“Running left-wing movements has always been the prerogative of spoiled rich kids. This pattern goes all the way back to the days when an overindulged and affluent young man named Karl Marx teamed up with another overindulged youth from a wealthy family, Friedrich Engels, to create the communist ideology.” — Thomas Sowell
OF COURSE, we are talking about communism — the ideology that remains a romantic fantasy for ageing pseudo-communist professors at the University of the Philippines.
Fifty-six years ago, if you were a leftist, anti-Marcos, anti-martial law, and shouting “No to dictatorship!”, you were seen as a naïve, impressionable, idealistic youth determined to change the world.
Today, if you are still a leftist shouting “Impeach the Vice President!” while completely ignoring the alleged massive corruption surrounding the 2026 General Appropriations Act, the national budget, and controversial flood control projects, you have become a useful idiot promoting an irrelevant and obsolete ideology.
The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848 by German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, was a response to the Industrial Revolution sweeping across Europe, particularly England, where factories operated under harsh and often inhumane conditions, exploiting workers, including women and children.
The communist movements led by Vladimir Lenin in Russia and Mao Zedong in China succeeded in transforming both countries into communist states.
After decades under communist rule, however, the Russians eventually concluded that such a system had become obsolete, irrelevant, and, perhaps most importantly, economically unprofitable.
Russia is now regarded as one of the world’s largest capitalist economies. China, meanwhile, has become the biggest trading partner of the very capitalist nation it once denounced — the United States.
Ironically, both former bastions of communism eventually embraced capitalism, along with many of its material comforts and consumer culture, sometimes even surpassing their American counterparts in doing so.
During the 1960s, inspired by these communist models, the late Jose Maria “Joma” Sison sought to transform the Philippines into another communist state. Following the Maoist and Leninist strategy of a peasant-led armed struggle, the movement aimed to surround the cities from the countryside through “red areas” dominated by the New People’s Army (NPA), while simultaneously fomenting unrest among workers, labor groups, and unions in the urban “white areas” through the National Democratic Front (NDF). These strategies eventually became the operational framework of the CPP-NPA-NDF.
Although the Armed Forces of the Philippines, the Philippine National Police, and the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) have dismantled all 89 guerrilla fronts of the CPP-NPA-NDF through a whole-of-government approach and Barangay Development Programs, the threat, according to government reports, has not completely disappeared.
What remains of the CPP-NPA-NDF, however, is an increasingly irrelevant and obsolete nuisance.
With an ideology that no longer attracts widespread support and with many of its armed members surrendering, the remaining communist elements have resorted increasingly to banditry. As the insurgency has steadily weakened in the countryside, the battleground has gradually shifted to urban areas, where cities have become key targets of what authorities describe as CPP-NPA-NDF disinformation campaigns.
Highly urbanized cities are now viewed as hubs for propaganda and psychological operations. Digital platforms and social media have become the movement’s preferred weapons — tools used to sow distrust, distort realities, and stir public sentiment against the government.
As events suggest, the problem has not disappeared; it has merely changed its arena.
With the battlefield shifting, the CPP-NPA-NDF also pivoted from armed struggle to parliamentary engagement. Political allies in the Makabayan bloc — such as Kabataan, Gabriela, and the Alliance of Concerned Teachers — are now aligned with the so-called “maleta bloc” in Congress. The insurgency has moved from the jungles into the halls of legislation, using democratic institutions while benefiting from public funds.
I still quaint memories of a time when being a “leftist” meant being a hardcore disciple of Karl Marx and Mao Zedong, complete with the ubiquitous Che Guevara T-shirt and the iconic cap bearing a red star.
Nowadays, a “leftist” is more likely to be identified with modern “woke” politics — with purple or green hair, a transgender activist, someone unable to define what a woman is, fearful of “red-tagging” yet willing to commemorate the founding anniversary of the NPA./PN
