceptions (Francisco Morales 2005: 14-15)

In the view of Francisco Morales, economic conditions were not the primary motivating factor for middle-class participation, but in fact a moral valuation of how democracy should operate.7 His views are echoed in the signage for a commemorative museum

7 An unnamed Mexican observer reached a similar conclusion:

The Positive: 1. Finally the middle class (almost exclusively from Quito) felt touched, moved, from its individualism and careerism, and saw the need to engage in what happens in the here and now, because, after all they‟re also affected. 2. Unlike most impoverished sectors, movements, and social issues, their claim was not about hunger or life‟s impossibilities… They raised the banner of struggle for dignity, decency, against corruption, and that institutions need to have a minimum of those virtues with a 212 exhibition, “Prohibido Olvidar,” held at the Centro Cultural Metropolitana in Quito in

August-September of 2005. The idea that after 25 years of misguided oligarchic rule, the protests had taken Ecuador on the “right path” and that there was only “one way” to solve those problems: remove all politicians (see Image 2). Compare Francisco Morales' analysis of the elite to the narrative content after both EDSAs in the Philippines. In both cases, storytellers promoted the idea of the rule of law as a moral condition, a moral condition that best described the daily life of the hard-working middle class. But the interesting distinction here is that Francisco Morales adopts a much more pronounced anti-elite tone. Unlike the readings of Philippine history that combine oligarchic families to the middle class and unite their interests, Francisco Morales' impugns the entirety of the Ecuadorian political elite as well as the entirety post-dictatorship democracy.

Figure 5. Signs from the Museum Exhibition, “Prohibido Olvidar,” Centro Cultural Metropolitana, Quito.

minimum of ethical nationalism. That doesn‟t seem so bad. 3. The challenge to institutions, to “partidocracia,” to corruption as the only way to live, led some sectors of the diverse middle class to claim direct democracy, the abolition of political parties, the creation of popular assemblies…but let‟s not forget that this fight hardly mobilized the urban popular sectors << http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2005/05/16/oja97-ecuador.html>> also reposted from an Ecuadorian source << http://www.llacta.org/notic/2005/not0515b.htm>> accessed 6/72011.

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But, part of that “dignity” also was a projection upon the presidency and the political class about how they should act. For these protesters, Gutierrez associating with

Bucaram dredged up memories of Bucaram's antics as a pro-poor populist: recording his own single, dancing with pageant winners, and generally comporting himself as an unserious leader. But again, simply seeing a president comporting himself in such a way unbecoming of a president – that is, not exhibiting the habitus appropriate for the position

– does not make a full explanation for why the middle class acted here. The idea that such things have happened before, that the middle class had to take charge, and that this was their historic task – that is how storytellers couched distinctions within narrative. Again, the theme of a democracy captured and limited by economic and political elites provides the experiential origins of middle-class protest. As Omar Ospina Garcia writes:

What remains clear is that, despite their pauperization, there is a middle class whose view of the government [with each uprising] has become more demanding. For if in the manifestations against Bucaram featured aristocratic and illustrious last names, [during the Rebelión de los Forajidos], the representatives of the middle class thought to be non- existent went into the streets. A middle class that went to take out the trashcan that carried to power the opportunism of the supposedly vanguardist sectors and the lack of education of a people whose level of instruction does not permit them to choose their leaders well… (Ospina Garcia 2005: 128)

The political experience of rejecting presidents and their educational attainment allows them to transcend the socioeconomic aspects of class. He continues,

Only when the State and its directing classes understand that a well-educated public does not vote for vulgar rogues and commits to educational reform that the country has demanded for decades will antiseptic social movements like these become unnecessary. For the two most-mentioned motives [of the forajidos] were for more ethics, more aesthetics, and for hygiene than for more politics (Ospina Garcia 2005: 128)

Leftist author Ney Barrionueva Silva provides a list of the reasons why the middle class was so central to the Rebelión. It is worth repeating the list at length, since it is a good example of the often time contradictory, hyperbolic, but altogether laudatory

214 explanations of why “the middle class” were the heroes of that April:

- Because they awoke, created awareness, and rose up against such indignity as a president looking to found his own personal satrap - Because this middle class was educated, university-trained, and professional, read newspapers, magazines, books, and a good number of them used the internet and cell phones, which made it difficult to fool them - Because it was an unemployed middle class, the majority of it - Because it was in solidarity with its absent relatives who had to leave the country for the lack of jobs in a genocidal migration - A middle class, that sensed the country was being robbed from them, that the Republic was being robbed from them, that democracy was being robbed from them, that their families were being robbed from them, that joy and hope were being robbed from them - Because the middle class bridged the gap (hizo de bisagra), linking to the people from below and on the other side, to the progressive and nationalist bourgeoisie… - The middle class achieved a synthesis of what the people demanded: to be done with the dictator Gutiérrez, to be done with the CSJ [Corte Superior de Justicia], to be finished with the Congreso Nacional, to be done with everything and everyone! - Because the middle class took the initiative for the Rebelión de los Forajidos - Because the middle class was not opposed by other class sectors - Because the middle class catalyzed the process [la Rebelión] without declaring itself “leader” nor “director”, but rather it disseminated and penetrated through all the pores of the people how to think and act like a unified people (Barrionueva Silva 2007: 132-133)

Barrionueva Silva‟s vision of the middle class reflects and parallels much of the discourse that described the protest as a whole: public indignation by a group which was far from political power, and yet rational enough to somehow organize itself without organization and generate a legitimate vision of anti-politics.

Race and Regionalism

Similar to EDSA and EDSA 2, as well as 11-A, the logic of determining one's social class or the social class of the protesters references a history of protest and a definition of middle class that begins as a residual category. Unlike similar protests in the Philippines in May of 2001 (the contentious EDSA 3), and in Venezuela in 2002 where a few days after Hugo Chávez‟s fall at the hands of middle-class protesters, his lower-class supporters counterprotested and help to return him to power, there was no counterprotest

215 after La Rebelión. Two events colored how storytellers recalled their social class during the protest. The first was the 2000 indigenous uprising against Jamil Mahuad. Taking note that they themselves were not indigenous, some storytellers contrasted that past protest with la Rebelión forajida and found their class that way. And again, similar to the way in which the Philippine left was written out of the EDSA narrative, CONAIE and

Pachakutik did not participate in la Rebelión to the degree to which they did in 2000, though they did issue statements of support.8

The other was the “defense of Quito” – a barricade and confrontation against supporters of Gutierrez who were approaching the city by bus. Knocking over buses and cars to block major entries into the city, protesters argued they were keeping out potentially violent, paid-off thugs. The exhibition “Prohibido Olvidar” emphasized this theme as well, linking los forajidos to historical “defensas” of Quito in the late colonial period. But what perhaps was the most troubling aspect of the protest was that they relied on racist conflations of costa/black – sierra/white.“The confrontation [between pro-

Guiterrez forces and los forajidos],” writes Carlos de la Torre,

… had, in some cases, marked regionalist and classist tones. Quiteños defended their city from the supposed Gutierrist hordes that were coming in buses from the Amazon and the coast. To be Quiteño meant not being black, nor Amazonian, nor from the coast, nor „a monkey‟ (un mono), as if those weren‟t characteristics of citizens of the capital (de la Torre 2007: 51)

Compare this with the tone of responses to EDSA 3 in the Philippines and to Chavez's election and to his supporters during 11-de-Abril. In all three cases, a distinct degree of classism is present that contains the following characteristics. First, if the middle class now has historical agency, the symbolic power accrued to that interpretation diminishes

8 E.g. “Pachakutik Feclicita y Saluda la Participación Activa de los Gobiernos Locales Alternativos en al Movilización Nacional Por la Dignidad” Boletin de Prensa MUPP-NP, 4/14/2005 << http://www.llacta.org/organiz/coms/2005/com0140.htm>> accessed 6/5/2011. 216 the agency of these lower class protesters. This explains why there is such a strong emphasis on the counterprotesters being bused in or paid off or fed – they are construed to be physically impossible to mobilize, reacting only to base instincts like loyalty, starvation, or greed. This is in contrast to the middle class which can call on its educational pedigree and communicative fantasies that made them greater than a crowd – cell phones in all three cases, television in Venezuela, and Radio La Luna in Ecuador.

To conclude this section, this chapter claims that the process by which the middle- class narrative was constructed during la Rebelión de los Forajidos can be classified as

“ascendant” because no other social class was manipulating the process by which it came to understand its goals in its own life situation, to borrow from Marx. The stories of the event across multiple sources demonstrate a common theme of acting independently of others, of the middle class leading other classes against the entirety of the political class.

The image of the middle class went beyond simply looking for the common good and good citizens. It was a vision that rejected the entirety of the political class as morally- unworthy – and which, at the time, sought no leaders, no charismatic savior, other than themselves. It was a self-consciousness that placed the middle class in conceptual time as historical actors in rejection of the here and now for a better politics in the future.

Consequence: Ecuador's Middle-Class Plebiscitarianism

If the Rebelión Forajida transformed and coalesced antipolitical sentiment into the middle class, then los forajidos were personified in the populism of President Rafael Correa – the broader project of the Revolución Ciudadana, the “non-party” party Alianza Pais, and

Correa himself. For the most part, observers have approached Correa's populism as both a

217 repetition of Ecuador's populist legacy as well as part of the regional trend towards left- leaning populist governments (e.g. De La Torre 2009). Its specific relationship to social class has been a matter of some debate, but what is clear is that observers consistently link “la clase media” that emerged out of la Rebelión de los Forajidos to Correa's populism. At the very least, this reinforces this chapter's assertion that middle-class formation in Ecuador proceeded from la Rebelión Forajida and the narrative that developed out of that event has had a powerful, immediate effect on politics. This chapter argues that as much as Correa has utilized a populist strategy, his prime constituency was and always has been la clase media forajida. By contrast, Correa has gained the enmity of certain segments of organized civil society, most notably the indigenous movement.

And in addition, Alianza Pais (Alianza Patria Altiva I Soberana, Proud and Sovereign

Fatherland Alliance), Correa‟s political movement, counts among its intellectuals and high-ranking officials other former forajido activists. Thus it makes sense to argue that

Correanismo was born of a mutually-constitutive and reiterative relationship with the ideas of la clase media forajida.

El Ministro Forajido

Vice-President Alfredo Palacio assumed the presidency after Gutierrez had been ousted.

He tapped Correa to be his Minister of Economy and Finance soon after assuming power.

In office, Correa was known as “el ministro forajido” (The Outlaw Minister) for two reasons. First, Correa had marched against Gutierrez in April of 2005 (Conaghan 2007:

7). Second, Correa turned out to be a vociferous critic of the IMF and transnational corporations, firmly rejecting a free trade agreement with the U.S., and emphasized the

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“social debt” over the “public debt” (Recalde 2006: 20; see also Conaghan 2008: 7).

Correa left office only after a few months after being appointed, and there were rumors that some of the political parties had pressured President Palacio for his resignation.

CONAIE's Luis Macas pledged the movement's support, and 300 protesters lined up outside the Ministry of Finance chanting “¡fuera todos!” – a familiar forajido chant – but also “¡Correa, presidente!” (Conaghan 2007: 7; El Universo 8/5/2005).

Correa‟s campaign for president in 2006 highlighted forajido themes of rejecting the oligarchy, national sovereignty, and he promised to convoke a constituent assembly to write a new constitution. In the second round of voting, Correa faced Ecuador‟s richest man, Alvaro Noboa. To contrast himself, Correa emphasized his “middle class” background. His official biography spoke to his middle-class upbringing in Guayaquil, his scholarship-funded education, as well as his Catholicism (De La Torre and Conaghan

2009: 347). It is difficult to distinguish between a Correa as a political operator as some theories of populism suggest (Weyland 1998) and Correa as simply a particularly savvy grassroots campaigner. What is clear, however, is that Correa utilized and relied on his origins as a member of la clase media forajida in his campaign.

As much as Correa‟s populism appeals to “el pueblo,” his political party/movement Alianza Pais is built from the ideas, leadership, and organization of la clase media forajida. Reading descriptions of the electoral successes of Alianza Pais, one might get the sense that – like Correa – AP was simply capitalizing on discontent. As one scholar put it, “The middle classes were receptive to the moralizing discourse of Alianza

Pais” (Davalos Aguilar 2007: 60). Another says, “[Alianza Pais] has been a form of capitalizing of the so-called “forajido” movement which impelled the downfall of the

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Gutierrez government” (Ibarra 2006: 14fn 11). The reason why AP was so effective at garnering the support of the middle class was that it could count forajidos among its members and its brain trust. Correa‟s vice-president, Lenin Moreno garnered a leaked US diplomatic cable remarking about his participation in the forajido movement.9 The author of AP‟s political manifesto, Alberto Acosta had been active in the protest movement in

2005. Like Correa, Acosta was an economist and had for some time been part of a civil society group called Jubileo 2000, oriented towards dealing with Ecuador‟s foreign debt.

Other Jubileo 2000 members, Fander Falconi and Gustavo Larrea would serve on

Correa‟s cabinet.10 Given all that, it also makes sense to think of Alizana Pais as an interactive product of middle-class formation and realpolitik in Ecuador.11

Plebiscitarianism of the Middle-Class: Warding off Civil Society

However, from the beginning of his presidency, Correa has displayed the hallmarks of plebiscitary rule. Conaghan and De La Torre (2008) and Conaghan (2008) have characterized his leadership style as a “permanent campaign” which in part plays to his populist appeal as well as serving an electoral function as term limits in Ecuador no longer exist. Correa ran for office without a party, citing the “dirtiness” of the institution, and quickly held a plebiscite once he had won to abolish the existing legislature and establish a constituent assembly for the purposes of writing a new constitution. The constituent assembly elections saw a supermajority of Alianza País candidates win seats, with Alberto Acosta leading the assembly as speaker. While the Revolución Ciudadana

9 “Ecuador Election Update: Correa Names Surprise” Embassy Quito, 8/9/2006. ID06QUITO2008 10 Larrea has since left to form his own political party, Participación > 11 See “Creación y Organización del Movimiento Alianza Pais” n/d 220 was ostensibly about deepening democratic participation, Correa and his close ministers

“[hold] a technocratic view of politica which regards [them] as the sole possessors of the knowledge that will lead Ecuador to a better future” (Nicholls 2010: 1).

Rather than let the assembly run its course, Correa intervened frequently. He and his close advisors selected candidates to run for assembly seats, out of a hodgepodge of

“former forajidos, leftists, and populists” (Conaghan 2008: 57). However, Correa and

Acosta quickly butt heads over the pace and content of debate, with Acosta preferring longer deliberation and careful discussion, and Correa preferring issues to be closed far more quickly. The relationship between these two former allies began to strain, and

Acosta eventually quit the speakership in protest. After Acosta had left, the assembly session advanced rapidly, but perhaps at the expense of true deliberative dialog.

The new constitution afforded spaces for participation: Articles 100 and 101 of the

Constitution outline institutions designed to promote democratic participation. The

Council of Citizen‟s Participation is in charge of organizing public meetings and assemblies, while the “empty chair” mechanism in local government is designed to allow

“autonomous voices outside the state to express the interest of those represented by him/her within the state” (Nicholls 2010: 4-5). But as Nicholls notes, “the Council becomes a de facto judge in determining which processes [of participation] are worth encouraging or not” and “…it can be argued that an important role of the Council is to control participation” (2010: 7).

But more broadly, Correa and his close advisors have approached the task of radical change without taking close heed of what their erstwhile allies demanded.

“Although indigenous movements, as well as most social movements, shared Correa‟s

221 stated desire to curtail neoliberal policies and implement social and economic policies that would benefit the majority of the country‟s people, they increasingly clashed over how to realize those objectives” (Becker 2011: 49). This is especially the case with the indigenous and environmental movements. While Luis Macias and CONAIE had supported Correa‟s resignation from the Palacio government, CONAIE and Pachakutik were divided over whether or not to support Correa in the 2006 presidential elections.

Ultimately, they did not support him in the first round, but did in the second.12

Despite what Lupien (2011) claims, that the new Constitution incorporates indigenous demands, Correa and his allies tamped down on significant demands of the indigenous movement, especially in regards to natural resource rights. CONAIE has been vigorously fighting against Correa‟s new Mining Law which claims to supersede the constitutional rights of indigenous peoples on their own territory (Martinez Novo n/d: 20; see also Becker 2011: 58). As a broader consequence of Correa‟s conflict with civil society, Pachakutik has become less “consolidated” as a political party (Rice 2011).

Though some evidence suggests that the indigenous movement at large is returning to some influence as they oppose Correa (see Martinez Novo n/d). In sum, technocratic influences throughout Correa‟s presidency have asserted the interests of a few key ministers and Correa himself over their alleged allies among civil society.

Conclusion

Since its independence in 1830, Ecuador's stark contrasts in geography have impeded efforts at developing an effective state and a lasting hegemonic historical bloc. The development of its social classes have at the same time cleaved closely to regional

12 Baéz Rivera and Solo de Zaldívar (2006) compile statistics to demonstrate Correa‟s tenuous support during the first round of voting from indigenous communities. 222 divisions, especially in the case of capitalist and bureaucratic sectors, but had long divided working class and other agents “from below”. In addition, these dynamics are further exacerbated by the legacy of oppression of indigenous peoples. Combined with its dependent and semiperipheral position in the world economy, the dynamics of social class formation in a strictly “objective” sense are haphazard, and the power of any one class alliance to exercise its will through the state has been circumscribed. As a result,

Ecuador has had a long history of unstable political regimes, be they democratic or authoritarian, and has seen recurrent bouts of populism whose frequency has far exceeded

Marx's quip that world-historical events appear first as tragedy, then as farce.

This chapter contends that Ecuador's long history of dependent development and the political and social effects of regionalism had significant effects on the discursive features of middle-classness as it emerged from the 1970s. Specifically, these factors affected the meaning of “la clase media” in two ways. First, after the discovery and nationalization of oil in the 1970s, coastal and state elites failed both separately and collectively to produce an effective, class-based hegemonic discourse to reinforce their domination. Despite this, these elites managed to forestall significant challenges to their shaky domination until the late 1990s, but not without generating a significant deficit of trust. Second, dependent development both amplified the size of the urban middle sectors associated with the state and the capital, Quito; and through neoliberal reforms and their subsequent social effects – emigration, heightened social conflict – led observers to see the middle class as regionally-isolated victims of elite political pacts and economic policies.

Towards the end of the 20th century, these dynamics made the state vulnerable

223 from below – as evidenced by the 2000 indigenous uprising and Los Forajidos in 2005.

These major protest events, coupled with a region-wide rejection of neoliberal neopopulism, helped to develop anti-political discourses previously unseen in Ecuador. In the crucible of the protests against President Lucio Gutierrez in 2005, and combined with the regionalized concept of class, protesters generated an explicitly “quiteño” rejection of the entire political class, rooted in the economic victimization of the middle class. Thus, through developing a concept of “la clase media” as victim and as agent, these protesters constructed a history of a social class that came of age during the crises of the previous two decades, which had led them to reject both the political class and neoliberalism. This chapter suggests that the discursive contributions of this middle class narrative would then be projected on a national scale through the populism of Rafael Correa – in his revolución ciudadana and the Alianza Pais.

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CHAPTER 6 – WITHER REVOLUTION “FROM THE MIDDLE?”

The momentous events in the Philippines, Venezuela, and Ecuador that marked dramatic shifts in regular politics in these countries also cemented (or failed to cement) a lasting narrative of the middle class. In each case, the consequence of the revolution “from the middle” was a new approach to the role of the middle class in democratic politics – approaches which helped to underpin or subvert the power of certain elites, but also impeded processes by which their countries could deepen democracy. In the Philippines and Ecuador, the result of these new narratives of the middle class has been a reconfiguring of the balance of class power through the “pivot” of the middle class; while in Venezuela, the absence of a defined middle-class narrative has sent the country down the path of political polarization. Despite these differences, these new configurations of power seem to have prevented their countries from extending the benefits of democracy to all its citizens – the new balance (or imbalance) of class power has left the prospect of deepening in these cases somewhat questionable. While this is a question of design – the dependent variable was “constraints” to deepening – if we were to ask about what those revolutions from the middle did to advance deepening, I believe we would run up against the same data.

This project proposed in the Introduction that a focus on class formation would move past the perception of the middle class as democracy’s savior, its worst enemy, or

225 simply a scheming rational actor. However, the results of the empirical chapters suggest that middle-class formation in these cases has led to a hamstringing of democratization in general. If we were to rest on that interpretation, we might see events like the Arab Spring protests of 2011 as a prelude to a frustrating future with democracy for those countries.

How should we interpret the empirical findings of this project? What are the theoretical and hypothetical ramifications from this work? And what prospects do countries have if they face revolutions from the middle?

This chapter argues that the hypotheses generated from this project do not add up to a negative prediction for the effects of middle-class formation on democracy. First, while revolutions from the middle can cement middle-class narratives that repel pushes for deepening, not every class power configuration that emerges from new middle class narratives will present the same impediments. Second, as these cases reveal that middle- class formation is such a central causal process in the balancing of class power in the absence of strong parties, scholars looking to deepen democracies must pay significantly more attention to the content of middle-class narratives. Finally, middle-class formation through revolutions from the middle must be seen not only in historical but global context

– observers from the developed “middle-classed” world must be wary about their role in asserting middle-class victories in the as-yet “unclassed” world. The global metanarrative may be a powerful influence on the revolution and on the validity of the democracy that follows, but may present its own constraints, independent of domestic class power configurations.

Thus, the conclusion of this chapter is that class formation and democratization in the developing world by way of revolution from the middle has an effect of allowing

226 countries to “skip steps” so to speak in their national democratic narrative, vaulting them past the early stages of transition and consolidation, but may make various forms of deepening difficult to achieve. While revolutions from the middle may hold countries in the “grey area” between electoral and liberal democracy – a feat unto itself – countries may need far more thoroughgoing revolutions to advance to deepened forms of democracy.

Summary of Findings

When this project approached EDSA, 11-A, and la Rebelión de los Forajidos, it sought to first array the balance of class forces – what we called the “structural narrative.” Then it process-traced backwards from the narrative to uncover key causal factors. Once that was done, the project then focused on the consequence for that particular narrative on democracy in that country. We argued that each case demonstrated a particular quality of process in middle-class narrative formation, based on the balance of class forces and the more immediate events precipitating each protest.

The impetus for this narrative-centric approach came from the empirical observation that three major protests that removed democratically-elected presidents in the Philippines, Venezuela, and Ecuador – EDSA 2, 11-de-Abril, and La Rebelion de los

Forajidos, respectively – all featured public discourse that elevated the role of the middle class in fomenting these events. Their attempted targets were three populist presidents:

Joseph “Erap” Estrada, Hugo Chavez, and Lucio Gutierrez. In all three cases, distinct social and political coalitions evoked “the middle class” as a justification for the inherently democratic nature of these protests. This was despite the observable fact that in

227 agitating to eject these presidents, the “middle class” was acting outside of democratic institutional channels, and arguably rejecting the votes of the lower class voters who had brought these presidents into power. Furthermore, because the aftermath of these protests was ambiguous for the consolidation and function of liberal democratic institutions in these countries, this project saw significant value in studying the historical origins and causal effects of middle-class narrative formation in these three cases.

Table 3. Summary of Main Findings Philippines Venezuela Ecuador Protest Event EDSA Revolution 11-de-Abríl (2002) La Rebelión de los (1986) Forajidos (2005) Successful or Successful Failed Successful Failed Revolution from the Middle? Successful Catholic Church + ------Quito Middle Class Hegemonic Bloc Oligarchic Families Challengers Communist Chavismo Political Class Party/New People’s (Chavez+State+Urban Army Poor) vs. CTV, FEDECAMARAS, Old Punto Fijo Pact Qualities of New M/c defined as Contested narrative, “Revolutionary” Middle-Class including the political polarization class, bureaucratic Narrative Church and presents opposing in origin, radical in oligarchy, exclusive narratives, political outlook. “revolutionary” role of the definition class of middle-class is unstable Civil Society Populist pressure Organized opposition Indigenous Challenges from urban por, to Chávez, movement and White-collar protest colonization of civil other cause- movements society of urban poor oriented civil society groups Constraints to Oligarchic Hyperolarized Middle-class Democratic Hegemonic Veto Plebiscitarianism Plebiscitarianism Deepening

The qualities of the middle class narrative after the revolution from the middle were also of central importance in this study. We saw in the Philippines as we looked at

228 the middle-class narrative from the first EDSA Revolution in 1986 that oligarchic elites and the Catholic Church were able to “win over the middle forces,” calling themselves middle class and claiming victory at EDSA. By inserting themselves into the narrative, the narrative itself would eventually insulate the oligarchic class and the Church from criticism years later when they opposed the presidency of Joseph Estrada at EDSA 2. The problem with a co-opted narrative is that for subordinate classes – in the Philippines’ case, white-collar workers – opposing the ruling elite through protest did not garner any support. The ironic fact is that the narrative may tell the middle class they are important, but it is in fact the oligarchs and the Church who can really compel the masses. As a larger consequence, it would be harder to deepen a democracy with a middle-class narrative in the hands of oligarchic elites as they wield a hegemonic oligarchic veto.

In Venezuela, the failure of the 11-A anti-Chavista coup in 2002 – both in allowing Chávez to return to Miraflores and allowing Pedro Carmona to issue authoritarian edicts – demonstrated to storytellers that the middle class was incapable of leading a charge for democracy. If the middle class does support Chávez, they are branded as traitors. If Chávez claims middle class support, he is challenged. And if the opposition claims middle class support, Chavistas easily remind them that the middle class supported a coup and an authoritarian interlude, if even only for a day. It would seem that the consequence of neither side being able to fully define or write the narrative of the middle class prevents either side from developing cross-class support, or better put, it prevents them from creating a hegemonic coalition. Combined with Chavez's increasingly aggressive style after 11-A, and the result is a hyperpolarized plebiscitary constraint to democratic deepening.

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In Ecuador, the slow-motion collapse of representative democracy, the weak party system, regionalism, and intensified indigenous protest weakened elite hegemony. With no ruling classes to guide the development of the narrative, and no one to contest, elites became opponents and the regionally-based Quiteno middle class becomes los forajidos.

Ecuador seems to be a strange case where anything that can go wrong in the balance of class power, does go wrong: the delicate equilibrium between the coast and the sierra is upset by the expanding state, the pacted democracy fails because demands are too great and parties too weak, etc. In any case, the middle class narrative that emerges from la

Rebelión de los Forajidos positions the middle class against all rulers, claims no organization or group controls them, and that they are practicing and validating a new type of democratic engagement – “la forma insurrection.” Of all the three cases,

Ecuador’s middle class asserts its most independent nature through Correa’s populism.

The heavy-handed and technocratic approach of this forajido-comprised government has put it at odds with the indigenous movement and it is important to remind ourselves that the demands of a great deal of the forajidos were not liberal-democratic, but formulated as radical. Here we see a combination of class-power and political-institutional constraints in the form of middle-class plebiscitarianism.

Case Selection, Causes, Extending Scope Conditions

In the introduction, this project justified its case selection by arguing that each country could be paired with the others in a reasonable approximation of similar social-structural dynamics in order to tease out the effects of certain key variations. In other words, there were “at least two reasons” for selecting any one of the countries in this project, based on

230 its similarities and dissimilarities to the other two cases. To be technical, these were three pairs of “most similar systems/Millian method of difference” (Przeworksi and Teune

1970), based on their scores on their “hegemonic stability,” “political stability,” and

“regionalism.” The project justified selecting the Philippines and Ecuador because though both had similar histories of political instability, the Philippines has had longer bouts of oligarchic class hegemony. Similarly, it selected the Philippines and Venezuela as both had been hegemonically-stable, but varied in their political stability. Finally, it justified selecting Ecuador and Venezuela as two oil states which varied in the regional emanation/concentration of political power. Of course, all three cases had experienced a massive, middle-class protest and were all semiperipheral nations, criteria which served as broader scope conditions for this project. In part, it is necessary to restate the original logic of selection so as to remind the reader that such criteria were heuristic and not meant to be causal in their own right.

However, hegemonic stability, political stability, and regionalism did feature in the analytic narratives for each case, so it is worth exploring their ultimate relationship to this project’s causal variables. After a close historical analysis of all three cases, we can conclude on balance that the three-way pairing of these cases may provide a strong, interlocking justification for their selection as units of analysis, but not necessarily for determining the causal weight of key variables – or at least the variables identified in the

Introduction. Regionalism proved to be an important distinction for Ecuador, but to elevate it to the level of a crucial causal variable would be erroneous. The costa/sierra divide which had historically divided Ecuadorian power elites is best understood in the context of this project as an historical circumstance that explains elite divisions, which is

231 conceptually-analogous to the Marcos Era in the Philippines and the breakdown period of the partyarchy in Venezuela. Nor can we rightly say that “political stability” or

“hegemonic stability” were – by themselves – the central outcomes to be explained: both are oblique references concept of class-power and political-institutional constraint fields, but the criteria for selection based on these stability factors were focused on the era before the revolution from the middle. Ultimately, we were interested in hegemonic stability in the Philippines, but the explanation and conceptualization for that stability we found in the concept of the oligarchic hegemonic veto. Thus, it should be repeated that this study was not deriving causal inferences on these criteria for case selection, but those criteria did hint at the importance of certain dimensions in the outcome variable.

What does this mean for this study's scope conditions? The selection criteria for the Philippines, Venezuela, and Ecuador do not affect the range of cases for which this study should apply: semiperipheral countries in the post-Third Wave period which have experienced a massive, middle-class protest. In fact, the framework tested and refined here through these closely-related cases makes us more confident about its applicability.

Granted, this project was not designed to end the discussion about these events or middle- class formation, but rather to stimulate and push scholarship towards a more eventful and theoretically-distinct approach.

Narratives, Theory, and Causal Hypotheses

This project has attempted to treat the middle class as if it were “an historical phenomenon, unifying a number of disparate and seemingly unconnected events, both in the raw material of experience and in consciousness” (Thompson 1963: 9). It saw

232 narrative as the best distillation of that phenomenon that unifies disparate events, most literally: “Class is defined by men as they live their own history, and, in the end, this is its only definition” (Thompson 1963: 11). This project took this tack because it promised to better illuminate the relationship between the middle class and democracy as we posited that how a middle-class narrative is made, for what purpose, and by whom were central questions that spoke directly to the that relationship, especially in the developing world.

The framework it erected in Chapter 2 saw narrative as the tie between left-Weberian, symbolic power, and linguistic approaches to middle-class formation. By focusing on the class-power, symbolic, and linguistic content of public narratives, this project suggested that narratives of class constitute the ways in which classes relate to each other. Thus in theory, the middle-class narrative was a constructed phenomenon that affects class power.

On balance, the theoretical framework did expose patterns of middle-class formation in these cases which add to our knowledge about the middle class in the developing world. Using narratives, we revealed that the balance of class forces in each case were indeed supported by and constrained by class narratives, especially the middle- class narratives that emerged after revolutions from the middle in the Philippines and

Ecuador. Anti-Marcos oligarchic elites in the Philippines had to work very hard to construct and define a middle class that supported their interests, defying the notion that white-collar workers were inherently moderate – a finding which suggests that

“moderation” as a middle-class attribute is subject to historical context, at the very least.

Political deal-making was the source of terms now known to be exclusively middle class in the Philippines – even if the alliance between left and center failed. Still, it took EDSA to cement that notion, which also added revolutionary potential to the class narrative, and

233 even then, the broad definition of the “middle forces” in the Philippines suggests that even the process of middle-class formation through narrative construction is hardly an teleological phenomenon, nor is it predictable simply reading off of class structure. These findings weaken the strict structure-to-consciousness approach of previous work, while demonstrating that symbolic distinctions and language itself are best understood through their relationship to narrative. The Philippines indeed was an excellent showcase for the power of this theoretical framework.

However, results in Venezuela suggest some temperance. Evidence suggests that economic instability can exert variable influence on this process of middle-class formation when revolutions from the middle are not involved. Through the 1960s and

1970s, Venezuela seems to have produced a strong alignment between the structural development of the middle sectors and an incipient middle-class narrative based on prosperity, despite the AD-COPEI polyclass narrative. However, despite the effectiveness of the narrative and the degree of AD-COPEI influence on class formation, once the price of oil dropped and the material basis for Venezuelan partyarchy disappeared, the prosperity narrative turned against the old parties – the middle class became associated with the indulgent 1970s. The telling statistic that from 1993 to 1996, the percentage of people willing to call themselves “middle class” versus “working class” decreased from

55 to 29 percent. There are several implications from the Venezuelan case. First, drastic structural shifts – economic downturns, rapid development – can break and make narratives: they exert significant pressure on hegemonic elites to maintain their material and cultural bases of consent and rule. We can speculate that the partyarchy's denial of class as a salient political identity in Venezuela was as effective as long as the material

234 bases of consent were present; this is corroborated by broader theories of hegemony (see

Przeworski 1986).

But what we may further speculate is that without a revolution from the middle early on in Venezuelan history, akin to EDSA or los forajidos, the influence of the partyarchy over the middle class was more likely to shift. That is, it is one thing to create a class from above, but it has significant differences from creating one “from the middle” or more specifically, through historical struggle. Certain regimes like China and South

Korea have been capable of building the middle class from above, using it to reinforce totalitarian and authoritarian regimes (Yang n/d) – there are parallels therefore with

Venezuela in the 1970s, though despite different developmental economies and political regimes. The telling comparison here is that while China's improving economic conditions seem to have cleaved the middle class closer to the state, but what turned the

South Korean middle class into a “democratic” one was not its structural origins per se, but the struggle against authoritarian rule in the 1980s (Villegas and Yang 2011).

Venezuela stands perhaps closer to China, but with a negative shift in economic conditions, rather than a positive one: the result being the rejection of the state by its erstwhile creations. South Korea suggests that top-down class building projects are also susceptible to the contingent occurrence of revolutions from the middle, but as other studies show, those narratives have a far more enduring effect on political configurations

(Villegas and Yang 2011). Point being, regimes that create the middle class from above may only have as much influence as economic conditions allow. This simply suggests that middle-class formation is still subject to structural factors, especially in the absence of revolutions from the middle, and that class formation – consolidated class formation –

235 is more likely with events driving the process rather than states.

But to state that theory must go with empirical data is simply stating the obvious.

Here the path dependence framework alongside theory and the case studies in this project reinforce the centrality of the revolution from the middle for middle-class formation. In the Introduction, this study proposed that path dependence would allow it to understand the array of causes and outcomes. The above discussion about the theoretical framework suggested that middle-class formation without a revolution from the middle may be more sensitive to structural changes. Focusing on EDSA, 11-A, and los Forajidos as critical junctures – contingent moments which set off patterns of institutional reproduction – this project revealed the causal importance of narratives of the middle class and how they emerged from these moments. Even with antecedent conditions at play, the events were contingent and operated independently of existing structures, revealing how middle-class formation builds on remembrances of protests and protesters, winners and losers.

Narrative Subtypes

One of the interesting findings from this study were narrative subtypes. These were smaller, yet common constructions that appeared throughout the cases. One such subtype was the middle-class lament. The lament is often told when an attempted protest or actual protest fails. In the lament, the middle class is historically emasculated, that is, its ability to make historical change is gone, or perhaps never existed in the first place. And a lament may take a different form, depending on the larger type of narrative formation taking place above it. So, for example, laments in the Philippines are derived from the co- opted narrative. Bong Austero’s “Open Letter to Our Leaders” shows that the lament may

236 demonstrate a weakness in the middle class, it can also unearth the hegemonic nature of that larger narrative formulation:

I am angry. And I know that there are many out there who are angrier than I am for the same reason. And that reason is simple. I am sick and tired of all you guys claiming to speak for me and many Filipinos. I feel like screaming every time you mouth words about fighting for my freedom and my rights, when you are obviously are just thinking about yours. You tell me that the essence of democracy is providing every citizen the right to speak his or her mind and make his or her own informed judgments, but you yourselves do not respect my silence and the choices I and many others have made. In other words, your concept of democracy is limited to having your rights and your freedoms respected, at the expense of ours (Austero 2/27/2006 << http://bongaustero.blogspot.com/2006/02/open-letter-to-our-leaders.html>>)

Austero’s rage lifts the veil on hegemony. Compare this to the laments from Venezuela in

Chapter 4; in a context where there is not a clear hegemonic narrative, it may be more likely for laments to take a more subdued tone. In any case, the lament is a fairly common narrative subtype and seems to vary depending on the larger narrative context.

Another subtype that appeared was the plea. The plea asks the middle class to act, for it has done something before or is supposed to act in particular moments. We could conceive of the Starbucks protesters in the Philippines and making a plea to the middle class. The tricky thing here is being able to determine if the person making the plea is being sarcastic or sincere. Recall the satirical caricature of “Un Futre” from 1920s Quito.

Crying out for one’s underwear is more of an attack on the subaltern or a move in a

Bourdieusian classification struggle (1985). But there are pleas that are made in hegemonic contexts that look like excoriations of the hegemon, but are better read as demands for action. For example, this plea to the clase media forajida in Ecuador:

What option does democracy have in Ecuador is there is no social fabric to produce it, to keep it alive, and to defend it at every turn? How are we supposed to be critics of paternalism and authoritarianism if there is not social actor that can demand another form of political organization? When the price of oil drops is the same middle class going to be disenchanted with its messianic leader? Nope, because the root of the problem is social autonomy, class identity, citizenship that is the product of a middle class independent of

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the state. That the entrepreneurs consolidate their businesses and turn a blind eye to democracy doesn’t surprise. That indigenous and popular organizations find themselves atomized and isolated by a dictatorial power also isn’t all that exceptional. The only class, la de los forajidos, can engender in its brain a solid democratic organization is bought, has sold its soul and condemns Ecuador to what we’re living through now (Crespo Hoy 1/9/11)

We can easily read this as an unsympathetic attack. But, if we assume la clase media forajida to be an up-and-coming hegemon, this plea is a plea for action; a call to the class who made a difference before. In other words, we can look at these pleas as Weapons of the Weak (Scott 1985) or as part of a Thompsonian “field-of-force” (1968) or moral economy. Further investigation on this point would be truly illuminating.

Defining Revolution from the Midddle: Pitfalls and Prospects for Refinement

Table 5 arrays the three core protests in the Philippines, Venezuela, and Ecuador alongside their scores for the measures for the revolution from the middle. In addition, I have added the EDSA 2 protests in the Philippines against Joseph Estrada and the protests against Abdalá Bucaram in Ecuador, for comparison's sake. As argued in the Introduction, the first EDSA and los Forajidos score positively on all four measurement criteria for a revolution from the middle – those events had contingent outcomes, were comprehended through the lens of an agential middle class, which altered the definition of the class itself.

In contrast, 11-A in Venezuelawas contingent and while Chavistas and anti-Chavistas debated the role of the middle class, there was an evident discussion of events through the lens of class. The difference, however, was that the middle class was not given agency in those events, nor did the definition of who was middle class change – to be specific, definitional questions remained unresolved, leading to the use of “la clase media” as a bludgeon for both sides.

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The difficulty here is that while this study proposed that all four criteria were necessary for a positive score on revolution from the middle, the conceptualization and operationalization reveal that different combinations of positive and negative scores do not inform the type of non-revolution. In other words, the variable can tell us what revolution from the middle is, but not what it isn’t. Case knowledge allows this study to suggest that EDSA 2 and the anti-Bucaram protests were “hegemonic revolts” (or evidence of an oligarchic hegemonic veto) insofar as oligarchic elites were capable of motivating civil society to defend their interests. The difference, however, was the extensive discursive appearance of the “middle class” and “middle forces” in the

Philippines, while the protests against Bucaram did not feature a preponderance of explicit middle-class references. Indeed, the reason why we can classify 11-A in

Venezuela as a “failed” revolution from the middle was that there was evidence of an incipient middle-class narrative forming, but those advocating that narrative failed in their attempt to remove Chávez, and thus lost the capacity to exclusively define the middle class.

Table 4. Case Scores for Revolutions “from the Middle” and Non-Revolutions

Contingent Comprehension M/C Meaning Revolution Outcome? of Rupture Given or “from the M/C? Agency? Definition Middle”? of M/C Changes? EDSA Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes (1986) EDSA 2 Yes Yes Yes No No (hegemonic (2001) revolt) 11-A Yes Yes (Contested) No No No (failed) (2002)

239 vs. Yes No No No No (hegemonic Bucaram revolt) (1997) Los Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Forajidos (2005)

So while other definitions of revolution can classify negative cases – for instance

Skocpol (1979) with social revolution and its “diminished” cousin, political revolution – this project’s formulations cannot. Future research should determine ways in which we can correctly identify negative cases, so that they are logically in line with the definition of revolution from the middle. Still, the definition of revolution from the middle operated well for this study – it was capable of identifying the key differences and similarities between all three cases.

Without going further and discussing the outcomes, this study is prepared to propose an hypothesis based on the results of its theoretical and broadly causal- conceptual tasks. Given that revolutions from the middle served as central moments for durable transformations in middle-class language and class power in the Philippines and

Ecuador, we can appropriately argue that revolutions from the middle are necessary conditions for stabilizing middle-class formation. The converse of that is, when no revolution from the middle has occurred, middle class formation may be more subject to structural strains which can reverse processes of middle-class formation. In other words, no revolution from the middle, no consolidated middle-class.

There are two implications for this hypothesis. First, narratives forged through revolutions from the middle may retain salience even as structural conditions change. In other words, narratives may be self-reproducing in the path-dependent sense, and while they may evolve (Thelen 2004), their core elements may remain the same. The enduring

240 nature of middle-class narratives in the United States and Britain suggest self- reproducing mechanisms at work, though those two cases may be outliers or “first mover” cases that might be subject to different rules. For developing world cases, the narrative may serve as either an impediment or a means by which new “members” are admitted to the middle class, but with the implication that such a move would not only be a cultural one, but a political one as well, given that narratives underpin the balance of class power, and that balance can determine the constraints to democratic deepening. The second implication is that class narratives forged through revolutions from the middle may require other revolutions from the middle or significant transformations otherwise conceived to create new ones; this is a broad extension of the implications of path dependence on this hypothesis.

The Causal Importance of Middle-Class Narratives

The qualities of middle-class narratives were central in this study’s argument. In all three cases, the definition of who belong to do the middle class and what their relationship was to democracy had strong (if not lasting) implications for their types of constraints to deepening. These narratives underpinned the balance of class power in the Philippines and Ecuador – they affirmed the moral superiority of the “middle class” and validated its less-than-(liberal)-democratic means for asserting their influence. This implies perhaps the insidious nature of middle-class narratives – or more specifically, their hegemonic qualities. One common point of comparison between the three cases studied here is the degree of hegemony or the extensiveness of it or its strength, etc. Comparing class coalitions and the middle-class narratives they produce suggests a few things about the

241 role of narrative in formulating a hegemonic bloc. For Gramsci (1971), hegemony was a means by which dominant classes could lead subalterns by convincing them the interests of the dominant class were their interests. They could do so through a combination of coercion and consent. Hegemony is by definition never complete – classes do, at their core, have different interests – and so we can also think of hegemony as a practice or an ongoing process (Roseberry 1994).

In each of the three cases presented in this project, particular combinations of would-be ruling classes involve themselves in an attempted hegemonic project, that is, they attempt to express their interests as the interests of “the middle class.” The

Philippines is the clearest case of this – oligarchs and the Church being named as middle class, but have to work for three years, negotiating with the left, organizing white-collar workers, etc. before events accelerate the process. But this is actually a bit of a curious claim – usually when dealing with the developing world middle class, the idea is that the class aspires upwards to the elites. I think the middle-class narrative is a special case where at least in name, dominant classes want to define themselves as middle class. The particular connotation of the middle class as a modern, democratizing agent can help validate the leadership of a would-be dominant class. In the developing world context, taking up the mantle of the middle class during moments of crisis – especially hegemonic crisis --- can help legitimate the dominant class’ continued rule by ensuring they will oversee the pace and quality of political and social modernization. In other words, the hegemonic power afforded to the Philippine oligarchy through the middle-class narrative allows them to perform “democratic” acts like EDSA 2: moments that explicitly lay out the terms by which the Philippines will advance.

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Ecuador’s more ascendant narrative demonstrates a sort of double-move on the part of narratives in this study. Clearly, La Rebelión de los Forajidos was an anti- hegemonic statement: it was a rejection of the already-tenuous political power of old

Costa and Sierra elites. The quiteño origins of los foroajidos and the centrality of Quito in the protests suggest that this was perhaps a decisive blow in a “war of position.” However, like Russia whose state was “gelatinous” in Gramsci’s terms, these radical middle classes found themselves faced with the task of consolidating their power while attempting to carry out their reform agenda. In that sense, the narrative fuels the populism of Rafael

Correa. It makes sense to think of Correa as a projection of middle-class hegemony onto

Ecuador where the class retains control over its story, in a way, but radiates it out through populism and plebiscitarianism. In part, such plebiscitarianism is necessary since the state has yet to truly “command” in Ecuadorian history without the influence of oligarchic forces, but also because Ecuador has significant civil society mobilization among its indigenous population and other cause-oriented groups. So being a democratic and revolutionary class in Ecuador, this middle class is counterhegemonic, but in establishing its own hegemony, requires more coercion than consent.

Alternatively, consider Venezuela: the middle-class narrative was and remains contested. Neither Chavistas nor anti-Chavistas can effectively claim middle class support without a “valid” invective being thrown at each other. Here without a shared notion of the middle class, the balance of class power is thrown into crisis – a Gramscian organic crisis, if you will. But the pattern of events in Venezuela is quite interesting – the failure of 11-A emptied out the “baggage” so to speak of the previous middle-class narrative, truly destroying the bases of hegemony for Punto Fijo democracy. In the other

243 two cases, the connotations between the middle class and democracy are extolled if at least still in place. Venezuela therefore does not even have a revolutionary, democratic middle-class in its imaginary, or if it did, I would imagine a Chavista tearing it down very quickly. This produces an intractable war of maneuver in Venezuela, but one where it is unlikely either side will ever win, in part because they do not believe their own arguments.

In all three cases, the quality and presence of middle-class narratives clearly has causal implications for the balance of class power and conditions how elites respond to challenges from below. The narratives that emerge from revolutions from the middle in the Philippines and Ecuador truly do influence the presentation and justification of class power in these cases. The absence of a similar narrative in Venezuela only reinforces the fact that without a middle class narrative, hegemony may be practically impossible. Thus it would be incorrect to say that what we are viewing is simply an interpretation of class- power politics in these cases, or a new window onto class power politics. Though in

Chapter 2 this project suggested that narratives allow us to parallel class power analysis at one ontological level with discourse on the other, it would be a mistake to suggest that in practice or on the ground the two are not closely related. Here heuristic frameworks give way to historical evidence: narratives create the balance of class power.

Narrative and Coalitional Arguments

This finding challenges long-standing left-Weberian arguments about the balance of class power and the interests of social classes, particularly the middle class. Post-Barrington

Moore arguments about middle-class formation and class power all focus on the

244 expression of class interests through political parties. Without going into an extended discussion about the role of political parties as interest aggregators or moderating forces, it can be said that middle-class formation is the result of party politics, and that for analytical purposes, looking at “middle-class parties” is sufficient enough for measuring middle-class politics. Texts like Luebbert’s Liberalism, Fascism, or Social Democracy

(1991), Rueschemeyer et al.’s Capitalist Development and Democracy (1992) and Collier and Collier’s Shaping the Political Arena (1991 [2002]) all highlight the pivotal position of middle-class parties as representatives of middle-class interests. Lubbert, for example, sums up his approach to class politics thusly: “By focusing on the behavior and electoral bases of parties… we can draw some conclusions about the comparative extent to which classes actually did behave in politics as unitary actors” (1991: 6). In other words,

Luebbert, like Lipset and Rokkan before him (1967) approaches parties and votes as the ultimate instance or indicator of the aggregation of class interests. This is no different from Rueschemeyer et al. (1992)’s approach, which we dismissed as theoretically underdeveloped in Chapter 2.To be sure, there are similarities in how regimes behave depending on with whom a consolidated middle class chooses to ally in Lubbert’s book and in this study. For instance, a coalition of landed elites and white-collar workers produces a conservative reaction to working-class and peasant politics which in interwar

Europe produced Fascism and Nazism and in the 21st century Philippines and produced

EDSA 2. This study certainly does not reject coalitional or configurational analysis in the study of class and democracy, but there are significant problems when dealing with developing-world cases, and these three in particular.

The main problem is that the cases studied here indicate that political alliances

245 between classes are not always forged through votes and cannot necessarily be understood through voting behavior for parties or otherwise. In all three cases, the political power of the middle class is predicated on the contingent coalitional outcomes of non-electoral mobilizations – hence the concept of “revolutions from the middle.” In fact, non-electoral mobilizations have been so central to the latter-day politics of the middle class in each of these three countries that the concept of parties as sole indicators of middle-class politics is patently absurd. To be sure, elections have indicated middle-class power as in Ecuador and pre-Chavez Venezuela, but they mean (and have meant) next to nothing for class politics in the Philippines and are otherwise only but one indicator of the range of political influence of the middle class. Indeed, this project has demonstrated that the impact of class narratives derived from the success or failure of revolutions from the middle plays a far more indicative – and causal – role in the development of democracy in these countries, and arguably other countries which have experienced similar middle-class uprisings.

The result of those revolutions from the middle – middle-class narratives – clearly act as organizing principles for would-be hegemonic elites in the Philippines and Ecuador

– the story of EDSA and los forajidos not only justifies power, but endows it. And again, their absence in Venezuela suggests that the reason why a balance of class power is impossible is that there is no narrative basis for anyone to rule. Furthermore, in all three cases here, the size of the middle class as a proportion of the population hovers around 12 to 14 percent: this is hardly an electoral mass capable of achieving change without coalition partners. However, in each case, actors have not taken the party route to establish (or try to establish) the independent power of the middle class. “Moral

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Majorities” in the street matter more than electoral ones, a focus on party support at the polls is inappropriate, and as such, parties as proxies are poor measures for middle-class politics.

In other words, political alliances and configurations still matter, but to understand why certain coalitions appear – especially in developing world countries – the narrative underpinnings of that alliance must be closely studied. Not that this finding is altogether new: Gareth Stedman Jones (1983) makes a similar claim about the discursive basis of

English Chartism. The point is, movements, parties, and their coalitions are subject to existing discursive structures. They are not entirely determined by them, but in certain cases when narratives emerge from revolutionary events, we would be amiss to ignore how the stories of those events weigh on the balance of class power: those forging that balance certainly don’t. 1 And certainly, as we peruse party statements, we should see how parties play a part in the narrative construction of classes – it may have more of an effect on the strength of the party than any implicit relationship it might have with its supposed

“base.”

Defining Constraints to Democratic Deepening

In the Introduction, this study suggested approaching the question of democracy and democratization in these cases not through a focus on regime type, but the constraints to that country’s regime to becoming more fully democratic. In other words, the thing to be

1 Implicitly, we could go back and attempt to excavate the narrative origins of class alliances in interwar Europe or 1930s Latin America. Some work has made some moves in this direction. Parker’s (1998) study of the Peruvian middle class shows how the discursive construction of “la clase media” made it difficult for Haya de la Torre’s APRA to make inroads among this group. I am not advocating a project of systematically revising the major works in comparative historical social science, but rather that we look at different angles and not accept uncritically the importance of parties.

247 explained were the constraints to democratic deepening placed on the Philippines,

Venezuela, and Ecuador by middle-class formation. In part, this project chose this route because current definitions of democratic regimes are at once hamstrung by calls to conceptual rigor as well as by the ongoing processes of political change in many “gray area” countries. Accepting that the Philippines, Venezuela, and Ecuador were less than

“perfect,” this project approached the problem as one where political and social dynamics were hidden in such vague definitions, and that a focus on deepening could illuminate the interplay between institutions, classes, and civil society that can distinguish one “gray area” regime from another. The study then made the broad proposal that such constraints were affected somehow by the combination of the preexisting balance of class power, the revolution from the middle, and the qualities of the new middle-class narrative. Thus, the origins of oligarchic hegemonic veto, hyperpolarized plebiscitarianism, and middle-class plebiscitarianism would be found in the very processes of middle class formation. These constraints should be evident as these countries experienced attempts to increase the substantive, formal, and effective participation in democracy.

On that mark, this study did clearly demonstrate a causal relationship between those complexes of causes and the type of constraints to deepening in each case.

Extending the discussion from the latter section, middle-class narratives forged from the revolution from the middle in the Philippines and Ecuador affected how would-be hegemonic elites viewed their position vis-à-vis the middle class narrative, which subsequently affected the nature of the balance of class power. The oligarchic bloc in the

Philippines and the forajido middle class technocrats in Ecuador each saw their victory at

EDSA and at La Rebelión de los Forajidos as a victory of the middle class, which

248 because of contingent circumstances, was a middle class of their making. Revolutionary and democratic, the middle class narrative that emerged from those events justified and enabled particular types of political and social configurations which have affected what is now considered “revolutionary” and “democratic.” As such, when challenged from civil society, these new “middle classes” responded with justifications along those lines.

However, differences in these countries’ antecedent conditions inform the differences in their ultimate constraints to democratic deepening. In the Philippines, the reforging of the oligarchy-Church coalition at EDSA at the exclusion of the Left was only perhaps possible because the Philippine oligarchic class was not riven so deeply by conflict, and certainly not divided so deeply by region. The nature of their displacement from power – Marcos’ sultanistic rule – was in fact the very thing to be overcome. In contrast, while there had been furtive attempts over the years to establish a working hegemonic coalition in Ecuador, time simply caught up to the costa and sierra elites – economic shifts began to obliterate their capacity to rule, while the indigenous movement slowly but surely became a key actor in national politics. Furthermore, the Philippine transition to democracy took place as a result of the revolution from the middle, while

Ecuador’s return to democracy was pacted and proved to be quite unstable.

The resulting constraints to deepening take the character of the middle-class narrative in both cases. In the Philippines, the oligarchic hegemonic veto defends the position of the oligarchic class if democratic institutions return a challenge to their power.

In addition, these classes have a “monopoly over the legitimate use of narrative” so to speak, which prevents white-collar workers from effectively challenging the oligarchy on their own terms – middle-class terms. In Ecuador, the victorious forajidos turned to

249 plebiscitary politics to push through their radical agenda against a reeling oligarchy. Their agenda reflected the technocratic interests of Correa and his close advisors, and though ostensibly radical and democratic, it crowds out civil society and diminishes the influence of the indigenous movement in its politics by the techniques they use to advance their agenda.

In Venezuela, where narrative was not forged through revolution from the middle, the subsequent hyperpolarized plebiscitarian politics stemmed from the active rejection of the middle class as the core political agent in Venezuelan politics after a tumultuous and precipitous decline of Punto Fijo democracy. Structural conditions destroyed the social bases of AD-COPEI hegemony, including the close association between the middle class as economic prosperity. Emboldened by his survival at 11-A, Chávez has used plebiscitary politics to outflank the remnants of the Punto Fijo era and the new opposition, but both sides would rather use the “middle class” as an means to attack each other. The resulting type of constraint prevents demands from being effectively met, or at least in a way that aspires to be more democratic and more substantive.

As intimated in the beginning of this chapter, looking at constraints to deepening suggests that middle-class formation in these cases inevitably leads to a hamstrung democracy. Such suggestions are a step too far: looking at constraints only reveals the configuration of impediments to deepening, but does not suggest that deepening is precluded. In fact, both Venezuela and Ecuador have made some inroads against economic inequality by vigorous state intervention among lower classes, particularly the urban poor. Sympathetic economic analyses of the Chavez regime suggest income inequality has gone down, social service beneficiaries have increased, public debt has

250 decreased, school enrollment is up, and a series of other indicators suggest that the

“substantive” portion of deepening is taking place in Venezuela (Weisbrot, Rey, and

Sandoval 2009). Bowen argues that Correa’s state-making reforms have rationalized a state long known for its ineffectiveness (2009), a prerequisite for any sort of deepening.

The Philippines has been long known for its vibrant civil society, and certainly its civil society has been quite self-conscious about its role as democratic bulwark (see Racelis

2003). All that being said, however, deepening in these cases requires a careful unpacking of the underlying social and political dimensions which prevent it from going further. It is one thing to say that a country will not deepen – which is not the case here –and quite another to suggest that in order for deepening to take place, certain constraints must be dealt with. These constraints reach far deeper than formal institutional configurations and as such, measuring a case’s “democracy” by regime type would still be inexact. Indeed, countries like the United States and Sweden have constraints to deepening; different ones, and perhaps unintended consequences of the process by which class forces came to power in both cases. On this point, we can only defer to other scholars and practitioners for whom this study could provide key insights into their tasks.

That being said, we can state some hypotheses based on the entirety of the causal model. While the outcomes presented here are not exhaustive of all possible forms of constraint, these cases when juxtaposed with each other suggest comparative pathways, which at worst indicate one of many paths to the same outcome. In any case, we can proceed by hypothesizing that revolutions from the middle are necessary conditions for class-based constraints to deepening. The Philippines and Ecuador indicate this is likely to be true, reinforced by the absence of a class-based constraint to deepening in

251

Venezuela as a result of its lack of a revolution from the middle. But given that middle- class plebiscitarianism inhabits both the class-based and political-institutional constraint sets, and that hyperpolarized plebiscitarianism in Venezuela is a member of the political- institutional set only, we can hypothesize a bit more specifically about hyperpolarization: a failed revolution from the middle is a sufficient condition for hyperpolarized constraints to democratic deepening. That is to say, failed revolutions from the middle destabilize the middle-class narrative, which in turn prevents would-be hegemonic actors to build a class coalition with the “middle class.”

Some Speculations about Latter-Day Revolutionary Waves, Middle-Class Formation and Democracy Let us restate the three main hypotheses developed in this Conclusion:

H1. Revolutions from the middle are necessary conditions for stabilizing middle- class formation

H2. Revolutions from the middle are necessary conditions for class-based constraints to deepening

H3. A failed revolution from the middle is a sufficient condition for hyperpolarized constraints to democratic deepening

To be clear, two of these hypotheses had to adapt existing variables to make their claims.

That is, “stabilized middle class formation” was not a variable in this project, and “failed revolution” was not an attribute for revolution from the middle. Still, given the evidence presented in this study, such refinements of concepts and variables were (and are) necessary steps to extend the findings of this project. That being said, there were many other hypotheses which this study considered, but rejected them based on insufficient causal leverage. Future research may consider intensive case studies or small-N comparative analysis to test these assertions, nonetheless.

252

The great test of this project’s validity appeared just as it was being completed. At the time of writing, countries across the Middle East and North Africa were experiencing what commentators collectively called the “Arab Spring” – a surge of popular revolts against the authoritarian governments in the region. The first such revolt in late 2010 and early 2011 in Tunisia was sparked by the self-immolation of a street vendor in protest against President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, ostensibly middle-class Tunisians utilized the tools of modern social media – Twitter, Facebook, the cell phone – to organize mass protests calling for Ben Ali’s ouster. New elections were set for October 2011. In Egypt, inspired to a certain degree by the success of their Tunisian counterparts, ostensibly middle-class protesters began to organize mass demonstrations against longtime dictator

Hosni Mubarak. Protesters remain vigilant as the Egyptian military appears to have control over the advancement of regime opening. In Libya, protests against the enigmatic

Muanmar Gaddafi escalated into a civil war whose results were as of yet undetermined.

Similar events were also taking place in Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, Morocco, Jordan, Saudi

Arabia, and Iraq. Results in those cases ranged from active repression in Syria to a combination of repression and concession (Bahrain), and limited concessions for democratic opening in others.

The Arab Spring , and it earlier cousins in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the

“Color” and “Flower” revolutions of the early to mid 2000s, were, for various scholars powered by middle-class protesters (see Baev 2011; Hanelt and Bauer 2011; Katz 2007).

The comparative axis of the middle class in these cases was not lost on observers from the developed world: no less an intellect than Paul Krugman identified similarities between the Egyptian protests and People Power in the Philippines (1/30/2011 <<

253 http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/the-manila-parallel/>>). No doubt that these events suggest deep implication for this project’s theoretical and causal frameworks, and certainly the three hypotheses stated above.

The reader will have to accept my tentative and poorly-sourced conclusions here about the Middle East in part because events are unfolding as I write this, but with early reports suggesting some variations between the cases, we can make informed speculations about the resulting regimes and provide guidance to researchers who may wish to look at these cases in depth. First, we should be cautious about jumping to conclusion about the winners and losers of these protest movements, especially as they deal with the “middle class.” This study hypothesized that successful revolutions from the middle will cement middle-class narratives, but also that successful revolutions from the middle will create class-based constraints to democratic deepening. Based on some speculative data, we can suppose that Tunisia and Egypt match the description for

“successful” revolutions from the middle. The caution comes into play if we overstate the effects of these revolutions on democracy – at best, the constraints developed out of these revolutions will be class-based, but the dust has yet to settle in either case, and as such, the content of the middle-class narrative is as yet unknown. The military and fundamentalist religious groups in both countries remain key players in the post- revolutionary period, and their effects on class language must be closely inspected. As

Kristen Stilt notes for Egypt, “a longtime [military-led National Democratic Party] member told me that one of the new names for the NDP under discussion is the Party of the Defenders of the Revolutionary Youth!” (New York Times 3/24/2011). Indeed, if

Krugman’s observations about Egypt are correct and that they parallel the Philippines, the

254 influence of religious groups may alter the definition of middle-class revolution in that country. The result could entrench old elites in Egypt, but simply under new names – potentially “the middle class.” We can speculate based on this project’s hypothesis that the winners may necessarily take up the mantle of the middle class as it gives them revolutionary cache. Conversely, we can say for Arab countries with less ambiguously negative results like Yemen and Jordan that the failure of those revolutions from the middle will necessarily precipitate hyperpolarization through the rejection of the “middle class” center. Clearly, however, we need to do close work with class languages in these countries. What was the nature of pre-revolt middle-class narratives? If these

“facebookers” are the “new” middle class, who were the old ones? Where did they go?

What is the long narrative of the middle class in these countries?

But we should also be cautious about creating a middle class “from abroad.” That is, given the global proclivity to see democracy and the middle-class as concomitant, and attached to that our collective fervor for seeing democratic movements succeed , as foreign observers, we have to be careful about how our observations create or reinforce class distinctions. No more is this evident in the near-universal laud placed on new social media: social networks, twitter, etc. There is no doubt that authoritarian regimes throughout the Middle East realized that social networking over the internet would cause significant legitimacy problems and assist in organizing opposition protests. That in

Tunisia and Egypt, protesters overcame attempts at blocking communication is certainly worthy of study and worthy of admiration. However, when it comes to class, we have to keep in mind that access to internet services in the developing world is not equally distributed. Granted that movements and states can and will innovate to organize their

255 supporters, the internet offers a powerful tool. The problem lies when we abet the fetishism of the technology in these cases, extolling the virtues of mass communication which may form a barrier for lower classes in their demand making. The poor may not communicate their demands the same way, through the same media (see again Rafael

2004). That they may reject their new middle-class leaders for religious or military ones does not necessarily suggest their needs or demands are any less “modern.” That we see ourselves in the “middle classes” of other countries because we too “tweet,” is evidence of the powerful effect of the global middle-class metanarrative. We may validate these forms of revolt, but reject others in part because the claimants are not enough like ourselves.2Being able to follow these events in real-time and across the globe perhaps helped to consolidate that notion of global middle-classness.

But all those negative connotations aside, this project does not necessarily suggest doom and gloom for the Middle East or any country which has undergone a revolution from the middle in recent years. The revolution from the middle has served as a narrative break from the past in the Philippines and Ecuador: a rejection of previous politics and the installation of the new. As we theorized in Chapter 2 and was borne out in the analysis of EDSA 2 in the Philippines, revolutions from the middle allow storytellers to link their narratives to larger metanarratives of democracy and class. In the transition from authoritarianism to democracy like in the Philippines, South Korea, and perhaps in

Tunisia and Egypt, the middle-class narrative can stabilize a weakly-institutionalized democracy as its citizens believe they have fulfilled the necessary first step to democracy,

2 Compare the events here with the overwhelmingly negative response to EDSA 2 by the foreign press. Whereas Filipino protesters were seen as engaging in mob rule, protesters in Egypt and Tunisia were not. Of course, the Philippines was ostensibly a democracy, but the ubiquitous use of the cell phone in the EDSA 2 protests was perhaps only interesting to Filipinos and to Charles Tilly (2002). 256 just as the French did in the French Revolution and just as the Americans and British prove in their national democratic narratives. That is, for all its constraining effects, the revolution from the middle provides a stable hegemonic base for democratic politics.

Again, granted the hegemony may crowd out other voices in the long run, the result is far less ambiguous than Moore’s bloody “bourgeois revolutions” and certainly does not carry the excessive notions of repression inherent in revolutions “from above.” Even in already democratized countries, revolutions from the middle do affirm the salience of democracy as an ideal. That such ambiguous events preserve democracy, even if it is globally, is an achievement given the short history of democracy in world-historical time. And to the extent to which the middle class as a global ideal wreaks havoc on domestic class structures, it does in its own strange way, bring us all together. That we all have work to do to deepen democracy does not mean we can, once in awhile, cheer for freedom and self-determination.

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