Communism vs. Liberalism

Trump is turning the screws on the Philippines while the masses stand disarmed and divided. Some are tied to Marcos and Wall Street through their leadership’s support to the liberal anti-Duterte opposition. Others are looking to the Dutertistas as the only force standing up to imperialist oppression. These divisions will only lead to disaster! To defend the Philippines against the Trump administration, we need to join together in a solid anti-imperialist front.

The Dutertistas’ hints about assassinations and coups portend nothing good. They are testing the waters, wondering if there is an opening to bring down the BBM regime and regiment the masses by crushing our democratic rights and unleashing brutal state repression. The BBM regime is confident it will be able to put down the Dutertista opposition because it has the backing of the Trump administration and the pro-American officer corps. But BBM is fueling the rise of Dutertismo by prostrating the country before the imperialists. The left is unable to stop the Dutertes’ rise because it is tied to BBM and the imperialists.

To break the hold of Dutertismo over the masses, the workers movement must reclaim the banner of anti-imperialism and take the lead in the struggle to liberate the nation. Defense of the victims of Dutertista terror must be fused together with a program to improve the conditions of the workers and the petty bourgeoisie at the expense of the imperialists. This requires taking up the fight to cancel the imperialist debt which is crushing the people, opposing the U.S.’s military encirclement of China and the use of the country as a barracks to defend the interests of American finance capital, and raising the banner of national liberation to rally the Southeast Asian masses being driven to the edge as the imperialist vice tightens on the region. Obviously none of this can be done while the left is tied to the liberals, the Marcos government and the imperialists.

As things stand now, no one is challenging the pro-imperialists liberals’ claims to speak for the victims of the Dutertes, for democracy and against police and AFP terror. Those looking to the liberals will have their hopes cruelly dashed. Corruption, brutality, the limited character of democratic rights and the dictatorial character of the regime—all these social scourges result from the poverty and backwardness of Philippine society, which is caused by imperialist enslavement. It is not possible to fight any of these things in an alliance with the U.S.’s liberal lapdogs or the Marcos regime. Moreover, the opponents of Dutertismo will be isolated and have society turned against them as long as they are associated with the supporters of imperialism. The struggle for justice and democracy can only succeed if it is waged on an anti-imperialist basis that attracts the masses behind it and addresses the real source of the problem.

Akbayan and Makabayan are campaigning for Congress to convict Sara Duterte. But what about the president? They aren’t calling for the impeachment of that equally corrupt oligarch, the man in charge who is selling the country out to the imperialists and disappearing activists in the countryside (and moreover was almost banned from running in the last election for failing to pay taxes on his family’s ill-gotten wealth). No: they’re pleading with Marcos to take a firm stand against corruption and crack down on his competition. As a strategy to defeat the Duterte right-wing reactionaries, this is totally self-defeating. It only associates the movement more closely with the Marcos government. This backhanded support to the U.S.’s neoliberal henchmen in Malacañang is exactly the reason why the masses believe that the right-wing populists are the only serious opponents of the existing status quo.

Marcos distanced himself from the calls for Sara’s impeachment, calling it a distraction from the real business of government—but his son was the first to sign the House impeachment order and the vote was pushed through by his allies in Congress. Both BBM and the liberal anti-Duterte opposition benefit from Marcos’s hypocrisy on this question. By letting Akbayan, Makabayan and the liberals spearhead the drive against the Dutertes, Marcos can appear respectable and put some distance between himself and the prosecution of his main political rival. And the liberals and the left can pretend that their high-minded struggle against corruption and state violence isn’t serving as a tool of BBM and his imperialist masters. This pretense won’t fool the masses—to rally them we must take a stand against all the political dynasties, from the Dutertes to the Marcoses to the Aquinos!

The Filipino people have had enough of being taxed to death by corrupt politicians. Socialists do have an interest in Sara’s impeachment—but not just Sara’s. Real and effective measures are needed against all the politicians who swindle the people, but the real drain on the country’s wealth is not the trapos lining their pockets. It’s the imperialists draining the country. The political dynasties have grown rich by helping the imperialists plunder the nation. Obviously, they can’t be trusted to combat this plague. They must be forced to open the nation’s books to the people, so everyone knows how much of the nation’s wealth is going into dodgy deals to attract imperialist investors, what land and resources are being used to enrich foreign finance capital at the expense of the development of the nation, who is taking bribes from the imperialists. If the political dynasties refuse, their assets should be seized and used to benefit the people!

The liberals in Congress will only take the most tepid and ineffective measures against corruption, because any real steps require a confrontation with the imperialists. And Makabayan isn’t taking any real steps either, because to do so will alienate their liberal colleagues in Congress. You can’t paddle your bangka in two rivers at the same time! Either you support the imperialists’ liberal lackeys or you serve the masses: you have to choose which side you’re on!

Duterte’s war on drugs killed untold thousands. The victims’ families and comrades burn for justice. Many leftists argue we can never get justice in the Philippines. When the Marcos administration executed the ICC warrant, arresting Rodrigo Duterte and deporting him to the Hague, most of the left celebrated this as a victory. From Akbayan to Makabayan and beyond, so-called socialists are demanding that the Philippines rejoin the ICC so the ICC can prosecute Duterte’s henchmen who carried out mass slaughter under the banner of the war on drugs.

The ICC’s business has always been prosecuting Third World leaders who fell out of favor with U.S. imperialism, from Africa to Serbia to Venezuela and beyond. The one exception—the arrest warrant for Netanyahu—remained a dead letter precisely because it went against American interests. The arrest and trial of Rodrigo Duterte is business as usual for the ICC: targeting a figure who’s inconvenient for U.S. interests in the Philippines. This does nothing to help the struggle to avenge the victims of the Duterte regime. By associating the cause with the imperialist oppressors, it alienates the people and helps Dutertistas. It has allowed Duterte’s former police chief Bato Dela Rosa, whose hands are covered in the masses’ blood, to posture as the defender of the nation. We need a fundamentally different strategy, one that unites the masses and brings them to their feet, instead of relying on Marcos and the pro-imperialist ICC.

The struggle for the justice for the victims of the war on drugs throws a spotlight on the shadowy machinery of torture and assassination which the oligarchs deploy to keep the Philippines in chains. The police and army officers who carried out these killings are the backbone of the whole system of neocolonial oppression, armed and trained by the imperialists. For that reason, it will take a determined mass struggle against the imperialists and their local flunkies to finally win justice for Duterte’s victims. A first step to rallying the masses behind this cause is to expose the truth about the victims, who was killed and who was responsible for the killings. To the liberal politicians who pledge their loyalty to this cause, we demand that they take action themselves instead of insisting that nothing can be done in the Philippines. Tell us the truth: open the archives of the police, the AFP and their torture centers!

The Trump administration is cutting military aid around the world, but the Philippines is one place where the money is flowing in the other direction. U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is promising to “share burdens,” arming and training the Philippine military and developing infrastructure that will allow the U.S. to “defend the Philippines’ sovereignty” against “China’s aggression.” This speaks volumes about the importance of the Philippines to U.S. imperialism’s main strategic aim of strangling China. But instead of building an anti-Trump campaign to throw out the U.S. troops and bases, the Filipino left’s main focus is…exposing Sara for not standing up to Chinese aggression in the “West Philippine Sea”!

Competing with the Dutertistas on the basis of Filipino nationalism does not advance the interests of the Filipino masses! It subordinates them to the Filipino capitalists who are subordinated to U.S. imperialism, and it divides the workers of the world. The Filipino nation and the hundreds of millions of Chinese workers and peasants have a common enemy in U.S. imperialism. These two nations currently stand divided because the leadership of each is capitulating to imperialism. The bureaucrats running the Communist Party of China reject the communist strategy of mobilizing the toiling masses of the world to struggle for the overthrow of imperialism. Their false perspective of developing socialism only in their own country surrounded by world imperialism leads them to look instead to alliances with reactionary politicians like the Dutertes and to a military strategy that tramples on the sensibilities of oppressed nations, like firing water cannons at Filipino fisherfolk to assert their control over the Southeast Asian Sea. For their part, the Filipino left’s alliance with supporters of U.S. imperialism in a common campaign against China alienates the Chinese masses and binds them closer to the CPC. The struggle for the liberation of the Philippines will never go forward under the American boot. Likewise, as long as they see the Filipino left siding with the U.S. against China, the millions and millions of Chinese workers and peasants will never support leftist struggles in the Philippines.

To undercut these divisions, the Filipino left must break its ties to the liberal lapdogs of U.S. imperialism. The struggle to defend Philippine sovereignty begins by opposing the U.S.! Building an anti-imperialist front of the workers and peasants of the Philippines and China is the best possible blow against U.S. imperialism, and also the best way to undermine the reactionary nationalist strategy of the CPC. Don’t be an imperialist running dog for Donald Trump’s anti-China war drive! Joint defense of the Southeast Asian Sea against the imperialist oppressors! Rip out the fishing barriers! Share the waters!