Marxism Kritik - DDI 2014 SWS

Marxism
1NC
(INSERT SPECIFIC LINK)
Capitalism is the overarching totality that governs all oppression
their discursive focus on categories of difference ALLOWS the
much larger CLASS CONFLICT to continue.
McLaren and Scatamburlo-DAnnibale, 4 (Peter and Valerie, University
of Windsor, Ontario, University of California, 2004, Educational Philosophy and Theory
Vol 36 No 2, Class Dismissed? Historical Materialism and the politics of difference,)
The cohesiveness of this position suggests that forms of exploitation
and oppression are related

internally to the extent that they are located in the same totality one which is
currently defined by capitalist class rule. Capitalism is an overarching totality that is ,
unfortunately, becoming increasingly invisible in post-Marxist discursive narratives
that valorize difference as a primary explanatory construct. For example, E. San
Juan (2003) argues that race relations and race conflict are necessarily structured by
the larger totality of the political economy of a given society, as well as by modifications in the
structure of the world economy. He further notes that the capitalist mode of production has articulated race with class in
a peculiar way. He too is worth a substantial quotation: While the stagnation of rural life imposed a racial or castelike
rigidity to the peasantry, the rapid accumulation of wealth through the ever more intensifying exploitation of labor by
capital could not so easily racialize the wage-workers of a particular nation, given the alienability of labor- powerunless
certain physical or cultural characteristics can be utilized to divide the workers or render one group an outcast or pariah
removed from the domain of free labor. In
the capitalist development of U.S. society,

African, Mexican, and Asian bodiesmore precisely, their labor power and its reproductive
efficacywere colonized and racialized; hence the idea of internal colonialism retains explanatory
validity. Race is thus constructed out of raw materials furnished by class
relations, the history of class conflicts, and the vicissitudes of colonial/capitalist
expansion and the building of imperial hegemony. It is dialectically accented and
operationalized not just to differentiate the price of wage labor within and outside the territory of the
metropolitan power, but also to reproduce relations of domination subordination invested with an
aura of naturality and fatality. The refunctioning of physical or cultural traits as ideological and political signifiers of class
identity reifies social relations. Such racial markers enter the field of the alienated labor process, concealing the artificial
nature of meanings and norms, and essentializing or naturalizing historical traditions and values which are contingent on
mutable circumstances. For San Juan, racism
and nationalism are modalities in which

class struggles articulate themselves at strategic points in history . He argues that
racism arose with the creation and expansion of the capitalist world
economy. He maintains, rightly in our view, that racial or ethnic group solidarity is given meaning and value in
terms of their place within the social organization of production and reproduction of the ideological-political order;
ideologies of racism as collective social evaluation of solidarities arise to reinforce structural constraints which preserve
the exploited and oppressed position of these racial solidarities. It is remarkable, in our opinion, that so
much of
contemporary social theory has largely abandoned the problems of labor,
capitalist exploitation, and class analysis at a time when capitalism is becoming more universal,
more ruthless and more deadly. The metaphor of a contemporary tower of Babel seems appropriate hereacademics
striking radical poses in the seminar rooms while remaining oblivious to the possibility that their
seemingly
radical discursive maneuvers do nothing to further the struggles against
oppression and exploitation which continue to be real, material, and not
merely discursive problems of the contemporary world (Dirlik, 1997, p. 176). Harvey (1998, pp. 29
31) indicts the new academic entrepreneurs, the masters of theory-in-and-for-itself whose discourse radicalism has
deftly side-stepped the enduring conundrums of class struggle and who have, against a sobering background of
cheapened discourse and opportunistic politics, been stripped of their self-advertised radicalism. For years, they
contested socialism, ridiculed Marxists, and promoted their own alternative theories of liberatory politics but now they
have largely been reduced to the role of supplicants in the most degraded form of pluralist politics imaginable. As
they pursue the politics of difference, the class war rages unabated and they
seem either unwilling or unable to focus on the unprecedented economic carnage occurring around the globe. Harveys
searing criticism suggests that post-Marxists have been busy fiddling while Rome burns and his comments echo those
made by Marx (1978, p. 149) in his critique of the Young Hegelians who were, in spite of their allegedly worldshattering statements, the staunchest conservatives. Marx lamented that the Young Hegelians were simply fighting
phrases and that they failed to acknowledge that in offering only counter-phrases, they were in no way combating the
real existing world but merely combating the phrases of the world. Taking a cue from Marx and substituting phrases with
discourses or resignifications we would contend that the practitioners of difference politics who operate within
exaggerated culturalist frameworks that privilege the realm of representation as the primary arena of political struggle
question some discourses of power while legitimating others. Moreover, because
they lack a class

perspective, their gestures of radicalism are belied by their own class
positions.10 As Ahmad (1997a, p. 104) notes: One may speak of any number of disorientations and even
oppressions, but one cultivates all kinds of politeness and indirection about the structure of capitalist class relations in
which those oppressions are embedded. To speak of any of that directly and simply is to be vulgar. In this climate of
Aesopian languages it
is absolutely essential to reiterate that most things are a

matter of class. That kind of statement is ... surprising only in a culture like that of the North American university
... But it is precisely in that kind of culture that people need to hear such obvious truths. Ahmads provocative
observations imply that substantive analyses of the carnage wrought by globalized class exploitation have, for the most
part, been marginalized by the kind of radicalism that has been instituted among the academic Left in North America. He
further suggests that while various post-Marxists have invited us to join their euphoric celebrations honoring the
decentering of capitalism, the abandonment of class politics, and the decline of metanarratives (particularly those of
Marxism and socialism), they have failed to see that the most meta of all metanarratives of the past three centuries, the
creeping annexation of the globe for the dominance of capital over laboring humanity has met, during those same
decades, with stunning success (Ahmad, 1997b, p. 364). As such, Ahmad invites us to ask anew, the proverbial question:
What, then, must be done? To this question we offer no simple theoretical, pedagogical or political prescriptions. Yet we
would argue that if social change is the aim, progressive educators and theorists
must cease displacing
class analysis with the politics of difference.
A historical materialist analysis is key to understanding the

oppression of all categories of difference the dialectic of
capital creates the material structures of exploitation.
An historical materialist approach understands that categories of

difference are social/political constructs that are often encoded in dominant
ideological formations and that they often play a role in moral and legal statemediated forms of ruling. It also acknowledges the material force of ideologies
particularly racist ideologiesthat assign separate cultural and/or biological essences
to different segments of the population which, in turn, serve to reinforce and
rationalize existing relations of power. But more than this, an historical
materialist understanding foregrounds the manner in which difference is
central to the exploitative production/ reproduction dialectic of capital, its
labor organization and processes, and in the way labor is valued and renumerated. The
real problem is the internal or dialectical relation that exists between capital
and labor within the capitalist production process itselfa social relation in which
capitalism is intransigently rooted. This social relationessential to the production of
abstract labordeals with how already existing value is preserved and new value
(surplus value) is created (Allman, 2001). If, for example, the process of actual
exploitation and the accumulation of surplus value is to be seen as a state of constant
manipulation and as a realization process of concrete labor in actual labor timewithin a
given cost-production system and a labor marketwe cannot underestimate the
ways in which difference (racial as well as gender difference) is encapsulated in
the production/reproduction dialectic of capital. It is this relationship that is
mainly responsible for the inequitable and unjust distribution of resources.
A deepened understanding of this phenomenon is essential for understanding
the emergence of an acutely polarized labor market and the fact that
disproportionately high percentages of people of color are trapped in the lower
rungs of domestic and global labor markets (McLaren & Farahmandpur, 1999).
Difference in the era of global capitalism is crucial to the workings, movements
and profit levels of multinational corporations but those types of complex relations
cannot be mapped out by using truncated post-Marxist, culturalist conceptualizations
of difference. To sever issues of difference from class conveniently draws
attention away from the crucially important ways in which people of color
(and, more specifically, women of color) provide capital with its superexploited
labor poolsa phenomenon that is on the rise all over the world. Most social relations
constitutive of racialized differences are considerably shaped by the relations of
production and there is undoubtedly a racialized and gendered division of
labor whose severity and function vary depending on where one is situated in the
capitalist global economy (Meyerson, 2000).6
Links
Post----- Links
The privileging of postmodern-theory production is zero sum
with material institutional analysis they relegate the class
struggle to the hypereducated scholar NOT the true oppressed.
Poitevin, PhD Cand Sociol @ UC-Davis, 2001 (Rene Francisco, The end of anticapitalism as we knew it: Reflections on postmodern Marxism, TheSocialist Review,
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3952/is_200101/ai_n8932891 The
Postmodern Intellectual as Revolutionary Subject, Or Capitalocentrism Strikes Back)
Let us bracket for a moment the limitations of postmodern/post-Marxist epistemologies,

together with their "provisional ontology," and focus instead on the merits of their
"performative" politics. What is it exactly that has been/can be accomplished politically
in this new paradigm? I will point out two results from the postmodern/post-Marxist
approach. First, in the postmodern/post-Marxist world, it is the (white,
middleclass) postmodern intellectual who gets constituted as the new
"revolutionary subject."40 In a political universe controlled by postmodern Marxist
physics, where there are no longer objective mechanisms of oppression, but
what matters is "rather how... we wish to think of the complex interaction between these
[sic] complexities,"" the postmodern intellectual becomes the de facto new
vanguard. In a political practice that denies the possibility of objective
criteria in deciding what constitutes social phenomena, postmodern
intellectuals are the agency in charge of allocating legitimacy to political
claims. It is no longer the material conditions or the historical conjuncture of a
particular situation that determine what is to be done, but as JK. Gibson-Graham
claim, it is "rather how we wish to think" about social problems that constitutes the
defining criteria for validity and politics - in a context where the "we" is constituted by a
postmodern intelligentsia. Simply put, it is no longer up to the working class, or
queer people of color, or women, or the party intellectual, or any other
subjectivity to decide which project is legitimate enough to merit
recognition - and commitment. In the postmodern Marxist world, the
hypereducated postmodern scholar is the one in charge of leading and
defining which struggles count and how they will be fought. Simply put, the
postmodern intellectual is the new revolutionary subject. One of the most immediate and
important tasks in the postmodern/post-Marxist "revolution" is theory production. To
paraphrase Lenin, there can be no revolutionary practice without postmodern theory.
The reason that postmodern theory is so important is because, as they themselves put it,
postmodern Marxism constructs political agency by offering a "range of subject positions
that individuals may inhabit, constituting themselves as class subjects with particular
political energies and possibilities."42 This, of course, is no small task given that "the
production of new knowledges is a world-changing activity, one that repositions other
knowledges and empowers new subjects, practices and institutions."43 This
privileging of postmodern-theory production, coupled with the unique role
conferred on the postmodern intellectual in a political process that privileges
discourse at the expense of institutional analysis constitutes (in an ironic twist
of fate for people who are so explicitly anti-Leninist) nothing short of a new
vanguardism on post-structuralist steroids.
The Postmodern epistemological framework precludes true

revolution it substitutes valuable institutional analysis for
irreverent intellectualism.
Poitevin, PhD Cand Sociol @ UC-Davis, 2001
(Rene Francisco, The end of anti-capitalism as we knew it: Reflections on postmodern
Marxism, The Socialist Review,
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3952/is_200101/ai_n8932891)
From Radical Democracy to Revolutionary Democracy Let me finish by addressing the

"vision thing" in Marxist theory, and by putting forward some minimal suggestions for
how to proceed. The problem with the Left in this country is not Marx's
theorizing of capital, it is the Left's profound poverty of vision. Simply put, we
cannot think "Revolution" anymore because we cannot think "Capitalism"
anymore. What passes for "radical democracy" nowadays is so timid and so
willing to declare and settle for quick victories that one has to wonder sometimes
where exactly it is that the radicalism in radical democracy lies. And to make
matters worse, we are living in a period in which the Left itself is the one in
charge of convincing us that the "Revolution" is not only politically
unfeasible, but also epistemologically impossible. To paraphrase Marx's famous
eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, postmodern Marxists have interpreted the world
for too long - the point is to change it. Do we need reform? Of course we do, but to
construct reform as a "sufficient" condition for social change is to engage not in the
politics of empowerment but in the practice of a politics of surrender with delusions of
grandeur. Furthermore, in a post-structuralist epistemological framework in
which structural and systemic explanations are forbidden, all we are left with is
a blurred capacity to prioritize what is to be done. In short, in the postmodern Marxist
world, it is impossible to structurally explain how the top 1 percent of the
world population has more wealth than the bottom 92 percent. To do that would
require the admission that there is something called capitalism with a logic to it. Recall
that in the postmodern Marxist world, the political importance of "any
relationship... [is determined by] how we wish to think of the complex interaction"; it
is not based on institutional or systemic mechanisms of how inequality gets
generated and reproduced.51 And given the postmodern Marxists' insistence on
defining capitalism from the get-go as having "no essential or coherent identity,"52 it is
no surprise that such academics are totally irrelevant to real people's struggles
against globalization, the IMF, the WTO, and NAFTA. It's the case of the chicken
coming home to roost. It is time to stop the politics of surrender and denial. It is
time to stop pretending that if we repeat things over and over again for long enough (this
is called "performative" in postmodern parlance), things will eventually change. The fact
is that the Left has been getting crushed for quite some time now. The fact is that it
is going to take more than a cadre of postmodern intellectuals and a new
definition of capitalism to establish a just economic and political system. And
attempts to co-opt and hijack Marxism for some reformist agenda is not going to do it
either.
The postmodern left downplays structural inequality for futile

questions of discourse and representations.
Poitevin, PhD Cand Sociol @ UC-Davis, 2001
(Rene Francisco, The end of anti-capitalism as we knew it: Reflections on postmodern
Marxism, The Socialist Review,
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3952/is_200101/ai_n8932891)
I ended the 1990s, however, profoundly dissatisfied with both the theory and the practice of what constitutes "the Left" in
this country. When I look around and see what passes for radical politics today, I see a Left so acquiescent and timid in its
demands that one has to wonder what is left of the Left. And the theory and action that claims recognition as critical, or
oppositional, is not only more dogmatically anti-Marxist than ever, it is also masquerading itself as socialist discourse.
What I see is a U.S. Left political practice - vehement in rhetoric and tone -- more invested in pursuing a reformist intramiddle class liberal agenda, all in the name of "going beyond Marx," than with the well-being of the majority of people in
this country. This
is a Left that insists on downplaying institutional and

structural inequality, the asymmetric distribution of social and economic
power, in favor of issues concerning language, cultural representation ,
procedural democracy, access to elite employment, and environmental degradation as a quality-of-life issue. So
my critique of actually existing U.S. Lefts comes out of my own need for intellectual and political self-clarification, but
more importantly, it is a way to look forward to what must be done. This approach, however, requires by way of
introduction a preliminary inventory and assessment of what I mean by "actually existing U.S. Lefts." While I acknowledge
that "the Left" is by no means monolithic, it is possible to provide a critique of radical politics by looking at the academic
Left in the university. This paper is first a critique of what constitutes the Left in academia - the poverty of politics and
theory in the ivory tower relates directly to the crisis of the broader Left. Within this academic context, "radical
democracy"' has been the Left's dominant theoretical orientation for the last two decades. And within the radical
democracy tradition itself, the "Amherst School" of postmodern Marxism, which I will explain in more detail shortly, has
been the most vocal trend in academic circles since the mid 1990s (as anybody who went to their Marxism 2000
Conference or who has looked at their journal Rethinking Marxism can testify.) As the title of this paper suggests, a close
reading of the Amherst School of postmodern Marxism as standard bearer for an academic Left will allow me to engage
with the broader current political crisis in Left politics -- and radical democracy. I begin with the postmodern
(mis)appropriation of Althusser's notion of "overdetermination," namely the intuition that reality is so complex that it is
better understood as a multicausal process rather than as a "structural" or systemic mechanism, as in the traditional
Marxist explanation of capitalism. Then, through a close reading of J.K. Gibson-Graham's (which is the professional name
of scholars Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson), The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It),2 I show that despite
its
intuitive analytical appeal and theoretical sophistication, their book

espouses an unconvincing and ultimately reactionary postmodern/postMarxist politics - one that is ultimately predicated around how to make
capitalism more user friendly. I will show that to practice or "perform"
postmodern Marxist politics in our present situation is not to engage in what the Amherst School of
postmodern Marxism describes as a "politics of opportunity and attainment,"3 but to practice the politics of
surrender instead. I will make clear that what ultimately gives internal consistency to many of the critiques of
postmodern and post-Marxist theorists is a profound distortion and co-optation of the most critical, unique, and
politically mobilizing features of Marxist theory, on one hand, combined with a renaturalization of a capitalism predicated
on liberal notions of social and economic reform, on the other.4 The Amherst School of postmodern Marxism, which is
predicated on a rethinking of Marxist theory from a post-structuralist standpoint,5 came together as a recognizable cluster
during the late 1980s, first through the writings of scholars like Richard Wolff, Stephen Resnick, and David Ruccio, and
later through the publication of the journal Rethinking Marxism and conferences sponsored by the Association for
Economic and Social Analysis (AESA), and a newer generation of scholars that can be traced to the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst (they either teach, worked, or graduated from there.)6 Operating within the broader tradition
of radical democracy triggered by Laclau and Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy,7 the Amherst School spent the
1990s ferociously debating and advocating their vision of politics predicated on the "overdetermination" of the social
world, namely, the claim that causal explanations of social phenomena, and macroanalyses of economic systems, are really
nothing more than myths and fictions that cannot stand the cross-examination of discursive analysis and the analytical
power of post-structuralist tools. Because of the close overlap between the critiques of Marxism espoused by radical
democracy, a la Laclau and Mouffe, and postmodern Marxism, a la J.K. Gibson-Graham, I use the term
"postmodern/post-Marxism" to refer to the epistemological and political goals they share in common. By
"postmodern/post-Marxism" I refer to the shared set of positions through which radical democracy and the Amherst
School reduce Marxism to a "teleological, totalizing, and essentializing" tradition. Moreover, within the radical
democracy/ post-- modern Marxism school, classical Marxism is also understood to be an inherently economistic and
class-reductionist paradigm. Both traditions share a commitment to postmodern
politics that refuses to

privilege class oppressions over other forms of domination . And they refuse to
theorize capitalism as a macro-level social structure that is inherently
exploitative. Thus it makes sense to combine them both for analytical purposes under the rubric of
"postmodern/post-Marxists." The main difference between radical democrats and postmodern Marxists is that the former
absolutely refuse to use the label "Marxist" to describe themselves, while the latter accept the label. Radical democracy is
definitely a "post-Marxist" tradition, with Laclau and Mouffe its best-known members. (Most) postmodern Marxists, on
the other hand, still claim the label "Marxists" to construct themselves, even if, at times, they might be conflicted about it.
In so doing, it is not at all clear what in the Marxist tradition the post-Marxists are actively drawing on. The need that J.K.
Gibson-Graham exhibit in one of their essays to clarify their self-identification as Marxists - however thinly - is a perfect
example of the uses of "Marxism" to describe the Amherst School: "The chapter reads as a Marxist speaking to an
audience of Marxists" because the paper was first presented at a Marxist conference.8
Post-al theorizations segregate difference from class formation

the result is a failure to correctly conceive of the material
nature of social relations.
Post-al theorizations of difference circumvent and undermine any systematic

knowledge of the material dimensions of difference and tend to segregate
questions of difference from class formation and capitalist social relations.
We therefore believe that it is necessary to (re)conceptualize difference by drawing
upon Marxs materialist and historical formulations. Difference needs to be
understood as the product of social contradictions and in relation to political
and economic organization. We need to acknowledge that otherness and/or
difference is not something that passively happens, but, rather, is actively
produced. In other words, since systems of differences almost always involve
relations of domination and oppression, we must concern ourselves with the
economies of relations of difference that exist in specific contexts. Drawing upon the
Marxist concept of mediation enables us to unsettle our categorical approaches to both
class and difference, for it was Marx himself who warned against creating false
dichotomies in the situation of our politicsthat it was absurd to choose between
consciousness and the world, subjectivity and social organization, personal or collective
will and historical or structural determination. In a similar vein, it is equally absurd to

see difference as a historical form of consciousness unconnected to class formation,
development of capital and class politics (Bannerji, 1995, p. 30). Bannerji points to the
need to historicize difference in relation to the history and social organization of capital
and class (inclusive of imperialist and colonialist legacies). Apprehending the
meaning and function of difference in this manner necessarily highlights the
importance of exploring (1) the institutional and structural aspects of
difference; (2) the meanings that get attached to categories of difference; and (3) how
differences are produced out of, and lived within specific historical
formations.5
Creating Space Link

Creating space for excluded voices IS neoliberal pluralism it
cannot pose a challenge to capitalism because it is rooted within
marketplace.
Moreover, it presents a challenge to those theorizations that work to consolidate

identitarian understandings of difference based exclusively on questions of cultural or
racial hegemony. In such approaches, the answer to oppression often amounts to
creating greater cultural space for the formerly excluded to have their voices
heard (represented). In this regard, much of what is called the politics of difference
is little more than a demand for inclusion into the club of representation a posture
which reinscribes a neo-liberal pluralist stance rooted in the ideology of
free-market capitalism. In short, the political sphere is modeled on the
marketplace and freedom amounts to the liberty of all vendors to display
their different cultural goods. What advocates of this approach fail to address is
that the forces of diversity and difference are allowed to flourish provided
that they remain within the prevailing forms of capitalist social
arrangements. The neo- pluralism of difference politics (including those based
on race) cannot adequately pose a substantive challenge to the productive
system of capitalism that is able to accommodate a vast pluralism of ideas
and cultural practices, and cannot capture the ways in which various
manifestations of oppression are intimately connected to the central
dynamics of capitalist exploitation.
Middle Passage/Atlantic Economy Link

The Middle Passage is the capitalist process of abstraction
separating labor from the social context and relations that
produce it.
Graeber, 6 (David, 2006, Critique of Anthropology, Vol. 26 No. 1, Turning Modes
of Production Inside Out: Or, Why Capitalism is a Transformation of Slavery, AS)
We can observe the following traits shared by slavery
and capitalism: (1) Both rely on a

separation of the place of social (re)production of the labor force, and the place where
that labor-power is realized in production in the case of slavery, this is effected
by transporting laborers bought or stolen from one society into another one; in
capitalism, by separating the domestic sphere (the sphere of social production) from the
workplace. In other words, what is effected by physical distance in one is effected by the anonymity of the market in
the other. (2) The transfer is effected through exchanging human powers for money: either by selling workers, or hiring
them (essentially, allowing them to rent themselves). (3) One
effect of that transfer is social

death, in the sense that the communities, kinship relations and so forth that shaped the
worker are, in principle, supposed to have no relevance in the workplace. This is true
in capitalism too, at least in principle: a workers ethnic identity, social networks, kin ties and the rest should not have any
effect on hiring or how one is treated in the office or shop floor, though of course in reality this isnt true. (4) Most
critically, the financial transaction in both cases produces abstract labor, which is pure creative potential. This is created
by the effects of command. Abstract labor is the sheer power of creation, to do anything at all. Everyone might be said to
control abstract labor in their own person, but in order to extend it further, one has to place others in a position where
they will be effectively an extension of ones will, completely at ones orders. Slavery, military service and various forms
of corvee are the main forms in which this has mani- fested itself historically. Obviously, this too is something of an
unrealized ideal: this is in fact precisely the area of most labor struggle. But its worthy of note that feudalism (or
manorialism if you prefer) tends towards exactly the opposite principle: the duties owed by liege to lord were very specific
and intri- cately mapped out. (5) A constant ideological accompaniment of this sort of arrangement is an ideology of
freedom. As Moses Finley first pointed out (1980), most societies take it for granted that no human is completely free or
completely dependent, rather, all have different degrees of rights and obligations. The modern ideal of political liberty, in
fact, has historically tended to emerge from societies with extreme forms of chattel slavery (Pericles Athens, Jeffersons
Virgina), essentially as a point of contrast. Medieval jurists, for example, assumed every right was someone elses
obligation and vice versa; the modern doctrine of liberty as a property of humans one could possess was developed
precisely in Lisbon and Antwerp, the cities that were at the center of the slave trade at the time; and the most common
objection to this new notion of liberty at the time was that if one owns ones freedom, it should then also be possible to sell
it (Tuck, 1979). Hence the doctrine of personal liberty outside the workplace or even the notion of freedom of
contract, that one so often encounters in societies dominated by wage labor, does not really mean we are dealing with a
funda- mentally different sort of system. It means we are dealing with a transformation. We are dealing with the same
terms, differently arranged, so that rather than one class of people being able to imagine themselves as absolutely free
because others are absolutely unfree, we have the same individuals moving back and forth between these two positions
over the course of the week and working day. So, in effect, a
transfer effected just once, by sale, under a

regime of slavery is transformed into one that is repeated over and over
again under capitalism. Now, it might seem a bit impertinent to compare the morning commute to the
Middle Passage, but structurally they do seem to play exactly the same role. What is accomplished
once, and violently and cata- strophically , in one variant, is repeated with endless mind-numbing
drudgery in the other. I should emphasize that when I say one mode of production is a transformation of the other, I am
talking about the permutation of logical terms. It doesnt necessarily imply that one grew out of the other, or even that
there was any historical connection at all. I am not necessarily taking issue, for example, with the historical argument that
capitalism first emerged within the English agricultural sector in the 16th and 17th centuries, rather than from longdistance trade (Brenner, 1976, 1979; Dobb, 1947; Wood, 2002). Or perhaps I should be more specific. It seems to me that
the Brenner hypothesis, as its called, can account for the first two of the three features that define industrial capitalism
as a mode of production: it demonstrates that the emergence of wage labor in the agricultural sector developed hand in
hand with structural forces that demanded ever-expanding profits. However, it doesnt explain the third: the emerging
rural prole- tariats were, in legal principle and usually in practice, servants resident in their employers households (see
e.g. Kussmaul, 1981). At the same time, this same age
of merchant capitalism did see a

sudden and spectacular revival of the institution of chattel slavery and other forms
of forced labor, which had largely vanished in Europe during the late Middle Ages even though these were legally
confined to the colonies. As C.L.R. James argued long ago, rationalized industrial
techniques were
largely developed on slave plantations, and much of the wealth that funded
the Industrial Revolution emerged from the slave trade and even more from industries with servile
work forces (Blaut, 1993: 2035; James, 1938; Williams, 1944). This makes sense. Wage labor relations might
have emerged among improving land- lords during that first period, but the wealthy traders of the time
were after abstract labor in the easiest form possible; their first impulse was to use slaves. Full,
industrial, capitalism might then be said to have emerged only when the two fused. One might speculate that one reason
large-scale merchants eventually came to apply wage labor at home, even within the industrial sector, was not because
slavery or other forms of forced labor proved inefficient as a form of production, but rather because it did not create
efficient markets for consumption: one cannot sell much of anything to slaves, and at least at that time it was difficult to
keep ones population of producers and consumers on entirely different continents.
Capitalism and slavery operate in dynamic simultaneity only

analyzing the latter obfuscates the larger structure of
exploitation we MUST conceive of the political economy of the
Atlantic as a single space defined by labor and trade.
Johnson, 4 (Walter, University of Pennsylvania, Journal of the Early Public Vol 24
No 2, Summer 2004, The Pedestal and the Veil: Rethinking the Capitalism/Slavery
Question, AS)
The existing discussion, that is to say, has devolved into a set of more- or-less
tautological propositions about how you define the categories of historical
analysis (if "capitalism"is defined as that-mode-of-production- characterized-by-wage-labor then slavery was, by
definition, not "capitalist"). But doesn't it make more sense to think about the political
economy of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic as a single space, its
dimensions defined by flows of people, money, and goods, its nested temporalities
set by interlocking (though clearly distinct) labor regimes, cyclical rhythms of cultivation and
foreign exchange, and shared standards of calculability and measurement?'2Try for just a minute to imagine
the history of that bolt of cotton that Marx left out of Capital. It had been bought before it even
existed by a British buyer who extended credit in sterling to an American factor.
It had been put in the ground, tended, picked, bagged, baled, and shipped by
an American slave. It had graded out well and brought a premium price because it was free of "trash" (leaves,
stems, sticks, rocks, etc.) and "stains" (which resulted from cotton being left in the field too long after it bloomed); its
condition, that is, reflected the palpable presence of standards of the exchange in Liverpool in the labor regime that
governed Louisiana. It had been shipped in the name of a planter who was thus liable for any difference between the price
he had received in advance and the price for which it was eventually sold-a planter, that is, who was legally present at the
exchange on which his cotton was sold. It had been summed out in the accounts between planters and factors in dollars
that the factors had bought with the sterling they had received from English buyers and sold to northern merchant
bankers who would pass it on to those seeking to buy English manufactures. And had
been finished in an
English mill, made into a coat, and ended up on the back of an English
millhand who paid for it with his wages.13 In trying to reframe the
capitalism/slavery discussion as a set of questions about eighteenth and nineteenth-century Atlantic
political economy, it might be worth just for a second (because that is all it will take) to see what
Marx did say about the history of slavery in Capital. Right before the business about the veil and the
pedestal he wrote this: "Whilst the
cotton industry introduced child-slavery in

England, it gave in the United States a stimulus to the transformation of the
earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery, into a system of commercial
exploitation."'14 What is striking about this sentence is the first word: "whilst." It frames the relation of what
we have been calling "capitalism" and what we have been calling "slavery" in terms of
dynamic simultaneity rather than simple super-cession, though it does so with careful attention to the
historically different relations of production-slavery and wage labor-which characterized the two poles of this single
Atlantic economy. In so doing, it frames the pedestal metaphor that directly follows it as a structural (or spatial)
metaphor rather than a temporal one. Rather than focusing on the specifics of capitalist development in Europe, this
sentence treats the Atlantic economy as its ground of analysis, a spatial unit over which economic practice had
differential but nevertheless related forms and effects. And the
name that Marx gives this transAtlantic political economy at this moment very close to the end of Capital is not "capitalism"
but "slavery"-"child-slavery," "veiled slavery," "slavery pure and simple." It would strain credibility to argue that
the hundreds upon hundreds of pages of Capital in which Marx ignored the question of slavery should be re-read in the
light of the several moments at the end where he seemed to suggest that "slavery" was the essential form of exploitation
in the nineteenth-century economy and that the forms it took in Manchester or in Mississippi were simply variant
manifestations of a shared essence. Safer to understand the invocation of "slavery" as a rhetorical effect, designed to
pierce the illusion that wage-workers were in any sense "free." "Slavery" was, after all, an often-invoked metaphor in the
nineteenth-century. The term served as a sort of universal comparison for disparate injustices, and in the process it lost
some of its meaning and most of its historical specificity. But the very metaphorical promiscuity of the term "slavery" as
Marx used it, calls us to pay close attention to both the pattern of its deployment and the maneuvers by which its seemingly universal applicability was contested and controlled. To pay attention, that is, to historical process by which the
boundaries between slavery and "freedom" were drawn, and to the character of the "veil" that separated them. The
"veil" to which Marx refers is most simply imagined as "contract freedom": the idea that wage-labor
contracts (by which "free" workers sold control over the capacities of their bodies by the hour) reflected freely given
"consent" to the bargain (and thus elided the deeper histories of expropriation and coercion that, according to Marx,
actuallystruc- tured the bargain).' It refers, that is, to the
historical process by which the

commodification of laborers and the commodification of labor power came
to be understood as two entirely separate and, indeed, opposite things-slavery and
freedom, black and white, household and market, here and there-rather than as two
concretely intertwined and ideologically symbiotic elements of a larger
unified though internally diversified structure of exploitation.
Afrofuturism Link
Black science fiction focuses on historical particularities
past and futureprecludes historical analysis of broader
class exploitation
Reynolds, The Guardian, 1997
(Simon, The Gaurdian, KODWO ESHUN, More Brilliant Than The
Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction,
http://bringthenoisesimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2008/01/bringnoise-deleted-scene-45-kodwo.html, accessed 7/29/14 bh@ddi)
'black science fiction' tendency in music, from Lee Perry and George
Clinton to contemporary sonic wizards like Tricky and Goldie. Although the idea of 'Afro-futurism' has been broached before
More Brilliant Than The Sun is a survey of the
(most notably by American critics Mark Dery and Greg Tate), Kodwo Eshun's book is the most sustained and penetrating analysis to date of
what the author calls 'sonic fiction': the otherworldly vistas and alien mindscapes conjured by genres like dub reggae, hip hop, techno, and
jungle. The book kicks off at blitzkrieg pace and ferocity, with a manifesto that excoriates music journalists and cultural studies academics for
being 'future shock absorbers', forever domesticating the strangeness of music. Dance music hacks are rightly ticked off for their abject failure
to deal with rhythm, dance music's absolute raison d'etre and primary zone of impact on its listeners. As for the academy, Eshun is particularly
scathing about treatments of black pop that analyse it in terms of soul, roots and 'the street'. Rejecting these notions of raw expression and
social realism, Eshun instead celebrates a lineage of black conceptualists, speculators and fabulists. These renegade autodidacts - Sun Ra,
Rammellzee, Dr Octagon, Underground Resistance's Mike Banks and Jeff Mills - weave syncretic and idiosyncratic cosmologies using an array
of esoteric sources. Eshun tracks this 'MythScience' through lyrics, songs and album titles, cover artwork, and (in Underground Resistance's
case) hermetic slogans etched into the run-out vinyl of 12-inch singles. As well as decoding these encrypted expressions of the Afro-Futurist
materiality of the music -- jungle's convoluted breakbeat rhythms, the

But Eshun's brand of "subbass materialism" has nothing in common with Marxist historical materialism.
Instead of causality or continuity, Eshun looks for breaks, those
moments when the future seems to leap out of music; his punning name for the Afro-futurist
imagination, Eshun
focuses on
the
headwrecking delirium of dub production and 'remixology', the timbral violence of the hip hop DJ's scratching.
canon he's erected in More Brilliant is a discontinuum. It's a provocative stance, for sure, but at times you wonder if the baby hasn't been
thrown out with the proverbial bathwater. Jungle, for instance, is probably best understood as a tangle of 'roots and future', to borrow a phrase
from drum & bass outfit Phuture Assassins; as a subculture and a sound, it has one foot in the concrete jungles of Kingston, Jamaica, and the
other in the data jungles of cyberspace. And is it really true, as Eshun seems to insist, that hip hop or reggae are diminished by attempts to
journalistic cliche too often marking a

condescending attitude towards black creativity, but the phrase also contains a kernel of
truth that can't be blithely brushed aside: the material realities of exclusion, disadvantage
and exploitation that simultaneously hamper and energise all forms of underclass
music, black and white.
locate them in a social context? 'The streets' may be a
Micropolitics Link
Micropolitical movements cede class analysis for examination of
consumptive relations that distracts from objective modes of
exploitation
Ebert, Ph.D., University of Minnesota in Critical and Cultural Theory and Professor in
Humanities at University of Albany, 2005
(Teresa L., Science and Society, Rematerializing Feminism, January 2005, Vol. 69 No.
1, jstor, accessed 7/27/14 bh@ddi)
The emergence of micropolitics marks the impact of the globalization of capitalist
production and the way that the dimensions of this objective reality have
become less and less graspable by a subject who, through the working of ideology, has been
remapped as the subject of desire. The subject of desire is, by its very formation, a local and localist
subject. This desiring subject grasps the world through its identity and furthermore constructs this
identity through the sat- isfactions that it acquires in its consuming relations to the world around it.
Micropolitics is the politics of consumption, and consumption is always a matter of

localities. Micropolitics does not have an inverse relation to universal objective reality, but rather is
comple- mentary to it: it
preoccupies the subject with the here and now and, in doing
its attention from the all encompassing objective reality that in
fact determines the here and now. Advanced capitalism deploys micropolitics to restrict the
so, distracts
access of the subject to the dynamics of traveling capital and its expanding range of exploitation. It is of
course ironic that micropolitics is seen as enabling politics - a politics that attends to the connections and
relations of the subject with its immediate conditions and serves as the basis for coalition and other local
practices. In fact, micropolitics has become the logic of activism in the new social movements. To say
what I have said in a different way: micropolitics
putting in its place lifestyle and consumption. It
is the politics of bypassing class and

is a politics that erases any examination
of the structures of exploitation, substituting instead ethnographical studies of the behavior

of the subject in its multiple consuming relations.
Morality
Invoking moral principles as self-evident truths ignores how
class and history inform morality
Cloud, PhD in Rhetorical Studies from Iowa and Professor in University of Texas
Communications Department, 2003
(Dana, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Beyond Evil: Understanding Power Materially and
Rhetorically, Fall 2003, muse, Vol. 6 No. 3, accessed 7-26-14 bh@ddi)
Against an imaginary interlocutor, Marx
and Engels argue that there are no eternal truths

or moral codes, only the production of morality in the service of classes at
different historical moments.8 Citizens today easily understand this proposition when it is applied to
individuals: Stealing food when hungry is morally distinct from a corporate executives looting the retirement savings of
his or her employees. Killing an intruder in self-defense is a matter apart from cold-blooded murder. Marx and Engels
point is that on a broader scale we
can apply the same principle, examining the motives

and contexts for actions that might, in some abstract sense, be regarded as
evil, but which, on closer examination, can be morally and politically
justified. The most significant test of the historical materialist approach to morality, arguably, was the Russian
Revolution. The revolution, even before its degeneration into Stalinism, has been decried as violent by conservatives,
liberals, and anarchists. In Their Morals and Ours, Trotsky argues against the idea that violent means are always immoral.
He answers liberal critics of the Bolshevik revolution who argue that fascism and communism are moral equals in the
belief that the ends justify the means.9 Against this charge, Trotsky defends the Russian Revolution during the civil war
years, during which he headed the Red Army.10 Trotskys book argues that criteria
for ethical and

political judgment should be derived from actual experience on earth, not
from alleged eternal truths that are said to exist outside of history and
society. A consistent historical materialist, he argues, will apply the principles of historical materialism to questions of
morality, locating the class belongingness of moral principles and contextualizing action in terms of
circumstance and purpose. Moral principles cannot transcend their class
basis. Trotsky writes, Morality is a product of social development; there is nothing immutable about it; it serves social
interests; these interests are contradictory; morality more than any other form of ideology
has a class character.11 In class society, violence and lying are the norms, the very principles upon which a
system of exploitation and oppression depends. Wage slavery is defined as the FORUM 533 free
market and the freedom to exploit others as a virtue ; wars against rival powers for
territory, resources, and geopolitical control are justified in terms of alleged humanitarian ends, even when these wars kill
more civilians than they save. Trotskys book is an examination of the morality of the violence of a revolution that sought
to overturn class society. He argues that moral
principles allegedly applied universally across

class are, first, not actually applied evenhandedly across class (the wealthy and powerful
break the rules all the time), and second, are used to condemn any revolution in the eyes
of history. Civil war is the supreme expression of the class struggle. To attempt to subordinate it to abstract norms
means in fact to disarm the workers in the face of an enemy armed to the teeth.12
Nietschze
There are values Nietchzes embracement of political
emptiness divorces moral categories from class analysis.
Cloud, PhD in Rhetorical Studies from Iowa and Professor in University of Texas
Communications Department, 2003
(Dana, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Beyond Evil: Understanding Power Materially and
Rhetorically, Fall 2003, muse, Vol. 6 No. 3, accessed 7-26-14 bh@ddi)
This discussion highlights the historical
and immediate contextual factors that belie any easy

or evenhanded application of the moral categories of good and evil. Is it evil to resist
occupation? Is evil even the right term to describe suicide bombings if they are seen in the context of the historical
imbalance of forces in the region? After a thorough historical and contextual examination, this kind of criticism takes sides
and enables its audience to formulate opinion and judgment that allow for action. It contextualizes Palestinian violence
and the violence of the 9/11 hijackers in terms of a defensive struggle against U.S. and Israeli imperialism. It would not
weigh the violence of the suicide bomber equally with the violence of the Israeli army. And though it would condemn, on
humanist grounds, any targeting of innocent civilian lives in a political struggle, it would not weigh equally the violence of
the terrorists with the violence of the U.S. state. In this analysis, evil
is relevant only as a rhetorical

formulation that attempts to mobilize communities for ends that are not , in
the end, equally in the interests of everyone called to identification with the
invoked moral order. Rhetorical scholars must get beyond evilin the sense of exposing the rhetoricity of
such apparently universal conceptsand help our students and audiences to do the same. But in the process, we must not
give up the grounds for judgment and action. A
critique of morality does not necessarily

entail a relativized world in which the will to power is the only guiding ideal.
A critical rhetoric based on the works of Nietzsche, and after him Foucault, may not
get beyond evil so much as it may embrace a kind of political emptiness . The
gains of political contextualization of evil are available in the humanist tradition of historical materialism and an
understanding of the class foundations of moral practice. There
are such things as goods and

virtues; we just have to be asking whose goods they are and what and whose
ends they serve. At the end of the day, it comes down to which side we are on.
Pirates Links
Piracy arose out of capitalist exploitation AND has economic
utility reject their romanticization of piracy.
Caldwell 11 (American journalist and senior editor at The Weekly Standard, as well as a
regular contributor to the Financial Times and Slate, Piracy is just a part of a capitalist system,
Financial Times, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/dd1d5428-fb2d-11e0-875600144feab49a.html#axzz2JmmPYpDf, 10/21/11)
A book recently published in France LOrganisation Pirate by Rodolphe Durand and

Jean-Philippe Vergne, both social scientists at the cole des Hautes tudes
Commerciales describes piracy as a recurrent feature of capitalism. While the
authors understand that it can be counterproductive to get into arguments about
capitalism, since no two people ever mean the same thing by it, they link piracy to
capitalisms need for a uniform legal regime across territories. When laws and
technologies change, piracy broadly understood as the rejection of authorities claim to
control private property in any realm tends to arise. This was true when the age of
navigation led sailors into waters where no one was ruler, and it is true on the frontiers
of the information age today. Piracy, in fact, often has an economic utility. Illegal
peer-to-peer file downloads have certainly facilitated the transition to a bookless,
cinema-less world. This is not to say that piracy makes the world a better place. The
Economist recently described the situation in Spain where 92 per cent of young adults
admit to having downloaded peer-to-peer content as a 1950s market. That is, the
only way to make money in movies is with a large-grossing box office smash. The result
has been a crippling of Spains homegrown film and music culture, relative to that of
other countries such as Germany or South Korea, which have stronger laws against
piracy. But many people benefit from piracy, in all its forms, not just the pirates
themselves. It served the interests of 17th century Englishmen to see Jamaica
turned into a pirate outpost. Online gambling in violation of local laws has
something in common with piracy. Pirates are not rebels against all order, in fact,
they often depend on the patronage of some powerful faction in government
or business. Somali pirate raids, for example, now take place up to 1,000 miles
offshore, closer to India than to Africa. Somebody has to pay for the petrol and the weeks
of rations, not to mention the GPS software. Oddly, we want to see pirates as
somehow romantic or noble. The Canadian journalist and author Jay Bahadur notes
in his intimate book about the world of Indian Ocean piracy, Deadly Waters, that the
word for pirate in Somali is burcad badeed or ocean robber. But when the pirates
themselves speak to the international press, they do so in the language of NGOs. They
speak of overfishing in the waters around the Horn of Africa by Chinese trawlers,
which destroyed Somali livelihoods, and present their depredations as a
legitimate form of taxation a weak case, to put it mildly.
Piracy is a unique impetus for capitalist development it creates

the economys new territories.
Ramdani 13, , Journaliste conomique et rdac-chef de Business Digest Do we need
Pirates?, Business Digest, 1/15/13, http://www.business-digest.eu/en/2013/01/15/do-we-need-pirates/)
1. Piracy and capitalism: between attraction and repulsion Capitalism, which

responds to the conquest of new territories, constantly changes form under the
pressure of external forces that compel it to adapt. By questioning how States
seek to establish monopolies, the pirate organization functions as one such
force, pushing capitalism in new directions. 2. Major areas of modern piracy
Piracy thrives where newly explored territory does not yet have clearly
defined boundaries. The Internet: From the beginning, pirate organizations have
protested at the national level against attempts to regulate the Web, which they perceive
as censorship. Biotechnologies: some biopiracy organizations such as the Craig Venter
Institute have announced that they possess the means to create and patent new synthetic
species, thereby flying in the face of governmental norms. Space: Although no
governments are currently seeking to appropriate outer space for themselves, the launch
of the first space module in 2010 by the private company SpaceX raises questions about
the future frontiers of the cosmos. 3. Why should business take an interest in pirate
organizations? Pirates disrupt the rules on ownership rights, thereby
contributing to the rise of capitalism, and they provide insight into possible
developments in economic rationale. For example, internet hackers constantly
push large companies to be more innovative and so help to restrict rampant profiteering
in the new economy. Perhaps most significantly, pirates operate at the frontlines of
capitalism, which means that keeping a closer eye on them would undoubtedly help
leaders to anticipate some of the major breakthroughs of tomorrow.
Walt Disney was a liar and so is the af

Wilson, The Socialist Review, 2004
(Colin, The Socialist Review, Original Pirate Material, September
2004, http://socialistreview.org.uk/288/original-pirate-material,
accessed 8/3/14 bh)
What most of us know about pirates we've learned from Walt Disney
- colourful clothes, wooden legs, Johnny Depp with lots of eyeliner. This inspiring book describes the reality. In a brief
period from around
1713 to 1726 thousands of people became pirates because it made their lives more democratic, humane and simply enjoyable than
anything else on ofer. The Atlantic was key to the development of
capitalism: European powers were carving up the 'new world' between them, warring between themselves over the
booty. Commodities like sugar and tobacco made merchants rich.
Violence and oppression were central to the Atlantic trade - two and a half
million Africans had been enslaved and shipped across the ocean by the 1720s, many dying in appalling conditions on the
way. The
whole system depended on deep-ocean ships, the newest technology of the
time, and on the
men who crewed them. Such men faced the risk of

death or serious injury from the sea - hence the wooden leg of the
stereotypical pirate - but they also faced exploitation and violence
from ships' captains. Food and drink were scarce and poor. Wages
were low or nonexistent. Some men were simply forced to work on
board ship. Finally, ordinary sailors were at the bottom of a
hierarchy, while captains slept in separate cabins and could whip
men as close to death as they pleased. English rulers had supported
pirates attacking Spanish ships and ports - Sir Francis Drake had been this kind of pirate a
hundred years earlier. But in 1713 England agreed a peace treaty, hoping to defeat Spain
by trade rather than war. Piracy was outlawed, but England's colonies were too big an
area for the navy to control - the Bahamas were undefended, and hundreds of pirates established a base there.
Pirates were mostly poor and embittered seamen. Some ships rose in mutiny
and became pirate ships. Other men became pirates when their ship was attacked - pirates
would ofer every sailor the chance to join them. They robbed other
ships, partly so they could survive, but not with any scheme of
becoming rich - if they couldn't use what they stole, they threw it
away. Rather than wealth they sought revenge on their rulers, and a life of dignity and enjoyment. Pirate ships were
profoundly democratic, drawing on traditions dating back to the English Revolution of the 1640s and 1650s. Captains
were elected at the start of a voyage, and had real authority only in battle; the partitions which formed officers' cabins
were torn down. Many
pirates were black - more than half the crew on some

ships. There are cases of women becoming pirates, and liberal
attitudes to sexuality were common. Pirates would sometimes
provide welfare for each other, giving money to a man injured at sea so he could live decently on
land. But such long-term responsibility was rare. The usual goal was 'a short life but a
merry one'. With grim humour, pirates inverted all respectable ideas. They
drank such toasts as 'Curse the King and all the Higher Powers'.
They joked about death, and boasted that they were going to hell - 'a
merrier place' than heaven. On trial for piracy they defended their actions, arguing it was the only way they could make a
living, or coolly mocked the judge. Sentenced to hang for piracy, William Fly spoke from the gallows to a large crowd,
telling captains to pay sailors their wages or take as a warning his murder of a captain. Pirates
often blew
themselves up as a group rather than face capture. Piracy stood in
the way of English trade, particularly trade in slaves , and the authorities
responded with a bloodbath. Between 1716 and 1726 over 400 pirates were
hanged, perhaps one in ten. Their bodies were hung outside ports in chains as a warning to seamen tempted to
follow their example. The golden age of piracy was over.
Race, Class, Gender Link

This triplet dismisses class as merely another form of difference.
In stating this, we need to include an important caveat that differentiates our approach
from those invoking the well-worn race/class/gender triplet which can sound, to the
uninitiated, both radical and vaguely Marxian. It is not. Race, class and gender,
while they invariably intersect and interact, are not co-primary. This triplet
approximates what the philosophers might call a category mistake. On the surface
the triplet may be convincingsome people are oppressed because of their race,
others as a result of their gender, yet others because of their classbut this is grossly
misleading for it is not that some individuals manifest certain characteristics known
as class which then results in their oppression; on the contrary, to be a member of a
social class just is to be oppressed and in this regard class is a wholly social
category (Eagleton, 1998, p. 289). Furthermore, even though class is usually
invoked as part of the afore- mentioned and much vaunted triptych, it is usually
gutted of its practical, social dimension or treated solely as a cultural
phenomenonas just another form of difference. In these instances, class is
transformed from an economic and, indeed, social category to an exclusively
cultural or discursive one or one in which class merely signifies a subject
position. Class is therefore cut off from the political economy of capitalism
and class power severed from exploitation and a power structure in which those who
control collectively produced resources only do so because of the value generated by
those who do not (Hennessy & Ingraham, 1997, p. 2).
Sustainable Development
Sustainable development entrenches the capitalist system
leading to more exploitation of the environment
Castro, 04, (Carlos J., University of Oregon, Sustainable Development:
Mainstream and Critical Perspectives, Organization Environment 2004; 17; 195 DOI:
10.1177/1086026604264910,
http://oae.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/17/2/195)//erg
Sustainable development is still a contested concept . There are grassroots organizations
and radical theorists who use the concept in a root critique of the established order (Merchant, 1992, pp. 211-234). Some
organizations operating in the Third World are working on issues of sustainable development from a progressive
organizations are trying to exercise social control over capital

using the concept of sustainable development . However, sustainable
development is still largely defined within the mainstream paradigm of
development, which gives primacy to the market in allocating resources and
theoretically takes account of the environment only as a subsidiary concern
when pursuing its main object of promoting economic growth. The main
shortcoming of the mainstream approach to sustainable development is that it is driven by the
rapid accumulation requirements of the capitalist economy, which means
that it is about sustaining development rather than developing sustainability
perspective. These
in the ecological sense. The priority is to ensure that environmental conditions are managed so as to ensure maximum
long-term capital accumulation (which necessitates rapid economic growth). In this respect, neoclassical environmental
economics gravitates toward a weak sustainability hypothesis at best. Here it is assumed that in most cases, human-made
capital can substitute for natural capital, so that in all but a few cases, there are no real limitations to expansion imposed
by the environment. Market
mechanisms can be adjusted to ensure that environmental factors are taken account of, with no real alteration in the
fundamental character of the capitalist economy . Some more ecologically inclined
economists, such as Daly (1989, 1996), have argued that it is conceivable that capitalism could incor- porate a strong
sustainability hypothesis, taking into consideration and preserving critical natural resources. But this is not the emphasis
of the dominant approach to environmental economics and for good reason: It would require an enormously costly
transformation of capitalism, a transformation that is almost certainly beyond the reach of the system, and one that is
opposed even in its initial steps at present (witness the Kyoto Protocol) by the vested interests.
Sustainable development is capitalist

Hopwood et al 05, (Bill Hopwood*, Mary Mellor and Geoff OBrien, Sustainable
Cities Research Institute, University of Northumbria, Sustainable Development:
Mapping Different Approaches, Wiley InterScience, 2005,
http://www.scribd.com/doc/80398031/SESION-4-HopwoodSusDevMappApproaches)//erg
While many claim that sustainable development challenges the increased integration of the world in a
capitalist economy dominated by multinationals (Middleton et al., 1993; Christie and Warburton, 2001), Brundtlands
ambiguity allows business and governments to be in favour of sustainability

without any fundamental challenge to their present course, using
Brundtlands support for rapid growth to justify the phrase sustainable
growth. Rees (1998) points out that this allows capitalism to continue to put forward
economic growth as its morally bankrupt solution to poverty. If the economy grows,
eventually all will benefit (Dollar and Kraay, 2000): in modern parlance the trickle-down theory. Daly (1993)
criticized the notion of sustainable growth as thought-stopping and
oxymoronic in a world in which ecosystems are finite . At some point, economic growth
with ever more use of resources and production of waste is unsustainable. Instead Daly argued for the term sustainable
development by which he, much more clearly than Brundtland, meant qualitative, rather than quantitative,
improvements. Development
is open to confusion, with some seeing it as an end in

itself, so it has been suggested that greater clarity would be to speak of
sustainable livelihoods, which is the aim that Brundtland outlined (Workshop on
Urban Sustainability, 2000).
Ecofeminism
Focusing on social factors of gender and ecology trade of with an
analysis of material factors throughout time that constitute
gender oppression
Mellor, Social Science Professor at Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne UK
and Chair of its Sustainable Cities Research Institute , 2000
(Mary, Ethics and the Environment, Feminism and Environmental Ethics: A Materialist
Perspective, Vol. 5 No. 1, 2000, jstor, accessed 7/27/14 bh@ddi)
The dilemma for ecofeminism is that its two elements are in contradiction to
each other. Although feminism has historically sought to explain and overcome
women's association with the natural, ecology is attempting to re-embed
hu(man)ity in its natural framework. Ecofeminism generally is incompatible
with 'equal opportunities,' liberal /equality/ humanist feminism, and there are obvious dangers for
the equalities that (some) women have achieved in going back to an association of women with nature
whether it is on an affinity, social constructionist, or materialist basis. From a deep materialist analysis
it is not possible to see sex/gender relations as entirely socially constructed.

It is no accident that women were associated with nature , it was not a mistake or
some historical legacy as Ulrich Beck (1992) has argued. As I will argue here, and have argued elsewhere,
the association of women with nature represents hu(man)ity's need to

confront its own materiality, its existence in ecological and bio logical time (Mellor 1992a).
The relationship is not a contingent one, an accident of historical association, it is a structural relation
(Mellor 1996). Hu(man)ity as a natural species is embodied in its physical being and embedded in its
natural context. Ecological time is the time framework of ecological renewal and of ecological change and
evolution. Hu(man)ity can interfere with this to a large extent, but rarely without consequences in the
for even the most privileged, while in the short term it is the least privileged
suffer most. Biological time is the life-cycle and rest/renewal time-scale of
the human being. The centrality of women's socioeconomic position in this
relationship is her responsibility for biological time.
long term,
and other species who
Their focus on the particularities of feminism inhibits a

historical analysis of broader class issues that constitute those
particular oppressions
Ebert, Ph.D., University of Minnesota in Critical and Cultural Theory and
Professor in Humanities at University of Albany, 2005
(Teresa L., Science and Society, Rematerializing Feminism, January 2005, Vol.
69 No. 1, jstor, accessed 7/27/14 bh@ddi)
FEMINISM AFTER THE POST" has become in theory and practice largely indifferent to
material practices under capitalism - such as labor, which shapes the social structures of daily life - and
has fetishized difference. It has, in other words, erased the question of
"exploitation," diffusing knowledge of the root conditions of women's
realities into a plurality of particularities of "oppressions." Feminism has embraced the cultural
turn - the reification of culture as an autonomous zone of signifying practices - and put aside a transformative politics. The
revival of a new feminism thus requires
clearing out the undergrowth of bourgeois

ideology that has limited the terms by which feminism understands the condition of
women. A new (Red) Feminism, in short, is not only concerned with the "woman question," it is even
more about the "other" questions that construct the "woman question": the issues of class and labor
constituting the very conditions of knowing - and changing - the root realities of global
capitalism. The present text is grounded in the conviction that canonical feminist understandings of
gender and sexuality institutionalized by "post" theories (as in poststructuralism, postcolonialism,
postmodern- ism, postmarxism) are - after one allows for all their local differences and family quarrels (e.g., Benhabib,
et al, 1995; Butler, et al, 2000) - strategies for bypassing questions of labor (as in the labor
theory of value) and capital (the social relation grounded in turning the labor power of the other into profit) and
instead dwell on matters of cultural differences (as in lifestyles). Reclaiming a materialist
knowledge, I contest the cultural theory grounding canonical feminism. Specifically, I argue that language - "discourse" in
its social circulations - "is practical consciousness" (Marx and Engels, German Ideology) and that culture,
far
from being autonomous, is always and ultimately a social articulation of the
material relations of production. Canonical feminism in all its forms localizes gender and
sexuality in the name of honoring their differences and the specificities of their oppression. In
doing so, it isolates them from history and reduces them to "events" in
performativities, thus cleansing them of labor. For Red Feminism, the local, the specific and the singular, namely the
"concrete," is always an "imagined concrete" and the result of "many determinations and relations" that "all form the
members of a totality, distinctions within a unity. Production (labor relations) predominates not only over itself . . . but
over the other moments as well" (Marx, Grundrisse). Going against the grain of the canonical theories and instead of
making woman "singular," I situate
gender and sexuality in the world historical

processes of labor and capital. My analysis of gender and sexuality will, predictably enough, be rejected
by mainstream feminism as too removed, too abstract, too theoretical and, therefore, a form of exclusion of women as
difference. I
do not deny difference. I simply do not see difference as autonomous and immanent. Rather, I
by class difference - that is, by
understand difference as always and ultimately determined

relations of property.
ID PTX
Identity politics focus on autonomous oppression fails to trace
the genealogies of social power that constitute oppressions
Ebert, Ph.D., University of Minnesota in Critical and Cultural Theory and Professor in
Humanities at University of Albany, 2005
(Teresa L., Science and Society, Rematerializing Feminism, January 2005, Vol. 69 No.
1, jstor, accessed 7/27/14 bh@ddi)
Identity politics is the latest formation of the subject under capitalism. It mostly provides the
managerial class (as it has come to be called in bourgeois sociology) with a way of
understanding itself that completely bypasses class - or if it runs into class, it
understands class in a neo-Weberian sense as life-chances in relation to the market. The managerial
class (which is really a class fraction) deploys identity
politics to define itself in an idealist

fashion that does not put pressure on or threaten the existing social relations of
labor. Even when the question of labor cannot be avoided , for example, in
discussions of feminism and anti-racist struggles - to take two prominent forms of
identity politics - labor becomes mostly a question of jobs and employment, that is to say, of
income (e.g., "equal pay") . But as Marxist theory has demonstrated, income, in and of itself,
does not determine the relation of the subject of labor to the conflictual
structures of labor. Income, to be more precise, can be from profit or from "wages." It makes
a radical difference whether the income is from profit (that is to say, the result of the
surplus labor of the other) or from wages (the effect of selling one's labor power). When the
question of labor has been dealt with in feminism or anti-racism, it has for the most part, been reduced
to how to increase the income of the subject - even the issue of domestic labor has been largely
understood in terms of "unpaid labor" and income for house- work. Rarely
have feminism or
anti-racism struggled against the existing labor relations based on the hegemony of
capital. The few exceptions to this have been those historical materialist feminists and
anti-racists who have engaged the historical constructions of gender, race
and sexuality through the division of labor. But this work, espe- cially in the feminism
of the 1970s and 80s, was largely cut off by the hegemonic rise of poststructuralism and
identity politics. In fact, identity politics is the space in which the subject acquires a place in social
relations through bypassing the fundamental issues involved in labor - the issues, in short, of one's place
in relation to the ownership of the means of production. "Difference" is acquired in identity politics by
essentially culturalizing the social divisions of labor. The relation between race, class and gender is
obviously a contested one. One arrives at radically different social theories by the way one relates these
terms to each other. As a way of grasping this complex linking and interlinking, I will risk some
simplification by saying there are two modes of understanding these complex relations. The
poststructuralist mode grants autonomy or at least semi- autonomy to each of these categories. In this
view race, gender and sexuality have their own immanent logic, which is untranslatable into any other
logic. And the relation that they have with each other, to use Althusser's term, is "overdetermined." In
other words, according to this view, one cannot arrive at a knowledge of sexuality through race, or
understand gender through class, etc., without excessive violence being done to the separate terms.
Such a theory has spawned numerous books dealing with the internal logic and immanent strategies by
which sexuality or race or gender are articulated. Another way of putting this question is that in this
paradigm the main issue is how gender works, Aowrace works; this, in effect, makes the macrologie of
these relations secondary - the question why gender works the way it does is usually quite marginal. The
other theory, historical
materialism, supercedes this theory of autonomy and

argues for relating the several categories to each other, not by separate and multiple logics
of race, gender and sexuality, etc. but through the single, inclusive logic of
wage-labor and capital. Most feminists, anti-racists and queer theorists have been quick to
dismiss materialist theory by saying that the logic of labor cannot explain desire in sexuality, oppression
in racism and inequality in gender relations. However,
gender, sexuality, and race become
social differences only when they become part of the social division of labor ,
and each has a long and differentiated history as part of the social division
of labor and thus as a significant social difference. Racism, contrary to Foucauldian
theory, is not simply a matter of asymmetrical power relations; nor is gender, or sexuality. Homophobia is not simply oppression - the exercise of power by hetero- sexuals over homosexuals. Gay
bashing is the articulation of a violence, that is to say, the effect of power, but it cannot be
understood in terms of power without inquiring into the genealogy of power .
Contrary to poststructuralist theory, power is not the effect of discourse nor is it simply the
immanent condition of all relations. Power is the social and political manifestation of
the ownership of the means of production. In other words, power is always generated at
the point of production, and its effects should also be examined in relation to the relations of production.
Racism, in other words, is not simply oppression (the exercise of power by whites over blacks); sexism is
not simply oppression (the exercise of power by men over women) . It
is true that racism,

sexism, and homophobia are experienced by the subject (e.g., African-American,
woman, lesbian) as effects of oppression and power. If we limit our inquiry to this
experiential level, we will end up simply with ethnographies of power, which I think
would be of very limited use. If, however, we go beyond regarding racism, sexism and
homophobia as simply effects of power to understand how power is derived from ownership of the
means of production, then we will be able to theorize relations of class, gender, race and sexuality in a
more historical and materialist way. In this view, sexism,
racism and homophobia are not

so much instances of oppression but cases of exploitation. This is another way of
saying that a poststructuralist theory of the social as the site of multi-oppression practices will not lead
The more
productive way is to place labor relations and their consequenc es - property
relations - at the center of this complex network and understand gender,
sexuality, and race as produced by the existing division of labor: that is, as contradictions
produced by the fundamental antagonism under capitalism - the antagonism of wageto a productive understanding of relations among class, gender, race and sexuality.
labor and capital
Indigenous
Their approach to the indigenous further alienates them from
the class systems they are a part of applying a Marxist dialectic
is critical to engendering an accurate inquiry of US colonialism.
Libretti, 1 (Tim, Associate Professor of English and Women's Studies at Northeastern
Illinois University. He has published articles on proletarian literature, U.S. Third World
and multi-ethnic literatures, Marxism, and cultural studies in such journals as MELUS,
Women's Studies Quarterly, and Mediations.2001, Modern Fiction Studies, Vol 47, No.
1, The Other Proletarians: Native American Literature and Class Struggle, AS)
Studying Native American literature as proletarian both expands traditional

sociological and thematic contours of the genre and also transforms its politics by
rethinking and deepening the materialist dialectic through an incorporation
of the historical experiences of work, exploitation, and colonization, as well
as the class consciousness of Native Americans who have rarely been
studied or understood as part of U.S. labor history. In calling "into question
standard representations that make wage labor invisible in the culture histories of Native
Americans," Patricia Albers has argued that "Native peoples are denied a place in most
accounts of labor history in the United States and, even when present, [. . .] are relegated
to a passive background position outside the flow of determinative economic movements
and events" (246). Moreover, much of the so-called "authentic" work of Native
Americans, she points out, tends to be perceptually isolated from other functionings of
the economy and dehistoricized, "treated in legendary terms as part of a timeless, sacred
tradition and ancient lore, [. . .] situated in a popular play of mythic images rather than
in a progression of actual historic events" (248). This isolation and invisibility of
Native American labor has also [End Page 165] been furthered by a narrow,
even obsessive, focus on the land question as the overriding if not sole
economic concern of Native Americans. As Martha Knack and Alice Littlefield
admonish, Another cause of scholarly silence about Indian labor has been the restrictive
definition of Native American economics as an issue of natural resources, specifically
land. Although the wholesale dispossession of land from the first Americans is a
dramatic, visible, and emotionally powerful issue, and one that has great strategic
importance to indigenous peoples in their claims for political sovereignty and financial
redress, it should not be allowed to obscure another resource that Indians possessed and
non-Indians came gradually to control--their labor. (4) Understanding the proletarian
dimensions of the Native American experience, Knack and Littlefield conclude, means
that "perhaps we need to reconsider what we mean by proletarian" (28). Rethinking the
sociological composition of the working class also entails reconceptualizing the corpus of
literary works that comprise the genre of proletarian literature, a genre we must theorize
as historical and fluid precisely because it is linked to the historical category of the
working class, the contours and composition of which are constantly changing in
response to the processes of class formation and economic development.
Comprehending the Native American working-class experience provides a

more complex understanding of not only the very concepts of class and class
formation in the United States, but more specifically of the role of genocide
and colonization in the formation and continuation of the U.S. as a racial,
patriarchal, and capitalist nation-state. Native Americans constitute a unique
sector of the U.S. working class, although, as noted above, they are not often recognized
as such. Accordingly, the literature highlights the specific interests of Native
Americans not only with regard to the land question but, perhaps more importantly,
with the desire for a nonalienated labor and a disalienated relationship to the
land, which is implicit in, though not usually understood as part of, the desire
for and demand of a return of the land. Moreover, as Native American writers such
as Leslie Marmon Silko and Simon Ortiz script master narratives of liberation responsive
to the Native American experience, [End Page 166] they are also mapping more complex
master narratives of class struggle and of liberation from global capitalism.
Understanding Native American literature as a working-class literature
engenders a more complex Marxism, one that is more comprehensive of and
responsive to the operations of U.S. capitalism in its imperialist and internal
colonial practices. The result is a proletarian literary category that more accurately
comprehends the multiple and varied sectors of the U.S. working class and thus, by
extension, a deepened, more historical Marxism.
We must understand Native Americans as proletarians their

analysis renders invisible the set of historical relations that
informed red genocide.
This rich passage raises many points for discussion in terms of how Ortiz constructs class consciousness and how this text
and his writing as a whole relate to and redefine the contours and politics of the proletarian [End Page 180] literary genre.
Ortiz here is asserting the privileged historical, economic, and social position, as well as the privileged perspective of the
Native American in the historical development and contemporary society of U.S. capitalism. Just as Lukacs in History and
Class Consciousness argues that "the superiority of the proletariat must lie exclusively in its ability to see society from the
center, as a coherent whole" (69), Ortiz effectively suggests that Native Americans occupy a "more central" position in
society from which to comprehend it as a coherent whole. However, while Lukacs argues that "the self-understanding of
the proletariat is [. . .] simultaneously the objective understanding of the nature of society" and that "when the proletariat
furthers its own class-aims it simultaneously achieves the conscious realization of the--objective--aims of society, aims
which would inevitably remain abstract possibilities and objective frontiers but for this conscious intervention" (149),
Ortiz represents Native Americans' self-understanding as yielding a more

accurate and insightful vision of the trajectory of social history because they
are most immediately threatened and affected by the historical development
of capitalism. First in line for genocide, they are first to understand through experience the operations and aims of
our current course of historical development. Thus they occupy the most advantageous position from which both to
achieve a full consciousness of U.S. capitalism and to intervene consciously in redirecting historical development.
Consequently, Ortiz means to bring the exigency of survival to the forefront of political and class consciousness,
while Native Americans are most urgently conscious of the task of

survival, it needs to be a larger working-class issue ; it needs to be the premise of the class
struggle itself to prioritize survival by making lands "productive to serve humanity." However, Ortiz warns that such a
suggesting that
goal "will take real decisions and actions and concrete understanding by the poor and workers of this nation" (360). The
above passage also highlights
the importance of understanding Native Americans

as a dynamic part of the U.S. proletariat and of U.S. labor history . In the text as a
whole, Ortiz worries about the "preservation" of Native American culture in museums and state parks that tend to
hypostatize Native Americans as relics of history rather than as historical and contemporary participants in U.S. society
and economy. The worry is that Native Americans will be isolated in "natural wilderness or [End Page 181] cultural parks"
(360) and thus relegated to the margins instead of recognized as the center of social change and class consciousness that
Ortiz believes they need to be. The
other sectors of the working class need to

understand the genocide and exploitation of Native Americans if they are
going to understand comprehensively the operations of U.S. capitalism , the
path of their genuine self-interest within that system, and the fate that awaits them if they do no act to redirect the course
of history by learning from and following the lead of Native Americans. It is here that Ortiz makes his most passionate
plea, one worth quoting at length: They will have to see that the present exploitation of coal at Black Mesa Mine in
Arizona does not serve the Hopi and Navajo whose homeland it is. They will have to understand that the political and
economic forces which have caused Hopi and Navajo people to be in conflict with each other and within their own nations
are the same forces which steal the human fabric of their own communities and lives. They will have to be willing to
identify capitalism for what it is, that it is destructive and uncompassionate and deceptive. They will have to be willing to
do so or they will never understand why the Four Corners power plants in northwestern New Mexico continue to spew
poisons into the air, destroying plant, animal, and human life in the area. They will have to be willing to face and challenge
the corporations at their armed bank buildings, their stock brokers, and their drilling, mining, milling, refining and
processing operations. If they don't do that, they will not understand what Aacqu and her sister Pueblos in the Southwest
are fighting for when they seek time and time again to bring attention to their struggle for land, water, and human rights.
The American poor and workers and white middle class, who are probably the most ignorant of all U.S. citizens, must
understand how they, like Indian people, are forced to serve a national interest, controlled by capitalist vested interests in
collusion with U.S. policy makers, which does not serve them. Only when this understanding is attained and decisions are
reached and actions taken to overcome economic and political oppression imposed on us all will there be no longer a
national sacrifice area in the Southwest. Only then will there [End Page 182] be no more unnecessary sacrifices of our
people and land. (360-61) In this catalog of what the American poor and working class need to see, understand, and do-much of which entails facing and comprehending the particular exploitation and colonized status of Native Americans-Ortiz is suggesting that Native American class consciousness and political self-interests are not only identical to those of
the non-Native American working class and poor but that, even more so, they are definitive of class consciousness and
working-class political interests. If they do not understand the Native American situation, they will not understand "the
same forces which steal the human fabric of their own American communities and lives." This same recognition is equally
crucial in the literary critical sphere when we attempt to map the coordinates of a genre of proletarian literature as such a
genre becomes the cultural representation and mouthpiece of the U.S. working class and its interests. To
marginalize Native American literature or categorize it wholly apart from

and exclusive of proletarian literature re-enacts the same gesture of making
invisible the Native American working class, of isolating it from the scene of
wage labor. Moreover, what is also rendered invisible by obscuring the
historical experience of Native Americans, their working-class experience,
and their narrative of survival and class struggle, is the historical memory of
an unalienated relationship with the land. We have already seen Ortiz represent precolonial
moments in which the Aacqu's lives were described as ones of material well being and spiritual integrity. While his
narrative of colonization represents their growing dependence on wage labor and their general dependence under
capitalism because of the diminution of their access to natural resources caused in part by their dispossession and in part
by industrial capitalism's destruction of those resources, Ortiz also highlights that what remains through oral history is a
memory of an actual culture or way of life characterized not by alienation but by integrity with nature, oneself, and others.
Ortiz writes, I don't know when it was that the grass was as high as a man's waist. I never knew that. All my life, the grass
had been sparse and brittle. All my life, the winters have been cold and windy [End Page 183] and the summers hot and
mostly rainless. But the people talk about those good years when they could cope with life on their own terms. The winters
were always cold and the summers hot, but they could cope with them because there was a system of life which spelled out
exactly how to deal with the realities they knew. The people had developed a system of knowledge which made it possible
for them to work at solutions. And they had the capabilities of developing further knowledge to deal with new realities.
There was probably not anything they could not deal properly and adequately with until the Mericano came. (349) The
phenomenon Ortiz describes here is the general deskilling of the human, of the
alienation that capitalism inflicts in its will to dominate. Here Ortiz depicts again, it is
worth reiterating, the way capitalism curtails rather than enhances productive efficiency as he represents how the
colonizing process hobbled the people, made them dependent rather than self-sufficient, and robbed them of their creative
abilities and skills. But what is perhaps most striking about the narrative is that Ortiz represents an actual useable past
that is not simply a utopian invention but rather a viable historical model. The importance of Ortiz's identification of this
historical actuality is that it challenges those critics who see Marxism's ideal of a culture of disalienation, in which each
person realizes her species being, as not only unattainable but also as never having been attained, as historically fantastic.
Take, for example, Stephen Greenblatt's criticism of a passage from The Political Unconscious in which Fredric Jameson
speaks to the process whereby capitalism diminishes the unalienated individual subject in its production of the
fragmented bourgeois individual. Greenblatt writes, The whole passage has the resonance of an allegory of the fall of
man: once we were whole, agile, integrated; we were individual subjects but not individuals, we had no psychology distinct
from the shared life of the society; politic and poetry were one. Then capitalism arose and shattered this luminous, benign
totality. The myth echoes throughout Jameson's book, though by the close it has been eschatologically reoriented so that
the totality lies not in a past revealed to have always [End Page 184] already fallen but in the classless future. A
philosophical claim that appeals to an absent empirical event. (3) While Greenblatt no doubt has a point--it is certainly
difficult to attribute alienation solely to the onset of capitalism, as though somehow feudal and slave economies featured
whole and happy individual subjects--his own sense of the past is equally distorted, at least in light of Ortiz's narrative.
Nonetheless, Greenblatt's criticism is one commonly hauled out to attempt to undermine the legitimacy of Marxist
theories of human nature and liberation. Thus, Ortiz's identification of this historical moment of integration, as opposed
to alienation, serves not only to challenge the cynical bourgeois critics of Marxism but, perhaps even more importantly, to
give the Marxist tradition a model of possibility on which to build and imagine a postcapitalist culture. To
distance
or isolate Native Americans from the U.S. working class and their literature from the
larger proletarian tradition is to impoverish and, really, to disempower the U.S.
working class by cutting it off from this model of possibility that ought to inform class struggle. Indeed, as Ortiz
strenuously argues throughout the piece, it is the condition of alienation from ourselves, nature, and other
people that most seriously needs to be addressed, as alienation is the premise of
exploitation and the destructive features of capitalism; Native Americans
possess most vividly the collective memory of unalienated life , as opposed to most
elements of the U.S. working class whose memory is confined to a capitalist world and an experience of wage labor, which
might explain why so much energy in labor struggles focuses on wages rather than focusing more concertedly on
alienation and on the use of resources. Native Americans are best positioned to assess the experience of alienation under
capitalism, Ortiz suggests, because they have not just an imagination but also an historical knowledge of a different mode
of production, culture, and way of life, as we see in the following passage in which Ortiz discusses the experiences of
Laguna and Navajo miners working for the Kerr-McGee mines in New Mexico: The Navajo men who went into the
underground mines did not have much choice except to work there, just like the Laguna miners who find themselves as
surface labor and semi-skilled [End Page 185] workers. The Kerr-McGee miners who had stayed for any length of time
underground breathing the dust laden with radon gas would find themselves cancerous. The Laguna miners would find
themselves questioning how much real value the mining operation had when their land was overturned into a gray pit
miles and miles in breadth. They would ask if the wages they earned, causing wage income dependency, and the royalties
received by the Kawaikah people were worth it when Mericano values beset their children and would threaten the heritage
they had struggled to keep for so long. (356) The Laguna miners are able to measure their value system and the social
relationships it entails against that of capitalism and its destructive, even murderous, effects on the land and the people.
Once again, Ortiz counterpoints two modes of conceptualizing value, embodied in one culture that prioritizes quality of
life and in another quantitatively oriented culture committed to accumulating monetary wealth at the expense of life. The
importance here, though, is that the Native American working class already possesses the value system for as well as the
memory and imagination of a postcapitalist culture that the non-Native American U.S. working class needs to recognize as
a valuable and crucial attribute of its tradition of resistance to capital and its aspirations of social transformation.
Similarly, Ortiz also speaks of the memory of the Peublo Revolt of 1680 in which enslaved Africans, native Americans, and
descendants of the Chicano people fought back against Spanish colonialism. This example of multiracial organizing and
resistance is highlighted as a central element of the collective memory of empowerment and change. It is just such models
of revolt that the U.S. working class needs as part of its historical and class consciousness, which it needs to be attached to
and not dissociated from. But yet when critics narrowly periodize and restrictively define the category of proletarian
literature, it is just such dissociation and erasure that takes place. In developing a Marxist cultural tradition on the Left
that is capable of directing and imagining full liberation, we must construct a proper proletarian literature genre which
maps comprehensively the body of texts that are expressions of class struggle and which mediates the sociological and the
cultural in a way that allows us to draw on the whole rich collective tradition of working class struggle [End Page 186]
against racial patriarchal capitalism. Understanding
Native American literature as

proletarian begins this process of political and literary reorganization. Both Silko and
Ortiz offer rethinkings of Marxism and class struggle that position Native Americans as pivotal actants and Native
American culture and history as a rich reservoir of models for imagining change as well as postcapitalist culture and
economy. Both culturally and politically, the Left needs to revivify its cultural imaginary and not dissociate by virtue of its
exclusive cultural and political categories from political and cultural traditions that offer meaningful cross-fertilization.
Indeed, just as Marx said the educators must be educated, so the Left must be educated by other left Marxist traditions it
might not have even recognized as such. As Ward Churchill admonishes, when you think about Native American political
concerns over such issues as land and water rights, The great mass of non-Indians in North America really have much to
gain, and almost nothing to lose, from the success of native people in struggles to reclaim the land which is rightfully ours.
The tangible diminishment of U.S. material power which is integral to our victories in this sphere stands to pave the way
for realization of most other agendas--from anti-imperialism to environmentalism, from African-American liberation to
feminism, from gay rights to the ending of class privilege--pursued by progressives on this continent. Conversely,
succeeding with any or even all these other agendas would still represent an inherently oppressive situation if their
realization is contingent upon an ongoing occupation of Native North America without the consent of Indian people. Any
North American revolution which failed to free indigenous territory from non-Indian domination would simply be a
continuation of colonialism in another form. (88) Indeed, just as Marx theorizes that the
working class is
the lynchpin of liberation because in order to liberate itself it must do away
with class altogether, we can take Churchill here, as well as Silko and Ortiz, to be in some sense saying that for
the non-Indian U.S. working class to liberate itself, Native Americans must be liberated. Put another way, the working
class cannot liberate only part of itself, so it must identify and understand [End Page 187] itself fully in order to liberate
itself fully. Mapping this understanding via the space of a proletarian literary genre is a place to begin.
Heidegger
Counter narrative to being that Bennett wanted to cut
Marx and Engels, 1848
(Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto, free
and ubiquitous, bh)
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class
struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master(3) and journeyman, in a word,
oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one
another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended,
either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the
common ruin of the contending classes. In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere
a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights,
plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again,
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has
not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new
classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in
place of the old ones. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however,
this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms . Society as a whole is more and more splitting up
into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other
Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest
towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed. The discovery of America , the
rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian
subordinate gradations.
and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities
generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the
tottering feudal society, a rapid development. The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds,
now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on
one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour
markets kept ever growing, the demand ever

rising. Even manufacturer no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery
revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern
Industry; the place of the industrial middle class by industrial
millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois. Modern industry has established the world market,
in each single workshop. Meantime the
for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to
communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce,
navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every
class handed down from the Middle Ages. We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development,
Each step in the development of

the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political
advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing
of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.
association in the medieval commune(4): here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany); there taxable third estate of the
monarchy (as in France); afterwards, in the period of manufacturing proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a
counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the
establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway.
The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie, historically,
The bourgeoisie
has played a most revolutionary part.

, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal,
patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his natural superiors, and has left
has drowned the

most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous
enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of
egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange
value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has
set up that single, unconscionable freedom Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious
remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous cash payment. It
and political illusions, it has substituted
exploitation.
It has
converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet , the man of science,
into its paid wage labourers.
naked, shameless, direct, brutal
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe.
2NC Blocks
External Impact
Cap causes extinction nuclear war, environmental destruction,
and social inequality.
Brown, 05 (Charles, Professor of Economics and Research Scientist at the University of
Michigan, 05/13/2005, http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pen-l/2005w15/msg00062.htm)
The capitalist class owns the factories, the banks, and transportation-the means of production and distribution. Workers
sell their ability to work in order to acquire the necessities of life. Capitalists
buy the workers' labor, but only

pay them back a portion of the wealth they create. Because the capitalists own the means of production, they
are able to keep the surplus wealth created by workers above and beyond the cost of paying
worker's wages and other costs of production . This surplus is called "profit" and consists of unpaid labor
that the capitalists appropriate and use to achieve ever-greater profits. These profits are turned into capital which
capitalists use to further exploit the producers of all wealth-the working class. Capitalists are compelled by competition to
seek to maximize profits. The capitalist class as a whole can do that only by extracting a greater surplus from the unpaid
labor of workers by increasing exploitation. Under
capitalism, economic development happens only

if it is profitable to the individual capitalists, not for any social need or good. The profit
drive is inherent in capitalism, and underlies or exacerbates all major social ills of our
times. With the rapid advance of technology and productivity, new forms of capitalist ownership have developed to
maximize profit. The working people of our country confront serious, chronic problems because of capitalism. These
The
threat of nuclear war , which can destroy all humanity, grows with the spread of
chronic problems become part of the objective conditions that confront each new generation of working people.
nuclear weapons, space-based weaponry, and a military doctrine that justifies their use in preemptive wars and wars
without end. Ever since the end of World War II, the U.S. has been constantly involved in aggressive military actions big
and small. These wars have cost millions of lives and casualties, huge material losses, as well as trillions of U.S. taxpayer
dollars. Threats
planet.
to the environment continue to spiral, threatening all life on our
Millions of workers are unemployed or insecure in their jobs, even during economic upswings and periods of
"recovery" from recessions. Most workers
experience long years of stagnant real wages, while

health and education costs soar. Many workers are forced to work second and third jobs to make ends meet.
Most workers now average four different occupations during their lifetime, being involuntarily moved from job to job and
career to career. Often, retirement-age workers are forced to continue working just to provide health care for themselves.
With capitalist globalization, jobs move as capitalists export factories and even entire industries to other countries.
Millions of people continuously live below the poverty level; many suffer homelessness and
hunger. Public and private programs to alleviate poverty and hunger do not reach everyone, and are inadequate even
for those they do reach. Racism remains the most potent weapon to divide working people. Institutionalized
racism provides billions in extra profits for the capitalists every year due to the unequal
pay racially oppressed workers receive for work of comparable value . All workers receive lower
wages when racism succeeds in dividing and disorganizing them. In every aspect of economic and social life, African
Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, Asian a nd Pacific Islanders, Arabs and Middle Eastern peoples, and other
Racist violence and

the poison of racist ideas victimize all people of color no matter which economic class
nationally and racially oppressed people experience conditions inferior to that of whites.
they belong to. The attempts to suppress and undercount the vote of the African American and other racially oppressed
people are part of racism in the electoral process. Racism permeates the police, judicial and prison systems, perpetuating
unequal sentencing, racial profiling, discriminatory enforcement, and police brutality. The democratic, civil and human
rights of all working people are continually under attack. These attacks range from increasingly difficult procedures for
union recognition and attempts to prevent full union participation in elections, to the absence of the right to strike for
many public workers. They range from undercounting minority communities in the census to making it difficult for
working people to run for office because of the domination of corporate campaign funding and the high cost of advertising.
These attacks also include growing censorship and domination of the media by the ultra-right; growing restrictions and
surveillance of activist social movements and the Left; open denial of basic rights to immigrants; and, violations of the
Geneva Conventions up to and including torture for prisoners. These abuses all serve to maintain the grip of the capitalists
on government power. They use this power to ensure the economic and political dominance of their class. Women still
face a considerable differential in wages for work of equal or comparable value. They also
confront barriers to promotion, physical and sexual abuse, continuing unequal workload
in home and family life, and male supremacist ideology perpetuating unequal and
often unsafe conditions. The constant attacks on social welfare programs severely impact single women, single
mothers, nationally and racially oppressed women, and all working class women. The reproductive rights of all women are
continually under attack ideologically and politically. Violence against women in the home and in society at large remains
a shameful fact of life in the U.S.
Root Cause
All oppression is MATERIALLY constituted by capitalism a
discursive focus fails to access the root cause.
Scott, Prof PostColonial Lit & Theory @ U Vermont, 2006
(Helen, Reading the Text in its Worldly Situation: Marxism, Imperialism, and
Contemporary Caribbean Womens Literature, Postcolonial Text, 2.1,
http://postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/viewArticle/491/174)
For Gedalofs study, the material coordinates of oppression are secondary to

the conceptual space where the social and the self meet within particular
discourses of gender, race, national and class identities (2). Her focus is on narratives
and discourses and she subscribes to a Foucauldian understanding of power as not
just a privilege possessed by a dominant group; it is rather exercised by and through us
all, situated as we are in multiple networks of nonegalitarian and mobile relations (19).
This formulation effectively jettisons the primacy of social structures and
class antagonism and instead generalizes power as something omnipresent, equating
the expression of a system of ideas with the exercise of social domination.[6] It thus has
much in common with the post-Althusserian rejection of economism and
reprioritization of ideology and disposal of Althussers rather nebulous but necessary
affirmation of the primacy of the material in the last instance in favor of a conception of
ideology as absolutely autonomous (Brenner 12-13). The problem with discourse
theory is that once ideology is severed from material reality it no longer has
any analytical usefulness, for it becomes impossible to posit a theory of
determination of historical change based on contradiction (Brenner, paraphrasing
Michle Barrett, 13). Marxists understand class in contrast not as an identity
but rather as a material relationship to the governing mode of production.[7]
In extension, all forms of oppression racial, national, gender and sexual have
specific material causes and effects and are shaped by the compulsions of
capitalism.[8] As Deborah Levenson-Estrada maintains in a study of women union
activists in 1970s Guatemala: There is no more important or prior issue class or
gender these are inside one another, and the struggle against gender conventions and
sexist ideologies is integral to any project of liberation. A critical consciousness about
class needs a critical consciousness about gender, and vice versa (227).
Class comes first it structures all other oppression.

Such theorizing has had the effect of replacing an historical materialist class
analysis with a cultural analysis of class. As a result, many post-Marxists have
also stripped the idea of class of precisely that element which, for Marx, made it
radicalnamely its status as a universal form of exploitation whose abolition
required (and was also central to) the abolition of all manifestations of oppression
(Marx, 1978, p. 60). With regard to this issue, Kovel (2002) is particularly insightful, for
he explicitly addresses an issue which continues to vex the Leftnamely the priority
given to different categories of what he calls dominative splittingthose categories of
gender, class, race, ethnic and national exclusion, etc. Kovel argues that we need to ask
the question of priority with respect to what? He notes that if we mean priority with
respect to time, then the category of gender would have priority since there are traces of
gender oppression in all other forms of oppression. If we were to prioritize in terms of
existential significance, Kovel suggests that we would have to depend upon the
immediate historical forces that bear down on distinct groups of peoplehe offers
examples of Jews in 1930s Germany who suffered from brutal forms of anti-Semitism
and Palestinians today who experience anti-Arab racism under Israeli domination. The
question of what has political priority, however, would depend upon which
transformation of relations of oppression are practically more urgent and, while this
would certainly depend upon the preceding categories, it would also depend upon the
fashion in which all the forces acting in a concrete situation are deployed. As to the
question of which split sets into motion all of the others, the priority would
have to be given to class since class relations entail the state as an
instrument of enforcement and control, and it is the state that shapes and
organizes the splits that appear in human ecosystems. Thus class is both
logically and historically distinct from other forms of exclusion (hence we
should not talk of classism to go along with sexism and racism, and species-ism).
This is, first of all, because class is an essentially human-made category, without
root in even a mystified biology. We cannot imagine a human world without gender
distinctionsalthough we can imagine a world without domination by gender. But a
world without class is eminently imaginableindeed, such was the human world
for the great majority of our species time on earth, during all of which considerable fuss
was made over gender. Historically, the difference arises because class signifies one
side of a larger figure that includes a state apparatus whose conquests and
regulations create races and shape gender relations. Thus there will be no
true resolution of racism so long as class society stands, inasmuch as a
racially oppressed society implies the activities of a class-defending state.
Nor can gender inequality be enacted away so long as class society, with its
state, demands the super-exploitation of womens labor. (Kovel, 2002, pp. 123
124)
Indigenous
Capitalism is the systemic backdrop to the genocide of Native
Americans it alienates their labor from their land and culture.
Similarly, Ortiz's
historical materialist narrative of colonization and conquest repeatedly

contrasts the destructiveness and inefficiency of capitalism and of exploitation
generally with the genuine productive efficiency and humanity of the
precapitalist and precolonial economy of the Native Americans . At each stage of the
development of capitalism after the onset of colonization, Ortiz claims, the productive capacity of Native
Americans and of the nation as a whole is curtailed rather than enhanced. For example, Ortiz notes that when the
Spaniards came they were impressed by the irrigation systems and advanced technologies the Indians had developed; they
had integrated
their technology harmoniously and efficiently into the ecology in a

subsistence economy designed above all to meet basic human needs as
opposed to maximizing profit or accumulating monetary wealth. Within a capitalist mode of production,
technological development is implemented, Ortiz suggests, in a way antagonistic to natural processes and thus in a way
antagonistic to people and inefficient in terms of its productivity and use of resources. For example, when the Spaniards
first came, Ortiz writes, The water ran sparkling clear, abundant, and fast, and the people irrigated their food plants and
drank from it. In the oral tradition of storytelling the chuna swirls and is vigorous and healthy. But since the time of the
railroads, the logging town, the carrot fields, and the construction of Bluewater Dam in the 1930's, the people have
watched the river. Very anxiously, the people kept going to Ghoomi and Gahnippa springs, and they thought about the
northwest direction toward Ambrosia Lake. There seemed to be enough water during the working years of the Irishman
and his pumps, but now there was hardly enough for the people who wanted to and could farm. (342) This
dual
and causal narrative of the development of capitalism and of the withering of abundance
and social and natural health also encompasses for Ortiz the exploitation of Native
Americans as wage labor and their genocide : Grants took its name from a lumber mill, and it
grew into a settlement when the railroad was built. Logs and lumber were shipped from there. Livestock, including cattle
and sheep raised [End Page 178] by Aacqumeh, Laguna, and Navajo people, were a local business activity. Actually, the
village of San Rafael south of the present city of Grants was the original settlement. It was an outpost for mercantile
interests and a military base of operations in the war of extermination against the Navajo people. Later, Grants became a
trade center though not as large as Gallup seventy miles westward. [ . . .] Grants became a little city of 15,000 or so in the
1970's. After the mid-'50s with the discovery of uranium in the Ambrosia Lake and Laguna areas, it grew into a boom
town. It was as drab and disorganized and ill-planned as any boom town ever was. [. . . ] The clearest and most blatant
example was the Grants city sewage plant which sits right on the banks of the Rio de San Jose which flows only twelve
miles before it reaches the village of Deetseyameh. (343-44) These passages all accomplish a sharp analysis of the central,
abiding, and intensifying contradiction of capitalism that Marx identifies, namely the contradiction between the relations
and forces of production. Just as Marx points out that the social and economic relations of capitalism fetter the forces of
production--constraining rather than availing our full productive and creative capacities and putting the requirements of
the system, such as price and profit, before the welfare of the people living in the system--Ortiz similarly points out quite
starkly how capitalism
advances destructively rather than productively, hardly

allowing human creative potential or natural productive capacity to flourish
or develop fully. To the contrary, capitalist development has entailed genocide and
natural destruction, processes that rapidly diminish rather than develop
and nurture our productive and creative capacities as a people, a land, and a
culture. Indeed, Ortiz's analytic narrative underscores how the capitalist system and culture of competition (contrary
to the common wisdom and blind mouths of the U.S. dominant culture) is humanly and economically inefficient and in
fact inimical to creativity and productivity, ensuring our demise rather than cultivating our prospects for survival--or at
least for the survival of the human.
Racism
Racism is only viable because of capitalist society.
San Juan Jr, 3 (E., 2003, Cultural Logic, Marxism and the Race/Class
Problematic: A Re-Articulation, http://eserver.org/clogic/2003/sanjuan.html
Here Marx
sketches three parameters for the sustained viability of racism in

modern capitalist society. First, the economic competition among workers
is dictated by the distribution of labor power in the labor-market via differential wage rates. The
distinction between skilled and unskilled labor is contextualized in differing national origins,
languages and traditions of workers, which can be manipulated into racial antagonisms.
Second, the appeal of racist ideology to white workers , with their identification as
members of the "ruling nation" affording--in W.E.B. DuBois's words--"public and psychological wage" or compensation.
Like religion, white-supremacist nationalism provides
the illusory resolution to the real

contradictions of life for the working majority of citizens. Third, the ruling
class reinforces and maintains these racial divisions for the sake of capital
accumulation within the framework of its ideological/political hegemony in the metropolis and worldwide.
Racism and nationalism are thus modalities in which class struggles articulate
themselves at strategic points in history. No doubt social conflicts in recent times have involved not only classes but
also national, ethnic, and religious groups, as well as feminist, ecological, antinuclear social movements (Bottomore 1983).
The concept of "internal colonialism" (popular in the seventies) that subjugates national minorities, as well as the
principle of self-determination for oppressed or "submerged" nations espoused by Lenin, exemplify dialectical attempts to
historicize the collective agency for socialist transformation. Within the framework of the global division of labor between
metropolitan center and colonized periphery, a Marxist program of national liberation is meant to take into account the
extraction of surplus value from colonized peoples through unequal exchange as well as through direct colonial
exploitation in "Free Trade Zones," illegal traffic in prostitution, mail-order brides, and contractual domestics (at present,
the Philippines provides the bulk of the latter, about ten million persons and growing). National oppression
has
a concrete reality not entirely reducible to class exploitation but
incomprehensible apart from it; that is, it cannot be adequately understood without the domination of
the racialized peoples in the dependent formations by the colonizing/imperialist power, with the imperial nation-state
acting as the exploiting class, as it were (see San Juan 1998; 2002). Racism
arose with the creation
and expansion of the capitalist world economy (Wolf 1982; Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991).
Solidarities conceived as racial or ethnic groups acquire meaning and value in terms of their place within the social
organization of production and reproduction of the ideological-political order; ideologies
of racism as
structural constraints which
preserve the exploited and oppressed position of these "racial" solidarities.
collective social evaluation of solidarities arise to reinforce
Such patterns of economic and political segmentation mutate in response to the impact of changing economic and political
relationships (Geshwender and Levine 1994). Overall, there is no denying the fact that national-liberation movements and
indigenous groups fighting for sovereignty, together with heterogeneous alliances and coalitions,
cannot be fully understood without a critical analysis of the production of surplus value and its
expropriation by the propertied class--that is, capital accumulation. As John Rex noted, different ethnic
groups are placed in relations of cooperation, symbiosis or conflict by the fact that as groups they have different economic
and political functions. Within this changing class order of [colonial societies], the
language of racial
difference frequently becomes the means whereby people allocate each other to
different social and economic positions. What the type of analysis used here suggests is that the
exploitation of clearly marked groups in a variety of different ways is
integral to capitalism and that ethnic groups unite and act together because they have been subjected to
distinct and differentiated types of exploitation. Race relations and racial conflict are
necessarily structured by political and economic factors of a more generalized sort (1983, 40305, 407). Hence race relations and race conflict are necessarily structured by the larger totality of the political economy of
a given society, as well as by modifications in the structure of the world economy. Corporate profit-making via class
exploitation on an international/globalized scale, at bottom, still remains the logic of the world system of finance
capitalism based on historically changing structures and retooled practices of domination and subordination. Class
structure, to be sure, is much more complex and ambiguous in advanced industrial social formations (Giddens 1973;
Balibar and Wallerstein 1991). Because of the comprehensive state regulation of contemporary social life, some have
replaced ownership or control of the means of production with control of the state apparatus as a more decisive criterion
of social development. In 1899 Eduard Bernstein dismissed class struggle because of the growing middle class, socialized
welfare reforms, liberalization, and so on. In the sixties C. Wright Mills also rejected fundamental class conflict as part of a
"labor metaphysic," while Herbert Marcuse bewailed the incorporation of the working class into advanced capitalist
society. However, the production and distribution of the social surplus cannot be ignored. This despite empiricist
arguments that "class interest" is now viewed not only as defined positivistically in relation to the means of production but
as constructed from the interactions of everyday life and attendant interpretations. Notwithstanding such formal and
technical shifts of subject-positions, classes and their historical transformation as the principal agents of change, in
particular, the transition to a socialist "classless" society, remain valid in conceptualizing realistic prospects of change in
capitalism conceived as a global economic and political system under the current post-9/11 hegemony--contested and
precarious, given the irresolvable contradictions of its crisis--of the United States. A recent translation of Albert Memmi's
magisterial book entitled Racism
reminds us that any understanding of the complex

network of ideas and practices classified by that term will always lead us to
the foundational bedrock of class relations. Memmi defines racism as "the generalized and final
assigning of values to real or imaginary differences, to the accuser's benefit and at his victim's expense, in order to justify
the former's own privileges or aggression" (2000, 169). The
underlying frame of intelligibility for

this process of assigning values cannot be anything else but the existence of
class-divided societies and nation-states with unequal allocations of power and resources. Both
motivation and consequences can be adequately explained by the logic of
class oppression and its entailments. In our epoch of globalization, inequality between propertied nation-states
(where transnational corporate powers are based) and the rest of the world has become universalized and threatens the
welfare of humanity and the planet.
Racism is a product of capitalism it is its tool to exploit labor,

thwart class-consciousness, and perpetuate a structurally
unequal social order.
Taylor, doctoral candidate in the department of African American Studies at
Northwestern University, 2011 (Keeanga-Yamahtta. January 4th 2011. The Socialist
Worker Race, Class and Marxism http://socialistworker.org/2011/01/04/race-classand-marxism NMS)
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 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 consciousness.
To claim, as Marxists do, that racism is a product of capitalism is not to deny or
diminish 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 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.
AT Race Explains X
Race CANNOT explain the social or even racism we have to
link racial oppression to the dynamics of capitalist society to
resist white supremacist patriarchy.
Having a concept of class helps us to see the network of social relations

constituting an overall social organization which both implicates and cuts
through racialization/ethnicization and gender ... [a] radical political economy
[class] perspective emphasizing exploitation, dispossession and survival takes the issues
of ... diversity [and difference] beyond questions of conscious identity such as culture
and ideology, or of a paradigm of homogeneity and heterogeneity ... or of ethical
imperatives with respect to the other. (Bannerji, 2000, pp. 7, 19)
A radical political economy framework is crucial since various culturalist
perspectives seem to diminish the role of political economy and class forces
in shaping the edifice of the socialincluding the shifting constellations and
meanings of difference. Furthermore, none of the differences valorized in
culturalist narratives alone, and certainly not race by itself can explain the
massive transformation of the structure of capitalism in recent years. We
agree with Meyerson (2000) that race is not an adequate explanatory category
on its own and that the use of race as a descriptive or analytical category has serious
consequences for the way in which social life is presumed to be constituted and
organized. The category of racethe conceptual framework that the oppressed often
employ to interpret their experiences of inequality often clouds the concrete reality
of class, and blurs the actual structure of power and privilege. In this regard,
race is all too often a barrier to understanding the central role of class in
shaping personal and collective outcomes within a capitalist society
(Marable, 1995, pp. 8, 226). In many ways, the use of race has become an
analytical trap precisely when it has been employed in antiseptic isolation
from the messy terrain of historical and material relations. This, of course, does
not imply that we ignore racism and racial oppression; rather, an analytical
shift from race to a plural conceptualization of racisms and their
historical articulations is necessary (cf. McLaren & Torres, 1999). However, it is
important to note that race doesnt explain racism and forms of racial
oppression. Those relations are best understood within the context of class
rule, as Bannerji, Kovel, Marable and Meyerson implybut that compels us to forge a
conceptual shift in theorizing, which entails (among other things) moving beyond the
ideology of difference and race as the dominant prisms for understanding exploitation
and oppression. We are aware of some potential implications for white Marxist
criticalists to unwittingly support racist practices in their criticisms of race-first
positions articulated in the social sciences. In those instances, white criticalists wrongly
go on high alert in placing theorists of color under special surveillance for downplaying
an analysis of capitalism and class. These activities on the part of white criticalists
must be condemned, as must be efforts to stress class analysis primarily as a means
of creating a white vanguard position in the struggle against capitalism. Our
position is one that attempts to link practices of racial oppression to the
central, totalizing dynamics of capitalist society in order to resist white
supremacist capitalist patriarchy more fully.7
AT Experience
We do not renounce experience we advance a framework that
connects contingent experiences to reveal the general
organization of social relations mediated by class.
Another caveat. In making such a claim, we are not renouncing the concept of
experience. On the contrary, we believe it is imperative to retain the category of lived
experience as a reference point in light of misguided post-Marxist critiques which imply
that all forms of Marxian class analysis are dismissive of subjectivity. We are not,
however, advocating the uncritical fetishization of experience that tends to
assume that experience somehow guarantees the authenticity of knowledge
and which often treats experience as self-explanatory, transparent, and solely individual.
Rather, we advance a framework that seeks to make connections between
seemingly isolated situations and/or particular experiences by exploring how
they are constituted in, and circumscribed by, broader historical and social
circumstances. Experiential understandings, in and of themselves, are suspect
because, dialectically, they constitute a unity of oppositesthey are at once
unique, specific, and personal, but also thoroughly partial, social, and the products
of historical forces about which individuals may know little or nothing (Gimenez,
2001). In this sense, a rich description of immediate experience in terms of
consciousness of a particular form of oppression (racial or otherwise) can be an
appropriate and indispensable point of departure. Such an understanding, however,
can easily become an isolated difference prison unless it transcends the
immediate perceived point of oppression, confronts the social system in
which it is rooted, and expands into a complex and multifaceted analysis (of
forms of social mediation) that is capable of mapping out the general
organization of social relations. That, however, requires a broad class-based
approach.
AT Only Class
Our method accesses their impacts - saying Marxism fails to
describe non-class oppression incorrectly equates us with
economic determinism.
Perhaps one of the most taken-for-granted features of contemporary social

theory is the ritual and increasingly generic critique of Marxism in terms of
its alleged failure to address forms of oppression other than that of class.
Marxism is considered to be theoretically bankrupt and intellectually passe, and class
analysis is often savagely lampooned as a rusty weapon wielded clumsily by those mindlocked in the jejune factories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. When Marxist
class analysis has not been distorted or equated with some crude version of
economic determinism, it has been attacked for diverting attention away
from the categories of differenceincluding race (Gimenez, 2001). To overcome
the presumed inadequacies of Marxism, an entire discursive apparatus, sometimes
called post-Marxism, has arisen to fill the void. Serving as academic pallbearers
at the funeral of the old bearded devil, post- Marxists (who often go by other names
such as postmodernists, radical multicul- turalists, etc.) have tried to entomb Marxs
legacy while simultaneously benefiting from it. Yet, the crypt designed for
Marx, reverential in its grand austerity, has never quite been able to contain his
impact on history. For someone presumably dead, Marx has a way of escaping from
his final resting place and reappearing with an uncanny regularity in the world of ideas.
His ghost, as Greider (1998) notes, hovers over the global landscape as he continues to
shape our understandings of the current crises of capitalism that haunt the living
present. Regardless of Marxs enduring relevance and even though much of postMarxism is actually an outlandish caricature of Marx and the entire Marxist tradition, it
has eaten through the Left like a cancer and has established itself as the new common
sense (Johnson, 2002, p. 129). What has been produced is a discourse eminently more
digestible to the academic Left whose steady embourgeoisement appears to be altering
the political palate of career social theorists. Eager to take a wide detour around political
economy, post-Marxists tend to assume that the principal political points of
departure in the current postmodern world must necessarily be cultural. As
such, most, but not all post-Marxists have gravitated towards a politics of difference
which is largely premised on uncovering relations of power that reside in the
arrangement and deployment of subjectivity in cultural and ideological practices
(cf. Jordan & Weedon, 1995). Advocates of difference politics therefore posit their ideas
as bold steps forward in advancing the interests of those historically marginalized by
dominant social and cultural narratives. There is no doubt that post-Marxism has
advanced our knowledge of the hidden trajectories of power within the processes of
representation and that it remains useful in adumbrating the formation of subjectivity
and its expressive dimensions as well as complementing our understandings of the
relationships between difference, language, and cultural configurations. However,

post-Marxists have been woefully remiss in addressing the constitution of
class formations and the machi- nations of capitalist social organization. In some
instances, capitalism and class relations have been thoroughly otherized; in
others, class is summoned only as part of the triumvirate of race, class, and
gender in which class is reduced to merely another form of difference.
Enamored with the cultural and seemingly blind to the economic, the rhetorical
excesses of post-Marxists have also pre- vented them from considering the
stark reality of contemporary class conditions under global capitalism. As we
hope to show, the radical displacement of class analysis in contemporary
theoretical narratives and the concomitant decentering of capitalism, the anointing of
difference as a primary explanatory construct, and the culturalization of
politics, have had detrimental effects on left theory and practice.
This is a link it assumes oppression operates outside material

arrangements.
The manner in which difference has been taken up within post-al frameworks has
tended to stress its cultural dimensions while marginalizing and, in some cases,
completely ignoring the economic and material dimensions of difference. This
posturing has been quite evident in many post-al theories of race and in the realm of
ludic1 cultural studies that have valorized an account of differenceparticularly racial
differencein almost exclusively superstructuralist terms (Sahay, 1998). But this
treatment of difference and claims about the relative autonomy of race have
been enabled by a reduction and distortion of Marxian class analysis which
involves equating class analysis with some version of economic determinism.
The key move in this distorting gesture depends on the view that the economic is the
base, the cultural/political/ideological the superstructure. It is then relatively easy to
show that the (presumably non-political) economic base does not cause the political
/cultural /ideological superstructure, that the latter is/are not epiphenomenal but
relatively autonomous or autonomous causal categories (Meyerson, 2000, p. 2). In such
formulations the cultural is treated as a separate and autonomous sphere,
severed from its embeddedness within sociopolitical and economic
arrangements. As a result, many of these culturalist narratives have produced
autonomist and reified conceptualizations of difference which far from enabling those
subjects most marginalized by racial difference have, in effect, reduced difference
to a question of knowledge/power relations that can presumably be dealt
with (negotiated) on a discursive level without a fundamental change in the
relations of production (Sahay, 1998). At this juncture, it is necessary to point out
that arguing that culture is generally conditioned/shaped by material forces
does not reinscribe the simplistic and presumably deterministic
base/superstructure metaphor which has plagued some strands of Marxist

theory. Rather, we invoke Marxs own writings from both the Grundrisse and Capital in
which he contends that there is a consolidating logic in the relations of
production that permeates society in the complex variety of its empirical reality.
This emphasizes Marxs understanding of capitalism and capital as a social relation
one which stresses the interpenetration of these categories, the realities which they
reflect, and one which therefore offers a unified and dialectical analysis of history,
ideology, culture, politics, economics and society (see also Marx, 1972, 1976, 1977).2
They inappropriately constitute politics as representational and

cultural historical materialism reveals culture is a facet of
class.
Foregrounding the limitations of difference and representational politics does not

suggest a disavowal of the importance of cultural and/or discursive arena(s) as sites of
contestation and struggle. We readily acknowledge the significance of contemporary
theorizations that have sought to valorize precisely those forms of difference that have
historically been denigrated. This has undoubtedly been an important development since
they have enabled subordinated groups to reconstruct their own histories and give voice
to their individual and collective identities. However, they have also tended to
redefine politics as a signifying activity generally confined to the realm of
representation while displacing a politics grounded in the mobilization of
forces against the material sources of political and economic
marginalization. In their rush to avoid the capital sin of economism, many postMarxists (who often ignore their own class privilege) have fallen prey to an
ahistorical form of culturalism which holds, among other things, that cultural
struggles external to class organizing provide the cutting edge of
emancipatory politics.3 In many respects, this posturing, has yielded an
intellectual pseudopolitics that has served to empower the theorist while
explicitly disempowering real citizens (Turner, 1994, p. 410). We do not discount
concerns over representation; rather our point is that progressive educators and
theorists should not be straightjacketed by struggles that fail to move beyond the politics
of difference and representation in the cultural realm. While space limitations prevent us
from elaborating this point, we contend that culturalist arguments are deeply
problematic both in terms of their penchant for de-emphasizing the totalizing
(yes totalizing!) power and function of capital and for their attempts to employ
culture as a construct that would diminish the centrality of class. In a proper
historical materialist account, culture is not the other of class but, rather,
constitutes part of a more comprehensive theorization of class rule in
different contexts.4
AT Monolithic
Class is NOT monolithic it is contingent on how the division of
labor, modes of production, and class antagonisms manifest
themselves at specific historical moments.
Problematic: A Re-Articulation, http://eserver.org/clogic/2003/sanjuan.html)
In historicizing the social division of labor, Marx demonstrated that classes are
specific and historically determinate. They are neither rigid nor immutable.
They arise from the complex dynamics of historical development. There are
not just two homogeneous classes, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, as the
Communist Manifesto proclaimed, but many dependent on the multiple
ramifications of the division of labor and the overdetermined specificity of
the modes of production as well as the historical conjunctures. For example, in
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx described the formation of
numerous middle and intermediate strata and various coalitions that formed during the
events of the 1848 revolution. He also later observed that in England "intermediate and
transitional strata obscure the class boundaries" that separate the increasingly polarized
bourgeoisie and the proletariat. What is crucial, however, is Marx's view that classes
are formed in the process of class antagonisms. Class struggle, not the relation to
the means of production, are primary in class formation and the coeval crystallization of
class consciousness (from class-in-itself to class-for-itself). This modifies Lenin's
doctrinal formulation of class: "Classes are large groups of people, differing from each
other by the place they occupy in an historically determined system of social production,
by their role in the social organization of labor and, consequently, by the dimensions of
the share of social wealth of which they can dispose and the mode of acquiring it"
(quoted in Schmitt 1987, 128). A fully constituted class was described by Marx in The
Eighteenth Brumaire, (section VII): "In so far as millions of families live under economic
conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture
from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they
form a class. In so far as there is merely a local interconnection among these smallholding peasants, and the identity of their interests begets no community, no national
bond, and no political organization among them, they do not form a class." In The
German Ideology, Marx and Engels write: "The separate individuals form a class only
insofar as they have to carry on a common battle against another class; otherwise they
are on hostile terms with each other as competitors. On the other hand, the class in its
turn achieves independent existence over against the individuals" (quoted in Schmitt
1987, 128). Classes, groups locked in battle, are thus not unchangeable
monolithic formations; they "are forever changing, developing,
differentiating themselves, while at the same time the common element
always comes to the fore and integrates the individual within the class"
(Fischer 1996, 77). Classes undergo a constant process of inner movement and
transformation dependent on the vicissitudes of the class struggle in a
historically specific configuration of the world-system as a complex dynamic

whole.
AT Perm
Do not buy their celebration of multiplicity the postmodern
paradigm that backs the reading of the 1AC EXCLUDES the
material coordinates of oppression.
Scott, Prof PostColonial Lit & Theory @ U Vermont, 2006
(Helen, Reading the Text in its Worldly Situation: Marxism, Imperialism, and
Contemporary Caribbean Womens Literature, Postcolonial Text, 2.1,
http://postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/viewArticle/491/174)
And yet postmodern paradigms can, ironically, given their habitual celebration
of multiplicity and specificity, lead to formulaic one dimensional, monofocused, reductive readings of texts as linguistic, discursive allegories, and
exclude multiple possibilities for more specific, grounded readings. And
despite postmodernisms vaunted radicalism, as many of its critics have argued, the
linguistic turn and descent into discourse in postcolonial studies have obscured
the material coordinates of imperialism, arguably depoliticizing a field of
study that is from its inception engaged with inherently political questions of empire,
race, colonialism and their relationship to cultural production.[14] In her study of
Caribbean women writers, Isabel Hoving equates high theory with political criticism
and attributes the crisis in postcolonial studies to weariness with the issues of gender,
class and race which is being met with a return to the literary (7). Yet it could be
argued that it is high theory that insistently pulls us away from concrete
histories, lived experiences of oppression and resistance, and specific artistic
movements and works, and leads us towards monotonous questions of
discourse, representation, language, and identity.
AT Intersectionality
Their solution is worse than the problem - Intersectionality
subsumes class as a category of identity that is DISTINCT from
the Marxist conception of class as the distinctive characteristic
of the capitalist social totality.
1. The implacably zombifying domination of the Cold War for almost half a century
has made almost everyone allergic to the Marxian notion of class as a social
category that can explain inequalities of power and wealth in the "free world."
One symptom is the mantra of "class reductionism" or "economism" as a weapon to
silence anyone who calls attention to the value of one's labor power, or one's capacity to
work in order to survive, if not to become human. Another way of nullifying the
concept of class as an epistemological tool for understanding the dynamics
of capitalist society is to equate it with status, life-style, even an entire "habitus"
or pattern of behavior removed from the totality of the social relations of
production in any given historical formation. Often, class is reduced to income,
or to voting preference within the strict limits of the bourgeois (that is, capitalist)
electoral order. Some sociologists even play at being agnostic or nominalist by claiming
that class displays countless meanings and designations relative to the ideological
persuasion of the theorist/researcher, hence its general uselessness as an analytic tool.
This has become the orthodox view of "class" in mainstream academic
discourse. 2. Meanwhile, with the victory of the Civil Rights struggles in the sixties
(now virtually neutralized in the last two decades), progressive forces relearned the value
of the strategy of alliances and coalitions of various groups. These coalitions have
demonstrated the power of demanding the recognition of group rights, the efficacy of the
politics of identity. Invariably, ethnic or cultural identity became the primordial
point of departure for political dialogue and action. Activists learned the lesson
that Stuart Hall, among others, discovered in the eighties: the presumably Gramscian
view that "there is no automatic identity or correspondence between economic, political
and ideological processes" (1996, 437). This has led to the gradual burgeoning of a
"politics of ethnicity predicated on difference and diversity." Nonetheless, Hall
insisted that for people of color, class is often lived or experienced in the modality of
race; in short, racism (racialized relations) often function as one of the factors that
"overdetermine" (to use the Althusserian term) the formation of class
consciousness. While this trend (still fashionable today in its version of
cosmopolitanism, post-national or postcolonial criticism, eclectic transnationalism of all
sorts) did not completely reject the concept of class, it rendered it superfluous by
the formula of subsuming it within the putative "intersectionality" of race,
gender, and class as a matrix of identity and agency. 3. One of the systematic
ideological rationalizations of this approach is David Theo Goldberg's Racist Culture.
Goldberg argues that class cannot be equated with race, or race collapsed into class; in
short, culture cannot be dissolved into economics. That move "leaves unexplained those
cultural relations race so often expresses, or it wrongly reduces these cultural relations to
more or less veiled instantiations of class formation" (1993, 70). Race then becomes
primarily an affair of race relations. It acquires an almost fetishistic valorization in this
framework of elucidating social reality. A less one-sided angle may be illustrated by Amy
Gutman's belief that class and race interact so intimately that we need a more nuanced
calibration of the specific moments in which the racial determinant operates over and
above the class determinant: "What we can say with near certainty is that if blacks who
live in concentrated poverty, go to bad schools, or live in single-parent homes are also
stigmatized by racial prejudice as whites are not, then even the most complex calculus of
class is an imperfect substitute for also taking color explicitly into account" (2000, 96).
What is clear in both Goldberg's and Gutman's analysis is that class (taken as a rigid
phenomenal feature of identity) is only one aspect or factor in explaining any dynamic
social situation, not the salient or fundamental relation. Unlike the Marxian concept
of class as a relation of group antagonisms (more precisely, class conflict) that is
the distinctive characteristic of the social totality in capitalism, class in
current usage signifies an element of identity, a phenomenon whose
meaning and value is incomplete without taking into account other factors
like race, gender, locality, and so on. Neoliberal pluralism and the discourse
of methodological individualism reign supreme in these legitimations of a
reified world-system, what Henri Lefebvre (1971) calls "the bureaucratic society of
controlled consumption." 4. To date, the standard judgment of a Marxist
approach to racism and racial conflict is summed up in reflex epithets such
as "economistic," "reductionist," "productivist," "deterministic," and cognate
terms. Despite the influence of Althusser, Gramsci, and assorted neo- or postMarxists,
the majority of scholars and their graduate acolytes in the West continue this Cold
War syndrome. It is probably a waste of time to dignify this silliness. However, I think
it is useful insofar as it might dispel the ideological hold of the paradigm supposed to
remedy the simplification: the intersection of race, class and gender. This mantra
obviously commits the other error of reducing class, and for that matter race and
gender, to nominal aspects of personal identity without any clear historical
or materialist grounding. The solution is worse than the problem.
Class should still be the basis of an intersectionalist analysis

because it occupies all categories of difference their critique
essentializes the marginalized as inexistent beyond their
identity.
We have argued that it is virtually impossible to conceptualize class without attending to

the forms and contents of difference, but we insist that this does not imply that class
struggle is now outdated by the politics of difference. As Jameson (1998, p. 136) notes,
we are now in the midst of returning to the most fundamental form of class struggle in
light of current global conditions. Todays climate suggests that class struggle is not yet a
thing of the past and that those who seek to undermine its centrality are not only
morally callous and seriously out of touch with reality but also largely blind to the
needs of the large mass of people who are barely surviving capitals newly-honed
mechanisms of globalized greed (Harvey, 1998, pp. 79). In our view, a more
comprehensive and politically useful understanding of the contemporary
historical juncture necessitates foregrounding class analysis and the
primacy of the working class as the fundamental agent of change.8 This
does not render as secondary the concerns of those marginalized by race,
ethnicity, etc. as is routinely charged by post-Marxists. It is often assumed that
foregrounding capitalist social relations necessarily undermines the importance of
attending to difference and/or trivializes struggles against racism, etc., in favor of an
abstractly defined class-based politics typically identified as white. Yet, such
formulations rest on a bizarre but generally unspoken logic that assumes
that racial and ethnic minorities are only conjuncturally related to the
working class. This stance is patently absurd since the concept of the
working class is undoubtedly comprised of men and women of different
races, ethnicities, etc. (Mitter, 1997). A good deal of post-Marxist critique is
subtly racist (not to mention essentialist) insofar as it implies that people of
color could not possibly be concerned with issues beyond those related to
their racial or ethnic difference. This posits people of color as singleminded, one-dimensional caricatures and assumes that their working lives
are less crucial to their self-understanding (and survival) than is the case with their
white male counterparts.9 It also ignores the fact that class is an ineradicable
dimension of everybodys lives (Gimenez, 2001, p. 2) and that social oppression is
much more than tangentially linked to class background and the exploitative relations of
production. On this topic, Meyerson (2000) is worth quoting at length: Marxism
properly interpreted emphasizes the primacy of class in a number of senses. One of
course is the primacy of the working class as a revolutionary agenta primacy which
does not render women and people of color secondary. This view assumes that working
class means whitethis division between a white working class and all the others, whose
identity (along with a corresponding social theory to explain that identity) is thereby
viewed as either primarily one of gender and race or hybrid ... [T]he primacy of class
means ... that building a multiracial, multi-gendered international working-class
organization or organizations should be the goal of any revolutionary movement so that
the primacy of class puts the fight against racism and sexism at the center. The
intelligibility of this position is rooted in the explanatory primacy of class analysis for
understanding the structural determinants of race, gender, and class oppression.
Oppression is multiple and intersecting but its causes are not.
AT Classism
Our conception of class is distinct from classism.
This framework must be further distinguished from those that invoke the terms
classism and/or class elitism to (ostensibly) foreground the idea that class matters
(cf. hooks, 2000) since we agree with Gimenez (2001, p. 24) 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. To marginalize such a conceptualization of class is to
conflate an individuals objective location in the intersection of structures of
inequality with peoples subjective understandings of who they really are
based on their experiences.
AT Starting Point
Race is the wrong starting point class can explain racial
antagonisms but not the other way around.
Cox theorizes racism as a "socio-attitudinal facilitation of a particular type of labor

exploitation": "The fact of crucial significance is that racial exploitation is merely
one aspect of the problem of the proletarianization of labor, regardless of
the color of the laborer. Hence racial antagonism is essentially politicalclass conflict" (1972, 208). The capitalist demonstrates his practical opportunism
when he uses racial prejudice to "keep his labor and other resources freely exploitable."
Race prejudice, for Cox, is not just dislike for the physical appearance or attitudes of
the other person. "It rests basically upon a calculated and concerted
determination of a white ruling class to keep peoples of color and their
resources exploitable" (1972, 214). And this pattern of race prejudice becomes part of
the social heritage so that "both exploiters and exploited for the most part are born heirs
to it." Cox, however, is not just a simple determinist addicted to the much abused,
proverbial base/superstructure formula. He demonstrates scholarly sophistication in
conceptualizing the historically nuanced "situations of race relations" in the U.S.,
describing the situation as "bipartite." The term "bipartite" refers to the fact that though
both colored and white persons live in the same geographical location,
whites insist that the whole society is "a white man's country" (1972, 216). Cox
would differ from another scholar of race relations, Leo Kuper, who believes that class
structures and racial structures constitute different systems of stratification. For Kuper,
"racial differences which are societally elaborated have preceded" social interaction
(1972, 95). But racial difference cannot usefully serve as a secondary hypothesis
in explaining, say, national-liberation struggles. In colonial and neocolonial
formations, independent class struggles emerged that were mobilized around
national, ethnic and race ideologies, as shown in Latin American, South Africa,
Algeria, and the Caribbean countries. But for Cox, the import of racial
differentiations, alignments and antagonisms insofar as they influence class
formation cannot be fully grasped unless they are situated within the process
of class conflicts operating on complex levels in a historically evolving
capitalist system. A recent example of this mode of "situating" the dialectic of race and
class is Alex Callinicos' argument that the 1992 Los Angeles mass upheaval was a "class
rebellion, not race riot," concluding his brief that "only a strategy which takes as its
starting point class rather than race can provide the basis for the necessary
unity of the oppressed" (1993, 57).
His Mat Alt Solvency
San Juan Jr
The alternative is historical materialist criticism voting
negative endorses an anti-capitalist methodology that
denaturalizes the functions of capital
San Juan Jr. 2006
(E., Red Critique, Winter/Spring, Crisis and Contradiction in Globalization
Discourse,http://www.redcritique.org/WinterSpring2006/crisisandcontradictioninglob
alizationdiscourse.htm)
In order to probe and analyze the multilayered contradictions of any phenomenon, we
need to apply the

principle of historical totalizing: connecting spheres of culture, ideology,
and politics to the overarching structure of production and reproduction.
This is axiomatic for any historical-materialist critique . Consequently, the question of
cultural identity cannot be mechanically divorced from the historically
determinate mode of production and attendant social relations of any given
socioeconomic formation. What is the point of eulogizing hybrid , cyborg-esque,
nomadic global citizenseven fluid, ambivalent "subject positions" if you like when the majority of these
postmodernized creatures are dying of hunger, curable epidemics, diseases
and psychosomatic illnesses brought about precisely by the predatory encroachment of
globalizing transnational corporations, mostly based in the U.S. and Western Europe? But it is not
just academic postmodernists suffering from the virus of pragmatist metaphysics who apologize for profit-making
globalization. Even a latterly repentant World Bank expert, Joseph Stiglitz, could submit in his well-known Globalization
and Its Discontents, the following ideological plea: "Foreign aid, another aspect of the globalized world, for all its faults
still has brought benefits to millions, often in ways that have almost gone unnoticed: guerillas in the Philippines were
provided jobs by a World Bank financed-project as they laid down their arms" (Stiglitz 420). Any one slightly familiar with
the Cold War policies of Washington vis--vis a neocolony like the Philippines knows that World Bank funds were then
used by the U.S. Pentagon to suppress the Communist Party-led peasant rebellion in the 1950s against the iniquitous
semi-feudal system and corrupt comprador regime (Doty; Constantino). It is globalization utilized to maintain direct
coercive U.S. domination of the Philippines at a crucial conjuncture when the Korean War was mutating into the Vietnam
War, all designed to contain "World Communism" (China, Soviet Union). Up to now, despite nationalist gains in the last
decade, the Philippine government plays host every year to thousands of U.S. "Special Forces" purportedly training
Filipino troops in the war against "terrorism"that is, against anti-imperialist forces like the Communist Party-led New
People's Army and progressive elements of the Moro Islamic National Liberation Front and the Moro National Liberation
Front (International Peace Mission). One needs to repeat again that the present world system, as Hugo Radice argues,
remains "both global and national", a contingent and contradictory process (4). Globalization dialectically negates and
affirms national entitiespseudo-nations as well as those peoples struggling for various forms of national sovereignty.
While a universal "free market" promoted by TNC triumphalism is deemed to be

homogenizing and centralizing in effect , abolishing independent states/nationalities, and creating
a global public sphere through juxtaposition, syncretic amalgamation, and so on, one perceives a countercurrent of fragmentation, increasing asymmetry, unbridgeable inequalities,
and particularistic challenges to neoliberal integrationincluding fundamentalist political Islam, eco-terrorism, drugs,
migration, and other movements of "barbarians at the gates" (Schaeffer). Is it a question of mere human rights in
representation and life-style, or actual dignity and justice in the everyday lives of whole populations with singular lifeforms? Articulating
these historical contradictions without theorizing the

concept of crisis in capital accumulation will only lead to the short-circuiting
transculturalism of Ashcroft and other ideologies waging battle for supremacy/hegemony over "popular
common sense" imposing meaning/order/significance on the whole globalization process (Rupert). Indeed, academic
inquirers of globalization are protagonists in this unfolding drama of universalization under duress. One may pose the
following questions as a heuristic pedagogical maneuver: Can globalized capital truly universalize the world and bring
freedom and prosperity to everyone, as its celebrants claim? Globalization as the transnationalized domination
of capital exposes its historical limit in the deepening class inequality in a

polarized, segregated and policed world. While surplus-value extraction in the international labor market remains basic to
the logic of accumulation, the ideology of neoliberal transnationalism has evolved into the discourse of war on terrorism
("extremism") rationalized as "the clash of civilizations". Contradictions and its temporary resolutions constitute the
imperialist project of eliding the crisis of unilateral globalism. A
historical-materialist critique
should seek to highlight the political economy of this recolonizing strategy
operating in the fierce competition of the ruling classes of the U.S., Japan, and Europe to impose hegemonic control in an
increasingly boundary-destroying space and continue the neocolonial oppression of the rest of the world. What is needed
is a radical critique of the ideology of technological determinism and its associated apologetics of the "civilizing mission",
the evangelism of "pre-emptive" intervention in the name of Realpolitik "democracy" against resistance by workers,
peasants, women, indigenous communities (in Latin America, Africa, the Philippines and elsewhere [see Houghton and
Bell; San Juan, "U.S. Imperial Terror"]), and all the excluded and marginalized peoples of the planet.
Identity/Marginalized Bodies
A historical materialist analysis is key to understanding the
oppression of all categories of difference the dialectic of
capital creates the material structures of exploitation.
An historical materialist approach understands that categories of

difference are social/political constructs that are often encoded in dominant
ideological formations and that they often play a role in moral and legal statemediated forms of ruling. It also acknowledges the material force of ideologies
particularly racist ideologiesthat assign separate cultural and/or biological essences
to different segments of the population which, in turn, serve to reinforce and
rationalize existing relations of power. But more than this, an historical
materialist understanding foregrounds the manner in which difference is
central to the exploitative production/ reproduction dialectic of capital, its
labor organization and processes, and in the way labor is valued and renumerated. The
real problem is the internal or dialectical relation that exists between capital
and labor within the capitalist production process itselfa social relation in which
capitalism is intransigently rooted. This social relationessential to the production of
abstract labordeals with how already existing value is preserved and new value
(surplus value) is created (Allman, 2001). If, for example, the process of actual
exploitation and the accumulation of surplus value is to be seen as a state of constant
manipulation and as a realization process of concrete labor in actual labor timewithin a
given cost-production system and a labor marketwe cannot underestimate the
ways in which difference (racial as well as gender difference) is encapsulated in
the production/reproduction dialectic of capital. It is this relationship that is
mainly responsible for the inequitable and unjust distribution of resources.
A deepened understanding of this phenomenon is essential for understanding
the emergence of an acutely polarized labor market and the fact that
disproportionately high percentages of people of color are trapped in the lower
rungs of domestic and global labor markets (McLaren & Farahmandpur, 1999).
Difference in the era of global capitalism is crucial to the workings, movements
and profit levels of multinational corporations but those types of complex relations
cannot be mapped out by using truncated post-Marxist, culturalist conceptualizations
of difference. To sever issues of difference from class conveniently draws
attention away from the crucially important ways in which people of color
(and, more specifically, women of color) provide capital with its superexploited
labor poolsa phenomenon that is on the rise all over the world. Most social relations
constitutive of racialized differences are considerably shaped by the relations of
production and there is undoubtedly a racialized and gendered division of
labor whose severity and function vary depending on where one is situated in the
capitalist global economy (Meyerson, 2000).6
Historical materialism better explains ALL oppression it

embeds categories of difference within broader material
structures to reveal how all exploitation function through an
overarching structure of capitalism.
Contrary to what many have claimed, Marxist theory does not relegate categories
of difference to the conceptual mausoleum; rather, it has sought to
reanimate these categories by interrogating how they are refracted through
material relations of power and privilege and linked to relations of
production. Moreover, it has emphasized and insisted that the wider political and
economic system in which they are embedded needs to be thoroughly
understood in all its complexity. Indeed, Marx made clear how constructions of
race and ethnicity are implicated in the circulation process of variable capital. To the
extent that gender, race, and ethnicity are all understood as social constructions rather
than as essentialist categories the effect of exploring their insertion into the circulation
of variable capital (including positioning within the internal heterogeneity of collective
labor and hence, within the division of labor and the class system) must be interpreted
as a powerful force reconstructing them in distinctly capitalist ways (Harvey, 2000, p.
106). Unlike contemporary narratives which tend to focus on one or another form of
oppression, the irrefragable power of historical materialism resides in its ability
to reveal (1) how forms of oppression based on categories of difference do not
possess relative autonomy from class relations but rather constitute the ways
in which oppression is lived/experienced within a class-based system; and (2)
how all forms of social oppression function within an overarching capitalist
system.
Race
A historical materialist method reveals how the process of
alienation mediates racial dynamics at the level of class
antagonisms.
Problematic: A Re-Articulation, http://eserver.org/clogic/2003/sanjuan.html
We cannot grasp the dialectics of race and class by using the market as the conceptual
space of cognition as well as a point of departure for crafting revolutionary political
strategy. Nor the idea of exchange and money, for that matter. Marxism begins with a
grasp of the social totality in its historical development. The key concept is
the mode of production consisting of productive forces and of relations of
production. Let us confine ourselves to capitalism as the determinate mode with its
various historical stages. In industrial capitalism the differentia specifica is the
buying and selling of labor power. Lenin states that capitalism is the system in which
labor-power becomes the prime commodity. This gives rise to the working
class as the group separated from the means of production, free (unlike slaves
or serfs) to dispose of their labor power, to sell it to another group--the capitalist-who utilizes it to expand the unit of capital he owns. This labor process involving
contracts that deal with the conditions of the sale of labor power needs to be strictly
historicized. While the market for labor-power has existed since antiquity, it
is only with the rise of industrial capitalism in the 18th century that a
substantial class of wage-workers emerged. We need to distinguish between the
production of commodities on a class basis and mercantile capitalism founded on the
exchange of the surplus products of prior forms of production (Braverman 1974). In
every determinate sociohistorical conjuncture, various features of different
modes of production may overlap, but a dominant structure of class
exploitation prevails, ascertainable through careful theoretical and
empirical analysis. What is distinctive in this mode of production is the fact that the
labor process has become alienated, that is, alienation now characterizes the work
situation of workers under capitalist control. This alienation of the process of
production exerts a peculiar force that affects the factoring of racial, ethnic,
sexual and other qualities in the struggle between classes. Alienation,
commodity fetishism, and what Georg Lukcs calls "reification" mediates and adjusts
the racial dynamics to the level and stage of class antagonisms in the specific
social formation.

Marxism Kritik - DDI 2014 SWS

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Marxism Kritik - DDI 2014 SWS

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Marxism

The cohesiveness of this position suggests that forms of exploitation

and oppression are related

the capitalist development of U.S. society,

and nationalism are modalities in which

they lack a class

is absolutely essential to reiterate that most things are a

must cease displacing

class analysis with the politics of difference.

A historical materialist analysis is key to understanding the

An historical materialist approach understands that categories of

Let us bracket for a moment the limitations of postmodern/post-Marxist epistemologies,

The Postmodern epistemological framework precludes true

From Radical Democracy to Revolutionary Democracy Let me finish by addressing the

The postmodern left downplays structural inequality for futile

is a Left that insists on downplaying institutional and

intuitive analytical appeal and theoretical sophistication, their book

politics that refuses to

Post-al theorizations segregate difference from class formation

Post-al theorizations of difference circumvent and undermine any systematic

will and historical or structural determination. In a similar vein, it is equally absurd to

Creating Space Link

Moreover, it presents a challenge to those theorizations that work to consolidate

Middle Passage/Atlantic Economy Link

and capitalism: (1) Both rely on a

effect of that transfer is social

transfer effected just once, by sale, under a

e.g. Kussmaul, 1981). At the same time, this same age

of merchant capitalism did see a

Capitalism and slavery operate in dynamic simultaneity only

pedestal he wrote this: "Whilst the

cotton industry introduced child-slavery in

historical process by which the

materiality of the music -- jungle's convoluted breakbeat rhythms, the

journalistic cliche too often marking a

Micropolitics is the politics of consumption, and consump- tion is always a matter of

is the politics of bypassing class and

of the structures of exploitation, substituting instead ethnographical studies of the behavior

and Engels argue that there are no eternal truths

can apply the same principle, examining the motives

for ethical and

principles allegedly applied universally across

This discussion highlights the historical

and immediate contextual factors that belie any easy

is relevant only as a rhetorical

critique of morality does not necessarily

are such things as goods and

A book recently published in France LOrganisation Pirate by Rodolphe Durand and

Piracy is a unique impetus for capitalist development it creates

1. Piracy and capitalism: between attraction and repulsion Capitalism, which

Walt Disney was a liar and so is the af

whole system depended on deep-ocean ships, the newest technology of the

time, and on the

men who crewed them. Such men faced the risk of

pirates were black - more than half the crew on some

Race, Class, Gender Link

organizations are trying to exercise social control over capital

Sustainable development is capitalist

ambiguity allows business and governments to be in favour of sustainability

is open to confusion, with some seeing it as an end in

it is not possible to see sex/gender relations as entirely socially constructed.

the association of women with nature represents hu(man)ity's need to

and other species who

Their focus on the particularities of feminism inhibits a