Makabayang Kilusan ng Bagong Kababaihan
March 18, 2004 marks the 32nd anniversary of the founding congress of the Makabayang Kilusan ng Bagong Kababaihan (MAKIBAKA - Patriotic Movement of New Women). The celebration is opportune especially at this time when the revolutionary women's movement has been gathering momentum and gaining strength in various parts of the country.
MAKIBAKA was founded in recognition of the enormous role of women in the revolution's overall advance. It recognized the fact that women, like men in a semifeudal and semicolonial society, suffer intense exploitation and oppression. Like men of the oppressed classes, women have no voice in decision-making in society. But more than this, they have no voice, or have a very weak one, in the workplace, at home, and in the various sections of society.
MAKIBAKA was founded to address the particular interests of women. It understood that as long as the exploitative and oppressive relations that tie women down to a wretched and oppressed state are ignored, women's strength, vitality and initiative for struggle can never be fully unleashed.
At its inception, MAKIBAKA organized mainly women students. It also organized women in urban poor communities and factories. MAKIBAKA also established KALAYAAN, an alliance against the rising prices of commodities, that likewise became the impetus for the first women's rally in 1971.
When martial law was declared in 1972, MAKIBAKA's members went to the countryside to join the armed struggle. Others joined the urban underground. Although the revolutionary women's movement reaped many victories in the beginning, MAKIBAKA also suffered setbacks when deviations from the correct line became prevalent. But MAKIBAKA took a stand in favor of the Second Great Rectification Movement and persevered in further advancing the national-democratic revolution.
At present, its principal focus is the establishment of MAKIBAKA chapters among the women toiling masses in the countryside and cities. Women's rights and welfare are advanced through the establishment of MAKIBAKA chapters and the implemention of their programs.
These programs involve, among others, improving the economic status of women, promoting equal responsibility in child-rearing, ensuring democracy in family relations, establishing health services, safeguarding reproductive rights and advancing the rights and welfare of children. Women participate in, and support, the armed struggle as the principal form of struggle against the semicolonial and semifeudal system that perpetuates the antiwomen feudal-patriarchal order.
With the help of the New People's Army, hundreds of women in the countryside have been recruited into mass organizations nationwide. More and more MAKIBAKA chapters are being set up in the barrios. In the cities, MAKIBAKA reaches out to and organizes a large number of women workers, semi-proletarians, urban poor, youth and students, professionals and other impoverished, oppressed and exploited women.
Malayang Pilipina resumes publication: MAKIBAKA's official publication Malayang Pilipina has resumed publication with the aim of helping further develop the political consciousness of MAKIBAKA members and reaching an ever bigger number of women to draw them into the women's liberation movement and the advance of the national-democratic revolution.
Set to come out quarterly, Malayang Pilipina resumed publication in August 2003 and is now on its third issue.
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