Celebrate Bonifacio Day by Embracing the Revolutionary Tradition of Filipino Youth! Oust the Fascist US-Duterte Regime!
This November 30, Anakbayan-USA celebrates the 157th anniversary of revolutionary leader and fighter, Andres Bonifacio. As a young worker, Bonifacio experienced the crushing poverty and exploitation fueled by Spanish colonialism and its local agents. While contributing to the fight for reforms as a member of La Liga Filipina, he soon realized that the masses’ demands for independence and democracy could only be won through armed revolution. This prompted Bonifacio to found the Katipunan to defeat Spain, a clandestine revolutionary army made up of workers, peasants, and even members of the ilustrado class. Although the Katipunan was successful in its struggle against Spain, it fell short of complete victory against the newly emerged enemy of the Filipino people: US imperialism. More than 100 years later, we commemorate Bonifacio’s legacy by calling on youth to immerse ourselves in the struggle of the working masses and continue the Filipino people’s unfinished revolution.
Anakbayan, which was founded 22 years ago, continues this revolution. We embrace the organization’s historic role in helping to oust President Joseph Estrada from power. We commemorate the founding of our first US-based Anakbayan chapter in Seattle in 2002, and the founding of Anakbayan-USA in 2012. Since our National Congress in 2019, where hundreds of youth came together to reaffirm their duty in serving the interests of the toiling Filipino masses both at home and overseas, we have grown by hundreds and grown new Anakbayan organizations across the United States. The growing youth and student movement struggling for national democracy serves as a reminder to youth overseas that the very essence of our Filipino identity is our shared struggle for liberation.
As a youth and student organization, we also look to Bonifacio’s life as a testament to the role of young people to go beyond our individual interests and instead root ourselves in the struggles of the toiling masses. Youth activists in the Philippines see the urgent need to serve the people as labor flexibilization, liberalization in the agricultural sector, and a massive unemployment and underemployment crisis continue to impoverish the working and peasant masses. Students from Ateneo University, UP Diliman, and many other campuses took up this call in a recent student strike. Their demands were not simply for mass promotion (or immediate mass graduation) for students amid the pandemic, but for immediate economic relief for the masses of people impacted by the pandemic and typhoons, and time off to go out and directly serve those in need. And like Bonifacio, there are countless youth who also understand the need to wage higher forms of struggle to directly confront the state. We honor the lives of modern-day Bonifacios like Jevilyn Cullamat, a recent revolutionary martyr who was decisive in her choice to wage people’s war as the Katipunan did.
As Filipino youth in diaspora, we must also put Bonifacio’s legacy into practice by being with and struggling alongside the health workers, food service workers, retail workers, warehouse workers, and the many more who continue to put their lives on the line while being more heavily exploited by their employers than ever before. We must also continue to walk along the same path that other modern-day Bonifacios in the diaspora have helped to lay down, like Amado Khaya, a member and leader of Anakbayan-USA who moved to the Philippines to directly serve indigenous and peasant Mangyan communities. They remind us that even if we do not live long enough to see a liberated Philippines, there will be millions of others who will continue to advance the struggle until victory.
The struggle for national democracy that Bonifacio helped ignite rages on today. In response to the people’s resistance across the country and around the world, the Duterte regime has escalated its fascist attacks—red-tagging, illegal detention, extrajudicial murder, and more—in a desperate attempt to stop the people’s movement. However, as long as the Filipino people suffer, new seeds will grow toward advancing Bonifacio’s revolution. This Bonifacio Day, let us inherit the revolutionary determination held by the Katipunan to never back down, even if faced by a stronger enemy. If Bonifacio showed us anything, it is that when the youth join the movement of the most exploited and oppressed in society, we become an unstoppable force for revolution.
Join Anakbayan!
Oust the fascist US-Duterte regime! It is right to rebel!
Mabuhay ang kabataang makabayan! / Long live patriotic youth!
Ipagtagumpay ang pambansang demokratikong rebolusyon! / Win the national democratic revolution!
#OustDuterte #AnakbayanAko #JoinAnakbayan
#Anakbayan22 #KM56 #Bonifacio157
