The Price of Order: Remembering September 21
and the Political Economy of Authoritarian Rule
There are dates in the history of a country that resist conversion into ordinary anniversaries. September 21 belongs to that category in the Philippines, not simply because Proclamation No. 1081 bears that date, but because it has come to represent a political rupture whose consequences extended far beyond the formal declaration of martial law. The arrests, the closing of newspapers and broadcast stations, the detention of political opponents, the enlargement of executive authority, and the subsequent institutionalization of authoritarian rule transformed what had been presented as an emergency measure into a new arrangement of political life. General orders issued immediately afterward directed the arrest and continued detention of persons whom the government considered connected with rebellion, subversion and threats to national security, while other orders placed important categories of offenses within the jurisdiction of military tribunals.
The commemoration of September 21 therefore cannot be separated from the experience of those who were arrested, detained, tortured, killed or disappeared during the years of dictatorship. This is no longer merely a matter of competing recollections between admirers and opponents of the Marcos government. The Philippine State itself, through Republic Act No. 10368, subsequently recognized victims of summary execution, torture, enforced or involuntary disappearance, arbitrary detention and other gross violations of human rights committed during the Marcos regime, and acknowledged a moral and legal obligation to restore their honor and dignity and provide recognition or reparation. The significance of that law lies not merely in the compensation it authorized but in the institutional acknowledgment that the injuries of the period were not simply unfortunate episodes attached to an otherwise conventional administration. They formed part of the historical record of the State and consequently of the obligations inherited by the democratic republic that followed it.
Such remembrance necessarily carries grief and anger, particularly among those whose families experienced detention, disappearance or death. Yet its importance extends beyond the emotional claims of memory. September 21 remains intellectually and politically relevant because the authoritarian experiment of 1972 was justified not merely through the language of emergency but through an ambitious theory of national reconstruction. Martial law was presented as a means of saving the Republic from disorder while simultaneously creating what the government called a New Society. The rhetoric appealed to discipline, social reform, economic development and national regeneration. General Order No. 15, for example, explicitly described one objective of the martial-law proclamation as the achievement of social, economic and political reforms and the transformation of the country into a new society supposedly infused with discipline and social conscience.
The argument had considerable political force because many of the conditions against which it was directed were real. The pre-1972 Republic was hardly an egalitarian democracy. Political parties were frequently personalistic machines, elections were expensive and violent, landed interests retained considerable influence, poverty remained widespread, and access to public authority was substantially conditioned by family, wealth and patronage. Rural insurgency and separatist conflict were real security problems rather than later inventions of official propaganda. The social discontent of the period was likewise genuine. To acknowledge these conditions is not to accept the authoritarian solution that followed; it is instead necessary to understand why the rhetoric of national reconstruction could acquire plausibility among sections of the population dissatisfied with the old order.
The New Society presented itself as a repudiation of precisely these defects. Its official argument held that an exhausted political order dominated by oligarchic interests could no longer reform itself through the conventional mechanisms of liberal democracy. What Ferdinand Marcos would describe as a “revolution from the center” proposed that the State itself would become the principal agent of transformation, disciplining both the political class and society from above while directing the resources necessary for modernization. The old oligarchy was to be restrained, administrative authority centralized, economic development accelerated and the population incorporated into a disciplined national project.
It was an ambitious proposition, but it contained a contradiction that became more apparent as authoritarian rule matured. The concentration of authority that was supposed to free the State from entrenched private interests also made access to the State itself more valuable. Once the executive possessed extraordinary discretion over credit, licenses, contracts, foreign exchange, monopolies, franchises, government guarantees and appointments, the problem of oligarchic influence did not disappear. It changed its institutional location. Competition among established interests was increasingly replaced by a system in which economic advantage depended upon access to an unusually centralized presidency and the networks surrounding it.
The resulting arrangement has frequently been described as crony capitalism, although the phrase itself can conceal as much as it reveals if used merely as an insult. Its more useful meaning concerns the transformation of the boundary between public authority and private advantage. World Bank retrospectives on the Philippine private sector later observed that the distinction between public and private activity had become blurred during the Marcos administration, with selected firms receiving directed credit, foreign-exchange access, tax privileges and other forms of state support. Some investments were productive, while others were inefficient and became liabilities ultimately absorbed by public financial institutions. The broader problem was therefore not state intervention as such, since successful developmental states elsewhere in East Asia also intervened extensively, but the absence of sufficiently impersonal institutions capable of disciplining beneficiaries of state assistance and withdrawing privileges when they failed to serve wider developmental purposes.
This distinction is important because criticism of the Marcos economic order need not proceed from the assumption that government intervention in economic life is inherently undesirable. Such an assumption would itself distort the development experience of much of Asia. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore all employed different combinations of state direction, industrial policy, public investment, controlled finance and collaboration between government and business. The decisive distinction was not between an interventionist State and a laissez-faire one, but between intervention governed by developmental discipline and intervention subordinated to privileged political access. A State that directs credit toward an industry while requiring exports, technological upgrading or measurable increases in productivity performs a different economic function from a State that socializes the liabilities of enterprises because their proprietors possess political connections.
The Philippine case under martial law increasingly revealed the latter danger. State power could be used to reorganize industries, grant monopolistic privileges and extend financial support, yet the State itself lacked effective independent mechanisms through which these decisions could be publicly contested. Congress had ceased to function in its old form; media institutions operated under severe restrictions; opposition figures were imprisoned, marginalized or forced abroad; and the political environment discouraged the kind of scrutiny that might otherwise have exposed the costs of favored economic arrangements at an earlier stage. The suppression of political accountability therefore had economic consequences. Authoritarianism was not simply a question of what government could say or whom it could imprison; it affected the distribution of resources and the ability of society to examine how those resources were being used.
This is why the enduring argument over martial law cannot adequately be resolved by inventories of infrastructure. Roads, bridges, irrigation systems, hospitals, schools, cultural buildings, power plants and other public works were built during the period, and any serious historical assessment has to acknowledge their existence and, where appropriate, their continuing usefulness. Yet physical accomplishment by itself is an insufficient measure of development. Every public structure embodies a financing decision, an allocation of scarce resources and an opportunity cost. A project paid for through foreign borrowing continues to impose obligations long after the inauguration ceremonies have ended. A government guarantee extended to an unsuccessful private enterprise may later become public debt. An industrial undertaking protected from competition may produce employment while simultaneously imposing higher costs elsewhere in the economy. A large infrastructure program may increase productive capacity, but it may also become economically burdensome if projects are poorly selected, contracts are inflated or foreign liabilities accumulate faster than the country's capacity to service them.
The relevant question is therefore not whether public works existed, because they plainly did. The question concerns the economic and institutional terms under which they were undertaken and the distribution of their benefits and costs. The developmental State cannot be evaluated through concrete alone. It has to be examined through employment, productivity, industrial capability, technological acquisition, agricultural transformation, real wages, public health, educational access and the long-term capacity of the economy to reproduce growth without repeatedly depending upon unsustainable external financing.
The external debt accumulated during the 1970s and early 1980s consequently belongs within the discussion. Borrowing is not inherently evidence of economic failure; developing economies commonly borrow to finance investments whose returns are expected to exceed the eventual cost of repayment. The difficulty arises when the quality of investment deteriorates, when borrowed funds sustain politically protected enterprises without corresponding increases in productive capacity, or when the structure of debt leaves the economy dangerously exposed to changes in international interest rates, export conditions and investor confidence. World Bank reviews of the Philippine economy have noted that a number of large investments during the period contributed to the external debt burden without producing commensurate increases in output.
The eventual economic crisis cannot be attributed to a single cause. The oil shocks, the changing international credit environment, higher global interest rates, deteriorating terms of trade, weaknesses in domestic industry, policy errors, capital flight and political instability all formed part of the deterioration. The assassination of Benigno Aquino Jr. in 1983 then intensified an already serious crisis of confidence. Any useful economic history must resist the temptation to explain the collapse entirely through either foreign circumstances or domestic corruption. Both external vulnerability and internal institutional weakness mattered, and they interacted with one another. A heavily indebted economy could have endured international shocks more successfully had investment returns been stronger and public confidence greater, while even competent domestic policy would have confronted severe pressures from the global environment of the period.
What remains particularly relevant is that the promise of authoritarian efficiency did not insulate the Philippines from either economic crisis or political decay. The restriction of political competition removed certain obstacles to rapid decision-making, but it also weakened the mechanisms through which bad decisions might be corrected. Administrative speed and administrative quality are not identical. A government may acquire the capacity to decide quickly while simultaneously losing the institutional capacity to determine whether the decision is correct, because officials become reluctant to transmit unwelcome information upward, private interests cultivate access to concentrated authority, and public institutions become increasingly identified with the political survival of the regime.
The language of the “revolution from the center” deserves particular scrutiny in this regard. It attempted to appropriate grievances traditionally associated with movements seeking structural transformation while insisting that such transformation could be accomplished without transferring political initiative to the population itself. The State would attack oligarchy, direct development and reorganize society, but the citizen would participate largely within structures defined by that same State. The contradiction was obvious: the New Society claimed to act in the name of ordinary Filipinos while narrowing the independent political spaces through which ordinary Filipinos might contest the policies being implemented on their behalf.
This contradiction was most visible when the language of social reform encountered the continuing realities of inequality. The regime promised agrarian transformation, national discipline and economic modernization, yet the structure of landed and commercial power proved more resilient than its rhetoric suggested. Existing oligarchs were weakened in some sectors, but politically favored economic groups emerged or expanded in others. The result was not the abolition of elite economic power but its partial recomposition. A more centralized State altered the manner in which wealth and influence interacted with government without necessarily democratizing ownership or substantially redistributing control over the productive resources of the country.
The experience also demonstrates why the political and economic dimensions of democracy cannot easily be separated. Freedom of the press, judicial independence, freedom of association and political opposition are sometimes treated as liberal luxuries distinct from the material problems of employment, wages and development. In practice, they are among the institutional instruments by which economic power is made answerable to society. Independent journalists investigate questionable contracts and monopolies. Legislatures examine public expenditure. Labor organizations contest wage policies and conditions of work. Farmers' groups challenge land arrangements. Universities subject official development theories to criticism. Courts establish limits upon executive action. When these institutions are weakened, those already possessing administrative or economic power encounter fewer obstacles to converting public authority into private advantage.
The human-rights question thus belongs within the political economy of martial law rather than in a separate moral appendix. Arbitrary detention, torture, disappearance and political intimidation affected not only individual liberties but the capacity of society to organize around competing economic interests. A worker who fears association, a peasant organizer exposed to military suspicion, a student movement constrained by surveillance, or a journalist unable to investigate politically connected firms operates within an economic system in which bargaining power has already been altered by coercive political arrangements.
This is also why the commemoration should avoid a simplistic nostalgia for the constitutional order preceding 1972. The failures of that order were among the conditions that permitted authoritarianism to present itself as an attractive alternative. Restoring elections by itself could not eliminate oligarchy, just as removing martial law could not automatically resolve landlessness, low wages, unemployment, inadequate housing or regional inequality. The deeper historical question concerns whether Philippine democracy has developed institutions capable of addressing these structural problems without repeatedly inviting the argument that political liberty must be suspended because democratic government is supposedly too disorderly to undertake serious reform.
More than half a century after the proclamation, many of the issues that gave force to the language of the New Society remain recognizable, even though the country itself has undergone profound political, demographic and economic change. Questions concerning unequal development, precarious employment, insecure housing, agrarian conflict, the concentration of wealth and dependence upon external sources of capital continue to influence political life. It would be inaccurate to suggest that nothing has improved since the 1970s, just as it would be misleading to treat every contemporary social conflict as a repetition of martial law. The more useful conclusion is that the endurance of these problems continues to create political opportunities for those who promise order as a substitute for difficult institutional reform.
The persistence of practices such as red-tagging demonstrates the relevance of this institutional caution. The Supreme Court has recognized that red-tagging, vilification, labeling and guilt by association may constitute threats to life, liberty or security, while civil-society monitors continue to report cases in which activists, journalists, environmental defenders and organizations are publicly associated with communist or terrorist movements. These contemporary practices do not make the present constitutional order identical to the dictatorship, and historical differences should not be erased for rhetorical convenience. They do, however, show how the vocabulary of national security can extend beyond armed groups and affect individuals engaged in lawful political, labor, environmental or community activity.
The lesson of 1972 therefore lies less in searching for exact repetitions than in recognizing recurring institutional temptations. Governments facing disorder will naturally invoke security, and the State possesses a legitimate responsibility to confront rebellion, terrorism and criminal violence. The democratic question concerns how that authority is exercised, whether accusations are supported by evidence, whether defendants receive due process, whether legitimate dissent remains distinguishable from armed activity, and whether the language of security becomes a convenient instrument against criticism that may be uncomfortable but lawful.
The same caution applies to the rhetoric of discipline. Discipline has frequently possessed an almost mystical place in Philippine discussions of development, as though national poverty were principally a consequence of insufficient obedience among the population. Yet development is not merely the accumulation of personal virtues. It depends upon institutional capability, productive investment, land use, industrial organization, technology, infrastructure, education, public health and the distribution of bargaining power. A poorly paid worker cannot be disciplined into a high-wage industrial economy; a tenant cannot practice his way into land ownership; a country cannot moralize itself into technological independence without institutions capable of financing, coordinating and protecting long-term productive investment.
Authoritarian political language nevertheless finds discipline attractive because it relocates responsibility downward. Structural failures can be attributed to the supposed indiscipline of citizens rather than to deficiencies in government policy or economic organization. Poverty becomes a problem of individual conduct; protest becomes evidence of disorder; demands for redistribution become obstacles to stability. This moralization of economic failure can coexist comfortably with policies that protect powerful interests, since the burden of adjustment is placed primarily upon those with the least influence over the design of policy.
The memory of martial law consequently becomes relevant to the continuing debate over what development means. If development is measured chiefly through highly visible projects, the State can present itself as benefactor while leaving largely unexamined the manner in which those projects are financed and administered. If development is understood more broadly as the enlargement of productive and human capacities, however, then the condition of the worker, farmer, small entrepreneur and household becomes central. The issue is no longer simply how many projects were completed but whether the economic structure enabled ordinary citizens to obtain secure employment, adequate wages, housing, education and meaningful opportunities for advancement.
The infrastructure defense of authoritarian government becomes especially problematic when it implicitly asks that political repression be weighed against economic accomplishment, as though a sufficient quantity of public works could compensate for abuses of state power. This is conceptually mistaken. Public infrastructure is one responsibility of government, while the protection of basic rights is another. The construction of a dam or highway cannot retroactively provide due process to a detainee or restore a person who disappeared in custody. Nor does the existence of human-rights violations establish that every economic undertaking of the same government was without value. Historical judgment need not choose between these two simplifications. It can acknowledge useful public investments while still recognizing that such investments did not confer upon the government a license to violate rights or eliminate political accountability.
For the victims and their descendants, the distinction is especially important because developmental nostalgia can transform their suffering into an incidental cost of modernization. Such reasoning effectively requires those who suffered to justify their claims against an accounting of buildings, roads and statistical growth. Republic Act No. 10368 rejected that logic by recognizing that human dignity created obligations independent of whatever material accomplishments the regime might claim.
At the same time, remembrance gains analytical strength when it refuses to treat every person who initially supported martial law as either malicious or foolish. Some Filipinos welcomed the declaration because they feared crime, insurgency and political disorder; others believed that strong government could finally break the control of entrenched families; sections of the business community initially valued administrative predictability; and some technocrats saw centralization as an opportunity to implement reforms previously obstructed by congressional patronage and electoral politics. These expectations form part of the historical record and should be understood rather than caricatured. Their eventual disappointment also reveals how authoritarian systems acquire legitimacy: not simply through force, but by attaching themselves to genuine social frustrations and promising solutions that existing institutions have failed to provide.
It was precisely this combination of legitimate grievance and concentrated authority that made the New Society politically significant. The regime did not invent the poverty of the countryside, the weaknesses of Philippine industry, the corruption of electoral institutions or the dominance of established families. Its historical responsibility lay in claiming that these problems required the concentration of political power while subsequently reproducing important elements of privilege under a more centralized arrangement.
The lesson is broader than the fate of any single administration. Political systems frequently survive by appropriating the language of those who criticize them. Demands for social justice can be converted into programs administered from above; nationalism can be invoked while external dependence continues; anti-oligarchic rhetoric can accompany the emergence of new privileged networks; and appeals to popular welfare can be used to legitimize institutions in which the population possesses limited influence over decisions supposedly undertaken in its interest. The contradiction between rhetoric and structure is therefore one of the most important subjects of any serious commemoration of September 21.
This also explains why remembrance cannot consist solely of remembering repression. The economic promises of the regime must be remembered alongside the repression because the two were components of the same political project. The New Society justified extraordinary authority partly through the assertion that ordinary democratic procedures had become obstacles to transformation. Evaluating that claim requires attention to the economy produced under extraordinary rule, including the development projects that succeeded, the enterprises that failed, the debt that accumulated, the industries that received protection, and the social groups that gained or lost bargaining power.
Such an evaluation also guards against the opposite historical error: the notion that the restoration of formal democracy in 1986 resolved the social conditions that had preceded authoritarianism. Many of the economic structures inherited from both the pre-martial-law republic and the dictatorship remained intact or were reorganized rather than abolished. Oligarchic politics did not disappear with the return of elections. Foreign dependence did not disappear with the restoration of Congress. Rural poverty and unequal landholding did not vanish with the new Constitution. The democratic restoration was indispensable because it reopened political space and restored institutional restraints upon executive authority, but it did not by itself complete the social transformation that generations of Filipinos had demanded.
The continuing task is therefore more difficult than either defending or condemning a single historical period. It requires a conception of democracy that extends beyond periodic elections without diminishing the importance of elections, and a conception of development that extends beyond economic growth without dismissing the necessity of growth. Political liberty and material security have to be treated as mutually reinforcing components of a democratic society rather than competing objectives between which the country must permanently choose.
Under such a conception, the dignity of the person acquires both political and economic content. It involves freedom from arbitrary arrest and coercion, but also access to the material conditions necessary for meaningful citizenship. It includes freedom of expression and association, but also the practical capacity of workers, farmers, communities and professional groups to organize around their interests. It requires due process against the power of the State while also requiring institutions capable of preventing private wealth from exercising disproportionate power over public decisions.
September 21 therefore remains a difficult but necessary date precisely because it forces Philippine society to examine the relationship among order, development and freedom. The dictatorship claimed that extraordinary authority could save the Republic and reconstruct society. Its history demonstrated instead the danger of attempting social transformation while weakening the institutions through which society itself can scrutinize those entrusted with transformation.
The commemoration need not become an annual exercise in partisan accusation, nor should it be reduced to a contest between nostalgic inventories of infrastructure and equally mechanical lists of abuses. The record is sufficiently important to demand more serious treatment. The period should be examined as an experiment in authoritarian development whose achievements, failures, contradictions and human costs remain relevant to any discussion of Philippine state-building. Its victims deserve remembrance not because memory requires the country to remain imprisoned by the past, but because a political community incapable of recognizing the injuries committed through its own institutions becomes more vulnerable to repeating them under new circumstances and new language.
The enduring significance of September 21 consequently lies in the unfinished character of the Republic. The conditions invoked in 1972—inequality, insecurity, political corruption, concentrated economic power and social conflict—were not abolished by martial law, just as they were not abolished by the restoration of democratic government. Their persistence should not be used to romanticize authoritarianism or to dismiss democratic politics as futile. It should instead encourage a more demanding understanding of democracy, one capable of confronting economic concentration and social deprivation while preserving the rights through which citizens participate in that confrontation.
Such a democratic order would have little need to describe repression as discipline, exclusion as stability or privilege as development. Its legitimacy would rest upon institutions sufficiently strong to permit disagreement, sufficiently impartial to restrain both public and private power, and sufficiently developmental to demonstrate that political liberty need not condemn the country to economic stagnation. The remembrance of September 21 would then cease to be merely an argument over whether the past was good or bad and become what historical commemoration ought to be: an examination of the choices that produced that past and of the institutional safeguards necessary to prevent its most destructive features from acquiring new forms.
In that sense, the struggle associated with the memory of martial law is not adequately understood as a struggle against one family, one party or one generation. Its more enduring content concerns the effort to construct a political order in which the State can be strong without becoming arbitrary, development can be directed without becoming patronage, security can be maintained without converting dissent into criminality, and economic growth can be pursued without treating the common citizen merely as the taxpayer, debtor, laborer or passive beneficiary of decisions made elsewhere.
The victims of authoritarian rule occupy an indispensable place in that continuing national argument because their experiences reveal what happens when the authority to define the national interest becomes excessively concentrated. The economic record occupies an equally necessary place because it demonstrates that the legitimacy of government cannot be established through physical accomplishment alone. A Republic worthy of preservation requires both the material capacity to improve the conditions of its people and the political restraint to recognize that those people are citizens rather than instruments of policy.
The commemoration of September 21 thus remains neither an antiquarian exercise nor a demand that succeeding generations inherit every bitterness of those who came before them. Its value lies in historical vigilance: in understanding how legitimate demands for order, reform and development can be absorbed into political arrangements that gradually narrow the space available for public judgment, and how the vocabulary of ordinary people can itself be appropriated to justify concentrations of power from which ordinary people remain distant.
More than five decades after 1972, that is perhaps the most important reason the date continues to matter. The historical problem was never simply that a government promised to save the Republic and build a new society. The deeper problem concerned the terms under which that Republic was to be saved, the distribution of authority within that proposed new society, and whether citizens themselves retained sufficient freedom and institutional power to determine whether the transformation being undertaken in their name was genuinely their own.
Any durable democratic settlement must answer those questions differently. It must make social justice compatible with political freedom, public investment compatible with accountability, national development compatible with human dignity, and effective government compatible with the participation of those whose lives are most affected by its decisions. The continuing relevance of September 21 lies in the fact that these questions remain unfinished business, and that the lessons of authoritarian rule become useful only when remembrance is joined to the construction of institutions capable of addressing them.