Walden Bello'nun kısa bir mülakatı / Walden Bello's Brief Autobiography July 09, 2008

Walden Bello’nun doktora ve yüksek lisansımı yapıp, yedi seneye yakın kaldığım bölüme geldiğini öğrendiği sıralarda, ben de tez araştırmamı yapmak üzere Türkiye’ye geri dönüyordum. O zaman tuttuğum blogda onun hakkında çıkan bir yazıyı paylaşmıştım.

Antipode’a verdiği bir röportajdan.

Daha sonra, büyük şans eseri, tezimi savunduktan sonra Türkiye’ye geri dönerken aynı otobüsteydik. Hep memlekete geri dönerken Walden Bello’yla karşılaşmam da bir tesadüf diyelim. Çok nazik, çok kibar, çok dost canlısı bir insandı. Kaldı ki, genelde çekingen bir insanımdır. Uçağım çok erken saatlerdeydi, zaten utangacımdır, hiç Walden, çok takdir edilesi bir insansın diyemeden gitmek zorunda kalmıştım.

Önce Türkçe çevirisini bırakıyorum, Antipode mülakatının:

Neden Mücadele Ediyorum?

Bu soru bana sık sık soruluyor. Bu, sizi durdurup temel ilkelere geri götüren türden bir soru.

Lisans öğrenimim sırasında bazı yazılarım ekonomik ve sosyal konulardı, ancak daha çok sevdiğim edebiyat ve felsefeyle ilgileniyordum. Bir aktivist olarak geç açıldım. 1960'ların ortalarında Filipinler'de üniversitede oldukça çalışkan bir öğrenciydim. 1970'lerde ABD'ye yüksek lisans yapmak için gittiğimde, Vietnam Savaşı'nın etkisiyle bir aktivist oldum. Sosyolojiye daldım ve Princeton'daki savaş karşıtı protestolara giderek daha fazla dahil olurken derslerimi tamamladım.

İlk tutuklanmam kişisel bir dönüm noktasıydı. Biliyorsunuz, ABD'de yabancı bir öğrenci olarak bulunuyordum ve o zamanlar yabancı öğrencilerin siyasi faaliyetlere katılmasına karşı oldukça katı kurallar vardı. Kesinlikle, protesto nedeniyle tutuklanıp hüküm giyerseniz, eve gönderilirdiniz. 1971'de Amerika'nın Laos'a girmesi sırasında, kampüsteki Savunma Analizleri Enstitüsü'nün ablukaya alındığı bir eylem vardı. Sivil itaatsizliğe katılanları desteklemek için gittim, ancak polisin protestoculara nasıl sert davrandığını görünce, kendiliğinden onlara katıldım ve tutuklandım ve daha sonra izinsiz giriş ve tutuklamaya direnmekten hüküm giydim. Sınır dışı edilmeyi bekliyordum ama olmadı. Ancak psikolojik bir çizgiyi aşmıştım.

1972'de Allende hükümeti döneminde Şili'deki gecekondu mahallelerinde siyasi örgütlenme üzerine tezimi yazmak için gittim. Başkent Santiago'yu çevreleyen birkaç gecekondu mahallesinde yaklaşık üç ay geçirdim ve yükselişte olanın devrim değil, karşı devrim olduğunu fark ettim. Karşı devrimin dinamiklerinden etkilenmiştim ve aynı zamanda onu inceleyerek edineceğim bilgilerin, kendimi kesinlikle bir parçası olarak hissettiğim sola faydalı olacağını hissediyordum. Bu yüzden tez konumu gecekondu örgütlenmesinden karşı devrimin yükselişine kaydırdım ve fanatik Allende karşıtı olan elit ve orta sınıf insanlarla görüşmeye başladım. Tabii ki kendimi bir Princeton araştırmacısı olarak tanıttım, ancak konuştuğum kişilerin çoğu, esmer tenli birinin Şili'de Fidel Castro'nun bir Küba ajanı dışında bir sıfatla bulunabileceğini düşünemiyorlardı ve iki kez dövülmekten kıl payı kurtuldum.

Yine de, bir kişi siyasi olarak angaje olurken, bir entelektüel olarak sosyal gerçekliğe saygı duyması ve onu kısa vadeli partizan amaçlar için çarpıtmaması gerektiğini hissettim. Karşı devrim kazanıyorsa, özellikle orta sınıfların neden onun içine çekildiğini anlamak daha da önemliydi. Tez, Şili'de, 1920'lerin başında İtalya'da ve 1920'lerin sonu ile 1930'ların başında Almanya'da karşı devrimci hareketlerin yükselişinin karşılaştırmalı bir analizi olarak sona erdi. Bunu ABD'de Şili için dayanışma çalışmaları yaparken yazdım.

1972'de Filipinler'de sıkıyönetim ilan edildiğinde Şili'deydim. ABD'ye döndüğümde, hemen sürgün siyasetine daldım. Washington, Marcos'un en önemli destekçisi olduğundan, ABD örgütlenmek için çok stratejik bir alan haline geldi. Bu yüzden tezimi bitirirken bile, Princeton ve Washington DC arasında mekik dokuyor, Marcos'a askeri ve ekonomik yardımı kesmeyi amaçlayan kararlı bir lobi haline gelecek olan şeyi kurmaya yardımcı oluyordum. Severina Rivera ile birlikte yazdığım ve 1977'de çıkan "Baskının Lojistiği: Filipinler'deki askeri diktatörlüğe ABD yardımı" adlı çalışma, Marcos rejimine ABD desteğinin farklı kanallarını ortaya koydu.

Washington'dayken, Marcos'a yapılan ekonomik yardımın büyük kısmının ikili kanallardan değil, Dünya Bankası aracılığıyla gittiğini fark ettim. Ancak, Dünya Bankası'nın Filipinler'deki operasyonları çok şeffaf değildi. Bu dev kurumun ne yaptığını anlamaya çalıştığınızda, tek elde ettiğiniz şey dezenfekte edilmiş basın bültenleriydi. Yani Bankanın ne yaptığını öğrenmek için Bankaya girip belgeleri çalmak zorunda kaldık. Bunu üç yıl boyunca, Şükran Günü ve Noel Günü gibi kimsenin olmadığı günlerde Bankayı hedef alarak yaptık. Görevlerden dönen yorgun Banka personeli gibi davrandık, kravatlarımız eğriydi ve "kimliklerimiz" için el yordamıyla ararken, gardiyanlar endişelenmeyin diyerek bizi içeri alıyorlardı. Sonunda, ülkedeki her Banka projesi hakkında 3000 sayfa gizli belge ve Bankanın Marcos'a muhalefet konusunda gerginleştiğini gösteren siyasi risk analizi elde ettik. Filipinler'de Kalkınma Fiyaskosu: Dünya Bankası kitabı 1982'de çıktı. Filipinler'de yeraltı bir çok satanlar listesinde yer aldı ve insanlar bana orta sınıfı Marcos'a karşı harekete geçiren kitaplardan biri olduğunu söylüyor. Bu bölümden çıkardığım bir ders, gerçekten iyi araştırma yapmak için bazen yasayı çiğnemeniz gerektiğiydi. Yakalansaydık, meslektaşlarım ve ben hırsızlıktan 25 yıl hapis cezası alabilirdik. Aslında, gizli Banka belgelerini nasıl ele geçirdiğimizin hikayesinin, cezai suçlar için zaman aşımı süresi geçene kadar beklemesi gerekiyordu.

ABD'deyken, Filipinler Komünist Partisi'ne (CPP) katıldım ve sonraki birkaç yılı atandığım yere giderek ve partinin gerekli gördüğü şeyi yaparak geçirdim. 1975'te doktora tezimi tamamladıktan sonra tam zamanlı bir aktivist oldum ve sonraki 19 yıl boyunca akademiye dönmeyecektim. Birçok genç Filipinli için, 1970'lerde ve 1980'lerde diktatörlükle etkili bir şekilde mücadele etmek, o zamanlar en etkili direniş örgütü olan CPP'ye katılmak anlamına geliyordu. İlham vericiydi ve disiplinli olsa bile esnek ve yenilikçiydi. Bir yandan bana örgütsel beceriler kazandırırken, diğer yandan şeylere dair analizimi dinliyordu. Parti rehberliğinde, Washington'daki çalışmaları organize etmeye, ülke çapında sıkıyönetim karşıtı koalisyonu kurmaya, uluslararası bir dayanışma ağı kurmaya yardımcı oldum ve sivil itaatsizlik konusunda uzmanlaştım, Marcos hükümetinin konsolosluklarını ve elçiliklerini ele geçirdim. Bu eylemlerin en akılda kalıcı olanı, 1978'de San Francisco'daki Filipinler Konsolosluğunu beş saat boyunca işgal eden bir ekibe liderlik ettiğim zamandı. Bir SWAT ekibi tarafından tahliye edildik, tutuklandık ve sonunda hapiste zaman geçirdik, buradan da ancak bir haftalık bir açlık grevine girdikten sonra çıktık.

14 yıl üye olduktan sonra 1980'lerin sonunda partiden ayrıldım. Neden? 1980'lerin ortalarında, şüpheli askeri muhbirlerin saflarını temizlemek için birkaç tasfiye gerçekleştirdi. Kampanyalar sonunda 2000'den fazla can aldı. Şok oldum ve olanları araştırmaya karar verdim. Bu tasfiyelere kurban veya cellat olarak katılan onlarca kişiyle yapılan görüşmeler, bana sadece partide sağlam bir adalet sisteminin korkunç eksikliğini değil, aynı zamanda insanlara yalnızca sınıf konumları ve siyasetleri için değer veren bir bakış açısındaki sorunu da ortaya koydu. Bir kez karşı devrimci olarak etiketlendikten sonra, "halkın" sizin için uygun gördüğü herhangi bir cezaya tabi olan düşmandınız.

Tasfiyeler, bir zamanlar esnek ve yenilikçi bir parti olan partinin doktriner, Stalinist bir makineye dönüşmesinin işaretiydi. Bu örgütün, yalnızca devrimci yaratıcılığı boğmakla kalmayıp aynı zamanda Sovyetler Birliği, Çin ve Kamboçya'daki çok sayıda sıradan vatandaşla birlikte kendi halkını da yok etmeye başlayan aynı solcu otoriterliğe dönüştüğünü görmek yürek burkan bir şeydi. Parti, tasfiyelerle ilgili çalışmamı kamuoyuna açıkladığım için beni asla affetmedi. 2005 yılında "karşı devrimci" olarak etiketlendim ve bazıları parti liderliğindeki Yeni Halk Ordusu tarafından zaten suikaste uğramış 14 kişilik bir listeye alındım.

1987'de, Frances Moore Lappe ve Joe Collins tarafından 1975'te kurulan San Francisco'daki Food First veya Gıda ve Kalkınma Politikası Enstitüsü'ne katıldım. Bu, yeni sanayileşen ülkelerin (NIC'ler) ayın gözdesi olduğu ve gelişmekte olan ülkelere Doğu Asya "kaplan ekonomilerinin" yolunu izlemeleri söylendiği bir zamandı. Bence, gizemi çözülmesi gereken bir modeldi. 1990'da ben ve Stephanie Rosenfeld, NIC modeline kapsamlı bir eleştiri olan Sıkıntılı Ejderhalar: Asya'nın Mucize Ekonomileri Krizde kitabını çıkardık. 1997'de Asya mali krizi patlak verdiğinde, Ejderhalar'da krizi altı yıl önceden tahmin ettiğim söylendi. Pek değil. Çevre ve tarımdaki krizlerle birlikte ortaya çıkan bir ekonomik yapı krizini ayrıntılı olarak anlattım, ancak finans alanında patlak verecek krizi öngörmemiştim. Kitabın mesajı, NIC'ler yoksulluk içinde yaşayan insan sayısını azaltmayı başarmış ve kapsamlı bir sanayileşme sağlamış olsa da, ihracata yönelik sanayileşmenin sürdürülebilir olmadığı ve diğer gelişmekte olan ülkeler için bir model olmadığıydı. Bu mesajın tüm etkileri, ihracata yönelik kalkınma stratejilerinin her yerde krizde olduğu bu günlerde nihayet ortaya çıkıyor.

1993'te Food First'ten ayrıldıktan sonra, Filipinler Üniversitesi'ne sosyoloji profesörü olarak katıldım. Doktoramı aldıktan yaklaşık 20 yıl sonra akademiye geri dönmüştüm. Aynı zamanda, Kamal Malhotra ve ben Bangkok'ta Küresel Güney'e Odaklan'ı kurduk. Odaklanma, küreselleşme çağında kuzey-güney konuları üzerinde çalışan Asya merkezli bir araştırma, savunuculuk ve eylem örgütü olması amaçlanmıştı. Odaklanma'yı 1995 yılında, Dünya Ticaret Örgütü'nün kurulduğu aynı yıl kurduk ve neredeyse hemen kendimizi küresel yönetim sisteminin mihenk taşı olarak tasarlanan bu kuruma ve entelektüel iskeleti olarak hizmet veren neoliberalizm doktrinine karşı konumlandırdık. 1997'de patlak veren Asya mali krizinin merkez üssündeydik ve Odaklanma, Uluslararası Para Fonu'nun (IMF) sert bir eleştirmeni ve sermaye kontrollerinin savunucusu olarak hızla ün kazandı. 1999'da Seattle'daki DTÖ'nün üçüncü bakanlar toplantısının ve 2003'te Cancun'daki beşinci bakanlar toplantısının çökmesine katkıda bulunan küresel sivil toplum saldırısının bir parçasıydık.

Bugün, DTÖ'nün Doha Ticaret Müzakereleri Turu'nun çöküşü ve IMF ve Dünya Bankası'nın meşruiyet kriziyle birlikte, Odaklanma, mevcut çok taraflı küresel yönetim sistemine ve neoliberal ticaret ve kalkınma yaklaşımlarına alternatifler üretmeye öncelik vermek için çalışmalarını yeniden yönlendiriyor. Yaklaşımımıza, katılımı, katılan ulusal ekonomilerin parçalanmasına değil, güçlenmesine yol açan, gerçekten adil bir uluslararası ekonomiyi getirmek için şirket odaklı küreselleşme kurumlarını sökmenin gerekliliğini yakalamak için "küreselleşmeden çıkış" adı veriliyor.
…
İnsanların analizlerinde kapitalizmin ve ABD gücünün gücünü vurgulamalarını anlıyorum. Ancak, ABD'yi ve küresel sermayeyi küçümsememekle birlikte, onları abartmamalıyız. Küreselleşme geriliyor ve ABD, Irak'ta kazanamayacağı bir savaşta kanlı ve aşırı yayılmış durumda. Aşırı üretim, aşırı yayılma ve meşruiyet üçlü krizi, üretimi, siyaseti ve çevire olan ilişkimizi organize etmenin alternatif yolları için alan açıyor. Bu çok heyecan verici bir konjonktür.

Öyleyse başlangıçta sorduğumuz soruya geri dönelim: neden mücadele ediyorum? Sanırım mücadele ediyorum çünkü insanın hayatıyla değerli bir şey yapması gerektiğini düşünüyorum. Bunda kahramanca bir şey yok. Sadece insan olmak için yapmalısınız. Bu, özellikle marjinalleştirilmiş ve ezilenler olmak üzere, insan kardeşlerimize borçlu olduğumuz bir şey. Dünyada, sahip olduğumuz bu tür sömürü ve yoksulluğun uzun zaman önce ortadan kaldırılmış olması gereken bir durumdayız. İnsanlar daha adil yapılar tasarlayabilmelidir. Ve bu yüzden insan bu sürecin bir parçası olmak zorunda. Çünkü ya sürece dahil olur ve kendinize sadık olursunuz ya da ondan kopar ve sadece bir seyirci olursunuz. Ve bu, bence, kendine sadık olmamak anlamına gelir. Yani, insanın neden benim yaptığım türden bir işe girdiği sorusunun cevabı, yapılacak tek doğru şey bu olduğu içindir. Bunda büyük bir ilham ve gizli bir kahramanlık yoktur. Bir tür şehitlik ve görkemli bir şey değil - sadece saf dürüstlük. Beni motive eden şey en azından bu.

From Antipode, Vol. 40, Iss. 3
Why am I engaged?
 
I am often asked this question. It’s the sort of question that stops you in your tracks and gets you back to the fundamentals.



Some of my writing as an undergraduate was on economic and social issues but I was more into literature and philosophy, which I loved. I was a late bloomer as an activist. I was pretty much a nose-to-the-grindstone student in college in the Philippines in the mid 1960s. It was only when I went to the States for graduate work in the 1970s that I became an activist owing to the impact of the Vietnam War. I dug into sociology and did my comprehensives even as I got more and more engaged in anti-war protests at Princeton.


My first arrest was a milestone personally. You know, I was in the US as a foreign student, and they had pretty strong rules then against foreign students becoming engaged in political activities. Definitely, if you were arrested for protesting and convicted, you were sent home. During the American foray into Laos in 1971, there was a blockade of the Institute for Defense Analysis on campus. I went to show support for those engaged in civil disobedience, but when I saw how the police were manhandling the protesters, I spontaneously joined them and was arrested and later convicted for trespassing and resisting arrest. I fully expected to be deported but wasn’t. But I had crossed a psychological line.


I went to do my dissertation on political organizing in the shantytowns in Chile during the Allende government in 1972. I spent about three months in several urban slums ringing the urban capital, Santiago, when I realized that it was no longer the revolution that was on the ascendant but the counterrevolution. I was intrigued by the dynamics of the counterrevolution at that same time that I felt that what I would gather from studying it would be useful to the left, which I certainly felt myself part of. So I shifted my thesis topic from shantytown organizing to the rise of the counterrevolution and started interviewing elite and middle class folks that were rabid anti-Allendistas. I of course passed myself off as a Princeton researcher, but many of those I talked to could not conceive of a brown-skinned person being in Chile except as a Cuban agent of Fidel Castro, and I narrowly escaped being beaten twice.
I felt though that while one was engaged politically, as an intellectual one had to respect social reality and not distort it for short-term partisan purposes. If the counterrevolution was winning, it was all the more important to understand why the middle classes in particular were being swept up in it. The thesis ended up as a comparative analysis of the rise of counterrevolutionary movements in Chile, Italy in the early 1920s, and Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s. I wrote it up while I was engaged in solidarity work for Chile in the US.

The declaration of martial law in the Philippines in 1972 found me in Chile. When I got back to the US, I immediately plunged into exile politics. Since Washington was the key supporter of Marcos, the US became a very strategic area to organize in. So even as I was finishing my thesis, I was shuttling between Princeton and Washington, DC, helping set up what would become a determined lobby seeking a congressional cutoff of military and economic aid to Marcos. A study I co-wrote with Severina Rivera, “The logistics of repression: US aid to the military dictatorship in the Philippines”, which came out in 1977, laid out the different channels of US support for the Marcos regime.


While in Washington, I noticed that the greater part of economic aid to Marcos was not going through bilateral channels but through the World Bank. However, World Bank operations in the Philippines were very non-transparent. When you tried to figure out what this giant institution was up to, all you got were sanitized press releases. So to find out what the Bank was doing, we had to break into the Bank to steal documents. This we did over a period of three years, hitting the Bank on those days when nobody was around, like Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day. We posed as tired Bank staff coming back from missions, with ties askew, and as we fumbled for our “IDs”, the guards would just say, don’t worry, and wave us through. In the end, we got 3000 pages worth of confidential documents on every Bank project in the country as well as political risk analysis showing the Bank was getting nervous about the opposition to Marcos. The book Development Debacle: the World Bank in the Philippines came out in 1982. It became an underground bestseller in the Philippines and people tell me that it was one of the books that mobilized the middle class against Marcos. One lesson I learned from this episode was that to really do good research, you sometimes have to break the law. Had we been caught, my colleagues and I could have gotten 25 years for theft. In fact, the story of how we really got secret Bank documents had to wait until way after the statute of limitations for criminal offenses had passed.


While in the US, I joined the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and spent the next few years going to where I was assigned and doing what the party thought was necessary. I became a full-time activist upon completing my PhD thesis in 1975 and would not return to academia for the next 19 years. For many young Filipinos, to effectively fight the dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s meant joining the CPP, which was then the most effective resistance organization. It was inspiring, and even as it was disciplined, it was flexible and innovative. It listened to my analysis of things, while at the same time imparting organizational skills to me. Under party guidance, I helped to organize the work in Washington, create the nationwide anti-martial law coalition, set up an international solidarity network, and became a specialist in civil disobedience, taking over consulates and embassies of the Marcos government. The most memorable of these actions was in 1978, when I led a team that occupied the Philippine Consulate in San Francisco for five hours. We were evicted by a SWAT team, arrested, and eventually spent time in jail, from which we got out only after engaging in a one-week-long hunger strike.


I left the party in the late 1980s, after 14 years as a member. Why? In the mid 1980s, it carried out several purges to clean the ranks of suspected military informers. The campaigns eventually took over 2000 lives. I was shocked and decided to investigate what happened. Interviews with scores of people who had participated in these purges either as victims or executioners revealed to me not only the appalling lack of a sound system of justice in the party but also the problem with an outlook that values people only for their class position and politics. Once you were labeled a counterrevolutionary, you were the enemy, subject to whatever punishment the “people” deemed fit for you.


The purges marked the degeneration of what was once a flexible and innovative party into a doctrinal, Stalinist machine. It was heart-rending, seeing this organization degenerate into the same leftist authoritarianism that had not only strangled revolutionary creativity but also begun wiping out its own people along with huge numbers of ordinary citizens in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia. The party never forgave me for publicly coming out with my study of the purges. In 2005, I was labeled a “counterrevolutionary” and put on a list of 14 people, some of whom had already been assassinated by the party-led New People’s Army.


In 1987, I joined Food First or the Institute for Food and Development Policy in San Francisco, which had been founded in 1975 by Frances Moore Lappe and Joe Collins. This was a time when the newly industrializing countries (NICs) were the flavor of the month, and developing countries were being told to follow the path of the East Asian “tiger economies”. It was, in my view, a model that needed to be demystified. In 1990, I and Stephanie Rosenfeld came out with Dragons in Distress: Asia’s Miracle Economies in Crisis, which was a comprehensive critique of the NIC model. When the Asian financial crisis took place in 1997, it was said that I had anticipated the crisis in Dragons by six years. Well, not quite. I detailed an unfolding crisis of economic structure along with crises in the environment and agriculture but I had not foreseen the crisis that would erupt in the financial sphere. The message of the book was that while the NICs had achieved a reduction in the number of people living in poverty and had brought about comprehensive industrialization, export-oriented industrialization was unsustainable and was not a model for other developing countries. The full implications of this message are finally being drawn out these days, when export-oriented development strategies are everywhere in crisis.
After leaving Food First in 1993, I joined the University of the Philippines as a professor of sociology. Nearly 20 years after I got my PhD, I was back in the academy. At the same time, Kamal Malhotra and I set up Focus on the Global South in Bangkok. Focus was meant to be an Asia-based research, advocacy, and action organization working on north–south issues in the age of globalization. We founded Focus in 1995, the same year the World Trade Organization was established, and almost immediately we positioned ourselves against this institution that was designed to be the lynchpin of the system of global governance and against the doctrine of neoliberalism that served as its intellectual scaffolding. We were right in the epicenter of the Asian financial crisis that broke out in 1997, and Focus quickly gained a reputation as a fierce critic of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and an advocate of capital controls. We were part of the global civil society offensive that contributed to the collapse of the WTO’s third ministerial in Seattle in 1999 and its fifth ministerial in Cancun in 2003.


Today, with the collapse of the WTO’s Doha Round of trade negotiations and the crisis of legitimacy of the IMF and the World Bank, Focus is reorienting its work to place the priority on coming up with alternatives to the current system of multilateral global governance and to neoliberal approaches to trade and development. Our approach is called “deglobalization”, to capture the necessity of dismantling the institutions of corporate-driven globalization in order to bring about a truly just international economy, participation in which leads to the strengthening, not the disintegration of those national economies that participate in it.
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I understand if people emphasize the strength of capitalism and US power in their analysis. However, while not underestimating the US and global capital, neither must we overestimate them. Globalization is in retreat, and the US is overextended, bloodied in a war that it cannot win in Iraq. The triple crisis of overproduction, overextension, and legitimacy opens up the space for alternative ways of organizing production, politics, and our relationship to the environment. This is a very exciting conjuncture.


So back to the question that we began with: why am I engaged? I guess I am engaged because I think one should do something worthwhile with one’s life. There’s nothing heroic about it. It’s just that you have to do it, to be human. It’s something we owe our fellow human beings, especially those who are marginalized and oppressed. We have a situation in the world in which this sort of exploitation and poverty that we have should have been banished long ago. Humans should be able to devise more equitable structures. And so one has to be part of that process. Because you either engage in the process and become true to yourself or you disengage from it and are just an onlooker. And that, I think, would signify not being true to oneself. So, the answer to the question why does one engage in the kind of work I do, is because that’s the only decent thing to do. There’s no great inspiration and no big heroism hidden in it. It’s not a sort of martyrdom and nothing glorious—it’s just pure decency. That’s at least what motivates me.

Walden Bello’nun doktora ve yüksek lisansımı yapıp, yedi seneye yakın kaldığım bölüme geldiğini öğrendiği sıralarda, ben de tez araştırmamı yapmak üzere Türkiye’ye geri dönüyordum. O zaman tuttuğum blogda onun hakkında çıkan bir yazıyı paylaşmıştım.

Antipode’a verdiği bir röportajdan.

Daha sonra, büyük şans eseri, tezimi savunduktan sonra Türkiye’ye geri dönerken aynı otobüsteydik. Hep memlekete geri dönerken Walden Bello’yla karşılaşmam da bir tesadüf diyelim. Çok nazik, çok kibar, çok dost canlısı bir insandı. Kaldı ki, genelde çekingen bir insanımdır. Uçağım çok erken saatlerdeydi, zaten utangacımdır, hiç Walden, çok takdir edilesi bir insansın diyemeden gitmek zorunda kalmıştım.

From Antipode, Vol. 40, Iss. 3
Why am I engaged?
 
I am often asked this question. It’s the sort of question that stops you in your tracks and gets you back to the fundamentals.

Some of my writing as an undergraduate was on economic and social issues but I was more into literature and philosophy, which I loved. I was a late bloomer as an activist. I was pretty much a nose-to-the-grindstone student in college in the Philippines in the mid 1960s. It was only when I went to the States for graduate work in the 1970s that I became an activist owing to the impact of the Vietnam War. I dug into sociology and did my comprehensives even as I got more and more engaged in anti-war protests at Princeton.

My first arrest was a milestone personally. You know, I was in the US as a foreign student, and they had pretty strong rules then against foreign students becoming engaged in political activities. Definitely, if you were arrested for protesting and convicted, you were sent home. During the American foray into Laos in 1971, there was a blockade of the Institute for Defense Analysis on campus. I went to show support for those engaged in civil disobedience, but when I saw how the police were manhandling the protesters, I spontaneously joined them and was arrested and later convicted for trespassing and resisting arrest. I fully expected to be deported but wasn’t. But I had crossed a psychological line.

I went to do my dissertation on political organizing in the shantytowns in Chile during the Allende government in 1972. I spent about three months in several urban slums ringing the urban capital, Santiago, when I realized that it was no longer the revolution that was on the ascendant but the counterrevolution. I was intrigued by the dynamics of the counterrevolution at that same time that I felt that what I would gather from studying it would be useful to the left, which I certainly felt myself part of. So I shifted my thesis topic from shantytown organizing to the rise of the counterrevolution and started interviewing elite and middle class folks that were rabid anti-Allendistas. I of course passed myself off as a Princeton researcher, but many of those I talked to could not conceive of a brown-skinned person being in Chile except as a Cuban agent of Fidel Castro, and I narrowly escaped being beaten twice.
I felt though that while one was engaged politically, as an intellectual one had to respect social reality and not distort it for short-term partisan purposes. If the counterrevolution was winning, it was all the more important to understand why the middle classes in particular were being swept up in it. The thesis ended up as a comparative analysis of the rise of counterrevolutionary movements in Chile, Italy in the early 1920s, and Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s. I wrote it up while I was engaged in solidarity work for Chile in the US.

The declaration of martial law in the Philippines in 1972 found me in Chile. When I got back to the US, I immediately plunged into exile politics. Since Washington was the key supporter of Marcos, the US became a very strategic area to organize in. So even as I was finishing my thesis, I was shuttling between Princeton and Washington, DC, helping set up what would become a determined lobby seeking a congressional cutoff of military and economic aid to Marcos. A study I co-wrote with Severina Rivera, “The logistics of repression: US aid to the military dictatorship in the Philippines”, which came out in 1977, laid out the different channels of US support for the Marcos regime.

While in Washington, I noticed that the greater part of economic aid to Marcos was not going through bilateral channels but through the World Bank. However, World Bank operations in the Philippines were very non-transparent. When you tried to figure out what this giant institution was up to, all you got were sanitized press releases. So to find out what the Bank was doing, we had to break into the Bank to steal documents. This we did over a period of three years, hitting the Bank on those days when nobody was around, like Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day. We posed as tired Bank staff coming back from missions, with ties askew, and as we fumbled for our “IDs”, the guards would just say, don’t worry, and wave us through. In the end, we got 3000 pages worth of confidential documents on every Bank project in the country as well as political risk analysis showing the Bank was getting nervous about the opposition to Marcos. The book Development Debacle: the World Bank in the Philippines came out in 1982. It became an underground bestseller in the Philippines and people tell me that it was one of the books that mobilized the middle class against Marcos. One lesson I learned from this episode was that to really do good research, you sometimes have to break the law. Had we been caught, my colleagues and I could have gotten 25 years for theft. In fact, the story of how we really got secret Bank documents had to wait until way after the statute of limitations for criminal offenses had passed.

While in the US, I joined the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and spent the next few years going to where I was assigned and doing what the party thought was necessary. I became a full-time activist upon completing my PhD thesis in 1975 and would not return to academia for the next 19 years. For many young Filipinos, to effectively fight the dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s meant joining the CPP, which was then the most effective resistance organization. It was inspiring, and even as it was disciplined, it was flexible and innovative. It listened to my analysis of things, while at the same time imparting organizational skills to me. Under party guidance, I helped to organize the work in Washington, create the nationwide anti-martial law coalition, set up an international solidarity network, and became a specialist in civil disobedience, taking over consulates and embassies of the Marcos government. The most memorable of these actions was in 1978, when I led a team that occupied the Philippine Consulate in San Francisco for five hours. We were evicted by a SWAT team, arrested, and eventually spent time in jail, from which we got out only after engaging in a one-week-long hunger strike.

I left the party in the late 1980s, after 14 years as a member. Why? In the mid 1980s, it carried out several purges to clean the ranks of suspected military informers. The campaigns eventually took over 2000 lives. I was shocked and decided to investigate what happened. Interviews with scores of people who had participated in these purges either as victims or executioners revealed to me not only the appalling lack of a sound system of justice in the party but also the problem with an outlook that values people only for their class position and politics. Once you were labeled a counterrevolutionary, you were the enemy, subject to whatever punishment the “people” deemed fit for you.

The purges marked the degeneration of what was once a flexible and innovative party into a doctrinal, Stalinist machine. It was heart-rending, seeing this organization degenerate into the same leftist authoritarianism that had not only strangled revolutionary creativity but also begun wiping out its own people along with huge numbers of ordinary citizens in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia. The party never forgave me for publicly coming out with my study of the purges. In 2005, I was labeled a “counterrevolutionary” and put on a list of 14 people, some of whom had already been assassinated by the party-led New People’s Army.

In 1987, I joined Food First or the Institute for Food and Development Policy in San Francisco, which had been founded in 1975 by Frances Moore Lappe and Joe Collins. This was a time when the newly industrializing countries (NICs) were the flavor of the month, and developing countries were being told to follow the path of the East Asian “tiger economies”. It was, in my view, a model that needed to be demystified. In 1990, I and Stephanie Rosenfeld came out with Dragons in Distress: Asia’s Miracle Economies in Crisis, which was a comprehensive critique of the NIC model. When the Asian financial crisis took place in 1997, it was said that I had anticipated the crisis in Dragons by six years. Well, not quite. I detailed an unfolding crisis of economic structure along with crises in the environment and agriculture but I had not foreseen the crisis that would erupt in the financial sphere. The message of the book was that while the NICs had achieved a reduction in the number of people living in poverty and had brought about comprehensive industrialization, export-oriented industrialization was unsustainable and was not a model for other developing countries. The full implications of this message are finally being drawn out these days, when export-oriented development strategies are everywhere in crisis.
After leaving Food First in 1993, I joined the University of the Philippines as a professor of sociology. Nearly 20 years after I got my PhD, I was back in the academy. At the same time, Kamal Malhotra and I set up Focus on the Global South in Bangkok. Focus was meant to be an Asia-based research, advocacy, and action organization working on north–south issues in the age of globalization. We founded Focus in 1995, the same year the World Trade Organization was established, and almost immediately we positioned ourselves against this institution that was designed to be the lynchpin of the system of global governance and against the doctrine of neoliberalism that served as its intellectual scaffolding. We were right in the epicenter of the Asian financial crisis that broke out in 1997, and Focus quickly gained a reputation as a fierce critic of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and an advocate of capital controls. We were part of the global civil society offensive that contributed to the collapse of the WTO’s third ministerial in Seattle in 1999 and its fifth ministerial in Cancun in 2003.

Today, with the collapse of the WTO’s Doha Round of trade negotiations and the crisis of legitimacy of the IMF and the World Bank, Focus is reorienting its work to place the priority on coming up with alternatives to the current system of multilateral global governance and to neoliberal approaches to trade and development. Our approach is called “deglobalization”, to capture the necessity of dismantling the institutions of corporate-driven globalization in order to bring about a truly just international economy, participation in which leads to the strengthening, not the disintegration of those national economies that participate in it.
…
I understand if people emphasize the strength of capitalism and US power in their analysis. However, while not underestimating the US and global capital, neither must we overestimate them. Globalization is in retreat, and the US is overextended, bloodied in a war that it cannot win in Iraq. The triple crisis of overproduction, overextension, and legitimacy opens up the space for alternative ways of organizing production, politics, and our relationship to the environment. This is a very exciting conjuncture.

So back to the question that we began with: why am I engaged? I guess I am engaged because I think one should do something worthwhile with one’s life. There’s nothing heroic about it. It’s just that you have to do it, to be human. It’s something we owe our fellow human beings, especially those who are marginalized and oppressed. We have a situation in the world in which this sort of exploitation and poverty that we have should have been banished long ago. Humans should be able to devise more equitable structures. And so one has to be part of that process. Because you either engage in the process and become true to yourself or you disengage from it and are just an onlooker. And that, I think, would signify not being true to oneself. So, the answer to the question why does one engage in the kind of work I do, is because that’s the only decent thing to do. There’s no great inspiration and no big heroism hidden in it. It’s not a sort of martyrdom and nothing glorious—it’s just pure decency. That’s at least what motivates me.