It is right for the Filipino people to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the EDSA Uprising, the four-day historic revolt that delivered the final blow of their 14-year struggle, which ended the corrupt and fascist dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos Sr.

To prolong his stay in Malacañang, Marcos Sr imposed martial law in 1972 and used the military and police to unleash fascist terror. Marcos blindfolded, muzzled, and oppresed the whole nation, while he amassed wealth and wallowed in power.

The Marcoses plundered at least $10 billion (or nearly ₱600 billion) and stashed it in foreign banks, or used to buy mansions, land, buildings, jewelry, businesses, and other properties. The Marcoses seized their rivals’ businesses and favored their cronies and loyal minions. The Marcoses amassed wealth, while people got buried deep in poverty.

The Filipino people waged relentless and continuous struggle for 14 years. They marched the streets to protest, and took the path of armed struggle in the countryside. Armed and unarmed, they valiantly persevered and sacrificed to end the dictatorship’s rule. The barefaced cheating by Marcos in the 1986 elections caused the explosion of the people’s outrage, rousing them to the streets in the four-day uprising.

Marking the EDSA Uprising this 2026 holds special significance. The commemoration of the uprising that toppled the then corruption-riddled fascist dictatorship, will be held amid the overflowing people’s rage over the billions of pesos pocketed from corrupt flood control projects. Protest actions have surged since September 2025. The people’s anger at corruption remain ablaze and threatens to erupt again in the streets.

The EDSA Uprising will be commemorated this year in the face of rising clamor to hold accountable all those involved in plunder, up to the very top. After four decades, another Marcos is now at the center of the Filipino people’s anger and protests.

After months of desperately covering up Marcos’ involvement in corruption, evidence has surfaced pointing to how he himself, in collusion with officials of Malacañang and the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH), masterminded the vast kickback-collection scheme from government infrastructure projects.

By junking the impeachment complaint filed against Marcos, Congress effectively prevented the public exposure of evidences, including the record of received kickbacks reaching ₱8 billion delivered to his house in Forbes Park. Complicit with Akbayan and other politicians posturing as anti-corruption, Marcos exerts all effort to deflect the people’s anger, using the specter of “Dutertes’ return” to scare the people who are pushing to hold him accountable.

Marcos’s kickbacks from flood control projects is only part of the Marcoses’ grand scheme to use his power to amass wealth. Since the Marcoses returned to Malacañang, the courts dismissed at least seven graft cases against them, involving over ₱3 billion in stolen wealth. Marcos pushed the enactment of the Maharlika Fund to enable his use of up to ₱75 billion in government funds for investments in businesses of his favored bourgeois compradors.

Despite being rivals in politics and plunder, bureaucrat-capitalists are united by their class interests in oppressing the people. Without people’s protests, they would not hold fellow corrupt officials accountable, for fear of their own future accountability. Though ousted from power in 1986, the Marcoses were not held accountable or made to pay by six successive governments. The Marcoses still hold hundreds of billions of pesos in stolen wealth, which they have used in past years to gradually return to power.

Government officials and the ruling classes’ plunder and wealth accumulation have become even more rampant in past decades. Every regime is notorious for large-scale anomalies—Kamag-anak Inc, PEA-Amari, Jueteng Protection, NBN-ZTE Deal, Pork Barrel King, Pharmally Scandal and others. Facing deepening economic crisis, they have grown even more shameless and brazen in stealing people’s funds. Duterte started the massive kickbacks in flood control projects which Marcos expanded. Even as vice president, Sara Duterte, notorious for corruption like her father, also embezzled hundreds of millions of pesos.

Marcos and his accomplices pocketing billions of pesos in people’s funds stoke the masses’ fury. While foreign capitalists and local ruling classes revel in wealth, the toiling masses and those with small livelihoods suffer immensely amid relentlessly rising food and commodity prices, low wages and salaries, unemployment and livelihood dislocation, failed services, continuing environmental destruction and resulting disasters. Subservient to US imperialist power, the armed state directs its fascist ferocity against the people.

The people will mark the 40th year of the Edsa Uprising amid the strengthening call, especially of the youth, to end the rotten ruling system. To achieve the people’s aspiration for genuine change, it is indeed necessary to end the semicolonial and semifeudal system, and the class rule of bureaucrat-capitalists, in league with comprador bourgeoisie, big landlords, and foreign monopoly capitalists.

The people must grasp the lessons of history to illuminate the path forward for the struggle for national democracy and a socialist future. The people must forge broad unity to advance the revolutionary struggle, through people’s protracted war. The Party calls on the people, especially the youth, to join the New People’s Army! No matter how challenging or great the sacrifice, let us advance the armed struggle in the countryside, and establish the new democratic government of our future.