Event Title
Anxieties of Empire: Class, Nationalism, and the Roots of the “Anti-Globalization” Movement
Location
Lindy C. Boggs Conference Center, Room 256
Session
Session One: The Global Justice Movement
Start Date
15-10-2010 3:30 PM
End Date
15-10-2010 6:00 PM
Description
As the Cold War ended and a “New World Order” emerged, elites in the U.S. and Mexico created a continental “free trade area” that dramatically exposed workers to international market forces and challenged their class and national identities. This paper will trace the roots of the global justice, or “anti-globalization,” movement of the late 1990s by examining the grassroots internationalisms that surfaced in the labor left in the U.S. and Mexico in the 1990s. It will explore how anxieties about empire and “globalization” spurred organizers in both countries to challenge labor officialdom and re-work ideas of class and nation, two categories they had forged in the 1980s, in part through the influence of the Central American revolutions and their international solidarity movements. The paper will do so by analyzing the histories and political networks of two grassroots organizations, one at each end of the globalized North American economic order – the U.S.-based labor coalition Jobs with Justice (JwJ) and the Mexico-based Popular Indigenous Council of Oaxaca - Ricardo Flores Magón (CIPO-RFM). The progressive unionists who led JwJ into the global justice agitation of the late 1990s built on activist networks born in Central America solidarity efforts in the early 1980s. Simultaneously, in southern Mexico, Marxists inspired by the Central American struggles re-worked their ideas of class, indigeneity, and “popular” struggle in the 1990s to create a new politics of global solidarity through CIPO-RFM.
Anxieties of Empire: Class, Nationalism, and the Roots of the “Anti-Globalization” Movement
Lindy C. Boggs Conference Center, Room 256
As the Cold War ended and a “New World Order” emerged, elites in the U.S. and Mexico created a continental “free trade area” that dramatically exposed workers to international market forces and challenged their class and national identities. This paper will trace the roots of the global justice, or “anti-globalization,” movement of the late 1990s by examining the grassroots internationalisms that surfaced in the labor left in the U.S. and Mexico in the 1990s. It will explore how anxieties about empire and “globalization” spurred organizers in both countries to challenge labor officialdom and re-work ideas of class and nation, two categories they had forged in the 1980s, in part through the influence of the Central American revolutions and their international solidarity movements. The paper will do so by analyzing the histories and political networks of two grassroots organizations, one at each end of the globalized North American economic order – the U.S.-based labor coalition Jobs with Justice (JwJ) and the Mexico-based Popular Indigenous Council of Oaxaca - Ricardo Flores Magón (CIPO-RFM). The progressive unionists who led JwJ into the global justice agitation of the late 1990s built on activist networks born in Central America solidarity efforts in the early 1980s. Simultaneously, in southern Mexico, Marxists inspired by the Central American struggles re-worked their ideas of class, indigeneity, and “popular” struggle in the 1990s to create a new politics of global solidarity through CIPO-RFM.