Several thousand protesters brought downtown Ottawa traffic to a standstill this weekend during top-level financeministers’ meetings, challenging globalization, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. This weekend atthe combined meetings of the Group of 20, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in Ottawa, terrorism wasa major issue: the G20 resolution calls for implementing relevant UN Security Council resolutions, freezing theassets of terrorists and their associates, and denying them access to the international financial system.

World Bank president James Wolfensohn meanwhile, told Canada’s Globe and Mail paper, “There’s a need for us tochange in the bank, but there’s also a need for civil society to give us credit for the ways we do change.”

Police arrested 49 people at the demonstrations, charging most with public mischief or breach of the peace; two werecharged with assaulting police officers. All but four had been released by yesterday afternoon. Police fired tear gasor pepper spray and plastic or rubber bullets and bean bags, and doused the crowd with water.

The meeting of the G20 in Ottawa and last week’s World Trade Organization meeting in Qatar demonstrate the globalspread of international finance and trade organizations. One of the people who has tracked that spread is feministwriter Silvia Federici.

Federici argues that war is on the global agenda because the new phase of capitalist expansionism is necessarily aviolent process. Corporate capital cannot extend its reach over the planet’s resources —-from the seas to the foreststo people’s labour, to our very genetic pools—- without generating an intense resistance worldwide.

Guest:

• Silvia Federici, associate professor in Political Philosophy at Hofstra University, and coordinator of theCommittee for Academic Freedom in Africa. She is the editor of “Enduring Western Civilization: The Construction ofthe Concept of Western Civilization and Its 'Others.'”