Graf­fiti In Nantes, France

The more I attend classes at uni­ver­sity, the more I feel like I belong in a museum. The big museum of failed and for­got­ten ideals. Move along, noth­ing to see here.

It started last sum­mer when I attended a macro-economy class. The prof enjoyed hang­ing out at Wall Street on his spare time dur­ing the week­ends. Unsur­pris­ingly, he was the type of per­son to get super excited about the stock mar­ket (in which we should def­i­nitely all invest), RRSPs (a must for all Cana­di­ans), sav­ing bonds (deemed too con­ser­v­a­tive) and other finan­cial prod­ucts. He had sparkles in his eyes as he talked about trad­ing stocks. Never mind it was only a few months after the big eco­nomic cri­sis which rocked the world in 2008. Cap­i­tal­ism was alive and well, he claimed. The val­ues to adopt were the Amer­i­can finan­cial model and the pur­suit of growth. No other sys­tem worked, right? So why ques­tion the “bestest” way for indi­vid­u­als to seek happiness?

Sure. I mean, what do you expect from a North Amer­i­can econ­omy (and busi­ness) prof? He was bound to be in love with lib­er­al­ism. Yet, it was cer­tainly the first time of my life I heard some­one prais­ing the mech­a­nism of aggre­gated sup­ply and demand, as well as a form of neolib­er­al­ism that did left mil­lions unem­ployed. But after all, maybe he was push­ing his point.

I’m cur­rently attend­ing a class on glob­al­iza­tion. First it is inter­est­ing to notice how cur­rent the courses are in Canada. In France, we barely touched the Alger­ian war of inde­pen­dence (which took place in the early 1960s) for instance because it was con­sid­ered to be “con­tem­po­rary his­tory” and as such, we would lack the required dis­tance to ana­lyze it. In Canada, no such sec­ond thought. Profs don’t seem to have any prob­lem ana­lyz­ing the cur­rent war in Iraq or in Afghanistan, even though it seems to me that it’s hard to have an unbi­ased opin­ion with­out much hindsight.

And in these classes, a lot of ideas and par­a­digms are pre­sented as uni­ver­sally accepted and almost com­mon­sen­si­cal. For instance, the cur­rent lib­eral glob­al­iza­tion just exists. It is men­tioned as if every­body on earth at one point did agree on it. Com­mu­nism and Social­ism failed. Yes, they did. No fur­ther expla­na­tion, that’s just the way it is. It is as if both ide­olo­gies are exactly the same and as if the fall of the Berlin wall and the sub­se­quent dis­in­te­gra­tion of the USSR sounded the death-knell of any alter­na­tive to liberalism.

Have you ever heard of ATTAC? ATTAC (Asso­ci­a­tion for the Tax­a­tion of Finan­cial Trans­ac­tions for the Aid of Cit­i­zens) is an activist orga­ni­za­tion for the estab­lish­ment of a tax on for­eign exchange trans­ac­tions. Granted, it was founded in France (you know, far away in Social­ist and use­less Europe) but it now exists in over forty coun­tries around the world. It’s by no means a left-wing fringe group — at least I thought so. But the way the prof talks about it, it sounds like they are a bunch of bearded old hip­pies with flow­ers in their hair who foment the revolution.

Shit. I was one of these hip­pies foment­ing the revolution.

Dur­ing the 18 years I spent in France, I protested, went on strike and demon­strated. I was run after by cops and tear-gassed (yet, never been arrested). I made signs, used a micro­phone and hap­pily sang rev­o­lu­tion­ary songs. In every way, I was your typ­i­cal French teenager.

Obvi­ously, when I came to Canada, I mel­lowed a lot. First, I didn’t know the cul­ture very much and you can’t fight against what you don’t know. Sec­ond, I was very much aware of the fact I was now liv­ing in North Amer­ica, the birth­place of lib­er­al­ism. Blindly rebelling against it didn’t seem to make any sense.

Canada is pretty peace­ful. Unlike France, there are few protests and demon­stra­tions (although our Prime Min­is­ter man­aged to anger Cana­di­ans enough to stir up a national protest last month). It lures you into a sense of tran­quil­ity. Yet, I can’t help think­ing that there is more to life than own­ing a house with a white picket fence and hav­ing 2.5 kids. It’s not because my life is some­what bet­ter here than in France that I for­got about all the socio-economic prob­lems around.

The eco­nomic gap, both within the so-called devel­oped coun­tries and between the lat­ter and the rest of the world is dri­ving me crazy. And so does the lack of basic labour laws in North Amer­ica (and don’t even get me started on the U.S health care sys­tem!). Neo­colo­nial­ism and the power that all the “Bret­ton Woods” orga­ni­za­tions, such as the IMF and the WTO still have in this world. The fact that the world is ruled by a lucky few and that we all stand by, watch­ing, as deci­sions are made way above our heads.

I have noth­ing against “peace, order and good gov­ern­ment” nor against “life, lib­erty and the pur­suit of hap­pi­ness” but I do see some issues in the world we live in. And I doubt that the cur­rent polit­i­cal model we use as well as this view of glob­al­iza­tion will do much to solve them. So yes, I’m still fight­ing. It starts by peace­fully ques­tion­ing the cur­rent world order and real­iz­ing we shouldn’t take it for granted.

As they say, “another world is pos­si­ble”. No, seri­ously. I believe in it, anyway.

Related arti­cles:

1. The French and the World Cup
2. Another World
3. Going To…
4. Rebel France III
5. The Run­away