Words of Warning: Global Networks, Asian Local Resistance,

and the Planetary Vulgate of Neoliberalism

Jamie Morgan

Globalization is the rst and last word in the vocabulary of media pundits,
cultural commentators, economists, politicians, and activists. Its attributed
characteristics are many. It is rst cause and last effect, the ultimate con-
straint, the nal enabler, the absence of freedom, the latest greatest hope. So
diverse, so opposed, so contradictory are these coexisting others that one might
almost describe the term as the nal resting place of an earlier harbinger of
momentous change, dialectic. So spaecious (spacious and specious) is its
semiotic play that, with a greater sense of irony, one might describe it as
the most signicant oating signier of the new century.1 Yet when the
meaning of lived human being is at stake, diversity, opposition, and contra-
diction rarely make for peaceful coexistence. Rather, such signicance, such
weight of time and place, facilitates practices of compaction, constriction,
and exclusion. Neoliberalism is the loudest voice, a rst among unequals in
the discourse of globalization. According to Pierre Bourdieu, neoliberalism

positions 11:3 2003 by Duke University Press

positions 11:3 Winter 2003 542

has become the planetary vulgate of modern capitalism.2 The power of

the vulgate resides in the socialization of uncritical citizens. But the East
Asian nancial crisis of 1997 and those that have followed reveal the disjunc-
ture between word and deed, promise and fullment, stated intentions and
consequences. As a result new forms of resistance have begun to emerge.
Neoliberalism is parasitic upon the illusion of our own powerlessness and its
own global irresistibility.3 To counteract it is to understand that only I can
act for myself and that I am responsible, but only through the connection
of local, regional, and global networks of critical action can neoliberalism
be effectively opposed.4 The Internet is part of what makes this possible,
and new organizations, such as the Association for the Taxation of Financial
Transactions for the Aid of Citizens (ATTAC), Third World Network, and
Focus on the Global South are exploiting this technology in conjunction
with traditional activism as a means to overwriting the vulgate. As such
they are a contribution to the creation of a genuinely critical civil society or
Habermasian public sphere, radicalized within and beyond nation-states.5

The Subcutaneous Character of Neoliberalism

According to Bourdieu, neoliberalism is a screen discourse or the universal

clothes of the new imperialismcultural, economic, and political. As such it
permeates language, offering a ready vocabulary replete with consequences
for lived human being. Yet it is proffered as a simple, commonsense, in-
the-world pragmatism. Its pragmatism is one of accommodation, of the
inevitability of the world. It seeks what Jacques Rancire calls the oldest
task of politics, the illusion of its depoliticization.6 Concomitantly, it reduces
the social to issues of technical expertise. Such a strategy resonates powerfully
(in all senses of the word) with Frankfurt school themes of modernity.7
Neoliberalism is an alliance of political conservatism (small c), with its
emphasis on freedom to (as opposed to freedom from), and neoclassical
economics. Neoclassical economics assumes that men and women are hard-
wired to follow self-interest and that unimpeded self-interest produces a
spontaneous and economically ideal order.8 This is expressed prosaically as
the discipline of the market, using such ancillary terms as competition, in-
novation, dynamism, and choice. Beneath these terms lurks a methodology of
Morgan Words of Warning 543

mathematical modeling where aspects of behavior that cannot be assigned

a numerical value are deemed irrelevant. Neoclassical economics is one of
the nal bastions of the Chicago school dictum of 1926, When you cannot
measure, your knowledge becomes meagre and unsatisfactory.
Neoliberalisms point of synthesis between conservatism and neoclassical
economics is the concept of individualism. The autonomous rational human
is the rationale of the neoliberal ideology of the minimal state; of legislated
nonintervention, privatization, deregulation, and de-unionization; and of
repealed trade, exchange rate, and nancial ow barriers. The neoliberal
autonomous human is a particular kind of rational actor. The neoliberal
individual is free to be different so long as he or she acts the same, according
to mathematical models. He or she is rational but not reasoning. Rationality
is how we calculate self-interest, while reason is the faculty by which we
critically reect on society, nature, and our relations to them in times, places,
and organizations. Reason gets in the way of predictable rationality because
new ideas confound mathematical symmetry. Such ideas mean that though
in the past action A was followed by action B, tomorrow this may not be the
case. If patterns only emerge after the fact, neoclassicism, even in its own
terms, becomes a dismal science, incapable of sustaining neoliberalism.
The neoliberal solution is to turn the world upside down.9 Theory need
not be reconstructed; rather, the world must be made to conform. Neolib-
eralism has an almost Swiftian self-satirizing impulse to vanquish history,
homogenize places, and atten institutions. In neoliberalism, critical ideas
are to be kept out of politics and economics because they distort the model.
In neoliberalism, we are as individual as our next purchase. Culture is the
commodity, and commodity is culture. The human is compartmentalized,
split between the leisure economy and work. Civil society, community, and
critique have no active place in neoliberal social science. They are conformist
nostalgias. How dangerous, then, that this passive and bovine somnambu-
lism is the dominant discourse within which democratic participation is
contained. Michel Foucault was among the rst to see the dangers of ne-
oliberal discourse, referring to it in his work on governmentality as both
individualizing and totalizing.10 Had he lived, he would surely have had
much more to say concerning this brittle holohedrism that encourages us to
celebrate old forms of domination in new spaces and guises.
positions 11:3 Winter 2003 544

The Bad Qi of Neoliberalism in Asia

The characteristics of Chinese economic reform and the causes of its impres-
sive growth statistics are a matter of signicant dispute,11 as are the meanings
in terms of which it might be deemed a success or failure for its citizens.12
China, as with the majority of East Asian states, has resisted the neoliberal
orthodoxy of unimpeded markets.13 Though China is certainly no summum
bonum, the recent gains of neoliberalism there add nothing to the possibility
that it may become a good society. The majority of Chinas next-generation
elites are educated in the United States.14 A degree in economics from such a
neoclassical powerhouse as Chicago fosters a neoliberal outlook. As the dis-
course is internalized, human issues become technical issues. The promise
of such Marxist mainstays as species being and emancipation, debased by
years of factional struggle, are displaced by target indexes.15 Commensu-
rately, external pressures associated with membership in the World Trade
Organization and the national creditworthiness of the state (measured by
Standard and Poors) ease China toward compliance. Neoliberalism nar-
rows the scope for dispute and dialogue concerning the characteristics and
meanings of reform.
In neoliberalism, a spontaneous and ideal order arises when men and
women follow unimpeded self-interest in the marketplace. As much greed
as possible is satised within the constraint of scarce resources. This, without
a trace of irony, is called optimum social welfare or Pareto efciency. Such
efciency is about absolute values of production. What is produced and for
whom is not its concern. In the competitive marketplace, one individual
may triumph and accumulate far in excess of others. This, still without a
trace of irony, remains optimum social welfare. Accordingly, neoliberalism
has nothing positive to contribute to discourses of economic immiseration,
exploitation, and inequality. It is capable of measuring these things but
provides no conceptual acknowledgment of them as products of its own sys-
tem. According to neoliberalism, China is a triumph of progressive market
reform.16 That some things are lost as others are gained is meaningless in
neoliberal terms. Neoliberal change is progress. Failure is the recalcitrance
of reality to conform to the inevitability of theory. The solution to Chinas
unemployment, to the collapse of the welfare system, to rural poverty, and
Morgan Words of Warning 545

to environmental degradation is more neoliberalism.17 This means more

privatization and more opening.
The inverse of this more is a neoliberal preference for less. There should
be fewer restrictions and fewer regulations. Here the symbolic violence of
neoliberal imperialism becomes heavy-handed practice. Recent U.S. presi-
dents have had much to say concerning investment transparency, accounting
practices, currency convertibility, and intellectual property rights in China.
These have been the core conditions for membership in the World Trade Or-
ganization. Practices of accountability and human rights reside elsewhere.
Rather than ends in themselves, they are strategic counters in a game of
power.18 The neoliberal antipathy to ideas, differences, and critical citi-
zens is a coded language. Unions distort markets translates into workers
rights are wrong. Protectionism undermines global competitive efciency
translates into least cost is best no matter who bears the cost of least cost.
Ironically neoliberalism, with its democratic valorization of the rational
individual, mirrors certain concerns of a polity that fears the collective pos-
sibilities of civil society, and of organized labor. The Chinese Communist
Party has tied its legitimacy to growth, creating a performance regime
to the economy above all other things.19 In a curious inversion of its former
Marxism the party is presiding over the commodication of society.20 The
partys fear of luan (chaos) provides a vested interest in producing uncritical
subjects. What is this if not the paradigmatic neoliberal passive consumer?
With no sense of time or place, neoliberalism cannot distinguish between
cultural practices. It cannot see the value in some values because it claims
to be value-free, underlabored by positive science. The role of the state, civil
society, and community in organizing and managing benecial economic
change cannot be reconciled to neoliberalism. Nowhere has this been more
evident than in the neoliberal view of nancial markets. Before the crisis
of 1997 the East Asian economic miracle was something of an embar-
rassment to the major global neoliberal organizations: the World Bank and
International Monetary Fund (IMF). The protectionist, export-oriented,
and state-guided development policies of the region did not t the free mar-
ket model. It was only when Japan offered funding that the World Bank
undertook an analysis.21 Even then the World Bank tried to square the
circle, claiming that the economies of the region were compatible with its
positions 11:3 Winter 2003 546

neoliberal outlook, since the real source of their growth was a steady stream
of investment-induced productivity gains that would be further enhanced
by market liberalization.22 Accordingly, the IMF and World Bank pushed
for capital market deregulation to allow a rapid inux of investment. In a
region with a high savings ratio and therefore no shortage of investment
funds, this offered few prospects for additional benets.
But there is such a thing as too much investment in too short a time.
The 1990s ood of funds into the area undermined the reliability of the
very indexes neoliberalism holds dear. Chasing the prots of a high-growth
region, Western investment funds contributed to a property and construction
boom in Southeast Asia. Firms borrowed on easy terms against the future
protability of these projects. As the price of land rose and the number of
projects outstripped any possibility that these properties could be occupied,
it became clear to nancial experts that many rms would default on these
loans.
Not only did neoliberalism help to create the conditions for nancial crisis,
but market liberalization helped to ensure that those conditions could be
exploited. When a nations economy is affected by loan defaults, investment
is withdrawn, reducing the value of the currency. Speculators can speed
this along by systematically selling the currency. If one has planned ahead,
this provides two opportunities for prot. First, on the back of the large
investment funds available, take out a loan in that currency and convert the
money into dollars. When the currency devalues against the dollar, convert
some of the money back into the currency and repay the loan. If the currency
has devalued 25 percent, then only 75 percent of the dollars will be needed to
pay back the loan. If one takes out a loan worth $100 million, then one makes
a $25 million prot. Second, on the basis of the current exchange rate, agree
to sell an amount of the currency at a specied date in the future at a value
slightly less than the current exchange rate. This seems an attractive discount
to those not in the know. When the currency devalues below the rate you have
agreed to sell at, buy the currency and make delivery. The difference between
the two exchange rates is clear prot. Since foreign exchange transactions are
conducted in hundreds of millions of dollars, this is a great deal of prot. The
point is that neoliberalism provides incentives for the destabilization of an
already precarious position. Neoliberal nance is the modern form of usury.
Morgan Words of Warning 547

It is prot from misery. The East Asian crisis was no more an unavoidable
economic cycle than the Great Leap Forward was a natural disaster.
The neoliberal response to crisis is to blame the victim, punish the inno-
cent, and protect the guilty. Though niggardly in their praise of previous
growth, the IMF and World Bank were quick to place the blame for the
crisis of 1997 at the door of the regimes of East Asia. All forms of social net-
works, of guanxi and informal practices, were suddenly suspect.23 Culture
was now in the dock. Confucian capitalism, so recently hailed, was suddenly
damned as corruption. Calls for a market cull of Asian banks and rms were
to follow. The weak must go to the wall to make the strong stronger. In
contradiction, preservation was the order of the day for large hedge funds,
highly leveraged in East Asian markets and fat with the pension capital of
Western investors. To protect these funds from the effects of the currency
speculation of other funds, the IMF and World Bank interceded in the cri-
sis, providing conditional loans to East Asian states. This along with large
interest rate rises temporarily stabilized the currencies and stock exchanges,
allowing a strategic withdrawal. Neoliberalism, in the name of individual-
ism, inaction, and nonintervention, showed it was prepared to organize, act,
and intervenebut not on an equal basis for all. Such a state of affairs calls
for an unfashionable word: ideology.
Neoliberalism moved quickly from the self-interest of all to that of the few.
Enforced higher interest rates merely exacerbated the rate of loan default, in-
creasing domestic bankruptcy and sharply reducing intraregional demand,
exporting recession across Asia. The Flying Geese model ceased to y. Eu-
rope and the United States as net importers from Asia remained unaffected.
So, too, were many of Asias superrich. Exchange rate stabilization allowed
them to convert their holdings into dollars squirreled in overseas banks
while their governments squandered borrowed money vainly maintaining
exchange rates at interest rates that were adding to the damage to business.
Ordinary people were the only ones with no place to turn. In 1997 in South
Korea, gross domestic production (GDP) fell by 6.7 percent, unemployment
rose fourfold, and urban poverty tripled24 proof that the neoliberal sense
of justice is blinkered rather than blind. In addition to funding exchange sta-
bilization, the IMF provided $23 billion of what is termed corporate welfare
to bail out Western creditors but nothing to support ordinary East Asians.25
positions 11:3 Winter 2003 548

When put to the test, the neutrality of neoliberal science and its technocracy
falls at the rst hurdle.

Saying No to TINA (There Is No Alternative):

The Tobin Tax and Other Initiatives in Asia

Neoliberalisms track record teaches hard lessons. One cannot put faith in a
technocracy that demands passivity. Inactivity must be replaced by a critique
that does not assume that the majoritys best interests are already served.
This demands an in-the-world philosophy. Foucault put this well: What is
philosophy todayI mean philosophical activityif not the critical work
of thought upon thought, if it does not, rather than legitimising what one
already knows, consist of an attempt to know how and to what extent it is
possible to think differently.26 Gayatri Spivak terms this thinking differ-
ently catachresis; one identies or names the multiplicity of force relations
or power as a step in displacing and seizing the apparatus of value coding.27
This is a reversal, but more than a reversal, since it interrogates the very struc-
ture that informs what questions can be asked.28 Here it means beginning
from the problems neoliberalism produces; deconstructing the language that
sustains policies, the language of their inevitability; and confronting them
with practical alternatives. For Foucault this is the contradiction of civil so-
ciety. It is both the site through which the individual is socialized in a passive
totalizing system but also the space in which his or her critical faculties can
act back upon the power within which he or she is designated.29
The Internet has provided a powerful means for the organization of such
resistance. Communication media allow the rapid dissemination of ideas in a
way that bypasses a medium that tends to marginalize critique of the neolib-
eral order.30 At the same time, its links produce a hybrid cross-fertilization
of ideas and organizational opportunities from the local and regional to
the global. In this sense it plays host to a network forum of civil society
activities from which common themes emerge.31 ATTAC was founded in
France in 1998. It has more than eighty thousand members worldwide, com-
prised of independent local groups in thirty-three countries, and more than
eleven thousand subscribers to its newsletter, Sand in the Wheels. Accord-
ing to its platform, it promotes the idea of an international tax on currency
Morgan Words of Warning 549

speculation and campaigns to outlaw tax havens, replace pension funds with
state pensions, cancel Third World debt, and reform or abolish the World
Trade Organization.32 A major plank in this platform is the Tobin Tax.33
Since hot money is one of the major causes of instability in international
economics, an obvious solution is to provide a disincentive to currency specu-
lation. Given that foreign exchange trade is currently in excess of $15 billion
a day, a tax of less than 1 percent could yield more than $200 billion a year.34
If administered by a new, directly accountable democratic global institu-
tion, separate from the neoliberal organizations, these funds could be used
to reverse many of the problems with which neoliberalism is associated.
Two hundred billion dollars represents ve times the Western development
aid budget and is far in excess of the net transfer of capital from East and
South to West due to self-interested neoliberal governance strategies and
conditional loans. Equally fundamentally, the ATTAC process is about ac-
tive citizenship, about taking responsibility for oneself and becoming an
engaged human as the very antithesis of the neoliberal passive consumer.
In East Asia the major civic actors arguing for the Tobin Tax are the Third
World Network, based in Malaysia, and Focus on the Global South, based in
Thailand and South Korea. The Third World Network is an independent
network specializing in the analysis of development issues.35 It publishes a
range of bulletins, magazines, and policy papers as vehicles for organized
responses to neoliberalism. Its workshops bring together nongovernmen-
tal organizations (NGOs) from China, Korea, and Malaysiafrom across
the region and beyond.36 It shares with the Global South a strong sense of
the interconnectedness of economics, politics, and culture. According to the
Global South, the response to radical free-market economics must be the
development of equitable and sustainable paradigm alternatives that ad-
vance the interests of the poor and marginalized peoples around the world,
especially in the Asia-Pacic. . . . Organized civil society has the potential to
empower people: as a scalizer of the market and government; as an inde-
pendent actor critically engaged with the private sector and eventually as the
leading actor in a process of democratic, social and economic planning that
serves to guide the actions of the market.37 Both organizations connect at a
global level through events such as the World Social Forum held recently in
Brazil.38 The forum, attended by thousands of NGO representatives from
positions 11:3 Winter 2003 550

120 countries, ran parallel to the Davos World Economic Forum, where ma-
jor economic players and state actors convened to discuss deepening global-
ization. Among the signicant outcomes of the Social Forum was a televised
satellite debate with representatives of the Economic Forum as well as an
agreement on means to effectively coordinate NGO activities on the Tobin
Tax and a debt moratorium.39 At a regional level the two are active in a
number of additional ways. They provide civil society leadership through
organizations such as the Council for Food Security. They provide a positive
critique of local neoliberal institutions, exposing the language of develop-
ment and reclaiming its forms. When the Asian Development Bank talks of
pro-poor reform solutions and private solutions for the poor, these terms
are not allowed to rest.40 Why are the poor not part of the consultation pro-
cess? When the Development Bank talks of good governance, the neoliberal
efciency assumptions this entails are put at issue. Why does good gover-
nance not mean publicly accountable systems of rights, entitlements, laws,
and distribution of resources? Why does the bank offer no prescriptions for
its own good governance, such as transparency and participation? By asking
difcult questions, NGOs are a thorn in the side of regimes and a pressure
for change.

One Step beyond Cynicism

At the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000, world leaders pledged

that by 2015 they would halve the gure of 1.2 billion people living on less
than a dollar a day. In Rio de Janeiro, at the rst Earth Summit, in 1992 the
industrialized states had pledged 0.7 percent of GDP to aid on poverty. By the
2002 Earth Summit in Johannesburg, no industrialized state had held to this
pledge. British aid, for example, had fallen to 0.4 percent of GDP.41 Over the
last fteen years, during the period of the rise of neoliberalism, aid to Africa,
the poorest continent on earth with a combined GDP of less than Mexico, has
actually halved to $13 billion. Life expectancy, meanwhile, has fallen below
fty-four years. A cynic might look at such statistics and conclude that while
neoliberalism holds sway in the industrialized world, alleviation of poverty
can at best be described as a matter of benign neglect; at worst, as evidence
concerning the manner in which neoliberal policies contribute to structures
Morgan Words of Warning 551

of discrimination mounts, as the fullment of its promise on poverty via

eradication rather than alleviation. Humanity cannot afford such cynicism.
The afuent world can afford more and can do more. Understanding this is
itself an intervention and a transformation in citizenship from the passive to
the active, withdrawing the tacit consent of what is done in our name. Primo
Levi puts it best: If not this way, how? If not now, when?42

Notes

1 Ernesto Laclau, Populism: Whats in a Name? (paper presented at a democracy and glob-
alization workshop, Lancaster University, May 2002).
2 Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant, New Liberal Speak: Notes on the New Planetary
Vulgate, Radical Philosophy, no. 105 (JanuaryFebruary 2001): 17.
3 A controversial work, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2000), 361, makes a similar point.
4 The idea of thinking globally but acting locally is discussed in Timothy Luke, Localized
Spaces, Globalized Places: Virtual Community and Geo-Economics in the Asia-Pacic, in
The Rise of East Asia: Critical Visions of the Pacic Century, ed. Mark Berger and Douglas Borer
(London: Routledge, 1997), 241259.
5 For a discussion of the theorization of the public sphere and legitimation see Jrgen Haber-
mas, The Theory of Communicative Action (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), 2:346347. Also
Habermas, The Public Sphere, in Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives
in Cultural Studies, ed. Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1991), 398.
6 Peter Osborne, Radicalism and Philosophy, Radical Philosophy, no. 103 (September
October 2000): 816.
7 Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 1997),
xixiv.
8 Jamie Morgan, Social Being As a Problem for an Ethical Economics, Post-Autistic Economic
Reviews, no. 16 (September 2002): article 4, www.btinternet.com/pae_news/review/issue16.
htm.
9 Jamie Morgan, The Upside-down World of Neoliberal Economics, Sand in the Wheels:
ATTAC Newsletter, no. 141 (August 2002), attac.org/attacinfoen/attacnews, reprinted in Third
World Economics, no. 287 (August 2002): 1415.
10 Colin Gordon, Governmental Rationality: An Introduction, in The Foucault Effect, ed.
Graham Burchell (London: Routledge, 1991), 3; also 1427 for a discussion of neoliberalism
as the fourth historical domain, with reference to Germany, France, and the United States.
11 See David Wank, Commodifying Communism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1999), and Joseph Studwell, The China Dream (London: Prole, 2002).
positions 11:3 Winter 2003 552

12 See Carl Riskin, Zhao Renwei, and Li Shi, eds., Chinas Retreat from Equality (New York:
M. E. Sharpe, 2001), and Nelson Chow, Socialist Welfare with Chinese Characteristics (Hong
Kong: Centre of Asian Studies, 2000).
13 For example, China has followed Keynesian scal policies since the East Asia economic crisis.
See Liu Guoguang, Wang Luolin, Li Jingwen, Liu Shucheng, and Wang Tongsan, Economics
Blue Book of the Peoples Republic of China, 1999 (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1999); my own
review in China Information 15, no. 2 (summer 2001): 148150; and Wu Yifeng, Market
Economy and Governmental Intervention: The Debate between New Classical Macroeco-
nomics and New Keynesian Economics, Social Science in China 16, no. 1 (spring 1995): 1630.
That the state itself has resisted unadulterated neoclassical economic policy, preferring Key-
nesian alternatives, is to some degree beside the point, since the basis of Keynesian policy
is also what is termed orthodox economics, i.e., a mathematized and atomized account of
the social conducive to neoliberalism. This in itself ties into the basic neoliberal tenets of the
Post-Washington Consensus that has gained impetus in recent years; see Ben Fine, Social
Capital versus Social Theory (London: Routledge, 2001), chap. 8.
14 Jamie Morgan, Running to Stand Still? China from Tiananmen to the Fourth Generation
Elite, China Report 38, no. 2 (AprilJune 2002): 199209.
15 Compare Cyril Lin, The Reinstatement of Economics in China Today, China Quarterly, no.
85 (March 1981): 148, and Barbara King, The Economists in Chinese Politics, in Groups
and Politics in the Peoples Republic of China, ed. David Goodman (Cardiff: University College
Cardiff Press, 1984), with the current work and qualication proles of young Chinese
Academy of Social Science economists, most of whom have experience of secondment at the
IMF and World Bank as well as advanced degrees from U.S. university departments noted
for their neoclassicism.
16 See Michael Weisbrot, Economists in Denial, Sand in the Wheels: ATTAC Newsletter, no.
139 (July 2002). To track this process see World Bank reports over the last fteen years. For
example, World Bank, China Engaged: Integration with the Global Economy (Washington,
D.C.: World Bank, 1997), and World Bank, China 2020 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank,
1997).
17 For discussion of poverty issues in China see Riskin, Zhao, and Li, Chinas Retreat From
Equality.
18 See Li Xing, Behind China and the West: Rules of the Game, Journal of Northeast Asian
Studies 15, no. 4 (winter 1996): 4965.
19 For the concept of a performance regime see Zhao Dingxin, The Power of Tiananmen:
State-Society Relations and the 1989 Beijing Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2001), 22.
20 Though concentrating on business behavior, David Wank gives a sense of this process at work
in the commodication of relationships; see Commodifying Communism, 169.
21 World Bank, The East Asian Miracle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
Morgan Words of Warning 553

22 The research concentrates on a typical neoclassical mathematical Cobb-Douglas production

function model. See Adjit Singh, Growth: Its Sources and Consequences, in Economic
Dynamism in the Asia Pacic, ed. Graham Thompson (London: Routledge, 2000), 5582.
23 For a discussion of varieties of practice see the special edition Corruption and Abuses of
Power during the Reform Era, Chinese Sociology and Anthropology 26, no. 2 (winter 1993
1994), guest ed. Gong Xiaoxia.
24 Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (London: Allen Lane, 2002), 97.
25 Ibid., 119.
26 David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (London: Hutchinson, 1993), 471. Similarly,
Jacques Derrida argues that the passage beyond philosophy does not consist in turning
the page of philosophy (which amounts to philosophising badly), but in continuing to read
philosophers in a certain way (Derrida, Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the
Human Sciences, in Writing and Difference [London: Routledge, 1978], 288).
27 Summarized in Gyan Prakash, Postcolonial Criticism and Indian Historiography, Social
Text, no. 3132 (fall 1992): 8. For catachresis in the context of ethical performance with
reference to Spivaks relation to the social theory of Foucault and Derrida see Donna Landry
and Gerald Maclean, eds., Selected Work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (London: Routledge,
1996), 143, 147.
28 On reversal see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Strategy, Identity, and Writing, in The Post-
Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogue (London: Routledge, 1990), 4, 42. Also (in terms
of hegemony and resistance) Spivak, Feminism and Critical Theory, in In Other Worlds
(London: Routledge, 1988), 84. It is in terms of concern with confronting that structure that
Spivaks understanding of catachresis as essentially a nominal process should be interpreted,
i.e., though where one begins is an act of choice, there is still something, shifting though it may
be, to be transitively identied as the system through which meaning is produced. Christopher
Norris expands this argument in terms of resisting radically relative readings of Derridas
deconstruction, in Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 1991), 144151.
29 Burchell, Foucault Effect, 23.
30 See Veronica Kleck and Valerie Peugeot, When Digital Information Disturbs Democ-
racy and the Economy, Sand in the Wheels: ATTAC Newsletter, no. 166 (March 2003),
attac.org/attacinfoen/attacnews. Also Jamie Morgan, Waving or Drowning? The Political
Economy of Summit Cynicism, Sand in the Wheels: ATTAC Newsletter, no. 148 (September
2002), attac.org/attacinfoen/attacnews.
31 See Virginia Vargas, On the Tension between Civil Society and the State in the Global
Arena, in From a Global Market Place to Political Spaces: The North South Dialogue Con-
tinues, ed. Leena Rikkil and Katarina Patomki (Helsinki: Network Institute for Global
Democratization, 2002), 127162.
32 See attac.org/fra/asso/doc/plateformeen.htm.
positions 11:3 Winter 2003 554

33 See James Tobin, A Proposal for International Monetary Reform, Eastern Economic Journal
4, no. 34 (winter 1978): 153159. Also Heikki Patomaki and Lieven Denys, Draft Treaty on
Global Currency Transactions Tax (Helsinki: Network Institute for Global Democratization,
2002).
34 See Heikki Patomki, Global Democracy Initiatives: The Art of the Possible (Helsinki: Network
Institute for Global Democratization, 2002).
35 To contact the Third World Network, subscribe to its publications, or nd out more about
its organizing principles and activities, visit www.twnside.org.sg.
36 For example, Pennie Azarconde la Cruz, Why Asian Groups Are Campaigning against a
New Round, Third World Resurgence, no. 108109 (AugustSeptember 1999), www.twnside.
org.sg/title/penny-cn.htm.
37 To contact Focus on the Global South, subscribe to its publications, or nd out more about its
organizing principles and activities visit www.focusweb.org/Aboutus.
38 For more information visit www.worldsocialforum.org/. For a discussion see Samir Amin,
The Priority of Strengthening Social Movements on a Global Scale, in Rikkil and
Patomki, From a Global Market Place, 4556.
39 Mario Osava, Tobin Tax Financial Reforms to Avert Crises, Says Forum, Third World
Economics, no. 250 (February 2001), www.twnside.org.sg/title/tobin.htm.
40 See Shalmali Guttal, A Master-plan for Market Expansion: The Asian Development Bank
and Governance (April 2002), www.focusweb.org/publications/2002/A-Masterplan-for-
Markets.htm.
41 See James Leake, The Global Ego Trip, Sunday Times, 11 August 2002.
42 Primo Levi, The Song of the Partisan, in If Not Now When (London: Abacus, 1987), 127.