Capitalism vs. K Affs - Michigan7 2014

Cap K vs K affs --- GHJPP 2014
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1NC
Capitalism causes inevitable crises, inequality, and dehumanization --pedagogical spaces are the crucial staging ground for keeping socialism
on the horizon
McLaren, Distinguished Fellow Critical Studies @ Chapman U and UCLA urban
schooling prof, and Scatamburlo-DAnnibale, associate professor of Communication
U Windsor, 4
(Peter and Valerie, Class Dismissed? Historical materialism and the politics of
difference, Educational Philosophy and Theory Vol. 36, Issue 2, p. 183-199)
For well over two decades we have witnessed the jubilant liberal and conservative pronouncements of the demise
history's presumed failure to defang existing capitalist

relations has been read by many self-identified radicals as an advertisement for
capitalism's inevitability. As a result, the chorus refrain There Is No
Alternative, sung by liberals and conservatives, has been buttressed by the symphony
of post-Marxist voices recommending that we give socialism a decent burial and
move on. Within this context, to speak of the promise of Marx and socialism may appear anachronistic, even
of socialism. Concomitantly,
nave, especially since the post-al intellectual vanguard has presumably demonstrated the folly of doing so. Yet we
stubbornly believe that the chants of T.I.N.A. must be combated for they offer as a fait accompli, something which
Leftists should refuse to accept namely the triumph of capitalism

and its political bedfellow neo-liberalism, which have worked together to
naturalize suffering, undermine collective struggle, and obliterate hope . We
concur with Amin (1998), who claims that such chants must be defied and revealed as
absurd and criminal, and who puts the challenge we face in no uncertain terms: humanity may let
itself be led by capitalism's logic to a fate of collective suicide or it may
pave the way for an alternative humanist project of global socialism. The
grosteque conditions that inspired Marx to pen his original critique of capitalism are present
and flourishing. The inequalities of wealth and the gross imbalances of power that exist today are
leading to abuses that exceed those encountered in Marx's day (Greider, 1998, p.
39). Global capitalism has paved the way for the obscene concentration of wealth in fewer and
fewer hands and created a world increasingly divided between those who enjoy opulent
affluence and those who languish in dehumanizing conditions and economic misery. In every
corner of the globe, we are witnessing social disintegration as revealed by a rise in abject
poverty and inequality. At the current historical juncture, the combined assets of the 225 richest
progressive
people is roughly equal to the annual income of the poorest 47 percent of the world's population, while the
combined assets of the three richest people exceed the combined GDP of the 48 poorest nations (CCPA, 2002, p. 3).
2.8 billion peoplealmost half of the world's populationstruggle in

desperation to live on less than two dollars a day (McQuaig, 2001, p. 27). As many as
250 million children are wage slaves and there are over a billion workers who are
either un- or under-employed. These are the concrete realities of our timerealities
that require a vigorous class analysis , an unrelenting critique of capitalism
and an oppositional politics capable of confronting what Ahmad (1998, p. 2) refers to as
capitalist universality. They are realities that require something more than that which is offered by
Approximately
the prophets of difference and post-Marxists who would have us relegate socialism to the scrapheap of history and
Never before has a Marxian analysis of

capitalism and class rule been so desperately needed. That is not to say that everything Marx
mummify Marxism along with Lenin's corpse.
Many critiques of Marx focus on

his strategy for moving toward socialism, and with ample justification;
nonetheless Marx did provide us with fundamental insights into class
society that have held true to this day. Marx's enduring relevance lies in his indictment of capitalism
said or anticipated has come true, for that is clearly not the case.
which continues to wreak havoc in the lives of most. While capitalism's cheerleaders have attempted to hide its
sordid underbelly, Marx's description of capitalism as the sorcerer's dark power is even more apt in light of
Rather than jettisoning Marx, decentering

the role of capitalism, and discrediting class analysis, radical educators
must continue to engage Marx's oeuvre and extrapolate from it that which is
useful pedagogically, theoretically, and , most importantly, politically in light of the
challenges that confront us. The urgency which animates Amin's call for a collective socialist
vision necessitates, as we have argued, moving beyond the particularism and liberal
pluralism that informs the politics of difference. It also requires challenging
contemporary historical and economic conditions.
the questionable assumptions that have come to constitute the core of

contemporary radical theory, pedagogy
and politics.
In terms of effecting
change, what is needed is a cogent understanding of the systemic nature

of exploitation and oppression based on the precepts of a radical political
economy approach (outlined above) and one that incorporates Marx's notion of unity in difference in
which people share widely common material interests. Such an understanding extends far
beyond the realm of theory, for the manner in which we choose to interpret and explore the social
world, the concepts and frameworks we use to express our sociopolitical
understandings, are more than just abstract categories. They imply
intentions, organizational practices, and political agendas. Identifying
class analysis as the basis for our understandings and class struggle as the basis for political
transformation implies something quite different than constructing a sense of
political agency around issues of race, ethnicity, gender, etc. Contrary to
Shakespeare's assertion that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, it should be clear that this is not the
in politics the essence of the flower lies in the name by

which it is called (Bannerji, 2000, p. 41). The task for progressives today is to seize the
moment and plant the seeds for a political agenda that is grounded in
historical possibilities and informed by a vision committed to overcoming exploitative conditions.
These seeds, we would argue, must be derived from the tree of radical political
economy. For the vast majority of people todaypeople of all racial classifications or
identities, all genders and sexual orientationsthe common frame of
reference arcing across difference, the concerns and aspirations that are most widely shared are those that
are rooted in the common experience of everyday life shaped and constrained
by political economy (Reed, 2000, p. xxvii). While post-Marxist advocates of the
politics of difference suggest that such a stance is outdated, we would argue
that the categories which they have employed to analyze the social are now losing
their usefulness, particularly in light of actual contemporary social movements. All over the globe,
there are large anti-capitalist movements afoot. In February 2002, chants of Another World
Is Possible became the theme of protests in Porto Allegre. It seems that those people struggling in the
streets havent read about T.I.N.A., the end of grand narratives of
emancipation, or the decentering of capitalism. It seems as though the struggle for basic
case in political matters. Rather,
survival and some semblance of human dignity in the mean streets of the dystopian metropoles doesnt permit
much time or opportunity to read the heady proclamations emanating from seminar rooms. As E. P. Thompson
(1978, p. 11) once remarked, sometimes experience walks in without knocking at the door, and announces deaths,
This, of course, does not mean

socialism will inevitably come about, yet a sense of its nascent promise
crises of subsistence, trench warfare, unemployment, inflation, genocide.

that
animates current social movements. Indeed, noted historian Howard Zinn (2000, p. 20) recently
pointed out that after years of single-issue organizing (i.e. the politics of difference), the
WTO and other anti-corporate capitalist protests signaled a turning point
in the history of movements of recent decades, for it was the issue of class that
more than anything bound everyone together. History, to paraphrase Thompson (1978, p. 25)
doesnt seem to be following Theory's script. Our vision is informed by Marx's historical materialism and his
revolutionary socialist humanism, which must not be conflated with liberal humanism. For left politics and
a socialist humanist vision remains crucial, whose fundamental features

include the creative potential of people to challenge collectively the
circumstances that they inherit. This variant of humanism seeks to give expression to the pain,
pedagogy,
sorrow and degradation of the oppressed, those who labor under the ominous and ghastly cloak of globalized
capital. It calls for the transformation of those conditions that have prevented the bulk of humankind from fulfilling
It vests its hope for change in the development of critical

consciousness and social agents who make history, although not always in conditions of
its potential.
their choosing. The political goal of socialist humanism is, however, not a resting in difference but rather the
emancipation of difference at the level of human mutuality and reciprocity. This would be a step forward for the
discovery or creation of our real differences which can only in the end be explored in reciprocal ways (Eagleton,
the enduring relevance of a radical socialist pedagogy

and politics is the centrality it accords to the interrogation of capitalism.
1996, p. 120). Above all else,
We can no longer afford to remain indifferent to the horror and savagery committed by capitalist's barbaric
We need to recognize that capitalist democracy is unrescuably

contradictory in its own self-constitution. Capitalism and democracy cannot be translated
into one another without profound efforts at manufacturing empty idealism. Committed Leftists must
unrelentingly cultivate a democratic socialist vision that refuses to forget the wretched of the
machinations.
earth, the children of the damned and the victims of the culture of silencea task which requires more than
Leftists must
illuminate the little shops of horror that lurk beneath globalizations shiny faade; they must challenge the
true evils that are manifest in the tentacles of global capitalism's reach. And, more than
this, Leftists must search for the cracks in the edifice of globalized
capitalism and shine light on those fissures that give birth to alternatives.
Socialism today, undoubtedly, runs against the grain of received wisdom, but its
vision of a vastly improved and freer arrangement of social relations
beckons on the horizon. Its unwritten text is nascent in the present even as it
abstruse convolutions and striking ironic poses in the agnostic arena of signifying practices.
exists among the fragments of history and the shards of distant memories. Its potential remains untapped and its
promise needs to be redeemed.
Engaging the state is the only way to break down the crises of capitalism
Frank '12 Thomas, brilliant badass, author of What's the Matter with Kansas? and
editor of The Baffler "To the Precinct Station: How theory met practice and drove it
absolutely crazy" http://www.thebaffler.com/past/to_the_precinct_station
Occupy itself is pretty much gone. It was evicted from Zuccotti Park about two
months after it beganan utterly predictable outcome for which the group seems to
have made inadequate preparation. OWS couldnt bring itself to come up with a real set of demands until after it
got busted, when it finally agreed on a single item. With the exception of some residual groups here and there
OWS has today pretty much fizzled out. The media

storm that once surrounded it has blown off to other quarters. Pause for a moment
and compare this record of accomplishment to that of Occupys evil twin, the Tea
Party movement, and the larger right-wing revival of which it is a part. Well, under
the urging of this trumped-up protest movement, the Republican Party proceeded to
win a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives; in the state legislatures
of the nation it took some six hundred seats from the Democrats; as of this
writing it is still purging Republican senators and congressmen deemed
populated by the usual activist types,
insufficiently conservative and has even succeeded in having one of its own
named as the GOPs vice-presidential candidate. * * * The question that the books
under consideration here seek to answer is: What is the magic formula that made OWS so successful? But its
What we need to be asking about Occupy Wall Street is: Why

did this effort fail? How did OWS blow all the promise of its early days? Why do even the most popular efforts
exactly the wrong question.
of the Left come to be mired in a gluey swamp of academic talk and pointless antihierarchical posturing? The
action certainly started with a bang. When the occupation of Zuccotti Park began, in September 2011, the OWS
cause was overwhelmingly popular; indeed, as Todd Gitlin points out, hating Wall Street may well have been the
most popular left-wing cause since the thirties. Inequality had reached obscene levels, and it was no longer the act
of a radical to say so. The bank bailouts of the preceding years had made it obvious that government was captured
by organized money. Just about everyone resented Wall Street in those days; just about everyone was happy to see
someone finally put our fury in those crooks overpaid faces. People flocked to the OWS standard. Cash donations
poured in; so did food and books. Celebrities made appearances in Zuccotti, and the media began covering the
proceedings with an attentiveness it rarely gives to leftist actions. But these accounts, with a few exceptions here
and there, misread that overwhelming approval of Occupys cause as an approval of the movements mechanics:
the camping out in the park, the way food was procured for an army of protesters, the endless search for
consensus, the showdowns with the cops, the twinkles. These things, almost every writer separately assumes, are
what the Occupy phenomenon was really about. These are the details the public hungers to know. The building of
a community in Zuccotti Park, for example, is a point of special emphasis. Noam Chomskys thoughts epitomize
the genre when he tells us that one of the main achievements of the movement has been to create communities,
real functioning communities of mutual support, democratic interchange, et cetera. The reason this is important,
he continues, is because Americans tend to be very isolated and neighborhoods are broken down, community
structures have broken down, people are kind of alone. How building such communities helps us to tackle the
power of high finance is left unexplained, as is Chomskys implication that a city of eight million people, engaged in
all the complexities of modern life, should learn how humans are supposed to live together by studying an
encampment of college students. The actual sins of Wall Street, by contrast, are much less visible. For example,
when you read Occupying Wall Street, the work of a team of writers who participated in the protests, you first hear
about the subject of predatory lending when a sympathetic policeman mentions it in the course of a bust. The
if you want to know how the people in Zuccotti

intended to block the banks agendahow they intended to stop predatory lending,
for exampleyou have truly come to the wrong place. Not because its hard to figure out how
to stop predatory lending, but because the way the Occupy campaign is depicted in these books , it seems to
have had no intention of doing anything except building communities in public
spaces and inspiring mankind with its noble refusal to have leaders. Unfortunately,
though, thats not enough. Building a democratic movement culture is essential for movements on the left,
authors themselves never bring it up. And
but its also just a starting point. Occupy never evolved beyond it. It did not call for a subtreasury system, like the
Populists did. It didnt lead a strike (a real one, that is), or a sit-in, or a blockade of a recruitment center, or a
takeover of the deans office. The IWW free-speech fights of a century ago look positively Prussian by comparison.
With Occupy, the horizontal culture was everything. The process is the
message, as the protesters used to say and as most of the books considered here largely concur. The
aforementioned camping, the cooking, the general-assembling, the filling of public places: thats what Occupy was
Beyond that there seems to have been virtually no strategy to speak of, no
agenda to transmit to the world. * * * Whether or not to have demands, you might recall, was
all about.
something that Occupy protesters debated hotly among themselves in the days when Occupy actually occupied
something. Reading these books a year later, however, that debate seems to have been consensed out of
existence. Virtually none of the authors reviewed here will say forthrightly that the failure to generate demands was
a tactical mistake. On the contrary: the quasi-official account of the episode (Occupying Wall Street) laughs off
demands as a fetish object of literal-minded media types who stupidly crave hierarchy and chains of command.
Chris Hedges tells us that demands were something required only by the elites, and their mouthpieces in the
media. Enlightened people, meanwhile, are supposed to know better; demands imply the legitimacy of the
Launching a protest with no formal

demands is thought to be a great accomplishment, a gesture of surpassing
democratic virtue. And here we come to the basic contradiction of the campaign. To
protest Wall Street in 2011 was to protest, obviously, the outrageous financial
misbehavior that gave us the Great Recession; it was to protest the political power
of money, which gave us the bailouts; it was to protest the runaway compensation practices that have turned
our societys productive labor into bonuses for the 1 percent. All three of these catastrophes ,
however, were brought on by deregulation and tax-cutting by a philosophy of
liberation as anarchic in its rhetoric as Occupy was in reality. Check your
premises, Rand-fans: it was the bankers own uprising against the hated state that
adversary, meaning the U.S. government and its friends, the banks.
wrecked the American way of life. Nor does it require poststructuralism -leading-throughanarchism to understand how to reverse these developments. You do it by
rebuilding a powerful and competent regulatory state. You do it by
rebuilding the labor movement. You do it with bureaucracy. Occupiers often
seemed aware of this. Recall what you heard so frequently from protesters lips back in the days of September
Restore the old Glass-Steagall divide between investment and commercial banks, they insisted.
Bring back big government! Bring back safety! Bring back boredom! But
thats no way to fire the imagination of the world. So, how do you maintain the
carnival while secretly lusting for the CPAs? By indefinitely suspending the
obvious next step. By having no demands. Demands would have signaled that
humorless, doctrinaire adults were back in charge and that the fun was over. This was
2011:
an inspired way to play the situation in the beginning, and for a time it was a great success. But it also put a clear
As long as demands and the rest of the logocentric

requirements were postponed, Occupy could never graduate to the next level. It
would remain captive to what Christopher Lasch criticizedway back in 1973as the cult of
participation, in which the experience of protesting is what protesting is all about .
expiration date on the protests.
Links
Katrina
Asserting the response to Katrina was based on race is factually incorrect
and reifies class boundaries by focusing on cultural diversity rather than
economic equality
Michaels 7 (Walter Benn, Professor of American Literature and Literary Theory at
University of Illinois at Chicago, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to
Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, 7/24/2007, pg 11)//JL
its the response to Katrina that is most illuminating
from the left
West told an audience
we live in one of the
bleakest moments in the history of black people in this nation.
he went
on to say, its a living hell for black people
This is
what we might call the George Bush doesnt care about black people
interpretation of the governments failed response to the catastrophe nobody
doubts that George Bush cares about Condoleezza Rice who is very much a black
person
there are, of course, lots of other black peoplelike
Clarence Thomas and Thomas Sowell and Janice Rogers Brown and,
for whom George Bush almost certainly has warm feelings what American
But
for our purposes, especially the response
from the David Brooks right. Lets be honest, Cornel
, not
at the Paul Robeson Student Center at Rutgers University,
Look at the Super Dome,
. Its not a big move from the hull of the slave ship to the living hell of the Super Dome.7
. But
and who is fond of pointing out that shes been black since birth. And
at least once upon a time, Colin Powell
. But
liberals want is for our conservatives to be racists

We want a fictional George Bush who doesnt care about black people
rather than the George Bush weve actually got one who doesnt care about
. We want the black people George Bush cares about to be some of my
best friends are black tokens.
poor people
. Although thats not quite the right way to put it. First because, for all I know, George Bush does care about poor people; at least he cares as much about poor people as anyone else does.
What he doesnt care aboutand what Bill Clinton, judging by his eight years in office, didnt much care about, and what John Kerry, judging from his presidential campaign, doesnt much care about and what we on the so- called
We would much rather get rid

we would much rather celebrate cultural
left, judging by our willingness to accept Kerry as the alternative to Bush, dont care about eitheris taking any steps to get them to stop being poor.
of racism than get rid of poverty
. And
diversity than seek to establish economic equality.
History/Wilderson
A focus on historical justice precludes focusing on inequality happening
now and perpetuates the capitalist system
As much as we like
our culture, we also like being proud of our history and
the way our people
have triumphed, or at least survived
we like
being outraged by the bad things somebody elses people did to ours we like
thinking that justice requires they make upor at least apologizefor them
why we
should care about the pas the answer
is that we shouldnt
our current near
being proud of
of
being proud
(whoever we think our people are)
. And, conversely,
, and
. But if the first three
chapters give us reasons to be skeptical of the category our people and of the links we can have to people in the past, chapter 4 gives us reasons to doubt the relevance of the past itself. The question it asks is
t, and
it gives
, and that
obsession with the importance of history is profoundly misplaced

history functions at best as a distraction from present injustices and at worst as a
way of perpetuating them
. Like the idea of diversity itself,
. Henry Ford said a long time ago, History is bunk; the purpose of this chapter will be to show that he was right.
The 1AC badly misreads historyslavery was not based on racial

antagonism but economic exploitation
Alexander 2010 (Michelle, associate professor of law, Ohio State University,
Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, former direct of ACLUS Racial
Justice Project, J.D., Stanford Law School) The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in
the Age of Colorblindness, The New Press 2010, pages 23-25
Only in the past few centuries, owing
largely to European imperialism, have the worlds people been classified along
racial lines. Here, in America, the idea of race emerged as a means of
reconciling chattel slaveryas well as the extermination of American Indians
with ideals of freedom preached by whites in the new colonies. In the early colonial period, when
settlements remained relatively small, indentured servitude was the dominant
means of securing cheap labor. Under this system, whites and blacks struggled to
survive against a common enemy, what historian Lerone Bennett Jr. describes as the big
planter apparatus and a social system that legalized terror against black and white bondsmen.
Initially, blacks brought to this country were not all enslaved; many were treated as
indentured servants. As plantation farming expanded, particular tobacco and cotton farming,
demand increased greatly for both labor and land. The demand for land
was met by invading and conquering larger and larger swaths of territory. American Indians
The concept of race is a relatively recent development.
became a growing impediment to white European progress, and during this period, the images of American
Indians promoted in books, newspapers, and magazines became increasingly negative. As sociologists Keith Kilty
and Eric Swank have observed, eliminating savages is less of a moral problem than eliminating human beings,
and therefore American Indians came to be understood as a lesser raceuncivilized savagesthus providing a
The growing demand for labor on plantations

was met through slavery. American Indians were considered unsuitable as slaves,
largely because native tribes were clearly in a position to fight back. The fear of
raids by Indian tribes led plantation owners to grasp for an alternative source
of free labor. European immigrants were also deemed poor candidates for slavery, not
because of their race, but rather because they were in short supply and enslavement
would, quite naturally, interfere with voluntary immigration to the new colonies. Plantation
owners thus viewed African, who were relatively powerless, as the ideal slaves. The systematic
enslavement of Africans, and the rearing of their children under bondage, emerged with all
deliberate speed quickened by events such as Bacons Rebellion. Nathaniel Bacon was a white property
justification for the extermination of a native peoples.
owner in Jamestown, Virginia, who managed to unite slaves, indentured servants, and poor whites in a revolutionary
effort to overthrow the planter elite. Although slaves clearly occupied the lowest position in the social hierarchy and
suffered the most under the plantation system, the condition of indentured whites was barely better, and the
majority of free whites lived in extreme poverty. As explained by historian Edmund Morgan, in colonies like Virginia,
the planter elite, with huge land grants, occupied a vastly superior position to workers of all colors. Southern
colonies did not hesitate to invent ways to extend the terms of servitude, and the planter class accumulated
uncultivated lands to restrict the options of free workers. The simmering resentment against the planter class
created conditions that were ripe for revolt. Varying accounts of Bacons rebellion abound, but the basic facts are
these: Bacon developed plans in 1675 to seize Native American lands in order to acquire more property for himself
and others and nullify the threat of Indian raids. When the planter elite in Virginia refused to provide militia support
for his scheme, Bacon retaliated, leading an attack on the elite, their homes, and their property. He openly
condemned the rich for their oppression of the poor and inspired an alliance of white and black bond laborers, as
well as slaves, who demanded an end to their servitude. The attempted revolution was ended by force and false
promises of amnesty. A number of people who participated in the revolt were hanged. The events in Jamestown
were alarming to the planter elite, who were deeply fearful of the multiracial alliance of bond workers and slaves.
In an
effort to protect their superior status and economic position, the planters
shifted their strategy for maintaining dominance. They abandon their heavy reliance on
Word of Bacons Rebellion spread far and wide, and several more uprisings of a similar type followed.
indentured servants in favor of the importation of more black slaves. Instead of importing English-speaking slaves
from the West Indies, who were more likely to be familiar with European language and culture, many more
slaves were shipped directly from Africa. These slaves would be far easier
to control and far less likely to form alliances with poor whites . Fearful
that such measures might not be sufficient to protect their interests, the planter
class took an additional precautionary step, a step that would later become known as a
racial bribe. Deliberately and strategically, the planter class extended
special privileges to poor whites in an effort to drive a wedge between
them and black slaves. White settlers were allowed greater access to Native American lands, white
servants were allowed to police slaves through slave patrols and militias, and barriers were created so that free
These measures effectively

eliminated the risk of future alliances between black slaves and poor
whites. Poor whites suddenly had a direct, personal stake in the existence
of a race-based system of slavery. Their own plight had not improved by
much, but at least they were not slaves. Once the planter elite split the labor
force, poor whites responded to the logic of their situation and sought ways to expand
their racially privileged position.
labor would not be placed in competition with slave labor.
Identity
Focusing on identity promotes the idea that class is a cultural issue --ensures class difference isnt seen as a disadvantage and doesnt get
resolved
the least important thing about usour identityis the thing we
have become most committed to talking about
this commitment is,
a profound mistake
the political left increasingly committed to the
Indeed, the point of this book as a whole is that
, and that
left politics,
. What it means is that
celebration of diversity
and the redress of historical grievance
especially from the standpoint of a
has converted itself into the accomplice
rather than the opponent of the right

the left today obsessively interests itself in
issues that have nothing to do with economic inequality
we have also started to treat economic difference as if it were cul tural
difference now were urged to be more respectful of poor people and to stop
thinking of them as victims, since to treat them as victims
denies them their
agency.
then its our
attitude toward the poor
that becomes the problem
and we can focus our
efforts of reform not on getting rid of classes but on getting rid of what we like to
call classism The trick
is to stop thinking of poverty as a disadvantage once
. The old Socialist leader Eugene Debs used to be criticized for being unwilling to interest himself in any social
reform that didnt involve the attack on economic inequality. The situation now is almost exactly the opposite;
And, not content with pretending that our real problem is cultural difference
rather than economic difference,

. So
is condescendingit
And if we can stop thinking of the poor as people who have too little money and start thinking of them instead as people who have too little respect,
, not their poverty,
to be solved,
, in other words,
, and
you stop thinking of it as a disadvantage
then, of course,
you no longer need to
worry about getting rid of it.

the trick is to think of inequality as a
consequence of our prejudices rather than as a consequence of our social
More generally,
system and thus to turn the
project of creating a more egalitarian society into the project of getting people (ourselves and, especially, others) to stop being racist, sexist, classist homophobes. This book is an attack on that trick.
Culture
Focusing on cultures reifies notions difference by categorizing behavior to
groups of people locking in difference
Two things make the notion of culture look like an attractive alternative to race. One
is that culture is learned rather than inherited
the other is that
culture is a looser concept than race;
the minute we call black culture black,
advantages disappear since in
order for a sentence Some white people are really into black culture to make
sense, we have to have a definition of white and black people that is
independent of their culture Culture cannot replace our concept of race
(its on the nurture side of nature/nurture);
not all black people have to love The Black Album in order for it to be a part of black culture (and some white people can love it
too). The problem is that
both these
like
completely
entity.
Learning how to rap doesnt make you a black person
as a biological
; it just makes you a rapper. The
culture, then, is that its utterly dependent on race.

we already know who the whites and blacks and Jews are.
problem with
We can only say what counts as white or black or Jewish culture if
Race
Race is a myth propped up by capitalists to divert attention from the
slavery of the middle class
Posner 14 (Richard, Writer at The Hampton Institute, The Family Tree Revisited:
The Mythology of 'Race', 1/22/2014, The Hampton Institute,
http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/mythology-of-race.html#.U7_6QoFdUUM)//JL
There are not separate races within the species Homo sapiens There are
only various ethnic groups that present some slight differences
as a result of
adaption
All the peoples of Earth are essentially, biologically and
genetically the same
The only "race" of people on Earth is the
.
in appearance
to the diverse environments in which they developed.
. We are a single family.
Human Race one world, one species, one family. Whether

that family was
"created" in
eden or
Africa is irrelevant The existence of
any ostensible "races
is merely the result of propaganda
the mythology of racism, created and perpetuated by a parasitic minority; the
pathological ruling class of the dominant culture The myth of racism is just one
;
you "believe"
the fabled garden of
conclude that it evolved on the plains of prehistoric
" in the minds of any people, of any nation, in any language,
, memes and
disinformation,
more weapon being used in the vain attempt to perpetuate an

unsustainable and irredeemable "civilization"
It is a
culture that not only consumes non-renewable resources
but devours and
destroys renewables, like arable land, potable water, trees and natural food sources
Any culture that depends for its very existence upon such a system
cannot endure
The mythology of racism was created expressly as a
justification for the enslavement of specific ethnic groups The
authoritative
assignment of
negative traits to
any given "race" makes it easier to
dehumanize them and thereby rationalize the inhuman abuse they will be subjected
to
While even today it is still used for that purpose, racism is also employed
exhaustively as a "wedge issue," a source of discord, divisiveness and conflict that
further enables the processes of oppression and subjugation, which support the
perpetuation of civilization.
that, by its very nature, is irreparably self-destructive.
with reckless abandon
at a rate far surpassing that of their recovery.

.
Malicious Intent
a variety of
seemingly
but fallacious
the members of
as property.
Even modern-language dictionaries seem to perpetuate the myth of racism.
Oxford English Dictionary (online) (source)
racism
noun
1. the belief
that there are characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to each race 2. discrimination against or antagonism towards other races - DERIVATIVES racist noun & adjective (emphasis added) The above definition seems to
presuppose that there are in fact separate and unique races within the human species. Irrefutably, there are not. The Fact Of The Matter Homo sapiens n. The modern species of humans, the only extant species of the
primate family Hominidae All humans now living belong to the subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens. (emphasis added) In genetic terms, there is only one race, said King in a phone interview. "
are Africans
All humans
." - Harvard University Gazette - Cancer researcher, geneticist, and social activist Mary-Claire King (source) "Three fossil skulls from Ethiopia have been revealed as the oldest human remains yet
discovered. The 160,000-year-old finds plug an important gap in the fossil record around the time our species first appeared and provides strong new evidence that Homo sapiens originated only in Africa..." (source)
Scientists
ancestor
announced the discovery of the oldest fossil skeleton of a human

our forebears underwent a previously unknown stage of evolution
Human beings have very low
genetic variability.
in the scientific sense, the world is

colourblind
Race is a real cultural, political and economic concept in society,
but it is not a biological concept and that unfortunately is what many people
wrongfully consider to be the essence of race in humans -- genetic differences
Evolutionary history is the key to understanding race
There's nothing even like a really
distinct subdivision of humanity
"
today
. The find reveals that
more than a million years before Lucy, the iconic early human ancestor specimen that walked the Earth 3.2 million years ago." (source)
"
Probably the entire species is descended from a single family that lived about 200,000 years ago." (emphasis added) (source)
"Using the latest molecular biology techniques,
Templeton has analyzed millions of genetic sequences found in three distinct types of human DNA and concludes that,
. That is, it should be.
," says
Templeton. "
, and new molecular biology techniques offer so much on recent
evolutionary history. I wanted to bring some objectivity to the topic. This very objective analysis shows the outcome is not even a close call:
." - Alan R. Templeton, Ph.D., professor of biology in Arts and Sciences at Washington University (source)
"Evolution isn't making people in
different parts of the world more distinct. There are no human races, just the one species: homo sapiens. Race is one of the most misunderstood terms in modern science, misused by seasoned scientists and laymen alike. Put
there are no human races, just the one species: homo sapiens
) "In the late
19th century, the 'Science of Race' was established. This was basically a
"scientifically determined" list of all the different cultures in the world
This heinous list was used as
simply,
." (source
, listed in order of intelligence. Of course,
following the path of historical bigotry, the Northern Europeans were placed at the top, and South Africans (native to the area) were at the bottom.
justification for the inhumane suppression of slaves originally from the western
coast of Africa It was also used in defense of discrimination against Asians, South
Americans, and any number of non Anglo-Saxon peoples
'racism' carries the
excess baggage of centuries of outright crimes against humanity (i.e. the
enslavement of Western and Central Africans
races" as
imagined by the public do not actually exist.
.
. Therefore, the term
for work in the Americas), not to mention xenophobia." (source)
"However, "
Any definition of race that we attempt produces more exceptions than sound classifications. No matter what
system we use, most people don't fit." - Original (source): The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 17, 1998, Page B4-B5 (source) The mountain of peer-reviewed scientific evidence establishing incontrovertibly that homo sapiens is
there is no sign of abatement

in the perpetuation of racism by the dominant culture of civilization. It is still used,
albeit a bit more subtly in some places, to perpetrate obscenely vicious crimes
against humanity.
a single family and is comprised of only one race could fill an encyclopedia, perhaps a small library, dedicated to that subject alone. Nonetheless,
Ubiquitous Inhumanity
Antiracism efforts eliminate the idea of inequality leaving poverty

untouched and giving neoliberals free reign to enforce economic
inequality
Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, 7/24/2007, pgs 74-76)//JL
antiracism serves an
important
political purpose
debates about
race
are no longer debates between racism and antiracism
the debate
today is between two kinds of antiracism One, identified with multiculturalism and
the left, urges us to respect and preserve differences
It
gives poor people identities
The
other, identified with the right
insists that the only
identity that matters (the one we should be respecting) is American identity.
liberalisms antiracism argues that we can solve our
problems by respecting racial difference, contemporary conservatism's antiracism
maintains we can solve our problems only by eliminating or ignoring it. The problem
with this debate
is that, from the standpoint of economic
But
other more
and more properly
. As weve seen, the central
in America today
. Rather,
the
and, turning
between blacks and whites and Native Americans and Jews and whoever.
them into black people or Latinos or women, insists on regarding their problems as effects of discrimination and intolerance.
, regards the respect for racial difference as itself a form of discrimination and
We are just one
race here, as Justice Antonin Scalia put it. It is American.25 Where contemporary
(or, looked at another way, the virtue of this debate)
inequality, it doesnt matter which side youre on and it doesnt matter

who wins Either way, economic inequality is absolutely untouched
the dream of a world where identities
are not discriminated
against
is
essential to) the dream of a free
market
A society free not only
of racism but of sexism and of heterosexism is a neoliberal utopia where all the
irrelevant grounds for inequality
have been eliminated and whatever
inequalities are left are therefore legitimated.
the left is more like a
police force for, than an alternative to, the right Its commitment to rooting o
prejudices
is a tacit commitment to the efficiency of the
market. its commitment to
victims of racism, sexism and
heterosexism
rather than exploitation
is a
commitment to the essential justice of the market
when our
favorite victims are the victims of prejudice, we are all neoliberals.
.
. The dream of a world free of
prejudice,
(whether American or hyphenated American)
, is as foundational to the right as it is to the left. And this dream is completely compatible with (
efficient
, actually,
truly
. Heres where the concept of neoliberalismthe idea of the free market as the essential mechanism of social justiceis genuinely clarifying.
(your identity)
Thus, when it comes to antiracism,

.
ut the residual
that too many of us no doubt continue to harbor deep inside
And
the idea that the victims of social injustice today are the
(the victims of discrimination
, of intolerance rather than oppression, or of oppression in the form of intolerance)

. The preferred crimes of neoliberalism are always hate crimes;
An exclusive focus on race makes a focus on economic difference moot

regardless of which side theyre on
and

The exemplary instance of victimization
remains the victim of
discrimination Its the violation of people's rights
that we
prefer to deplore
the attraction of the
Leo Frank story may be the way in which it testifies to the triumph of racial
prejudice over class privilege
it demonstrates the irrelevance of wealth
and (from the standpoint of the racist) turns class warfare into white supremacism
while (from the standpoint of the antiracist) turning class war fare into bigotry
it
is a kind of gift since it makes
over the rational anger of the poor as the irrational anger of the racist and enables
everyone to agree that the real issue here is not money but race. if racism
in modern American political life
as citizensthe failure of the liberal state to live up to its liberalism
. The problem in Chesnutt is not that the farm laborers cant afford to ride in the clean comfortable car; its that some people who can afford to (like Dr. Miller) arent allowed to. And Leo
Frankthe Jew they lynched in Georgia because of that little factory girlis Roths version of Dr. Miller, a man whose class cant save him from his race. Indeed, part of
, which is to say, the way in which
. If youre a racist,
shows you that racism is the solution; if youre an antiracist, it shows you that racism is the problem. Either way, Tom Watsons anti-Semitism
So
makes economic issues irrelevant by asserting that what really matters is

the difference between races, antiracism does exactly the same thing.
The
difference is just that Chesnutt and Roth condemn what Dixon celebrates. For Roth and Chesnutt, as for Dixon, the fundamental conflicts: are between races; antiracism, just as reliably as racism, turns the hostility between rich and
poor into the hostility between black and white, Christian and Jew.
Disease
The notion that diseases are associated with specific races is a scientific
fallacy and reinforces notions of racism by grouping communities that
were geographically distinct
This is nicely illustrated by recent discoveries about
disease and race
sickle cell anemia has been a disease
customarily
identified with black people it turns out that we cant really distinguish between
black people and white people
invoking a genetic association with
sickle cell.
not all of the people we call black actually have such an association
it is characteristic among people whose ancestors were at one point centered in
parts of West and Central Africa and isnt at all associated with black people
point
the apparent link between
years, at least in the United States,
. For many
and, of course, a disease of the blood
. But
(between black blood and white blood) by
For one thing,
since
whose ancestry is elsewhere in Africa

there are people we think of as
white
with whom the trait is associated The unifying factor is
apparently descent from people who lived where malaria was a problem
in a country composed largely of white people from
the Mediterranean and of black people from southern Africa sickle cell would be
thought of as a white disease.6
. And, for another,
(i.e., certain parts of the Greek population)
since the sickle cell trait is a
variant of traits that protect against malaria. Thus, as Adolph Reed pointedly suggests
Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Coleridges poem promotes endless expansion and colonial exploitation by
eradicating the consequences of discovery
Levy 4 (Michelle, assistant professor of English at Simon Fraser University,
Discovery and the domestic affections in Coleridge and Shelley, 2004,
http://web.nsboro.k12.ma.us/algonquin/faculty/englishteachers/coppens/Rimecritical
article6.html)//JL
as Samuel Taylor Coleridge was writing "The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere
recalling how
he "read incessantly and
had
become obsessed with stories of the unknown,
This
childhood reading was not, however, without its ill effects
he
became "haunted by spectres
The Ancyent Marinere" records the powerful force that tales
In the fall of 1797,
," (1) he
found himself reflecting on the influence of his childhood reading,
, from the age of three,
,"
, by the age of six,
from Robinson Crusoe to the Arabian Nights' Entertainments. (2)
. By reading the Arabian Nights' Entertainments,
, whenever I was in the dark," causing such "anxious & fearful" behavior that his father, when he "found out the effect, which these books had
produced," seized "and burnt them." (3) "
of the unknown exerted on Coleridge's imagination

claiming that the Mariner "had told this story ten thousand times since the voyage
which was in early youth and fifty years before
; he even bestowed his own compulsive habits on his fictional creation,
." (4) In August 1806, Coleridge himself recited the Mariner's tale as another child, eight-year-old Mary
Godwin, hid behind a sofa and listened enraptured. (5) The profound influence of Coleridge's poem on Mary Shelley could be seen ten years later, in August 1816, when she, while reading Coleridge's companion piece to "The
Ancyent Marinere," "Christabel," began to write her own story of the unknown, Frankenstein. (6) In writing Frankenstein, a novel that replicates "The Ancyent Marinere"'s intricate narrative structure of stories told within stories and
Coleridge's
fascination with the unknown reflects a larger cultural obsession of the Romantic
period.
writers of Coleridge's
time produced unprecedented
quantities of gothic fiction and exotic tales with stories set in the Middle Ages, the
Orient, or, as in "Kubla Khan, or, a Vision in a Dream," both. while Coleridge and
Shelley
were captivated by printed narratives of the unknown they were
vociferously opposed to unregulated and irresponsible venturing into the unknown
in the real world
Coleridge
could not help but observe that many of these discoveries
incorporates the poem as a formative influence on her characters, Shelley participates in a conversation with Coleridge about the pleasures and the dangers of tales of the unknown.
Across generations and genders,
and Shelley's
and Shelley's
,
But
, like many,
. As more than ever before was being learned and written about previously unknown worlds, whether they were found with a telescope or a microscope, on the seven seas or in a
laboratory,
and Shelley, among others,
inevitably led to conquest and exploitation By creating a composite voyage

alluding to the originary moments in European maritime exploration in "The Ancyent
Marinere
Coleridge laid bare the economic motivations for and ethical implications of the
Mariner's having been "the first that ever burst / Into that silent Sea" of the Pacific
the Mariner's sufferings and guilt cannot be divorced from
the expansionist project that culminated
.
"--from Ferdinand Magellan's first circumnavigation of the globe in the sixteenth century to Captain James Cook's explorations of the South Pacific and Antarctic regions in the later part of the eighteenth
century--
(lines 105-6). (7) Indeed, readers of the poem have long argued that
, by the end of the eighteenth century, in the slave trade, the plantation system, and imperial culture. (8) Readers of
Frankenstein have also observed that Mary Shelley, by reflecting darkly on contemporary maritime exploration and scientific experimentation, lodged a powerful complaint against the twin dangers of imperialism and science. (9)
Less attention, however, has been devoted to the ways in which
Coleridge
and Shelley
sought to eradicate
, or at least to mitigate
, the damage
caused by reckless discovery

Coleridge
saw the domestic
affections as the primary tool for restraining these excesses.
By
liberating the imagination from the constraints of prudence and suffering, narratives
of discovery tended to promise excitement and glory without consequences The
Ancyent Marinere
reflect on the power of tales of the unknown
Thus they manifest their awareness that
.
In this essay, I will argue that both
and Shelley
The commonality between "The Ancyent Marinere" and
Frankenstein extends beyond their recommendation of the domestic affections to their recognition that the desire for discovery and conquest was profoundly inflamed by printed accounts of discovery and conquest.
. Both "
" and Frankenstein self-consciously
, paying particular
attention to the way such stories inspire imitation, both in the physical world and on the page.
print culture enabled and encouraged British imperialism Coleridge's poem

exhibit a tension between their attraction to stories of the unknown and their
repulsion by the effects of unbridled exploration
Coleridge
sought
to exploit the enthralling nature of the unknown
.
Shelley's novel
. By investing considerable faith in the restraining powers of the domestic affections,
and Shelley
without encouraging actual projects of discovery.
, perhaps without complete success,
and
Walt Whitman
The aff locks in capitalist consumption by promoting purchase and
possession
Blake 8 (David Haven, Associate Professor of English at The College of New Jersey,
Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity, 2008, Yale University Press,
pg. 133)//JL
Whitman unwittingly articulates the historical appeal of consumer
capitalism As both an advertisement and a commodity, the
poet becomes a
key to
unity.
he invite us to find out individuality through his book he
promises
our divisions will be swept into his colossal
force.
all have access to the poet
politically marginalized groups
have been encouraged to discover their identity
through the
.
public
celebrated
Not only does
that in the end,
many
fugitive,
unifying
Tuckahoe, congressman, prostitute,
of Leaves of Grass. Lauren Berlant has argued that the most
the United States
in
, as well as a larger sense of community,
purchase of commodities
consumption can
be a form of political power.
Whitmans misgivings about capitalism
participates in a long historical process in which consumption would become a
primary means of
participating in public life.
the poets insistent publicity threatens to obscure his democratic
goals
He
signals a social transformation that no single person can resist, for his is the power
to turn the private individual into a public being
with hegemonic intensity
I have embraced you, and henceforth
. Surely that participation has been meaningful to consumers, but it raises the problem of whether
Despite
, Song of Myself
casually
Whitman would have been disappointed with those results and the limited perspectives they have
produced. At the same time, we might ask whether
. Once we see in Whitmans poet a nexus of increasingly prevalent cultural forcesnamely, promotion, advertisement and celebritythe bravado of his claims makes startling, if not terrifying, sense.
. Although he nominally directs his address to the weak and the faltering, he pursues his readers in
Song of Myself
: I dilate you with tremendous breadth . I buoy you up; Every room of the house do I fill with an armed force. Lovers of me, bafflers of graves:
Sleep! I and they keep guard all night; Not doubt, not decrease shall dare to lay finger upon you,
possess you to myself,
And when you rise in the morning you will find what I tell you is so.
Whitmans poetry has been historically used to promote commercial

progress and industrial capitalism
Sewell 4 (Bill, Professor of History at St. Marys University, Reconsidering the
Modern in Japanese History: Modernity in the Service of the Prewar Japanese
Empire, 2004, Japan Review, http://shinku.nichibun.ac.jp/jpub/pdf/jr/IJ1607.pdf)//JL
Coinciding
with Japans emergence from seclusion Whitmans joyous celebration
of the modern garnered meaningful praise among late Meiji Japanese literati
Soseki
proclaimed Whitmans happy arrival as
that of a great man descending from heaven. Japanese fascination with Whitman
did not end there
some
began to write in his style.
It was Whitmans vision of heroic progress
that provoked this fascinationboth in substance and in style
Whitman
sought to capture the essence of life in a new age by providing it
with a new poetic style, one more appropriate for a fresh and exciting era.
Whitman represented important evolutionary
transitions apparent in wider society, including the expansion of a commercial
roughly
, Walt
.2 While Uchimura
Kanzo (1861-1930) apparently first introduced Whitman to Japan, a young Natsume
(1867-1916)
.5 While
began translating Whitmans oeuvre,6 others
7 So rapidly did Whitman gain
prominence in Japan that Lafcadio Hearn sought to warn Japanese against Whitmans influence.8
. On the surface,
, who grew up amid
the jubilant tur-moil of a booming New York City,
A deeper consideration
reveals that contrasting with antebellum, anti-modern views emanating from the south,
and liberal middle class

the advent of industrial capitalism and the
triumph of new technologies
Whitmans
vision of the modern was optimistic and progressive, rendering him for many a
veritable prophet of the modern.
(including its sensibilities),
.9 He noted with special approval the rising significance of the average man.10 Despite occasional misgivings late in life,
11
Love Letters
The 1ACs Buddhist approach reifies capitalism by letting technocratic
elite outpace the revolution
Zizek 1 (Slavoj, Slovenian Marxist philosopher, psychoanalyst and cultural critic a
senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy, University of
Ljubljana, Slovenia, From Western Marxism to Western Buddhism, Spring 2001,
Cabinet Magazine, http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/2/western.php)//JL
The ultimate postmodern irony of today is the strange exchange between Europe and
Asia: at the very moment when "European" technology and capitalism are triumphing worldwide at the level
of the "economic infrastructure, the Judeo-Christian legacy is threatened at the level of "ideological
superstructure" in the European space itself by New Age "Asiatic" thought , which, in
its different guises ranging from "Western Buddhism " to different "Taos," is establishing itself as
the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism .1 Therein resides the highest speculative identity of opposites in today's global
civilization: although "Western Buddhism" presents itself as the remedy against the
stressful tension of capitalist dynamics , allowing us to uncouple and retain inner peace and Gelassenheit, it actually
functions as its perfect ideological supplement . One should mention here the well-known concept of "future shock" that
describes how people are no longer psychologically able to cope with the dazzling rhythm of technological development and the social changes that accompany it. Things
simply move too fast, and before one can accustom oneself to an invention, it has
already been supplanted by a new one, so that one more and more lacks the most elementary
"cognitive mapping." The recourse to Taoism or Buddhism offers a way out of this
predicament that definitely works better than the desperate escape into old traditions. Instead of trying to cope with the
accelerating rhythm of techno-logical progress and social changes, one should
rather renounce the very endeavor to retain control over what goes on, rejecting it as the expression of the modern logic of
domination. One should, instead, "let oneself go," drift along, while retaining an inner distance and
indifference toward the mad dance of accelerated process , a distance based on the insight that all this social and
technological upheaval is ultimately just a non-substantial proliferation of semblances that do not really concern the innermost kernel of our being. One is almost
tempted to resuscitate the old infamous Marxist clich of religion as the "opium of
the people," as the imaginary supplement to terrestrial misery. The "Western Buddhist" meditative stance
is arguably the most efficient way for us to fully participate in capitalist
dynamics
while retaining the appearance of mental sanity. If Max Weber were alive today, he would definitely write a second, supplementary, volume to his Protestant
Western Buddhism" thus fits perfectly the fetishist

mode of ideology in our allegedly "post-ideological" era, as opposed to its traditional symptomal mode in
which the ideological lie which structures our perception of reality is threatened by symptoms qua "returns of the repressed," cracks in the fabric of the
ideological lie. The fetish is effectively a kind of symptom in reverse . That is to say, the symptom is
the exception which disturbs the surface of the false appearance , the point at which the repressed Other
Scene erupts, while the fetish is the embodiment of the Lie which enables us to sustain the
unbearable truth. Let us take the case of the death of a beloved person. In the case of a symptom, I "repress" this death and try not to think about it, but the
Ethic, entitled The Taoist Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capitalism.2 "
repressed trauma returns in the symptom. In the case of a fetish, on the contrary, I "rationally" fully accept this death, and yet I cling to the fetish, to some feature that embodies for me
the disavowal of this death. In this sense, a fetish can play a very constructive role in allowing us to cope with the harsh reality. Fetishists are not dreamers lost in their private worlds.
They are thorough "realists" capable of accepting the way things effectively are, given that they have their fetish to which they can cling in order to cancel the full impact of reality. In
Nevil Shute's melodramatic World War II novel Requiem for a WREN, the heroine survives her lover's death without any visible traumas. She goes on with her life and is even able to talk
rationally about her lover's death because she still has the dog that was the lover's favored pet. When, some time after, the dog is accidentally run over by a truck, she collapses and her
entire world disintegrates.
Satire
Satire fails at breaking down capitalism --- default to our method
Hill et al 2 (Dave, Research Professor in Education at Anglia Ruskin University;
Peter McLaren, Distinguished Professor in Critical Studies, College of Educational
Studies, Chapman University; Mike Cole, Professor in Education, Cass School of
Education and Communities; Glenn Rikowski, Researcher at the University of
Birmingham, Marxism Against Postmodernsim in Educational Theory, 2002,
http://books.google.com/books?id=bTo2AAAAQBAJ&pg=PA98&lpg=PA98&dq=
%22satire%22+%22marxism%22+%22capitalism
%22&source=bl&ots=bpV1Xo8HiT&sig=SrqllJ6g3tfOiNgiJ9wJYuVadLU&hl=en&sa=X
&ei=6oHaU_WpL-PnygOu9YLADQ&ved=0COsBEOgBMBY#v=onepage&q&f=true)//JL
To extend parodic activity to social class behavior we have to question the extent
to which workers and the ruling class mimicking each other would shake the
foundations of capitalism
Surrealism and other art forms
continue to
perform similar functions
However subversive these may be,
they do not provide directions for change . Satirists can mock, can work with
the
and inequality.
would
performed and
, as do, for example, certain alternative comedians.
counter-hegemonic forces to destabilize

anything goes. In such a scheme of things, anything can be oppressive as well as progressive.
. But
satire does not organize
. Nor does ultra-relativism, where
Fear of the oceans

The 1ACs idea of the sublime is nothing but a manifestation of capitalism,
turning the horrific into something beautiful, affirmation prevents any
possible revolution
Woodard 7 (Ben, PhD candidate in Theory and criticism at Western University.
Masters in theory and criticism at the European graduate school. A Capitalistic
Sublime?, http://naughtthought.wordpress.com/2007/07/29/a-capitalistic-sublime/,
hhs-nw)
The aforementioned iekian move has a strong Kantian feel in that , as Philip
Shaw points out in The Sublime, in Kants Critique of Pure Reason he points out
how Copernicus understood the movements of the heavenly bodies by
focusing not on the spectacle, the planets themselves, but the spectator. Both
strands of thought rely on the notion of the spectator not simply having a
subjective or otherwise limited point of view, but that the object observed is fundamentally rife
with the concept of perception. Looking specifically at Kants definition of the sublime, one can
take note of the formlessness thats imperative in the definition, the way
Kants definition swings from materialist to idealist it is an object but at the same time
unbound, borderless. Or put another way, as Kant states in his Critique of Judgment, the sublime tests the
limits of our imagination The issue I would like to raise here is the
possibility of a capitalistic sublime . The issue in regards to the sublimes relation to
capitalism hinges on the temporality of the sublime or in other words how long
is it expected from the horrifying to become a feeling of the sublime ? The other
related question is whether capitalism can cause a feeling of the sublime because
of its extreme size or whether it functions more in terms of an atomized
sublime . In regards to the first point it has been pointed out in the works of anticapitalists, how there is an odd kind of fearful awe of the machinery of
capitalism. While Marxs Victorian novel style details of the factory come immediately to mind, I beleive that Antonio
Gramscis writings reveal a more interesting view. In his prison notebook writings, Gramsci seems to have a
strange sense of respect for the mind numbing effect of capitalism . One
could argue that the mental deadening of the laborer is the slow
transformation of the horrible (ones working conditions, lack of benefits, low wage etc) to a
postponed sublime (ones eventual wealth or at least the American dream of economic security). On the other
hand, and to address the second point, could capitalism function in a more
compartmentalized way that seems so small and petty and necessary that
its that which deadens us, because it seems beneath us? This leads us
back to the problem of narcissism being woven into the concept of the
sublime. Lets take a look at a certain Mr West. In particular lyrics to a recent song Cant tell me nothin:<Continues> The
capitalist sublime , if there can be such a thing, seems more like a false opening (more like
then a false covering over of a kind of negativity . Or put another way, it
seems more of a concern via Proudhon than Marx. The capitalistic zen, the my mind/soul is somewhere else,
the Kantian sublime)
seems to function through a kind of atomized sublime, the idea that each screw turned gets one closer to the displaced future where
the capitalist realists live. Or back to Mr West: He got that ambition, baby look in his eyes, This week hes moppin floors, next week
bit by bit deadening which we

take as a bridge to the capitalist utopia. Whereas the uncanny is an odd return to home, a wishful
its the fries. So does the sublime have any place in here, in the atomized,
fear as Freud point out. It seems that while the uncanny fundamentally requires time and the sublime asks for distance, both are
genitalia (as it is for some neurotics

capitalism serves as the imaginary
real of our time, as that which binds the visible possibility of worlds (as he
rooted in the feminine the sublime in women as das Ding and the uncanny in female
according to Freud). One could bring up ieks argument here that
argues in Contingency, Hegemony and Universality - much to the chagrin of Ernesto Laclau) but still something doesnt seem to sit
quite right. Also, to follow an idea brought up by Larval Subjects, can bricks of our ontology be deposited into texts, into objects?
Following the arguments in Georges Poulets article Criticism and the Interiority of Experience
one could argue

that ones consciousness is effectively invaded by another in the
seemingly benign act of reading. The fashionable death of the author (a la Derrida and his cohorts) may
snuff out this line of thinking perhaps a bit too quickly (and I myself am tempted to do following my distrust of phenomenology) and
we find ourselves back at the place of strange exchanges of idealism and materialism in Kants work. Does all text itself illicit a kind
of view of unboundness that is found along the sublime path? Or to broaden the question and to return to the atomized sublime do
all material objects have that sublime glow, that warmth of congealed labor, do we arrive back at the stoop of Marx?
<continues>The
ontological evacuation of the sublime in capitalism seems to

not be a sacrificing of the body to alleviate the mind, but the very
elevation of the act of evacuation itself which may be the very American aspect of global capitalism
at its worst. And if, as iek argues, the entire capitalistic machinery runs on the concept
of the drive, how is it possible to break out a context where we are
presently dead (or undead) and the impossible is placed in a constantly postponed dream of a lucrative existence. The
feeling of the sublime is not so much postponed but the deadening feel of labor is eliminated as we see ourselves eventually living
the good life.
Our narcissism is not so much one of survival, of ourselves before the welled up
ocean, but of our possibility to stop striving endlessly . Philip Shaw ends his text The Sublime in
a fairly disconcerting way arguing for a return to the beautiful, that reintroducing desire in the context of the sublime is the only to
save ourselves from nihilistic rumination. Following the work of John Milbank (and other Chrisitan figures who see the need to
combat postmodern nihilism) Shaw falls in step with a kind of Levinasian reliance on the other that the combination of two
incomplete beings can give a kind of completeness, bring us back to beauty. Somewhere Lacan is laughing, desire never brings us
quiet, it takes us to an empty house where we see ourselves looking in the window, sadly feeling our wallet.
Seaborgs
Haraways ideas reverse the relation of technology and modes of
production. This ignores the way technology is deployed in the pursuit of
profit
Ebert 95 (Teresa L. Ebert, English Professor at the University at Albany, teaches Critical and Cultural Theory,
Marxist Theory, Feminist Critique, Globalization Theory, The Crisis of (Ludic) Socialist Feminism published in
Gender Journal, http://search.proques t.com/docview/228211868/fulltext? PROQUEST \\ME)
What kind of politics do socialist feminists need for these postmodern New Times that are not so new? Can the ludic
The best way to

answer such a question is to critique-ally engage Donna Haraway's
"Cyborg Manifesto," one of the most influential examples of ludic postmodern socialist feminism. In
this manifesto, Haraway attempts to map a new "route for reconstructing
socialist-feminist politics" (163) by building "an ironic political myth" to
deal with the "rearrangements in world-wide social relations tied to
science and technology" (161) -- what she calls the "informatics of domination." In so doing,
she rewrites technology as a sociocultural, if not an outright
textual/discursive, entity by reunderstanding it as "coding ." As she argues,
turn away from Marxism provide an effective "new politics" for patriarchal late capitalism?
"Communications sciences and modem biologies are constructed by a common move -- the translation of the world
into a problem of coding" (164).
In other words, Haraway is reversing the relation of

technology to the mode of production (capitalism) producing it -- that is,
the relation of superstructure and base -- if not severing it altogether.
Haraway articulates technology as not only autonomous and selfgenerating; she represents it as the ground of all other social, cultural,
and economic realities. For example, Haraway posits the new economic arrangements, such as the
"homework economy" or "the projections for world-wide structural unemployment," as "stemming from the new
Consequently, she erases the very real material conditions of

science and technology as capitalist science and technology. She occludes
the way technology itself is deployed and developed according to the
imperatives of profit, and she erases both the exploitation of labor
involved in producing the technology and the uses of technology to
further increase the expropriation of labor. Instead, she rewrites material reality as "cyborg
technologies" (168).
semiologies." She argues that "the entire universe of objects that can be known scientifically must be formulated as
problems in communications engineering (for the managers) or theories of the text (for those who would resist).
Thus although Haraway seems, at first, to be

quite different from other ludic critics (especially deconstructionists) in
her understanding of contemporary social reality, she is in fact subscribing
to the same basic logic of the priority of the semiotic and substitutes a
semiotic or discursive materialism for historical materialism .
Both are cyborg semiologies" (162-63).
The metaphor of the cyborg obscures class by replacing it with a focus on

semiotics
Ebert 95 (Teresa L. Ebert, English Professor at the University at Albany, teaches Critical and Cultural Theory,
Marxist Theory, Feminist Critique, Globalization Theory, The Crisis of (Ludic) Socialist Feminism published in
Gender Journal, http://search.proques t.com/docview/228211868/abstract?accountid=14667 PROQUEST \\ME)
Elaborating on this ludic logic, [Judith Butler] argues that "the term 'emancipation'" is "exposed as contradictory and
She thus proposes a "post-teleological,"

"postfoundationalist" use of the term as "citational" (i.e., as discursive or rhetorical act)
untenable" and thus "unrealizable."(16)
"that will mark off the 'playful' use of the category from the serious and foundationalist one." This "playful" (ludic)
use of the concept foregrounds the indeterminate and undecidable "play" of its signifiers and "citations" and means
that "the writer," according to Butler, "will
not know in advance for what purposes or in
what direction the term will come to signify."(17) The "serious,"

"foundationalist" use that she rejects is, of course, Marxism, in which
emancipation has a serious, "unplayful" use as a "struggle concept."
Emancipation, for historical materialists, is "founded" historically (not
ontologically or metaphysically) on the social contradictions of patriarchalcapitalism. Emancipation is not undecidable; rather, it is the specific historical effect of the revolutionary
struggle to transform the social relations of production: to change from a society organized
around profit and the social divisions of labor and property to one that
meets the needs of all people and equally distributes property and social
resources without exploiting people's labor. Politics, in the ludic logic, is primarily a cultural
politics aimed at semiotic freedom. It seeks to achieve the unrestricted play of differences through the subversion
of existing significations (representations). This is what [Drucilla Cornell] (following [Jacques Derrida]) calls the
"dream of a new choreography of exual difference" in which we "dance differently with the old distinctions."(18)
Whether these political strategies for realizing the unrestricted play of differences are called "resignification"
(Butler), "re-metaphorization" (Cornell), or "recoding" ([Donna Haraway]), they are all semiotic practices confined to
the superstructure.Haraway's
"cyborg politics" is the practice of semiotic

recodings, of writing ("recoding") other stories: "feminist cyborg stories have the task of
recoding communication and intelligence to subvert command and
control" (175). Haraway's celebrated new "route for reconstructing
socialist-feminist politics" (163), then, is to substitute a technological and
semiotic matterism for a historical materialism as the ground of feminist
theory and practice, and in so doing, occlude production and marginalize
labor. The similarities between Haraway's "recoding" as a politics of
liberation and Judith Butler's "resignification" as a politics of "selfsubversion" and "resistance" raise the question of whether there is any
difference at all between Haraway's discursive socialist feminism and
poststructuralist textual or "performative" feminism?(66)The "cyborg
perspective" is basically a bourgeois perspective that obscures the class
politics of its own privileged condition by suppressing its relation to the
extraction of the surplus labor of others, especially women of color. Haraway's
"complaint about socialist/Marxian standpoints is their unintended erasure of polyvocal, unassimilable, radical
difference made visible in anti-colonial discourse and practice" (159). But what is this "unassimilable, radical
Haraway's representative cyborg, "Sister

Outsider"? If so, does this not risk becoming yet another form of
colonialization and Eurocentric essentialization of the "racial other" as the
"unassimilable" outsider -- this time in the name of the "other"? The
"radical, unassimilable difference" in racist, patriarchal capitalism is not
the "postmodernist identity" of women of color but the conditions
oppressing them. The "radical, unassimilable difference" is poverty. It is
the production of profit and privilege for the few out of the expropriation
of the labor of the many (the "others"). Poverty cannot be ended; it
cannot be assimilated within bourgeois society, that is, within the existing
labor relations of capitalism. Poverty (i.e., need) is the radical,
unrepresentable, suppressed "other" to bourgeois pleasure.
difference"? Is it the difference of "women of color,"
Their metaphor is incompatible with Marxist though- different views on

human nature, the drivers of history, and individualism
Tong 9 (Rosemarie Tong, Director of Center for Professional and Applied Ethics, Distinguished Professor of
Health Care Ethics in the Department of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Applied and Professional Ethics at
UNC Charlotte, Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction page 97,
http://excoradfeminisms.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/feminist_thought_a_more_co mprehensive_intro.pdf \\ME)
To appreciate the differences between classical Marxist and contemporary socialist feminism, we need to
understand the Marxist concept of human nature. As noted in Chapter 1, liberals believe that
several characteristics distinguish human beings from other animals. These characteristics include a set of abilities,
such as the capacity for rationality and the use of language; a set of practices, such as religion, art, and science;
and a set of attitude and behavior patterns, such as competitiveness and the tendency to put oneself over others.
Marxists reject the liberal conception of human nature, claiming instead

that what makes us different from other animals is our ability to produce
our means of subsistence. We are what we are because of what we do
specifically, what we do to meet our basic needs through productive
activities such as fishing, farming, and building. Unlike bees, beavers, and
ants, whose activities are governed by instinct and who cannot willfully
change themselves, we create ourselves in the process of intentionally
transforming and manipulating nature.3 For the liberal, the ideas,
thoughts, and values of individuals account for change over time. For the
Marxist, material forcesthe production and reproduction of social life
are the prime movers in history. In laying out a full explanation of how
change takes place over time, an explanation usually termed historical
materialism, Marx stated, The mode of production of material life conditions
the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the
consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social
existence that determines their consciousness .4 In other words, Marx believed a
societys total mode of productionthat is, its forces of production (the
raw materials, tools, and workers that actually produce goods) plus its
relations of production (the ways in which production is organized)
generates a superstructure (a layer of legal, political, and social ideas) that in turn reinforces the
mode of production. Adding to Marxs point, Richard Schmitt later emphasized that the statement Human
beings create themselves is not to be read as Men and women, as
individuals, make themselves what they are, but instead as Men and
women, through production collectively, create a society that, in turn,
shapes them.5 So, for example, people in the United States think in certain ways about liberty, equality,
and freedom because their mode of production is capitalist.
The affs view of sexism ignores the role class plays. This inevitably fails
because it ignores the difference between proletariat and bourgeois
women. Class must come first
Tong 9 (Rosemarie Tong, Director of Center for Professional and Applied Ethics, Distinguished Professor of Health
Care Ethics in the Department of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Applied and Professional Ethics at UNC
Charlotte, Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction page 106-107,
http://excoradfeminisms.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/feminist_thought_a_mor e_comprehensive_intro.pdf \\ME)
classical Marxist feminists tried to use a class

analysis rather than a gender analysis to explain womens oppression. A
Affirming the ideas of Marx and Engels,
particularly good example of classical Marxist feminism appeared in Evelyn Reeds Women: Caste, Class, or
Stressing that the same capitalist economic forces and social

relations that brought about the oppression of one class by another, one
race by another, and one nation by another42 also brought about the
oppression of one sex by another, Reed resisted the view that womens
oppression as women is the worst kind of oppression for all women. Although
Reed agreed that relative to men, women occupy a subordinate position in a
patriarchal or male-dominated society, she did not think that all women
were equally oppressed by men or that no women were guilty of
oppressing other women. On the contrary, she thought bourgeoisie women
were capable of oppressing both proletarian men and women. In a
Oppressed Sex?41
capitalist system, money is most often power. Not found in Reed is any manifesto urging
all women to band together to wage a caste war against all men.43 Rather, she encourages
oppressed women to join oppressed men in a class war against their
common capitalist oppressors, female and male. Reed thought it was misguided to insist
that all women, simply by virtue of possessing two X chromosomes, belong to the same class. On the contrary, she
maintained that women,
like men are a multiclass sex.44 Specifically,

proletarian women have little in common with bourgeoisie women, who
are the economic, social, and political as well as sexual partners of the
bourgeoisie men to whom they are linked. Bourgeoisie women are not
united with proletarian women but with bourgeoisie men in defense of
private property, profiteering, militarism, racismand the exploitation of
other women.45 Clearly, Reed believed that the primary enemy of at least
proletarian women is not patriarchy, but first and foremost, capitalism.
Optimistic about male-female relations in a postcapitalist society, Reed maintained that [f ]ar from
being eternal, womans subjection and the bitter hostility between the
sexes are no more than a few thousand years old. They were produced by
the drastic social changes which brought the family, private property, and
the state into existence.46 With the end of capitalist male-female
relationships, both sexes will thrive in a communist society that enables
all its members to cooperate with each other in communities of care.
Survival politics
Cultural studies to reaffirm popular culture practices like playing music is
profoundly depoliticizing and channels resistance away from the state and
cedes the political to the right. Cultural studies is the consolation prize in
the game of politicsthe real winners are the right wing elites
Gitlin, 97 (Todd, professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia, The antipolitical populism of cultural studies, Dissent, Spring, proquest)
From the late 1960s onward, as I have said, the insurgent energy was to be found in movements that aimed to politicize specific identities-racial
minorities, women, gays. If the "collective behavior" school of once-conventional sociology had grouped movements in behalf of justice and democratic
rights together with fads and fashions, cultural studies now set out to separate movements from fads, to take seriously the accounts of movement
participants themselves, and thereby to restore the dignity of the movementsonly to end up, in the 1980s, linking movements with fads by finding
equivalent dignity in both spheres, so that, for example, dressing like Madonna might be upgraded to an act of"resistance" equivalent to demonstrating in
behalf of the right to abortion, and watching a talk show on family violence was positioned on the same plane. In this way, cultural studies extended the
Eventually, the popular culture of marginal groups (punk,

reggae, disco, feminist poetry, hip-hop) was promoted to a sort of counterstructure
of feeling, and even, at the edges, a surrogate politics-a sphere of thought and
sensibility thought to be insulated from the pressures of hegemonic discourse , of
New Left symbiosis with popular culture.
instrumental reason, of economic rationality, of class, gender, and sexual subordination. The other move in cultural studies was to claim that culture
continued radical politics by other means. The idea was that cultural innovation was daily insinuating itself into the activity of ordinary people .
Perhaps the millions had not actually been absorbed into the hegemonic sponge of
mainstream popular culture. Perhaps they were freely dissenting. If "the revolution"
had receded to the point of invisibility, it would be depressing to contemplate the
victory of a hegemonic culture imposed by strong, virtually irresistible media. How
much more reassuring to detect "resistance" saturating the pores of everyday life! In
this spirit, there emerged a welter of studies purporting to discover not only the "active" participation of audiences in shaping the meaning of popular
culture, but the "resistance" of those audiences to hegemonic frames of interpretation in a variety of forms-news broadcasts (Dave Morley, The
`Nationwide ' Audience, 1980); romance fiction (Janice Radway, Reading the Romance, 1984); television fiction (Tamar Liebes and Elihu Katz, The Export of
Meaning, 1990; Andrea Press, Women Watching Television, 1991); television in general (John Fiske, Television Culture, 1987); and many others. Thus, too,
the feminist fascination with the fictions and talk shows of daytime "women's television"-in this view, the dismissal of these shows as "trivial," "banal,"
"soap opera," and so on, follows from the patriarchal premise that what takes place within the four walls of the home matters less than what takes place in
a public sphere established (not coincidentally) for the convenience of men. Observing the immensity of the audiences for Oprah Winfrey and her legions
of imitators, many in cultural studies upended the phenomenon by turning the definitions around. The largely female audiences for these shows would no
longer be dismissed as distracted voyeurs, but praised as active participants in the exposure and therefore politicizing of crimes like incest, spousal abuse,
and sexual molestation. These audiences would no longer be seen simply as confirming their "normality" with a safe, brief, wellbounded, vicarious
acquaintanceship with deviance. They could be understood as an avant-garde social movement. Above all, in a word, cultural studies has veered into
populism. Against the unabashed elitism of conventional literary and art studies, cultural studies affirms an unabashed populism in which all social
activities matter, all can be understood, all contain cues to the social nature of human beings. The object of attention is certified as worthy of such not by
being "the best that has been thought and said in the world" but by having been thought and said by or for "the people"-period. The popularity of popular
culture is what makes it interesting-and not only as an object of study. It is the populism if not the taste of the analyst that has determined the object of
attention in the first place. The sociological judgment that popular culture is important to people blurs into a critical judgment that popular culture must
therefore be valuable. To use one of the buzzwords of "theory," there is a "slippage" from analysis to advocacy, defense, upward "positioning." Cultural
studies often claims to have overthrown hierarchy, but what it actually does is invert it. What now certifies worthiness is the popularity of the object, not
its formal qualities. If the people are on the right side, then what they like is good. This tendency in cultural studies-I think it remains the main line-lacks
irony. One purports to stand four-square for the people against capitalism, and comes to echo the logic of capitalism. The consumer sovereignty touted by
a capitalist society as the grandest possible means for judging merit finds a reverberation among its ostensible adversaries. Where the market flatters the
individual, cultural studies flatters the group. What the group wants, buys, demands is ipso facto the voice of the people. Where once Marxists looked to
factory organization as the prefiguration of "a new society in the shell of the old," today they tend to look to sovereign culture consumers. David Morley,
one of the key researchers in cultural studies, and one of the most reflective, has himself deplored this tendency in recent audience studies. He maintains
that to understand that "the commercial world succeeds in producing objects. . . which do connect with the lived desires of popular audiences" is "by no
means necessarily to fall into the trap . . . of an uncritical celebration of popular culture." But it is not clear where to draw the line against the celebratory
tendency when one is inhibited from doing so by a reluctance to criticize the cultural dispositions of the groups of which one approves. Unabashedly, the
populism of cultural studies prides itself on being political. In the prevailing schools of cultural studies, to study culture is not so much to try to grasp
cultural processes but to choose sides or, more subtly, to determine whether a particular cultural process belongs on the side of society's angels. An aura
of hope surrounds the enterprise, the hope (even against hope) of an affirmative answer to the inevitable question: Will culture ride to the rescue of the
cause of liberation? There is defiance, too, as much as hope. The discipline means to cultivate insubordination. On this view, marginalized groups in the
populace continue to resist the hegemonic culture. By taking defiant popular culture seriously, one takes the defiers seriously and furthers their defiance.
Cultural studies becomes "cult studs." It is charged with surveying the culture, assessing the hegemonic import of cultural practices and pinpointing their
Is this musical style or that literary form "feminist" or "authentically

Latino"? The field of possibilities is frequently reduced to two: for or against the
hegemonic. But the nature of that hegemony, in its turn, is usually defined tautologically: that culture is hegemonic that is promoted by "the
potentials for "resistance."
ruling group" or "the hegemonic bloc," and by the same token, that culture is "resistant" that is affirmed by groups assumed (because of class position,
The process of labeling is circular, since

it has been predetermined whether a particular group is , in fact, hegemonic or
resistant. The populism of cultural studies is fundamental to its allure, and to the political meaning its adherents find there, for cultural studies
bespeaks an affirmation of popularity tout court. To say that popular culture is "worth attention" in the
scholarly sense is, for cultural studies, to say something pointed: that the people
who render it popular are not misguided when they do so, not fooled, not
gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, and so on) to be "marginalized" or "resistant."
dominated, not distracted, not passive.
If anything, the reverse: the premise is that popular culture is popular because
and only because the people find in it channels of desire pleasure, initiative, freedom. It is this premise that gives cultural studies its aura of political
engagement-or at least political consolation. To unearth reason and value, brilliance and energy in popular culture is to affirm that the people have not
However
unfavorable the balance of political forces, people succeed in living lives of vigorous
resistance! Are the communities of African-Americans or AfroCaribbeans suffering?
Well, they have rap! (Leave aside the question of whether all of them want rap.)
The right may have taken possession of 10 Downing Street, the White House, and
Congress-and as a result of elections, embarrassingly enough!-but at least one is
engage in cultural studies. Consolation: here is an explanation for the rise of academic cultural studies during precisely the years
been defeated. The cultural student, singing their songs, analyzing their lyrics, at the same time sings their praises .
when the right has held political and economic power longer and more consistently than at any other time in more than a half century. Now, in effect, "the
cultural is political," and more, it is regarded as central to the control of political and economic resources. The control of popular culture is held to have
become decisive in the fate of contemporary societies-or at least it is the sphere in which opposition can find footing, find breathing space, rally the
powerless, defy the grip of the dominant ideas, isolate the powers that be, and prepare for a "war of position" against their dwindling ramparts. On this
view, to dwell on the centrality of popular culture is more than an academic's way of filling her hours; it is a useful certification of the people and their
projects. To put it more neutrally, the political aura of cultural studies is supported by something like a "false consciousness" premise: the analytical
assumption that what holds the ruling groups in power is their capacity to muffle, deform, paralyze, or destroy contrary tendencies of an emotional or
ideological nature. By the same token, if there is to be a significant "opposition," it must first find a base in popular culture-and first also turns out to be
second, third, and fourth, since popular culture is so much more accessible, so much more porous, so much more changeable than the economic and
political order. With time, what began as compensation hardened-became institutionalized-into a tradition. Younger scholars gravitated to cultural studies
because it was to them incontestable that culture was
politics. To do cultural studies, especially in connection with identity politics, was the politics they knew. The contrast with the rest of the West is
illuminating. In varying degrees, left-wing intellectuals in France, Italy, Scandinavia, Germany, Spain and elsewhere retain energizing attachments to Social
Democratic, Green, and other left-wing parties. There, the association of culture with excellence and traditional elites remains strong. But in the Anglo-
popular culture emerges

as a consolation prize. (The same happened in Latin America, with the decline of
left-wing hopes.) The sting fades from the fragmentation of the organized left, the
metastasis of murderous nationalism, the twilight of socialist dreams virtually
everywhere. Class inequality may have soared, ruthless individualism may have
intensified, the conditions of life for the poor may have worsened, racial tensions
may have mounted, unions and social democratic parties may have weakened or
reached an impasse, but never mind. Attend to popular culture, study it with
sympathy, and one need not dwell on unpleasant realities. One need not be unduly vexed by
American world, including Australia, these conditions scarcely obtain. Here, in a discouraging time,
electoral defeats. One need not be preoccupied by the ways in which the political culture's center of gravity has
One
need not even be rigorous about what one opposes and what one proposes in its
place. Is capitalism the trouble? Is it the particular form of capitalism practiced by multinational
moved rightward-or rather, one can put this down to the iron grip of the established media institutions.
corporations in a deregulatory era? Is it patriarchy (and is that the proper term for a society that has seen an
Racism? Antidemocracy?
Practitioners of cultural studies, like the rest of the academic left, are frequently
elusive. Speaking cavalierly of "opposition" and "resistance" permits-rather,
cultivates-a certain sloppiness of thinking, making it possible to remain "left"
without having to face the most difficult questions of political selfdefinition. The
situation of cultural studies conforms to the contours of our political moment . It
confirms-and reinforces-the current paralysis: the incapacity of social movements
and dissonant sensibilities to imagine effective forms of public engagement. It
upheaval in relations between women and men in the course of a half-century)?
substitutes an obsession with popular culture for coherent economic-political thought or a connection with
mobilizable populations outside the academy and across identity lines. One must underscore that this is not simply
because of cultural studies' default. The default is an effect more than a cause. It has its reasons. The odds are
indeed stacked against serious forward motion in conventional politics. Political power is not only beyond reach, but
functional majorities disdain it, finding the government and all its works contemptible. Few of the central problems
of contemporary civilization are seriously contested within the narrow band of conventional discourse.
Unconventional politics, such as it is, is mostly fragmented and self-contained along lines of racial, gender, and
sexual identities. One cannot say that cultural studies diverts energy from a vigorous politics that is already in
insofar as cultural studies makes claims for itself as an insurgent politics,

the field is presumptuous and misleading. Its attempt to legitimize the ecstasies of
the moment confirms the collective withdrawal from democratic hope . Seeking to find
force. Still,
political energies in audiences who function as audiences, rather than in citizens functioning as citizens, the
dominant current in cultural studies is pressed willy-nilly toward an uncritical celebration of technological progress.
It offers no resistance to the primacy of visual and nonlinear culture over the literary and linear. To the contrary: it
embraces technological innovation as soon as the latest developments prove popular. It embraces the sufficiency of
markets; its main idea of the intellect's democratic commitment is to flatter the audience. Is there a chance of a
modest redemption? Perhaps, if we imagine a harder headed, less wishful cultural studies, free of the burden of
A chastened, realistic cultural studies would divest

itself of political pretensions. It would not claim to be politics. It would not mistake
the academy for the larger society. It would be less romantic about the world-and
about itself. Rigorous practitioners of cultural studies should be more curious about the world that remains to
imagining itself to be a political practice.
be researchedand changed. We would learn more about politics, economy, and society, and in the process,
If we wish to do politics, let us

organize groups, coalitions, demonstrations, lobbies, whatever; let us do politics. Let
us not think that our academic work is already that.
appreciate better what culture, and cultural study, do not accomplish.
Democracy
Modern conceptions of democracy disguise class oppression- it isnt
control by the people but bourgeois representatives
Wood 98 (Ellen Meiksins Wood, taught political science at Glendon College, York University in Toronto, Canada,
The Retreat from Class A New 'True' Socialism pgs. 66-68)
democratic discourse - which, as the argument

progresses, they increasingly equate with liberal-democratic ideology must 'construct' as illegitimate and oppressive social relations which
would otherwise not be so perceived. The historical meaning and effects
of liberal-democratic discourse, however, have been far more ambiguous.
We need to be reminded, to begin with, that the idea of democracy has a
very long history - something one would never guess from their account. There can be no
doubt that modern conceptions of equality have expanded - at least in
breadth if not in depth - far beyond the exclusive Greek conception which
denied the democratic principle to women and slaves. At the same time,
the changes that have occurred in the meaning of democracy have not all
been on the side of delegitimizing inequality . Far from it. In fact, one of the
most significant dimensions of the 'democratic revolution' is that it marks
the dissociation of 'democracy' from its meaning as popular power, rule by the
demos. It is precisely for this reason - and not simply because of some
general advance in democratic values - that 'democracy' ceased to be a
dirty word among the dominant classes. One need only consider the
difference between the horror with which the American 'Founding Fathers'
regarded 'democracy', and the overweening pride with which their
successors have claimed the name of 'democracy' for the political order
established by these constitutional founders. The difference cannot simply be attributed to the progress of
democratic culture. In a sense the reverse is true - or at least, the founding
fathers had a stricter understanding than did later generations of what
'democracy' entailed. For them the word had the same meaning as for the
Greeks: direct rule by the people, the people as plebs not as populus (to use a distinction
Their argument requires that the new
employed by Mouffe and Laclau). or - from the vantage point of the propertied classes - mob rule. By these strict
the American republic was not - fortunately, in their view - a

democracy (unless it was a 'representative democracy', as suggested by Alexander Hamilton, already
signalling a new meaning, explicitly distinguished from popular rule). By
the much diluted standards of later generations, children of the
'democratic revolution', the same republic was the most democratic
country on earth, and indeed the perfect ideal of democracy. For, while the old
meaning of democracy as popular power survived - especially in socialist
discourse - the 'democratic revolution' that established liberal democracy also brought
with it a new meaning, which had to do not with the substance of popular
power but with certain procedural forms and civil liberties . Indeed, by the new
standards, the direct exercise of popular power might be perceived as 'antidemocratic'. It must be stressed that democracy in its original meaning always had
class connotations - referring precisely to the dominance of the people as plebs. When Aristotle classified
standards,
the main types of constitution then existing in Greece, he insisted on distinguishing between them not simply on
the basis of number but also on the basis of class: 'The proper application of the term "democracy" is to a
constitution in which the free-born and poor control the government - being at the same time a majority; and
the term "oligarchy" is properly applied to a constitution in which

the rich and better-born control the government - being at the same time
similarly
a minority.'36 His predecessor, Plato, was even more direct. Describing the class war between rich and poor
which for him, as for Aristotle, was the source of civil strife, he explains the principle of democracy thus: And when
the poor win, the result is a democracy.'37 In its train come wild excesses of freedom and equality ending in
The new meaning of democracy dissociated it from class

connotations as rule by the 'poor. By defining democracy in formal terms
not related to the substance of class power, it had the effect precisely of
obscuring the very oppressions which the old meaning starkly revealed.
Liberal democratic discourse has ever since served not only to
delegitimate certain kinds of subordination, but on the contrary, also to
mystify and legitimate the relations of class domination and exploitation,
indeed to deny their very existence by redefining them as relations
between free and equal individuals. What follows from all this is that the differences of
meaning among various conceptions of democracy are not simply
differences but also to a significant extent antagonisms. Or, to put it more precisely,
although there are aspects of liberal democracy that have a general value, the two 'discourses'
diverge irreconcilably at the point where they express the conflicting
interests of two opposing classes. Liberal-democratic discourse - however
progressive it may be in some respects, however much subordinate
classes may have appropriated it and even helped to create it by means of
their own struggles - serves the class interests of capital by denying the
relations of subordination on which capitalist power rests, and by
delimiting the sphere in which popular power may operate. The other
meaning of democracy, which in its original form reflected the interests of the demos as against those
of the propertied classes in Greece, in its modern socialist form expresses the interests of the
working class against capital by restoring the meaning of popular power
and extending it to the class less organization of social production.
anarchy.
Claiming the debate space & frank

The aff reflects the ideology of Occupy. Claiming debate space as a site
for politics sells out radical change to the private sphere of individual
protest in the academy
Marcus 2012 associate book editor at Dissent Magazine (Fall, David, The
Horizontalists, http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-horizontalists)
an ethnographer traveling in India. Journeying
up and down the Ganges Delta, he encounters a fisherman who claims to know the source of
all truth. The world, the fisherman explains, rests upon the back of an elephant.
But what does the elephant stand on? the ethnographer asks. A turtle. And the
turtle? Another turtle. And it? Ah, friend, smiles the fisherman, it is turtles
all the way down. As with most well-circulated apocrypha, it is a parable that lacks a clear
provenance, but has a clear moral: that despite our ever-dialectical minds, we
will never get to the bottom of things; that, in fact, there is nothing at the
bottom of things. What we define as society is nothing more than a set of locally
constructed practices and norms, and what we define as history is nothing more
than the passage of one set to the next. Although we might find the picture of our universe as an
There is a much-recycled and certainly apocryphal tale told of
infinite tower of tortoises rather ridiculous, as one reteller admitted, it only raises the question, Why do we think
Since the early 1970s we have wonderedwith increasing anxiety

why and if we know better. Social scientists, literary critics, philosophers, and jurists
have all begun to turn from their particular disciplines to the more general question
of interpretation. There has been an increasing uneasiness with universal
categories of thought; a whispered suspicion and then a commonly held belief that the sumsocieties,
histories, identitiesnever amounts to more than its parts. New analytical frameworks have begun
to emerge, sensitive to both the pluralities and localities of life. What we need, as
Clifford Geertz argued, are not enormous ideas but ways of thinking that are
responsive to particularities, to individualities, oddities, discontinuities, contrasts, and singularities.
This growing anxiety over the precision of our interpretive powers has translated
into a variety of political as well as epistemological concerns. Many have become
uneasy with universal concepts of justice and equality . Simultaneous toand in part because of
the ascendance of human rights, freedom has increasingly become
understood as an individual entitlement instead of a collective possibility.
The once prevalent conviction that a handful of centripetal values could
bind society together has transformed into a deeply skeptical attitude
toward general statements of value. If it is, indeed, turtles all the way
down, then decisions can take place only on a local scale and on a
horizontal plane. There is no overarching platform from which to legislate;
only a local knowledge. As Michael Walzer argued in a 1985 lecture on social criticism, We
have to start from where we are, we can only ask, what is the right thing for us to
do? This shift in scale has had a significant impact on the Left over the past twenty to thirty years.
Socialism, once the name of our desire, has all but disappeared; new
desires have emerged in its place: situationism, autonomism, localism,
communitarianism, environmentalism, anti-globalism. Often spatial in metaphor, they
have been more concerned with where and how politics happen rather than at
what pace and to what end. Often local in theory and in practice, they have come to represent a
shift in scale: from the large to the small, from the vertical to the
horizontal, and fromwhat Geertz has calledthe thin to the thick. Class, race, and genderthose
we know better?
classic left themesare, to be sure, still potent categories. But they have often been imagined as spectrums rather
than binaries, varying shades rather than static lines of solidarity.
Instead of society, there is now
instead of radical schemes to

rework economic and political institutions, there is an emphasis
on localized campaigns and everyday practices. The critique of capitalismonce
talk of communities and actor networks;
heavily informed by intricate historical and social theorieshas narrowed. The ruthless criticism of all, as Karl
Marx once put it, has turned away from exploitative world systems to the pathologies of an over-regulated life. As
post-Marxists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe declared in 1985, Left-wing thought today stands at a crossroads.
The evident truths of the pastthe classical forms of analysis and political calculation, the nature of the forces in
conflict, the very meaning of the Lefts struggles and objectiveshave been seriously challenged.From Budapest
from Kabul to the sequels of Communist victory in Vietnam and

Cambodia, a question-mark has fallen more and more heavily over the whole
way of conceiving both socialism and the roads that should lead to it. In
many ways, the Left has just been keeping up with the times. Over the last quarter-century, there
has been a general fracturing of our social and economic relations, a multiplication
of, what one sociologist has called, partial societiesgrouped by age, sex,
ethnicity, and proximity. This has not necessarily been a bad thing. Even as the old Leftthe
vertical Leftfrequently bemoaned the growing differentiation and individuation,
these new categories did, in fact, open the door for marginalized voices and
communities. They created a space for more diversity, tolerance, and inclusion. They signaled a turn toward
the language of recognition: a politics more sensitive to difference. But this turn was also not without its
disadvantages. Gone was the Lefts hope for an emerging class consciousness, a
movement of the people seeking greater realms of freedom. Instead of
challenging the top-down structures of late capitalism, radicals now aspired to
createwhat post-Marxists were frequently callingspaces of freedom. If one of the explicit
to Prague and the Polish coup dtat,
targets of the global justice movement of the late 1990s was the exploitative trade policies of the World Trade
its underlying critique was the alienating patterns of its

bureaucracy: the erosion of spaces for self-determination and expression .
Organization, then
The crisis of globalization was that it stripped individuals of their rights to participate, to act as free agents in a
society that was increasingly becoming shaped by a set of global institutions. What most troubled leftists over the
past three or four decades was not the increasingly unequal distribution of goods and services in capitalist societies
but the increasingly unequal distribution of power. As one frequently sighted placard from the 1999 Seattle protests
Occupy Wall Street has come to represent the latest turn in this
was, itself, a matter of
recovering local space: a way to repoliticize the square. And in a moment
read, No globalization without participation!
movement toward local and more horizontal spaces of freedom. Occupation
characterized by foreclosure, it was also symbolically, and sometimes literally, an attempt to reclaim lost homes
Occupy Wall Street sought

out not only new political spaces but also new ways to relate to them. By
resisting the top-down management of representative democracy as well as the
bottom-up ideals of labor movements, Occupiers hoped to create a new politics in
which decisions moved neither up nor down but horizontally. While embracing the new reach of
and abandoned properties. But there was also a deeper notion of space at work.
globalizationlinking arms and webcams with their encamped comrades in Madrid, Tel Aviv, Cairo, and Santiago
they were also rejecting its patterns of consolidation, its limits on personal freedom, its vertical and bureaucratic
structures of decision-making. Time was also to be transformed. The general assemblies and
general strikes were efforts to reconstruct, and make more autonomous, our experience of time as well as space.
assemblies insisted that

decision-making was an endless process. Who we are, what we do, what
we want to be are categories of flexibility, and consensus is as much about
repairing this sense of open-endedness as it is about agreeing on a particular set
Seeking to escape from the Taylorist demands of productivity, the
of demands. Life is a mystery, as one pop star fashionista has insisted, and Occupiers wanted to keep it that way.
Likewise, general strikes were imagined as ways in which workers could take back timeregain those parts of life
that had become routinized by work. Rather than attempts to achieve large-scale reforms, general strikes were
improvisations, escapes from the daily calculations of production that demonstrated that we can still be happy,
creative, even productive individuals without jobs. As one unfurled banner along New Yorks Broadway read during
this springs May Day protests, Why work? Be happy. In many ways, the Occupy movement was a rebellion
against the institutionalized nature of twenty-first century capitalism and democracy.
Equally skeptical of
corporate monopolies as it was of the technocratic tendencies of the state, it was

ultimately an insurgency against control, against the ways in which organized power and
capital deprived the individual of the time and space needed to control his or her life. Just as the vertically inclined
leftists of the twentieth century leveraged the public corporationthe welfare stateagainst the increasingly
powerful number of private ones, so too were Occupy and, more generally, the horizontalist Left to embrace the age
of the market: at the center of their politics was the anthropological man in both his formshomo faber and
For this reason, the

movement did not fit neatly into right or left, conservative or liberal, revolutionary or
reformist categories. On the one hand, it was sympathetic to the most classic of left
aspirations: to dismantle governing hierarchies. On the other, its language was
imbued with a strident individualism: a politics of anti-institutionalism and personal
freedom that has most often been affiliated with the Right. Seeking an alternative to the
homo ludenswho was capable of negotiating his interests outside the state.
bureaucratic tendencies of capitalism and socialism, Occupiers were to frequently invoke the image of autonomy: of
Their
aspiration was a society based on organic, decentralized
circuits of exchange and deliberationon voluntary
associations, on local debate, on loose networks of affinity
a world in which social and economic relations exist outside the institutions of the state.
groups. If political and economic life had become abstracted in the age of globalization and financialization,
then Occupy activists wanted to re-politicize our everyday choices . As David Graeber,
one of Occupys chief theoretical architects, explained two days after Zuccotti Park was occupied, The idea
is essentially that the system is not going to save us, so were going to
have to save ourselves. Borrowing from the anarchist tradition, Graeber has called this work direct
action: the practice of circumventing, even on occasion subverting, hierarchies through practical projects. Instead
of attempting to pressure the government to institute reforms or seize state power, direct actions seek to build
By creating spaces in which individuals take control over

their lives, it is a strategy of acting and thinking as if one is already free.
Marina Sitrin, another prominent Occupier, has offered another name for
this politicshorizontalism: the use of direct democracy, the striving
for consensus and processes in which everyone is heard and new
relationships are created. It is a politics that not only refuses
institutionalization but also imagines a new subjectivity from which one can project
the future into the present. Direct action and horizontal democracy are new
names, of course, for old ideas. They descend most directlyfrom the ideas and
a new society in the shell of the old.
tactics of the global justice movement of the 1990s and 2000s. Direct Action Network was founded in 1999 to help
the anti-WTO protests in Seattle; horizontalidad, as it was called in

Argentina, emerged as a way for often unemployed workers to organize during the financial crisis of 2001.
coordinate
Both emerged out of the theories and practices of a movement that was learning as it went along. The ad hoc
working groups, the all-night bull sessions, the daylong actions, the decentralized planning were all as much by
necessity as they were by design. They were not necessarily intended at first. But what emerged out of antiglobalization was a new vision of globalization. Local and horizontal in practice, direct action and democracy were
to become catchphrases for a movement that was attempting to resist the often autocratic tendencies of a fast-
But direct action and horizontal democracy also tap into a

longer, if often neglected, tradition on the left: the anarchism, syndicalism, and
autonomist Marxism that stretch from Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, and Rosa Luxemburg to C.L.R.
James, Cornelius Castoriadis, and Antonio Negri. If revolutionary socialism was a theory
about ideal possibilities, then anarchism and autonomism often focused
on the revolutionary practices themselves. The way in which the revolution was organized
globalizing capitalism.
was the primary act of revolution. Autonomy, as the Greco-French Castoriadis told Le Monde in 1977, demands not
only the elimination of dominant groups and of the institutions embodying and orchestrating that domination but
also new modes of what he calls self-management and organization. With direct action and horizontal
democracy, the Occupy movement not only developed a set of new tactics but also a governing ideology, a theory
of time and space that runs counter to many of the practices of earlier leftist movements. Unlike revolutionary
socialism or evolutionary social democracyMarxs Esau and JacobOccupiers conceived of time as more cyclical
than developmental, its understanding of space more local and horizontal than structural and vertical. The
revolution was to come but only through everyday acts. It was to occur only throughwhat Castoriadis obliquely
referred to asthe self-institution of society. The seemingly spontaneous movement that emerged after the first
general assemblies in Zuccotti Park was not, then, sui generis but an elaboration of a much larger turn by the Left.
As occupations spread across the country and as activists begin to exchange organizational tactics, it was easy to
forget that what was happening was, in fact, a part of a much larger shift in the scale and plane of Western politics:
a turn toward more local and horizontal patterns of life, a growing skepticism toward the institutions of the state,
and an increasing desire to seek out greater realms of personal freedom. And although its hibernation over the
summer has, perhaps, marked the end of the Occupy movement, OWS has also come to represent an important
and perhaps more lastingbreak. In both its ideas and tactics, it has given us a new set of desiresautonomy,
Its
occupations and general assemblies, its flash mobs and street performances, its
loose network of activists all suggest a bold new set of possibilities for the Left: a
horizontalist ethos that believes that revolution will begin by transforming our
everyday lives. It can be argued that horizontalism is, in many ways, a product
radical democracy, direct actionthat look well beyond the ideological and tactical tropes of socialism.
of the growing disaggregation and individuation of Western

society; that it is a kind of free-market leftism: a politics
jury-rigged out of the very culture it hopes to resist. For not
only does it emphasize the agency of the individual, but it draws
one of its central inspirations from a neoclassical image: that of
the self-managing societythe polity that functions best when the
state is absent from everyday decisions. But one can also find in its antiinstitutionalism an attempt to speak in todays language for yesterdays goals. If we
must live in a society that neither trusts nor feels compelled by collectivist visions,
then horizontalism offers us a leftism that attempts to be, at once, both individualist
and egalitarian, anti-institutional and democratic, open to the possibilities of selfmanagement and yet also concerned with the casualties born out of an age that has
let capital manage itself for far too long. Horizontalism has absorbed the crisis of knowledgewhat
we often call postmodernismand the crisis of collectivismwhat we often call neoliberalism. But instead of
seeking to return to some golden age before our current moment of fracture, it seeksfor better and worseto find
a way to make leftist politics conform to our current age of anti-foundationalism and institutionalism. As Graeber
argued in the prescriptive last pages of his anthropological epic, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Capitalism has
transformed the world in many ways that are clearly irreversible and we therefore need to give up the false
choice between state and market that [has] so monopolized political ideology for the last centuries that it made it
But herein
lies the problem. Not all possible forms of human existence and
social interaction, no matter how removed they are from the
institutions of power and capital, are good forms of social
organization. Although it is easy to look enthusiastically to those societiesancient or modern, Western or
difficult to argue about anything else. We need, in other words, to stop thinking like leftists.
non-Westernthat exist beyond the structures of the state, they, too, have their own patterns of hierarchy, their
to select one form of social

organization over the other is always an act of exclusion.
Instituting and then protecting a particular way of life will always
require a normative commitment in which not every value system
is respectedin which, in other words, there is a moral hierarchy.
own embittered lines of inequality and injustice. More important,
by working outside structures of power one may circumvent

coercive systems but one does not necessarily subvert them. Localizing politics
More problematically,
stripping it of its larger institutional ambitionshas, to be sure, its advantages. But without a larger structural
does not go far enough. Bubbles of freedom, as Graeber calls them, may
create a larger variety of non-institutional life. But they will always neglect other
crucial avenues of freedom: in particular, those social and economic rights that can
vision, it
only be protected from the top down. In this way, the
anti-institutionalism of
horizontalism comes dangerously close to that of the libertarian
Right. The turn to previous eras of social organization, the desire
to locate and confine politics to a particular regional space, the
deep skepticism toward all forms of institutional life not only
mirror the aspirations of libertarianism but help cloak those
hierarchies spawned from non-institutional forms of power and
capital. This is a particularly pointed irony for a political ideology that claims
to be opposed to the many injustices of a non-institutional marketin particular,
its unregulated financial schemes. Perhaps this is an irony deeply woven into the theoretical quilt of autonomy: a
vision that, as a result of its anti-institutionalism, is drawn to all sites of individual liberationeven those that are to
be found in the marketplace. As Graeber concludes in Debt, Markets, when allowed to drift entirely free from their
violent origins, invariably begin to grow into something different, into networks of honor, trust, and mutual
connectedness, whereas the maintenance of systems of coercion constantly do the opposite: turn the products of
human cooperation, creativity, devotion, love and trust back into numbers once again. In many ways, this is the
result of a set of political ideas that have lost touch with their origins. The desire for autonomy was born out of the
socialistif not also often the Marxisttradition and there was always a guarded sympathy for the structures
needed to oppose organized systems of capital and power. Large-scale institutions were, for thinkers such as
To only try to
create spaces of freedom alongside of the State meant, as Castoriadis was to argue later in his life,
to back down from the problem of politics. In fact, this was, he believed, the failure of
1968: the inability to set up new, different institutions and recognize that there is no such thing as a
society without institutions. This isand will bea problem for the horizontalist
Left as it moves forward. As a leftism ready-made for an age in which all sides of the political spectrum are
Castoriadis, Negri, and C.L.R. James, still essential if every cook was truly to govern.
, it is always in danger of becoming absorbed

into the very ideological apparatus it seeks to dismantle. For it
aspires to a decentralized and organic politics that , in both
principle and practice, shares a lot in common with its central
target. Both it and the free market are anti-institutional. And the latter
arrayed against the regulatory state
will remain so without larger vertical measures.
Structures, not only everyday practices,
need to be reformed. The revolution cannot happen only on the ground; it must also happen from above.
A direct democracy still needs its indirect structures , individual freedoms still need to
be measured by their collective consequences, and notions of social and economic equality
still need to stand next to the desire for greater political participation.
Deregulation is another regulatory regime, and to replace it requires new
regulations: institutions that will limit the excesses of the market. As Castoriadis insisted
in the years after 1968, the Lefts task is not only to abolish old institutions but to discover new kinds of
relationship between society and its institutions. Horizontalism has come to serve as an important break from the
static strategies and categories of analysis that have slowed an aging and vertically inclined Left. OWS was to
represent its fullest expression yet, though it has a much longer back story and stillone hopesa promising
future. But horizontalists such as Graeber and Sitrin will struggle to establish spaces of freedom if they cannot
formulate a larger vision for a society. Their vision is notas several on the vertical left have suggestedtoo
in seeking out local spaces of freedom, they

have confined their ambitions; they have, in fact, come, at times,
to mirror the very ideology they hope to resist. In his famous retelling of the
utopian but not utopian enough:
the search of all-too-deep-lying turtles, we have

to be careful to not lose touch with the hard surfaces of lifewith the political,
economic, stratificatory realities within which men are everywhere contained. This is an ever-present
turtle parable, Clifford Geertz warned that in
temptation, and one that, in our age of ever more stratification, we must resist. Prefer boring politicskey to
prevent criticism from being an end in itselfwe alternative is war against capital Thomas, brilliant badass, author
of What's the Matter with Kansas? and editor of The Baffler "To the Precinct Station: How theory met practice and
Occupy itself is pretty

much gone. It was evicted from Zuccotti Park about two months after it beganan
utterly predictable outcome for which the group seems to have made inadequate preparation. OWS
drove it absolutely crazy" http://www.thebaffler.com/past/to_the_precinct_station
couldnt bring itself to come up with a real set of demands until after it got busted, when it finally agreed on a single
OWS has
today pretty much fizzled out. The media storm that once surrounded it has blown
off to other quarters. Pause for a moment and compare this record of
accomplishment to that of Occupys evil twin, the Tea Party movement, and the
larger right-wing revival of which it is a part. Well, under the urging of this trumpedup protest movement, the Republican Party proceeded to win a majority in the
U.S. House of Representatives; in the state legislatures of the nation it took
some six hundred seats from the Democrats; as of this writing it is still purging
Republican senators and congressmen deemed insufficiently conservative and
has even succeeded in having one of its own named as the GOPs vicepresidential candidate. * * * The question that the books under consideration here seek to answer is:
What is the magic formula that made OWS so successful? But its exactly the wrong question. What we need
to be asking about Occupy Wall Street is: Why did this effort fail? How did OWS blow all the
item. With the exception of some residual groups here and there populated by the usual activist types,
promise of its early days? Why do even the most popular efforts of the Left come to be mired in a gluey swamp of
academic talk and pointless antihierarchical posturing? The action certainly started with a bang. When the
occupation of Zuccotti Park began, in September 2011, the OWS cause was overwhelmingly popular; indeed, as
Todd Gitlin points out, hating Wall Street may well have been the most popular left-wing cause since the thirties.
Inequality had reached obscene levels, and it was no longer the act of a radical to say so. The bank bailouts of the
preceding years had made it obvious that government was captured by organized money. Just about everyone
resented Wall Street in those days; just about everyone was happy to see someone finally put our fury in those
crooks overpaid faces. People flocked to the OWS standard. Cash donations poured in; so did food and books.
Celebrities made appearances in Zuccotti, and the media began covering the proceedings with an attentiveness it
rarely gives to leftist actions. But these accounts, with a few exceptions here and there, misread that
overwhelming approval of Occupys cause as an approval of the movements mechanics: the camping out in the
park, the way food was procured for an army of protesters, the endless search for consensus, the showdowns with
the cops, the twinkles. These things, almost every writer separately assumes, are what the Occupy phenomenon
was really about. These are the details the public hungers to know. The building of a community in Zuccotti Park,
for example, is a point of special emphasis. Noam Chomskys thoughts epitomize the genre when he tells us that
one of the main achievements of the movement has been to create communities, real functioning communities
of mutual support, democratic interchange, et cetera. The reason this is important, he continues, is because
Americans tend to be very isolated and neighborhoods are broken down, community structures have broken down,
people are kind of alone. How building such communities helps us to tackle the power of high finance is left
unexplained, as is Chomskys implication that a city of eight million people, engaged in all the complexities of
modern life, should learn how humans are supposed to live together by studying an encampment of college
students. The actual sins of Wall Street, by contrast, are much less visible. For example, when you read Occupying
Wall Street, the work of a team of writers who participated in the protests, you first hear about the subject of
predatory lending when a sympathetic policeman mentions it in the course of a bust. The authors themselves never
if you want to know how the people in Zuccotti intended to block the
banks agendahow they intended to stop predatory lending, for example you
have truly come to the wrong place. Not because its hard to figure out how to stop predatory lending,
but because the way the Occupy campaign is depicted in these books , it seems to have had no
intention of doing anything except building communities in public spaces and
inspiring mankind with its noble refusal to have leaders. Unfortunately, though, thats
not enough. Building a democratic movement culture is essential for movements on the left, but its also just a
bring it up. And
starting point. Occupy never evolved beyond it. It did not call for a subtreasury system, like the Populists did. It
didnt lead a strike (a real one, that is), or a sit-in, or a blockade of a recruitment center, or a takeover of the deans
With Occupy, the

horizontal culture was everything. The process is the message , as the
office. The IWW free-speech fights of a century ago look positively Prussian by comparison.
protesters used to say and as most of the books considered here largely concur. The aforementioned camping, the
Beyond that
there seems to have been virtually no strategy to speak of, no agenda to transmit
to the world. * * * Whether or not to have demands, you might recall, was something that Occupy protesters
cooking, the general-assembling, the filling of public places: thats what Occupy was all about.
debated hotly among themselves in the days when Occupy actually occupied something. Reading these books a
year later, however, that debate seems to have been consensed out of existence. Virtually none of the authors
reviewed here will say forthrightly that the failure to generate demands was a tactical mistake. On the contrary: the
quasi-official account of the episode (Occupying Wall Street) laughs off demands as a fetish object of literal-minded
media types who stupidly crave hierarchy and chains of command. Chris Hedges tells us that demands were
something required only by the elites, and their mouthpieces in the media. Enlightened people, meanwhile, are
supposed to know better; demands imply the legitimacy of the adversary, meaning the U.S. government and its
Launching a protest with no formal demands is thought to be a great

accomplishment, a gesture of surpassing democratic virtue. And here we come to
the basic contradiction of the campaign. To protest Wall Street in 2011 was to
protest, obviously, the outrageous financial misbehavior that gave us the Great
Recession; it was to protest the political power of money , which gave us the bailouts; it was to
friends, the banks.
protest the runaway compensation practices that have turned our societys productive labor into bonuses for the 1
All three of these catastrophes, however, were brought on by deregulation

and tax-cuttingby a philosophy of liberation as anarchic in its rhetoric as
Occupy was in reality. Check your premises, Rand-fans: it was the bankers own
uprising against the hated state that wrecked the American way of life. Nor does it
require poststructuralism-leading-through-anarchism to understand how to reverse these
developments. You do it by rebuilding a powerful and competent regulatory
state. You do it by rebuilding the labor movement. You do it with
bureaucracy. Occupiers often seemed aware of this. Recall what you heard so frequently from protesters
lips back in the days of September 2011: Restore the old Glass-Steagall divide between investment and
commercial banks, they insisted. Bring back big government! Bring back safety! Bring
back boredom! But thats no way to fire the imagination of the world. So, how do
you maintain the carnival while secretly lusting for the CPAs? By
indefinitely suspending the obvious next step. By having no demands. Demands
would have signaled that humorless, doctrinaire adults were back in charge and
that the fun was over. This was an inspired way to play the situation in the beginning, and for a time it was
a great success. But it also put a clear expiration date on the protests. As long as demands and the rest
of the logocentric requirements were postponed, Occupy could never graduate to
the next level. It would remain captive to what Christopher Lasch criticizedway back in 1973as the
cult of participation, in which the experience of protesting is what protesting is all
about.
percent.
Gratuitous Violence
Basing politics on the gratuitous violence of racism usurps understanding
of political economythis legitimizes neoliberal ideology and mystifies
class antagonism
Reed 2013 professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania,
specializing in race and American politics. He has taught at Yale, Northwestern and
the New School for Social Research. An expert on racial and economic inequality, he
is a founding member of the Labor Party and a frequent contributor to The Nation
(2/25, Adolph, Nonsite, Django Unchained, or, The Help: How Cultural Politics Is
Worse Than No Politics at All, and Why, http://nonsite.org/feature/djangounchained-or-the-help-how-cultural-politics-is-worse-than-no-politics-at-all-and-why)
In both films the bogus happy endings are possible only because they characterize their respective regimes of racial hierarchy in the
superficial terms of interpersonal transactions. In The Help segregationisms evil was small-minded bigotry and lack of sensitivity; it
In Tarantinos vision, slaverys definitive injustice was

its gratuitous and sadistic brutalization and sexualized degradation. Malevolent, ludicrously
arrogant whites owned slaves most conspicuously to degrade and torture them. Apart
was more like bad manners than oppression.
from serving a formal dinner in a plantation houseand Tarantino, the Chance the Gardener of American filmmakers (and Best
Original Screenplay? Really?) seems to draw his images of plantation life from Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind, as well as
Tarantinos slaves do no actual

work at all; theyre present only to be brutalized. In fact, the cavalier sadism with
which owners and traders treat them belies the fact that slaves were, first and
foremost, capital investments. Its not for nothing that New Orleans has a
monument to the estimated 20,000-30,000 antebellum Irish immigrants who died
constructing the New Basin Canal; slave labor was too valuable for such lethal
work. The Help trivializes Jim Crow by reducing it to its most superficial
features and irrational extremes. The master-servant nexus was, and is, a labor
relation. And the problem of labor relations particular to the segregationist regime
wasnt employers bigoted lack of respect or failure to hear the voices of the
domestic servants, or even benighted refusal to recognize their equal humanity. It was that the labor relation
was structured within and sustained by a political and institutional order
that severely impinged on, when it didnt altogether deny, black citizens avenues for
pursuit of grievances and standing before the law. The crucial lynchpin of that
order was neither myopia nor malevolence; it was suppression of black citizens capacities for
direct participation in civic and political life, with racial disfranchisement and the constant
threat of terror intrinsic to substantive denial of equal protection and due process before the law as its principal
mechanisms. And the point of the regime wasnt racial hatred or enforced disregard;
its roots lay in the much more prosaic concern of dominant elites to maintain
their political and economic hegemony by suppressing potential opposition and in the
linked ideal of maintaining access to a labor force with no options but to accept employment on
whatever terms employers offered. (Those who liked The Help or found it moving should watch The Long Walk
old Warner Brothers cartoonsand the Mandingo fighters and comfort girls,
Home, a 1990 film set in Montgomery, Alabama, around the bus boycott. I suspect thats the film you thought you were watching
when you saw The Help.) Django
Unchained trivializes slavery by reducing it to its

most barbaric and lurid excesses. Slavery also was fundamentally a labor
relation. It was a form of forced labor regulatedsystematized, enforced and sustained
through a political and institutional order that specified it as a civil
relationship granting owners absolute control over the life, liberty, and fortunes of others
defined as eligible for enslavement, including most of all control of the conditions of their labor and appropriation of
Historian Kenneth M. Stampp quotes a slaveholders succinct explanation:

For what purpose does the master hold the servant ? asked an ante-bellum Southerner. Is it
not that by his labor, he, the master, may accumulate wealth?1 That absolute control
its product.
permitted horrible, unthinkable brutality, to be sure, but perpetrating such

brutality was neither the point of slavery nor its essential injustice . The masterslave relationship could, and did, exist without brutality, and certainly without sadism and sexual degradation. In Tarantinos
It does not
diminish the historical injustice and horror of slavery to note that it was not the
product of sui generis, transcendent Evil but a terminus on a continuum of
bound labor that was more norm than exception in the Anglo-American world until well into the
eighteenth century, if not later. As legal historian Robert Steinfeld points out, it is not so much slavery, but the
emergence of the notion of free laboras the absolute control of a worker over her
personthat is the historical anomaly that needs to be explained.2 Django
Unchained sanitizes the essential injustice of slavery by not problematizing it and by
focusing instead on the extremes of brutality and degradation it permitted, to the
depiction, however, it is not clear that slavery shorn of its extremes of brutality would be objectionable.
extent of making some of them up, just as does The Help regarding Jim Crow. The Help could not imagine a more honest and
complex view of segregationist Mississippi partly because it uses the period ultimately as a prop for human interest clich, and
Django Unchaineds absurdly ahistorical view of plantation slavery is only backdrop for the merger of spaghetti western and
Neither film is really about the period in which it is set.

Film critic Manohla Dargis, reflecting a decade ago on what she saw as a
growing Hollywood penchant for period films, observed that such films are
typically stripped of politics and historical fact and instead will find meaning in appealing to
blaxploitation hero movie.
seemingly timeless ideals and stirring scenes of love, valor and compassion and that the Hollywood professionals who embrace
accuracy most enthusiastically nowadays are costume designers.3 That observation applies to both these films, although in Django
concern with historically accurate representation of material culture applies only to the costumes and props of the 1970s film genres
Tarantino wants to recall. To make sense of how Django Unchained has received so much warmer a reception among black and
leftoid commentators than did The Help, it is useful to recall Margaret Thatchers 1981 dictum that economics are the method: the
Few observersamong
opponents and boosters alikehave noted how deeply and thoroughly
both films are embedded in the practical ontology of neoliberalism , the complex
object is to change the soul.4 Simply put, she and her element have won.
of unarticulated assumptions and unexamined first premises that provide its common sense, its lifeworld. Objection to The Help has
been largely of the shooting fish in a barrel variety: complaints about the films paternalistic treatment of the maids, which generally
have boiled down to an objection that the master-servant relation is thematized at all, as well as the standard, predictable litany of
anti-racist charges about whites speaking for blacks, the films inattentiveness to the fact that at that time in Mississippi black
people were busily engaged in liberating themselves, etc. An illustration of this tendency that conveniently refers to several other
variants of it is Akiba Solomon, Why Im Just Saying No to The Help and Its Historical Whitewash in Color Lines,August 10, 2011,
available at:http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/08/why_im_just_saying_no_to_the_help.html. Defenses
of Django
Unchained pivot on claims about the social significance of the narrative of a black
hero. One node of this argument emphasizes the need to validate a history of
autonomous black agency and resistance as a politico-existential
desideratum. It accommodates a view that stresses the importance of recognition of
rebellious or militant individuals and revolts in black American history. Another centers
on a notion that exposure to fictional black heroes can inculcate the sense
of personal efficacy necessary to overcome the psychological effects of inequality
and to facilitate upward mobility and may undermine some whites negative stereotypes about black people. In either register
assignment of social or political importance to depictions of black heroes rests on

presumptions about the nexus of mass cultural representation, social commentary, and racial justice that
are more significant politically than the controversy about the film itself . In
both versions, this argument casts political and economic problems in psychological
terms. Injustice appears as a matter of disrespect and denial of due recognition, and the remedies proposed
which are all about images projected and the distribution of jobs associated with their projection
look a lot like self-esteem engineering. Moreover, nothing could indicate
more strikingly the extent of neoliberal ideological hegemony than the idea that
the mass culture industry and its representational practices constitute a meaningful terrain
for struggle to advance egalitarian interests. It is possible to entertain that view seriously only
by ignoring the fact that the production and consumption of mass culture is thoroughly
embedded in capitalist material and ideological imperatives. That, incidentally, is why I prefer
the usage mass culture to describe this industry and its products and processes, although I recognize that it may seem archaic to
some readers. The mass culture v. popular culture debate dates at least from the 1950s and has continued with occasional
crescendos ever since.5 For two decades or more, instructively in line with the retreat of possibilities for concerted left political
action outside the academy, the popular culture side of that debate has been dominant, along with its view that the products of this
precinct of mass consumption capitalism are somehow capable of transcending or subverting their material identity as commodities,
Despite the dogged commitment of several generations of American

graduate students who want to valorize watching television
and immersion in hip-hop or other specialty market niches centered on youth recreation and
the most ephemeral fads as both intellectually avant-garde and politically resistive, it
should be time to admit that that earnest disposition is intellectually shallow and an
ersatz politics. The idea of popular culture posits a spurious autonomy and
organicism that actually affirm mass industrial processes by effacing
them, especially in the putatively rebel, fringe, or underground market niches that
depend on the fiction of the authentic to announce the birth of new product cycles.
The power of the hero is a cathartic trope that connects mainly with the sensibility of adolescent boys
of whatever nominal age. Tarantino has allowed as much, responding to black critics complaints about the violence and
if not avoiding that identity altogether.
Studies and cultural studies
copious use of nigger by proclaiming Even for the films biggest detractors, I think their children will grow up and love this movie.
I think it could become a rite of passage for young black males.6 This response stems no doubt from Tarantinos arrogance and
is hardly alone in
defending the film with an assertion that it gives black youth heroes, is
generically inspirational or both. Similarly, in a January 9, 2012 interview on the Daily Show, George Lucas
opportunism, and some critics have denounced it as no better than racially presumptuous. But he
adduced this line to promote his even more execrable race-oriented live-action cartoon, Red Tails, which, incidentally, trivializes
segregation in the military by reducing it to a matter of bad or outmoded attitudes. The ironic effect is significant understatement of
both the obstacles the Tuskegee airmen faced and their actual accomplishments by rendering them as backdrop for a blackface,
slapped-together remake of Top Gun. (Norman Jewisons 1984 film, A Soldiers Story, adapted from Charles Fullers A Soldiers Play,
is a much more sensitive and thought-provoking rumination on the complexities of race and racism in the Jim Crow U.S. Armyan
army mobilized, as my father, a veteran of the Normandy invasion, never tired of remarking sardonically, to fight the racist Nazis.)
Lucas characterized his film as patriotic, even jingoistic and was explicit that he wanted to create a film that would feature real
heroes and would be inspirational for teenage boys. Much as Django Unchaineds defenders compare it on those terms favorably
to Lincoln, Lucas hyped Red Tails as being a genuine hero story unlike Glory, where you have a lot of white officers running those
guys into cannon fodder. Of course, the film industry is sharply tilted toward the youth market, as Lucas and Tarantino are acutely
aware. But Lucas, unlike Tarantino, was not being defensive in asserting his desire to inspire the young; he offered it more as a
boast. As he has said often, hed wanted for years to make a film about the Tuskegee airmen, and he reports that he always
intended telling their story as a feel-good, crossover inspirational tale. Telling it that way also fits in principle (though in this instance
not in practice, as Red Tails bombed at the box office) with the commercial imperatives of increasingly degraded mass
entertainment. Dargis observed that the ahistoricism of the recent period films is influenced by market imperatives in a global film
industry. The more a film is tied to historically specific contexts, the more difficult it is to sell elsewhere. That logic selects for special
effects-driven products as well as standardized, decontextualized and simplisticuniversalstory lines, preferably set in fantasy
worlds of the filmmakers design. As Dargis notes, these films find their meaning in shopworn clichs puffed up as timeless verities,
including uplifting and inspirational messages for youth. But something else underlies the stress on inspiration in the black-interest
these filmsThe Help, Red Tails, Django Unchained, even

a claim to public attention based partly on their social
significance beyond entertainment or art, and they do so because they engage
with significant moments in the history of the nexus of race and politics in the United States. There would
films, which shows up in critical discussion of them as well. All
Lincoln and Glorymake
not be so much discussion and debate and no Golden Globe, NAACP Image, or Academy Award nominations for The Help, Red Tails,
or Django Unchained if those films werent defined partly by thematizing that nexus of race and politics in some way. The
pretensions to social significance that fit these films into their particular market niche dont conflict
with the mass-market film industrys imperative of infantilization because those
pretensions are only part of the show; they are little more than empty bromides,
product differentiation in the patter of seemingly timeless ideals which the mass
entertainment industry constantly recycles . (Andrew OHehir observes as much about Django Unchained,
which he describes as a three-hour trailer for a movie that never happens.7) That comes through in the defense of these films, in
Their substantive content is

ideological; it is their contribution to the naturalization of neoliberalisms
ontology as they propagandize its universalization across spatial,
temporal, and social contexts. Purportedly in the interest of popular education cum entertainment, Django
the face of evidence of their failings, that, after all, they are just entertainment.
Unchained and The Help, and Red Tails for that matter, read the sensibilities of the present into the past by divesting the latter of its
They reinforce the sense of the past as generic old-timey times

distinguishable from the present by superficial inadequacies outmoded fashion, technology,
specific historicity.
commodities and ideassince overcome. In The Help Hillys obsession with her pet project marks segregations petty apartheid as
irrational in part because of the expense rigorously enforcing it would require; the breadwinning husbands express their frustration
with it as financially impractical. Hilly is a mean-spirited, narrow-minded person whose rigid and tone-deaf commitment to
segregationist consistency not only reflects her limitations of character but also is economically unsound, a fact that further defines
her, and the cartoon version of Jim Crow she represents, as irrational. The
deeper message of these films, insofar as
is that there is no thinkable alternative to the

ideological order under which we live. This message is reproduced throughout the mass entertainment
industry; it shapes the normative reality even of the fantasy worlds that masquerade as
escapism. Even among those who laud the supposedly cathartic effects of
Djangos insurgent violence as reflecting a greater truth of abolition than
passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, few commentators notice that he
and Broomhilda attained their freedom through a market transaction .8 This
reflects an ideological hegemony in which students all too commonly
wonder why planters would deny slaves or sharecroppers education
because education would have made them more productive as workers . And,
tellingly, in a glowing rumination in the Daily Kos, Ryan Brooke inadvertently thrusts mass
cultures destruction of historicity into bold relief by declaiming on the segregated society
presented in Django Unchained and babbling onwith the absurdly ill-informed and pontifical selfrighteousness that the blogosphere enablesabout our need to take
responsibility for preserving racial divides if we are to put segregation in the past and fully
fulfill Dr. Kings dream.9 Its all an indistinguishable mush of bad stuff about racial injustice in the old-timey days . Decoupled
from its moorings in a historically specific political economy, slavery becomes at
bottom a problem of race relations, and, as historian Michael R. West argues forcefully,
race relations emerged as and has remained a discourse that substitutes
etiquette for equality.10 This is the context in which we should take account of what inspiring the young
they deny the integrity of the past,
means as a justification for those films. In part, the claim to inspire is a simple platitude, more filler than substance. It is, as Ive
already noted, both an excuse for films that are cartoons made for an infantilized, generic market and an assertion of a claim to a
particular niche within that market. More insidiously, though, the ease with which inspiration of youth rolls out in this context
resonates with three related and disturbing themes: 1) underclass ideologys narrativesnow all Americans common sensethat
the belief that

racial inequality stems from prejudice, bad ideas and ignorance, and 3) the cognate
of both: the neoliberal rendering of social justice as equality of opportunity, with an aspiration of creating
competitive individual minority agents who might stand a better fighting chance
in the neoliberal rat race rather than a positive alternative vision of a
society that eliminates the need to fight constantly against disruptive
market whims in the first place.11 This politics seeps through in the chatter about Django Unchained in
particular. Erin Aubry Kaplan, in the Los Angeles Times article in which Tarantino asserts his appeal to youth,
remarks that the most disturbing detail [about slavery] is the emotional
violence and degradation directed at blacks that effectively keeps them at the bottom
of the social order, a place they still occupy today. Writing on the Institute of the Black World
link poverty and inequality most crucially to (racialized) cultural inadequacy and psychological damage; 2)
blog, one Dr. Kwa David Whitaker, a 1960s-style cultural nationalist, declaims on Djangos testament to the sources of degradation
and unending servitude [that] has rendered [black Americans] almost incapable of making sound evaluations of our current
In its blindness to political economy,

this notion of black cultural or psychological damage as either a legacy of
slavery or of more indirect recent origine.g., urban migration, crack epidemic, matriarchy, babies making babies
comports well with the reduction of slavery and Jim Crow to interpersonal
dynamics and bad attitudes. It substitutes a politics of recognition and a patter of
racial uplift for politics and underwrites a conflation of political action and therapy . With
respect to the nexus of race and inequality, this discourse supports victim-blaming programs of personal
rehabilitation and self-esteem engineering inspirationas easily as it does multiculturalist
respect for difference, which, by the way, also feeds back to self-esteem engineering and
inspiration as nodes within a larger political economy of race relations . Either
way, this is a discourse that displaces a politics challenging social structures
that reproduce inequality with concern for the feelings and characteristics
of individuals and of categories of population statistics reified as singular groups that are equivalent to individuals. This
discourse has made it possible (again, but more sanctimoniously this time) to characterize
destruction of low-income housing as an uplift strategy for poor people; curtailment
situations or the kind of steps we must take to improve our condition.12
of access to public education as choice; being cut adrift from essential social
wage protections as empowerment; and individual material success as socially important
role modeling.
Neoliberalisms triumph is affirmed with unselfconscious clarity in the ostensibly
leftist defenses of Django Unchained that center on the theme of slaves having liberated themselves. Trotskyists, wouldbe anarchists, and psychobabbling identitarians have their respective sectarian
garnishes: Trotskyists see everywhere the bugbear of bureaucratism and mystify
self-activity; anarchists similarly fetishize direct action and voluntarism and
oppose large-scale public institutions on principle, and identitarians romanticize
essentialist notions of organic, folkish authenticity under constant threat from
institutions. However, all are indistinguishable from the nominally libertarian
right in their disdain for government and institutionally based political
action, which their common reflex is to disparage as inauthentic or
corrupt.
Focus on slavery
Insisting on transhistorical primacy of slavery is intellectually dangerous
and should be rejected
(2/25, Adolph, Nonsite, Django Unchained, or, The Help: How Cultural Politics Is
Worse Than No Politics at All, and Why, http://nonsite.org/feature/djangounchained-or-the-help-how-cultural-politics-is-worse-than-no-politics-at-all-and-why)
That sort of Malcolm X/blaxploitation narrative, including the insistence that Birth of a Nation and Gone With the
a line of anti-racist
argument and mobilization that asserts powerful continuities between current racial
inequalities and either slavery or the Jim Crow regime. This line of argument has been most
popularly condensed recently in Michelle Alexanders The New Jim Crow, which analogizes contemporary
mass incarceration to the segregationist regime. But even she, after much
huffing and puffing and asserting the relation gesturally throughout the book, ultimately
acknowledges that the analogy fails.37 And it would have to fail because the
segregationist regime was the artifact of a particular historical and political moment in
a particular social order. Moreover, the rhetorical force of the analogy with Jim Crow or
slavery derives from the fact that those regimes are associated
symbolically with strong negative sanctions in the general culture because
they have been vanquished. In that sense all versions of the lament that its as if
nothing has changed give themselves the lie. They are effective only to the
extent that things have changed significantly. The tendency to craft political
critique by demanding that we fix our gaze in the rearview mirror appeals to an
intellectual laziness. Marking superficial similarities with familiar images of
oppression is less mentally taxing than attempting to parse the
multifarious, often contradictory dynamics and relations that shape racial inequality
in particular and politics in general in the current moment. Assertions that
phenomena like the Jena, Louisiana, incident, the killings of James Craig Anderson and Trayvon
Martin, and racial disparities in incarceration demonstrate persistence of oldschool, white supremacist racism and charges that the sensibilities of Thomas Dixon and
Margaret Mitchell continue to shape most Americans understandings of slavery do important, obfuscatory
ideological work. They lay claim to a moral urgency that, as Mahmood Mamdani
argues concerning the rhetorical use of charges of genocide, enables disparaging efforts either
to differentiate discrete inequalities or to generate historically specific causal
accounts of them as irresponsible dodges that abet injustice by temporizing in its face.38 But
more is at work here as well. Insistence on the transhistorical primacy of racism as a
source of inequality is a class politics. Its the politics of a stratum of the
professional-managerial class whose material location and interests, and thus whose
ideological commitments, are bound up with parsing, interpreting and administering
inequality defined in terms of disparities among ascriptively defined populations
reified as groups or even cultures. In fact, much of the intellectual life of this
stratum is devoted to shoehorning into the rubric of racism all manner of
inequalities that may appear statistically as racial disparities.39 And that project
shares capitalisms ideological tendency to obscure races foundations, as
well as the foundations of all such ascriptive hierarchies, in historically
specific political economy. This felicitous convergence may help explain why proponents of cultural
Wind continue to shape Americans understandings of slavery, also is of a piece with
politics are so inclined to treat the products and production processes of the mass entertainment industry as a
terrain for political struggle and debate. They dont see the industrys imperatives as fundamentally incompatible
they share its fetishization of

heroes and penchant for inspirational stories of individual Overcoming.
This sort of politics of representation is no more than an imagemanagement discourse within neoliberalism. That strains of an ersatz left imagine it
to be something more marks the extent of our defeat . And then, of course, theres that Upton
with the notions of a just society they seek to advance. In fact,
Sinclair point.
AT
AT: Perm
They don't get a perma perm is a test of competitiveness between policy
optionsthat model doesn't make sense when the debate is between
amorphous philosophical positions because you can't really tie them down
to anything. They can always explain why in the abstract certain things
they said are compatible with Marxism but that just raises the question of
why they included the rest.
Even if cap is experienced racially for themthat doesnt deny our
argumenteven if they destabilize racecap ensures a constant
reshuffling of artificial divisionsperm is deck chairs
Dave Hill, teaches at Middlesex University and is Visiting Professor of Critical Education Policy and Equality Studies
at the University of Limerick, Ireland. Culturalist and Materialist Explanations of Class and "Race", Cultural Logic
2009 http://clogic.eserver.org/2009/Hill.pdf
In contrast to both Critical Race Theorists and revisionist socialists/left
liberals/equivalence theorists, and those who see caste as the primary form of
oppression, Marxists would agree that objectively- whatever our race or gender
or sexuality or current level of academic attainment or religious identity, whatever
the individual and group history and fear of oppression and attack- the
fundamental objective and material form of oppression in capitalism is
class oppression. Black and Women capitalists, or Jewish and Arab capitalists , or
Dalit capitalists in India, exploit the labour power of their multi-ethnic men and women
workers, essentially (in terms of the exploitation of labour power and the appropriation of surplus value) in
just the same way as do white male capitalists, or upper-caste capitalists. But the
subjective consciousness of identity, this subjective affirmation of one particular identity, while
seared into the souls of its victims, should not mask the objective nature of
contemporary oppression under capitalism class oppression that, of course, hits some
raced and gendered and caste and occupational sections of the working class harder than others. Martha
Gimenez (2001:24) succinctly explains that class is not simply another ideology
legitimating oppression. Rather, class denotes exploitative relations between
people mediated by their relations to the means of production. Apples
parallellist, or equivalence model of exploitation (equivalence of exploitation based on race, class and
gender, his tryptarchic model of inequality) produces valuable data and insights into aspects of and
the extent and manifestations of gender oppression and race oppression in capitalist USA. However, such
analyses serve to occlude the class-capital relation, the class struggle, to
obscure an essential and defining nature of capitalism, class conflict.
Objectively, whatever our race or gender or caste or sexual orientation or scholastic attainment,
whatever the individual and group history and fear of oppression and attack, the
fundamental form of oppression in capitalism is class oppression . While the
capitalist class is predominantly white and male, capital in theory and in practice
can be blind to colour and gender and caste even if that does not happen very often. African
Marxist-Leninists such as Ngugi wa Thiongo (e.g., Ngugi wa Thiongo and Ngugi wa Mirii, 1985) know very well that
when the white colonialist oppressors were ejected from direct rule over
African states in the 1950s and 60s, the white bourgeoisie in some African states
such as Kenya was replaced by a black bourgeoisie, acting in concert with
transnational capital and/or capital(ists) of the former colonial power. Similarly in
India, capitalism is no longer exclusively white . It is Indian, not white British alone. As Bellamy
observes, the diminution of class analysis denies immanent critique of any
critical bite, effectively disarming a meaningful opposition to the
capitalist thesis (Bellamy, 1997:25). And as Harvey notes, neoliberal rhetoric, with its
foundational emphasis upon individual freedoms, has the power to split off
libertarianism, identity politics, multiculturalism, and eventually narcissistic
consumerism from the social forces ranged in pursuit of justice through the
conquest of state power. (Harvey, 2005:41) To return to the broader relationship between race, gender,
and social class, and to turn to the USA, are there many who would deny that Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell
have more in common with the Bushes and the rest of the Unites States capitalist class, be it white, black or
Latina/o, than they do with the workers whose individual ownership of wealth and power is an infinetismal fraction
The various oppressions, of caste,

gender, race, religion, for example, are functional in dividing the working class and
securing the reproduction of capital; constructing social conflict between men and
women, or black and white, or different castes, or tribes, or religious groups, or
skilled and unskilled, thereby tending to dissolve the conflict between capital and
labor, thus occluding the class-capital relation, the class struggle, and to obscure
the essential and defining nature of capitalism, the labor-capital relation and its
attendant class conflict.
of those individual members of the ruling and capitalist class?
Even if inequality manifests in racial term, if we win race is a flawed

explanation for that inequality then their politics can only stand in for
class consciousnessthat makes the right more influential and abandons
any sort of political accountability
(November, Adolph, The Real Divide, http://progressive.org/mag_reed1105)
Race in this context becomes a cheap and safely predictable alternative to
pressing a substantive critique of the sources of this horror in New Orleans and its
likely outcomes. Granted, the images projected from the Superdome, the convention center, overpasses,
and rooftops seemed to cry out a stark statement of racial inequality. But
thats partly because in the contemporary U.S., race is the most familiar
language of inequality or injustice. Its what we see partly because its what
were accustomed to seeing, what we look for. As I argued in The Nation, classas income,
wealth, and access to material resources, including a safety net of social
connectionswas certainly a better predictor than race of who evacuated
the city before the hurricane, who was able to survive the storm itself, who was warehoused in the
Superdome or convention center or stuck without food and water on the parched overpasses, who is marooned in
shelters in Houston or elsewhere, and whose interests will be factored into the reconstruction of the city, who will be
New Orleans is a predominantly black city, and it is a largely

poor city. The black population is disproportionately poor, and the poor population is
disproportionately black. It is not surprising that those who were stranded and forgotten, probably
those who died, were conspicuously black and poor. None of that, however, means that race
or even racism is adequate as an explanation of those patterns of inequality. And
race is especially useless as a basis on which to craft a politics that can
effectively pursue social justice. Before the yes, buts begin, I am not
claiming that systemic inequalities in the United States are not significantly racialized.
able to return.
The evidence of racial disparities is far too great for any sane or honest person to deny, and they largely emerge
Nor am I saying that we should overlook

that fact in the interest of some idealized nonracial or post-racial politics. Let me be
blunter than Ive ever been in print about what I am saying: As a political strategy, exposing
racism is wrongheaded and at best an utter waste of time. It is the political equivalent of an
from a history of discrimination and racial injustice.
appendix: a useless vestige of an earlier evolutionary moment thats usually innocuous but can flare up and
the language of race and racism

is too imprecise to describe effectively even how patterns of injustice and
inequality are racialized in a post-Jim Crow world. Racism can cover everything from
individual prejudice and bigotry, unself-conscious perception of racial stereotypes,
concerted group action to exclude or subordinate, or the results of ostensibly
neutral market forces. It can be a one-word description and explanation of
patterns of unequal distribution of income and wealth, services and opportunities, police
brutality, a stockbrokers inability to get a cab, neighborhood dislocation
and gentrification, poverty, unfair criticism of black or Latino athletes, or being denied
admission to a boutique. Because the category is so porous, it doesnt really
explain anything. Indeed, it is an alternative to explanation. Exposing racism apparently
makes those who do it feel good about themselves. Doing so is cathartic,
though safely so, in the same way that proclaiming ones patriotism is in
other circles. It is a summary, concluding judgment rather than a preliminary to a concrete argument. It
become harmful. There are two reasons for this judgment. One is that
doesnt allow for politically significant distinctions; in fact, as a strategy, exposing racism requires subordinating the
discrete features of a political situation to the overarching goal of asserting the persistence and power of racism as
Many liberals gravitate to the

language of racism not simply because it makes them feel righteous but
also because it doesnt carry any political warrant beyond exhorting people not to
be racist. In fact, it often is exactly the opposite of a call to action. Such formulations as racism is our
national disease or similar pieties imply that racism is a natural condition. Further, it
implies that most whites inevitably and immutably oppose blacks and
therefore cant be expected to align with them around common political
goals. This view dovetails nicely with Democrats contention that the only way to win elections is to reject a
an abstraction. This leads to the second reason for my harsh judgment.
social justice agenda that is stigmatized by association with blacks and appeal to an upper-income white
Upper-status liberals
are more likely to have relatively secure, rewarding jobs, access to health care, adequate
housing, and prospects for providing for the kids education, and are much less likely to be in danger of
seeing their nineteen-year-old go off to Iraq. They tend, therefore, to have a higher
threshold of tolerance for political compromises in the name of electing this years sorry
pro-corporate Democrat. Acknowledging racismand, of course, being pro-choice
is one of the few ways many of them can distinguish themselves from their
Republican co-workers and relatives. As the appendix analogy suggests, insistence on understanding
constituency concerned exclusively with issues like abortion rights and the deficit.
inequality in racial terms is a vestige of an earlier political style. The race line persists partly out of habit and partly
because it connects with the material interests of those who would be race relations technicians. In this sense, race
The tendency to insist on the primacy of race itself

stems from a class perspective. For roughly a generation it seemed
reasonable to expect that defining inequalities in racial terms would
provoke some, albeit inadequate, remedial response from the federal government. But thats no
longer the case; nor has it been for quite some time. That approach presumed a federal government
that was concerned at least not to appear racially unjust. Such a government no
longer exists. A key marker of the rights victory in national politics is that the
discussion of race now largely serves as a way to reinforce a message to
whites that the public sector is there merely to help some combination of
black, poor, and loser. Liberals have legitimized this perspective through their own racial bad faith. For
is not an alternative to class.
many whites, the discussion of race also reinforces the idea that cutting public spending is justifiably aimed at
weaning a lazy black underclass off the dole orin the supposedly benign, liberal Democratic versionteaching
New Orleans is instructive. The right has a built-in

counter to the racism charge by mobilizing all the scurrilous racial stereotypes
that it has propagated to justify attacks on social protection and
government responsibility all along. Only those who already are inclined to
them personal responsibility.
believe that racism is the source of inequality accept that charge. For others, nasty victimblaming narratives abound to explain away obvious racial disparities. What we must do, to pursue
justice for displaced, impoverished New Orleanians as well as for the society as a whole, is to emphasize
that their plight is a more extreme, condensed version of the precarious
position of millions of Americans today, as more and more lose health care,
bankruptcy protection, secure employment, affordable housing, civil liberties, and access to
education. And their plight will be the future of many , many more people in
this country once the bipartisan neoliberal consensus reduces government
to a tool of corporations and the investor class alone.
AT: Celebrating diversity good

Celebrating diversity cant resolve economic inequality ---- serves as a
distraction helping the rich --- poverty is comparatively more unjust
Obviously, it didnt work out that way, either for labor (which is weaker than its ever been) or for Labor Day (which mainly marks the end of summer). You get bigger crowds, a lot livelier party and a much stronger sense of solidarity
for Gay Pride Day. But Gay Pride Day isnt about economic equality, and
celebrating diversity shouldnt be an acceptable
alternative to seeking economic equality In an ideal universe we wouldnt be

celebrating diversity at all we wouldnt even be encouraging it
in an ideal
universe the question of who you wanted to sleep with would be a matter of
concern only to you and to your loved (or unloved) ones. As would skin color;
Diversity of skin color is something we should
happily take for minted, the way we do diversity of hair color.
the question of whether youre black or white, straight or gay, a man or a woman
shouldn't matter
. An important issue of social justice hangs
on not discriminating against people because of their hair color or their skin color or
their sexuality
no issue of social justice hangs on
.
because
some people
might like it, some people might not but it would have no political significance whatsoever.
When you go to school or to workjust like when you go to
vote
any more than the question of whether you are blond or brunette
. No issue of social justice hangs on appreciating hair color diversity;
appreciating racial or cultural diversity If youre worried about the growing

economic inequality
that there may be something unjust as well as
unpleasant in the spectacle of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer,
no cause is less worth supporting, no battle is less worth fighting than
.
;in American life, if you suspect
the ones we fight for diversity

while
radicals of the tenured left continue to struggle for what they hope will
finally become a truly inclusive multiculturalism, the really radical idea of
redistributing wealth becomes almost literally unthinkable n the early 1930s,
Long
proposed a law making it illegal for anyone to earn more than a million
dollars a year and for anyone to inherit more than five million dollars
Such
a restriction today would seem as outrageous and unnatural as interracial-not to
mention gaymarriage seemed or would have seemed then we dont need to
. While some cultural conservatives may wish that everyone should be assimilated to their fantasy of one truly American culture, and
the supposed
.I
Senator Huey
of Louisiana
. Imagine the response ifeven suitably
adjusted for inflationany senator were to propose such a law today, cutting off incomes at, say, $15 million a year and inheritances at $75 million. Its not just the numbers that wouldnt fly; its the whole concept.
. But
purchase our progress in civil rights at the expense of a commitment to

economic justice.
we should not
phantasm of respect
for difference to take the place of that commitment to economic justice
the commitment to diversity is at best a distraction and at worst an
essentially reactionary position
More fundamentally still,
allowor we should not continue to allowthe
. In short, this book is an effort to
move beyond diversityto make it clear that
and to help put equality back on the national agenda.
AT: Race is biological

The concept of race is biologically false --- its a social construct
In what way are people who have the one drop fundamentally like each
other and people who dont have it fundamentally different from the people who
do?
we talk about genes,
the more we know about
genetic heritage, the more skeptical most scientists have become about the
But what is this unity?
Today we dont talk so much about blood anymore,
and we are able to trace peoples ancestry with a specificity that would have amazed even the most passionate
nineteenth-century aficionados of physical difference and racial instincts. But it would also have disappointed them, because it has turned out that
idea of race
. In fact,
the dominant scientific view now is that race is a myth, and that
as a biological rather than a social construct, race has ceased to be
in the words of R. W. Lewontin,
seen as a fundamental reality characterizing the human species The reason

for this is not,
that there arent any physical differences
People clearly do
have different skin colors
genetic variation within populations belonging to what we call the same race is
often greater than genetic variation between races
a person from the
Congo and a person from Mali are more likely to be genetically different from each
other than either is from a person from Belgium Hence it doesnt make genetic
.4
of course,
between people.
and different textures of hair, and we all have ancestors who came from different places or who came out of Africa at different times. The problem is that
. So Joseph Graves puts it,
sense to think of people from Mali and the Congo as belonging to the same race
and of
Belgians as belonging to a different race. On the one hand, then, there are people whose ancestors came from Belgium and people whose ancestors came from Mali and people whose ancestors came from Thailand. But, on the other
its not that there arent physical differences (in

this sense the Court in Plessy had it right); its just that there arent physical
differences between races.
hand, there isnt (at least from the scientific standpoint) any white or black or Asian race. So
Race isnt biological --- its a social construction used to pit groups against
each other and prop up elite control
On the one hand, there are physical connections between us and
the past that distinguish us from one another
On the other hand, we
cant really get much cultural mileage out of these connections
Its not hard to see the general problem here.
: your ancestors are not my ancestors.
. If your ancestors lived in the tropics and mine lived in
Eastern Europe, youre more likely to be born with sickle cell and Im more likely to get Tay-Sachs. And youre also more likely to be taught Bantu than Yiddish, whereas for me its the other way around. But youre not more likely to
be born speaking Bantu, and Im not more likely to be born speaking Yiddish.16 We may inherit our diseases from our ancestors and our eye colors and our hair texture, but we dont inherit our languages. And, naturally,
what goes for languages goes also for books and music and art
. If none of the students in my class has read either
does it really
make sense to say there is any such thing as heritage? There are some things we
inherit (our genes), and there are some things we learn
theres no necessary connection between them Theres no reason why people
with a certain set of genes ought to be reading a certain set of books
There are just the things we learn
and the things we dont learn, the things we do and the things we dont do. We
Emerson or Douglass and if biology cant connect the white ones with Emerson or the black ones with Douglass, what sense does it make to say either one belongs to their heritage? Indeed,
(maybe Bantu or English, Emerson and Douglass). But
and thinking of those books as part of
their heritage, or why, when they read some other set of books, they should think of them as part of someone elses heritage.17
can make the same point about cultural identity

If acting
black
were truly a function of being black (having a biologically black
body), then people who had black bodies would inevitably act black and we would
have no need for the notion of cultural identity
we need the idea of black culture precisely because being black is not a
, about acting black or white or Asian or Jewish.
, say,
(belonging to black culture)
. Acting black would be like acting tall (you can reach high things) or short (you cant reach high things).
But as we have seen,
physical fact
its because theres no physical fact of
blackness that
we need the idea of black culture
its also
because theres no physical fact of blackness that we cant hang on to the idea
in the way that being tall or short is. So, on the one hand,
, if we want to hang on to the idea of blackness,
of black culture
, but, on the other,
once we separate cultural diversity from racial diversity

we see that cultural diversity cannot serve as
a stand- in for racial diversity
You cant keep race alive by
translating it into culture
Either race is a physical fact, dividing human
beings into biologically significant differences, or there is no such thing as race,
.
. Why? Because
(the
audiences at concerts may have different-color skins, but they are by definition not culturally diverse),
. There are no boxes for musical taste on your birth certificate.
. We do it, but it makes no sense.
whatever
its called
AT: Hip-hop is inherently black

Nothing is inherently a part of black culture --- the people make the
culture black not the other way around
whats the behavior that makes black people black? There is no
answer You can
be black
and not do any or all of the things currently or
historically associated with black culture conversely, theres nothing you can do
that will make you black
If,
the only people who
listened to or performed hip-hop were white
hip-hop would be a part of
white culture and if every black kid in the country were into emo, emo would be a
part of black culture Its not the blackness of the culture that makes the
So
equivalent
and not like Jay-Z and not wear your hair in cornrows and not eat soul food
. And,
in the same way that same-sex desire makes gay people gay.
starting tomorrow,
(were already halfway there),
people black; its the blackness of the people that makes the culture
black
.15
AT: Black means oppressed

Having a historically contingent definition of a race precludes the
possibility of having a defined culture
Du Bois
wrote that the black
man is a person who must ride Jim Crow in Georgia. But the beliefs
that
underlay the Jim Crow laws have turned out to be mistaken; we no longer believe
them, and we no longer have Jim Crow So the true meaning of Du Boiss definition
should now be clear if a black man is a man who has to ride Jim Crow, now
The American version of Sartres the Jew is one whom others consider a Jew was produced, as we have already noted, by W. E. B.
in 1940 when he
about race
that no one has to ride Jim Crow, there is no such thing as a black man
. Or a white
man either. There are people with different colors of skin, different textures of hair, different heights and different weights, different kinds of abilities and different kinds of disabilities. But there are no people of different races
AT: Poverty was created by racism

Capitalism has redefined the people that need to be excluded from those
with different cultural identities to the poor
money didnt always function as an alternative to
race; sometimes it was a way of insisting on race The poll tax
was one of
several devices used
for
the purpose of drawing the color line where it was
no longer legal to do so. The Fourteenth Amendment had made it unconstitutional to
keep black people from voting because they were black, but it did not
make it illegal to charge a fee for voting. The poll tax could thus be
used to deny most black people the right to vote not because they were black but
(ostensibly) because they were poor.
the Jaw applied to poor whites too,
the
supposedly race-neutral poll tax was in fact one of the first in over a centurys worth
of color-blind efforts to draw the color line
If, however, we look at the history of American apartheid, we will remember that
in the South
, for example,
precisely
(and would not until the passage of the
Twenty-fourth Amendment in 1964)
And if, in theory,
the infamous
grandfather clause set that right. You were exempt from paying the tax if you could prove your grandfather had voted, a test that the children and grandchildren of slaves could never pass. So
. And as the civil rights movement not only undid the apparatus of state-sponsored discrimination but made serious
inroads into the technologies of private discrimination as well, charging people a lot of money (for your food, your school, your golf course and tennis courts) would be a handy way of enforcing the racialized hierarchies of American
The reason you cant get in here is not that your skin is the wrong color; its that
your bank account is too small.
.
What the state now refuses to do, the market will do for it.
the
banner tells the truth about racism: high prices can achieve what the law forbids.
the real joke is
a quite different truth not so much about racism as
life.
OUR PRICES DISCRIMINATE BECAUSE WE CANT, reads the sign at what an old episode of The Simpsons calls the rich peoples mall
Part of the joke in The Simpsons, then, is the way
the way in which the banner tells
But
about the new irrelevance of racism

the
monetarization of the technology of discrimination involves not just a new way of
keeping the wrong people out but a new description of who the wrong people are
not the blacks, not the Jews, but the poor
High prices arent a clever way of keeping out
the poor
People who cant afford to
ride in first class
are the victims of poverty,
. After all, its the rich peoples mall, not the white peoples mall, and
. Its as if the poll tax were being applied but without the grandfather clause. And when the point is put this
way, we can go one step farther and see that the whole idea of the wrong people has become irrelevant.
. The purpose or charging high prices is not to find an indirect way of excluding those whom the law no longer allows you to exclude.
, people who shop at (not to mention work at) Wal-Mart instead of at the rich peoples mall,
not of prejudice
draw the money line; it draws itself.
. This is what Chesnutt means when he suggests that the money line is less arbitrary, more logical than the color line.
No one even needs to
AT: Race is the root cause

Poverty was the cause of people being left behind --- not racism --- their
representations blanket over economic inequality
The problem of the 20th century,
Du Bois observed
will be the problem of
the color line
the twenty-first century will also be fond of that problem The
difference is that the work that used to be done by racism the work of obscuring
W. E. B.
at its beginning,
. It looks like
class difference is now done by antiracism. The

controversy over
Katrina is,
, a case in point
Is the relevant thing about all those people abandoned in New
Orleans the fact that they are black or the fact that they are poor? We like blaming
racism, but
there werent too many rich black people left behind
Republican policies that left the poor behind were not racist
This doesnt mean, of course, that racism didnt play a
role in New Orleans. It just means that in a society without racial discrimination,
there would still have been poor people who couldnt find their way out
ongoing
response to the catastrophe of Hurricane
as we noted in the introduction
the governments
. Its like an inverted version of the question about the rich Jew Leo Frank: was he
lynched because he was Jewish or because he was rich?
the truth is
Orleans did so. The
when everybody who could get out of New
party
, and the economic inequality in American
society has grown under Democratic presidents as well as Republicans.
any
of New Orleans. Whereas in a
society without poor people (even a racist society without poor people), there wouldnt have been.
AT: Cultural discrimination is the same as class

discrimination
Class discrimination is fundamentally worse --- cant be resolved at the
institutional level
Thats why, for Chesnutt, the problem with segregation is that it interferes with
liberty of contract. And although, at the beginning of the twentieth century,
segregation wasnt a problem for most Americans or for the Supreme Court, interference
with freedom of contract was. In a famous case of 1905, for example, the Court struck down a New
York state law that prohibited employees in bakeries from being required or permitted to work more than ten
Lochner, the owner of Lochners Home Bakery, had been fined

for overworking an employee, and on appeal the Court overturned his conviction ,
declaring that the Bakeshop Act infringed upon the right of the indi vidual to labor
for such time as he may choose and thereby violated both employers and employee's liberty of conhours a day or sixty hours a week. Joseph
tract. When Chesnutt protests against the infringement on his doctors ability to ride in the first-class car, he is just
asking that black doctors be guaranteed the same freedoms as white bakers.
By contrast, no ones
liberty of contract is violated when poor people dont shop at the rich
people's mall . Rather, the poor people who decline to shop there are like bakers who decide
not to work for Lochner. Theyre just exercising their freedom of contract in this case, by refusing
to enter into one. If you dont like the hours, you dont have to take the job ; if you dont
like the price, you dont have to buy the product. The injustice in Chesnutt, then, is that racism and the
drawing of the color line interfere with the market . If youre forced to ride with the
malodorous farm laborers because youre poor, thats unfortunate but not unfair . If
youre forced to ride with them because youre black, thats another story . So the
poor are not victims of discrimination; they are the unfortunate by-products of an
essentially just mechanismthe market. Poverty, in other words, is not a civil rights issue. The
government kept black people from voting, and eventually the government made it possible for black
people to start voting. The government kept women from voting, and it eventually
allowed them to vote too. But you dont need the government to keep poor people
from shopping at the rich peoples mall. And you cant get the government to enable
poor people to start shopping there.
AT: Omi and Winant

Omi and Winants definition of racism promotes difference and exclusion
Which is a conclusion that no one wants to accept those
who are critical of
racism
have continued to insist that race is a central and even
desirable factor in American life
Omi and
Winant write that there are two temptations to be avoided in thinking
about race. The first is
to think of it as something fixed, concrete and
objective
The second is the temptation to think of it as a mere illusion
which an ideal social order would eliminate Race, they say, will always be at the
center of the American experience,
people have gone about trying to make sure that Omi and Winants
prediction comes true and to guarantee that even if people cant belong to concrete
and objective races, they can still have (social or cultural) racial identities
our commitment to diversity is deeply tied to keeping race alive
diversity is itself understood as racial
our commitment to
diversity even with nonracialized groups (above all cultures) depends on treating
them as if they were races different
. Even
(the vast majority)
and who do not believe in the biology of racial identity
. Thus in what is certainly the most influential academic text on the social construction of race (Racial Formation in the United States), Michael
Howard
the temptation
, that is, a physical fact.
and its a good thing too because without a racial identity, one is in danger of having no identity.18 What weve seen in this
chapter are some of the ways in which
. And what weve also begun
to see is how
, partly because
and partly because (as subsequent chapters will make clear)
but equal, worthy of our respect.
AT: Mitchell
Mitchell concedes and changed his mind in 2002
Mitchell, 02 (11/9/02, Gordon, [eDebate] Adri and Ross,
http://www.ndtceda.com/pipermail/edebate/2002-November/044264.html)
Politically I have moved quite a bit since 1998, when I wrote that debate institutions
should pay more attention to argumentative agency, i.e. cultivation of skills that facilitate translation of critical thinking,
public speaking, and research acumen into concrete exemplars of democratic empowerment. Back then I was highly skeptical of the
"laboratory model" of "preparatory pedagogy," where students were kept, by fiat, in
the proverbial pedagogical bullpen. Now I respect much more the value of a
protected space where young people can experiment politically by taking imaginary
positions, driving the hueristic process by arguing against their convictions . In fact, the
integrity of this space could be compromised by "activist turn" initiatives designed
to bridge contest round advocacy with political activism. These days I have much
more confidence in the importance and necessity of switch-side debating, and the
heuristic value for debaters of arguing against their convictions. I think fashioning
competitive debate contest rounds as isolated and politically protected safe spaces
for communicative experimentation makes sense. However, I worry that a narrow diet of competitive contest round debating
could starve students of opportunities to experience the rich political valence of their debating activities
AT: Rejecting politics key

Politics is inevitable and cant simply be transcended its necessary for
any complicated society to function
Schwartz 95 (Joseph M. Schwartz is Professor of Political Science at Temple University, The Permanence
of the Political pages 9-10 \\ME)
Politics may well be the most underdefined and undertheorized concept
in political science, perhaps because metareflection on the nature of ones discipline is inherently contestable.
Although I do not offer a comprehensive treatise on the nature of politics, to clarify my critique of the radical
traditions desire to transcend politics, an explicit discussion of how I utilize the term politics may be in order.
Perhaps the best-known political science definition of politics is that it is those activities by which a society
authoritatively allocates its valuesmoral, economic, and culturalthrough conflict and cooperation among social
groups with both shared and divergent interests. 8 Yet does such a definition threaten to render politics
synonymous with all human social activity?9 The
uniqueness of political activity lies in its

authoritative allocation of values. Political action renders judgments that
are legallyultimately, forciblybinding on the members of that
community. Such activity, when carried out democratically, involves the
citizens of a polity engaging in a public allocation of goods which takes
precedence over social relations deemed to be voluntary or private.10 (Of
course, the expansion of democracy has involvedand still involvesthe
reconceptualization of who counts as a full citizen and what the rights of
citizens are.) In the vast majority of societies and historical epochs, the authoritative allocation of social
values has been carried out undemocratically. Political decision-making has more often
than not been limited to a narrow stratum of society. Even the very Greek
city-states that invented the term rule of the people, democracy,
excluded slaves, women, propertyless laborers, and metics (the ancient
Greek equivalent of guest workers) from membership in the polity. In
part, the radical critique of liberal democracy is an immanent one,
exposing how imperfect liberal democracies exclude the less privileged
from full political voice, and more centrally, critiquing the relegation of certain crucial spheres of
social life to the realm of the private. Such a relegation is political in and of itself and
excludes those who create such institutions from having a political voice
in the very decisions that are binding on them. Thus, as critique, the
radical tradition appeared to demand the expansion of the realm of
politics, as well as the full democratization of that realm. But when one closely examines the
radical vision of a truly humane (frequently referred to as social)
society, it more often than not appears to be a peculiarly postpolitical
society, in which both diverse social interests and the need for political
mediation among them would wither away amid the spontaneous selfcreation of a solidaristic society. This work attempts to rescue the spirit of
the radical critique of the imperfections of liberal democracy from its
dangerous prescriptive aim of transcending the very need for politics
either through the stifling solidaristic general will of Rousseau, the spontaneous postscarcity anarchism of Marxs
full communism, or the technocratic, scientistic rule of Lenins vanguard party. Put succinctly, my prescriptive
politics is unavoidable in any society that is more than

minimally complex and diverse in social structure and that the only just
way of making such political decisions is through democratic politics and
democratic disagreement. The radical visions desire to transcend the messy
business of democratic disagreement through the instantiation of a solidaristic society
embodying truly universal human interests not only is profoundly antipolitical; it also
violates the very democratic impulses that inspired the radical critique of
not only authoritarian, but also less-than-fully democratic regimes. Thus, this
argument is that
work desires not only to highlight the necessity or unavoidability of politics but also to affirm radical democratic
pluralism as the most desirable of political regimes. Tragically, this goal was not the uneqivocal one of the radical
tradition in both theory and practice.11
Politics doesnt ignore individual experience. It consists of our ontology of

the world
Schwartz 95 (Joseph M. Schwartz is Professor of Political Science at Temple University, The Permanence
of the Political page 15 \\ME)
politics cannot adequately be

understood as a simple reflection of given material interests. Not only do
ideal interests play a critical role in politics (e.g., normative values and
sexual, racial, or national conceptions of identity); but as Max Weber argued in The
Sociology of World Religions, it is often our ideas, the laypersons ontology of how
the world works, that structure both our ideal and material interests:
Not ideas, but material and ideal interests directly govern mens
conduct. . . . Yet very frequently the world images that have been created by ideas have like switchmen,
In contrast to both the predominant liberal and radical conceptions,
determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest.17 For example, although
both Protestants and Hindus have an ideal interest in salvationand in acquiring the material status necessary for
salvationtheir distinct ideas of salvation, Protestant predestination versus Hindu reincarnation, lead to
radically divergent conceptions of the type of social action commensurate with the individuals ideal interests.
democratic politics involves not just collective deliberation on our

own material and ideal interests, but also deliberation about public ideas
and how those values can best be institutionalized. That is, we argue
politically about how the world functions and what moral purposes those
functions should serve.
Likewise,
Alt
Boring politics
Thats the only way to break the guilt and resentment cycle. Political
critique key to prevent the ballot from becoming a palliative endorsement
of catharsis
Enns 12Professor of Philosophy at McMaster University (Dianne, The Violence of
Victimhood, 28-30)
Guilt and Ressentiment We need to think carefully about what is at stake here. Why is this
perspective appealing, and what are its effects? At first glance, the argument appears simple: white, privileged
women, in their theoretical and practical interventions, must take into account the experiences and conceptual
work of women who are less fortunate and less powerful, have fewer resources, and are therefore more subject to
systemic oppression. The lesson of feminism's mistakes in the civil rights era is that this mainstream group must
effects, as I have argued, include a

veneration of the other, moral currency for the victim, and an insidious
competition for victimhood. We will see in later chapters that these effects are also common in
situations of conflict where the stakes are much higher. We witness here a twofold appeal: otherness
discourse in feminism appeals both to the guilt of the privileged and to the
resentment, or ressentiment, of the other. Suleri's allusion to embarrassed privilege exposes the
not speak for other women. But such a view must be interrogated. Its
operation of guilt in the misunderstanding that often divides Western feminists from women in the developing
The guilt of those who feel themselves deeply

implicated in and responsible for imperialism merely reinforces an
imperialist benevolence, polarizes us unambiguously by locking us into the
categories of victim and perpetrator, and blinds us to the power and
agency of the other. Many fail to see that it is embarrassing and insulting
for those identified as victimized others not to be subjected to the same
critical intervention and held to the same demands of moral and political
responsibility. Though we are by no means equal in power and ability,
wealth and advantage, we are all collectively responsible for the world we
inhabit in common. The condition of victimhood does not absolve one of moral responsibility. I will return
to this point repeatedly throughout this book. Mohanty's perspective ignores the possibility
that one can become attached to one's subordinated status, which
introduces the concept of ressentiment, the focus of much recent interest in the injury caused by
world, or white women from women of color.
racism and colonization. Nietzsche describes ressentiment as the overwhelming sentiment of slave morality, the
ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to

values. 19 The sufferer in this schema seeks out a cause for his suffering a guilty agent who
is susceptible to suffering someone on whom he can vent his affects and so procure
the anesthesia necessary to ease the pain of injury. The motivation behind ressentiment,
revolt that begins when
according to Nietzsche, is the desire to deaden, by means of a more violent emotion of any kind, a tormenting,
secret pain that is becoming unendurable, and to drive it out of consciousness at least for the moment: for that one
requires an affect, as savage an affect as possible, and, in order to excite that, any pretext at all. 20 In its
ressentiment acts as the righteous

critique of power from the perspective of the injured, which delimits a specific site of
contemporary manifestation, Wendy Brown argues that
blame for suffering by constituting sovereign subjects and events as responsible for the injury of social
Identities are fixed in an economy of perpetrator and victim, in

which revenge, rather than power or emancipation, is sought for the injured,
subordination.
making the perpetrator hurt as the sufferer does. 21 30 Such a concept is useful for understanding why an ethics
of absolute responsibility to the other appeals to the victimized. Brown remarks that, for Nietzsche, the source of
the triumph of a morality rooted in ressentiment is the denial that it has

any access to power or contains a will to power. Politicized identities arise
as both product of and reaction to this condition; the reaction is a substitute
for action an imaginary revenge, Nietzsche calls it. Suffering then becomes a social
virtue at the same time that the sufferer attempts to displace his suffering onto
another. The identity created by ressentiment, Brown explains, becomes invested in its
own subjection not only through its discovery of someone to blame, and a new
recognition and revaluation of that subjection, but also through the satisfaction of revenge .
22 The outcome of feminism's attraction to theories of difference and otherness is thus deeply contentious. First,
we witness the further reification reification of the very oppositions in

question and a simple reversal of the focus from the same to the other. This
observation is not new and has been made by many critics of feminism, but it seems to have made no serious
impact on mainstream feminist scholarship or teaching practices in women's studies programs. Second, in the
the other has been

uncritically exalted, which has led in turn to simplistic designations of marginal, othered status
and, ultimately, a competition for victimhood. Ultimately, this approach has led to a new moral
eagerness to rectify the mistakes of white, middle-class, liberal, western feminism,
code in which ethics is equated with the responsibility of the privileged Western woman, while moral immunity is
granted to the victimized other. Ranjana Khanna describes this operation aptly when she writes that in the field of
the reification of the other has produced separate ethical

universes in which the privileged experience paralyzing guilt and the neocolonized, crippling
resentment. The only overarching imperative is that one does not
comment on another's ethical context. An ethical response turns out to be
a nonresponse. 23 Let us turn now to an exploration of this third outcome.
transnational feminism,
Fear of the Oceans

Nick Lands appropriation of capitalism as an emancipative inhuman
construct contributes to a cult of capitalism that shuts out any possibility
of resistance, the alternative is a cosmic reinscription of thanatropic
regression
Negarestani 11 (Reza, Iranian contemporary philosopher, Drafting the
inhuman: Conjectures on capitalism and organic necrocracy,
http://aaaaarg.org/upload/reza-negarestani-drafting-the-inhuman-conjectures-oncapitalism-and-organic-necrocracy-1.pdf, hhs-nw)
As Nick Land elaborated in The Thirst for Annihilation
what brings
about the possibility of this weird marriage between human praxis and
inhuman emancipation is the tortuous economy of dissipation inherent to
capitalism as its partially repressed desire for meltdown
Capitalism in
this sense is not an attainable state but rather a dissipative
tendency
or process which moves along the detours of organizational complexity
increasing commodification
to ultimately deliver humans
conservative horizon into an unbound state of dissolution
impulses of
capitalism against its implicit desire for meltdown are doomed to fail as
capitalism fully gains it angular momentum by reaping planetary
resources and conceiving its irreparably schizophrenic image
that assigns
capitalism an inhuman emancipative role. This model of emancipation is
comparable with H.P. Lovecrafts fantastic concept holocaust of freedom
which celebrates the consummation of human doom with human
emancipation
Nick Land identifies capital as a
planetary singularity toward utter dissipation whose dynamism becomes
more complicated as it circuitously verges upon zero
Land
presents a
definition of capitalism which
is a
detoured and hence complex singularity toward the inorganic exteriority
which ultimately enforces an all-inclusive liberation from the conservative
nature of the organism and its confines for thought.
is
the
has
as well as his essays,
. Although the economy of dissipation can be captured by
humans through a libidinal materialist participation with the techno-capitalist singularity, it ultimately escapes the gravity of humans and entails their dissolution into the inorganic exteriority.
(anti-essence)
and convoluted syntheses of techn and physis so as
. Immunological
. It is this singularized deliverance of the
human to the state of dissolutionconcomitant with its pulverizing impact on the correlation between thought and the self-love of man (viz. organic survivalism)
. Thus through a politico-economic reappropriation of Freuds theory of the death-drive,
. Now compare Lands trenchant veneration of Freuds account of
the death-drive as a creativity that pushes life into its extravagances with the inhumanist model of capitalism wherein the affirmation of and demand for more is but a rivers search for the sea.
model or
here
despite its collusive entanglements with humans desires and interests
Yet the question we must ask
whether
capitalist dissipative singularity is really emancipative

?
does
the capitalist model of accelerating planetary dissipation really effectuate
an inhumanist model of emancipation that breaks away from the
conservative ambits of the human?
or not
And even more crucially,
The ambition of this essay is, accordingly, to renegotiate the definition of the capitalist singularity through a closer and
more extreme engagement with Freuds speculative thesis on thanatropic regression. Accordingly, we shall investigate if this emancipative conception of capitalism genuinely presents a radical model of the Inhuman or not.
The collusion between science and capitalism imparts an alarmingly

critical significance to such inspections into the relation between
capitalism and its image as an inevitable singularity
. The collusion of capitalism with science enables capitalism to
incorporate contemporary sciences continuous disenchantment of cosmos
as the locus of absolute objectivity
Capitalism is inevitable because it terrestrially coincides with and
converges upon the cosmic truth of extinction
t is emancipative
because it harbours the debacle of human and binds the enlightening
disenchantment implicit in dissolution as an objectifying truth.
that coheres with the compulsive regression of the organism toward
the inorganic exteriority
and inevitable extinction. In doing so, capitalism can establish a concurrently inevitable and emancipative image of itself:
(Brassier); i
9In other words, the complicity of
capitalism provides capitalism

Whilst the former grants capitalism a vector of
participation, the latter constitutes capitalisms crafty model of
emancipation.
nothing has been more profitable for capitalism than
its clandestine alliance with science through whose support capitalism has
become increasingly elusive, more difficult to resist, harder to escap
Antihumanism
has
ironically become the formidable assassin of capitalism in that it connects
capitalism with an inhumanist model of emancipation or grants capitalism
science and
with a speculative weapon capable of imposing capitalism as the universal horizon of politic economic problems as well as
the ultimate mode of departure from the restricting ambit of the terrestrial sphere.
In a sense, probably
e and more
seductive for those who await the imminent homecoming of scientific enlightenment or the advent of technological singularities.
, in this regard,
mythical powers against various manifests of humanist hubris
. Therefore, this essay can also be
read as a speculative reprisal against the supposedly anti humanist aspects of capitalism which contribute to its image as an irresistible singularity. This essay, consequently, shall attempt to wrest a radical conception of inhumanism
from the Capital-nurturing hands of antihumanism in its various forms. In the wake of the complicity between science and capitalism, it is becoming more evident that the inhumanist
resistance
against capitalism should not dabble in preaching against humanism and

its philosophical minions. Instead, it should dispose of the kind of
antihumanist thought that romanticallywhether willingly or not
contributes to the cult of Capital
In The Thirst for Annihilation
Land introduces an inhumanist model of capitalism
The reason for Lands emphatic recourse
is that the
extremity and terrestrial generality of Freuds account of the death-drive
are able to universally mobilize capitalism beyond its historic and
particular conditions
it is the death-drive that transcendentally and
from within universalizes capital
Land assumes that the
emancipative conception of capitalism requires a realist model capable of
positing the reality of emancipation exterior to ontological and subjective
privileges of human
and occludes both thinking and praxis.
and later in his numerous essays,
through a reappropriation of Freuds
energetic mod el of the nervous system.
to Freuds energetic model
. In other words,
as the all-encompassing capitalism. Furthermore, as Land points out, if death is already inherent to capital as a machine part, the
death of capitalism is a delusion either generated by anthropomorphic wishful thinking or neurotic indulgence in victimhood.10 In short,
. And it is Freuds energetic model that as a prototypical model of speculative thought revokes the enchanted ontological privileges of life by presenting life as a temporal
scission from its precursor exteriority qua inorganic. Both the life of thought and the life of the human body are externally objectified by the originary exteriority that pulls them back toward a dissolution which is posited in anterior
posteriority to life. The external objectification of the human hardwarecoincidental with the independent reality of dissolutionundermines the monopoly and hegemony of the human genetic lineage as the vehicle of social
On the other hand, the objectification of thought is traumatically

bound as a vector of disillusionment in regard to radical deficiencies of life
. Such disillusionment paves the road toward an
dynamics.
as the constitutive horizon of thoughts topology and dynamism
abyssal realm where thought must be armed with a speculative drive.

Accordingly for Land, Freuds
model is comprised of an emancipative
yet implicitly antihumanist front
Ray Brassier seems to be fully aware of the
threats that the Landian definition of capitalism poses
the emancipative energy of the truth of extinction
implicated in the theory of thanatropic regression is converted to an alien
and thus impartial justification for capitalist indulgences which conflate
energetic
in that it posits the anterior posteriority of dissolution as a radical truth determined to flush human faculties down the latrine of
pure objectivity. In his tour de force on nihilism and enlightenment, Nihil Unbound,
against the disenchanting potentials of Freuds account of
the death-drive. In the wake of such a definition,
anthropic interests with the ever more complicating paths of organic

survivalism
the inevitable truth of extinction as the apotheosis of the
enlightenments project of disenchantment is exploited by the Freudian
. In other words,
reformulation of capitalism
. In this way, the anterior posteriority of extinction as an ultimate disenchantment affirms and reenacts human not only as the participating
and accelerating element but also as something which deviously reconciles vitalism with the disenchanting truth of extinction.11 In order to purge Freuds theory of thanatropic regression from such manipulations and draw an
, Ray Brassier presents a

solution.12 Brassier
proposes that Freuds theory of thanatropic regression must be
intimate link between the will to know and the will to nothingness
genuinely speculative
reinscribed on a cosmic level so that not only the organic dissolves into
the inorganic but also the inorganic gains a dissipative or loosening

tendency toward the precursor exteriority qua the anterior posteriority of
extinction The cosmological re-inscription of Freuds account of the deathdrive unshackles the disenchanting and hence emancipative truth of
extinction from the capitalism-friendly horizon of vitalism
.
It is in loosening every index of interiority and deserting their domain of
influence that the truth of extinction forces thought to be a speculative
imagination for and of the cosmic abyss.
.
.13 Just as the organic interiority is deserted on
behalf of the inorganic, the in organic materials as conditions of embodiment are deserted on behalf of an unbound cosmic exteriority where even the elementary fabric of matter is an index of interiorization and must be undone
Impacts
McLaren (Alt included)

Capitalism causes inevitable crises, inequality, and dehumanizationthe
alternative is a class-based critique of the systempedagogical spaces are
the crucial staging ground for keeping socialism on the horizon
McLaren, Distinguished Fellow Critical Studies @ Chapman U and UCLA urban
schooling prof, and Scatamburlo-DAnnibale, associate professor of Communication
U Windsor, 4
(Peter and Valerie, Class Dismissed? Historical materialism and the politics of
difference, Educational Philosophy and Theory Vol. 36, Issue 2, p. 183-199)
For well over two decades we have witnessed the jubilant liberal and conservative pronouncements of the demise
history's presumed failure to defang existing capitalist

relations has been read by many self-identified radicals as an advertisement for
capitalism's inevitability. As a result, the chorus refrain There Is No
Alternative, sung by liberals and conservatives, has been buttressed by the symphony
of post-Marxist voices recommending that we give socialism a decent burial and
move on. Within this context, to speak of the promise of Marx and socialism may appear anachronistic, even
of socialism. Concomitantly,
nave, especially since the post-al intellectual vanguard has presumably demonstrated the folly of doing so. Yet we
stubbornly believe that the chants of T.I.N.A. must be combated for they offer as a fait accompli, something which
Leftists should refuse to accept namely the triumph of capitalism

and its political bedfellow neo-liberalism, which have worked together to
naturalize suffering, undermine collective struggle, and obliterate hope . We
concur with Amin (1998), who claims that such chants must be defied and revealed as
absurd and criminal, and who puts the challenge we face in no uncertain terms: humanity may let
itself be led by capitalism's logic to a fate of collective suicide or it may
pave the way for an alternative humanist project of global socialism. The
grosteque conditions that inspired Marx to pen his original critique of capitalism are present
and flourishing. The inequalities of wealth and the gross imbalances of power that exist today are
leading to abuses that exceed those encountered in Marx's day (Greider, 1998, p.
39). Global capitalism has paved the way for the obscene concentration of wealth in fewer and
fewer hands and created a world increasingly divided between those who enjoy opulent
affluence and those who languish in dehumanizing conditions and economic misery. In every
corner of the globe, we are witnessing social disintegration as revealed by a rise in abject
poverty and inequality. At the current historical juncture, the combined assets of the 225 richest
progressive
people is roughly equal to the annual income of the poorest 47 percent of the world's population, while the
combined assets of the three richest people exceed the combined GDP of the 48 poorest nations (CCPA, 2002, p. 3).
2.8 billion peoplealmost half of the world's populationstruggle in

desperation to live on less than two dollars a day (McQuaig, 2001, p. 27). As many as
250 million children are wage slaves and there are over a billion workers who are
either un- or under-employed. These are the concrete realities of our timerealities
that require a vigorous class analysis , an unrelenting critique of capitalism
and an oppositional politics capable of confronting what Ahmad (1998, p. 2) refers to as
capitalist universality. They are realities that require something more than that which is offered by
Approximately
the prophets of difference and post-Marxists who would have us relegate socialism to the scrapheap of history and
Never before has a Marxian analysis of

capitalism and class rule been so desperately needed. That is not to say that everything Marx
said or anticipated has come true, for that is clearly not the case. Many critiques of Marx focus on
his strategy for moving toward socialism, and with ample justification;
nonetheless Marx did provide us with fundamental insights into class
mummify Marxism along with Lenin's corpse.
society that have held true to this day. Marx's enduring relevance lies in his indictment of capitalism
which continues to wreak havoc in the lives of most. While capitalism's cheerleaders have attempted to hide its
sordid underbelly, Marx's description of capitalism as the sorcerer's dark power is even more apt in light of
Rather than jettisoning Marx, decentering

the role of capitalism, and discrediting class analysis, radical educators
must continue to engage Marx's oeuvre and extrapolate from it that which is
useful pedagogically, theoretically, and , most importantly, politically in light of the
challenges that confront us. The urgency which animates Amin's call for a collective socialist
vision necessitates, as we have argued, moving beyond the particularism and liberal
pluralism that informs the politics of difference. It also requires challenging
contemporary historical and economic conditions.
the questionable assumptions that have come to constitute the core of

contemporary radical theory, pedagogy
and politics.
In terms of effecting
change, what is needed is a cogent understanding of the systemic nature

of exploitation and oppression based on the precepts of a radical political
economy approach (outlined above) and one that incorporates Marx's notion of unity in difference in
which people share widely common material interests. Such an understanding extends far
beyond the realm of theory, for the manner in which we choose to interpret and explore the social
world, the concepts and frameworks we use to express our sociopolitical
understandings, are more than just abstract categories. They imply
intentions, organizational practices, and political agendas. Identifying
class analysis as the basis for our understandings and class struggle as the basis for political
transformation implies something quite different than constructing a sense of
political agency around issues of race, ethnicity, gender, etc. Contrary to
Shakespeare's assertion that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, it should be clear that this is not the
in politics the essence of the flower lies in the name by

which it is called (Bannerji, 2000, p. 41). The task for progressives today is to seize the
moment and plant the seeds for a political agenda that is grounded in
historical possibilities and informed by a vision committed to overcoming exploitative conditions.
These seeds, we would argue, must be derived from the tree of radical political
economy. For the vast majority of people todaypeople of all racial classifications or
identities, all genders and sexual orientationsthe common frame of
reference arcing across difference, the concerns and aspirations that are most widely shared are those that
are rooted in the common experience of everyday life shaped and constrained
by political economy (Reed, 2000, p. xxvii). While post-Marxist advocates of the
politics of difference suggest that such a stance is outdated, we would argue
that the categories which they have employed to analyze the social are now losing
their usefulness, particularly in light of actual contemporary social movements. All over the globe,
there are large anti-capitalist movements afoot. In February 2002, chants of Another World
Is Possible became the theme of protests in Porto Allegre. It seems that those people struggling in the
streets havent read about T.I.N.A., the end of grand narratives of
emancipation, or the decentering of capitalism. It seems as though the struggle for basic
case in political matters. Rather,
survival and some semblance of human dignity in the mean streets of the dystopian metropoles doesnt permit
much time or opportunity to read the heady proclamations emanating from seminar rooms. As E. P. Thompson
(1978, p. 11) once remarked, sometimes experience walks in without knocking at the door, and announces deaths,
This, of course, does not mean

socialism will inevitably come about, yet a sense of its nascent promise
animates current social movements. Indeed, noted historian Howard Zinn (2000, p. 20) recently
pointed out that after years of single-issue organizing (i.e. the politics of difference), the
WTO and other anti-corporate capitalist protests signaled a turning point
crises of subsistence, trench warfare, unemployment, inflation, genocide.
that
in the history of movements of recent decades, for it was the issue of class that
more than anything bound everyone together. History, to paraphrase Thompson (1978, p. 25)
doesnt seem to be following Theory's script. Our vision is informed by Marx's historical materialism and his
revolutionary socialist humanism, which must not be conflated with liberal humanism. For left politics and
a socialist humanist vision remains crucial, whose fundamental features

include the creative potential of people to challenge collectively the
circumstances that they inherit. This variant of humanism seeks to give expression to the pain,
pedagogy,
sorrow and degradation of the oppressed, those who labor under the ominous and ghastly cloak of globalized
capital. It calls for the transformation of those conditions that have prevented the bulk of humankind from fulfilling
It vests its hope for change in the development of critical

consciousness and social agents who make history, although not always in conditions of
its potential.
their choosing. The political goal of socialist humanism is, however, not a resting in difference but rather the
emancipation of difference at the level of human mutuality and reciprocity. This would be a step forward for the
discovery or creation of our real differences which can only in the end be explored in reciprocal ways (Eagleton,
the enduring relevance of a radical socialist pedagogy

and politics is the centrality it accords to the interrogation of capitalism.
1996, p. 120). Above all else,
We can no longer afford to remain indifferent to the horror and savagery committed by capitalist's barbaric
We need to recognize that capitalist democracy is unrescuably

contradictory in its own self-constitution. Capitalism and democracy cannot be translated
into one another without profound efforts at manufacturing empty idealism. Committed Leftists must
unrelentingly cultivate a democratic socialist vision that refuses to forget the wretched of the
machinations.
earth, the children of the damned and the victims of the culture of silencea task which requires more than
Leftists must
challenge the
true evils that are manifest in the tentacles of global capitalism's reach. And, more than
this, Leftists must search for the cracks in the edifice of globalized
capitalism and shine light on those fissures that give birth to alternatives.
Socialism today, undoubtedly, runs against the grain of received wisdom, but its
vision of a vastly improved and freer arrangement of social relations
beckons on the horizon. Its unwritten text is nascent in the present even as it
abstruse convolutions and striking ironic poses in the agnostic arena of signifying practices.
illuminate the little shops of horror that lurk beneath globalizations shiny faade; they must
exists among the fragments of history and the shards of distant memories. Its potential remains untapped and its
promise needs to be redeemed.
Root cause --- Race

Class is better starting pointintersecting inequality is real, but Marxism
is key to historicize it and address collective imperatives
Taylor 11 [Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, on the editorial board of the International Socialist Review and a doctoral
student in African American Studies at Northwestern University; Race, class and Marxism, SocialistWorker.org,
http://socialistworker.org/2011/01/04/race-class-and-marxism]
Marxists believe that the potential for that kind of unity is dependant on battles and struggles against racism today. Without a commitment by revolutionary organizations in the here and
now to the fight against racism, working-class unity will never be achieved and the revolutionary potential of the working class will never be realized. Yet despite all the evidence of this
Marxism has been maligned as, at best, "blind" to

combating racism and, at worst, "incapable" of it. For example, in an article published last summer, popular
commentator and self-described "anti-racist" Tim Wise summarized the critique of "left
activists" that he later defines as Marxists. He writes: [L]eft activists often marginalize people of color by operating from a
commitment to fighting racism over many decades,
framework of extreme class reductionism, which holds that the "real" issue is class, not race, that "the only color that matters is green," and that issues like racism are mere "identity
politics," which should take a backseat to promoting class-based universalism and programs to help working people. This reductionism, by ignoring the way that even middle class and
affluent people of color face racism and color-based discrimination (and by presuming that low-income folks of color and low-income whites are equally oppressed, despite a wealth of
evidence to the contrary) reinforces white denial, privileges white perspectivism and dismisses the lived reality of people of color. Even more, as we'll see, it ignores perhaps the most
important political lesson regarding the interplay of race and class: namely, that the biggest reason why there is so little working-class consciousness and unity in the Untied States (and
thus, why class-based programs to uplift all in need are so much weaker here than in the rest of the industrialized world), is precisely because of racism and the way that white racism
has been deliberately inculcated among white working folks. Only by confronting that directly (rather than sidestepping it as class reductionists seek to do) can we ever hope to build
cross-racial, class based coalitions. In other words, for the policies favored by the class reductionist to work--be they social democrats or Marxists--or even to come into being, racism and
Wise accuses Marxism of: "extreme class reductionism,"

meaning that Marxists allegedly think that class is more important than race;
reducing struggles against racism to "mere identity politics"; and
requiring that struggles against racism should "take a back seat" to
struggles over economic issues. Wise also accuses so-called "left activists" of reinforcing "white
denial" and "dismiss[ing] the lived reality of people of color"--which, of
course, presumes Left activists and Marxists to all be white. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - What
do Marxists actually say? Marxists argue that capitalism is a system that is
based on the exploitation of the many by the few. Because it is a system
based on gross inequality, it requires various tools to divide the majority--racism
and all oppressions under capitalism serve this purpose. Moreover, oppression is used to justify and "explain"
unequal relationships in society that enrich the minority that live off the majority's labor. Thus, racism developed initially to
explain and justify the enslavement of Africans--because they were less than human and undeserving of liberty and
freedom. Everyone accepts the idea that the oppression of slaves was rooted in the class relations of
exploitation under that system. Fewer recognize that under capitalism, wage slavery is the
pivot around which all other inequalities and oppressions turn. Capitalism used racism to
white supremacy must be challenged directly. Here,
justify plunder, conquest and slavery, but as Karl Marx pointed out, it also used racism to divide and rule--to pit one section of the working class against another and thereby blunt class
To claim, as Marxists do, that racism is a product of capitalism is not to deny or

its importance or impact in American society. It is simply to explain its origins and the
reasons for its perpetuation. Many on the left today talk about class as if it is one of many oppressions, often describing it as "classism." What people
are really referring to as "classism" is elitism or snobbery, and not the fundamental organization of society under capitalism. Moreover, it is popular today
to talk about various oppressions, including class, as intersecting. While it
is true that oppressions can reinforce and compound each other, they are
born out of the material relations shaped by capitalism and the economic
exploitation that is at the heart of capitalist society. In other words, it is the material and economic structure of
consciousness.
diminish
society that gave rise to a range of ideas and ideologies to justify, explain and help perpetuate that order. In the United States, racism is the most important of those ideologies. Despite
Marx himself was well aware of the centrality of race under

capitalism. While Marx did not write extensively on the question of slavery and its racial impact in societies specifically, he did write about the way in
which European capitalism emerged because of its pilfering, rape and destruction, famously writing: The discovery of gold and silver in
America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of
the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the
commercial hunting of Black skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.
the widespread beliefs to the contrary of his critics, Karl
He also recognized the extent to which slavery was central to the world economy. He wrote: Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc.
Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that has given the colonies their value; it is the colonies that have created world trade, and
it is world trade that is the pre-condition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance. Without slavery North America, the most progressive of
countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe out North America from the map of the world, and you will have anarchy--the complete decay of modern commerce and
civilization. Cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations. Thus slavery, because it is an economic category, has always existed among the
institutions of the peoples. Modern nations have been able only to disguise slavery in their own countries, but they have imposed it without disguise upon the New World. Thus, there is a
fundamental understanding of the centrality of slave labor in the national and international economy. But what about race? Despite the dearth of Marx's own writing on race in particular,
one might look at Marx's correspondence and deliberations on the American Civil War to draw conclusions as to whether Marx was as dogmatically focused on purely economic issues as
If
Marx was truly an economic reductionist, he might have surmised that slavery and
capitalism were incompatible, and simply waited for slavery to whither away. W.E.B. Du Bois
his critics make him out be. One must raise the question: If Marx was reductionist, how is his unabashed support and involvement in abolitionist struggles in England explained?
in his Marxist tome Black Reconstruction, quotes at length a letter penned by Marx as the head of the International Workingmen's Association, written to Abraham Lincoln in 1864 in the
midst of the Civil War: The contest for the territories which opened the epoch, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the
immigrant or be prostituted by the tramp of the slaver driver? When an oligarchy of 300,000 slave holders dared to inscribe for the first time in the annals of the world "Slavery" on the
banner of armed revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first declaration of the rights of
man was issued...when on the very spots counter-revolution...maintained "slavery to be a beneficial institution"...and cynically proclaimed property in man 'the cornerstone of the new
edifice'...then the working classes of Europe understood at once...that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy war of property against labor... They consider
it an earnest sign of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggles for the
Not only was Marx personally opposed to slavery

and actively organized against it, but he theorized that slavery and the resultant
race discrimination that flowed from it were not just problems for the slaves themselves, but for white
rescue of the enchained race and the Reconstruction of a social order.
workers who were constantly under the threat of losing work to slave labor. This did not mean white workers were necessarily sympathetic to the cause of the slaves--most of them were
not. But Marx was not addressing the issue of consciousness, but objective factors when he wrote in Capital, "In the United States of America, every independent movement of the
Moreover,
Marx understood the dynamics of racism in a modern sense as well--as a means by which workers
who had common, objective interests with each other could also become mortal enemies
because of subjective, but nevertheless real, racist and nationalist ideas. Looking at the tensions between Irish and English
workers was paralyzed as long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the Black it is branded."
workers, with a nod toward the American situation between Black and white workers, Marx wrote: Every industrial and commercial center in England possesses a working class divided
into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the
Irish worker he feels himself a member of the ruling nation and so turns himself into a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists of his country against Ireland, thus strengthening their
domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude is much the same as that of the "poor whites" to the "niggers" in the
former slave states of the USA. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker at once the accomplice and stupid tool of the English rule in
This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short by all the
It is the secret
by which the capitalist maintains its power. And that class is fully aware of it. Out of this quote, one can see a Marxist
theory of how racism operated in contemporary society, after slavery was ended. Marx was highlighting three things: first, that capitalism promotes
economic competition between workers; second, that the ruling class uses racist ideology to
divide workers against each other; and finally, that when one group of workers suffer
oppression, it negatively impacts the entire class .
Ireland.
means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organization.
Our starting point of class analysis resolves the case better than the 1ACs
anti-ethical stance
Cole, Centre for Education for Social Justice @ Bishop Grosseteste U College
Lincoln, 12
(Mike, Critical race theory in education, Marxism and abstract racial domination,
British Journal of Sociology of Education, 33:2, p. 167-183)
Prestons pedagogical solutions are
the abolition of both whiteness and capitalism, of which the former ,
according to Preston, is perhaps capitalisms weakest link (2010, 123). There are three
major problems with the abolition of whiteness. First it is too vague to
have any practical implications (hardly surprising given the abstract
theorizing that preceded its announcement).12 Just how are white people to
be persuaded to abolish their whiteness, and what would follow such
abolition? Second, given its vagueness, it is seriously open to misinterpretation. While
What then are the implications for educational practice?
Preston clearly does not propose the abolition of white people, his advocacy of the abolition of whiteness is clearly
abolition of
whiteness is useless as a unifier and counter-productive as a political
rallying point. Indeed, were the abolition of whiteness to be routinely
promoted in educational establishments, it would most likely cause severe confusion
and indeed mayhem. Unproductive divisions on grounds of race, class and culture would
undoubtedly accelerate.13 As far as the abolition of capitalism is concerned, by its very nature, abstract
academic Marxism, as developed by Postone and not linked to practice, is not
open to being interpreted as such. Third, and following on from the first and second problems, the
appropriate for Marxist pedagogy. Rather the urgent need is to partake in

Marxist praxis. This must entail a concrete engagement with the real
possibilities of twenty-first-century socialism (for example, Lebowitz 2006; Martinez, Fox,

and Farrell 2010; Motta and Cole 2013, forthcoming). Rather than abolish whiteness, however
perceived, it is more appropriate to unite around a common purpose . Central
should be a theoretical exploration of the concept of participatory democracy, but linked to
concrete practice, such as in the communal councils and communes of Venezuela
a country where people are directly involved in decision-making and where
Marxism, in the form of twenty-first-century socialism, is being considered seriously as a
viable alternative to capitalism.14
Capitalism is the root cause of racism --- racism was used to justify
capitalist exploitation
Posner 14 (Richard, Writer at The Hampton Institute, The Family Tree Revisited:
The Mythology of 'Race', 1/22/2014, The Hampton Institute,
http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/mythology-of-race.html#.U7_6QoFdUUM)//JL
America and, to be fair, most of the world have not yet resolved the problem of
racism by any stretch of the imagination
slavery
is still certainly extant in America. most, if not all, of the former American
. It is not an exaggeration to say that
- which, it's worth repeating, racism was invented to justify -
In fact
middle class has been enslaved, regardless of ethnicity, through the

processes of debt bondage and wage slavery Wage slavery and debt
bondage are established when capitalist slave masters provide labor with the barest
minimum subsistence wage and leave them to pay for their own
laborers to "work for a living" is more profitable
It
also compels the wage slaves to buy said shelter, food, clothing and medical care
and virtually everything else they need, from the very system that has enslaved
them
capitalist slavers
have built into their
"system" the ability to control the availability and pricing of Life's "necessities".
Since the ruling class "owns" just about everything, they can "sell" it at whatever
price suits them.
buy or die are the choices the wage/debt slave is forced to
make By inculcating them with the belief that their worth is measured by the things
they "own" and keeping the "cost of living" relatively higher than the wages paid,
the slave masters are able to coerce workers into burdening themselves with
"credit" which keeps them perpetually indebted, hence debt bondage
.
sustenance and maintenance. Forcing
, more cost effective, than providing shelter, food, clothing and medical care for them.
Not only are
spared the expenses of maintaining their slaves. To cut costs and increase profit they
Ultimately,
So not only does wage slavery save
costs but, combined with debt bondage, it allows the slavers to recoup the wages paid to labor, plus "interest" on the "credit" the workers are manipulated into using. This scenario plays out across virtually our entire civilization.
Where there are no slaves in the traditional sense, there are wage/debt slaves in their stead. These Are the Good Old Days? As criminal and inhuman as all this certainly is, I fear what is yet to come will make it seem highly
In the relatively near future, when the pathocracy finally achieves its long
sought dystopian goal of a global, totalitarian plutocracy, the extreme
overpopulation of Earth will provide a vast ocean of traditional slave labor for
centuries. It will no longer be necessary to avoid working the slaves to death as
long as enough are kept alive
If industrial civilization manages
to stand a bit longer
I foresee the creation of labor camps, monstrous both in
size and nature Think
Auschwitz-Birkenau-type camps the size of
Rhode
Island
The prison gates are closing
Our final
incarceration is imminent
"None
are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free
desirable by comparison.
many decades if
not
and just healthy enough to do their jobs and reproduce.
, perhaps fifty years,
numerous
a small state like
or Connecticut.
more swiftly now. The walls and bars of the prison have been abuilding a long while.
. When the gates slam shut and the lock-bolt is driven home, we will look around in stunned disbelief and ask each other, "how can this be?"
." - Johan Goethe
The
Wheel Keeps Turning I have reached a conclusion regarding the cycle of empire that has constantly repeated itself throughout the relatively short span of human history. And please keep in mind that the word "conclusion" is
since the event

Neolithic Revolution, the driving force
behind the machinery of human history has been a very simple and fundamental
thing.
There is
a small, psychopathic,
subset of the species Homo sapiens who, being non-productive and unable or
unwilling to provide for their own needs, have turned for their survival to deceit,
contrivance, manipulation and all manner of mendacious behavior in order to
completely interchangeable with "opinion." It seems clear to me that,
It can be stated quite clearly in only a few sentences.
known as the
To wit;
and seemingly has been for around ten to twelve thousand years,
exploit those who are productive contributors to the general welfare These
parasites have exploited their fellows in every possible way, taking unearned
benefits
These individuals,
consider
themselves vastly superior to those who unwittingly support them
they
have pursued an utterly ruthless and inhuman agenda with
the goal of subjugating and enslaving the rest of humanity, whom they consider to
be inferior
the pathocrats stand on the

verge of fulfilling their quest for their long sought, dystopian dreamworld. In the
psychopath, a dream emerges like some Utopia of a "happy" world
.
from their labor but returning nothing to the group, clan, tribe or society.
usually essential psychopaths, also

.
process of ponerogenesis,
Consequently, for millennia, through the
and their descendants
Yes, in my humble opinion, it really is that simple.
And now, in the technologically small world of the 21st century,
"
and a social system which does not reject them
or force them to submit to laws and customs whose meaning is incomprehensible to them. They dream of a world in which their simple and radical way of experiencing and perceiving reality would dominate; where they would, of
In this Utopian dream, they imagine that those "others", different,

but also more technically skillful than they are, should be put to work to achieve this
goal for the psychopaths and others of their kin
Such a vision justifies killing people, whose

suffering does not move them to compassion
From this
interminable
quest for total worldly dominance has arisen our destructive and unsustainable
modern industrial civilization
And so there is an
ancient cycle of Pathocracy that has accompanied the implacable march of
civilization, with its attendant male-dominated hierarchies
accumulation of wealth by a small, pathological, subset of a population

conveys Oppression and exploitation of the majority by this
pathological "aristocracy" in its attempt to establish totalitarian dominance
Unrestrained growth that inevitably exceeds the carrying capacity of the occupied
landbase, which leads to widespread, deepening poverty and suffering
Imperial overreach in wars of conquest, colonization and occupation
waged
Failure of the societal system due to the unrelenting,
irrational, draconian measures of psychopathic rulers
The "victors" take over but

inevitably retain the patriarchal hierarchic structure of civilization
There is
always the common denominator of a small group of pathological individuals who
exploit and enslave the majority of the general
population in an irrational quest for absolute supremacy.
this is an
endeavor that
can only fail.
the mythology of
course, be assured safety and prosperity.
. "We", they say, "after all, will create a new government, one of justice".
They are prepared to fight
and to suffer for the sake of such a brave new world, and also, of course, to inflict suffering upon others.
because "they" are not quite conspecific.
opposition which can last for generations."
They do not realize that they will consequently meet with
("Political Ponerology" by Andrew M. Lobaczewski, IV, PONEROLOGY, INHERITED DEVIATIONS, page 139)
seemingly
; a fatal disease that is now near rendering the only world we have to live upon uninhabitable.
, for at least ten thousand years:
- Concentrated
, in whatever form was current,
along with the ensuant power it
combined with failing infrastructure
and dwindling resources
in the effort to acquire ever more essential resources
possessed by a pathological lust for power
resulting in bloody rebellion; or the empire collapses under its own weight; or the empire is conquered by another, younger and/or more powerful
- Popular anger reaches "critical mass"
and said hierarchy is inevitably infiltrated and
dominated by new or surviving essential psychopaths and another parasitic ruling class brings the next pathocracy to power
This theme and its variations are human history since the Neolithic Revolution.
, driven
beyond all reason by greed and addiction to power, without conscience or remorse, oppress,
As history has repeatedly proven,
, by its very nature,
So, What's the Point?
What has all this to do with racism? Simply this;
racism has long been an important and very effective weapon in the
arsenal of the ruling class, the pathocracy The supremacists
are
well aware that race has nothing to do with reality. superficial physical differences
provide a convenient means by which false dichotomies of "us and
them" are created This
gives manufactured substance to fallacious claims of the
inferior nature of the "other When one "race" can be defined as "inferior"
.
, members of the pathocracy,
The
between people from diverse environments
, in turn,
".
and dehumanized through a campaign of disinformation and slander, their

enslavement can be profitably justified. This tactic can be used to
rationalize everything from slavery to colonization and even genocide It
makes it "OK" to steal the resources of less deserving, inferior, uncivilized
indigenous peoples
It also makes it acceptable or even
desirable to slaughter an "inferior race" in the process
.
or even those of "civilized" cultures that are "different" or simply weaker.
By the time the indoctrination machine of civilization is done, an entire culture
of peaceful, intelligent and sustainably productive indigenous people, living harmoniously with their landbase, can be transformed into a population of filthy, ignorant, primitive savages that are an existential threat to the civilized.
What right do such inferior heathens have to hoard natural resources to which civilization is naturally entitled?
The false concept of race also represents a
potent "wedge issue" that can be used within the "empire" to manufacture discord
and incite conflict among its diverse subjects. It focuses attention on
visible
variations between ethnic groups; superficial differences
It's
always easier to instill fear of or contempt for the "other" when there are visible
dissimilarities
They are observable "evidence" of difference
When these visual cues are well established in the general "normal"
population, they form a base upon which a campaign of disinformation and
propaganda can be built. This ability to divide
is one of the most
powerful weapons in the arsenal of any ruling class. Assuring that the huddled
masses are kept busy fighting
goes a very long way toward keeping them
from recognizing and turning upon the actual source of their misery Racism,
irrelevant
that have evolved due to distinct environmental conditions.
from the established norm of the dominant culture.
, things that can
be seen and are therefore real and "true".
, to create baseless conflict among the subjugated,
amongst themselves
Capitalism & Slavery
"However, historical references indicate that class society before capitalism was able, on the whole, to do without this particular form of oppression [racism]. Bad
the ancient Greeks and Romans knew nothing

were both black and white
Racism is a product of capitalism. It grew
as the society of classical Greece and Rome were it is historically reasonably well documented that
about race
. Slaves
and in fact the majority of slaves were white. The first clear evidence of racism occurred at the end of the 16th century
with the start of the slave trade from Africa to Britain and to America. " (emphasis added)
"
out of early capitalism's use of slaves for the plantations of the New
World, it was consolidated in order to justify western and white
domination of the rest of the world
Lo and behold! The emergence of capitalism is evidently
synchronous with the origins of racism!
racism is not about ethnic dissimilarities. It is

about establishing a
rationale for slavery
It was only with the emergence of capitalism that
racism reared its ugly head.
, racism is a
fabrication in its entirety. The supremacist element has woven this racism myth into
the fabric of history
and it flourishes today as a means of dividing the working class between white and Muslim or black, and native and
immigrants or asylum seekers." (emphasis added) (source)
Fascinating! What an elegant bit of historical obscurity this is! I wonder why we were never taught this minor lesson in our
history classes.
I say again,
, in fact,
and keeping people divided. As is shown by ancient history, people who enslaved others were actually not always particular about skin color. As long as slaves were productive
and subservient, they might just as well have been any color of the rainbow.
It is very clear that, scientifically, practically, pragmatically, rationally, obviously and without doubt
, a web of hatred and discord spun from nothing more than the pathological lust for total domination of the human race by a small parasitic pathocracy.
Racism & Fascism
fascism: A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism American Heritage Dictionary, 1983
(source) According to the second edition (1989) of the Oxford English Dictionary,
English occurred in 1936

a
the earliest known usage of the word "racism" in
book by the American fascist, Lawrence Dennis, "The Coming American Fascism". From the book; "If, in this discussion, it be assumed that one of our values
It's no
surprise that we find "racism" and "fascism" linked from the start. What other ism is
closely associated with fascism? Fascism & Corporatism Corporatism and
capitalism go hand in hand and benefit greatly from slavery
They are two
sides of the same coin.
Corporatism
has rewritten our language of social discourse at
the same time it has taken half the wealth of this nation and concentrated it in the
hands of a few.
should be a type of racism which excludes certain races from citizenship, then the plan of execution should provide for the annihilation, deportation, or sterilization of the excluded races ." Page 80, chapter 9
, either traditional or wage.
corporatism:
Noun1. control of a state or organization by large interest groups (emphasis added)
"
, or corporate fascism, is the
American form of this disease. It has thrived here unchallenged for several decades. And it
" (source)
"How can this be? This can be because the United States of America is being run by powerful politicians and corporate CEOs who care not one whit about America or the American
people in their quest for control of the global economy. Such a public/private partnership is known as fascism." (source) "Fascism came about essentially as a result of the economic and political crisis of the years after World War I.
Fascism
protected the existing social order by suppressing the working-class movement by
force and by providing scapegoats for popular anger such as minority groups: Jews,
foreigners, or blacks; it also prepared the citizenry for the economic and
psychological mobilization of war
What has long been the bane of
capitalism? Communism
Racism first arose out of the white desire to exploit black

people economically - and it is maintained today for much the same reasons
The belief in separate human races, once considered a "scientific" reality is in
fact a groundless fabrication. Supremacists keep the deception alive for the
purposes of promoting discord in a quest for their obscene version of Utopia and to
Units called fasci di combattimento (combat groups), from the Latin fasces, were originally established to oppose communism. The fascist party, the Partitio Nazionale Fascista, controlled Italy 1922-43.
." (emphasis added) (source)
What has long been one of the favorite means of causing discord and conflict within the general population? Scapegoats for popular anger; race, religion,
foreigners = prejudice/bigotry = racism.
Hatred Out Of Whole Cloth
"
." (emphasis added)
(source)
rationalize a world with only two classes; masters and slaves.

for the purpose of
justifying slavery
there is equal promotion of discrimination based
upon factors other than race
Note that,
sowing discontent and
and other abuse,
. Bigotry is certainly not confined to racism alone.
Sexual discrimination is still rampant in the modern world. Animosity between men and women is
encouraged by the male-dominated hierarchy through unequal treatment in every facet of life. Women are still treated as second class citizens at best and exploited as "property" at worst. Pornography, prostitution and, in some
cases, marriage are all forms of enslavement. Those who are not genetically predisposed toward the "normal" of heterosexuality are stigmatised and subject to ostracism or worse.
discrimination becomes starker every day
Class
. The poorest of people are constantly reminded and kept ever aware that there are those who have more, giving
The
color of one's skin
can and will be turned
into a wedge to be driven between us. The ruling class will take any opportunity to
emphasize and escalate even the slightest disparity to a burning issue of contention
and hence into conflict.
them a convenient target for their anger and resentment. Those who work to "make a living" are kept in constant fear of the masses of poor "others" waiting to "steal" their jobs and/or possessions if given half a chance.
, a person's religion, sexual orientation, nationality, age or social station; anything that can be called "different"
People engaged and distracted by emotionally debilitating, artificially induced disharmony are far easier to exploit and manipulate.
That Was ThenWhat About
Now? In ages past, pathocracy consumed villages, towns, cities, states and eventually even nations, creating short-lived empires. But these empires were local or regional phenomena. Their coming and passing had little if any
Other societies, particularly those indigenous cultures not yet "civilized",

went on with Life blissfully unaware of the great dramas that might be playing out
on the other side of the world. Today the emergence of a truly global pathocracy
puts the entire planet at very real risk.
no corner of
the planet is immune to the ravages of civilization and its culture of economic
colonialism
There is little chance to avoid
global feudalism as long as the ruling class is able to keep humanity conflicted
Eradicating the myth of "racism" would be a major step toward halting the historic
cycle of oppression
affect elsewhere.
In this age of high technology, the "free market" and capitalist globalization/privatization,
, the spreading cancer of its corporate fascism and the usurious privately owned banking cartel that controls it all.
, war and death that always accompanies civilization and its empires. It would also bring us that much closer to putting an end to the diseases of "nationalism" and "patriotism"
that are fostered by the pathological ruling class. We are a global family, community, tribe, clan; whatever descriptor you pick, we are all fundamentally the same, bound together by Life. It's time to recognize that this is an asset,
embrace it and use it in the creation of a culture of resistance and to bring a calculated and controlled end to industrial civilization for the sake of all Life. Failure to do so greatly increases the likelihood of near term human
extinction.
Root cause --- Heterosexism/Sexism

Capitalism is the root cause of (hetro)sexism- its used as a tool to divide
the working class
Dickinson 7
(Torry D Dickinson, a tenured Professor of Womens Studies at Kansas State University,

(Hetero)Sexism as a Weapon of the World-System http://www.jstor.org/stable/40241695 \\ME)
As an institution that appears at every level of global-society, hetero- and

ageist-sexism has served as the world-system's primary weapon of
mystification and division. Throughout the capitalist world-system, the
market and labor processes are cultural forces that shape the ways that
all socially defined groups live (Smith et al., 1988: x). And sexism in the worldsystem has always included heterosexism and ageism at its very core. By
referring here to (hetero)sexism as one of the world-system's weapons- which take the form of systemically and
culturally generated, unequal processes- I am directly acknowledging, extending, and re-contextualizing Suz- anne
Pharr's feminist formulation that homophobia is a weapon of sexism. Pharr was the first social analyst to widely
articulate the view that heterosexism, homophobia, and compulsory heterosexuality serve as a weapon of sexism.
She stated that heterosexism was an integral part of sexism and

connected the dots for egalitarian people who had seen heterosexism as
separate from sexism. In her seminal book and article, Pharr also suggested, along with many past and
contemporary feminist scholars, that sexism (including heterosexism) constituted a separate social system that had
(hetero)sexism serves as one of the worldsystem's shields. As an offensive and defensive weapon, the shield of
hetero- and ageist-sexism both allows power- holders to advance
inequalities in intimate and abstract ways and to defend and protect the
system. In contrast to the view that sexism is an independent and holistic system, I argue that hetero- and ageist- sexism (or the institution of
gender) can best be understood not as a separate system (or as relations organized
under the institution of the household), but as one of a number of interconnected, everpresent global institutions of the capitalist world-system. Sexism is connected to all
its own logic and roots (1988). Here I argue that
activities in the global system and emanates from more than the gendering of household work, the secular increase
in unwaged activities especially in areas of the global South, and the simultaneous increase in dependency on
waged labor, especially in areas of the global North (Dickinson & Schaeffer, 2001; 2008) and in the lives of some
U.S. professional households or "good job" families (Nelson & Smith, 1999). Rather than resulting from the workings
of one set of social processes, the institution of gender expressed and created all aspects of the modern, global
"The locus of
patriarchal control is not found in its pan-historical perseverance, but in
the contemporary organization of production" (Smith, 1984a: 74). Hetero- and
ageist-sexism form an integral part of the multi- faceted institutional
relations that sustain historical capitalism, and the formation of its many
layers and its connections with households can be revealed through
feminist, world-systemic analysis and social-change practice.
social system. Following world-systems analysts' definition of racism, Joan Smith wrote,

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Cap K vs K affs --- GHJPP 2014

history's presumed failure to defang existing capitalist

Leftists should refuse to accept namely the triumph of capitalism

2.8 billion peoplealmost half of the world's populationstruggle in

Never before has a Marxian analysis of

Many critiques of Marx focus on

Rather than jettisoning Marx, decentering

the questionable assumptions that have come to constitute the core of

change, what is needed is a cogent understanding of the systemic nature

in politics the essence of the flower lies in the name by

This, of course, does not mean

crises of subsistence, trench warfare, unemployment, inflation, genocide.

a socialist humanist vision remains crucial, whose fundamental features

It vests its hope for change in the development of critical

the enduring relevance of a radical socialist pedagogy

We need to recognize that capitalist democracy is unrescuably

OWS has today pretty much fizzled out. The media

What we need to be asking about Occupy Wall Street is: Why

if you want to know how the people in Zuccotti

Launching a protest with no formal

As long as demands and the rest of the logocentric

for our purposes, especially the response

from the David Brooks right. Lets be honest, Cornel

at the Paul Robeson Student Center at Rutgers University,

Look at the Super Dome,

at least once upon a time, Colin Powell

liberals want is for our conservatives to be racists

. We want the black people George Bush cares about to be some of my

best friends are black tokens.

We would much rather get rid

of racism than get rid of poverty

diversity than seek to establish economic equality.

(whoever we think our people are)

. But if the first three

obsession with the importance of history is profoundly misplaced

The 1AC badly misreads historyslavery was not based on racial

The growing demand for labor on plantations

These measures effectively

. What it means is that

and the redress of historical grievance

especially from the standpoint of a

has converted itself into the accomplice

rather than the opponent of the right

rather than economic difference,

you stop thinking of it as a disadvantage

you no longer need to

worry about getting rid of it.

system and thus to turn the

too). The problem is that

Learning how to rap doesnt make you a black person

; it just makes you a rapper. The

culture, then, is that its utterly dependent on race.

We can only say what counts as white or black or Jewish culture if

to the diverse environments in which they developed.

. We are a single family.

Human Race one world, one species, one family. Whether

the fabled garden of

conclude that it evolved on the plains of prehistoric

" in the minds of any people, of any nation, in any language,

more weapon being used in the vain attempt to perpetuate an

that, by its very nature, is irreparably self-destructive.

with reckless abandon

at a rate far surpassing that of their recovery.

Even modern-language dictionaries seem to perpetuate the myth of racism.