This Labor Day, the longstanding demands of the working class for better wages and working conditions, embodied in the clamor for a national living wage, reflect the urgency and necessity of the people’s democratic revolution in the face of the anti-people neoliberal policies of the US-Marcos regime.
World history has shown the necessity of working-class leadership in waging revolution. National liberation struggles have been fought and won with a revolutionary proletarian party at the helm. In the Philippines, the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) has successfully led the national democratic revolution for over five decades, through periods of advance and retreat, with a clear understanding of the role of the proletariat in revolution.
Today’s ongoing global political crisis only emphasizes this point. Around the world, depressed wages and rising prices of basic goods have left workers dying or dead, while transnational corporations rake in record profits from the exploitation of cheap labor and the devastating plunder of the environment. Peoples’ resistance has been met with increasing repression, as seen in the rising proliferation of overtly fascist regimes across the globe. Imperialist wars, fueled by the scramble of the United States to arrest its strategic decline, continue to wreak havoc on the lives of millions of working-class citizens.
The global crises that impact workers of the world is severely felt by workers in the Philippines. Being a semicolonial and semifeudal country under the orbit of the US, workers experience severe unemployment, job insecurity, little to no benefits, and inadequate wages. Minimum wage levels, barely addressing half of the total daily needs of a working class family, are depressed further by regional wage distortions, uncontrolled inflation and rampant corruption.
Filipino workers overseas, trying to help their families overcome the crisis in the home country, continue to bear the problems of job insecurity and inadequate wages. For the many who are based in the US, this is compounded further by racism and the uncertainty of the Trump administration’s racist and fascist policies.
It is not only just but urgent that Filipino workers and other sectors of society unite around the clear call for a national minimum wage that would afford them a decent standard of living, and the call to stop inflation or lower the prices of basic goods and services as these have gone far beyond the reach of majority of the people. It is likewise urgent to go further and struggle for genuine agrarian reform and nationalist industrialization to build an economy that will accommodate the needs of the people.
As the US-Marcos regime stays true to its reactionary character in its continued implementation of anti-people policies, the role of the proletariat, through its revolutionary proletarian party, has never been more clear. The Filipino people must be united against the root evils of imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucrat capitalism. The necessity and primacy of armed struggle, in the framework of the people’s democratic revolution, remains evident. Only through the leadership of such a party can a sustained, articulate, and forward-looking revolutionary movement of this character be realized.
Now more than ever, the proletarian cooperative spirit, productive discipline, and collective desire for the liberation of all classes must be harnessed in service of the revolution. The NDFP reaffirms the leadership of the CPP in the national democratic revolution. We express our unfaltering support for the armed struggle in the countryside carried out by the New People’s Army. We also support the efforts of our comrades in the Revolutionary Council of Trade Unions and Katipunan ng mga Samahang Manggagawa in revitalizing their unions and chapters, to bring working-class Filipinos closer to the national democratic revolution.
Our efforts to rebuild, strengthen, and expand our forces towards the inevitable victory of the Filipino people against reaction will be our lasting contribution to the struggle of the international proletariat against the imperialist world order. The NDFP and the Philippine revolutionary movement will continue to march forward, alongside our comrades from other parts of the world, towards the genuine liberation of the working class and the peoples of the world. ###