Philippines – Ang Bayan Editorial: Wage People’s War for Patrimony and National Freedom
We hereby share the editorial of the newest edition of Ang Bayan, newspaper of the Communist Party of the Philippines, published by Philippine Revolution Web Central, on September 7.
The Filipino people are at a crucial juncture in the country’s neocolonial history. All remaining vestiges of independence are now being completely and violently torn down. This is amid plans by American and Japanese big capitalists to strip and flatten vast mountains and land to take away the Philippines’ wealth. The historic task of defending the country’s patrimony, towards ending national oppression under US imperialist rule, rests on the shoulders of the current generation of the Filipino people.
The US-Marcos regime seeks to subject the country to a new level of foreign plunder. This is comparable to the period of US colonial rule in the early 20th century, when the country suffered from relentless devastation. American companies took away the country’s wealth, denuded the mountains, grabbed and cleared millions of hectares of land, laid railways and built ports to quickly transport and export timber, pineapples, sugar and other commodities extracted from the country.
A similar threat to the country emerges with Marcos’ Executive Order 122 which seeks the further liberalization of mining. This order is an outright act of national treason. It aims to remove regulations on foreign capital to accelerate the entry of their destructive and plunderous mining operations. The order will trample upon the rights of indigenous peoples to their ancestral land, and the rights of the people to the country’s land and resources.
The order will further tighten foreign economic and political control over the country. Foreign companies, especially American and Japanese big capitalists, have applauded the order, drooling over the mineral wealth beneath Philippine soil.
Marcos’ order aligns with Pax Silica, the economic and military scheme of US imperialism. This aims to take away or block China’s access to the sources and processing of “critical minerals” and “rare earth elements”—raw materials in the production of semiconductors, batteries and other electronic parts for “artificial intelligence” and weaponry. US imperialism regards China’s dominance over these resources as a threat to its security.
The US is now aggressively deploying its military power in various parts of the world. It aims to undermine its rival China’s access to Philippine mineral wealth. After having colluded with big Chinese capitalists in the 1990s–2000s to push neoliberal policies in the Philippines that ravaged the country’s economy and livelihoods, US imperialism now seeks sole control of the Philippines and expel China power. American economic aggression is matched with military aggressiveness, evidenced by continuous strengthening of the military presence in Asia to control the seas surrounding China.
The Filipino people face a grim future under this impending chapter of neocolonial plunder. In the coming years, the broad masses can expect even intensified oppression and hardship with their land and livelihoods taken away, the environment ravaged, the country’s wealth plundered, and local productive forces destroyed. With Marcos pursuing the further liberalization of mining, the country is bound to suffer even more widespread disasters—landslides, oversilted rivers and catastrophic flooding across vast plains.
Widespread and brutal violence and repression will accompany the aggressive entry and land-grabbing by foreign companies and their local bourgeois comprador partners. To clear the path for foreign plunderers, those who resist and defend the land they inherited and cultivated are violently attacked, slapped with multiple charges, jailed and tortured. US imperialism vigorously supports the strengthening of reactionary armed forces to suppress all who fight to defend their land, livelihood and environment. This new era of imperialist plunder will bring even harsher and more cruel repression.
This situation demonstrates why the protracted people’s war in the Philippines must continue and advance further. The people’s war is the strategy of the Filipino people to defend the country’s independence and patrimony. It is the broad masses’ response to tyranny and fascism that serve the interests of foreign monopoly capitalists and the local ruling classes.
The people’s war is a revolutionary political movement of the broad masses. It encompasses all forms of struggle to resist foreign capitalists and their bourgeois comprador, landlord and bureaucrat-capitalist partners from taking over and seizing the country’s land and resources.
Armed struggle is the primary form of struggle for defending patrimony and attaining national freedom. Guerrilla warfare is the tactic of the broad masses of the people to fight a gargantuan enemy. Though US imperialism and the puppet fascist state may be monstrous in their power and violence, they cannot withstand the thousand-fold ant stings of the fighting masses.
There is an urgent need for the Party’s continuing task of uniting and mobilizing the entire people on the blazing path of the people’s war. The Party calls on all patriotic and democratic classes and sectors, especially the proletarian masses and petty-bourgeois intellectuals: join the New People’s Army and advance the armed resistance!
Carry forward the people’s war throughout the country, in all regions and provinces, from Abra to Sarangani! The people’s soldiers for the national struggle for freedom arise from the ranks of ordinary people. An Armalite or a shotgun, old or new, a pistol or a spear, a stone or a bow, in the hands of the masses and their guerrilla forces, are the weapons for defending patrimony and fighting for true national freedom.
