Tom Reifer
Posted October 29, 2025
Global Battlefields:
Memoir of a Legendary Public Intellectual from the Global South,
Walden Bello
Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, 2025. 321 pp $30.95 ?978 1963892109
AT ONCE INTIMATE and wide-ranging, Walden Bello’s Global Battlefields begins with a discussion of Pramoedya Ananta Toer, a celebrated Indonesian intellectual jailed in 1948-9 for revolutionary activities against Dutch occupying forces. In 1959-60, Toer publicly defended the Chinese minority and became a beacon of the Indonesian left.
This was during the period when independent Indonesia gave birth to the largest independent mass socialist movement in the world, some 20 million strong, grouped around the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), and the widely popular nationalist leader Sukarno.
From Bandung to Counterrevolution
Sukarno declared independence after Japan’s 1945 defeat, going on to become Indonesia’s first President after independence in 1949. In 1955, Sukarno organized the famous Bandung Conference of Afro-Asian Solidarity. Composed largely of newly independent states, Bandung was part of the emerging Non-Aligned Movement seeking independence from the logic of Cold War superpower competition and raised the banner of the Global South.
Yet the counterrevolution of 1965-1966 overthrew Sukarno. Up to one million people on the left — and those thought to be associated with it — were massacred. The coup and subsequent repression was supported by the United States and CIA; the resulting Suharto dictatorship lasted until 1998.
Consigned to prison for 14 years on the penal colony of Buru Island, Toer wrote his famous novels — the Buru Quartet — chronicling Indonesia’s birth. Until 2000, his works were banned. As Walden notes, Toer’s biographer and translator Max Lane attributes his subsequent “writer’s block” to the inability of the remnants of Indonesia’s left to reflect on what led to these catastrophic events and seek a way forward.
Indonesia’s story assumes significance for Bello because of the experience of defeat, in the land of his own birth, the Philippines, and internationally.
“The fact that neoliberal capitalism has had its share of crises over the last two decades has not translated into a rejuvenation of the vision of socialism in mass consciousness, whether in the Global North or the Global South….[M]y central identity was…an activist, a partisan of collective movements for social transformation, that, to be brutally honest…failed…it is a failure I live with every day as traditional elite politics reigns supreme and unchallenged in our country and capitalism lurches on drunkenly but similarly unchallenged globally.”
Walden goes on to write that “unlike Pramoedya, I did take up the pen.” Reflecting that his own assessments of his experience and that of the left were perhaps too negative, Bello has an elective affinity with Perry Anderson and others who have not shied away from registering what Christopher Hill called The Experience of Defeat.
Yet not until later in the memoir is the scale and scope of this really register — namely the passing away of the forces of opposition from the left to today’s emergent global neofascism.
Activism and Observing Counterrevolutions
Born into a family of artists on November 11, 1945, “in the middle of the country’s largest lake, Laguna de Bay,” Walden was given this name as his father was reading Thoreau at the time. His father had been imprisoned and tortured by the Japanese occupying forces during the war, and other members of his family played a part in the resistance.
Schooled at the Jesuit university, Bello moved on to college teaching and journalism until becoming a graduate student in Sociology at Princeton University. There he was introduced to Marxism, including its Western variants, joining protests against the Vietnam War in Washington, DC.
Encountering demonstrations against the Institute for Defense Analysis at Princeton after the U.S. invasion of Cambodia in 1970, Walden spontaneously joined the action to prevent police from breaking what was a human chain, with people linking arms. He later learned these included the famous historians Arno Mayer and Stanely J. Stein. Walden expected to be deported, as are students ae today, but nothing happened. Instead he became a leader of the anti-Vietnam War movement, leading the occupation of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School.
Fascinated with the Chilean road to socialism, Bello headed to Chile as a participant observer but saw how the revolution was on the defensive. Witnessing the right-wing mobilization, he shifted his work from a study of revolution to the growing counterrevolution. In analyzing the second-largest middle class in Latin America, he concluded it was “Janus-faced.” Sometimes it would fight for democracy against elites, but in the face of uprisings, it could easily become part of counterrevolutionary and fascist movements.
His analysis focused on the independent role of these class forces, rather than being passive actors manipulated by the CIA. Bello remarked, “I imagined the same enraged faces at the fascist and Nazi demonstrations that took control of the streets in Italy and Germany.”
Returning to the United States before the bloody coup of September 11, 1973, Walden involved himself in solidarity work with Chile. However almost a year before the Chilean coup, on September 21, 1972, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law. This drew Bello into working with others in New York, Washington, and San Francisco in opposing the law. He co-authored Logistics of Repression, which became a springboard to his outstanding writings on repression.
Philippine Solidarity
At the time there were some half a million Filipinos in the United States. Migration went back to the early twentieth century, with the arrival of Filipino farmworkers and cannery workers in such places as Hawaii, the West Coast and Alaska. This era was immortalized in Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart.
With the subsequent opening up of U.S. immigration laws in 1965, a larger and more diverse Filipino working and middle class emerged. As part of the emergence of communities of color at that time, many joined into the Marxist-Leninist Union of Democratic Filipinos (KDP), and Walden did too.
Living an exilic identity, Walden joined a parallel underground organization within the KDP, the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). Both were part of the National Democratic Front (NDF), which also included the New People’s Army (NPA), its armed communist wing.
Philippine solidarity work included nonviolent civil disobedience at the Philippine consulate in San Francisco, but also involved an extraordinary episode of Bello stealing thousands of pages of documents from the World Bank. This resulted in one of Bello’s best-selling co-authored books, Development Debacle: The World Bank in the Philippines.
Development Debacle was a kind of “Pentagon Papers” of the World Bank in the Philippines, selling tens of thousands of copies. Influenced by the famous United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), and those of the related dependency school (as well as that of James O’Connor on The Fiscal Crisis of the State), it laid out a profound critique of the political economy of the Philippines.
By the early ‘80s, Walden also became associated with the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute (TNI), an international fellowship of committed scholar activists from around the world. First headed by Eqbal Ahmad, and later by Basker Vashee (1973-1990), TNI exemplified a high level of commitment. Vashee, for example, had been a one-time student, colleague and cell-mate of historian Giovanni Arrighi, both jailed for their anti-colonial activities in Rhodesia (today’s Zimbabwe).
In 1983, after the Marcos regime’s assassination of the leading Philippine opposition figure Benigno Aquino, Jr., Washington pressured Marcos to hold an election. Benigno’s widow Corazon Aquino ran against Marcos. The NDF made a “fateful decision” to boycott the election, and when Marcos fraudulently claimed victory, massive protests led to his ouster. As the result, the left found itself sidelined and increasingly marginalized.
Still in the United States, Walden became the new head of the Institute for Food and Development Policy, founded by Frances Moore Lappe and Joe Collins. Yet with Aquino now in power in the Philippines, Bello came to reflect on the reemergence of liberal capitalist democracy.
On the one hand, he saw that power became more dispersed than under Marcos, replete with private armies and local warlords. On the other hand, a system of ideological hegemony, based on the consent of the people, affirmed their participation in the electoral process. This façade of liberalism provided elites greater legitimacy and pushed coercion into the background. The left had to confront this new reality.
Yet beneath the surface brutal purges had broken out within the CPP-NPA. Through extensive interviews, Bello was able to interview Communists who pinned their political and military defeats on scapegoats. Given the absence of the party’s juridical due process, and the reality that such defeats couldn’t be explained simply through the betrayal of internal spies, Bello concluded that party leaders were satisfied in explaining away their failure as the result of “deviation” from a proper fidelity to Marx and Lenin.
Raised in the Catholic tradition that emphasized one’s duties to a higher being, Bello left the party in 1989-90. He traversed the similar territory as did Gramsci in the Prison Notebooks and that of the great democratic theorist, Norberto Bobbio, as an “outsider.”
The 1990s and International Activism
Concentrating on international activism, Bello co-authored American Lake: The Nuclear Peril in the Pacific, continued work at Food First, and debated World Bank head, Robert McNamara.
With the publication of Dark Victory: The United States, Structural Adjustment, and Global Poverty, Walden returned to teaching Sociology at the University of the Philippines, and with Kamal Malotra, co-founded Focus on the Global South, the leading progressive think tank in Southeast Asia today.
Though based in Bangkok, this movement-oriented non-governmental organization (NGO) also had offices in India and the Philippines. Run by an extraordinary array of scholar-activists and staffers, Focus quickly became one of the leading opponents against corporate globalization.
During the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, Focus fought against what Walden called the “iron cage” of globalization with the World Trade Organization (WTO). It participated in the anti-WTO “Battle of Seattle” protests in 1999 and in Washington, DC the following year to debate with World Bank President James Wolfensohn, financier George Soros, and the managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). It was in Prague to protest against the World Bank and IMF meetings.
In July 2001, Walden and his Focus team were in Genoa, where some 250,000 converged to protest the Group of Eight (G8). In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Walden and others flew to protest the Fourth Ministerial meetings of the WTO in Doha, Qatar, where the repressive monarchy was able to dramatically limit the presence of NGOs.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 Bello helped to form the Asian Peace Society in Hong Kong. He has put together various missions to Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and the Philippines.
At the Fifth Ministerial meeting in Cancun, Mexico in 2003, however, the Group of 33 developing countries and civil society formed a united front, propelled forward by the altruistic suicide of Korean farmer Lee Kyung Hae, and caused the collapse of the talks.
Walden’s “Alternative Futures” chapter chronicles the Porto Alegre versus Davos debate, referring to the activist World Social Forum. WSF formed in response to the formation of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Switzerland, where the masters of the universe gathered to plan a corporatized future. The WSF rotated places, taking place in alternate years in Brazil, Venezuela, India, Kenya and then in various world regions.
Eventually, Walden was to make an important contribution to this debate against structural adjustment with his book Deglobalization. Instead of the export-oriented obsessions of the IMF and World Bank, he emphasized building up local economic capacity. Against austerity and corporate domination, he called for autonomous development by weighting the playing field against the few.
Resisting Globalization and Militarization
Walden received the prestigious 2003 Right Livelihood Award, also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize. In his acceptance speech, he referenced Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, connecting early attempts to embrace what Polanyi called the “stark utopia” of the ideology of the self-regulating market with the emergence of fascism.
Focusing at the intersection of militarization and globalization, with the U.S. empire at the forefront of both processes, Bello has been preoccupied with holding Washington responsible and refutes the increasing appropriation of an anti-globalist message by the far right.
To hold the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq responsible for its crimes, he worked to establish the World Tribunal on Iraq. Central throughout this period has been upholding the rights of Lebanon, and those of the Palestinian people, against Israel’s U.S.-supported violations of sovereignty and denial of the rights of self-determination.
Though largely involved with movements outside the Philippines, Walden was unexpectedly called back to run for office as part of a left-formation, Akbayan, in 2009. Reflecting on the land-grabbing politics of the Philippine oligarchy, Walden chronicles in Global Battlefields the export of America’s machine politics to the patron-client culture of Philippine elites.
He saw the emergence of leaders such as Joseph Estrada, elected Philippine President in 1998, a preview of things to come. And while revelations of corruption and inter-elite rivalry eventually led to impeachment proceedings against Estrada, it was only through the military’s withdrawal of support and popular protest that he stepped down.
Sadly, the new administration of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, which Akbayan initially supported, turned out to be even more corrupt. While in Congress, Bello pushed ahead support for agrarian reform and embarked on what he called his first real electoral campaign. He witnessed the depths of Philippine poverty in the countryside.
Later Bello joined forces with the Liberal Party, pushing forward the Reproductive Health Bill in Congress against powerful forces, including the Catholic Church. Subsequent work involved fighting international slavery and sexual abuse. This involved taking up the cause of the treatment of overseas Filipino migrant workers and their struggle against being viewed as disposable, especially in the repressive Gulf states.
Bello also continued efforts to promote a more peaceful world, at once organizing against China’s attempts to violate Philippine sovereignty in the South China sea, while attempting to terminate the Visiting Forces Agreement between the Philippines and the United States that threatens to draw the Washington into a nuclear war with China.
Although Bello resigned from the Congress over his party’s continued support of President Beningo Aquino III, he came back into politics by running for Senate in 2016, only to see the election of the charismatic leader Rodrigo Duterte, whom Bello saw as a fascist original. Duterte came to power on a vicious anti-crime slate and after being elected murdered tens of thousands through extra-judicial killings. Duterte famously said Hitler killed millions; he would be happy to follow with killing as many drug dealers.
Yet Duterte’s approval ratings were running at some 75% after leaving office. Although now facing charges at the Hague, still has great support in the Philippines.
“A Luta Continua”
Walden agreed to run for President in 2022 against the ticket of Sara Duterte and Bongbong Marcos, Jr., as the latter continued the dynastic politics of their dictatorial parents. In the aftermath of his loss, Bello was arrested for criticizing Duterte.
Walden ends the memoir by talking about his award from Amnesty International Philippines as the Most Distinguished Human Rights Defender Awardee, and reflecting on his efforts to unplug people from the matrix of neoliberal illusions.
As one who had a chance to get to know and work under Bello at Focus, I find his writing reflecting his acute skills of leadership and analysis. A powerful voice from the Global South and one that is internationalist in focus, Bello is reflective about his experiences and clear about the suffering that occurs under the present brutal capitalism system.
Bello is a voice of clarity about the importance of analysis, movements and vision as he struggles to create a better and alternate world. His closing chapters, “A Luta Continua” and “A Reckoning,” show him as was said about Giovanni Arrighi, to be “one of the finest lights through the period through which he lived.”
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