Multiculturalism or World Culture?
On a "Left"-Wing Response to Contemporary Social Breakdown

http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/multiculturalism.html
Goldner, Loren

Year Published:  2000   First Published:  1991
Resource Type:  Article/Report/Letter
Cx Number:  CX7932

Post-modernists are profoundly bored by any questions of economics and technology which cannot be connected to cultural differences. The implicit agenda of the multiculturalists is to present the values associated with intensive capitalist accumulation as "white male", so "non-white" peoples such as Japanese or Koreans who currently embody those values with a greater fervour than most "whites" are ignored.


Abstract:  A look at world history in a contemporary context would lead the multiculturists to the question of the current economic and technological supremacy of Japan, which, one would think, might pose some difficulties for their assault on the ideology of "dead white European males" as the ruling ideology of our time. The indisputable fact that the world's most dynamic capitalist zone for the past three decades has been in Asia does not trouble them in the least, since they are, among other things, profoundly bored by questions of economics and technology which cannot be connected to cultural difference. The implicit, if not explicit, agenda of the multiculturalists is to present the values associated with intensive capitalist accumulation as "white male", so that "non-white" peoples such as the Japanese or Koreans who currently embody those values with a greater fervor than most "whites" somehow lose their difference, and certainly their interest. 'The executives and R&D teams of the Asian firms currently pounding American and European industry with their cutting-edge products would undoubtedly be surprised to learn that their values were "white". (It used to be the case that the association of cultural attributes with skin color was called.. .racism.) The multiculturalists document the struggles of Andean or Eritrean women against imperialism and gender oppression in every detail, but the successive strikes waves of the Korean workers, one of the most important upsurges of the past decade, is passed over in silence. Somehow when a Third World country is industrialized, is ceases to be "different".

Subject Headings

• Cultural Studies
• Imperialism
• Multiculturalism
• Post-Modernism