(Message to the Kabataang Makabayan on the occasion of its 55th anniversary and 156th birth anniversary of Andres Bonifacio)

The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) extends warm militant greetings to the leadership and mass members of Kabataang Makabayan (KM) on the occasion of its 55th founding anniversary. We also mark the 156th birth anniversary of Filipino working-class hero Andres Bonifacio.

Kabataang Makabayan has played an important role in the different stages in the country’s revolutionary history over more than five decades. Indeed, KM has proved itself as one the Party’s most reliable partners in waging the people’s democratic revolution in the country.

Kabataang Makabayan worked alongside the Party during the early stage of Marxist-Leninist ideological struggles, rectification, organizational building, mass propaganda and mobilization and building the New People’s Army (NPA). It assisted the Party in nationwide building and spreading the people’s war across the archipelago. It played an important role in underground propaganda and organizing work among the youth and workers during the Marcos martial law years which would later reenergize the legal protest movement in the 1970s. It has persisted in the revolutionary underground as one of the stalwarts of the National Democratic Front (NDF) where it represents the interests of the Filipino youth and their demand for national democratic change.

Its membership of young activists and intellectuals continues to serve as a deep bench for training revolutionary proletarian cadres and recruitment of Party members. Over the past years, cadres from the ranks of KM have been deployed to various fields of revolutionary work. Most notably, many intellectuals and workers activists, are now in the NPA and serve as its political officers and unit commanders, working together with Red fighters and cadres from among the peasant and minority masses.

The Party considers KM as a crucial partner in the work of arousing, organizing and mobilizing the Filipino people. Under the open fascist tyranny and state terrorism of the US-Duterte regime, it is now being called upon to serve as one of the revolutionary core of the people’s democratic resistance.

Kabataang Makabayan must seize the opportunity arising from rapidly worsening conditions in the country marked by lack of access to education, widespread youth joblessness, loss of hope and cultural degradation. They must rouse the Filipino youth in their tens of thousands.

The KM must do its utmost to carry out national democratic propaganda among the youth intellectuals and the toiling masses. It must dispel the fascist lies of the Duterte regime and expose imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism as the basic ills that plague the Filipino people. It must teach about the continuing necessity of waging revolutionary armed struggle to end the backward, oppressive and exploitative semicolonial and semifeudal society.

The founding of KM was made to coincide with the birth of Andres Bonifacio who successfully led the Filipino people in waging armed revolution against Spanish colonialism. This was done so in order to underscore the patriotic content of the national democratic program, and which remains the key element in the Filipino people’s struggle for national and social liberation.

Kabataang Makabayan must continue to carry out antiimperialist propaganda and raise the Filipino youth’s patriotic fervor. Like Bonifacio, the current generation of young Filipinos must be at the forefront of the Filipino people’s clamor for genuine national freedom.

The activists of Kabataang Makabayan must expose the link between foreign big corporate interests and the Duterte regime’s fascist onslaught and suppression campaign. They must expose the big mining companies, plantations, energy, tourism and other infrastructure projects, as well as foreign big banks who finance and benefit from Duterte’s reign of terror. They must expose how the country’s wealth and the toiling masses are being wringed by the superprofit extracting operations of big foreign monopoly capitalists and their local big bourgeois comprador partners. They must expose how foreign big corporations and big landlords are dispossessing the peasant masses of their agricultural and ancestral lands. They must expose the fakery of Duterte’s land reform declarations which merely aim to facilitate the grabbing of lands from the peasants.

Activists of KM must unite the people and mobilize them to demand a stop to the plunder of the country’s patrimony and environment, and the rape of our mountains, rivers and seas. They must unite with the broad masses in demanding a stop to all foreign big mining operations, plantations and corruption-laden infrastructure projects. They must expose US military intervention and military presence and how it directs the AFP and PNP in counterinsurgency operations to suppress the patriotic and democratic forces in the country.

Kabataang Makabayan and the student and youth movement must further invigorate the national democratic propaganda movement. It must plan to reproduce the Party’s newspaper Ang Bayan and its own Kalayaan in the tens of thousands and carry these to the biggest possible number of people in school campuses, factories, urban communities and rural villages. Kabataang Makabayan and its chapters must regularly issue statements on burning national and local issues and print them for mass distribution. The KM must lead thousands upon thousands of group discussions and study meetings, using both open and clandestine methods. It must institutionalize other forms of mass propaganda that reach out to the masses such as weekly film showing, travelling cultural shows and others.

Its activists must continue to help in further invigorating the national democratic cultural movement by producing poems, songs, visual and graphic art, street performances, video productions and others. The activists of KM must use social media as a tool for propagating the national democratic line while fighting its pernicious ultrademocratic pull which promotes individualism and disorganization.

The activists and cadres of KM must study, uphold and inculcate Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and apply and further improve it to the various fields of revolutionary work they are involved in, including carrying out social investigation among the masses. They must publish the results of their studies as a way of propagating and promoting Marxism-Leninism. They must also encourage the scholars among their ranks to apply Marxism-Leninism in their fields of academic work as a way of fighting the bourgeois and pettybourgeois reformist ideological influences hiding behind such labels as postmodernism and others.

Across the world, the youth are again proving themselves a great force of progressive and democratic change as they demonstrate in great numbers against oppressive neoliberal policies and government corruption which aggravate the people’s social economic conditions.

In the Philippines, where conditions are fast deteriorating under the US-Duterte regime, revolutionary activists are called upon to militate the Filipino youth and unite them with the masses into a strong force for social revolution.

End the US-Duterte fascist regime! End imperialist plunder and rape! Carry forward the national democratic revolution!