The Blackwell Companion to Globalization

Chapter 34

Resisting Globalization

RICHARD KAHN AND DOUGLAS KELLNER

The current forms and scope of worldwide resistance to globalization policies and processes is one of the most important political developments of the last decade. However, to speak singularly of ‘resistance’ is itself something of a misnomer. For just as globalization must ultimately be recognized as comprising a multiplicity of forces and trajectories, including both negative and positive dimensions, so too must the resistance to globalization be understood as pertaining to highly complex, contradictory and sometimes ambiguous varieties of struggles that range from the radically progressive to the reactionary and conservative.

‘Globalization’ itself is one of the most highly contested terms of the present era with passionate advocates and militant critics (Kellner 2002). By the nineteenth century debates raged over whether the global reach of the capitalist market system and the disruptions it brought were producing a beneficial ‘wealth of nations’ (i.e. Adam Smith) or producing an era of exploitation and imperialism (i.e. Karl Marx). For the Marxist tradition, globalization has since signified an oppressive hegemony of capital, and after the Great Depression and World War II many critics have discussed the manner in which a discourse of ‘modernization’ emerged to celebrate the growth of a globalized capitalist market system against its ideological and geopolitical competitor, state communism. Counterhegemonic ...