The conflict between the Marcos and Duterte rival reactionary factions is stark, fierce, and unrelenting. Their hostilities arise from their mutual insatiable greed for wealth and power. These contradictions are rapidly coming to a head due to Marcos’s desire to hasten efforts to completely crush Duterte’s capability to return to power and thwart his rival’s attempts to reclaim their economic and political interests.

This conflict will escalate further with the approach of the 2025 midterm elections. Expect these clashes to be a mere prelude to the outbreak of larger and more violent confrontations. The stability of the ruling Marcos regime can be shaken, but it will also lead to its greater consolidation and monopolization of political power. This will also be accompanied by the expansion and strengthening of a broader democratic movement that will challenge Marcos’ fascist rule.

Congressional hearings are exposing how the ruling system has decayed with Duterte’s blatant misuse of power to plunder, expand his wealth and criminal empire, as well as indulge in luxury and decadence. These detail the direct role of Duterte and his closest accomplices in the killings of tens of thousands under Oplan Tokhang and the sham “war on drugs,” as well as in the bloody campaign of fascist repression. The people’s clamor for justice is intensifying, demanding the accountability, arrest, and prosecution of Duterte and his accomplices in crime and corruption.

While public attention is focused on congressional hearings implicating Duterte, the ruling Marcos faction continues its bureaucrat capitalist wealth accumulation and consolidation of political power. Since taking office in Malacañang, at least five major corruption cases against the Marcoses (amounting to over ₱202 billion) have been dismissed by the courts (with only a minor case involving the 57-hectare Paoay estate claimed by the Marcoses recently overturned by the Supreme Court). Marcos is also busy revising history to cover up the corruption, fascism, and crimes during his father’s dictatorship (1972-1986).

Marcos took away from Duterte (and from China) anomalous government contracts for several major infrastructure projects and transferred these to his favored companies (supported by loans from the US, Japan, and the World Bank). Marcos allocated ₱550 billion of public funds to the Maharlika Investment Fund to funnel this into the businesses of his cronies, such as Ramon Ang, Enrique Razon, Manny Pangilinan, the Aboitiz group, and others. For 2025, at least ₱10 billion has been alloted to Marcos’ “confidential and intelligence funds” for his personal and political gain. Despite its pressing needs and facing large debts, the PhilHealth was ordered by Marcos to remit its “unused” ₱20 billion funds.

Conspiring with syndicates, Marcos, his wife Liza Araneta, and the Romualdez family now control the supply of rice and sugar, as well as onions and other agricultural products. They use this control to manipulate prices and maximize profits. The sale of illegal drugs in the Philippines is currently under the control of Marcos’s operatives.

Marcos shamelessly enjoys a lavish lifestyle using public funds, including one billion pesos squandered this year for his jetsetting. He was caught using a helicopter to avoid traffic to attend a concert. He was gifted with a $1 million private concert by Duran Duran for his birthday, which not only violates the law but also shows Marcos’s gross contempt for the daily suffering and hardships of the masses.

Marcos appointed loyalists in military and police positions. Under his orders, state forces have carried out relentless armed suppression and violation of human rights across the country. Killings, torture, and abductions continue. There are nearly 800 political detainees. Hundreds of rural villages are under military rule to suppress the resistance of the masses.

The Marcos regime is currently the most concentrated expression of the bureaucrat capitalist, fascist, and neocolonial state. It serves the interests of foreign monopoly capitalists and the ruling classes of big bourgeois compradors and big landlords, and the interests of the ruling dynasties.

The broad masses of the Filipino people are being oppressed under the bureaucrat capitalist state. Marcos continues to implement the neoliberal policies of liberalization, privatization, and deregulation. They are burdened with excessive taxes and fees, yet they receive almost no health, education, housing, or other public services which the state should ensure are free. The masses’ living standards are plummeting in the face of high prices, low wages, unemployment, and the dispossesion of land and livelihood.

The situation is clear evidence of the deepening crisis of the ruling system dominated by bureaucrat capitalists who wallow in corruption and criminality—Duterte then, Marcos now, and all reactionary regimes since US imperialism established its neocolonial state. In the struggle and rivalry among insatiable factions for wealth and power, the rotten system is laid bare to its core.

The Filipino people are determined to defend their rights and fight against the US-Marcos bureaucrat capitalist regime. The masses must be aroused, organized, and mobilized, and a broadest united front established to bring together all anti-fascist and anti-corruption forces. The organized strength of the basic classes and sectors is at the core and forefront of the broad struggle against the Marcos fascist and puppet regime.

To fully advance and succeed, the struggle against the bureaucrat capitalist regime must be linked to the struggle for national democracy. Along with imperialism and feudalism, this can only be fully eliminated by ending the semicolonial and semifeudal system. To realize this aspiration, it is necessary to take the revolutionary path, primarily by advancing the armed struggle to achieve the strategic aim of establishing a genuinely democratic people’s government.