The BMP’s resolute struggle for socialism in the Philippines
The enduring struggle for the socialist transformation of the Philippines resolutely marches onward in the early half of the 21st century.
The country’s continuing conflict manifests a direct confrontation between two fundamentally opposed socioeconomic groupings embodying Filipino society. It remains a historic social battle that essentially pits hostile camps with counterposed interests and aims. Moreover, it is a class-based antagonism centred upon the future direction and development of the Philippines’ socioeconomic life.
This class struggle is between the social majority who are forced to sell their labour power to survive versus a tiny few who privately own the means of production and distribution, even while the minority still controls capital. The capitalist class exploits the labouring class by extracting surplus value through the latter’s subjugated position and role within the economy. As such, this setting profoundly reflects the basic contradiction of the capitalist system itself: while value is produced collectively, it is appropriated individually.
Moreover, the class struggle in the Philippines is generally impacted by the deepening strategic competition among imperialist great powers. As their escalating rivalry intensely roils the expansive Eurasia-Indo-Pacific area, the country’s domestic equilibrium becomes even more threatened and destabilised. This worsening world situation only aggravates the reliant Philippine economy ever more. Such a state of affairs consequently imperils the survival and wellbeing of the long-suffering masses of the Filipino working class.
Philippine society is therefore underpinned by a near-permanent systemic disorder, characterised by chronic crisis conditions caused by constantly emergent internal-external dynamics and pressures.
The various forces of the Filipino revolutionary Left unceasingly strive to change the Philippines’ state-based capitalist system. A fundamental way for them to carry this out is to decisively alter the correlation of class forces within Philippine society. Their central aim is to build socialism as the alternative strategic project for genuine social change. Fittingly, some of the more crucial formations advancing along this aspirational path are those aligned with the country’s revolutionary socialist movement.
One of the most active and steadfast revolutionary proletarian organisations intensifying this general line of march is the Bukluran ng Manggagawang Pilipino (BMP, Solidarity of Filipino Workers).
Advancing socialist change in the Philippines
The socialist struggle in the Philippines is a comprehensive task to surmount and dismantle its prevailing capitalist socioeconomic system. Spearheaded by the Filipino working class, its political thrust aims at systemic change. Its revolutionary social agenda is to forge the collective emancipation of the exploited and oppressed majority of Philippine society.
This is an epochal movement led by the country’s proletariat to overthrow its bourgeois ruling-class exploiters and oppressors. The capitalist minority greatly benefits at the expense of the proletarian majority even as the former perennially receives the huge economic and political support of US monopoly capital. In this way, the Filipino bourgeoisie keeps the backward and maldeveloped Philippine economy inserted into global circuits of capital. It is this historically structured setup and process that preserves the Philippines — US imperialism’s first Asian outpost — as a dependent semi-colonial state on the global periphery of the imperialist world system.
The country’s capitalist socioeconomic formation is accordingly geared toward a permanent accumulation of profits by means of the systemic exploitation and oppression of its toiling masses. It is effectively controlled by a counterrevolutionary class that rules through an uber reactionary state-anchored regime. As an integrated social organism, it operates to provide the material and economic basis for Philippine society’s capitalist relations of production. It is this bourgeois system — bolstering an unequal relationship of the means of production — that the Filipino revolutionary proletarian movement determinedly seeks to replace.
Toward this goal, the socialist line of struggle necessarily involves highly active organised forces based within the Filipino working class itself. From an ideological-political-organisational standpoint, this proletarian movement is primarily aligned with a foremost current of the international left: revolutionary socialism. Its philosophical foundations are guided by the fundamental principles of Marxism-Leninism, and are inherently inspired by Russia’s Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917 led by the Bolsheviks — history’s first victorious socialist revolution.
Within the Philippine arena of class contention, proletarian socialist forces relentlessly pursue a form of struggle that is revolutionary in character. This is exemplified through an escalating series of politically driven mass-based battles directed at achieving deep democratic reforms (as a material basis for socialism). By this manner, socialist objectives can profoundly be gained through a transitional set of radical policy measures targeted at refashioning the presently unequal Philippine economic structure and its inherently unjust procedures. Certainly, such systemically progressive policy objectives — with their corresponding demands — will never be granted to the popular masses by the existing capitalist Philippine state through normal bourgeois channels. The Filipino working class can only attain socially liberating goals for societal change by militantly seizing state power for itself.
Philippine society has long been ruled by an unbroken succession of reactionary regimes — highly corrupt, rentier-oriented and autocratic — bankrolled and boosted by powerful Filipino oligarchs. The Philippine state’s national policy agenda is chiefly formulated and implemented by the country’s privileged bourgeois elites. This sort of governance essentially leads to the making of Philippine governments that readily side with the economic-political-security enterprises of US imperialism. To necessarily protect the capitalist ruling-class’s socioeconomic interests — which are intertwined with those of the Philippine state’s own institutional securities — all Philippine governments customarily employ various aspects of state terrorism against the Filipino masses to safeguard the status quo.
On this premise, the proletarian-led revolutionary socialist movement in the Philippines is fully committed to completely replacing the country’s existing capitalist system with one that is socially emancipatory, economically democratic, and politically progressive in character through an ensuing direct capture of state power on behalf of — and for — the toiling masses.
Furthermore, the convergence of domestic-foreign predicaments are forever fusing to exacerbate the situational magnitude of the country’s crisis-driven conjuncture(s). Such absolutely harmful economic and political crises are what firmly motivate and drive the Filipino proletariat headlong into the struggle for socioeconomic change. These developing material conditions are undoubtedly determining the social consciousness of the working class and popular masses toward radically progressive aspirations. This is how the Philippine socialist movement — including the BMP — are able to strikingly reposition themselves within the revolutionary frontline of struggle as a collective vanguard for systemic change in the country.
A revolutionary socialist political centre
The BMP is a revolutionary socialist political centre of the Filipino working-class movement. It was formed amid a major split that occurred within the ranks of the underground Maoist-oriented Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and its allied legal mass organisations throughout the 1992-93 period. This seminal moment affected the entire Philippine left. It unleashed long-term ramifications for the country’s revolutionary proletarian forces that are still being felt until today.
In the immediate aftermath, thousands of party members, including leading cadres, seasoned organisers, militant mass activists, armed fighters and partisans rejected and then left the CPP-led national democratic movement by the end of 1993. Subsequently, many National Democracy (ND)-aligned people’s organisations representing the basic masses of Philippine society joined this ideological-political-organisational exodus. Together with them, hundreds of labour unions from the ND movement followed suit.
Nonetheless, a leading internal party opposition force contemporaneously emerged and declared its “autonomy” from the CPP’s central leadership by July 1993. This emergent current was known as the Leninist Opposition. It was led by Comrade Filemon ‘Ka Popoy’ Lagman, the former secretary of the CPP’s Metro Manila-Rizal Regional Party Committee (MRRPC) and was able to bring under the command of its respective central political leadership an overwhelming majority of the Metro Manila-based trade unions then affiliated with the Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU, May First Movement) — the CPP-oriented ND labour centre — together with other allied mass organisations.
Soon after regrouping, the Leninist forces swiftly reorganised themselves into an alternative revolutionary left project for the Philippines. Such an undertaking was to clearly distinguish their renewed revolutionary socialist commitment with a fresh pathway forward. This principal task was pursued to counterpose the Leninist Opposition’s new thrust to the CPP’s line of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought.
This critical development — then animating and stirring some of the other Philippine revolutionary left tendencies — successfully arose amid the dissolution of the former Soviet Union earlier in December 1991. This event — occurring less than two years earlier — in turn, also momentously let loose the international left movement’s varied initiatives at socialist rejuvenation across many countries and regions around the world. As a global left phenomenon, this overall process also provided an impetus for some of the Philippine left organisations to avowedly advance a regenerated Marxist-Leninist line of march. This was particularly the case with the mass organisations that had swiftly gravitated toward the MRRPC’s (Leninist Opposition) newly centralised leadership.
All of these occurrences, together with their accompanying undercurrents, pushed this left bloc to a conclusive affirmation. To progress their novel revolutionary socialist project, the MRRPC’s core leadership moved to openly and formally establish the BMP on September 14, 1993. This momentous endeavour critically paved the way for other revolutionary socialist and revolutionary left-oriented mass organisations to be launched in the months and years ahead, quite similar to the BMP’s onset.
From the start, the BMP has always intended to organise on a national scale. As a political centre, it boosts the mass struggles of the Filipino proletariat toward a revolutionary socialist direction. While the BMP’s collective forces emanate from its organised chapters spread across geographically defined territories, it is also composed of labour federations consisting of affiliated trade unions, together with semi-proletarian mass organisations based in poor working-class communities.
At its elementary level, the BMP’s basic structure is the buklod — workplace cells of socialist worker-activists. The primary task of a buklod is to establish fractions of revolutionary workers inside factories, raise their revolutionary class consciousness around socialist principles and objectives, and mobilise them in defence of workers’ rights, demands and struggles. This is designed to organise a socialist presence within specific workplaces, as they subsequently grow outward into a Philippine-wide struggle.
As a principled standpoint, the BMP asserts a proletarian internationalist agenda. Its central duty is to help advance the universal triumph of the world socialist revolution. Along this line, the BMP carries out solidarity mass actions to support international working-class struggles worldwide — while concurrently advancing the immediate aims of the socialist revolutionary struggle inside the Philippines.
To further project a form of its working-class internationalism, the BMP presently maintains official affiliations with both the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) and the International Center for Labor Solidarity (ICLS). Although the WFTU is an expressly Communist-oriented global trade union federation, the ICLS remains a progressively oriented international labour organisation. By affiliating to them, the BMP is able to apply its foremost commitments and obligations to the world socialist revolution on the basis of proletarian internationalism.
The BMP has become a trailblazer within the broad organised Philippine labour movement. It is well-acknowledged as a principled non-state actor on the country’s national political stage. More specifically, the BMP is highly recognised as an independent left formation that presses ahead with its own militant form of revolutionary politics — inside factories, in working-class communities and on the streets — while unabashedly and proudly projecting the socialist line.
The BMP’s past and present leaderships have always been very conscious, clear and consistent in upholding and pursuing an independent revolutionary class line in the course of heightening its ever-numerous mass campaign struggles. Simultaneously, while engaging in united front work, the BMP practises the principled policy of “March separately, but strike together!” in relation to its many allies and partners within tactical alliances, and even in left-oriented coalitions. These methods are principally employed by the BMP to help stamp a “proletarian imprint” on the widening democratic struggles. Moreover, this is to sharply project the socialist alternative inside working-class formations, including within broad-based democratic and progressive mass movements operating across the Philippine arena of class struggle. This approach has clearly been put into practice by the BMP throughout its continuing existence.
As the political terrain of mass struggles shifts, the BMP tactically modifies the focus of its revolutionary initiatives and political actions. As much as possible, these are promptly aimed at providing the appropriate and correct political calls and demands reflecting the urgent needs of the working-class masses under specific circumstances — while steadily guiding them toward the strategic socialist direction. This has always been the case involving BMP’s revolutionary mass struggles, especially during very critical moments linked to crucial events underlying the Philippines’ turbulent history over the past two decades.
The BMP’s revolutionary mass struggles
The BMP has openly participated in an inclusive range of prominent political struggles involving the working masses ever since its inception. Despite the socialist political centre’s limitations, it relentlessly strives to position itself as a leading voice of the Filipino working-class movement.
It does so by vigorously projecting its political view from the lens of revolutionary systemic change. This is a central feature of the BMP’s socialist political-organisational standpoint that has been put into operation countless times since the 1990s. It is this attitude that has enabled the BMP — by chalking up a lengthy record of admirably militant mass campaign struggles — to generate a certain level of respectability among its contemporaries within the broad Philippine left, while frequently being perceived by the country’s fascistic state-security apparatus as a “threat to national security”.
The BMP steadily projects a radically progressive attitude and stance. Its mass campaigns primarily sketch out the goals and objectives of the socialist proletarian movement on both national and global scales. This is a general political response to the basic demands of the revolutionary and progressive layers of the Filipino working class seeking out positive answers to address concrete challenges and issues impacting society. Again, and in absolute terms, the urgent and utmost needs concerning Philippine society’s toiling majority are clearly never answered by the bourgeois state and its parochially minded ruling-class elites. Still, these concerns affecting the Filipino working masses are of course a great many to list down here.
Nonetheless, a brief note on some of the BMP’s collective struggles is perhaps relevant at this point. Respectively, some of the BMP’s major national allies aligned with the revolutionary socialist movement should likewise be mentioned. Together, these linked facets represent a prime current within the Philippine left spectrum.
Given its revolutionary duty to help advance the overall interests of the Filipino working class, the BMP openly confronts the mostly anti-poor and anti-democratic schemes of the bourgeoisie. The BMP firmly pursues this proletarian course of action to principally expose and oppose the true nature and agenda of the bourgeois Philippine state and its ruling-class elites, while proposing progressive alternatives to the masses of working-people through mass-based political struggles. In absolute terms, this counter-capitalist posture strives to actively advance a broad array of revolutionary proletarian struggles.
The BMP has certainly undertaken many of these types of mass movement struggles over the past thirty years. This primarily involves worker-led mass struggles to defend and promote labour rights and welfare throughout the workplace. It likewise embraces mass-based political offensives to transform the state via anti-capitalist/regime-change struggles. This includes anti-imperialist mass resistance campaigns targeting the aggressive geostrategic agenda and manoeuvres of the US in the Philippines. It similarly, and inherently, involves mass actions to politically expose and oppose China’s intrusive great power social chauvinist activities beyond its frontiers. More so, the BMP directly pursues internationalist solidarity campaigns, with component mass actions inside the Philippines, to openly support progressive liberation struggles of oppressed nations and peoples across the globe.
The BMP has staunchly helped to initiate and establish a number of broad labour alliances and coalitions at the national and local levels since November 1993. These proletarian projects spearheaded mass campaigns focused on vital pro-worker policy reforms, especially on the need for the country to adopt a national living wage policy, combined with urgent pay increases. Fully related to this is the BMP’s strident demand for the Philippine state to “immediately and strictly prohibit all forms of labour contractualisation” — both in the private and public sectors. With other core labour rights, such as the right to organise and to strike, persistently being eroded by state-sanctioned attacks on labour leaders and organisers throughout the Philippines, the BMP ardently fights to defend them all. These labour struggles are integral to the BMP’s unwavering political fightback to overturn the country’s customary neoliberal economic paradigm that has destroyed the lives of the long-impoverished Filipino workers and their families.
On the political front, the BMP has been actively involved in historic mass struggles entailing the ouster of previously reigning regimes. The BMP — always in coordination with its closest allies — played a decisive role in shaping the insurrectionary character and form of these anti-regime fights. This vital requisite was typified by continually intensifying and expanding revolutionary mass struggles nationwide. As such, they were generally geared to culminate in a direct overthrow of past regimes through a general uprising of the Filipino masses. The BMP persistently endeavoured to have the working-class movement at the forefront of these counter-state battles, to help shift them toward anti-capitalist struggles for socialist change.
An example of this was when the BMP played a key role in the successful ouster of former President Joseph “Erap” Estrada from 1999 to January 20, 2001. This was the second time that a sitting Philippine president was brought down by a people’s power uprising. Prior to this, longtime dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr. was ousted through a revolutionary mass insurrection on February 25, 1986. Both of these epic events in contemporary Philippine history occurred at the same location — along Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (EDSA), in the heart of the country’s capital. That is why these historic regime-change episodes are more popularly known as ‘EDSA-1’ and ‘EDSA-2’ among many Filipinos.
Throughout the mass campaign to oust Estrada, the BMP rapidly gained widespread prominence as one of the principal left forces that steadfastly resisted his reactionary regime. At one point, it was able to directly mobilise tens of thousands of trade union-based workers to physically shut down the country’s premier financial centre — Ayala Avenue — at the height of the anti-Erap struggle. As BMP general secretary during this phase of revolutionary mass upsurge against a sitting regime, Ka Popoy Lagman was widely viewed (and publicly recognised) as a central leader in the fight that eventually brought down the Estrada government.
In this political fight to oust the Erap regime, the BMP — together with its closely allied left coalition, SANLAKAS — raised the unmistakable slogan of “Resign All!”. This principled call was chiefly directed at rallying the masses of working people, together with broad layers of the democratic forces, to replace the reactionary and corrupt Estrada government with a progressively-oriented coalition government. Had it been successful, this post-Erap coalition government of the poor masses would have implemented a sweeping range of meaningful democratic reforms. These policy changes were to have initially opened the way toward substantial alterations to unjust socioeconomic conditions that remain fundamentally structural in nature.
Unfortunately, Lagman was assassinated just two weeks after the people’s power uprising that toppled the Erap regime. He was killed on his way to a meeting by unknown gunmen inside the Diliman Campus of the University of the Philippines on February 6, 2001. The BMP leader became the country’s first high-profile political figure to be killed for reactionary motives under the freshly installed bourgeois-autocratic regime of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (GMA).
Ka Popoy’s assassination unleashed an acute trend of reactionary backlash all across the Philippines. Many more left leaders, cadres, organisers and mass activists were to eventually fall victims to the various modes of Philippine state terrorism over the next nine years of GMA’s ultra-right-wing rule. During her repressive counterrevolutionary reign, rampant arrests, violent dispersals of rallies, tortures, disappearances, and assassinations of left activists, labour organisers, journalists and other democratic opposition figures became a state-wide norm.
Amid this backdrop of a sharply polarised Philippine political situation, worsened by an unremitting downturn of the capitalist economy spurred by the devastating undercurrents of neoliberal globalisation, and further exacerbated by the spillovers of US imperialism’s ‘Global War of Terror’ (post-9/11), the major forces advancing the revolutionary socialist struggles in the Philippines were at all times conscious in upholding a general stance of principled resistance to the fascistic GMA regime, even as they pressed ahead with an independent revolutionary class line of march.
As a national crisis situation sharply arose in the Philippines, the BMP’s ready response was to unite with other left and progressive forces to oust the reactionary GMA regime — and replace it with an alternate revolutionary government — to effect much-needed systemic change for the country.
In July 2005, the BMP joined a newly launched coalition project comprising a vast number of left organisations. Known as Laban ng Masa (LnM, Fight of the Masses), the coalition’s immediate goal was to directly overthrow the GMA government by extra-legal means. The LnM project united a broad array of political forces spanning the Philippine left spectrum, minus the CPP-led bloc and right-wing social democrats.
LnM was fully determined to engage in varied forms of revolutionary mass struggles that pointed toward an insurrectionary climax. The left coalition’s political aim was to establish a Transitional Revolutionary Government (TRG) as an inevitable replacement to an ousted GMA regime. A progressively-oriented Philippine state was to be ruled upon the basis of a Plataporma ng Masa (Platform of the Masses). This transitional platform of governance was directed at pursuing radical socioeconomic policy measures to carry out an initial transformation of the Philippine state apparatus. This revolutionary agenda was levelled as an attempt to alter the balance of class forces within Philippine society.
To significantly advance this overall revolutionary alternative, the LnM’s collective leadership made a political decision to critically develop a principled degree of cooperation with certain groups of organised military rebels (OMRs). Together, these varied formations of rebel military soldiers all had as their main goal the removal of the GMA regime. At the same time, however, the LnM tried to proselytise among some of their main leaders, particularly the junior officers, on the political orientation of the revolutionary left — and the need for a structural transformation of the Philippine state beyond a mere regime-change agenda.
These “reformist” soldiers, who were simply aiming for a very limited and selective range of bourgeois-oriented policy changes, were seriously determined to overthrow the GMA government through military force to attain their narrowly focused plans. Still, a mutual understanding was arrived at, and by way of a broad united front, to oust the GMA regime via coordinated actions.
The OMRs were to initiate and launch armed assaults upon specifically major targets underpinning the Philippine state — in unequivocal terms, a military rebellion. Simultaneously, various formations of the Philippine left — including LnM — were to organise and conduct a series of large-scale mass protest actions in coordination with the military attacks. Essentially, the parallel thrust of a nationwide mass political resistance blended with military actions was aimed at triggering a hoped-for revolutionary mass uprising to bring down the GMA regime, akin to EDSA-1 and 2.
In the context of this anti-GMA strategy agreed to by LnM, the BMP’s own leadership also sought to build on — and exacerbate — this developing situation. Even as it marched separately from the OMRs, the revolutionary socialist political centre endeavoured to launch a coordinated general strike at around the same time as the former’s intended military strike. It was hoped this scenario could help to spark a revolutionary mass insurrection to topple the sitting Philippine government. By this point, GMA had become the country’s first head of state to ever garner negative trust ratings from the Filipino public.
Unfortunately, however, the plans set by the leadership of the OMRs were found out by the GMA regime just hours before their prepared military rebellion was to be executed in the last days of February 2006. Unfazed by this, the LnM’s collective leadership swiftly decided to ramp-up its own prearranged huge protest action along EDSA. This was launched in the early morning of the following day, and just hours after some key OMR leaders were arrested and detained by the Philippine state’s security apparatus still loyal to GMA.
As the LnM’s militant mass struggle contingent (of more than fifteen thousand people) was marching along EDSA at mid-morning on February 24 — on the eve of the EDSA-1 anniversary — the GMA regime promptly imposed a State of National Emergency by means of Presidential Proclamation No. 1017. This measure was meant to counter what the reactionary government publicly described as a “tactical alliance” between the “extreme left” and the “extreme right”.
Less than two hours after PP-1017 was declared, police forces blocked LnM marchers at EDSA as they neared the vicinity of the general headquarters of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and national headquarters of the Philippine National Police (PNP); their camps directly face each other on EDSA. After a short but tense moment of negotiations, the PNP proceeded to arrest some of the major LnM leaders. The police then violently dispersed the left coalition’s frontline, consisting of LnM’s top mass leaders. This resulted in many injuries to LnM marchers, including the BMP’s general secretary at the time, Comrade Leody De Guzman. In this atmosphere, scores of LnM’s mass activists also got arrested and detained. But LnM unwaveringly fought on until GMA eventually lifted her State of National Emergency after a week of having unleashed a legalised form of state terror.
Together with its political allies, the BMP intensely resisted the GMA regime for the next four years until she was finally forced to step down from power at the end of June 2010. This came in the aftermath of a compelling outcome to the presidential election held in May that year. The revolutionary and progressive forces of the broad Philippine left movement were a decisive factor in coercing GMA to carry out this national electoral exercise after nearly a decade of tumult — a period that induced pre-revolutionary crisis moments — and that ultimately weakened her right-wing reign. Amid this change, the BMP gained an acknowledgement as one of the major subjective forces that had contributed in the national struggle to shift (on a limited scale) the country’s political equation during this almost ten-year-long interlude.
Since then, the BMP has mobilised its working-class base a tremendous number of times over the past many years. This reflects its continuing revolutionary struggles against all of the post-GMA regimes. It has openly and militantly mobilised its organised forces in direct opposition to the previous reactionary governments of Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III and Rodrigo Duterte, and against the current regime of Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. The BMP’s standpoint remains the same, as nothing much has changed at all — “Ever onward with the socialist revolution until victory!”
The BMP has maintained its distinct revolutionary socialist character as an active element within the Philippine progressive mass movement over the past three decades. As a revolutionary socialist political centre of the Filipino proletarian class, it has been able to directly plan, organise and lead a large number of militant mass campaign struggles since the 1990s. In some ways, the BMP has been able to achieve a certain number of tactical victories for the Filipino working-class in a broader sense.
But still, its rallies have at times resulted in violent clashes with Philippine state security forces as an outcome of the BMP’s varied types of mass mobilisations. Scores of them ended with arrests, detentions and injuries, including formal charges filed by the state against its leaders and militant socialist activists. The BMP’s worker-led and resistance-directed mass protest actions have involved factory occupations, mass barricades, blockades of streets and bridges, and even direct takeovers of national government buildings. All of these are a part of the revolutionary socialist tradition in the militant fight to triumphantly advance a post-capitalist systemic alternative in the Philippines.
The BMP’s principal allies
In waging its militant mass struggles, the BMP is definitely not alone, whether on the Philippine political stage or in the national arena of class struggle. This persevering revolutionary socialist political centre is solidly linked to an array of key principal allies. As it fights onward to advance the socialist revolution in the Philippines, the BMP maintains very close working relations with certain revolutionary left formations. Since they collectively share many of the same ideological-political-organisational principles, these organisations are widely acknowledged as all belonging to a singularly distinct left bloc. In simple terms, this bloc’s component organisations occupy the revolutionary socialist space of the Philippine left spectrum.
The core of this left bloc includes socialist and progressive-democratic organisations. Aside from the BMP, the other socialist organisations are: the Partido Lakas ng Masa (PLM, Party of the Labouring Masses), the Kongreso ng Pagkakaisa ng Maralitang Lungsod (KPML, Congress of Unity of the Urban Poor), and Aniban ng Manggagawa sa Agrikultura (AMA, Union of Agricultural Workers). Additionally, two other left formations are actively involved with this political bloc: SANLAKAS and Samahan ng Progresibong Kabataan (SPARK, Association of Progressive Youth).
The PLM is a socialist political party that runs electoral candidates at both the national and local levels. Established on January 30, 2009, the PLM is also a partylist organisation for contesting congressional elections, specifically for seats in the Philippine House of Representatives. Under the leadership of its founding chairperson, Comrade Sonny Melencio — together with its national president, Comrade Leody De Guzman — the mass-based and mass struggles-oriented PLM is guided by its freshly introduced Platform of the Government of the Masses. As a transitional socialist platform, this party document primarily outlines the urgent demands of the Filipino masses, together with socialist principles and lessons to guide the building of socialism in the Philippines. The PLM is politically known for its varied forms of mass movement-based campaigns pointing toward socialism. While doing so, the PLM simultaneously addresses a broad range of basic issues and concerns affecting the socioeconomic conditions and democratic space vital for the general wellbeing and social progress of the poor working-class masses of Philippine society.
Likewise, the KPML mainly organises the ranks of the urban semi-proletariat in working-class communities within the cities and towns. In the Philippine context, this largely involves organising the mass layers of the urban poor living in mainly informal settler communities throughout major urban centres spread across the country. Upon its founding on December 18, 1986, the KPML became Metro Manila’s largest umbrella organisation of — and for — the urban poor. Led by its national president, Comrade Kokoy Gan, the KPML endures as a socialist-oriented national confederation of diverse urban poor formations. After almost four decades of revolutionary and progressive struggles, the KPML continues to fight for comprehensive and state-supported socialised housing programs, together with integrated and sustainable socioeconomic livelihood, educational and health packages for the millions of extremely impoverished Filipino masses residing in the country’s copious urban poor communities.
On the other hand, AMA organises the ranks of the rural semi-proletariat and poor peasants in agricultural communities across the Philippine countryside and coastal areas. It is a national organisation of small farmers, artisanal fishers and agricultural workers. AMA struggles to advance sustainable development thrusts, while fighting for genuine and urgent agrarian reform policies, including against land conversion and reclamation activities. Concurrently, AMA also conducts mass campaigns on wider social justice causes related to the defence of human rights, imperialist wars of aggression, and climate justice. Led by its national president, Comrade Rene Dela Cruz, AMA continues to steadfastly project the socialist line through its multi-pronged mass campaign advocacies and struggles. Notable is the fact that AMA directly traces its revolutionary left lineage and tradition to the Philippines’ first unified socialist peasant organisation founded in May 1945: the Pambansang Kaisahan ng mga Magbubukid (PKM, National Union of Peasants).
As a progressive-democratic coalition, SANLAKAS embraces basic mass organisations representing the Filipino social majority. The BMP is one of its constituent members. Led by its chairperson and president, Comrades Lidy Nacpil and Manjette Lopez, respectively, SANLAKAS resolutely fights to uphold and defend the genuine democratic rights and freedoms — economic, social and political — of the exploited and oppressed masses. As a left-activist coalition, it firmly struggles to end all forms of capitalist subjugation against humanity (both domestic and global), and against imperialism, neoliberalism, fascism, and climate change. Launched on October 29, 1993 — just weeks after the BMP’s founding congress — SANLAKAS has long been recognised, and is well-known throughout the Philippine left and progressive mass movement, as an “independent left counter-pole” that consistently and sharply raises a compelling need for an imperative post-capitalist systemic-change agenda.
Similarly, SPARK is a national organisation of Filipino youth and students. As an activist formation, it critically seeks to, “serve as a venue for the youth to realise its integral role in shaping history by linking it to the struggles of the masses, of the workers, and of all marginalised sectors in society.” Also faithful in upholding proletarian internationalism, SPARK is stalwartly dedicated to combating the capitalist system, including imperialism, neoliberal globalisation, fascist rule, and the ever-looming dangers of climate change. In waging its many mass campaign struggles, and on the basis of a wide array of issues and concerns affecting the future wellbeing of the Filipino youth, SPARK is presently led by its national coordinator, Comrade John Lazaro.
All of these formations collectively uphold and advance the revolutionary socialist line of march of the Filipino working-class masses. Yet, there are other revolutionary proletarian organisations marching along the same road of revolutionary communist struggle in the Philippines. Most of them are advancing the socialist line via the legal and open form of struggle. But a few of them — for mainly principled and/or tactical reasons — have opted to assume a clandestine and underground mode. Nonetheless, the latter are still able to effectively combine both legal and illegal work as an essential task in conducting revolutionary proletarian class struggle inside the country.
A prime exemplification of an underground revolutionary Communist party in the Philippines — which consciously adheres to the Marxist-Leninist line — is the Partido ng Manggagawang Pilipino (PMP/Party of the Filipino Workers). While the BMP shares a common ideological-political line as that of the PMP, the latter organisation remains a secret and illegal Marxist-Leninist party that clandestinely operates across Philippine society, particularly within the ranks of the Filipino proletarian class. Established on August 4, 2002, the PMP is committed to help advance the world socialist revolution. In pursuit of its avowed goals, the PMP is primarily guided by Lenin’s “two-stage, uninterrupted revolution” to foremost achieve socialism in the Philippines.
As a revolutionary vanguard party rooted in the Filipino workers’ movement, the PMP acts as a shining light of socialism within the Philippine arena of class contention. By purposely asserting the fundamental theoretical principles of Marxism-Leninism to the working-class, the party articulates a precise revolutionary strategy needed for winning socialism in the country. Through this directional bearing, the PMP is able to chiefly provide a steady course of action for the Filipino proletariat to pursue in their ongoing revolutionary mass struggles.
In consequence, the party’s vital role is to affirm and project a general political line of march. This party line — comprising a specific revolutionary program with a reciprocal set of political demands and a corresponding strategy plus tactics — is what the Filipino working class can independently and confidently employ to accomplish a structural transformation of Philippine society. In a sense, the PMP consistently labours to act as, “the advanced detachment of the working class”, and to equally serve as, “the General Staff of the proletariat” to equip the Filipino revolutionary workers’ movement with an independent and class-conscious political leadership. A significant segment of the Philippine Left, particularly those forces marching on the revolutionary socialist path of struggle, are positively guided and led by the PMP’s preeminent ideological-political line.
The Party always strives to capacitate and empower the proletarian masses to win socialist victory. It does so on the basis of the correct revolutionary theory of Marxism-Leninism, and in synergy with a concretely appropriate revolutionary strategy and matching tactics. Under the party’s red banner of revolutionary proletarian leadership, the Filipino working-class movement resolutely fights onward to pointedly counter the bourgeois ruling class and its parochial interests, the reactionary political parties and their severely destructive policy agendas, and other bigoted forces that brazenly uphold the exploitative-oppressive status quo in a sectarian manner.
The BMP fights onward
The BMP held its 9th National Congress in January 2023. After its new Central Committee was elected, a fresh set of officers for BMP’s National Executive Committee was likewise formalised. Voted as BMP’s first-ever Chairperson Emeritus was Comrade Leody De Guzman, while Comrade Domeng Mole became the new Chairperson. Re-elected as BMP President was Comrade Luke Espiritu.
Just a year prior to the BMP’s democratic process of leadership renewal, Ka Leody momentously sealed his name in Philippine political history by becoming the first socialist proletarian leader — as a long-time factory worker — to run for the presidency of the Philippines as the PLM’s candidate. As one of the ten presidential candidates for the May 9, 2022 Philippine presidential election, Ka Leody was the only one who manifestly stood out — all the rest of the presidential contenders represented the bourgeoisie. Being a socialist aspirant, his left electoral platform gained prominence for its progressively radical content. Among all his fellow candidates for the Philippine presidency, Ka Leody was the only one who was shot at by nameless gunmen during an electoral sortie in the southern Philippines — and survived the election-related ambush. As a result of this incident, two PLM supporters were wounded but quickly recovered.
Ka Leody articulated clear anti-capitalist and anti-establishment policy positions. Because his presidential campaign publicly projected a systemic-change agenda, Ka Leody generated a significant buzz and traction among Millennials and Generation Z — especially through social media. This, of course, was not enough for him to win the presidency given the Philippine electoral system’s traditional built-in bias for candidates with plentiful pesos-pistols-popularity-power. As a revolutionary socialist working-class leader, Comrade Leody obviously does not have any of the capitalist ‘4 Ps’ of traditional Philippine politics.
Comrade Leody’s vice-presidential running mate was LnM chairperson, Comrade Walden Bello. The latter was also the only vice-presidential candidate to be charged in court for the crime of cyber-libel at the height of the 2022 electoral race. Their allied senatorial candidate was the BMP President, Comrade Luke Espiritu. Although they were able to openly advocate and widely publicise their socialist-oriented electoral platform, none of them won in the country’s general elections.
Despite this electoral setback, the PLM is already priming itself to politically intervene in the forthcoming May 2025 midterm elections. It is aiming to win seats in both the Philippine Senate and House of Representatives. While the PLM’s primary mode of contestation for seats in the latter parliamentary chamber will be via the partylist elections, its electoral struggle for senate seats will see the PLM run three (of the left bloc’s) leading cadres: Comrades Leody De Guzman, Luke Espiritu and Lidy Nacpil.
The BMP has certainly been able to accumulate a comprehensive range of experience from its revolutionary mass struggles in the Philippines for over three decades. It has been able to steadily enhance its remarkable capabilities while combating the capitalist system. Moreover, it unflinchingly perseveres in its historic fight for socialist change regardless of the many challenges that still lie ahead.
The BMP remains a working-class vanguard of the revolutionary democratic struggles for reforms directed at socialist change in the Philippines. It is consistently focused on rousing the Filipino proletarian class in the battle to attain full democracy for Philippine society. Toward this goal, the BMP is conscious of its guiding role in developing and advancing bold initiatives, catalysing moves, and polarising actions to constantly propel the labouring masses into a perpetual forward motion to actively realise their social emancipation. And as the historic motive force for any genuine material change in today’s bourgeois Filipino society, only the exploited and oppressed masses of the Filipino working class can truly bring about a socially liberating and structurally transformative project for the country in the future.
Furthermore, the BMP constantly gears up to position itself in the frontline of a worker-led movement for revolutionary mass insurrection — employing all forms of struggle within the wide arsenal of the proletarian revolution — to achieve socialism for the Philippines, while shattering the country’s unjust and imposed shackles that remain chained to US imperialism.
Finally, as a leading revolutionary left force in the Philippines, the BMP resolutely endeavours to prevail as an eminent political instrument for socialist change for as long as the country’s capitalist system remains the same and unchanged.
Rasti Delizo is a global affairs analyst. He is a member and a former vice president of the BMP.
