Canada's Thinker-activists and Critics of Globalization
by Prof. Michael Keefer
December 27, 2005
GlobalResearch.ca
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Resisting the Post-National: Canadian Critiques of the Geo/Cultural/Politics of Globalization
The unpleasant neologism of “Geo/Cultural/Politics” is intended as one marker of a sequence of unmaskings I would like to offer here—and as a compressed way of saying that globalization, though represented by its advocates in discourses strongly flavoured with claims both of economic rationality and of historical inevitability, is in actuality a political project designed to enhance, at the expense of everyone else, the geopolitical power of social elites associated with trans-national corporate interests;1 that it does so through an economics of piracy sustained by barely-concealed threats of violence on the part of state powers controlled by those same interests;2 and that this project is both associated with and to a significant degree propagated by particular forms of cultural representation and socio-cultural reproduction, and also dedicated to the destruction of competing forms of representation and social reproduction.3 But perhaps the best apology for this neologism, this act of compression, might be to suggest that the phenomenon itself is uglier than any language I can use in describing and analyzing it.
Although I will be principally discussing the contributions of a number of contemporary English-Canadian public intellectuals and activists—let’s compress again, and call them ‘thinker-activists’—to emergent discourses of resistance to globalization, I do not mean to suggest that the fact of their being Canadian has provided them with privileged insights into the matter. Nor do I want to imply that the forms of resistance to the condition of globalized post-nationalism (which is also to say neo-liberalism or neo-conservatism) that they have advocated and participated in have necessarily taken a recognizably nationalist form.
Let me add, parenthetically, that when I conflate neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism I am not forgetting that the former term refers to a political economy and ideology of pseudo-democratic corporatism whose penetration of national economies and devastation of social infrastructures is facilitated by international institutions like the World Bank and the IMF and trade agreements modeled on the U.S.-Canadian FTA and the subsequent NAFTA, while the latter term refers to a harder-edged ideology with Leo Straussian-monetarist roots which has increasingly cast aside any pretence of working through quasi-legal instrumentalities in favour of a geopolitics of naked aggression. The two are different—but only as the left and right wings of the same bloody bird.
Canadian anti-globalizers
While Canadians as such have no privileged access to an understanding of globalization, a number of Canadian thinker-activists have made signal contributions to the anti-globalization movement. Maude Barlow, for example, who has been a sig
by Prof. Michael Keefer
December 27, 2005
GlobalResearch.ca
Email this article to a friend
Print this article
Resisting the Post-National: Canadian Critiques of the Geo/Cultural/Politics of Globalization
The unpleasant neologism of “Geo/Cultural/Politics” is intended as one marker of a sequence of unmaskings I would like to offer here—and as a compressed way of saying that globalization, though represented by its advocates in discourses strongly flavoured with claims both of economic rationality and of historical inevitability, is in actuality a political project designed to enhance, at the expense of everyone else, the geopolitical power of social elites associated with trans-national corporate interests;1 that it does so through an economics of piracy sustained by barely-concealed threats of violence on the part of state powers controlled by those same interests;2 and that this project is both associated with and to a significant degree propagated by particular forms of cultural representation and socio-cultural reproduction, and also dedicated to the destruction of competing forms of representation and social reproduction.3 But perhaps the best apology for this neologism, this act of compression, might be to suggest that the phenomenon itself is uglier than any language I can use in describing and analyzing it.
Although I will be principally discussing the contributions of a number of contemporary English-Canadian public intellectuals and activists—let’s compress again, and call them ‘thinker-activists’—to emergent discourses of resistance to globalization, I do not mean to suggest that the fact of their being Canadian has provided them with privileged insights into the matter. Nor do I want to imply that the forms of resistance to the condition of globalized post-nationalism (which is also to say neo-liberalism or neo-conservatism) that they have advocated and participated in have necessarily taken a recognizably nationalist form.
Let me add, parenthetically, that when I conflate neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism I am not forgetting that the former term refers to a political economy and ideology of pseudo-democratic corporatism whose penetration of national economies and devastation of social infrastructures is facilitated by international institutions like the World Bank and the IMF and trade agreements modeled on the U.S.-Canadian FTA and the subsequent NAFTA, while the latter term refers to a harder-edged ideology with Leo Straussian-monetarist roots which has increasingly cast aside any pretence of working through quasi-legal instrumentalities in favour of a geopolitics of naked aggression. The two are different—but only as the left and right wings of the same bloody bird.
Canadian anti-globalizers
While Canadians as such have no privileged access to an understanding of globalization, a number of Canadian thinker-activists have made signal contributions to the anti-globalization movement. Maude Barlow, for example, who has been a sig