Globalization, Popular Resistance and Postmodernity

This paper asks if globalization is simply the latest reticulation of the regional, class, and cultural struggles embedded at the core of worldwide capitalist exchange. As practices of transnational businesses, national state authorities, and regional growth coalitions turn to globalization rhetorics to promote on-going commercial expansion, new networks of local activists, international migrants, and progressive intellectuals are developing their own anti-global rhetorics and practices to defend themselves, their localities, and the environment. This paper investigates how these conflicts arise, in part, out of the modes of organization at work in the world economy. That is, professional-technical experts with vested interests in the corporate groups or state offices that now organize most forms of production and consumption find their expert authority contested by popular resistances. These essentially populist movements seek to defend the discretion of ordinary people against trained expertise in choosing how localities and individuals attain valued goals, like economic equality, democratic participation, environmental balance, or cultural integrity.