The CPP-NPA continues to thrive especially in the remote areas of the country because its politics of empowerment resonates not just with the oppressed but all those who wanted to build a new future founded on justice and equality.
Deliberate or not, the glaring error of some partisan critics of the Left is to polemicize with a distorted sense of history and improper reading of the local political landscape.
After more than half a century, the Philippine revolutionary struggle could already offer its experience in conducting a protracted resistance in this part of the world.
Politicians are experts in articulating this unscientific argument. They blame the people’s resistance for causing social ills as if the system were just and equitable before the Left conspired to destroy it. They insinuate that the people’s struggle is instigating terror. It is convenient for them to scapegoat activism instead of acknowledging their criminal liability in perpetuating a state of mass poverty.
Working tirelessly on the ground are community organizers who turned a particular issue into a political question and mobilized the people to discuss, decide, and determine the proper course of action. They are immersed in full-time political work even if this does not yield any pecuniary benefit.
The Left’s primary source of support and inspiration is the fighting masses. Their conditions reflect the failure of the current system to end poverty, hunger, landlessness, and inequality which vindicate the need for a revolutionary struggle.
I was prepared to be disappointed with NatDem politics but instead, I became more immersed in their mass campaigns. I was overwhelmed with several political realizations: Here was a movement making democracy work through collective leadership, here was a political force whose strength is linked to the empowerment of its members in the grassroots, here was history claiming the present to build a new future.