We live in the ruins of 1991. At that time we witnessed the toppling of the Soviet Union in what was once called the “second world” and corresponding to it, the diminution of the welfare state in the “first world,” the exhaustion of various national liberation projects in the “third world,” and the consequent unfettered expansion of neoliberal globalization across the planet.

Progressive writers and activists have grappled with the significance of these events ever since. The challenge for the left—perhaps most powerfully articulated in the World Social Forum process—has been to produce alternatives to the reign of neoliberalism and imperialism. Numerous visions have been articulated, and many protests have taken place. There have been significant forms of progressive statist resistance, most notably Bolivia’s socialist-led government, as well as innovative theoretical and practical alternatives such as food sovereignty, degrowth, ecosocialism, ecofeminism, numerous forms of emancipatory politics, and the calls for deglobalization, but none of have been able to dethrone the dominant economic ideology of our time.

Neoliberalism’s genius has been its ability to continuously resurrect itself in the face of opposition and the many international crises of the past thirty years: the 1997 Asian economic crisis, the 2008 global financial crisis, and the 2020-2023 coronavirus pandemic. No doubt neoliberalism will continue to re-invigorate itself during the current reign of the anti-globalist Donald Trump.

So how do leftists construct effective local, regional, or global alternatives to the dominant order? The left has four obvious “allies”: accelerating economic inequality, neoliberal’s perpetual structural crises, conservatives’ inability to solve these breakdowns, and the endurance of progressive social movements, political parties, and writers. 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.

The text recounts 55 years of militancy against the various agents of neoliberalism and imperialism: President Marcos in the Philippines, US militarism, the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank. The text also includes his reminiscences about his family, his loves—most poignantly his deceased wife Kho—and tributes to activists of his era. His cohort has been one of the most long-lived generations of progressives the world has seen. They are worth studying for the inspirational, resilient, romantic, revolutionary lives that many of them have lived.

Bello has written 25 books on international development and resistance to neoliberal capitalism and imperialism. He is best known for his concept of “deglobalization,” his call for re-embedding the economy’s imperatives under the aegis of social ones: producing for domestic needs rather than export markets, focusing on effectiveness as opposed to efficiency, and allowing for diverse economic models rather than a single free market template. His alternative program rests on an interpretation of globalization as not only a capitalist, colonial project, but also as a hyper-centralizing one. While globalization decentralizes production it concentrates administration of production under the global governance of institutions, corporations, banks and the most powerful states. This consolidation of administration eliminates the ability of poor countries to bargain among various options. Bello contends that this possibility of playing off one power against another was crucial for many developing countries to ascend during their most economically successful period of the twentieth century: the Trente Glorieuses of 1945-1975.

Global Battlefields begins with the admission that most of his, and his generation’s, struggles of the past two generations have ended in failure. There have been successes: protests against the global governance institutions helped stall the institutionalization of a planetary free-market. Even so, the neoliberal regime remains firmly in place, perhaps more firmly and internationally than any prior economic regime.

It is understandable that Bello, and many whose writing and activism were nurtured the 1960s, would experience their political careers and the story of the left in their times as a history of defeat. But this interpretation must be historicized. A century ago, those who were in their 20s in the 1920s would spend their lives witnessing left-wing revolutions, successful anti-imperialist movements, the defeat of fascism, and the expansion of the welfare state. By the 1960s they had lived through more victories than losses. Bello’s generation, and all of us since, have had a different, more disillusioning experience: the downward arc of the spiral, the failures that often follow success.

One thing that stands out when reading Bello’s book is his unwillingness to be trapped by any one political ideology. He continuously rethinks his assumptions as the historical reality in the Philippines and the world evolves and devolves. Bello has moved from undergraduate existentialist rebellion against religion to working as a member of the Communist Party of the Philippines (1974-1989) to a critical leftism concerned with individual and human rights within broader collective movements, to co-founder of the prominent activist-intellectual think tank “Focus on the Global South,” to politics as a member of the House of Representatives of the Philippines from 2007 until 2015, in each phase distinguished as a leading activist against the key institutions of neoliberalism and imperialism. His views change, but not as abrupt breaks, like those who switched from socialism to conservatism or relativism, but ultimately as an ever-evolving vision that becomes more accommodating and yet also more innovative in terms of its concepts and strategies. This is a key lesson that progressives need to learn from our history: the journey of the left is not simply one of accomplishments and defeats but also one of continuous reinvention as the terrain changes.

Bello’s book is timely. Rebellions need theories and tactics but also models of perseverant, optimistic, progressive lives especially in our era of proliferating threats. Bello’s analytical rigor illuminates the trials that he and his allies confront. He notes that the new normal is polycrisis: an intersection of climate change, unrelenting capitalist expansion, increasing inequality between and within states, and the perpetual drive to imperial violence. The right, and especially the far-right, has understood that their struggle must be fought on the street, online, and in institutional politics. Bello has also recognized and lived, better than most, that the left must adapt an analogous set of tactics: struggles must always be intensified on old and new fronts. And he has documented his quest with moral clarity, humour, and romance to boot.

Thomas Ponniah is the co-editor of Another World is Possible: World Social Forum proposals for an alternative globalization and The Revolution in Venezuela: social and political change under Chávez.