Framing Martial Law: Intellectuals as Signifying Agents in the Marcos Dictatorship

Scholars have tended to either discount the role played by intellectuals in authoritarian regimes— or, when they do highlight the role of intellectuals, reduce their roles to that of merely providing technical or administrative support to such regimes. Drawing largely from collective action frame literature, and using de Leon, Desai, and Tugal (2009; 2015)’s concept of “political articulation,” I underscore the importance of a group of intellectuals who supported the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines and show how, instead of only rendering specialist knowledge to craft policies or run the bureaucracy, they also functioned as “signifying agents” engaged in what we can think of as “framing” reality, interpreting Philippine society during the 1970s in ways that understood the problems being experienced by subordinate groups in a certain light, portrayed these groups as belonging to a particular bloc with certain enemies and allies, and prescribed certain courses of action by which these groups could address their problems. Through archival research and content analysis, I show how these intellectuals engaged with but also modified the ideas of both leftist and non-leftist intellectuals by depicting the problems being experienced by subordinate groups as a result of U.S. imperialism, feudalism, and liberal democracy; by tagging the landlord class rather than all dominant classes as the main or principal enemy while portraying certain sections of the dominant classes as potential allies; and by calling on people to support what some of them also called “revolution” -- but one that needed to be very different from the “revolution” waged by the communists. This revolution they envisioned was nationalist for opposing the interference of foreign powers but essentially conservative for only seeking to replace feudal relations with a capitalist one. All argued in favor of the state accumulating and centralizing political power to counter the landlords and other reactionary forces and implement reforms. In effect, the Marcos dictatorship was portrayed by these intellectuals as an ally of subordinate groups in liberating them from feudalism, and hence in ending their suffering. By analyzing the ways by which intellectuals supportive of the Marcos dictatorship engaged in framing, the study sets the stage for further studies on how intellectuals mobilized to persuade subordinate groups to adopt their ways of framing reality and whether and in what ways they actually succeeded in linking people to the state, thereby reinforcing authoritarianism not merely through the provision of technical or administrative support.