Marvin LeNoue

November, 2009
Normative Globalism and its Discontents
Globalization is over and normative globalism as described by Treanor (2001) is upon us.
Multi-national corporations (MNCs) are the transnational actors by-passing the nation state on
their way to global governance; with neoliberalism as their political-philosophical position,
MNCs are forging a world federalism rhetorically linked to Anglo-American rights-based
liberalism, but in reality based solely in raw market fundamentalism and extractive capitalism.
Our entry to this new realm is marked by the terminal boundary of the space assigned to the
matter of globalization within the American popular attention span, an inconsequential width
across which one edge may be easily sighted from its opposite. The recognizability of
globalization as a process faded when it became completed reality on the ground, an accepted
contextual component and no longer an issue of debate. There is a sense of transformation from
process to state, and the state is the new world-nation founded on the precepts of hypermarketized capitalism.
Most Americans never gave much attention to the outside world, except as a background
for various military-industrial armed outreach programs. Although there were some mutterings
from labor during the gutting of American manufacturing over the decades of the 80s and 90s,
the flattening of the Earth only became a major topic of public discourse when numerous
university-educated Americans started losing their jobs to outsourcing. Thus, for the majority of
Americans, the phenomenon globalization was primarily defined by the outsourcing of work in
skilled and professional occupational categories to foreign countries where large numbers of
educated workers are available for little money. Although the corporations are our friends is a
credo that has found wide acceptance in todays United States, a lot of furor was generated over
the replacement of American technology workers and skilled office support personnel with
Indians, Chinese, Filipinos, and what-have-you.
Now, in early 2008, a Google of outsourcing brings up a lone dissenting voice positioned
19 places down the results list. This is a labor union sponsored website, Outsourceoutrage.com,
the pages of which include references to 1.7 million private sector jobs lost over the preceding
three years, and an estimate of 14 million as a further number of jobs vulnerable in an
accelerating trend documented by researchers at UC Berkeley and lamented in the testimonials

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of newly de-occupationalized tech workers (Lehrer, 2004). However, the real information here is
the fact that the first 18 hits contained 17 sites put up by entities that were strongly prooutsourcing, including businesses that provide outsourcing support and services, and publications
covering the outsourcing industry. (The first hit was the Wikipedia entry for outsourcing.)
Searching a more focused outsourcing American jobs string brought up an initial unbroken 13
hits on media presenting negative or critical perspectives on outsourcing; Outsourceoutrage was
the first hit, and no material was dated more recently than 2004. Process changes to state;
outsourcing/globalization becomes common lived experience in the new world-nation.
The Post-Globalized Context
The post-global human experience takes place within a web of collective consciousness
reified as a data stream that is transmitted simul-instantaneously and literally universally by a
neurally dense and multiply redundant communication network. This realm is characterized by a
flattened network of virtual and physical relationships (Friedman, 2005), the permeability of all
types of boundaries, and the potential for the shaping of local happenings by events occurring far
away (Neubauer, 2005). The web is anchored at distributed nodal points, or what Richard Florida
(as cited in Milliron, 2007) calls spikes. These are places where globalization has happened at
a much faster pace, and people tend to embrace and enjoy the atmosphere of mixing and
changing culture and life-way, creating a self-accelerating cycle (Milliron). Between the nodes,
in the more open expanses of the web, are cultural spaces that remain little-affected or even
untouched by globalized activity and influence. The existence of these areas promotes the
lingering illusion of globalization-in-process. In reality however, even the most remote reaches
of the planet are wrapped within the digital neural network of the post-global world, and may be
accessed at will with relatively little effort.
Governance in the world-nation is paradoxically nebulous yet forcefully present. Much of
the authority and autonomy attached to nation-state conceptions is diminished, the public roles
and responsibilities of government have shifted (Giroux, 2006; Neubauer, 2005; Staats, 2004;
Tierney, 2004; Torres, 2002), and the vast majority of people are unable to clearly recognize who
is running things, and to what purpose. The most influential and visible unified political force is
neoliberal doctrine and its attendant market fundamentalism (Neubauer; Giroux, 2004c, 2006;
Saltman & Gabbard, 2003), of late somewhat tempered and modified by a resurgence of the state
operating under it oldest mandate: as a guarantor of security (Beck, 2002). Under a strong-state

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neo-liberal regime, the free flow of money and materials on a world-wide scale is championed,
while the purpose of the state is minimized to the maintenance of conditions that allow this flow
and provide global capitalism with a stable and secure operating environment. Foreign policy is
framed within a penal, rather than developmental, paradigm, with the threat and reality of
military aggression operating as the enforcement arm of the economic system (Giroux, 2004b;
Saltman & Gabbard).
Within domestic policy, the logic of punishment is reflected by the dismantling of social
support systems and the hollowing out of the public welfare state as documented by Henry
Giroux and many other writers; the neo-liberal version of the state is an individualized entity in
which power serves its own (capitalist) interests. Taking care of the public weal is only
marginally profitable; in America, Texas State Representative Debbie Riddle, R-Tomball,
expressed a stance in 2002 that seems to find more favor as large-scale military adventurism puts
severe financial strains on Empire:
Where did this idea come from that everybody deserves free education, free medical care,
free whatever? . It comes from Moscow, from Russia. It comes straight out of the pit of
hell. And it's cleverly disguised as having a tender heart. It's not a tender heart. It's
ripping the heart out of this country. (In King, 2003).
Within a social architecture that regards the body of the general public with such disdain, the
only profitable approach to taking care of individuals who are not equipped to work and
consume goods is incarceration or abandonment (Giroux, 2006; Hirschfield, 2008). The
American education system has become the primary sorting mechanism deployed in support of
this approach.
Education for a Post-Globalized World
To the governors of the world-nation, education only appears as a public good to the
degree that it serves to control and incapacitate poor and minority youth, who are now visualized
as a threat rather than a resource (Giroux, 2004b), and to the extent that it serves as a training
ground for participation in the marketplace (Giroux, 2004a; Schultz, 2005), and an incubator for
the reproduction of social values (Aronowitz, 2000). In neo-liberal educational institutions, three
themes dominate: corporatism, militarism, and punishment for noncompliance. The omnipresent
fiscal crisis in education, first engendered in the 1970s by defunding and the launching of initial
governmental forays into the realm of market fundamentalism as a driver of social welfare policy,

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has tipped the traditional balance between governmentality and commodification firmly towards
the dominance of the capitalist imperative (Miller, 2003; Schultz). Under the neo-liberal
rationality, the exit of the state from its problem-solving role in social management (DuGay,
2002) leaves a vacuum in the education sector that will be filled by entities concerned with
profit-seeking and other agendas that have little to do with training the citizens of a civil
democratic society.
On the level of practical operations, educational institutions in America and world-wide
are moving to adapt to the bounds of the new playing field by raising tuitions and moving toward
an internationalized, for-profit service provider model (Altbach & Knight, 2007; Brustein, 2007;
Edwards, 2007; Yu, 2008). Struggling to capture a market share that can generate enough money
to replace missing state support, they are competing with a new class of expert private purveyors
of for-profit education and training such as the University of Phoenix, Capella University,
Kaplan University, and others; educational organizations like these wield an influence that belies
their comparatively recent appearance on the scene (e.g. Walker, 2005), and they possess
flexibility and a rapid-response capability that traditional institutions can not match.
The urgent necessity of immediately and rapidly equipping an American work force for
participation in the new transnational economy is a refrain heard at all levels of the educational
enterprise, and efforts are being made to respond to this need (Delano & Hutton, 2007; Lehane,
2008; Milner, 2007; Milliron, 2007; U. S. Dept. of Ed., 2006). Along with this awakening to the
imports of the post-globalism for education come questions as to whether the drivers of
American educational policy are capable, or even desirous of playing the catch-up game with
countries that focused the Post WW II development of their education systems on preparing
people for employment (Daggett & Pedinotti, 2005; Daggett, n.d.) rather than the creation of a
liberalized, professional middle class.
While investment in the competitive capabilities of a particular national public appeals to
an older, nostalgic view of nation state-centered social membership, the corporate capitalist
imperative may be just as easily advanced via the strategy of accessing the planet-wide human
resource base that has become available, and working in a de-localized business environment
while assuring the security of capital investments by means of policing operations carried out at
the transnational rather than civic level (Giroux, 2007; Saltman & Gabbard, 2003). In this
scenario, the capitalist enterprise can avoid non-profitable entanglements with the public realm

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and escape whatever regulatory impulses may remain in the functionally diminished enterprise of
national statism. Such a strategy meshes well with the new politics of disposability (Giroux,
2006), takes the logic of extraction and cost externalization to the next level of reach and
mobility, and allows for rapid and efficient response to changes in the operating environment.
The needs and objectives of neo-liberal world government do not support the continuing
function of Western public liberal education models, so they are being decommissioned. In the
American example, there exists a clearly identified need for increased investment in education,
and an overhaul of the entire approach, yet that is not being done. In fact, political rhetoric about
improving the quality of public schools plays over a systematic and aggressive defunding of
education, including the latest program (No Child Left Behind [NCLB]) offered up as the most
recent solution (National Education Association, 2008). As has been well-documented over the
past six years, NCLB is in actuality a thinly-disguised effort to remove any opportunities for true
innovation, creativity, and learning from the education system, while at the same time creating
an enhanced gate-keeping effect that reduces the availability of educational opportunity and
increases inflows to the privatized prison system and the military. The emergence of schooling
based on accountability models like NCLB eliminates public discussion of the purposes of
schooling and removes decisions about schooling from the public sphere, thus disempowering
education as a force for the production of democracy (McNeil, 2002). The reality of the situation
is that American education is being removed from the realm of public goods, privatized, and
standardized along lines that fit the needs of the corporate security enforcement system (U.S.
Armed Forces), the prison industry, and the low-wage global economy (Giroux, 2004b, 2007;
Saltman & Gabbard, 2003).
The future will see the U.S. higher education system operating in fulfillment of two welldefined roles. One focus will be the provision of research, innovation, and skilled science and
technology personnel to the military industrial complex. In an interesting parallel with the
widespread import of European intellectual capital during the WW II era, there will be a
continuation and increase in the trend toward importing human resources from Asia and
funneling them through the American university system. The other primary effort will be to
move to training-focused philosophies and methodologies of education in order to increase the
production of a domestic corps of semi-skilled labor smart enough to be suitable for the de-

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professionalized, low-wage workplaces of the global economy, and ignorant enough to be easily
controlled.
The training paradigm may in fact come to equal or surpass the traditional higher
education model in terms of offering practical value for the job market. Some signs of this effect
are already present, as two-year institutions adopt their vocational training missions to better
serve the needs of diverse populations and the new economy, while at the same time working to
embrace the logic of privatization and expand entrepreneurial efforts (Harbour & Jaquette, 2007;
Milliron, 2007). One author cites a report from The American Association of Community
College Trustees that documents the enrollment of more students with Baccalaureate degrees in
community colleges than there are students with Associate degrees attending four-year colleges.
As jobs require higher skill levels, community college has become the new graduate school for
liberal arts majors (Daggett, n.d.). There may also be an increasing detachment of credentialing
from the processes of knowledge creation, aggregation, and dissemination that will open the way
for a new ecology of learning to emerge (Yu, 2008). More room for entrepreneurial private
sector involvement in training could pave the way for some public two-year institutions to break
away from state sponsorship, which often imposes regulatory and accountability burdens that
hamper institutional ability to adapt to changing market demands (Harbour & Jaquette).
It is the ability to adapt to radical changes that will determine success in the post-modern,
post-globalized world. Today, nations, cultures, societies, institutions, and individuals alike face
challenges that can only be met through the application of creativity, flexibility, and the ability to
constantly learn. In an ideal world, a redesigned education system would hold up the acquisition
of these three traits as a core objective. In the real world, individuals must cultivate these
qualities on a personal basis by finding ways to constantly work in, out, and around existing
models and systems of education and come away with just-in-time solutions. If one is to thrive or
even just survive in todays world economy, the dynamic aspects of being able to learn must
receive a higher valuation than the traditionally revered static state of being learned.

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