Portland State University PDXScholar Educational Leadership and Policy Faculty Publications and Presentations Educational Leadership and Policy Spring 2001 Class, Cultism, and Multiculturalism Ramin Farahmandpur Portland State University, [email protected] Peter McLaren University of California - Los Angeles Follow this and additional works at: https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/elp_fac Part of the Elementary Education and Teaching Commons, and the Social and Philosophical Foundations of Education Commons Let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Citation Details McLaren, P., & Farahmandpur, R. (2001). Class, Cultism, and Multiculturalism. Multicultural Education, 8(3), 2-14. This Article is brought to you for free and open access. It has been accepted for inclusion in Educational Leadership and Policy Faculty Publications and Presentations by an authorized administrator of PDXScholar. Please contact us if we can make this document more accessible: [email protected]. Class, cultism, & multiculturalism: A notebook on forging a revolutionary politics McLaren, Peter;Farahmandpur, Ramin Multicultural Education; Spring 2001; 8, 3; ProQuest Research Library pg. 2 • By Peter McLa ren Ramin Farahmandpur If this were a dictatorship it'd be a tape parades and local beer hall celebra­ millionaire novelas offame for the lucky few , heck of a lot easier. tions only serves to momentarily deflect and misery and poverty for the unlucky many. -George W. Bush attention from the millions of exploited The functional integration among produc­ men, women, and children around the world. tion, trade, global financial markets, and Who Wants to a The challenge of turning the country into transport and speed technologies that make one giant theme park to entertain the rul­ financial transactions instantaneous, have The new millennium has finally ar­ ing class has not been met in all corners of facilitated the re-deployment of capital to rived with Bourbon Street reverie. But the the globe, and the opposition is withering "least-cost" locations that enable exploita­ unsettling triumph represented by ticker away by the minute. More and more coun­ tion on the basis of advantages it will bring tries are donning what William Greider to those wishing to become part of the has called globalization's "golden straight­ "Millionaires R Us Club." Peter McLaren is a professor jacket" of "follow our orders, and we will As global assembly lines increase, and and Ramin Farahmandpur make you rich (someday)"-forced auster­ as speculative and financial capital strikes is a graduate student at the Graduate School of Education ity programs orchestrated by institutions across national borders in commando-like and Information Studies such as the International Monetary Fund assaults ("move in, take the goods, and of the University of California, that dictates what foreign governments move out"), the state continues to experi­ Los Angeles. mayor may not do (2000, p, 14). ence difficulty in managing economic trans­ The text of this article was first presented Despite all the fanfare surrounding actions but has not yet detached itselffrom at the Annual Meeting the promises of free trade, it remains the the infrastructure of corporate imperial­ of the American Educational case that both advanced and developed ism. Transnational corporations and pri­ Research Association, countries have been hurt by globalization. vate financial institutions-Gold Card New Orleans, Louisiana, April 26, 2000. A version of this article will appear Only a few metropolitan centers and select members of the leading worldwide bour­ in an Australian volume social strata have benefited, and it is no geoisie-have formed what Robinson and edited by Bill Cope and Mary Kazantatis secret who these select occupants are. It's Harris (2000) call a "transnational capi­ and sections of this article will also not the case that the poor are next in line to talist clan." And while the emergent global appear in the following articles: Peter become millionaires. That's not part ofthe ca pi talist historic bloc is marked by contra­ McLaren, Aimee M. Carillo-Rowe, Rebecca overall scheme. The success of Regis has dictions in terms of how to achieve regula­ L. Clark, and Philip A. Craft (in press), brought with it his repressed double, the tory order in the current global economy, "Decentering strategies of white racial unemployed worker who returns to visit the national capitals and nation states con­ domination," in Glenn Hudak and Paul Kihn (Eds), Labelling: Politics, Identity, scene of his firing to do some 'firing' of his tinue to reproduce themselves. Home mar­ and Pedagogy, New York: Routledge; Peter own, only this time through the barrel of an kets have not disappeared from the scene McLaren and Jill Pinkney-Pastrana (in automatic rifle as he guns down his ex-boss since they continue to provide ballast for press), "Cuba, Yanquizacion, and the cult and fellow workers. No, the poor are not the imperialist state through ensuring the of Elitin Gonzalez: A view from the next in line to enter free market heaven. general conditions for international pro­ 'Enlightened States, '" International In fact, the poor are completely written duction and exchange. Journal of Qualitative Studies in out of the script; they serve as permanent Liberal democracies like to pretend Education (a special issue on Cuba, edited extras for the background shots for larger that the state is a separate and autono- by Denise Blum and Peter McLaren). MULTlCULTURAL EDUCATlON 2 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. A Notebook on Forging a Revolutionary Politics mous sphere of activity because that way In fact, self-determining governments only have stolen the election through voter cleans­ they can set up convenient smokescreens get in the way of the goal of transnational ing in his brother J e b' s state of Florida, but against the internal workings of the capi­ corporations, which is "to open all domestic is determined to realize his potential for talist production process. They can also markets, natural resources, builtinfrastruc­ manifest delusion and to exercise a stub­ prevent the staggering exposure of capital­ tures, and labor pools of all societies of the born willingness to give away billions of ism's zero-sum game and hinder our under­ world to foreign transnational control with­ dollars of tax cuts to the wealthiest one standing of the indivious ways in which the out the barrier of self-determining govern­ percent of the population. Bush not only state actually functions to sustain and pro­ ment and people in the way" (McMurtry, lacks moral intelligence, but he serves as mote the capitalist system. Not to mention 1999,p.58). The real agendaoftransnational an understudy for such a lack. He's already the ways in which the state locates blame corporations is, in other words, to create an upstaged Dan Quayle in the 'wasted mind' within individuals (they are too lazy, igno­ anti-welfare capitalism with a human face department, but it remains to be seen what rant, unskilled) rather than within their while drawing attention away from the para­ his boss, Dick Cheney, has in mind for him. conditions of existence (i.e., the value form doxical congeniality of capitalism and its How has the globalization of capital of wealth that is historically specific to repressed underside. fared? The economic performance of indus­ capitalism). Within liberal democracies, The current mind-set of global capital­ trial countries under globalization in the individuals are conveniently held respon­ ism can, in fact, be traced to the Trilateral 1980s and 1990s is much poorer than dur­ sible for their own poverty as blame is Commission of 1973 (composed of the ing the 1950s and 1960s when they oper­ shifted away from the capitalist race to the world's leading corporate CEOs, academ­ ated under a more regulated social-market bottom to see who can prosper with the ics, government officials, etc.), who argued economy (Singh, 2000). Economic growth minimum or lowest standards of social and that there existed "an excess of democracy" as well as GDP growth has been lowered economic justice as well as environmental in the Western world and who advocated and productivity has been cut in half; in protection and sustainability. The blame the legitimacy of hierarchy, coercion, disci­ addition, unemployment has risen dramati­ is always shifted away from the means by pline, secrecy, and deception, as well as the cally in the OECD countries. which surplus-value is created through the non-involvement of a governable democ­ That the United States has fared bet­ internal or dialectical relation that exists racy (McMurtry, 1999). Mutagenic capital­ ter on the issue of unemployment than between labor and capital-that is, away ist values have transmogrified into a social Western European countries cannot be at­ from the way workers are locked into an ethos, making it easier for flim-flam finan­ tributed to the less flexible labor markets internal and antagonistic relation to capital cial ventures to proliferate, breaking the of the latter, nor on the information tech­ in the most alienating and dehumanizing of tenuous accord that has long existed be­ nologies revolution. In the case of Japan ways-and away from the fact that exploita­ tween labor and capital. Adam Smith's and Korea, their periods of fast economic tion is a constitutive feature ofthe capitalist notion of the market as a servant of the