It is not to be confused with the existingdemocratic form of government in the country.
History and background
The national democratic movement has its origins in opposition to former president and dictator Ferdinand Marcos during the late 1960s and early 1970s, but in its entirety is interpreted by the ND as a continuation of struggles since the 1896 Philippine Revolution led by the Katipunan.[4] As a result of sustained economic, political, and military abuses during the Marcos dictatorship, several figures such as Jose Maria Sison (writing under the eponym Amado Guerrero) proposed that the creation of a revolutionary mass movement of a national democratic character was necessary to overcome the "three basic problems" underpinning the oppressive conditions of Philippine society in the 1970s. Sison's vision uses Maoist principles for social analysis and in carrying out people's democracy or national democracy:[5]
Under the present concrete conditions of Philippine society which are semi-colonial and semi-feudal, the Communist Party has to wage a national democratic revolution of a new type, a people's democratic revolution. Though its leadership is proletarian, the Philippine Revolution is not yet a proletarian-socialist revolution. We should not confuse the national-democratic stage and the socialist stage of the Philippine Revolution. Only after the national-democratic stage has been completed can the proletarian revolutionary leadership carry out the socialist revolution as the transitional stage towards communism.
— Philippine Society and Revolution p.78[6]
^Angeles, Leonora. “The PKP (Communist Party of the Philippines) and MAKIBAKA (Free Movement of New Women) Revisited: The Place of Women’s Liberation in Revolutionary Theory and Practice.” Kasarinlan A Philippine Quarterly of Third World Studies, vol. 3, no. 4, Jan. 1988, pp. 26–35.