The Trump administration is devastating the Philippines. Foreign investment has plummeted while the country’s debt has reached record levels. The Filipino people are being crushed by the burden of high taxes to pay the debt and high prices for imported food and fuel. At the same time, the country is on the front line of Trump’s anti-China offensive and the U.S. troop presence is expanding, bringing the American boot down on the archipelago.

The Philippines is being ravaged in order to maintain U.S. hegemony over the whole world. With their economic dominance eroding, the American imperialists are determined to reverse China’s economic rise and intensify the exploitation of the Global South. The Filipino bourgeoisie is trapped between the relentless pressure of the Trump administration and the increasingly desperate masses. This is provoking a furious struggle within the country’s ruling elite over how to defend the shrinking ration they collect from the imperialist table while keeping the masses under foot. The two sides in this struggle are represented by the Marcos and Duterte political dynasties.

Bongbong Marcos’s government is appealing for U.S. backing by being the best possible tuta for American interests. Faced with harsher demands from imperialist investors, the Marcos government is frantically offering more and more tax incentives, more and more public private partnerships, taking out more and more foreign loans to build infrastructure to attract investment. As imperialism drains the Filipino nation, BBM is struggling to pacify the population, rolling out new government aid and development programs and paying for them with foreign loans, putting the country deeper into debt and deeper in the pockets of foreign finance capital. BBM has prostrated the Philippines before Trump’s anti-China offensive, converting it into a barracks for the American military. He packed the government with pro-American anti-China hawks, opened more bases to U.S. forces and is reconfiguring the Armed Forces of the Philippines to fit the needs of American containment of China. BBM has the American troops behind him in the event the masses push back against their enslavement.

The Dutertes rage against Marcos for being weak and capitulating. To shore up the bourgeoisie’s rapidly eroding position, they are looking to pressure the imperialists for better terms by tapping the masses’ hatred of national oppression and maneuvering between the U.S. and China. These counterfeit anti-imperialists have no intent of mounting a real struggle for national liberation! The Dutertes and their allies like Bato Dela Rosa and Vic Rodriguez do have an interest in pushing back against the imperialists in order to improve their position. But they will be the first to abandon the struggle when things get hot, because any serious challenge to the neocolonial order also threatens the business and narrow clan interests of these parasitic oligarchs. It sends them right back into the arms of the imperialists for arms and aid to put down the masses. This is exactly what happened when Duterte welcomed U.S. troops to crush the Moros in the Battle of Marawi. The Dutertes must keep the masses under tight control, and their grip only becomes tighter as the conditions of the masses become more desperate. This is the reason the Dutertistas are manipulating the masses’ legitmate fear of violent crime with law-and-order hysteria, demanding a return to the war on drugs that targeted social discontents, in particular the left and union militants, for extra-judicial killings. The Dutertista chokehold cripples the fighting ability of the proletariat, the only force capable of pushing back the imperialists, and prepares the ground for further imperialist onslaughts.

The Trump administration is out for our blood. A fightback is urgently needed, but all wings of the bourgeoisie are bound to the imperialists. Without an independent working-class pole, the outcome of this struggle will be a disaster. The Marcos government is clamping down on our democratic rights in the name of suppressing the Dutertista threat. If the Dutertistas manage to bring down the Marcos regime, they will replace it with a harsher neocolonial one. Either way, resistance to Trump’s offensive will be crippled.

The defense of the nation requires building an anti-imperialist opposition that mobilizes the masses behind the leadership of the proletariat. But the left and union tops—Makabayan, Akbayan, Partido Lakas ng Masa (PLM), Federation of Free Workers, National Confederation of Labor, etc.—are rejecting this course. They have ditched the anti-imperialist stuggle to crawl into the utterly pro-imperialist liberal anti-Duterte opposition. They’re tailing haciendero BAM Aquino, green capitalist Kiko Pangilinan and Kakampink leader Leni Robredo, the many time recipient of imperialist NGO awards. The Philippine liberals have been closely tied to U.S. imperialism since it reconquered the country after World War II. This reflects the weakness of their class in a neocolony that is crushed under the boot of American imperialism, with little ability to push back against the real masters of the country.

The liberal opposition against Duterte serves the interests of the Trump administration. First, by pressuring President BBM to repress the Dutertista nationalists, this campaign sides with the wing of the political establishment that is more capitulatory to the U.S. Second, by begging the ICC to crack down on Duterte’s human rights violations, the opposition is further subordinating the country to the imperialists. On top of that, the liberals are waving the banner of Chinese aggression, going after the Dutertes for not being supportive enough of the main strategic interest of the Trump administration, the strangulation of China, when it is the U.S., not China, that militarily occupies the Philippines and plunders the country’s resources.

The left’s ties to this opposition are discrediting it in the eyes of the masses, who are fed up with the imperialist extortion being administered by the Marcos government and its liberal bloc partners. Support for the Dutertistas is growing because they appear to be the only serious opponents of national humiliation and pauperization. There must be a fight in the left and workers movement to split with the liberals and their enablers, for an anti-Trump opposition with a program to liberate the nation!

Imperialism and the UniTeam

The neocolonial bondage of the Philippines deepened when the U.S. emerged as the world’s only superpower after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Globalization broke down the barriers to foreign finance capital and directly subordinated every aspect of the economy to the world market. Backward and unproductive domestic manufacturing was swept away almost entirely. Even steel production closed down, making the country totally reliant on imported materials. Rice, the staple food, is grown on small farms with backward methods, and at the same time relies on agribusiness for seed, fertilizer and pesticide. Dependence on imperialism combined with low yields has pauperized the peasantry, driving them into the cities, and transformed the country into the world’s largest importer of rice, with the highest rice prices in the region.

As domestic manufacturing closed and peasants migrated to the cities, foreign investors moved in to take advantage of the low-wage, educated, English-speaking workforce in low-end industrial and service jobs. Foreign-owned light industry sprang up, in particular Japanese, South Korean and U.S. electronics assembly and semiconductor packaging plants that serve as a middle link in the global supply chain. Millions flooded out of the country to work abroad. Their remittances, the majority of them from the U.S., provide a crucial economic cushion and contribute nine percent of the Philippine GDP.

As globalization transformed the economy, the Philippine bourgeoisie acted more and more as a labor contractor for the imperialists. At the same time, the proletariat grew as new layers were drawn into manufacturing. A large urban petty bourgeoisie emerged which, like the proletariat, is exploited by imperialist finance capital. The Filipino working people directly confront the imperialist bosses.

During globalization, the imperialists savaged the Philippines under the liberal watchwords of free trade, open borders, human rights, etc. The left and the labor bureacrats fully embraced these bourgeois ideals and the NGOs, becoming heavily dependent on foreign aid money. They played no role independent of the liberals and became associated with the U.S.-dominated world order in the eyes of the masses. This paved the way for the rise of Rodrigo Duterte.

In the 2016 presidential election, the left did not offer an anti-imperialist alternative to Duterte’s right-wing nationalist populism. The National Democrats have the allegiance of the most advanced layers of the working class because they have the reputation as militant fighters against imperialist oppression. They played a particularly disastrous role in this period. At first, the NatDems bought into Duterte’s populist credentials, supporting him as an anti-imperialist modernizing nationalist and even entering his Cabinet. But when Duterte started imprisoning and assassinating leftists and kicked the NatDems out of the government, they zig-zagged into the pro-imperialist liberal anti-Duterte opposition. Both positions were a betrayal of the masses’ anti-imperialist aspirations.

Because the communists failed to fight for leadership of the anti-imperialist struggle, Rodrigo Duterte left office with the highest approval ratings of any president since the 1986 People Power Revolution. In the 2022 elections, Bongbong Marcos and Sara Duterte worked together in the UniTeam coalition. Sara’s selling point was continuity with her father’s outgoing administration. BBM traded on nostalgia for his father’s dictatorship as a golden age when the country had a domestic manufacturing base and built infrastructure, schools and hospitals. The left either supported Leni Robredo, the preferred candidate of Western imperialism or campaigned for PLM’s Leody de Guzman and academic Walden Bello, who buried the question of imperialism. The UniTeam won the election decisively.

But the UniTeam began to break apart immediately after the election. The country came out of the pandemic with an unbearable debt burden which had almost doubled during the COVID pandemic, when Duterte imposed some of the longest and harshest lockdowns in the world. Rising interest rates meant the debt was burning through a growing percentage of the country’s income and global inflation was causing fuel and food prices to skyrocket. The imperialists were threatening to cut the country’s credit, and the same year the country was hit by ten typhoons, causing U.S. $38 billion in damage. With the Chinese economy stagnating after COVID, the infrastructure and aid programs China had promised to the Duterte administration fell through. Pressed by high prices and high taxes, the population was stretched to the breaking point. Under this pressure, Marcos swung into line and did whatever the imperialists told him.

Since the Trump administration came into office, the imperialist pressure has gone into hyperdrive. Trump’s tariffs are disrupting the economy, threatening trade war with China and hitting the Japanese and South Korean industries that invest in the Philippines. Foreign investment has fallen by 85 percent and the country’s debt has reached its highest point since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Trump’s war on immigrants is choking the flow of remittances. Inflation is crushing the masses. All the cracks in society are opening under the pressure of the imperialist offensive.

Build the Anti-Imperialist Front!

Numerous unions and leftist tendencies are campaigning in the elections. They are campaigning against each other, but their campaigns all sound the same: end the political dynasties, higher wages, lower prices, fight corruption. Despite the left taking up these causes, the conditions of the masses have not improved. Prices are going up, wages are stagnating and the whole society is being polarized between two great political dynasties in their struggle for power.

To defend the masses’ livelihoods today, much less improve their conditions and advance towards socialism, requires a struggle against the imperialists. But nobody is raising the question of imperialist domination in this election campaign: all of the workers candidates have dropped this in order to crawl into the camp of the pro-U.S. bourgeois liberals. To play a progressive role, the left must cut its ties to the Marcos cronies and the liberals, and those elements in the workers movement who conciliate them. It is by fighting in their own defense against the imperialists that the Filipino workers can mobilize the peasants and urban petty bourgeoisie behind them. This is the way that we can take advantage of our place in the world economy by attracting the support of workers all along the supply chain, across the Global South, in China and into the imperialist centers, in struggle against our common oppressor. What is urgently needed is an anti-imperialist front that unites the oppressed masses under the bright red banner of the working class!

The struggle for higher wages and lower prices is a struggle against the Trump administration’s imperialist onslaught. It requires a common front against the imperialists and the bankers, speculators and parasitic middlemen. But the unions are organizing this struggle as a moral appeal, launching token, isolated strikes while counting on the liberals in Congress, the ILO, labor mediation and the DOLE to help the workers. All these forces are beholden to the imperialists! Instead of relying on them, the unions need to rally the support of the masses. The key to this is taking the lead in the anti-imperialist struggle, linking the struggle for higher wages and lower prices to cancellation of the debt, seizure of the imperialists’ assets and renegotiation of foreign investment on terms favorable to the working people. Where unity is needed against the imperialists, the unions are currently divided. The union federations are separated by political affiliation and each one stabs the others’ struggles in the back. Socialists must take advantage of the election campaign period to break down these divisions, not just with empty words but with funds, strike support action and defense of all those penalized for fighting for their class. Real solidarity actions will not only strengthen the existing unions, but help to attract younger workers who are overwhelmingly unorganized to rebuild the unions.

Likewise, the fight against the political dynasties can only go forward insofar as it is organized as a struggle against imperialism. All of the workers candidates are squirming to avoid this basic point. For example, PLM proposes to end the political dynasties by passing a law like the one drafted by BAM Aquino, himself the third generation of a leading political dynasty. The obvious question is: how will you get the political dynasties in Congress to pass a law against themselves? PLM proposes to do this with a People’s Initiative, by having ten percent of the electorate sign a piece of paper saying they want to ban the political dynasties. It’s in the constitution—never mind the many democratic provisions in the constitution that are only ever honored in the breach. PLM insists that it’s possible take political power away from the great families who have relied on imperialist support to lord over the masses since the Spanish occupation…by getting one-tenth of the population to sign a piece of paper. This is even crazier than Marcos’s plan to develop the country with imperialist loans! The oligarchs will fight to the death for their power and privileges—as the masses know very well from their own real life experience. So why is PLM campaigning on such a ridiculous position? To actually break the power of the political dynasties in this country, you’re going to have to take away their weapons and their property. And there’s no possible way to do this while remaining respectable in bourgeois liberal circles. The root of the problem is PLM’s commitment to “fight the forces of Darkness and Evil” together with BAM Aquino and Kiko Pangilinan.

The political dynasties exist as intermediaries between the imperialists and the impoverished masses. To get rid of the political dynasties requires revolution that overthrows the whole apparatus of neocolonial domination in the country. The left must stop using their election campaigns to mislead the masses and to promote illusions in the oligarchs’ cronies in Congress. We must use the election period to strengthen the masses and weaken the great families by targeting the real source of their power: their imperialist masters. Building the independent fighting power of the working class as the leader of the nation is way to open the road to revolution.

In the recent period, the left has been unable to influence events in the country or improve the conditions of the masses. An election campaign that aims to mobilize the masses to fight against imperialist oppression with the methods of the class struggle would be an excellent step towards rescuing the left from irrelevance. To this end, we propose that the left break with the pro-imperialists liberals and unite behind this platform to build an anti-Trump workers opposition:

• For national liberation! Break the U.S.-Philippine alliance! Smash EDCA and VFA! U.S. troops out!
• Radical agrarian reform now! Form peasant committees! Seize the lands of the oligarchs and the neocolonial masters!
• For national industrialization! Expropriate the imperialists and the Philippines’ Top 10 Billionaires! Cancel the imperialist debt!

The main obstacle to rebuilding the anti-imperialist movement is not the power of the imperialists, the brutality of the AFP or Marcos’s police powers. Contrary to what a lot of leftists argue, it’s not the “backward colonial mentality” of the Filipino masses. The main obstacle is within the left and workers movement. The leadership is tied to the liberal bourgeoisie who themselves are dependent on the imperialists. To begin to turn this situation around, the left must break its ties with the liberal bourgeoisie and their imperialist patrons. As comrade Lenin put it: “Unity with opportunism means unity between the proletariat and its national bourgeoisie, i.e., submission to the latter, a split in the international revolutionary working class. We do not say that an immediate split with the opportunists in all countries is desirable, or even possible at present; we do say that such a split has come to a head, that it has become inevitable, is progressive in nature, and necessary to the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat” (“Opportunism, and the Collapse of the Second International,” 1915).