Official NDFP Statement On Bringing The Lessons Of EDSA To Their Revolutionary Conclusion
Elias Dipasupil | Secretary General | National Democratic Front Of The Philippines
February 25, 2025
The gains of the EDSA People Power will be realized only by bringing the uprising to its revolutionary conclusion. Succeeding regimes have sought to trivialize, co-opt, and bastardize this definitive occasion of February 1986 when millions of Filipino people united to topple the fascist Marcos dictatorship. The most recent and outrageous effort was that of a fascist invoking People Power against another fascist.
So broad was the discontent with the Marcos regime that the EDSA People Power Uprising succeeded in forming a complex convergence of disparate anti-Marcos groups, from the sincere to the self-interested. Civil libertarians hoped to restore the trappings of pre-martial law democracy, the religious prayed for an end to the evils of military rule, activists advanced this as a step towards comprehensive social change, big business alongside traditional politicians wished to regain the economic power usurped by Marcos cronies, and military officers disgruntled by the Ver faction’s monopoly wanted to institute their own version of fascism. It is this broadness and convergence that gave it strength, but at the same time rendered it vulnerable to co-optation and distortion.
Thus, four decades later, we find the the country still deep in poverty, reeling from inflation, steeped in corruption, stripped off our natural wealth by foreign corporations, and faced still with the arrogant presence of foreign military forces on our soil. The culture of impunity is pervasive. With a Marcos back in Malacañang, we face unbridled corruption, ballooning foreign loans and onerous economic policies coupled with the Martial Law-type monstrosity of media repression, historical distortion, extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances and aerial bombings and artillery attacks in rural communities.
Still, the EDSA People Power uprising remains a historical moment in the Filipino people’s struggle against tyranny. Today, as tyrannical factions continue to spread their rule over the country and the world, it would be well to remember the lessons EDSA has to offer:
One, the people will not tolerate fascism or militarism and will resist with all forms of struggle, no matter how long it takes. For 14 years, hundreds of activists expanded and consolidated cells and networks in the urban underground, establishing the National Democratic Front, until the masses could muster enough forces for open mass protests in defiance of martial law impositions. Red fighters of the New People’s Army employed guerrilla tactics to frustrate military forces ten times their size and dug deep in the countryside, arousing and organizing peasants to resist militarization and implement land reform. Cadres of the Communist Party of the Philippines developed alliances with all anti-Marcos forces and guided the national democratic movement to its advance, laying the groundwork for the emergence of a broad anti-dictatorship struggle triggered by the Aquino assassination. All these came with sacrifices by the best and brightest among our youth, and the determination of the masses of peasants and workers.
Another lesson is that the military, the main machinery for fascism, will continue to be used by those in power with or without the trappings of democracy. Military rule is a convenient and necessary recourse of any faction to stay in power, be it the local landlords, the bureaucrat capitalists or the big bourgeois compradors, at the command of their imperialist masters. The fascist machinery of the AFP and the NTF-ELCAC, backed by the US imperialist regime, weaponizes the legal system and all other government agencies in its Whole of Nation Approach against the Filipino people, distorting EDSA’s original vision of anti-tyranny at every turn. Only the total defeat of the unholy trinity of fascism, imperialism and feudalism can ensure true freedom and democracy.
And most important, the singular experience of EDSA’s united struggle against a dictatorship will continue to live on only if this is brought to its revolutionary conclusion, to the creation of a people’s democratic government and the realization of comprehensive social change that the people deserve and aspire for: social change with genuine agrarian reform, nationalist industrialization, real democracy and independence from imperialist control—the content of the NDFP’s 12-point programme. It is the people’s open democratic mass movement in the towns and cities that breathes potential for another EDSA and the revolutionary war being waged daily in the countryside that will help bring EDSA’s promise to its pro-people conclusion.
Drawing lessons from EDSA, the people can create comprehensive, social revolution, a national democratic revolution by joining in their numbers the New People’s Army, and supporting the National Democratic Front under the leadership of the Communist Party of the Philippines.
Source : https://philippinerevolution.nu/statements/bringing-the-lessons-of-edsa-to-their-revolutionary-conclusion/