e were treated this morning to a most enlightening
discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of structural
analysis as practiced here in the Philippines, and then to a provocative
exposition of the richness but also the limitations of Marx’s theory
of social change. I hope to pick up some of the contributions of
these papers in my own presentation this afternoon, particularly the
concern found both in Marx and among the practitioners of structural
analysis, that social theory should somehow light the path to a better
future. But first I should like to sketch briefly two general orientations
which run through the history of social thought and which provide,
I believe, a useful framework for analysis.
One finds in the history of social thought two contrasting
explanations of social structure and particularly of the reality of social
inequality. These are attempted answers to the question: why is it
that, wherever one looks, one finds not only inequality in power and
privilege but structured inequality whereby certain groups or classes
of people systematically enjoy more than others do of the benefits
which society can provide? Even in a cemetery in communist and
supposedly egalitarian Yugoslavia, I noted that the graves of Party
members occupy the “better” and more prominent positions, while
their non-communist fellow citizens await the Last Judgment in more
W
SOCIAL THEORY
John J. Carroll, S.J.
Social Theory and Social
Change in the Philippines
obscure graves. “Some are smarter than others” may be true as far
as it goes, but it hardly explains the systemic nature of the inequality
which is observed almost everywhere.
In attempting an answer to this question, one tradition of social
thought presents inequality and even specific systems of inequality
as ordained by nature or by God Himself and as necessary for the
common good of all in the community. In its modern sociological
version, which I refer to as consensus theory, this tradition sees the
members of society as united by a common culture, a common
understanding of what the world and society are all about, of what is
important and unimportant in life, of what are the goals and values
which man and the community should be pursuing.The organization
of the key institutions of society—economic and political activity and
the family and such cultural institutions as religion and education
and the mass media—is seen as society’s attempt to realize its key
values and achieve its major goals. The culture of modern industrial
society, for example, attributes great value to science and rationality,
to economic progress, health and material welfare. It is important,
therefore, that the most talented people be attracted to the most
demanding jobs in these high priority areas; and so the high incomes
and other rewards received by bank presidents and brain surgeons,
make sense and contribute to the good of the whole society. In a
communist society, loyalty to the Party may be the number one virtue,
and be rewarded accordingly. Power in each case—the power of the
Security and Exchange Commission or the army of secret police—is
exercised in the name of the society and in order to promote and
protect the key values of society; in consensus theory, power is the
servant of society and of its values.
The other approach, which I refer to as coercion theory, pictures
society as primarily a structure of power, and views inequality as simply
the outcome of power relationships over time among individuals
and interest groups. Proponents of this approach would argue that
brain surgeons make no greater contribution to the health of the
community than do garbage collectors; they would suggest that the
high incomes of the surgeons are due to the fact that they control
a scarce resource (their special skills) which is at times desperately
needed by those in a position to pay for it; and they would suspect
that surgeons sometimes, like other professional groups from plumbers
92 Readings for Theology 141: A Theology of the Catholic Social Vision
1
Reinhard Bendix, Work and Authority in Industry (New York: Wiley, 1956).
to sociologists, connive among themselves to keep their skills in short
supply by limiting entrance to the field. Finally they would go on
to argue that the position of bank president may be due as much to
inherited family wealth and connections, to power, as to competence
and skill.
But what of society’s values, its symbols and self-understanding, its
concept of the common good—the stuff of which consensus theory
is made? Since the time of Marx, coercion theorists have viewed
these as ideologies or legitimations imposed upon society by the elite,
propagated through the cultural institutions such as the churches and
the schools, enacted into law, and serving fundamentally to justify
the position of those who hold wealth and power. In the concrete,
these writers point to interpretations of social inequality such as the
following: that Divine Providence has allotted to each man his place
in society, and hence it would be wrong and sinful to try to change
it; that the wealthy and powerful exercise paternalistic care over those
dependent on them, who therefore owe them a debt of gratitude; that
poverty is due to laziness or vice and wealth stems from virtue and
hard work in a world of equal opportunity for all; and, in the socialist
societies of Eastern Europe, that the workers are really the owners
of the factories and the managers only their representatives.1 In each
of these cases, coercion theorists point out, a value system has served
to legitimate a structure of inequality and defend the interests of the
elite.Thus, reversing the position of the consensus theorists, coercion
theorists see values as the servants of power.
Obviously, these contrasting views of society—the consensus
model and the coercion model—have important implications in
both the theoretical and the practical orders. As Fr.Tabora’s paper has
suggested, behind them may lie different philosophies of man and
society, of culture and ethics and law.Again, the social practitioner who
is concerned about promoting a more just and humane society, will ask
to what extent an appeal to values such as equality and participation,
justice and the common good, will actually help to bring about a
change in social structures; and to what extent the power implicit
in the use of pressure tactics or even violence may be necessary.
And ideologues, who are interested in ideas more for their ability to
Carroll, S.J., Social Theory and Social Change in the Philippines 93
Having set up the questions, let me present succinctly my
tentative answers, before proceeding to the data on which they are
based. I would hold that coercion theory provides a more adequate
explanation of the inequality which we observe today in Philippine
social and economic life than does consensus theory. Power, in other
words, has much more to do with who gets what than do society’s
values or the common good. Secondly, I would suggest that power has
become more salient over time and values less salient as determinants
of social structure; that is, Philippine society over time has been
moving more and more in the direction of the coercion model. And
thirdly, I would argue that this process is related to the progressive
COERCION THEORY AND PHILIPPINE REALITY
mobilize sentiment and guide action than in their truth value, find
in consensus theory a tool defending the status quo, and in coercion
theory a weapon for attacking it. Thus, today’s authoritarian regimes
of both right and left base their claims to legitimacy on theories of
the popular will grounded in the consensus approach (e.g.,“an august
covenant with the people”) while their opponents attack them with
the analysis and rhetoric of coercion theory (e.g., “the U.S.-Marcos
dictatorship.”)
It is tempting, particularly for those who are primarily interested
in making a case for or against “the system” to use either consensus
theory alone or coercion theory alone; but such an approach stems
from a misunderstanding of the nature of modern social theory
and fails to do justice to the complexity of reality. For this reason,
it is an inadequate guide for action. Social theory is not reality, but
a measuring instrument or a set of eyeglasses for looking at reality.
Reality is “out there”, always more complex than our formulations.
Social theory is in the mind of the theorist, a tool which he uses as
long as he finds it helpful, and which he is ready to discard when a
more adequate tool becomes available. Thus the key question with
regard to the approaches is not “which one is true?,” but “which one
better explains this particular reality?” or even better, “how do the
two of them together help to illuminate present reality and light a
path into the future?”
94 Readings for Theology 141: A Theology of the Catholic Social Vision
2
Erich Weede, “Sociological Analyses of Income Inequality,” American Sociological
Review,Vol.45, No. 3 (June 1980). pp. 497-50l.
3
Gary S. Feilds, Poverty, Inequality, and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1980).
4
“Percentage Share of Total Family Incomes of Different Income Groups”,
unpublished material made available by Ellen H. Palanca of the Department of Economics,
Ateneo de Manila University.
centralization of political and economic life in the country. Let me
now try to develop these propositions in a little more detail.
The distribution of income is one of the more quantifiable
measures of inequality, and provides a convenient starting-point for
our analysis. It is known, of course, that incomes tend to be more
unequally distributed in the economically less developed nations than
in the industrialized world; and typically inequality increases in the
early stages of industrialization before leveling off and decreasing at
a later stage.2 But the relationship is neither universal nor necessary,
and there are many examples of nations with similar levels of GNP
per capita but very different levels of inequality. Factors such as
democratic institutions, socialist ideology, or the resolute will on the
part of even an authoritarian government such as that of Taiwan,
can make a difference.3
What is our situation here in the Philippines with regard to
income distribution? Well, we are probably not the worst in the
world in this respect; Brazil and some of the other Latin American
countries seem to have that distinction. But we have long had a highly
unequal distribution and, given our lower per-capita income, it may
be in fact more catastrophic in human terms—in terms of absolute
poverty and malnutrition and wasted human potential—than is the
case in Latin America. Moreover, despite the weakness of the data,
all indications are that our income distribution has become more
unequal over time even as the economy appeared to be growing and
per-capita income increasing. Some calculations which I have done,
based on figures provided by the National Census and Statistics Office,
indicate that the wealthiest 20% of families in 1961 received 332 times
the income of the poorest 40%; in 1971, the ratio had risen to 4.42,
and by 1981 it was 6.30.4 Confirmation of this trend for the 1960’s
and early 1970’s may be found in the various studies summarized by
Carroll, S.J., Social Theory and Social Change in the Philippines 95
Poverty, Inequality... pp. 218-27.
University of the Philippines, School of Economics,“An Analysis of the Philippine
Economic Crisis: A Workshop Report”, June 1984, p. 43.
7
Perla Q. Makil, “Forest Management and Use: Philippine Policies in the Seventies
and Beyond.” Philippine Studies, 32 (1984), pp. 27-53.
6
5
Among the mechanisms which have led to this widening of the
gap, the U.P. report mentions the government’s reliance on indirect
taxes rather than on progressive income and property taxes; budgetary
expenditures favoring the military, public buildings and monuments;
subsidies to private firms and tourist facilities; an industrial relations
policy by which government, taking a management point of view,
sees wages as primarily a cost of production and therefore restricts
and hampers labor-union activity; favoritism; monopoly in the sugar
trade and monopsony in coconuts. Others have pointed to the manner
in which credit and interest-rate policies have favored the wealthy;
and among many more specific studies, Makil’s analysis of Philippine
forest management policy has shown how the latter has systematically
favored the interests of the logging companies over the claims of the
forest dwellers to a livelihood from their ancestral lands.7
Aside from income distribution as such, one may note the
extent to which expenditures for social services have decreased as a
proportion of the government budget, from 35% in 1970 to 23% in
The overall rise in income inequality is already cause for
grave concern, but that the rise in this inequality came
almost entirely at the expense of the lower income deciles
is alarming.
Gary S. Fields,5 and for the more recent period in the University of
the Philippines’ workshop report on the economic crisis. The latter
notes, for example, that the real wages of skilled workers in Manila
in 1980 were only 63.7% of their 1972 level, and those of unskilled
workers were down to 53.4% of that level. Moreover, the differences
among the income levels in the major sectors of the economy, and
the differences between the more highly-paid and the less highlypaid workers in each sector, have become wider, leading the authors
of the report to conclude as follows.6
96 Readings for Theology 141: A Theology of the Catholic Social Vision
9
University of the Philippines, “An Analysis...”, Table 10, p. 63.
Exaltacion Ellevera Lamberte, “Macro-Level Indicators of Upland Poverty: The
Case of the Delivery of and Access to Services in the Upland Areas,” Philippine Sociological
Review,Vol 31, Nos.1-2 (January-June 1983), pp. 19-52.
10
“Address of the President to the Board of Directors” (Washington: World Bank,
1973), p.l0.
8
It would be difficult to show that the increasing inequality which
we observe in the Philippines is in accord with the values of our
society; certainly it contrasts with what has always been the official
rhetoric. Some have argued, however, that while not desirable in itself,
it is a necessary price that must be paid for economic development
which will ultimately benefit all the people. But even this position
was long ago rejected by the World Bank, for example, which as we
all know is no citadel of socialism. If I recall correctly, it is some eight
years now since McNamara as its president argued that while some
inequality may be useful in order to provide incentives and rewards
for initiative (the consensus argument), the degree of inequality found
in many countries of the developing world could not be justified by
any respectable theory of development.
We are left, then with coercion theory as the better explanation
of the inequality around us. Our society, in other words, can best be
seen as a structure of power, with power determining who gets what.
The arguments by which our income distribution has been defended
would seem to have about the same validity, and to serve the same
function of pacifying the poor, as the appeals to Divine Providence
in eighteenth-century England. Nor did this all begin with martial
One can conclude that policies aimed primarily at accelerating
economic growth, in most developing countries, have
benefited mainly the upper 40% of the population and the
allocation of public services and investment fund has tended
to strengthen rather than to offset this trend.
1982,8 or the way in which even government services tend to be more
available in the more affluent lowland and urban area than among
those who need them most.9 In sum and without going into more
detail, what Robert McNamara said more than ten years ago seems
to be verified in our country.10
Carroll, S.J., Social Theory and Social Change in the Philippines 97
law: income was concentrated and becoming more so long before
martial law, and the real wages of workers in Manila were declining
from the early 1960’s at least. One might, if he were sufficiently
venturesome, suggest that since the time when the Spaniards began
using and reinforcing the authority of the local datu, freeing him to
some degree from whatever pressures he felt to be responsive to the
needs and expectations of his followers, the ordinary Filipino and his
community have been progressively losing control over important
aspects of their lives. But the process seems to have become much
more rapid in the present century, as population pressure and the
closing of the agricultural frontier strengthened the position of
those who possessed land or capital, and as political and economic
centralization moved the centers of decision-making away from the
local community to the poblacion, to Manila, and even to New York
and Washington.
Meanwhile, national institutions such as the electoral process, the
separation of powers, free public education and the mass media, and
labor and peasant organizations, which in theory should have served
to exercise control over the use of power, in the name of the whole
society, have either been subverted or have proven unequal to the task.
Hence, power, having escaped the control of both the local community
and the wider society, tends to be used arbitrarily for the benefit
of the power holder. Moreover, in the hands of a skilled operator,
power generates more power and its various forms—economic
power and political power and the sheer power of the gun—are
used to reinforce one another. One thinks of the policemen, himself
a poor man and exploited in many ways, extorting money from the
jeepney driver; the Constabulary officer engaged in illegal logging, or
smuggling; the crony capitalist buying up plantations and creating a
private army to protect them; a transnational corporation hiring the
“Lost Command” to drive out settlers from its domain. Thus, power
becomes more concentrated over time and the nation’s income, in a
manner seemingly contrary to the law of gravity, “trickles upward”
to the highest reaches of the social system. And destruction, like the
rocks and debris from a government building project which I saw
cascading down a mountainside near Tagaytay, wiping out the homes
and fields and hopes of the simple farmers in the valley, rains down
on those below.
98 Readings for Theology 141: A Theology of the Catholic Social Vision
11
Alleyne Ireland, cited in Frederick Fox S.J., “One Hundred Years of Philippine
Education: 1860-1960”, Part II “New Flags over Malacañan: 1899-1960”, unpublished
manuscript, 1963, pp. 3-4.
If the analysis which we have attempted is substantially correct,
then for one who values equality and participation in society, an
important conclusion follows.The problem facing Philippine society
today is bigger than President Marcos and the aftermath of martial
law. It involves much more than getting the political and economic
systems, derailed by the assassination of Senator Aquino, back on
the tracks. Here it seems to me that the more radical among our
activists (the “red” groups) see the issues more clearly than many of
the middle-class “yellow” groups which were shocked into political
awareness by the assassination. They recognize that seventy years of
relatively free elections, separation of powers, freedom of the press
and the rest did not bring the great mass of the Filipinos into the
mainstream of national development. They note, as a friend of mine
wrote some time ago, that while the confetti was falling in Makati,
Makati-based firms were still pushing small farmers off their land in
Bukidnon.Thus, they see much truth in the prediction of one of the
early American administrators here, that “unless the Philippines first
secured for itself a solid, balanced, and well-distributed, economy, its
education and its democracy would be empty shells.”11
The solution, therefore, will involve restructuring our institutions,
or more fundamentally, establishing society’s control over the
distribution and use of wealth and all forms of power, bringing these
under the rule of law and orienting them toward the shared values and
goals of Filipinos, re-moralizing a de-moralized society if you wish.
Another and less comfortable conclusion from our analysis is that
the people cannot be simply divided into categories, the “oppressors”
and the “oppressed” or the “bad guys” and the “good guys”, with
ourselves of course among the “good guys.” The problem pertains
to Philippine social structure as a whole, of which we are all a part,
and for which we all bear some responsibility.
BEYOND CONSENSUS AND COERCION:
A PATH INTO THE FUTURE?
Carroll, S.J., Social Theory and Social Change in the Philippines 99
12
Encounter, July 1974. pp. 7-13.
But how is change to come about? Here I believe that we must
go beyond the present limits of social science and invoke a vision of
man and of society and of the forces which move them. Is man totally
selfish? Does he respond to an appeal to values, or to his own interests
only? Is he totally determined by his society, culture and psychological
conditioning? Or does he have the possibility of transcending these
to some degree? Must we push the contradictions of society to the
point of revolution, in the belief that only when the material basis
of men’s values will have been radically restructured will society and
man himself be changed? Should we appeal to values, in the tradition
of consensus theory, or rely on power to bring about change?
Science has no definitive answer to these questions, but I believe
that a good scientific case can be made for the proposition that man
is both capable of responding to values and frequently influenced or
blinded by his own interests to the point where he identifies them
with the common good. The man who uttered the classic statement
“What is good for General Motors is good for America” was
undoubtedly influenced by his position as President of G.M., but he
could have reflected on the matter a little more deeply. This being so,
society will inevitably be somewhat “messy” and anyone who claims
to have all the answers or the formula for the perfect society should
be distrusted from the start. In fact, the Polish historian of Marxism,
Leszek Kolakowski, once wrote a mischievous article entitled “Can
the Devil Be Saved?”, the “devil” in this case being religion and the
churches, in which he developed the argument that while society
can get along very well without God, it cannot do without the
doctrine of original sin.12 For, he argued, without something like that
doctrine, we are left with a concept of man as either totally good or
totally depraved, and both of these positions lead to totalitarianism: if
man is totally good then we cannot tolerate any imperfections, any
peccadillos, in his behavior and we end up in the puritanism of the
Chinese Cultural Revolution; if he is totally evil, then he cannot be
trusted with freedom. Hence, Kolakowski argued, it is the social role
of the churches to defend freedom by maintaining their somewhat
complicated but nevertheless realistic view of man.
100 Readings for Theology 141: A Theology of the Catholic Social Vision
13
T.H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (London: Cambridge University Press,
1950).
14
I have developed some of these ideas before, in The Church: A Political Force?
This view would suggest that values are important in society, but
especially when they are backed up by a certain amount of power; and that
the key role of power is not to overturn social structures by force but
to obtain a hearing for values. Or to put it differently, those at the top
of the pyramid will be most likely to take seriously the point of view
of those further down when they feel the pyramid itself being shaken
from below. Thus, historically, in England the winning of equality
before the law, of political equality, and of an array of social rights by
the lower socio-economic classes has been achieved not only through
struggle, but also through a deepening of the concept of citizenship.13
Gradually, in the face of rising social tensions, it was realized that what
the poorer classes were demanding should be theirs by right as citizens,
and this realization added moral force to their demands. Similarly, the
gains made by Black Americans in recent decades can be attributed
to the fact that the social tensions created by the demonstrations
and boycotts and civil disobedience of the Blacks themselves and of
their White sympathizers, forced the American nation to confront
the contradiction between its stated principles and the ugly reality
of discrimination and segregation.
It would be interesting to discuss labor unionism from this point
of view, if only to point out once again that power is not enough
and there is need also for a framework of values; where unions have
become powerful and see themselves as simply the business agents for
their own members, the interests of weaker and unorganized, groups
(the elderly, the handicapped, fatherless families) can be trampled as
the giants do battle with each other. Or one might reflect on the
complex interaction among the key groups in Poland: the Solidarity
Movement, the State, and the Church. Despite their differences, they
are at least one in their desire to keep the Russians at a distance, and
this may ultimately be the basis for a negotiated peace among them.
But what I have said so far may be sufficient to illustrate the process
of social change as I see it.
It is the central argument of this paper, therefore, that the curative
powers of society include both pressure, and moral suasion.14 The first
Carroll, S.J., Social Theory and Social Change in the Philippines 101
(Manila: Human Development Research and Documentation, February 1984).
would in the Philippine case come from the organized poor, aided
by those of the middle class who are committed to genuine social and
not merely political change.The moral suasion could be expected to
come from these same middle-class groups but also from the media
and churches as the “official” custodians of society’s values. It would
be directed primarily at promoting a positive and creative response
on the part of the whole society to the pressures coming from the
poor—the kind of response that leads to change, and reconciliation
within a framework of common values rather than to polarization
and ultimately to violence. Of course, should such a response not be
forthcoming, the moral suasion itself would become another form
of pressure: no elite likes to have its legitimacy challenged by the
suggestion that its “authority” has no moral basis and is in fact only
brute force, that it has no moral claim on “its” power and wealth.
The strategy is a demanding one. It asks of the elite a creative
response which will inevitably entail a loss of some of its power and
wealth; and of the middle classes that they take a definitive stand with
the poor for genuine structural change, change that will be costly to
them as well. It asks of media and the churches that they speak out
clearly on the basic moral issues facing the nation: on human dignity
and the need to safeguard it in the process of both socio-political
change and economic development; on human rights, including the
right to organize, to participate in decision-making, to express dissent;
on the need not only for a return to the rule of law and to integrity in
personal and public life, but also for a more equitable distribution of
power and wealth in Philippine society and for the structural changes
which will bring this about; on national autonomy in relationships
with foreign powers. Of the poor, the strategy asks that they continue
to organize in defense of their rights, and that they vigorously resist
all of those forces whether of the right or the left—which would take
it upon themselves to define the common interest and then impose
their definition on the nation.
Which brings me to my final point.The strategy proposed here is
quite different from that of some of our friends on the left, who seem
constrained by the coercion model to rely on power alone: they would
confront the power of the “oppressor” with that of the “oppressed” in
102 Readings for Theology 141: A Theology of the Catholic Social Vision
15
Vincent G. Cullen, S.J., “National Development Versus the People’s Welfare”,
Philippine Studies 32 (1984), pp. 335-343.
a definitive showdown; after which—it seems—they would work to
impose their own vision of the Promised Land on the nation. It is hard
to see how such a collision of forces, or imposition, can lead to the remoralization of society or to the regaining by the little man of control
over the forces which dominate his life. Experience suggests that, in
some areas at least, the barrio people see the NPA as simply another
outside force which, like the Army and the multinationals, would
impose itself upon them; and that their only hope for articulating
their values and regaining some control over their lives lies in their
own, local and autonomous, organizations.15 The reliance on power as
an instrument for bringing about social change strikes me as similar
to the use of massive doses of drugs to fight infection in the human
body; the drugs may indeed combat the infection but also destroy
healthy cells and leave the patient drastically weakened. It might be
better to rely more on the curative powers of the body itself.
Will the Filipino accept this challenge, take this path, and in so
doing find his way to a better future for himself and his children? I
cannot say; unlike current ideologies, responsible social science offers
no “money-back guarantee.” But this I can say: the example of Ninoy
Aquino and the response which his sacrifice awakened in the hearts
of millions of Filipinos give us far more reason to hope now than we
had thirteen months ago.
Carroll, S.J., Social Theory and Social Change in the Philippines 103