Notes on Marxism without the M16

Okay, as a former rebel, I am expected to say, almost by default, that I reject Marxism, and everything that comes with it: dialectical materialism, historical materialism, the whole toolbox we once carried to view the world. That’s the script people assume we follow after returning to civilian life. And there is a part of me that wishes I could simply renounce all of it. Life would be easier if I could say, “I’ve moved on, I’m done, that chapter is closed.”

But the honest answer is more complicated, and more inconvenient. Because as a social scientist, a student of history, and an angry observer of the current situation in our country, I have not found any framework more grounded, more realistic, or more brutally honest than Marxism when it comes to explaining why the Philippines is the way it is.

Unfortunately, being a former rebel also means carrying a history inside me that I cannot simply deny. It lives in my bones, in my reflexes, and even in the way I read the news. But now that I have already disavowed violent armed struggle, and firmly, and decisively, the question becomes painfully real: what theory do I follow now? What compass do I use?

Today, as a civilian who still wants radical, structural, widespread change, that line becomes a haunting question: How can people like us remain revolutionary… without being armed insurgents?

And this is where the irony cuts deep.

Because the very reason I joined the armed struggle—my anger at injustice, my grief at wasted lives, my frustration at a country trapped between corruption and inequality—those reasons have not disappeared. But I can no longer convince myself that waging war in the mountains is the answer. I cannot tell young people that their lives are best spent in a war that has outlived its strategic usefulness. I cannot pretend that we are one tactical offensive away from victory, or that martyrdom is a sustainable political program.

Yet despite all that, the explanatory power of Marxism remains. Surplus value still makes sense and class struggle still shapes our lives. The way capitalism turns everything— from labor, land, bodies, even hopes and dreams—into commodities is still visible every day. And no amount of distancing from my past will change the fact that Marx’s critique of capitalism remains one of the most useful tools I have for understanding why society keeps producing the same injustices in different packaging.

And so I find myself asking, almost timidly, almost guiltily: Does Marxism, in the contemporary Philippines, really require armed struggle to remain valid?

Because if Marxism is truly a science of social change, then it must evolve with the terrain of struggle. If historical materialism means anything, it must mean that revolutions adapt when history changes. And if class struggle is real, then it cannot be confined to one arena, one weapon, one blueprint copied from a different century.

Can Marxism breathe outside the barrel of a gun?

Back to basics

If we go back to Marx and Engels, they were less like doctrinaires and more like very stubborn empiricists. They kept asking: given the actual conditions of a country, what forms of struggle make sense? They were not romantic about violence for its own sake.

Historical materialism, if we take it seriously, is brutal to dogma. It says: you don’t export  strategies from 1848 onto 2025 just because your party handbook says so. You look at the level of productive forces, the form of the state, the presence or absence of democracy, the strength and consciousness of the working class, and the balance of forces internationally.

Then you decide how to struggle. In that sense, Marxism is not “always pick up a gun” and more “do not lie about what the concrete situation demands.”

What Marx and Engels actually said about democracy and violence

Inside the Party, we were only ever given a very specific “cut” of Marx and Engels, the ones that framed revolution in insurrectionary terms. But they actually said more than what made it into our EDs and study guides.

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels talk about winning the “battle of democracy”. For them, that was not just a euphemism for people’s war. It was a recognition that in some societies, the working class could use democratic institutions as a real terrain of struggle, such as elections, unions, parliaments, and legal organizations.

Later in life, Engels became very explicit. Looking at countries like England and the US, he acknowledged that there were paths to workers’ power that did not have to be violent insurrections, because democratic rights, however limited, created new possibilities. Marx himself said there were places where the working class might “attain their aims by peaceful means.”

The key point for me is this: They never canonized armed struggle as the only valid expression of Marxism. They did canonize class struggle as the motor of history, but were open about the many forms it could take depending on the conditions.

If we cling to the end-all, be-all tactic of armed struggle, regardless of how the world has changed, we are not being “more Marxist.” We are actually betraying the rudimentary method that Marx and Engels tried to practice: letting reality dictate the form of struggle, not the other way around.

1848 Europe versus 2025 Philippines

It also helps to be brutally honest about context. The Manifesto was written during a Europe that was characterized by monarchies and empires, no universal suffrage, outlawed unions, no real legal space for workers’ parties, and state violence as the standard answer to dissent. In that world, it made sense that revolution often meant street battles, barricades, and insurrections. There simply weren’t many legal, institutional channels for workers and peasants to assert power.

The Philippines today is not a paradise, but it is also not 1848 Europe. In fairness to our democratic institutions, we have universal suffrage, regular (if flawed) elections, legal unions and federations, partylist representation, mass media, social media, and broad civic space, and spaces in bureaucracy and local government that can be contested and transformed.

As someone who has seen both underground and legal sides, I can say with some confidence that the terrain of struggle is wider than the jungle and the mountains. And the wider it gets, the less honest it becomes to claim that only armed struggle is “revolutionary” and everything else is “revisionist” or “counter-revolutionary.”

From a Marxist lens, that’s just bad analysis. The base and the superstructure have not totally changed but morphed into something distinct. The old tactic cannot remain sacred.

Free Marxism!

If we disavow armed struggle, what is left of Marxism? 

This is the question that haunts a lot of us former rebels. If we abandon people’s war, do we automatically abandon Marx? My own answer, whichs still evolving, is this: Marxism as a theory of how capitalism works is still incredibly useful. Surplus value, exploitation, the commodification of life are things that are not less true just because we’ve left the Party.

Marxism as a method of analysis, or simply asking who is working, who benefits, how class power operates, is still one of the sharpest knives we can bring to any public issue in the Philippines, from labor flexibilization to corruption to land conversion to foreign capital. What we are really rejecting is not Marxism itself but a particular Leninist-Maoist reading that hard-wires it to armed struggle.

If we peel that away, what remains is a framework that can still guide our pro-poor public policy, union organizing, peasant movements for land and support services, tax justice campaigns, regulation of monopolies, and critique of systemic corruption, political dynasties and oligarchy.

In other words, Marxism without the gun can still be Marxism. As a critique, as a compass, as a way of reading the world, it can finally be free of the fetters of protracted war.

We can keep Marx’s critique of capitalism and discard the cult of armed struggle. We can keep historical materialism and reject “historical cosplay.” We can keep the demand for justice and equality and let go of the idea that martyrdom and protracted war are the only proof of sincerity.

For the worker–peasant alliance in the Philippines today, Marxism can guide our campaigns for genuine agrarian reform and rural development through policy, budget, and local power, for strengthening unions, co-ops, and social enterprises, defending and expanding social services, for labor rights, and public education, and for resisting corruption and oligarchy through civic, legal, and media work. None of this is less “class struggle” just because it does not involve an M16.

For now, I feel that Marxism in the Philippines today is most honest, and most useful, when it stops insisting on war and starts insisting on democracy, justice, and organized, legal mass power.

But that won’t satisfy the dogmatists. But then again, maybe that tells us who is really following Marx, and who is just guarding a shrine.