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GLOBAL BATTLEFIELDS: A NO-HOLDS-BARRED RECKONING  
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Max Elbaum
April 14, 2025
Convergence
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_ Walden Bello’s memoir wrestles with tough questions of political
strategy and radical ethics in a world full of uprisings, wars,
obscene inequality, and aggressive counter-revolutionary movements. _

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_Global Battlefields: Memoir of a Legendary Public Intellectual from
the Global South_
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by Walden Bello. (Clarity Press, 2025)

For starters, Walden Bello’s memoir takes the reader inside some of
the biggest fights against dictatorship, exploitation, and empire over
the last 60 years. 

_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)
[[link removed]], 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.

_Max Elbaum is a member of the Convergence Magazine editorial board
and the author of Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to
Lenin, Mao and Che 
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Books, Third Edition, 2018), a history of the 1970s-‘80s ‘New
Communist Movement’ in which he was an active participant. He is
also a co-editor, with Linda Burnham and María Poblet, of Power
Concedes Nothing: How Grassroots Organizing Wins Elections 
[[link removed]](OR Books, 2022)._

_Convergence is a magazine for radical insights. We work with
organizers and activists on the frontlines of today’s most pressing
struggles to produce articles, videos and podcasts that sharpen our
collective practice by lifting up stories from the grassroots and
making space for reflection and study. Our community of readers,
viewers, and content producers are united in our purpose: winning
multi-racial democracy and a radically democratic economy._

* Left Strategies
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* Chile
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* Salvador Allende
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* the Philippines
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* Communist Party of the Philippines
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* Union of Democratic Philippines
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* Ferdinand Marcos
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