The streets of the Philippines have erupted once more in a historic show of force that saw aver a hundred thousand people march in what has become the largest protest under the Marcos Jr. regime. The September 21 demonstrations was a massive show of the people’s rightful outrage against corruption in the reactionary state. What began as indignation over corruption-laden flood control-projects has swelled into a mass movement against bureaucrat capitalism: a collective reckoning with a political system that has long treated public office as private business.

Students and young people have again surged to the frontlines. From the campuses of Manila to regional universities, thousands walked out of their classrooms, linking arms with workers, farmers, and the urban poor. Their chants and placards carried not only anger but analysis. They understand that corruption is not simply an act of a few politicians, but the symptom of a system rooted in bureaucrat capitalism.

Their militancy recalls the proud legacy of Kabataang Makabayan (KM), the revolutionary youth organization founded in 1968 that helped ignite the First Quarter Storm against the Marcos fascist dictatorship. Similar to the fiery legacy of KM, this generation of youth knows that the rot of corruption is inseparable from the broader system of bureaucrat capitalism which represents the marriage of big landlords, big comprador bourgeoisie, and bureaucrat capitalists who use the state as their personal fiefdom and in service to US imperialist interests.

Outside the Philippines, the fire of protest has spread among overseas Filipinos. In cities from Amsterdam to Hong Kong, from Los Angeles to Doha, migrants and Filipino expats have joined coordinated demonstrations denouncing the same corruption that drove many of them abroad. Their anger is rooted in experience: they labor under harsh conditions, send billions in remittances home, only to watch the wealth they produce siphoned off by corrupt politicians and their cronies.

The upsurge of protests at home and abroad has shaken the ruling classes because it signals a shift from outrage to an organized force capable of ousting them from power. In response, the Marcos Jr. regime deployed thousands of police to harass and inflict violence against demonstrators, and to red-tag youth organizers.

What frightens the ruling classes is not simply the number of people protesting in the streets but the direction of their fury. These protests are not pleading for reform but pointing toward transformation and system change. They now understand that corruption cannot simply be “fixed” without dismantling the semifeudal and semicolonial conditions that breed it. Once again, the specter of people’s power haunts the halls of Malacañang. But unlike the past, the people now recognize that merely changing leaders will not end their suffering.

So let the Philippine ruling classes tremble, for the fighting Filipino masses are at their gates. The youth are marching, the workers are organizing, the peasants are rising. The massive protests of September 21 are not the end, they are just the beginning of a new chapter in the Filipino people’s struggle to break free from the grip of bureaucrat capitalism, feudalism and US imperialism.

The Marcos Jr. and Duterte ruling cliques may still sit in Malacañang, but the ground beneath them is shaking.