Now I have arrived
Now I am here, present,
I the singer.
Now is the time to celebrate,
Come here and present yourself,
those who have an aching heart,
I raise my song.
Náhuatl poem, La Jornada, January 30,1996
We stand at the threshold of the twenty-first century, at the crossroads of history, squinting nervously toward the horizon for some indication that past events will prefigure what will be most assuredly portentous times. Given the complexity of issues that educators, policy makers, administrators, and activists face at the dawn of the new millennium, the publication of Critical Education in the New Information Age could not be more timely. Its authors—Manuel Castells, Ramón Flecha, Paulo Freire, Henry A. Giroux, Donaldo Macedo, and Paul Willis—have not only embraced current educational issues with a political and moral urgency, they have also mapped these issues with a critical acumen that is grounded in the best analyses that contemporary social theory has to offer. Indeed, the efforts of these authors constitute a new development in the engagement of critical social theory with issues of educational reform and transformation. Confronted by the new world order of communications technologies, the informational society, diasporic movements linked to globalization, cultural politics connected to postmodemity, and educational developments such as multiculturalism and critical pedagogy, educators of the twenty-first century face a daunting challenge.
Critical Education in the New Information Age is designed to assist educators in navigating what sometimes amounts to a political and epistemological minefield that has resulted from contending and conflicting discourses of educational and social reform; further, it is a volume that speaks to new strategies of resistance and struggle demanded by the challenge of the information age, to the development of new languages of criticism and interpretation, and to a revolutionary praxis that refuses to compromise its commitment to the imperatives of emancipation and social justice.
When former generations stood beneath the gilded portal that marked the beginning of the previous century, few could have predicted the spectacular (and spectacularizing) success of capitalism throughout the globe, including this century’s greatest artiste demolisseur, Karl Marx. Still fewer could have foreseen that the very success of capital would not only pave the way for a concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands but would also set the stage for the triumphant comeback of the dark ages of extreme poverty and institute a long and unendurable period of suffering and hopelessness for millions of the world population. Neoliberalism—what Subcommandante Marcos of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional in Chiapas, Mexico, refers to as “the fourth world war,” designed lex non scripta to eliminate the world’s minority populations—has entered an unholy alliance with the brutal forces of imperialism and capitalist exploitation. Our modern capitalist world economy has given priority not to the furthest reaches of human dignity but rather to the ceaseless accumulation of capital. The new world system reflects an internationalization of culture and a worldwide division of labor that over the last several generations has exacerbated human misery. Global capitalism continues to serve as a Malthusian plague upon the planet, eating away the very flesh of democracy and abandoning justice to the rag and bone shop of lost dreams. To contest the unfettering of the market has become tantamount to an act of lèse-majesté. No matter what future we envision, we can rest assured that reality will keep showing us things we do not want to see, telling us things we do not want to hear, and brushing against the grain of our most sophisticated predictions and our most impulsive predilections.
We live at a time when capitalism has become an unrepentant universal system and the global arbiter of the public good. The golden era of postwar capitalism (the history of which is frequently distorted by right-wing apologists, who often hide the fact that 20—40 percent of the U.S. population lived at or below the poverty level in the early 1960s) with its sustained economic development, its technological innovation, its promise of structural equanimity, and its paramystical promise of easy and endless consumption, disappeared in the mid-1970s as part of “the United States business class’s campaign to roll back working Americans’ Golden Age attainments and reconcentrate wealth and power in the United States” (Street, 1998, p. 55). Since this time, capital has prided itself more and more on taking the low road of class warfare.
Particularly during the Reagan years—noted for its aura of cultural triumphalism, feel-good rhetoric, corporate gluttony, outright criminal scenarios involving the Contras, backroom dealings with Latin American military regimes, and the brutal suppression of popular revolutionary movements—hegemonic practices and regulatory forces that had undergirded postwar capitalism were dramatically destabilized. Perry Anderson remarks that the “real illumination of postmodernism” was generated by the Reagan Presidency: “unbridled nouveau riche display, teleprompt statecraft, boll-weevil consensus” (1998, p. 92). The palmy, halcyon days before the arrival of the new Leviathan of globalization—when liberal Keynesian policy making established at least a provisional social safety net—have been replaced by panna-tional structures of production and distribution and communication technologies that enable a “warp speed capitalism” to make instant worldwide financial transactions.1 According to Paul Street, “the alternately fatalistic and celebratory chant of globalization has become a great capitalist smoke screen [that] disarms any resistance to capital and diverts us from seeing the real not-so-novel nature of U.S. capitalists’ all-too-domestic assault on U.S. workers” (1998, p. 56).
The world has not witnessed Marx’s assurance that the expropriators of capitalism would themselves be expropriated by the workers, and that the failure of capitalism would be brought on by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production itself, accompanied by a revolt of the working class. The fall of the Soviet Union has further garnered for the Marxist left an undeserved dismissal by the champions of the borderless free market. U.S. citizens, who have grown chary of any perspectives that smack of socialism—such as universal health care—look askance upon the very word Marxism, as if it has embedded within its ontology the demon seed of totalitarianism. But it is not difficult to look beneath such accusations in order to see the system that is being defended. Samir Amin remarks:
It is rather amusing to see managerial types who dismiss Marxism as unduly deterministic proffering this rather vulgar, absolute kind of determinism. Moreover, the social design they seek to defend with this argument, namely the market-based management of the world system, is utopian in the worst sense of the term, a reactionary, criminal utopia, doomed in any case to fall apart under the pressure of its own highly explosive charge. (1997, p. 151)
And while it is undeniable that today capitalism is flourishing more than at any time in its history, it is also true that it faces a structural crisis of unequal proportion. This structural crisis is taking place not only in the United States but also in major European countries such as France, Britain, and Germany, which have double-digit unemployment rates. Recently, thousands of jobless people in France staged sit-ins in government offices, and immigrant youths from Northern and sub-Saharan Africa clashed with police in depressed French neighborhoods, provoking voices on the right to decry the “Intifada of the suburbs,” equating these depressed districts with Arab territories under Israeli occupation. Spain has an unemployment rate of more than 20 percent; and many postcommunist nations have as high as 30 percent unemployment (Petras and Polychroniou, 1996, p. 109).
The United States is more vulnerable to the ravages of globalization than many other industrialized nations, as U.S. workers now earn much less than their European and Japanese counterparts (Street, 1998). These conditions of worsening human misery have provoked Robert Brenner to remark: “If, after more than two decades of wage-cutting, tax-cutting, reductions in the growth of social expenditure, deregulation and ‘sound finance,’ the ever less fettered ‘free market’ economy is unable to perform half as well as in the 1960s, there might be some reason to question the dogma that the freer the market, the better the economic performance” (1998, p. 238). Capitalism’s worldwide structural crisis is linked to the internal logic of the capitalist system itself and is manifested in overaccumulation and failure to utilize fully its productive capacity. Deindustrialization, capital flight, the ascendancy of financial and speculative capital, the retrenchment in capacity-increasing investment by the industrial magnates, the expansion of transnational circuits of migrant workers, downsizing, cost cutting, and the deproletarianized surplus labor force have created radically new social conditions throughout most of the globe. According to James Petras and Chronis Polychroniou:
The reorganization of the labor process has greatly transformed the relation between capital and labor. Capital is eliminating multiple layers of management and administration between the top executives and production workers to lower costs. The remaining managers and engineers are increasingly part of the labor force on the production floor. The differences in income, power, and prerogatives remain, but the hierarchy of production has been transformed, and the immediate managers are more integrated into the workplace. The superfluousness of the “white apron boys” in production means less waste for administrative overhead expenses. Under capitalism, this means more profit and less cost. (1996, p. 113)
Of course, these conditions cannot be seen as a refutation of Marx, but rather as vividly illustrating the contradictory character of capitalism that Marx emphasized in Capital. I concur with E. San Juan when he writes: “While there is no doubt that imperialism has altered in the wake of corporate globalization, the collapse of Soviet ‘communism,’ and the rise of new social movements (ecological, feminists, indigenous, etc.) not anticipated by revolutionaries of the last century, the most powerful analytic framework for understanding social processes and for creating feasible agencies of change remains, to my mind, the Marxist perspective and its rich, complex tradition” (1998, p. 57).
There are many reasons why history has not conspired to demonstrate the truth of Francis Fukuyama’s pronouncement that the world had arrived at “the end of history” after the fall of the Berlin wall and the demise of Soviet communism. A policy adviser who served in Reagan’s State Department, the neo-Hegelian Fukuyama goes on to announce, in the cadences of official rhetoric, “the end of ideology,” “the ultimate triumph of Western liberal democracy,” and “the unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism” (1989, p. 3). Reason and history had finally come together, supposedly for the first time, in such an orgy of unity.
Terry Eagleton points out that the myth of the “end of history” is a false form of universalism. It is false because not only is it a form of ideological imperialism but also it does not represent a form of universalism in a positive sense other than in the realm of description. In contrast, socialism consists of a necessary critique of this false universalism. Eagleton is worth repeating:
Socialists, or at least Marxists, are often hotly upbraided with being universalists. But while this is true in one sense, it is false in another. One is a socialist, among other reasons, precisely because universality doesn’t exist at present in any positive, as opposed to merely descriptive or ideological, sense. Not everyone, as yet, enjoys freedom, happiness and justice. Part of what prevents this from coming about is precisely the false universalism which holds that it can be achieved by extending the values and liberties of a particular sector of humankind, roughly speaking Western Man, to the entire globe. The myth of the “end of history” is the complacent belief that this has now happened or is well on the way to happening. Socialism is a critique of this false universalism, not in the name of a cultural particularism which is often enough simply its other face, but in the name of the right of everyone to negotiate their own difference in terms of everyone else’s. (1996, p. 118)
There are many reasons to reject Fukuyama’s hypothesis outside of Eagleton’s critique of its false universalism, not least of which is the continuing existence of human misery under capitalism and the important relevance of Marx’s legacy. Contrary to Fukuyama’s assertion, class inequalities do exist in the West and are growing. According to Paulo Freire (this volume), although its death has been proclaimed, ideology remains alive and well and still operates overwhelmingly in the interests of capital. This sentiment is cogently expressed by Doug Kellner, who notes that “we continue to live in a capitalist society, and as long as we do, Marxism will continue to be relevant. . . . As long as tremendous class inequality, human suffering, and oppression exist there is a need for critical theories such as Marxism and the visions of radical social change that the tradition has inspired” (1995, p. 26).
Loren Goldner casts these contradictions in more forceful terms:
From the South Bronx to South Central L.A., millions of ruined and stunted lives are palpable evidence that in this system, human beings exist for the “economy” instead of vice versa, and that human beings of no use to the accumulation of capital are discarded onto the social scrap heap, criminalized, and used by the system to rationalize and legitimate its own barbarism. The simultaneous coexistence of a significantly increased labor productivity and significantly lengthened work week is a flagrant demonstration, beneath and beyond the chatter of politicians, the media and academia, of the priorities of the system. (1998, p. 52)
While surely the end of history has not arrived, it does seem clear, however, that neither have we entered into Marx’s realm of freedom but rather into a posthistorie where life has been drained of the fullness of meaning. Fukuyama’s world-historical speculation offers the United States philosophically sanctioned comfort as it glides into the new millennium, one claw buried in the chest of a defeated “communism,” and wings spread against the enemies of neoliberalism and the free market, or anyone seditious enough to prevent democracy from subordinating all human activity on the planet to the logic of capital accumulation. Fukuyama’s triumph of liberal capitalism has not, however, freed humankind from history but rather extended the dispensation of prehistory’s tempestuous reign of cruelty. Marx, it should be remembered, did not describe the overthrow of capitalism as the end of history, but rather as the end of the prehistory of human society. He famously sought the attainment of a mode of production no longer based on exploitation but one that subordinated the use of productive powers to democratically organized, collective regulation and the transcendence of class society (Callinicos, 1995). Alex Callinicos does not believe that the world has arrived at the end of history, but rather at the end “of a century that has seen plenty of ‘tragic failures and defeats’ suffered by the left, at a time when humankind is confronted by a globally entrenched but peculiarly regressive kind of laissez-faire capitalism, whose demands are likely to cause yet more misery and destruction” (1995, p. 211).
Fukuyama’s cheery millennialist pronouncements celebrate the death of doom-and-gloom Marxism and the triumphant arrival of the “good news” of the bourgeois apocalypse ushered in by the democratizing impulses of the free market. Farewell to the past of which we have seen the last. We can now flush war, imperialism, and poverty down the toilet of history. The coming embourgeoisement of the global future will be about peace and prosperity once the last obstacles to capitalist expansion have been obliterated.
Challenging Fukuyama’s trust in the “miracle-working powers of technoscience and the ultimate beneficence of a transnational capitalism,” Patrick Brantlinger argues for “social planning on a global scale” to avoid the human misery and environmental destruction brought about by the success of transnational capitalism (1998, p. 79).
Capital has triumphed over its historical antecedents by transforming itself into an organic system of generalized commodity production. István Mészáros writes that “by reducing and degrading human beings to the status of mere ‘costs of production’ as ‘necessary labor power,’ capital could treat even living labor as nothing more than a ‘marketable commodity,’ just like any other, subjecting it to the dehumanizing determinations of economic compulsion” (1998, p. 28). Over the past several decades numerous academics, artists, and cultural workers of various stripes have looked to cultural diversity and the possibility of a subversive cultural politics to challenge the productive systems of capitalism. After all, we live in a world of global space and of commodity, capital, and labor flows that require permeable state boundaries and hybrid identities. For some, this would suggest numerous possibilities for creative alliances against cultural domination. Yet Eagleton reminds us that capitalism is able to accommodate a vast pluralism of ideas and cultural practices:
Capitalism is the most pluralistic order history has ever known, restlessly transgressing boundaries and dismantling oppositions, pitching together diverse life-forms and continually overflowing the measure. The whole of this plurality, need one say, operates within quite stringent limits; but it helps to explain why some postmodernists look eagerly to a hybridized future while others are persuaded that it has already arrived. (1996, p. 133)
Given the range of themes discussed in this volume—from postmodernism, to commodity fetishism, to repoliticized postmodern pedagogy—it is felicitous that its publication coincides with the 150th anniversary of two important historical events: the publication of The Communist Manifesto and, less well known, the signing of the Treaty of Guadaloupe Hidalgo, formally ending a two-year war between the United States and Mexico. Through this treaty, the United States “legally” acquired some 800,000 square miles of territory, stretching from Texas to California, which it had earlier seized by force. Holders of aboriginal title and sovereignty who never relinquished their powers to the government of the Mexican Republic of 1848 were displaced, and the civil rights of former Mexican citizens were not respected.
Today, we are witnessing the continued marginalization and human rights violations of native and Latino/Latina groups throughout the Southwestern United States, spearheaded by California’s infamous anti-immigration legislation (currently held up in the courts), anti-affirmative action measures, and anti-bilingual education efforts: propositions 187, 209, and 227 respectively. Faced with such a cruel and unrelentingly racist scenario it is hardly surprising to learn that the United States is helping to build up the Mexican military through arms acquisitions and Pentagon training of over one thousand Mexican military officers under the pretense of stopping the flow of narcotics from Mexico to the United States. Without downplaying the reality of narco-corruption, the strategic military alliance between Mexico and the United States undoubtedly has ramifications for stepping-up the low intensity warfare against the Zapatistas in Mexico, and keeping Mexico’s markets safe for U.S. investment (McLaren, 1998). While conservative politicians and growing sectors of the United States population shrillingly denounce the rise of “illegal” immigrants (primarily from Mexico) in Los Angeles and throughout the Southwestern United States, it is perniciously ironic that this influx of undocumented workers is being blamed solely on miserable economic and political conditions in the so-called Third World countries. What the politicians and the media persistently fail to report is that the root of this situation can be traced to the downgraded manufacturing sector in the United States and the growth of new low-wage jobs in the service sector where the growth industries—finance, real estate, insurance, retail trade, and business services—come equipped with low wages, weak (if any) unions, and a high proportion of part-time and female workers. These workers are more than likely to be immigrants who work for low pay, have little employment security, require few job skills and little knowledge of English (Sassen, 1998). Of course, the growing high-income professional and managerial class in major cities has also created a need for low-wage service workers—restaurant workers, residential building attendants, preparers of specialty and gourmet foods, dog walkers, errand runners, apartment cleaners, childcare providers and others who work in the informal “off the books” economy (Sassen, 1998). That these practices are linked to global economic expansion of finance capital is indisputable. What is not so easy to demonstrate are the ways in which the United States is plundering its domestic resources to finance global financial markets. As Polychroniou notes:
The domestic economy has become a means of extracting the necessary resources to finance the global operations of capital. The elimination of high-paying industrial jobs and cuts in wages, social programs, and benefits provide the resources through which the U.S. imperial state supports the operations of finance capital overseas. The U.S. economy is, thus, shaping up as a two-tiered economy: a wealthy elite that derives its gains and benefits from the global economy and a laboring population that works at the minimum wage to support the international drive of capital. (1996, p. 61)
The anniversary of the Communist Manifesto is being celebrated by leftist political organs of every shape and stripe and discussed by conservative polemicists in mainstream publications such as the Los Angeles Times. It may seem surprising that as a way of marking the anniversary, the Times gave considerable space to the serious ruminations of leftist scholars such as Eric Hobsbawm (1998) and Russell Jacoby (1998). Yet in a world in which Marxism has been so thoroughly discredited by a right-wing chorus of racial disharmony, capitalist triumphalism, and political opportunism and in which the demonization of the former Soviet Union bulks so large, Marxism is no longer considered a threat to the minds of U.S. citizens. It is a disease to which we have become fully immunized.
What is afoot today is a direct assault on the very possibility of democracy. Globalization has placed democracy, already corrupted by its own internal contradictions, in a state of duress from which it has become impossible to free itself (see Ramón Flecha, this volume). Once considered the oxygen of democracy, capital now habitually blunts democracy, placing democracy at risk. It is clearly no longer the salvation of humanity (if it ever was) but a false prophet, a saint de bois. In fact, capital has transmogrified democracy into its own detritus, its most fetid form of excreta. The United States has recently witnessed ominous changes in the wake of capitalist flows: massive corporate buyouts and mergers accompanied by a steady decline in wages that are spiraling to their lowest international levels; the elimination of health insurance, pension, vacation, and other benefits; longer working hours; the restructuring of labor followed by a weakening of labor unions; the transferring of stable, industrial workers to low-paid temporary contract wage earners in the service industry; and the shrinking of long-term, large-scale capital investment.
The United States has not hesitated in toppling the governments of developing nations that have placed the economic welfare of their own people before the export of their resources to the First World. International organizations are diminishing the right of nations to curtail exploitation by capital as GATT, the UN, IMF, and World Bank “increasingly pre-empt national and local laws and standards in spheres such as health and welfare, workers’ rights, environmental protection, food quality, capital flows, and ownership” (Teeple, 1995, p. 123). And all this is occurring at a time when consumerism has become a world addiction, when values of democracy and freedom are being replaced by the K-Marting of the American dream, when Rust Belts appear throughout the United States, and when the pain of poverty is mocked by a culture that has given capitalism a surreal face. Basketball star Michael Jordan makes more money for one Nike advertisement than the entire annual salaries of the South Asian Nike workers; William Burroughs is used as a poster boy for globalization in a Nike advertisement; economist Jeffrey Sachs, architect of “shock therapy capitalism,” delivers his paean for the new world order from the hallowed halls of Harvard while announcing that sweatshops are the only hope for poor countries. The confluence of interest between big business and the counterculture has never been stronger: there is no longer any separation between cultural revolution and corporate revolution, between the business rebel and the literary rebel. How did this happen?
The orbit of capitalist rule in this century has appreciably widened. Capitalism now circles the entire globe, continuing its historical role of making the labor of the many into the wealth of the few, and leaving little outside of its agonistic theater of exploitative social relations that cannot be commodified. I make this claim without reifying either the local or the global or positing them as discrete entities. I would add that the global and the local are mutually constitutive parts of a contradictory social whole (San Juan, 1998) and that demonizing or romanticizing one at the expense of the other is a futile if not politically disabling endeavor. Eagleton captures some of the dimensions of this constitutive dilemma: “The answer to whether the world is growing more global or more local is surely a resounding yes; but these two dimensions are currently deadlocked, each pushing the other into a monstrous parody of itself, as transnational corporations which know no homeland confront ethnic nationalisms which know nothing else” (1996, p. 119). Kevin Robins describes globalization as the compression of time and space horizons and the creation of a new “global space.” He defines global space as “a space of flows, and electronic space, a decentered space, a space in which frontiers and boundaries have become permeable. Within this global arena, economies and cultures are thrown into intense and immediate contact with each other—with each ‘Other’ (an ‘Other’ that is no longer simply ‘out there,’ but also within)” (1992, p. 318). While one antidote to globalization is local autonomy, Robins stresses that it is important not to idealize the local, since it is always relational. That is, it is no longer linked to the national but rather recast in relation to the global. Local cultures, notes Robins, are still overshadowed by national and nationalist cultures as well as the emerging world culture.
The process of globalization is often accompanied by efforts at dede-mocratization, by strengthening the state against civil society, by increasing prison construction, by enlarging and strengthening police forces (the Los Angeles Board of Education recently voted in favor of equipping school police cars with twelve-gauge shotguns), and by inculcating new respect for the cultural faiths of Western business. Wealth is being transferred from the middle and working classes to the upper echelons of the corporate and financial world. According to Petras and Polychroniou,
In the West, globalization is rapidly dividing societies into two sharply differentiated social classes in a similar fashion to the general trends in the Third World and the postcommunist societies. Simply put, the rich are getting richer and the poor are growing poorer. In 1992, the top one-fifth of U.S. families received 51.3 percent of income while the bottom one-fifth got only 6.5 percent of the income. However, there is an even greater inequality in wealth compared with income. Patterns of concentration of wealth in the United States reveals that the richest 10 percent are in possession of over 87 percent of all wealth. This phenomenon of inequality is worsening rapidly on a global level. (1996, p. 107)
The crisis within capitalism is so pronounced that some prominent social scientists publicly denounce the globalization process and signal their public support for the oppressed. For instance, on January 17, 1998, distinguished sociologists Pierre Bourdieu, Frederic Lebaron, and Gerard Mauge published the following in the French newspaper, Le Monde:
In the first place the undeniable relationship between unemployment rate and profit rate. The two phenomena—the exorbitant consumption of some and the misery of others—not only come together—while some get rich in their sleep, the others become poorer by the day—they are also interdependent: when the stock exchange rejoices, the unemployed suffer, the enrichment of some is linked to the pauperization of the others. Mass unemployment remains in fact the most effective tool in the hands of employers with which to impose the stagnation or lowering of wages, to push up working rhythms, to deteriorate working conditions, to increase job insecurity, to impose flexibility, to create new forms of domination in the work place and to dismantle the legal protection of workers. When the enterprises “size down,” with some of the“social schemes” announced flamboyantly in the media, their investment returns rise spectacularly. When the unemployment rate falls in the US, Wall Street is depressed. In France, 1997 has been the year all records were broken on the Paris Stock Exchange. But above all, the movement of the unemployed calls into question the carefully maintained divisions between “good” and “bad” poor, between “excluded” and “unemployed,” between unemployed and wage-earners. Even if one cannot equate in a mechanical way unemployment and crime, nobody can ignore today that “urban violence” has its roots in unemployment, generalized social insecurity, and mass poverty. The “exemplary” convictions of Strasbourg, the threats to reopen correctional institutions, or the suppression of family allowances to parents of trouble-makers, who allegedly have renounced their parental duties, are the hidden face of neoliberal employment policies. When will young unemployed people be obliged to accept any miserable job as Tony Blair proposes, and will the welfare state be replaced by the American styled “security state”? Because it makes us understand that any unemployed person is potentially condemned to long-term unemployment and that the long-term unemployed are potentially excluded, that exclusion from unemployment benefits means to be condemned to assistance, social aid, charity, the movement of the unemployed calls into question the division between “excluded” and “unemployed”: when the unemployed are sent to the social aid office, they are deprived of their status as unemployed and they are rejected into exclusion. But above all it makes us understand that any wage-earner may lose their job at any moment, that the generalized job insecurity (especially of the young), the organized “social insecurity” of all those who live under the threat of a “social scheme,” turn any wage-earner into a potential unemployed. Forceful evacuation will not evacuate “the problem.” Because the cause of the unemployed is also the cause of the excluded, casual workers and wage-earners who work under the same threat. Because a moment may come, in which the reserve army of the unemployed and casual workers, which condemns to submission all those who have the provisional chance to be excluded from its ranks, will turn against those who have based their policy (oh socialism!) on a cynical confidence in the passivity of the most subdued.
The most serious symptoms of capitalist trauma under neoliberal policy directives include: job insecurity and long-term unemployment, the loss of social assistance, the pauperization of the masses and their subsequent social demonization, and a growing reliance on private charities. It is the world of Dickens and Orwell: democracy as charnel house, as a daily confrontation with mortality. But unlike Dickens, it is not only the masters of capital who are responsible for poverty but the structure of the capitalist system and the contradictions within capitalism itself.
Although many of the changes within global capitalism have been traumatic, I do not believe that globalization represents a radical rupture with the past—some powerful and uncanny shift in global capitalist relations—such that possibilities of contesting capitalism have disappeared. Capitalism is described by Ellen Meikins Wood (1995a) as the “system that dies a thousand deaths,” because capitalism has historically bound all the significant ruptures of the twentieth century, from epistemological skepticism to the assault on universal truths and the unitary cohesiveness of identity. Yet even with this revelation, one must not abandon hope since the limits of historical possibility are not so narrow that we must inevitably sink into moribund pessimism. History does not float above the messy relations of everyday human existence like some kind of ectoplasmic ether, circling around Mount Olympus, waiting for direction from the gods. Nor can it be reduced to a phalanx of signifiers that can be marched through the victory arch of liberal difference, a parade of binarisms that organize social life into black/white, self/other, us/them oppositions. Rather, history is the product of causal as well as indeterminate forces that carry with them the possibility of resistance to, and a transformation of, existing structures of domination and exploitation.
Marx and Engels were among the first to recognize the revolutionary potential of the capitalist economy as well as the causal relationship between the social relations of production and the social division of labor. But their prediction that the bourgeoisie would produce their own gravediggers in the form of the proletariat has not come to pass, and historical conditions have seemingly put beyond reach the end to class society by the overthrow of capitalism. Marx and Engels were also wrong about the disappearance of the intermediate strata such as the middle class. Far from the basically self-enclosed system of internal logic that Marx wrote about in Capital, capitalism has become ominously totalizing. As Wood put it recently, capitalism “has penetrated just about every aspect of human life and nature itself, in ways that weren’t true of so-called advanced capitalist countries as recently as two or three decades ago” (1997, p. 1). The major revolutions of the twentieth century occurred in precapitalist or undeveloped capitalist systems in which peasants and workers were able to form necessary alliances and in which imperialism was considered the highest stage of capitalism, involving competition over the division and redivision of largely a noncapitalist world. It was assumed by many leftist scholars that noncapitalist victims of imperialism would be rescued before capitalism would engulf the entire world. Rosa Luxemburg, to cite one prominent example, believed that capitalism could not exist by itself without cannibalizing itself. It needed to participate in traditional forms of precapitalist colonial warfare and struggles over territory. But today capitalism seems to survive through constant mutation, achieving its ends not so much through police state thugs and high-tech military weaponry (although these factors certainly play a part) but through its power to commodify everything in its path. Capital’s ability to reproduce itself appears unstoppable, like a brakeless train crashing down a steep incline. Humanity is being dragged into the cataclysm of world capitalism.
In its headlong rush to amass vast pools of capital (and in the process colonizing the deepest recesses of our lifeworld; see Ramón Flecha, this volume), capitalism has also revealed its most raw and angry internal contradictions and the various means by which it renders as inevitable its circular and exploitative logic. The political arrogance that accompanies capitalism’s success and its Panglossian promise that it can usher in the best of all possible worlds once its social safety net consisting of social programs, affirmative action, and immigrant protection services has been jettisoned, may just be what will enable us eventually to bring it down. The supposed archaism of Marxism may actually be a postconventional promise of hope.
The free market revolution driven by continuous capitalist accumulation has left the social infrastructure of the United States in tatters (not to mention other parts of the globe). And through its policies of increasing its military-industrial-financial interests, it continues to suck the lifeblood from South America and other regions of the globe. The sudden collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s and the shift to capitalism in Eastern Europe, brought about in part by the strains generated by the transition to the informational society (see Manuel Castells, this volume), has brought nearly five billion people into the world market. The globalization of capitalism and its political bedfellow, neoliberalism, work together to naturalize suffering, obliterate hope, and assassinate justice. The logic of privatization and free trade—wherein social labor is the means and measure of value and surplus social labor lies at the heart of profit—now shapes archetypes of citizenship, manages our perceptions of what constitutes the “good society,” and creates ideological formations that produce necessary functions for capital in relation to labor. As schools continue to be financed more by corporations that function as service industries for transnational capitalism, and as bourgeois think-tank profiteerism prevails in guiding educational policy and practice, the U.S. population faces a challenging educational reality. And while liberals call for capital controls, foreign exchange controls, stimulation of growth and wages, labor rights enforcement for nations borrowing from the United States, and the removal of financial aid from banking and capital until they concede to the centrality of the wage problem and unless they insist on labor rights (Greider, 1997), very few call for the abolition of capital itself. As long as capitalist accumulation fuels educational reform, problems will simply be shifted from one domain to another in a clear case of litem lite resolvere.
The locus criminis where the concrete determinations of industrialization, corporations, markets, greed, patriarchy, and technology come together—the center where exploitation is fundamentally articulated—“is occupied by that elusive entity known as capital” (Kovel, 1997, p. 7). Joel Kovel argues that “capital is elusive because it cannot be singled out in isolation from anything else. It is a social relation grounded in the commodification of labor power, in which labor is subject to the law of value—a relation expressed through wage labor, surplus value extraction, and the transformation of all means of production into capital” (1977, p. 7). The insinuation of the coherence and logic of capital into everyday life remains ominously uncontested. The economic restructuring that we are witnessing today offers both new fears concerning capital’s inevitability and some new possibilities for organizing against it.
An obvious explanation of the strength of the capitalist class is that its predatory power is fundamentally linked to the global commercial media system. Nature has been superseded by media culture (see Manuel Castells, this volume), as communication technologies have a direct impact on the media and on the formation of images, representations, and public opinion. New electronic technologies are reshaping the context for the production of subjectivities and the colonization of the lifeworld (see Flecha, this volume), and this clearly has implications for the structuring of identities among our youth (see Henry A. Giroux, this volume). It also has implications for private and public surveillance of individuals and groups. Ex-CIA agents are being hired by transnational corporations for their expertise in “electronic countermeasures” and corporate spying that employ such devices as “burst bugs” (that can record hours of ordinary conversation and transmit them to remote receivers in a two-second burst), laser microphones (that reconstruct conversations taking place inside from minute vibrations of window panes) and gadgets such as the Tempest (that uses faint electromagnetic radiation emitted by a computer monitor to reproduce what was on the screen). We have entered a new era of high-tech class warfare. Profits for the rich provide the ethical warrant while democracy and protection for the poor and the most vulnerable are, as they say, unaffordable. A few blocks away from where I live The Spy Shop in West Hollywood does a brisk business with gossip columnists, private investigators, Peeping Toms, and corporate barons, selling the latest devices for industrial and personal espionage. We have arrived at an informational society that reflects a tight interdependency between its social, political, and economic spheres (Castells, this volume). The corporate takeover of the Delphic oracle by the global media barons and their establishment media outlets ensure a spin on world events that will promote a future tilted toward corporate viewpoints and hospitable to the interests of business owners, not workers. As the corporate technoelite (with Brain Lord Bill Gates at the helm) and high priests of the information revolution claim that the knowledge industry engulfing the globe via cyberspace will break down power concentrations and thus clear important paths for democracy, their unwillingness to consider a world freed from capital sets severe limits on our reentry into a world of equitable social relations.
Amid the cyberhype of the postmodern informational economy, where we are informed that an end to labor and political economy has occurred, we ignore the fact that the digital workplace (which has its own set of problems) is not supplanting the menial jobs awaiting millions of people in the foreseeable future (McNally,1998). It remains the case that many countries are excluded from the new informational society (see Castells, this volume). Further, there exists a structural logic embedded within the informational society that leads to forms of domination (i.e., the relationship of economic units to particular informational flows in the overall system of informational networks; see Castells, this volume). While there has been a great deal of talk about new communications technologies helping to create new jobs and facilitating the expansion and deepening of democracy, it often is the case that such electronic information systems merely “extend and widen the scope and increase the speed of large-scale speculative movements of finance capital across the globe; they do not exist as autonomous forces defining a new high-tech or information society” (Petras and Poli-chroniou, 1996, p. 113). It is perhaps more accurate to view new technological apparatuses as prosthetic devices attached to financial, real estate, and insurance capital that enable “the speedy transfer of capital out of productive employment and hasten the deindustrialization of labor and the growth of rich investment bankers and low-paid service workers” (ibid., p. 114).
It is a disturbing truism that a politics that does not exist in the mass media does not exist in today’s democracy (Castells, this volume). Perhaps because they are obsessively distracted by events such as the White House zippergate scandal and the Keystone Cops investigation of O. J. Simpson, the media do little to facilitate public understanding of the objective historic conditions that led to the demise of bureaucratic collectivism and state socialism in former Soviet bloc countries. Capitalist discourses are coordinated and marketed by a small number of transnational media corporations, mostly based in the United States. This is a media apparatus, according to Robert W McChesney, “that works to advance the cause of the global market and promote commercial values, while denigrating journalism and culture not conducive to the immediate bottom line or long-run corporate interests. It is a disaster for anything but the most superficial notion of democracy—a democracy where, to paraphrase John Jay’s maxim, those who own the world ought to govern it” (1997, p. 11).
Of course, the media can also work in the interests of social justice. As George Yudice argues, “there is no inherent contradiction between technological modernization and grassroots mobilization” (1998, p. 372). One need only examine the use of the internet by the Zapatistas in Chiapas to realize that the media offer tremendous oppositional potential. Yet the capacity of corporate power to overwhelm oppositional use of the media is a serious concern. According to some political theorists, global corporations have helped to transform democracy into a form of polyarchy. William Robinson is worth quoting at length:
Global capitalism is predatory and parasitic. In today’s global economy, capitalism is less benign, less responsive to the interests of broad majorities around the world, and less accountable to society than ever before. Some 400 transnational corporations own two-thirds of the planet’s fixed assets and control 70 percent of world trade. With the world’s resources controlled by a few hundred global corporations, the life blood and the very fate of humanity is in the hands of transnational capital, which holds the power to make life and death decisions for millions of human beings. Such tremendous concentrations of economic power lead to tremendous concentrations of political power globally. Any discussion of “democracy” under such conditions becomes meaningless.
The paradox of the demise of dictatorships, “democratic transitions,” and the spread of “democracy” around the world is explained by new forms of social control, and the . . . concept of democracy, the original meaning of which, the power (cratos) of the people (demos), has been dis-configured beyond recognition. What the transnational elite calls democracy is more accurately termed polyarchy, to borrow a concept from academia. Polyarchy is neither dictatorship nor democracy. It refers to a system in which a small group actually rules, on behalf of capital, and participation in decision-making by the majority is confined to choosing among competing elites in tightly controlled electoral processes. This “low-intensity democracy” is a form of consensual domination. Social control and domination is hegemonic, in the sense meant by Antonio Gramsci, rather than coercive. It is based less on outright repression than on diverse forms of ideological co-optation and political disempowerment made possible by the structural domination and “veto power” of global capital. (1996, pp.20-21)
In a similar vein, Richard Brosio astutely remarks:
Organized workers in the First World countries are forced to compete with those from areas only recently sucked into the vortex of globalizing capitalism. Furthermore, supra-national organizations created by capitalism can act with a free hand; threaten disinvestment or a capital strike; narrow the policy options of national governments; and even of democratic politics itself. Organized labor had learned how to deal somewhat effectively with the central states in their own countries; however, it has not yet figured out how to play defense against the latest offensive by capital. Because of titanic (and undemocratic) economic changes, the industries that best supported working-class cultures are being destroyed. (1997, p. 22)
History’s presumed failure to defang existing capitalist social relations is read, especially by the current generation, as an advertisement for capitalism’s inevitability. The present refusal to take anticapitalist struggle seriously is undoubtedly due to the conventional wisdom percolating through the intelligentsia—as well as the entire North American continent—that there is no realistic alternative to the market and that the collapse of Soviet communism and the decline of Marxist parties and movements in many parts of the world have once and for all refuted Marx and his heirs. It is easy for the media to skip over the fact that Soviet communism was an overly bureaucratized and cumbersome (not to mention corrupt) form of state capitalism. As Ian Birchall remarks: “ ‘Socialism in one country’ failed, not because it abolished the market, but because it failed to escape the world market that Marx so vividly described, a world market mediated through the arms race and international trade, which turned the workers’ state into its opposite, bureaucratic and tyrannical state capitalism” (1998, p. 120). There exists a motivated amnesia surrounding historical alternatives to capitalism. Conveniently forgotten are the examples of working-class self-activity, such as the workers’ democracy of the Paris Commune of 1871, the first years of the Russian Revolution, Spain in 1936-37, Hungary in 1956, the French action committees of 1968, the Chilean cordones of 1973, the Portuguese workers’ commissions of 1974-75, the Iranian Shoras of 1979, and the rise of Solidarity in Poland in 1980. To recall such moments is to reclaim the prophetic meaning of the struggle for democracy.
Influential right-wing think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute, the Progress and Freedom Foundation, and the Washington Legal Foundation have joined forces with drug, medical device, biotechnology, and tobacco manufacturers as powerful political lobbies that argue for rolling back government regulatory powers and promoting the smooth mobility of capital. The effect of their lobbying for the most part helps to keep local citizens in a condition of social somnambulism. Daily newspaper stories across the United States advise us that the new world order is calling us to take up our rightful places in the empire of capital. Those “places” we are advised to inhabit in order to greet the future in security and comfort go by a series of names: technoburbs, edge cities, exopolises. Edge cities not only offer financial relief to corporations, which transfer to them in order to “reengineer” and free themselves from the labor unions, regulation, and tax burdens of transitional downtowns (Vanderbilt, 1997) but also cultivate rest and recreation sanctuaries where Goldschlager nights, jello shots, and karaoke can help ease tensions acquired from longer workdays, increased job insecurity, and the threat of long-term unemployment.
While U.S. political leaders still gloat over the fall of the Soviet Union, they feel little responsibility for the conditions that now exist in what Ronald Reagan once called “the evil empire.” And while Western politicians dance a jig on the grave of communism, postcommunist countries in the grip of impoverishment under neoliberalism continue to be savaged by crime, prostitution, ethnic division, national and religious authoritarianism, long-term unemployment, a decline in production and consumption, foreign dictation of economic policy, and the emergence of authoritarian rule (Petras and Polychroniou, 1996). Failure of a domestic capitalist class to emerge in the East has left restoration in the hands of intermediaries for Western capitalism as well as a powerful stratum of mafia networks (ibid., pp. 103-4).
The left in general (and here we include those who work from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, from Marxism to deconstruction) has made faltering attempts to mount a serious political offensive against globalization. Terry Eagleton notes that “the left has always had an infallible knack of tearing itself apart before the political enemy could lay a glove on it” (1996, p. 122). Given the current state of the educational left in the United States, Eagleton’s remark is uncomfortably apposite. The educational left finds itself without a revolutionary agenda for challenging in the classrooms of the nation the reality of capitalism and its stubborn and uncontested ability to persist as the national ideology. It is a situation in which pedagogy is progressively merging with the productive processes within advanced capitalism. Education has been reduced to a subsector of the economy, designed to create cybercit-izens within a teledemocracy of fast-moving images, representations, and lifestyle choices. Capitalism has been naturalized as commonsense reality, part of nature itself, and the term social class has been replaced by the less antagonistic term socioeconomic status. It is impossible to examine education reform in the United States without taking into account continuing forces of globalization and the progressive diversion of capital into financial and speculative channels, what some call “casino capitalism on a world scale.”
In fact, some might argue that critical pedagogy is already dead and can only rehearse the aesthetics of its disappearance. For the last several decades, identity politics has commanded much of the attention of the educational left. Conceptually underwritten by a poststructuralist approach that valorizes the primacy of fragmentation, exchange, pastiche, textuality, discursive incommensurability, and difference as touchstones of analysis and explanation, identity politics has helped to usher in a more nuanced understanding of how, for instance, ethnic and gender representations perform specific ideological vocations. Yet, instead of leading to the rearticulation of class with discursive formations associated with ethnicity, race, gender, and religion, among others, this trend diverts critical analysis away from the global sweep of advanced capitalism and the imperialist exploitation of the world’s labor and precludes a focus on political economy in any but a reactive way. The haute politique of essentialist identity theorists focuses on ethnicity and gender issues so forcefully that there are no decibels left for calls for class struggle.
As of this writing there are approximately thirty-five wars occurring around the world—both within and between nation states—that have been defined by the mainstream media as struggles over ethnic, religious, or political identity (not to mention conflicts over class and race in urban centers across the United States). Although interest in postmodern critique is a majority current these days, its lack of attentiveness to class struggle will make its durability limited. Accounts that rely on postmodern identity politics for analyzing global ethnic and religious conflicts often elide an analysis of the forces most crucial in understanding these events: the juggernaut of imperial market forces and the social histories of these conflicts that link imperialism to the histories of the exploited classes and their struggles within the international division of labor. We need to be precise about this and not slide over its significance. More specifically, we need to be clear about the distinction between capitalism and the systems of intelligibility with which we attempt to understand this reality. Much of this language needs to be defetishized. Avant-garde discourse will not defeat the integral system of capitalism, which encompasses and subordinates all other systems, even if we refuse to believe that capitalism does not hold an implacable sway over us. Eagleton notes that “it is not changing one’s mind which abolishes grand narratives, as though they would simply vanish if we were all to stop looking at them, but certain material transformations in advanced capitalism itself” (1996, p. 43).
In my classes at UCLA, for instance, there is an upsurge of white middle-class male students who define themselves among the most oppressed. The term “oppression” is now so broad and all encompassing that nearly every complaint imaginable is drawn into its widely flung semantic net. Oppression has been relativized and commodified such that it now includes almost everyone who suffers in some way. Here, it becomes necessary to distinguish those who are truly exploited and oppressed and those who suffer from existential anxiety. The critic Starhawk clarifies this important distinction as follows: “Oppression is what the slaves suffer, malaise is what happens to the slaveowners whose personalities are warped and whose essential humanity is necessarily undermined by their position. Malaise and oppression are both painful but they are not comparable. The necessary first step in the cure for what ails the slaveowner is to free the slaves” (cited in Welch, forthcoming).
Not only must multiple forms of oppression be identified but they must be placed within historical context (see Henry Giroux and Donaldo Macedo, this volume). While postmodernists examine such forms of oppression as sexism, racism, and homophobia, some of them believe that placing relations of production as the central oppressive structure is an example of class reductionism. Historical materialists are, for the most part, at pains to recognize multiple forms of oppression, but they view them within the overarching system of class domination and the variable discriminatory mechanisms central to capitalism as a system (Stabile,1995). Because some postmodern theorists and their poststructuralist bedfellows operate from a theoretical terrain built upon a number of questionable assumptions (i.e., they view symbolic exchange as taking place outside the domain of value; they privilege structures of deference over structures of exploitation and relations of exchange over relations of production; they emphasize local narratives over grand narratives; they encourage the voices of the symbolically dispossessed over the transformation of existing social relations; they reduce models of reality to historical fictions; they abandon the assessment of the truth value of competing narratives; and they replace the idea that power is class-specific and historically bound with the idea that power is everywhere and nowhere), they end up advancing a philosophical commission that propagates hegemonic class rule and reestablishes the rule of the capitalist class (Wenger, 1991, 1993-94). What this has done is precisely to continue the work of reproducing class antagonisms and creating a new balance of hegemonic relations favoring dominant class interests. Carl Boggs warns that “while such postmodern diffuseness generates new space for critical discourse and oppositional movements, it simultaneously undermines formation of cohesive, politically defined communities at the societal level” (1993, p. 181). Carole Stabile summarizes the predicament of postmodernism:
Despite its many contradictions and confusions, postmodernism does have some unifying principles: an uncritical and idealist focus on the discursive construction of the “real” . . . and a related privileging of the notion of “difference.” If, in the end, we cannot point to any “real” interests that might unify “us,” then the only form of political action conceivable is one based on “differences” in identity. As opposed to Marx’s notion of unity in difference, or E. P. Thompson’s “identity of interests,” in which people share widely common interests which can be represented by political agencies, postmodernists reject any such representation in favor of particular and localized differences. (1995, p. 93)
Capitalism’s presumed inevitability—and perhaps ultimate desirability—has persuaded some Marxists to redefine themselves as post-Marxists so that they might engage in a multiplicity of struggles in the creases and folds of culture. Accompanied by a sloganeering anticapi-talism, many postmodernists, including poststructuralist Marxists, talk about creating “spaces” of resistance, local pockets of playful forms of dissensus, and of breaching the comfort zones of unreflective self-consciousness and commonsense rationality. More important, however, in their celebration of overdetermination, many post-Marxists deny what Barbara Epstein calls the “inherent connections between causes and effects” :
This approach is appealing when set against intellectual rigidity. It asks whether there might not be more possibilities than have been considered, more paths to explore than allowed for in existing theory. Yet skepticism is not a sufficient basis for radicalism, nor is playfulness. An intellectual practice so grounded will tend to sail off into the stratosphere—losing any connection with actual or possible social struggles, and with the goal of egalitarian social change as a whole. Poststructuralism (whether Marxist or otherwise) is playful at its best, sectarian at worst; and the slide from one to the other can take place very quickly. Anti-essentialism is hardly the only dogma to plague the left intellectual world; but it does seem to be the leading contender today. And if those who are in positions of power and influence have clear, coherent, explicit goals, while the left understands politics as a game of escalating skeptical questioning, it is not hard to figure out who is going to prevail. (1998, p. 112)
Surely it is undeniably a good idea to follow antiessentialism in disbanding, dispersing, and displacing the terms that claim to represent us in a shared field of representations premised on the mutual imbrication of “us” and “them” that we give the term Western identity. Antiessentialism has, above all, enabled researchers to criticize the notion of the unsullied position of enunciation, the location of interpretation free of ideology, what Vincent Crapanzano refers to as a “lazy divinity . . . contemplating its creation in order to observe it, register it, and interpret it” (cited in Da Cunha, 1998, p. 243). Yet identity politics grounded in an antiessentialist position has not focused sufficiently on the material preconditions for liberated ethnic identities that have been undermined by the dramatic intensity of historical events erupting across the landscape of advanced capitalism. In this sense, postmodernism is a bit like retouching capitalist exploitation, airbrushing cultural representations so that their links to capitalist flows are erased. While displacing our historical selves into some new contraband identity, through a frenzied spilling over of signifiers once lashed to the pillars of conventional meanings, might reap benefits and help to soften the certainty of the dominant ideological field, such postmodern maneuvers do little to threaten material relations of production that contribute to the already hierarchically bound international division of labor. As Petras and Polychroniou warn: “Theorists of ‘identity politics,’ ‘cultural postmodernists,’ and advocates who focus on a distinct antistate ideology in the name of civil society must be firmly rejected. The state must be viewed as a major resource and lever for change. This view must be accompanied by an approach that minimizes bureaucracy and maximizes the redistribution of resources within civil society” (1996, p.115).
Stabile is similarly concerned that identity politics more often than not serves to create militant opposition between groups as well as competing hierarchies based on oppression:
Instead of seeing the fragmentation of identities as cause for celebration, we should try to understand how identity has been transformed into a commodity for those with the capital to consume it and how the capitalist system has worked (and will continue to work) against the organization of socialist politics. In place of an identity politics that serves only to pit groups against one another in a never-ending litany of competing claims to oppression, we need a more cogent understanding of the systemic nature of oppression. We need to consider the extent to which the politics of identity represents not a challenge to, but a product of, the system, a manifestation of market segmentation and the commodification of identity produced by the globalization of capital as a world system. What appear to be oppositional strategies may very well turn out to be the symptoms of oppression. (1995, p. 107)
Woods is salutory in her warning that:
Both sides of the twentieth-century’s ambiguous history—both its horrors and its wonders—have no doubt played a part in forming the postmodernist consciousness; but the horrors that have undermined the old idea of progress are less important in defining the distinctive nature of today’s postmodernism than are the wonders of modern technology and the riches of consumer capitalism. Postmodernism sometimes looks like the ambiguities of capitalism as seen from the vantage point of those who enjoys its benefits more than they suffer its costs. (1995b, p. 7)
The conservative postmodernists’ rejection of the authoritarianism of modernist “master” narratives and theories that attempt to understand society in its “totality” preserves the very distortions that gave rise to them. This has occurred through the postmodernists’ remaindering of the leftovers of postwar humanism, the conflation of fascism with Enlightenment rationality, and the cultivation of a fabulously entrenched pessimism that celebrates the profusion of difference over that of equality in manner similar to neoliberals who celebrate the unfettered character of the market. It is not difference that should be celebrated but “the difference that makes a difference,” that is, difference as understood in its contextual and historical specificity, a difference that can be understood within a larger narrative of equality and emancipation.
My own concern is directed at the danger of the governing tropes of identity politics displacing issues of class struggle. I feel this is a legitimate concern and that it needs to be addressed in ways that do not regress into a conservative Marxist anti-postmodernism or, for that matter, a poststructuralist anti-Marxism. I have grown tired of all the invitations to “mourn” the passing of Marx in favor of ushering in the postmodernist tomorrow with forms of identity politics that replace class analysis with new semiotic critiques of lifestyle shopping. Not all forms of identity politics are pro-capitalist, however, and some versions have actually enriched our conception of class. In fact, Robin D. G. Kelley argues that “Identity politics, in other words, has always been central to working-class movements” (1997, p. 123). My position is not a riposte to identity politics but rather a criticism of conservative postmodernism’s petit-bourgeois driven movement away from a “represented exterior” of signifying practices that renders an anti-capitalist project not only unlikely but firmly inadmissible. Not withstanding the slippage between Marxist categories and poststructuralist categories, I believe that the more conservative ludic versions of postmodernist theories, in straddling uneasily the abyss between identity politics and class analysis, have relegated the category of class to an epiphenomena of race/ethnicity and gender. Perry Anderson writes that with the advent of postmodernism, oppositional politics aligned against capitalism have all but disappeared. He writes:
The universal triumph of capital signifies more than just a defeat for all those forces once arrayed against it, although it is also that. Its deeper sense lies in the cancellation of political alternatives. Modernity comes to an end, as Jameson observes, when it loses any antonym. The possibility of other social orders was an essential horizon of modernism. Once that vanishes, something like postmodernism is in place. (1998, pp. 91-92)
While there are many good reasons to be critical of the current discourses of postmodernism, particularly those that retreat from the arena of the political, there is also a danger in jumping on the bandwagon of the current backlash against postmodernism among the left (see Giroux, this volume), including crude dismissals of any and all of the “posts” that we are witnessing from some Marxist factions. Criticisms of postmodernism are necessary but are often done at the expense of appropriating important insights. While I have taken the liberty of criticizing many of the shortcomings of certain ludic varieties of postmodernism, Henry Giroux (this volume) argues for the importance of writing the political back into postmodernism so that the relationship between modernism and postmodernism becomes dialectical, dialogical, and critical. Such a concern is sympathetic to Paulo Freire’s sentiment that it is impossible to be neutral before the future (Freire, this volume). Giroux’s important and necessary recasting of postmodernism as an oppositional discourse sets out to challenge modernist legislating intellectuals, who would dismiss postmodernism outright, and to reclaim postmodernism’s central insights that illuminate how power is produced and circulated through cultural practices that mobilize multiple relations of subordination. Postmodernism, as Giroux cogently points out, is an indispensable tool for understanding the relationships among cultural formations, systems of intelligibility, formations of affect, and economic and political relations.
For instance, Mary Louise Pratt argues that neoliberalism needs to be understood as a cultural phenomenon as well as an economic and political intervention. In this sense, postmodernism can help examine neoliberalism in terms of how it creates
categories of belonging, structures of possibility, forms of agency; how it seeks to reorganize the everyday; how it generates needs and conditions for fulfilling them (or not); how it creates meaningful political agendas that redefine citizenship and legitimate inequality. These dimensions are crucial to understanding the potency of the neoliberal paradigm—and also to identifying its weaknesses and fissures. . . . Do crises of agency result when the imposition of consumerism creates new desires and meanings, while economies are structurally adjusted so that only small minorities can actually act on those desires and meanings? If not, why not? (Pratt, 1998, p. 435)
Terry Eagleton—a characteristically acerbic critic of postmodernism whose blunt pronouncements frequently assail the fashionable apostasy of postmodern treatises—at least recognizes postmodernism’s role in assisting the oppressed in their efforts to reclaim their voices in postmodern theaters of oppression: “Postmodernism is not . . . some sort of theoretical mistake. It is among other things the ideology of a specific historical epoch in the West, when reviled and humiliated groups are beginning to recover something of their history and selfhood. This, as I’ve argued, is the trend’s most precious achievement” (1996, p. 121).
Similarly, Olivia Maria Gomes da Cunha recognizes that postmodernism’s focus on identity politics has in many ways been productive. She writes that the shift in discourse of social activists from “consciousness raising” to “identity” has opened up cultural critique to new strategies of resistance: “The focus on identity made it possible to articulate that which cannot be articulated: the diffuse, the shapeless. At the same time, it enabled the integration of subject positions within a collective setting” (1998, p. 245). Yet, postmodernism is clearly more than the “ideology of the oppressed.” It continues to be sold short when leftist critics ignore its ability to assist educators in creating pedagogies of dissent and possibility. There is surely a central place for the more oppositional forms of postmodern education to take in contesting the production, through mass schooling, of sites for the training of the global workforce. Henry Giroux (this volume) notes how postmodernism can—and must—be marshaled into the service of creating critical pedagogies that map the strategies and tactics employed by “border youth” as they take up meanings and negotiate identities in a world marked by globalization, poverty, broken families, media culture, and alienation. What Giroux brings to the table are the best insights from postmodernism linked to the best that critical modernism has to offer. Postmodern pedagogy as articulated by Giroux can become a political companion to historical materialist critiques of globalization and can provide a larger theoretical context for interrogating the ways that cultural discourses circulate and are taken up at the level of lived experience.
Donaldo Macedo (this volume) takes up this challenge by surveying the fault lines of contemporary mainstream pedagogies (what he refers to as “poisonous pedagogies”) and challenging their creation and canonization of a “common culture.” Macedo deftly identifies those characteristics of mainstream pedagogies that not only poison the thinking of generations of our youth but assassinate their hopes and dreams of a better future by distorting their understanding of world history and creating epistemological conditions that reinscribe disinformation. Macedo pinpoints the dangers of education within a neoliberal democracy. A similar sentiment is reflected in the words of Subcommandante Marcos, who warns that “a new lie is being sold to us as history. The lie of the defeat of hope, the lie of the defeat of dignity, the lie of the defeat of humanity. The mirror of power offers us an equilibrium: the lie of the victory of cynicism, the lie of the victory of civility, the lie of the victory of neoliberalism” (La Jornada, January 30, 1996).
Ramón Flecha (this volume) argues for a pedagogy based on a communicative perspective underwritten by intersubjective dialogue. Of course, the challenge of critical pedagogy from the perspectives of Giroux, Macedo, and Flecha rests on the fundamental assumption that teachers are willing and able to undertake what Freire (in this volume) calls the practice of analyzing their practice. Freirean pedagogy stipulates the avoidance of pedagogical necrophilia and biophilia while engaging in the challenge of democratizing power.
The phenomenon of globalization is implicated in the production of transnational and diasporic cultures, especially in my home state of California, a state that Richard Walker describes as “a Frankenstein laboratory of modern hopes and failures” (1996, p. 163). California, and in particular, Los Angeles, is fertile ground for fast-track capitalist development—what some call “tycoon capitalism.” California has been a state of immigrants since the Spanish conquest of the eighteenth century. Each decade’s new arrivals always outnumber those born in the state. Californians can brag—and sometimes do—that their state has been built upon the greed, the avarice, and the whims of America’s finest haute bourgeoisie—the Hearsts, Packards, Waltons, Gettys, Haases, Bechtels—who were experts at exploiting immigrant labor and producing much of the country’s motherlode of economic surplus (Walker, 1996). Nixon’s dismantling of the War on Poverty and the Great Society housing programs and Ronald Reagan’s campaign to punish welfare mothers, subsidized renters, and free-lunching schoolchildren greased the tracks leading to the state’s current stranglehold on the poor, clearing the political path for anti-immigrant and anti-affirmative-action campaigns, Propositions 187 and 209, respectively.
In addressing the intemationalization and diasporic character of minorities in California and elsewhere, contemporary social theorists overemphasize the importance of diversity at the expense of understanding how ethnic differences become classed, racialized, and gendered. A politics of difference can often occlude the structural exploitation of capitalism. For instance, Arif Dirlik suggests that there exists a complicity between post-colonist literature and the ideology of global capitalism. He notes that
A major reason for this complicity is the inability or the unwillingness of postcolonial intellectuals to offer a historical account for the phenomenon of postcoloniality, and of its relationship to the broader structures of contemporary life, especially the structures of capital, which is rendered impossible by the repudiation of structures and foundational categories in the postcolonial argument. There is, however, a further, and less invisible, problem. The postcolonial argument takes as its point of departure the representation of culture and politics from the margins, from diasporic situations, and the perspectives of the disenfranchised, to question the homogenizing claims of power (Eurocentric, national, ethnic, class) to culture. What it neglects to confront with any measure of seriousness is the fact that not all marginality is equally marginal, that there is a world of difference between culture written from the perspectives of oppressed groups (some of them terminally), and culture written from the perspectives of diasporic (or settler colonial) intellectuals located in First World institutions of cultural power (or managements of transnational corporations), who may be writing from the peripheries of nations or empires, but are seated in the centers of global power. The difference is, as Ahmad puts it, class. (1997, p. 176)
In a similar fashion, James Clifford points out the danger associated with contemporary theories that deflect concern away from the structural imbrication of race, class, and gender:
We see that theories and discourses that diasporize or internationalize “minorities” can deflect attention from long-standing, structured inequalities of class and race. It is as if the problem were multinationalism—issues of translation, education, and tolerance—rather than of economic exploitation and racism. While clearly necessary, making cultural room for Salvadorans, Samoans, Sikhs, Haitians, or Khmers does not, of itself, produce a living wage, decent housing, or health care. Moreover, at the level of everyday social practice, cultural differences are persistently racialized, classed, and gendered. Diaspora theories need to account for these concrete, cross-cutting structures. (1997, p. 258)
The growing nationalism and white supremacy often blamed for such California race wars as the 1965 Watts riot (it should be noted that California now has a higher poverty rate than during the time of the uprising—poverty of children is 33 percent) and the 1993 Los Angeles uprising need to be rethought from the perspective of the dialectic of race and class. Richard Walker remarks that “We must . . . be careful not to lay the blame for the present recrudescence of nativism and white supremacy simply on a universal white racism, as if the high tide of Anglo-Saxonism had never receded and as if class and economy played no role in how people are dominated and denigrated” (1996, p. 177). “It is not enough,” notes Walker, to “declare race the central stratifying variable. The scramble for class power and privilege has lent particular force to the suppression of contending ‘races,’ and the denigration of those at the bottom of the class system has gone hand in hand with racial character assassination” (ibid.). Racial conquest and class encounter was not the sole provenance of the working classes, it should be remembered, but was overwhelmingly conjugated with the practices of financiers, the petit bourgeoisie, and plantation merchants and continues today as part of a politics of political opportunism and mass disenfranchisement within an elite war of position (ibid.).
We need to develop a revolutionary multiculturalism that shares much in common with the pedagogies developed (in this volume) by Giroux, Macedo, Flecha, and Freire. A revolutionary multicultural pedagogy challenges educators to develop a concept of unity and difference that reconfigures the meaning of difference as political mobilization rather than cultural authenticity (see Flecha). In raising the quaestio vexata of domination, it calls for rejecting pedagogical approaches based on ethnocentrism and rejecting relativism in favor of interculturalist and pluriculturalist approaches grounded in a critical utopianism (see Flecha). It also is directed at dismantling the discourses of power and privilege and social practices that have epistemically mutated into new and terrifying forms of xenophobic nationalism in which there is but one universal subject of history: the white, Anglo, heterosexual male of bourgeois privilege. In saying this, I am not arguing that Western cultures and their offspring are only and always oppressive. Here, Eagleton’s admonition bears repeating: “What an insult to the working people of the West, whose labor lay at the source of those cultures, to inform them airily that they are nothing but oppressive! And how conveniently such histrionic gestures serve to reinforce forms of ethnocentrism in the so-called third world itself, thus merely exporting the beast from one sphere to another” (1996, p. 125). Yet the challenge of critical pedagogy does point to a necessary displacement of the United States as the center of analysis and to the development of a more inclusive, global perspective, one that needs to be decentered and de-Westernized (see Macedo, this volume).
We need to move beyond celebrating pluralism. We need to understand how discursive constructions of race and ethnicity are linked to economic exploitation. In other words, we need to explore how forms of ethnicity are structurally imbricated in the antinomic configuration of flexible transnational capitalism. If we are to build upon these insights in our pedagogical practices, we would do well to follow the suggestions of Paul Willis (this volume), who argues that if we wish to fully understand the process by which capital accumulation is realized through circuit and exchange, we need to examine the commodity form, what Marx refers to as a “social hieroglyph.” An examination of the nature of cultural commodities can help us understand how symbols are made to connect with reality and how they shape, reflect, and refract reality. An understanding of universal commodity culture and the ubiquity of the commodity form is essential in grasping the myriad ways in which meanings exist as commodities within personal modes of production. Willis’s insights complement the critical pedagogy advanced by Giroux, Macedo, and Freire when he calls for a focus on whole cultural processes fed by signs and commodities rather than an emphasis on their separate coding and decoding instances. In this way, radical educators can help their students understand how labor power is produced as a special form of commodity capable of infinite extension and adaptation and how the autonomy of commodity culture is in actuality a ruse. Despite their appearance otherwise, commodities are always connected to, and mediated by, the larger social totality.
The emerging field of critical media literacy speaks to Willis’s preoccupation with cultural artifacts as commodity forms and also registers Manuel Castells’ emphasis (this volume) on understanding the specific effects of the technological revolution on the social structure. The fundamental realization that guides the development of a critical media literacy as part of a critical/postmodern pedagogy is that, although the production of knowledge and social organization have enabled us as a species to live in a purely social world, we are now entering a new battleground for the political control of meaning through the skilled manipulation of messages and symbols. Educators need to understand the profound implication that informational culture poses for the future of democracy (Giroux, this volume). Teaching critically in an informational culture stipulates that students understand what is at stake in struggling for access to specific flows of knowledge or information within networks of economic exchanges.
In other words, critical pedagogy needs to establish a project of emancipation that moves beyond simply wringing concessions from existing capitalist structures and institutions. Rather, it must be centered on the transformation of property relations and the creation of a just system of appropriation and distribution of social wealth. It is not enough to adjust the foundational level of school funding to account for levels of student poverty, to propose supplemental funding for poverty and limited English proficiency, to raise local taxes to benefit schools, to demand that state governments partly subsidize low-property-value communities, or to fight for the equalization of funding generated by low-property-value districts (although these efforts surely would be a step in the right direction). I am arguing for a fundamentally broader vision based on a transformation of global economic relations—on a different economic logic, if you will—that transcends a mere reformism within existing social relations of production and international division of labor. But challenging the swaggering, gun-slinging, frontier-style economic practices of the tycoon capitalism that we are witnessing today must also be accompanied (as Giroux argues) by a powerful cultural critique that can speak forcefully to the creation of antiracist, antisexist, and antihomophobic pedagogies of liberation.
In our attempts to rethink and revise our pedagogies of liberation in light of the challenges brought on by the new informational age, we need to remember that the global options of transnational corporations are not endless and that the state is not fully external to the market and, therefore, powerless. The state still serves as a center for both managing and restructuring labor-capital relations at times of crisis and in no way has become fully fetishized. Markets do not control states in an absolute fashion, rendering them obsolete. We can struggle against the state without falling into the myth of globalization. The state can potentially be rearticulated through revolutionary praxis to serve the interests of the powerless and disenfranchised. While we may not be able to delink ourselves from the global project, we can struggle to undermine it in a “pluriverse” of important ways.
Yet, in our struggles for local autonomy we must not give up the fight for a renewed civic sphere and the essential components of this sphere: our schools. Questions that need to foreground our debates as we engage in the continuing struggle for democracy can be formulated as follows: Can a reconfigured civil society alter institutional arrangements in the interest of social justice? Can a reorganization of civil society serve as the basis for renewing the state-nation compact (Yudice, 1998, p. 372)? Can we now begin a new process of writing history from below? The potential outcomes that follow from such questions point to some of the hopes and promises of the struggle ahead. We need to engage this struggle not as vanguardists or adventurists but as committed cultural workers engaged in companionable, solidarity-building strategies that will effectively change the production process, prizing it away from the bourgeois elites, rather than providing grist for its mill. In this context, social movements must play an important role in the struggle ahead (see Flecha, this volume). As social theorist and labor historian, Stanley Aronowitz (1981), argues, new forms of politics need to be developed in the conflictual arenas of culture (see Giroux, Willis, and Castells, this volume).
Critical pedagogy must recognize that identity is positionality—what Stuart Hall calls “the point of suture between the social and the psychic” (1997, p. 33). An identity politics that celebrates linguistically defined positionality in language and avoids defining positionality in terms of the state, social structures, and larger configurations of power and privilege should be discarded. Critical pedagogy must transmute into a contraband pedagogy, a renegade pedagogy that views identity as a contingent articulation among class interests, social forces, and signifying practices and that replaces an essentialist logic with a theory of otherness as a form of positivity based on notions of effectivity, belonging, and “the changing same” (Grossberg, 1997; Gilroy, 1993). A contraband pedagogy builds upon class solidarity without ignoring differences by conceiving alliances across race and gender as a set of affiliations (Kelley,1997). Identities are understood as both momentary and historical investments in social discourse, as different positionalities that you permit yourself to be subjected to, and that are imbricated in different race, class, and gender histories that are inscribed in these positions (Hall, 1997). Yet at the same time contraband pedagogy is attentive to the ways in which the ideology of the free market has, at this historical moment, been sutured into our daily vernacular so as to secure a particular configuration of dominant class interests.
Critical pedagogy serves, in the broadest sense, as a political hermeneutic that guides the articulation of lived meaning within the contingencies of history, according to an ethical commitment to social justice (see Giroux and Macedo, this volume). It has constituted itself as a way of navigating through the technologies of power created within the contested terrains of postmodern cultures. Critical pedagogy as I am fashioning it argues for the self-education of the working class and struggles against alienated labor in which the worker becomes poorer the more wealth she produces and in which the increase in the world of commodities is directly related to the estrangement of the worker from herself and her species-life. The strength of critical pedagogy lies in its capacity to foster the principle of social justice and to propel this principle into the realm of hope, so that it might arch toward the future in a continuing orbit of possibility. In doing so, it offers a historical challenge to helplessness and despair. Its strength also resides in its singular ability to make resignation implausible and defeat untenable, despite the criticism launched by some that would immobilize critical pedagogy by dismissing it as “always already” trapped within a modernist voice of sovereign authority and totalizing certitude. Critical pedagogy functions as a form of critical utopianism that reveals the birth of tomorrow out of the struggle of today. Critical pedagogy must move forward into the next millennium uncompromised in its commitment to help individuals free themselves from their socially enclaved lives so that they might make themselves available to their collective imagination. Yet it needs to recognize its own provisionality, and to caution itself against prematurely bringing closure to the narrative of emancipation. The politics of the imagination upon which critical pedagogy is based also requires that we imprint our collective will on the workings of history. What the left needs is not a republic of dreamers isolated from class struggle but a contraband pedagogy, a profane pedagogy and educational brigandism for the next century, one capable of forging new tactical possibilities for pressing forward the project of social democracy and setting limits to the reign of capital. It is this unalloyed commitment to critical agency, in particular, that creates such a formidable alliance among the diverse authors of this volume, and it is what makes Critical Education in the New Information Age such an important resource for the challenging times ahead.
The regional and liberalization pacts that emerged in the past decade—the World Trade Organization, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the European Union, Latin America’s Mercosur, and the recent negotiations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development surrounding the Multilateral Agreement on Investment—are shaping the new world order in accordance with the most ideal investment conditions for transnational corporations. It is no secret that the GATT-WTO is subservient to the will of the transnational monopolies, promotes unilateral adjustment from the weakest nations to the strongest, occludes the issue of sustainable development, and severs the connection between economic management and political and social management (see Samir Amin, Capitalism in the Age of Globalization, London and New Jersey: Zed Books, 1997). Anything hindering foreign investment—i.e., rules and regulations that protect workers and jobs, public welfare, environment, culture, and domestic businesses—is dutifully removed. The World Trade Organization (which was created on January 1, 1995, following the signing of the GATT global free trade agreement in 1994) and the International Monetary Fund both work to obtain trade concessions from those countries whose economies are in distress and to gain access to unprotected sectors of Third World economies. The WTO, the IMF, the OECD, The International Chamber of Commerce, the European Round Table of Industrialists, the Union of Industrial and Employers Confederation of Europe, the United States Council for International Business, the International Organization of Employers, the Business Council on National Issues, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, the United Nations Commission on Trade and Development, the Business and Industry Advisory Committee, all work to ensure market control and assist transnational corporations in becoming some of the largest economies in the world. In the United States, research centers in Silicon Valley, Route 128 in Boston, the Research Triangle in North Carolina (Raleigh/ Durham) and Fairfax County, Virginia, and other locations throughout the country are not only facilitating possibilities for electronic commerce, but are creating technological contexts for corporate mergers and take-overs.
Of course the philosophical architecture of neoliberalism behind all of this can be traced to the bourgeois salons of “Red Vienna” and the thinking of Frederich Von Hayek, an Austrian economist who moved to the University of Chicago and became the mentor of Milton Friedman (not to mention influencing Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher). Hayek’s concept of “the catallaxy” or the spontaneous relations of free economic exchange between individuals (influenced by the work of Ernst Mach and Michael Polyani) rests on the notion that there exists no connection between human intention and social outcome and that the outcome of all human activity is essentially haphazard. This position opposes that of the critical educationalists in this volume who emphasize the sociohistorical context of economic systems and who stress the socially constituted way in which knowledge about social life might lead to revolutionary action on behalf of the oppressed. Hayek’s bourgeois ideological perceptions led him to the economistic idea that culture must adjust to the economic imperatives of the marketplace. He was militantly opposed to government regulation in general, except when it came to protecting the free, unfettered functioning of the market (see Hilary Wainwright, Arguments for a New Left: Answering the Free Market Right, London and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994).
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