15/01/2026
DUTERTISMO: REVOLUTIONARY PRAGMATISM AND THE CRISIS OF PHILIPPINE MAOISM
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The socialism of Rodrigo Duterte emerges from a matrix of experiences and theoretical influences that conventional ideological taxonomies struggle to accommodate.
At Lyceum of the Philippines University during the ferment of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Duterte studied political science under Jose Maria Sison, who would transform Philippine Marxism through the founding of the Communist Party of the Philippines in 1968. During this formative period, Duterte became a member of Kabataang Makabayan, the militant youth organization co-founded by Sison that served as the organizational vanguard of the national democratic movement.
This was no casual affiliation.
Kabataang Makabayan represented the cutting edge of anti-imperialist organizing, mobilizing youth against American intervention in Vietnam, the emerging authoritarianism of Ferdinand Marcos, and what they identified as the interlocking systems of bureaucrat capitalism and feudalism that structured Philippine underdevelopment.
Yet Duterte's socialism cannot be understood as mere intellectual conviction divorced from lived experience.
In his August 2017 speech in Ozamiz City, he explained the visceral foundation of his political consciousness: "How can I not be a socialist? I'm always left because we are only migrants in Mindanao. We went through hardships, we experienced the demolition of our house."
This experience of displacement and marginalization shaped his worldview far more profoundly than theoretical texts. His mother, Soledad Roa, served not merely as a schoolteacher but as a civic leader who participated actively in the anti-Marcos dictatorship movement, recognized as a respected voice in Mindanao's women's movement during the 1980s. His father Vicente Duterte occupied the position of provincial governor.
This synthesis of progressive activism from below and institutional power from above gave Duterte a unique perspective on how transformative change actually occurs.
In his 2016 campaign appearance in San Pedro City, as reported by the Inquirer, Duterte articulated a deliberate distinction: βAko, sosyalista. Hindi ako komunista. Kaming mga sosyalista, para kami sa taoβββI am a socialist, not a communist. We socialists are for the people.β
This distinction is not a rejection of Marxist developmental logic (i.e., socialism constitutes a historical stage in the broader process of communist development), but a divergence in political strategy and temporal emphasis.
Where orthodox communist movements in the Philippines historically subordinated immediate welfare to the imperatives of protracted armed struggle, Duterteβs socialism foregrounded tangible improvements in peopleβs material conditions within the existing state framework. His orientation privileged the expansion of the middle class through access to credit for small enterprises, the strengthening of basic social services, and the prioritization of human welfare over doctrinally rigid revolutionary forms or deferred utopian outcomes.
This pragmatic orientation was further clarified in his 2016 Skype conversation with Jose Maria Sison where Duterte explained his approach in explicitly developmental terms: βI will follow the pattern of socialism, sir. I said I am a socialist and though I am not a member of the Communist Party but I am a socialist and I belong to the Left. This will be the first time in the history of our country that there is a Leftist for president. I want to raise really the marginalized from poverty. If I can just lift them up a bit after six years, I'll be happy, sir.β
Taken together, these statements reveal an understanding of socialist transformation rooted in sequencing rather than abstraction. Duterte did not deny the historical relationship between socialism and communism. Instead, he insisted that in the Philippine context, socialist governance had to be lived, administered, and materially felt before any higher ideological horizon could be meaningfully pursued.
Concrete social uplift, not theoretical fidelity, became the measure of political legitimacy.
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The socialist credentials of Duterte's presidency manifest most concretely in the legislative architecture he erected.
In August 2017, despite objections from his own economic team about fiscal sustainability, Duterte signed the Universal Access to Quality Tertiary Education Act, abolishing tuition and fees in all 112 state universities and colleges across the Philippines. As reported by the Philippine News Agency, this law benefited over two million students during his administration. This was a categorical assertion that education constitutes a universal social right independent of market capacity to pay.
In February 2019, he signed the Universal Health Care Act into law, guaranteeing equitable access to quality and affordable healthcare for all Filipinos through automatic enrollment in the National Health Insurance Program. These measures, alongside laws institutionalizing alternative learning systems for out-of-school youth, mandating free technical-vocational education, granting inclusive education for disabled learners, and establishing medical scholarships, represented transformative assertions of collective provision that no Philippine president since the 1986 People Power uprising had dared to institutionalize.
According to research published in PMC on social policy reforms under Duterte, his administration allocated unprecedented levels of public resources for social spending, reaching the highest levels in 32 years both as a share of public spending and as percentage of GDP. He expanded the conditional cash transfer program to cushion the poor from increased indirect taxes, made it a permanent feature of the social protection system, and maintained continuity with the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program despite initially inheriting it from his predecessor.
The Build Build Build infrastructure program represented historic investment levels in public infrastructure. Under Duterte's administration, infrastructure spending surged to 6.3% of GDP in 2017 and remained above 5% throughout his tenure, nearly tripling the average of 2% of GDP spent from 1986 to 2016.
According to the Department of Public Works and Highways, 40,080 kilometers of roads were constructed, maintained, widened, upgraded and rehabilitated, including 3,101 kilometers of tourism roads, 999 kilometers of roads leading to industries and trade corridors, and 2,712 kilometers of farm-to-market roads. The program constructed 6,854 bridges and delivered 157,383 classrooms, 7,369 health facility projects, and 302 evacuation centers, generating an estimated 6.6 million jobs from 2016 to 2020.
On labor rights, Duterte publicly opposed contractualization, declaring his intention to end the practice that he argued destroyed the country's workforce through job insecurity. While he ultimately vetoed a 2019 bill banning labor contractualization under pressure from business groups, his consistent rhetorical stance against the practice and appointment of labor-friendly officials represented a marked departure from his predecessors' uncritical embrace of flexible labor arrangements.
He supported exempting monthly incomes of 25,000 pesos or less from income taxes and proposed rebuilding industries and factories, particularly reviving the Philippine steel industry in Mindanao as crucial steps toward genuine industrialization.
He distributed approximately 60,000 hectares to land beneficiaries, implementing the agrarian reform that communists claimed to champion. As he declared during his announcement terminating peace talks, "I tell communists that they do not know how to distribute land. I have been at it actually ever since I became President."
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The drug war remains Duterte's most controversial policy, condemned by Western human rights organizations and liberal critics as indiscriminate violence against the poor. Yet this critique fundamentally misunderstands both the material conditions generating narcotics proliferation in peripheral capitalist societies and the relationship between state security and socialist transformation.
A rigorous Marxist analysis reveals dimensions of the drug war that bourgeois human rights discourse systematically obscures.
Classical Marxist criminology, as articulated by scholars like Chambliss and Graham, recognizes that drug prohibition under capitalism serves ruling class interests by criminalizing substances whose production and distribution do not generate profit for legitimate bourgeois enterprises while protecting pharmaceutical companies producing legal narcotics.
The war on drugs in the United States, as Michelle Alexander and other scholars demonstrate, functions as racial capitalism and neoliberal governance through mass incarceration of Black and poor populations. Dawn Paley's research on Plan Colombia and Plan Mexico reveals how militarized drug wars serve transnational capital by displacing populations, privatizing security forces, and implementing neoliberal policy reforms under cover of anti-narcotics operations.
The Philippine context, however, differs fundamentally from these North American and Latin American patterns. The methamphetamine crisis that Duterte confronted was not a product of pharmaceutical companies seeking markets but of Chinese and Mexican cartels flooding the Philippines with shabu that devastated working-class communities.
According to the Council on Foreign Relations' John Gershman, Duterte saw drug dealing and addiction as "major obstacles to the Philippines' economic and social progress." The narcotics trade in the Philippines operated through networks combining police corruption, political protection by local elites, and neighborhood-level distribution systems that extracted wealth from the poorest communities while providing nothing but addiction and social disintegration.
From a materialist perspective, the drug trade constitutes parasitic capital accumulation that undermines working-class organization and socialist development. Addiction destroys the productive capacity of the workforce, channels scarce resources from poor families into criminal networks, and creates conditions of social atomization that prevent collective political action. The violence associated with drug trafficking terrorizes working-class neighborhoods, making organization and resistance impossible. Police corruption funded by narcotics money transforms law enforcement into an instrument serving criminal rather than popular interests.
Duterte's approach reflected understanding that in conditions where the state apparatus itself had been captured by narcotics interests, where judges could be bought, where police protected rather than prosecuted traffickers, conventional legal mechanisms could not address the crisis.
His Davao City experience demonstrated that rapid, forceful disruption of drug networks, however brutal, could restore conditions under which normal social and economic life could resume. Over 22 years as mayor, he transformed what was considered the murder capital of the Philippines into one of Southeast Asia's safest cities, creating space for implementation of progressive social programs including the country's first ordinances protecting women's rights and LGBT individuals from discrimination.
The class dimensions of the drug war merit careful analysis. Critics correctly observe that the campaign disproportionately targeted poor users and small-scale dealers while largely sparing wealthy users and high-level traffickers. This reflects not Duterte's indifference to the poor but the structural realities of narcotics enforcement in any capitalist society. Wealthy users consume privately, conduct transactions through secure channels, and access treatment facilities rather than street corners. Poor users operate visibly in public spaces where police intervention occurs.
The tragedy is not that poor users faced enforcement but that structural violence inherent in capitalism creates conditions driving drug use as response to alienation, hopelessness, and material deprivation.
Amnesty International's 2017 report documented that most victims lived below the poverty line, that police received bounties for killings, and that the campaign constituted "war on the poor." Yet this framing obscures crucial realities. The drug trade itself constituted war on the poor, extracting wealth, destroying families, preventing productive employment, and maintaining neighborhoods in conditions of terror.
As one researcher noted, Duterte was "seen broadly as sympathetic to concerns about poverty, inequality, and housing, and pursued a reasonably robust anti-poverty agenda while he was mayor." His supporters understood the drug war not as attack on poor communities but as defense of those communities against the narcotics networks preying upon them.
The question from a socialist perspective is whether state violence to eliminate drug networks enables or prevents working-class organization and socialist transformation. Duterte's simultaneous implementation of unprecedented social programs suggests he understood security as precondition for development. The NTF-ELCAC's "whole-of-nation approach," discussed below, integrated security operations with development programs, recognizing that sustainable elimination of drug networks requires addressing material conditions generating demand.
Western socialist critics who condemn the drug war while offering no viable alternative for addressing narcotics proliferation in conditions of state capture and judicial dysfunction engage in the worst kind of abstract moralism. Their critique assumes functioning legal institutions, uncorrupted police forces, and treatment infrastructure that simply do not exist in peripheral capitalist societies. The demand for due process in conditions where due process serves only to protect criminal elites constitutes defense of the status quo rather than revolutionary transformation.
This is not to defend or deny the suffering of innocent victims. Rather, it is to insist that socialist analysis must grapple with the material contradictions confronting leaders attempting progressive transformation in societies where criminal networks have captured state institutions.
The drug war's brutality reflected the depth of institutional rot Duterte confronted. That he coupled security operations with the most expansive social welfare programs in Philippine history suggests understanding that long-term solution requires addressing capitalism's structural generation of alienation and material deprivation driving addiction.
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PART TWO:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1AVVBEKuRS/
PART THREE:
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1NPoHvMDia/
