Patricio Abinales

[In the US, Global Battlefields: Memoir of a Legendary Public Intellectual from the Global South by Walden Bello. Clarity Press, 2025.]

Walden Bello (Source: Transnational Insitute)

No one had heard of Walden Bello among activists and cadres fighting the Marcos dictatorship inside the Philippines in the 1970s. His name only began to be mentioned in the early 1980s when copies of his two books, Logistics of Repression and Other Essays: The Role of US Assistance in Consolidating the Martial Law Regime in the Philippines (co-edited with Severina Rivera, published by the Friends of the Filipino People in 1977) and Development Debacle: The World Bank in the Philippines (co-authored with Davis Kinley and Elaine Elinson, and published by the Institute for Food and Development Policy in 1981), reached the Philippines and were promptly photocopied and distributed all over. (Apologies to Walden and the publishers for my piracy; I photocopied the books and distributed them to the underground while I was a research assistant at the UP Third World Studies Center.)

We did not believe he was Filipino. After all, “Walden” sounded like a white guy, what Hawaiians call a haole from the mainland. But once we met him and discovered he was Pinoy, the jest within the movement was that perhaps he was really “Waldeng,” an Ilocano who Americanized his name for the Western audience.

These thigh-slappers aside, there was subtle discomfort over how Walden’s political trajectory diverged from his Philippine-bred comrades. Schooled in Stalin’s and Mao’s mindsets that revolutions in the 20^th century had to be national undertakings with proletarian internationalism conveniently put in the backburner, Filipino communists had a hard time locating him in their revolutionary vista.

The Party’s first line of leaders were graduates or students of the University of the Philippines (UP). Walden matriculated in the Jesuit school in UP’s backyard, which was notorious for producing moderates and social democrats. Growing up in an artists’ islet of Laguna Lake, he wasn’t a probinsiyano like many leaders of the Communist Party of the Philippines. After college, he was off for graduate studies at Ivy League Princeton, experiencing the last waves of the anti-Vietnam War, anti-establishment youth revolt. He also went to Chile, where he witnessed Salvador Allende’s “doomed enterprise to move the country on a ‘peaceful road to socialism,’” and left deeply committed to opposing US assistance to the Marcos dictatorship.

His future comrades were politicized initially in the protests against the Philippines’ servility to America’s failed Vietnam adventure. Then, the bankruptcy of the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas emboldened Jose Ma. Sison and 17 of his comrades to “re-establish” a Mao-inspired CPP. Marcos broke the rulebook of cacique democracy by stealing his way to a second term. The oligarchic system began to erode even as the economy plunged. The subsequent student-police street battles radicalized the young. They provided the new party with its first generation of cadres. Marcos broke the impasse by declaring martial law. As Sison predicted, the “US-Marcos dictatorship” would become the revolution’s best recruiter.

But the revolutionaries at home were inward-looking. Their primary concern was to win national state power; proletarian internationalism could wait. The People’s Republic of China was the only fraternal party that could be trusted; the rest of the radical world – especially the USSR – were revisionist renegades.

Despite these antipodal beginnings, Walden joined the CPP’s US-based anti-dictatorship support group. He was great at solidarity work, collaborating with progressives of different political colors. He and his “allies” worked well in staging the usual protests and sit-ins but also staging acts of political burlesque to expose the complicity of allegedly respectable institutions like the World Bank in propping up the dictatorship.

He shuttled between the realpolitik of Washington, DC, and the post-1968 politics of San Francisco, mischievously describing it as being “exposed to both the hard power of a late imperial society and its libidinal side.”

Not even the unraveling of his collective caused by differences over organizing strategies in the U.S. Filipino community, made him waver. His international connections were far more extensive than those of his fellow cadres in the US and even his political officers back home. The CPP, as the upcoming memoir of Ed Quitoriano tells us, was focused on getting arms first from China and North Korea. Its international liaison offices in Europe were poorly managed, the staff prone to infighting (this was confirmed by Maya Butalid’s excellent autobiography, Chasing Windmills, Olympia Publishers, 2022).

This dogmatic view of international work as a mere source of largesse for the revolution and not a genuine effort to build international solidarity limited the Party’s reach. The CPP abroad ended up being among clusters of small, loud, but politically inconsequential sects.

The political divorce arising from the clash between Walden’s internationalism and the CPP’s provincialism was inevitable. Walden came home in 1986 to witness a Left in disarray. Marginalized by Cory Aquino in 1986, the CPP degenerated into warring factions. His first contribution to the debates only deepened the wounds. He wrote about the bloody purge, Kampanyang Ahos, that destroyed the Mindanao Commission, the largest and most dynamic of the CPP’s regional bodies.

He was a fierce combatant, crossing swords with his fellow legislators while being pursued by Imelda Marcos, whom he once likened to Miss Piggy.

It was not a good way of inserting oneself into the movement he had served for 15 years. Walden eventually sided with cadres who rejected Sison’s Maoist restoration, and the Chairman’s acolytes took to calling him names: reformist, pseudo-revolutionary, social democrat.

The “rejectionists” merged with disgruntled social democrats and other leftwing grouplets to form Akbayan, and the party-list won enough votes to send Walden (and Etta Rosales) to the House of Representatives from 2009 to 2015. Again, he stood out as he fought for progressive measures to become law (there were lots of frustrations).

He was a fierce combatant, crossing swords with his fellow legislators while being pursued by Imelda Marcos, whom he once likened to Miss Piggy. He accused President Arroyo and her subordinates “pigs” of corruption, prompting his “honorable” (sic) colleagues to have him investigated by the “ethics committee” (sic!).

But parliamentary politics was unsurprisingly not for him. Too many compromises. Walden was uncomfortable with Akbayan breaking bread with President Benigno Aquino III. Still, he supported the latter’s reformist agenda. But after PNoy did not budge on the issue of the presidential development funds (a significant source of spoils) and the President’s mishandling of the Mamapasano massacre and his refusal to acknowledge the Americans’ role in the tragedy, he resigned from Congress – the first to do so in the institution’s history.

Academia and his international comrades saved him from becoming politically irrelevant. Walden became one of the leaders of the anti-globalization movement (he still is). He produced more books at the UP Department of Sociology and trained a new generation of progressives.

Walden retired from academia after 15 years of service but remained a tireless anti-globalization activist: 15 books at 50 and 18 by the time he reached his late 70s. These books against empire and capitalism are recognized in the Philippines and abroad (they top my list in the political economy section of my courses on the Philippines). The International Studies Association named him “Outstanding Public Scholar” for seamlessly fusing being an academic and a public intellectual.

His activism led to his being given the Right Livelihood Award, the global left’s version of the Nobel Prize. Compared to him, the late Sison never achieved the same stature. The CPP’s founding chairman complained to Butalid once that he wished Filipinos honored him the same way South Africans revered Nelson Mandela.

This book exudes Walden’s limitless energy, intellectual power, and political irreverence. I am all the more delightfully surprised at his candidness: from confessing his sexual adventures (discovering pleasure in shaking hands with the milkman, and his first dalliance being with a sex worker) to impishly recalling his fierce exchanges with those in power (his debate with World Bank president Robert McNamara inspires). He can remain friends with all his detractors, including his Maoist critics. He is forgiving of them because he thinks there is still enough goodness in the Cause to look past the insults.

Upon closing the book, I asked myself with whom one could compare Walden Bello among the long lines of revolutionaries of the 20^th 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. The sole difference, perhaps, is that Trotsky was cleaved by Stalin’s henchman. Filipino Stalinists still regard Walden as an ally, a flawed one, but an ally, nevertheless. He will be alright.

Patricio N. Abinales