By Sarah Raymundo
While the ruling class prepares its annual spectacle at Batasang Pambansa for Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s upcoming State of the Nation Address, those of us monitoring the pulse of the nation from afar look to an entirely different arena.
The true state of the nation is never delivered from a podium inside an air-conditioned hall of compradors and landlords. It is written on the streets, organized in factories, and forged in the agrarian heartlands where comrades in BAYAN, KMU, KMP, UMA, and the broad national democratic movement are painstakingly mobilizing for the People’s SONA. To witness this discipline from a distance is not to feel removed, but to be reminded of where history is actually made.
This organizing does not unfold in isolation. On the 243rd birth anniversary of Simón Bolívar in Venezuela, anti-imperialist masses mobilized to reject the hypocritical presence of US and Israeli forces operating under the guise of “post-earthquake relief.” The Venezuelan people articulated an urgent truth: those who finance and enact genocide in Palestine cannot be trusted to deliver humanitarian care in Caracas. In Cuba, the heroic resistance against six decades of a criminal US blockade continues alongside preparations for the 100th birth anniversary of Fidel Castro. Across West Asia—in Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran—the Axis of Resistance demonstrates daily that US imperialism and Zionism cannot enforce their will without meeting the wall of popular resistance.
The marchers gathering for the People’s SONA are an indispensable component of this global anti-imperialist front. In Southeast Asia, Washington is scrambling to shore up its crumbling hegemony, wrapping its military expansion in the deceptive language of “regional stability” and “tech integration.” But the masses recognize a dying empire trying to resurrect itself at their expense.
At the center of the Marcos Jr. presidency sits the long-standing trinity of semi-colonial and semi-feudal oppression: imperialism, bureaucrat capitalism, and feudalism. Marcos Jr. acts as the chief administrator of this system—a facilitator of foreign economic plunder and a guardian of oligarchic impunity.
Consider the recent rollout of the “Pax Silica” framework alongside US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s visit to Manila. Far from bringing “development,” Pax Silica subordinates Philippine critical minerals and strategic lands to the military-industrial complex of the United States. Rubio’s presence was an inspection of a colonial outpost, ensuring that Philippine nickel, copper, and territory remain available for American tech-monopolies and war machinery.
To secure this plunder, the state deploys brutal counterinsurgency.
The massacre of the Toboso 19 in Negros Occidental—which claimed the lives of peasants, community researchers, journalists like RJ Nichole Ledesma, and UP student leader Alyssa Alano—reveals the fascism required to maintain the current agrarian order. As UMA and human rights organizations consistently point out, counterinsurgency in the countryside functions to strip activists and peasants of their political humanity before stripping them of life, clearing land for agribusiness and foreign extraction under the guise of “peace and order”.
Meanwhile, in Manila, bureaucrat capitalism expresses itself as an endless squabble over public funds and impeachment threats between rival ruling factions. Marcos Jr. presides over this decaying apparatus, maintaining the illusion of governance while ensuring that whichever faction prevails, the imperialist master remains served.
The official SONA will attempt to project stability and progress. But as long as landlessness persists, wages remain suppressed, and sovereignty is traded away for imperial backing, that stability is a fiction. The global front against fascism and US-led wars is growing, and the Filipino people marching today are sustaining a crucial battleground in that world-historic struggle. #