ABOUT US
The League of Filipino Students (LFS) started as an alliance against tuition fee increases and school repression during the time of Martial Law. Born September 11, 1977, the alliance formally became a national democratic mass organization in 1982. The LFS remains one of the largest student organizations in the country, continuously taking part in the history of the struggle of the youth and the people. It has chapters in different colleges, universities and high schools, and also has a chapter in the San Francisco State University in America. The LFS is among the founding members of the Kabataan Partylist, the first and only youth partylist in Philippine Congress. It is a member of the New Patriotic Alliance (Bagong Alyansang Makabayan – BAYAN) and Kalikasan-People’s Network for the Environment (Kalikasan-PNE). It is also a member of the Asia Pacific Youth and Students Association, the International League of Peoples Struggle and the Philippines-Cuba Friendship Association. LFS-UPLB is a member-organization of Samahan ng Kabataan para sa Bayan (SAKBAYAN) and is a convenor of Youth League for the Advancement of Democratic Rights (Youth-LEAD) Save Our Education Movement (SOEM) and Republika Katagalugan.
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BASIC PRINCIPLES
The LFS is a national democratic mass organization with a socialist perspective. It believes in these basic truths:
Philippine society is semi-colonial and semi-feudal and the Filipino people is plagued by three evils – imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism. The Philippine education system, being colonial, commercialized and reactionary, needs to be replaced by a nationalist, scientific and mass-oriented education. The historical role of the youth and students is to arouse, mobilize and organize the broadest number of youth for the national democratic struggle of the people. The youth and the students need to unite with the basic masses, the peasants and the workers, in its struggle for genuine social change, through genuine agrarian reform and national industrialization.
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WHAT WE DO
To raise the socio-political awareness of the youth, the LFS organizes discussions such as forums, group discussions and other similar activities. It releases Commitment, its official newsletter, and Praxis, its theoretical journal. It also maintains online presencs through lfs.ph and Facebook among oter channels. It launches leadership and skills trainings and seminars for its members. To foster the cultural development of its members, as well as integration among its chapters, the LFS joins and holds their own plays, films and other cultural productions. To voice out the calls and stance of LFS through collective action, it organizes mass mobilizations, pickets, noise barrage and other forms of protests. Aside from taking up issues of the basic masses, the LFS also organizes integration programs with the workers, urban poor, peasant, fisherfolk, and indigenous peoples. It also reaches out to disaster victims through the Tulong Kabataan program. To foster solidarity with the youth and people of other nations, the LFS hosts exposure trips such as the annual Baliksambayanan program of members from USA, and the integration programs of the Anti-Invasion Asian Student Joint Action – Japan (AASJA).
