The event that led to Marcos's downfall is usually labelled as the February Revolution or the Revolution. On the other hand, all sorts of analyses have argued to the effect that the Revolution cannot be called a revolution, that it can best be described as a form of regime-change, a coup d'etat, a restoration, and so forth [see Carino 1986]. Yet to the hundreds of thousands of Filipinos from all social classes who massed on the streets that week there seemed to be no doubt that they were making and that they were participating in people power. For the to be, it sufficed for them to throw caution aside (bahala na), to confront the tanks and guns of the state, to experience a couple of hours of solidarity with the anonymous crowd, and to participate in exorcising the forces of darkness (i. e., the Marcos regime). Should the business of naming the event a revolution be understood, then, simply in terms of its political referent? Whatever the reality of the processes enveloping them, the crowds on EDSA seemed to readily interpret or locate their experience within a familiar discourse of and mass action. The present essay explores the discursive frame of radical politics from the 1950s up to 1986. I) I hope to explain why revolution and people power were familiar in 1986, as well as why the imagined 1986 EDSA also constitutes a departure or break from the Marcos/Communist Party discourse of revolution. The lack of a Great Tradition preceding the Spanish intervention in the seventeenth century prevents any identification of contemporary Filipino leaders with god* Department of History and Politics, James Cook University, Townsville, Q 4811 Australia (Visiting Research Scholar, The Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University, from November 1991 to November 1992) 1) Craig Reynold's masterly study of Thai radical discourse [1987J provided some basic insights for this essay. See also Vicente Rafael's provocative essay on the circulation of political signs during the early Marcos regime. Benedict Anderson's comments on an early draft of this paper are gratefully acknowledged.
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