This article critically interrogates the development agenda articulated in the draft Comprehensive Agreement on Social and Economic Reforms (CASER) of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP). The NDFP represented communist insurgents who, in 2017, were negotiating the Philippine government a framework for implementing socioeconomic reforms in the context of peace talks between two sides engaged in an armed conflict for the last five decades. The document pushed for a state-led agrarian reform and sovereign industrialization and offered an alternative development pathway to delinking, favoring working peoples’ rights over monopoly capitalist profits. CASER also represented significant adjustments in articulating the insurgents’ “national democratic” program to address recent issues and developments. The document, however, has the drawback of being silent on some significant challenges of delinking. CASER also needs to account for qualitatively changed conditions and shifting terrains of class struggle brought on by capitalism’s neoliberal phase since the late 1970s.
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