and the alter-globalization movement in canada kamila pietrzyk a dissertatio

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TIME, TECHNOLOGY AND TROUBLEMAKERS: 'FAST ACTIVISM' AND
THE ALTER-GLOBALIZATION MOVEMENT IN CANADA
KAMILA PIETRZYK
A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO
THE FACULTY OF GRADJJATE STUDIES
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
GRADUATE PROGRAM IN POLITICAL SCIENCE
YORK UNIVERSITY
TORONTO, ONTARIO
JUNE 2013
©KAMILA PIETRZYK 2013
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Abstract
This study documents and critically evaluates the history of the alter-globalization
movement in Canada. It makes a contribution to existing scholarship by providing the
most comprehensive historical account available of the movement's major mobilizations
during the past fifteen years. The study also deploys an interdisciplinary theoretical
framework to examine the largely overlooked temporal dimensions of contemporary
activism in the age of instant communication. While recent years have seen a proliferation
of scholarship lauding the advantages of "new media activism," of which the alter
globalization movement in an example par excellence, most of this literature neglects
what are arguably more pressing questions regarding the ways in which contemporary
social actors conceptualize and organize time, and the implications of these hegemonic
temporal norms for patterns of collective action. To redress this gap, this study evaluates
the social, cultural and political implications for activism of the process of time-space
compression, driven by the basic dynamics of capitalism and facilitated by digital
communication technologies. Using evidence collected from semi-structured interviews,
it therefore not only offers the first systematic and in-depth account of the history (and
pre-history) of the Canadian alter-globalization movement, it also demonstrates that the
social acceleration of time facilitated by new media technologies encourages a tendency
toward "fast activism" by diminishing three activist time-related practices in particular:
building sustained movement infrastructure, learning from the past, that is, collective
memory, and thinking reflexively about the future, that is, long-term strategic planning.
The study's conclusion offers some tentative suggestions for improving the political
capacities and potentials of today's anti-status quo troublemakers.
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For my parents
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Acknowledgements
I want to express my sincere gratitude to my advisor Dr. Leo Panitch for his peerless
intellectual guidance and consistently going the extra mile to support my academic
ambitions. Special thanks are due to Dr. Lesley Wood and Dr. Stephanie Ross, for their
valuable (and speedy) comments and suggestions concerning this project. I also wish to
· acknowledge Dr. Edward Comor, who first inspired me to pursue this rewarding research
path. Many thanks also to the members of my defense committee.
In addition, I wish to sincerely thank my generous respondents, without whom this
project would not have been possible, as well as all of my friends and family, whose
unwavering support in good times and bad continues to be deeply appreciated.
Finally, I would also like to thank the wonderful staff in the Department of Political
Science, as well as the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and
the Provost of York University for their support.
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Table of Contents
ABSTRACT ................................................................................................................ ii
DEDICATION ............................................................................................................ iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ....................................................................................... iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................................................................ v
INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................... l
Chapter Outline .................................................................................................. 4
CHAPTER 1: Theoretical Framework: Media, Time, and Movements ................. 7
Medium Theory and the Political Economy of Time ....................................... .12
Social Acceleration ............................................................................................ 17
Modernity and the Future Time Perspective ..................................................... 20
The Politics ofH ere and Now ............................................................... 25
The Collapse oft he Future .................................................................... 27
Media, Memory and Movements ...................................................................... 28
Durability and Networks ................................................................................... 38
AGM as a Cycle of Protest ................................................................................ 42
Research Questions and Methodology. ............................................................ .43
CHAPTER 2: The Canadian AGM in Historical Perspective ................................ .49
Popular Summit: Ottawa, 1981 .......................................................................... 52
"No, Eh?" The Struggle against the FTA. .......................................................... 53
The G7 in Toronto, 1988 .................................................................................... 59
The North American Free Trade Agreement.. .................................................... 63
The People's Summit, Halifax, 1995 .................................................................. 69
A Shift in Tactics ................................................................................................ 71
The anti-MAI campaign ..................................................................................... 74
"No to APEC!" Vancouver 1997 ........................................................................ 84
CHAPTER 3: "Cycle 2.0" : The AGM at the Turn of the Millennium ................... 99
From Washington to Windsor. ........................................................................... 100
Quebec City 2001: "Stop the FTAA!" .............................................................. 111
Debate: Diversity ofTactics .................................................................. 118
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9/11 .................................................................................................................... 135
Kananaskis 2002: "Wanted: the G8, for crimes against humanity and the
environment!" .................................................................................................... 13 7
Debate: Summit-Hopping ...................................................................... 146
"No Blood For Oil!" .......................................................................................... 155
CHAPTER 4: Crisis, Resistance, Change: The Canadian AGM 2007-2010 .......... 159
Montebello 2007: "Stop the War, Stop the SPP!" ............................................. .160
Forum Social Quebecois .................................................................................... 173
"No Olympics on Stolen Native Land!" ............................................................ 175
Toronto 2010: "Defend Turtle Island: Abolish the G8/G20!" ............................ l 77
CHAPTER 5: Learning from the Past, Looking to the Future:
Collective Memory and Long-Term Planning in AGM Activists' Practice ............. 213
Collective Memory. ............................................................................................ 214
Media, Memory and Movement Infrastructure ....................................... 217
The Practices ofM emory. ......................................................................2 20
Counter-Memory or Corporate Media Memory? .................................. 226
Forgive and Forget? ............................................................................... 227
Strategic Planning in the 'Empire of Speed' ...................................................... 229
Strategic Planning Tools ........................................................................ 236
Strategic Planning in Social Movement Organizations ......................... 237
Long-Term Planning in Comparative Perspective ................................. 242
CONCLUSION: Time to Resist .................................................................................. 245
Making Memory Matter. .................................................................................... 253
Thinking Strategically for Radicals ................................................................... 257
The Need for Reflexivity. .................................................................................. 259
REFERENCES ............................................................................................................ 262
APPENDIX ...................................................................................... 295
1
Introduction
In June 2010, thousands of people took to the streets of Toronto in protest as the leaders
of the world's most powerful states - the Group of Twenty (G20)-met inside the heavily
fortified Metro Toronto Convention Centre amidst the twenty-first century's first major
economic crisis. The meeting agenda focused above all on reaching agreement regarding
spending cuts designed to socialize the cost of huge government bailouts handed out to
banks and financial corporations in the previous two years. The themes, targets and tactics
of the protests against the G20's agenda as well as the drastic level of police repression
resulting in the largest ever mass arrests in Canada inspired many to reflect upon the
recent history of resistance to neoliberal austerity in this country - yet no comprehensive
account of similar protests in the Canadian context has been produced. The aim of this
dissertation is precisely to redress this gap by providing the most comprehensive
historical account available of the so-called anti-, or better yet, alter-globalization
movement (AGM) in Canada. 1
Commonly considered to have emerged following a mass protest in Seattle against the
World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1999, the international alter-globalization movement
has been an important site of political contestation over the past fifteen years. During this
time, a large body of literature has emerged to document the movement's primary
manifestation in the form of spectacular, large-scale protests against organizations of
1 Many movement scholars and activists alike eschew the term "anti-globalization" as unduly
negative, given that the movement was never opposed to globalization per se; rather, protesters object to
the capitalist vested interests that have shaped globalization's trajectory. Alternative names used to refer
to the movement include the global justice movement, globalization from below, and the alter
globalization movement (AGM). Though a scholarly consensus has yet to emerge concerning the choice
of a single name, according to Alain Touraine (2011), the use of the· French-derived term "alter
globalization" is becoming increasingly widespread; what is more, the acronym AGM is more wieldy
than the comparatively awkward "GJM" (global justice movement). Since it, too, denotes participants'
interest not merely in opposing neoliberal globalization but in inventing alternatives, the term "alter
globalization movement" will be used throughout this study.
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global governance such as the Group of Seven (G 7), the World Trade Organization
(WTO), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), as well as specific free trade and
investment treaties. If most of this scholarship examines the main protest-events and
campaigns of the AGM across borders, in recent years the unique trajectory of the AGM
in the United States, France, Germany, and other European democracies has been
documented by leading social movement scholars (see della Porta 2009). However, so far
the unique history of the alter-globalization movement in the Canadian context has
attracted attention primarily from popular writers (e.g. Klein 2000b; Barlow and Clarke
2001), and a handful of Quebecois scholars who have written on the history of the alter
mondialisme in La Belle Province (e.g. Canet et al. 2010, Dufour 2006). By
supplementing these scant existing accounts with extensive original empirical research,
this study offers the first in-depth history of the Canadian alter-globalization movement,
making a major contribution to the literature on (Canadian) social movements in the
contemporary era.
Beyond the need to fill a lacuna in the history of Canadian extra-parliamentary, left-wing
activism, the AGM is an important and worthwhile object of study also because it was the
first major social movement to emerge in the age of digital communication. As examined
in more depth in the ensuing chapter, the AGM activists' pioneering and continually
expanding use of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) has been
extensively interpreted as one of its key advantages and distinguishing features, ushering
in a new approach to civic engagement known as "new media activism." As activists
began to deploy the global internet to network across borders, movement and media
scholars alike began to extol the unprecedented "means, speed, and intensity of
communication" among the various groups involved as key to explaining the novelty of
global justice struggles (Routledge 2000: 25).
However, while it is important to recognize the instrumental value of new media for
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contemporary activism, celebratory accounts of "new media activism" tend to overlook
what are arguably more profound and pressing questions regarding the ways in which
social actors, including activists, conceptualize and organize time, and the implications of
these hegemonic temporal norms for patterns of collective action.
Recent decades have seen an increase in scholarly as well as popular interest in the
question of time and temporality, a welcome recognition of the dialectic between time and
space that had been forgotten, if temporarily, in the midst of the globalization debate.
Thanks to Manuel Castells' theorization of "timeless time" (2001), David Harvey's "time
space compression" (1989), Anthony Giddens' "time-space distanciation" (1991), as well
as popular titles such as Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything (Gleick 2000)
and In Praise of Slowness (Honore 2004), the central role of new ICTs in facilitating the
speed-up of daily life in the context of capitalism has been established. However, as Judy
Wajcman has observed, although temporality "has become a central issue in the social
sciences and much has been written about the increasing lack of control over time
experienced in postmodern societies," there remains "a dearth of empirical research
informing these debates" (2008: 73). Certainly, no existing account examines the
temporal norms, values and practices of contemporary anti-status quo movements: the
few extant critiques of the implications of time-space compression for collective action
are limited, primarily anecdotal and/or speculative (e.g. Hassan 2009, Scheuerman 2009).
Thus, while this study's primary contribution to knowledge is to fill a gap in the collective
memory of Canadian activism, it also highlights overlooked temporal dimensions of
collective action, in particular the alter-globalization activists' values and practices related
to building sustained movement infrastructure, thinking reflexively about the future, that
is long-term strategic planning - and learning from the history of past struggles, that is
collective memory.
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Chapter Outline
The aim of the first chapter is to establish the dissertation's theoretical framework by
bringing together insights from social movement, media, time, and collective memory
studies. The chapter begins with an overview of the central features of the alter
globalization movement, and in particular, its internet-mediated, networked, fluid and
flexible structure. Though I acknowledge the main advantages of "new media activism," I
argue, using the insights of "time studies," that activists in high-speed, highly networked,
"advanced" capitalist societies like Canada, are subject to unprecedented temporal
pressures linked to the proliferation of ubiquitous, time-annihilating technologies in the
context of capitalism. Drawing upon Canadian communication theory, elaborated in the
ensuing section, I argue that this shift has powerful implications for the predominant
habits of thought and orientations to (collective) action by promoting a cultural neglect of
the past and the future in favour of a preoccupation with the present and with short-term
concerns.
To provide some substance to this claim, and to establish the theoretical framework for
chapter 5, in the ensuing substantive section I delineate the historical evolution of the
dominant conceptions of time in Western culture, beginning with the dominant future
orientation. Next, I tum to the changing temporal norms related to the past, specifically in
connection to collective memory. In what follows, I discuss the other temporal concepts
that inform my analysis of the AGM's history, namely the question of the value and
practice of building sustained movement infrastructure - not just organizations but also
lasting coalitions - and the concept of protest cycles. Informed by this theoretical
framework, in the final section of this chapter I elaborate with more precision the research
questions animating this study. I also explain its methodology.
The study's ensuing, substantive chapters utilize the above framework to document and