Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

 

The new millennium has finally arrived with Bourbon Street reverie. But the unsettling triumph represented by ticker tape parades and local beer hall celebrations only serve to momentarily deflect attention from the millions of exploited men, women, and children around the world. The challenge of turning the country into one giant theme park to entertain the ruling class has not been met in all corners of the globe, but the opposition is withering away by the minute. More and more countries are donning what William Greider has called globalization’s "golden straightjacket" of "follow our orders, and we will make you rich (someday)"—forced austerity programs orchestrated by institutions such as the International Monetary Fund that dictates what foreign governments may or may not do (2000, p, 14).

Despite all the fanfare surrounding the promises of free trade, it remains the case that both advanced and developed countries have been hurt by globalization. Only a few metropolitan centers and select social strata have benefited, and it is no secret who these select occupants are. It’s not the case that the poor are next in line to become millionaires. That’s not part of the overall scheme. In fact, the poor are completely written out of the script, they serve as permanent ‘extras’ for the background shots for larger millionaire epics of fame for the lucky few, and misery and poverty for the unlucky many. The functional integration among production, trade, global financial markets, new production and transport technologies, and ‘speed’ technologies that make financial transactions instantaneous, have facilitated the redeployment of capital to "least-cost" locations that enable exploitation on the basis of advantages.

As global assembly lines increase, and as speculative and financial capital flows moves across national borders in commando-like assaults ("move in, take the goods, and move out") the state continues to experience difficulty in managing economic transactions but has not yet detached itself from the infrastructure of the imperialist state. Transnational corporations and private financial institutions—Gold Card members of the leading worldwide bourgeoisie—have formed what Robinson and Harris (2000) call a "transnational capitalist clan." And while the emergent global capitalist historic bloc is marked by contradictions in terms of how to achieve regulatory order in the current global economy, national capitals and nation states continue to reproduce themselves. Home markets have not disappeared from the scene since they continue to provide ballast for the imperialist state through ensuring the general conditions for international production and exchange.

The globalization of capitalism is not in any way accountable to democratic interest, yet its cheerleaders have hidden its diabolical nature behind the non-sequitur claim that the free market promotes democracy. In fact, self-determining governments only get in the way of the goal of transnational corporations, which is "to open all domestic markets, natural resources, built infrastructures and labor pools of all societies of the world to foreign transnational control without the barrier of self-determining government and people in the way" (McMurtry, 1999, p. 58). In other words, to create an anti-welfare capitalism with a human face. The current mind-set of global capitalism can, in fact, be traced by to the Trilateral Commission of 1973 (composed of the world’s leading corporate CEOs, academics, government officials, etc.), who argued that there existed ‘an excess of democracy’ in the Western world and who advocated the legitimacy of hierarchy, coercion, discipline, secrecy, and deception, as well as the non-involvement of a governable democracy (McMurtry, 1999).

How has the globalization of capital fared? The economic performance of industrial countries under globalization in the 1980s and 1990s is much poorer than during the 1950s and 1960s when they operated under a more regulated social-market economy (Singh, 2000). Economic growth as well as GDP growth has been lowered and productivity has been cut in half; in addition, unemployment has risen dramatically in the OECD countries. That the United States has fared better on the issue of unemployment than Western European countries cannot be attributed to the less flexible labor markets of the latter, nor on the information technologies revolution. In the case of Japan and Korea, their periods of fast economic growth, poverty reduction, and raises in the standard of living was under managed trade and capital controls, not laissez-faire evangelism. When Korea, Malaysia and Indonesia, for example, liberalized their external capital flows they suffered economic meltdowns (Singh, 2000). Latin-American countries that have liberalized their trading and external capital regimes have suffered from fall outs and from severe financial crises, including the Peso crisis of 1994-95 and the "Samba effect" of 1999. Latin American countries following the Washington consensus have, since the late 1980s, experienced a long-term growth rate reduction from 6 percent per annum to 3 percent per annum (Singh, 2000). The battle over free trade is not only about profits. It’s also about manufacturing ideology. Globalization has been a dismal failure for the vast majority of the world’s capitalist nations. And yet the corporate elite refuse to concede defeat. In fact, they are boldly claiming victory and furthermore, that history is on their side. In a sense they are correct. But we have to understand that they are speaking for themselves. They have been victorious. In fact, they’ve made millions. The question remains. At whose expense?

Global capitalism has won the battle over ideology hands down. Global capitalist monocracy has declared itself victorious over socialist and communist ideologies. The latter are being auctioned off at Sotheby’s as relics of class struggle from bygone eras, to be archived in museums dedicated to democracy’s victory over the evil empires spawned by Mr. Marx. For now, capitalism has succeeded in steering the wheels of history to the far right, to a head-on collision with the reigning neoliberal bloc, where postmodernized signposts on the streets declare the triumph of privatization over socialization, individualism over collectivism, life-style identity politics over class politics, cynicism over hope, and barbarism over civilization. Capitalism has become our ticket to the gaudy world of tinsel dreams and chloroformed hope, to a subterranean public sphere where American Psycho replaces Che Guevara as the icon of the postmodern revolution. For the millions of people whose lives remain commodified and regulated in the charnel house of ‘fast-track’ capital accumulation and its seductive companion, consumer ideology, the clearly visible contradictions within capitalist social and economic relations of production have become too obvious to be recognized. They have been naturalized as common sense.

The social and political antagonisms haunting capitalism today are clearly visible. On the one hand, we witness firsthand the vast profusion of material resources able to sustain the livelihood of the six billion inhabitants of the earth, and provide basic necessities including full employment, housing, and heath care. On the other hand, the growing bipolarization and the over-accumulation of capital by the new breed of opulent gangster capitalists from reigning global mafiacracies has reduced the odds of surviving hunger, poverty, malnutrition, famine, and disease for a growing segment of working-class men, women, and children who are now joining the ranks of the urban ghettos and global slum dwellers all over the world. We are not talking only about Calcutta and Rio de Janeiro, but our own urban communities from New York to Los Angeles. In stead of celebrating growing economic democracy worldwide, we are facing growing inequality the proportions of which stagger the mind. As Willie Thompson notes: "The trend is precisely in the opposite direction, towards intensified polarization, the concentration of misery, suffering, deprivation and hopelessness at the lower end of the scale, mirrored by exorbitant and unceasing accumulation [of capital] at the other pole…"(1997, pp. 224-225).

Is History Having Fun Yet? Are We Already Tired of the Future?

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the cataclysmic social and political implosions in Russia and Eastern European countries coincides with the premature "end-of-ideology" proclamations and correlative self-canceling pronouncements about the end of history hailed by conservative social theorists such as Francis Fukuyama who, in classic red-bating style, has announced the end of revolutionary movements and the demise of socialism altogether. However, in their mad dash towards capitalist utopia, the growing lumpen-proletariats in ex-socialist European countries, drunk on the prospect of get-rich-quick schemes and reaping enormous windfalls, are stumbling over the corpse of Lenin and learning the lessons of privatization and the empty promises of market socialism the hard way. Of course, Russia is not the only country being deceived by capitalism’s promises of prosperity. Thousands of workers in countries whose dictators borrowed from the World Trade Organization--and who stealthily pocketed most of the profits--are suffering through imposed austerity programs in which they have been made to assume repayment of international loans.

The world’s greatest exponent of class struggle, Karl Marx, still remains under attack (in itself not such a surprising observation). The opponent grabbing the headlines this time and this time one opponent is a prominent spokesperson for evolutionary psychology. Maintaining that the Talmud and Tanakh has, over the centuries, ordered Jews to adopt an unconscious eugenics program by insisting that they practice endogamy in order to remain racially pure, California State Long Beach professor, Kevin MacDonald, has recently and infamously argued that Jewish emphasis group co-operation has resulted in Jews having significantly higher IQs than other ethnic groups (Ortega, 2000). Used by publicity--hungry British historian, David Irving, as an expert witness in a libel lawsuit against Professor Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin books (a case in which Irving claimed that there were no gas chambers at Auschwitz, and, fortunately, as case that he lost), MacDonald not only argued that Judaism is an evolutionary group strategy used to discipline genes as part of a social program of increasing Jewish intelligence beyond other groups and thus ensuring group survival (a strategy that he claims was copied by the Nazis in their philosophy of Aryan superiority developed as a defense against the Jews), he also accused Marxism of being a subversive Jewish-controlled intellectual movement responsible for untold deaths: "In the 20^th century many millions of people have been killed in the attempt [by Jews] to establish Marxist societies based on the ideal of complete economic and social leveling, and millions of people have been killed as a result of the failure of Jewish assimilation into European societies" (MacDonald, cited in Ortega, 2000, p. 14). Here we see both bad science and racist logic taken to the nauseating heights of actually blaming the Holocaust on the Jews themselves and blaming the victims of so-called Marxist regimes on Jewish political theory. The Cold War may be over but science has a way of returning, time and time again, to the scene of history’s greatest crimes and persecuting its victims all over again.

 

Technology as Snake Oil

Despite the collapse of any significant opposition movements to neo-liberal capitalism, educators have been encouraged to be optimistic as they navigate their way through the first precarious stage of the new millennium. Even though the contradictions of capitalism abound, as the homeless stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the affluent on the crowded streets of our urban megalopolises, teachers still cling to the Malthusian dream of living in the best of all possible worlds. Such engineered optimism and its accompanying incapacity for dissent has helped capitalism to survive for decades through a low-intensity democracy, driven by pitiless bureaucrats who provide just enough equality to keep people from taking to the streets in acts of civil disobedience. But even this unstated alliance among ruling interests is breaking down, as recent anti-WTO events in Seattle and Washington D.C. attest. While Jean-Bertrand Aristide can recently note that "history moves in waves. We cannot always live on the crests" (2000, p. 56), the planet remains ill-prepared for the impact that the crisis of globalization is currently having on the already poverty-stricken. If the situation already appears out of control what will happen when we face the Tsunami that will smother vast populations when capital’s comet comes crashing from its heavenly heights, smack into the swirling ocean of economic uncertainty. Teachers are told that they are entering a new postindustrial, high-tech information era that will usher in a gilded age of prosperity for themselves and their students. As James Petras (2000) notes, however, this characterization of current economic conditions is patently false, since computer industries represent less than three percent of the economy. In this predominately financial-industrial economy, government leaders in league with privateers and laissez-faire evangelists like to hype the information age era stuff, because in doing so it is easier for them to generate false optimism about the future, and to draw attention away from the fact that prosperity is largely confined to speculative-financial and real estate sectors of the capitalist class at a time when retrenchment by the state is draining resources from the poor and redirecting them to already bulging pockets of the rich. By creating a façade of information era utopianism through carnival-like hucksterism that accompanies the corporate invasion of our classrooms and a computer technology millenarianism that assures salvation through internet consciousness, potential criticism can be siphoned away from the fact they we live in an era marked by monopolistic giants, greedy conglomerates, snake oil privateers and selective protectionists who support massive state subsidies, the selling-off of public enterprises to private monopolies, welfare for the rich, domestic and overseas multi-billion dollar money laundering, arms industry domination of the export sector and the placing of key state institutions under the influence of financial sectors of civil society – in short, who support the creation of a social order in which class warfare runs amok (Petras, 2000).

Teachers are also taught that the internet will "equalize" society. That is yet another myth. Borders are not transcended but reinscribed. The internet is supposed to dissolve distance through simultaneity. Yet, as Randy Martin notes, information and communication technology has created a spatial unevenness "characterized by densities of access and vast exclusions"(2000, p. 100). Such technology reinscribes boundaries—especially when those boundaries occur within those strata with "high regime status"(2000, p. 10). Martin notes importantly that the "info—poor and hidden masses are a spatial effect of technology and not merely those next in the queue to get on-line" (2000, p. 10).

Of course, the marketization, privatization, and neo-liberalization of schooling is functionally advantageous to the conditions described above. Although it has been smuggled in under cover of a revival of the democratic imperative of privatization, schooling has been reduced to a sub-sector of the economy and continues to provide ballast for existing discourses and practices of class exploitation and white supremacist heteronormative patriarchy. What we are saying is certainly no longer a secret. What is new is the stage managed resignation that has accompanied the news. When we learn that Latino students are twice as likely as African-Americans and 3 times as likely as whites to drop out of high school, or that, in 1997, 25.3 percent of Latinos aged 16 to 24 dropped out of high school compared with 13.4 percent of African Americans and 7.6 percent of whites (McQueen, 2000), the information registers but somehow ceases to enrage us. Part of the reason for this is that exploitation through the capitalist marketplace has been so naturalized and the pauperization of the state so dehistoricized and depoliticized that we have learned to accept a certain amount of exploitation and accompanying forms of racism and sexism and homophobia that we feel is an inevitable part of living in a developed capitalist democracy. What we fail to grasp is that capitalism and democracy actually work against each other and the familiar coupling of the two words is really just a form of linguistic – hence ideological - mystification. We guess the rationale is that if we keep hearing the term "capitalist democracy" frequently enough, we will begin to believe that the two terms are inseparable and unconsciously strip the terms of domination. In fact, the two terms need to be torn apart, not yolked together. Maybe another adjective needs to precede the term ‘democracy’. Maybe ‘socialist democracy’ is a more appropriate coupling. But since we have been enculturated throughout the cold war to get a headache even at the mere mention of the word ‘socialism’, it is unlikely we will ever see ‘socialist democracy’ appear with any mounting regularity in the journals devoted to educational reform, at least not anytime soon.

California is often a precursor to the dominant scenarios of U.S. futurity. It is the state that passes propositions (i.e., 187, 209, 227) that routinely are given birth through a marriage of political Monday-morning-quarterbacks in the form of rich businessmen like Ron Unz, and manic, mean-spirited, right-wing populists such as Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson, and their ilk. California’s political initiatives often serve as political harbingers for a politics that will eventually spread throughout other states like a runaway contagion, mixing racism, sexism, bourgeois historical amnesia, class arrogance, and homophobia into a political cocktail as wickedly dangerous as any biological weapon invented by the Pentagon. California is a state that generates a lot of tension around educational reform – a tension that can be traced largely to mind numbing ethnocentrism, Anglo elitism, and social frameworks of perception and classification that are inextricably connected to the current climate of Latinophobia. This is not hard to understand in an agonistic geopolitical arena where scapegoating immigrants from Mexico is a commonplace and accepted practice. California is also where the English Only movement is gaining momentum.

Donaldo Macedo captures the absurdity of the English Only proponents who argue that English is the most effective language for citizens of the United States, and that it is the language that will best guarantee a successful future:

In the midst of the widening scenario of immigrant bashing, it is not difficult to make the case that democracy has been discountenanced, its attempts at civic renewal and invigoration of the public sphere even rendered detumescent. Two types of reactions predominate. The first is to engage in a half-revolution through "reformist" efforts, underwritten by a teleological belief in the evolution of democracy through the free market. The second is to engage in political activism that cuts to the heart of neo-liberalism, corporate control of the schooling process, and capitalist relations of exploitation. While the former beggars the praxis of critical struggle, the latter lacks a coherent national and international strategy.

With the exception of the Seattle and Washington anti-globalization campaigns, opposition to neo-liberalism has been muted, thanks to the polished statecraft of Clinton and his successful cheerleading for an unfettered free market, under cover, we might add, of a Third Way detente between Keynesian economics and ultra-capitalism. Opposition has also been blunted through the efforts and cagey triumphalism of New Right apologists of the free market. The colonial apotheosis of New Right heroes such as Pat Buchanan, Donald Trump, and Jesse Ventura, and George W. Bush, and the brain-stunting banality of their political platforms, has met with a lack of any real spirited opposition among the educational left. But this is partly due to lack of any rival oppositions to global capitalism either nationally or on a world scale. For the foreseeable future the left has painted itself into a corner. But it can only truck with pessimism for so long. The ineffectual character of the U.S. Left is perhaps no where better highlighted than its inability to mobilize strong public support in sending Elian, the "miracle child," back to Cuba.

Capitalism and the Cult of Elián Gonzalez

Much has made of Elián Gonzalez, the six-year-old Cuban boy around whom a highly publicized international custody case has evolved. The only survivor among a group of Cubans (including Elián’s mother) whose boat capsized while trying to escape from Cuba to Miami, Florida, Elián has been described by religious pundits, politicians, and especially his Cuban-émigré "relatives and fellow exiles as a "miracle child" ( we note that around the same time as Elian was rescued, a boat of 400 Haitian adult and children was forced back to Haiti). What has contributed to the drama surrounding Elian’s transformation into St. Lazarus’s "Mini-Me"?

It began with news reports that claimed that Elián bore few traces of injury when he was rescued and that a ‘normal’ child surely would have died from exposure. The two fishermen who rescued Elián had revealed that they had not planned to go fishing that day, leaving us to wonder if they had been beckoned by some kind of divine force, and a Christian one at that. According to some reports, dolphins pushed Elián in the direction of his rescuers. Family members began to circulate stories of seeing the image of the Virgin Mary and La Virgen de Guadalupe in their mirrors, stories that could be counted on to indulge a public always ripe for the supernatural. Elián’s rescue at sea evokes the journey of the infant Moses recovered from the Nile in a cradle built from reeds. As bizarre an implausible as these stories seem-- recounted routinely in news stories by local residents in Little Havana as well as by politicians and religious broadcasters across the United States - they do more than hint at the notion of divine intervention.

As the Miracle Child’s mystical cousin, the beautiful Marisleysis Gonzalez, collapses in seemingly sacred rapture and is admitted to a nearby hospital (perhaps she is fighting demons sent from Castro who remain invisible to all but the faithful), we are presented by the media with countless shots of her anguished face. It is the same beatific visage that adorned our television screens after Elián was reunited by the INS with his father, only this time tears flowed in an angry torrent down her cheeks as she prayed for the fate of Elián who had been currently reunited with his "communist" father in the now infamous INS SWAT-team raid. Each time her face graces our television sets, her soul seems to be perpetually suspended between agony and epiphany.

Of the thousands of new clips that featured Elián’s sacred diaspora from the island of tyrants and dictators to the land of milk and honey, some showed devout Cuban Catholic women in black shawls strategically placing religious artifacts at Lazaro’s home when Elián was in his custody. Local artists made paintings of Elián ascending into Heaven, reaching toward the outstretched arms of Mary, Queen of Heaven. Bystanders tried to reach over the fence of Lazaro’s yard in order to touch the miracle child with the hope that such a touch might have some kind of a magical effect.

Polls reveal that most Cuban Americans residing in Little Havana want Elián to remain in the United States, the "land of freedom" and Elián’s relatives have been tireless in their attempts to prevent him from returning to Cuba, the "land of evil", where president Fidel Castro is portrayed as a monster capable of infanticide who, like the Biblical Herod, might try to ‘disappear’ the miracle child. Some stories have been circulating informally about Santero priests in Miami who claim that if Elián returns to Cuba, he will be sacrificed by Castro who will drink his blood. Elián’s blood apparently will give Castro the power to live forever.

It would not be that far-fetched to conclude that Little Havana’s Cuban Americans exiles function collectively and cohesively as an integrated anti-communist lobby when it comes to proselytizingagainst Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution. We are sure few Cuban Americans would object to being called "anti-Castro Cubans." But to what extent could Little Havana’s population also be considered to be a religious cult? Part of the answer lies both in its system of values and beliefs that are constantly counterposed to the "evil" empire of Cuba, and the matter-of-fact means by such values are inculcated. We suggest that as the residents of Little Havana constantly complain about communist brainwashing practices being employed against Elián by Cuban government operatives, including his father, they themselves are participating in various "ideological" practices that serve and promote capitalist democracy and ‘furies of private interest.’ It is the type of brainwashing that is awash in every corner of United States society, from school assemblies, to television programming, to magazine advertisements, to the local gossip at the corner store. Such values, democratic or otherwise, rarely stand alone. In this instance they are conditioned by worldwide corporations who exercise dominant control over what is believed by the exiles to be a "free" and "open" market where producers and sellers compete on an equal playing field. Lost in this equation is the fact that these corporate oligopolies – also known as emergent supranational institutions – are linked to a global social structure of accumulation that works to enforce economic, political, and cultural norms. These "capitalist" norms have become the regulating mechanisms of what has been called "the new world order." Elite-based polyarchies operating as a transnationalized state work to consolidate ideological-cultural practices - and it is the combined effect of these practices that is the real wizard behind the glittering façade of OZ (see Robinson, 1998).

A question never asked by the Miami-based adherents of this market theodicy, is the price one pays to live in a truly ‘free and efficient market." In other words, what is the price that one pays for not selling one’s labor to a master? For those who do not follow this fundamentalist market theology and its accompanying declaration of human freedom, misery and starvation result. The Miami Cultists fail to question a claim made by philosopher John McMurtry (1998), that "freedom" in capitalist democracy lies within the moral commandments of the market’s rule, in particular the command that no one is to interfere with its smooth, unfettered movement.

The anti-Castro cultists seek their salvation in capitalist market doctrine and their undiminished and militant faith in the frictionless character of its market laws. Such a position removes the inconvenience of having to undress such laws so as to reveal their inner workings and to evaluate the consequences of such laws in the lives of millions of poor and suffering children. It excuses them from the burden of insight into how the United States, as global imperialism’s alpha male, rapaciously enforces those laws. The received doctrine of the market with its principles of classical market theory and its market value program are upheld at any price, even if it means dismissing people as disposable and, as McMurtry notes, even if it means accepting that people will starve to death if they are not hired for profitable use in an oversupplied labor market. McMurtry describes capitalism’s value program as informed by a totalitarian master discourse in which the ultimate vehicle of value is the corporate person, and the ultimate measure of value is money profitability. In other words, what increases corporate revenues and profits, on the one hand, is perceived as good and to be approved and what decreases corporate revenues and profits is bad and to be condemned. He claims that this prescriptive duality of Good and Bad is no less absolute and binding than religious commandments. Our argument is that the "free market" decrees absolute commandments of non-intervention. The "invisible hand," to which all alike must submit, that lies at the center of market command is, in reality, the bloc fortunes of several hundred billionaires who own as much wealth as almost half the globe’s population put together, the interlocking directorates of multinational corporations, and global intrafirm trading empires that dominate the market’s base of supply and demand. These ruling positions of the global market hierarchy participate in a regulating paradigm of mind and reality in which the ultimate value system supporting democracy is comprised by the laws of the market, which seemingly exist prior to and independent of society. In other words, they ARE the laws of nature and of God (McMurtry, 1998).

The value system of the market doctrine before which Miami’s anti-Castro cultists kneel in reverence supports the efforts of free marketeers and global carpetbaggers to harass, to torture, and to murder union and community organizers who fight for legislative protection of citizen rights. Do these Cultists for Capital know that they are supporting a value system that is purposively eroding job security and protection from hazardous working conditions? The Miami cultists have attempted to inject their anti-Castro invective into a pro-American discourse, without revealing that the source of their hatred towards Castro’s Cuba is the fact that Castro took away their class privileges, their property ownership and their accompanying ability to exploit the poverty-stricken who labored under the iron fist of dictator Fulgencio Batista. Castro will never be forgiven for closing down the casinos and brothels and nationalizing all business, depriving the US mafia and US based multinationals of a profitable cash cow. They will never forgive Castro for surviving the dozens of assassination attempts carried out by the CIA. In their paeans directed at Elián, the miracle child, the anti-Castro cultists deflect attention from the 40 year economic war waged against the people of Cuba. The embargo imposed by the United States denies food, medicine and other supplies whose lack the cultists rejoice in pointing out in their tirades against the conditions of poverty in Cuba. We find it interesting that senators such as Trent Lott and Lonnie Mack protested the INS raid to reunite Elián with his father yet supported efforts to triple the size of the INS police forces. Surely they know that INS raid occur all the time—especially against undocumented immigrants.

The media was quick to report assertions that Elián’s father was abusive (there was never a shred of evidence produced) but rarely mentioned the incident that took place outside the home of Elián Gonzalez's Miami relatives, when radio talk show host Scott Piasant of Portland, Oregon, displayed a T-shirt reading, "Send the boy home" and "A father's rights," then was physically assaulted by nearby exile crowd before police come to rescue. The media also failed to report that two cousins that had spent time with Elián at the house of great uncle Lazaro had been previously arrested on felony charges, including burglary, grand theft, robbery, petty larceny, and felony firearms and prowling charges. The media chose to ignore the fact that Lazaro and Elián’s other great uncle, Delfin, had both been arrested for DUI. Lazaro was reported to have nearly twice the legal limit of alcohol in his body at the time of his arrest. The public was also left in the dark as to the man responsible for directing much of the on-camera media coverage of Elián’s Miami relatives, someone who is known in Miami for running dirty political campaigns (Macpherson, 2000).

Of course, in covering the Elián story, news commentators and reporters could have talked about how much more free pupils are in the United States to murder their classmates and, in the case of California, to be arrested and tried in the judicial system as adults. Reporters seemed to suffer memory loss when it came to mentioning clandestine attempts by the U.S. government to destabilize Latin American and Caribbean regimes. Providing context is not a big part of the media’s function, which is to generate ballast for the existing status quo . All of these "memory lapses" can be attributed to the value system that inscribes our everyday social life, values linked to the laws of the market. Within the context of these values, the United States must be following God’s will more than any other country, since its standard of living is the highest in the world. What is clear is that the Miami Cubans do not want a normalization of relations between the US and the Cuban government since the future of Cuba, must in their view, be linked to their right-wing organizations in Miami. The US Left has largely abandoned the Elián saga to a Manichean struggle between those who argue for family values (e.g. return Elián to his father) versus those who vehemently oppose communism (Elián must remain in the U.S. because in Cuba’s supposedly totalitarian regime he will lose his autonomy and become a member of the group mind).

The Abolition of Whiteness

Spurred on by a lack of opposition to the race, class, gender, and class exploitation that has been bolstered by neo-liberal policies worldwide, multicultural education continues to defang its most emancipatory possibilities by calling for diversity in isolation from an interrogation of its center of sameness known as the hegemony of whiteness. It is this sameness that is the distillate of colonialism, and the ether of white lies that spikes the very air we breathe. Slavoj Zizek has pointed out that in the Left’s call for new multiple political subjectivities (e.g., race, class, feminist, religious), the Left asserts its exact opposite --"an underlying all-pervasive sameness—a non-antagonistic society in which there is room for all manner of cultural communities, lifestyles, religions, and sexual orientations" (2000, p. 39). Zizek reveals that this Sameness relies on an antagonistic split. We believe that this split results from the labor-capital relation sustained by white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Which is why we need to join Noel Ignatiev, David Roediger, and others in calling for the abolition of whiteness. We need to recognize (as we have tried to make clear in our work over the years) that there is no positive value that can be given to the social position known as whiteness. The term cannot be recovered, or given a positive spin. White people need to disidentify entirely with the white race. To seek any kind of identity with a white race – or political détente - is ill-conceived at best.

As Theodore Allen (1994, 1997) notes, the social function of whiteness in this respect was social control, a practice which has colonial origins that can be traced back to the assault upon tribal affinities, customs, laws, and institutions of Africans, native Americans, and Irish by English/British and Anglo-American colonialism. Such insidious practices of social control reduce all members of oppressed groups to one undifferentiated social status beneath that of any member of the colonizing population. With the rise of the abolitionist movement, racial typologies, classification systems, and criteriologists favoring whiteness and demonizing blackness as the lowest status within humanity’s ‘great chain of being’ became widespread in order to justify and legitimize the slavery of Africans and ensure the contribution of lifetime chattel bond-servitude. Today "whiteness’ has become naturalized as part of our ‘commonsense’ reality.

Whiteness is not a unified, homogeneous culture but a social position. As Ignatiev comments:

Ignatiev (1998b) also warns:

 

Ignatiev (1998a) writes that identification with white privilege reconnects whites to relations of exploitation. The answer to this plight, notes Ignatiev, is for whites to cease to exist as whites. Whites "must commit suicide as whites to come alive as workers or youth or women or artists or whatever other identity will let them stop being the miserable, petulant, subordinated creatures they now are and become freely associated, developing human beings" (1998a, p. 200). He goes on to say:

Although the ideology of whiteness needs to be vigorously critiqued, this task only partially fulfills the requirements for anti-capitalist anti-racist struggles. What is needed further is an acute recognition of how the ideology of whiteness contributes to the reproduction of class divisions--particularly divisions between working-class Anglo-Americans and ethnic minorities—in order to reinforce existing property relations.

Along with efforts to abolish the white race (not white people, there is, of course, a distinct difference) we must support efforts to abolish capital. While it may be true that the globalization of capital brings in its wake the trappings of democracy, it is important not to mistake these seductive trappings for the real thing. As Perry Anderson notes:

Educators are fed up with white lies. They see through them. They are beginning to attach a language to them and are starting to theorize the issues more completely, and more deeply. Are decorous shifts towards decentralization, rigorous academic standards, teacher accountability, and parental choice supposed to fool anyone? Have recent attempts to camouflage the deep assumptions of terms such as ‘accountability’ so frequently bruited about by neo-liberal pundits these days, really blinded teachers to the proto-fascist elements of the New Right gospellers and free market evangelists? Are teachers fooled by such aerosol terms as ‘empowerment’ that are shouted as much in the board rooms of corporations as they are in teacher education programs? Teachers are no fools, and they are not to be fooled with. While we might inhabit a period of political defeat at the ballot box, we find ourselves on the cusp of a moral victory as teachers begin to exercise their voices of dissent.

Mainstream Multiculturalism: Liberals Who Champion Dífference

By focussing on the margins rather than the hegemonic center of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, mainstream multiculturalists have airbrushed the most vexing dilemmas in the liberal humanist call for diversity and have left uncontested the ever-present discourses of liberal democracy and the workability of capital – discourses that naturalize events so that their outcome no longer seems open to debate. By championing the values of a well-tempered democracy, liberal multiculturalists have also left unchallenged the social relations of production. Latent in the spectrality that has been disclosed by the discursive and representational practices of mainstream multiculturalism is the continuing advance of white supremacist logic and social practices. Ghosted into the ideas of mainstream multiculturalists is a promiscuous fascination with difference and epistemological exoticisms and the return of the erstwhile eclipsed Other. Mainstream multiculturalism remains permeated by the capitalist mode of production through structures of class, race, gender, and sexual domination.

Beyond the Mainstream: Marxist Multiculturalism

Marxist multiculturalists recognize the political primacy of making structural changes in the larger social system while fighting the ability of capital to re-absorb reform efforts within its own commodity logic. Consequently, many Marxist multiculturalists see the need for a direct action politics centered around equality, anti-racism, and a politics of difference. This is decidedly not a politics of piecemeal increments. It is a revolutionary praxis for the present that we refer to as "revolutionary multiculturalism."

Revolutionary multiculturalism emphasizes the collective experiences of marginalized people in the context of their political activism and social mobilization. We distinguish revolutionary multiculturalism from the dominant ideologies of multiculturalism which seek to legitimize the social order through racial harmony and a national identity based on the "Americanization" of marginalized cultures. As a framework for developing a pedagogical praxis, revolutionary multiculturalism opens up social and political spaces for the oppressed to challenge the various forms of class, race, and gender oppression that are produced and reproduced by dominant social relations. We believe that by using their lived experiences, histories, and narratives as tools for social struggle (McLaren, 1995), subaltern groups can interpret and reconstruct their oppressive social conditions into meaningful social and political action (McLaren, 1995; 1997), Revolutionary multicultural pedagogy encourages marginalized groups and communities to forge political alliances, and in so doing to eradicate cultural homogeneity by interpreting and (re)constructing their own history (McLaren, 1995). As part of a concerted effort of anti-capitalist struggle, revolutionary multiculturalism seeks to establish social and economic equality in contrast to the conservative and liberal ideology of "equal opportunity" that masks the existing unequal distribution of power and wealth.

A revolutionary multicultural curriculum in the classroom encourages students to interrogate the multiple meanings of race, class, gender, and sexuality in a society which playfully and seductively inverts and reverses the true meaning of social equality. In our view, revolutionary multiculturalism has the potential of pressuring democracy to live up to its name by putting bourgeois liberal egalitarianism on the witness stand of history. Cruz (1996) argues that we must refuse the entrapment of the empty promises of bourgeois democracy by

Here, we follow Joel Kovel in struggling not only against economic conditions but also against the delimiting of the self by capital’s conversion of labor power into a commodity: the adherence to bureaucratic rationalization, possessive individualism, and consumerist desire. As Kovel notes: "It follows that capital must be fought and overcome, not simply at the micro level but as it inhabits and infests everyday life through the structures of bureaucratic rationalization and consumerist desire. However, capital can not be overcome unless it is replaced, at the level of the subject, with an alternative notion" (1998, p. 109). It is important to note here that revolutionary multiculturalism does not privilege "class’ oppression over race, gender, or sexual oppression. We believe that by linking anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-homophobic struggles to local and internationalist anti-capitalist struggle, such struggles will be better equipped to succeed in the long run. We are not arguing that race, gender, or sexual oppression be reduced to economic issues, nor do we wish to marginalize or displace the important work that continues to be done in anti-racist and feminist scholarship. To suggest that revolutionary pedagogy is an alternative to work being done in cultural studies is to fall into the "divide and rule" traps of bourgeois capitalist scholarship which fears the establishment of worldwide efforts at alliance building against capital relations of exploitation.

We acknowledge that we live in a heterogeneous society that is constituted by conflicting and contradictory social formations and the diversity of social and cultural life. Yet we also acknowledge that such diversity is a contested one. The question we raise is: diversity for whom? We do not subscribe to a politics in which specific and disparate social movements are cobbled into a form of artificial, mechanical unification or totality. There has to be some establishment of priorities, a vanguard of some kind, although we don’t envision returning to the Bolshevik model here. Neither do we support front organizations of specialized movements but foresee a model in which various groups independently address issues and create new discourses and forms of mobilization. This would take place within an overall form of inter-group and inter-ethnic solidarity. But this would not be a mechanical coalition of diverse groups brought together as a broad-based historical bloc, with each group’s goal representing an equal strategic priority. We follow Boris Kagarlitsky in advocating for a "hierarchy of strategic priorities but at the same time a real equality of people in the movement" (2000, p. 71). He articulates the struggle as follows:

We must move beyond the liberal socialism of those who espouse radical democracy in order to embrace a unified struggle in which a collective political consciousness is not only possible but necessary. We don’t need to scrap universalism, as the postmodernists would advocate, but rather to assiduously struggle for what Kagarlitsky refers to as an "open universalism" based on a dialogue of cultures (2000, p. 75). After all, universals are not static, they are rooted (routed) in movement. They are nomadically grounded in living, breathing subjects of history who toil and who labor under conditions not of their own making. We must continue to attack the restricted Western bourgeois character of Enlightenment universalism but to attack universalism itself is not only foolish but politically dangerous. Bruce Robbins is correct when he asserts that all universal standards are in some way provisional. In other words, they deal with "provisional agreements arrived by particular agents" (1999, p. 74). He goes on to maintain that universal standards "are provided in a situation of unequal power, and they are applied in a situation of unequal power. Thus, they are always some degree of injustice" (1999, p. 74). There is no such thing as a clean universalism that is not tainted by power and interest of some sort. Robbins concludes that "all universalisms are dirty. And it is only dirty universalism that will help us against the powers and agents of still dirtier ones" (p. 1999, 75).

Although we support the Enlightenment’s project of universalism, we also recognize its limitations. This is in sharp contrast to those postmodern educators who frequently associate Enlightenment’s universalism with Euro-centrism’s emphasis on objectivity and rationality. While we resist efforts to police the expression of non-European viewpoints, we find the politics of postmodern pluralism—i.e., providing voice to those marginalized social groups who have been denied political participation—to be problematic. The belief that an increased diversity on marginalized voices, will automatically ensure that marginalized social groups will gain social, political, and economic demands and interests is not altogether correct. We argue that the struggle for diversity must be accompanied by a revolutionary socialist politics.

Kenan Malik (1996) asserts convincingly that postmodernism’s refutation of universalism is, for the most part, similar to the crude 19^th century racial theories, which rejected universal categories and instead emphasized relativism. Malik further adds that "in its hostility to universalism and in its embrace of the particular and the relative, poststructuralism embodies the same romantic notions of human difference as are contained in racial theory" (p. 4). Thus, "while difference can arise from equality, equality can never arise from difference" (p. 4).

We believe that it is important to reject a politics where the left is implicated in the "divide and rule" tactics of the ruling elite. A. Sivanandan describes how such a politics plays out in Britain:

At the current historical juncture, when the workers’ movement has been demoralized, supporters of postmodern radicalism have, in effect, strengthened the bourgeoisie. Kagarlitsky writes:

Towards a Revolutionary Multicultural Pedagogy

In our view, a critical pedagogy is clearly a necessary yet insufficient condition for revolutionary praxis. A critical pedagogy must be able to endorse the cultural struggles of workers and co-ordinate such struggle as part of a broader ‘cross-border’ social movement unionism aimed at organizing and guiding the working-classes and marginalized cultural workers in their efforts to build new international anti-capitalist struggles.

A revolutionary multicultural pedagogy recognizes the necessity of a worker-centered pedagogy that is empowering, democratic, participatory, and is also able to address the material conditions of the workers. Thus, the revolutionary multicultural pedagogy we are advocating here is one which stresses worker participation and their self-organization on the basis of their collective economic and political interests. As a consequence, a central practice of a revolutionary multicultural pedagogy is an examination of how identities of workers are lived conjuncturally particular class, race, and gender relations.

The corporate-sponsored multiculturalism that we witness today in school classrooms maintains class and racial divisions by articulating a liberal version of equality that is grounded in equal recognition of cultural practices. While this is a good thing as far as it goes, it overlooks the exploitation of wage labor by focusing for the most part on cultural practices, which are frequently divorced from the social relations of production. In this instance, the social identities of marginalized minorities become articulated around consumption practices rather that production or labor practices. In the same manner, identity politics effectively detaches cultural practices from labor practices.

Multicultural capitalism acknowledges social groups primarily as consumers in the global market. We ignore at our peril capitalism’s ability to accommodate differences by linking them to its own global market operations that encompass flexible methods of production and the personification of services and goods for diverse ethnic, cultural, and linguistic minorities. Capitalism gives recognition to ethnic and racial minorities who possess capital, while minorities without sufficient disposable income are systematically marginalized (LaFeber, 1999).

We believe that a pre-condition for a ‘globalized borderless capital’ is "cross border cooperation" of ethnic, cultural, and linguistic communities of people (LaFeber, 1999). But such co-operation is double-edged. While border-crossing facilitates capitalist flows, it also consolidates the advantage of capitalist class. Thus, it is imperative that a border pedagogy move beyond the celebration of hybridized identities and pluralism and encompass an analysis of political economy and class exploitation. That is, border pedagogy should engage in a critique of the existing contradictions between capital and labor, the exploitation of labor, and profiteerism.

Equal representation does not necessarily guarantee social and economic equality under capitalism. Thus, a revolutionary multicultural pedagogy must refocus on the issue of redistribution of wealth by recognizing that equality must be struggles for within the social relations of production--particularly property relations (McLaren & Farahmandpur, 1999b, 2000). A revolutionary multiculturalism undresses capitalism as a pernicious system and exposes crucial regimes of exploitation hither to silenced or undeclared. It attempts to reveal how relations of exploitation are in the warp and woof of "embodied" everyday life. As Morris Suzuki notes, "the contemporary world of global capital is not a universe where the non-material has conquered or subordinated the material: We must therefore find ways of looking at political agency which united the material and symbolic dimensions of life rather than counterposing them" (2000, p. 70). A revolutionary multiculturalism seeks to amp the fault lines of agency, where discourses and social relations converge in the activities of everyday life.

A revolutionary multicultural pedagogy links the social identities of marginalized and oppressed groups—particularly the working-class, indigenous groups, and marginalized populations--with their reproduction within capitalist relations of production. It also examines how the reproduction of social, ethnic, racial and sexual identities, as particular social and cultural constructs, as well as shared histories of struggle, are linked with the reproduction of the social division of labor. It therefore moves beyond the oftentimes fragmented and atomized entrapments of identity politics, which often polarizes differences instead of uniting them around the common economic and political interests of marginalized social groups. It bears repeating that our aim here is not to ignore the cultural and ethnic identities of marginalized social groups, to relegate anti-racist struggles to distant sideshow, nor elevate capitalist exploitation over racialized social practices, for instance, but to argue that one of the most insidious aspects of capitalism is precisely that its relations of exploitation hurt people of color in particularly invidious—and disproportionately disabling--ways. We wish to bring into deeper conversation than one finds in critical race theory or multicultural education--the relationship between race, gender, and ethnic identities with class identities in the hope of articulating a political framework that moves towards transnational ethnic alliances.

Faced with the uncertainty of the present, some look to religion to save us from ourselves. It has been said that religion is for those who fear hell; but it could also be said that educational activism is for those of us who have already been there. The educational activists of today are those who are not afraid to recognize the type of social evil that we see all around us and to name it as such. And they are committed to fight the racist, sexist, and corporate evil that still envelopes us even as we move with confidence to face the challenge of the new millennium.