Martial Law, Revolution and the Politics of Memory

Fifty-four years after its declaration, the legacy of Martial Law remains central to how Filipinos understand state repression. But remembering that history also requires examining how the CPP used the same period to expand its revolutionary project—and what happened inside the movement it built.

Every September 21, the Philippines returns to one of the most consequential dates in its modern history: the declaration of Martial Law by Ferdinand E. Marcos Sr. in 1972.

The historical record provides ample reason to remember the period with seriousness. Martial Law was accompanied by widespread arbitrary arrests and detention, torture, enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, and restrictions on democratic freedoms. Amnesty International documented the detention of tens of thousands of people during the early years of Martial Law and reported widespread torture among prisoners it interviewed. Human rights organizations subsequently documented patterns of disappearances, killings and other abuses committed by state forces.

Those abuses should neither be minimized nor excused by the existence of an armed communist insurgency. The state has a responsibility to protect civilians and observe human rights even when confronting rebellion. The experience of Martial Law was precisely one reason the 1987 Constitution imposed significant safeguards on the government’s extraordinary powers.

But remembering Martial Law solely as a story of state repression leaves out another important part of the historical record: the way the Communist Party of the Philippines understood, organized around, and ultimately incorporated that repression into its revolutionary strategy.

That history does not diminish the abuses committed under Marcos. It complicates the story.

When repression pushed the movement underground

By the time Martial Law was declared in 1972, the CPP was already building both an armed organization (the New Peoples’ Army) and a nationwide political network (the National Democratic Front of the Philippines).

The Party’s own historical accounts describe the development of guerrilla zones, rural mass organizations, youth organizations and other legal formations before Martial Law. Its 1993 document Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought as Guide to the Philippine Revolution says that the Party continued to lead the legal democratic mass movement even as it pursued armed struggle, while organizing among workers, peasants, youth, women, cultural activists and professionals. It describes the First Quarter Storm and subsequent mass actions as contributing to the growth of the revolutionary mass movement.

Then came Martial Law.

The CPP’s own historical narrative describes the declaration as a turning point. It states that the urban-based legal democratic mass organizations were outlawed and that Party cadres and mass activists were subsequently absorbed into the underground movement and the revolutionary movement in the countryside. This is an important detail because it demonstrates something often missing from simplified accounts of the period. Martial Law repressed the movement, but repression did not end it. It altered the environment in which the movement operated.

The closure of democratic space pushed many activists underground. At the same time, the CPP already possessed an organizational framework capable of absorbing people from the legal mass movement into clandestine political and military structures.

The Party’s own documents make clear that these were not unrelated activities. Its 1975 discussion of the revolutionary strategy described armed struggle as the principal component of the revolution while portraying legal and mass struggle as serving the broader revolutionary project. Its later historical account likewise describes the interaction between the urban mass movement and armed expansion.

This does not mean that every student, worker, peasant, church worker or activist who joined a protest movement in the 1970s was secretly an NPA recruit. Nor does it mean that every person who opposed Marcos was a communist. The mass opposition to Marcos was broader than the CPP, and the abuses committed by the dictatorship affected people across political and social backgrounds.

But it is equally misleading to erase the CPP’s own documented strategy from that history. The Party was building a revolution before Martial Law, and it used the political conditions created by Martial Law to continue expanding that revolution.

When a historical wound becomes political capital

The memory of Martial Law remains a legitimate basis for demanding accountability. But historical memory can also become political capital when one part of the history is repeatedly invoked while another is left outside the frame.

That problem is visible in some contemporary revolutionary statements.

On September 21, 2026, the CPP-linked Philippine Revolution Web Central published a statement commemorating the 54th anniversary of Martial Law by calling for “stronger people’s armed resistance” in service of the national democratic revolution. The statement explicitly connected the commemoration of Martial Law with the continuation of the people’s war.

Another NDFP statement published for the anniversary described the lessons of Martial Law as a reason to continue the struggle for what it calls the people’s democratic revolution.

That is important because it shows that, for the revolutionary movement, Martial Law is not simply an historical subject. It remains part of a present political framework.

The memory of state repression is used not only to remember victims of dictatorship but also to interpret present political conditions and justify continued revolutionary struggle. That is a legitimate subject for scrutiny, particularly when the same political framework continues to regard armed struggle as central to achieving political change.

The question is not whether contemporary activists are allowed to remember Martial Law. They obviously are.

The question is whether the historical analogy remains sufficiently precise when it is used to describe the present.

Marcos-era repression and today’s abuses are not interchangeable

There are genuine human rights concerns in the Philippines today.

Contemporary allegations involving red-tagging, attacks against activists, extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, harassment and militarization deserve investigation and accountability where evidence supports them. Those concerns should not be dismissed simply because they are raised by organizations associated with the broader progressive movement. But neither should every present-day controversy automatically be described as a repetition of 1972.

Martial Law under Marcos Sr. involved the concentration of extraordinary powers at the national level and a documented pattern of widespread violations over years. Amnesty International’s historical documentation includes arbitrary detention, torture, disappearances and killings on a scale that made the period fundamentally different from an ordinary democratic administration facing allegations of individual abuses.

The distinction is important because “state abuse” and “Martial Law” are not interchangeable terms. A democratic government can commit human rights violations. When it does, those violations should be investigated and punished. But proving that an abuse occurred does not automatically establish that the country is again under a dictatorship.

The part of the story that rarely receives equal attention

There is another uncomfortable historical record that deserves space in any serious discussion of political violence in the Philippines: abuses committed inside the communist movement itself.

Human Rights Watch has documented NPA executions following so-called People’s Court proceedings and described the killing and torture of people accused of being military “deep penetration agents” during the communist movement’s internal purges in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Amnesty International likewise documented NPA summary executions, torture, abductions, and attacks connected to the movement’s internal purges and its campaign against perceived enemies.

These were not simply allegations of battlefield casualties. They included people whom the movement itself accused, tried, detained or punished through its own revolutionary mechanisms.

In 2021, the CPP-NPA acknowledged responsibility for the landmine attack in Masbate that killed Keith and Nolven Absalon and injured Nolven’s young son. The Commission on Human Rights said that responsibility should lead to lawful prosecution and emphasized that accountability must apply to both state and non-state actors.

These cases raise an uncomfortable question about political memory:

Why should the history of state violence be remembered in detail while violence committed in the name of revolutionary justice is sometimes explained primarily through political context?

State repression produced revolutionary resistance. Therefore, the armed struggle was a response to repression.

There is historical truth in the first part of that relationship. State abuses can radicalize populations and provide armed movements with powerful political grievances.

But the conclusion does not follow automatically.

The CPP existed before Martial Law. The NPA was established in 1969. The Party had already adopted a strategy of protracted people’s war and was expanding its mass and military organization before Marcos declared Martial Law. Its own documents describe these developments. Martial Law, therefore, cannot be treated as the origin of the communist revolution. Nor can the revolution be treated as the justification for Martial Law abuses.

What should “Never Again” actually mean?

There is value in the phrase “Never Again.”

But if it is to have meaning beyond political mobilization, it should apply universally.

Never again should government possess unchecked power to arrest, torture or kill people because they are political opponents.

Never again should political organizations claim that an ideological cause gives them authority to decide who deserves to live.

Never again should civilians become acceptable casualties of either the communist insurgenct or counterinsurgency.

Never again should political movements transform victims into mere symbols while ignoring victims who complicate their narrative.

And never again should the country’s history be reduced to a contest over which political side gets to own the memory of suffering.

The lesson of Martial Law is not that one political camp has a permanent monopoly on victimhood. It is that concentrated power without accountability can produce abuse. That lesson applies to the state. It also applies to organizations that seek political power through armed struggle.

Remembering without repeating

Fifty-four years after Martial Law, Filipinos do not need to choose between remembering the abuses of the Marcos dictatorship and examining the record of the revolutionary movement that grew during the same historical period.

Both belong to the history.

The CPP’s own documents show that the movement had already developed an armed revolutionary strategy and mass political machinery before 1972. Martial Law then destroyed the legal space in which much of that movement operated and pushed activists underground, creating conditions the Party subsequently incorporated into its revolutionary work.

Decades later, the revolutionary movement continues to invoke Martial Law as a political reference point while openly connecting its commemoration to the continuation of armed resistance.

At the same time, its own historical record includes internal purges, revolutionary courts, executions, torture and attacks that deserve the same serious examination demanded of state abuses.

That does not make Martial Law less terrible.

It makes the history more complete.

And perhaps that is the harder meaning of remembering.

Not to replace one political narrative with another, but to refuse narratives that require us to forget inconvenient victims.

Martial Law should be remembered.

Its victims deserve truth, justice and recognition.

But remembering it honestly also means asking what happened after the dictatorship, how political movements used its legacy, what violence continued in the name of competing causes, and why a country that has experienced both authoritarian state power and revolutionary armed struggle continues to carry the consequences of both.

History becomes useful only when it is allowed to challenge everyone, including those who claim to speak in its name.

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References:

• https://www.marxists.org/history/philippines/cpp/liwanag/1993/mlmzt-guide.htm
• https://www.amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/asa350191977en.pdf
• https://www.marxists.org/history/philippines/cpp/liwanag/1988/review-history.htm
• https://www.marxists.org/history/philippines/cpp/riple/1975/specific-characteristics.htm
• https://ndfp.info/confront-the-us-marcos-regime-with-stronger-peoples-armed-resistance
• https://liberation.ndfp.info/the-peoples-defiant-spirit-against-the-marcos-dictatorship
• https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/04/five-things-to-know-about-martial-law-in-the-philippines
• https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/11/21/philippines-rebels-execute-3-after-sham-trials