Globalization and Politics: A Critique of Stephen Gill’s Postmodern Views

Abstract

In outlining his views on globalization, market civilization, and neo-liberalism, Stephen Gill’s main point of departure from an orthodox Marxian line is his use of discourse to “deconstruct” neo-liberalism. It is his combining of postmodernism and Marxism that makes his argument contradictory since Marxism is predicated on the historical-materialist view of history that states what people produce and their relationship to things that they produce conditions their social, political, and intellectual lives. Marxist ideology is a “humanist project” in which the individual is generally understood to be conscious, stable, unified, rational, and coherent. Since Foucault, and other postmodernists, call into question the existence of a lasting subject or individual, this is problematic for Gill’s argument.