Revolution Is Not a Slogan
The radical art of political endurance and reform
When I first came into activism, I moved like a punk with anarchist leanings — drawn to the hardest line, the purest stance. Negotiating self-interests felt like betrayal of the cause. The street seemed truer than the chamber, slogans sharper than policy. But conviction, I’ve learned, doesn’t change the world on its own. To be right is one thing. To be effective is another.
A former boss at Greenpeace once said, “The opposite of war is politics.” Not because politics is noble, but because it’s what we do instead of destroy each other. It’s messy, often maddening — but it’s the ground where real change takes root. In the Philippines, that ground is especially fraught. Here, survival itself is political.
Our terrain doesn’t reward purity. It favors those who bend — who learn the choreography of compromise without forgetting why they showed up. Ideology matters, but only if it moves. Think of it less as monument, more as vessel — built to carry us across, not to anchor us in place.
Radicalism, when imported wholesale into electoral politics, often turns self-defeating. Around the world — and here at home — rigid moralism on the Left has cleared paths for strongmen promising order. In scorning the flawed, many radicals leave the field open to the dangerous. The irony bites: in rejecting the “lesser evil,” they enable the greater one.
History offers its own lessons. The 1986 People Power Revolt didn’t triumph through ideological clarity, but through convergence — imperfect figures like Cory Aquino at the center. The Left’s principled boycott cost them years of political relevance. Meanwhile, the post-Edsa NGO current — often dismissed by the revolutionary left as a distraction or nuisance — has quietly helped deliver policy reforms that have shaped everyday life: reproductive health, ecological and biodiversity conservation, anti-discrimination laws, youth governance. Not through purity, but through patience. Not through protest alone, but through presence.
A vital, often overlooked pillar of leftist work is deep social investigation and class analysis — tools that reveal not just who holds power, but how it moves through the everyday lives of ordinary people. Yet in moments of heightened visibility, like elections, this grounding often slips away. Take the Marcos-Duterte campaign: they made no claim to moral purity, instead wielding ambiguity and fatigue like weapons, presenting themselves as steady alternatives to the performative virtue of opponents — including the well-meaning but outmaneuvered Ka Leody campaign. Calls for public debates and moral clarity, though earnest, failed to reach a populace wary of elite discourse and hungry for tangible relief. Bong Go’s “Malasakit Centers,” patchwork solutions masking systemic neglect, won support because they met immediate needs — often the only accessible care for many. These moments reveal the urgent need for class analysis rooted in empathy and reality — not to excuse reactionary politics, but to understand the conditions that give them sway. Without this, the Left risks shouting into silence while those attuned to the social terrain quietly gather strength.
This is why the Left needs liberal democracy — not as an endpoint, but as a platform. Where civil rights exist, organizing thrives. To dismiss liberalism outright is not to build power but to abandon the very arena where power can be contested and reimagined. Authoritarians never hesitate to claim that space.
The figures who survive our politics — Bong Revilla dancing back into office, GMA slipping quietly into power — succeed not through virtue, but through mastery of the game. They win not hearts, but ground. If the Left refuses to play, others will write the rules.
If we are to counter such forces, we must do more than denounce them. We must understand them. Learn their architecture. Speak their language — if only to write better laws. This is why we need those who can bridge ideals and institutions — carrying conviction into policy, protest into appropriations. Trailblazing partylists like Akbayan were among the first to harness democratic space in the legislature, ushering in hard-won reforms. Yet the partylist system, once a beacon for grassroots voices, has since been co-opted by traditional politicians, blurring its original purpose. Meanwhile, the Makabayan bloc has pushed national democracy into the House of Representatives’ mainstream discourse. Leni Robredo’s tenure as Vice President under Duterte sparked a surge of youth political engagement through her brand of principled governance. Risa Hontiveros offers another model: activist turned politician, her ideals sharpened by practice. She doesn’t just speak truth to power — she codifies it.
The community pantry phenomenon revealed what mutual aid can look like in practice: where the state faltered, communities stepped up. It wasn’t charity, but a kind of grassroots infrastructure — care as political act, generosity as quiet defiance. These weren’t just responses to crisis. They were blueprints for another way of living.
To dismiss partial victories as inadequate is to miss their dialectical power. Electoral gains, policy reforms, even something as immediate as a community pantry — these are not ends, but openings. They meet needs in the present while pointing to the failures of the system that made them necessary. Small wins can expose structural rot. Compromises can sharpen political awareness. The task is to hold the tension — between what is urgent and what is possible, between what we dream and what we can build now.
The question isn’t whether we stay true to our ideological distinctives to the letter of our manifestos. It’s whether we stay useful. In a country where politics is often a fight for breath, endurance itself may be the most radical act.
Not everyone who shouts endures. But those who endure — quietly, strategically — may yet change everything.