The Filipino people are rising against US imperialist wars and aggression to defend Philippine sovereignty and address the increasing hardships brought about by the present world disorder. The national democratic revolution continues to advance nationwide, despite the reactionary government’s yearly claims that they have decimated the people’s army to inconsequence and destroyed guerrilla fronts.
In the countryside, the rural folk continue to support the New People’s Army as their main weapon for liberation while reactionary armed forces impose martial law type hamlets, bomb villages, and massacre families. Despite the influx of US dollars, cyber high-tech and heavy armaments for counter-revolutionary programs, the NPA continues to grow and launch tactical operations and other military actions.
In the urban areas, in protest actions big and small, in multiple, dispersed, specific activities, different sectors of society are advancing aspects of the 12-point program of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines for national democracy as a comprehensive guide for their own struggles. People’s mass organizations are growing stronger, more militant and more effective in pushing for their demands, influencing progressive and patriotic forces to respond. These continuing struggles give life and enrich the NDFP 12-point program, proving its correctness as the people’s program for societal change.
The NDFP unites different sectors and interests in our call to end imperialist wars and to end US imperialist support for the landlord, bourgeois-comprador and bureaucrat-capitalist dominated reactionary government.
On our 53rd founding anniversary, the NDFP with its member-organizations honor Jose Maria Sison, Luis Jalandoni, Antonio Zumel, Fidel Agcaoili, Benito Tiamzon, Wilma Austria-Tiamzon and many other named and unnamed heroes and martyrs of the revolution. We take inspiration and lessons from their struggle to sharpen and renew our commitment in continuing the fight with the Filipino people to advance the national democratic revolution to victory.
We started more than five decades ago when the Communist Party of the Philippines brought together democratic people’s organizations that were forced to go underground when the dictator Marcos Sr. declared Martial Law. Among them were Katipunan ng Gurong Makabayan (KAGUMA), Makabayang Kilusan ng Bagong Kababaihan (MAKIBAKA), Kabataang Makabayan (KM), Christians for National Liberation (CNL), and Pambansang Samahan ng Makabayang Tsuper (PSMT).
These mass organizations continued to work in the urban underground and in armed struggle in the countryside under the most oppressive and suppressive conditions imposed by the tyrannical Marcos Sr’s rule. They embraced revolution, particularly through protracted people’s war, as the only viable alternative to achieve freedom and democracy.
Since then, NDFP’s allied organizations have grown nationwide, drawing in more national democratic organizations and encompassing sectors such as Liga ng Agham para sa Bayan (LAB) for scientists and engineers (1975), Makabayang Samahang Pangkalusugan (MASAPA) for doctors and health workers (1978), Revolutionary Council of Trade Unions (RCTU) for workers (1985), Pambansang Katipunan ng Magbubukid (PKM) for peasants (1985), Cordillera People’s Democratic Front (CPDF) for indigenous people in the north (1986), Artista at Manunulat ng Sambayanan (Armas) for artists and writers (1987), Makabayang Kawani ng Pilipinas (MKP) for government employees (1992), Moro Resistance and Liberation Organization (MRLO) and Lumad Revolutionary Organization in the south (2005), Compatriots for migrant Filipinos (2013), and Lupon ng mga Manananggol Para sa Bayan (LUMABAN) for lawyers (2023).
Through the years, the NDFP has stood as the most consolidated national democratic organized force of the people’s united front, drawing in patriotic sections of the population first against the US-Marcos dictatorship and later against the US-subservient regimes that continued to abet exploitation, oppression and repression under the guise of bourgeois democracy. We grew in strength because the NDFP consistently stood for the interests of the workers and peasants as the main force, recognized and encouraged the essential participation of the petty bourgeoisie, and gave due consideration to the needs of other patriotic sectors, while dealing with restraint and just concessions with the elements from the ruling class who wished to relate with the national democratic movement.
We weathered the attempts by the revisionist contras to demolish the NDFP or drag it away from people’s war when we successfully convened in 1994 the NDFP National Conference that reaffirmed the national democratic line, cemented the 12-point program, and systematized the organizational procedures and consensus among the allied organizations. Thus, we marched in unity along the second rectification movement and the revolution went on to achieve further successes in the middle phase of the people’s war.
We accepted the task to represent the movement and the emergent people’s government in the peace negotiations and our efforts resulted in important agreements such as the Hague Joint Declaration, the JASIG and the CAHRIHL, agreements that the successive government administrations chose to distort and the present regime now wishes to discard unilaterally.
We presently uphold and advance the rectification movement, led by the CPP, that has shown gains in overcoming our weaknesses and developing the national democratic movement amid the brutal onslaught of the US-Marcos regime.
Today, even as we celebrate more than five decades of achievements and arduous struggle, we recognize the crisis foisted upon the people by the imperialist wars and face these new challenges with serious determination and well-founded optimism.
The Filipino people, together with the whole world, are mired in deep economic difficulties within the imperialist system’s worsening economic and political turmoil. The energy crisis these wars have created worsens the people’s already miserable living conditions and further exacerbates the threat on people’s lives and livelihood as the US-Marcos regime pigheadedly allows the US to escalate militarization of our country in its First-Island-Chain and drag us into the abyss of a brewing inter-imperialist war.
The National Democratic Front pf the Philippines stands for an active, free and peaceful foreign policy to fight for the country’s safety amid the inter-imperialist wars. Additionally, the NDFP’s 12-point program fights for national industrialization; agrarian reform; people’s democratic rights; a people’s democratic government; comprehensive social policy; mass-based, scientific, and nationalist culture; women’s liberation; and right to self-determination of Moro and indigenous people. This program will address the problems of low wages, landlessness, joblessness and job precarity, environmental destruction, human rights violations and inadequate social services that the reactionary puppet regime refuses to resolve in its drive to serve its imperialist masters.
We welcome the gains of the people’s army and the revolutionary mass base in the countryside. We likewise commend the forces in the revolutionary urban underground for their untiring efforts to expand and consolidate revolutionary organizations and networks, and link up with the revolutionary forces in the countryside. The national democratic revolution is advancing even as the US is increasingly taking a more direct hand in the reactionary puppet government’s counter-revolutionary military campaigns.
We encourage our allied organizations to strike deep roots among the masses more than ever, arouse and mobilize them to join the New People’s Army and strengthen the armed struggle as our only way to establish a people’s democratic government that will end imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism.
We call on the Filipino people to rise and demand an end to imperialist aggression and war in Iran, in Gaza, Venezuela, Cuba, and everywhere else in the world. The victory of the people’s democratic revolution will be our contribution to the global movement against US imperialism, the scourge of the world today.
