EDSA republic – Kenneth Cardenas

Energy after the new strongmen:

February 19, 2023February 24, 2023 Kenneth Cardenas2 Comments

Notes for the next revolution

I will be presenting this paper at Dynamics of Change and Continuity in Philippine Political Economy: Martial Law and the Marcos Restoration on 24 February 2023.

Energy industry reform was one of the defining features of the Edsa Republic’s political economy. It involved the largest privatizations, the largest flows of fresh investment, and the most profitable arms of the largest Philippine conglomerates. As a marquee policy, it also offered a way for successive post-Marcos administrations to signal their commitment to their creditors, repudiate the state-directed orthodoxy of 20^th century development thinking, and experiment with a doctrinaire form of neoliberalism.

Yet market rule broke many of its promises. Monopolization, high prices, and supply shortfalls remain, or have deepened. In abandoning grand, strategic public investment, and in prioritizing investor sentiment and creditworthiness over the quality and price of a modernizing good, energy industry reform saw neoliberalism at the household level, and likely contributed to nostalgia for the megaproject-focused approach last seen under the Bagong Lipunan.

This paper articulates a refusal against both the neoliberalization of energy under the Edsa Republic, and the surrender to “political will”, with its attendant risk of crony capitalism and authoritarianism, pushed by the Philippines’ new strongmen. I argue that electrification uniquely offers embedded lessons for disentangling public investment and commons formation from authoritarianism, debt traps, and development aggression. By listening to the expertise that had been cultivated within Napocor in the late 20^th century, and in electric cooperatives in the early 21^st, and by anticipating energy transitions and crises in the medium-term future, I aim to recuperate a latent developmentalism within the Philippine energy industry as a reservoir of possibility for the next revolution. I pay specific attention to efficiencies that cannot be discovered and/or distorted by the market, and to forms of resistance to centralized power that inhere within the Philippine energy landscape.

Dynamics of Change and Continuity in Philippine Political Economy

November 4, 2022February 19, 2023 Kenneth CardenasLeave a comment

Martial Law and the Marcos Restoration

February 23-24, 2023 via Zoom

The Department of Sociology, Mindanao State University – Iligan Institute of Technology and Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University are convenors of the conference. Other institutions such as the Ateneo de Manila School of Social Sciences, Martial Law Museum, and the University of the Philippines – Diliman’s Department of Political Science are also co-convenors.

Conference website

Half a century after Ferdinand Marcos Sr. put the Philippines under the grip of authoritarian rule, his son is elected as the republic’s 17^th president. The election of Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to the nation’s highest office, on the same year that the 50^th anniversary of Martial Law is being commemorated, heralds a turning point in Philippine history necessitating a critical reassessment of the country’s darkest years in the 20^th century. What has the historic authoritarian turn, embodied by the enactment of Martial Law, meant for the political economy of development in the Philippines? This question gathers particular significance as the return of a Marcos to national power fuels fears of historical revisionism, particularly in the portrayal of touted achievements of Marcos Sr. The deployment of political economy lens in assessing the consequences of Martial Law also enriches contemporary debates on industrialization, sustainable development, neoliberalism and global market integration, and inclusive growth.

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“De-Marcosification” and the rise of new urban rentiers:

October 4, 2022October 4, 2022 Kenneth Cardenas3 Comments

On the unintended consequences of post-EDSA privatizations.

I will be presenting this paper at the The 5th Philippine Studies Conference in Japan organized by the Annual Philippine Studies Forum in Japan, on 27 November 2022.

This paper revisits the lasting imprint left by privatizations after the EDSA Revolution on the development of capitalism in the Philippines in the early 21st century, with an emphasis on path-dependence, unintended consequences, and domestic technocratic and bureaucratic actors.

Focusing on the efforts of the Presidential Commission on Government Reorganization (PCGR) in the late 1980s, it re-evaluates how a specific understanding of the state’s role in the economy was developed through the reorganization of crony- and state-owned enterprises. It proposes that consequential features of privatization were not the outcome of an ideologically-coherent liberalization. Instead, they were part of a moralized “De-Marcosification” process: liquidating crony-owned or inefficient state investments to fund agrarian reform. This practice of linking proceeds from privatizations to specific policy objectives, in the form of “special accounts”, had since proliferated across the Philippine government. Key development and policy objectives were linked to the speed and constancy of asset liquidation, and became decisive in how privatizations in the 1990s and 2000s were implemented.

*“We must systematically ‘de-Marcosify’ society.” From* Principles and Policy Proposals, the provisional report of the Presidential Commission on Government Reorganization.

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Urban Property Development and the Creative Destruction of Filipino Capitalism

January 10, 2017March 4, 2021 Kenneth CardenasLeave a comment

This material originally appeared as a chapter in W. Bello and J. Chavez (eds.) State of Fragmentation: The Philippines in Transition. Bangkok: Focus on the Global South.

This entry is the first in a four-part serialization.

Part II: The new rules of the game
Part III: Back to the land
Part IV: The city and the restoration of class power

The past decade had been incredibly good for Filipino capitalism. In 2000, the combined profit of the thirty companies comprising the PSE composite index stood at PHP 26.1 billion. By 2010, it grew to 304.23 billion, or an increase of 635 percent in real terms. Within the same ten years, the Philippines’s gross domestic product grew by only 59 percent (see Table 1). In 2006, when Forbes began publishing an annual list of the richest Filipinos, the combined net worth of the forty wealthiest Filipinos was US$16 billion. By 2010, their fortunes were collectively worth 22.8 billion dollars, an increase of 32.3 percent in real terms. In comparison, GDP per capita increased by a mere 13 percent within the same period.[1] Far from depending exclusively on the Philippine market, several of their conglomerates are presently embarking on ambitious foreign expansion plans. Henry Sy’s SM Prime is presently planning to open five more malls in China within the next three years;[2] the Gokongweis’ Universal Robina is eyeing a factory in Burma, which would follow successful investments into manufacturing in Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, and China;[3] and San Miguel Corporation, as part of its plan to bring total sales to one trillion pesos by 2013, is planning to put up plants in Burma, Cambodia, and Laos.[4]

This was by no means an expected outcome. The 2000s was a very turbulent decade for business: it began with Philippine capitalism in serious crisis, with the economy still reeling from the Asian financial crisis of 1997-8. The initial contraction, at half a percent, was mild compared to the severe drops seen in the rest of middle-income Southeast Asia. But an anemic recovery, coupled with a hollowed-out neoliberal state unwilling and unable to either stem the outward flow of portfolio investments or to spend its way out of the crisis, prolonged the economy’s stay in the doldrums, culminating in a fiscal crisis in 2005. For much of the decade, the country was also in the grips of a political crisis. The impeachment trial of Joseph Estrada, the subsequent revolt of middle Manila, and the installation of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in 2001 proved to be only the beginning: as the decade wore on, Arroyo’s questionable mandate increasingly became illegitimate, and would echo throughout the decade as a rigged election, mass mobilizations, and the reanimation of an adventurist, impune military. Finally, its closing years saw the global capitalism erupt in a systemic crisis that it has yet to emerge from.

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