In February 1986, Filipinos gathered along Epifanio de los Santos Avenue to topple a dictatorship that had fused state power with crony capitalism. The promise of EDSA was simple yet profound: restore democracy, dismantle monopolies of power, and return sovereignty to the people.

Forty years later, the more uncomfortable question must be asked: Did we dismantle crony rule only to institutionalize elite capture?

Political scientists have long warned that transitions from authoritarianism do not automatically yield egalitarian democracies. Instead, they often produce “oligarchic democracies”—systems in which elections exist but power remains concentrated in entrenched families and economic elites (Winters 2011). In the Philippine case, the post-EDSA order restored electoral democracy but left the country’s deeply unequal social structure intact.

From Crony Capitalism to Oligarchic Democracy

Under Ferdinand Marcos Sr., economic power was centralized in the hands of favored cronies. After 1986, those monopolies were broken—but ownership and political dominance reverted to traditional elites rather than diffused to the broader citizenry. As Paul Hutchcroft famously described, the Philippines has long been characterized by “booty capitalism,” where the state becomes a prize for private extraction rather than an engine of national development (Hutchcroft 1998).

The 1987 Constitution sought to prevent dictatorship through safeguards—term limits, checks and balances, a bill of rights. Yet scholars have noted that while these mechanisms constrain executive abuse, they do not automatically dismantle elite dominance in Congress, local government, or the economy (Quimpo 2008). Political clans remain entrenched. Land reform remains incomplete. Regulatory agencies remain vulnerable to capture.

Instead of a dictatorship of one man, we inherited a democracy of families.

Jeffrey Winters argues that oligarchies adapt to institutional change; they do not disappear. They simply shift arenas—from monopolizing executive access to dominating legislatures, financing elections, and shaping regulatory outcomes (Winters 2011). The post-EDSA state thus became less centralized but not necessarily more egalitarian.

The result is what many Filipinos feel intuitively: a republic that is formally democratic but substantively unequal.

The Katipunan’s Warning: Liwanag Over Ningning

This condition would not have surprised the early Filipino revolutionaries.

In his essay “Liwanag at Dilim,” Emilio Jacinto warned against the seduction of “ningning”—surface brilliance, spectacle, and illusion—over “liwanag,” the clear light of truth and moral purpose (Jacinto 1896). The Katipuneros did not fight merely for the transfer of power from Spaniards to ilustrados; they envisioned a moral community grounded in dignity, equality, and shared sacrifice. The fact is, the revolution the Katipuneros advocated was not predicated on creating a new governance model, no. They sought the reinstatement of the old indigenous governance models that existed prior to colonialism, a governance system rooted in a moral economy (Salazar, 2015).

Andrés Bonifacio spoke of a nation not merely politically free but socially redeemed. Hermenegildo Cruz and later working-class intellectuals insisted that independence without justice would leave the masses in perpetual suffering.

Forty years after EDSA, one must ask: have we chosen ningning over liwanag?

We celebrate elections but tolerate dynasties. We protect procedural democracy but ignore structural inequality. We romanticize People Power anniversaries but hesitate to confront the deeper architecture of economic exclusion.

The Katipunan’s revolution was not only anti-colonial; it was anti-oligarchic.

The Limits of the 1987 Framework

The 1987 Constitution was drafted in the shadow of dictatorship. Its central concern was preventing a relapse into authoritarianism. But it was less explicit about constructing a developmental state capable of disciplining capital, directing industrial policy, and redistributing opportunity. The fact is, this constitution only strengthened the institutions pre-Martial law that were the primary causes of systemic decay that justified one-man rule in the first place.

The extractive institutions were again forced into the lives of Filipinos. These institutions were diametrically opposed to Filipino concepts of relationships and governance, so they were expected to fail eventually.

Comparative political economy suggests that late-developing nations that escaped underdevelopment—such as South Korea and Taiwan—did so through strong, technocratic, and strategically interventionist states (Amsden 1989; Evans 1995). These states were not perfect democracies at the outset, but they were developmental: they subordinated oligarchic interests to national industrial goals.

The Philippines, by contrast, liberalized rapidly in the 1990s without first consolidating domestic industrial capacity. The result was growth without structural transformation. Wealth accumulated, but manufacturing stagnated. Overseas remittances substituted for national production.

Elite capture thus persisted not only in politics but in the economic model itself.

Toward a Developmental Republic

The way forward is not nostalgia for authoritarianism nor romanticization of unrest. It is a structural transformation.

What would a “developmental republic” look like?

1. A state capable of long-term industrial policy.
2. Anti-dynasty enforcement and genuine political party reform.
3. Campaign finance transparency and public funding mechanisms.
4. Strong competition policy to prevent monopolistic extraction.
5. A hybrid capitalism that balances markets with social equity—combining entrepreneurial dynamism with strategic state direction.

Hybrid models already exist. The Nordic social democracies blend market economies with robust welfare states. East Asian developmental states combined export discipline with state coordination (Evans 1995). The lesson is clear: capitalism need not be purely extractive. It can be structured toward broad-based prosperity.

Such transformation requires constitutional courage—but through legal, deliberative, and democratic means.

Revolution Reimagined

If revolution is to mean anything today, it must mean moral clarity.

It must mean choosing liwanag over ningning.
It must mean dismantling systems of privilege through law, reform, and institutional redesign—not through violence.
It must mean reclaiming the republic from elite capture and restoring it to civic virtue.

EDSA was a beginning, not an endpoint.

Forty years later, the struggle is no longer against a single dictator but against structural inequality embedded in institutions.

The task before us is not merely to remember People Power, but to deepen it.

The Katipunan called the nation a “bayang sawi”—a suffering people. But they also believed that suffering could be redeemed by collective moral action.

The new revolution is the re-institution of a developmental state with a fully developed moral economy. The aim of this new revolution is to eradicate the extractive state based on Western, foreign experiences, particularly its institutions of Ningning, and replace it with institutions grounded in a moral economy.

The new revolution is a movement towards Liwanag — moral clarity. 

The question at forty is not whether EDSA failed.
The question is whether we have the courage to complete what it began.

Selected References:

Amsden, Alice H. 1989. Asia’s Next Giant: South Korea and Late Industrialization. New York: Oxford University Press.

Evans, Peter. 1995. Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Hutchcroft, Paul D. 1998. Booty Capitalism: The Politics of Banking in the Philippines. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Jacinto, Emilio. 1896. “Liwanag at Dilim.”

Quimpo, Nathan Gilbert. 2008. Contested Democracy and the Left in the Philippines after Marcos. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Winters, Jeffrey A. 2011. Oligarchy. New York: Cambridge University Press.