The difference between Aquino and sexy, pogi, and tanda

“Corruption” is commonly understood to be the use of  public funds for “personal gain,” but how do we define  “personal gain”? Is “personal gain” limited to enriching one’s self or one’s family? What about the use of public funds to enrich one’s class?

For the administration and its supporters, you are only corrupt if you directly pocket government money and use it to buy yourself a condo in Beverly Hills or to buy your son an Ivy League education—anything that only you and your family could enjoy.

Hence, from their perspective, the difference between “Pogi,” “Sexy,” and “Tanda,” on one hand, and the President and his men, on the other, couldn’t be more stark: Only the former are corrupt because they used public funds to enrich their immediate families and promote their selfish interests; the President on the other hand remains pure—the “King of Reforms”—because he has never used public funds for his own immediate gain.

This moral categorization explains their lack of remorse over the Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP) and their continued allegiance to the President. To call for his accountability, their narrative goes, is to be “distracted,” to collude with the enemies, or to fall into the embrace of the greater evils likely to be catapulted to power by the so-called “bobotantes” of this country.

But does someone have to immediately or directly gain from the use of public funds in order to be corrupt? What if the benefits are more indirect or intangible? And what if the benefits are not limited to one’s self or to one’s family but are more widely shared with members of one’s class?

Is that no longer corruption?

Take the P200-billion-plus DAP, the multibillion-peso pork barrel funds more generally—or for that matter, the use of much of the state’s resources in our class-divided society.

Contrary to those who want to reduce the entire pork barrel controversy into a penal or technical question, the DAP and the entire pork barrel system has had broader social and political consequences than simply putting cash into the hands of a few individuals or families.

When the government gave P50 million plus to each of the Senators, it did not only open up opportunities for tongpats, the government also effectively allowed Aquino to use public funds to give material concessions to the other elite families or factions represented by the Senators, thereby greasing his relations with potential adversaries, and allowing him to claim that he not only represents the interests of its own elite faction but of all elite families that have taken turns to run government. The DAP served as a glue to forge intra-elite cohesion.

But by doling out these DAP funds to their constituents, each of these elites families consequently used public funds to foster inter-class cohesion by providing medical services, scholarships, and other forms of patronage to their indigent voters, thereby enabling them to back their claim that their families do not only represent the interests of their families or their class but also of other families and lower classes in society.

This ability to provide material concessions, the Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci long ago reminded us, is absolutely crucial for any dominant class to achieve what he called hegemony: the ability to induce some degree of obedience to one’s rule, on the part of other competing elites as well as on the part of lower classes, by being able to present one’s self or faction as promoting not just one’s narrow economic interests but the interests of all.

Or, as Machiavelli would have put it: this ability to dispense public funds any way they please to anyone who pleases them is absolutely necessary for a ruler to be both feared and loved—and thus to stay on in power and not just in office.

This, of course, is consistent with what many sociologists, political scientists, and historians have repeatedly concluded about the pork-barrel system system—a system that President Aquino and his men have ardently consistently defended: That it has functioned to oil a national system of patronage that has kept lower classes dependent on and consequently submissive to the upper classes, thereby perpetuating relations of domination between the more powerful class and the less powerful in society.

In short, the pork barrel system has fried subordinate classes in their own fat since the pork barrel funds come in part from their own compulsory contributions as taxpayers.

None of these—the securing of consent from subordinates, the reproduction of relations of dependence, the perpetuation of elite rule—could obviously be stashed away by President Aquino in a secret Swiss account or used directly to buy a Beverly Hills condo. These are consequences that could not be seen by the naked eye.

But insofar as political power remains a precondition for the dominant aristo-bourgeoisie of our country to extract surplus or surplus labor from lower classes, to secure rents from the country’s natural resources, or to perpetrate what political economists have “accumulation by dispossession,” or the use of state violence to privatize the commons and turn it into capital, these intangible consequences of DAP and the pork system are certainly no less real.

They have provided “personal gains”—invisible, indirect, but no less concrete gains—and not just for the President himself, not even just all the members of his class, but also those from lower classes who have been attracted to their cross-class bloc.

How else—if not for their political power, or their command of the state—have they managed to keep workers working at starvation wages, to keep extracting copper ores from those mountains, or to keep holding on to their haciendas?

Simply put, political power is what ultimately helps secure our elites’ economic power– their ability to open Swiss accounts, to buy a Beverly Hills condo, or to send their offspring to a London boarding school–in a manner that has come to be far more socially acceptable than the schemes allegedly cooked up by the likes of Napoles, Sexy, Pogi, or Tanda.

And this, in the end, is what differentiates President Aquino and his men from them:

Deaf to the people’s clamor for reforms and for a clean government, Sexy, Pogi and Tanda represent the more backward, more parasitic, more short-sighted factions of our ruling class, using public funds to enrich only their own families and to keep only their own families in power. They are, for these reasons, the relatively easier targets, the easier enemies.

Attuned to, and seeking to ride on, people’s real aspiration for change but prevented from fully delivering by their own class interests, President Aquino, Roxas, and others represent the relatively more sophisticated, more swabe, more restrained, because more far-sighted factions of our ruling class, using public funds not to enrich their already-rich families, but to enrich their entire class by keeping it in power.

For unlike Tanda et al., Aquino and his party have actually paradoxically taken Gramsci’s or Machiavelli’s lessons to heart: they know that for them to stay in power, they could no longer be so crass as to get caught with their hands inside the cookie jar; they have to fight the temptation of easy money. They couldn’t be too selfish; they have to sacrifice a little by spreading the love around. And they couldn’t be too myopic because they know they are playing a long game, and they recognize that to win, they actually need to back their claim that their class is the class that can satisfy people’s aspiration for change.

In short, they understand what Enrile et al. could not seem to accept: that for things to remain the same, things will have to “change.”

But they are not, for all that, uninterested in “personal gains.” They’re just not interested in barya.

Many of our people, desperate for real change after decades of untrammelled corruption by our more venal elites, are understandably desperate to believe what that the ruling class—banking on the ordinary man’s “common-sense” denial of the existence of classes—wants all of us to believe: that Sexy, Pogi, and Tanda are soiled, but the President is, for once, pure.

But to confuse sophistication for innocence is also to mistake “change” for change: Sometimes rulers have to “change” precisely so that things can remain the same. – Rappler.com

Herbert Docena is a PhD candidate in Sociology.