Anger Is Not a Mandate for Armed Delusion

The Communist Party of the Philippines’ January 12 statement once again attempts to convert legitimate youth anger into a political endorsement of armed revolution. Cloaked in sweeping language about corruption, injustice, and repression, the piece mistakes grievance for consent, criticism for allegiance, and activism for insurgency.

But it was less a fact-based analysis than social appropriation.

The Filipino youth are angry, yes, but they are not naïve. And they are certainly not marching en masse toward a 57-year-old armed project that has failed every generation it tried to mobilize.

Corruption, inequality, abuse of power, and poor governance are undeniable realities. Young Filipinos experience these firsthand through limited opportunities for education, precarious work, rising costs of living, and institutional failures. But to assert that these conditions are driving youth to revolution, specifically the CPP-NPA’s armed struggle, is a categorical leap unsupported by basic logic, much less evidence on the ground.

Anger does not automatically radicalize people into violence. Disillusionment does not equal consent to join an underground army. Protests donot mean endorsement of a vanguard party that demands obedience, secrecy, and sacrifice without democratic accountability.

What the CPP presents as a “burgeoning youth rebellion” is, in reality, a plurality of political expressions, many of which explicitly reject armed struggle, authoritarian discipline, and ideological dogma.

The False Binary: Submission or Revolution

The CPP’s framing relies on a tired binary: either submission to a “fascist” state or participation in armed revolution. This false choice erases the wide terrain of democratic struggle, legal activism, policy advocacy, sectoral organizing, electoral engagement, community development, investigative journalism, and reform movements, where most young Filipinos actually operate. In reducing political agency to only two extremes, the CPP reveals its own limitation, where it cannot imagine youth empowerment outside its own ideological architecture.

The series of incidents in Mindoro, including the death of a young student, the discovery of a Fil-American woman in the vicinity of an armed encounter, and the case of another missing young woman, are serious matters that demand transparent investigation and accountability, not only from the state, but more importantly, from the national democratic organizations that pushed these youths into violent armed struggle.

Turning tragedy into propaganda, even in the face of mothers pleading to spare their children from being used as poster girls, immediately assigning political meaning, declaring moral verdicts, and folding individual lives into a pre-written revolutionary script, is not justice. It is plain instrumentalization, bordering on exploitation.

When every tragic death is instead used to validate armed struggle, and every arrest is declared proof of the state’s fascism, critical inquiry collapses, due process becomes optional, and unfortunately, grief is converted into recruitment tactic.

The CPP romanticizes young intellectuals “flowing to the countryside” to learn from the masses and embrace revolution. This narrative carefully omits a long and painful record of students being cut off from their families, youths in integration with NPA units being packaged as "researchers," questions being lethally punished internally, and critical thought subordinated to party line.

The irony is glaring. While claiming to defend critical thinking, the CPP requires ideological conformity. It vehemently denounces “fascism,” even as it operates a rigid command structure where disagreement is oftentimes treated as betrayal.

Young people are not rejecting “colonial mentality” only to submit to another orthodoxy. They demand agency, plurality, and accountability, values incompatible with clandestine armed movements.

The CPP’s rejection of former rebels and its obsessive hostility toward the NTF-ELCAC and the Barangay Development Fund, are revealing. To the Party, these are but machinery and mechanisms for the suppression of dissent, while glossing over the fact that these in fact erode the CPP’s leverage for insurgency. Development programs, reintegration of former rebels, and community-based governance interrupt the CPP’s long-standing method of thriving in spaces mired in neglect and despair.

The Youth Are Questioning Power, Including the CPP

Perhaps the most uncomfortable truth for the CPP is that today’s youth are questioning all power structures, including the revolutionary Left itself. As they denounce systemic corruption in government, they are equally wary of the national democratic line, particularly the CPP-NPA’s so-called “people’s war.”

They ask why armed struggle continues despite decades of self-inflicted failure. They question the CPP’s two-faced posture of condemning “red-tagging” on one hand, while on the other, continuing to agitate students and other vulnerable sectors to join the NPA’s armed struggle in the countryside.

They see through the CPP-NPA’s ironic moral high ground in pointing out rural underdevelopment, even as it bleeds the countryside dry through “revolutionary taxation,” economic sabotage, and acts of burning and looting.

What the youth are not doing is flocking to the NPA in significant numbers. They do want change but not through endless war. The Filipino youth are angry, critical, and politically awake. But they are not obligated to inherit the CPP’s unfinished war or its rigid worldview. To equate dissent with insurgency is to insult their intelligence.

As the critical youth continues to emerge and assert itself, it is the obligation of the government (at least of those who still believe that the youth is the hope of the motherland) to make space and help chart the path toward a new, dynamic youth movement, one built around and directed toward constructive activism.

Revolution is not proven by rhetoric and the future of the youth cannot be built on a strategy that has already buried generations. The CPP does not speak for the youth. It speaks over them. And increasingly, the youth are choosing to speak for themselves.