CIAO DATE: 11/2008
February 2003
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
Professor Findlay's paper served as the opening address to a conference on globalization and culture entitled "Content Providers of the World Unite!", held at McMaster University in October 2001. Two Institute members, Susie O'Brien and Imre Szeman, organized the meeting and a companion volume of papers from the conference is also being published by the Institute.
Findlay's title thus takes its lead from the conference organizers. He seeks to provide a framework for thinking about a ‘cultural politics' that is appropriate to the contemporary globalizing situation. In the end, he wants to build on Marx's earlier notions of the proletariat to build alliances between ‘workers' and ‘aboriginal peoples' in forging a strategy of resistance to globalization in Canada. These ideas are revealed gradually in the paper and are developed to the greatest degree in the concluding sections.
What is particularly helpful in the paper is Findlay’s historical situation of what Jan Aart Scholte (2000) and others refer to as ‘globality’: the development of a sense of the world as one place. He reflects on three different examples of the development of globality in the nineteenth century: Marx’s use of the phrase Workers of the World . . ., Goethe’s reference to the idea of Weltliteratur or World Literature, and Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World. He links these reflections to Adam Smith’s sense of the ‘world’ and to works by Schlegel and Hegel, where the notion of the ‘world’ also features prominently.
In the end, Findlay’s understanding of the need for struggle and resistance is informed by the nature of earlier struggles in a time of increasing globality in the late 18th and throughout the 19th centuries. His emphasis on the continuity of certain themes related to globality is helpful when he proceeds at the end of the paper to reflect on discontinuities and differences between the earlier period and our contemporary era.
Resource link: Content Providers of the World Unite! A Critical Canadian Analysis and Agenda [PDF] - 284K