On the Philippine Revolution

8 min readMay 14, 2021

One of the most underreported events in the world today in the national democratic revolution currently taking place in the Philippines, led by the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), its armed wing, the New People’s Army (NPA), and its united front, the National Democratic Front of the Philippines. In the face of some of the most severe anti-communist oppression ever seen in the history of the Philippines and guided by Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, the revolutionary classes of the Philippines, led by the revolutionary vanguard of the CPP, are carving a new society in the Philippines, liberating it from a fascist government sponsored by imperialists, and laying the foundations of socialism.

The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) was founded on December 26 1968, a date which coincided with Chairman Mao Zedong’s 75th birthday, the New People’s Army (NPA) was founded on March 29 1969 and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDF). The CPP was founded as a result of the First Great Rectification Movement, an anti-revisionist movement led by Jose Maria Sison, which criticized, repudiate and rectified the major ideological, political and organizational errors and weaknesses of the 1930s-era Philippine Communist Party, which had since capitulated to exclusively peaceful means and to revisionism. Crucially, the First Great Rectification Movement established Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought as the theoretical guidance of the CPP. In the 1980’s, the CPP-NPA-NDF saw major success and popular support, given it was the army of the people fighting against the especially brutal fascist Marcos regime. In 1992, on the backdrop of the dissolution of the USSR and the so-called “end of history”, the CPP had reached a point where it needed to reaffirm its commitment to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, to proletarian internationalism, democratic centralism and to socialism, as well as to repudiate modern revisionism, “anti-Stalinism” and Trotskyism. What followed was the Second Great Rectification Movement, to reaffirm the CPP’s basic principles and to rectify errors. The modern revisionist elements of the party either left or were expelled, and many later kowtowed to electoralism, a few revisionist renegades even became military agents of the reactionary Philippine state.

Since its inception, the New People’s Army (NPA), which is currently active in over 70 of the 81 provinces of the Philippines, has followed Mao’s military theory of protracted people’s war. Protracted people’s war can be divided into three stages: the first stage is the strategic defensive stage, the second stage is the strategic equilibrium stage and the third and final stage is the strategic offensive stage. The Filipino revolutionaries have further subdivided the strategic defensive stage, (which the Philippine revolution is currently in) into phases, the early, middle and advanced phases of each stage. The Philippine revolution is currently in the middle-defensive stage. This stage consists of the NPA building company-strength forces in every guerrilla front in order to carry out widespread and intensive guerrilla warfare. Due to the archipelagic nature of the Philippines, the NPA is not aiming to build liberated zones, as were built during the people’s wars in China and Vietnam, and as is being built in the present day by the forces of the people’s war in India. Instead however, the NPA has built and is continuing to build over 110 guerrilla fronts, comprising approximately 50–200 guerrillas, across the archipelago, in which, organs of new popular power is in the hands of the people at the village, intervillage and town level.

The NPA is currently engaged in operations to defend the environment of the Philippines, as well as the indigenous people who inhabit it, from predatory multinational capitalist corporations, who’s only concern is profit. The NPA has fought against the evictions of indigenous people by these multinationals, and continues to conduct operations against these corporations with the aim of sabotaging their operations and making it difficult for them to abuse the Philippines in the way that they currently do.

One of the CPP-NPA-NDF’s primary goals is to root out and expel all foreign imperialism from the Philippines. The Philippines has long been oppressed by American imperialism. After the Spanish-American war of 1898, the American imperialist took over the Philippines from Spanish imperialism. From 1898 until 1946, the American imperialists maintained a direct stranglehold over the Philippines, and it was officially a colony of the United States of America. During this period, the Philippines was truly brutalised by US imperialism, which looted, raped and pillaged the Philippines, with the goal of making profit out of the Filipino people by any means necessary. Even after formal independence was won from both US and Japanese imperialism in 1946, the US has continued to oppress the Philippines via neocolonialism, with US companies extracting superprofits from both the labour of the Filipino masses and through the resources which rightly belong to the people of the Philippines. To reflect the neocolonial nature of the modern Philippines, one only needs to examine the statistics, for instance foreign direct investment comprises 69.6% of the manufacturing industry and 60.6% of agriculture, forestry and fishing in the Philippines. Several hundred US military forces maintain permanent presence and store their weapons in its facilities across the country, maintained within the military camps of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP).

While US imperialism still to this day prevails as the primary country imperializing the Philippines, (for example, the US maintains five active military bases in the Philippines), in recent years, China has emerged as a secondary imperialist power in the Philippines. Despite the fact that, before its turn to modern revisionism and capitalist restoration, the CPP maintained fraternal relations with the Communist Party of China, the modern revisionist CPC is exploiting the Philippines economically, through mining nickel from the country’s mountains and extracting magnetite from coastal areas. China also covets the untapped oil reserves of the West Philippine Sea.

Now we have covered history and backdrop, we will now cover the work the forces of the Philippine revolution are engaged in to empower the masses. The CPP-NPA-NDF has built people’s revolutionary committees in the countryside and it has armed the people. The CPP conducts mass work, applying Mao’s universal theory of the mass line and the party being fully accountable to the masses, listening to the masses’ concerns and proposals, and implementing what they need. The CPP-NPA goes into the communities of its mass base, they talk to the masses about their situation, their problems and what they want in their lives, they collate and compile all the data, summarise it and then offer them solutions of how to improve their situations based on this information. These solutions include building Organs of Political Power, local organisations of the masses to resist the forces of imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism. These Organs of Political Power will then proceed to carefully and thoroughly attend to the people’s basic needs, such as healthcare and education, services which the reactionary Philippine state fails and refuses to deliver. For instance, in March of 2020, the NPA was given orders to disseminate information regarding the COVID-19 pandemic and to attend to all urgent medical needs of the people. In Negros island, a unit of the NPA built a medical clinic in which around 1,000 people per day were provided medical services, including check-ups, dental services, and general provision of basic medication.

The Philippine revolutionaries have struck a strong balance between the armed and illegal struggles being led by the CPP mainly in the countryside, and the legal political struggles being waged by legal democratic forces both in the cities and rural areas. These organisations work within the ambit of the reactionary state structure. These mass movements and organisations range from workers unions, mass organizations, alliances and sectoral political parties. While these organizations objectively serve to arouse, organize and mobilize the people in militant anti-imperialist, anti-feudal, anti-capitalist and other national democratic and socialist struggles. Despite the fact that they work within the ambit of the reactionary state structure, they are still subject to severe anti-communist armed suppression from the reactionary state, this can involve “red-tagging”, labelling national democratic activists with legal organisations as communists who are with the NPA, and arresting them in witch hunts.

One important issue that must be addressed is the sheer brutality with which the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), the military arm of the reactionary Philippine state, the fascist Duterte regime and the national bourgeois compradors and neocolonial international bourgeoisie. The situation of human rights in the Philippines has deteriorated particularly since Rodrigo Duterte came to power. More people have already been murdered by the Duterte regime than under the notorious fascist Marcos regime. This is exemplified by the fact that in early 2018, Duterte said in a speech that he was giving an order for the AFP to shoot female rebels in their genitalia, although he later said this was “sarcasm”. The AFP employs a policy of state terrorism against both the NPA and against civilians, regularly conducting aerial bombardments of civilian areas, mass killings of civilians, aerial machine-gun strafing of civilian areas near mountain and rural communities, and forced mass evictions of indigenous peoples, plunging them further into deep poverty, to make way for multinational capitalist, usually foreign, corporations to exploit the resources of the Philippines and reap superprofits. The CPP-NPA unequivocally stands in support of the self-determination of the Lumad, Moro, Cordillera and other indigenous peoples of the Philippines. Duterte’s fascist regime has also killed an estimated 30,000+ people in it’s so-called “drug war”, which is in reality, a war over control of the illegal drug trade.

In conclusion, the Philippines is currently undergoing a new democratic and national democratic of the revolutionary classes in general and the proletariat in particular, and led by the CPP, in class warfare with the reactionary and ruling classes. The people of the Philippines are rising up and waging people’s war against imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism, against neocolonialism, landlordism and fascism. The genuine anti-capitalists, anti-imperialists and revolutionary socialists of the world should lend their support to the Philippine revolution, nonetheless, as Marxists, criticising it if necessary.

Long live the Communist Party of the Philippines!

Long live the New People’s Army!

Long live the Philippine revolution!

Long live the masses of the Philippines!

Acknowledgments: I would like to sincerely thank the Philippine Revolution Web Central and the Chief Information Officer of the CPP, Comrade Marco L. Valbuena, for kindly assisting me with this article.

On the Philippine Revolution

Written by Resistance Reports

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