[Vantage Point] What’s left for the Philippines’ Left?

• The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) has seen a significant decline in its influence and military capability, with only a small number of armed members remaining compared to its peak.
• The ideological struggle of the CPP is challenged by historical developments, as modern economic successes in countries like China and Vietnam contradict the Maoist principles the CPP upholds.
• The CPP's opposition to foreign military agreements and economic initiatives, such as EDCA and Pax Silica, reflects a disconnect with current geopolitical realities, as these partnerships may enhance the Philippines' economic prospects.

This is AI-generated. Read the article for full context. Report any errors.

For more than half a century, the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) has been promising a revolution. Today, I find myself asking: what exactly is left to revolutionize when history has already rendered judgment on the ideology behind it?

At its height, the CPP’s armed wing, the New People’s Army (NPA), reportedly commanded more than 25,000 armed fighters across the archipelago. It was an insurgency that the Philippine state could not dismiss, but that’s no longer the organization confronting us today.

Government figures say all 89 guerrilla fronts that existed at the beginning of the Marcos administration have been dismantled. By August 2025, authorities estimated that only about 785 armed NPA members remained, with roughly 780 firearms operating in small, dispersed units.

I hesitate to call what remains an army. An army seeks to defeat another army, capture territory, and ultimately seize political power. What we see today are armed remnants capable of ambush, extortion, and intimidation, but apparently incapable of mounting anything resembling the revolution promised by the CPP in 1968.

The revolution has become a war of attrition against history itself.

We note its political decline, too. Makabayan mounted an ambitious Senate campaign in 2025. Not one candidate won, while the broader movement’s party-list representation contracted.

Various shades

This does not mean every Filipino identified with the Left has become irrelevant. Social democrats, labor activists, environmentalists, Akbayan, and the CPP-aligned national-democratic movement are not interchangeable. 

Akbayan, after all, topped the 2025 party list elections. My argument concerns the revolutionary Maoist Left and the worldview that continues to orbit around it.

Nowhere is its intellectual predicament more obvious to me than in its opposition to EDCA (Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement) and, more recently, Pax Silica.

EDCA is a 2014 military pact between the Philippines and the US, which allows US forces rotational access to designated military bases in the country, pre-positioning of equipment, and infrastructure construction, even as the Philippine maintains complete ownership and sovereignty over all sites.

Pax Silica, meanwhile, is a US-led global alliance launched in December 2025 to protect global supply chains for semiconductors, artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure, and critical minerals among allied nations, primarily to counter China’s tech dominance.

According to Left-leaning groups, these foreign partnerships enhance geopolitical risks for the Philippines. EDCA is transforming our country into an American military outpost and giving Americans access makes us a target. Washington is using Manila to contain China. Philippine sovereignty is supposedly being surrendered to another imperial power and local development is being sacrificed for foreign security interests.

These allegations deserve a debate. No military agreement should escape scrutiny. Concerns for the environment, indigenous rights, and Philippine sovereignty surrounding Pax Silica should not be simply shrugged off.

Parroting Beijing?

But listen carefully to the larger narrative. The perspective begins sounding remarkably similar to Beijing’s.

China has repeatedly argued that expanded EDCA access undermines regional stability and drags the Philippines into America’s confrontation with China. Parts of the Philippine national-democratic Left make essentially the same strategic argument.

I’m not alleging collusion. But there is a more interesting question about the resistance to EDCA that needs to be answered. Why are supposedly opposing ideological camps repeatedly arriving at positions producing the same strategic outcome: weakening Philippine-American security cooperation precisely when China is pressing its expansive claims in the West Philippine Sea?

What about the opposition to Pax Silica?

The Philippines joined the US-led initiative in April. New Clark City is being positioned as a hub for AI, semiconductors, advanced manufacturing, critical minerals, and secure technology supply chains. The proposed development covers roughly 1,620 hectares, with BCDA projecting eventual investments of $40 billion to $70 billion and more than 130,000 jobs.

Those are projections, not guarantees, and the government should be required to prove them.

But Pax Silica’s strategic purpose is unmistakable. The United States and its partners want technology and critical-mineral supply chains less dependent on China. The Philippines wants to climb those same supply chains rather than remain primarily an exporter of labor and low-value commodities.

And once again, elements of the Philippine Left are marching against it.

The ideological ancestors of today’s Philippine Maoists once looked toward Mao Zedong’s China as proof that a communist revolution could transform an impoverished Asian society. Yet modern China became an economic superpower only after dismantling much of Mao’s economic system.

Beginning in 1978, Deng Xiaoping’s China opened itself to foreign investment, introduced market incentives, and loosened collectivized agriculture, eventually becoming one of capitalism’s greatest manufacturing platforms. China’s economy subsequently grew around 9% annually for decades, while close to 800 million people escaped extreme poverty.

China did not accomplish that by becoming more Maoist. It achieved economic success  by becoming less so.

Vietnam offers another uncomfortable exhibit. Its Doi Moi reforms that began in 1986 moved the country toward markets, private enterprise, foreign investment, and international trade. Vietnam remained communist politically, while retreating from orthodox communist economics. The Soviet Union, too, disappeared in 1991. 

Communism’s greatest historical humiliation was not simply that its enemies defeated it. Its surviving practitioners had to abandon much of its economics to survive.

So that while Filipino Maoists continue fighting American imperialism as though history stopped during the Vietnam War, communist Vietnam, for example, welcomes American investment. 

The revolutionaries have somehow become more doctrinaire than the revolution that inspired them.

Meanwhile, American bases in Subic and Clark disappeared more than three decades ago. Today, Chinese vessels confront Filipino vessels in waters over which the Philippines possesses sovereign rights.

Yet much of the revolutionary script remains unchanged: America is the imperialist; capitalism is exploitation; foreign investment creates dependency; and security cooperation with Washington constitutes surrender.

An ideology that cannot adjust to a changing reality eventually stops being a logical tool for truth. It becomes dogma.

The NPA may still possess guns. Its remnants can still kill and intimidate. The government must therefore continue treating them as a security threat until armed resistance ends.

But I no longer see an advancing tide of the revolution, only its vestiges.

Perhaps the supreme contradiction of the Philippine communist movement is that, after more than half a century of armed struggle and generations sacrificed for a revolution, its greatest adversary turned out to be neither the Armed Forces, the United States, nor capitalism.

It is history.

Time moved on. The revolution did not.

I welcome your views on these and other issues where decisions made in power shape the country’s economic future.