‘Global Battlefields’: Walden Bello’s no-holds-barred reckoning

First published at Convergence Magazine.

Global Battlefields: Memoir of a Legendary Public Intellectual from the Global South
By Walden Bello
Clarity Press, 2025

Global Battlefields puts you at dueling demonstrations on the streets of Santiago, Chile in the year before the bloody coup that overthrew the government of Salvador Allende. Readers get a vivid picture of the long fight against the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines and the US solidarity movement with the insurgency there. Key battles in the movement against corporate-led globalization get eyewitness coverage: Bello participated in the street battles of Seattle, Prague, Cancun, and Genoa and broke into the World Bank to copy documents detailing that institution’s collaboration with the Marcos regime. The book includes a first-hand account of the first World Social Forum in Puerto Allegre, Brazil, where Bello made the opening statement in a televised trans-Atlantic debate with elite spokespeople at the Davos World Economic Forum.

The chapter titled “Jousting with Empire” brings the reader to Baghdad just a few days before US bombs started to fall and to clandestine meetings where Bello interviewed leaders of Hezbollah and Hamas. Later in the 2000s, Bello went back to the Philippines and was elected to Congress; the memoir recounts his legislative fights to win women’s reproductive rights, protect Filipinos working abroad, and steer an independent course between the US and China.

This memoir’s richly textured recounting of these and many other experiences would alone make Global Battlefields worth reading. But the volume offers even more in the sections where the author draws from his experiences to wrestle with questions of political analysis, strategy, and ethics.

How to respond when events surprise you

One of those questions constitutes a key theme in the memoir: How should a radical respond when real-world events don’t unfold in a way that conforms to one’s pre-conceived political framework?

Bello first faced this question as a graduate student in the early 1970s. Excited by the 1970 election of Salvador Allende as President of Chile, he decided this radical victory offered an opportunity to study how to build socialism by peaceful and democratic means. He got approval for a PhD. dissertation that would explore the dynamics of mobilization in Chilean shantytowns by left-wing political parties. He read extensively in the radical media about what to expect and gathered that he would be studying events in a period of revolutionary momentum.

After arriving in Chile in 1972, Bello started attending demonstrations called by Allende supporters and found dynamics he had not expected. “I noticed a certain defensiveness among participants…The revolution, it dawned on me, was on the defensive, and the right was beginning to take command of the streets.” 

So, Bello changed his mind: “I had wanted to do a thesis that would make some contribution to activist organizing in revolutionary times. This had been overtaken by events, and I made the painful decision to do, instead, a thesis aimed at gaining an understanding of the rise of counterrevolution.”

What follows is a fascinating account of how the research for this thesis was accomplished and how it led Bello to challenge the dominant thinking in Left circles at the time about the role of the middle class in political conflict. He terms that layer “Janus-faced,” and argues that the middle class can sometimes ally with the working class in the fight for democracy, but at other times stand with the ruling class as it represses upsurges from below. Among other points, Bello noted that in analyzing the Chilean experience, “the roles of the CIA, the Chilean elites, the Chicago Boys, and the Chilean military…have been widely studied. There have, however, been few studies apart from my thesis, on the role of the middle class.” 

Bello commented that changing his mind in response to Chile’s unanticipated reality was “painful.” But as someone studying the Chilean struggle, rather than being an activist within it, shifting course did not require deep soul-searching. Matters were quite different for Bello in the next phase of his life, however.

The Philippine Revolution

Just as Bello returned to his graduate program at Princeton from Chile, President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in his native Philippines and initiated a period of dictatorial rule. Bello threw himself into support work for those in his homeland who were resisting the Marcos regime and its main backer, the US. Bello joined the Union of Democratic Filipinos (KDP), then the main US group in solidarity with those engaged in armed struggle against the dictatorship under the leadership of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). Recruited to the CPP in 1974, Bello writes that, “I was a disciplined member, forsaking a steady job, sleeping on the couches of comrades’ homes…all in the service of a revolution I thoroughly believed in and felt was inevitable since history was on the side of the party.”

Over the next decade, the CPP-led New People’s Army, following the Maoist strategy of “protracted people’s war,” experienced steady growth. The CPP-led National Democratic Front—which Bello credits with being “non-doctrinaire, flexible and innovative”—established itself as the most dynamic force in the broad anti-Marcos movement.

Then, in 1985-1986, matters took an unexpected turn. The Reagan administration, worried about the growing strength of the revolutionaries, and seeing Marcos losing popular support, pressed Marcos to call an election. Their goal was a smooth, controlled process that would undercut the Left and bring to power a government with greater legitimacy, either by the elite opposition taking the presidency or via some form of power sharing between Marcos and his elite opponents.

But to the surprise of both Washington and the revolutionary Left, the “snap election” announcement unleashed a torrent of activism among Filipinos of all classes who saw in Cory Aquino’s electoral challenge a genuine chance to both get rid of Marcos and replace dictatorial rule with some kind of liberal democracy. The CPP leadership, however, clung to its belief that the election was a mere ruse—that the US would never abandon its support for Marcos and that only a victory by the armed struggle could bring any kind of democracy to the Philippines. The CPP reasserted its position that the contest was another “meaningless contest among reactionaries,” voted to stand aside from the growing upsurge, and called for a boycott of the balloting.

The result was a disaster for the Left. Aquino won the vote, and when Marcos attempted to declare victory anyway, massive crowds gathered in protest and a section of the military leadership shifted allegiance to the surging opposition. In what Bello called “a gift” to Washington, the CPP and NDF watched what became known as the People Power Revolution from the sidelines. The Reagan administration, realizing that things hadn’t gone exactly according to plan but thrilled that the Left had marginalized itself, decided it was safe to push Marcos out and put the dictator and his family on a plane to Hawaii.

“My thinking was shaken loose…”

Bello describes the aftermath:

The shock to the NDF that the February uprising had delivered wore off slowly. It was inevitable that the shattering of its basic assumption that the US would not allow Marcos to be dislodged would trigger an internal debate… the dynamics of liberal democracy were very different from authoritarianism as a form of regime, but unfortunately, the CPP-NDF continued to act in the same way. Imaging the enemy [the post-Marcos-Aquino government] to be essentially the old dictatorship albeit with a democratic mask, it fell back on what it regarded as the tried and tested formula: tight, centralized, hierarchical organizing, with a focus on intensifying the armed struggle…

Over the following years the CPP-NDF experienced a number of splits and was never able to regain the level of influence it held before 1985. Bello resigned in 1989 and writes in the memoir:

My participation in the Communist Party of the Philippines was the high point of my political life…It was a time when I was willing to give up my life for a cause…It is an experience that fills me with nostalgia. It remains memorable despite its having been banished post-Peoples Power Revolution by the cold facts of analysis and history.

Regarding those “cold facts,” Bello writes that “My thinking was shaken loose from its theoretical and political cage by the boycott debacle.” A section of the memoir lays out Bello’s changed thinking about the balance between coercion and ideological hegemony in capitalist rule, the place of armed struggle in revolutionary strategy, the political economy of the Philippines, the need to re-envision the Left and the global socialist project in the post-1989 era, and related matters.

Class politics and individual rights

Along with his re-examination of anti-capitalist strategy, Bello’s experience in the CPP led him to face what he describes as an “ethical crisis.” This was provoked by a series of internal party purges aimed at “ferreting out people suspected as ‘deep penetration’ military agents (DPAS).” The campaign ran out of control and resulted in the execution of several thousand party cadres.

Bello conducted the first empirical investigation of the campaign, and experienced what he terms a “rude shock.” Among the reasons he identifies as leading to the “madness,” he cites an “instrumental” view of people “as having rights only by virtue of their membership in the right classes or, failing that, 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.”

Bello writes that his examination “pushed me to the position that individuals had rights beyond class rights and they derived this from their being simply human beings and were not gifts bestowed upon them by the party or by a supernatural being.”

Agreement or disagreement is not the point

On the issue of individual rights, as with Bello’s changed assessment of the evolution of the Philippine Left and the many other issues tackled in Global Battlefields, readers may or may not agree with the author’s view. But using political agreement as the main criterion for evaluating his memoir would be missing the volume’s main takeaway:

The world is in constant change, and everyone active in politics will encounter situations that don’t follow the pattern that our political framework leads us to expect. When we do, the challenge is to take another look at our assumptions as well as take a deeper look at the facts. That combination gives us an opportunity to improve our thinking. We may modify and improve the framework we held going in, we might overhaul it or replace it, or we might find factors that we did not at first understand were in play and reaffirm our pre-existing view.

The great value in Bello’s memoir is that he offers a case study of an activist intellectual going through that kind of process. And this being a moment of rapid, deep-going change in the underlying structures of global politics, that example is especially timely.

Bello concludes his memoir by quoting the lyrics of Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry.” These lines stand out:

Good friends we have had

Oh good friends we’ve lost

Along the way.

In this great future you can’t forget your past

So dry your tears, I say

The authoritarians who now occupy the citadel of imperial power in Washington are currently conducting a campaign to erase our past. They are working hard to make every museum, classroom, and book a fountain of lies about how the US and all of humanity have reached our current moment of crisis. Works that recount and analyze the past from the point of view of the exploited and oppressed, the marginalized and slaughtered, and those who have fought the good fight, whether in victory or defeat, are more important than ever. By adding this memoir to his activist contributions and extensive body of political writing, Walden Bello has done his part.