I just wanted to show some photos from the May Day march in Manila of various National Democratic Mass Organisations. These are organisations who follow the political programme of National Democracy and are affiliated with the Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (New Patriotic Alliance). You can read their names and a little bit about them in the alt text. From my notes, I'm going to try and sum up some of the perspectives and analysis these organisations put forward while I was with them.
The Philippines is a rich country. It has abundant natural mineral resources, extremely fertile soils, and has a majority working age population. There is no physical reason the country cannot provide everyone who lives there with a decent standard of living or have a developed industrial economy. However, the people are poor. 50% of the population have a monthly income of less than 12,000 pesos a month (£145 per month). 20% of families go to bed hungry, the highest proportion in South East Asia. 70% of the population has no formal contract or employment or guaranteed income. Meanwhile, the 150 richest families in the Philippines have an average monthly income of 17,000,000 pesos a month, and the three richest families own 7% of the country's GDP.
The country is semi-feudal, with land ownership dominated by land landowning families whose lineage goes back to the Spanish conquest. 78% of farmers do not own their own land and have to either rent from these land barons, settle untilled lands and hope they are not evicted, or work for the landlords for pitiful $2 a day wages (as is the case for sugar workers in Negros). Agricultural techniques are backwards and undermechanised. There is no incentive for landlords to invest in agriculture, making a decent living from rentierism alone, while farmers themselves lack the capital to make improvements. Farmers also face issues with land conversion, with land owners forcing conversion from peasant production towards real estate, solar farms, and mining. Neoliberal policies have also left the agricultural sector exposed to foreign competition. An example of this in practice is the Rice Liberalisation Law, introduced in 2019 which removed protective barriers, state price stabilisation powers and income support to rice farmers. The result was a flood of imported rice from Thailand and Vietnam. Local rice production collapsed and farmers lost billions of pesos to imports. With local production anaemic, the Philippines is now the world's number one importer of rice and at the mercy of fluctuations on the world' market and the doubling of prices at the market. The people have benefited most from this are import companies linked to powerful political families (the Araneta family especially). People who are forced to leave the land often join the ranks of the 40 million people classified as the urban poor, where they face low pay, insecure work, and landgrabs and demolitions of their homes to make way for real estate owned by the same land owning families.
The country is semicolonial, and is used as a staging post for projection of US power into Asia. The US uses 9 military bases in the Philippines, conducting an annual military excercise alongside other imperialist countries known as the Balikatan. The country's mineral resources are extracted by foreign corporations and processed overseas, contributing to the industrialisation of other countries. Despite being the world's top source of nickel and cobalt, mining only contributes 1% to the Philippines' GDP - basically the only thing that stays in the country are worker wages. Many of the industries that do exist exist in special economic zones where labour rights do not apply to undertake outsourced production work (such a semiconductor manufacturing), once again for the benefit of foreign industries. Ultimately the country's main overseas export is its people. 8,000 Filipinos leave the country each day to work overseas, and 11% of the country's GDP is remittances. Migrant workers experience superexploitation through tied visa regimes (especially in the Middle East) and once again, find themselves working for the benefit of imperial powers rather than their homeland.
The country's government is dominated by bureaucrat-capitalists - individuals linked to large landowning families and corporations who use their position in the state to their advantage. Ghost projects are used to syphon billions from the state into the accounts of politicians' families (the ghost Flood Control projects and associated protests against these in 2025 being a good example). State forces are used to settle land disputes in favour of landlords with connections. The Araneta family is one of the largest landowning families in the Philippines. Greggy Araneta, who heads the family's property is married to the sister of President Bongbong Marcos (himself the son of Ferdinand Marcos, military dictator overthrown during the 1986 EDSA revolution), Irene Marcos. BBM himself is married to Liza Araneta, another member of the clan. Bureaucrat capitalism is ultimately a reflection of the semifeudalism in state politics.
In order to resolve these issues, the Philippines needs several major transformative changes. One is genuine agrarian reform: large landed estates should be broken up, and their land transferred to the tillers for free. The state should provide farms with the support to rationalise and modernise agriculture in order to achieve food sovereignty. The country needs national industrialisation: the natural resources of the country owned by foreign corporations should be nationalised and used to benefit the Philippine people. State owned companies should be established to develop the industries necessary to solve the problems of the Philippine people, provide them with decent housing, healthcare, public transportation, and to modernise agriculture. To achieve this, the country needs a revolution capable of smashing the bureaucrat capitalists and the US imperialists that support them, led by the working class, urban poor, and peasantry, the constituencies with the interest in these changes and capacity to carry them out.
These movements broadly share this perspective and analysis, each seeing the struggle of their sector as part of the same fight. They coordinate and support one another in their struggles. While I was there I met KMU members at Kowloon House dimsum restaurant chain. They had recently undertaken a successful (though they are still fighting to see the agreement they struck with the company fully implemented and resisting attempts of the company to dismiss people) 6 day strike action involving a 24 hour mass picket at the company's food production factory. The picket was manned by members of peasant unions, environmental defenders, students, urban poor organisations, with 200 people present, with a collective kitchen established to feed picketers.
Seeing these movements in action was a real privilege and its given me a lot to think about in terms of the kind of movements I'd like to see in my own country. I wish we had an alliance of organisations, fighting on every front of people's struggles, deeply rooted in the communities they sought to organise and represent, armed with a common understanding of the underlying causes of the country's problems and their interlinkages with the global system of capitalist imperialism, the fundamental changes need to resolve these problems, and a commitment to revolutionary action in order to achieve them.
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