Protests across the country against the state’s corruption system continue to surge. It reflects the seething anger of the broad masses of the Filipino people against the monstrous bureaucrat-capitalist plunder of the Marcos regime.
To shield himself from the people’s anger, Marcos is trying to polish his image to reverse his long-standing reputation as a purveyor of corruption. While aiming at some political rivals and even allies who don’t remit their kickbacks, Marcos is trying to conceal his own role in the widespread corruption.
Marcos established a meaningless “independent commission” that is supposed to investigate the anomalous flood-control projects. This investigation ordered by Marcos Jr is merely a tactic to confuse the public and divert attention from him.
Marcos is truly the mastermind of corruption behind the anomalous flood-control project, into which he poured more than ₱1 trillion since taking power in 2022. As with his predecessors, Marcos has pocketed billions of pesos from kickbacks on multibillion-peso government contracts, including roads, bridges, railways, and other major construction projects, as well as smuggling, defense contracts, land lease contracts, and a myriad forms of pocketing the nation’s funds.
The bureaucrat-capitalist leader Marcos indulges in luxury and extravagance. He is known for his penchant for multimillion-peso exclusive concerts and lavish feasts, like those held for his recent birthday. He was heavily criticized for flying to Singapore just to watch car races. He and his wife used public funds to turn Malacañang into a private vacation house for their family’s whims.
Marcos is a brazen liar when he pretended to stand with the people in condemning corruption and claimed he would join the protests were he not president. The truth is that Marcos holds the repressive power of a fascist state, which he uses to bleed the nation and crush all forms of people’s resistance.
The legacy of the 14-year fascist dictatorship and plunder of the people’s money by his father, Marcos Sr, lives on. Organizers and members of workers’ unions, community associations, student organizations, and human-rights advocates are surveilled, harassed, and targeted for violent attacks by state agents. Hundreds of political prisoners remain jailed. Human-rights and international humanitarian law are rampantly violated as Marcos imposes martial law in thousands of rural barangays to suppress the people’s defense of their land and livelihood against the entry or expansion of plantations and mining operations.
Marcos, head of the bureaucrat-capitalist state, is the king of corruption. He is the chief fascist with an iron fist who crushes all dissent. He is the chief puppet of the Americans and factotum serving the strategic economic, financial, and military interests of US imperialism.
The Filipino people are victims of widespread, systemic corruption and fascism. They suffer from decaying social services, rising cost of living, low wages, widespread unemployment, loss of livelihood, and a general deterioration of socio-economic conditions. They are rising and protesting to hold Marcos and the corrupt to account.
Filipinos must strengthen their unity, build their organizations, and expand and intensify their protests in the coming months. They should expose and reject the forces riding the anti-corruption protests who defend Marcos in exchange for profit and position. These forces serve Marcos’s schemes to calm the protests. Yet they fail, because Marcos’s hollow and meaningless displays only further fuel the protest movement. Calls for Marcos’s resignation or ouster and for the removal of all corrupt officials from the state are mounting.
As the protests against Marcos and widespread corruption broaden, the Filipino people should raise and link them to the broader struggle to end the oppressive, exploitative semicolonial and semifeudal system. This system is dominated by big bourgeois compradors, bureaucrat-capitalists, and big landlords.
These classes in the Philippines were engendered by US imperialism and control the neocolonial state. They all answer to, serve and collude with US imperialism in plundering the nation’s wealth and in the fascist suppression of the broad masses. In particular, the bureaucrat-capitalists use state power to steal public funds and amass riches through every form of corruption.
In the end, the struggle against corruption and all forms of oppression of the Filipino people go beyond removing Marcos, or even ousting the entire government. Systemic corruption can only be uprooted through a people’s democratic revolution to end the three basic problems of bureaucrat-capitalism, imperialism, and feudalism. This is being carried forward by the Communist Party of the Philippines, which wields the New People’s Army as the main weapon to destroy the armed forces of the reactionary and neocolonial state.
The Party urges the Filipino people to further strengthen their revolutionary organizations, broaden the ranks of the National Democratic Front, and support and join the New People’s Army.
The Party calls on youth to go to the vast countryside where the revolutionary movement continues to build organs of political power. These are built on the foundation of revolutionary mass organizations of peasants, youth, women, and other democratic sectors, alongside the people’s army. They serve as seeds of a democratic people’s government that will replace the rotten, puppet regime at the moment of revolutionary victory in the armed struggle for national liberation and social justice.
