Description
This absorbing memoir by a legendary public intellectual from the Global South vividly recounts his journey from student activist to global figure on the international left. It begins with Walden Bello’s sojourn at an Ivy League university, Princeton, where he becomes a leader of the movement against the Vietnam War on campus in the early 1970s. Then he transports the reader to Salvador Allende’s Chile, where he witnesses the unfolding of a doomed enterprise to move the country on a “peaceful road to socialism.”
Back in the United States in 1972, he becomes part of a movement to cut off US assistance to the Marcos dictatorship, joining the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) in the process. To erode support for Marcos in the US and internationally, he and his companions engage in innovative civil disobedience, hilarious political comedy deploying Sesame Street characters, and a celebrated heist of 6000 pages of confidential documents from the World Bank that were then turned into the best-selling international expose Development Debacle: The World Bank in the Philippines.
Bello provides a detailed account and analysis of the anti-dictatorship movement in the Philippines, where the National Democratic Front led by the CPP gained hegemony, then was derailed and eventually marginalized following the so-called “EDSA Uprising” that succeeded in ousting Ferdinand Marcos, Sr, in 1986. He takes us behind the scenes, exposing the Reagan administration officials’ maneuvering that prevented the left from coming to power.
Bello does not spare the movement of its shortcomings. Specifically, he regrets the decision to boycott the 1986 elections and derides the underestimation of Washington’s ability to change course. Then there’s the movement’s self-inflicted wound, a runaway purge that leads to the execution of hundreds that triggers an ethical reassessment and political change of course, notably his departure from the CPP.
Bello’s return to the Philippines and Asia is the subject of the next few chapters, where he evolves into one of the leaders of the of the global struggle against neoliberalism and its key institutions, the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. With George Bush’s invasion of Iraq, he also steps into a high-profile role in the international movement against the US empire. He flies to Baghdad in a desperate mission to prevent the impending American assault in early May 2003 and then takes a nine-hour journey across the desert from Baghdad to Damascus. He introduces the reader to the din and smoke of the historic street battles of the 2000’s—in Seattle, Prague, Genoa, and Cancun—in which he, along with thousands, took part. Here we find not simply a narration of developments, but also an engaged intellectual’s analysis of why the anti-globalization and anti-empire movements failed to institutionalize themselves.
From 2009 to 2015 Walden Bello served as an elected official in the parliament of the Philippines. He takes us from the parliamentary battles over family planning and agrarian reform to his journeys to the Middle East to assist overseas Filipino workers imprisoned in horrible working conditions or trapped in the middle of civil wars, as in Syria. He shares his efforts to make the Philippines steer an independent course between the United States and China, including his defying China by leading a congressional mission to the Spratly Islands to assert his country’s territorial rights, even as he pushes for the withdrawal of the Philippines from its military agreements with the United States. He offers us the reasons for his resignation from the Philippine Congress in 2015—the only recorded resignation on a matter of principle in the history of the Congress of the Philippines.
After his dramatic departure from public office, Bello continues to be an engaged activist and public scholar, winning local and global recognition via multiple awards—the Amnesty International Philippines’ award for being the “Most Distinguished Defender of Human Rights,” the Right Livelihood Award, also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize, and his being named Outstanding Public Scholar by the International Studies Association.
Walden Bello concludes his memoir with a candid assessment of his more than five decades active engagement in both the national and global arenas and a public scholar who has produced 26 books and hundreds of articles. Truly, a life well lived, with much to offer by way of hope and example.
JENNY BOURNE, Race and Class –
“If anyone has earned the right to call themselves ‘a legendary public intellectual’ (as per the subtitle of this book) it is surely Walden Bello. Over his 80 years
he has, uniquely, managed to balance being a mischief-maker and a legislator, a revolutionary street fighter and an influential academic (with twenty-six books on aspects of political economy to his name1). Unlike so many on the sclerosed Left, who stand on the sidelines and carp, he is also a creator who moves with the times – founding, in 1995, the influential thinktank Focus on the Global South, that now ‘combines research, activism and capacity building in order to generate critical analyses and debates on corporate-led globalisation, neo-liberalism and militarisation, particularly in Asia, Latin America and Africa’. Global Battlefields shows how, since the 1970s, Bello’s political footprint can be found everywhere from anti-Vietnam organising at Princeton to Allende’s Chile, from Venezuela to Seattle, Istanbul to Beirut, and from the immediate politics of his homeland, Philippines, to the world stage and, more usually, the counter-stage.” JENNY BOURNE, Race and Class
STEPHEN R. SHALOM –
“Bello’s contributions to movements for social justice in the Philippines and globally have been extensive, and this memoir provides a valuable summary of his distinguished career.” STEPHEN R. SHALOM, NewPolitics
Alan Wald, Against the Current –
“Walden Flores Bello is close to a global celebrity. Beyond that, he outdistances all these autobiographers through his smooth blend of extraordinary activist commitment with an academic career that spans several countries. Global Battlefields showcases a gifted and principled man driven by an outsider’s ambition to storm the gates of an oppressive social order..”ALAN WALD, Against the Current
ALEX DE JONG –
“One does not need to agree with Bello’s views—for example, on the collapse of the Soviet Union, which he refers to as “socialist”— to be informed and entertained by Global Battlefields. One of Bello’s most charming characteristics is that although he takes politics seriously, he also finds joy in the struggle. From dressing up as Kermit the Frog in front of the IMF headquarters to occupying the Philippine embassy or bluntly declaring “fuck you Marcos” on prime time television to then candidate and now President Marcos Jr. in 2021, Bello has a flair for the dramatic. When police came to arrest him in 2022 after the Duterte camp filed libel charges, Bello insisted that police put handcuffs on him, the seventy-six-year-old former congressman.
Apparently Walden Bello needed some convincing from friends before deciding to write his memoirs. It is good that they convinced him.” ALEX DE JONG, Tempest
THOMAS PONNIAH –
“There are few better ways to understand the resistance to neoliberal imperialism, and the aspirations that underpin that rebellion, than the renowned Filipino and international, public intellectual and activist Walden Bello’s autobiography Global Battlefields.” THOMAS PONNIAH, Canadian Dimension
MIKE PHIPPS –
“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.” MIKE PHIPPS, LabourHub
Paul Adlerstein –
“A great political memoir uses an individual story to humanize the dilemmas of fighting to remake the whole world. Such is the case with Walden Bello’s compelling new memoir, Global Battlefields. Throughout the book Bello dissects a central tension in his political life: the dance of ideas and action. Bello makes this theme clear through his repeated citation (at least four times by my count) of Karl Marx’s declaration in Theses on Feuerbach: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it…And since the day in April 1970 when he leapt into the middle of a skirmish between police and protestors, Walden Bello has embodied the praxis demanded in Marx’s quote.” PAUL ADLERSTEIN, Foreign Policy in Focus
PATRICIO N. ABINALES –
“He was a fierce combatant, crossing swords with his fellow legislators while being pursued by Imelda Marcos, whom he once likened to Miss Piggy.,,Upon closing the book, I asked myself with whom one could compare Walden Bello among the long lines of revolutionaries of the 20th century. Not Mao or Ho Chi Minh – too simplistic. Lenin or Stalin? Too authoritarian, grim, and humorless. Bukharin perhaps? He wrote well as a theorist and a novelist but was also a bit naïve and overly trusting. Maybe Chou En Lai? He was too much of a diplomat and never had the guts to challenge Mao.I choose Trotsky. Much like Walden, Lev Davidovich Bronstein was a passionate revolutionary, a prodigious intellectual, and never hesitated to call bullshit when needed. Walden may not match Trotsky’s military talents (he built the Red Army from scratch), but in sustaining a resilient global anti-capitalist network the Fourth International pales in comparison.” PATRICIO N. ABINALES, Positively Filipino
Max Elbaum –
“Walden Bello’s memoir takes the reader inside some of the biggest fights against dictatorship, exploitation, and empire over the last 60 years…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.” MAX ELBAUM, Convergence