David McNally (professor)

To make history — to change the actual course of world events — is intoxicating, inspiring, and life-transforming.

Professor David (New York May 2014)

David McNally (born 1953) is a Marxist theorist and is a Professor of political science at York University in Toronto, and chair of the university's political science department.

Quotes

Another World Is Possible : Globalization and Anti-capitalism (2002)

Behind their fluffy rhetoric about free trade and free markets lurks a hostility toward freedom for ordinary people — and a love affair with police and prisons.

In short, the rules of behaviour in capitalist society systematically produce irrational consequences.

• At its heart, this book is about where this new left has come from, and where it might be going.
  • Preface, p. 11

• When history moves — really moves — it does so in great convulsive jolts.
  • Chapter 1, This Is What Democracy Looks Like, p. 13

• To make history — to change the actual course of world events — is intoxicating, inspiring, and life-transforming.
  • Chapter 1, This Is What Democracy Looks Like, p. 23

• Corporate globalization and the economic agreements designed to entrench it have little to do with trade — and all but the most ignorant neo-liberal pundits surely know this too.
  • Chapter 2, Globalization - It's Not About Free Trade, p. 30

• "Free trade" is a slogan used to attack practices designed by competitor economies to protect their own interests.
  • Chapter 2, Globalization - It's Not About Free Trade, p. 33

• "Free trade" is a policy imposed on the weakest and evaded by the most powerful.
  • Chapter 2, Globalization - It's Not About Free Trade, p. 33

• Under NAFTA, in other words, the right of corporations to bring thousands of tons of hazardous waste into local communities overrides the right of residents to protect their health.
  • Chapter 2, Globalization - It's Not About Free Trade, p. 41

• Put baldly, globalization has been nothing less than a mechanism for a massive transfer of wealth from poor to rich — in other words, exactly what it is was designed to be.
  • Chapter 2, Globalization - It's Not About Free Trade, p. 47

• Behind their fluffy rhetoric about free trade and free markets lurks a hostility toward freedom for ordinary people — and a love affair with police and prisons.
  • Chapter 2, Globalization - It's Not About Free Trade, p. 52

• Contrary to liberal myth, Smith was not an apologist for capitalists. He argued in fact, that capitalists always seek "to deceive and oppress the public" by conspiring to inflate their prices and profits.
  • Chapter 3, The Invisible Hand Is A Closed Fist, p. 61

• The neoliberal utopia of unrestrained capitalism is being created by a war against the poor and the commons. In fact, the "new enclosures" are a sign that the struggles that marked the birth of capitalism are still very much alive.
  • Chapter 3, The Invisible Hand Is A Closed Fist, p. 69

• Common wealth is in the process of being transferred from the public domain to the private sector.
  • Chapter 3, The Invisible Hand Is A Closed Fist, p. 70

• Globalization is thus also about global commodification of labour; it is about — global proletarianization — the creation of a world working class for capital to exploit.
  • Chapter 3, The Invisible Hand Is A Closed Fist, p. 78

• In short, the rules of behaviour in capitalist society systematically produce irrational consequences.
  • Chapter 3, The Invisible Hand Is A Closed Fist, p. 86

• What was it, then, about the development of capitalism that gave rise to modern racial ideology?
  • Chapter 4, The Colour Of Money, p. 112

• The fundamental truth about globalization — that it represents freedom for capital and unfreedom for labour — is especially clear where global migrants are concerned.
  • Chapter 4, The Colour Of Money, p. 137

• The Greek philosopher Plato may have rejected the idea that "might makes right" some 2,500 years ago, but America and its allies today make it the cornerstone of foreign policy.
  • Chapter 4, The Colour Of Money, p. 147

• In many respects, the Second World War was a continuation of the First, a conflict triggered by the mismatch between industrial power and imperial reach.
  • Chapter 4, The Colour Of Money, p. 150

• Once capitalist classes learn to live with unions — which they generally do reluctantly, only after efforts to crush them have failed — they then attempt to co-opt organized labour. They do so by courting a "special relationship" with union leaders who, as their organizations become larger and more complex, typically assume the role of full time union functionaries.
  • Chapter 6, Democracy Against Capitalism, p. 208

• Genuine growth is always dialogical — it requires engagement in a dynamic, developing, and open-ended dialogue.
  • Chapter 7, Freedom Song, p. 231

• A society that has moved beyond commodification is one that has embraced the most thoroughgoing radical democracy in all spheres of social life.
  • Chapter 7, Freedom Song, p. 234

• Social movements will not develop if they refuse to name and define alternative possibilities.
  • Chapter 7, Freedom Song, p. 235

• The suffering inflicted by this present order invariably produces a struggle to overcome it.
  • Conclusion, p. 275