Mike Phipps reviews Global Battlefields: Memoir of a Legendary Public Intellectual from the Global South, by Walden Bello, published by Clarity.
As one of this book’s many endorsements points out, “The name ‘Walden Bello’ is virtually synonymous with the struggle for global social justice.” Activist, academic and Philippines politician, Bello, who will be eighty this year, covers a phenomenal range of activity in this memoir.
Yet it nearly didn’t get written. Bello admits at the outset that he feels like a failure: the two big movements he was involved in, the Philippines left and the international movement for socialism, both failed to realise their potential: “Traditional elite politics reigns supreme and unchallenged in our country and capitalism lurches on drunkenly but similarly unchallenged globally.”
But as the late Mike Marqusee argued, “You can learn more from a failure than from a success – if you recognise it as such.” Looking back, Bello feels that the failures he experienced were perhaps merely “setbacks in a longer-term enterprise.” In any event, we can be thankful that he decided to write this illuminating memoir.
Vietnam and Chile
He was born on an island in the middle of the Philippines’ largest lake to artistic parents and was schooled by the Jesuits. After graduating, he was sacked from his first two jobs, as a college professor and associate editor of a provincial newspaper, for offending two religious establishments—the Christian and the Muslim—with his writing. But his real radicalization began at Princeton University, which was “convulsed by struggles over racism, women’s rights, capitalism, and above all Vietnam, as was the rest of the United States.” Bello was arrested on a sit-down protest on campus but escaped deportation. One wonders how he would have fared today. Later he played a leading role in taking over and shutting down Princeton’s school of public administration as part of the anti-war campaign.
In 1971, impressed by the radical changes taking place under the democratically elected Socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile, he decided to study events there for his PhD. He soon realised that the revolution was on the defensive, and the right were beginning to take command of the streets. He decided to focus his studies on the rise of the Chilean counter-revolution and how the Popular Unity government had failed to win over the pivotal middle classes. He concluded that, in the 1973 Chilean coup, the US intervention was successful “because it was inserted into an ongoing counterrevolutionary process that had its base in the middle class. CIA destabilization efforts were just one of the factors that contributed to the victory of the right, and not the decisive one. This was not something that progressives wanted to hear then,” observed Bello and he never published his work.
Organising against Marcos
In September 1972, the Marcos regime declared martial law in the Philippines. “Over the next 14 years, thousands were imprisoned, tortured, or extra-judicially executed under a dictatorship that can best be described as a predatory, kleptocratic state. During those 14 years, bringing down that regime became my raison d’être.”
Bello worked in the Union of Democratic Filipinos (KDP) which brought together activists influenced by the ongoing armed revolution in the Philippines with second generation Filipino-Americans who were politicized by housing and union struggles in the US. He joined the Communist Party of the Philippines and over the next 15 years “was a disciplined member of this organization, forsaking a steady job, sleeping on the couches of comrades’ homes, crisscrossing the U.S. on cheap ‘red-eye’ flights from which I would emerge totally exhausted, subsisting on Doritos and burritos and cigarettes.” His commitment eroded his marriage and brought him into confrontation with the repressive apparatus of the state.
In 1978, he took part in the nonviolent takeover of the Philippine Consulate in San Francisco to protest against rigged elections in his home country, an action for which he lost his teaching job at the City College of San Francisco. He and his comrades refused to recognise the authority of the court which subsequently found them guilty of criminal trespass. They began a hunger strike in jail, which succeeded in getting them released.
Later he and others broke into the World Bank headquarters and stole 6,000 pages of documents that showed the many connections of the IMF and World Bank to the Marcos regime. The contents were written up in Development Debacle, which became an underground bestseller in the Philippines and arguably contributed to the later downfall of the dictatorship.
In 1981, he helped organise a protest against Imelda Marcos, the wife of the Philippines dictator, who was visiting the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts – the first ever at that venue. He and his comrades dressed up in their finest outfits, having paid a small fortune for the best seats from which to unveil banners condemning the dictatorship and get the spotlight. Other innovative protests followed.
The left marginalised
The 1983 assassination of Ninoy Aquino, the main leader of opposition to Marcos, by agents of the regime, invigorated the middle class opposition, who now began to distance themselves from the left, sidelining the National Democratic Front and other organisations the left had constructed.
The Reagan Administration was quick to adapt and began to apply pressure to get Marcos to share power. In the 1986 presidential elections, in which the US was now aiming to engineer an opposition win, the NDF misread the public mood and unwisely called for a boycott, marginalising itself. As Marcos announced a fraudulent victory and thousands took to the streets, the US finally pressurised the dictator to go.
“The new liberal democratic regime had a contradictory character,” writes Bello. “It was certainly open and democratic, but the military took advantage of its legitimacy to repress the Left, which could no longer depend on the liberal elite and the middle class to defend it.”
The author got his first full-time job in thirteen years, researching at Food First in San Francisco. His analysis of the flexibility of the new Philippines formal democracy diverged from the Communist Party, which had not updated its line. The Party, concerned about its penetration by military agents, also began massive purges – including the execution of thousands of its members, the full story of which could be pieced together only later.
The Party itself later recognised the purges as “madness”, but beyond the lack of common sense or proper controls within the organisation, Bello felt something else was responsible: “Marxism’s very instrumental view of people, that is, its lack of a developed concept of individual rights; in other words, it saw individuals as having rights only by virtue of their membership in the right classes, or, failing that, their holding the right politics. Thus, if an individual is suspected or judged to be a ‘class enemy,’ he or she does not have an innate right to life, liberty, and respect, and what happens to her depends purely on the tactical needs of the moment.”
The fratricidal purges hugely reduced the Communists’ influence in the country. Bello’s own analysis of it was denounced as “bourgeois” and he left the Party at the end of the 1980s.
Return to Southeast Asia: Anti-globalization activism
Bello remained an activist and was now able to think more creatively. Studying US policy towards countries in the Global South, he concluded that the key consideration “as to its preference for a type of political regime was preventing the Left from coming to power, and if either authoritarianism or liberal democracy failed to secure this, then there was still the final solution: military intervention.”
His job, and his comparative studies of structural adjustment and newly industrializing countries, took him across southeast Asia and allowed him to forge lasting links with worker and student activists. In 1994, he moved permanently back to Asia, joining the faculty of the University of the Philippines at Diliman and co-founding the activist think tank Focus on the Global South in Bangkok.
At this time, the new wave of globalization was piling up problems for the Philippines economy, with the government’s acceptance of Marcos’s debt of $26 billion, and its tariff reforms causing largescale deindustrialization. Bello worked with others to oppose the administration’s drive to commit the Philippines to the precepts of the World Trade Organisation and Agreement on Agriculture, which aimed to bring about greater foreign penetration of the country’s domestic market.
Financial liberalisation and privatisation of water energy accompanied these mis-steps. The overall result was that between 1990 and 2010, the Philippines’ rate of growth slumped to the second lowest in Southeast Asia and a third of its people lived below the poverty line. Bello did not just analyse these issues, he took part in direct action against the institutions, including at the mass protest at the 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organisation in Seattle, where he was beaten up by club-wielding police. The scale of the protest, however, made people aware of the ’dark side’ of globalization and checked its rapid advance.
A year later, Bello was caught up in the unprovoked police attacks on peaceful protesters in Genoa, in which carabinieri shot dead one activist. But as Focus on the Global South continued providing invaluable advice to developing country delegations at these events, the West began to pull back from using the WTO to spearhead trade liberalisation.
As an alternative to global neoliberalism, Bello proposed deglobalization: “refocusing the economy back on production for the domestic market rather than for export markets, resubordinating the market to society, reasserting cooperation over competition.”
After 9/11, Bello threw himself into activity in opposition to the West’s war on Iraq. He is scathing about its cheerleaders: “I found Tony Blair, the prime minister who led Britain to war, to be even more repugnant than Bush, Jr. The latter was, in many ways, a blockhead… Blair was a hypocrite and a liar, parading as a champion of freedom and democracy while knowing that Saddam Hussein possessed no weapons of mass destruction.”
In Congress
Bello was elected to the Philippines Congress in 2007 as a member of Akbayan, a broadly social-democratic party, but far from constraining his activism, he was able to use this platform to be more effective. He was active in getting the Reproductive Health Law, which legalised family planning, onto the statue book; yet, ten years on the Philippines remains, along with the Vatican, the only country in the world with no divorce law and abortion remains criminalised.
Bello writes that his most challenging, and frustrating, experience in Congress was heading up the Committee on Overseas Workers Affairs and dealing with the racket of Filipino recruitment agencies conniving with receiving country governments and employers to exploit millions of migrant labourers, with Philippine government officials often facilitating the exploitation. “The government and the Philippine elite bore a grave responsibility for this system of exploitation in a larger sense, in that labour export was a substitute—and a poor one—for promoting economic policies that could absorb the millions of Filipinos who saw no alternative but to work abroad.” On a Congressional mission to Saudi Arabia, he discovered that the rape and abuse of Filipina domestic workers were common.
In 2024, Amnesty International Philippines awarded Bello the title of “Most Distinguished Human Rights Defender”. In his acceptance speech, he said: “Neoliberal policies are now discredited. The Washington Consensus is in the junk heap… Those who have been responsible for destroying economies cannot be allowed to just walk away from the wreckage, just as that monster Duterte cannot be allowed to just get away with spilling the blood of 27,000 Filipinos… It is high time we seek justice for economic crimes. It is high time we cease honouring such criminals with Nobel Prizes in Economics but bring them instead to the ICC.”
Life lessons
Bello ends where he began, when looking at the counter-revolution in Chile, with an analysis of the global far right. It is driven by racism and anti-migrant sentiment, of course, but a central cause of its return is the decades of neoliberalism that preceded it, as Bello analysed in his 2019 book.
Summing up, Bello says that his politics has been defined by a search for truth and a desire to act. But it has also been informed by “good, old-fashioned ethics”. Furthermore, it is the “absence of a strong moral compass or its underdevelopment that has led to the self-inflicted tragedies of the left.”
And the lessons he has learned over a lifetime of activity? One, the struggle never stops. Two, one might wish for victory in the course of one’s lifetime, but it is psychologically less devastating to consider the possibility that it could well take longer. Three, just as defeat can be learned from, so victory may blind one to the flaws and seeds of destruction that the successful project inevitably contains. Finally, vision: “Programs for change and against empire and war will have limited traction unless they are attached to a larger vision that responds not only to ‘class interest’ but to our fundamental values as human beings.”
Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.
