Professional Documents
Culture Documents
1NC
The aff both hollows out the state for neoliberal purposes and
obscures a systemic analysis of the ever-presence of corporate
surveillance, furthering capitalist domination
Toynbee 13 (Polly, columnist for the Guardian former BBC social affairs editor,
columnist and associate editor of the Independent, co-editor of the Washington
Monthly and a reporter and feature writer for the Observer, The Guardian, June 10,
Snowden's revelations must not blind us to government as a force for good,
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/10/snowden-governmentforce-for-good-big-brother)
The state is our enemy, a malevolent, prying Big Brother who can
intrude on anyone, anywhere . The fallout from Edward Snowden's revelations to the Guardian about the
extent of the state's invasion of privacy will be long-lasting. How much more shocking that this is allowed by a Democratic president
who stood for hope and trust. No wonder the right eagerly expresses its shock, from Glenn Beck to Mitt Romney, with an I-told-youso relish that stirs the anti-government paranoia of the militias, the Tea Party and all who saw a communist plot even in minimalist
Obamacare.
Everywhere the idea of the good state is under siege . Civil liberties
advocates often find their arguments against an over-mighty state purloined by the right, chiming nicely with libertarian shrink-thestatists. In the Commons William Hague denied GCHQ complicity, but nonetheless government looms like a predator drone locking
on to every private email.
decades cowed the case for government as a force for goo d. In nervous
retreat, politicians of the liberal left have too willingly colluded with the prevailing state-inept, private-sector-better wind.
The
crash and the slump should have ignited a sense that government
is often all that stands between us and disaster, but the foghorns of
the right succeeded in blaming government more than runaway
financiers . Basic economics still has the nerve to teach as fact that markets are more rational than public servants can
ever be:
and God knows what. The pro-state case is uphill work when trolled into "Go and live in North
Korea, then." The danger is the NSA revelations tip the balance. Published this week, The Entrepreneurial State, by Professor
Mariana Mazzucato of Sussex University, offers a forensic analysis of how the state is prime investor and creator of most great
innovations.
Companies can thank the state not just for their security
under the law, for educating their staff, or building roads for their
trucks but for the most productive great leaps forward too . Not only the
internet but its technologies sprang from vast state investment (such as GPS and touch screens, biotech and nanotech), where the
state took the risk but others took the profit;
research ; US pharmaceuticals depend on $600bn of state-funded research, accounting for 75% of the drugs that companies
profit from afterwards. Mazzucato debunks the myth that the state needs do nothing but stay away and says
the green
climate change a socialist plot . Those who see the state as an alien
with tentacles grown beyond democratic control want to hack it
down . The greater threat is a too weak state overwhelmed by global
business.
Defending the benevolent state as the best expression of the collective public endeavour gets harder when trust
in the politicians who run it ebbs away. Fine speeches may be a hazard when, fairly or not, Obama disappoints for failing to govern
with the majesty of his rhetoric. In Britain the MPs' expenses scandal was damaging enough, worse still if despite frequent
entrapment senior parliamentarians are still "cabs for hire". Corruption looks endemic when ex-ministers reap rich rewards from
companies contracting with their former departments. What use a lobbyists' register when lobbyists sit at the heart of government?
Cameron's election strategist, Lynton Crosby, won't reveal his clients, yet his lobbying firm has represented alcohol and tobacco
interests that have successfully kicked away laws on cigarette packaging, alcohol pricing and registering lobbyists. Murdoch had his
own man at Cameron's side from day one, no revolving door but en suite. What is the public to think? With political trust rarer than
hen's teeth, the mendacity of the Conservatives at the last election will make it near impossible to persuade anyone at the next one.
The "most family-friendly" and "the greenest" government ever; "no NHS reorganisation"; no VAT rise; no cuts to education
maintenance allowance or child trust fund; three more army battalions; 3,000 more police; rail fares to be pegged; a post office bank
created and not sold off none of it was intended to be true. Cameron said just days before the election: "Any cabinet minister who
comes to me and says 'Here are my plans' and they involve frontline reductions, they'll be sent straight back to their department to
go away and think again." None were sent back. "All in it together," said George Osborne as he cut benefits and gave top earners a
5% tax bonus.
How can people trust political promises again ? All this stirs anti-
government hostility, as more voters refuse to vote, or opt for anyone disguised as an outsider
. Are citizens to
total security but no intrusion on privacy ? " You can't have 100%
security and also then have 100% privacy and zero inconvenience ,"
said President Obama, defending US surveillance this week. An off-duty soldier is slaughtered, bombs go off at the Boston marathon
and the first question asked is: why isn't anyone who ever expressed an extreme view under 24-hour watch? Trust comes from
telling the truth and treating citizens as adults: it can't be done, and anyway the terror risk is low compared with road deaths or the
two women murdered by partners each week. Labour's hard task is not just to instil trust in the party but to repair the idea of good
government. Honesty, authenticity and conviction build trust, while overcaution seems shifty. Trust comes not just from popular
policies, such as massive home-building, but sticking to unpopular ones. Refusing a referendum because Ed Miliband will not lead
Britain out of Europe to its destruction may be more of a winner than it seems: Ukip is the democratic choice for exit, Labour for
staying at the international table. However counterintuitive in this era, Labour needs to hymn the good the state does and the
civilising value of what taxes buy health, education, safety, proud public spaces. All the things that people value most.
The final stage of a mortal combat between [hu]mankind and capitalism is in progress . A
specificity of capitalism is that, in contrast to "classical" barbarism (which is of destructive, murderous and plundering nature), it
annihilates life by creating a "new world" a "technical civilization" and an adequate, dehumanized and
denaturalized man. Capitalism has eradicated man from his (natural) environment and has cut off the roots through which he had
drawn life-creating force. Cities are "gardens" of capitalism where degenerated creatures "grow". Dog excrement, gasoline and
sewerage stench, glaring advertisements and police car rotating lights that howl through the night - this is the environment of the
"free world" man. By
its own reproduction. "Consumer-man [person]" represents a transitional phase in the capitalismcaused process of mutation of man towards the "highest" form of capitalistic man: a robot-man.
"Terminators" and other robotized freaks which are products of the Hollywood entertainment industry which creates a "vision of the
future" degenerated in a capitalist manner, incarnate creative powers, alienated from man, which become vehicles for
destruction of man and life. A new "super race" of robotized humanoids is being created, which should clash with "traditional
mankind", meaning with people capable of loving, thinking, daydreaming, fighting for freedom and survival
- and impose their rule over the Earth. Instead of the new world, the "new man" is being created - who has been reduced to a level of
humanity which cannot jeopardize the ruling order. Science and technique have become the basic lever of capital for the destruction
of the world and the creation of "technical civilization". It is not only about destruction achieved by the use of technical means. It is
about technicization of social institutions, of interpersonal relations, of the human body. Increasing transformation
of
nature into a surrogate of "nature", increasing dehumanization of the society and increasing denaturalization of man are
direct consequences of capital's effort, within an increasingly merciless global economic war, to achieve
complete commercialization of both natural and the social environment. The optimism of the
Enlightenment could hardly be unreservedly supported nowadays, the notion of Marx that man imposes on himself only such tasks
as he can solve, particularly the optimism based on the myth of the "omnipotence" of science and technique. The race for profits has
already caused irreparable and still unpredictable damage to both man and his environment. By the creation of "consumer society",
which means through the transition of capitalism into a phase of pure destruction, such
However, in and of itself the profound structural crisis of the capital system is very far from being enough to inspire confidence in a successful outcome.
The task
Links
Cloud Computing
Cloud computing shift surveillance over to corporations
Subani 9 (Hamad, Author of multiple political books, 09/06/02, Techtangerine, Ten Reasons Why
Cloud Computing is a Bad Idea, http://www.techtangerine.com/2009/06/02/ten-reasons-why-cloudcomputing-is-a-bad-idea/)
Cloud Computing makes you dependent on the goodwill of your ISP Cloud Computing may require gratuitous
bandwidth for the client, depending on what the client is hosting on the Cloud. And the same ISPs who are
clamouring for bandwidth caps may charge and arm and a leg if the client exceeds his or her bandwidth quota.
Most of todays industry heavyweights owe their success to living up to these expectations. Microsoft and IBMs
unexpected touting of Cloud Computing is more akin to Toyota adopting the business model of a car rental agency
(If that were to happen, Toyota may likewise rebrand itself in the fashion of Silicon Valley, as a subscription based
Transport Service Provider). It is no surprise that old timers, such as Steve Wozniak who have been at the forefront
Cloud
Computing makes your Cloud Data subject to American law Since
most of the major Cloud Computing servers are operated by
companies based in the United States, data you put on your Cloud is
subject to American law. And the American law in turn, is subject to overrides,
loopholes, Patriot Acts, and exceptions, depending on which
governmental agency (or which person/interest) wants your data. You
of the development of personal computing, have publicly voiced their concerns over Cloud Computing.
may not even be informed that your data was compromised for the same reason Jack Bauer gets away with
Cloud
data no longer needs a warrant to be obtained by the authorities . To
torturing his hostages/prisoners (national security). And even if there is no national security issue,
quote, CLOUD DATA Documents, Photos, and Other Stuff Stored Online How They Get It: Authorities typically need
only a subpoena to get data from Google Drive, Dropbox, SkyDrive, and other services that allow users to store data
on their servers, or in the cloud, as its known. What the Law Says: T he
model. Amazon Web Services quietly booted whistleblowing website Wikileaks off their cloud computing servers.
This was done without any court order. Looks like Amazon Web
Services is also a flagship of the American government. In another piece of
news, Amazon has won a $600 million contract to build a Cloud Computing System for the CIA. Most American
businesses with a shred of integrity in this regard have already closed doors, and therefore those that remain in
business should be considered suspect. Take the case of Lavabit, a highly secure (and free) POP/IMAP/Webmail
email service. This service was used by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. On 8th August 2013, Lavabit users
were greeted with the following message: My Fellow Users, I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to
become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by
shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could
legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know whats going onthe
first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately,
Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the
last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests. Whats going to happen now? Weve
already started preparing the paperwork needed to continue to fight for the Constitution in the Fourth Circuit Court
of Appeals. A favorable decision would allow me resurrect Lavabit as an American company. This experience has
taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would _strongly_
recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.
Sincerely, Ladar Levison Owner and Operator, Lavabit LLC Defending the constitution is expensive! Help us by
donating to the Lavabit Legal Defense Fund here. Or take the case of Cryptoseal Privacy, a VPN service which
suddenly shuttered leaving perplexed users with the following message: With immediate effect as of this notice,
CryptoSeal Privacy, our consumer VPN service, is terminated. All cryptographic keys used in the operation of the
service have been zerofilled, and while no logs were produced (by design) during operation of the service, all
records created incidental to the operation of the service have been deleted to the best of our ability. Essentially,
the service was created and operated under a certain understanding of current US law, and that understanding may
not currently be valid. As we are a US company and comply fully with US law, but wish to protect the privacy of our
users, it is impossible for us to continue offering the CryptoSeal Privacy consumer VPN product. In other words,
if
corporation with your Cloud hosted by an American corporation, and your main competitor is an American
heavyweight with backdoor access to the State Agencies, your confidential data on the
Cloud may be just a few phone calls away. American corporations are known to use the
State Agencies as personal armies, although very little of this gets documented. Worse, if the CEO of the
Company that hosts your Cloud and the CEO of your competitor
belong to the same fraternity, your confidential data on the cloud
may be just a handshake away. Of course, your data on the Cloud is encrypted and cannot be
accessed by anyone other than yourself. But then, there are always exceptions. Amazon Web Services is considered
was attributed to the fact that Amazon.com had remotely deleted files that were on the users own device, and
therefore the move was like a hacker-style intrusion. But if suppose the Kindle followed the Cloud Computing model,
where ebooks were read and stored online instead of the device itself, Amazon.com would probably never get
caught. And the unavailablity of these titles could be attributed to an innocuous server outage. In April 2010, China
hijacked the Internet for 18 minutes by tricking other telecom routers. Nearly 15% of all American civilian and
military Internet traffic was quietly redirected into Chinese networks before being rerouted without delay. If your
cloud data transfers were included in this traffic, there is a possibility that it is being dissected somewhere in
Suddenly, all ringers, gurus, and experts are clamouring for Cloud Computing. Articles are appearing in respectable
publications weighing the pros and cons. Business heads are flaunting how they managed to cut costs. Does this
remind you of Big Tobacco, Big Sugar, Big Science and Big Pharma? Do you buy into the pitch? Are you willing to
invest your data in the scheme? Cloud Computing may be of little consequence for the Average Small Business
The May 2009 issue of WIRED carried an interesting article on Cloud Computing, highlighting pros and cons. The key
example cited in favour of Cloud Computing was an Eli Lily information consultant, who as a client of Amazon Web
Services uses his iPhone to run genomic analysis on the Cloud. How many businesses executives can picture
themselves doing this? Cloud Computing may not contribute to your national economy When you buy the hardware,
software and technical expertise for setting up a server locally, you are supporting several local businesses. With
Cloud Computing, you bypass all of these. But arent the major Cloud Computing providers American owned and
American based? Yes they are. But when they get things figured out, they might consider outsourcing. And Cloud
Computing is very feasible to outsource. Given their track record, they dont exactly cherish employing Americans,
unless Obama forces them to do so. Update (An Eleventh Reason?): Cloud Computing may not be as reliable as
touted. To quote AP News 21/04/2011, Major websites including Foursquare and Reddit crashed or suffered
slowdowns Thursday after technical problems rattled Amazon.coms widely used Web servers, frustrating millions of
people who couldnt access their favorite sites. Though better known for selling books, DVDs and other consumer
goods, Amazon also rents out space on huge computer servers that run many websites and other online services.
The problems began at an Amazon data center near Dulles Airport outside Washington and persisted into the
afternoon. The failures were widespread, but they varied in severity. HootSuite, which lets users monitor Twitter and
other social networks more easily, was down completely, as was questions-and-answers site Quora. The locationsharing social network Foursquare experienced glitches, while the news-sharing site Reddit was in emergency
read-only mode. Many other companies that use Amazon Web Services, like Netflix Inc. and Zynga Inc., which runs
Facebook games, appeared to be unscathed. Amazon has at least one other major data center that stayed up, in
California. No one knew for sure how many people were inconvenienced, but the services affected are used by
millions. Amazon Web Services provide cloud or utility-style computing in which customers pay only for the
computing power and storage they need, on remote computers. Lydia Leong, an analyst for the tech research firm
Gartner, said that judging by details posted on Amazons AWS status page, a network connection failed Thursday
morning, triggering an automatic recovery mechanism that then also failed. Amazons computers are divided into
groups that are supposed to be independent of each other. If one group fails, others should stay up. And customers
are encouraged to spread the computers they rent over several groups to ensure reliable service. But Thursdays
problem took out many groups simultaneously. Update (a Twelfth reason?): Michael Chertoff Loves Cloud Computing
Michael Chertoff Shape Shifting....In 1999, an obscure conspiracy theorist, David Icke, made a startling claim. He
stated that the ruling elite of the Western world were actually shape-shifting lizards. This theory became a laughing
matter and was even used to smear genuine conspiracy theorists. But no matter how much time passed, the theory
would simply not die. Ask any follower of Icke, and they will point you to images of the ruling elite, such as this
photograph of Michael Chertoff (Secretary of homeland security from 2005 to 2009). That is supposedly the face he
makes before shape-shifting into a ten foot lizard. Even we are to dismiss the claims of Ickes followers, the
generally accepted consensus among the alternate media is that the man exists to defecate on the liberties of the
American people. Chertoffs grandpoppa is of Russian origin, and in Soviet Russia, Internet surfs YOU! In a February
9th 2012 op-ed in the Washington post, Chertoff can be seen whining how EU privacy laws may balkanize the
Internet, because American Cloud Computing providers will not be allowed to invade the privacy of their European
customers. Update (A Thirteenth Reason?): Like it or not, Cloud Computing is being forced down your throat In late
keywords. In order for the censorship to work, the urls the Internet users were visiting were being forwarded to
apology. In more recent shenanigans, the babyish design of the Windows 8 tile interface was discovered to be
another attempt to shove Cloud Computing on unsuspecting computer users. While the Tile interface is great for
touchscreens and tablets, it can be fairly problematic when it comes to managing files. There is no way to access
the Windows file system through it. The Tiles got the Windows user base so grumpy that Windows 8 caused the
most precipitous decline in PC history! And the dumbed down approach has caused such consternation among
power users that the free Windows 8.1 update restores the classic Start button and allows users to bypass the Tile
interface to reach the good old Desktop. Microsoft has touted the Tile interface as a way for your apps and
programs to provide you with updated information while running in the background. But the apps and programs
that provide live info through Tiles are mainly cloud based apps. For example, Microsoft charges a hefty price for
its Outlook mail client. Any rational user would expect that there would be an Outlook Tile which would notify them
of new messages, reminders and calendar appointments, given the simplicity of programming such a Tile. But no,
there aint. The only usable Tile that can be used for email and calendar hooks up to Microsofts cloud-based email
service. Outlook users drawing mail from their own email service providers are simply not invited to the Tile
interface. To quote on exasperated user: They are trying to FORCE people into the cloud, Their cloud in order to get
these tiles to work at all. And another user: I think that Microsoft will soon find itself under the guns of the law
AGAIN if they dont release a way for people to use these features with an enterprise environment WITHOUT having
to use their live accounts. It is crazy to think that they are trying to force an enterprise user to use their mail and
calendar apps, but wont let you use your information locally in it. I think that Microsoft ahs really missed the mark
here. I know that most tester and die-hards will just say use the main Outlook and I am. Here is the point though,
IF you are going to supposedly revolutionize Windows and take away a]our START button and force us to use the
new UI, Then the LEAST you can do is make all the bells and whistles offered work Locally and through your new
online service. Dont tell us that in order for it to work, we can only use yours. The Mail and Calendar Tiles that do
work in Windows 8 sync up with Microsofts servers. Given the fact that Microsoft has officially admitted to releasing
the data of 137,424 of its users to various world governments, can it be trusted with such private information?
Culture
Emphasis on culture over materialism is flawed
Zavarzadeh 3 (Mas'ud, retired professor of English at Syracuse University ,The Pedagogy of
Totality Journal of Advanced Composition Theory 2003 JAC Online ***the event Zavarzadeh refers to
is 9/11 KC)
an instance of the clash of civilizations: culture ("values," "language," "religion," the "affective") did it. "They" hate
struggles that would end the global regime of wage labor. The event is an unfolding of a material contradiction not a
clash of civilizations. If teaching the event does not at least raise the possibility of a class understanding of it, the
International Relations Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific" on February 12, 1998 (three years before "9/11"), John
The Caspian
region contains tremendous untapped hydrocarbon reserves , much of them
J. Maresca, the Vice President for International Relations of Uno cal Corporation, stated that
located in the Caspian Sea basin itself. Proven natural gas reserves within Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and
Kazakhstan equal more than 236 trillion cubic feet. The region's total oil reserves may reach more than 60 billion
barrels of oil-enough to service Europe's oil needs for 11 years. Some estimates are as high as 200 billion barrels. In
1995, the region was producing only 870,000 barrels per day (44 million tons per year [Mtly]). (Monthly Review, Dec.
2001) The problem for U. S. capital was how to get the energy to the market .
The safest and most profitable way to get the energy to the West was, Maresca testified, by building "A commercial
corridor, a 'new' Silk Road" through Afghanistan. Developing "cost-effective, profitable and efficient export routes for
Central Asia," according to Maresca, is the point of converging "U.S. commercial interests and U.S. foreign policy":
Afghanistan had to be liberated to build the new silk road not because of a
"clash of civilizations." A pedagogy that brings up the event in the
classroom has a responsibility at least to raise these issues: to limit
"knowledge" to "background information" and then substitute CIA stories
for conceptual analysis of material causes is not curing ignorance but
Disability
Persons with disabilities will inevitably lose the competition
game created by capital this also turns case
Roberts 3 (Pamela, School of Policy Studies Roosevelt University, Disability Oppression in the
Contemporary U. S. Capitalist Workplace, Science & Society, Vol. 67, No. 2, Summer 2003, 136159,
KC)
talk to people as a person with autism or more jobs might be open to you if you know a bit of vocab), thus society
Women report
disability at higher rates then men. This is likely a result of women
already being excluded from certain activities. When you add any
perceived abnormality on top of that, they are even less likely to
be accommodated. People with disabilities have had some success in getting help to live in society
through various programs. Among the first programs that attempted to
improve social standing of people with disabilities were simple cash
benefits (i.e. Social Security Disability Income, charity, etc). These programs attempted to install means of
income for people with disabilities, to help them get by due to the fact that
capitalism actively tries to exclude them from the labor force. However,
chooses to accommodate these people more often than those with less education.
these programs (despite being often very minimal payments), are in essence an attempt to install equality of
There are
the obvious anti-discrimination laws, e.g. you cannot ask someone if
they are disabled and you are not allowed to deny them service or
employment as a result. This is a typical liberal response to
discrimination: dont actually reverse harm done to or accommodate the
discriminated, simply state in the law its not legal to discriminate against
them. This is comparable to the civil rights acts for the Captive Afrikan people and other oppressed groups. It is
results. This does not do anything other then provide a welfare check funded by imperial dividend.
of course a crime to discriminate, but youd be lying to yourself if you thought that this has addressed the root of
creation of the social model of disability. People with disabilities demanded mandatory accommodation, not cash
benefits or civil rights. They began to somewhat integrate into society where it was reasonable, the US DOT
estimates that 55% to 60% of buses were accessible to wheelchairs by 1993 as opposed to 24% before the passing
of the ADA. However not all accommodation is as simple as a wheelchair ramp (not to mention wheelchair ramps
arent the only thing people in wheelchairs need), some epileptics need accommodation no judge in a capitalist
state would deem reasonable in a workplace, place of commerce, or recreation area. Let us not forget to mention
disabilities reported socializing once a week, compared to 85% of people without disabilities, 55% went to a
supermarket compared to 85% without disabilities. Roughly half the percentage of people with disabilities reported
going to a movie, seeing live music, or going to a sporting event at least once a year compared to people without
disabilities. According to a 2009 study by C. Marshall, E. Kendall, M. Banks & R. Gover, children with disabilities are
two to three times more likely to be bullied. The National Autistic Society reported that 40% of children with autism
reported experiencing bullying, and students in special education were told that tattle tailing is bad almost twice as
often as students in traditional education. Although only 3% of students nationwide are enrolled in separate schools
for students with disabilities as of 2009 according to the NCES, that number is much higher for certain groups of
students with disabilities. 8% for people with autism and the hearing impaired, 13% for students with emotional
disturbance, 19% for students who are deaf or blind, and nearly 20% for those with multiple disabilities. Finally
According to a study by Cornell University, 37% of those in jail, 31% of those in state prison, and 23% of those in
federal prison have some sort of disability, only 17% of the general population are people with disabilities.
exploited countries, they are killed by the conditions they live in, are
deeply unsupported and barely get by, or stay with their family their whole life. According to a 1998 UNDP study,
and
1% for women with disabilities and, according to DAA, as of 2001 fewer then 2% of children with disabilities are
enrolled in school. According to UNESCO as of 2005 in Africa more than 90% of all children with disabilities have
never attended school; we can compare this to Canada and Australia where more than 40% of children with
the education of
people with disabilities in the imperialist countries is vastly
superior. In India the DINF reported that only 0.15% of people with disabilities in India have jobs in the
disabilities have only completed primary education according to DAA. Clearly
industries, and they only make up 0.4% of the total workforce in India. Compare this to the USA where roughly 35%
of those with disabilities have jobs as of 2004. This data shows that not only is it a higher proportion of people with
tourettes or autism might have, and this makes sense when we consider how capitalism has failed to include them
scientific socialism. Scientific socialism will strike disability at the root and include people with disabilities in all
walks of life.
disabled people in Hitlers gas chambers, this was not central to the Nazi movement in the way that scapegoating
the Jews was. Similarly, bigotry against those with AIDS remains largely linked to anti-gay prejudice.
If disability is
rooted in the economic organisation of society, real change must
involve a new economic organisation of society. If it is not primarily a
political or ideological construct, the key cannot be to change
attitudes or language, important as these are. Achieving real change requires a power which
disabled people alone do not possess. While the differences may be significant, the experience of
other social movements has shown that the common and fundamental
problem in attempting to unite an oppressed group is the issue of class. The huge struggles
for black liberation turned into demands for black businesses, while
the fight against sexism has been appropriated by raunch culture on the one hand
and concerns about the glass ceiling for a minority of high-achieving women on the
such as cultivating disability pride or urging more people to come out as disabled.
other. For gays and lesbians too, genuine equality, despite (as well as because of) the rise of the pink economy,
remains elusive. Despite legislation outlawing discrimination against these oppressed groups, inequality remains
deeply entrenched within the system. b2. Class and disability Like its counterparts in the US ruling class,
the
Economist complained about the potential costs of antidiscrimination legislation: Everyone agrees that it is desirable to
cater for [disabled peoples] needs. But if those needs are treated
as rights, the obligation to help them could become limitless Rights for
the disabled must be balanced against the goal of a competitive economy.64 After these initial
warnings about its alleged unaffordability, objections to antidiscrimination legislation focused on limiting its provisions,
excluding scroungers (including alcoholics or drug addicts) and fakers deemed
undeserving of rights or benefits. This issue of cost underpins most debates about disability,
as well as those more generally around the social costs of labour.65 British capitalism needs some social
spending in order to compete on the world market. But in recessions this conflicts with demands for reductions in
housingas is the case for most other workers. As Glynn Vernon once said, [My main problem is] I dont have
first disability trade union conference (organised by Nalgo, one of Unisons predecessors) took place in Hull in 1988.
Today disabled members sections exist in most British trade unions, with notable efforts to unite able-bodied and
disabled workers. Recent trade union campaigns (for example, the PCSs Public Services Not Private Profit campaign
and Unisons against the Private Finance Initiative/Public Private Partnerships), as well as others such as Keep Our
NHS Public or Defend Council Housing, have brought unions together with service providers and user groups,
including those of disabled people.
Economy
Their reification of market mechanism short circuits political
action. Advocate the alternative to repoliticize the economy.
Zizek 99 (Slavoj, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies, Ljubljana,
Slovenia, The Ticklish Subject, page 352-355)
The big news of todays post-political age of the end of ideology is thus the
radical depoliticization of the sphere of the economy: the way the economy
functions (the need to cut social welfare, etc.) is accepted as a simple insight into
the objective state of things. However, as long as this fundamental depoliticization
of the economic sphere is accepted, all the talk about active citizenship, about
public discussion leading to responsible collective decisions, and so on, will
remain limited to the cultural issues of religious, sexual, ethnic and other wayof-life differences, without actually encroaching upon the level at which long-term
decisions that affect us all are made. In short, the only way effectively to bring
about a society in which risky long-term decisions would ensue from public
debate involving all concerned is some kind of radical limitation of Capitals
freedom, the subordinated of the process of production to social control the
radical repoliticization of the economy. That is to say: if the problem with todays
post-politics (administration of social affairs) is that it increasingly undermines the
possibility of a proper political act, this undermining is directly due to the
depoliticization of economics, to the common acceptance of Capital and market
mechanisms as neutral tools/procedures to be exploited.
Environment
Presenting nature as fixable presumes a relationship with it
that necessitates its degradation
Swyngedouw 6 (Erik, Department of Geography @ Manchester, Urban and Landscape Perspectives 9, 2,
p.185-205, September, JM)
that centres on the question of what kind of natures we wish to inhabit, what kinds of natures we which to
preserve, to make, or, if need be, to wipe off the surface of the planet (like the HIV virus, for example), and on
different social, cultural, and philosophical positionalities, agree with this dictum. Disagreement is allowed, but
only with respect to the choice of technologies, the mix of organisational fixes, the detail of the managerial
Feminism
Your focus to narrow the discussion to solely race and failure
to discuss capitalism inflates every other sources of
exploitation, including race discussions - this turns the case
Brown 93 (Wendy, Ph.D. in Political Philosophy from Princeton, Professor of Political Theory &
Philosophy at UC Berkeley Wounded Attachments, Political Theory, Vol. 21.3, August 1993, pp. 393395, JSTOR, KC)
In addition to the formations of identity that may be the complex effects of disciplinary and liberal
modalities of power, I want to suggest one other historical strand relevanto the production of
politicized identity, this one hewn more specifically to recent developments in political culture.
Although sanguine to varying degrees about the phenomenon they are describing, many on the
proliferation of other sites of political identification, I want to refigure this claim by suggesting that
formulations of power and persons-all of which they also are-but as tethered to a formulation of
justice which, ironically, reinscribes a bour- geois ideal as its measure. If it is this ideal that signifies
educational and vocational opportunity, upward mobility, relative protection against arbitrary
violence, and reward in proportion to effort, and if it is this ideal against which many of the exclusions
and privations of people of color, gays and lesbians, and women are articulated, then the political
If
there is one class that is politically articulated in late modem U.S. life, it is that which gives itself the
name of the "middle class." This is the "class" that represents the normalization rather than the
the
represen- tation of the ideal of capitalism to provide the good life for all.
politicization of capitalism, the denial of capitalism's power effects in ordering social life,
Poised between the rich and the poor, feeling itself to be protected from the encroachments of neither,
the phantasmatic middle class signifies the natural and the good between
the decadent or the corrupt, on the one side, and the aberrant or the
decaying, on the other. Middle class identity is a conservative identity in
the sense that it semiotically recurs to a phantasmatic past , an idyllic and
uncorrupted historical moment (implicitly located around 1955) when life was good-housing was
affordable, men supported families on single in- comes, and drugs were confined to urban ghettos.
politics require a standard internal to existing society against which to pitch their claims, a standard
that not only preserves capitalism from critique but sustains the invisibility and inarticulateness of
sector is not the only source of horsepower in our economic system. Mandel and Shalev seem to recognize this. On
page 10, they challengre what they term the economic functionalism of the varieties of capitalism approach. They
also chide David Soskice for suggesting that continental-style housewifery and Scandinavian-style paid
carework are simply two alternative ways in which women serve the business community (16 ).
But they
never directly question the hegemonic importance of that particular
constructthe business community to the larger abstract entity known
as the economy. We continue to measure economic success and
efficiency in terms of the level and growth of goods and services produced
for sale gross domestic product. But we know better. The amount of time
devoted to non-market work in the advanced capitalist economies is
roughly equivalent to the amount of time devoted to market work . It shapes our
living standards and qualities of life (Folbre 2009a Time Use and Inequality in the Household). Wage
earnings have a huge impact on economic welfare. But the distribution of
the costs of caring for dependentsachieved largely through marriage
and the welfare statelargely determines the disposable income that
individuals have to meet their personal needs (Folbre 2006). Investments in human capital
made by parents as well as schools do not show up as investments in our national income accounts. Yet we
devote
considerably more time than men to nonmarket work, including the care of
dependents. Precisely because this work helps pull the cart, societies
devote considerable effort and attention to ways of harnessing and driving
it. Public policies toward family formation, marriage, child care, and elder
care are not merely a byproduct of decisions made regarding wage
employment. Indeed, in welfare state budgets, expenditures on
dependentsexpenditures that essentially replace and supplement those once made within families and
communities far exceed expenditures on job training for adults and social
safety net provisions such as unemployment insurance. In other words,
the welfare state does not simply regulate or mediate capitalist relations
of production; it regulates and mediates family lifethe process of
reproduction. It socializes some forms of family support and privatizes
others; it promotes health and encourages fertility and defines citizenship
and restricts immigration. Its taxes and transfers have implications for gender roles that reach well
know they yield a large social rate of return (Folbre 2009b The Ultimate Growth Industry). Women
the writings of Malthus, two centuries ago [Malthus 1976 (1798)]. In certain contexts, the state may claim collective
for post-Mao
China, the citizen is simultaneously a consuming and a producing
body that defines an open site of state disciplinary practice, when the
nation is plagued by a surfeit of bodies. Within this context, factors that
determine the worth of surplus bodies are complex. Some urban
households, for example, rely on clandestine forms of body trafficking in
their search for brides and children drawn from rural territories; others
may willingly pay state-imposed penalties for additional births . Handwerker
rights to citizens bodies and their reproductive potential. Thus, as Anagnost (1995) argues
(1995), writing of infertility in China, illustrates how both womens fertility and infertility are situated as critical
feminist analysis highlights the conflicts arising from the gendered structures of power in society. More specifically,
womens place was in the home. The exclusionary practices also led
women to organize on their own behalf. Womens efforts to gain
social, economic, and political inequality in the United States are as
old as the nation itself. However, given their attention to both
capitalism and patriarchy , socialist feminists found that the nature
of womens activism varies by class. Middle-class women have
fought for equal rights with men; poor and working-class women
demanded the opportunity to carry out their gendered obligations,
which involved improving the economic circumstances of their
families and communities at the point of consumption. In 1789, Abigail
Adams urged her husband, John, who was attending the Constitutional Convention, to remember the ladies, or we
are determined to foment a rebellion and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or
representation. In 1848, the rebellion predicted by Abigail Adams sixty years earlier erupted when Lucretia Mott and
Elizabeth Cady Stanton convened the first womens rights convention, attended by three hundred people (including
Held in
Senecca Falls, New York, the conference issued a Declaration of
Independence. The document proclaimed the self evident truth that
all men and women are created equal, and its resolutions
declared that the laws that placed women in a position inferior to
that of men are contrary to the great precept of nature and
therefore of no force or authority. After considerable struggle,
married women gained the right to own their own property (1849),
to keep their wages and inheritance, to make contracts in their own
name, and to have joint custody of their children (1860). But
women did not win the vote until 1919, when Congress ratified the
Nineteenth amendment to the constitution. From 1920 to this day,
sexism (the unequal treatment of women by men) has continued to
spark activism by middle-class women. For much of this time, African
American and Latina women organized separately, first due to the
laws of segregation that separated women racially and then
because of unmatched agendas. Poor and working-class women
mobilized to fulfill their gendered obligations, which required them
to carry out the expectations of women as defined by their
community. Middle-class women rose up to protest that the
democratic promise of equal opportunity for all did not apply to
them; poor and working class women protested that the workings of
the market economy undercut their gendered family maintenance
roles. The lack of family income made it difficult, if not impossible, for them
to effectively carry out their part in the tasks of social reproduction
assigned to the family and linked to womens roles in the home. The
discrepancy between the profit-driven markets ability to produce
enough income and jobs and the resources needed by the family to
maintain themselves fueled activism among low-income women.
They organized to ensure that they would be able to meet their
forty men) sparked by their lack of rights and the exclusion of women from the antislavery movement.
welfare rights movement, and to this day are involved in local campaigns against toxic waste, for neighborhood
womens places, whether low-p aid jobs or local neighborhoods, made it possible for women to recognize their
The new
assertions of Black pride and the political demands that pride fuelled
provoked alarmed and angry reactions from other groups whose own
identities depended on the subordination of blacks. And of course political
elites, especially but not only Republican party operatives, who stood to benefit from the
politics of backlash, worked to sharpen these reactions, making such code
words of race hatred as 'quotas,' or 'law and order,' or 'welfare
dependency,' focal to their popular appeals. Still, the very emergence of farreaching race conflict reflected the fact that subordination had come to be
contested. Blacks were no longer allowing others to define their identity,
repress their interests, and stamp out their aspirations. That was an achievement.
The rise of gender politics followed a similar course. While women do not
have what is recognized as a distinctive language or turf, the
understanding of gender has in other ways been prototypical of the
understanding of group identity. Gender identities are closely similar to
racial identities, because the traits which were thought to be feminine or
masculine, and the social roles to which women and men were consigned,
were always understood as the natural consequence of biological
difference. Necessarily, therefore, the emergence of a liberatory movement among
women was preceded and accompanied by an effort to cast off this
inherited identity and construct new identities that disavowed biological
fatalism or, in some variants, celebrated biological difference. Indeed, Zaretsky writes of
'the profundity and the intensity of the identity impulse among women that emerged in the early seventies.'" The
most salient issues of the women's movement - the struggle for the Equal
Rights Amendment, for reproductive rights, and the campaigns against
rape and sexual harassment - are closely reflective of this effort to
reconstruct the meaning of gender by challenging the biological
underpinnings of traditional meanings. The mounting of such a challenge to the most ancient
However, these achievements set in motion a train of repercussions that were not simple.
Freedom of speech
Attempts to create free communication fundamentally deny
the nature of modern interactions. Communications are not
free, but rather scripted and defined by the socialization of the
market. Capitalism has opened the social to the fullest extents
of its capacity and ruptured all social interactions.
Wark 14 (McKenzie, Professor of Culture and Media in Liberal Studies, The New
School for Social Research, Furious Media,
http://www.publicseminar.org/2014/04/where-next-for-media-theory/#.VaRwoflVikr,
Page 202-203, NKF)
a disease of
use values, but communication works only one way . Here is no return. Laborpower makes out of the totality something else , which imagines itself to be always and
already separate, and indeed to be what makes the totality out of a dialectic or a diff erence between itself and its other.
But it
is already just inconsistent parts of the One , the Real, the infrastructure, the given
without given- ness. Whatever one calls it, and whatever it is,
capitalism or philosophy. Where Marx critiqued the nineteenthcentury ideologies of capitalism, Laruelle sets his sights on its
philosophies, both its most ancient and its most contemporary. His
spoil- sport might be particularly useful for retrieving the Furies
from capitalism, from the now widespread belief that the network is
a swarm of benign communicants, of happy busy worker bees.
Through their distributed protocols of decision, it is supposedly
possible to communicate between worlds, and through multiple
portals . His pet swarm that capital hallucinates to replace the spectacle can supposedly reconcile capital and its other, be it
nature, God, or whatever: That which is good, networks; that which networks is good.
of the Furies.
snaking path from Epiphanes to Laruelle might rather remind us: no deal.
just fragments of the One become Two, which simply evidence. The One unilaterally without pretending to be negotiating with it. Of
course it is yet to be seen whether Laruelle might not merely renovate the temple of bourgeois philosophy, but perhaps thats no
less honorable a fate than the a empts by Fourier or Vaneigem to escape it. And
it is yet to be seen
Hegemony
Hegemony maintains a system of capital that privileges the
few at risk of extinction
Foster 6
(John Bellamy, Prof of Sociology @ U of Oregon, PhD in Political Science @ York University, The New Geopolitics of
Empire 2006, Monthly Review Vol. 57.8 January JF)
U.S. imperial geopolitics is ultimately aimed at creating a global space for capitalist
development. It is about forming a world dedicated to capital accumulation on behalf of
the U.S. ruling classand to a lesser extent the interlinked ruling classes of the triad powers as a whole (North America,
Europe, and Japan). Despite the end of colonialism and the rise of anti-capitalist new countries, Business Week pronounced
in April 1975, there has always been the umbrella of American power to contain it.[T]he U.S. was able to fashion increasing
prosperity among Western countries, using the tools of more liberal trade, investment, and political power. The rise of the
the U.S.
imperium has benefited those at the top of the center-capitalist nations and not just the
power elite of the United States. Yet, the drive for global hegemony on the part of particular
capitalist nations and their ruling classes, like capital accumulation itself, recognizes no insurmountable
barriers. Writing before September 11, 2001, Istvn Mszros argued in his Socialism or Barbarism that due to unbridled U.S.
imperial ambitions the world was entering what was potentially the most dangerous phase of
imperialism in all history: For what is at stake today is not the control of a particular part
of the planetno matter how largeputting at a disadvantage but still tolerating the independent actions of some rivals,
but the control of its totality by one hegemonic economic and military superpower .This
is what the ultimate rationality of globally developed capital requires , in its vain attempt to bring
under control its irreconcilable antagonisms. The trouble is, though, that such rationalityis at the same time
the most extreme form of irrationality in history, including the Nazi conception of world
domination, as far as the conditions required for the survival of humanity are concerned .37
In the present era of naked imperialism, initiated by the sole superpower, the nature of the threat to
the entire planet and its people is there for all to see. According to G. John Ikenberry, Professor of
multinational corporation was the economic expression of this political framework.36 There is no doubt that
Geopolitics and Global Justice at Georgetown University, in his 2002 Foreign Affairs article Americas Imperial Ambition: the
U.S. neoimperial vision is one in which the United States arrogates to itself the global role of setting standards, determining
described the strategy as breakout. Yet, such a hard-line imperial grand strategy, according to Ikenberryhimself no
The unprecedented dangers of this new global disorder are revealed in the twin cataclysms
to which the world is heading at present: nuclear proliferation and hence increased chances of the outbreak of
nuclear war, and planetary ecological destruction. These are symbolized by the Bush administrations refusal to
sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to limit nuclear weapons development and by its failure to sign the Kyoto Protocol as a first
step in controlling global warming. As former U.S. Secretary of Defense (in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations) Robert
McNamara stated in an article entitled Apocalypse Soon in the MayJune 2005 issue of Foreign Policy: The United States has never
endorsed the policy of no first use, not during my seven years as secretary or since. We have been and remain prepared to initiate
the use of nuclear weaponsby the decision of one person, the presidentagainst either a nuclear or nonnuclear enemy whenever
The nation with the greatest conventional military force and the
willingness to use it unilaterally to enlarge its global power is also the nation with the greatest
nuclear force and the readiness to use it whenever it sees fitsetting the whole world on edge. The nation that contributes
we believe it is in our interest to do so.
more to carbon dioxide emissions leading to global warming than any other (representing approximately a quarter of the worlds
total) has become the greatest obstacle to addressing global warming and the worlds growing environmental problems raising
the possibility of the collapse of civilization itself if present trends continue . The United States is
seeking to exercise sovereign authority over the planet during a time of widening global crisis: economic
stagnation, increasing polarization between the global rich and the global poor , weakening U.S.
economic hegemony, growing nuclear threats, and deepening ecological decline. The result is a heightening of international
instability. Other potential forces are emerging in the world, such as the European Community and China, that could eventually
challenge U.S. power, regionally and even globally. Third world revolutions, far from ceasing, are beginning to gain momentum
again, symbolized by Venezuelas Bolivarian Revolution under Hugo Chvez. U.S. attempts to tighten its imperial grip on the Middle
East and its oil have had to cope with a fierce, seemingly unstoppable, Iraqi resistance, generating conditions of imperial
overstretch. With the United States brandishing its nuclear arsenal and refusing to support international agreements on the control
of such weapons, nuclear proliferation is continuing. New nations, such as North Korea, are entering or can be expected soon to
Terrorist blowback from imperialist wars in the third world is now a wellrecognized reality, generating rising fear of further terrorist attacks in New York, London, and elsewhere. Such vast and
overlapping historical contradictions, rooted in the combined and uneven development of the
global capitalist economy along with the U.S. drive for planetary domination, foreshadow what is potentially the
most dangerous period in the history of imperialism. The course on which U.S and world capitalism
is now headed points to global barbarismor worse. Yet it is important to remember that nothing in the
development of human history is inevitable. There still remains an alternative paththe global
struggle for a humane, egalitarian, democratic, and sustainable society.
enter the nuclear club.
(including Anative)
has de- railed the anticapitalist struggle during the past quarter
century so thoroughly as have these movements. Sometimes it
seems that identity politics is all that remains of the left . Identity
politics has simply swamped class politics . The mainstream versions of these movements
(the ones fighting to get into the system rather than overthrow it)
Many of the
lost in all the clamor for admittance to the sys- tem by the
majorities in their own movements . There have been gains, of course. The women's movement has
forever changed the world's consciousness about gender. Unpaid housework has been recognized as a key ingredient in the wage
slave system. Reproduction as well as production has been included in our analysis of the system
. Identity politics
Moreover, the demand for real racial and gender equality is itself
inherently revolutionary in that it cannot be met by capitalists,
given that racial and gender discrimination are two of the key
structural mechanisms for keeping wages low and thus making
profits possible.
People are not desriminated against solely based on colorsocial practices contribute to their oppression
Young 6 (Robert Young- British postcolonial theorist, cultural critic, and historian Putting
Materialism back into Race Theory: Toward a Transformative Theory of Race
http://www.redcritique.org/WinterSpring2006/puttingmaterialismbackintoracetheory.htm KC)
rejects the "Eurocentric Masculinist Knowlege Validation Process" for its positivism but, in turn,
the site of contradictions and, hence, in need of conceptual elaboration to break from cultural common sense, a
conduit for dominant ideology. It is this outside that has come under attack by black (humanist) scholars through the
invocation of the black (transcendental) subject.
Other consequences of capitalist tranformation for the intensification of identity politics are more direct. In a sense,
the old prediction has proved true;
governments have shifted. Organized labour has lost ground dramatically to new supra-national institutions created
by capital. It is true, as Panitch says, that the nation states are major authors of these institutions, and also
continue to serve important functions for internationalizing capital.'" Nevertheless ,
once in existence,
international organizations and networks, including multinational
corporations and international banking organizations, together with their
domestic corporate and financial allies who freely use the threat of
disinvestment as leverage in their dealings with governments, become
major constraints on the policy options of the state . Constraints on the state are also
constraints on the ability of democratic publics, including the organized working class, to exert influence through
electoral-representative arrangements. The trade unions and political parties constructed by organized workers in
the mother countries gained what influence they had through their leverage on governments, where strike power,
If
capitalist internationalism circumscribes what national governments can
do, it inevitably also circumscribes working class political power . Third, as a
consequence of both internationalism and the shifting power
constellations within nations, the economies and polities of the mother
counties of industrial capitalism are being restructured, with dire
consequences for the old working class. This process is most advanced in
England and the United States where unions are weaker and welfare state
protections less adequate. The old mass production industries which created the industrial working
trade union organization and working class voting numbers made them a force with which to be reckoned.
class are being dismantled or reorganized and decentralized, with the consequence that the numbers of blue collar
workers are shrinking. And as communities disperse and the mass media supplants the local pub, the old working
instead of
wiping out the 'train of ancient and venerable prejudices,' the advance of
global capitalism is whipping ancient prejudices to fever pitch. Identity
politics is pervasive, and probably inevitable. But group conflict is likely to
rise under some conditions, and subside under others. One important source
of disturbance has to do with the large-scale migration of people spurred by
capitalist penetration of subsistence agricultural economies, with the
consequence that conflicts over land escalate, and people no longer able
to survive in agriculture migrate to urban centres." At the same time, the
spread of consumer culture also attracts people from the periphery, while
the development of globe spanning circuits of communication and
transportation facilitates the recruitment of cheap labour to the
metropole.'"Every migration,' says Enzensberger, 'no matter what triggered it, what motive
they be.'16 The pattern is being repeated in the contemporary era. In other words,
underlies it, whether it is voluntary or involuntary, and what scale it assumes, leads to conflicts.'" Or
as Jean Daniel, editor of Le Nouvel Observateur, warns about population movements and the
If
unfamiliar proximity is likely to intensify group consciousness and
fractionalism, this is especially so when outsider groups are seen as
competitors for limited jobs, neighbourhood space, honour and influence .
'unprecedented' mingling of peoples, we should remember that 'Babel . . . was a curse.'"
In his last book, Ralph Miliband wrote that intra-class conflicts among wage-earners involving race or
gender or ethnicity or religion can reasonably be understood as the effort to find scapegoats to
explain insecurity and alienation?' If he was not entirely. right, he was surely at least significantly
right.
Group conflict is far more likely when people feel growing uncertainty
about their own future and as is true in many instances, are experiencing
real declines in living standards. When times get harder, and competition
for scarce resources intensifies, theories about the Other, and how the
Other is to blame for these turns in events, being ubiquitous, are readily
available. And, of course, such interpretations are more likely to be seized upon when alternative
and perhaps more systemic explanations of the troubles people face are not available, or when such
explanations yield no practicable line of action. No wonder there has been a spread of an identity
politics, often a hate-filled identity politics, in the metropole. As Vaclav Have1 says, 'The world of our
experiences seems chaotic, confusing. . . And the fewer answers the era of rational knowledge
provides . . . the more deeply it would seem that people, behind its back as it were, cling to the
ancient certainties of their tribe.'* Finally, as so many times before, the group divisions of identity
politics are being worsened by political elites who seize the opportunity for gaining advantage from
a retired Russian officer commented to a New York Times reporter about the conflict between the
Tatars and ethnic Russians, 'Half the population is building mosques, the other half is building
churches. And the bosses are building big brick houses for themselves.' Once again, the United States
is at the forefront. Last October, BusinessWeek editorialized about the 'unprecedented widening of the
income gap between winners and losers in the workplace.' BusinessWeek worried that the losers
might ignore its advice that 'Growth is the single most important salve for the high-risk, high gain
society' and seek scapegoats, such as 'elitist big business.' There are of course reasons for
Businessweek's concerns about the resurgence of class politics.
mobilized as never before, having developed over the past two decades a range of
vehicles to do ideological and policy warfare, from big think tanks, to revived trade associations, to
new associations of peak corporations. Reflecting both these developments and the changed
international economic context in which they have unfolded, enormous changes have taken place in
the American class structure, as the rich have gotten much richer, the poor much poorer, and most
people have gotten poorer as well. National wealth increased, but the vast majority of wage earners
lost ground, with the consequence that more people are working, working longer, and harder. The U. S.
Census reported that beteen 1973 and 1989, the real income of male high school graduates dropped
by a third; the income of those who didn't make it through high school dropped by 40 percent. And the
palpable evidence of economic trauma also grew, in the form of visible poverty and pathology, of
beggars and spreading homeless encampments in all of the major cities. Still, Businessweek needn't
worry, at least not so far. Americans are being led by their political leaders to other scapegoats, and
certain conditions prepare the way. For one thing, organized labour is on its back, its membership at
11 percent of the private sector labour force, down from 30 percent only two decades ago. For
economic changes are not the only shocks to the American psyche.
Cultural changes which undermine the established bases of identity are
contributing to widespread unease. Contested racial boundaries and, not
less important, changing sexual and family mores are eroding a world in
which whites were in command, men were men, women were women, and
the rules for mating and family life were clear. Needless to say, in a society in
another,
which the culture of group identity figures so largely, changes of this sort
generate a distinctive terror. In this sense, the numerous commentators who
blame the black movement and the women's movement for the rightward
shift of the past two decades are not entirely wrong. In a world of identity
politics, mobilization by the Other is always a provocation. Thus economic
and cultural change are combining to generate popular anxiety and anger.
But the economic transformation, its impact on hard-hit groups, the
measures that might moderate the transformation or its impact, do not
figure much in American political discussion, except sometimes in the
speculations of pundits trying to account for electoral discontent. Instead,
public anger has easily been routed into the familiar channels of identity
politics, as issues like immigration, crime, and welfare, all code terms for
Afro-American and Latino minorities, (with welfare a code evoking wanton
women besides) dominate the political discussion. Republican and Democratic
leaders alike are following the precedents of American history. Hemmed in by a politically mobilized
and aggressive capitalist class, party leaders promulgate arguments which account for the felt
Narratives/Poems
Insider-only identity politics regresses to an infinitely
segmented society that accomplishes nothing
Merton 72 (Robert, former University Professor at Columbia University (since deceased),
Insiders and Outsiders: A Chapter in the Sociology of Knowledge, American Journal of Sociology
78:1, July 1972, JSTOR, KC)
that implies the balkanization of social science, with separate baronies kept exclusively in the hands of Insiders
follow that only women can understand women-and men, men. On the same principle, youth alone iscapable of
understanding youth just as, presumably, only the middle aged are able to understand their age peers.7
the doctrine of
In this form
of solipsism, each group must in the end have a monopoly of knowledge
about itself just as according to the doctrine ofindividual methodological
solipsism each individual has absolute privacy of knowledge about him- or
her-self. The Insider doctrine can be put in the vernacular with no great loss in meaning: you have to be one in
systems.10 Extreme Insiderism moves toward a doctrine of group methodological solipsism.1"
order to understand one. In somewhat less idiomatic language, the doctrine holds that one has monopolistic or
privileged access to knowledge, or is wholly excluded from it, by virtue of one's group membership or social
position. For some, the notion appears in the form of a question-begging pun: Insider as Insighter, one endowed with
special insight into matters necessarily obscure to others, thus possessed of penetrating discernment. Once
adopted, the pun provides a specious solution but the serious In- sider doctrine has its own rationale.
the social epistemological doctrine of the Insider links up with what Sumner
(1907, p. 13) long ago defined as ethnocentrism: "the tech- nical name for [the] view
of things in which one's own group is the center of everything, and all
others are scaled and rated with reference to it." Sumner then goes on to include as a
Clearly,
component of ethnocentrism, rather than as a frequent correlate of it (thus robbing his idea of some of its potential
analytical power), the belief that one's group is superior to all cognate groups:
"each group nourishes its own pride and vanity, boasts itself superior, exalts its own divinities, and looks with
contempt on out- siders" (p. 13). For although the practice of seeing one's own group as the center of things is
empirically correlated with a belief in its superiority, centrality and superiority need to be kept analytically distinct
in order to deal with patterns of alienation from one's membership group and contempt for it.13
sort do not testify, of course, that ethnocentrism and its frequent spiritual correlate, xenophobia, fear and hatred of
merely because it has lately become adopted as a vogue word, blunted in meaning through indiscriminate use as a
rhetorical weapon in intergroup conflict. Nor need we continue to confine the scope of the concept, as it was in its
origins and later by Lasswell (1937, p. 361) in his short, incisive discussion of it, to the special case of the state or
nation. The concept can be usefully, not tendentiously, extended to desig- nate the extreme glorification of any
social formation
legal universalisms silence about women that is, its failure to recognize or remedy the material of womens
Catharine MacKinnon, for example, expressly aims to write womens experience into law; but as many other
feminists have remarked, this begs the question of which womens experience(s), drawn from which historical
bourgeois liberty to substantive equality but potentially intensifies the regulation of gender and sexuality in the law,
abetting rather than contesting the production of gender identity as sexual. In short, as a regulatory fiction of a
particular identity is deployed to displace the hegemonic fiction of universal personhood, the discourse of rights
converges insidiously with the discourse of disciplinarity to produce a spectacularly potent mode of juridicalregulatory domination.16 This problem is not specific to MacKinnons work nor even to feminist legal reform,
efforts at
bringing subjugated discourses into the law merely constitute examples
of what Foucault identified as the risk of recodification and recolonization of
disinterred knowledges by those unitary discourses, which first
disqualified and then ignored them when they made their
appearance. These efforts suggest how the work of breaking silence can
metamorphose into new techniques of domination, how our truths
can become our rulers rather than our emancipators, how our
confessions become the norms by which we are regulated . Though this kind
although it emerges with particular acuteness in both. Rather, MacKinnons and kindred
of regulatory function is familiar enough to students of legal and bureaucratic discourse, it is less frequently
recognized and perhaps more disquieting in putatively countercultural discourse, when
confessing injury
can become that which attaches us to the injury, paralyzes us within it, and
prevents us from seeking or even desiring a status other than that
of injured. In an age of social identification through attributes marked as culturally significant gender, race,
sexuality, and so forthconfessional discourse, with its truth-bearing status in a postepistemological universe, not
only regulates the confessor in the name of freeing her , as Foucault described
that logic, but extends beyond the confessing individual to constitute a
regulatory truth about the identity group: confessed truths are
assembled and deployed as knowledge about the group. This
phenomenon would seem to undergird a range of recurring troubles
in feminism, from the real woman rejoinder to poststructuralist
deconstructions of her to totalizing descriptions of womens
experience that are the inadvertent effects of various kinds of
survivor stories. Thus, for example, the porn star who feels miserably exploited, violated, and humiliated
in her work invariably monopolizes the feminist truth about sex work, as the girl with math anxieties constitutes the
feminist truth about women and math; eating disorders have become the feminist truth about women and food, as
even
as feminism aims to affirm diversity among women and womens
experiences, confession as the site of production of truth,
converging with feminist suspicion and de-authorization of truth
from other sources, tends to reinstate a unified discourse in which
the story of greatest suffering becomes the true story of woman. (This
sexual abuse and violation occupy the feminist knowledge terrain of women and sexuality. In other words,
may constitute part of the rhetorical purchase of confessional discourse in a postfoundational epistemological era:
confession substitutes for the largely discredited charge of false consciousness, on the one hand, and for generalized
truth claims rooted in science, God, or nature on the other.) Thus, the adult who does not manifestly suffer from her
or his childhood sexual experience, the lesbian who does not feel shame, the woman of color who does not primarily
or correctly identify with her marking as suchthese figures are excluded as bona fide members of the identity
categories that also claim them. Their status within these discourses is that of being in denial, of suffering from
false consciousness, or of being a race traitor. This is the norm-making process in traditions of breaking
silence, which, ironically, silence and exclude the very persons these traditions mean to empower.
The affs use of the debate space and the ballot duplicate the
power structure of patriarchy that they are trying to break
down. The 1acs speech act does nothing and instead turns
case.
Tonn 5 (Mari Boor Tonn, Associate Professor of Communication at the
University of Maryland, Taking Conversation, Dialogue, and Therapy
Public Rhetoric and Public Affairs Vol. 8, No. 3 KC).
most curious irony of the conversation movement: portions of its constituency. Numbering among the most fervid
Natives
Cultural imperialism is at the root of Native relationships with
the rest of the country- this leads to a state of oppressive
power relations that culminate in exploitation and a new form
of colonization
Whitt 95 (Laurie Anne, Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Humanities Department at
Michigan Technological University, Cultural Imperialism and the Marketing of Native America, pg. 13940 in Natives and Academics, KC)
Privacy
Approaching privacy legally and individually instead of socially
as a common good traps it in a paradigm that reinforces
neoliberal subjectivity.
Coll 14 (Sami, Geneva sociology professor, Power, knowledge, and the subjects of
privacy: understanding privacy as the ally of surveillance, Information,
Communication & Society, 17.10, Taylor and Francis)
In following the adaptation of Foucaults model of the dispositive of power to privacy,
companies and
make
people feel at ease with the spread of the information society now
at the core of modern capitalism, without blocking the economic
market
(Kessous & Rey, 2007). For Regan, it can in fact be alibi on the part of public power wishing to avoid the new
problems brought about by the development of enormous data files (Regan, 1995, p. 219). For example, in the Montreux
Declaration (2005), a reference document produced and used by privacy commissioners and privacy advocates from all over the
world, there is no fundamental critique of the information society. While expressing concerns about surveillance practices, the report
mentions that the development of the information society must not be hindered in any way.
privacy as a critique of
share the same perspective. Aside from this empirical study, many authors have already focused on different theoretical aspects of
privacy (Holvast, 2007, p. 738), which leads to different perspectives.
controversial , and any attempt to provide a univocal definition of it must be considered an act of power. Because we
depicted privacy as a tool of governance in the sole context of Swiss loyalty cards and because almost two-thirds of the interviews
were conducted with women,4 some precautions should be taken about the generalizability of our study. However, we think that our
argument demonstrates at the very least that
(Stalder, 2002);
rather, they
tendency and to make privacy less easy to grab and control would
be to pursue the work of scholars who have been trying to approach
it as a common good, rather than considering it only as an
individual resource to be protected against potential invasions
(Regan,
1995; Westin, 2003). That might address Tocquevilles early concern expressed in the second volume of Democracy in America
(2004). According to him,
Privacy as an
Only a
conception of privacy oriented in terms of a collective good can possibly balance measures meant to serve these overwhelming
interests. In other words, as argued by Regan (1995, p. 221),
protect the individual, but also the society and its democratic
values . This study aimed to demonstrate that when privacy policies are reduced to the selfdetermination principle, a risk is
taken to shape it as a tool of power and governance. Privacy and its definition must urgently be understood as a struggle of power
between the promoters of a model of informational capitalism based on surveillance of citizens and consumers, and those who
would prefer to promote privacy as a common good that could lead society to more democracy and freedom. Since Big Data is going
to be a revolution in the way we produce knowledge, make decisions, and govern people through massive data collection and
analysis (Mayer-Schnberger & Cukier, 2013), the normativity of privacy we wanted to discuss in this article must be more than ever
at the centre of the debates.
Race
Race is a construction borne of economicschange in the
definition of whiteness proves
Gans 5 (Herbert J., American sociologist who has taught at Columbia University between 1971 and
2007, Race as Class, Contexts 4:4, November 2005, University of Michigan Libraries KC)
Race became a marker of class and status almost with the first settling of
the United States. The countrys initial holders of cultural and political power were
mostly WASPs (with a smattering of Dutch and Spanish in some parts of what later became the United
States). They thus automatically assumed that their kind of whiteness
marked the top of the class hierarchy. The bottom was assigned to the
most powerless, who at first were Native Americans and slaves. However, even
before the former had been virtually eradicated or pushed to the countrys edges, the skin color and related facial
features of the majority of colonial Americas slaves had become the markers for the lowest class in the colonies.
the distinction
between black and white skin became important in America only with
slavery and was actually established only some decades after the first
importation of black slaves. Originally, slave owners justified their
enslavement of black Africans by their being heathens, not by their skin
color. In fact, early Southern plantation owners could have relied on white
indentured servants to pick tobacco and cotton or purchased the white slaves that were available then,
including the Slavs from whom the term slave is derived . They also had access to enslaved
Native Americans. Blacks, however, were cheaper, more plentiful, more
easily controlled, and physically more able to survive the intense heat and
Although dislike and fear of the dark are as old as the hills and found all over the world,
brutal working conditions of Southern plantations. After slavery ended, blacks became farm laborers and
sharecroppers, de facto indentured servants, really, and thus they remained at the bottom of the class hierarchy.
This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the
pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the
ruling classes.This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class,
despite its organization.29 In his famous passage on the antagonism between English and Irish
workers in Britain in the end of the 19th century, Marx
Benton-Cohen explores
why some borderline Americansa term she uses to refer to resident noncitizens
with a tenuous claim on whitenessbecame white Americans, while
others did not.Why, she asks, did Eastern and Southern Europeans, one
group of borderline Americans become white, while Mexicans did not ?
Concentrating on the middle of the nineteenth century to the New Deal era,
Borderline Americans can be read as another chapter in Americas history of racial formation, as told by Noel Ignatiev
in How the Irish Became White. What we are presented with here is an effort to explain how the Mexicans became
brown. Benton-Cohens contribution is to show that the conflict between Mexicans and Americans, which today
seems to be timeless and inevitable, was a contingent outcome, motivated in large part by the penetration of
industrial capitalism into southern Arizona. This conflict has a curious history containing moments of cooperation and
not conflict. Unlike the dominant narratives which examine the social construction of race, Benton-Cohen takes us to
the local level and focuses attention not on state actors (although she does not overlook them) but on corporate
and white American into a sharp border. The first four chapters of the book offer the most compelling reads,
BentonCohen takes us to Tres Alamos and Tombstone, and exposes us to places where
relations between Mexicans and white Americans were characterized , for the
most part, by harmony, equal legal protection, and sense of membership in the
providing engaging portraits of four different communities in Cochise County. In the first two chapters,
same community. In Tres Alamos and Tombstone, Mexicans and whites inhabited a shared world characterized by a
hybrid borderlands culture of the 1880s, when Mexican-Anglo intermarriages and business partnerships still
flourished. Benton-Cohen argues that race, at least the racial antagonism between Mexicans and whites, was not a
central organizing feature of these communities. In this shared world, it was not Mexicans who were the others,
but a range of groups such as Apaches, Chinese immigrants, and Cowboyseach other representing a common
enemy for the Mexicans and white Americans. She attributes the prevailing ecumenical view of whiteness in these
two communities to their agricultural-based economies and the fact that most of the Mexicans residing there were
Warren, the subjects of the next two chapters, tell a different story. In these communities,
residential segregation restricted the cosmopolitan interactions which characterized Tres Alamos and Tombstone. As
mining boom took hold, corporations redeveloped the geographic and social ecology of Cochise County. Bisbee
expanded and race entered into once unknown places such as Tres Alamos and Tombstone. Along with these
corporations, homesteaders from other parts of America moved in, and brought with them understandings of racial
difference that were foreign to Cochise County. The white labor movement as she names it, gained a strong
influence over Arizona politics, and elected officials who saw Mexicans as racial others. Over time, the four
communities began to resemble each other, as an Anglo/Hispanic color line became a prominent feature of them all.
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
colonizing/imperialist power, with the imperial nation-state acting as the exploiting class, as it were (see San Juan
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 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
structural constraints which preserve the exploited and oppressed position of these "racial" solidarities.
cooperation, symbiosis or conflict by the fact that as groups they have different economic and political
functions.Within
Economic
participation, the value of labor, social and political participation and
entitlement, and cultural marginalization or inclusion are all part of this
overall social formation
extraction of surplus value in capitalism as it is a commonsense practice at the level of social life.
people's consciousnesses or identities. It is in such socially structured identities that the nation- alist and capitalist
hegemonic institutions and discourses construct them; popular enactments in turn reshape hegemonic practices.
Class is often the Cinderella in analyses of this threesome with respect to national projects. That is, it is treated as a
"lifestyle choice of you and your family," as Lillian Robinson (1995:8) puts it when criticizing scholars who treat class
gotten a lot of play on the structural side of race. But the organi- zation of production and the racial division of labor,
although
race was initially invented to justify a brutal regime of slave la- bor that
was profitable to Southern planters, race making has become a key
process by which the United States continues to organize and understand
labor and national belonging.Africans, Europeans, Mexicans, and Asian s
each came to be treated as members of less civilized , less moral, less selfrestrained races only when they were recruited to be the core of the U.S.
capitalist labor force. Such race making depended andcontinues to rest upon
occupational and residential segregation (Massey and Denton 1993). Race making in
turn facilitated the degradation of work itself, its or- ganization as "unskilled," intensely
driven, mass-production work. Race making is class making, just as much as class
making is race making. They are two views of the same thing.
sus. Rather they are modified, not-quite whites, as in Hispanic whites (Wright 1994: 50-51). In sum,
Racism was the most convenient way for capital to divide and
oppress the massesonly undoing capitalism solves racism
GLW 10 (Green Left Weekly, Why capitalism needs racism, GLW Iss. 823, 1/24/10,
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/43086 KC)
The capitalist social pyramid is black at the base and white at the top . In South
Africa, until apartheid was formally abolished in 1994, this pyramid was legally sanctioned. Elsewhere, while slavery and
segregation have been outlawed, the richest people are still the whitest
and the poorest are the blackest.Racism suits capitalism because it's an
important way of justifying economic discrimination. It's no accident that
wherever you find racism, someone seems to be making money from it . Racist
ideas help capitalism get away with super-exploiting racial and ethnic minorities, and all non-white people. "Those Arabs" or "Those
when unemployment
is on the rise, it's always handy to blame "Asians", or whichever ethnic group is
being demonised at the time, for taking jobs away from "real" Australians. And when
Asians", we're told, "are used to doing dirty, hard work, and they'll be glad to get a job at all." Or
The capitalist system with a tiny minority of people owning the means of
production oppresses and exploits the working class. This, indeed, constitutes the essence
of capitalism: the extraction of surplus value and profit from workers by capitalist employers. These capitalists may
be white, black, men, women, (high caste) Brahmin, or(untouchable) Dalit. In India as well as in Britain, there
are millionaire men, women, Brahmin, and Dalit capitalists and politicians. Marxist analysis also suggests
that class conflict, which is an essential feature of capitalist society, will result in an overthrow of
capitalism given the right circumstances. There has been considerable
debate, historically, in different countries over whether this can, or will, be
achieved either by revolutionary force or by evolutionary measures and steps
for example through the evolutionary, reformist measures of social democracy). Important examples of such debate- between
protagonists of revolutionary socialism and those of evolutionary socialism/social democracy are the late nineteenth century debates in
Germany over Revisionism associated with the revisionist Eduard Bernstein (e.g., in 1899, his The Prerequisites for Socialism and the
Tasks of Social Democracy see Tudor and Tudor, 1988) on the one hand, and on the other hand, , orthodox revolutionary Marxist critics
of revisionism such as Rosa Luxemburg (for example, in Reform and Revolution, in 1899/1900. Today such debates are carried on
between revolutionary socialists/ Marxists such as the various Trotskyite groups, parties and internationals on the one hand, and social
democratic parties and internationals on the other. As for where the former communist parties stood, a historical transition was made in
the 1970s and 1980s by various communist parties and leaders when they foreswore revolution and adopted gradualist social
democracy. 3 These arguments and conflicts take place within many leftist revolutions. Today, for example, in Venezuela, Trotskyites
argue for a revolutionary rupture with capitalism, while others urge caution, an accommodation with capitalism and capitalists. (See
Gonzalez, 2007; ISG, 2007; Esteban et al, 2008; Fuentes, 2009.) And Trotskyite, revolutionary, anti-capitalist groups and parties have
persistent major problems working within larger left formations, united fronts and popular fronts. Thus PSOL at first joined the PT
government in Brazil but left in 2004 in protest at(Brazilian President) Lulas neoliberal pro-capitalist policies, and in 2007 Sinistra
Critica pulled out of the broader left Rifondazione Comunista. There is considerable current debate within the Trostskyite movement and
internationals over the incompatibility of socialist revolution with social democratic broader parties. (See, for example, Bensaid, 2009.) 4
there are denials, by postmodernists and other theorists of complexity and hybridity and postmodernists
and post-ists of various stripes, that we no longer live in a period of metanarratives,
such as mass capitalism, social class, working class, 7 or, indeed,
woman or black. 5 For many theorists since the 1980s, history is at an
end, the class war is over, and we all exalt in the infinite complexity and
hybridity of subjective individualist consumerism . It is interesting, and rarely remarked upon,
that arguments about the death of class are not advanced regarding the
capitalist class. Despite their horizontal and vertical cleavages (Dumenil and Levy, 2004), they appear to
know very well who they are. Nobody is denying capitalist class
consciousness. Opposition to the rule of capital and its policies (either its wider policies, or
specific policy) is weakened when the working class is divided, by race, caste,
religion, tribe, or by other factors. When I say divided, I am using it here
as an active verb, to mean that the capitalist class divides the working class, for
example by its ideological state apparatuses- its media, its formally or
informally segregated school systems. This is divide and rule. Examples of schooling systems
perpetuating such divisions are in apartheid South Africa, Arab-Jew segregated schooling
in Israel, Protestant-Catholic religiously segregated Northern Ireland , and parts
of the USA in particular its inner cities, and, indeed, parts of Britain, where, in some inner-city working-class schools,
more than 90 percent of the pupils are from minority ethnic groups . 6 In
many of the cities of the USA and Britain the ethnic division is localized. But such
segregation and division is overwhelmingly a class stratification. It is
rarely the millionaire and capitalist minorities who live in the ghetto, or
poor minorities or whites who live in millionaires row.
Gillborn (2008) is right about underachievement by Blacks (Black Caribbean and Black African school students) in
most of
underachievement is related to class location Black Caribbeans are , with
Bangladeshis, Pakistanis and Traveller/Roma, the most heavily working class of any ethnic
group. When class location as measured by those claiming and in receipt of Free School Meal (FSM)
is accounted, the all minority ethnic groups other than Gypsy Roma/travellers perform better
than whites. Regarding more privileged groups in society, Strand (2008b) points out that (at age 16)
White British pupils from high SEC (Socio-Economic Class) homes are one
of the highest attaining ethnic groups, while White British pupils living in
disadvantaged circumstances are the lowest attaining group (p. 2). Gillborn (e.g.,
England and Wales. However, to repeat the points made above in relation to Dehals data and analysis,
this
pp. 54-56), too, draws attention to this, showing that with regard to non-FSM students (for example at age 16 in
their national GCSE assessments) that white students perform better than (most) other ethnic groups. To repeat,
Theory) offered, for example, by Cole, Maisuria, Miles and Sivanandan, and the Institute of Race Relations that he
In his work on
Critical Race Theory, Gillborn in most cases ignores and in other cases
belittles the class dimension, a class dimension that, ironically, his own statistics of 2000 (Gillborn
founded, in Britain, 15 and in the USA by the Red Critique journal, for example, Young, 2006.
and Mirza, 2000) draw attention to. Gillborn (in his chapter 3, 2008, p. 45) does refer to the relative importance of
and intersections between, inequalities based on race, class, and gender. He does, as have I, following Strand and
Dehal (Dehal, 2006; Strand, 2007, 2008a, b) above, note that economic background is not equally important for all
students. On p. 46 he criticises an exclusive focus on class. On p. 69 Gillborn notes that the data certainly
confirms that social class background is associated with gross inequalities of achievement at the extremes of the
class spectrum. He repeats: However, class does not appear to be equally significant for all groups. He then adds,
importantly for his argument (i.e., an argument that seeks to avoid concentrating on data concerning the poorest
strata in society), the growing emphasis on FSM students projects a view of failing Whites that ignores 5 out of 6
teacher labelling and expectation, treatment by agencies of the state, such as the police, housing, judiciary, health
social class underachievement in education and society, extraordinarily subdued. In Hill(2009), Race and Class in
Britain: a Critique of the 15 statistical basis for Critical Race Theory in Britain: and some political implications, I also
critique what I regard and analyse as the misuse of statistics in arguments put forward by some Critical Race
Theorists in Britain showing that Race trumps Class in terms of underachievement at 16+ exams in England and
Wales. 16 Accepting the urgent need for anti-racist awareness, policy and activism from the classroom to the street
17 I welcome the anti-racism that CRT promulgates and analyses while criticising its over-emphasis on white
supremacy and its statistical misrepresentations.
The problem with standard critical race theory is the narrowness of its
remit, says Mike Cole. One of the main tenets of critical race theory is that "white supremacy" is the
norm in societies rather than merely the province of the racist right (the other
major tenet is primacy of "race" over class). There are a number of significant problems with this use of the term
"white supremacy". The first is that it homogenises all white people together in positions of power and privilege.
Writing about the US, critical race theorist Charles Mills acknowledges that not "all whites are better off than all nonwhites, but ... as a statistical generalisation, the objective life chances of whites are significantly better". While this
UK. That such statistics are indicative of racism, however, is beyond doubt, and to interpret them it is useful to
employ the concept of "racialisation". Given that there is widespread agreement among geneticists and social
the fact that Islamophobia is not necessarily triggered by skin colour. It is often sparked by one or more (perceived)
Times Higher advocating critical race theory ("All shades of a wide white world", October 19) by citing the US journal
"the
abolition of whiteness is ... not just an optional extra in terms of defeating
capitalism (nor something which will be necessarily abolished postcapitalism) but fundamental to the Marxist educational project as praxis ".
Indeed, for Preston, "the abolition of capitalism and whiteness seem to be
fundamentally connected in the current historical circumstances of
Western capitalist development".From my Marxist perspective, coupling the
"abolition of whiteness" to the "abolition of capitalism" is a worrying
development that, if it gained ground in Marxist theory, would most
certainly further undermine the Marxist project.I am not questioning the sincerity of the
Race Traitor , which seeks the "abolition of the racial category 'white'". Elsewhere, Preston has argued
protagonists of "the abolition of whiteness", nor suggesting in any way that they are anti-white people but merely
questioning its extreme vulnerability to misunderstanding. Anti-racists have made some progress in the UK at least
in making anti- racism a mainstream rallying point, and this is reflected, in part, in legislation. Even if it were a good
conception of racism. Only then can we fully understand its multiple manifestations and work towards its eradication.
legal reform or a cultural-ideological battle to win the hearts and minds of people and thus keep the existing socio-
transformative theory of racea theory that reclaims revolutionary class politics in the interests of contributing
By freedom, I do not simply mean a legal or cultural articulation of individual rights as proposed by bourgeois race
theorists. Instead,
(Patricia Hill Collins), and neo-conservative culturalism (Shelby Steele), share a philosophical-ideological commitment
presents "the African as subject rather than object" ("Multiculturalism" 270)is in fact part of the positing of a Black
"essence" that can form the basis for a cross-class alliance between black workers and black business, between, that
is, exploited and exploiters.
People are not discriminated against solely based on colorsocial practices contribute to their oppression
Young 6 (Robert Young- British postcolonial theorist, cultural critic, and historian Putting
Materialism back into Race Theory: Toward a Transformative Theory of Race
http://www.redcritique.org/WinterSpring2006/puttingmaterialismbackintoracetheory.htm KC)
the site of contradictions and, hence, in need of conceptual elaboration to break from cultural common sense, a
conduit for dominant ideology. It is this outside that has come under attack by black (humanist) scholars through the
invocation of the black (transcendental) subject.
Security
The securitization of the 1AC is the bourgeois attempt to push
forward the ultimate capitalist agenda to construct threats in
order to justify conservatism
Neocleous, 8-Professor of Critique of Political Economy @ Brunel University [Mark, Critique of Security,
Brunel University in the Department of Government, Published 2008]
Blackstone, Paine, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, and in various other formulations elsewhere.' Thus
takes on its shoulders all that is disagreeable and servile in life, and procures thus for other classes leisure, serenity
the actual
advantage is of this capitalist civilization, with its misery and its
degradation of the masses, as compared with barbarism. He can
find only one answer: security! One side of this double role, then,
is that security is the ideological justification for 'civilisation' (that is,
capitalism) as opposed to 'barbarism' (that is, non-capitalist modes
of production); hence Locke's need to move from the 'state of nature' to the state of civil society. The
other side is that security is what the bourgeois class demand once it has
exploited, demoralised and degraded the bulk of humanity. For all
the talk of 'laissez faire', the 'natural' phenomena of
labour, wages and profit have to be policed and secured. Thus security
entails the concept of police, guaranteeing as well as presupposing
that society exists to secure the conservation of a particular kind of
of mind and conventional' (c'est bon, ca) 'dignity of character'. Storch then asks himself what
Social Movements
New leftist critique the social model is incondusive to mass
class conscience shift apparatuses of surveillance ensure
resistance is stifled THE DRAGON WATCHES THE SHEEP
Eiermann 14 (Eiermann, Martin, PHD Sociology Candidate at UC
Berkeley, BA in History from Harvard University "Its Not (just) about the
NSA ." Martineiermann.com. 14 Feb. 2014. KC)
Let me briefly recap the dominant narrative of the Left. Im undoubtedly riding roughshod over the
subtleties of the argument, but I hope that the exaggeration of differences can help to illuminate
from New York to San Francisco could travel through Frankfurt and Beijing (or simultaneously along
we are really talking about front-end reforms: About the ways in which the internet is used and
abused, and about the regulation of those behaviors. But what about state control at the front-end
United States (the NSA) have muscled their way into the digital
realm. The dark web offers some refuge for those who prefer
anonymity (for good or ill), but the average user should fully expect
to be monitored by a wide range of government agencies. However, Im
not entirely convinced by the narrow focus on the state. Historically, our privacy norms
emerged from the interplay of economic forces (the rise of the
modern factory and the separation of work from domestic life),
technological changes (the advent of photography and its use by
the tabloid press), and political agendas (attempts to strike a
balance between the power monopoly of the state and the ideal of
the free individual). But as Jeffrey Rosen recently pointed out in the New York Times, privacy
initiatives only responded to two of three factors: James Madison warned against the abridgment of
freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power, while Louis Brandeis
took the journalists of his time to task and lamented that each crop of unseemly gossip, thus
harvested, becomes the seed of more and, in direct proportion to its circulation, results in the
lowering of social standards and of morality. For more than a century, privacy debates have engaged
with issues of political power and sensationalist culture, but little attention was usually paid to the
third factor the economic context even as Fordist industrialists re-established control over the
lives of their workers by providing housing and entertainment, and thus company oversight outside
the factory gates. Were in a similar position today: We scrutinize the state for its Orwellian ambitions,
but not the context that renders them feasible. Lets turn to two grand masters for guidance. Kevin
Kelly, internet evangelist and founding editor of WIRED Magazine, had this to say when we met in
2011: I
against the usual suspects (its gratifying to see James Clapper flop before a Congressional
Committee), and exempts the rest from scrutiny. We condemn the mobsters but not the environment
central importance. But the narrow focus on the state also belies
the realities of the early 21st century. The state was never the only
game in town, and it certainly isnt today. If there is a meta-story to
the last eight months, I think it goes something like this: We can finally
stop to talk about digital technologies as a graven image. They are made
by men, and thus subject to all the hopes and fallibilities of man.
They are sites of contestation and objects of power struggles among
economic, political and cultural forces. And the exposure of
surveillance practices is above all else an opportunity to dig into the
capillaries of power, to map and scrutinize them, and to broaden our
critique beyond concerns about the excesses of the liberal State.
as Lovink suggests
task is not so much to fabulate futures as to describe in concepts what practices of relation, of pasts into presents and toward
futures, could be
nineties, I think we won the battle and lost the war. Social
movements around free information and new community broke
through the carapace of old media. We won! And then a new ruling
class of figured out how to commodify our emergent gift economies
at a higher level of abstraction .
We lost! Well, too bad. Time to regroup and try something else.
. It
rests on the old saw of some organic, whole, romantic other that
has been lost and can be restored . But as we have known since Donna Haraway at the latest:
theres no going back.
sometimes, a bit coy, perhaps. But the fantasy of privacy is really just a denial of the sociality of our species-being. Its a way of
reanimating the old bourgeois fantasy of atomistic nomads. By all means be a critic of the dangers of surveillance, but
lets
not assume there was ever all that much of a discrete , secret, separate private
life . Indeed the history of surveillance and repression ought to inform
this. Before the NSAs big data surveillance was the FBI and its taps
and tail s. There was the destruction of the IWW, McCarthyism, the flat-out murder of members of the Black Panthers.
Lets not pretend we have lost our innocence just now. Would it
really surprise anyone if key Occupy activists came in for
administrative harassment right about now?
Structural Violence
Neoliberalism and violence are inextricably intertwined
violence is a reflection and expression of capitalism
Springer 12 (Simon, assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of
Victoria Neoliberalising violence: of the exceptional and the exemplary in coalescing moments, Area
44:2, Royal Geographical Society, 2012, Wiley Online KC)
this light, we can regard a concern for understanding the causality of violence as being a
consideration that posits where neoliberalism might make its entry into this bolstering systematic
Harvey (2005) to regard this as neoliberalism's primary substantive achievement. Yet to ask the
particular question does neoliberalism cause violence? is, upon further reflection, somewhat
irrelevant. Inequality alone is about the metrics and measuring of disparity, however qualified, while
the link between inequality and violence is typically treated as an assessment of the validity of a
causal relationship, where the link may or may not be understood to take on multiple dimensions
(including temporally, spatiality, economics, politics, culture, etc.). However ,
creates particular kinds of agents who become capable of certain kinds of violence dependent upon
both their distinctive geohistorical milieu and their situation within its hierarchy. It is in this
distinction that future critical inquiries could productively locate their concerns for understanding the
associations between violence and neoliberalism. By examining the contingent histories and unique
geographies that define individual neoliberalisations, geographers can begin to interpret and dissect
the kaleidoscope of violence that is intercalated within neoliberalism's broader rationality of power.
It
But what is not spoken in Klein's account, nor is it foregrounded in most treatments of neoliberalism in
variety of regulatory, surveillance and policing mechanisms to ensure neoliberal reforms are instituted
have been vocal in their calls for the indictment of neoliberal ideas (England and Ward 2007; Peck
has come under intensifying scrutiny since the onset of the most recent financial crisis in late 2008,
understanding of the functioning of this relation of the ban is imperative to undoing the abusive
moment we currently find ourselves in, precisely because it forces us to recognise that
everyone
(including myself and other academic geographers ) is implicated in the perpetuation of
neoliberalised violence.
It s a common place that human society can survive and develop only in a
lasting real peace. Without peace countries cannot develop. Although since 1945 there has been
no world war, but numerous local wars took place, terrorism has spread all over
the world, undermining security even in the most developed and powerful countries, arms race and
militarisation have not ended with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, but escalated and
continued, extending also to weapons of mass destruction and misusing enormous
resources badly needed for development, many invisible wars Kothari, R. (1987). are suffered
by the poor and oppressed people, manifested in mass misery, poverty, unemployment,
homelessness, starvation and malnutrition, epidemics and poor health conditions, exploitation and oppression, racial
denial or
regular infringement of the democratic rights of citizens , women, youth, ethnic or
religious minorities, etc., and last but not least, in the degradation of human
environment, which means that the war against Nature , i.e. the disturbance of
and other discrimination, physical terror, organised injustice, disguised forms of violence, the
ecological balance, wasteful management of natural resources, and large-scale pollution of our environment, is still
participation and mutually advantageous co-operation among nations. It further requires a pluralistic democracy on
global level with an appropriate system of proportional representation of the world society, articulation of diverse
interests and their peaceful reconciliation, by non-violent conflict management, and thus also a global governance
peace requires, indeed, a new, demilitarised and democratic world order, which can provide equal opportunities for
sustainable development. Sustainability of development (both on national and world level) is often interpreted as
an issue of environmental protection only and reduced to the need for preserving the ecological balance and
delivering the next generations not a destroyed Nature with overexhausted resources and polluted environment.
i.e. between, on the one hand, continuation of visible and invisible wars, as long as this is possible at all, and, on
No ideological or
terminological camouflage can conceal this real dilemma any more, which
is to be faced not in the distant future, by the next generations, but in the
coming years, because of global terrorism soon having nuclear and other
mass destructive weapons, and also due to irreversible changes in natural
environment.
the other, transformation of the world order by demilitarisation and democratization.
spectacle becomes especially decisive for public memoryand for the foresight with which public
policy can motivate and execute precautionary measureswhen it comes to the attritional casualties
claimed, as at Bhopal, by the forces of slow violence.
and the exemplary in coalescing moments, Area 44:2, Royal Geographical Society, 2012, Wiley
Online)//AS
Like violence, neoliberalism is also notoriously difficult to define. Beyond a vision of naturalised
market relations and unobstructed capital mobility, and in spite of variance in doses among regions,
intensifies under neoliberalism and its associated violence against Others comes to form the rule.
Surveillance
Analysis of the surveillance apparatus misses the boat.
Understanding how corporate power has begun dominating
social relations is key to interpreting the modern metanarrative of invasive surveillance.
Giroux 14 (Henry, Global TV Network Chair Professorship, McMaster University in
the English and Cultural Studies Department, Totalitarian Paranoia in the PostOrwellian Surveillance State, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21656totalitarian-paranoia-in-the-post-orwellian-surveillance-state#, NKF)
Privacy is no longer a principled and cherished civil right. On the contrary, it has been
absorbed and transformed within the purview of a celebrity and market-driven
culture in which people publicize themselves and their innermost
secrets to promote and advance their personal brand. Or it is often a principle invoked by
conservatives who claim their rights to privacy have been trampled when confronted with ideas or arguments that unsettle their
Where Orwell's characters loathed the intrusion of surveillance, according to Bauman and Lyons, today We seem to experience no
joy in having secrets, unless they are the kinds of secrets likely to enhance our egos by attracting the attention of researchers and
Everything private is
now done, potentially, in public - and is potentially available for public
consumption; and remains available for the duration, till the end of time, as the internet 'can't be made to forget'
anything once recorded on any of its innumerable servers. This erosion of anonymity is a
product of pervasive social media services, cheap cell phone cameras, free photo and video Web hosts,
and perhaps most important of all, a change in people's views about what ought to
be public and what ought to be private.13 Orwell's 1984 looks subdued next to the current parameters, intrusions,
technologies and disciplinary apparatuses wielded by the new corporate-government surveillance state. Surveillance
has not only become more pervasive, intruding into the most private of spaces and activities in
order to collect massive amounts of data, it also permeates and inhabits everyday activities so
as to be taken-for-granted. Surveillance is not simply pervasive, it has become
normalized. Orwell could not have imagined either the intrusive capabilities of the new
high-powered digital technologies of surveillance and display, nor could he have envisioned the growing web of
political, cultural and economic partnerships between modes of
government and corporate sovereignty capable of collecting almost
every form of communication in which human beings engage. What is new in the postOrwellian world is not just the emergence of new and powerful technologies used by governments and corporations to spy on
editors of TV talk shows, tabloid front pages and the....covers of glossy magazines.
people and assess personal information as a way to either attract ready-made customers or to sell information to advertising
FBI. I think the renowned intellectual historian Quentin Skinner is right in insisting that
surveillance is about
more than the violation of privacy rights, however important. Under the surveillance state,
the greatest threat one faces is not simply the violation of one's right to
privacy, but the fact that the public is subject to the dictates of
arbitrary power it no longer seems interested in contesting. And it is precisely this
existence of unchecked power and the wider culture of political indifference that puts at
risk the broader principles of liberty and freedom, which are
fundamental to democracy itself. According to Skinner, who is worth quoting at length: The
response of those who are worried about surveillance has so far been too
much couched, it seems to me, in terms of the violation of the right to privacy.
Of course it's true that my privacy has been violated if someone is reading my emails without my knowledge. But my point is that
my liberty is also being violated, and not merely by the fact that
someone is reading my emails but also by the fact that someone has
the power to do so should they choose. We have to insist that this in itself takes
away liberty because it leaves us at the mercy of arbitrary power.
It's no use those who have possession of this power promising that
they won't necessarily use it, or will use it only for the common good. What is offensive
to liberty is the very existence of such arbitrary power.14 The dangers of the
surveillance state far exceed the attack on privacy or warrant simply a discussion about balancing security against civil liberties. The
Enlightenment
not only
mythologies . The Snowden revelations in June 2013 mark the symbolic closure of the new media era. The NSA
scandal has taken away the last remains of cyber-naivety and lifted the internet issue to the level of world politics.
The
pieces: decentralization,
will be used against you . In 2014, weve come full circle and returned to a world before 1984. That was not
only Orwells year, but also the moment Apple hit the mediascape with the personal computer.
and control
on the new state of affairs: Resistance and surveillance : The design of todays
digital tools makes the two inseparable. And
Its said that generals always fight the last war. If so, were like
those generals. Our understanding of the dangers of surveillance is
filtered by our thinking about previous threats
update our nightmares. Lets take this call seriously.
(Freudian)
can assign identity and address, which can control mobility within a
certain field, and which can claim final authority over the legitimacy
of violence within a specific domain . But networks do all those
things too . As said, Google-China is a key example here, but US superjurisdiction is another to be sure. The US
can , it seems, claim a right to inspect any data seemingly remotely
related to a machine on its soil . In fact the limit of US jurisdiction cant be defined by a contiguous land
mass or even a body of law.
markets and corporate gardens , nor particularly faithful in anarchic autopoiesis and
absolute commonwealths. It seems that in practice we perhaps cynically lean on one of these three when the accidents caused by
combinations of the other two become too awful.
),
but this polity has no rights within that Cloud and does not share
its
(for example)
primary sense of citizenship yet correct? BB I will rely on the characterization of The Stack as a
design brief. You are correct that no private Cloud platform existing today has the full power of a State, and perhaps they never
will.But
In this example
, States
BB Well, yes, how indeed. We will have to prototype it. There are
thousands of possible routes to and from hard and soft in these cases. Again, I am not making a claim that this has taken place, but
working backwards from an emergent future we can see where this leads. Considering the inroads of gov.googleapps.com with the
local, State, and Federal agencies,
The Feds
Feds
Perhaps
to quietly adopt or offer Google ID support for certain important functions, and
passport can also buy my plane ticket, book my hotel , etc. But thinking long term,
we could envision competing states/cloud platforms with competing
services and protocol lock-ins . It may be that California offers far better digital identity services than
Arizona and so non-residents choose to be part of that platform, effectively paying taxes to a state other than their own. People
might become more intertwined with the services and content, and political conflicts of California, because
the state
schooling , who knows. Perhaps they choose to live under Californias data laws/ platform even if they are in
Dubai, and
perhaps no one can stop them. Perhaps they dont give up their Dubai passports but it might not matter. Maybe Taiwans services
will be, for whatever reasons, deliberately designed to prevent interoperation with California. So the walled garden problem
becomes one of real competing feifdoms. We can make up scenarios, and its probably well worth doing. I am waiting for California
to set up its own embassy in Brussels. The optimistic scenario is the emergence of new modes of sovereignty that would let
people assemble and connect in ways that better serve their real needs and wants. Perhaps these are not recognizable as states,
platforms, corporations, or commons, but some bizarre hybrid of all four plus three new things we dont know yet. Equally likely is
what we can call
Cloud Feudalism . In this scenario, the walls of some gardens are hard and thick. The
(including biopolitics)
reduce user-citizens
The Right, in its libertarian formulation, loves to set itself up as the defender of
individual liberty against state power. And thus contemporary capitalism often referred to by that overused buzzword,
in
the
a central part of the neoliberal turn , and is not something ancillary to it. However ,
the
and leftists , and not only on the topic of the national security state a state, it should be noted, that is inextricably
linked with the nominally private sector, in the form of contractors such as the one that employed Edward Snowden.
As the
it becomes
warmongering or
social justice as criminal justice that attempts to deploy the repressive power of the state to protect women who are portrayed as
helpless victims. Or take a very different issue: the recent chemical spill in West Virginia, which has exposed hundreds of thousands
of people to toxic drinking water. The always-acerbic and astute Dean Baker notes the witless habit of referring to this event as a
failure of government regulation and a consequence of free-market fundamentalism.
that the state protects the property rights of the rich while allowing
them to profit from befouling our common resources . Baker has, I think, done
some of the best popular writing attacking the fiction that the Right is for free markets while the Left is for government regulation.
As Ive noted elsewhere,
impact is.
state
transformed and
into a
combination of "
and to make all aspects of daily life visible and subject to data manipulation.5
In a world
and resuscitated
and
texting.7A This collecting of information might be most evident in the video cameras that inhabit every public space from the
streets, commercial establishments and workplaces to the schools our children attend as well as in the myriad scanners placed at
the entry points of airports, stores, sporting events and the like. Yet
cherished notions of agency collapse into unabashed narcissistic exhibitions and confessions of the self, serving as willing fodder for
the spying state.
and object.
some individuals will not willingly turn their private lives over to
the spying state and corporations, the NSA and other intelligence
agencies work hard to create a turnkey authoritarian state in which
Yahoo, Google, Faceboo k, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple. The first thing to note
about these data is that a mere generation ago, they did not exist.
midst, flowing from new technology , waiting to be picked up; and power, as
always, creates temptation, especially for the already powerful . Our
cellphones track our whereabouts.
servers and are saved and kept for a potential eternity in storage
banks , from which they can be recovered and examined. Our purchases and contacts and
illnesses and entertainments are tracked and agglomerated. If we
are arrested, even our DNA can be taken and stored by the state .
Today, alongside each one of us, there exists a second, electronic self, created in part by us, in part by others.
This other
decades, the US
which citizens
(i.e., people with political rights and obligations who are civically engaged and partake in the decisions
(see, e.g.
consumer society, happiness, success and fulfilment are typically measured by peoples purchasing power and material possessions
(Durning 1992; Schor 1998). However, because the satisfaction that comes with material consumption is typically short lived,
encouraging people to remain reliable consumers involves constantly enticing them with new products (Bauman 1998).
excluded from the more significant decisions that affect their lives. It is precisely this sort of alienation that pacifies many people
and encourages them to simply fit into the realm of acceptable options dictated by the political and economic elite. These
acceptable options which typically involve things like choosing between various ice-cream flavours, types of cars or political
candidates are ultimately all consumer choices that reflect the prevailing status quo but are nonetheless typically regarded as
indicators of freedom. Considering this association often made between consumer choice and freedom, it is no wonder that
there has been no concerted effort in the US to oppose the fact that most private and public settings have been increasingly turned
into what George Ritzer (2005) has described as sites of consumption. According to Ritzer, in the past several decades, settings
that were traditionally not associated with shopping, such as schools, airports and private homes, have been turned into settings of
consumption. With respect to the latter, Ritzer (2005: x) suggests that
attack , making nine references to September 11 in his January 2014 speech in which he was to present reforms (Matthews
2014). Instead,
emergence of the
corporate-state surveillance
is not strictly confined to the task of archiving immense pools of data collection to be used in a number of
like
students'
attentiveness in classrooms.20
TV shows such as "Big Brother" or "Undercover Boss ," which turn the
event of constant surveillance into a voyeuristic pleasure .21 The atrophy of
democratic intuitions of culture and governance are evident in popular representations that undermine the meaning of democracy
as a collective ethos that unconditionally stands for social, economic, and political rights.22 One
example can be
their omniscient
terrorists
The older modernity held up the ideals of justice, equality, freedom, and democracy,
however flawed. The investment in public goods was seen as central to a social contract that implied that all citizens should have
access to those provisions, resources, institutions, and benefits that expanded their sense of agency and social responsibility.
"budgetary priorities" are relentlessly pushed so as to hollow out the welfare state and drastically reduce social provisions as part of
a larger neoliberal counter revolution to lower the taxes of the rich and mega-corporations while selling off public good to private
interests.
social good have been co-opted by a politics of fear , relegating notions of the civic
good, public sphere,
liability , if not a pathology. 25 Fear has lost its social connotations and no
longer references
state and corporate injustices.30 This type of illegal spying in the interest of stealing industrial secrets and closing down dissent by
peaceful protesters has less to do with national security than it has to do with mimicking the abuses and tactics used by the Stasi in
East Germany during the Cold War. How else to explain why many law-abiding citizens "and those with dissenting views within the
law can be singled out for surveillance and placed on wide-ranging watch lists relating to terrorism."3
Terror
The aff utilizes the representations of terrorism as a part of
the culture of fear that seeks to suppress and manipulate the
public to justify surveillance
Giroux 4 (Henry, Professor at Boston University, Miami University, and Penn State
University and a scholar of critical pedagogy theory, Routledge, War on Terror, Vol.
18, Issue 4, http://www.henryagiroux.com/online_articles/Third%20Text%202004war%20on%20terror.pdf)
As militarisation spreads its influence both at home and abroad
militarisation is also
it works to eliminate
cultural politics that militarisation has to be opposed. As the forces of militarisation are ratcheted up within multiple spaces in the
body politic,
To expose and
resist such an ideology should be one of the primary responsibilities of intellectuals, activists, parents, youth, community members,
and others concerned about the fate of democracy on a global scale. Working both within and outside traditional public spheres,
artists, community activists, writers, and educators can expose the ideology of militarisation in all its diversity and how it risks
turning the United States into a military state while at the same time undermining crucial social programmes, constitutional
liberties, and valuable public spaces. Accord- ing to Arundhati Roy, this new politics of resistance demands:
Fighting to
listening to the whispering of the truly powerless . It means giving a forum to the
myriad voices from the hundreds of resistance movements across the country which are speaking about real things
about
Challenging militarisation
is a
Therefore,
power) ekes the position of class war by undertaken savage cuts in living standards and harsh
economic reforms, purposely to save capitalism from imminent collapse and negation. The rich and other
members of the ruling class are less likely to be affected by these cut in social spending than the working and
the lumpen classes. Therefore, the gap between the ruling class and the working/lumpen class become wider,
and this will inevitably affects the prevailing social relations within capitalism. Reformist measures such as less
pay (wages) but longer working time, mass sacking of employees, poor working conditions, cut in social spending
and
harsh austerity measures will be implemented Thus triggers social conflicts and class
struggle among the classes. In this situation, there is potential that class struggle that will lead to strikes,
protest and industrial disharmony between the working class and the ruling class. As Alan Wood (2002) noted
that most obvious and painful manifestations of the crisis of capitalism are not only economic but those
phenomena that affect their personal lives at the most sensitive and emotional points: the breakdown of the
family, the epidemic of crime and violence, the collapse of the old values and morality with nothing to put in
their place, the constant outbreak of wars - all of this gives rise to a sense of instability, a lack of faith in the
present or the future11 These contradictions caused by the capitalist mode of production and the inability of the
state (domination of ruling class) to provide for Lumpen class is recipe for anarchy. This stems from that
unemployed and others who cannot understand the series of frustration will be forced to response to the crisis
one way or the other. Frustrated sections of the lumpen class are more likely form criminal gangs, radical Islamic
organisations, who will find more solutions to their plight and social
condition by engaging in anarchism, and other forms of individual terrorist method against
the state. Although, most of these organisations were formed to champion a particular
cause at the initial stage, but became a political force when their ideologies found
an echo and support from a sections of disenchanted and frustrated member of
lumpen class who join these organisations in large numbers. The cause and ideology of
these sectarian organisations comes in direct confrontation with that of the ruling class,
and they engage in individual terrorism first to respond to the series of frustration and
problems they faced, and second, to influence and change the behaviour of the ruling class and the
state. This method of expressing grievances by the lumpen class is more likely to compel the
ruling class and the state to engage in counterterrorist strategies, capable of clamping down
groups, sects, fascist and terrorist
and suppress
terrorism is a tactic of all classes in class conflict, rather than just a tactic of a
Terrorism is therefore a reflection of social relations among social classes
within modern capitalism (Jonathan, 2011) such that the use of terror can be
perpetrated by any of the classes whenever their interests, rights and priviledges are at stake. It
Therefore,
lumpen class.
must however be noted that the extent to which lumpen class-induced individual terrorism will occur varies from
countries to countries. Individual terrorism by a section of the lumpen class is more likely to occur in developing
countries than in developed one. This is because in the developed countries, tensions among the classes are not
so tense because the state can afford, and ensure that social security benefits; unemployment stipends, single
mother benefits, scholarship and student loans, pension among others are made available to the working class
and the lumpen class. This is possible because there is so much capital (wealth of the state) nurtured by overexploitation of third world countries vis-a-vis taxes and incomes from multinational firms. Therefore, there are
enough resources to soften the antagonism among social classes, and ensure that sections of the lumpen class
are discouraged from forming or joining sectarian groups that will engage in individual terrorism against the state.
Wilderson
Race is a construction of capitalismdifferences can be
overcome after dismantling capitalism
Mullings 5 (Leith, Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York, Interrogating
Racism: Toward an Antiracist Anthropology, Annual Review of Anthropology 34, 2005, University of
Michigan Libraries, KC)
national consolidation. Although the variety of racism developed in the West had the greatest impact on the rest of
the world, racial systems are simultaneously national and international projects. Racial projects as they appear in
different parts of the world are constructed, in part, from tools and symbols already existing within local cultural
innate and natural prejudice of colour does its invocation as a historical explanation do more than repeat the
as a historical explanationfor example, George Fredrickson and Winthrop Jordanrecognize the difficulty. The
preferred solution is to suppose that, having arisen historically, race then ceases to be a historical phenomenon and
becomes instead an external motor of history; according to the fatuous but widely repeated formula, it takes on a
life of its own.14 In other words, once historically acquired, race becomes hereditary. The shopworn metaphor thus
reasons. The revolutionary bicentennials that Americans have celebrated with such unction of independence in
1976 and of the Constitution in 1989can as well serve as the bicentennial of racial ideology, since the birthdays are
not far apart. During the revolutionary era, people who favoured slavery and people who opposed it collaborated in
identifying the racial incapacity of Afro-Americans as the explanation for enslavement.15 American racial ideology is
as original an invention of the Founders as is the United States itself. Those holding liberty to be inalienable and
we ought
to begin by restoring to racethat is, the American version of raceits proper history. As
holding Afro-Americans as slaves were bound to end by holding race to be a self-evident truth. Thus
convenient a place as any to begin a brief summary of that history, along with that of plantation society in British
North America, is in seventeenth-century Virginia. Virginia foundered during its early years and survived only
through the good will and, when the colonists had exhausted that, the extorted tribute of the indigenous Indians. But
during the second decade of the seventeenth century,
growing of tobacco. The first boom in what would eventually become the United States took place
during the 1620s, and it rested primarily on the backs of English
indentured servants, not African slaves. Not until late in the century, after the boom had
passed, did landowners begin buying slaves in large numbers , first from the West
Indies and, after 1680, from Africa itself.16 During the high years of the boom it was the free-born Englishman who
became, as one historian put it, a machine to make tobacco for somebody else.17 Indentured servants served
longer terms in Virginia than their English counterparts and enjoyed less dignity and less protection in law and
custom. They could be bought and sold like livestock, kidnapped, stolen, put up as stakes in card games, and
awardedeven before their arrival in Americato the victors in lawsuits. Greedy magnates (if the term is not
redundant) stinted the servants food and cheated them out of their freedom dues, and often out of their freedom
itself, when they had served their time. Servants were beaten, maimed, and even killed with impunity. For expressing
opinions unfavourable to the governor and the governing council, one man had both his arms broken and his tongue
bored through with an awl, while another lost his ear and had to submit to a second seven-year term of servitude
to a member of the council that had judged his case.18 Whatever truths may have appeared self-evident in those
days, neither an inalienable right to life and liberty nor the founding of government on the consent of the governed
The substitution of black labor for white was, in part, accompanied by the
process, described earlier, of division of skills into simpler, assembly line tasks.
Black migrants were largely unskilled while the union movement's
strength lay in controlling access to training in complex skills. A way of
cracking the unions' power was to break down the skills and substitute unskilled
labor. Black labor was not the only source of substitution, but it was an important and
growing element. Returning to Figure I, the efforts to develop the black labor force
aroused the ire of white labor (4) which felt a threat to their efforts to improve
their lot. The antagonism towards black workers was not simply race
prejudice but a fear that blacks, because of their weakness in the labor market, could be
used by capital as a tool to weaken or destroy their organizations or take away their jobs.
As Spero and Harris (l966:l28) state: "The use of Negroes for strike breaking has . . . led the white trade unionist to
regard the black workers as an enemy of the labor movement."
to exclude black workers or to keep them restricted to certain jobs. (See Bonacich, I972, for a more
thorough discussion of the reasoning behind these reactions.) Black workers came on the
industrial scene unfamiliar, for the most part, with the aspirations of organized
labor. 1'hey were not an easy element to organize to start out with, but whatever potential for
organization was pre- sent was discouraged by white union antipathy and
exclusion (5). Union policies frequently meant that black workers had no alternative but
to turn to strike-breaking as the only means of entering white-dominated lines of work. Sometimes
even strike-breaking did not secure long-term employment as white workers roared back, anxious to see them dis-
uncommon, black workers were apt to view the action as self-sewing, to protect the unions from scabbing by blacks.
It would take more than non-discrimination to end the dis- trust, and many white unionists were not willing even to
little of the race problem in industry who declare that it can be settled merely by the unions opening their doors to
the Negroes. It is much more complex than that, and will require the best thought that conscientious whites and
blacks can give to it. The Negro has the more difficult part to solve in resisting the insidious efforts of unscrupulous
white employers and misguided intellectuals of his own race to make a professional strike-breaker of him, The
antagonism of the labor movement to black workers weakened still further the latter's position in the labor market
efforts by capital to utilize black labor to their detriment added to the militance of white workers (8). Strikes were
sometimes called over this very issue, which could unite white workers in a common grievance (Tuttle, 1970a: 107-8).
Alternatives
(Epifanio, Jr., Fulbright Lecturer in American Studies at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium,
Crisis and Contradiction in Globalization
Discoursehttp://www.redcritique.org/WinterSpring2006/crisisandcontradictioninglobalizationdiscourse.htm)
global/local antagonisms in which (to modify Jameson) "the truth of experience no longer coincides with the place in which it takes
place" but implicates everyone from the center to the periphery, in various gradations of responsibility ("Cognitive Mapping" 349).
As soon as you
abandon the ground of reality that has been conquered and
reconquered by dialectical materialism, as soon as you decide to
remain on the 'natural' ground of existence, of the empirical in its stark, naked brutality,
you create a gulf between the subject of an action and the milieux
of the 'facts' in which the action unfolds so that they stand opposed to each other as harsh,
irreconcilable principles. It then becomes impossible to impose the subjective
will, wish or decision upon the facts or to discover in them any directive for
action. A situation in which the 'facts' speak out unmistakably for or against a definite course of action has never existed, and
The practical danger of every such dualism shows itself in the loss of any directive for action.
neither can or will exist. The more conscientiously the facts are explored in their isolation, i.e. in their unmediated relationsthe
less com-pellingly will they point in any one direction. It is self-evident that a merely subjective decision will be shattered by the
dialectical materialism is
seen to offer the only approach to reality which can give action a
direction. The self-knowledge, both subjective and objective, of the proletariat at a
given point in its evolution is at the same time knowledge of the
stage of development achieved by the whole society. The facts no
longer appear strange when they are comprehended in their coherent reality, in the relation of all partial
aspects to their inherent, but hitherto unelucidated roots in the whole: we then perceive the
tendencies which strive towards the centre of reality, to what we
are wont to call the ultimate goal. This ultimate goal is not an
abstract ideal opposed to the process, but an aspect of truth and
reality. It is the concrete meaning of each stage reached and an
integral part of the concrete moment. Because of this, to
comprehend it is to recognise the direction taken (unconsciously) by events
and tendencies towards the totality. It is to know the direction that
determines concretely the correct course of action at any given
momentin terms of the interest of the total process, viz. the emancipation of the proletariat. However, the
evolution of society constantly heightens the tension between the
partial aspects and the whole. Just because the inherent meaning of reality shines forth with an ever
pressure of uncomprehended facts acting automatically 'according to laws'. Thus
more resplendent light, the meaning of the process is embedded ever more deeply in day-to-day events, and totality permeates the
Manifesto on the tasks of orthodoxy and of its representatives, the Communists, have lost neither their relevance nor their value:
"The Communists arc distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians
of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independent of
nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass
through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole" <23-24>
point of
departure and the key to the historical understanding of social
relations. All the isolated partial categories can be thought of and
treatedin isolationas something that is always present in every society.
(If it cannot be found in a given society this is put down to *chance* as the exception that proves the rule.) But the
changes to which these individual aspects are subject give no clear
and unambiguous picture of the real differences in the various
stages of the evolution of society. These can really only be
discerned in the context of the total historical process of their
relation to society as a whole. <7-8>
Marx*s dictum: "The relations of production of every society form a whole"" is the methodological
This must determine its politics. Its politics may not always
accord with the empirical reality of the moment; at such times its slogans may be
ignored. But the ineluctable course of history will give it its due. Even more, the moral strength conferred
by the correct class consciousness will bear fruit in terms of
practical politics.17 The true strength of the party is moral: it is fed by
the trust of the spontaneously revolutionary masses whom economic
conditions have forced into revolt. It is nourished by the feeling that the party is the objectification
proletariat.
of their own will (obscure though this may be to themselves), that it is the visible and organised incarnation of their class
Only when the party has fought for this trust and earned it can it
become the leader of the revolution. For only then will the masses
spontaneously and instinctively press forward with all their energies
towards the party and towards their own class consciousness. By
separating the inseparable, the opportunists have barred their own
path to this knowledge, the active self-knowledge of the proletariat. Hence their leaders speak scornfully, in
consciousness.
the authentic tones of the free-thinking petty bourgeoisie of the "religious faith' that is said to lie at the roots of Bolshevism and
revolutionary Marxism. The accusation is a tacit confession of their own impotence. In vain do they disguise their moth-eaten
doubts, by cloaking their negativity in the spendid mantle of a cool and objective 'scientific method'. Every word and gesture
betrays the despair of the best of them and the inner emptiness of the worst: their complete divorce from the proletariat, from its
path and from its vocation.
What they call faith and seek to deprecate by adding the epithet 'religious* is
nothing more nor less than the certainty that capitalism is doomed
and thatultimatelythe proletariat will be victorious. There can be no
'material' guarantee of this certitude. It can be guaranteed
methodologicallyby the dialectical method. And even this must be tested and proved by
action, by the revolution itself, by living and dying for the revolution. A Marxist who cultivates the objectivity of the academic study
is just as reprehensible as the man who believes that the victory of the world revolution can be guaranteed by the 'laws of nature'.
The unity of theory and practice exists not only in theory but also for
practice. We have seen that the proletariat as a class can only
conquer and retain a hold on class consciousness and raise itself to
the level of itsobjectively-givenhistoric task through conflict and action. It is
likewise true that the party and the individual fighter can only really take
possession of their theory if they are able to bring this unity into
their praxis. The so-called religious faith is nothing more than the certitude that regardless of all temporary defeats and
setbacks, the historical process will come to fruition in our deeds and through our deeds. <p42-43>
ethical social action can lead to progress, or what he, and Lukacs before
him, term social evolution (130). Habermas, however, renders historical materialism
less ideologically rigid and more interrelated to the pursuit of
concepts like moral-practical insight (120), and the moralization of motives for action [italics
common belief that
omitted] (136). This can easily be described using the familiar terms of freedom to control ones own production, freedom from
oppressive economic dictates, freedom to ones own cultural identity and from cultural violence being visited upon the former, etc.
Progress is, under this historical and materialist rubric, both social and
physical; it represents advances in empirical knowledge and moral-practical insight . . . the
development of productive forces and the maturity of forms of social intercourse (142).
Habermas (1979), however, warns against a retrogression of Marxs general
theory into historical objectivism . . . [where] philosophical questions [are suppressed] in favor of
a scientistic understanding (96). Although suspicious of absolute narratives, he
also takes a different stance from some on the postmodern left that
the instability of social norms is necessarily beneficial to the moral
development of a society. In neo-normative tenor he states, a philosophical ethics not restricted to
metaethical statements is possible today only if we can reconstruct general presuppositions of
communication and procedures for justifying norms and values (97).
the moral development of social life.
Intersectional Alt
Reject the aff in favor of a common critical language of
decolonization
Grosfoguel 2008 (Ramon, Associate Professor in the Department of Ethics Studies
at the University of California, Berkeley, July 4th, Transmodernity, border thinking,
and global coloniality, http://www.humandee.org/spip.php?
page=imprimer&id_article=111)
The common
language should be anticapitalist, antipatriarchal,
antiimperialist and against the coloniality of power towards a
world where power is socialized, but open to a diversality of
institutional forms of socialization of power depending on the
different decolonial epistemic/ethical responses of subaltern groups
in the worldsystem. Quijanos call for a socialization of power could become another abstract universal that leads to a global
anticapitalist universal imaginary that decolonizes Marxist/Socialist perspectives from its Eurocentric limits.
design if it is not redefined and reconfigured from a transmodern perspective. The forms of anticapitalist struggles and socialization of power that
emerge in the Islamic world are quite different than the ones that emerge from indigenous peoples in the Americas or Bantu people in West Africa. All
share the decolonial anticapitalist, antipatriarchal and antiimperialist project but providing diverse institutional forms and conceptions to the project
of socialization of power according to their diverse, multiple epistemologies. To reproduce the Eurocentric socialist global designs of the 20th century, that
This is a call
for a universal that is a pluriversal (Mignolo 2000), for a concrete
universal that would include all the epistemic particularities
towards a "transmodern decolonial socialization of power." As the Zapatistas say,
departed from a unilateral eurocentered epistemic centre, would just repeat the mistakes that led the left to a global disaster.
Negativity Alt
Our alternative is to vote negative to reject the affirmative as
a refusal to participate in activities which support capitalism.
We must hollow out capitalist structures by refusing to invest
our energy in reforms and rescue operationsavoids transition
wars
Herod 4-Social Activist since 1968, owns an awesome website, Attended Columbia University and spent a year abroad at the
University of Beirut (Lebanon) [James, Getting Free, 2004,
http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/GetFre/06.htm]
destroying
capitalism. This strategy, at its most basic, calls for pulling time, energy, and resources
out of capitalist civilization and putting them into building a new civilization. The image then is
one of emptying out capitalist structures, hollowing them out, by draining wealth,
power, and meaning out of them until there is nothing left but shells. This is definitely
It is time to try to describe, at first abstractly and later concretely, a strategy for
an aggressive strategy. It requires great militancy, and constitutes an attack on the existing order. The
strategy clearly recognizes that capitalism is the enemy and must be destroyed, but it is not a frontal
attack aimed at overthrowing the system, but an inside attack aimed at gutting it, while
simultaneously replacing it with something better, something we want. Thus capitalist structures
and start participating in activities that build a new world while simultaneously undermining the old.
We create a new pattern of social relations alongside capitalist relations and then we continually build
and strengthen our new pattern while doing everything we can to weaken capitalist relations. In this
what obstacles have to be overcome before we can live that way, and know how to distinguish
between our social patterns and theirs. But we must not think that the capitalist world can simply be
ignored, in a live and let live attitude, while we try to build new lives elsewhere. (There is no
elsewhere.) There is at least one thing, wage-slavery, that we cant simply stop participating in (but
even here there are ways we can chip away at it). Capitalism must be explicitly refused and
replaced by something else.
armies and tanks, but a war fought on a daily basis, on the level of everyday life , by
millions of people. It is a war nevertheless because the accumulators of capital will use coercion,
brutality, and murder, as they have always done in the past, to try to block any rejection of the
system. They have always had to force compliance; they will not hesitate to continue doing so.
Nevertheless, there are many concrete ways that individuals, groups, and neighborhoods can gut
capitalism, which I will enumerate shortly. We must always keep in mind how we became slaves;
then we can see more clearly how we can cease being slaves. We were forced into wage-slavery
because the ruling class slowly, systematically, and brutally destroyed our ability to live autonomously.
By driving us off the land, changing the property laws, destroying community rights, destroying our
tools, imposing taxes, destroying our local markets, and so forth, we were forced onto the labor market
in order to survive, our only remaining option being to sell, for a wage, our ability to work. Its quite
clear then how we can overthrow slavery. We must reverse this process. We must begin to reacquire
the ability to live without working for a wage or buying the products made by wage-slaves (that is, we
must get free from the labor market and the way of living based on it), and embed ourselves instead in
cooperative labor and cooperatively produced goods. Another clarification is needed. This strategy
does not call for reforming capitalism, for changing capitalism into something else.
It calls for replacing capitalism, totally , with a new civilization. This is an important distinction,
because capitalism has proved impervious to reforms, as a system. We can
sometimes in some places win certain concessions from it (usually only temporary
ones) and win some (usually short-lived) improvements in our lives as its victims,
but we cannot reform it piecemeal, as a system . Thus our strategy of gutting and
eventually destroying capitalism requires at a minimum a totalizing image, an
awareness that we are attacking an entire way of life and replacing it with another,
and not merely reforming one way of life into something else . Many people may not be
accustomed to thinking about entire systems and social orders, but everyone knows what a lifestyle is,
or a way of life, and that is the way we should approach it. The thing is this: in order for capitalism to
be destroyed millions and millions of people must be dissatisfied with their way of life. They must want
something else and see certain existing things as obstacles to getting what they want. It is not useful
to think of this as a new ideology. It is not merely a belief-system that is needed, like a religion, or like
Marxism, or Anarchism. Rather it is a new prevailing vision, a dominant desire, an overriding need.
What must exist is a pressing desire to live a certain way, and not to live another way. If this
Concepts of
revolution that focus on the taking of power are typically centred on the
notion of counter-power. The strategy is to construct a counter-power, a
power that can stand against the ruling power. Often the revolutionary
movement has been constructed as a mirror image of power, army against
army, party against party, with the result that power reproduces itself
within the revolution itself. Anti-power, then, is not counter-power, but something much more
radical: it is the dissolution of power-over, the emancipation of power-to. This is the great, absurd, inevitable
challenge of the communist dream: to create a society free of power relations through the dissolution of power-over.
This project is far more radical than any notion of revolution based on the
conquest of power and at the same time far more realistic. Anti-power is
fundamentally opposed to power-over not only in the sense of being a
radically different project but also in the fact that it exists in constant
conflict with power-over. The attempt to exercise power-to in a way that does not entail the exercise of
power over others, inevitably comes into conflict with power-over. Potentia is not an alternative to
potestas that can simply co-exist peacefully with it. It may appear that we can simply
cultivate our own garden, create our own world of loving relations, refuse to get our hands dirty in the filth of power,
exercise of
power-to in a way that does not focus on value creation can exist only in
antagonism to power-over. This is due not to the character of power-to
(which is not inherently antagonistic) as to the voracious nature, the 'were-wolf hunger'
(Marx 1965, p. 243) of power-over. Power-to, if it does not submerge itself
in power-over, can exist, overtly or latently, only as power-against, as antipower. It is important to stress the anti-ness of power-to under capitalism,
because most mainstream discussions of social theory overlook the
antagonistic nature of developing one's potential. The antagonistic nature
of power is overlooked and it is assumed that capitalist society provides
the opportunity to develop human potential (power-to) to the full. Money, if it is seen as
but this is an illusion. There is no innocence, and this is true with an increasing intensity. The
being relevant at all (and, amazingly, it is generally not mentioned in discussions of power, presumably on the basis
that money is economics and power is sociology), is generally seen in terms of inequality (unequal access to
The
same point can be made in relation to subjectivity. The fact that power-to
can exist only exist as antagonism to power-over (as anti-power) means of
course that, under capitalism, subjectivity can only exist antagonistically,
in opposition to its own objectification. To treat the subject as already
emancipated, as most mainstream theory does, is to endorse the present
objectification of the subject as subjectivity, as freedom . Many of the attacks on
resources, for example), rather than in terms of command. Power-to, it is assumed, is already emancipated.
subjectivity by structuralists or post-modernists can perhaps be understood in this sense, as attacks on a false
book is an exploration of the absurd and shadowy world of anti-power. It is shadowy and absurd simply because the
world of orthodox social science (sociology, political science, economics and so on) is a world in which power is so
completely taken for granted that nothing else is visible. In the social science that seeks to explain the world as it is,
to show how the world works, power is the keystone of all categories, so that, in spite of (indeed, because of) its
proclaimed neutrality, this social science participates actively in the separation of subject and object which is the
fundamentally unjust worldbefore going on to reassure us (less surprisingly) that justice for the individual can be
Our anger is directed not just against particular happenings but is against
a more general wrongness, a feeling that the world is askew, that the
world is in some way untrue. When we experience something particularly
horrific, we hold up our hands in horror and say 'that cannot be ! it cannot be
true!' We know that it is true, but feel that it is the truth of an untrue world.
What would a true world look like? We may have a vague idea: it would be a world of
justice, a world in which people could relate to each other as people and
not as things, a world in which people would shape their own lives. But we
do not need to have a picture of what a true world would be like in order
to feel that there is something radically wrong with the world that exists.
won through individual effort.
Feeling that the world is wrong does not necessarily mean that we have a picture
of a utopia to put in its place. Nor does it necessarily mean a romantic, some-day-myprince-will-come idea that, although things are wrong now, one day we shall
come to a true world, a promised land, a happy ending. We need no
promise of a happy ending to justify our rejection of a world we feel to be
wrong. That is our starting point: rejection of a world that we feel to be
wrong, negation of a world we feel to be negative. This is what we must
cling to.
Our refusal to accept tells us nothing of the future, nor does it depend for its validity on any particular outcome. The
fact that we scream as we fall over the cliff does not give us any guarantee of a safe landing, nor does the legitimacy
of the scream depend on a happy ending. Gone is the certainty of the old revolutionaries that history (or God) was on
our side: such certainty is historically dead and buried, blasted into the grave by the bomb that fell on Hiroshima.
There is certainly no inevitable happy ending, but, even as we plunge downwards, even in the moments of darkest
(that which might be). We live in an unjust society but we wish it were not so: the two parts of the sentence are
than the first. It is the tension between the two parts of the sentence that gives meaning to the scream. If the
second part of the sentence (the subjunctive wish) is seen as being less real than the first, then the scream too is
the time of Machiavelli, social theory has been concerned to break the unbreakable sentence in half. Machiavelli lays
the basis for a new realism when he says that he is concerned only with what is, not with what things as we might
wish them to be. Reality refers to the first part of the sentence, to what is. The second part of the sentence, what
ought to be, is clearly distinguished from what is, and is not regarded as part of reality. The 'ought' is not entirely
discarded: it becomes the theme of 'normative' social theory. What is completely broken is the unity of the two parts
Our scream
implies a two-dimensionality which insists on the conjunction of tension
between the two dimensions. We are, but we exist in an arc of tension
towards that which we are not, or are not yet. Society is, but it exists in an
arc of tension towards that which is not, or is not yet. There is identity,
but identity exists in an arc of tension towards non-identity. The double
dimensionality is the antagonistic presence (that is, movement) of the not-yet
within the Is, of non-identity within identity . The scream is an explosion of the tension: the
of the sentence. With that step alone, the scream of rejection-and-longing is disqualified.
explosion of the Not-Yet contained-in-but-bursting-from the Is, the explosion of non-identity contained-in-butbursting-from identity. The scream is an expression of the present existence of that which is denied, the present
existence of the not-yet, of non-identity. The theoretical force of the scream depends not on the future existence of
the not-yet (who knows if there will ever be a society based on the mutual recognition of dignity?) but on its present
grounded firmly in that same bitterness of history, it becomes just a one-dimensional and silly expression of
optimism. Precisely such a separation of horror and hope is expressed in the oft-quoted Gramscian aphorism,
the
scream. It is a scream of hope, not of despair. And the hope is not a hope for
salvation in the form of divine intervention. It is an active hope, a hope
that we can change things, a scream of active refusal, a scream that
points to doing. The scream that does not point to doing, the scream that
turns in upon itself, that remains an eternal scream of despair or, much
more common, an endless cynical grumble, is a scream which betrays
itself: it loses its negative force and goes into an endless loop of selfaffirmation as scream. CynicismI hate the world, but there is nothing that can be doneis the scream
gone sour, the scream that suppresses its own self-negation. The scream implies doing. 'In the
beginning was the deed', says Goethe's Faust. But before the deed comes
the doing. In the beginning was the doing. But before the doing comes the
scream. It is not materialism that comes first, but negativity. It is true that the
scream springs from experience, from a doing or a frustrated doing. But
the doing too springs from the scream. The doing springs from a want, a
contradictory. But to make this argument we need to go back to the beginning. In the beginning, we said, is
doing is quite simply to see the world as struggle. It might be argued, with some force, that changing society should
be thought of not in terms of doing but in terms of not-doing, laziness, refusal to work, enjoyment. 'Let us be lazy in
everything, except in loving and drinking, except in being lazy': Lafargue begins his classic The Right to be Lazy with
this quotation (1999, p.3), implying that there is nothing more incompatible with capitalist exploitation than the
end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its
commencement.'(Marx, 1965, p. 178) The imagination of the labourer is ecstatic: at the commencement of the labour
process it projects beyond what is to an otherness that might be. This otherness exists not only when it is created: it
exists already, really, subjunctively, in the projection of the worker, in that which makes her human. The doing of the
architect is negative, not only in its result, but in its whole process: it begins and ends with the negation of what
exists. Even if she is the worst of architects, the doing is a creative doing. Bees, to the best of our knowledge, do not
Pedagogy Alt
The act of rejection creates the fissures necessary to resist
global capitalism
Holloway 05 (John, 8-16, Ph.D Political Science-University of Edinburgh , Can We
Change The World Without Taking Power?,
http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/5616)
Of expanding the
fissures, how to push these fissures forward structurally. The people who
say we should take control of the state are also talking about cracks. There
is no choice but to start with interstices. The question is how we think of them, because the
state is not the whole world. There are 200 states. If you seize control of one, it is still only a crack in capitalism.
It is a question of how we think about those cracks, those fissures. And if we start off from ourselves, why on
earth should we adopt capitalist, bourgeois forms for developing our struggle? Why should we accept the
template of the concept of the state?
Relentless criticism can delegitimate the system and release people into
struggle. And as struggle develops, victories that are no more than
incremental by their own terms- stopping a meeting stopping the IMF, the
hopes stirred forth by a campaign such as Ralph Naders in 2000 can
have a symbolic effect far greater than their external result, and constitute
points of rupture with capital. This rupture is not a set of facts added to
our knowledge of the world, but a change in our relation to the world. Its
effects are dynamic, not incremental, and like all genuine insights it
changes the balance of forces and can propagate very swiftly. Thus the
release from inertia can trigger a rapid cascade of changes, so that it
could be said that the forces pressing towards radical change need not be
linear and incremental, but can be exponential in character. In this way,
Impact/Root Cause
Anti-Blackness
Capitalism has allowed for federal manipulation by the private
sector that resulted in slavery
Blackmon 1 . (Douglas, an American writer, journalist and a Pulitzer Prize winner in 2009 for his
book, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World
War II From Alabama's Past, Capitalism Teamed With Racism to Create Cruel Partnership, The Wall
Street Journal, 7/16/01, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB995228253461746936.html KC)
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. On March 30, 1908, Green Cottenham was arrested by the Shelby County, Ala., sheriff and
charged with vagrancy. After three days in the county jail, the 22-year-old African-American was sentenced to an
unspecified term of hard labor. The next day, he was handed over to a unit of U.S. Steel Corp. and put to work with
hundreds of other convicts in the notorious Pratt Mines complex on the outskirts of Birmingham. Four months later,
he was still at the coal mines when tuberculosis killed him. Born two decades after the end of slavery in America,
Green Cottenham died a slave in all but name. The facts are dutifully entered in the handwritten registry of prisoners
statutes passed to reassert white control in the aftermath of the Civil War. Mr. Cottenham was one of more than 40
Shelby County men shipped to the Pratt Mines in the winter of 1908, nearly half of them serving time for jumping a
freight train, according to the Shelby County jail log. George Roberson was sent on a conviction for "assault with a
Subjected to squalid
living conditions, poor medical treatment, scant food and frequent
floggings, thousands died. Entries on a typical page from a 1918 state report on causes of death
stick," the log says. Lou William was in for adultery. John Jones for gambling.
among leased convicts include: "Killed by Convict, Asphyxia from Explosion, Tuberculosis, Burned by Gas Explosion,
Pneumonia, Shot by Foreman, Gangrenous Appendicitis, Paralysis." Mr. Cottenham was one of dozens of convicts who
died at the Pratt Mines complex in 1908. This form of government and corporate forced labor ended in 1928 and
slipped into the murk of history, discussed little outside the circles of sociologists and penal historians. But the story
of Alabamas trade in human labor endures in minute detail in tens of thousands of pages of government records
stored in archives, record rooms and courthouses across the state. These documents chronicle another chapter in
the history of corporate involvement in racial abuses of the last century. A $4.5 billion fund set up by German
corporations, after lawsuits and intense diplomatic pressure from the U.S. and others, began making payments last
month to the victims of Nazi slave-labor programs during the 1930s and 1940s. Japanese manufacturers have come
under criticism for their alleged use of forced labor during the same period. Swiss banks agreed in 1998 to a $1.25
billion settlement of claims related to the seizure of Jewish assets during the Holocaust. Traditions of Segregation
In the U.S., many companies real-estate agents that helped maintain rigid housing segregation, insurers and other
financial-services companies that red-lined minority areas as off-limits, employers of all stripes that discriminated in
hiring helped maintain traditions of segregation for a century after the end of the Civil War. But in the U.S.,
recurrent calls for reparations to the descendants of pre-Civil War slaves have made little headway. And there has
been scant debate over compensating victims of 20th century racial abuses involving businesses. The biggest user
of forced labor in Alabama at the turn of the century was Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co., the U.S. Steel unit that
owned the mine where Mr. Cottenham died. Dozens ofother companies used convicts, too, many
of them now defunct or absorbed into larger businesses. Executives at some of the corporate descendants say they
shouldnt be asked to bear responsibility for the actions of executives long dead or the practices of businesses
spokesman Thomas R. Ferrall says that concerns voiced about convict leasing by Elbert H. Gary, the companys
chairman at the time, helped set the stage for "knocking the props out from under" the system. "We think U.S. Steel
proper was a positive player in this history was a force for good," Mr. Ferrall says. The companys early presence
in Alabama is still evident a few miles from downtown Birmingham. There, on a hillside overgrown with brush,
hundreds of sunken graves litter the ground in haphazard rows. A few plots bear stones. No other sign or path marks
the place. Only a muddy scar in the earth the recently filled-in mouth of a spent coal mine suggests that this is
the cemetery of the Pratt Mines complex. "The convicts were buried out there," says Willie Clark, an 82-year-old
retired coal miner. He grew up in a house that overlooked the cemetery and the sprawling mine operation that once
living in the ramshackle "Pratt City" neighborhood surrounding the old mining site still call the graveyard the "U.S.
Steel cemetery." There are no records of those buried on the hillside. Mr. Cottenham could be among them. When
Mr. Cottenham died in 1908, U.S. Steel was still new to convict leasing. But by then, the system was decades old and
a well-oiled machine. After the Civil War, most Southern states set up similar penal systems, involving tens of
thousands of African-Americans. In those years, the Southern economy was in ruins .
County, in the cotton country of southern Alabama, nearly 700 men were leased between June 1891 and November
1903, most for $6 a month, according to the leatherbound Convict Record still kept in the courthouse basement. Most
were sent to mines operated by Tennessee Coal or Sloss-Sheffield Steel & Iron Co., another major industrial presence
what the state paid them and what they spent to maintain the convicts while in their custody. Some convicts had
enough money to pay the fees themselves and gain their freedom; the many who didnt were instead put to work.
Company lease payments for the convicts time at hard labor then were used to cover the fees.
Feminism
The oppression of women is not the ahistorical products an
abstract system of patriarchy its the historical product of the
emergence of a classed society founded on the logic of surplus
accumulation The shift from necessity to surplus transformed
division of labor into a tool to concentrate wealth and power
over women
Cloud 3 (Dana, Prof. Comm at UT, Marxism and Oppression, Talk for Regional Socialist
Conference, KC)
Because homosexuality was not an identifiable category of such societies, discrimination on that basis
of capitalism when colonialism and slavery drove the economic system. The prohibition against gays
oppression have in
did not always exist and are not endemic to human nature .
They were created in the interest of ruling classes in society and continue to
and lesbians is a relatively modern phenomenon. But what all forms of
common is that they
benefit the people at the top of society, while dividing and conquering the rest of us so as to weaken
the common fight against the oppressors. The work of Marxs collaborator Friederich Engels on The
Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State in some respects reflects the Victorian times in
which in was written. Engels moralizes about womens sexuality and doesnt even include gay and
would help provide health care, family leave, unemployment insurance, access to primary and higher
Identity Politics
Identity politics have spurred the worst tragedies in human
history
Piven 95 (Frances Fox Piven, Professor of Political Science and Sociology at The Graduate Center,
City University of New York., Globalizing Capitalism and the Rise of Identity
Politics,http://socialistregister.com/socialistregister.com/files/SR_1995_Piven.pdf, KC)
identity politics is ubiquitous because of what it offers people in protection, comfort and
pride, it has also been a bane upon humankind, the source of unending
tragedy. The fatal flaw in identity politics is easily recognized. Class politics, at least in
principle, promotes vertical cleavages, mobilizing people around axes which
broadly correspond to hierarchies of power, and which promote challenges
to these hierarchies. By contrast, identity politics fosters lateral cleavages
which are unlikely to reflect fundamental conflicts over societal power and
resources and, indeed, may seal popular allegiance' to the ruling classes that
exploit them. This fatal flaw at the very heart of a popular politics based
on identity is in turn regularly exploited by elites . We can see it dramatically, for
example, in the unfolding of the genocidal tribal massacres in Rwanda,
fomented by Hutu governing class which found itself losing a war with
Tutsi rebels. And of course the vulnerability to manipulation resulting from
identity politics is as characteristic of modem societies as tribal societies.
Thus identity politics makes people susceptible to the appeals of modern
nationalism, to the bloody idea of loyalty to state and flag, which is surely
one of the more murderous ideas to beset humankind. State builders cultivate a
sort of race pride to build allegiance to an abstract state, drawing on the ordinary and
human attachments that people form to their group and their locality and
drawing also on the animosity to the Other that is typically the
complement of these attachments. The actual group that people experience, the local
But if
territory that they actually know, comes to be joined with the remote state and its flag, just as the
external enemy of the state comes to be seen as the menacing Other, now depicted as a threat not
only to the group and its locale, but as a threat to the nation state. I hardly need add that this melding
of identity politics with state patriotism can stir people to extraordinary acts of destruction and selfdestruction in the name of mystical abstractions, and the identity politics that energizes them.
Napoleon was able to waste his own men easily in his murdurous march
across Europe because they were quickly replaced with waves of recruits
drawn from a French population enthused by their new attachment to the
French nation. And World War I showed that modem states could extract
even more extraordinary contributions of life and material wellbeing from
their citizenry, as Europeans seized by nationalist passions joined in a
frenzy of destruction and death in the name of state patriotism.' In the
United States, popular politics has always been primarily about race,
ethnicity and religion. Perhaps a population of slaves and immigrants of diverse origins,
captive and free, provided some objective basis for the cultivation of identity politics, constructed by
ordinary people themselves, and of course by political and economic elites who have never been slow
to see that division ensured domination.'"
Race
Capitalism is the root cause of slavery and racism
Crawford 5 (Henry Winant. Graduate student @ Queens U studying race theory and critical
whiteness The New Politics of Race: Globalism, Difference, Justice., Canadian Journal of Sociology
Online, March-April 2005, Henry Winnant is a professor of sociology @ UC Berkeley, KC)
This is perhaps one of the books greatest strengths, insofar as it reminds the reader that, as Winant
writes, the pattern of northern racialized rule has continued unbroken (p. 88). Furthermore, that
what exists now is global apartheid, and this is evidenced in the massive exploitation and endemic
indebtedness of the global South as well as in the global distribution of resources.
I think it is fair to say that they are dialectical: State pol- icy, law,
and popular discourse make race and gender matter for one's life chances ;
people embrace these categories because they matter, but they do not inhabit them in the
ways hegemonic institutions and discourses construct them ; popular enactments in
turn reshape hegemonic practices. Class is often the Cinderella in analyses of this threesome with respect to
national projects. That is, it is treated as a "lifestyle choice of you and your family ," as
embrace.
Lillian Robinson (1995:8) puts it when criticizing scholars who treat class as if it were a set of cultural choices that
states.
Perhaps the best point of departure is the collective volume that emerged from the fortieth
anniversary conference on Capitalism and Slavery, held at Bellagio, Italy, and was published in 1987.
The editors, Barbara L. Solow and Stanley L. Engeriran, divided the non-biographical contributions
into three parts, corresponding to three major hypotheses on the relationship between economic
development and slavery in the British empire. We may appropriately test the first hypothesis most
briefly. Williams only briefly broached the subject and his assessment has not been of major
economic
factors rather than racism occupied pride of place in the switch to African
historiographical interest in the subsequent literature. Williams took the position that
labour in the plantation Americas, that slavery 'was not bom of racism' but rather
slavery led to racism. Although some recent interpretations make racial
preferences and inhibitions central to the choice of African labour , Williams's
order of priorities, if not his either-or approach, is supported by a survey of hundreds of
articles. They show virtual unanimity on the primacy of economics in
accounting for the turn toward slave labour. Non-economic factors, such as race or
religion, entered into the development of New World slavery only as a limiting parameter. Such factors
affected the historical sequence by which entire human groups (Christians, Jews, Muslim North
Africans, Native Americans) were excluded from liability to enslavement in the Atlantic system. Since
Williams published his book, the main change in the historiographical context of origins is an increase
in the number and variety of actors brought into the process. That broader context complicates the
The capitalist system with a tiny minority of people owning the means of
production oppresses and exploits the working class. This, indeed, constitutes the essence
of capitalism: the extraction of surplus value and profit from workers by capitalist employers. These capitalists may
be white, black, men, women, (high caste) Brahmin, or(untouchable) Dalit. In India as well as in Britain, there
are millionaire men, women, Brahmin, and Dalit capitalists and politicians. Marxist analysis also suggests
that class conflict, which is an essential feature of capitalist society, will result in an overthrow of
capitalism given the right circumstances. There has been considerable
debate, historically, in different countries over whether this can, or will, be
achieved either by revolutionary force or by evolutionary measures and steps
for example through the evolutionary, reformist measures of social democracy). Important examples of such debate- between
protagonists of revolutionary socialism and those of evolutionary socialism/social democracy are the late nineteenth century debates in
Germany over Revisionism associated with the revisionist Eduard Bernstein (e.g., in 1899, his The Prerequisites for Socialism and the
Tasks of Social Democracy see Tudor and Tudor, 1988) on the one hand, and on the other hand, , orthodox revolutionary Marxist critics
of revisionism such as Rosa Luxemburg (for example, in Reform and Revolution, in 1899/1900. Today such debates are carried on
between revolutionary socialists/ Marxists such as the various Trotskyite groups, parties and internationals on the one hand, and social
democratic parties and internationals on the other. As for where the former communist parties stood, a historical transition was made in
the 1970s and 1980s by various communist parties and leaders when they foreswore revolution and adopted gradualist social
democracy. 3 These arguments and conflicts take place within many leftist revolutions. Today, for example, in Venezuela, Trotskyites
argue for a revolutionary rupture with capitalism, while others urge caution, an accommodation with capitalism and capitalists. (See
Gonzalez, 2007; ISG, 2007; Esteban et al, 2008; Fuentes, 2009.) And Trotskyite, revolutionary, anti-capitalist groups and parties have
persistent major problems working within larger left formations, united fronts and popular fronts. Thus PSOL at first joined the PT
government in Brazil but left in 2004 in protest at(Brazilian President) Lulas neoliberal pro-capitalist policies, and in 2007 Sinistra
Critica pulled out of the broader left Rifondazione Comunista. There is considerable current debate within the Trostskyite movement and
internationals over the incompatibility of socialist revolution with social democratic broader parties. (See, for example, Bensaid, 2009.) 4
there are denials, by postmodernists and other theorists of complexity and hybridity and postmodernists
and post-ists of various stripes, that we no longer live in a period of metanarratives,
such as mass capitalism, social class, working class, 7 or, indeed,
woman or black. 5 For many theorists since the 1980s, history is at an
end, the class war is over, and we all exalt in the infinite complexity and
hybridity of subjective individualist consumerism . It is interesting, and rarely remarked upon,
that arguments about the death of class are not advanced regarding the
capitalist class. Despite their horizontal and vertical cleavages (Dumenil and Levy, 2004), they appear to
know very well who they are. Nobody is denying capitalist class
consciousness. Opposition to the rule of capital and its policies (either its wider policies, or
specific policy) is weakened when the working class is divided, by race, caste,
religion, tribe, or by other factors. When I say divided, I am using it here
as an active verb, to mean that the capitalist class divides the working class, for
example by its ideological state apparatuses- its media, its formally or
informally segregated school systems. This is divide and rule. Examples of schooling systems
perpetuating such divisions are in apartheid South Africa, Arab-Jew segregated schooling
in Israel, Protestant-Catholic religiously segregated Northern Ireland , and parts
of the USA in particular its inner cities, and, indeed, parts of Britain, where, in some inner-city working-class schools,
more than 90 percent of the pupils are from minority ethnic groups . 6 In
many of the cities of the USA and Britain the ethnic division is localized. But such
segregation and division is overwhelmingly a class stratification. It is
rarely the millionaire and capitalist minorities who live in the ghetto, or
poor minorities or whites who live in millionaires row.
The problem with standard critical race theory is the narrowness of its
remit, says Mike Cole. One of the main tenets of critical race theory is that "white supremacy" is the
norm in societies rather than merely the province of the racist right (the other
major tenet is primacy of "race" over class). There are a number of significant problems with this use of the term
"white supremacy". The first is that it homogenises all white people together in positions of power and privilege.
Writing about the US, critical race theorist Charles Mills acknowledges that not "all whites are better off than all nonwhites, but ... as a statistical generalisation, the objective life chances of whites are significantly better". While this
UK. That such statistics are indicative of racism, however, is beyond doubt, and to interpret them it is useful to
employ the concept of "racialisation". Given that there is widespread agreement among geneticists and social
the fact that Islamophobia is not necessarily triggered by skin colour. It is often sparked by one or more (perceived)
Times Higher advocating critical race theory ("All shades of a wide white world", October 19) by citing the US journal
"the
abolition of whiteness is ... not just an optional extra in terms of defeating
capitalism (nor something which will be necessarily abolished postcapitalism) but fundamental to the Marxist educational project as praxis ".
Indeed, for Preston, "the abolition of capitalism and whiteness seem to be
fundamentally connected in the current historical circumstances of
Western capitalist development".From my Marxist perspective, coupling the
"abolition of whiteness" to the "abolition of capitalism" is a worrying
development that, if it gained ground in Marxist theory, would most
certainly further undermine the Marxist project.I am not questioning the sincerity of the
Race Traitor , which seeks the "abolition of the racial category 'white'". Elsewhere, Preston has argued
protagonists of "the abolition of whiteness", nor suggesting in any way that they are anti-white people but merely
questioning its extreme vulnerability to misunderstanding. Anti-racists have made some progress in the UK at least
in making anti- racism a mainstream rallying point, and this is reflected, in part, in legislation. Even if it were a good
conception of racism. Only then can we fully understand its multiple manifestations and work towards its eradication.
transformative theory of racea theory that reclaims revolutionary class politics in the interests of contributing
By freedom, I do not simply mean a legal or cultural articulation of individual rights as proposed by bourgeois race
theorists. Instead,
(Patricia Hill Collins), and neo-conservative culturalism (Shelby Steele), share a philosophical-ideological commitment
to the subject.
matter. The philosophico-cultural moveas Asante once put it in a representative formulation, Afrocentricism
presents "the African as subject rather than object" ("Multiculturalism" 270)is in fact part of the positing of a Black
"essence" that can form the basis for a cross-class alliance between black workers and black business, between, that
is, exploited and exploiters.
Structural Violence
Cap causes massive Structural violence that outweighs
everything
Abu-Jamal 98-[Mumia, award winning Pennsylvania journalist, quotes James Gilligan, Professor at
Harvard/NYU, A quiet and deadly violence, http://www.flashpoints.net/mQuietDeadlyViolence.html]
The deadliest form of violence is poverty. --Ghandi It has often been observed that
America is a truly violent nation, as shown by the thousands of cases of social and
communal violence that occurs daily in the nation. Every year, some 20,000
people are killed by others, and additional 20,000 folks kill themselves. Add to this
the nonlethal violence that Americans daily inflict on each other, and we begin to
see the tracings of a nation immersed in a fever of violence. But, as remarkable,
and harrowing as this level and degree of violence is, it is, by far, not the most
violent features of living in the midst of the American empire. We live, equally immersed,
and to a deeper degree, in a nation that condones and ignores wide-ranging "structural' violence, of a kind
that destroys human life with a breathtaking ruthlessness . Former Massachusetts prison official
and writer, Dr. James Gilligan observes;
Those
excess deaths (or at least a demonstrably large proportion of them) are a function of the class
structure; and that structure is itself a product of society's collective human choices, concerning
how to distribute the collective wealth of the society. These are not acts of God. I am contrasting
suffered by those who occupy the bottom rungs of society, as contrasted by those who are above them.
"structural" with "behavioral violence" by which I mean the non-natural deaths and injuries that are caused by
specific behavioral actions of individuals against individuals, such as the deaths we attribute to homicide, suicide,
soldiers in warfare, capital punishment, and so on. --(Gilligan, J., MD, Violence: Reflections On a National Epidemic
(New York: Vintage, 1996), 192.) This form of violence, not covered by any of the majoritarian, corporate, rulingclass protected media, is invisible to us and because of its invisibility, all the more insidious. How dangerous is it--
submerged beneath the sands of history, buried, yet ever present, as omnipotent as death. In the struggles over
the commons in Europe, when the peasants struggled and lost their battles for their commonal lands (a precursor to
similar struggles throughout Africa and the Americas), this violence was sanctified, by church and crown, as the
'Divine Right of Kings' to the spoils of class battle. Scholars Frances Fox-Piven and Richard A Cloward wrote, in The
New Class War (Pantheon, 1982/1985): They did not lose because landowners were immune to burning and
preaching and rioting. They lost because the usurpations of owners were regularly defended by the legal authority
and the armed force of the state. It was the state that imposed increased taxes or enforced the payment of
increased rents, and evicted or jailed those who could not pay the resulting debts. It was the state that made lawful
the appropriation by landowners of the forests, streams, and commons, and imposed terrifying penalties on those
who persisted in claiming the old rights to these resources. It was the state that freed serfs or emancipated
sharecroppers only to leave them landless. (52) The "Law", then, was a tool of the powerful to protect their
interests, then, as now. It was a weapon against the poor and impoverished, then, as now. It punished retail
violence, while turning a blind eye to the wholesale violence daily done by their class masters.
The law
was,
and is, a tool of state power, utilized to protect the status quo, no matter how op pressive
that status was, or is. Systems are essentially ways of doing things that have concretized into tradition, and
War
Capitalism makes mass nuclear annihilation inevitable.
Webb, 04
(Sam Webb, National Chairman, Communist Party USA. War, Capitalism, and George W. Bush. 420-04. http://www.pww.org/article/view/ 4967/1/207/O)
Capitalism
war would fade and with it the stockpiles of nuclear weapons. But those hopes were dashed. Rather than easing,
the nuclear threat is more palpable in some ways and caches of nuclear weapons
are growing. And our own government possesses the biggest stockpiles by far. Much
like previous administrations, the Bush administration has continued to develop more powerful nuclear weapons,
but with a twist: it insists on its singular right to employ nuclear weapons preemptively in a range of military
situations. This is a major departure from earlier U.S. policy the stated policy of all previous administrations was
that nuclear weapons are weapons of last resort to be used only in circumstances in which our nation is under
severe attack. Meanwhile, todays White House bullies demonize, impose sanctions, and make or threaten war on
states that are considering developing a nuclear weapons capability. Bush tells us that this policy of arming
ourselves while disarming others should cause no anxiety because, he says, his administration desires only peace
and has no imperial ambitions. Not surprisingly, people greet his rhetorical assurances skeptically, especially as it
becomes more and more obvious that his administrations political objective is not world peace, but world
domination, cunningly couched in the language of fighting terrorism. It is well that millions of peace-minded
the world community the other superpower in this unipolar world if the hand of the warmakers in the White
House and Pentagon is to be stayed. A heavy responsibility rests on the American people. For we have the
opportunity to defeat Bush and his counterparts in Congress in the November elections. Such a defeat will be a
body blow to the policies of preemption, regime change, and saber rattling, and a peoples mandate for peace,
disarmament, cooperation, and mutual security. The world will become a safer place. In the longer run, however,
it
2NC Blocks
A2 Cap Sustainable
The neoliberal drive for endless growth is profoundly
unsustainable in an environment of limited resources
Peck and Tickell 1994 (Jamie and Adam, Jamie Peck is the Canada Research Chair in
Urban & Regional Political Economy and Professor of Geography at the University of British
Columbia and Adam Tickell is a professor of Geography and the Vice-Principal at the
University of Birmingham, December, Jungle Law Breaks out: Neoliberalism and GlobalLocal Disorder, Royal Geographical Society, volume 26, issue number 4)
Mechanism in 1992 (see Leyshon 1993). These contradictory tendencies in neoliberal regulation are already becoming
The
pattern of regionalised growth which is so often held up as the paradigmatic post-Fordist
accumulation dynamic, flexible specialisation, has been shown to be dependent upon a
high-trust regulatory environment, under which there are highlydeveloped co-operative relations between economic actors linked to
extensive utilisation of collective services and institutions (Lorenz 1992). These environments, Hirst and Zeitlin
(1992, 76) argue, are incompatible with a neoliberal regime of unregulated
markets and cut-throat competition '.Although it is often argued that high-trust regulatory practices
manifest, as evidence mounts of the fragility of 1980s growth patterns and/or their incompatibility with neoliberalism.
can be constructed (and maintained) in localised enclaves such as Emilia-Romagna, these regulatory systems are now subject to
erosion as they come into contact with the harshly competitive global environment (Amin and Robins 1990; Peck 1994).
A2 Democracy
Democracy cant solve capitalism
Herod 7 (James, Student at Graceland College and Columbia University, 35 year
old author on anarchy, May 2007, Getting Free,
http://www.jamesherod.info/Getting_Free.pdf)
governments dont
government
tool, and they know how to use it and keep it from being turned
against the m. Although building worker-controlled political parties, then using those parties to win elections and get
control of governments, and then using those governments to establish socialism seemed like a plausible enough strategy when it
was initiated in the mid-nineteenth century, it's way past time for us to recognize and admit that it simply hasn't worked
U.S. politics under todays mature capitalism are not about the welfare of the
people) as envisioned in classical notions of democracy, but rather
about which party can best deliver profitability to investors and corporations . There
Boiled down,
are continuing debates between those who simply want to slash labor costs, taxes, and regulations for the rich,
and those who want to do some of that but also use some regulation and government spending to encourage
higher wages and demand-driven growth.
need the full power of the state, there is no time for debate or inquiry or
deliberation. There is no time for the setting of conditions. There is only time to
give them exactly what they want. Or else! Egged on by the news media, all responsible
people fall in line or face ostracism. As for education and the social services that mark the good
society, well, they have to wait in line and hope something is left after the capitalist master is fed. In stagnant
times, it is a long wait. Marxs work provides searing insights on how to understand a society that, at the
Marx argued
that a core contradiction built into capitalism was between its ever-increasing
socialization and enhancement of productivity , and its ongoing system of private appropriation
surface, appears to be one thing but, at its deeper productive foundations, is something else.
of profit. In other words, one of the great virtues of capitalism, in comparison to the relatively stagnant societies
that preceded it, is that it is constantly revolutionizing societys productive capacity and the social
interconnections between people within production. But ,
A2 Disease
Capitalism prevents innovation for life-saving medicine
Palecek 9 (Mike, Iowa author, former federal prisoner for peace, and newspaper reporter,
Aug 12, [www.marxist.com/capitalism-versus-science.htm])
Most research done by the private sector is centered on finding new anti-retroviral drugs - drugs that patients will
have to continue taking for a lifetime. There has been a push to fund research for an AIDS vaccine and, more
recently, an effective microbicide. However, the vast majority of this funding comes from government and nonprofit groups. The pharmaceutical industry simply isnt funding the research to tackle this pandemic. And why would
patented or patentable. Drug companies will not have the ability to make massive profits off the production of this
drug, so they are not interested. Researchers have been forced to raise money themselves to fund their important
work. Initial trials, on a small scale, are now under way and the preliminary results are very encouraging. But it has
been two years since this breakthrough was made and serious study is only just getting underway. The U of As
faculty of medicine has been forced to beg for money from government and non-profit organizations. To date, they
have not received a single cent from a for-profit medical organization.
1918 Spanish flu pandemic was less than 2.5 percent, and most of those deaths are now attributed to secondary
(C.) Co-evolution.
Posner 2005
Richard, Judge, 7th Circuit court of Appeals, Catastrophe: Risk and Response, pg. 22
AIDS illustrates the further point that despite the progress made by modern medicine in the diagnosis and
treatment of diseases, developing a vaccine or cure for a new (or newly recognized or newly virulent) disease may
be difficult, protracted, even impossible. Progress has been made in treating ATDS, but neither a cure nor a vaccine
has yet been developed. And because the virus's mutation rate is high, the treatments may not work in the long
run.7 Rapidly mutating viruses are difficult to vaccinate against, which is why there is no vaccine for the common
cold and why flu vaccines provide only limited protection.8 Paradoxically, a treatment that is neither cure nor
vaccine, but merely reduces the severity of a disease, may accelerate its spread by reducing the benefit from
avoiding becoming infected. This is an important consideration with respect to AIDS, which is spread mainly by
voluntary intimate contact with infected people. Yet the fact that Homo sapiens has managed to survive every
disease to assail it in the 200,000 years or so of its existence is a source of genuine comfort, at least if the focus is
on extinction events. There have been enormously destaictive plagues, such as the Black Death, smallpox, and now
Natural
selection favors germs of limited lethality; they are fitter in an
evolutionary sense because their genes are more likely to be spread
if the germs do not kill their hosts too quickly. The AIDS virus is an example of a
AIDS, but none has come close to destroying the entire human race. There is a biological reason.
lethal virus, wholly natural, that by lying dormant yet infectious in its host for years maximizes its spread. Yet there
lived in small, scattered bands, which would have limited the spread of disease), despite wider human contacts that
make it more difficult to localize an infectious disease. The reason is improvements in medical science. But the
comfort is a small one. Pandemics can still impose enormous losses and resist prevention and cure: the lesson of
the AIDS pandemic. And there is always a first time.
Bacteria and viruses that are deadly to one type of creature can
evolve quickly to infect another. While the swine flu outbreak is the
latest example, a host of infectious and deadly diseases have
hopped from animals to humans and from humans to animals. The
cross-species infection can originate on farms or markets, where conditions foster mixing of
pathogens, giving them opportunities to swap genes and gear up to kill previously
foreign hosts (i.e. you). Or the transfer can occur from such seemingly benign activities as letting a
performance monkey on some Indonesian street corner climb on your head. Microbes of two varieties can even
gather in your gut, do some viral dancing, and evolve to morph you into a deadly, contagious host. Diseases passed
quite limited because of the historically straightforward application of immunizations. The growing number and type of vaccine targets, coupled with
novel, more effective formulations, adjuvants, and routes of delivery for vaccines, will undoubtedly create new challenges. Although progress in vaccine
technology has the potential to prevent illness and reduce the economic burden of diseases in the long term, thereby improving outcomes, ongoing
problems remain in the short term. Who should and will pay for these anticipated improvements in health? How will this period of change be managed?
This article describes the present vaccine revolution and attempts to answer these questions, which are becoming increasingly important in managed
Universal
immunization against certain diseases has led to the eradication of
smallpox and has almost completely eliminated many other infectious
agents in the U.S., including those causing diphtheria, tetanus,
poliomyelitis, measles, mumps, rubella, and Haemophilus influenzae type
care.The advent of vaccines to prevent deadly childhood illnesses was one of the great success stories of the 20th century.
invasive disease.1 However, many other diseases, including the three biggest killershuman immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection, tuberculosis, and
malariahave not yet been adequately targeted by a vaccine effective enough to achieve a similar outcome. In addition, some common vaccinepreventable diseases such as influenza and pertussis continue to cause significant morbidity and mortality, primarily in adults, because of the under-
mortality in childhood now include protecting against infectious agents that can result in significant morbidity. Scientific progress and these broadened
applications will no doubt result in improved health-based outcomes, but progress often comes at a significant short-term cost. Although it is true that
improved outcomes are the goal of health care technology and that preventing disease is preferable to treatment, thus reducing overall costs, confusion
persists about the best course going forward. Given the current underutilization of vaccines (even when patients have no copayments) and the expanding
use of vaccines to cover morbidity rather than mortality, managed care organizations (MCOs) are confronted with several questions, particularly in terms
of benefits, reimbursement, and formulary management. To accept the newer vaccine technology, MCOs will require not only improved mortality data but
also cost-efficacy data with long-term proven outcomes accompanied by lower medical and pharmacy expenses. For example, the use of new vaccines for
human papillomavirus (HPV) must result in fewer cases of cervical cancer as well as in reduced cost savings in related medical expenses, such as for Pap
smears and colposcopies. In this way, a manufacturer might be able to differentiate its product from a competing one. For several years, cost efficacy has
been used to evaluate other classes of injectable vaccines, and it is a good method of comparing products when no head-to-head studies have been
conducted. MCOs are beginning to analyze data involving comparisons of outlays for resources for specific outcomes, such as adverse events and
hospitalizations. Most vaccines in use today were developed by one of two classic methods. In the 19th century, Salmon and Smith pioneered the
inactivation of an organism and the injection of immunogenic components.4 The attenuation of live organisms, as first attempted by Louis Pasteur,5 was
adapted to modern vaccine technology by Enders et al. in the 1950s.6 All but three vaccines in the currently recommended immunization schedule in the
U.S.those directed against hepatitis B virus, rotavirus, and HPVare manufactured according to these techniques. In the 1970s, a pair of key discoveries
the expression of proteins in plasmids and the ability to sequence DNAushered in the era of genetic engineering.7,8 A decade later, in 1986, these
techniques were used to develop the first recombinant vaccine, the hepatitis B vaccine.9 Recombinant technology enables the target antigen to be
produced outside the context of the parent organism, such that no live, infectious agents or potentially toxic components of those agents need to be
handled. As a result, the quantity of antigen produced, the vaccines safety, and the purity of the product are improved; efficacy is increased; costs are
reduced; and potential side effects are minimized. Since the advent of the hepatitis B vaccine in 1998, one recombinant vaccine, LYMErix, has been
approved. Although LYMErix was effective against Lyme disease in adults,10 GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) withdrew this product in 2002 because of declining
sales and negative publicity.11 This outcome has dampened enthusiasm for further development of human vaccines against Lyme disease, but it has not
had an adverse impact on the prospects for creating a vaccine that uses a similar strategy of a recombinant protein against other infectious agents. Many
other recombinant vaccines are currently being evaluated in clinical trials to determine their activity against such varied targets as malaria, hookworm,
cytomegalovirus, parvovirus, and anthrax.12 The second major advance in the 1980s was in the area of adjuvantation. Adjuvants are used to improve the
presentation of an antigen to the immune system or to enhance its immunogenicity. The only adjuvants currently approved in the U.S. for the concomitant
use with vaccines are the mineral salts calcium phosphate and alum.13 Mineral salts are still used in some inactivated vaccines, but their effectiveness is
modest at best. For example, aluminum salts were included in early influenza vaccine formulations but were removed when the vaccines showed
comparable immunogenicity in the absence of these salts.14 In 1987, however, the application of conjugation as a method of adjuvantation led to the
approval of a highly effective vaccine against H. influenzae type b, a leading cause of invasive infections, including meningitis, in children.15
Polysaccharide-based vaccines in general are poorly immunogenic, particularly in small children, because of a lack of T-cell help for the B-celldependent
antibody response. Conjugating polysaccharides to a toxoid carrier converts these antigens from T-independent to T-dependent antigens, thus improving
overall immunogenicity and lengthening the period of effectiveness.16 The success of this approach has led to the development of other polysaccharide
conjugate vaccines, including Prevnar (Wyeth), a 7-valent pneumococcal conjugate vaccine approved in the U.S. in 2000, and Menactra (Sanofi-Pasteur), a
quadrivalent meningococcal vaccine licensed in the U.S. in 2004. A vaccine directed against the serotypes of Salmonella typhi, which is responsible for
typhoid fever, is now being studied.12 The ongoing problem of suboptimal immunogenicity of protein-based vaccines, coupled with the success of
conjugation for polysaccharide-based vaccines, is driving a search for new vaccine adjuvants. We predict that the development of virtually all vaccines
co-expressed with a set of backbone genes responsible for high growth in eggs but attenuation in humans, allowing the production of safe, high-yield
vaccines.17 Undesirable traits, such as the multibasic cleavage site found in the main attachment protein of highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses, can
be edited out at the DNA level before rescue of the virus, further enhancing safety.18 The use of plasmid-based methods also has the potential to hasten
production of reassortant vaccines (i.e., vaccines from viruses created by combining genes from more than one organism or strain). The current process
for making influenza vaccine relies on selecting appropriate vaccine strains from among many candidates generated by chance, whereas molecular
methods allow complete control over the output, eliminating several steps in the generation of seed stocks.17 A variety of virus types, engineered by
these methods to be safe in humans, are being used to express immunogenic foreign proteins outside of the context of the virulent parent organism. As an
example, adenoviruses in which critical virulence genes are deleted have been used to express proteins from HIV19 and are being utilized in clinical trials
for many other pathogens such as the Ebola virus and malaria.12 It may be possible to create vaccine cocktails directed against several different
pathogens by inserting multiple proteins into a single vector or by mixing several vaccines made with the same viral vector but expressing different
proteins.20 It is also possible to deliver the immunogenic proteins without using a replication-competent, live virus. Virus-like particles (VLPs) are selfassembling constructs that express a viral antigen, but they do not contain the necessary material to replicate. This technology was used to develop
Gardasil, Mercks vaccine to protect against HPV, approved in 2006.21 In conjunction with new technology for vaccines, adjuvants are also needed. New
compounds may enhance immunogenicity quantitatively, by increasing the levels of protective immune responses, and qualitatively, by eliciting
responses from different arms of the immune system or by broadening the scope of covered immunogens. This advance has the potential to improve
overall outcomes and achieve cost-savings by allowing lower doses to be used and, possibly, by eliminating or postponing the need for booster injections.
Although no new adjuvants have been approved in the U.S. since the original licensing of the mineral salts, several compounds appear close to being
approved. The squalene-containing, oil-in-water emulsion adjuvant MF59 from Novartis has been approved in Europe for use in influenza vaccines targeted
to the elderly population.22 In a clinical trial in humans, another oil-in-water emulsion from GSK enhanced the immunogenicity of a potential pandemic
influenza vaccine. This vaccine enabled the dose to be reduced, and it induced responses that were cross-reactive in several clades (distinct virus
groupings).23Clinical trials of GSKs VLP-based HPV vaccine Cervarix have shown similar cross-protective responses to subtypes not included in the
vaccine, which might be attributable to the novel adjuvant ASO4.21,24,25 The ability of certain adjuvants to enhance the levels of memory B cells and
antibodies, in some cases to numbers much higher than those seen with natural infection,26 has implications for the longevity of the response as well. In
one study comparing ASO4 plus alum with alum alone against HPV, significantly higher antibody titers were observed when ASO4 was included.26 This
advantage was maintained during long-term follow-up. These dual benefitsextending the time that antibody levels are maintained above the threshold
required for neutralization of the organism and enhancing the capacity of the patient to respond to a booster immunizationare important for future
planning and estimating costs. However, we need to better define the correlates of immunity for specific vaccines. The threshold necessary for
neutralization differs among various organisms; knowing this parameter and other related measures is desirable and sometimes necessary. Advances in
vaccine technology necessitate concomitant advances in vaccine immunology. Considering the rising costs of research and development, another
desirable feature of adjuvants is their ability to be paired with multiple antigens so that they can be included in different vaccines. For example, ASO4 has
been studied in conjunction with both hepatitis B and HPV vaccines.26 This capability can reduce the vaccines developmental costs and the time to
market. With each new adjuvant and each new combination of adjuvant and vaccine, the advantages of increased immunogenicity, longevity, and perhaps
broadened coverage of strains must be balanced with the potential for increased reactogenicity. In this context, reactogenicity refers to the generally
undesirable effects of the vaccine, typically mediated by the immune response to the vaccine rather than by the products direct toxicological effects.
Redness or swelling at an injection site are two common examples. Despite this rapid technical progress, vaccines were not on the radar screen for
managed care before some of the recent product launches. Previously, the extent of managed cares involvement was limited to assisting in acquiring
supplies for some integrated systems, working with quality on Health Plan Employer Data and Information Set (HEDIS) measures, and participating in
clinics and health fairs. However, the advent of newer vaccines that target diseases causing morbidity rather than mortality in the U.S. (e.g., rotavirus or
herpes zoster) is encouraging MCOs to perform more clinical and economic analyses in order to ensure that their investments in vaccination are being
maximized. The entry of the live attenuated influenza vaccine FluMist (MedImmune) into the market in 2004 and the anticipated introduction of a second
HPV vaccine (Cervarix, GSK) present new challenges. These products target essentially the same disease processes as those targeted by vaccines already
approved, but they differ in their approach and, potentially, in their clinical effectiveness. The availability of similar products is relatively new in the world
of vaccines, and MCOs will have to evaluate them closely in terms of their efficacy, safety, and economic impact. For example, the question confronting
MCOs, in view of the HPV vaccine (Gardasil), as well as ASO4, and MF59, is whether the potential of lower reactogenicity from an established adjuvant is
more important than the potential for a stronger and possibly more durable immunogenic response. Ultimately, we might simply derive the answer if we
know which product provides better protection against the HPV types most commonly linked to cervical cancer in a cost-effective manner. These types of
analyses place a greater value on cost-effectiveness, clinical, and budget-impact data for the newer vaccinesdata that have been lacking in the past.
Although short-term benefits offer immediate returns to MCOs, it would be irresponsible for these health plans to focus exclusively on these benefits and
deny coverage of vaccines in an effort to save money. Such restrictions place the broader population at risk, and they may have the unintended
consequence of damaging a companys reputation. Further, a focus on short-term benefits puts health plans at a disadvantage in terms of competing for
participants during enrollment; most plans offer broad vaccine coverage, although there might be restrictions based on product labels, guidelines, or age
limitations. Another way to increase the value of future vaccines would be to quantify both the possible short-term and long-term cost offsets attributable
to the availability of the specific product. Again, because it is crucial that MCOs not waste money, the emphasis should be on outcomes and costeffectiveness. In concert with the advances in vaccine engineering and adjuvantation, novel routes of delivery are also being investigated. Intradermal
delivery directly to an environment rich in antigen-presenting cells (APCs) is considered to be a dose-sparing measure for several vaccines, including those
used for HIV and influenza.27 Needle-free variants of this route, such as trans-dermal patches and electroporation, are also being tested for conditions as
diverse as influenza, travelers diarrhea, and melanoma.12,28,29 Mucosal delivery, which has the advantage of not requiring a needle, is already being
used for several vaccines. The live, attenuated influenza vaccine FluMist is given as a nasal spray, and the rotavirus vaccine, licensed in the U.S in 2006, is
delivered orally.30,31 The mucosal route of delivery may contribute to the heterovariant cross-protection seen with both of these vaccines by inducing
broader immunity, including mucosal immunoglobulin A. Mucosal delivery is also being studied for several other potential vaccines directed against
diseases such as HIV infection and tuberculosis.12 In the past, MCOs tended not to pay a premium for convenience alone. If an alternative (needle-free)
route of delivery is associated with improved outcomes, such a premium might be worth the additional investment. The demand for vaccines by
employers and physicians is also an important consideration. Individual health plan members and small employers might be less willing to cover the cost
of new vaccines because of the possibly significant impact on premiums. Small employers with a pool of healthy young employees might not be interested
in covering vaccines for disease states with poorly documented short-term benefits. With the arrival of many new biologic agents and vaccines, as well as
the future role of genomics, the traditional model of medical coverage may need to evolve. The questions of how these innovations will be funded and who
will fund them may become more fluid. In the past, the question of whether different vaccines created an equivalent reduction in morbidity and mortality
for the same cost was not asked; however, this question needs to be addressed. Many payment and reimbursement structuresranging from universal
coverage, effective from the first dollar, to differing levels of reimbursement, such as a standard coverage (100%) versus a nonstandard benefit (a 20%
plan member copayment)will be analyzed and reviewed by those responsible for funding these advances. Again, documented clinical and financial
outcomes and targeted disease states will be playing a significant role in determining how health plans approach the placement of vaccine products. The
role of activism and the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) guidelines will remain important variables. This is because many health
plans routinely follow the ACIPs recommendations; if this reviewing body begins to cover certain vaccines or populations, many plans will probably follow
those guidelines. The success of vaccines against childhood diseases has created enthusiasm for researching additional targets. Mercks Gardasil was the
first vaccine licensed with a primary indication to prevent cervical cancer. A second HPV vaccine, Cervarix is being considered for licensure in the U.S.
Other preventive cancer vaccines are also in development, many of which are in clinical trials,12 and therapeutic vaccines designed to treat or ameliorate
different types of cancer after it has occurred are also being pursued. Therapeutic vaccines for chronic infectious diseases such as hepatitis B, HIV, and
cytomegalovirus are being studied, as are vaccines designed to halt or reverse the progression of Alzheimers disease.12,32 Even with these new goals
and with the trend of therapeutic vaccines moving toward targeting morbidity rather than mortality, we must still ask: How should efficacy be analyzed?
Although 100% efficacy is rarely seen, products with the greatest clinical impact on the broadest population have been favored. With some of the newer
agents, this criterion might not remain as important. For instance, if a vaccine works in a portion of the population and that segment can be identified, an
MCO might direct the products use to ensure its appropriateness for that segment. If a screening tool or a laboratory value can narrow the pool of patients
to those who are most likely to benefit from a vaccine, an MCO might use controls (e.g., prior authorizations) to ensure that the most appropriate patients
are being targeted with that tool or lab value, thereby resulting in improved success and in protection of the companys financial investment. As more
costly vaccines enter the market, the financial implications for health plans and physicians will become more pronounced. The debate over who will pay
and how much will be paid will only intensify. Vaccines remain the single best investment in health care,33 but the costs associated with the increasing
options are beginning to strain both public and private systems. Most health plans have liberal coverage and reimbursement policies for vaccines, and this
approach is considered to offer a good return on investment. As we mentioned earlier, this traditional approach may be re-examined in some areas, with
many alternative options to be explored. With most of these alternatives, one goal remains: making sure that the best vaccines reach the right patients
with few impediments. For physicians, the introduction of newer vaccines has led to a greater number of nontraditional vaccinators, such as pharmacies
and businesses traditionally outside the health care system that are now becoming acquainted with, and challenged by, the financial implications.
Expectations about reimbursement levels and profitability may need to be addressed to ensure that all parties involvedhealth plans, physicians,
employers, and patientsfeel their contribution is significant. In 2007, the immunization schedule for children was already crowded; 15 different vaccines
were recommended for children from birth to six years of age, and 14 were recommended for older children, seven to 18 years of age. Many of these
vaccines are administered multiple times, and adults may need additional boosters. The development and approval of new vaccines against infectious
diseases, as well as other potential uses for them, are likely to exacerbate this problem. A desire to simplify the regimen is fueling a trend toward
combination vaccines. Although many combined vaccines have been used historically (e.g., diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus), new combinations are
being approved for children (e.g., pentavalent vaccines such as GSKs Pediarix [diphtheria, acellular pertussis, tetanus, hepatitis B, and inactivated polio
vaccine]) and for adults (e.g., GSKs Twinrix for hepatitis A and B). The main challenge will be to balance immunogenicity in the newer formulations while
maintaining their benefits of easier administration and lower costs. In this regard, adherence is likely to be a key issue in the future. If it can be shown that
a product improves compliance and clinical outcomes while reducing costs, that vaccine may benefit from preferential positioning by health plans. For
instance, Happe et al., using data from SelectHealth, retrospectively compared children receiving the HEDIS Combination 2 vaccine series with those
receiving each vaccine series individually.34 By two years of age, children in the combination cohort were more likely to have been fully vaccinated, and
vaccinated within the recommended age ranges, than children receiving each series individually (86.9% vs. 74.1%, P < 0.001; 45.2% vs. 37.5%, P = 0.001
respectively). Additional studies with data indicating improved compliance rates and outcomes support the value of this technological advancement.
Vaccines exemplify the premise behind managed care to promote wellness and prevent disease while also avoiding unnecessary treatment-related costs.
The benefits of childhood vaccines in reducing mortality alone are undeniable.1 However, the costbenefit relationship for the new generation of vaccines
that can target reductions in morbidity or prevent rare and costly illnesses such as cancer is less clear. The promise of a brighter future is motivation up to
a point; eventually, however, as the health care dollar is stretched, proven results, both clinical and financial, will be required. In health care, there is an
increasing awareness of the need to look at the bigger picture and to have less siloing between pharmacy and medical divisions. Most organizations
that practice evidence-based medicine acknowledge that both pharmacy and medical dollars often need to be spent in order to realize improved overall
outcomes and reduced long-term expenses. One obstacle that affects this investment is the phenomenon of continuous enrollment in areas of the
community with high competition for plan enrollees. If one plan invests liberally in vaccine benefits but a competitor does not, is the plan making the
investment placed at a disadvantage in terms of premiums? Community-wide standards, agreed upon by health plans, employers, and physicians, would
need to address this matter and ensure that all parties act in concert through their investments in the short-term and long-term health of the community.
A2 Environment
The efficiency caused by capitalism is increasing the demand,
this causes more emissions which destroys the environmentempirically proven
Foster et al 10 (John Bellamy, is editor of Monthly Review and professor of sociology, University of Oregon,
Brett Clark, assistant professor of sociology, North Carolina State University, Richard York, co-editor of Organization
& Environment and associate professor of sociology, University of Oregon, Monthly Review, Capitalism and the
Curse of Energy Efficiency: The Return of the Jevons Paradox, http://monthlyreview.org/2010/11/01/capitalism-andthe-curse-of-energy-efficiency, July 2, 2012) ALK
optimists have tried to argue that the rebound effect is small, and
therefore environmental problems can be solved largely by technological
innovation alone, with the efficiency gains translating into lower
throughput of energy and materials (dematerialization). Empirical evidence of a
substantial rebound effect is, however, strong. For example, technological
advancements in motor vehicles, which have increased the average m iles p er
Technological
g allon of vehicles by 30 percent in the U nited S tates since 1980, have not
reduced the overall energy used by motor vehicles. Fuel consumption per
vehicle stayed constant while the efficiency gains led to the augmentation ,
not only of the numbers of cars and trucks on the roads (and the miles driven), but also their size and
performance (acceleration rate, cruising speed, etc.)so that SUVs and minivans now dot U.S. highways. At the
at the macro level that scale effects come to bear: improvements in energy efficiency can lower the effective cost
Ecological
economists Mario Giampietro and Kozo Mayumi argue that the Jevons Paradox can only
be understood in a macro-evolutionary model, where improvements in
efficiency result in changes in the matrices of the economy, such that the
overall effect is to increase scale and tempo of the system as a whole . Most
of various products, propelling the overall economy and expanding overall energy use.31
analyses of the Jevons Paradox remain abstract, based on isolated technological effects, and removed from the
decoupling of economic growth, from consumption of greater energy and resources. Growth in energy efficiency is
often taken as a concrete indication that the environmental problem is being solved. Yet savings in materials and
energy, in the context of a given process of production, as we have seen, are nothing new; they are part of the
everyday history of capitalist development.36 Each new steam engine, as Jevons emphasized, was more efficient
than the one before. Raw materials-savings processes, environmental sociologist Stephen Bunker noted, are
older than the Industrial Revolution, and they have been dynamic throughout the history of capitalism. Any notion
that reduction in material throughput, per unit of national income, is a new phenomenon is therefore profoundly
ahistorical.37 What is neglected, then, in simplistic notions that increased energy efficiency normally leads to
increased energy savings overall, is the reality of the Jevons Paradox relationshipthrough which energy savings
are used to promote new capital formation and the proliferation of commodities, demanding ever greater resources.
Rather than an anomaly, the rule that efficiency increases energy and material use is integral to the regime of
capital itself.38 As stated in The Weight of Nations, an important empirical study of material outflows in recent
decades in five industrial nations (Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, the United States, and Japan): Efficiency
gains brought by technology and new management practices have been offset by [increases in] the scale of
economic growth.39 The result is the production of mountains upon mountains of commodities, cheapening unit
costs and leading to greater squandering of material resources. Under monopoly capitalism, moreover, such
commodities increasingly take the form of artificial use values, promoted by a vast marketing system and designed
to instill ever more demand for commodities and the exchange values they represent as a substitute for the
economic disaster. In Jevonss eyes, the momentous choice raised by a continuation of business as usual was
simply between brief but true [national] greatness and longer continued mediocrity. He opted for the former the
maximum energy flux. A century and a half later, in our much bigger, more globalbut no less expansive
goals.
A2 Framework
Government controls education and people through
surveillance
Giroux 6 (Henry, Professor at Boston University, Miami University, and Penn State
University and a scholar of critical pedagogy theory, America on the Edge: Henry
Giroux on Politics, Culture, and Education, April 1, https://books.google.com/books?
hl=en&lr=&id=rV7HAAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=henry+giroux+
%22surveillance
%22&ots=7GAuAhT7Bh&sig=Ca47k8ljKf3SDxhvHSxRW8lIvN8#v=onepage&q&f=fal
se)
, the ideology
the military-industrial-
prison-educational-entertainment complex
and
Public
schools not only have more military recruiters; they also have more
military personnel teaching in the classrooms. In addition, schools
now adopt the logic of "tough love" by implementing zero tolerance
policies that effectively model urban public schools after prisons,
just as students' rights increasingly diminish under the onslaught of
a military-style discipline . Students in many schools, especially those in poor urban areas, are routinely
searched, frisked, subjected to involuntary drug tests, maced, and carted off to jail. The not-so-hidden curriculum here is that kids
can't be trusted; their actions need to be regulated preemptively; and their rights are not worth protecting. But children and schools
are not the only victims of a growing militarization of American society.
pedagogy , and one of its consequences is a growing authoritarianism that encourages profit-hungry monopolies, the
ideology of faith-based certainty, and the undermining of any
vestige of critical education, dissent, and dialogue . Education is either severely
narrowed and trivialized in the media as a form of entertainment or converted into training and character reform in the schools.
Within higher educa-tion, democracy appears as an excess, if not a pathology, as right-wing ideologues and corporate wannabe
administrators increasingly police what faculty say, teach, and do in their courses on the grounds that their teaching and research is
either insufficiently patriotic or politically biased. And it is going to get worse. If George W. Bush's first term appeared as an
aberration due to "an electoral quirk, the fruit of a Florida fiasco, the arcane algebra of the U.S. electoral system, and a split decision
of the supreme court,"56 his reelection in 2004 appears as a dangerous turn-ing point in American history. Not only did he receive
slightly more than 50 percent of the popular vote, but he also garnered a mandate for a mode of leadership and set of domestic and
foreign policies that bring the United States close to the edge of a totalitarian regime. George W. Bush's reelection is tantamount to
a revolution aimed at rolling back most of the democratic gains of the last century. Paul Krugman is right in arguing that "Bush isn't
a conservative. He's a radicalthe leader of a coalition that deeply dislikes America as it is. Part of that coalition wants to tear down
the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt, eviscerating Social Security and, eventually, Medicare. Another part wants to break down the
barriers between church and state."57 Under Bush's first term as president, growing appeals to fear and insecurity coupled with a
growing militarism, authoritarianism, and culture of cynicism became the most powerful values and forces shaping public life.
Hence, it is not surprising that Karl Rove, Bush's chief strategist, most admires the Gilded Age under the presidency of William
McKinley (1896-1901), a period when robber barons and strikebreakers ruled, and the government and economy were controlled by
a cabal that was rich, powerful, and ruthless. Given that Bush's second campaign was run by "dividing the country along (the) fault
lines of fear, intolerance, ignorance and religious rule,"" the future dots not look bright for democracy. Critical race theorist
David Theo Goldberg got it right in arguing that the message of the
2004 election was: don't get ill, lose your job, or retire; don't
breathe, swim in the ocean, travel, or think critical thoughts; invest
your life-savings in the stock market even though you will likely
lose it all; go to community college for two years of technical
training rather than to four-year universities where your mind will
be turned to liberal mush; support tax cuts for the wealthy, and
military service for the poor. If you step out of line, remember the
Patriot Act is there to police you at home and a loaded B52 bomber
hovers overhead abroad."
extrem-ists, Christian fundamentalists, and free-market evangelicals, cultural workersincluding composition theorists, critical
educators, artists, and others need to try to connect to the energies of a deep democratic tradition extending from Horace Mann to
W. E. B. Du Bois to John Dewey. Such a critical tradition is both moving and theoretically useful because it not only examines the long
legacy of the struggle for democracy in the schools, but also argues for struggling over public and higher education as one of the
few public spaces left where democracy can actually be taught, experienced, and defended. Educators, students, and others need to
make clear that politics as it is being practiced in Washington, D.C. is no longer about democracy, the public good, public
participation, or critical citizenship. What needs to be recognized is that under the auspices of a diverse group of extremists,
including political, religious, and market fundamentalists, political and educational culture is being transformed by the discourses of
privatization, consumerism, and market-based choice, the spectacle of celebrity, and the revived ethics of social Darwinism.
Abstracted from the ideal of public commitment,
pedagogy that embody the legacy and principles of social justice, equality, freedom, and rights associated with the democratic
concerns of history, space, plurality, power, discourse, identities, morality, and the future.
examining the all-important question as to the conditions of possibility or otherwise of the postulated systematic
The
effect of circumscribing in this way the scope of the one and only
admissible approach is that it automatically disqualifies in the name
of methodology itself, all those who do not fit into the stipulated
framework of discourse. As a result, the propounders of the right method are spared the
vital social concern are a priori excluded from their rational discourse metaphysical, ideological, etc.
difficulties that go with acknowledging the real divisions and incompatibilities as they necessarily arise from the
contending social interests at the roots of alternative approaches and the rival sets of values associated with them.
far from
offering an adequate scope for critical enquiry the advocated
general adoption of the allegedly neutral methodological framework
is equivalent, in fact, to consenting not even to raise the issues that
really matter. Instead, the stipulated common methodological procedure succeeds in transforming the
This is where we can see more clearly the social orientation implicit in the whole procedure. For
enterprise of rational discourse into the dubious practice of producing methodology for the sake of methodology: a
tendency more pronounced in the twentieth century than ever before. This practice consists in sharpening the
recommended methodological knife until nothing but the bare handle is left, at which point the new knife is adopted
for the same purpose. For the ideal methodological knife is not meant for cutting, only for sharpening, thereby
interposing itself between the critical intent and the real objects of criticism which it can obliterate for as long as
the pseudo-critical activity of knife-sharpening for tits own sake continues to be pursued. And that happens to be
precisely its inherent ideological purpose. Naturally, to speak of a common methodological framework in which
one can resolve the problems of a society torn by irreconcilable social interests and pursuing antagonistic
is
delusory,
at
best,
of forms from the Viennese version of logical positivism to Wittgensteins famous ladder that must be thrown
away at the point of confronting the question of values, and from the advocacy of the Popperian principle of little
authority of the ideally common methodology. However, even on a cursory inspection of the issues at stake it out
identity of the two, opposed sides of a structurally safeguarded hierarchical order by means of the reduction of
the people belong to the contending social forces into fictitious rational interlocutors, extracted from their divided
real world and transplanted into a beneficially shared universe of ideal discourse would be nothing sort of
methodological miracle. Contrary to the wishful thinking hypostatized a s a timeless and socially unspecified
this would be far too much to expect precisely because the society in which we live is a deeply divided society. This
is why through the dichotomies of fact and value, theory and practice, formal and substantive rationality, etc.
The conflict-transcending methodological miracle is constantly stipulated as the necessary regulative framework of
the ruling ideology. What makes this approach particularly difficult to challenge is that its value-commitments are
mediated by methodological precepts to such a degree that it is virtually impossible to bring them into the focus of
discussion without openly contesting the framework as a whole. For the conservative sets of values at the roots of
such orientation remain several steps removed from the ostensible subject of dispute as defined in
approaches that lend to articulate the social interests and values of the ruling order through complicated at times
completely bewildering mediations, on the methodological plane. Thus, more than ever before, the task of
ideological demystification is inseparable from the investigation of the complex dialectical relationship between
methods and values which no social theory or philosophy can escape.
aligned with a culture of fear and insecurity (im)mobilized by the call for
patriotism and national security. For instance, prior to September 11, there was a growing concern that the
university was too removed from public life, too secular in its concerns, and too markedly embrace in its embrace of cosmopolitan modernity.
After the events of 9/11, the nature of the
The most powerful members of this group included Joseph Coors in Denver, Richard Mellon
Scaife in Pittsburgh, John Olin in New York City, David and Charles Koch in Wichita, the Smith Richardson family in North Carolina and Harry
Bradley in Milwaukeeall
think tanks, which over the past thirty years have come to include the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Koch Foundation,
the Castle Rock Foundation, and the Sarah Scaife Foundation, This formidable alliance of far rightwing foundations deployed their resources in building and
extremists have labored to put into place an ultraconservative re-education machinean apparatus for producing and
disseminating a public pedagogy in which everything tainted with
the stamp of liberal origin and the word "public" would be contested and destroyed. Commenting on the rise of
this vast right-wing propaganda machine organized to promote the
idea that democracy needs less critical thought and more citizens
whose only role is to consume, noted author Lewis Lapham writes: The quickening
construction of Santa's workshops outside the walls of government and the academy resulted in the
increased production of pamphlets, histories, monographs, and background briefings intended to bring about the
ruin of the liberal idea in all its institutionalized formsthe
demonization of the liberal press, the disparagement of liberal sentiment, the
destruction of liberal educationand by the time Ronald Reagan
arrived in triumph at the White House in 1980 the assembly lines
were operated at full capacity. (Lapham 2004, 38)
Right has
ample political, cultural, and economic resources to attempt to
exercise total control over all aspects of public life and to
implement a political agenda consistent with the goals of
maintaining uncontested U.S. military and economic dominance
globally. Beshara Doumani argues that it is crucial to understand the current
campaign to discipline the academy unleashed after 9/11 as part of a sustained
effort to shift public discourse in favor of four major agendas in foreign and
domestic policies: dominating the globe through the doctrine of preemptive
military intervention with special focus on the Middle East, dismantling the New Deal
society, reversing the gains of the various civil rights and
environmental movements, and blurring the line between the
church and state. (Doumani 2006,15-16) Central to implementing this project is
the desperate attempt by right-wing forces to try "to neutralize two institutions
where there is some minimal commitment to free and open inquiry
the media and university system" (Libal 2005). Right-wing efforts to roll back the gains of the
welfare state and dismantle all institutions that serve the public
good attest to the exercise of a logic of total control that is
characteristic not only of all political movements with a totalitarian
bent, but also symptomatic of a growing authoritarianism in the
United States (Giroux 2005c).
A2 Link Turn
No link turncircumvention is guaranteed in a capitalist
society
Gill 1995 (Stephen, Research Professor of Political Science, Communications and
Culture at York University, Jan-Mar, The Global Panopticon? The Neoliberal State,
Economic Life, and Democratic Surveillance, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political,
volume 20, no 1, p.1-49)
to deepen their activity within civil society and the economy as well as to internationalize as they seek to maximize profits and
offset risks. The use of surveillance and sorting techniques for maximizing knowledge about and influence over workers, savers, and
A2 Permutation
Praxis DA- They strip all of the conceptual theory that allows
us to understand the world
Tumino 1 (Stephen, Professor of Philosophy in English at the University of Pittsburg,
remainder of date, What is Orthodox Marxism and Why it Matters Now More than
Ever, Red Critique, Spring 2001)
is a resistance to the flexodox. Contrary to the common-sensical view of "orthodox" as "traditional" or "conformist" "opinions," is its
other meaning: ortho-doxy not as flexodox "hybridity," but as "original" "ideas." "Original," not in the sense of epistemic "event,"
"authorial" originality and so forth, but, as in chemistry, in its opposition to "para," "meta," "post" and other ludic hybridities: thus
"ortho" as resistance to the annotations that mystify the original ideas of Marxism and hybridize it for the "special interests" of
various groups. The "original" ideas of Marxism are inseparable from their effect as "demystification" of ideologyfor example the
Class is thus an
"original idea" of Marxism in the sense that it cuts through the hype
of cultural agency under capitalism and reveals how culture and
consumption are tied to labor, the everyday determined by the
workday: how the amount of time workers spend engaging in surplus-labor determines the amount of time they get for
reproducing and cultivating their needs. Without changing this division of labor social
change is impossible. Orthodoxy is a rejection of the ideological annotations: hence, on the one hand, the
deployment of "class" that allows a demystification of daily life from the haze of consumption.
resistance to orthodoxy as "rigid" and "dogmatic" "determinism," and, on the other, its hybridization by the flexodox as the result of
theory of value is an elemental truth of Orthodox Marxism that is rejected by the flexodox left as the central dogmatism of a
"totalitarian" Marxism. It is only Marx's labor theory of value, however, that exposes the mystification of the wages system that
disguises exploitation as a "fair exchange" between capital and labor and reveals the truth about this relation as one of exploitation.
Only Orthodox Marxism explains how what the workers sell to the
capitalist is not labor, a commodity like any other whose price is determined by fluctuations in supply and
demand, but their labor-powertheir ability to labor in a system which has systematically "freed" them from
the means of production so they are forced to work or starvewhose value is determined by the amount of time socially necessary
to reproduce it daily. The value of labor-power is equivalent to the value of wages workers consume daily in the form of commodities
that keep them alive to be exploited tomorrow. Given the technical composition of production today this amount of time is a slight
fraction of the workday the majority of which workers spend producing surplus-value over and above their needs. The surplus-value
is what is pocketed by the capitalists in the form of profit when the commodities are sold. Class is the antagonistic division thus
established between the exploited and their exploiters. Without Marx's labor theory of value one could only contest the after effects
The flexodox
rejection of the labor theory of value as the "dogmatic" core of a
totalitarian Marxism therefore is a not so subtle rejection of the principled defense of the
(scientific) knowledge workers need for their emancipation from exploitation
because only the labor theory of value exposes the opportunism of
of this outright theft of social labor-power rather than its cause lying in the private ownership of production.
knowledges (ideology) that occult this exploitation. Without the labor theory of value
socialism would only be a moral dogma that appeals to the sentiments of "fairness" and "equality" for a "just" distribution of the
social wealth that does the work of capital by naturalizing the exploitation of labor under capitalism giving it an acceptable "human
face."
Mszros develops a devastating critique of figures such as von Hayek and Weber, while of the latter he sharply
attacks the limitations of Social Democracy and Stalinism. He takes special aim at the tendency of
Marxists, going as far back as the Second International, to assume that the material
conditions of capitalism can be directly utilized to bring forth a noncapital-producing society. Marx of course said many times that capitalism
engenders the material conditions for its dissolution. The Marxists of the
Second International took this to mean, however, that the centralization of capital
and socialization of labor under capitalism would bring forth
socialism in quasi-automatic fashion. All that was required was a
Party large and strong enough to pick up the pieces once capitalism
collapsed. They therefore felt no responsibility to articulate a vision of a socialist future, using Marx's strictures against
utopianism as a "pillow for intellectual sloth." Mszros stresses that most Marxists failed
to see that capitalism's material conditions cannot be directly
utilized to create a new society, since they are afflicted with
hierarchies of class, gender, and race. Though the material
conditions engender the forms necessary for a reconstruction of
society, the actual creation of these forms hinges, not on historical necessity, but
on the conscious articulation and implementation of human
relations which dispense with the capitalist law of value. Though evolutionist
former,
confidence in the direct applicability of capitalism's material conditions for building socialism seemed to suffer a setback with the
collapse of the Second International in 1914, it obtained a new lease on life with the transformation of the Russian Revolution into a
totalitarian society in the Stalin period. The emergence of statified property as a veritable fetish in Stalin's Russia and Mao's China
convinced even those opposed to Stalinism (such as the Trotskyists) that the abolition of the market and private property
represented an advance upon private capitalism. Marxists dung to the assumption mat the centralization of capital and socialization
of labor, even under a totalitarian regime, proved that history was moving inexorably in the direction of socialism. Burdened by this
assumption, they felt little need to address the question, "what happens after the revolution?" The world which underlay these
assumptions came crashing down by 1989. The 1980s proved without a shadow of a doubt that the centralization of capital and
socialization of labor when held within the integument of the capital-form did not bring humanity closer to a socialist future, but
radical
negation can only be defined as a subordinate moment of the
positive project of labor's hegemonic alternative to capital itself
past attempts to overcome the dehumanizing constraints and contradictions of capitalism, the meaning of
(432,793)
impression that Mszaros has done a much better job arguing for the need of a theory of transition than actually supplying one. It is
of course hardly possible to expect any one thinker, even in a book of this length, to supply a worked-out answer to the question of
Mszaros
is quite right that achieving this is a formidable task which requires
marshaling the fullest energies of today's socialist theorists and
activists. The question, however, is whether Mszros's move away from an Hegelian-centered Marxism leaves him with too
how to ensure that the revolutionary seizure of political power ultimately leads to the abolition of capital itself.
narrow a philosophic base from which to work out the question of "what happens after the revolution" which so concerns him. As
noted earlier, Marx's 1844 projection of a "thoroughgoing Naturalism or Humanism" which transcends both capitalism and what he
called "vulgar communism" was achieved by being deeply rooted in the Hegelian concept of self-movement through "the negation of
the negation." For Marx, the Hegelian notion that the transcendence of alienation proceeds through second negativity was no
metaphysical abstraction, as it .was for Feuerbach; on the contrary, Marx held that insofar as the idea of second negativity is
embodied in forces of revolution like the proletariat, it expresses "the actual movement of history." Given this legacy, can we really
meet the need of projecting a total alternative to capital today if we turn our backs on the Hegelian Marxist legacy? Is it really
possible to work out a comprehensive theory of a post-revolutionary society without the benefit such crucial philosophic concepts as
"the negation of the negation?" And can Marx's legacy truly be recaptured for our time if the relationship between philosophy and
revolution is not reformulated and reconcretized anew? There is no doubt that Mszros's turn away from a philosophic Marxism in
favor of an emphasis on a "theory of transition" rooted in "a strategic view of the social complex" flows from his recognition of the
limitations of the Hegelian Marxist tradition as exemplified in the work of Georg Lukcs. Cogent as much of his critique of Lukcs is,
however, it is important not to throw out the Hegelian baby with the bath water. While many Hegelian Marxists failed in the end- to
meet the historic test of projecting a concept of liberation that points to the transcendence, not just of capitalist private property,
but of capital itself, there remain crucial dimensions of this tradition that we would reject at our peril. I am especially referring to the
development of Marxist-Humanism in the U.S., which emerged from a direct effort to break down the meaning of Hegel's Absolutes
for the contemporary freedom struggles. From the early 1950s through the 1980s, Dunayevskaya sought to achieve continuity with
Marx's unchaining of the dialectic by elucidating the concept of "absolute negativity as new beginning" for today's ideological and
social realities. In discerning the movements from practice of our era as embodying a quest for totally new human relations, she
called for a new movement from theory to make this reaching for the "negation of the negation" explicit and real. Today it may
well be hard to see how forces of revolt embody the idea of second negativity. The failures of actual revolutions are so glaring, the
collapse of revolutionary movements so obvious, and the crisis in projecting a philosophic expression of the working classes' quest
for universality so overwhelming, that the presence of absolute negativity in today's freedom struggles has been obscured.
This
We cannot destroy capitalism with single-issue campaigns , yet the great bulk
of radicals energy is spent on these campaigns.
police brutality, stop union busting , abolish the death penalty, stop the logging of redwoods ,
outlaw the baby seal kill , ban geneti- cally modified foods, stop the World Bank and
the World Trade Or- ganization, stop global warming, and on and
on.
What
we are
doing
generates evils faster than we can ever eradicate them . Although some of these
campaigns use direct action (e.g., spikes in the trees to stop the chain saws or Greenpeace boats in front of the whaling ships to
block the harpoons), for the most part the
to power. These struggles all have value and are needed. Could anyone think that the campaigns against global warming, to free
Leonard Peltier, or to aid the East Timorese ought to be abandoned? Single-issue cam- paigns keep us aware of what's wrong and
sometimes even win gains. But in and of themselves,
We
We
could begin to root ourselves in our local communities . This will be more possible
for some than for others, of course. There can be no hard- and-fast rule.
We could attack the ruling class on all fronts . There are mil-
lions of us, plenty of us to do everything, but everything must include fights on the local level, especially at the three strategic sites
men- tioned earlier.
It is fool- ish
most reformism, is deeply naive . The authors do not fully perceive or understand
the true nature of the enemy we face. Having failed to take into considera- tion the imperatives of a system based on profit taking
they fail to realize that many of the reforms they seek to impose
are incompatible with that system , or that in its current phase, the system is
incapable of accommodating these reforms without selfdestructing, and conse- quently, contemporary capitalists will
fanatically fight these reforms because it is a matter of survival for
them . These theorists of globalization from below, however, do not per- ceive this. They think these
reforms can be imposed, through protests and the withdrawal of
consent. This is where their use of mainstream sociological
categories has gotten in the way . Although they use the term
capital
occasionally,
global
historical system , but are rather merely talking abstractly about "established institutions" and "the power of the
powerful." They claim that such power "is based on the active cooperation of some people and the consent and/or acquiescence of
others."
withdrawal of consent . "So- cial movements can be understood as the collective withdrawal of con- sent to
established institutions." This may be true on an abstract level and in the long run (although apartheid in South Africa survived for
half a century after the vast majority hated it).
But
(for their continued survival as capitalists), our theorists are led to make wildly romantic demands. Long
lists of these demands are presented in their "Draft of a Global Program.@ They want to "end global debt slavery"; "invest in
sustainable development"; "reestablish national full employment poli- cies"; "end the despoiling of natural resources for export";
"end the domination of politics by big money"; "democratize international trade and financial institutions"; "establish a >hot money
tax"; "encourage development, not austerity"; "make global markets work for develop- ing economies"; "establish a Global Economy
Truth Commission"; and on and on. All this is going to be accomplished by a global net- work of autonomous groupings and NGOs,
working through existing governments, corporations, markets, and international financial insti- tutions. I don't think so. An NGO
swarm cannot reconstitute society.
Nor can it nix capitalism , or even fix it B which is really all it seems to be
aiming for. Globalization from below, as described by Brecher, Costello, and Smith, is a badly flawed conceptualization of the struggle for liberation.
ignored , in a live-and-let-live attitude, while we try to build new lives elsewhere. (As mentioned earlier, there is no
elsewhere.) There is at least one thing, wage slavery, that we cant simply stop participating in (but even here there are ways
we can chip away at it).
by something else . This constitutes war, but it is not a war in the traditional sense of armies and tanks; it is a
war fought on a daily basis, on the level of everyday life, by millions of people. It is a war nevertheless because the
accumulators of capital will use coercion, brutality, and murder, as they have always done in the past, to try to block any
rejection of the system. They have always had to force compliance; they will not hesitate to continue to do so. Still, there are
many concrete ways that individuals, groups, and neighborhoods can gut capitalism, which I will enumerate shortly.
We
must always keep in mind how we became slaves ; then we can see more clearly
how we can cease being slaves.
community rights, destroying our tools, imposing taxes, gutting our local markets, and so forth, we were forced onto the labor
market in order to survive, our only remaining option being to sell our ability to work for a wage. Its quite clear, then, how we
can overthrow slavery:
we must reverse this process . We must begin to reacquire the ability to live
without working for a wage or buying the products made by wage slaves (that is, we must free ourselves from the labor market
and the way of living based on it), and embed ourselves instead in cooperative labor and cooperatively produced goods. Another
clarification is needed.
Many people
may not be accustomed to thinking about entire systems and social orders, but everyone knows what a lifestyle is, or a way of
life, and that is the way we should approach it.
, the conquest of political power has been the aim of all rising
classes . Here is the starting point and end of every historic period. This can be seen in the long struggle of the Latin
peasantry against the financiers and nobility of ancient Rome, in the struggle of the medieval nobility against the bishops and in the
struggle of the artisans against the nobles, in the cities of the Middle Ages. In modern times, we see it in the struggle of the
bourgeoisie against feudalism
and revolution are different factors in the development of class society. They condition and complement each other, and are at the
same time reciprocally exclusive, as are the north and south poles, the bourgeoisie and proletariat.
Every legal
constitution is the product of a revolution . In the history of classes, revolution is the act of
political creation, while
society that has already come into being . Work for reform does not
contain its own force
work for
the reform of capitalism ; not the suppression of the wage labour system
instead of suppression of capitalism itself . Does the reciprocal role of legislative reform and
revolution apply only to the class struggle of the past? It is possible that now, as a result of the development of the bourgeois
juridical system, the function of moving society from one historic phase to another belongs to legislative reform and that the
conquest of State power by the proletariat has really become an empty phrase, as Bernstein puts it? The very opposite is true.
What distinguishes bourgeois society from other class societies from ancient society and from the social order of the Middle Ages?
Precisely the fact that class domination does not rest on acquired rights but on real economic relations the fact that
wage
what do I see? The confounded fellow has no collar ! And that is precisely
Bernsteins difficulty.
formal partial suppression or complete loosening of the corporative bonds, by the progressive transformation of the fiscal
administration and of the army. Consequently, when we consider the question from the abstract viewpoint, not from the historic
viewpoint, we can imagine (in view of the former class relations) a legal passage, according to the reformist method, from feudal
society to bourgeois society. But what do we see in reality? In reality, we see that
yoke of capitalism.
Poverty, the lack of means of production, obliges the proletariat to submit itself to the yoke of
capitalism. And no law in the world can give to the proletariat the means of production while it remains in the framework of
bourgeois society, for not laws but economic development have torn the means of production from the producers possession. And
neither is the exploitation inside the system of wage labour based on laws.
fixed by legislation
but by economic factors. The phenomenon of capitalist exploitation does not rest on a legal
disposition but on the purely economic fact that labour power plays in this exploitation the role of a merchandise possessing, among
other characteristics, the agreeable quality of producing value more than the value it consumes in the form of the labourers
means of subsistence. In short, the fundamental relations of the domination of the capitalist class cannot be transformed by means
of legislative reforms, on the basis of capitalist society, because these relations have not been introduced by bourgeois laws, nor
have they received the form of such laws. Apparently, Bernstein is not aware of this for he speaks of socialist reforms. On the
other hand, he seems to express implicit recognition of this when he writes, on page 10 of his book, the economic motive acts
freely today, while formerly it was masked by all kinds of relations of domination by all sorts of ideology. It is one of the peculiarities
of the capitalist order that within it all the elements of the future society first assume, in their development, a form not approaching
socialism but, on the contrary, a form moving more and more away from socialism. Production takes on a progressively increasing
social character. But under what form is the social character of capitalist production expressed? It is expressed in the form of the
large enterprise, in the form of the shareholding concern, the cartel, within which the capitalist antagonisms, capitalist exploitation,
the oppression of labour-power, are augmented to the extreme. In the army, capitalist development leads to the extension of
obligatory military service to the reduction of the time of service and consequently to a material approach to a popular militia. But
all of this takes place under the form of modern militarism in which the domination of the people by the militarist State and the class
character of the State manifest themselves most clearly. In the field of political relations, the development of democracy brings in
the measure that it finds a favourable soil the participation of all popular strata in political life and, consequently, some sort of
peoples State. But this participation takes the form of bourgeois parliamentarism, in which class antagonisms and class
domination are not done away with, but are, on the contrary, displayed in the open. Exactly because capitalist development moves
through these contradictions, it is necessary to extract the kernel of socialist society from its capitalist shell. Exactly for this reason
must the proletariat seize political power and suppress completely the capitalist system. Of course, Bernstein draws other
conclusions. If the development of democracy leads to the aggravation and not to the lessening of capitalist antagonisms,
the
Social-Democracy , he answers us, in order not to render its task more difficult , must by all
means try to stop social reforms and the extension of democratic
institutions , (page 71). Indeed, that would be the right thing to do if the Social-Democracy found to its taste, in the
petty-bourgeois manner, the futile task of picking for itself all the good sides of history and rejecting the bad sides of history.
However, in that case, it should at the same time try to stop capitalism in general, for there is not doubt that latter is the rascal
placing all these obstacles in the way of socialism. But capitalism furnishes besides the obstacles also the only possibilities of
realising the socialist programme. The same can be said about democracy.
superfluous
working class.
or annoying
political forms
(autonomous administration, electoral rights, etc.) which will serve the proletariat as fulcrums in its
task of transforming bourgeois society. Democracy is indispensable to the working class because only through the exercise of its
democratic rights, in the struggle for democracy, can the proletariat become aware of its class interests and its historic task.
New World Order: The Promise of Critical Pedagogy, Sage Publications, Volume 6,
Issue 21, http://people.ufpr.br/~clarissa/pdfs/CPChallengeNeoLiber_Giroux.pdf)
Central to
neoliberal ideology
right-wing politicians
and its implementation by the Bush administra- tion is the ongoing attempt by
Indeed,
when it has provided crucial safety nets for the poor and dispossessed,
but they have no qualms about using the government to bail out
the airline industry after the economic nosedive
George W. Bush
and the events of 9/11 . Nor are there any expressions of outrage from free market cheer-
leaders when the state engages in promoting various forms of corporate welfare by providing billions of dollars in direct and indirect
subsidies to multinational corporations. In short,
casino capitalism , a winner-take-all philosophy suited to lotto players and day traders alike. As
corporate culture extends even deeper
buttressed daily by a culture industry in the hands of a few media giants,
this rigid
(p. 1).
Reform fails
Sinha 2005 (Subir, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Development Studies at
SOAS, University of London, Neoliberalism and Civil Society: Project and
Possibilities, Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader)
given the growing fiscal constrains upon the state, limits the scope for interest-rate manipulation the most important neoliberal
because
the moment you abandon the point of view of totality, you must also
jettison the starting point and the goal, the assumptions and the
dialectical method in the name of exact 'science' should end by branding Marx as a Blanquist. It is no accident
opportunistic for all the implications of this position to emerge clearly.9 But even though the opportunists sought above all to
eradicate the notion of the dialectical course of history from Marxism, they could not evade its ineluctable consequences. The
economic development of the imperialist age had made it progressively more difficult to believe in their pseudo-attacks on the
capitalist system and in the 'scientific' analysis of isolated phenomena in the name of the 'objective and exact sciences'. It was not
One
had to choose: either to regard the whole history of society from a
Marxist point of view, i.e. as a totality, and hence to come to grips
with the phenomenon of imperialism in theory and practice. Or else
to evade this confrontation by confining oneself to the analysis of
isolated aspects in one or other of the special disciplines. The attitude that
enough to declare a political commitment for or against capitalism. One had to declare ones theoretical commitment also.
inspires monographs is the best way to place a screen before the problem the very sight of which strikes terror into the heart of a
Social-Democratic movement turned opportunist. By discovering 'exact' descriptions for isolated areas and 'eternally valid laws' for
specific cases they have blurred the differences separating imperialism from the preceding age. They found themselves in a
capitalist society 'in general'and its existence seemed to them to correspond to the nature of human reason, and the 'laws of
nature' every bit as much as it had seemed to Ricardo and his successors, the bourgeois vulgar economists. <29-30>
Any effective political theory will have to do at least two things: it will have to offer an
integrated understanding of social practices and, based on such an interrelated knowledge, offer a
guideline for praxis. My main argument here is that among all contesting social theories now, only Orthodox
Marxism has been able to produce an integrated knowledge of the existing social totality and provide lines of praxis that will lead to
building a society free from necessity. But first I must clarify what I mean by Orthodox Marxism. Like all other modes and forms of
political theory, the very theoretical identity of Orthodox Marxism is itself contestednot just from non-and anti-Marxists who
question the very "real" (by which they mean the "practical" as under free-market criteria) existence of any kind of Marxism now
but, perhaps more tellingly, from within the Marxist tradition itself. I will, therefore, first say what I regard to be the distinguishing
marks of Orthodox Marxism and then outline a short polemical map of contestation over Orthodox Marxism within the Marxist
theories now. I will end by arguing for its effectivity in bringing about a new society based not on human rights but on freedom from
necessity. I will argue that to know contemporary societyand to be able to act on such knowledgeone has to first of all know
explain social inequalities primarily on the basis of these secondary contradictions and in doing soand this is my main argument
legitimate capitalism. Why? Because such arguments authorize capitalism without gender, race, discrimination and thus accept
economic inequality as an integral part of human societies. They accept a sunny capitalisma capitalism beyond capitalism. Such a
society,
based on cultural equality but economic inequality, has always been the notwhether it has been called "new left,"
"postmarxism," or "radical democracy." This is, by the way, the main reason for its popularity in
the culture industryfrom the academy (Jameson, Harvey, Haraway, Butler,. . . ) to daily politics (Michael Harrington, Ralph Nader,
Jesse Jackson,. . . ) to. . . . For all, capitalism is here to stay and the best that can be done is to make its cruelties more tolerable,
grasp this polarisation neglects the fact that behind the excessive issue of credit can lie the problem of the falling rate of profit. It
doesnt have to lie behind all crises & may work on a longer time basis. It may explain the first Great Depression of the 1870s, the
second one of the 1930s, & todays crisis, but not every economic downturn. This longer cycle is often referred to as the Kondratieff
cycle, or as Ernest Mandel termed it a wave. Mandels argument was that it wasnt a natural cycle as there could be no guarantee
of an upturn, but there was a guarantee of a downturn in the form of the falling rate of profit as more constant capital replaced
profit-producing labour. The upturns depended upon historical factors. The recovery in the late-Victorian era was arguably due to the
introduction of railways, the telegraph, etc., & the post-war boom, as already stated, by the harnessing of the new energy sources of
fragile and dangerous situation.] Countries may not be able to feed themselves in the near future. Capitalism
undercuts diversity and threatens groups: It favors cultural homogenization as well as the homogenization of goods
and services to advance market control. By pushing Western secular consumerism and materialism and crushing all
other value systems, some would argue that capitalism inspires terrorism. Capitalism ignores and destroys natures
life support systems:
A2 Space
The search for outer spatial fixes to capitalism causes Star
Wars
Dickens and Ormrod 7 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty
of Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies , U of Cambridge, and J.S., Senior
Lecturer of Applied Social Science @ U of Brighton, "Cosmic society: towards a sociology of
the universe," book, p. 63-64)
Outer spatial fixes: for war or peace? These fixes could easily become the basis
for a new global war, one in which a militarized outer space would
be an important part. This is because there is a potential and actual
contradiction between regional fixes such as those attempted by
China, India and Japan and the demands for capital to find new
sources of accumulation. A regional fix is often made autarchic: a zone that, on account of active
state intervention, allows limited trade with the outside world. As Harvey (2006) suggests, this may not
be a problem so long as there are sufficient resources of capital and labour in
the region in question for local capital to continue accu- mulation . But, if this is
not the case, capital will inevitably move elsewhere. In the process, however, it
confronts other capitalist enterprises over access to labour and resources. Nationally based private
enterprises therefore finish up competing for shrinking
opportunities for accumulation and this indeed is a recipe for
potential armed conflict. As the next chapter discusses in more detail, China, Japan and
India are amongst the countries now attempting to secure military
presences in outer space. If Harveys theory is correct, these are means of protecting regional
interests by ensuring that capital in these regions will have ready access to resources and labour beyond their own
A2 State Solves
Movements focused on the state are inevitably co-opted by
capital or become corrupt- we must move beyond a state of
power relations- this is the only way to beat power
Holloway 2 (John, Ph.D in Political Science from the University of Edinburgh, Social Science
Professor at Univ. of Puebla, Change the World Without Taking Power,
http://libcom.org/library/change-world-without-taking-power-john-holloway, KC)
At first sight it would appear obvious that winning control of the state is the key to bringing about social change.
society? One answer is that these movements have often had an instrumental view of the capitalist nature of the
state. They have typically seen the state as being the instrument of the capitalist class. T he
notion of an
'instrument' implies that the relation between the state and the capitalist
class is an external one: like a hammer, the state is now wielded by the
capitalist class in their own interests, after the revolution it will be
wielded by the working class in their interests . Such a view reproduces, unconsciously
perhaps, the isolation or autonomisation of the state from its social environment, the critique of which is the starting
point of revolutionary politics. To borrow a concept to be developed later, this view fetishises the state: it abstracts it
from the web of power relations in which it is embedded .
state, each one maintaining relations with all the others in a network of inter-national relations. Each state is then
the centre of its own world and it becomes possible to conceive of a national revolution and to see the state as the
motor of radical change in 'its' society. The problem with such a view is that social relations have never coincided
since the beginning of capitalism) a global web. The focusing of revolution on the winning of state power thus
involves the abstraction of the state from the social relations of which it is part. Conceptually, the state is cut out
from the clutter of social relations that surround it and made to stand up with all the appearance of being an
autonomous actor.
What was
initially negative (the rejection of capitalism) is converted into something
positive (institution-building, power-building). The induction into the
conquest of power inevitably becomes an induction into power itself. The
initiates learn the language, logic and calculations of power; they learn to
wield the categories of a social science which has been entirely shaped by
its obsession with power. Differences within the organization become
struggles for power. Manipulation and maneuvering for power become a
way of life. Nationalism is an inevitable complement of the logic of power.
The idea that the state is the site of power involves the abstraction of the
particular state from the global context of power relations. Inevitably, no
clearly expresses this hierarchisation. The form of the party, whether vanguardist or parliamentary, presupposes an
orientation towards the state and makes little sense without it. The party is in fact the form of disciplining class
struggle, of subordinating the myriad forms of class struggle to the over-riding aim of gaining control of the state.
The fixing of a hierarchy of struggles is usually expressed in the form of the party programme. This instrumentalist
impoverishment of struggle is not characteristic just of particular parties or currents (Stalinism, Trotskyism and so
on): it is inherent in the idea that the goal of the movement is to conquer political power. The struggle is lost from
the beginning, long before the victorious party or army conquers state power and 'betrays' its promises. It is lost
once power itself seeps into the struggle, once the logic of power becomes the logic of the revolutionary process,
once the negative of refusal is converted into the positive of power-building. And usually those involved do not see
it: the initiates in power do not even see how far they have been drawn into the reasoning and habits of power.
rather than ends, becomes converted into its opposite, into the
assumption of the logic, habits and discourse of power into the very heart
of the struggle against power. For what is at issue in the revolutionary transformation of the world is
not whose power but the very existence of power. What is at issue is not who exercises
power, but how to create a world based on the mutual recognition of
human dignity, on the formation of social relations which are not power
relations.
A2 Sustainability
Capitalisms contradictions make its collapse inevitable
Dickens 9 (Peter, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of
Politics, Psychology, Sociology and International Studies at the University of
Cambridge May 2009, The cosmos as capitalisms outside, The Sociological
Review, Vol. 57 Issue Supplement S1, p. 68-82) //AMM
Can capitalism go on expanding forever? It is a question many people have asked for many
years. It is also a relevant question when considering the prospect of capitalisms
potentially infinite expansion into the cosmos. In the early decades of the 20th century
Rosa Luxemburg suggested that capitalism always needs an outside, a zone of noncapitalism in which people would buy goods made in capitalist societies (Luxemburg
2004). To continue expanding, capitalism needs to continue placing a large part of its
surplus into the means of production, machines and technology. Imperialism, according to
Luxemburg, is the competitive struggle between capitalist nations for what remains of the noncapitalist outside. And yet, Luxemburg also argued, there is a fundamental contradiction,
stemming from over-accumulation of capital and the need for outside regions in
which to invest are even more significant as regards the further expansion of capitalism
(Brewer 1990, Harvey 2003). Luxemburg was nevertheless the first attempt to explicitly raise the
question of how capitalism relates to a non-capitalist outside and whether capitalism can, in
principle, last forever as it colonises its outside. The question of capitalisms outside is
asked again, albeit in a rather different form. Hardt and Negri, in their influential text
is no more outside. They state that in the passage from modern to
postmodern, from Imperialism to Empire, there is progressively less distinction between
inside and outside (2000:187). They make this case in relation to the economy,
politics and militarism in todays form of globalisation . As regards economics, Hardt and
Negri admit that the capitalist market has always run counter to any division
between inside and outside. It has been constantly expanded globally and yet
encountered barriers. But at the same time it has also thrived on overcoming such barriers,
reorganising itself to overcome these limits . But now the global market is so
dominant that it is even more difficult to envisage a distinction between an inside
and an outside market waiting to be subjugated, made part of the capitalist market and in
due course reorganised as a site of capitalist production. There is no outside left and
capital is reduced to re-engaging in a form of primitive accumulation ; privatising
now being
A2 Transition Wars
The crackdown wont happen, capital cant afford to attack its
labor and it would only increase the success of the transition
away from the status quo
Meszaros 95 (Istvan, Professor at the University of Sussex, Beyond Capital, p.
725-727) //AMM
Nor can one imagine that the authoritarian might of capital is likely to be used only against a revolutionary
socialist movement. The repressive anti-labour measures of the last two decades not to mention many
instances of past historical emergency characterized by the use of violence under the capital system give a
foretaste of worse things to come in the event of extreme confrontations. But this is not a matter of either/or,
with some sort of apriori guarantee of a 'fair' and benevolent treatment in the event of labour's willing
accommodation and submission. The matter hinges on the gravity of the crisis and on the circumstances under
one of
the heaviest chains which labour has to wear today is that it is
tied to capital for its continued survival, for as long as it does not
succeed in making a strategic break in the direction of a
transition to a radically different social metabolic order. But that
is even more true of capital, with the qualitative difference that
capital cannot make any break towards the establishment of a
different social order. For capital, truly, 'there is no alternative'
and there can never be to its exploitative structural
dependency on labour. If nothing else, this fact sets well marked limits to
capital's ability to permanently subdue labour by violence,
compelling it to use, instead, the earlier mentioned 'flexible chains'
against the class of labour. It can use violence with success
selectively, against limited groups of labour, but not against the
socialist movement organized as a revolutionary mass movement.
which the antagonistic confrontations unfold. Uncomfortable as this truth may sound to socialists,
A2 XLR8
Sustainable development has been commodified and
greenwashed by the corporate elite whose main concern is
profits we control the root cause of environmental
degradation, the quickest route to extinction, and a loss of
value to life
Cock 13 (Jacklyn, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, 6/20, Helen Suzman
Foundation, Green Capitalism or Environmental Justice? A Critique of the
Sustainability Discourse, http://hsf.org.za/resource-centre/focus/focus-63/Jacklyn
%20Cock.pdf) //AMM
The
capitalism . It is driving a key feature of capitals response to the ecological crisis: the
commodification of nature. This involves the transformation of nature
and all social relations into economic relations, subordinated to the
logic of the market and the imperatives of profit. The immediate
outcome is the deepening of both social and environmental
injustice. Green capitalism The ecological crisis is not some future and indeterminate event. It is now
generally acknowledged that we are in the first stages of ecological
collapse. Capitals response to the ecological crisis is that the
system can continue to expand by creating a new sustainable or
green capitalism, bringing the efficiency of the market to bear on nature and its reproduction.
These visions amount to little more than a renewed strategy for
profiting from planetary destruction1. The business of sustainability , in this
is simply a new frontier for accumulation in which carbon
trading is the model scheme 2. The two pillars on which green capitalism rests are
view,
technological innovation and expanding markets while keeping the existing institutions of capitalism intact. This is
Thomas Friedmans green revolution which relies on linking the two. As he insists, green technology represents
the mother of all markets3. More specifically, green capitalism involves: appeals to nature (and even the crisis)
as a marketing tool; developing largely untested clean coal technology through Carbon Capture and Storage,
which involves installing equipment that captures carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases and then pumping
the gas underground; the development of new sources of energy such as solar, nuclear and wind, thereby
creating new markets; the massive development of biofuels, which involves diverting land from food production;
ideological anchor of green capitalism. In South Africa, as elsewhere, there has been a
steep growth in the number of companies producing sustainability reports, and in the
emergence of various corporate indicators and guidelines. Media coverage is growing with, in
2010 alone, a Financial Times Special Report on Sustainability, the publication of the quarterly Trialogue
Sustainability Review as a supplement to the Financial Mail, and the Earth supplement to the daily newspaper,
in 2008, 61 companies made it onto the index, from 105 companies that were reviewed for inclusion4. According to
an asset manager, Very
the
the worst corporate polluters in South Africa all now produce lengthy
sustainability reports. ArcelorMittal SAs 2009 sustainability report claims that [o]ver the last year,
Thus
we made an even greater commitment to engagement with all stakeholder groups by accelerating interactions with
communities, employees, regulators, government and advocacy groups. This claim, however, is hotly disputed by
resources company, describes the companys vision of Sustainable Development as follows: to be the company
of choice - creating sustainable value for shareholders, employees, contractors, suppliers, customers, business
Janeiro, 1992, it held out great potential. By the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002,
development says nothing about justice and has been extensively criticised for the vagueness which has enabled it
our relationship
to nature is being dramatically transformed through this process of
commodification. More and more of nature is being framed in terms
of exchange value and mediated through the market. According to Burawoy
this commodification of nature is the central feature of the
contemporary period of third wave marketisation or neo-liberal
capitalism26. The outcome is a world in which billions are chronically
malnourished, lacking access to clean water and electricity. This is surely
not a world we want to sustain. For all these reasons, Joel Kovel prefers the term sufficiency. Sufficiency
makes more sense, building a world where nobody is hungry or cold
or lacks health care or succor in old age... Sufficiency is a better term than...
households that have fallen into arrears. Conclusion We are living in a period when
sustainability, as the latter leaves ambiguous the question of whether what is to be sustained is the existing system
has termed the dark forces, particularly the vested interests involved in the fossil fuel industry28. The
paradigmatic dark force at the moment is BP. This is what the prince of darkness, the CEO of BP, had to say
recently about the transition to a low carbon economy: .we have before us a period of economic transition as great
as, if not greater than, the Industrial Revolution29.
now.
Metaphysics
inveterately reduces the world. The purpose of the reduction is to
lose sight of the mere fact of existence, the unsummoned thereness of reality, of the given.
make the world intelligible and hence manageable , fit to be worked on, and
made ready to have practical order imposed on it. The world, as given, is disliked; it is
disliked in large part just because it is given; the dislike engenders anger, and from anger comes rebellion. Western
humanity is and has always been at war with given reality, to a much greater degree than the rest of humanity, and
and make it over. The craving is either to put the human stamp on reality or at least to rescue nature from
the absence of any honestly detectable stamp, any detectable natural purpose or intention. As Nietzsche says:
humanity, in its asceticism, "wants to become master not over something in life but over life itself, over its most
profound, powerful, and basic conditions" (Nietzsche, 1969, sec. 11, pp. 117-18). Western humanity cannot let
things be on their own terms or coax gently from them their own best potentiality; it is so far unable to practice
what Heidegger calls Gelassenheit. Western metaphysics is the sponsor of anger and hence of repeated violence
towards nature.
bits then move from the sphere of entertainment to the deadly serious and integrated spheres of capital accumulation and policing
as they are collected and sold to business and government agencies who track the populace for either commercial purposes or for
Absorbed in privatized
orbits of consumption, commodification and display, Americans
vicariously participate in the toxic pleasures of consumer culture,
relentlessly entertained by the spectacle of violence in which, as David
Graeber, suggests, the police become the almost obsessive objects of
imaginative identification in popular culture watching movies or
viewing TV shows that invite them to look at the world from a police
point of view."39 It is worth repeating that Orwell's vision of surveillance and the totalitarian state
looks tame next to the emergence of a corporate-private-state surveillance
system that wants to tap into every conceivable mode of
communication, collect endless amounts of metadata to be stored in vast intelligence storage sites
around the country and use those data to repress any vestige of dissent .40
Whistle-blowers are not only punished by the government; their lives
are turned upside down in the process by private surveillance
agencies and major corporations who increasingly work in tandem. These
institutions share information with the government and do their
own spying and damage control. For instance, Bank of America
assembled 15 to 20 bank officials and retained the law firm of
Hunton & Williams to devise various schemes to attack WikiLeaks and
Glenn Greenwald, who they thought was about to release damaging
information about the bank.41 Some of the most dreadful
consequences of neoliberal modernity and cultures of surveillance
include the elimination of those public spheres capable of educating
the public to hold power accountable, and the dissolution of all
social bonds that entail a sense of responsibility toward others. In this instance,
fear of a possible threat to the social order and its established institutions of power.
politics has not only become dysfunctional and corrupt in the face of massive
inequalities in wealth and power, it also has been emptied of any substantive
meaning. Government not only has fallen into the hands of the elite and right-wing extremists, it has embraced a mode of
lawlessness evident in forms of foreign and domestic terrorism that undercuts the obligations of citizenship, justice and morality. As
spycams to biometrics and Internet drilling reinforce not only the fear of being watched, monitored and investigated but also a
propensity toward confessing one's intimate thoughts and sharing the most personal of information. What is profoundly disturbing
and worth repeating in this case is the new intimacy between digital technologies and cultures of surveillance in which there exists a
profound an unseen intimate connection into the most personal and private areas as subjects publish and document their interests,
surveillance takes place in the capital cycle at the stage M = >C (labour power), where invested money capital buys
labour power as a commodity on the labour market. A legally binding relation between a specific employer and a
specific employee is established in the form of a labour contract. Applicant surveillance is the collection of data
about potential employees that aims at ensuring that a candidate has made correct and complete statements about
his/her life and work, that s/he fits the companys interests and will continuously and efficiently create surplus
value. Applicant surveillance sorts job applicants into groups of suited and unsuited candidates by collecting data
about their lives and work career. The applicants are frequently not aware of this surveillance. The Californian
company Social Intelligence sells applicant surveillance as a specialized service commodity to companies and
performs applicant surveillance on social media for employers. The companys description says: Social
of employees. It includes performance measurement and activity assessment, and aims at creating data for making
the work process more efficient, i.e. producing more surplus value in less time. Both forms can either be known or
unknown to the employees. Known workplace and workforce surveillance makes employees discipline their own
activities. Unknown workplace surveillance aims at detecting employees that are considered to be unproductive or
it acts as a data foundation to make organizational changes (such as promotion of the most loyal and efficient
employees, lay-off of employees that are considered not productive enough) that remain unknown or become
known only later to employees
Disability
No link-- There is a distinct social model between Disabilities
and capitalism
McNulty 12 (McNulty, Noreen. "A Social Theory of Disability." A Social Theory of
Disability. 2012. Web. 14 July 2015. http://isreview.org/issue/90/social-theorydisability KC)
disabilities. Since then, more than thirty colleges and universities offer undergraduate or graduate degrees in
disability studies in the United States. Governments across the globe have passed legislation and created offices or
departments for people with disabilities. Countless nonprofit organizations have sprung up to provide services and
advocate for people with disabilities.These developments have certainly improved the lives of some with
this new edition, The New Politics of Disablement, Oliver and Barnes not only update the previous edition; they
survey the theories and origins of disablement and the ways in which disability is represented in society at large.
They put forth a perspective of why the disability rights movement has failed to bring about significant change, and
offer a critique of the dominant postmodernist/poststructuralist theories in disability studies today. This 2012 edition
is also written in the context of a global capitalist crisis, and is written in the spirit of bringing transformative
change for people with disabilities, as well as all oppressed people. Oliver and Barnes offer a historical materialist
approach for describing how the category and meaning of disability arose with the rise of capital, and how the
meaning has changed as capitalisms needs change. The authors open with a survey of definitions of disability, the
origin of disability studies, and the origin of disability itself. They start with the movements of the 1960s that began
to challenge long-held assumptions and theories based in seeing disablement as a personal tragedy and an
Through
struggle, they recognized common characteristics of their
experience of disability. Their [activists] aim was to shift public
and policy attention away from established orthodoxy toward the
role of disabling economic, political and cultural barriers that
prevented people with disabilities from participating in mainstream
society as equal citizens. Oliver is often cited as coining the term social model of disability in
1981, and Oliver and Barnes respond to critiques of the model in this edition. They explain, The social
model breaks the causal link between impairment and disability. The
reality of impairment is not denied but is not the cause of disabled
individual medical issue, explained through a persons functional limitations or deficits.
peoples economic and social disadvantage. They go on to point out that the
social model was not intended to be a social theory but rather to be
used as a tool to bring about political change, allowing for collective
organization, and as an alternative to the individual/medical mode l.
They acknowledge that the social model is a simple view of a complex issue,
despite the fact that many other writers have used it in their own
social theories. Presenting a survey of the anthropological and sociological research on disability, the
authors summarize the range of views of disability and impairment in different cultures and the various ways in
which cultures have responded to difference and disability. They provide a useful materialist view of how
disablement as a social problem or category came to be. Here the authors pull from a Marxist, materialist view of
discussion of the current economic crisis and the response to disability in the context of capitalist crisis. Throughout
the book, the authors follow the twists and turns of capitalist development and its effect on how disability is defined
and how capitalism responds to it, including the recent global crisis. One response of the market is in the
privatization of services and the rise of charitable organizations, neither of which lead to self determination for
people with disabilities. Drastic cuts to state services in an age of austerity also threaten day-to-day survival and
quality of life. Another response is in rights-based solutions to discrimination. The authors challenge this solution
desired aims. Issues of genetic testing and modification, euthanasia, and biotechnology are raised.
Citing Disabled Peoples International, societies spend millions on genetic research to eradicate disease and
impairment but refuse to meet our needs to live dignified and independent lives. This sort of response, Oliver and
Barnes argue, undermines changes that would support and indeed celebrate the reality of human diversity,
difference and frailty. They warn such an approach fits snugly into the social and economic relations of capitalism
in seeking to eradicate the abnormal and those who become, or even might become, an economic burden. The
New Politics of Disability offers a useful critique of the decline of the disabled peoples movement of previous
which, they argue, tends to neglect the economic and material bases of inequality as well as the goal of politicaleconomic redistribution. A clear vision of how to move disability struggles forward is lacking, note the authors. But
this is not surprising, given the current state of disability rights activism and the global crisis of capitalism.
Identity Politics
Reformism DA Marxs analysis requires a focus on the body
because its the base of the capitalist superstructure. Failure
to analyze the divisions that mark bodies as justification for
labor means the neg can only analyze the superstructure, not
the base. The affs historical analysis of the body is thus more
totalizing and material than they are.
Levin 85 (DAVID MICHAEL LEVIN, THE BODY POLITIC: POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE HUMAN
BODY, Department of Philosophy, Northwestern University, Evanston, ILA, KC)
In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, and therefore at a very early stage of his thinking, Marx
introduced the question of embodiment, and undertook to articulate, in terms that not only initiated the discourse,
but still continue to define its direction, its 237 reach and range, virtually all the principal points that need to be
addressed by radical social theory (Fromm, 1961, pp. 131-135). In a very bold way, Marx successfully staked out the
territory for critical thought: so successfully, in fact, that even today, we can make use of those stakes to lay out for
Marx formulated
the most central goal: to "humanize" or spiritualize" the senses, and bodily life in
general, as part of the process of self-development and self realization .
What is more, he understood the historicity of this process: he understood,
and consequently helps us to understand, that human embodiment manifests a great
potential for human being, that this potential requires careful and thoughtful
cultivation, that the body and the body politic, an inseparable
existential unit, reflect one another in a perpetual dialectical drama,
and that, for this reason, corresponding and fundamental changes in our
political economy must take place if this essential cultivation of our
potential as bodily beings is to be facilitated. Marx even located the
problem of embodiment within a field of cultural meanings deeply
conflicted: the body he describes is, for example, drawn and quartered in a field
of philosophical texts sharply polarized by "internal contradictions":
subjectivism vs. objectivism, spiritualism vs. materialism, myself vs. others, activity vs. passivity. He therefore
formulated the body problematic as an historical task for critical
social theory and revolutionary political praxis. The 1844 Manuscripts (especially,
ourselves the ground to be covered. With remarkable awareness and understanding,
perhaps, the Third) focus on the aesthetic and spiritual development of the senses: deepening sensory awareness,
(Fromm, 1961, p. 206). Over against this, Marx dreams of a body politic which would enable a man, as he puts it so
charmingly, "to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, and debate after dinner." Marx
never ceased to think the "nature" and "potential" of human embodiment, never 238 ceased to call the body politic
into question from the standpoint of the well-being of the human body. Even much later, in Capital, for example, he
followed out the implications of his earlier thinking; and he argued for a world so organized that the
productive "work" we would do could always be something that "gives play" to "our
bodily and mental powers" (Marx, 1906, pp. 197-198).
are oblique references to the human body, and I would suggest, as such, they are also references not
to just individual stray bodies, but to collectivities of bodies comprising the body politic.
People
take stancesthey take sidesbecause they stand somewhere, and where they always stand
in taking a side is in some identity-formation, assumed or affirmed,
normalized or marginalized, politic or politicized, covered or
This kind
of academic restlessness can also take place within such an identity
discipline like feminism or queer studies. As Wiegman suggests, certain feminists
and poetics, even though these have ceased to provide a living paradigm for modernity.
are anxious to return to a universal woman because they have grown tired of others' "identity
the dance of identification as we experience it pleasurably and disturbingly "inside" and "across" our
bodies' persons, individually and collectively considered. Our recourse to more externalized structures
like the sides of an argument or the solidity of economic classespromises some reprieve, but we
grow no less restless "outside" our personal and collective selves, as though individuals and their
dis/affectionate affiliations are emptied of their identity, mere meanings and patterns bereft of that
inner motivating vitality. As "identity politics" is not dead, is in fact thriving, so I'd
suggest we get on with making its theory and practice thrive in our intellectual institutions,
accompanied by less nervousness and as much pleasure as possible .
Nealon's examination
of "affect" as queer reception history is a good instance of this.11 By
insisting on pleasure as a face/t of identification, I realize that I risk
others' diminishing the political struggle at stake in the disciplining
of identity forms. I would not sacrifice one to the other. If identity is
always political, the economies of pleasure at work in identification
also cannot escape the play for power, in shared or monopolistic versions. In fact, it
is the activity of pleasure on and across subjects of identity that
makes identity such a forceful vehicle for oppressive politics, and
likewise this pleasure functions in collective assaults against
oppression. The pleasures of thinking that one belongs to a superior white race must be
reckoned as interfused with the obligations, confusions, fears, and privileges afforded by such a
Marxists believe that the potential for that kind of unity is dependent on battles and struggles against
Marxism has been maligned as, at best, "blind" to combating racism and, at worst, "incapable" of it.
For example, in an article published last summer, popular commentator and self-described "anti-racist"
Tim Wise summarized the critique of "left activists" that he later defines as Marxists. He writes:
[L]eft
by presuming that low-income folks of color and low-income whites are equally oppressed, despite a
we'll see, it ignores perhaps the most important political lesson regarding the interplay of race and
the sense of triumph over this enemy, which cannot take place without in some eerie way taking the very place of
page of the New York Times, except on that rare occasion in which one part of the Left swipes at another, producing
a spectacle of the Left for mainstream liberal and conservative press consumption which is all too happy to discount
every and any faction of the Left within the political process, much less honour the Left of any kind as a strong force
new social movements are merely cultural, that a unified and progressive Marxism must return to a materialism
based in an objective analysis of class, itself presumes that the distinction between material and cultural life is a
stable one. And this recourse to an apparently stable distinction between material and cultural life is clearly the
resurgence of a theoretical anachronism, one that discounts the contributions to Marxist theory since Althussers
displacement of the base-superstructure model, as well as various forms of cultural materialismfor instance,
Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Indeed, the untimely resurgence of that distinction
is in the service of a tactic which seeks to identify new social movements with the merely cultural, and the cultural
with the derivative and secondary, thus embracing an anachronistic materialism as the banner for a new orthodoxy.
movements, and for what reasons, get relegated to the sphere of the merely cultural, and how that very division
between the material and the cultural becomes tactically invoked for the purposes of marginalizing certain forms of
that new social movements based on democratic principles became articulated against a hegemonic Left as well as
would agree that a narrowly identitarian construal of such movements leads to a narrowing of the political field,
The
problem of unity or, more modestly, of solidarity cannot be resolved
through the transcendence or obliteration of this field, and certainly
not through the vain promise of retrieving a unity wrought through
exclusions, one that reinstitutes subordination as the condition of
its own possibility. The only possible unity will not be the synthesis of a set of conflicts, but will be a
there is no reason to assume that such social movements are reducible to their identitarian formations.
mode of sustaining conflict in politically productive ways, practice of contestation that demands that these
movements articulate their goals under the pressure of each other without therefore exactly becoming each other.
Feminism
Marxism cannot solve the alternative because it leaves the
public/private dichotomy and leaves the masculine worldview
in tact
Pandey 6 (Anupam, thesis submitted to faculty of graduate studies and research in partial
fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of doctorate of philosophy department of political
science Carleton university, forgin bonds with women, nature and the third world: an ecofeminist
critique of international relations, proquest, KC)
(Heidi Hartmann is a feminist economist and the founder of the Institute for
Women's Policy Research, a scientific research organization formed to meet the need for womencentered, public policy research, The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More
Progressive Union, HEIDI I. HARTMANN, United States 1945- . Economist. Founding Director of the
Institute for Women's Policy Research (1987). Capitalism and Women's Work in the Home, 1900-1930
(1976), Women's Work, Aden's Work: Sex Segregation on the Job (1981), Comparable Worth: New
Directions for Research (1985), Women, Work, and Poverty: Woman-Centered Research for Policy
Change (2006) KC).
The
that feminism is at best less important than class conflict and at worst
divisive of the working class. This political stance produces an analysis
that absorbs feminism into the class struggle . Moreover, the analytic power
of marxism with respect to capital has obscured its limitations with
respect to sexism. We will argue here that while marxist analysis provides essential insight into
the laws of historical development, and those of capital in particular, the categories of
marxism are sex-blind. Only a specifically feminist analysis reveals the
systemic character of relations between men and women. Yet feminist analysis
by itself is inadequate because it has been blind to history and insufficiency materialist. Both
Marxist analysis, particularly its historical and materialist method, and
feminist analysis, especially the identification of patriarchy as a social and
historical structure, must be drawn upon if we are to understand the
development of western capitalist societies and the predicament of
women within them. In this essay we suggest a new direction for marxist feminist analysis. I
MARXISM AND THE WOMAN QUESTION The woman question has never been the "feminist question."
Marxist analysis has been class relations; the object of marxist analysis has been understanding the
laws of motion of capitalist society. While we believe marxist methodology can be used to formulate
feminist strategy, these marxist feminist approaches discussed above clearly do not do so; their
marxism clearly dominates their feminism. Marxism enables us to understand many aspects of
capitalist societies: the structure of production, the generation of a particular occupational structure,
example, the growth of the proletariat and the demise of the petit bourgeoisie. More precisely and in
more detail, Braverman among others has explained the creation of the "places" clerical worker and
not the other way around. Marxist categories, like capital itself, are sexblind. The categories of Marxism cannot tell us who will fill the empty
places. Marxist analysis of the woman question has suffered from this
basic problem.
An ethic of erotic justice, therefore, does not lower but raises moral
expectations. lt teaches us to demand for ourselves (and others)
what we deserve, namely, to be whole persons to each other and to
be deeply, respectfully loved. A gmcious, liberating ethic will teach us to claim our right to
erotic justice and also to invest in creating a more just and equitable world. ln our late-capitalist
culture, desire has been commodified to sell goods. ln that process
of commodification, desire has been narrowly sexualized and
privatized, so much so that liar many people erotic desire now denotes only desire of a genital sort.
More specifically desire has been truncated to mean taking pleasure
in possession. Possessiveness is a primary virtue in a capitalist
political economy. Pleasure has become the pleasure of owning
consumer goods and status objects, as well as exercising monopoly
control over another person as my man" or my woman." lt is a
major challenge I enlarge the meaning I desire I ineoolate once again a sense I being free-spirited, full I
joy in being alive non-possessed," throughout ones life. This expanded notion 'desire can
be a mighty, though tender, spark from within I, enlivening our desire - a more ethical world.
Erotic power can stir I I engage in a full-bodied wav in Creating My suspicion is that the
pervasive fear of sex and passion, rampant in all patriarchal religious traditions, is deeply
implicated in the difficulty for many people have in sustaining I interest in, much less a passion for, social justice. By
paving attention to sexual oppression, people fail I grasp how a multiplicity of interconnected social oppressions
operate in the small and large places their lives, in and on their bodies and the body politic. These injustices
diminish human lov- ing. When people are willing I accept power as control in their intimate lives, they are also
likely to acquiesce to other oppressive structures that control them. They fail to see that sexual oppression is
intimately bound up with race, gender, - class oppression. People fail, therefore, to connect their personal pain with
larger systemic patterns injustice. White, middle-strata Christians are deeply hurting but have few clues about the
sources of their suffering.
Narratives/Poems
Totalizing analysis of capitalism just fragments resistance- our
approach is better
Gibson-Graham, 96 (J.K. Gibson-Graham, Professor of Human Geography at the
Australian National University and Professor of Geosciences at the University of Massachusates,
Amherst, 1996, The End of Capitalism As We Know It, KC)
systemic replacement still seem to be dominant in the Marxist political imagination. The New World Order is often represented as political fragmentation founded
upon economic unification. In this vision the economy appears as the last stronghold of unity and singularity in a world of diversity and plurality. But why cant the
economy be fragmented too? If we theorized it as fragmented in the United States, we could being to see a huge state sector (incorporating a variety of forms of
appropriation of surplus labor), a very large sector of self-employed and family-based producers (most noncapitalist), a huge household sector (again, quite various
in terms of forms of exploitation, with some households moving towards communal or collective appropriation and others operating in a traditional mode in which
Efforts toward dialog between Marxists and religiously identified progressives are certainly essential,
and might lead to a common social agenda. But I want to argue for more. My deeper concern is that,
perspective values all beings as intrinsically good and acknowledges and respects the parts they play
positively or unfortunately negatively in the same creative, evolutionary process of life and
liberation. Two points about this conception of spirituality need to be under lined. TheoreticaLly, it is
compatible with both materialism and other worldly idealism. These alternative ideologies
conceptualize the range of spiritual relationships differently, but both arise from a common basis of
what might be called a sense of deep connectedness and an affirmation of being. This basis unites
believers and non-believers in spite of ideological or metaphysical differences. Practically, a similar
contrast applies: spirituality can take apolitical or progressive forms. It can be self-centered and
naive, rigidly reactionary, or even fascistic; or it can express itself with great fullness when guided by
socialism
without spirituality can be as empty and cruel as capitalism. The
worldwide expansion of capitalism has undermined the his torical
foundations of spirituality by scattering families, destroying
established communities, replacing traditions with consumerism,
and alienating our relationship to nature. Marxists need to take
seriously the de-spiritualization of society, and themselves, under
capitalism.3 Marxists have theorized the devastating spiritual
effects of capi talism, through the secular concept of alienation,
defined as disconnection from self, others, and nature (see especially
Olhnan, 1976). But within Marxist theory there is presently no
corresponding positive concept; we have only the doubly negative
conception of non-alienated relationships. One might try to communicate the
a progressive political vision. A third point, for which we have only too much evidence:
We
Marxists can explain better than anyone the main sources of social and
psychological dysfunction in this society; we can offer real options
on the level of political economy; we must also acknowledge the
need to restore the foundations of spiritual relationships, in
families, communities, traditions, and with nature. To do this we must join
with, and learn from, communities of faith. This is not to advocate a theoretical cop-out for political
expediency. Quite the contrary, it needs to be remembered that Marxism came into the world with a
new definition of materialism, one that incorporated the conception of creative activity. Marx
redefined, or relocated, the hitherto idealist notion of creative potential as a natu ral fact. n the
first Thesis on Feuerbach
This is amply sup ported by the capitalist media: look in any bookstore for the head ing Spirituality
for a range of apolitical, pseudo-political, or re actionary panaceas that accommodate people to
based not on need or desire, but on the ability to pay. A community structured around commodified public spaces is
economically exclusive. Not everyone has the money, or the class-based taste, to outlit themselves with the right
way in.
I refer specifically to a queer marxist feminism to argue that marxist feminism as it has emerged since the 1960s is
a necessary but not suf- ficient tool for the of contemporary lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered politics.
present in each other (see Banneiji, 1995). An adequate understand- ing of class
formation must therefore be based on a rich analysis of the ways class
relations are gendered, racialized and sexualized, just as an
examination of sexualities must attend to the ways that sexual and
intimate relations are classed, gendered and racialized. Marxist
feminism thus rejects both dual (or multi) systems theo- ries that see class,
gender, race/ ethnicity and sexuality as separate spheres that intersect, on the one
hand; and the reductionist marxism that seeks to capture all of social reality through the single lens of class
exploitation as examined in the works of classical marxism, on the other! Marxist feminism expanded the
parameters of marxist analysis by seriously rethinking in the light of the challenge of an emerging social movement
A queer marxist feminism builds on this conception of social reproduction by relating it to the indigenous politics of sexual
emancipation developed in the lesbian and gay liberation
movement. I believe a queer marxist feminism can contribute to a
revival of some of the most emancipatory aspects of lesbian and gay
liberation by explaining how the limits and contradictions in the gains we have made since 1969 are tied to
the specific dynamics of racialized, gendered and sexualized capitalist reproduction. This is not a
departure from marxist feminism, but an expansion of it in light of
the politics of queer liberation. In the first section of this article I briefly map the politics that
emerged out of the lesbian and gay liberation movement. I believe that a critical encounter with
these indigenous politics is a crucial feature of a queer marxistfeminist analysis. In the second section, I work to- wards the development of a queer marxist-feminist
analysis that sheds light on the current moment in sexual politics. It is my contention that this kind of analysis
provides insight into aspects of queer existence that are not
examined in the postmodern queer theories or liberal accounts that
tend to dominate theoretical work in this area.
Race
deteriorating. It is funny how in the United States, most whites have an obliterated consciousness when it comes to
racism, they see it as an adjunct to something else, whether economic theory or religious dogma. The questions of
internal power dynamic (of which racism is a part) are reduced to a group of Wall Street economic overlords or
owners of industry, to which we are all *equally* disposed and exploited. Again, any economic analysis cannot be
based on the white European experience alone, rather than the United States America as a nation-state. To me, this
is part of where they always go wrong...using mechanical analysis to explain everything. I ain't buying it, the cops
ain't stopping the cars of Black folks cause they are just oppressing "everybody alike". It's racism, stupid, get your
head out of your butt!
Wilderson
They have it backwards- capitalism began because of the
violent exploitation of the black body
Wilderson, 5 (Frank, Full professor of Drama and African American studies at the
University of California, Irvine, January 27 2005, Gramscis Black Marx: Whither the
Slave in Civil Society?,
http://bmorereadinggroup.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/frank_gramsci.pdf, KC)
of the worker the question, What does it mean to be free? is raised. But the question
hides the process by which the discourse assumes a hidden grammar which has
already posed and answered the question, What does it mean to suffer? And
In other words, from the incoherence of Black death, America generates the coherence of White life. This is
important when thinking the Gramscian paradigm (and its progenitors in the world of U.S. social movements today)
struggles over
hegemony are seldom, if ever, asignifying-at some point they
require coherence, they require categories for the record-which
means they contain the seeds of anti-Blackness.
which is so dependent on the empirical status of hegemony and civil society:
is in its desire to democratize work and thus help keep in place, insure the coherence to; Reformation and
Enlightenment foundational values of productivity and progress. This is a crowding-out scenario for other postrevolutionary possibilities, i.e. idleness.
The K erases the concept of White privilege and positionalitymeans it can never solve our imapcts
Wilderson, 5 (Frank, Full professor of Drama and African American studies at the
University of California, Irvine, January 27 2005, Gramscis Black Marx: Whither the
Slave in Civil Society?,
http://bmorereadinggroup.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/frank_gramsci.pdf, KC)
It is true that Gramsci acknowledges no organic division between political
society and civil society. He makes the division for methodological purposes. There
is one organism, the modern bourgeois-liberal state (Buttigieg 28),
but there are two qualitatively different kinds of apparatuses: on the one hand, the
Alt Fails
Intersectionality Key
The alt misrecognizes violence as purely capitalist. This denial of
the complexity of violence means the alt will fail. The alt treats all
violence as essentially the same and stemming from the same
capitalist impulse. Instead we should understand violence as a
continuum so that we may see the symptoms of the capacity of
ordinary people to commit atrocious acts.
.
Collective denial and misrecognition are prerequisites for mass
violence and genocide. But so are formal bureaucratic structures and professional roles. The
unremark- able peacetimes that precede the sudden, seemingly unintelligible outbreaks of mass violence
practical technicians of everyday violence in the backlands of Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33), for
example, include the clinic doctors who prescribe powerful tranquilizers to fretful and frightfully hungry babies, the
Catholic priests who celebrate the death of angel-babies, and the municipal bureaucrats who dispense free baby
means by symbolic violence, the violence that is often nus-recognized for something else, usually something
good. Everyday violence is similar to what Taussig (1989) calls terror as usual. All these terms are meant to reveal
a public secret - the hidden links between violence in war and violence in peace, and between war crimes and
peace-time crimes. Bourdieu (1977) finds domination and violence in the least likely places - in courtship and
marriage, in the exchange of gifts, in systems of classification, in style, art, and culinary taste- the various uses of
culture. Violence, Bourdieu insists, is everywhere in social practice. It is misrecognized because its very
everydayness and its familiarity render it invisible. Lacan identifies rneconnaissance as the prerequisite of the
social. The exploitation of bachelor sons, robbing them of autonomy, independence, and progeny, within the
structures of family farming in the European countryside that Bourdieu escaped is a case in point (Bourdieu, Chapter
42; see also Scheper-Hughes, 2000b; Favret-Saada, 1989). Following Gramsci, Foucault, Sartre, Arendt, and other
modern theorists of power-vio- lence, Bourdieu treats direct aggression and physical violence as a crude,
uneconomical mode of domination; it is less efficient and, according to Arendt (1969), it is certainly less legitimate.
While power and symbolic domination are not to be equated with violence - and Arendt argues persuasively that
violence is to be understood as a failure of power - violence, as we are presenting it here, is more than simply the
expression of illegitimate physical force against a person or group of persons. Rather, we need to understand
violence as encompassing all forms of controlling processes (Nader 1997b) that assault basic human freedoms and
individual or collective survival. Our task is to recognize these gray zones of violence which are, by definition, not
obvious. Once again, the point of bringing into the discourses on genocide everyday, normative experiences of
reification, depersonalization, institutional confinement, and acceptable death is to help answer the question: What
preparations for mass killing can be found in social sentiments and institutions from the family, to schools, churches,
They harbor the early warning signs (Charney 1991), the priming
(as Hinton, ed., 2002 calls it), or the genocidal continuum (as we call it) that push social
consensus toward devaluing certain forms of human life and lifeways from
hospitals, and the military.
the refusal of social support and humane care to vulnerable social parasites (the nursing home elderly, welfare
queens, undocumented immigrants, drug addicts) to the militarization of everyday life (super-maximum-security
prisons, capital punishment; the technologies of heightened personal security, including the house gun and gated
communities; and reversed feelings of victimization
If we study history on
purely materialistic grounds we cannot study man [humanity]
accurately unless we first understand that man [humanity] is a
species possessing within his nature rationality as an essential
attribute of his being; thus, making him man [person] qua acting man [person]. If man
[people] were purely material and his consciousness were derived
from his [their] activity in society he [they] would not be
phenomenologically conscious nor epistemologically aware that
there is a possibility to advance in stature specifically because his [their]
existing political economy inhibits this from taking place. Therefore, he [They]
would not desire to move toward a newer and better epoch where he can
actualize more of his species being. Simply put, if man [people]s
consciousness were derived from his economic and social state of existence
he would not consider the notion that there is a better way for man
[people] to exist. His consciousness is grounded in his economic epoch and only this existing epoch can afford
man [humanity] his consciousness; man [ humanity], in Marxs view, is imprisoned
would cause too many problems with his historical materialism.[12]
[humanity]s consciousness changes as the political economy changes around him as technological advancement
Rothbards critique, The first grave fallacy in this farrago is right at the beginning: where does this technology come
Al-Islam
confronted with historical reality itself), nor the historical events that occurred during thousands of years of human
history confirm this theory. It is amazing to read the writings of some followers of Marxism who dogmatically try to
explain the past history in the light of historical materialism, and read their master's opinions into the pages of
history, for instance in the book History of the Ancient world.2
Al-Islam2
Marx, in many of his writings, has raised another issue on the basis of dialectical logic, which may
as a revision of his view and also a kind of departure from absolute historical
materialism. That issue is related to the problem of reciprocal causation. According to the
principle of reciprocal causation, the cause-effect relationship should not be regarded as a
But
be regarded
one-sided process. If `A' is the cause of change in `B', in the same way `B' also in its turn becomes the cause of `A'.
this dialectical principle interpreted in this form. But we may say that, according to this principle, the suggestion of
priority of one thing over the other is meaningless with regard to causal relation between two things like matter and
spirit, or action and thought, or economic base and all other social institutions. Because if two things are
interrelated and dependent upon each other for their existence, and the existence of one is conditioned by that of
the other, the question as to which is prior or fundamental, is meaningless. Marx, in some of his statements,
considers all social processes, essential or nonessential, as based upon economic factors, and has not suggested
the effect of superstructure on the infrastructure, as referred to earlier. However, in some of his statements he
accepts a reciprocal cause-and-effect relationship between the infrastructure and the superstructure, but maintains
that the basic and ultimate role is played by the base. In the book Revisionism from Marx to Mao, two works of
Marx, The Capital and The Critique of Political Economy, are compared. The author, while stating that in both the
works Marx regards the economic base as unilaterally determining the entire social structure, says: In spite of this,
Marx, consciously or unconsciously, has added a new dimension to this definition by stating that superstructures,
despite primacy of the base over superstructures, can play an essential role in society. 3 The author further asks:
What is the difference between the predominant function or `determining role' that the economic infrastructure
always plays and the `essential role' played by the superstructures? It means that if the superstructure occasionally
plays the essential role, it becomes the main determining and governing factor. In such cases, it may even be said
that what we call the superstructure is not a superstructure but is really the infrastructure or the base, and what we
call the infrastructure is the superstructure. Engels, in a letter written in his later years to one Joseph Bloch,
writes: ....According to the materialist conception of history, ultimately determining element in history is the
production and reproduction of real life.4 More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody
twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a
meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase.5 The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the
superstructure: political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious
class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and then even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the
brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into
systems of dogmas, also exercise their influence upon the course of historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. There is an interaction of all these elements in which, amid all the endless host of
accidents the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary.6 Strangely enough, if the view that the
economic element is the only determining one is a meaningless, abstract, and senseless phrase, this phrase has
been uttered by no other person than Marx himself. Moreover, if the elements of superstructure in many cases
preponderate in determining historical struggles, it means that the determining and decisive element is not the
economic one. After saying this, there is no need to believe that the economic movement, amid all the host of
accidents, asserts itself as necessary. It is more amazing that Engels, in the later part of the same letter, accepts
that he himself and Marx may be held responsible for this mistake (or in his own words, twist). He says: Marx and I
are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that the younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side
than is due to it. We had to emphasize the main principle vis-a-vis our adversaries, who denied it, and we had not
always the time, the place or opportunity to allow the other elements involved in the interaction to come into light.
7 But some other people offer quite the opposite explanation of this excessive emphasis by Marx and Engels on the
economic elements. They say, this overemphasis is not meant for their opponents in the other camp, but aimed at
disarming the rival supporters of this view in their own camp. In the book Revisionism from Marx to Mao, the author,
after-pointing out that in the Critique of Political Economy Marx has emphasized the unilateral role of the economic
factors more than in any other work-and I have already quoted the well-known passage from the preface to that
book-explains Marx's reasons for compiling the Critique: Another cause of writing the Critique of Political Economy,
was the publication of a book by Proudhon, Manuel du Speculateur de la Bourse, and another book by Darimon, the
follower of Proudhon. When Marx saw that his rivals in the camp of Proudhon from one side, and the followers of
Lassalle from the other side were relying upon the economic element in a reformative (not revolutionary) way, he
endeavored to seize this weapon from their hands and used it for the purpose of revolution. This necessitated a
historical
materialism and economic base according to the requirements of Chinese conditions. His new interpretation
rigidity suited to the purpose of popularizing his beliefs.8 Mao has reinterpreted the, meanings of
was aimed to explain his own role as the leader of the Chinese Revolution also. His interpretation of historical
materialism reaches a point that one finds this theory and its emphasis on the economic base, and as a
reduced to mere
play of words and nothing else. Mao, in his treatise on contradiction, under the title, The Principal
consequence the so-called scientific socialism whose basis is historical materialism,
Contradiction and the Principal Aspect of Contradiction, says: ....The principal and the non-principal aspects of a
contradiction transform themselves into each other and quality of a thing changes accordingly. In a certain process
or at a certain stage in the development of a contradiction, the principal aspect is A and the non-principal aspect is
B, at another stage of development or in another process of development, the roles are reversed change
determined by the extent of the increase or decrease in the strength with which each of the two aspects struggle
against the other in the development of a thing.9 He further says: Some people think that this is not the case with
certain contradictions. For example in the contradiction between productive forces and the relations of production,
the productive forces are the principal aspect; ... in the contradiction between the economic foundation arid its
superstructure, the economic foundation is the principal aspect and there is no change in their respective positions.
This is the view of mechanistic materialism. True, the productive forces, practice, and the economic foundation
generally manifest themselves in the principal and decisive roles; whoever denies this is not a materialist. But
under certain conditions, such aspects as the relations of production, theory, and superstructure in turn manifest
themselves in the principal and decisive role; this must also be admitted. When the productive forces cannot be
developed unless the relations of production are changed, the change in the relations of production10 plays the
principal and decisive role. As Lenin put it, without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.
The creation and advocacy of the revolutionary theory plays the principal and decisive role.... When the
superstructure (politics, culture and so on) hinders the development of economic foundation, political and cultural
reforms become the principal and decisive factors. By saying this, are we running counter to materialism? No. The
foundation. This is not running counter to materialism; this is precisely avoiding mechanistic materialism and
firmly upholding dialectical materialism.11 Whatever Mao says contradicts historical materialism. When he says, if
the relations of production hinder development and progress of the productive force, or when he says a
revolutionary movement requires a revolutionary theory, or when he says, the superstructure hinders the
development of economic foundation, he asserts something which can and should occur always. But
But Marx has emphatically stated in his preface to the Critique of Political Economy: At a
certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of
society come in conflict with the existing relations of production ; or-what is but
base.
a legal expression for the same thing-with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto.
From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of
social revolution, with the change of economic foundation, the entire immense superstructure is more or less
rapidly transformed.12 Such notions as the change in relations of production prior to the development of productive
forces in order to pave the way for the progress of productive forces, the formulation of revolutionary theories prior
to spontaneous birth of revolutionary ideas, the notion that transformation of superstructure transforms the base-all
imply priority of thought over action and priority of spirit over matter. They imply the essentiality and independence
of political and intellectual aspects with respect to the economic aspect, and this contradicts historical materialism.
Mao's statement that if the process of effect and action is accepted to be one-sided, dialectical materialism is
negated is correct. But what is to be done if the basis of so-called scientific socialism rests upon this very principle
of unilateral effect, and contradicts dialectical logic, i.e. the doctrine of unity of opposites, which is one of the laws
of dialectics? We are forced to discard either the so-called scientific socialism and reject dialectical logic, or we
have to uphold dialectical logic and reject `scientific' socialism and historical materialism, upon which it is based. In
addition to this, what does Mao mean when he says ... we recognize that in the development of history as a whole
it is the material essence of things that determines spiritual things, and social existence that determines social
consciousness? Doesn't his own admission that superstructure can reciprocally act on the base, imply that
sometimes productive forces determine relations of production and sometimes vice versa, .i.e. the process is
reversed? Sometimes revolutionary movement produces revolutionary theories and sometimes vice versa? Sometimes politics, culture, power, religion, etc. are the factors responsible for bringing about a change in the economic
foundation of society and sometimes the process is reversed? sometimes, it happens that material things decide
spiritual matters and social existence determines social consciousness, and sometimes the process is quite
reversed? Actually, Mao's statement that the principal and non-principal aspects of a contradiction transform
themselves into each other is made to justify his Maoist viewpoint-which practically goes against Marxist historical
materialism-not to explain the Marxist theory of historical materialism, despite the claim that he does so. Mao too,
like Marx, has practically demonstrated that he is too intelligent to remain a Marxist forever. The Chinese Revolution
under Mao's leadership practically violated scientific socialism and historical materialism, and, consequently,
Marxism. Under the leadership of Mao, China overthrew the feudal regime of old China by means of an agricultural
Al-Islam3
Al-Islam4
as a theory, as
a philosophical point of view or as a part of superstructure, either applies to itself or it doesn't . If
both cases, historical materialism is contradicted by itself. It means that historical materialism
it does not apply to itself, it contradicts itself. If it is governed by itself, it is valid for a limited period only; it cannot
be applied to other periods from which it excludes itself. This objection is also valid in the case of dialectical
materialism, which considers the principle of dialectical movement and the principle of unity of opposites applicable
to the whole reality including scientific and philosophical laws. In the Principles of Philosophy and the Method of
Realism (Vol I, II) I have dealt with these problems. But it is clear that the claim that the universe is the playground
of the forces of dialectical materialism and society that of historical materialism is absolutely baseless. Certain
other objections are also valid against historical materialism. For the time being we refrain from mentioning them.
But I cannot conceal my amazement as to how such a baseless and unscientific theory could become famous as a
scientific theory. The art of propaganda is indeed capable of working wonders!
A2: Revolutions
Revolution (syndicalism) cant solve capitalism
Herod 7 (James, Student at Graceland College and Columbia University, 35 year
old author on anarchy, May 2007, Getting Free,
http://www.jamesherod.info/Getting_Free.pdf)
syndicalist
strategy ignores
households , as if households werent part of the means of production. Thus, it excludes millions of
homemakers from active participation in the revolution . Homemakers can only
serve in a supporting role
To think that a revolution can be made only by those people who hold jobs is the sheerest
folly. Perhaps im- mediately after syndicalists seize the factories and make a revolution, this exclusion could be overcome by having
everyone join a council at home or in school, but this is no help beforehand, during the revolu- tion itself. The whole image is badly
skewed. Moreover, syndicalists have never specified clearly enough how all the various councils are going to function together to
make deci- sions and set policy, defend themselves, and launch a new civilization. In the near revolution in Germany in 1918, the
worker and soldier councils were for a few months the only organized power. They could have won. But
they were
confused about what to do . They couldnt see how to get from their
separate councils to the establishment of overall power and the
defeat of capitalism . In the massive general strike in Poland in 1980, factory, office, mining, and farm councils
were set up all over the country. But these councils didnt know how to coalesce into an alternative social ar- rangement capable of
replacing the existing power structure. They even mistakenly refrained from attacking ruling-class power with the intent of
destroying it. Instead, the councils merely wanted to coexist in some kind of uneasy dual structure (perhaps because they were
afraid of a Soviet invasion; but a strategy that has not taken external armies into account is badly flawed). Workplace associations
would have to be permanent assemblies, with years of experience under their belts, before they could have a chance of success.
that has not been capable of destroying capitalism , although it has been headed in
the right direction.
Rejection Bad
Stepping out of the system cant solve capitalism
Herod 7 (James, Student at Graceland College and Columbia University, 35 year
old author on anarchy, May 2007, Getting Free,
http://www.jamesherod.info/Getting_Free.pdf)
We cannot destroy capitalism by dropping out, either as an individual, a small group, or a community. Its been tried over and over,
and it fails every time. There is no escaping capitalism; there is nowhere left to go. The only escape from capitalism is to destroy it . Then
we could be free (if we try). In fact,
capitalists love it when we drop out . They dont need us. They
have plenty of suckers already. What do they care if we live under bridges, beg for meals, and die young? I havent seen the ruling
class rushing to help the homeless.
out is
the notion that a whole community can withdraw from the system
and build its own little new world somewhere else . This was tried repeat- edly by
utopian communities throughout the nineteenth century. The strategy was revived in the 1960s as thousands of new left radicals
retired to remote rural communes to groove on togetherness (and dope). The strategy is once again surfacing in the new age
movement as dozens of communities are being established all over the country.
suffer from the mistaken idea that they dont have to attack
capitalism and destroy it but can simply withdraw from it, to live
their own lives separately and independently. It is a vast il- lusion.
Capitalists rule the world. Until they are defeated, there will be no
freedom for anyone.
impossible. Steeles revisit of the debate sets out the issues in it and shows how each one was avoided or
fuzzed over in order to escape the conclusion that there was not even a theoretical
alternative to the market for a modern society. A primitive native
tribe might operate without com- modity production (production for
market), but not an industrial society. The possible combinations of
inputs and outputs are simply too large to be controlled by anything
but market demand. Steeles book would have gained in interest by suggesting why so many scholars
gave socialism and the Soviet economy the benefit of the doubt while they wrote theoretical articles about The
critical of socialism in theory or practice demonstrated a moral backwardness that was unwelcome on academic
faculties. The study of
producing fantasy . Consequently, the experts were not prepared for the sudden collapse of
communism. In May 1981, President Reagan at Notre Dame University dismissed communism as a sad, bizarre
chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written. The experts went berserk. Columbia
University professor Seweryn Bialer, for example, confidently contra- dicted Reagan in Foreign Affairs: The Soviet
Union is not now nor will it be during the next decade in the throes of a true systemic crisis, for it boasts enormous
unused reserves of political and social stability that suffice to endure the deepest difficulties. Openness to
argument, Steele writes, is a wonderful virtue, but it did not characterize the academic study of socialism.
but I had always conceived these displays as having the end goal of
less or better work, not no work. Weeks accurately highlights that
Marxian post-capitalism is heavy on pull-your-own weight rhetoric,
even though I suspect one would be substantially less alienated
from that weight under socialism than one is under capitalism.
Although I would likely gain great personal satisfaction from a full
rejection of the Protestant work ethic, I'm not prepared to entirely
disavow the necessity of work, as a practice or as a concept. The concept
of "work" allows us to appeal to a wide swath of the population, a swath that takes great pride in its work ethic,
whether as the long-suffering earthly worker awaiting that heavenly reward or as the blue collar laborer who pulled
him/herself up by the bootstraps. In other words, organizing around the axiom of "work" allows a wide sampling of
individuals to relate to our struggle for control of the means of production, for only when we control those can we
begin to truly allocate work equitably, resulting in far less and better work for all. The value of Weeks's text as an
effective challenge to one's worldview aside, upon finishing it, I had the distinct feeling that someone with an
Weeks
chastises the reader for failing to imagine a satisfactory post-work,
post-capitalism future. When her admonishments are not quite adequate, she invokes Jameson to
illogical vested interest in me had been deeply disappointed: I felt as though I had just visited my father.
further chide us (212). Weeks reminds us--as the reader reaches an unprecedented level of self-loathing for our
utter failure to envision a proper post-capitalism utopia--that it is much more important that we imagine than what
we imagine (207). Despite her condescending tone, Weeks's point is well taken: Marxists have not been imaginative
enough, and we should spend more time thinking about the potential of a post-work world, not limiting ourselves to
imagining one that involves different, better or less work. After all, I frequently daydream about winning the lottery,
and the starting point for those musings is always quitting my job. Admittedly, my post-work fantasy isn't very
exciting: beach house on the West Coast, condo in Caracas, apartment in Paris, travel to Laos with the Wolfe,
buying off a bunch of folks' student debt via Rolling Jubilee. Yawn. Kathi Weeks is right: my revolution and my
socialism involve work. But not some uncritical, blindly accepted glorification of work, but necessary drudgery
Cap Inevitable
Evolution means we are all selfish
Thayer 2k [Bradley; Former Research Fellow, International Security Program, Associate
Professor of Defense & Strategic Study, Missouri State University, International Security; "Bringing in
Darwin: Evolutionary Theory, Realism, and International Politics", Vol. 25, Issue 2; JL]
Evolutionary theory offers two sufficient explanations for the trait of egoism. The
first
is a classic Darwinian
Evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins's selfish gene theory provides the second sufficient explanation for egoism. A
conceptual shift is required here because Dawkins's level of analysis is the gene, not the organism. As Dawkins
explains, at one time there were no organisms, just chemicals in a primordial "soup."[42] At first, different types of
molecules started forming by accident, including some that could reproduce by using the constituents of the soup-carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen. Because these constituents were in limited supply, molecules competed
for them as they replicated. From this competition, the most efficient copy makers emerged. The process, however,
was never perfect. Sometimes mistakes were made during replication, and occasionally these accidents resulted in
more efficient replication or made some other contribution to fitness. One such mistake might have been the
formation of a thin membrane that held the contents of the molecule together--a primitive cell. A second might
have involved the division of the primitive cell into ever larger components, organs, and so on to create what
Dawkins calls "survival machines." He explains, "The first survival machines probably consisted of nothing more
than a protective coat. But making a living got steadily harder as new rivals arose with better and more effective
in this process, but it continued nonetheless because of evolution. Dawkins makes clear, however, that the interests
of the gene and the organism need not coincide at different stages in an organism's life, particularly after
wealth.
another principle,
namely
the accumulation of
Now you may feel that men should not try to dominate other men although I do not see how you
could believe this in Australia given the importance attached to sports. You may like to replace mans desire to
dominate other men, and in a few cases it is prevented by religious conversion or a decent temperament. But as
Transition War
A transition causes transition wars- progress is innate and
necessary for the quality of life
Aligica 3 [Paul; Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson
Institute; The Great Transition and the Social Limits to Growth: Herman Kahn on Social Change and Global
Economic Development, April 21, http://www.hudson.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=publication_details&id=2827; JL]
potential for the kinds of disasters which most at its advocates are trying to avoid"
(Kahn, 1976, 210; 1984).
construct an economic model of socialism in one advanced country is a legitimate exercise: but to extract it from
any computable relationship with a surrounding, and necessarily opposing, capitalist environmentas this work
doesis to locate it in thin air
The transition would be a blood bath you cant turn off the
economy. Pragmatic political strategies are key.
Barnhizer 6 [David Barnhizer Professor of Law at Cleveland State University,
Summer 2006, Waking from Sustainability's "Impossible Dream, Georgetown
International Environmental Law Review, Lexis]
Cap Sustainable
Free markets are adaptable Adjusts to all crises better
The Australian 9 [Staff Writer, The Case for Capitalism, 6-25
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25685611-16382,00.html, JL]
THE way Australians are selling out of shares will delight doomsayers, giving them additional evidence for their
argument that capitalism has failed and that only the state can save us from privation. The number of shareholders
has slumped by 14 per cent from 2004, when more than half of us had portfolios. But the problem with the
cassandras' commentary is that while they are obviously accurate in pointing to the damage down by the global
financial crisis, they have misunderstood the nature of the disease and are peddling a snake oil solution to an
ultimately promissory notes based on the supposed value of bundles of loans. And it was also caused by the
incompetence of regulators charged with stopping such market manipulation. According to Financial Times
journalist Gillian Tett, the collapse of the $US12,000 billion market for these so-called securities precipitated the
much broader slump. In the US, where regulators once required banks to hold reserves of $US800 million to cover
loans with a face value of $US10bn, the amount required was reduced to just $US160m. This sort of exposure
meant disaster was inevitable, and beyond the global scope of the problem there was little to distinguish last year's
crisis from other get-rich-quick schemes throughout history. But critics, such as the Prime Minister in his nowfamous essay in which he argued that the state must regulate the economy to protect ordinary people from the
Perm
Reform Good
Thinking of ways to reform capitalism leads to effective
solutions, unlike rejecting it altogether
Miller 13 (Michael M. Miller is a research fellow at the Acton Institute
and director of PovertyCure, which promotes entrepreneurial solutions
to poverty in the developing world, 9-2-13, 1, Reforming Capitalism
for Freedom, Legatus, http://legatus.org/tag/capitalism/, KR)
In the wake of the financial crisis, one of the recurring themes
among business and political leaders is the need to reform
capitalism and create new ways to think about business and the role
of profit. The common narrative is that business as usual doesnt work. Weve tried the free market and
while it made money for some, it also caused the housing boom, the financial crisis, and created a society where all
that matters is making as much profit as possible. The financial crisis is calling us to come up with new models of
how we should arrange the economy. There are two issues here: first, a new way of looking at business and second,
the reform of the current economic system. Let me address both, beginning with business. Its good that business
leaders are making an effort to understand that business is about more than just profit. Profit is important, of
course, but as Blessed John Paul II reminded us, profit is not the main purpose of business. The main purpose is to
serve human needs and wants. Profit is one of the indicators that reveals whether you are meeting those needs. I
also agree that business as usual is not enough. Weve had some serious moral crises in business from fraudulent
accounting to big banks colluding with the government to receive special bailouts. Whats more, business is not
outside the requirements of morality. Most corporate social responsibility programs have a serious flaw they are
relativistic. You cant build a culture of business ethics if there is no truth and no right and wrong. Though
mainstream business leaders rarely talk about it, business has the moral and social responsibility to cultivate a
healthy moral ecology. This means honesty and obeying the laws; it also means respecting families and not
What do we mean by capitalism? Unfortunately, the term capitalism has become proxy for that which is bad
and often becomes a substitute for the sins of greed and avarice. Theres another problem and a more serious
one. In common parlance word capitalism is usually identified with a free-market economy both by its detractors
and defenders. But capitalism and the free market are not always the same thing. There are many different
varieties of capitalism: oligarchic capitalism, corporate capitalism, crony capitalism, managerial capitalism, and
free-market capitalism to name a few. Most of the critics of capitalism lament so-called market fundamentalism
or unfettered markets, but we dont have anything of the sort. What we have in the U.S. is a type of managerialcrony capitalism where big business and big government collude to make regulations that serve their interests.
When things went wrong with our managerial capitalist system, instead of assigning blame correctly we blamed this
Totalization Bad
Alt Fails: The alternative is a fantasy- all your impact are scare
tactics that should be ignored
Gibson-Graham 96 (J.K. Gibson-Graham, Professor of Human Geography at the Australian
National University and Professor of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1996,
The End of Capitalism As We Know It, KC)
Its
organic unity gives capitalism the peculiar power to regenerate
itself, and even to subsume its moments of crisis as requirements of
its continued growth and development. Socialism has never been endowed with
Capitalism takes on its full form as a natural outcome of an internally driven growth process.
that mythic capability of feeding on its own crises; its reproduction was never driven from within by a
life force but always from without; it could never reproduce itself but always had to be reproduced,
often an arduous if not impossible process. Other modes of production that lack the organic unity of
Capitalism are more capable of being instituted or replaced incrementally and more likely to coexist
World, for example, or backward regions in what are known as the advanced capitalist nations) are
notion of capitalist exclusivity is a monolithic conception of class, at least in the context of advanced
capitalist countries. The term class usually refers to a social cleavage along the axis of capital and
labor since capitalism cannot coexist with any but residual or pre-figurative non-capitalist relations.
The presence and fullness of the capitalist monolith not only denies the possibility of economic or
class diversity in the present but prefigures a monolithic and modernist socialism one in which
Capitalisms singularity
operates to discourage projects to create alternative economic
institutions and class relations, since these will necessarily be
everyone is a comrade and class diversity does not exist.
Acceleration Perm
Neoliberalism can be used to transcend itself the
permutation embraces the transformative potential of
neoliberal technologies in particular instances like the aff to
move to a post-capitalist resource paradigm.
Williams & Srnicek 13 (Alex, PhD student at the University of East London,
presently at work on a thesis entitled 'Hegemony and Complexity', Nick, PhD
candidate in International Relations at the London School of Economics, Co-authors
of the forthcoming Folk Politics, 14 May 2013,
http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-anaccelerationist-politics/ md)
5. Accelerationists want to unleash latent productive forces. In this project, the
Thought: C. Derick Varn and Dario Cankovich Interview Alex Williams and Nick
Srnicek, http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=9240 md)
Our conclusion that post-capitalist planning is required stems from the
theoretical failures of market socialism as well as from our own belief
data analytics, logistics networks, and automation can all play a role
in building the material platform for a post-capitalist system. The
belief that our current technologies are intrinsically wedded to a
neoliberal social system is not only theoretically obsolete, but also
practically limiting. So without thinking technology is sufficient to save
us, we nevertheless believe that technology is a primary area where
tools and weapons for struggle can be developed. With regards to the
centralised nature of planning, it should be clear to everyone that the Soviet system
was a failure in many regards. The issue here is to learn from past experiments such
as GOSPLAN, and from theoretical proposals such as Parecon and Devines
democratic planning. Particularly inspiring here is the Chilean experiment,
Cybersyn, which contrary to the stereotype of a planned economy, in fact
attempted to build a system which incorporated workers selfautonomy and factory-level democracy into the planned economy.
There remain issues here about the gender-bias of the system (the
design of the central hub being built for men, for instance), yet this experiment
is a rich resource for thinking through what it might mean to build a
post-capitalist economy. And it should be remembered that Cybersyn was built
with less than the computing power of a smartphone. It is todays technology
which offers real resources for organising an economy in a far more
rational way than the market system does. It has to be recognised then
that communism is an idea that was ahead of its time. It is a 21st century idea that
was made popular in the 20th century and was enacted by a 19th century economy.
Impact Turns
Generic
Growth from capitalism solves every impact
Silk 93 [Leonard; Professor, Economics, Pace University; Dangers of Slow Growth, FOREIGN
AFFAIRS v. 72 n. 1, Winter 1993, p. 173-174; JL]
Disease
Cap solves disease
Zey 98 (Michael G. Professor of management in the School of Business
Administration at Montclair State University and executive director of the
Expansionary Institute. Seizing the Future: The Dawn of the Macroindustrial Era.
Second Edition. Page 120)
In this chapter we will encounter medical and technological breahthroughs
genetic therapy, superdrugs, fetal surgery, and cell and molecular repair that
are helping society extend the life span and improve the quality of
our physical existence. The advances are as striking as any of the
Macroindustrial Era, and their implications are revolutionary. Genetics
and the Assault on Disease Increasingly, we are discovering that our
medical fate lies in our genes. Once we achieve the ability to diagnose
medical problems at the genetic level and replace faulty genes with
healthy ones, we will eradicate a great number of diseases before
they ever start. The onset of what has been labeled the genetic age of
medical research will revolutionize medicine and help us increase life
expectancy and minimize human suffering.
Extinction
Zimmerman and zimmerman 1996 (Barry and David, both have M.S.
degrees from Long Island University, Killer Germs p 132)
Then came AIDSand Ebola and Lassa fever and Marburg and
dengue fever. They came, for the most part, from the steamy jungles of the
world. Lush tropical rain forests are ablaze with deadly viruses. And
changing lifestyles as well as changing environmental conditions
are flushing them out. Air travel, deforestation, global warming are
forcing never-before-encountered viruses to suddenly cross the
path of humanity. The resultemerging viruses.Today some five
thousand vials of exotic viruses sit, freeze-dried, at Yale Universityimports from
the rain forests. They await the outbreak of diseases that can be
ascribed to them. Many are carried by insects and are termed
arboviruses (arthropod borne). Others, of even greater concern, are airborne
imagination does not begin to match all the tricks that nature can play
According to Lederberg, The survival of humanity is not preordained
Environment
Capitalism key to environmental protection
Taylor 3, [Jerry; Director of natural resource studies at CATO; Aprill 22, 2003; Happy Earth Day?
Thank Capitalism; http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3073; JL]
food, shelter, and a reasonable education to higher "quality of life" issues. The richer you are, the more likely you
rises from subsistence levels, air and water pollution increases correspondingly. But once per capita income hits
between $3,500 and $15,000 (dependent upon the pollutant), the ambient concentration of pollutants begins to
such findings are indeed counterintuitive. But the data don't lie. How do we explain this? The obvious answer --
federal government passed its panoply of environmental regulations than after the EPA came upon the scene.
when people are willing to spend money on environmental quality, the market will provide it. Meanwhile,
latter are far less pollution-intensive than the former. But the former are necessary prerequisites for the latter.
Capitalism can
save more lives threatened by environmental pollution than all the
environmental organizations combined.
Third World, making poverty the number one environmental killer on the planet today.
Poverty
Free market capitalism is vital to preventing extinction and
ensuring equality, value to life including individual rights also
solves disease and poverty
Rockwell 2 [Llewellyn; President of the Mises Institute; The Free Market; Why They Attack Capitalism,
Volume 20, Number 10, October; http://www.mises.org/freemarket_detail.asp?control=418&sortorderarticledate; JL]
If you think about it, this hysteria is astonishing, even terrifying. The market economy has created unfathomable
prosperity and, decade by decade, for centuries and centuries, miraculous feats of innovation, production,
the politically connected and their enforcers. The high value placed on women, children, the disabled, and the aged
unknown in the ancient worldowes so much to capitalisms productivity and distribution of power. Must we
compare the record of capitalism with that of the state, which, looking at the
sweep of this past century alone, has killed hundreds of millions of people in wars,
famines, camps, and deliberate starvation campaigns? And the record of central
planning of the type now being urged on American enterprise is perfectly abysmal.
Ginn 12
[Vance; Economist in the Center for Fiscal Policy at the Texas Public Policy Foundation; January 17,
2012; How Government, Not Capitalism, Is Causing Income Inequality; http://mic.com/articles/3401/howgovernment-not-capitalism-is-causing-income-inequality; JL]
Blaming capitalism for the ills of income inequality is also incorrect. In a capitalist system,
markets provide information to allow prices and wages to send signals for an efficient allocation of scarce resources.
With diversified levels of educational attainment, different years of training, and other factors, one's marginal
product of labor may demand a much higher wage than someone else. It is probable that there would be high levels
charities, family members, and NGOs could replace welfare programs. These types of resources would have to be
accountable, transparent, and efficient or risk closing; they would also have to provide valuable services because
they will be competing for donations. Competition does not exist or is driven out by government programs. This is
probably the biggest problem with government programs: they have the power of the purse and remain in business
even when they fail. The government is not the answer and creates more problems than it solves from the
redistribution of income and waste. More choices given to individuals with their money and the spontaneous order
of society will bring about the most efficient outcomes. Therefore, those in society may not be getting paid what
they are "worth" because of government manipulation and lack of capitalism, where risk equals reward or failure.
Voter ignorance creates an environment in politics that repeats the same mistakes (see Learn Liberty short video).
To reform our society in a way that benefits everyone, we must educate ourselves and expand our knowledge of our
world. As noted by Socrates, "The unquestioned mind is not worth living." In today's divided political sphere, more
constructive debates are needed more than ever. Let us keep up the fight for liberty, America!
Space
Cap key to successful space programs
Martin 10 (Robert, Amerika, June 21, http://www.amerika.org/politics/centrifugecapitalism/, accessed: 3 July 2011)
the common adventure of exploration. The first step is a sustainable permanent human
lunar settlement.
War
Capitalism incentivizes peaceoutweighs all other factors
Bandow 5 [Doug; senior fellow at the Cato Institute; Nov 10, 2005; Spreading Capitalism is
Good for Peace; http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/spreading-capitalism-is-good-peace;
JL]
But World War I demonstrated that increased trade was not enough. The prospect of economic ruin did not prevent
rampant nationalism, ethnic hatred, and security fears from trumping the power of markets. An even greater
conflict followed a generation later. Thankfully, World War II left war essentially unthinkable among leading
industrialized - and democratic - states. Support grew for the argument, going back to Immanual Kant, that
republics are less warlike than other systems. Today's corollary is that creating democracies out of dictatorships will
reduce conflict. This contention animated some support outside as well as inside the United States for the invasion
of Iraq. But Gartzke argues that "the 'democratic peace' is a mirage created by the overlap between economic and
the latest volume of Economic Freedom in the World, created by the Fraser Institute, "representative governments
war, but then, neither is democracy. It long has been obvious that democracies are willing to fight, just usually not
each other. Contends Gartzke, "liberal political systems, in and of themselves, have no impact on whether states
fight." In particular, poorer democracies perform like non-democracies. He explains: "Democracy does not have a
measurable impact, while
nations with
very
low
levels of
variables, including alliance memberships, nuclear deterrence, and regional differences. Although the causes of
conflict vary, the relationship between economic liberty and peace remains.
Socialism is the Big Lie of the twentieth century. While it promised prosperity,
equality, and security, it delivered poverty, misery, and tyranny. Equality was
achieved only in the sense that everyone was equal in his or her
misery. In the same way that a Ponzi scheme or chain letter initially succeeds but eventually collapses,
socialism may show early signs of success. But any accomplishments quickly fade as the fundamental deficiencies
of central planning emerge. It is the initial illusion of success that gives government intervention its pernicious,
seductive appeal. In the long run, socialism has always proven to be a formula for tyranny and misery. A pyramid
scheme is ultimately unsustainable because it is based on faulty principles. Likewise, collectivism is unsustainable
ignores incentives . In a capitalist economy, incentives are of the utmost importance. Market
prices, the profit-and-loss system of accounting, and private
property rights provide an efficient, interrelated system of
incentives to guide and direct economic behavior. Capitalism is
based on the theory that incentives matter! Under socialism, incentives either play a
minimal role or are ignored totally. A centrally planned economy without market prices or profits, where property is
By
failing to emphasize incentives, socialism is a theory inconsistent
with human nature and is therefore doomed to fail. Socialism is based on the
owned by the state, is a system without an effective incentive mechanism to direct economic activity.
theory that incentives don't matter! In a radio debate several months ago with a Marxist professor from the
University of Minnesota, I pointed out the obvious failures of socialism around the world in Cuba, Eastern Europe,
and China. At the time of our debate, Haitian refugees were risking their lives trying to get to Florida in homemade
boats. Why was it, I asked him, that people were fleeing Haiti and traveling almost 500 miles by ocean to get to the
The Marxist
admitted that many "socialist" countries around the world were
failing. However, according to him, the reason for failure is not that
socialism is deficient, but that the socialist economies are not
practicing "pure" socialism. The perfect version of socialism would
work; it is just the imperfect socialism that doesn't work. Marxists
like to compare a theoretically perfect version of socialism with
practical, imperfect capitalism which allows them to claim that
socialism is superior to capitalism. If perfection really were an
available option, the choice of economic and political systems would
be irrelevant. In a world with perfect beings and infinite abundance,
any economic or political system--socialism, capitalism, fascism, or
communism--would work perfectly. However, the choice of economic and
political institutions is crucial in an imperfect universe with
imperfect beings and limited resources. In a world of scarcity it is essential for an
economic system to be based on a clear incentive structure to promote economic efficiency. The real
choice we face is between imperfect capitalism and imperfect socialism.
Given that choice, the evidence of history overwhelmingly favors
capitalism as the greatest wealth-producing economic system
available. The strength of capitalism can be attributed to an
incentive structure based upon the three Ps: (1) prices determined
by market forces, (2) a profit-and-loss system of accounting and (3)
private property rights. The failure of socialism can be traced to its
neglect of these three incentive-enhancing components. HE Continues The
"evil capitalist empire" when they were only 50 miles from the "workers' paradise" of Cuba?
temptress of socialism is constantly luring us with the offer: "give up a little of your freedom and I will give you a
little more security." As the experience of this century has demonstrated, the bargain is tempting but never pays
off. We end up losing both our freedom and our security. Programs like socialized medicine, welfare, social security,
and minimum wage laws will continue to entice us because on the surface they appear to be expedient and
beneficial. Those programs, like all socialist programs, will fail in the long run regardless of initial appearances.
These programs are part of the Big Lie of socialism because they ignore the important role of incentives. Socialism
will remain a constant temptation. We must be vigilant in our fight against socialism not only around the globe but
also here in the United States. The failure of socialism inspired a worldwide renaissance of freedom and liberty. For
the first time in the history of the world, the day is coming very soon when a majority of the people in the world will
live in free societies or societies rapidly moving towards freedom. Capitalism will play a major role in the global
revival of liberty and prosperity because it nurtures the human spirit, inspires human creativity, and promotes the
spirit of enterprise. By providing a powerful system of incentives that promote thrift, hard work, and efficiency,