Thursday, September 23, 2004

"Everything contained in the descriptive and normative term "globalization" is the effect not of economic inevitability but of a conscious and deliberate policy, if a policy more often than not not unaware of its consequences. That policy is quite paradoxical in that it is a policy of depolicitization. Drawing shamelesssly on the lexcicon of liberty, liberalism, and deregulation, it aims to grant economic determinisms a fatal stranglehold by liberating them from all controls, and to obtain the submission of citizens and governments to the economic and social forces thus "liberated." Incubated in the meetings of great international institutions such as the World Trade Organization and the Eruopean Commission, or within the "networks" of multinational corporations, this policy has imposed itself through the most varied means, specially juridical, on the liberal--or even social democratic--governments of a set of economically advanced countries, leading them gradually to divset themselves from the power to control economic forces." Pierre Bourdieu in Contre-feux 2: Pour un mouvement social european (published in US by The New Press as Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market 2 from which this passage was cited).