Alisin lahat!
Towards a ‘united front from below’ in the battles ahead
The conflict between the House of Duterte and the House of Marcos is now coming to a head.
What we witnessed this week in the Senate—the repulsive power-grab carried out by the pro-Duterte Senators and their shameless coddling of that remorseless buffoon of a criminal in the Senate building—are just the opening shots in what is likely to be a vicious, even potentially bloody, denouement to the years-long confrontation between the two camps.
The battlelines have been drawn, but let us be clear: This is not so much a fight between proponents of “good governance” and the “kurakot,” as some liberals frame it. Neither is this ultimately a fight between defenders of “democracy” and champions of “genocidal authoritarianism,” as some progressives see it.
While there are important differences between the two warring camps, there are also fundamental similarities which we cannot afford to overlook: Neither can be counted on to carry out the sweeping reforms needed to “cleanse” the system; both cannot be relied on to uphold human rights or protect the State’s liberal institutions.
Rather than a battle between good and evil or a clash between progress and degeneration, what we are witnessing instead is a fight in which both antagonists are ultimately on the same side against working-people: a fight over how to perpetuate elite rule in the country.
As the global capitalist system goes through its most far-reaching restructuring in generations—as the US empire’s decline reaches its terminal phase, as China and Russia rise and claim their own spheres of domination, and as Neoliberalism decays into a new phase of world-fascism—the different fractions of the country’s ruling class are scrambling to impose their preferred modes of adjusting to this emerging world order on the rest of us, the working people of the world.
Which specific sectors of the dominant classes each dynasty represents is not entirely clear: The Dutertes seem to speak for the parvenus, or for the rising new dynasties, elites, and bourgeoisie from the country’s peripheries; the Marcoses appear to be the flagbearers of the old, established big landowning and commercial families centered in Forbes Park or Dasma.
Their respective projects also remain hazy or full of contradictions: The former seem more ‘radical in their plans,’ intent on a far more thorough top-down transformation of elite rule aimed at opening up new accumulation opportunities for themselves, more aligned with Beijing and Moscow in their rejection of the US-led world order to justify their own authoritarian project, and less hesitant to use more coercive and despotic means to crush social opposition. The latter seem to be of a more “conservative” bent, opposed to more disruptive reconfigurations of neoliberal rule that could undermine their entrenched interests, more attached to US capital and therefore more inclined to prop up US imperialism, and more confident of their ability to defeat challenges from below without resorting to full-fledged dictatorship.
What we can say for sure is this: For all their differences, both are determined to reproduce a social order in which we working-people remain locked in our chains—hungry, insecure, alive but deprived of life. Two factions, one party: the Party of Order. Both seek to tweak the management of world capitalism—but the changes they seek to make are ultimately aimed at keeping things the same.
But as such, this also means that this is not just “a fight among elites” that only happens to have negative repercussions on us working-people, as some in the Left characterize it. It is also ultimately a fight between all of them on top and all of us from below. Each side seeks to entice us to their side or to reduce us to passive spectators, but we working people are meant to be central protagonists in this conflict, with also so much to lose—and to win. This too is our fight.
In the hope of helping our side survive and prevail, we at Partido Sosyalista wish to share our proposals for how we ought to conduct ourselves in the months ahead, as the impeachment trial proceeds and the 2028 elections draw nearer.
To begin with, we suggest that we must adamantly refuse to allow ourselves to be used as cannon fodder by either side in their intra-elite wars of attrition. That means that while we must exact accountability from the Dutertes and support the Vice President’s impeachment and conviction, we also cannot allow the Marcoses to go scot-free: they too must be compelled to return the billions they stole from us and they too must be removed from office by the people exercising our sovereign right to constitute our own government. While we must mobilize to prevent the Dutertes from returning to Malacañang, we must refuse to do so in such a way as to enable the Marcoses to hang on to power and savor the fruits of impunity..
Neither Duterte nor Marcos! Out with them all! Alisin lahat!: this must be our rallying cry and we should not grow tired of repeating it.
More than this, we at Partido Sosyalista propose that we endeavor to overcome our own divisions and forge our own unities vis-a-vis the two factions of the party of Order. For us, this does not mean subordinating everyone to One Big Ultra-Centralized Party; it only means working towards a commonality in our over-all goals and a coherence in the diversity of tactics pursued by the groups to which we belong. Electorally but also beyond the limits of the electoral system, the time has long come for a real united front from below—a popular bloc that includes only the different oppressed groups and absolutely excludes any fraction of the dominant classes and their representatives.
No to a coalition with the anti-women, anti-LGBTQ conservative Church, with the pro-business Liberal Party, or with supposedly “enlightened elites” who have come down from the hills of Loyola Heights: this should be the “no” that marks the boundaries of our front. Only concrete relations of solidarity and a common line of march among workers, peasants, and the salaried—particularly the women, the LGBTQ+, Indigenous peoples, cultural minorities, and other oppressed groups among them: this should be our guidepost as we march forward separately but collectively. On the streets or during the elections, we must present ourselves as an autonomous third pole allied with neither Duterte nor Marcos— a real alternative for the people. So many big-”P” Parties all marching forward as one small-”p” party: the party of Change.
Finally, as we refuse to side with one elite faction over another and as we forge our own unity, we must also refuse to voluntarily imprison our bodies and our imaginations within the boundaries of “politics” as defined by those in power.
“Politics” understood as participating in elections or engaging in street protests with state permission: this is the means by which our class is integrated into normalcy and made dependent on the party of Order. We watch politics and “participate” in it through ballots and petitions such that our class is organized into disorganization by the great party of Order. We must repudiate this kind of politics and engage in a different, because transformative, kind of politics—the “anti-politics” of emancipation, of the self-abolition of our class and of all classes and all states. The party of Order’s grand game of “Trip to Jerusalem” ends when we wipe away all the chairs, not with supporting who gets to be on the last chair.
Here we can take guidance and inspiration from the youth who refused to protest within the confines of bourgeois legality in Mendiola last September 21, 2025—and from all those who engaged in the globe-spanning insurrections that swept the world last year, stretching from Indonesia to Nepal to Madagascar and many other countries in between. The protagonists in these social upheavals were all ordered to march only where the authorities wanted them to march, to raise only slogans that those in power had pre-approved. They resisted. We must follow their lead while avoiding their mistakes.
While we have no choice but to work within the confines of the existing order, we must still dare to dream and to look beyond the limited horizons set by power. We may recognize the necessity of pragmatism, but our class struggle must never raise pragmatism to dogmatic principle or post-hoc justification. To build a new world, we must overcome our self-incarceration within the prisons of the old.
The choice before us, as the battle between the House of Duterte and the House of Marcos escalates, does not have to be limited to a choice between two evils. The choice before us is the perpetuation of elite, capitalist rule and our consequent descent to barbarism and annihilation, on one hand, or the beginning of the true history of humanity—when we can really forge our own destiny by living under social arrangements built on mutual care, solidarity, and free association. We at Partido Sosyalista join all those who choose life and freedom.
