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Teaching Against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism: A
Critical Pedagogy
By Peter McLaren and Ramin Farahmandpur
$24.95
Reviewed by Mike Alexander Pozo
Capitalism can generally
be understood as necessarily expansive. As it produces more and more capital it
also accumulates a surplus, which increases the urgency to find new ways of
investing the excess capital. It is this mania of needing to spread to new
hosts and proliferate that has led many to locate the fatal crux of capitalism
in its need to spread. It does so
knowingly, even at the detrimental cost of impoverishing millions upon millions
and thereby creating a global army of potential adversaries. Yet by also laying
waste to natural resources it further creates its own limits to growth. But it
is the frenzy, especially over the last twenty years or so, to eliminate all
trade barriers and preventions against investment that has quite benignly come
to be known today as globalization. By trampling over measures set up to protect
smaller or less developed countries, globalization has been a modern all-access pass for powerful
corporations and the ruling elite. It has allowed them to extend their grasp
into unexploited natural resources (mostly in the developing world) and uncover
a vast array of inexpensive, exploitable labor (also, mostly in the developing
world).
As many have stated,
globalization, the expansion of new markets, is not new in world history.
However, the current manifestation is unique as we near world-wide crises of
the depletion and even exhaustion of natural resources. This contradiction was
recognized by Marx. If the “spirit of capitalist production”, as he wrote, was
the immediate gain of profits, than nature or agriculture, was completely
antithetical to this drive. Rather than immediate rewards its purpose was the
long term production of material needs capable of sustaining generations of
human beings. Globalization, today, can perhaps then be seen as a more
reactionary state of late capitalism because the horizon of its expansion is
now near. In Teaching Against
Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism, globalization is all of this yet
also unable to hide its imperialist mark.
So it is both within this
frantic state of globalization and amongst the “contented” defenders of late
capitalist reality that we encounter the educators Peter McLaren
and Ramin Farahmandpur.
More specifically we locate them in the current morass of
A critical revolutionary
pedagogy combines the unrelenting Marxist critique of capitalism with the Freirian refusal to detach the educational from the social/political.
McLaren and Farahmandpur’s
argument for a pedagogy wholly invested in social, political and economic
determinants is straightforward. Education creates future workers and what is
most crucial is the “kind” of worker that is emerging from this educational
system. McLaren and Farahmandpur
explain that, “Education is involved in the direct production of the one
commodity that generates the entire social universe of capitalism in all its
dynamic and multiform existence: labor power” (207).
What is apparent today,
given the increasing inaccessibility of higher education and the inundating of
campuses with corporate influences, is that the worker that education is
producing is one literally “manufactured” to be an uncritical, apathetic and obedient
consumer. This education is one the authors identify as “capitalist schooling”.
They write, “capitalist schooling participates in the
production, distribution and circulation of knowledge and social skills
necessary for reproducing the social division of labor and hence capitalist
relations of exploitation” (51). Not only is the classroom as contested space
at stake but the very students who populate them; the would-be consumers or a
potentially active political citizenry. As Henry Giroux has noted, the
possibilities for public spaces that encourage critical thinking, awareness and
debate are fast becoming difficult to find in this country. The loss of the
classroom to capitalist logic therefore threatens the very future of democracy
in the
The authors, however, are
frank in admitting the difficulties of using Marx in light of current academic
trends away from politics, meta-narratives and other totalities in what they describe as “Post-Marxist Times”.
Throughout the text one reads and feels the undercurrent of post modernism as
the recurring antagonist to Marxist theory within academics. Yet the authors
ask us to truly contemplate how far we have really come under such “theories”.
Fredric Jameson ironically enough once implied in A Singular Modernity that capitalism was modernity and though elements of the “post-modern” may exist we
have by no means overcome capitalism or become post-capitalist. However one chooses
to define post modernism it has clearly been influential and in many respects
still permeates the halls of academia, frowning upon anyone who dares
resuscitate the words “Socialism” or “Marx”.
It should be said,
however, that the authors devote a fair amount of time in engaging post
modernism. They display a fair, albeit critical, position towards post
modernism that is not wholly dismissive. Whether or not too much is attributed
to post modernist “theory” and practioners, I think,
is also a fair question to ask. But the authors nevertheless explain their
grievances with post modernism. They write, “Post modernism theory’s stress on micropolitics transforms what are essentially social
struggles into discursive struggles that over value economies of desire at the
expense of political economy and a philosophy of praxis” (23). Because of post
modernism’s obsession with highly aesthetic and individualistic expressions of
identity and particular experiences, it allows many to drift away from trying
to collectively affect policy or demand economic justice and merely settle for
such discursive forms of “resistance”. In other words, compared to the allure
of post modernism or any fad for that
matter, Marxist concerns over economics, politics and class oppression seem
completely unglamorous and outdated.
It is also interesting to
note that the fragmenting of various identity based social movements is not
addressed by post modernism but rather embraced and celebrated as part of
having accepted capitalism’s alienating “reality”. The authors posit a more
class orientated and optimistic role for people of color. They write, “The
cruelest forms of violence and exploitation have been reserved for people of
color. Surely, it is among the people of color where the leadership
will arise to lead the assault against capitalism and its racist formations and
practices” (213). Marxism can then be seen not as a subordination of
various racial, ethnic, sexual or gender issues but rather as the means in
which to reconnect all these issues and their groups to the economic and
political structures that enable various forms of oppression.
The task for educators and
students on the left is to refocus our methodology. But it also remains a task
that before re-introducing Marx we may
have to wash ourselves of the post modernist legacy. McLaren
and Farahmandpur, as I mentioned before, are much
more open than I am to the possibilities that may be inherent with certain strands of post modernism. Yet they too
feel, for the most part, that post modernism on the whole is insufficient in
providing a viable political platform. They assert that, “the educational left
in the
What one takes away from
this book is the constant relevancy of Marx today. It is not however a Marxism
employed to critique capitalism and then leave it standing as it was. The
Marxist analysis and critique employed by McLaren and
Farahmandpur is not meant to rival other more sophisticated literary theories. Its honest (but now supposedly cliché) goal is still
adamantly to change the world and therefore replace
capitalism. The fall out from post 9-11 and the second term of George W. Bush
are signs that imperialism, or globalization, are all symptomatic of
exploitative capitalism. Contrary to what some may say about “the end of
history”, as long as capitalism has not disappeared then surely Marxism will remain
as its only real threat.
Teaching Against Global
Capitalism and the New Imperialism
combines crucial Marxist analysis along with a decent blend of humor making it
anything but a dry Marxist text. Its
applicability can not be overstressed and therefore provides perfect reading
material for courses in pedagogy, cultural studies and composition writing. But
it is also a text that provides critical examples, explanations and pedagogical
models for teachers and students trying to resist what can feel like an
overpowering corporate and right wing influence on education today. Its
authors, in trying to present and explain capitalism through vivid contemporary
references and by using delirious post modernist metaphors, seek to reveal the
grotesque reality of human experience under capitalism. This distorted, carnivalesque reality of late capitalist global imperialism
remains the duel sibling of the normalized
concepts of profits, competition and free markets.
In the various chapters, McLaren and Farahmandpur
encapsulate globalization, education,