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  • Moral Politics in the Philippines: Inequality, Democracy, and the Urban Poor by Wataru Kusaka
  • Soon Chuan Yean
Wataru Kusaka Moral Politics in the Philippines: Inequality, Democracy, and the Urban Poor Singapore: NUS Press; kyoto: kyoto University Press, 2017. 341 pages.

Moral Politics in the Philippines: Inequality, Democracy, and the Urban Poor has been a long-anticipated book since its Japanese version came out in 2013. Its author, Wataru Kusaka, obtained his postgraduate degree at the Graduate School of Social and Cultural Studies, Kyushu University, but his first exposure to the Philippines was doing volunteer work in Leyte as an undergraduate student. He also attended graduate classes at the University of the Philippines-Diliman (266). But above all, it was his engagement with [End Page 541] the people in the slums of Barangay Old Capitol Site, Quezon City, where he found his passion and formed his insights about the Philippines.

Kusaka's work provides a theoretical proposition for rejecting the loose populist and elite democracy approaches in interpreting Philippine democracy. He highlights the interclass antagonism and the ambiguous attitude of the middle class toward the poor. He celebrates the demise of elite democracy and the disenabling of clientelist politics among the urban poor (31), two of the main constitutive political institutions in Philippine society, thus allowing the poor to have more freedom and become less dependent on politicians in asserting their political rights. However, Kusaka criticizes the revival of "moral nationalism," which he defines as consisting of "attempts to create a common enemy by encouraging antagonism toward 'the elite' (referring to the traditional politicians or trapo) in the civic sphere and toward 'the rich' (referring to groups of people that deprive the livelihood of the poor, which may not belong to the trapo) in the mass sphere, thereby constructing the 'people' that transcends class lines" (277). Even though he does not differentiate the term "moral nationalism" from the usual definition of nationalism, Kusaka regards moral nationalism as arising from a "hegemonic practice that calls for 'moral solidarity of the nation'" (238). His identification of the initial rise of moral nationalism, however, is not clear. It perhaps arose during Pres. Joseph Estrada's administration, when Philippine society was most clearly divided along class lines (chapter 3), and its revival came during Pres. Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino's term (chapter 6).

Most challenging is identifying Kusaka's definition of "civic" and "mass" spheres. He offers this lengthy explanation on these concepts

[Civic and mass spheres] represent the living environments and discourse spaces of the middle and impoverished classes, respectively—a division engendered by the language, education, media, and livelihood gaps … [These environments and spaces] engender an antagonistic "we/they" relationship between these dual public spheres, one drawn between classes and the other between moralities. The class demarcation line, which derives from the unequal distribution of economic, occupational, educational, cultural and other resources, is fairly fixed due to divisions among people … [But] the moral demarcation line derives from differing concepts of good and evil, and is thereby more fluid.

(5–6) [End Page 542]

Moral Politics is critical of this emergence of dual spheres, which "creates groups that are seen as either 'good' or 'evil' and draw[s] a demarcation line between the two" (1), and the consequent antagonistic relations between the middle and lower classes that are detrimental to democracy (5). It argues that the good–evil dichotomy, engaged in by both the middle class and urban poor, includes the struggle for hegemony (13–14). Kusaka does not define "moral politics" in specific terms but gives general characteristics of how both classes practice it (38–42). For the middle class, moral politics is characterized by, for example, "policy-based debate," "accountability," "transparency," "good government," and "rule of law" (38), as opposed to politics that deals in "corruption, cronyism, personality, and elite domination of the poor through clientelism" (39). For the urban poor, moral politics is denoted by "fairness without regard for wealth or [for] the poor, and on concern for and generosity toward those in need" (40) and respect for "'dignity' (dangal, dignidad, pagkatao)" (41) especially of the needy without depriving them of their means of making an honest livelihood.

Cutting across...

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