Ideology

First Thoughts on Perceptions and Belief

When my wife was a teenager she spent her days walking through the hills of her province, a grenade in her pocket, carrying messages for the local sugar workers’ union. The man who would become her first husband was a charismatic union organiser in the years before his untimely death, a leader of men. My wife’s sisters and brothers had all joined the movement, the Communist-led rebolusyon, in the desperate hope that things would change. Their ideology was less the maxims of Marx and Lenin and more a collection of social norms. They were working against the outrage of massive unemployment, poverty, malnutrition, subsistence-only wages and political exploitation in their own way. And then everything did change.

This was the Philippines under the Marcos dictatorship, just before people power, before the EDSA revolution in 1986 showed the world that enough people with enough hope could change the way of things peacefully.

An important point to realise about that revolution, the first ever to succeed in the Philippines, is that the Communists did not participate, and neither did most of the self-identified left. They simply isolated themselves from history. As with many successful revolutions, people power gave voice to middle class anger, was led by the disaffected amongst the upper classes, and changed an old land-holder regime for another, in the form of Corazon Aquino’s new administration.

Aquino’s ilk are known as trapos – traditional politicians – and they believe in market norms rather than social norms, even though many people would argue that patronage is their prime method of maintaining power. As a way of framing my initial thoughts about ideology in this post I’m drawing the distinction between market and social norms in line with Dan Ariely’s recently published Predictably Irrational. In previous posts I’ve argued that the market is a social system, which I still believe, but I want to suggest here that market norms can be defined by price in some way or another, and that social norms are determined by obligation. They might be part of the same overall system, but they’re definably different.

I also want to argue that market norms alone cannot form a true ideology (capitalism, here, would be a mix of social and market norms). Relating that back to landholding trapos in the Philippines, who are often mired in corruption and are clearly manipulative of the political system, the pure market basis should be obvious.

Everything has a price, even life and death.