DEEP DIVES | The Third Rectification: A Revolution Past Its Prime and Time

Following its Second Congress in late 2016, the Communist Party of the Philippines internally decided to conduct the Third Rectification Movement, which it framed as a necessary self-correction. Formally announced in its official organ in late 2023, the CPP’s ideological movement was billed as a return to ideological rigor, organizational discipline, and a renewed commitment to people’s war. 

The Communist Party of the Philippines launched its First Rectification Movement in the late 1960s to strengthen discipline and clarify ideology after its reestablishment, emphasizing Maoist protracted war but also triggering internal purges. The Second Rectification in 1993 sought to correct adventurist tactics and ultraleft errors, including deadly internal purges that victimized civilians and cadres alike. 

Two decades later, the CPP decided to launch a "Third Rectification Movement" to address what the Central Committee described as "critical errors and tendencies" that have impeded the Party's growth. These shortcomings have reportedly led to significant "battlefield losses" for its armed wing, the New People's Army, as well as a "slowdown in the recruitment of new members." The internal campaign aims to correct ideological errors, primarily "military conservatism" and "empiricism," which the leadership believes have resulted in poor tactical decisions and organizational stagnation. While the Party claims it wants to restore relevance and discipline within the organization, the reality is that it is confronting a society and labor force that has become vastly different from the one it once mobilized. What matters, then, is not the ritual of repentance but whether the remedy actually fits the disease. 

For former rebels, however, the Third Rectification is not a cure. It is a defensive consolidation, a last-ditch attempt to resuscitate an exhausted strategy by doubling down on doctrine and discipline. 

While the movement openly acknowledges some of its failures, it still refuses to confront the most basic diagnosis that its strategic foundations are no longer aligned with the social realities it claims to address. This disconnect is evident in the thousands of former cadres and members of its mass base who have already walked away from the struggle. What remains is an exercise in ideological nostalgia, one that cannot restore the movement’s relevance nor redeem the lives lost in its name. It also refused to ask the hard but unavoidable question at the heart of its doctrine: is armed struggle still the only valid, or even necessary, means of pursuing social change?

The Workers Today

A decisive reason the Third Rectification can no longer rebuild mass strength is that it refuses to engage with the realities of modern workers. The Party’s organizing imagination remains trapped in a classical proletarian-peasant framework. Today, millions of Filipinos work through apps as delivery riders, freelancers, and service contractors, and navigate precarious and digitally-mediated forms of flexible labor that were unimaginable to the old templates of class struggle.

Recent data illustrates this shift clearly. Research linked to the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) estimates that 9.9 million Filipinos or about 22% of the employed labor force  now participate in gig work. Of these, roughly 1.7 million work through app-based platforms such as ride-hailing and food or courier services. Their grievances are specific and technical: algorithmic management, lack of benefits, and rating-based terminations. 

Even the CPP acknowledged this reality. In a 2022 Ang Bayan report, it noted that as early as 2018 there were already 2 million gig workers, a number that had grown sharply during the pandemic, with 84% dependent on online platforms.

Automation and artificial intelligence are reshaping work even further. Jobs disappear, new roles emerge, and workers shift constantly between livelihoods. A strategy built around territorial organizing or protracted armed struggle simply cannot engage a workforce that is mobile, fragmented, and digitally coordinated.

This disconnect becomes even clearer when considering millions of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs). They are the backbone of the Philippine economy, and send home more than US $37 billion in 2024. Nearly half of them occupy low-skill, low-pay jobs, their earnings further eroded by currency fluctuations. Government support mechanisms are strained, with the Department of Migrant Workers’ budget cut from ₱10.12 billion to ₱8.5 billion in 2025, leaving many OFWs vulnerable to hardship and uncertainty.

A revolutionary script built on land reform and guerrilla warfare does not speak to these realities. Filipino workers at home and abroad confront problems that are immediate, legal, economic, and deeply personal: labor protections, contract security, wage justice, migration safety, and family survival. Left-wing strategies that rely heavily on union-centric organizing or abstract calls for industrialization consistently fail to address these urgent concerns. They also do not translate into support for armed struggle because workers across industries reject it because it does nothing to resolve their day-to-day vulnerabilities.

A clandestine, ideologically rigid movement cannot resonate with a workforce defined by rapid technological change, global mobility, and precarious employment. Repeating slogans about peasants and rural encirclement is not adaptation but a clear refusal to evolve, and ultimately, a failure of political imagination.

Rectification as Repetition, Not Reinvention

Rectification should mean genuine rethinking, retooling, and re-imagining. But in truth, the Third Rectification has become a cycle of the same rituals. These rituals include more study sessions, more criticism and self-criticism, and tighter enforcement of old doctrine. Instead of asking hard questions about whether a mid-20th-century model of peasant war still fits today’s realities, the movement hides behind ideological routines. 

When correction becomes ritual, it stops being transformative. IIt turns into obedience training. This training is a way to keep members loyal rather than to make the struggle more effective. The movement’s idea of “serving the people” often ends up reversed. It is the people who serve the ideology. Communities feed, shelter, and risk themselves for the NPA, but receive no clear or immediate benefit in return. Their sacrifices are treated as proof of revolutionary virtue rather than as problems to be solved. The Party claims to act for the people, yet it rarely listens to what the people actually want or need in the present.

Even the NPA’s tactical offensives reflect this reversal. These operations are justified as advancing the struggle, but many civilians see no real gain. They do not feel safer, richer, or freer afterward. The supposed victories often serve internal goals. These goals include maintaining morale, proving capability, or collecting revolutionary taxes. They rarely genuinely improve people’s lives. If armed actions truly served the people, they would target the corrupt politicians or criminals who exploit them daily. But that is not what happens. What persists instead is an ideological pattern where struggle itself becomes sacred, and results become secondary.

To say that ideology must serve the people means this: revolutionary ideas should be tools to make life better, not burdens the people must carry. A movement that demands endless loyalty and sacrifice without tangible progress forgets whom it claims to liberate.

Rectification, then, should not be about repeating oaths or perfecting discipline. It should be about aligning struggle with the people’s actual conditions and aspirations. Without that, all corrections are just rituals. And all ideology becomes empty faith.

Society and a New Form of Revolution

Any honest look at the Third Rectification should begin with the realities people face today: insecurity, debt, weak social services, and daily survival with little say in decisions that affect them. The issue is not what programs exist on paper, but what ordinary people actually experience. 

In this context, the right form of struggle is not destruction or a return to an old model of armed rebellion. It is the steady work of taking back political power and public institutions for the benefit of the people. Revolution today should mean gaining control over the institutions that manage resources, shape policies, and deliver services. It should not be some romantic insurrection but practical, grounded, and directed toward real needs.

Reclaiming power means organizing communities, cooperatives, associations, unions, and participatory councils that have real decision-making authority. It means gaining influence in government and public institutions to ensure fair distribution of resources. It requires building alliances across labor, peasant, migrant, the youth, and issue-based movements. It uses legal and political tools wisely, reserving confrontation only for situations where it is unavoidable. It also means using technology to promote transparency, coordination, and accountability, not for manipulation. This is politics that is firm, realistic, and humane, focused on building lasting structures of power rather than glorifying decades of armed campaigns.

Organizational Exhaustion

The NPA no longer commands the recruitment pipelines or community tolerance it once did. Cadres have aged, defected, or surrendered. The incentives that once bound communities to the movement, like security, protection, and livelihood, have withered. A rectification program that focuses on internal discipline and ideological purity without materially improving the lives of communities will, at best, produce a smaller, hardened core. At worst, it will turn the movement into a self-referential sect. The deaths of past cadres are exploited as slogans or recycled into recruitment propaganda.

The Unforgiving Truth

The Third Rectification is unlikely to revive a mass movement because it avoids the central truth that the world has changed but the CPP’s strategy has not. It’s true that armed struggle, like reform struggle, offers no guarantees. Every path carries risk. But history shows that reform-oriented strategies have delivered real gains more quickly, at far less human cost, and without the devastation of prolonged war. Forcing a six-decade-old armed strategy does not hasten change. It only prolongs suffering, uncertainty, and delay. The people do not advance under this approach since they wait, endure, and absorb the consequences.

The CPP now faces a simple choice: open itself to forms of struggle beyond people’s war, or continue repeating the same method as if sacrifice were a goal in itself. Choosing the latter reduces the Third Rectification to a defiant but irrelevant ritual. Choosing the former means focusing on building participatory, democratic social structures. 

A New Kind of Rectification Movement

If there is a rectification worth pursuing today, it is the one already taking shape outside the underground, a movement led by former rebels who have confronted both the failures of the Party and the realities of the communities they once organized. These are people who lived the armed struggle, saw its limits up close, and chose a different path, not out of surrender, but out of responsibility. 

Their work across villages, peasant associations, women’s groups, and reintegration communities shows what genuine correction looks like: grounding political action in the needs of ordinary people, not in rigid doctrine. They are proving that dignity, livelihood, and safety can be restored not by romanticized violence but by patient, collective, and transparent organizing.

This emerging rectification is not defined by nostalgia or rebellion for its own sake. It is defined by honesty in acknowledging where the old struggle failed and building institutions that protect workers, farmers, and IP communities, without the need for armed struggle.

 In these efforts, there is no illusion of the protracted victory. There is clarity, maturity, and humanity. If the path to genuine change exists, it is here, in the rectification movement rooted not in war, but in the experiences of those who survived it and chose to build something better.