Cap vs K affs

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

history's presumed failure to defang existing capitalist

relations has been read by many self-identified radicals as an advertisement for
capitalism's inevitability. As a result, the chorus refrain There Is No
Alternative, sung by liberals and conservatives, has been buttressed by the symphony
of post-Marxist voices recommending that we give socialism a decent burial and
move on. Within this context, to speak of the promise of Marx and socialism may appear anachronistic, even
of socialism. Concomitantly,

nave, especially since the post-al intellectual vanguard has presumably demonstrated the folly of doing so. Yet we
stubbornly believe that the chants of T.I.N.A. must be combated for they offer as a fait accompli, something which

Leftists should refuse to accept namely the triumph of capitalism

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

people is roughly equal to the annual income of the poorest 47 percent of the world's population, while the
combined assets of the three richest people exceed the combined GDP of the 48 poorest nations (CCPA, 2002, p. 3).

2.8 billion peoplealmost half of the world's populationstruggle in

desperation to live on less than two dollars a day (McQuaig, 2001, p. 27). As many as
250 million children are wage slaves and there are over a billion workers who are
either un- or under-employed. These are the concrete realities of our timerealities
that require a vigorous class analysis , an unrelenting critique of capitalism
and an oppositional politics capable of confronting what Ahmad (1998, p. 2) refers to as
capitalist universality. They are realities that require something more than that which is offered by
Approximately

the prophets of difference and post-Marxists who would have us relegate socialism to the scrapheap of history and

Never before has a Marxian analysis of

capitalism and class rule been so desperately needed. That is not to say that everything Marx
said or anticipated has come true, for that is clearly not the case. Many critiques of Marx focus on
his strategy for moving toward socialism, and with ample justification;
nonetheless Marx did provide us with fundamental insights into class
society that have held true to this day. Marx's enduring relevance lies in his indictment of capitalism
mummify Marxism along with Lenin's corpse.

which continues to wreak havoc in the lives of most. While capitalism's cheerleaders have attempted to hide its
sordid underbelly, Marx's description of capitalism as the sorcerer's dark power is even more apt in light of

Rather than jettisoning Marx, decentering

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

the questionable assumptions that have come to constitute the core of

contemporary radical theory, pedagogy

and politics.

In terms of effecting

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

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

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

which it is called (Bannerji, 2000, p. 41). The task for progressives today is to seize the
moment and plant the seeds for a political agenda that is grounded in
historical possibilities and informed by a vision committed to overcoming exploitative conditions.
These seeds, we would argue, must be derived from the tree of radical political
economy. For the vast majority of people todaypeople of all racial classifications or
identities, all genders and sexual orientationsthe common frame of
reference arcing across difference, the concerns and aspirations that are most widely shared are those that
are rooted in the common experience of everyday life shaped and constrained
by political economy (Reed, 2000, p. xxvii). While post-Marxist advocates of the
politics of difference suggest that such a stance is outdated, we would argue
that the categories which they have employed to analyze the social are now losing
their usefulness, particularly in light of actual contemporary social movements. All over the globe,
there are large anti-capitalist movements afoot. In February 2002, chants of Another World
Is Possible became the theme of protests in Porto Allegre. It seems that those people struggling in the
streets havent read about T.I.N.A., the end of grand narratives of
emancipation, or the decentering of capitalism. It seems as though the struggle for basic
case in political matters. Rather,

survival and some semblance of human dignity in the mean streets of the dystopian metropoles doesnt permit
much time or opportunity to read the heady proclamations emanating from seminar rooms. As E. P. Thompson
(1978, p. 11) once remarked, sometimes experience walks in without knocking at the door, and announces deaths,

This, of course, does not mean

socialism will inevitably come about, yet a sense of its nascent promise
animates current social movements. Indeed, noted historian Howard Zinn (2000, p. 20) recently
pointed out that after years of single-issue organizing (i.e. the politics of difference), the
WTO and other anti-corporate capitalist protests signaled a turning point
in the history of movements of recent decades, for it was the issue of class that
more than anything bound everyone together. History, to paraphrase Thompson (1978, p. 25)
crises of subsistence, trench warfare, unemployment, inflation, genocide.
that

doesnt seem to be following Theory's script. Our vision is informed by Marx's historical materialism and his
revolutionary socialist humanism, which must not be conflated with liberal humanism. For left politics and

a socialist humanist vision remains crucial, whose fundamental features

include the creative potential of people to challenge collectively the
circumstances that they inherit. This variant of humanism seeks to give expression to the pain,
pedagogy,

sorrow and degradation of the oppressed, those who labor under the ominous and ghastly cloak of globalized
capital. It calls for the transformation of those conditions that have prevented the bulk of humankind from fulfilling

It vests its hope for change in the development of critical

consciousness and social agents who make history, although not always in conditions of
its potential.

their choosing. The political goal of socialist humanism is, however, not a resting in difference but rather the
emancipation of difference at the level of human mutuality and reciprocity. This would be a step forward for the
discovery or creation of our real differences which can only in the end be explored in reciprocal ways (Eagleton,

the enduring relevance of a radical socialist pedagogy

and politics is the centrality it accords to the interrogation of capitalism.
1996, p. 120). Above all else,

We can no longer afford to remain indifferent to the horror and savagery committed by capitalist's barbaric

We need to recognize that capitalist democracy is unrescuably

contradictory in its own self-constitution. Capitalism and democracy cannot be translated
into one another without profound efforts at manufacturing empty idealism. Committed Leftists must
unrelentingly cultivate a democratic socialist vision that refuses to forget the wretched of the
machinations.

earth, the children of the damned and the victims of the culture of silencea task which requires more than

Leftists must
challenge the
true evils that are manifest in the tentacles of global capitalism's reach. And, more than
this, Leftists must search for the cracks in the edifice of globalized
capitalism and shine light on those fissures that give birth to alternatives.
Socialism today, undoubtedly, runs against the grain of received wisdom, but its
vision of a vastly improved and freer arrangement of social relations
beckons on the horizon. Its unwritten text is nascent in the present even as it
abstruse convolutions and striking ironic poses in the agnostic arena of signifying practices.

illuminate the little shops of horror that lurk beneath globalizations shiny faade; they must

exists among the fragments of history and the shards of distant memories. Its potential remains untapped and its
promise needs to be redeemed.

Engaging the state is the only way to break down the crises of
capitalism
Frank '12 Thomas, brilliant badass, author of What's the Matter with Kansas? and
editor of The Baffler "To the Precinct Station: How theory met practice and drove it
absolutely crazy" http://www.thebaffler.com/past/to_the_precinct_station
Occupy itself is pretty much gone. It was evicted from Zuccotti Park about two
months after it beganan utterly predictable outcome for which the group seems to

have made inadequate preparation. OWS couldnt bring itself to come up with a real set of demands until after it
got busted, when it finally agreed on a single item. With the exception of some residual groups here and there

OWS has today pretty much fizzled out. The media

storm that once surrounded it has blown off to other quarters. Pause for a moment
and compare this record of accomplishment to that of Occupys evil twin, the Tea
Party movement, and the larger right-wing revival of which it is a part. Well, under
populated by the usual activist types,

the urging of this trumped-up protest movement, the Republican Party proceeded to
win a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives; in the state legislatures
of the nation it took some six hundred seats from the Democrats; as of this
writing it is still purging Republican senators and congressmen deemed
insufficiently conservative and has even succeeded in having one of its own
named as the GOPs vice-presidential candidate. * * * The question that the books
under consideration here seek to answer is: What is the magic formula that made OWS so successful? But its

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

did this effort fail? How did OWS blow all the promise of its early days? Why do even the most popular efforts
exactly the wrong question.

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

if you want to know how the people in Zuccotti

intended to block the banks agendahow they intended to stop predatory lending,
for exampleyou have truly come to the wrong place. Not because its hard to figure out how
to stop predatory lending, but because the way the Occupy campaign is depicted in these books , it seems to
have had no intention of doing anything except building communities in public
spaces and inspiring mankind with its noble refusal to have leaders. Unfortunately,
though, thats not enough. Building a democratic movement culture is essential for movements on the left,
authors themselves never bring it up. And

but its also just a starting point. Occupy never evolved beyond it. It did not call for a subtreasury system, like the
Populists did. It didnt lead a strike (a real one, that is), or a sit-in, or a blockade of a recruitment center, or a
takeover of the deans office. The IWW free-speech fights of a century ago look positively Prussian by comparison.

With Occupy, the horizontal culture was everything. The process is the
message, as the protesters used to say and as most of the books considered here largely concur. The

aforementioned camping, the cooking, the general-assembling, the filling of public places: thats what Occupy was

Beyond that there seems to have been virtually no strategy to speak of, no
agenda to transmit to the world. * * * Whether or not to have demands, you might recall, was
all about.

something that Occupy protesters debated hotly among themselves in the days when Occupy actually occupied
something. Reading these books a year later, however, that debate seems to have been consensed out of
existence. Virtually none of the authors reviewed here will say forthrightly that the failure to generate demands was
a tactical mistake. On the contrary: the quasi-official account of the episode (Occupying Wall Street) laughs off
demands as a fetish object of literal-minded media types who stupidly crave hierarchy and chains of command.
Chris Hedges tells us that demands were something required only by the elites, and their mouthpieces in the
media. Enlightened people, meanwhile, are supposed to know better; demands imply the legitimacy of the

Launching a protest with no formal

demands is thought to be a great accomplishment, a gesture of surpassing
democratic virtue. And here we come to the basic contradiction of the campaign. To
protest Wall Street in 2011 was to protest, obviously, the outrageous financial
misbehavior that gave us the Great Recession; it was to protest the political power
of money, which gave us the bailouts; it was to protest the runaway compensation practices that have turned
adversary, meaning the U.S. government and its friends, the banks.

All three of these catastrophes,

however, were brought on by deregulation and tax-cutting by a philosophy of
liberation as anarchic in its rhetoric as Occupy was in reality. Check your
premises, Rand-fans: it was the bankers own uprising against the hated state that
wrecked the American way of life. Nor does it require poststructuralism-leading-throughanarchism to understand how to reverse these developments. You do it by
rebuilding a powerful and competent regulatory state. You do it by
rebuilding the labor movement. You do it with bureaucracy. Occupiers often
our societys productive labor into bonuses for the 1 percent.

seemed aware of this. Recall what you heard so frequently from protesters lips back in the days of September

Restore the old Glass-Steagall divide between investment and commercial banks, they insisted.
Bring back big government! Bring back safety! Bring back boredom! But
thats no way to fire the imagination of the world. So, how do you maintain the
carnival while secretly lusting for the CPAs? By indefinitely suspending the
obvious next step. By having no demands. Demands would have signaled that
humorless, doctrinaire adults were back in charge and that the fun was over. This was
2011:

an inspired way to play the situation in the beginning, and for a time it was a great success. But it also put a clear

As long as demands and the rest of the logocentric

requirements were postponed, Occupy could never graduate to the next level. It
would remain captive to what Christopher Lasch criticizedway back in 1973as the cult of
participation, in which the experience of protesting is what protesting is all about .
expiration date on the protests.

Links

Art
Art has already become commodified, it is a symbol of
capitalism and continues the cycle
Brown 5 (Richard Harvey Brown, Richard Harvey Brown is professor of sociology

at the University of Maryland. 6/2005, Culture, Capitalism, and Democracy in the

New America,
http://site.ebrary.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/lib/umich//docDetail.action?
docID=10170004.)//ky
THE CREATION OF ART AS A PRIVILEGED CATEGORY The ambivalence that many people
feel toward art as a source of freedom and pleasure or as an enemy of
ethics also can be understood as a tension between the conspicuous
consumption discussed by Thorstein Veblen and the Protestant ethic described by Max Weber.
Veblens () theory of the leisure class seeks to understand why the very bases of human life and the central
means and ends of capitalist society that is, labor and wealth ultimately were not regarded as worthy of honor.
By contrast, Weber (, ) introduces his study of the Protestant ethic with remarks on music and
architecture that he presents as examples of the pervasive rationalism of Western society, notably in the domain of
art and not just in business firms and state bureaucracies. The social definition of art as a distinct and universal
category of experience was a first step in this long process of transforming aesthetic creations into exchangeable
commodities. To be exchanged for cash, art had to be apprehended as independent of its contexts of use and
assessed in terms of some nonlocal value. Painting on canvas was a step in this direction since it made the artwork

In the aesthetic theories of Enlightenment

Europe, the value in art that transcended all contexts was beauty, and it
remained so during the initial stages of industrialization, until art was
later reduced to another universal value money. The postmodern period may be
characterized as the latest stage in this transformation. Now beauty, money, art, and even
anti-art are all fragmented into interchangeable signs. Indeed, postmodernization has
more removable from its initial milieu.

not merely eroded the experience of culture as an integrated unity by confronting each lived unity with many
others.

More, art itself is no longer seen as a domain of unity, however

ideally conceived, but rather as a fragmentation of forms in response to
various emerging and changing taste cultures and semiotic orders. In all these
transformations, art operates as an ideological construction rather than as any
kind of natural category. In its modern usage, to call an object or activity
art is to bestow upon it an apparently inherent, quasi-sacred value,
while withholding this value from other often similar activities. The term
art then functions as a category of distinction that assists in the
construction and maintenance of a hierarchy of values and, thence, of
persons; the hierarchy, once constructed, can be made to appear natural
and inevitable (Bourdieu ; Kelly , ). Although the arts are taken to fall within a broader
category of pleasure, they invoke a specific sort of contemplative appreciation that associates contemporary
cosmopolitan elites with earlier aristocrats and nobles. Indeed, from this viewpoint, the arts as revered yet
pleasurable objects and activities are due as much to the status of their current patrons and their association with
leisured, courtly taste as to any intrinsic moral or spiritual properties that they may embody (Bourdieu Earlier
generations of Americans, like Europeans, bought paintings for pleasure, status, or commemoration but not for
investment. Here Veblens dictum that waste is efficient as a display of wealth is apt, for a century ago art was
bought more to lose money than to gain it. Moreover, rich Americans could not get tax writeoffs by giving their
collections to museums because there was no personal income tax and few public museums. People applauded

The
sacralization of cultural objects began in the United States in the with
the creation of large, prestigious institutions and the mystification of
artistic production. At midcentury John Singleton Copley complained that painters had a social status
extravagant purchases not as shrewd investments, but rather as elitist acts of commercial indifference.

similar to that of tradesmen (in Hughes but by the end of the century the artist had been separated from his or her
publics and mythologized as a crazed demigod or desperado. Similarly, by the outset of the twentieth century the
previously commonplace practice of performing Shakespeare along with a farce, a comic dance, and a trained

animal act had disappeared, the rowdy audience behavior in public performances had been eliminated (no more
crunching peanuts during a concert or hissing inept actors), and newcomers were convinced to value, if not share,
the aesthetics of the elite (Griswold , ). The modern conception of the arts was universalized in
both time and space so that artifacts from ancient Greece or other cultures could be revered as art (Kelly In the
economic and social realms, things were thought to be better because newer, as opposed to the aesthetic realm,

American elites continued to validate their

economic success by reaffirming the past and its artistic masterpieces ,
where they remained better because older. Thus,

especially Old European Masters. Likewise, movies were not at first considered a highbrow aesthetic form
precisely because of the newness of the cinema and its association with technological progress. Even though this
particular medium earned the label of seventh art form, the image of Hollywood often connoted vulgarity or
navet. Cinema still is more European, connoting art, whereas movies are more American, connoting
entertainment.

Art is now produced for capital, any form just continues the
cycle as it has become commodified into the system
Brown 5 (Richard Harvey Brown, Richard Harvey Brown is professor of sociology
at the University of Maryland. 6/2005, Culture, Capitalism, and Democracy in the
New America,
http://site.ebrary.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/lib/umich//docDetail.action?
docID=10170004.)//ky

POSTINDUSTRIAL AND POSTMODERN COMMODIFICATIONS OF ART The barrier between artistic and economic values
and pursuits began to crumble as the market absorbed more and more areas of life and as capital became
increasingly liquid. With mass communication, marketing, and spectacles, capitalistic ventures since the midtwentieth century have further invaded the cultural realm. The greater volume of cash and credit, the abstraction of
things into interchangeable commodities generally, laws permitting art to be used as a tax deduction, and the
abstract qualities of modern all favored the swift convergence of one commodity into another and of liquid assets

Thus, we have come to think of works of art themselves as

investments, assets, or collateral for debt. Further, as the number of
executive, professional, and technical workers has grown, along with their
discretionary income, the ideology extolling consumption has claimed a
larger social territory. Indeed, the blurring of criteria used to distinguish consumption and investment
into art.

has facilitated the invasion of various art scenes by purely commercial interests. In contrast to the earlier period,
when the arts were considered more as a grace note to industrial rhythms or an emotional escape from them, the

arts have become another kind of commodity subject to the logic of profit.
New taste makers and shapers of desire whether they be curators, media moguls, gallery
owners, or theater critics shape culture markets as protean places for the
consumption of new lifestyles and identities through the consumption of
art. Since the latter decades of the twentieth century, capitalism has become more global
and driven by electronic information. As a result, space-time experience
has become more compressed and turnover more accelerated. Flexible
accumulation, short production runs, and rapid market shifts now characterize art as much as other advanced

There is a speedup in the workshops of symbolic production.

The transactions involving artworks, their values, and their rates of
turnover all have accelerated. Innovations and obsolescence of art are
more rapid and their market cycles shorter (Moulin ; Reitlinger ). Even though
economic sectors.

there have always been cycles in the values assigned to distinct genres, artists, or individual pieces, the time
interval separating peaks from nadirs keeps getting shorter, with avant-gardes succeeding one another with
blurring speed. As a result, prices reached in art auctions have both soared and dived. As the arts have become
another form of accumulation, magazines such as ARTnews compile an investors guide to the art market and
issue newsletters that highlight trends in auction prices, tax legislation, and other topics relevant to those who
consider cultural capital a subcategory of economic capital. Similarly, Connoisseur magazine featured an investors
file that reviewed newly discovered schools, periods, or artists that had good price/equity ratios and upside
potentials. The Times/Sotheby art index reports putative statistics on the price movements of art objects from
Tibetan bronzes to Italian Bronzinos. Of course, even with information arriving electronically from all over the globe,

The rise of
mass media as a dominant cultural factor also affects the
commercialization of art and the condition of the artist. In a dialectical
like most stock market news, these tips are usually obsolete before they reach their readers.

fashion, the culture industry thrives on what it fears, and it is nourished

by what it excludes free creativity (Gouldner ). The industry seeks to transform an
earlier role of the artist or intellectual into that of a contract worker, to turn art and ideas into novelty items or
spectacles for sale. As the industry defangs autonomous creators through promises of wealth, the success of
works of high culture becomes defined by money. Great books are known as such by becoming best-sellers,
masterpiece art shows are called blockbusters, classical movies are supposed to be Oscar winners, and best
musical scores are expected to win golden or platinum recordings. Similarly, indigenous or communal traditions are
folklorized to become more easily vended (Widmer Peterson ). For example, formerly autochthonous
country music is now remade for mass presentations by media stars. As audience reception becomes disconnected
from shared conceptions of aesthetic merit or communal traditions, fame based on recognizable achievement is

Postmodern artists embrace the very

celebrity and commercialization that modernists tended to eschew. Even
literary or visual artists perform themselves. They and their works are
known for being known, purchased because of their names in a celebrity
system that offers a market price and legal brand name protection for
personalities, even though it is acknowledged that the fame they enjoy is
transient. As high modernism was absorbed as the formal aesthetics of
corporate capitalism and the bureaucratic state, postmodernism
integrates high and popular culture in the eclectic and short-lived
consumerism of the new global economy.
replaced by celebrity based on image recognition.

Bataille/Fear of the Ocean

When there is not a distinction between living and nonliving
matter, economy is inclusive of both and lifes dynamism
makes conscious management impossiblethe perceived
uncontrollability of the economy legitimates capitalist
development without restriction
Asger Sorenson 2012, Associate Professor of the philosophy of education at Aarhus University in
Denmark, On a universal scale: Economy is Batailles general economy in the journal of Philosophy and Social
Criticism
In a practical perspective one can consider the natural foundation of society as con- sisting of energy in different
forms, some of which make energy accessible to human exploitation. In spite of the theory of relativity and our

in a practical perspective it therefore makes good

sense to distinguish between dead and living matter and between matter and
energy.120 These distinctions make plain the conflict between on the one side
the circulation of money and commod- ities understood mechanically as dead
matter and on the other side living organisms that are transformed quantitatively and
knowledge of the world as one big ecosystem,

qualitatively because of the accumulated energy inside living matter. The traditional models of economical thought

Economy in the
ordi- nary sense aims at the optimal management of resources, and
management is possible only if one assumes an appropriate degree of
standstill and unchangeability; if every- thing moves and emerges by
itself, then conscious management is impossible. Batailles theoretical
fight to think the unreduced desire and the flow of energy in nature into economy
leaves an impression of economy as totally unmanageable and
uncontrollable in a practical sense. The anti-authoritarian, theoretical perspective
means that the general economy loses its character of political economy
are clearly hostile to the self-organizing life of nature,121 and this is with good reason.

and instead transforms itself into a scientistic ontology, the alleged necessity of which contributes to legitimate

which in turn can legitimate a capitalist

development without any restrictions. As mentioned, this was clearly not Batailles
intention, but the conceptual logic in this part of his thinking does not
leave him much choice. However, in this account of the objective basis for the general econ- omy, as it
ideologically a total liberation of desire and consumption,

is presented in the first part of The Accused Share, one does not see many signs of the dialectical thinking, which is
the foundation of the other two parts,122 and this ten- sion makes the project as a whole vulnerable to critiques of

Bataille himself became aware of the problems with reconciling the

connected with the account of the objectively given, and
the more in-depth reflections concerning the inner subjectively given experiences,123 and he actually ended up declaring the very attempt to create the connection
between the subjective experiences of eroticism and sovereignty and what
is objectively given by the use of resources as deeply problematic .124 It is
inconsistency. Actually

wish for political result, which was

thus as political economy that the general economy turns out to have its greatest limitations. The basic problem is

with Batailles extended sense of economy it becomes very difficult to

recommend a definite economical strategy at the ordinary polit- ical level .
that

His main concern is the material conflict between the human being and life as such, between the human expression
of desire, which liberates energy for loss, and the accumulation of energy on the earth and in nature in general. The
human being has in the historical development of civilization developed a still greater consumption of energy, and it
is thus not just capitalism, which is self-destructive, but the very human way of being. What Bataille has pointed out

The full actualization of

the potential of human desire in sovereignty can lead only to emptying out
all disposable energy resources on earth, and that will mean the end , if
not of life as such, then at least of the human way of living. The complete
at the individual and the historical level is actually an onto- logical problem.

realization of the human potential of civilization liberates the energy piled up in and on the earth to take up again
the interrupted flow, which destines energy to a final loss in the tepidness of the universe.

Their critique ignores the role of money in capitalismthis

allows unlimited accumulation of resources

Asger Sorenson 2012, Associate Professor of the philosophy of education at Aarhus University in Denmark,
On a universal scale: Economy is Batailles general economy in the journal of Philosophy and Social Criticism
Batailles anti-authoritarian traits are also expressed in his indifference to money. Throughout the development of
the general economy he thus discusses, sometimes in great detail, resources, things and commodities, just as he

when it comes to
money, he just states, quite simply and almost in passing, that money is a form of
energy.99 That means, however, that Bataille ignores a basic piece of knowledge
gained by the classical political economy, namely that money, as Locke notes,
has the special quality that, when recognized as of value, it allows almost unlimited
accumulation of wealth. This is not the case with produced goods and not at all with living and thereby
perishable resources.100 It is the very social recognition of the value of money that
makes it a spe- cific social resource, where the energy precisely is depending on the actual
recognition. Batailles disregard of money can therefore be interpreted as a
disregard of what is specifically capitalist about modern societ y, since
precisely capital could never come into existence without money in this
sense.101 Bataille clearly sees that desire can be directed towards something perishable, just as it can be
directed towards something immaterial like value; but apparently he has not noticed the societal
mediation, which bestows on money almost magical value, that is, what
Marx calls the fetish character of money.102 In the natural scientific energy per- spective of
the general economy this is of course a recognition of a fictional resource, but as
Locke clearly sees, the acceptance of this fiction is crucial for the development of
social inequality as distinct from the naturally given inequality.103 Dead matter is socially recognized as
deals with sacrifices, gifts, labour, trade, growth, saving, accumulation and wealth; but

valuable, in the form both of houses, money, jewellery and of con- sumer goods such as washing machines, and
social inequality is primarily expressed through the social adaptation, organization and distribution of dead matter.
In the general perspective dead matter, however, is not as perishable or explosive as living matter, and there are
therefore no urgent practical reasons, nor any ontological necessities with respect to energy, which call upon the
one in possession of such an excess to expend it without any retribution. In the perspective of societal economy

the accumulation of wealth can be a prob- lem, since it can be a sign of

surplus production and lack of purchasing power. This problem Keynesian
economics solved politically by a continuous redistribution of the socially
recognized dead values, that is, primarily money. It is, however, not the
energy movement of life that necessitates this redistribution, but the
social misery that makes the exploited masses boil over in rage against
the ruling injustice. One can thus experience a social pressure from parts of society despite the
exploitation that actually strips them of their natural living energy. Bataille, however, does not
distinguish between use-value and exchange-value, he has no specific
concept of plus-value and no systematic concept of capital either. Since he
does not share the objectively orientated theory of labour-value of the
classical political economy of Locke, Smith and Marx, but takes sides with
the neoclassical conception of value as subjectively constituted by desire,
it becomes difficult for the general economy to criticize economical
inequality at the societal level. As mentioned before, accu- mulation is for Bataille
not primarily a problem in relation to the societal distribu- tion of
economical goods; it is mainly a problem because of the pressure generated by the surplus energy.
Bataille is not really interested in the distribution of goods at a societal
level, nor in the form of government in a society, and I think it therefore

quite fair to characterize the general economy as apolitical in the same sense that
liberalism can be considered apolitical.104

Batailles criticism is rooted in the critique of the explosion of

the capitalist economy in the mid-20th centurycapital-driven
consumption if the root cause of catastrophic expenditure of
modern society.
Yang, 00- (Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, A graduate of the
University of California, Berkeley, she has held fellowships at the Center for Chinese Studies of the University of
Michigan, the Chicago Humanities Institute, University of Chicago, and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.
Her publications include Gifts, Favors, and Banquets), Mayfair Yang, Putting Global Capitalism in Its Place:
Economic Hybridity, Bataille, and Ritual Expenditure, Current Anthropology, Vol. 41, No. 4 (August/October 2000),
pp. 477-509 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological
Research, accessed at the University of Michigan Library,//{fishnets}

The dominant tendency of Western critiques of capitalist economy in the

past three decades has been to focus on a sobering picture of the
consolidation of Western capitalism, its penetration to the farthest
corners of the globe, and its destruction and conversion of local
economies. In the world-systems theory of the 1970s and 80s, capitalism
is portrayed as quickly and effectively integrating regional and imperial
economies into the capitalist world system, and Marxist class analysis is
applied to whole nation-states in a scenario of global class struggle
between core and semiperiphery and against the exploited periphery
(Wallerstein 1979).11 For others, the second half of the 20th century is marked by the
rise of multinational corporations which break out of the limitations of the
nation-state and directly induct foreign labor forces ranging across the
globe (Miyoshi 1993). The thesis of flexible accumulation argues that capitalism has entered a new
historical stage since the 1960s, one marked by its deeper penetration in
the world and the greater intensification and global integration of
production as new technologies of communication and transport produce
time-space compression (Harvey 1989). In this new capitalist regime, the global economy
achieves a new competitive edge by abandoning hierarchical, capitalintensive bureaucratic enterprises for flexible smaller subcontracting
firms. In all this thinking there is a Eurocentric assumption that the Midas touch of capitalism immediately destroys local
indigenous economies and cultures or transforms them into a standardized form involving private accumulation, rational-legal
principles, individual maximization, and Western cultural domination. Older forms are seen to present no challenge to the allencompassing and overriding logic of capitalism, whose development is predetermined. Rather than assume that capitalist forces
arrive everywhere like conquering victorious armies, I will suggest here that capitalism can be altered, subverted, or appropriated

Another body of
critiques of capitalism emerging in French intellectual circles (Schrift 1997, Botting
andWilson 1998) offers a very different approach from the more dominant
tradition of political economy which privileges the tropes of labor and
production. Inspired by Marcel Mausss (1967) classic work on primitive gift economies
and by a Nietzschean challenge to the asceticist ethics and utilitarianism
of capitalism, these writers include Georges Bataille (1985, 1989a, 1989b), Jean
Baudrillard (1975), Pierre Bourdieu (1977), Marshall Sahlins (1972, 1976), and Pierre
Clastres (1987). Instead of taking capitalism as the subject of analysis, these
writings seek to mount their critique from outside capitalism, focusing on
the radical difference of primitive economies and the way in which
primitive gift, sacrificial, ritual, and festival economies present
oppositional logics and harbor the potential for alternative social orders.
Despite certain shortcomings, these works are more conducive to reconceptualizing
capitalism in such a way as to reveal the multiplicity of economies, the
by, made to accommodate to, and even itself absorb preexisting socioeconomic forms.12

tensions between them, and their differential embeddings within the

larger social formation. The passage from The Grundrisse with which we began is also cited by Baudrillard in The
Mirror of Production (1975:8687), but he does so in order to launch his unique critique of historical materialism. Baudrillard objects
to Marxs assumption that the contradictions of labor and ownership in capitalism can be projected back to precapitalist societies
such as primitive, archaic, and feudal forms as their structural pivots. Although Marx challenged bourgeois society, his theories did
not go far enough to extricate themselves from the productivist and utilitarian ethic of capitalism found in such concepts as
subsistence, labor, economic exchange, and relations and means of production. For Baudrillard, this failure to achieve a radical
break from capitalist epistemology means that Marxism liberates workers from the bourgeoisie but not from the view that the basic
value of their being lies in their labor and productivity. Historical materialism is thus unable to grasp the profound difference
between societies based on symbolic circulation and societies based on ownership and exchange of labor and commodities. Notions
of labor and production do violence to these societies, where the point of life and the structural order are predicated not on
production but on symbolic exchange with humans, spirits, and ancestors. Historical materialism cannot see that these societies
possess mechanisms for the collective consumption of the surplus and deliberate antiproduction whenever accumulation threatens
the continuity of cycles of reciprocity (p. 143). It fails to recognize that they did not separate economics from other social relations
such as kinship, religion, and politics or distinguish between infra- and superstructure. It also perpetuates the Enlightenment
invention of Nature as a resource for human production rather than an encompassing symbolic field whose offerings to humans

Baudrillards emphasis on consumption and the

radical difference of precapitalist formations owes much to the earlier
work of Georges Bataille. Bataille produced a very different kind of
critique of capitalism, one focused not on production but on consumption .
He found that in archaic economies production was subordinated to
nonproductive destruction (1989a:90). The great motive force of these
societies was not the compulsion to produce (which unleashes a process
of objectification whereby all forms of life, including humans, become
things) but a desire to escape the order of things and to live for the
present moment through exuberant consumption in the form of excesses
of generosity, display, and sacrifice. The societies of Kwakwakawakw potlatch feasting, Aztec human
must be compensated through sacrifice.13

sacrifice, Islamic militarism, and Tibetan monastic Lamaism all understood the necessity of nonproductive expenditure (Bataille
1989b). They set aside a major proportion of their wealth for expenditures which ensured the wasting and loss of wealth rather
than rational accumulation. This destructive consumption allowed them to avoid the deadly hand of utility and to restore some of
the lost intimacy of an existence without a separation between sacred and profane. Whereas Weber (1958) looked to religion to

Bataille looked to archaic religion for seeds of a

subversion of capitalism. If forms of archaic ritual prestation and
sacrificial destruction of wealth could be reintegrated into modern
economies, capitalism would have built-in mechanisms for social
redistribution and for limiting its utilitarian productivism and incessant
commodification of nature and culture. Its expansionary tendencies would suffer frequent shutdowns
and reversals. Batailles project called for widening the frame of our economic
inquiry to what he called a general economy, which accounted not only for
such things as production, trade, and finance but also for social
consumption, of which ritual and religious sacrifice, feasting, and festival
were important components in precapitalist economies. In Batailles approach, religion
explain the origins of the capitalist ethic,

was not an epiphenomenal derivative of the infrastructures of production but an economic activity in itself. A general economy
treats economic wealth and growth as part of the operations of the law of physics governing the global field of energy for all organic
phenomena, so that, when any organism accumulates energy in excess of that needed for its subsistence, this energy must be
expended and dissipated in some way. What he proposed in his enigmatic and mesmerizing book The Accursed Share was that, in
our modern capitalist productivism, we have lost sight of this fundamental law of physics and material existence: that the surplus
energy and wealth left over after the basic conditions for subsistence, reproduction, and growth have been satisfied must be
expended. If this energy is not destroyed, it will erupt of its own in an uncontrolled explosion such as war. Given the tremendous
productive power of modern industrial society and the fact that its productivist ethos has cut off virtually all traditional avenues of
ritual and festive expenditures, energy surpluses have been redirected to military expenditures for modern warfare on a scale

Bataille thought that the incessant growth machine

that is the post-World War II U.S. economy could be deflected from a
catastrophic expenditure on violent warfare only by potlatching the entire
national economy. In giving away its excess wealth to poorer nations, as in the Marshall Plan to rebuild war-torn
unknown in traditional societies.

Europe, the United States could engage in a nonmilitary rivalry for prestige and influence with the Soviet Union, that other center of

Thus, Bataille wished to

resuscitate an important dimension of the economy, nonproductive
expenditure, that has all but disappeared in both capitalist and state
socialist modernity. Scholars such as Jean-Joseph Goux (1998) have pointed to a troubling overlap between Batailles
industrial modernitys radical reduction of nonproductive expenditure.14

views on luxury and sacrificial expenditure and postmodern consumer capitalism. Consumer capitalism is also predicated on

massive consumption and waste rather than on the thrift, asceticism, and accumulation against which Ba- taille directed his theory
of expenditure. It exhibits potlatch features in the tendency for businesses to give goods away in the hope that supply creates its
own demand; it collapses the distinction between luxury and useful goods and between need and desire (Goux 1998). Unlike
modernist capitalism, postmodern consumer capitalism is driven by consumption rather than production. Thus, Batailles vision of
the ritual destruction of wealth as defying the principles of accumulative and productive capitalism does not address this different
phase of consumer capitalism, whose contours have only become clear since his death in 1962. It seems to me that despite their

If
Bataille had addressed our consumer society today, he would have said
that this sort of consumption is still in the service of production and
productive accumulation, since every act of consumption in the world of
leisure, entertainment, media, fashion, and home decor merely feeds
back into the growth of the economy rather than leading to the finality
and loss of truly nonproductive expenditure. Even much of modern warfare is no longer truly
overt similarities, the principles of ritual consumption and those of consumer capitalism are basically incompatible.

destructive but tied into the furthering of military- industrial production. Nor, despite its economic excesses, does our consumer
culture today challenge the basic economic logic of rational private accumulation as a self-depleting archaic sacrificial economy

capitalist consumption is very much an individual

consumption rather than one involving the whole community or social
order.
does.15 Furthermore,

Batailles solution to capitalism just offloads the system onto

other country, forming endless production cycles in other
countries
Yang 2k (Mayfair Mei-Hui Yang, Ph.D. Anthropology, University of California at
Berkeley, October, 2000.
http://www.jstor.org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/stable/10.1086/317380.) //ky

Baudrillards emphasis on consumption and the radical difference of precapitalist formations owes much to the

Bataille produced a very different kind of critique of

one focused not on production but on consumption. He found that in archaic
economies production was subordinated to nonproductive destruction
earlier work of Georges Bataille.
capitalism,

(1989a:90). The great motive force of these societies was not the compulsion to produce (which unleashes a
process of objectification whereby all forms of life, including humans, become things) but a desire to escape the
order of things and to live for the present moment through exuberant consumption in the form of excesses of

The societies of Kwakwakawakw potlatch feasting,

Aztec human sacrifice, Islamic militarism, and Tibetan monastic Lamaism
all understood the necessity of nonproductive expenditure (Bataille
1989b). They set aside a major proportion of their wealth for expenditures
which ensured the wasting and loss of wealth rather than rational
accumulation. This destructive consumption allowed them to avoid the deadly hand of utility and to restore
generosity, display, and sacrifice.

some of the lost intimacy of an existence without a separation between sacred and profane. Whereas Weber
(1958) looked to religion to explain the origins of the capitalist ethic, Bataille looked to archaic religion for seeds of
a subversion of capitalism. If forms 13. Baudrillard contests the functional explanation that primitive magic,
sacrifice, and religion try to accomplish what labor and forces of production cannot. Rather than our rational reading
of sacrifice as producing use values, sacrifice is engagement in reciprocity with the gods for taking the fruits of the
earth (1975:8283). of archaic ritual prestation and sacrificial destruction of wealth could be reintegrated into
modern economies, capitalism would have built-in mechanisms for social redistribution and for limiting its utilitarian
productivism and incessant commodification of nature and culture. Its expansionary tendencies would suffer

Batailles project called for widening the frame of

our economic inquiry to what he called a general economy, which
accounted not only for such things as production, trade, and finance but
also for social consumption, of which ritual and religious sacrifice,
feasting, and festival were important components in precapitalist
economies. In Batailles approach, religion was not an epiphenomenal
derivative of the infrastructures of production but an economic activity in
itself. A general economy treats economic wealth and growth as part of
the operations of the law of physics governing the global field of energy
frequent shutdowns and reversals.

for all organic phenomena, so that, when any organism accumulates

energy in excess of that needed for its subsistence, this energy must be
expended and dissipated in some way. What he proposed in his enigmatic and mesmerizing
book The Accursed Share was that, in our modern capitalist productivism,
we have lost sight of this fundamental law of physics and material
existence: that the surplus energy and wealth left over after the basic
conditions for subsistence, reproduction, and growth have been satisfied
must be expended. If this energy is not destroyed, it will erupt of its own
in an uncontrolled explosion such as war. Given the tremendous
productive power of modern industrial society and the fact that its
productivist ethos has cut off virtually all traditional avenues of ritual and
festive expenditures, energy surpluses have been redirected to military
expenditures for modern warfare on a scale unknown in traditional
societies. Bataille thought that the incessant growth machine that is the
post-World War II U.S. economy could be deflected from a catastrophic
expenditure on violent warfare only by potlatching the entire national
economy. In giving away its excess wealth to poorer nations, as in the
Marshall Plan to rebuild war-torn Europe, the United States could engage
in a nonmilitary rivalry for prestige and influence with the Soviet Union,
that other center of industrial modernitys radical reduction of
nonproductive expenditure.14 Thus, Bataille wished to resuscitate an
important dimension of the economy, nonproductive expenditure, that has
all but disappeared in both capitalist and state socialist modernity. Scholars
such as Jean-Joseph Goux (1998) have pointed to a troubling overlap between Batailles views on luxury and
sacrificial expenditure and postmodern consumer capitalism. Consumer capitalism is also predicated on massive
consumption and waste rather than on the thrift, asceticism, and accumulation against which Bataille directed his
theory of expenditure. It exhibits potlatch features in the tendency for businesses to give goods away in the hope
that supply creates its own demand; it collapses the distinction between luxury and useful goods and between
need and desire (Goux 1998). Unlike modernist capitalism, postmodern consumer capitalism is driven by

Thus, Batailles vision of the ritual destruction of

wealth as defying the principles of accumulative and productive capitalism
does not address this different phase of consumer capitalism , whose
contours have only become clear since his death in 1962. It seems to me
that despite their overt similarities, the principles of ritual consumption
and those of consumer capitalism are basically incompatible . If Bataille had
consumption rather than production.

addressed our consumer society today, he would have said that this sort of consumption is still in the service of
production and productive accumulation, since every act of consumption in the world of leisure, entertainment,
media, fashion, and home decor merely feeds back into the growth of the economy rather than leading to the
finality and loss of truly nonproductive expenditure. Even much of modern warfare is no longer truly destructive but
tied into the furthering of military- industrial production. Nor, despite its economic excesses, does our consumer
culture today challenge the basic economic logic of rational private accumulation as a self-depleting archaic
sacrificial economy does.15 Furthermore, capitalist consumption is very much an individual consumption rather
than one involving the whole community or social order.

Batailles method of the general economy only redirects capital

to the excess, it produces a new system of capitalism that
causes current movements to fail
Hegarty 2k (Paul Hegarty, studied Languages, Economics and Politics at
Kingston Polytechnic, Critical Theory at Nottingham, and did a PhD in French and
Critical Theory, on Georges Bataille and Jean Baudrillard. 8/2000.
http://site.ebrary.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/lib/umich/docDetail.action?
docID=10567020.) //ky

Heterology persists in Bataille's oeuvre, but takes the guise of the general economy - a system which seeks to
account for what is other (heterogeneous) and to 'be other' in the way it is written (compared to social 'science').

The 'notion of the general economy' emerges in its own right in the essay T h e Notion of Expenditure', which draws
together the various strands already at work in Bataille's writing - Hegel, Nietzsche, Sade, anthropology. The ideas
announced in this essay are more fully developed throughout the three volumes of The Accursed Share, and persist,
in a slightly different formulation, in the late texts, such as Eroticism. Whilst Bataille's oeuvre could be categorized
as consisting of an array of more or less interchangeable, subtly different terms and notions, this array can be
categorized through the notion of general economy, which thus comes to serve as the organizing notion of Bataille's
work (this organization could be visualized as a set of clusters, or as the contingent constellations of the 'strange

The very
formulation of something called a 'general economy' suggests an attempt
to account for some sort of whole, and also suggests the insufficiency of
economics as a free-standing term. In this way, Bataille (from a quasiMarxist position) challenges the belief held by both capitalism and
communism in the primacy of 'the economic', where the economic is the
sphere of production, as well as currently being the realm of commodity
fetishism. Bataille wishes to criticize a conception of society based on its
economics because this categorization is what has led to society being
dominated by the economic sphere: in other words, the observation that
the economic is the most important is not innocent - it has contributed to
the problem it 'describes', as it comes from the same set of presumptions.
Bataille argues, via Mauss, that the notion of there being an economic realm that is autonomous is limited
attractors' of chaos theory, rather than the linear structures of genuinely systematic philosophies).

to modern, Western, societies, and those brought under their influence, 1 and that to a large extent the economic
has no such existence in most societies. Bataille is also echoing Weber, in that he sees capitalism as having
removed all vestiges of genuine community and the unifying beliefs of the past (Bataille differs in that, for him, this
loss dates from a much earlier period - the start of humanity), as accumulation, and secondarily, profit, have taken
over (The Accursed Share, 136; OC VII, 130). As a result of this privileging of the economic, all value is processed in
the same way. In fact, even the idea of value is complicit in this. The result is that what is valued is all that fosters
accumulation and preservation, or comes from them. Bataille's general economy seeks to get beyond this, to talk of

Bataille is referring to
what elsewhere he terms the homogeneous and the heterogeneous. The
homogeneous, or the sphere dominated by economics, consists of all that
is deemed normal, all that seeks to make society a controllable, controlled
phenomenon. In other words, it is the realm of work, religion, utility,
(party) politics, laws, taboos, reproductive sex, truth, knowledge. The
realm beyond this is that of excess: eroticism, death, festivals,
transgression, drunkenness, laughter, the dissolution of truth and
knowledge. This realm of excess is the general economy, but the general
economy is also the process whereby the homogeneous realm interacts
with excessive phenomena. The general economy redefines the economic
such that not everything is under 'the economic', but everything is part of
one economy among many - this many is the general economy. The fact that the
economies of loss, waste, expenditure and, 'above all', excess. More specifically,

economic in the traditional sense ('restricted economy') and what is, strictly speaking, anti-economic, co-exist in the
general economy, also means that they interact. The distinction between the two types of economy is never total,
even if it is clear cut. This interaction takes a form not dissimilar to Hegel's dialectical system, but with the
intervention of Nietzsche - Bataille's system has no overcoming, just the revelation of nothingness, as excess and
waste are not recuperable for self-consciousness. We might attempt to incorporate what is threatening to the
norms, sanity, life and so on, but such overcoming is already trapped in a restricted economy, rather than the way
out of it. For example, taboo and transgression are absolutely linked, as we need a law for there to be a crime,
whilst law is the system that believes it has controlled transgression, but no matter how often it enacts this control,
the moment of transgression is still beyond it.

The 1ACs idea of the sublime is nothing but a manifestation of

capitalism, turning the horrific into something beautiful,
affirmation prevents any possible revolution
Woodard 7 (Ben, PhD candidate in Theory and criticism at Western University.
Masters in theory and criticism at the European graduate school. A Capitalistic

Sublime?, http://naughtthought.wordpress.com/2007/07/29/a-capitalistic-sublime/,
hhs-nw)
The aforementioned iekian move has a strong Kantian feel in that , as Philip
Shaw points out in The Sublime, in Kants Critique of Pure Reason he points out
how Copernicus understood the movements of the heavenly bodies by
focusing not on the spectacle, the planets themselves, but the spectator. Both
strands of thought rely on the notion of the spectator not simply having a
subjective or otherwise limited point of view, but that the object observed is fundamentally rife
with the concept of perception. Looking specifically at Kants definition of the sublime, one can
take note of the formlessness thats imperative in the definition, the way
Kants definition swings from materialist to idealist it is an object but at the same time
unbound, borderless. Or put another way, as Kant states in his Critique of Judgment, the sublime tests the
limits of our imagination The issue I would like to raise here is the
possibility of a capitalistic sublime . The issue in regards to the sublimes relation to
capitalism hinges on the temporality of the sublime or in other words how long
is it expected from the horrifying to become a feeling of the sublime ? The other
related question is whether capitalism can cause a feeling of the sublime because
of its extreme size or whether it functions more in terms of an atomized
sublime . In regards to the first point it has been pointed out in the works of anticapitalists, how there is an odd kind of fearful awe of the machinery of
capitalism. While Marxs Victorian novel style details of the factory come immediately to mind, I beleive that Antonio
Gramscis writings reveal a more interesting view. In his prison notebook writings, Gramsci seems to have a
strange sense of respect for the mind numbing effect of capitalism . One
could argue that the mental deadening of the laborer is the slow
transformation of the horrible (ones working conditions, lack of benefits, low wage etc) to a
postponed sublime (ones eventual wealth or at least the American dream of economic security). On the other
hand, and to address the second point, could capitalism function in a more
compartmentalized way that seems so small and petty and necessary that
its that which deadens us, because it seems beneath us? This leads us
back to the problem of narcissism being woven into the concept of the
sublime. Lets take a look at a certain Mr West. In particular lyrics to a recent song Cant tell me nothin:<Continues> The
capitalist sublime , if there can be such a thing, seems more like a false opening (more like
the Kantian sublime) then a false covering over of a kind of negativity . Or put another way, it
seems more of a concern via Proudhon than Marx. The capitalistic zen, the my mind/soul is somewhere else,
seems to function through a kind of atomized sublime, the idea that each screw turned gets one closer to the displaced future where
the capitalist realists live. Or back to Mr West: He got that ambition, baby look in his eyes, This week hes moppin floors, next week

bit by bit deadening which we

take as a bridge to the capitalist utopia. Whereas the uncanny is an odd return to home, a wishful
its the fries. So does the sublime have any place in here, in the atomized,

fear as Freud point out. It seems that while the uncanny fundamentally requires time and the sublime asks for distance, both are

genitalia (as it is for some neurotics

capitalism serves as the imaginary
real of our time, as that which binds the visible possibility of worlds (as he
rooted in the feminine the sublime in women as das Ding and the uncanny in female
according to Freud). One could bring up ieks argument here that

argues in Contingency, Hegemony and Universality - much to the chagrin of Ernesto Laclau) but still something doesnt seem to sit
quite right. Also, to follow an idea brought up by Larval Subjects, can bricks of our ontology be deposited into texts, into objects?
Following the arguments in Georges Poulets article Criticism and the Interiority of Experience

one could argue

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

<continues>The

ontological evacuation of the sublime in capitalism seems to

not be a sacrificing of the body to alleviate the mind, but the very
elevation of the act of evacuation itself which may be the very American aspect of global capitalism
at its worst. And if, as iek argues, the entire capitalistic machinery runs on the concept
of the drive, how is it possible to break out a context where we are
presently dead (or undead) and the impossible is placed in a constantly postponed dream of a lucrative existence. The
feeling of the sublime is not so much postponed but the deadening feel of labor is eliminated as we see ourselves eventually living

Our narcissism is not so much one of survival, of ourselves before the welled up
ocean, but of our possibility to stop striving endlessly . Philip Shaw ends his text The Sublime in
the good life.

a fairly disconcerting way arguing for a return to the beautiful, that reintroducing desire in the context of the sublime is the only to
save ourselves from nihilistic rumination. Following the work of John Milbank (and other Chrisitan figures who see the need to
combat postmodern nihilism) Shaw falls in step with a kind of Levinasian reliance on the other that the combination of two
incomplete beings can give a kind of completeness, bring us back to beauty. Somewhere Lacan is laughing, desire never brings us
quiet, it takes us to an empty house where we see ourselves looking in the window, sadly feeling our wallet.

Katrina
Asserting the response to Katrina was based on race is
factually incorrect and reifies class boundaries by focusing on
cultural diversity rather than economic equality

Michaels 7 (Walter Benn, Professor of American Literature and Literary Theory at

University of Illinois at Chicago, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to
Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, 7/24/2007, pg 11)//JL
its the response to Katrina that is most illuminating
from the left
West told an audience
we live in one of the
bleakest moments in the history of black people in this nation.
he went
on to say, its a living hell for black people
This is
what we might call the George Bush doesnt care about black people
interpretation of the governments failed response to the catastrophe nobody
doubts that George Bush cares about Condoleezza Rice who is very much a black
person
there are, of course, lots of other black peoplelike
Clarence Thomas and Thomas Sowell and Janice Rogers Brown and,
for whom George Bush almost certainly has warm feelings what American
But

for our purposes, especially the response

from the David Brooks right. Lets be honest, Cornel

, not

at the Paul Robeson Student Center at Rutgers University,

Look at the Super Dome,

. Its not a big move from the hull of the slave ship to the living hell of the Super Dome.7

. But

and who is fond of pointing out that shes been black since birth. And

at least once upon a time, Colin Powell

. But

liberals want is for our conservatives to be racists

We want a fictional George Bush who doesnt care about black people
rather than the George Bush weve actually got one who doesnt care about

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

best friends are black tokens.

poor people

. Although thats not quite the right way to put it. First because, for all I know, George Bush does care about poor people; at least he cares as much about poor people as anyone else does.

What he doesnt care aboutand what Bill Clinton, judging by his eight years in office, didnt much care about, and what John Kerry, judging from his presidential campaign, doesnt much care about and what we on the so- called

We would much rather get rid

we would much rather celebrate cultural

left, judging by our willingness to accept Kerry as the alternative to Bush, dont care about eitheris taking any steps to get them to stop being poor.

of racism than get rid of poverty

. And

diversity than seek to establish economic equality.

Generic
Categorization based on skin color, gender or sexuality [etc.]
benefits the upper class as it decenters the issue of class while
dividing up those that are most effected by capitalisms
exploitative agenda and pitting them against each other
Rosemary Hennessy 1997, Hennessy has written on a range of issues in feminist theory and politics,
teaches in the English Department of the University of Albany, SUNY, Review of Justice Interruptus: Critical
Reflections of the Postsocialist Condition. By Nancy Fraser. New York: Routledge, 1997. Hypatia

recent
assessments are returning to the same telling symptomthe
disconnection of cultural politics from political economy that has been the banner
It is not news that the U.S. Left has been suffering political paralysis. What is notable, and perhaps hopeful, is that

of social theory and activism for almost two decades. The major contribution of the essays that comprise Nancy Fraser's Justice Interruptus is
their attention to this situation, which she diagnoses as "postsocialism." While the addition of one more "post" to the gathering catalog of

postsocialism refers
to a series of related symptoms of the languishing Left: the absence
of any credible vision of an alternative to the present order, the
failure to connect a politics of identity to a politics of equality, and, what
is really the context for these developments, a resurgence of economic liberalism. Fraser's main
concern about the current political landscape is the shift in the grammar of political claims-making from a socialist
political imaginary that is primarily concerned with the problem of
redistribution of wealth and resources to a politics of identity in which the
postals circulating now is distressing, what the term postsocialism signifies seems right. For Fraser,

central problem of justice is cultural recognition (Fraser 1997, 2). Her suggestion for a way out is that neither a politics of redistribution nor a
politics of recognition alone is adequate for meaningful social change; rather, both are needed. Eschewing historical explanation of why these
two forms of social justice are integrated, Fraser instead offers the more pragmatic thesis that in practice they are always intertwined and
reinforce one another dialectically. In a footnote, she reminds us that the "interimbrication" of the two is a leitmotif in all of her work (34, n. 8).
Justice Interruptus is based on essays Fraser wrote and published between 1990 and 1996. The chapters treat a wide range of issuesthe
family wage; the recasting of the relationship between private and public spheres by particular historical events (the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill
hearings is one example); the history of the category of "dependency" as it has affected debates on welfare in the U.S.; and, the critical
frameworks of leading feminist theorists (Iris Young, Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Carole Pateman). While the problem of postsocialism's
interruption of justice does not shape every chapter, [End Page 126] it is the book's recurring refrain, and Fraser's endorsement of a "bivalent"
or "bifocal" vision that encompasses both a politics of recognition and redistribution informs her analysis throughout. For that reason, I will pay
special attention to this core argument. The postsocialist condition Fraser diagnoses is both an effect of the hegemony of two decades of neoliberalism and the legacy of the New Left. Never a coherent organized front, the New Left emerged out of struggles in Europe after World War II
to come to terms with the theoretical rigidity and political abuses of an overly economistic, Stalinist marxism and (in the U.S. as well) out of the

women, blacks, and eventually lesbians and gay menwhose

interests, for many, did not seem to be adequately represented in traditional socialist
demands of social subjects

politics and theory. Debates over how to explain the relationship of culture to political economy, over the adequacy of the base-superstructure
model of classical marxism, over the extent to which cultural forms like the media are independent or actually shape economic relations raged

The consequent theoretical attention to ideology, to

the social construction of race, gender, sexualityand more recently to ethnicity and
nationalityopened up new and important areas of social life to critical examination, but they often did so at a
cost. In tandem with social movements organized around these axes of identity, social theory
increasingly came to focus on cultural politics, and gradually attention to the cultural construction of
identities was completely dislocated from any connection to political economy. By the
mid-eighties the systemic understanding of social life that had characterized
the New Left's socialist analysis and vision in the early seventies had been largely abandoned. By the
nineties, both in the academy and in community activism, various versions of postmodern identity politics
had become the reigning paradigm, often understood in terms of a logic of intersecting oppressions.
Fraser's call to reconnect the politics of identity to political economy
is an intervention into this vague explanatory frame and its limited
preoccupation with culture. But unfortunately she stops short of really grappling, either historically or theoretically,
in the early phases of the New Left.

with the Left's abandonment of historical materialism. Consequently, the disavowed specter of marxism haunts her project. Fraser claims that
undergirding her diagnostic label of postsocialism is a vision of a full-scale successor project to socialism, an alternative postsocialism that
incorporates the best of socialism. The idea of a full-scale successor project to socialism is appealing, but why not simply call it a new socialism?
Is the word socialism so tainted and the ideals it stands for so unacceptable now that it has lost all ability to marshal political support? I will
elaborate below on how Fraser's reluctance to embrace socialism resonates in her ambivalent stance on class. But even if we accept the
premise that the best of socialism needs to be promoted and explained under a new sign, is postsocialism the best alternative? Although she
does not explain why she thinks we "are not in a position to [End Page 127] envision a full scale successor project to socialism" (1997, 4) or

why she takes a critical stance toward it, the "post" in the postsocialism she promotes is clearly the sign of a critical perspective. This is a
standpoint that supports comprehensive, normative thinking and that will lay the conceptual ground for redressing the interruption of
distributive and cultural justice. To that end, she promotes a "bivalent" solution to the problematic splitting of the social from the cultural, the

Fraser may be reluctant to name her vision socialist is that although she bemoans
the decentering of class, she finally is not interested in endorsing the class-based analysis that is the signature claim
of socialism. While she sees the mobilizing of social movements around various categories of cultural
identity to be an unfortunate result of the decentering of class, she does not explain why
economic from the discursive. One reason

class is not a viable starting point for social theory, what the relationship is between the concept of political economy that she uses and class,
or, for that matter, what the relationship is between the politics of redistribution and class. The frame for her understanding of socioeconomic
injustice is "a rough and general" one, loosely referring to exploitation, economic marginalization and deprivation (1977, 13) and informed by a
commitment to egalitarianism. One of the consequences of this general model of economic injustice is that her concept of "redistribution" can
actually obscure the basis for socioeconomic inequities under capitalism (for example, the fact that the unpaid labor of many is the source of
profits for the few). At worst, the concept of redistribution can be taken to imply that social welfare programs rather than fundamental structural
changes are the way to remedy economic inequities. Most of all, conceptualizing political economy in terms of distribution forfeits the

under capitalism there are and historically have

always been uneven, complex material connections between the
unequal relations of production (another way of understanding class) and the production
of identities, knowledges, and culture. That Fraser relinquishes a systemic understanding of social life
opportunity to acknowledge that

premised on the human requirement to produce what is needed to survive also points to her ambivalent relationship to socialist feminisma
tradition she draws on and was herself part of, but that her postsocialism seems to have disowned. The rich tradition of socialist feminism does
connect political economy and cultureand it does so not in a rigid monocausal or reductively economistic way that makes all cultural identities
1
simply determined by class. Certainly, Fraser is alert to the inequity capitalism as a social system has wrought and its damaging effects on
people's lives; her references to contemporary neo-liberalism detail the global dimension of this violent social system. But she does not
emphasize or explain what it is about late capitalism and neo-liberalism that has provoked the interruption of justice that is her subject. My
concern is that Fraser's reluctance to spell out the class character of capitalism's deep [End Page 128]structures finally undermines the
adequacy of her conceptual maps to the emancipatory project she espouses. Nonetheless, Fraser's core argument that "the project of
transforming the deep structures of both political economy and culture appears to be the one overarching programmatic orientation capable of
doing justice to all current struggles" (1997, 32) is a statement worth highlighting and embracing. Despite the ways her analysis might strain
against it, this call for attention to deep structures is exactly what has been so absent on the Left. Precisely because it makes this bold proposal,
Justice Interruptus is an important and timely book. In the lead chapter, "From Redistribution to Recognition?," Fraser distinguishes two
different kinds of claims for justice. Recognition claims understand justice as cultural or symbolic and tend to reinforce group specificity and
differentiation (affirmative action programs, to cite one classic example). Redistribution claims understand justice as socioeconomic and aim to
abolish the political economic arrangements that underpin group identity as well as the group differentiation they effect (for example, feminist
demands to abolish the gendered division of labor). Fraser contends that the two claims for justice can be merely different, or they can interfere
with and undermine each other. In treating some of the complex relationships between competing claims for justice, Fraser complicates the
"intersecting oppressions" approach to difference and identity that is so pervasive in U.S. feminism presently. She argues that different

Groups whose claims

of injustice are primarily rooted in cultural misrecognition (lesbians and gay men)
are positioned at one end, and groups whose claims of social
injustice are primarily rooted in economic injustice are positioned at
the other (the exploited working class). As Fraser sees it, lesbians and gay men suffer from injustices that are rooted in cultural
conceptions of injustice and possible remedies to them can be situated within a four-celled matrix.

misrecognition, and any economic injustice they suffer is attendant on that. Consequently, the solutions to the injustices against them will need
to be cultural. Between the two extremes of sexuality and class are bivalent groups whose claims for social justice derive from roots in both
economic inequity and cultural misrecognition (groups organized or identified by gender and race). In addition, she outlines two broad
categories for remedying injustice that traverse these optionsaffirmative remedies that do not change basic social structures and
transformative ones that do. While her heuristic is basically descriptive, Fraser does end by recommending that for all bivalent collectivities
transformative economics and a "deconstructive" as opposed to an "identity" cultural politics works best.

The aff commodifies alteritytheir guilty rhetoric conceals

privilege and precludes actual solvency
Chow 93 [Rey Chowcurrently Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature at Duke University, 1995. "Writing
Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies". Peer Reviewed. 186.] l.gong
Why are "tactics" useful at this moment? As discussions about "multiculturalism," "interdisciplinarity," "the third

issues develop in the American academy and

society today, and as rhetorical claims to political change and difference
are being put forth, many deep-rooted, politically reactionary forces
return to haunt us. Essentialist notions of culture and history conservative
notions of territorial and linguistic propriety, and the "otherness" ensuing from
them unattested claims of oppression and victimization that are used
merely to guilt-trip and to control sexist and racist reaffirmations of
sexual and racial diversities that are made merely in the name of
righteousnessall these forces create new "solidarities" whose ideological
premises remain unquestioned. These new solidarities are often informed by a
strategic attitude which repeats what they seek to overthrow. The weight
of old ideologies being reinforced over and over again is immense. We need to remember
world intellectual," and other companion

we fight are battles of words. Those who argue the

oppositional standpoint are not doing anything different from their enemies and are most certainly
not directly changing the downtrodden lives of those who seek their survival in
metropolitan and nonmetropolitan spaces alike. What academic intellectuals
must confront is thus not their "victimization" by society at large (or their
victimization in solidarity with the oppressed), but the power, wealth, and
privilege that ironically accumulate from their "oppositional" viewpoint , and
the widening gap between the professed contents of their words and the upward
mobility they gain from such words. (When Foucault said intellectuals need to struggle
against becoming the object and instrument of power, he spoke precisely to this kind
of situation.) The predicament we face in the West, where intellectual freedom shares a
history with economic enterprise, is that "if a professor wishes to denounce aspects of big
business, he will be wise to locate in a school whose trustees are big businessmen." 28 Why should we
believe in those who continue to speak a language of alterity as lack while
their salaries and honoraria keep rising? How do we resist the turning into propriety of
as intellectuals that the battles

oppositional discourses, when the intention of such discourses has been that of displacing and disowning the

How do we prevent what begin as tacticsthat which is ''without any

base where it could stockpile its winnings" (de Certeau, p. 37)from turning into
a solidly fenced off field, in the military no less than in the academic
sense?
proper?

Attempting to take down that system fail, it has already

encompassed the movement, the only method is to work
within the system through alienation, coalition ultimate feeds
into the system
Vandenberghe 8 (Frdric Vandenberghe. Professor Vandenberghe graduated
in social and political sciences from the Rijksuniversiteit Gent in Belguim in 1998
and received his Masters from the School of High Studies in Social Sciences (Ecole
des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) in Paris in 1989 and a Doctorate in
Sociology from same university in 1994. September 18, 2008. Deleuzian
capitalism. http://psc.sagepub.com/content/34/8/877.)//ky
2 Colonization, commodification and reification From a systemic point of view, the flexible
rationalization of the organization that transforms the worker into an
actor-networker can best be understood in terms of the generalized
introduction of market principles in the organization, with the result that
the boundaries between the organization and its environment (markets
and other organizations) are eroded and that the relations between the
inside and the outside are radically transformed. Decentralization and
segmentation of the organization itself, autonomization of its unities and marketization of

their internal relations, increased self-organization of the unities and of the sub-unities, introduction of modes of
financial calculation and budgetary obligations, translation of programmes into costs and benefits that can be given
an accounting value, orientation towards shareholders value, all those structural transformations that accompany
the introduction of the principles of exchange, competition and calculation in what was heretofore a hierarchical-

convert the organization into a flexible and

profitable network of enterprises pursuing a common project of
sustainable capitalization. When intra-organizational networks are
interconnected in inter-organizational networks that cut across sectors
and when those start to network and become interconnected on a global
scale in a machinic network of sorts, we become the involuntary witnesses
of the rhizomatic spreading of networks across sectors and frontiers that
marks the passage from the network enterprise to the global network
monocratic-bureaucratic organization effectively

society of late capitalism. The global economy is not made up of nations, but of transnational
networks of companies that spread through the world in search of cheap labour and a quick buck. Networks, not
firms, have become the actual operating unit (Castells, 1996: 171 ).

Although the spread of

networks might appear anarchic at first, it should be noted, however, that
the centrifugal process of decentralization is balanced by a centripetal
process of concentration and command. In the archipelago of networks,
there is a mainland of power that commands the decentralized
concentration of capital. In the conclusion of the first and the third volumes of his trilogy on the rise

of the network society2 Manuel Castells has drawn attention to the fact that the global network is geared to the
extraction of profit and enframed by a meta-network of financial flows that is operated by electronic networks:
Networks converge toward a meta-network of capital that integrates capitalists interests at the global level and
across sectors and realms of activity (Castells, 1996: 506) . . . Thus, global financial markets, and their networks of
management, are the actual collective capitalist, the mother of all accumulations (Castells, 1998: 343).4 The
virtual integration of regional, national, multinational and transnational corporations into a global network of
networks is not only driven by the introduction of market principles (marketization as input); the thirst for profit is
also what drives the expansion of the networks through the globe and triggers the colonizing process of universal
commodification (commodification as output) that characterizes contemporary neo-capitalism.5 Unlike the imperial
capitalism of yesteryear, which had to expand through space and integrate its non-capitalist environment in a
colonial system of exploitation to guarantee the continuous extraction and accumulation of surplus value,

It colonizes the life-world

instead and introduces the calculating and objectifying logic of the
economy and the administration into everyday life, threatening thereby
the communicative structure of society (Habermas, 1981: I, ch. 4). Having progressively
contemporary network capitalism no longer colonizes the world.

integrated the markets of the periphery and the semi-periphery into a single world market, the logic of the market
society progressively invades and colonizes the life-world like the masters of colonization in tribal societies by
commodifying culture, the mind, the person and, ultimately, life itself.6 Once capitalism has conquered the whole
world and covered it with a financial network that eludes control by the states and captures the heterogeneous
totality of monetary fluxes, capital starts to operate like a Deleuzian machine with a general axiomatic of decoded

This axiomatic is general,

because it transvalues all possible goods into commodities and recodes all
possible values into determinate prices,7 and it is global, because it deterritorializes the flows and operates in the smooth space of worldcapitalism. Saying that capital operates as a general and global axiomatic
system that functions on the plane of immanence is a convoluted way of
saying that it rules the whole world and forms an empire that no longer
has an outside and that can thus no longer be criticized from without, but
only from within, through a subversion of the axiomatics of capital. 8 When the
flows (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980: 567) that functions on a single plane.

lines of flight are sealed, or, what amounts to the same, captured and coopted by the axiomatics of capital, there is
nothing that is not enframed by capitalism, nothing that escapes the global flows of capital, though that does not
mean that there is no alternative.

Only that the alternative has to come from within

capitalism. To survive and further expand, capital had to shift from colonization in the strict sense to

colonization in a more encompassing sense. To overcome its dependency on labour, it had to shift from an
extensive to a more intensive form of production and integrate the other spheres of life and, ultimately, the
production of life itself, into its axiomatic. Indeed, having reached the limits of the exploitation of labour, capital
transgresses them and starts to exploit immaterial labour that is, intellectual, communicative, symbolic or
emotional labour that is produced outside of the sphere of production.9 To continue the process of accumulation
and overcome its dependency on labour, capitalism had to exploit the life-world and extract value from
communicative processes that are not productive in the strict sense and that it cannot produce itself, but on which
it is nevertheless dependent. The exploitation of material labour is no longer sufficient; intellectual labour has now
to be exploited as well. Capitalism is innovative. To innovate continuously, it constantly draws on knowledge that it
does not produce itself, but that is the result of individual and collective processes of communication, cooperation
and learning that take place in the life-world. With the privatization of the commons, the boundaries between
production and communication, production and consumption, labour and leisure, paid and unpaid work disappear.
As the consumption of services, cultural goods and information during leisure time produces the knowledges and
skills that capitalism needs to constantly innovate, the distinction between production and consumption collapses.
When free time becomes productive, everything becomes work. By becoming the source of the production of values
through communication, innovation and continuous improvisation, immaterial labour eventually merges with the
work of the production of the self (Gorz, 2003: 20). With the exploitation of immaterial labour, capitalism takes a
linguistic turn and extends its reach into the life-world. A double extension of capital takes place, which is both
quantitative and qualitative. Echoing the Marxist distinction between the formal and the real subordination of
labour under capital, i.e. between the extraction of surplus-value that operates by means of an extension of the

workday and accumulation by means of the technological rationalization of the production process, cognitive
capitalism accumulates not only more, but also differently. With Deleuze and Guattari ,

we can
conceptualize the colonization of the life-world in terms of a progressive
generalization of machinic control beyond the sphere of production and a
concomitant interiorization of domination by the subject. When the
machinic production of capital captures the subjects to control them from
within, enslavement by the machine mutates into subjection to the
machine. Since the machinic production of capital has left the factory and spread to the whole of society, the

capitalist machine reproduces itself on an enlarged scale by producing the subjects that produce and consume the

Deleuze and Guattari suggest that modern technology

has successfully overcome the opposition between enslavement and
subjection, domination and submission or alienation and subjectification. In
products they have produced.

the cybernetic human-machine systems of advanced liberal capitalism, humans and machines have been coupled
through a multiplicity of recursive processes and feedback loops and integrated in some kind of a living selfregulating mega-machine that operates globally on a single plane. When subjects are incorporated by the system
as components of its own machinery, the subjects have become its living medium and mediation: A small amount
of subjectification took us away from machinic enslavement, but a large amount brings us back to it (Deleuze and

Using language that post-humanists self-consciously avoid,

we could say with Adorno (1975: I, 391) that reification reaches its limits
with the reification of humans. When the constraints of the system are no
longer imposed on humans from without, but alienation is mediated
through them, alienation is introjected and reaches its very limits .
Overdramatizing a bit, we could say that the end of alienation coincides
Guattari, 1980: 572).

asymptotically with the end of Humankind.

Indeed, when enslavement by the machine is

no longer opposed to machinic, but both tend to coincide with the becoming-machine of men and women,
subjection becomes the mode of alienation. Subjected to a capitalist megamachine that produces willing subjects,
the latter have been fully integrated into a living machine that functions not against their will, their thoughts, their
desire, their body, etc., but through those. Deleuzes and Guattaris dialectics of subjectification remind me of
Adornos and Horkheimers dialectic of the Enlightenment. Although I have always opposed their bleak depiction of
late capitalist society as a totally administered world (total verwaltete Welt) on metatheoretical, methodological
and empirical grounds (Vandenberghe, 19978), I am now tempted to consider their analysis as a brilliant
anticipation of what was to come. At this point, I must confess that I am slightly afraid that the contemporary
conjunction and coevolution of science, technology and neo-capitalism might well offer a belated confirmation of
some of the most radical theses on reification, alienation and commodification that have been propounded by the
first generation of the Frankfurt School.10 To flesh out my worries, I will analyse the structural transformations of
contemporary capitalism and underline their alienating consequences. More particularly, I will present the
government of the subject, the commercialization of experience and the commodification of life as three
overlapping processes that undergird the current forms of societal rationalization and reification. Progressively
invading the domains of the person, culture and nature in order to control and commodify them, advanced liberal
capitalism colonizes the life-world and life itself. It not only threatens the communicative infrastructure of the lifeworld, which is bad enough, but does worse: the conjunction and integration of capital, science and technology
potentially puts the human race itself at risk and opens thereby, though probably not in the way that the
structuralists had expected it, the perspective of the end of the human sciences.11

Attempts at taking down current power structures reify them,

they dont target the new, diffused system of power that turns
the actors into the subjugator, continuing the system of
capitalism
Vandenberghe 8 (Frdric Vandenberghe. Professor Vandenberghe graduated
in social and political sciences from the Rijksuniversiteit Gent in Belguim in 1998
and received his Masters from the School of High Studies in Social Sciences (Ecole
des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) in Paris in 1989 and a Doctorate in
Sociology from same university in 1994. September 18, 2008. Deleuzian
capitalism. http://psc.sagepub.com/content/34/8/877.)//ky
2.1 Governing the self Capitalism not only produces objects, but also
subjects and subjectivities. To assure the conditions of its own enlarged

reproduction, it has not only to produce goods and services, but also the
producers and consumers of those products and services. Those processes of the
production and reproduction do not remain constant, however, but are historically variable, as Michel Foucault has
amply shown in his genealogical studies of the mid-1970s, from Discipline and Punish to The History of Sexuality.
Analysing the epochal changes in the epistemic, normative and institutional constellations through the ages (Surez
Mller, 2004), Foucault used his study of the changes in the penal regime of the 18th and 19th centuries to theorize
the different forms of production of subjects and subjectivities from the sovereign power of the ancien rgime to
the disciplinary power of modernity and from there perhaps also, as Deleuze (1986, 1990: 22947) suggests, to

In the society of control, which

regulates conduct through the continuous modulation of affects,
disciplinary power is more economic and liberal, more subtle and indirect,
more decentralized and capillary, micro and molecular, diffused and
individualized, though not less pervasive and effective than the forms of
power that preceded it. Unlike sovereign power, which is exercised through corporal punishments and
decisions about life and death, disciplinary power is not repressive but democratic
and productive: It is a power that aims to produce forces, to make them
grow and regulate them rather than block, submit or destroy them. . . . It
is a power that is positively exercised over life, that attempts to
administer, raise, multiply and exercise precise controls and global
regulations over it (Foucault, 1976: 179180).12 Targeting the self of the subjects through a host of
the regulatory power of the emerging society of control.

panoptic and confessional technologies, the former operating through the external, the latter through the internal
environment of the individual, it aims to produce docile bodies and responsible subjects. Disciplinary power does
not destroy the subject; it produces it as one of its effects. In the original project of the History of Sexuality, which
was initially to comprise six volumes and not just three or four, Foucault wanted to enlarge his genealogy of ethicopolitical subjectification, from the Greeks to the Middle Ages and beyond, by illustrating how responsible,
autonomous, free subjects are produced, not just in prisons, factories, schools and hospitals, but continuously and
throughout society. Looking at his last investigations on the care of the self from the perspective of his middle,
more sociological period, we come to realize that what he was really after was a genealogy of the present society of
control that shows, through a careful analysis of the technologies of subjectification and other techniques of the
self, how disciplinary power produces subjects not against their will, but by adopting and coopting their will, thus
precisely through their will. There are thus not two Foucaults, the one of the analytics of power and the other of the
problematics of the subject, but only one who analyses power in terms of the government of the self and the others.

It is thus not power, but the subject that

constitutes the general theme of my research.13 Systematically extending the scattered
As Foucault (1994: 223) himself says:

remarks of the last Foucault on pastoral power, the police and government into a sociological theory of power,
knowledge and subjectivity in advanced liberal societies, Nikolas Rose (1999a, 1999b), the animator and instigator
of the Anglo- Australian school of governmentality-studies, has forcefully introduced the notion of government
over and against the notion of domination to theorize and analyse the multiplicity of theories and vocabularies,
methodologies and technologies, instruments and techniques of rule (from the layout of buildings and the
structures of timetables to the statistical methods of calculation and the psychoanalytic ones of interpretation)
through which a heterogeneous network of governmental and non-governmental authorities and agencies (from the
Ministry of Economic Affairs all the way down to the economist, the manager, the journalist, the teacher, the priest,
the doctor, the counsellor and the psychoanalyst) seek to control and regulate, shape and modulate, the conduct of
individuals that constitute a population by working on and through their aspiration and intentions.14 Government is
a form of power referring to the conduct of conduct (Foucault, 1994: IV, 237). To govern is not to impose directly a
certain action, but to control it indirectly through the structuration of the possible field of options and actions of
individuals. In so far as governing means governing through the freedom, aspirations and beliefs of the individuals
rather than in spite of them, government does not annul the capacity of individuals as agents, but presupposes it
and draws on it to further its own ends: Personal

autonomy is not the antithesis of

political power, but a key term in its exercise, the more so because most
individuals are not merely the subjects of power but play a part in its
operations (Rose and Miller, 1992: 174). Appealing to the aspirations of self-determination and selfrealization, the government of subjects passes through the personal strivings of each and every individual for selffulfilment.

Power does not crush aspirations, but acknowledges and adjusts

itself to them, while instrumentalizing and utilizing them for its own
objectives. In the same way as one should not identify government and domination, one should not identify

government with the state and should avoid the paranoiac prism of conspiracy theories that seek the hailing hand

Rather than thinking of the state

extending its power through its apparatuses, the analytics of power
of the state in any of its ideological apparatuses.

decapitates the state and concentrates its analysis of the powers of

freedom on the proliferation of a heterogeneous multiplicity of
governmental and non-governmental, public and private, legal, scientific,
economic, religious, educational, therapeutic and other organizations and
institutions, authorities and agencies that seek to regulate, modulate and
influence the internal worlds of organizations, institutions, families and
individuals by shaping them in desired directions . Among the plurality of
mediating instances that intervene between the state and the individuals
while interconnecting, intentionally or unintentionally, the aspirations of
the authorities and the activities of individuals, one finds, among others,
bureaucrats and experts, philosophers and philanthropists, sociologists
and psychologists, doctors and hygienists, managers and planners, priests
and parents. Although all those different actors follow their own interests,
confront their own problems and look for their own solutions, each and
any of them can potentially be enrolled by other actors who translate
their interests and bring them thereby into a loose alignment of sorts,
forming a governmental dispositif (Foucault), assemblage (Deleuze) or
actor-network (Latour) of sorts:15 Each of these diverse forces can be enrolled in a
governmental network to the extent that it can translate the objectives and values of others into its own terms, to
the extent the arguments of another become consonant with and provide norms for its own ambitions and actions
(Miller and Rose, 1990: 10). Thanks to the continuous translations of the respective epistemologies, moralities and
ideologies into common visions of the good life and their materialization into concrete programmes of action,
White Papers, reports, books, plans, etc., flexible and loose associations are established between a variety of agents
that come to share a common language and common interests and that seek to shape, each in its own way, the
practices of individuals by summoning them to become loving parents, ardent consumers, active citizens and

As networks form and relays, translations and connections

are established to the mutual benefit of those who govern and those who
are governed, power is disseminated through the whole of society and a
machinic assemblage without exterior is performatively constructed that
from within couples the political aspirations of the authorities to the
individual motivations of the subjects. Drawing attention to the fundamental role that theories,
enthusiastic employees.

technologies, techniques, methodologies and methods of government play in rendering the practices of individuals,
groups, organizations and populations thinkable, representable, calculable and administrable, or in short:
governable, genealogists of the present insist on the importance of studying empirically the humble and mundane
technologies, instruments and inscription devices (Latour) by which all kind of authorities seek to instantiate

Techniques of notation, computation and

calculation; procedures of examination and assessment; the invention of
devices such as surveys and presentational forms such as tables; the
standardisation of systems of training and the inculcation of habits; the
inauguration of professional specialisms and vocabularies; building design
and architectural forms the list is heterogeneous and is, in principle,
unlimited. (Miller and Rose, 1990: 8) In their detailed studies of the
variegated techniques of social regulation, governmentality studies draw
on several specialized subdisciplines like science studies, economics,
accounting or architecture, but reconfigures their materials within the
framework of a political sociology of power. Against this background, we can now analyse
government and rule at a distance:

some of the major transformations of the mode of social regulation that have intervened in the last quarter of a
century and that characterize advanced liberalism (Rose, 1993, 1999b: 13766). We have already seen that
capitalism has been able to restructure itself and expand in the 1970s and 1980s through a neo-liberal cooptation
of the libertarian aspirations to autonomy and authenticity that were voiced by the new left in the 1960s and the

Translating and displacing the

aspirations of autonomy, freedom, initiative, creativity, spontaneity,
originality and responsibility of the individual into a political programme
that aims to roll back the state and to govern without governing society
1970s and by the new right in the 1970s and the 1980s.

(Rose, 1993: 298), neo-liberalism has succeeded in turning the critique of

alienation, domination and bureaucracy to the advantage of the market.
Thatcherism, Reaganism and, in its wake, also Third Way-ism, have
reactivated the anti-statism of classical liberalism and linked it up with a
series of techniques that has rendered the criticism of welfare and
bureaucracy governmental and, thus, implementable. Through
liberalization, privatization and budgetary restraint, it has paved the way
to a system of governance without government. Compared with the old labourist,
Keynesian and Fordist mode of social regulation of the golden thirties, the new liberal mode is
much more global though dispersed and multi-layered, much more
marketized and consumerist and also much more accountable and
controllable. Four aspects stand out. First, social regulation is now on the
verge of becoming a global affair (Bayart, 2004). Globalization introduces a major change of scale
of government. Although local and national regulations are obviously still important, a whole series of governmental
agencies is now operating not only below, but also, as the phrase goes, above and across states. Local, regional,
national and international agencies and authorities, like the EU or the GATT, for instance, as well as transnational
nonand quasi-governmental organizations, like the ILO or Greenpeace, are now increasingly coordinating their
policies in the domain of health and labour standards, economical and ecological regulation or anti-terrorism, to
name a few examples, and exerting sophisticated and effective pressures on states, organizations and individuals.
The state is increasingly privatized (e.g. privatization of public services, but also of war mercenaries making up 10
per cent of the coalition of willing in the second Gulf War) while, conversely, private instances are publicized (e.g.
creation of public law through contractual agreements, such as the multilateral agreement on investments [MAI]

What is emerging, therefore, is a decentered,

dispersed and multi-layered system of government at the global level .
that spanned the battle of Seattle).

Second, a whole range of marketized mechanisms (contracts and subcontracting, publicprivate partnerships,
quasi-markets, internal budgeting, end-user empowerment, etc.) have been introduced into economic life to replace
the rigidities of central planning and stimulate competition not only among private firms, but also among the public
services. Through the introduction of competition in social services, the privatization of public services and the
generalized transformation of clients into customers, the scope of economic rationality has vastly expanded. Third,
the productivist logic of the enterprise and the consumerist language of choice have spread from the economic to
the individual sphere. Through techniques of market research, advertisement, designing, branding life-styling and,
not to forget, credit, individuals are seduced into consumption and summoned to become entrepreneurs of their
own life, as it were, through the acquisition of goods and services. As Zygmunt Bauman (1995: 270) pithily remarks:
it is thus not only the gas industry but life in general that has been privatized. This privatization of life has now
invaded all the spheres of life: production, consumption, education, leisure, health and even death. Fourth, to
render organizations accountable, transparent and controllable, audits are now regularly used (as British academics
trying to cope with the constraints of the Research Assessment Exercises [RAE] and the Teaching Quality
Assessments [TQA] no doubt have noticed). If individuals are controlled through the conduct of conduct,
organizations are for their part regulated through auditing, or the control of control, as Power has aptly called it
(Power, 1994). Transforming organizations in order to make them conform to ideals of auditability, audits attempt to
act indirectly upon systems of control rather than directly upon first order activities. In so far as the technologies of
government of advanced liberalism embody a new receptivity to private sectors of management, we can conclude
by saying that they are political technologies that enterprise up individuals and organizations alike.

Movements against conformity with the system only

strengthened capitalism, they become commodified and
advertised. Even human experience has become a commodity
Vandenberghe 8 (Frdric Vandenberghe. Professor Vandenberghe graduated
in social and political sciences from the Rijksuniversiteit Gent in Belguim in 1998
and received his Masters from the School of High Studies in Social Sciences (Ecole
des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) in Paris in 1989 and a Doctorate in
Sociology from same university in 1994. September 18, 2008. Deleuzian
capitalism. http://psc.sagepub.com/content/34/8/877.)//ky

2.2 The commodification of culture It has become a commonplace to note that late capitalism has taken a cultural
turn. This cultural turn in the economy should be understood in the context of the more general de-differentiation
of the social subsystems that characterizes postmodern societies (Crook, Pakulski and Waters, 1992). The collapse
of the boundaries between culture and the economy works in two ways: the economy interpenetrates culture and
transforms it into a commodity (economization of culture), and culture is coupled in return to the economy, losing
its autonomy in the process (culturalization of the economy). The dissolution of the autonomy of the domain of

culture does not mean that culture loses its importance. To the contrary, it gains in importance and effectiveness.

Conceiving of the dissolution of culture as an explosion, an astute

observer of the postmodern scene has noticed a prodigious expansion of
culture throughout the social realm, to the point at which everything in
our social life from economic value and state power to practices and the
very structure of the psyche itself can be said to have become cultural
(Jameson, 1991: 48). As a result of this shifting out of culture through the social
realm, culture assumes the role that was once imparted to the material
forces of production. In so far as the whole production process has shifted from the production of goods
to the production of signs, this shifting out is in line with the shift from an industrial
to a post-industrial and post- Fordist mode of capitalist production. What
are increasingly being produced and consumed nowadays are not material
objects but semiotic objects or signs. As the aestheticization of
commodities progresses, the design and branding of consumer products
become more and more important. As objects are increasingly aestheticized and emptied out of
their material content, the aesthetic form trumps the latter. Use-value becomes secondary, and at the end,
everything happens as if it is now the exchange-value that induces the use-value. Even more, according to
Baudrillard, the exchange-value simply absorbs the latter, becomes self-referential and turns into a simulacrum,

Although Baudrillards influential theory of

hyperreality playfully, and at times cynically, exaggerates the extent of
the dematerialization of reality, there can be no doubt about the fact that the spectacularization
that is, into a copy without an original.

(Debord) of commodities indeed characterizes contemporary consumer culture. Contemporary mass culture is more
and more commodified, but that does not mean that it is standardized and homogenized. To the contrary,
commodification leads to diversification and heterogenization. Todays mass culture is pluralist, heterogeneous,
fragmented and diversified, or postmodernist, to use a vague word which summarizes it all. Diversity sells, and to
guarantee a constant access to diversity, the margins of the sub- and counter-cultures of rebellious youth are
constantly inspected for novelty. Counter-culture aims to subvert the mainstream, while the mainstream attempts

The idea that consumer culture is a form of conformism

has become a commonplace of anticonsumerism. It obscures the fact that
capitalism feeds on negativity and difference and that rebellion is
actually fueling the carousel of fashion and, thus, implicitly complicit in
the making of fashion victims. Consumer culture is hip. Advertising tells
us that we are unique and different, nonconformist and not part of the
masses, and sells us what we need to become what we are a nose ring, a
tattoo, the latest double CD of Paul Oakenfold, or whatever else might be
needed to distinguish oneself from ones fellow punters and to make an
artwork of ones self. The idea of conspicuous consumption has been outmoded by hip consumerism:
to coopt the sub-culture.

Its no longer about keeping up with the Joneses, its about being different from them (Rutherford, quoted by Ray

In the new age of cultural capitalism, it is not only popular

culture folklore and proletarian art, plus sports (Kuper, 1999: 229)
that is commodified. Since high culture is no longer exempted from the free market, but considered as
and Sayer, 1999: 11).

an upmarket niche on the high street, we can say that culture as such, understood as the totality of symbolic
expressions that determines the whole way of life, from birth to the grave, from morning to night and even in
sleep (T. S. Eliot), has become colonized and integrated as a profitable province of the economic system. Culture,
which was once considered in opposition to the vulgar interests of the economic sphere, has become a commodity
and nothing else but a commodity (Adorno, 1977: 338). The webs of significance that human beings spin around
themselves to make sense of the world have been systematically raided by the culture industries. This was already
the case when Adorno and Horkheimer coined the phrase to refer to the American mass culture of the 1940s and

commercialization of culture has

progressed to the point that experience itself is now on the verge of
becoming a commodity, and nothing else but a commodity . The integration
of computers, telecommunications, cable television, consumer electronics,
broadcasting, publishing and entertainment in an integrated
communications network that is largely controlled by a few global
corporations (Disney, Time Warner, Bertelsmann and Vivendi Universal)
the 1950s but, following the digital revolution, the

has given commercial enterprises unprecedented control over human

experiences. With the transformation of the culture industry into an
industry of programmes, human experience has become the consummate
commodity of the new capitalist economy. The mind is more or less directly plugged into the
terminals of the multi-media: The technical system that was up to now essentially a dispositif to transform material
has become a system to transform spirit, operated by a whole network that transmits programmes (Stiegler, 2001:
136). Integrating Leroi-Gourhan, Derrida and Husserl into a theory of external memory, Bernard Stiegler has argued
that the transmission of television programmes leads to a massive synchronization of the individual consciences for
the sake of profit. When millions, perhaps hundred millions of people watch the same event on television, at the
same time, live, consciences all over the world interiorize, adopt and live the same temporal objects at the same
time (Stiegler, 2004: 51). This synchronization of consciousness is at the same time a programming of the mind.
What is at stake is the control of the time of attention in order to control the information, the cognition, the volition,
the affects, the drives, in short: the mind and the body of the consumer. In order to sell soap, sweets, laptops,
mobile phones, plane tickets or dreams, one has to address consciences, and those consciences are markets, or
perhaps even a meta-market (Stiegler, 2004: 46 and 125) that grants potential access to all the other markets.
Jeremy Rifkin (2001) analyses the long-term shift from industrial to cultural production. He contends that
hypercapitalism is entering a new phase, the age of access, in which markets are giving way to networks and
ownership of goods is steadily replaced by paid access to interconnected supplieruser networks. Whether it is
music, games or films, cuisine, travel or theme parks, sports or gambling, what one pays for and what is marketed

connecting the
mind to the market and selling lived experiences, capitalism has
commodified time and culture. Slowly, but surely, it comes to resemble the
context of total blindness (totaler Verblendungszusammenhang) that
Adorno had anticipated by exaggerating and extrapolating the dumbing
impact of the culture industries: Capitalism is making its final transition
into fullblown cultural capitalism, appropriating not only the signifiers of
cultural life and the artistic forms of communication that interpret those
signifiers but lived experience as well (Rifkin, 2001: 144). As the culture industry gives way to
is not so much the goods and the services as the cultural experiences one consumes. By

the experience industry, there is hardly a sphere of life that escapes the reach of capitalism. By paying for access
to experiences and for the experiences themselves, we become, so to say, the consumers of our own lives.16

Trying to be eco-friendly does not address the root cause of

capitalism, it actually coopts movements into a form that
allows capitalism to continue unhindered
Patterson 2k (Mary Jane Patterson. Patterson is a masters student in
environmental studies. This article was produced in consultation with Robert Gibson,
an associate professor of Environment and Resource Studies. They are both at the
University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. November 2000, Natural capitalism: can
the free market be used to jump-start the switch to sustainability?,
http://dl2af5jf3e.search.serialssolutions.com/?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&ctx_enc=info
%3Aofi%2Fenc%3AUTF8&rfr_id=info:sid/summon.serialssolutions.com&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:jou
rnal&rft.genre=article&rft.atitle=Natural+capitalism&rft.jtitle=New+Internationalist
&rft.au=Patterson%2C+Mary+Jane&rft.date=2000-01-01&rft.issn=03059529&rft.issue=329&rft.spage=14&rft.externalDBID=AUSTGUIDE&rft.externalDocID
=Natural_capitalism00017570.) //ky
In the packed ballroom of a glittering downtown hotel, Amory Lovins is working his magic. Calmly and
confidently, the mustachioed guru of eco-efficiency explains how `natural
capitalism' can save money and the planet both at the same time. An
enthusiastic standing-room-only audience of businesspeople,
environmental activists, municipal politicians and university students is
lapping it up -- hook, line and `powerpoint' presentation. Along with everyone else, I
am swept up in the logic and common sense of it all. But I wonder why we haven't been doing
this before? And why aren't we doing it now? After the presentation there are questions and comments from

The head of a national NGO exults that finally she won't have to
feel guilty about driving a car. A local councillor steps up to the
microphone to share the city's own efficiency success stories. The buzz in
the air is palpable. It is an Amory love-in. There is no denying the appeal of Lovins' message. In his recent
the audience.

best-selling book Natural Capitalism (co-authored with his ex-spouse L Hunter Lovins and eco-entrepreneur Paul
Hawken) he describes how an enlightened form of capitalism, retuned to seek eco-efficiencies, would save the
environment, stimulate the economy, increase employment and bridge the gap between rich and poor. What's not
to like? Similar concepts calling for ten-fold or four-fold gains in resource efficiency (`Factor Ten' and `Factor Four')
have been embraced in Europe as `the new paradigm for sustainable development' .

It is an attractive
vision of the future that is rare in its appeal to environmentalists and the
business community alike. There is no denying the credentials of the messengers either. The Lovinses
are co-founders of the Rocky Mountain Institute in Snowmass, Colorado, a nonprofit think tank. They are also among
Time magazine's `Heroes for the Planet' for Earth Day 2000. A dynamic speaker and writer, Amory Lovins has been
a prominent critical voice in energy policy and resource use for more than 20 years. Co-author Paul Hawken is both
an entrepreneur and an environmental activist -- and a thoughtful writer on the nexus between the two worlds .

Together these three have set out to save capitalism from itself -- to
`harness the talent of business to solve the world's deepest environmental
and social problems'. The central premise behind `natural capitalism' is
that we have the technical capacity to use the planet's resources much
more efficiently, allowing us to maintain and even enhance our material
well-being while sharply reducing resource extraction, waste discharge
and associated damage. Businesses would operate more like biological systems, recycling waste into
new raw materials and providing services rather than products. The motivation for ecologically sound ways of doing
business would be economic rather than altruistic because efficiency measures would also save money. In effect,
we could have our cake and eat it too. Lovins illustrates his hypothesis with many real-life examples from the
business world, where companies found that `greening up' was good for the bottom line. His public presentation
and the book abound with success stories: $2.8 million saved here, 81-per-cent reduction in resource extraction
there. The stories are numerous and attractive. But they are more the exception than the rule. Eco-efficiency is not
what drives most of real-life capitalism. `Natural

capitalism' may be reasonable and

desirable. And certainly it is a refreshing notion for environmentalists
weary of being the continual bearers of bad news. But it is not the way the
world runs at the moment. In general business has blithely ignored and vigorously denied its role in
degrading the environment. So how do we get the market to favour eco-efficiencies? How do we achieve a `natural
capitalism' that is also equitable, given the free market's tendency to deepen the gulf between rich and poor? And
given the rampant consumerism that dominates Western culture and is quickly spreading around the globe, how do
we ensure that the savings from eco-efficiencies are not simply spent on more consumer trinkets? The market is
undeniably powerful and it does seek efficiencies. Traditionally the `efficient' way of dealing with wastes was to
dump them, cost-free, into the air or water. But if efficiency could be harnessed to reduce resource use and waste,
capitalism could be made to work in the service of the environment. Lovins and company are not alone in exploring
this possibility. Eco-sensitive economists have long advocated the use of market mechanisms to encourage antipollution measures. And activists have for years lobbied for removal of the subsidies that support unsustainable
energy projects and industrial agriculture. There is also a growing international movement for `green' taxes. These
would remove taxes from `goods' (things like jobs and income) and instead put them on `bads' (things like pollution
and resource extraction). Grains of sand The question is not whether such steps are desirable or whether they could
work, but whether the necessary political will to make it happen can be mustered. Can this be accomplished under
the Lovins' banner? Not everyone is persuaded. `It's a mystification,' says Joel Kovel, professor of Social Studies at
Bard College in New York. `They

are using a popular, easy-to-assimilate and

apolitical definition of capitalism. The whole weight of evidence is that this is not what real

capitalism is about.' Kovel argues that virtuous small businesses can exist but that they play no role in the overall
workings of society. `A couple of grains of sand on the beach' is how he puts it. One should not imagine that the
realm of exchange is neutral. `The

real forces of society are dictated by the

accumulation of capital. The inherent nature of capitalism is to expand,
and it sucks everything into its orbit.' There are examples of businesses
saving money while operating in a more environmentally friendly manner .

But this doesn't mean that most businesses could follow suit. For most, absorbing the ecological and social costs of
their operations would be expensive and perhaps suicidal, unless their competitors did the same. To counter this,
`natural capitalism' boosters advocate `a fundamental rethinking of the structure and the reward system of

Only by overhauling the entire system can we ensure that it is

competitive to be environmentally friendly. But where does this
commerce'.

overhauling begin? And how far does it extend? Virtually any country
would find it difficult to make these changes on its own. If Australia, for
example, were to attempt such a turnaround it might conceivably find a
way to equalize the increased costs for Australian business competitors in
the domestic market. But an integral part of the present market system is
the globalization of trade. With the increasing reliance on exports to
international markets, encouraged by the World Trade Organization,
Australia would find it impossible to attempt economic reforms such as
these in isolation. Australian corporations would be immediately outbid in foreign markets by competitors
from other countries with lower costs and fewer restrictions. Such a transformation could only be successful on a
global scale, through international treaties and agreements imposed on the now virtually lawless world of global
corporate finance. Silent politics This does not mean that reforms such as green taxes, appropriate subsidies and
internalization of costs are not worthy goals. In fact, they may be the only way to turn around our self-destructive

But the changes would require substantial political

intervention into the market and extraordinary political will at all levels
from the municipal to the international. And this is not something that the natural capitalists
economic system.

address. They are largely silent on the subject of politics, preferring to paint themselves as proudly and deliberately
apolitical. The Rocky Mountain Institute website describes their work as `independent, nonadversarial, and
transideological'. They're careful not to rock the boat, trying to appeal to the widest audience (mainly North
American) possible. Maybe they do understand the US public well. And maybe they're right to assume they'll have
more success if changes are wrapped in the cloak of neutral economic logic. But the reality is that the conditions for
Lovins' brand of `natural capitalism' are unlikely to arise from the market itself. They will have to be imposed by cooperative, collective action -- by governments and other organizations of civil society hip-deep in politics. And that's
not all. If the market won't deliver eco-efficiency without substantial political intervention, it certainly won't deliver
an equal distribution of the benefits or ensure that the savings aren't squandered on more consumption. These
changes won't happen without strong government intervention in the workings of capital. Self-regulation, based on
the record to date, just won't do it. An appealing package There is much to admire in the `natural capitalism'
approach. It's both innovative and positive, a more attractive image than the negative, we're-going-to-hell-in-ahandbasket messages that come so often from environmental groups. It has the potential to galvanize the business
and technology communities in a way that no other initiative has -- if only because it affirms their modus operandi.
And it pulls together some sorely needed economic and environmental changes into one appealing package. That
said, `natural capitalism' is a programme for change that is at best partially developed. Very little that it advocates
will emerge from capitalism as it's currently structured. Both the core of its agenda -- aggressive pursuit of ecoefficiencies -- and the associated objectives of equity and overcoming consumerism, demand ambitious political
action. When Lovins and company avoid discussion of political or cultural change they are not telling the whole
story. Maybe their restraint on the political aspects is strategic. Quite possibly the Lovinses and Hawken are trying
to get North Americans to buy into the concept first. Then they will slowly introduce the scarier parts about political
and cultural change. Whether this strategy is appropriate or not is an open question. As Joel Kovel says, `natural
capitalism' presents lots of good technocratic ideas but `we shouldn't think of it as a substitute for genuine political
engagement'.

History/Wilderson
A focus on historical justice precludes focusing on inequality
happening now and perpetuates the capitalist system
Michaels 7 (Walter Benn, Professor of American Literature and Literary Theory at
University of Illinois at Chicago, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to
Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, 7/24/2007, pg 22)//JL
As much as we like
our culture, we also like being proud of our history and
the way our people
have triumphed, or at least survived
we like being outraged by the bad things somebody elses people did to ours we
like thinking that justice requires they make up or at least apologizefor
them
why we should care about the past the answer
is that we shouldnt,
our current near obsession with the importance of history is profoundly
misplaced
history functions at best as a distraction from present
injustices and at worst as a way of perpetuating them
being proud of

proud of

being

(whoever we think our people are)

. And, conversely,
, and

. But if the first three chapters give us reasons to be skeptical of the category our people and of the links we can have to people in the past, chapter 4 gives us reasons to doubt the relevance of the past itself. The

question it asks is

, and

it gives

and that

. Like the idea of diversity itself,

. Henry Ford said a long time ago, History is bunk; the purpose of this

chapter will be to show that he was right.

The 1AC badly misreads historyslavery was not based on

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

became a growing impediment to white European progress, and during this period, the images of American
Indians promoted in books, newspapers, and magazines became increasingly negative. As sociologists Keith Kilty
and Eric Swank have observed, eliminating savages is less of a moral problem than eliminating human beings,
and therefore American Indians came to be understood as a lesser raceuncivilized savagesthus providing a

The growing demand for labor on plantations

was met through slavery. American Indians were considered unsuitable as slaves,
largely because native tribes were clearly in a position to fight back. The fear of
raids by Indian tribes led plantation owners to grasp for an alternative source
of free labor. European immigrants were also deemed poor candidates for slavery, not
because of their race, but rather because they were in short supply and enslavement
would, quite naturally, interfere with voluntary immigration to the new colonies. Plantation
owners thus viewed African, who were relatively powerless, as the ideal slaves. The systematic
justification for the extermination of a native peoples.

enslavement of Africans, and the rearing of their children under bondage, emerged with all
deliberate speed quickened by events such as Bacons Rebellion. Nathaniel Bacon was a white property
owner in Jamestown, Virginia, who managed to unite slaves, indentured servants, and poor whites in a revolutionary
effort to overthrow the planter elite. Although slaves clearly occupied the lowest position in the social hierarchy and
suffered the most under the plantation system, the condition of indentured whites was barely better, and the
majority of free whites lived in extreme poverty. As explained by historian Edmund Morgan, in colonies like Virginia,
the planter elite, with huge land grants, occupied a vastly superior position to workers of all colors. Southern
colonies did not hesitate to invent ways to extend the terms of servitude, and the planter class accumulated
uncultivated lands to restrict the options of free workers. The simmering resentment against the planter class
created conditions that were ripe for revolt. Varying accounts of Bacons rebellion abound, but the basic facts are
these: Bacon developed plans in 1675 to seize Native American lands in order to acquire more property for himself
and others and nullify the threat of Indian raids. When the planter elite in Virginia refused to provide militia support
for his scheme, Bacon retaliated, leading an attack on the elite, their homes, and their property. He openly
condemned the rich for their oppression of the poor and inspired an alliance of white and black bond laborers, as
well as slaves, who demanded an end to their servitude. The attempted revolution was ended by force and false
promises of amnesty. A number of people who participated in the revolt were hanged. The events in Jamestown
were alarming to the planter elite, who were deeply fearful of the multiracial alliance of bond workers and slaves.

In an
effort to protect their superior status and economic position, the planters
shifted their strategy for maintaining dominance. They abandon their heavy reliance on
Word of Bacons Rebellion spread far and wide, and several more uprisings of a similar type followed.

indentured servants in favor of the importation of more black slaves. Instead of importing English-speaking slaves
from the West Indies, who were more likely to be familiar with European language and culture, many more

slaves were shipped directly from Africa. These slaves would be far easier
to control and far less likely to form alliances with poor whites . Fearful
that such measures might not be sufficient to protect their interests, the planter
class took an additional precautionary step, a step that would later become known as a
racial bribe. Deliberately and strategically, the planter class extended
special privileges to poor whites in an effort to drive a wedge between
them and black slaves. White settlers were allowed greater access to Native American lands, white
servants were allowed to police slaves through slave patrols and militias, and barriers were created so that free

These measures effectively

eliminated the risk of future alliances between black slaves and poor
whites. Poor whites suddenly had a direct, personal stake in the existence
of a race-based system of slavery. Their own plight had not improved by
much, but at least they were not slaves. Once the planter elite split the labor
force, poor whites responded to the logic of their situation and sought ways to expand
their racially privileged position.
labor would not be placed in competition with slave labor.

Identity
Focusing on identity promotes the idea that class is a cultural
issue --- ensures class difference isnt seen as a disadvantage
and doesnt get resolved

Michaels 7 (Walter Benn, Professor of American Literature and Literary Theory at

University of Illinois at Chicago, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to
Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, 7/24/2007, pg 22)//JL
the least important thing about usour identityis the thing we
have become most committed to talking about
this commitment is,
a profound mistake
the political left increasingly committed to the
Indeed, the point of this book as a whole is that

, and that

left politics,

. What it means is that

celebration of diversity

and the redress of historical grievance

especially from the standpoint of a

has converted itself into the accomplice

rather than the opponent of the right

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

reform that didnt involve the attack on economic inequality. The situation now is almost exactly the opposite;

And, not content with pretending that our real problem is cultural difference

rather than economic difference,

. So

is condescendingit

And if we can stop thinking of the poor as people who have too little money and start thinking of them instead as people who have too little respect,
, not their poverty,

to be solved,

, in other words,

, and

you stop thinking of it as a disadvantage

then, of course,

you no longer need to

worry about getting rid of it.

the trick is to think of inequality as a
consequence of our prejudices rather than as a consequence of our social
More generally,

system and thus to turn the

project of creating a more egalitarian society into the project of getting people (ourselves and, especially, others) to stop being racist, sexist, classist homophobes. This book is an attack on that trick.

Culture
Focusing on identity promotes the idea that class is a cultural
issue --- ensures class difference isnt seen as a disadvantage
and doesnt get resolved

Michaels 7 (Walter Benn, Professor of American Literature and Literary Theory at

University of Illinois at Chicago, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to
Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, 7/24/2007, pg 22)//JL
the least important thing about usour identityis the thing we
have become most committed to talking about
this commitment is,
a profound mistake
the political left increasingly committed to the
Indeed, the point of this book as a whole is that

, and that

left politics,

. What it means is that

celebration of diversity

and the redress of historical grievance

especially from the standpoint of a

has converted itself into the accomplice

rather than the opponent of the right

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

reform that didnt involve the attack on economic inequality. The situation now is almost exactly the opposite;

And, not content with pretending that our real problem is cultural difference

rather than economic difference,

. So

is condescendingit

And if we can stop thinking of the poor as people who have too little money and start thinking of them instead as people who have too little respect,
, not their poverty,

to be solved,

, in other words,

, and

you stop thinking of it as a disadvantage

then, of course,

you no longer need to

worry about getting rid of it.

the trick is to think of inequality as a
consequence of our prejudices rather than as a consequence of our social
More generally,

system and thus to turn the

project of creating a more egalitarian society into the project of getting people (ourselves and, especially, others) to stop being racist, sexist, classist homophobes. This book is an attack on that trick.

Race
Race is a myth propped up by capitalists to divert attention
from the slavery of the middle class
Posner 14 (Richard, Writer at The Hampton Institute, The Family Tree Revisited:
The Mythology of 'Race', 1/22/2014, The Hampton Institute,
http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/mythology-of-race.html#.U7_6QoFdUUM)//JL
There are not separate races within the species Homo sapiens There are
only various ethnic groups that present some slight differences
as a result of
adaption
All the peoples of Earth are essentially, biologically and
genetically the same
The only "race" of people on Earth is the
.

in appearance

to the diverse environments in which they developed.

. We are a single family.

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

that family was
"created" in
eden or
Africa is irrelevant The existence of
any ostensible "races
is merely the result of propaganda
the mythology of racism, created and perpetuated by a parasitic minority; the
pathological ruling class of the dominant culture The myth of racism is just one
;

you "believe"

the fabled garden of

conclude that it evolved on the plains of prehistoric

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

, memes and

disinformation,

more weapon being used in the vain attempt to perpetuate an

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

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

with reckless abandon

at a rate far surpassing that of their recovery.

.

Malicious Intent

a variety of

seemingly

but fallacious

the members of

as property.

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

Oxford English Dictionary (online) (source)

racism

noun

1. the belief

that there are characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to each race 2. discrimination against or antagonism towards other races - DERIVATIVES racist noun & adjective (emphasis added) The above definition seems to
presuppose that there are in fact separate and unique races within the human species. Irrefutably, there are not. The Fact Of The Matter Homo sapiens n. The modern species of humans, the only extant species of the
primate family Hominidae All humans now living belong to the subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens. (emphasis added) In genetic terms, there is only one race, said King in a phone interview. "

are Africans

All humans

." - Harvard University Gazette - Cancer researcher, geneticist, and social activist Mary-Claire King (source) "Three fossil skulls from Ethiopia have been revealed as the oldest human remains

yet discovered. The 160,000-year-old finds plug an important gap in the fossil record around the time our species first appeared and provides strong new evidence that Homo sapiens originated only in Africa..." (source)

Scientists
ancestor

announced the discovery of the oldest fossil skeleton of a human

our forebears underwent a previously unknown stage of evolution
Human beings have very low
genetic variability.

in the scientific sense, the world is

colourblind
Race is a real cultural, political and economic concept in society,
but it is not a biological concept and that unfortunately is what many people
wrongfully consider to be the essence of race in humans -- genetic differences
Evolutionary history is the key to understanding race
There's nothing even like a really
distinct subdivision of humanity

"

today

. The find reveals that

more than a million years before Lucy, the iconic early human ancestor specimen that walked the Earth 3.2 million years ago." (source)

"

Probably the entire species is descended from a single family that lived about 200,000 years ago." (emphasis added) (source)

"Using the latest molecular biology techniques,

Templeton has analyzed millions of genetic sequences found in three distinct types of human DNA and concludes that,
. That is, it should be.

," says

Templeton. "

, and new molecular biology techniques offer so much on recent

evolutionary history. I wanted to bring some objectivity to the topic. This very objective analysis shows the outcome is not even a close call:

." - Alan R. Templeton, Ph.D., professor of biology in Arts and Sciences at Washington University (source)

"Evolution isn't making people in

different parts of the world more distinct. There are no human races, just the one species: homo sapiens. Race is one of the most misunderstood terms in modern science, misused by seasoned scientists and laymen alike. Put

there are no human races, just the one species: homo sapiens
) "In the late
19th century, the 'Science of Race' was established. This was basically a
simply,

." (source

"scientifically determined" list of all the different cultures in the world

This heinous list was used as
justification for the inhumane suppression of slaves originally from the western
coast of Africa It was also used in defense of discrimination against Asians, South
Americans, and any number of non Anglo-Saxon peoples
'racism' carries the
excess baggage of centuries of outright crimes against humanity (i.e. the
enslavement of Western and Central Africans

races" as
imagined by the public do not actually exist.

, listed in order of intelligence. Of course,

following the path of historical bigotry, the Northern Europeans were placed at the top, and South Africans (native to the area) were at the bottom.

. Therefore, the term

for work in the Americas), not to mention xenophobia." (source)

"However, "

Any definition of race that we attempt produces more exceptions than sound classifications. No matter what

system we use, most people don't fit." - Original (source): The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 17, 1998, Page B4-B5 (source) The mountain of peer-reviewed scientific evidence establishing incontrovertibly that homo sapiens is

there is no sign of abatement

in the perpetuation of racism by the dominant culture of civilization. It is still used,
albeit a bit more subtly in some places, to perpetrate obscenely vicious crimes
against humanity.

a single family and is comprised of only one race could fill an encyclopedia, perhaps a small library, dedicated to that subject alone. Nonetheless,

Ubiquitous Inhumanity

Antiracism efforts eliminate the idea of inequality leaving

poverty untouched and giving neoliberals free reign to enforce
economic inequality
Michaels 7 (Walter Benn, Professor of American Literature and Literary Theory at
University of Illinois at Chicago, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to
Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, 7/24/2007, pgs 74-76)//JL
antiracism serves an
important
political purpose
debates about
race
are no longer debates between racism and antiracism
the debate
today is between two kinds of antiracism One, identified with multiculturalism and
the left, urges us to respect and preserve differences
It
gives poor people identities

The
other, identified with the right
insists that the only
identity that matters (the one we should be respecting) is American identity.
liberalisms antiracism argues that we can solve our
problems by respecting racial difference, contemporary conservatism's antiracism
maintains we can solve our problems only by eliminating or ignoring it. The problem
with this debate
is that, from the standpoint of economic
But

other more

and more properly

. As weve seen, the central

in America today

. Rather,

the

and, turning

between blacks and whites and Native Americans and Jews and whoever.

them into black people or Latinos or women, insists on regarding their problems as effects of discrimination and intolerance.

, regards the respect for racial difference as itself a form of discrimination and

We are just one

race here, as Justice Antonin Scalia put it. It is American.25 Where contemporary

(or, looked at another way, the virtue of this debate)

inequality, it doesnt matter which side youre on and it doesnt matter

who wins Either way, economic inequality is absolutely untouched
the dream of a world where identities
are not discriminated
against
is
essential to) the dream of a free
market
A society free not
only of racism but of sexism and of heterosexism is a neoliberal utopia
where all the irrelevant grounds for inequality
have been eliminated and
whatever inequalities are left are therefore legitimated.
the left is more
like a police force for, than an alternative to, the right Its commitment to rooting o
prejudices
is a tacit commitment to the efficiency of the
market. its commitment to
victims of racism, sexism and
heterosexism
rather than exploitation
is a
commitment to the essential justice of the market
when our
favorite victims are the victims of prejudice, we are all neoliberals.
.

. The dream of a world free

of prejudice,

(whether American or hyphenated American)

, is as foundational to the right as it is to the left. And this dream is completely compatible with (

efficient

, actually,

truly

and

. Heres where the concept of neoliberalismthe idea of the free market as the essential mechanism of social justiceis genuinely clarifying.

(your identity)

Thus, when it comes to antiracism,

the residual

that too many of us no doubt continue to harbor deep inside

And

the idea that the victims of social injustice today are the

(the victims of discrimination

, of intolerance rather than oppression, or of oppression in the form of intolerance)

. The preferred crimes of neoliberalism are always hate crimes;

ut

An exclusive focus on race makes a focus on economic

difference moot regardless of which side theyre on

Michaels 7 (Walter Benn, Professor of American Literature and Literary Theory at

University of Illinois at Chicago, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to
Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, 7/24/2007, pgs 67-68)//JL
The exemplary instance of victimization
remains the victim of
discrimination Its the violation of people's rights
that we
prefer to deplore
the attraction of the
Leo Frank story may be the way in which it testifies to the triumph of racial
prejudice over class privilege
it demonstrates the irrelevance of wealth
and (from the standpoint of the racist) turns class warfare into white supremacism
while (from the standpoint of the antiracist) turning class war fare into bigotry
it
is a kind of gift since it makes
over the rational anger of the poor as the irrational anger of the racist and enables
everyone to agree that the real issue here is not money but race. if racism
in modern American political life

as citizensthe failure of the liberal state to live up to its liberalism

. The problem in Chesnutt is not that the farm laborers cant afford to ride in the clean comfortable car; its that some people who can afford to (like Dr. Miller) arent allowed to. And Leo

Frankthe Jew they lynched in Georgia because of that little factory girlis Roths version of Dr. Miller, a man whose class cant save him from his race. Indeed, part of

, which is to say, the way in which

. If youre a racist,

shows you that racism is the solution; if youre an antiracist, it shows you that racism is the problem. Either way, Tom Watsons anti-Semitism

So

makes economic issues irrelevant by asserting that what really matters is

the difference between races, antiracism does exactly the same thing.

The

difference is just that Chesnutt and Roth condemn what Dixon celebrates. For Roth and Chesnutt, as for Dixon, the fundamental conflicts: are between races; antiracism, just as reliably as racism, turns the hostility between rich and
poor into the hostility between black and white, Christian and Jew.

Disease
The notion that diseases are associated with specific races is a
scientific fallacy and reinforces notions of racism by grouping
communities that were geographically distinct
Michaels 7 (Walter Benn, Professor of American Literature and Literary Theory at
University of Illinois at Chicago, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to
Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, 7/24/2007, pg 32)//JL
This is nicely illustrated by recent discoveries about
disease and race
sickle cell anemia has been a disease
customarily
identified with black people it turns out that we cant really distinguish
between black people and white people
invoking a genetic
association with sickle cell.
not all of the people we call black actually
have such an association it is characteristic among people whose ancestors
were at one point centered in parts of West and Central Africa and isnt at all
point

the apparent link between

many years, at least in the United States,

. For

and, of course, a disease of the blood

. But

(between black blood and white blood) by

For one thing,

, since

associated with black people whose ancestry is elsewhere in Africa

there are people we think of as white
with whom the trait is
associated The unifying factor is apparently descent from people who lived where
malaria was a problem
in a country
composed largely of white people from the Mediterranean and of black people from
southern Africa sickle cell would be thought of as a white disease.6
. And, for another,

(i.e., certain parts of the Greek population)

since the sickle cell trait is a variant of traits that protect against malaria. Thus, as Adolph Reed pointedly suggests

Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Coleridges poem promotes endless expansion and colonial
exploitation by eradicating the consequences of discovery
Levy 4 (Michelle, assistant professor of English at Simon Fraser University,
Discovery and the domestic affections in Coleridge and Shelley, 2004,
http://web.nsboro.k12.ma.us/algonquin/faculty/englishteachers/coppens/Rimecritical
article6.html)//JL
as Samuel Taylor Coleridge was writing "The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere
recalling how
he "read incessantly and
had
become obsessed with stories of the unknown,
This
childhood reading was not, however, without its ill effects
he
became "haunted by spectres
The Ancyent Marinere" records the powerful force that tales
In the fall of 1797,

," (1) he

found himself reflecting on the influence of his childhood reading,

, from the age of three,

,"

, by the age of six,

from Robinson Crusoe to the Arabian Nights' Entertainments. (2)

. By reading the Arabian Nights' Entertainments,

, whenever I was in the dark," causing such "anxious & fearful" behavior that his father, when he "found out the effect, which these books had

produced," seized "and burnt them." (3) "

of the unknown exerted on Coleridge's imagination

claiming that the Mariner "had told this story ten thousand times since the voyage
which was in early youth and fifty years before

; he even bestowed his own compulsive habits on his fictional creation,

." (4) In August 1806, Coleridge himself recited the Mariner's tale as another child, eight-year-old Mary

Godwin, hid behind a sofa and listened enraptured. (5) The profound influence of Coleridge's poem on Mary Shelley could be seen ten years later, in August 1816, when she, while reading Coleridge's companion piece to "The
Ancyent Marinere," "Christabel," began to write her own story of the unknown, Frankenstein. (6) In writing Frankenstein, a novel that replicates "The Ancyent Marinere"'s intricate narrative structure of stories told within stories and

Coleridge's
fascination with the unknown reflects a larger cultural obsession of the Romantic
period.
writers of Coleridge's
time produced unprecedented
quantities of gothic fiction and exotic tales with stories set in the Middle Ages, the
Orient, or, as in "Kubla Khan, or, a Vision in a Dream," both. while Coleridge and
Shelley
were captivated by printed narratives of the unknown they were
vociferously opposed to unregulated and irresponsible venturing into the unknown
in the real world
Coleridge
could not help but observe that many of these
discoveries inevitably led to conquest and exploitation By creating a
composite voyage alluding to the originary moments in European maritime
exploration in "The Ancyent Marinere
Coleridge laid bare the economic motivations for and
ethical implications of the Mariner's having been "the first that ever burst / Into that
silent Sea" of the Pacific
the Mariner's sufferings and guilt
cannot be divorced from the expansionist project that culminated
incorporates the poem as a formative influence on her characters, Shelley participates in a conversation with Coleridge about the pleasures and the dangers of tales of the unknown.

Across generations and genders,

and Shelley's

and Shelley's
,

But

, like many,

. As more than ever before was being learned and written about previously unknown worlds, whether they were found with a telescope or a microscope, on the seven seas or in a

laboratory,

and Shelley, among others,

"--from Ferdinand Magellan's first circumnavigation of the globe in the sixteenth century to Captain James Cook's explorations of

the South Pacific and Antarctic regions in the later part of the eighteenth century--

(lines 105-6). (7) Indeed, readers of the poem have long argued that

, by the end of the eighteenth century, in the slave

trade, the plantation system, and imperial culture. (8) Readers of Frankenstein have also observed that Mary Shelley, by reflecting darkly on contemporary maritime exploration and scientific experimentation, lodged a powerful
complaint against the twin dangers of imperialism and science. (9) Less attention, however, has been devoted to the ways in which

eradicate
Coleridge
excesses.

Coleridge

and Shelley

sought to

, the damage caused by reckless discovery

saw the domestic affections as the primary tool for restraining these

, or at least to mitigate

and Shelley

In this essay, I will argue that both

The commonality between "The Ancyent Marinere" and Frankenstein extends beyond their recommendation of the domestic affections to their recognition that the desire for discovery and conquest was

By liberating the imagination from the constraints of

prudence and suffering, narratives of discovery tended to promise excitement and
glory without consequences The Ancyent Marinere
reflect on the
power of tales of the unknown
Thus they
profoundly inflamed by printed accounts of discovery and conquest.

. Both "

" and Frankenstein self-consciously

, paying particular attention to the way such stories inspire imitation, both in the physical world and on the page.

manifest their awareness that print culture enabled and encouraged

British imperialism Coleridge's poem
exhibit a tension between their
attraction to stories of the unknown and their repulsion by the effects of unbridled
.

and Shelley's novel

exploration
Coleridge
exploit the enthralling nature of the unknown
. By investing considerable faith in the restraining powers of the domestic affections,

and Shelley

sought

, perhaps without complete success,

without encouraging actual projects of discovery.

to

Walt Whitman
The aff locks in capitalist consumption by promoting purchase
and possession
Blake 8 (David Haven, Associate Professor of English at The College of New Jersey,
Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity, 2008, Yale University Press,
pg. 133)//JL
Whitman unwittingly articulates the historical appeal of consumer
capitalism As both an advertisement and a commodity, the
poet becomes a
key to
unity.
he invite us to find out individuality through his book he
promises
our divisions will be swept into his colossal
force.
all have access to the poet
politically marginalized
groups
have been encouraged to discover their identity
through the purchase of commodities
consumption can be a form of political power.
Whitmans misgivings about
capitalism
participates in a long historical process in which consumption
would become a primary means of
participating in public life.
the poets insistent publicity threatens to
obscure his democratic goals
He signals a social transformation that no single person can resist,
for his is the power to turn the private individual into a public being
with hegemonic intensity
I have embraced you,
.

public

celebrated

Not only does

that in the end,

many

fugitive,

unifying

Tuckahoe, congressman, prostitute,

of Leaves of Grass. Lauren Berlant has argued that the most

in the United States

, as well as a larger sense of

community,

. Surely that participation has been meaningful to consumers, but it raises the problem of whether

Despite

, Song of Myself

casually

Whitman would have been disappointed with those

results and the limited perspectives they have produced. At the same time, we might ask whether

. Once we see in Whitmans poet a nexus of increasingly prevalent cultural forcesnamely, promotion, advertisement and celebritythe bravado of his

claims makes startling, if not terrifying, sense.

. Although he nominally directs his address to

the weak and the faltering, he pursues his readers in Song of Myself

: I dilate you with tremendous breadth . I buoy you up; Every room of the house

do I fill with an armed force. Lovers of me, bafflers of graves: Sleep! I and they keep guard all night; Not doubt, not decrease shall dare to lay finger upon you,

and henceforth possess you to myself,

And when you rise in the morning you will find what I tell you is so.

Whitmans poetry has been historically used to promote

commercial progress and industrial capitalism

Sewell 4 (Bill, Professor of History at St. Marys University, Reconsidering the

Modern in Japanese History: Modernity in the Service of the Prewar Japanese
Empire, 2004, Japan Review, http://shinku.nichibun.ac.jp/jpub/pdf/jr/IJ1607.pdf)//JL
Coinciding
with Japans emergence from seclusion Whitmans joyous celebration
of the modern garnered meaningful praise among late Meiji Japanese literati
Soseki
proclaimed Whitmans happy arrival as
that of a great man descending from heaven. Japanese fascination with Whitman
did not end there
some
began to write in his style.
It was Whitmans vision of heroic progress
that provoked this fascinationboth in substance and in style
Whitman
sought to capture the essence of life in a new age by
providing it with a new poetic style, one more appropriate for a fresh and exciting
era.
Whitman represented important
evolutionary transitions apparent in wider society, including the expansion of a
commercial and liberal middle class
the advent of industrial
capitalism, and the triumph of new technologies.
Whitmans vision of the modern was optimistic and progressive,
rendering him for many a veritable prophet of the modern.
roughly

, Walt

.2 While Uchimura

Kanzo (1861-1930) apparently first introduced Whitman to Japan, a young Natsume

(1867-1916)

.5 While

began translating Whitmans oeuvre,6 others

7 So rapidly did Whitman gain

prominence in Japan that Lafcadio Hearn sought to warn Japanese against Whitmans influence.8

. On the surface,

, who

grew up amid the jubilant tur-moil of a booming New York City,

A deeper consideration reveals that contrasting with antebellum, anti-modern views emanating from the south,

(including its sensibilities),

9 He noted with special approval the rising significance of the average man.10

Despite occasional misgivings late in life,

11

Love Letters
The 1ACs Buddhist approach reifies capitalism by letting
technocratic elite outpace the revolution
Zizek 1 (Slavoj, Slovenian Marxist philosopher, psychoanalyst and cultural critic a
senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy, University of
Ljubljana, Slovenia, From Western Marxism to Western Buddhism, Spring 2001,
Cabinet Magazine, http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/2/western.php)//JL
The ultimate postmodern irony of today is the strange exchange between Europe and
Asia: at the very moment when "European" technology and capitalism are triumphing worldwide at the level
of the "economic infrastructure, the Judeo-Christian legacy is threatened at the level of "ideological
superstructure" in the European space itself by New Age "Asiatic" thought , which, in
its different guises ranging from "Western Buddhism" to different "Taos," is establishing
itself as the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism .1 Therein resides the highest speculative identity of
opposites in today's global civilization: although "Western Buddhism" presents itself as the remedy
against the stressful tension of capitalist dynamics , allowing us to uncouple and retain inner peace and Gelassenheit, it
actually functions as its perfect ideological supplement . One should mention here the well-known concept of
"future shock" that describes how people are no longer psychologically able to cope with the dazzling rhythm of technological development and the social changes that accompany it.

Things simply move too fast, and before one can accustom oneself to an invention,
it has already been supplanted by a new one, so that one more and more lacks the most
elementary "cognitive mapping." The recourse to Taoism or Buddhism offers a way out of this
predicament that definitely works better than the desperate escape into old traditions. Instead of trying to cope with the
accelerating rhythm of techno-logical progress and social changes, one should
rather renounce the very endeavor to retain control over what goes on, rejecting it as the expression of the
modern logic of domination. One should, instead, "let oneself go," drift along, while retaining an inner distance
and indifference toward the mad dance of accelerated process , a distance based on the insight that all this social
and technological upheaval is ultimately just a non-substantial proliferation of semblances that do not really concern the innermost kernel of our being. One is almost
tempted to resuscitate the old infamous Marxist clich of religion as the "opium of
the people," as the imaginary supplement to terrestrial misery. The "Western Buddhist" meditative stance
is arguably the most efficient way for us to fully participate in capitalist
dynamics

while retaining the appearance of mental sanity. If Max Weber were alive today, he would definitely write a second, supplementary, volume to his Protestant

Western Buddhism" thus fits perfectly the fetishist

mode of ideology in our allegedly "post-ideological" era, as opposed to its traditional symptomal mode in
which the ideological lie which structures our perception of reality is threatened by symptoms qua "returns of the repressed," cracks in the fabric of the
ideological lie. The fetish is effectively a kind of symptom in reverse . That is to say, the symptom is
the exception which disturbs the surface of the false appearance , the point at which the repressed Other
Scene erupts, while the fetish is the embodiment of the Lie which enables us to sustain the
unbearable truth. Let us take the case of the death of a beloved person. In the case of a symptom, I "repress" this death and try not to think about it, but the
Ethic, entitled The Taoist Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capitalism.2 "

repressed trauma returns in the symptom. In the case of a fetish, on the contrary, I "rationally" fully accept this death, and yet I cling to the fetish, to some feature that embodies for me
the disavowal of this death. In this sense, a fetish can play a very constructive role in allowing us to cope with the harsh reality. Fetishists are not dreamers lost in their private worlds.
They are thorough "realists" capable of accepting the way things effectively are, given that they have their fetish to which they can cling in order to cancel the full impact of reality. In
Nevil Shute's melodramatic World War II novel Requiem for a WREN, the heroine survives her lover's death without any visible traumas. She goes on with her life and is even able to talk
rationally about her lover's death because she still has the dog that was the lover's favored pet. When, some time after, the dog is accidentally run over by a truck, she collapses and her
entire world disintegrates.

Satire
Satire fails at breaking down capitalism --- default to our
method
Hill et al 2 (Dave, Research Professor in Education at Anglia Ruskin University;
Peter McLaren, Distinguished Professor in Critical Studies, College of Educational
Studies, Chapman University; Mike Cole, Professor in Education, Cass School of
Education and Communities; Glenn Rikowski, Researcher at the University of
Birmingham, Marxism Against Postmodernsim in Educational Theory, 2002,
http://books.google.com/books?id=bTo2AAAAQBAJ&pg=PA98&lpg=PA98&dq=
%22satire%22+%22marxism%22+%22capitalism
%22&source=bl&ots=bpV1Xo8HiT&sig=SrqllJ6g3tfOiNgiJ9wJYuVadLU&hl=en&sa=X
&ei=6oHaU_WpL-PnygOu9YLADQ&ved=0COsBEOgBMBY#v=onepage&q&f=true)//JL
To extend parodic activity to social class behavior we have to question the extent
to which workers and the ruling class mimicking each other would shake the
foundations of capitalism
Surrealism and other art forms
continue to
perform similar functions
However subversive these may be,
they do not provide directions for change . Satirists can mock, can work with
the

would

and inequality.

performed and

, as do, for example, certain alternative comedians.

counter-hegemonic forces to destabilize

. But

satire does not organize

. Nor

does

ultra-relativism,

where anything goes. In such a scheme of things, anything can be oppressive as well as progressive.

Satire is not overidentificationcedes the political and doesnt

deconstructmovements need to be invisible
Shukaitis 11 [Stevphen Shukaitis, PhD Sociology (Queen Mary, University of London), Fascists as much
as painters: imagination, overidentification, and strategies of intervention", Peer Reviewed, 2011, Sociological
Review, 59 (3)] l.gong

It

is to return to the questions of what a strategy of overidentification is ultimately based on, what does it

accomplish, and to what end.

While it is tempting to brush off questions of the

difference between parody, satire, and overidentifiction, this would be a
mistake because it is precisely in these differences that overidentifiction
as strategy achieves it unique function. This conflation of
overidentification and related concepts would be especially tempting
precisely of how humor and satire have been taken up in the US by the left
as a response to the politics of fear-mongering, for instance in the increased prominence
of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show, Stephen Colbert and The Colbert Report ,
and the satirical newspaper The Onion (Day 2011). Colbert serves as an example of how
these related phenomena seem to overlap through the way that he adopts
the style and composure of a right wing news anchor to undermine the
political right through parody and imitation. But what makes what Stephen Colbert
and Jon Stewart do different from overidentification is that their position
is never ambivalent. Viewers are unlikely to think that what is being said
is serious, which is much different from the activities of Laibach and the
NSK where ultimately their position is left open and is thus unsettling.
Overidentification as a strategy operates through avoiding this closure , even
if it is a closure that would be reassuring rather than leaving the audience unsettled.

Heidegger
(inconsistent with some alts) The aff destroys distinctions
necessary to understanding class-based oppression and
overcoming it

Kimberly DeFazio 2012, Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin- La Crosse, Machine-Thinking and
the Romance of Posthuman, The Red Critique

while for Heidegger the problem is the

subject/object binary, and for posthumanists it is the human/animal
distinction, what they all reject as metaphysical thinking is the logic of the
"binary" which is the structuring principle of class society. Class societies,
in which a few control the labor and products of others and thus have
control over the lives of the majority , necessarily create cultural and conceptual
divisions which codify these class relations . Conceptual divisions have
their material roots not in the mind but in the world which the mind
reflects, through more or less complex mediations. This is one of the basic principles of materialism: ideas
are not the product of the (individual) mind; rather, social consciousness is
shaped by social existence. Therefore changing how people think and thus act
(whether to oneself, other humans, animals or the environment) requires changing the material
divisions that produce othering. Philosophy which simply does away with
conceptual distinctions in thinking , as Heidegger and other romantics do, not only
gets rid of the very concepts (like "class," "exploitation," "determination")
needed to understand the structuring principles of class society , but, in effect,
A broader point that needs to be made here is that,

displaces material change of objective conditions onto the subjective change of the individual. This is the essential
politico-cognitive work that neoromantic theory does for capital. Whether through such concepts as Keats'
"negative capability" Kant's "sublime," Heidegger's "Being" or "the question of the animal" that is the more recent
focus of such writers as Derrida, Wolfe, and Calarco, romantic machine-thinking celebrates the dissolution of
boundaries: between self and other, subject and object, philosophy and poetry, rich and poor, the social (as city)

It constructs a post-rational linguistic realm of higher values which

exceed restricting social codes and conventions. Boundaries, in romanticism, are viewed
and nature.

as the imposition of cultural codes and linguistic conventions that rigidly delineate, not as material (as effects of

It is through the replacement of "mechanical" concepts with

speculative ones that romanticism blurs social boundaries and epistemological
distinctions in an effort, not to transform capitalism, but to find a freer mode of thinking within it.
labor relations).

As Wordsworth puts it in his Preface toLyrical Ballads, it involves taking familiar incidents and "throw[ing] over them
a certain colouring of imagination"or, in the updated idiom of posthumanism, a "revolution in language and

Heideggerian pre-reflective experience , like "the question

the space in which "abstract" binaries like class (not to
mention other social differences) evaporate. By blurring lines, romantic theory seeks, as
Heidegger puts it, "the liberation of language from grammar " ("Letter on Humanism" 218),
rather than social transformation. To liberate language from grammar is of course to free up
thought" (Calarco, Zoographies 6).
of the animal,"

is

in short

thinking (from cultural bounds), to suspend the social structures of language and, according to Heidegger, to come
closer to understanding Being. Grammarless language is thus the fantasy of the plentitude of meaning outside of
the social. No matter how adamantly posthumanism condemns Heidegger's human-centered thinking, the very deessentializing strategies it deploys to challenge human-animal distinctions are informed by the (Heideggerian)
desire to escape existing social conventions, through the relay of the animal.

Heidegger reduces all humanism to Englightenment humanism

the aff is necessarily in opposition to material humanism
which is an imperative critique of capitalist modes of
production
Kimberly DeFazio 2012, Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin- La Crosse, Machine-Thinking and
the Romance of Posthuman, The Red Critique

Consequently, one of the important implications of the posthumanist theorization of "humanism"

Heidegger's basic critique of metaphysics ) is that it reduces all

humanism to Enlightenment humanism . In doing so, it also erases the
materialist theory of humanism, which is a critique of both Enlightenment
humanism and posthumanism. As Marx himself argues, "the human essence is no
abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the
ensemble of the social relations" (Marx, "Theses on Feuerbach"). The materialist
theory of humanism, to put this another way, is the theory of humans' place in the city: the site
of labor, consciousness, and history. This theory of humanism has in fact always been put in
question by capitalist ideology , the main task of which is the use of culture
to explain away (naturalize) the social relations of labor from which capitalists profit.
Whereas materialist humanism is the articulation of the possiblefreedom
from necessity, from the relations of exploitationdominant theories of the
human/humanism are ultimately aimed at preserving existing class relations. They do so by
erasing the roots of humanity in labor and treating the human instead as
the subject of consciousness and reason (i.e., the cogito, the speaking subject) or as the
(which imports

subject of post-rational feeling and sensuousness (a subject of consciousness who considers

consciousness of feeling more important than rational knowing). What is thereby erased is that

what humans do to nature is a result of what humans do to themselves :

"the exploitation of man by man." It is the social relations and not epistemological and
cultural ones that shape material life, not only for humans but also for all species. On these

terms, the human subject is, above all, the subject of labor. To theorize the basis of the human life in
terms of labor is to emphasize that, in "the working-up of the objective world" of nature (humans' lifeactivity), humans make their life-activity "the object of [their] will and [their] consciousness" (Marx,
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts 62). That is to say, "Man makes his life-activity itself the object
of his will and of his consciousness. He has conscious life-activity" (62). And because his life-activity of
production becomes an object of consciousness, his life-activity "is not a determination with which he
directly merges" (62). This is the basis on which Marx makes a distinction between humans and
animals, between human life-activity and animal life-activity (what he also calls the "natural life").
Humans, in their productive life, are "self-conscious." The animal, by contrast, "is immediately
identical with its life-activity. It does not distinguish itself from it," or, in short, it "merges" with its
life-activity (62). In fact, Marx writes, "It is just because of this that [the human] is a species being. Or
it is only because he is a species being that he is a Conscious Being, i.e., that his own life is an object
for him" (62). Freedom and consciousness have an integral connection here, since only because
humans' life-producing activity is an object of reflection "is [their] activity free activity" (62). Insofar
as the "human" is shaped by social relations,

in exploitative social relations,

therefore,

the "human essence" is loss,

deprivation, alienation, and contradiction. In the case of

capitalism, for the first time in history, the majority of workers are "freed" in a "double sense." The
mass of the working population, lacking means of production to meet their own subsistence needs,

It is no longer the production of use values

values that meet the needs of the society but exchangevalues
produced for the sake of private accumulation of profit. In contrast to ancient
must sell their labor in order to survive.

societies, where "[t]he individual... can never appear in the total isolation of the mere free labourer"
(Marx, Pre-Capitalist 81), with the generalization of commodity relations (relations of exchange), the
individual appears increasingly isolatedan effect of the fact that "the worker finds the objective
conditions of his labour as something separate from him, as capital," which also assumes that

capitalist finds the workers as propertyless, as abstract

"the

labourers" (86). The

alienation ("estrangement") of the worker from the means and product of labor, as Marx discusses in
detail in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, leads to further forms of alienation, all of
which derive from the separation of the worker from her means and product of labor. Not only does
the life-activity of production become an alienating activity, ensuring that only when one is not
working does one feel truly "at home", but insofar as the individual's realization of their life-activity in
labor is alienated, the worker is alienated from herself and others. It could not be otherwise, then,
that people's self-estrangement becomes in turn the estrangement from others as well, from the
individual's "species being." Thus, although it is in production that people confirm their species-life,
estranged labor turns consciousness of species life, of the central activity of species life, into means
of existence, into means of life (Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts 59). "In tearing away
from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labour tears from him his species life, his
real species objectivity, and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his
inorganic body, nature, is taken from him" (63). But, for Marx, the solution to alienation is not

"retreat" into nature, and idealized forms of community with animals and others, but fighting for new
social relations, and thus a new "human essence." It is in the city (as the space of class conflicts) that
this fight will take place. It is quite telling, then, that, as Wolfe makes clear, for posthumanists,
human exploitation of humans stems from human exploitation of animals: "if we allow the
human/animal distinction to remain intact... then the machinery of speciesism and animalization will
be available to use against various subjugated groups, animal or human, as history well shows"
("Speciesism, Identity Politics, and Ecocriticism" 102). Such arguments are especially effective (and
hence popular in the publishing industry) because, however much he may criticize commodification,

he ultimately takes critical pressure off of the role of capital in

impoverishing the world's majority and destroying the environment, and
places it (back) onto a "humanity" beyond classes. The implication of Wolfe's
argument is that struggles which prioritize

social

equality are not only unethical but futile, since

there can be no social change between humans until humans change their (more "fundamental")
relations to animals.

Poetry
Modern poetry is reliant on the capitalist system
Sidwell 11 (Marc Sidwell, Marc Sidwell is a freelance writer and researcher based
in London, specializing in liberal education and the Great Books. He is a Research
Fellow for the New Culture Forum and a subeditor for Standpoint Magazine, and his
article on California's Thomas Aquinas College is available on their website. Marc is
co-editor, with Professor Anthony O'Hear, of The School of Freedom: A Liberal
Education Reader from Plato to the Present Day, published in 2009. Professor
O'Hear is also the author of The Great Books: A Journey Through 2,500 Years of the
West's Classic Literature. 12/09/2011, Poetry and capitalism make a heroic
couplet, http://search.proquest.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/docview/910331036?pqorigsite=summon.) //ky

T.S. ELIOT was a banker, but that hasn't stopped two poets from refusing to be shortlisted for this year's prestigious,
Pounds 15,000 Eliot Prize over a sponsorship deal with Aurum Capital, an investment firm specialising in funds of

First Alice Oswald and now John Kinsella have given up their
coveted places on the list. Kinsella told The Guardian he was an "anticapitalist in full-on form", while Oswald announced that "poetry should be
questioning not endorsing such institutions". It's not entirely clear
whether either Oswald or Kinsella feel the children helped by hedge fund
charity Ark, also supported by Aurum, should be throwing their
schoolbooks in the face of those benefactors as well. What is clear is
where the rebel poets would have liked the money to have come from
instead: your taxes. The prize recently had its Arts Council funding cut, a cut that was protested by
leading poets, including Carol Ann Duffy, another name on the shortlist . It is apparently preferable
for poetry to be funded by forced contributions from taxation (to which
the City is a significant contributor) rather than supported by voluntary
contributions from a financial services firm. It's important at such times to
remind ourselves that poetry doesn't have to be the enemy of a liberal
society and its financial institutions. Eliot liked his job at Lloyds, and refused to give it up for a
hedge funds.

life on the charity of his friends. America's national poet, Walt Whitman, wrote in an editorial of 1842 that "Every
time that congress or a state legislature meddles in matters of finance, they only plunge the interests of the people
deeper and deeper into difficulty." Today, David Buik of BGC Partners still introduces his regular emails with poetic
asides, continuing the literate tradition of Benjamin Graham, who opened his classic The Intelligent Investor with an

Perhaps
the blend of the poetic and the financial best suited to our own time , however,
epigraph from Virgil's Aeneid: "Through chances various, through all vicissitudes, we make our way."

is found in the first act of the second part of Goethe's Faust, where the devil Mephistopheles convinces the emperor
that debasing the currency by endlessly printing more money will restore wealth to his realm. Goethe had the
measure of quantitative easing a century before Keynes. Mephistopheles observes in an aside, "That merit and
success are link'd together,/ This to your fools occurreth never;/ Could they appropriate the wise man's stone,/ That,
not the wise man, they would prize alone." The wise man's stone is the philosopher's stone, which turns base metal
into gold. Today's rebel poets, it seems, are Goethe's fools: they want to live on money printed from thin air, refuse
to value those who can actually turn lead into gold, and reject the idea that capitalism celebrates, that success be
linked to merit through a process of voluntary exchange. The Poetry Book Society, which negotiated the three-year
deal with Aurum, is defending its decision, and with another eight names on the list, this show of anti-capitalist
principle won't prevent the announcement of a worthy winner. But given the statements of Oswald and Kinsella, it
may be that rather than accepting opprobrium, investment houses should be questioning rather than endorsing
such poets.

Feminism
Our method better accesses solvencydivisions dont allow
revolution
Dana Neacsu 2005, Head of Public Services at Columbia Law School and a New York attorney,
The Wrongful Rejection of Big Theory (Marxism) by Feminism and Queer Theory: A Brief Debate

Marxism justifies socio-economic theoretical constructs and explains how even less controversial concepts, such as
"cultural divisions," as Jon Elster demonstrated, "are never class neutral. 68 "Marxism offers
an identity to the millions of have-nots,"6 9 across geographical and racial borders because, under Marxism,

Marxism is uniquely fit

to explain how poverty may become a tool in the hands of politicians
interested in connecting poverty to certain minority social groups. Politicians
"classes are distributed non-randomly over cultural groups., 70 Furthermore,

have done this, for example, by ghettoizing those groups and forcing them to live in geographical areas that are
underdeveloped and thus have no available jobs.71 However, by offering "economic ghettos" slightly different to
different underprivileged social groups, politicians have successfully segregated the poor by their color, for

it has become very difficult for

these minority groups to see themselves as belonging to one class-the
underprivileged-and speak with one voice, although their demand is one: an employmentexample, and successfully divided that electorate.72 As a result,

filled future. Of course, there are "more complex" theoretical perspectives than Marxism that explain social
phenomena.73 For example, "[c]ritical race feminism . . . goes beyond traditional feminist approaches, which are
usually based on the experiences of white middle and upper class women." 74 These are theories that "focus on the
intersection of race and gender," for example, and they emphasize the anti-essentialist aspect of the group
members they represent. 75 However, it is my belief that, for as long as Marxism has been ignored, a certain

Marxism remains a valid social theory, if

only because its "bold vision does grasp [much] ofhistorical reality ., 77
Sometimes, "exfoliating social appearances and finding the common
denominator among social realities"78 may be a necessary theoretical
step in understanding options for social reform . Because "Marx[ism] reduce[s]
society-the space of human interaction-to its raw essence[,] to an economic and a
non-economic component,' 79 it remains a useful intellectual tool. This
dichotomy, often described as simplistic,80 in fact helps us focus on important issuesthere are basic (economic) issues that relate to housing, education, health
care, employment, and a host of other issues that the electorate cares about deeply.
poverty of the liberal discourse has flourished.76

However, it is those basic economic issues, as recent events have shown in the U.S., post-Hurricane Katrina, as
well as in France and Belgium,8' that can easily change the electorate into a mob.

Turns the case

Dana Neacsu 2005, Head of Public Services at Columbia Law School and a New York attorney,
The Wrongful Rejection of Big Theory (Marxism) by Feminism and Queer Theory: A Brief Debate

The problems raised by feminist and queer theories vis-i-vis Marxism could be described using Janet Halley's
paradigm of minoritizing and universalizing understandings." 9 Minoritizing understandings are about politics-ofrecognition, while universalizing understandings are about social constructivist models. 20 Pierre Bourdieu
remarked, "I know too well that. .. it is all too easy to deride the mediocrely petty-bourgeois and vaguely socialdemocratic inspiration of any enterprise aimed at building[] against all forms of particularism .... ,,I Of course,
Marxism has been derided for many reasons, and postmodernism was an answer that grew out of those laughs. 122
However, the time has come to admit that the decades of postmodern thought have brought us to the brink of a
crisis of imagination of liberal effort-world-wide. With few exceptions-which include Western Europe, Cuba, Syria,
and Iran-unrestrained capitalism is reigning.123 The battle is about finding universalizing understandings that could

Marxism belongs to that universalist

school of thought. It assumes a general consensus of ethical values
despite the gender, age, or sexual orientation of the members of any
society. However, such an aspiration seems to be the very reason for the derision current politics shows it to
explain a choice for our liberal democracy, for example.

be. The derision is deplorable. It cannot be but a doctrinal fagade: achieving a decent lifestyle for all must be a

value respected by all progressive movements and their members, unless they can afford not to care about
Hiroshima, metaphorically speaking, because they are too absorbed with the "night thoughts of a tired surgeon.'
24 From a feminist point of view, the main deficiency of Marxism is its focus on the economy.'25

Marx has
been viewed as eliminating "those [activities] identified by feminists as
'reproductive' (childcare, nursing)" as well as those concerned with kinship regulation.126
Marx is accused of using a narrow meaning of "production," and not
including in his meaning of "mode of production of material life," all social
interaction "conducive to the creation and re-creation of a society's
physical existence.' 2 7 Catharine MacKinnon disliked Marx's writings for ignoring women.12 The best
articulated criticism of Marxism is that its construction of "class" is essentialist and "ignore[s] the oppression of
social groups not constituted economically."' 29 It is well known that together with postmodemism,
poststructuralist feminism "engendered" the orthodox interpretation of "reproduction of class relations.' 130 If
issues such as reproductive rights and unpaid household labor were marginal to Marxist discourse, to its credit,

However, Marxism remains relevant today. In

addition to what has already been mentioned, Marxism can also help explain how the
oppression of gays and lesbians132 is expressed economically "through
denial of employment, housing, and health care.' 3 3 Any comprehensive
demand for human rights, which would include social and economic rights
in addition to civil and political ones, would have such discrimination
addressed. Marxism can help feminists focus on issues "that are meaningful to those who do
not enjoy [what Gayatri C. Spivak defined as] 'the institutional privileges of power."",134 Marxism is able
to unite feminists from different parts of the world whose interests
otherwise may not intersect.135 For example, Marxism offers the tools to
criticize the scourge of globalization 136 and the end of garment trade
quotas, which cause women in many global regions to face the bleak
choice of either earning 30 cents an hour to work in a "real sweatshop" or
becoming a prostitute.137 Recently, this choice was faced by Chinese women who had been
feminism brought them to center stage. 13

employed by American garment companies with factories in Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands, an area sometimes

Marxism can provide insight into a world

divided into classes whose members form further alliances according to a
wide set of interests and identities, including gender and sexuality. 39
With its focus on class struggle, Marxism can provide theoretical guidance
to those who want to organize social movements along other lines of
social interest.'40 For example, Marxists have contributed to struggles over
reproductive rights by showing the links between feminist concerns about
gender subordination and the rights of women and class issues about who
does the work of child care and under what conditions, or about who has
access to reproductive technology and medical services and for what Marxism
can also help explain the spread of HIV in economically deprived areas of
the globe and in those with high rates of prostitution. 42 It can help because a
Marxist explanation would connect the spread to both the poverty of
resources to stop the virus and to the poverty of knowledge, which is
often caused by a lack of adequate resources to support adequate public
awareness. 43 However, as queer theorists have noted, there are "privileged forms of
sexuality-such as heterosexuality, marriage, and procreation-that are
protected and awarded by the state and subsidized through social and
economic incentives."' 44 These forms need to be addressed separately if we want to understand their
referred to as a "quiet little American territory."' 38

specificity, and Marx did in fact ignore such issues.145 Nevertheless, if making distinctions is intellectually

If mass politics are

involved, a singular focus on sexuality and gender may be particularly illadvised. For the last few decades, the Left and the Right have played good cop/bad cop when it comes to
sexuality: they are both interested in regulating it. 146 Both have successfully addressed it as
necessary, it is also necessary to recognize commonality among the differences.

a "site of critique.' 41 7 For example, sexuality has been a "field of power, [and] a category of identity"
for the Left .148 Moreover, queer theory has been "a critique of heterosexuality" as a regulatory social practice.
149 And for the Right, sexuality is a place to criticize liberals, and the Left fears that what was gained yesterday
may be lost tomorrow. 150 Marxism, whose materialism remains useful for both feminist and queer theories,' 51 is
an answer to those uncertainties. A "materialist queer critique," for example, explains how "human capacities for
reproduction and pleasure are always historicized or organized under certain specific conditions across a complex
ensemble of social relations-economic, political, [or] ideological. 152 Furthermore,

it explains how
sexuality "mediate[s] and traverse[s] other facets of social reproduction.' '
53 More interestingly, a materialist queer theory can provoke the Left to develop
"a radical oppositional politics" that speaks to lesbians and gays and
queers whether they are urban middle-class members or marginalized in
prisons and shelters. 154

Focusing just on movements against the patriarchy ignores the

root causes, address capitalism is key to solve the femicide
Harijan 14 (Harijan, Swaneagle. Studied Frontline Performance Art, Dismantling

Racism, Native American Studies at The Evergreen State College. 2014. FEMINISM,
FREE TRADE & COLONIAL/CAPITALISM,
http://search.proquest.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/docview/1502685847?pqorigsite=summon.) //ky
The way women are demeaned is not to be ignored. One has only to look
at the sexual assault by the tens of thousands each year in the US
Military, many are men raped by other men, to see that there is a serious strain of depravity being perpetrated.
It can't be cut off from what is happening to women and men all over the Amerikkkas and anywhere the US military

the Pacific NW alone, we had our

Bermuda Triangle of femicide of prostitutes in Spokane, Seattle and
Vancouver, BC carried out by Robert Yates, Gary Ridgeway (Green River Killer) and Robert Pickton respectively.
is based and its trainees carry out their heinous deeds. In

All three had once been apprehended by police but were released to go on killing more women. Robert Yates was in
the military and part of a 2nd amendment militia in New York State before being based at Fairchild AFB in Spokane.

The
School of Assassins in Fort Benning, GA has produced many death squads
and dictators who learned rape as a weapon of war. Los Zetas, one of the most
Gary Ridgeway was a conservative Christian who believed he was helping police by killing prostitutes.

notorious Mexican Cartels, were founded by mutinous Mexican troops trained at the SOA. Kaibiles, US-trained death
squads in Guatemala, were known for hacking open pregnant Mayan women and were involved in doing tiie same in
Acteal, Chiapas, Mexcio in 1997, killing 45 people total. Many Kaibiles also mutinied and joined cartels in Mexico
and Central America. What I want to know from Molly Molloy, is why she does not even mention the fact that

The guns used

by cartels came primarily from US gun shows along the Mexican border.
What is also worth noting is that tiie young women killed in Jaurez were
not prostitutes, but maquiladora workers or students, for the most part.
Being poor and brown is a marked disadvantage in the free trade
atmosphere. Marginalized women are most vulnerable. All of the killing
must stop. The men are not less valuable, but it's men who do most of the
killing, and many of them 'play' with women before snuffing them. The
sexualized killings of women occur with increasing numbers in Guatemala, Honduras, etc.

killings must be examined in the context of free trade, development and

profit. We can't ignore the criminal disaster-capitalism that impacts all
our lives or separate it from the loss of life to tiie most marginalized
peoples in our communities . Indigenous women are the most murdered cultural group in the US
and Canada. Right now there are two particularly disturbing deaths of indigenous women in Seattle that remain
unsolved. I know the family of one of those women. It does not take long before the structural violence of these
killings reaches each one of us one way or another. Unprecedented apathy harms all life and we all face terminal
times. Will we continue to ignore the glaring crisis?

Capitalism reinforces the patriarchal system in society

Fraser 9 (Nancy Fraser, Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social

Science and Department Chair, July 20, 2009. Feminism, Capitalism, and the
Cunning of History, http://dl2af5jf3e.search.serialssolutions.com/log?
L=DL2AF5JF3E&D=IVK&J=TC0000615072&P=Link&U=http%3A%2F
%2Fproxy.lib.umich.edu%2Flogin%3Furl%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fsite.ebrary.com%2Flib
%2Fumich%2FTop%3Fid%3D10504809%26lpg%3D374.)//ky
In general, then, I use state-organized capitalism to refer to the OECD welfare states and the postcolonial
developmental states of the postwar period. It was in these countries, after all, that second-wave feminism first
erupted in the early 1970s. To explain what exactly provoked the eruption, let me note four defining characteristics
of the political culture of state-organized capitalism. 1. Economism. By definition, as we already saw, stateorganized capitalism involved the use of public political power to regulate (and in some cases, to replace) economic

the states in
question derived much of their political legitimacy from their claims to
promote inclusion, social equality, and cross-class solidarity. Yet these
ideals were interpreted in an economistic and class-centric way. In the political
markets. This was largely a matter of crisis management in the interest of capital. Nevertheless,

culture of state-organized capitalism, social questions were framed chiefly in distributive terms, as matters
concerning the equitable allocation of divisible goods, especially income and jobs, while social divisions were
viewed primarily through the prism of class. Thus, the quintessential social injustice was unfair economic

The effect of this classcentric,

economistic imaginary was to marginalize, if not wholly to obscure, other
dimensions, axes, sites, and causes of injustice. 2. Androcentrism. It followed that the
distribution, and its paradigm expression was class inequality.

political culture of state-organized capitalism envisioned the ideal-typical citizen as a majority-ethnic male worker
a breadwinner and a family man. It was widely assumed, too, that this workers wage should be the principal, if not
the sole, economic support of his family, while any wages earned by his wife should be merely supplemental.

Known as the family wage, this gendered construct served both as a

social ideal, connoting modernity and upward mobility, and as the basis
for state policy in employment, welfare, and development. Granted, the
ideal eluded most families, as a mans wage was rarely by itself sufficient
to support children and a non-employed wife. And granted, too, the Fordist industry to
which the ideal was linked was soon to be dwarfed by a burgeoning low-wage service sector. But in the 1950s and
60s,

the family-wage ideal still served to define gender norms and to

discipline those who would contravene them, reinforcing mens authority in households
and channeling aspirations into privatized domestic consumption. Equally important, by valorizing waged work, the
political culture of state-organized capitalism obscured the social importance of unwaged care work and
reproductive labor. Institutionalizing androcentric understandings of family and work, it naturalized injustices of
gender and removed them from political contestation.

The Bourgeoisies manipulation of the female labor force

reinforces patriarchy, analyzing and taking down this system is
a pre-requisite to solving for gender inequality
Chakravarty 2k (Deepita Chakravarty, Deepita Chakravarty is Assistant
Professor, Economics Area, Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode, IIMK
Campus, Mar. 25-31, 2000, Agriculture, Patriarchy and Capitalism,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/4409079.) //ky

The author has shown how the waterseed- fertiliser package increases the work opportunities of female agricultural
labour and how it has loosened the hold of caste on the division of labour. A comparison of work generation
between command areas and non-command areas due to the initiation of the green revolution technology,
however, has not shown any marked difference. In fact, it has been found that seasonal fluctuations in women's
work opportunity are greater in the command areas compared to the non-command areas. One probable reason is
that in the command area, though work availability is high, it is usually peaked so that its availability over a number
of days is reduced. Turning to the female family labour category ,

the author has found in almost

all the villages under study that work participation rates in agriculture are
quite high and the incidence of female family labour is higher among the
backward castes. A kind of 'housewification' is taking place through the

withdrawal of women from paid agricultural labour to family agricultural

labour as the male occupation changes from agricultural attached labour
to sharecropper or marginal farmer, following the easy availability of the HYV techniques. The
technology has made small and marginal farms increasingly viable, but at
the cost of intensive exploitation of female family labour . The author elaborates on
how the HYV package through its greater market orientation essentially strengthens the structures of patriarchy. It
has been argued that a technology can affect the female workers differentially depending on the category they
belong to. One example may suffice. Weeding is an activity that traditionally gives more employment to female

Use of HYV techniques sometimes includes the use of weedicides

and this has different impacts on the two categories of female workers
considered by the study. It reduces the work burden of female family
labour inducing a positive impact on these categories of working women.
On the contrary, because it reduces work opportunity for women in
general, it affects women agricultural labour in a negative way . The author
has pointed out a changing trend in the work organization due to changes
in technology, and the impact of these changes on women workers. HYV
technology demands a change in the traditional forms of attached labour
or casual labour. Due to the significant increase in multiple cropping and diversification of cropping,
workers.

agricultural operations have to be performed very quickly and they have to be time-bound. This feature leads to an
employment system that can be called a contract system. Work is undertaken on contract by labour groups
consisting of both males and females. The wage is paid in lump sum, which is divided among the members of the
labour group. It was observed in the field study that because the intensity of work is very high and the work hours
are longer, women labourers often find it difficult to enter into this kind of contract. They find it impossible to
manage other household chores along with such contractual work. Also the nature of the work demandso nly able-

In their own words, if they work as contract labour for two days
they have to rest for four days. Thus it seems that even though in the
contract system earning is much higher, women cannot take full
advantage of it. It has been claimed that the very existence of the discrimination against women in the
labour market is as prevalent after the introduction of HYV technology as it was before. Though division of
work by gender is not fixed for all regions and times, the historical
division of labour precludes women from entering into high productivity
work. If we look at it from the other side, we find whatever work women
are allowed to do, it quickly becomes a women-specific operation and
therefore very lowly paid. All the productive activities that women are
allowed in are relatively less capital-intensive. Even though in certain
operations productivity of men and women is the same, women are paid
lower wages. This argument seems to be a bit unconvincing. If productivity does not differ, after some point
bodiedp ersons.

of time, employers will naturally go for female labour because of the lower wage cost. This will increase the female
labour demand and consequently will tighten the labour market for the female workers lowering the wage
differential. Another possibility is undercutting of wage rates by the male labourers to compete in the labour
market. The social notion of women as inferior human beings deprives them of several opportunities of being
equally productive, such as education, credit and sometimes even health care facilities and food. Discrimination
against women in the social sphere leads to labour market segmentation by gender, the basis of which can be
differentiation in productivity. According to the framework of traditional economic analysis, the concept of work

But half of the women directly

dependent on agriculture are engaged in either subsistence activity (thereby
covers the so-called productive sphere or gainful economic activity.

shouldering the entire responsibility of feeding their families) or working with men on their family land. These
women workers do not appear in the global or national statistics. Such a statistical neglect keeps them out of the
reach of all the amelioration programmes.

The basic methodologies and conceptual

frameworks must be changed in order to understand and estimate the
work participation of these women. Hardly any attempt has yet been made
to make a critical analysis of women's role in production. The author explores in the
book the macro aspects of women's work participation rates and other economic variables regarding work, keeping
in mind the nonaccounting of women's patterns of work. The author's point of view is that various complementary
approaches for data collection would be better because women's work has special characteristics like multiplicity,
seasonality, part-time work, payment in kind, home-based work, etc. This is reasonable.

Capitalism is the root cause of patriarchal crime

Chesney-Lind 89 (Meda Chesney-Lind, Meda Chesney-Lind, Ph.D. is a Professor
of Women's Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She has served as Vice
President of the American Society of Criminology and president of the Western
Society of Criminology. Nationally recognized her work on women and crime, her
books include Girls, Dilinquency and Juvenile Justice which was awarded the
American Society of Criminology's Michael J. Hindelang Award for the "outstanding
contribution to criminology, 1992" and The Female Offender: Girls, Women and
Crime published in 1997 by Sage. Mar, 1989. Capitalism, Patriarchy, and Crime:
Toward a Socialist Feminist Criminology by James W. Messerschmidt,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/190045.) //ky
Instead, he marshals considerable evidence to show that street crime is a collective response
to the material conditions confronted by young margin- alized men:
poverty, racism, negated futures, and the power accorded men in
patriarchal capitalism. It is life in the ghetto, rather than political con- sciousness, that produces a

street culture in which robbery and other forms of violence provide opportunities for young men to display their
toughness and masculinity. Add the possession of lethal weapons, a fiercely competitive survival orientation ("it's
f--- your buddy week, fifty-two weeks a year") (p. 67), hanging out, and the mix is set for high levels of violence.
While some of this discussion sounds like the old literature on delinquent gangs, Messerschmidt's analysis is unique
in that it places male street crime in its patriarchal context. Although Messerschmidt's discussion of women's crime
gets a bit bogged down at first in reviewing the place of women in capitalist society ,

he does a fine job

showing that the vast bulk of women's crime is trivial (shoplifting, fraudchiefly welfare fraud-and prostitution) and motivated by women's
economic marginalization rather than liberation. His coverage of the problem of

international sex tours, an often-neglected topic in discussions of women's crime, is also excellent. Feeding on the
desperation of poor women in the Third World, an estimated, 70-80 percent of male tourists from Japan, the United
States, Australia, and Western Europe are traveling to Asia to participate in "sexual entertainment" (p. 95).
Messerschmidt's treatment of sexual violence against women covers, for the most part, familiar ground. He does,
however, make a few points that are a bit unusual. Especially important is the work he reviews linking family life

Consider, for
example, the fact that more women are raped by their husbands each year
than by strangers, acquaintances, or other persons (p. 141). Missing, however,
in this discussion is the relationship of girls' and women's victimization
and their subsequent criminality, a link that is becoming increasingly clear in feminist
with women's victimization, particularly the relationship between domestic violence and rape.

criminology. The treatment of corporate crime (the crimes of powerful men) pulls together a disparate literature

Messerschmidt documents the extensiveness of workplace injury

and death and the criminal dimensions of deliberate corporate neglect of
workplace safety (greatly encouraged under the Reagan administration). He also reviews
cases, like that involving the defective Ford Pinto, in which executives
calmly calculated the dollar value of human life at $200,000. Paying off law
suits, therefore, was estimated to cost less than the $11 per car it would
have taken to remedy the gas-tank problem (p. 105). This discussion sets the
stage for a consideration of the type of masculinity that is rewarded by
corporate America-men who receive promotions are "ambitious, shrewd,
and nearly amoral" (p. 118). The links between patriarchy and capitalism are also clear from the data
very skillfully.

Messerschmidt has collected on how corporations replicate and reinforce woman's place both here and abroad-for
example, A. H. Robin's sale of unsterilized Dalkon shields at a 48 percent discount after the product was banned in
the U.S., defended on the grounds of getting more contraception for the AID dollar (p. 112). Finally,

Messerschmidt takes direct aim at the Reagan administration and its

approach to crime control-particularly dismantling the welfare state at the
same time that additional federal monies are being set aside for the building of new prisons. He argues that
these policies, taken together, have been criminogenic: They have
simultaneously increased street crime and kept it visible while they have
obscured and encouraged the crimes of the powerful. In contrast, his socialist-

feminist solution to crime would focus on full employment and workplace

democracy. He would also democratize the family, through communal
living and shared parenting. To some feminists, and even Messerschmidt himself, the latter sound
like less than complete solutions given the sexist patterns that have quickly developed in most intentional
communities, but few would argue with the value of the ultimate goal. A more direct consideration of how America's
love affair with militarism might be addressed would have also been valuable. In total, Messerschmidt's book is
thought provoking and well worth reading. It makes clear that any future discussion of male crime should consider
the social context of patriarchy.

Relations of production are the root cause of patriarchy,

addressing capitalism is key to addressing other
superstructures
Farrelly 10 (Colin Farrelly, Colin is a political theorist and philosopher and a
Queen's National Scholar. In addition to teaching at Queens University, Colin has
held the positions of Visiting Professor in UCLAs Luskin School of Public Affairs,
Research Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Oxford
University, Visitor in Oxfords Program on Ethics and the New Biosciences, as well as
permanent academic appointments at Waterloo University, Manchester University
and the University of Birmingham. He has published 4 books and over 40 papers in
academic journals in political science, philosophy, law, science and medicine. 15
NOV 2010, Patriarchy and Historical Materialism,
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/doi/10.1111/j.15272001.2010.01151.x/pdf.)//ky
The standard Marxist account of production (that is, who makes material goods like food
and other commodities) thus needs to be supplemented with an account of
reproductive and caring labor. For who bears and raises offspring has
played an important role in shaping both the relations of production and
the superstructures of human societies. Once supplemented with T5 and T6, the account of
the relations of production will be modified in significant ways . For who has effective ownership
of their bodies and powers, especially the powers of reproduction, is one
of the most important relations of production in human history. In order to
satisfy T1 (at least historically), women themselves cannot have effective ownership
of their bodies and powers, in much the same way that the broader class
of the immediate producers could not have effective control over their
labor power in slave societies. Slaves could not own their labor power when the only way to
produce a surplus for slave-owners was to ensure that slaves labored in the arduous ways they were compelled to
labor. This is why the relations of production of capitalism did not arise two thousand years ago. Similarly, women
(as a class) could not have effective control over their labor power if the requirements of T1 were to be met. This

Such superstructures are

determined by the relations of production. Men controlled the reproductive
capacities of women, thus ensuring that high rates of fertility were
maintained. But how then, did things evolve over time? In particular, the capitalist system has
witnessed significant changes to patriarchal institutions and practices, as
explains why patriarchal superstructures first evolved and then persisted.

women enjoy greater access to education and employment outside the home, and divorce and birth control inside

These have involved significant changes to the superstructure of

society: the law, family, and religion. Why did such changes occur? Why, for example, did the
the home.

womens rights movements of the twentieth century arise then and not in earlier historical epochs? Is political
action, like organizing social movements, the real cause of such modulations to patriarchy? The functionalist
interpretation of historical materialism, as I detailed above, does not rule out the possibility that ideas (like class
consciousnesses and feminism) can impact economic structures. However, ideas are not, for Marxists, the real
driving force in human history. So then what is? What has helped redress some of the most oppressive forms of
patriarchy? For historical materialism, the key lies in overcoming T6 (the vulnerability thesis), which profoundly

Much like Marxs explanation of why the French

Revolution occurred, the primary reason why older forms of patriarchy
impacts T5 (the reproduction thesis).

began to be transformed in capitalism lies with the tendency of productive

forces to develop and demolish relations of production (including those of
patriarchy) that impede the development of those forces. Let us now turn
to Marxs diachronic materialism to address these points.

Capitalism reinforces the patriarchal system in society

Fraser 9 (Nancy Fraser, Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social

Science and Department Chair, July 20, 2009. Feminism, Capitalism, and the
Cunning of History, http://dl2af5jf3e.search.serialssolutions.com/log?
L=DL2AF5JF3E&D=IVK&J=TC0000615072&P=Link&U=http%3A%2F
%2Fproxy.lib.umich.edu%2Flogin%3Furl%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fsite.ebrary.com%2Flib
%2Fumich%2FTop%3Fid%3D10504809%26lpg%3D374.)//ky
In general, then, I use state-organized capitalism to refer to the OECD welfare states and the postcolonial
developmental states of the postwar period. It was in these countries, after all, that second-wave feminism first
erupted in the early 1970s. To explain what exactly provoked the eruption, let me note four defining characteristics
of the political culture of state-organized capitalism. 1. Economism. By definition, as we already saw, stateorganized capitalism involved the use of public political power to regulate (and in some cases, to replace) economic

the states in
question derived much of their political legitimacy from their claims to
promote inclusion, social equality, and cross-class solidarity. Yet these
ideals were interpreted in an economistic and class-centric way. In the political
markets. This was largely a matter of crisis management in the interest of capital. Nevertheless,

culture of state-organized capitalism, social questions were framed chiefly in distributive terms, as matters
concerning the equitable allocation of divisible goods, especially income and jobs, while social divisions were
viewed primarily through the prism of class. Thus, the quintessential social injustice was unfair economic

The effect of this classcentric,

economistic imaginary was to marginalize, if not wholly to obscure, other
dimensions, axes, sites, and causes of injustice. 2. Androcentrism. It followed that the
distribution, and its paradigm expression was class inequality.

political culture of state-organized capitalism envisioned the ideal-typical citizen as a majority-ethnic male worker
a breadwinner and a family man. It was widely assumed, too, that this workers wage should be the principal, if not
the sole, economic support of his family, while any wages earned by his wife should be merely supplemental.

Known as the family wage, this gendered construct served both as a

social ideal, connoting modernity and upward mobility, and as the basis
for state policy in employment, welfare, and development. Granted, the
ideal eluded most families, as a mans wage was rarely by itself sufficient
to support children and a non-employed wife. And granted, too, the Fordist industry to
which the ideal was linked was soon to be dwarfed by a burgeoning low-wage service sector. But in the 1950s and
60s,

the family-wage ideal still served to define gender norms and to

discipline those who would contravene them, reinforcing mens authority in households
and channeling aspirations into privatized domestic consumption. Equally important, by valorizing waged work, the
political culture of state-organized capitalism obscured the social importance of unwaged care work and
reproductive labor. Institutionalizing androcentric understandings of family and work, it naturalized injustices of
gender and removed them from political contestation.

Seaborgs
Haraways ideas reverse the relation of technology and modes
of production. This ignores the way technology is deployed in
the pursuit of profit
Ebert 95

(Teresa L. Ebert, English Professor at the University at Albany, teaches Critical and Cultural Theory,
Marxist Theory, Feminist Critique, Globalization Theory, The Crisis of (Ludic) Socialist Feminism published in
Gender Journal, http://search.proques t.com/docview/228211868/fulltext? PROQUEST \\ME)
What kind of politics do socialist feminists need for these postmodern New Times that are not so new? Can the ludic

The best way to

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

"Communications sciences and modem biologies are constructed by a common move -- the translation of the world
into a problem of coding" (164).

In other words, Haraway is reversing the relation of

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

Consequently, she erases the very real material conditions of

science and technology as capitalist science and technology. She occludes
the way technology itself is deployed and developed according to the
imperatives of profit, and she erases both the exploitation of labor
involved in producing the technology and the uses of technology to
further increase the expropriation of labor. Instead, she rewrites material reality as "cyborg
technologies" (168).

semiologies." She argues that "the entire universe of objects that can be known scientifically must be formulated as
problems in communications engineering (for the managers) or theories of the text (for those who would resist).

Thus although Haraway seems, at first, to be

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

The metaphor of the cyborg obscures class by replacing it with

a focus on semiotics
Ebert 95

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

She thus proposes a "post-teleological,"

"postfoundationalist" use of the term as "citational" (i.e., as discursive or rhetorical act)
untenable" and thus "unrealizable."(16)

"that will mark off the 'playful' use of the category from the serious and foundationalist one." This "playful" (ludic)
use of the concept foregrounds the indeterminate and undecidable "play" of its signifiers and "citations" and means
that "the writer," according to Butler, "will

not know in advance for what purposes or in

what direction the term will come to signify."(17) The "serious,"
"foundationalist" use that she rejects is, of course, Marxism, in which
emancipation has a serious, "unplayful" use as a "struggle concept."
Emancipation, for historical materialists, is "founded" historically (not
ontologically or metaphysically) on the social contradictions of patriarchalcapitalism. Emancipation is not undecidable; rather, it is the specific historical effect of the revolutionary
struggle to transform the social relations of production: to change from a society organized
around profit and the social divisions of labor and property to one that
meets the needs of all people and equally distributes property and social
resources without exploiting people's labor. Politics, in the ludic logic, is primarily a cultural
politics aimed at semiotic freedom. It seeks to achieve the unrestricted play of differences through the subversion
of existing significations (representations). This is what [Drucilla Cornell] (following [Jacques Derrida]) calls the
"dream of a new choreography of exual difference" in which we "dance differently with the old distinctions."(18)
Whether these political strategies for realizing the unrestricted play of differences are called "resignification"
(Butler), "re-metaphorization" (Cornell), or "recoding" ([Donna Haraway]), they are all semiotic practices confined to
the superstructure.Haraway's

"cyborg politics" is the practice of semiotic

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

Haraway's representative cyborg, "Sister

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

Their metaphor is incompatible with Marxist though- different

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

Marxists reject the liberal conception of human nature, claiming instead

that what makes us different from other animals is our ability to produce
our means of subsistence. We are what we are because of what we do
specifically, what we do to meet our basic needs through productive
activities such as fishing, farming, and building. Unlike bees, beavers, and
ants, whose activities are governed by instinct and who cannot willfully
change themselves, we create ourselves in the process of intentionally
transforming and manipulating nature.3 For the liberal, the ideas,
thoughts, and values of individuals account for change over time. For the
Marxist, material forcesthe production and reproduction of social life
are the prime movers in history. In laying out a full explanation of how
change takes place over time, an explanation usually termed historical
materialism, Marx stated, The mode of production of material life conditions
the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the
consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social
existence that determines their consciousness.4 In other words, Marx believed a
societys total mode of productionthat is, its forces of production (the
raw materials, tools, and workers that actually produce goods) plus its
relations of production (the ways in which production is organized)
generates a superstructure (a layer of legal, political, and social ideas) that in turn reinforces the
mode of production. Adding to Marxs point, Richard Schmitt later emphasized that the statement Human
beings create themselves is not to be read as Men and women, as
individuals, make themselves what they are, but instead as Men and
women, through production collectively, create a society that , in turn,
shapes them.5 So, for example, people in the United States think in certain ways about liberty, equality,
and freedom because their mode of production is capitalist.

The affs view of sexism ignores the role class plays. This
inevitably fails because it ignores the difference between
proletariat and bourgeois women. Class must come first
Tong 9

(Rosemarie Tong, Director of Center for Professional and Applied Ethics, Distinguished Professor of Health
Care Ethics in the Department of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Applied and Professional Ethics at UNC
Charlotte, Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction page 106-107,
http://excoradfeminisms.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/feminist_thought_a_mor e_comprehensive_intro.pdf \\ME)

classical Marxist feminists tried to use a class

analysis rather than a gender analysis to explain womens oppression. A
Affirming the ideas of Marx and Engels,

particularly good example of classical Marxist feminism appeared in Evelyn Reeds Women: Caste, Class, or

Stressing that the same capitalist economic forces and social

relations that brought about the oppression of one class by another, one
Oppressed Sex?41

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

like men are a multiclass sex.44 Specifically,

proletarian women have little in common with bourgeoisie women, who
are the economic, social, and political as well as sexual partners of the
bourgeoisie men to whom they are linked. Bourgeoisie women are not
united with proletarian women but with bourgeoisie men in defense of
private property, profiteering, militarism, racismand the exploitation of
other women.45 Clearly, Reed believed that the primary enemy of at least
proletarian women is not patriarchy, but first and foremost, capitalism.
Optimistic about male-female relations in a postcapitalist society, Reed maintained that [f ]ar from
being eternal, womans subjection and the bitter hostility between the
sexes are no more than a few thousand years old. They were produced by
the drastic social changes which brought the family, private property, and
the state into existence.46 With the end of capitalist male-female
relationships, both sexes will thrive in a communist society that enables
all its members to cooperate with each other in communities of care.

Survival politics
Cultural studies to reaffirm popular culture practices like
playing music is profoundly depoliticizing and channels
resistance away from the state and cedes the political to the
right. Cultural studies is the consolation prize in the game of
politicsthe real winners are the right wing elites
Gitlin, 97 (Todd, professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia, The antipolitical populism of cultural studies, Dissent, Spring, proquest)

From the late 1960s onward, as I have said, the insurgent energy was to be found in movements that aimed to politicize specific identities-racial
minorities, women, gays. If the "collective behavior" school of once-conventional sociology had grouped movements in behalf of justice and democratic
rights together with fads and fashions, cultural studies now set out to separate movements from fads, to take seriously the accounts of movement
participants themselves, and thereby to restore the dignity of the movementsonly to end up, in the 1980s, linking movements with fads by finding
equivalent dignity in both spheres, so that, for example, dressing like Madonna might be upgraded to an act of"resistance" equivalent to demonstrating in
behalf of the right to abortion, and watching a talk show on family violence was positioned on the same plane. In this way, cultural studies extended the

Eventually, the popular culture of marginal groups (punk,

reggae, disco, feminist poetry, hip-hop) was promoted to a sort of counterstructure
of feeling, and even, at the edges, a surrogate politics-a sphere of thought and
sensibility thought to be insulated from the pressures of hegemonic discourse , of
New Left symbiosis with popular culture.

instrumental reason, of economic rationality, of class, gender, and sexual subordination. The other move in cultural studies was to claim that culture
continued radical politics by other means. The idea was that cultural innovation was daily insinuating itself into the activity of ordinary people .

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

Is this musical style or that literary form "feminist" or "authentically

Latino"? The field of possibilities is frequently reduced to two: for or against the
hegemonic. But the nature of that hegemony, in its turn, is usually defined tautologically: that culture is hegemonic that is promoted by "the
potentials for "resistance."

ruling group" or "the hegemonic bloc," and by the same token, that culture is "resistant" that is affirmed by groups assumed (because of class position,

The process of labeling is circular, since

it has been predetermined whether a particular group is , in fact, hegemonic or
resistant. The populism of cultural studies is fundamental to its allure, and to the political meaning its adherents find there, for cultural studies
gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, and so on) to be "marginalized" or "resistant."

To say that popular culture is "worth attention" in the

scholarly sense is, for cultural studies, to say something pointed: that the people
who render it popular are not misguided when they do so, not fooled, not
dominated, not distracted, not passive. If anything, the reverse: the premise is that popular culture is popular because
bespeaks an affirmation of popularity tout court.

and only because the people find in it channels of desire pleasure, initiative, freedom. It is this premise that gives cultural studies its aura of political
engagement-or at least political consolation. To unearth reason and value, brilliance and energy in popular culture is to affirm that the people have not

However
unfavorable the balance of political forces, people succeed in living lives of vigorous
resistance! Are the communities of African-Americans or AfroCaribbeans suffering?
Well, they have rap! (Leave aside the question of whether all of them want rap.)
The right may have taken possession of 10 Downing Street, the White House, and
Congress-and as a result of elections, embarrassingly enough!-but at least one is
engage in cultural studies. Consolation: here is an explanation for the rise of academic cultural studies during precisely the years
been defeated. The cultural student, singing their songs, analyzing their lyrics, at the same time sings their praises .

when the right has held political and economic power longer and more consistently than at any other time in more than a half century. Now, in effect, "the
cultural is political," and more, it is regarded as central to the control of political and economic resources. The control of popular culture is held to have
become decisive in the fate of contemporary societies-or at least it is the sphere in which opposition can find footing, find breathing space, rally the
powerless, defy the grip of the dominant ideas, isolate the powers that be, and prepare for a "war of position" against their dwindling ramparts. On this
view, to dwell on the centrality of popular culture is more than an academic's way of filling her hours; it is a useful certification of the people and their
projects. To put it more neutrally, the political aura of cultural studies is supported by something like a "false consciousness" premise: the analytical
assumption that what holds the ruling groups in power is their capacity to muffle, deform, paralyze, or destroy contrary tendencies of an emotional or
ideological nature. By the same token, if there is to be a significant "opposition," it must first find a base in popular culture-and first also turns out to be
second, third, and fourth, since popular culture is so much more accessible, so much more porous, so much more changeable than the economic and
political order. With time, what began as compensation hardened-became institutionalized-into a tradition. Younger scholars gravitated to cultural studies
because it was to them incontestable that culture was
politics. To do cultural studies, especially in connection with identity politics, was the politics they knew. The contrast with the rest of the West is
illuminating. In varying degrees, left-wing intellectuals in France, Italy, Scandinavia, Germany, Spain and elsewhere retain energizing attachments to Social
Democratic, Green, and other left-wing parties. There, the association of culture with excellence and traditional elites remains strong. But in the Anglo-

popular culture emerges

as a consolation prize. (The same happened in Latin America, with the decline of
left-wing hopes.) The sting fades from the fragmentation of the organized left, the
metastasis of murderous nationalism, the twilight of socialist dreams virtually
everywhere. Class inequality may have soared, ruthless individualism may have
intensified, the conditions of life for the poor may have worsened, racial tensions
may have mounted, unions and social democratic parties may have weakened or
reached an impasse, but never mind. Attend to popular culture, study it with
sympathy, and one need not dwell on unpleasant realities. One need not be unduly vexed by
American world, including Australia, these conditions scarcely obtain. Here, in a discouraging time,

electoral defeats. One need not be preoccupied by the ways in which the political culture's center of gravity has

One
need not even be rigorous about what one opposes and what one proposes in its
place. Is capitalism the trouble? Is it the particular form of capitalism practiced by multinational
moved rightward-or rather, one can put this down to the iron grip of the established media institutions.

corporations in a deregulatory era? Is it patriarchy (and is that the proper term for a society that has seen an

Racism? Antidemocracy?
Practitioners of cultural studies, like the rest of the academic left, are frequently
elusive. Speaking cavalierly of "opposition" and "resistance" permits-rather,
cultivates-a certain sloppiness of thinking, making it possible to remain "left"
without having to face the most difficult questions of political selfdefinition. The
situation of cultural studies conforms to the contours of our political moment . It
confirms-and reinforces-the current paralysis: the incapacity of social movements
and dissonant sensibilities to imagine effective forms of public engagement. It
upheaval in relations between women and men in the course of a half-century)?

substitutes an obsession with popular culture for coherent economic-political thought or a connection with
mobilizable populations outside the academy and across identity lines. One must underscore that this is not simply
because of cultural studies' default. The default is an effect more than a cause. It has its reasons. The odds are
indeed stacked against serious forward motion in conventional politics. Political power is not only beyond reach, but
functional majorities disdain it, finding the government and all its works contemptible. Few of the central problems
of contemporary civilization are seriously contested within the narrow band of conventional discourse.
Unconventional politics, such as it is, is mostly fragmented and self-contained along lines of racial, gender, and
sexual identities. One cannot say that cultural studies diverts energy from a vigorous politics that is already in

insofar as cultural studies makes claims for itself as an insurgent politics,

the field is presumptuous and misleading. Its attempt to legitimize the ecstasies of
the moment confirms the collective withdrawal from democratic hope . Seeking to find
force. Still,

political energies in audiences who function as audiences, rather than in citizens functioning as citizens, the
dominant current in cultural studies is pressed willy-nilly toward an uncritical celebration of technological progress.
It offers no resistance to the primacy of visual and nonlinear culture over the literary and linear. To the contrary: it
embraces technological innovation as soon as the latest developments prove popular. It embraces the sufficiency of
markets; its main idea of the intellect's democratic commitment is to flatter the audience. Is there a chance of a
modest redemption? Perhaps, if we imagine a harder headed, less wishful cultural studies, free of the burden of

A chastened, realistic cultural studies would divest

itself of political pretensions. It would not claim to be politics. It would not mistake
the academy for the larger society. It would be less romantic about the world-and
about itself. Rigorous practitioners of cultural studies should be more curious about the world that remains to
imagining itself to be a political practice.

be researchedand changed. We would learn more about politics, economy, and society, and in the process,

If we wish to do politics, let us

organize groups, coalitions, demonstrations, lobbies, whatever; let us do politics. Let
us not think that our academic work is already that.
appreciate better what culture, and cultural study, do not accomplish.

Democracy
Modern conceptions of democracy disguise class oppression- it
isnt control by the people but bourgeois representatives
Wood 98

(Ellen Meiksins Wood, taught political science at Glendon College, York University in Toronto, Canada,
The Retreat from Class A New 'True' Socialism pgs. 66-68)

democratic discourse - which, as the argument

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

employed by Mouffe and Laclau). or - from the vantage point of the propertied classes - mob rule. By these strict

the American republic was not - fortunately, in their view - a

democracy (unless it was a 'representative democracy', as suggested by Alexander Hamilton, already
signalling a new meaning, explicitly distinguished from popular rule). By
the much diluted standards of later generations, children of the
'democratic revolution', the same republic was the most democratic
country on earth, and indeed the perfect ideal of democracy. For, while the old
meaning of democracy as popular power survived - especially in socialist
discourse - the 'democratic revolution' that established liberal democracy also brought
with it a new meaning, which had to do not with the substance of popular
power but with certain procedural forms and civil liberties . Indeed, by the new
standards, the direct exercise of popular power might be perceived as 'antidemocratic'. It must be stressed that democracy in its original meaning always had
class connotations - referring precisely to the dominance of the people as plebs. When Aristotle classified
standards,

the main types of constitution then existing in Greece, he insisted on distinguishing between them not simply on
the basis of number but also on the basis of class: 'The proper application of the term "democracy" is to a
constitution in which the free-born and poor control the government - being at the same time a majority; and
similarly

the term "oligarchy" is properly applied to a constitution in which

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

The new meaning of democracy dissociated it from class

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

Claiming the debate space & frank

The aff reflects the ideology of Occupy. Claiming debate
space as a site for politics sells out radical change to the
private sphere of individual protest in the academy
Marcus 2012 associate book editor at Dissent Magazine (Fall, David, The
Horizontalists, http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-horizontalists)

an ethnographer traveling in India. Journeying

encounters a fisherman who claims to know the source of
all truth. The world, the fisherman explains, rests upon the back of an elephant.
But what does the elephant stand on? the ethnographer asks. A turtle. And the
turtle? Another turtle. And it? Ah, friend, smiles the fisherman, it is turtles
all the way down. As with most well-circulated apocrypha, it is a parable that lacks a clear
provenance, but has a clear moral: that despite our ever-dialectical minds, we
will never get to the bottom of things; that, in fact, there is nothing at the
bottom of things. What we define as society is nothing more than a set of locally
constructed practices and norms, and what we define as history is nothing more
than the passage of one set to the next. Although we might find the picture of our universe as an
There is a much-recycled and certainly apocryphal tale told of
up and down the Ganges Delta, he

infinite tower of tortoises rather ridiculous, as one reteller admitted, it only raises the question, Why do we think

Since the early 1970s we have wonderedwith increasing anxiety

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

classic left themesare, to be sure, still potent categories. But they have often been imagined as spectrums rather
than binaries, varying shades rather than static lines of solidarity.

Instead of society, there is now

instead of radical schemes to

rework economic and political institutions, there is an emphasis
on localized campaigns and everyday practices. The critique of capitalismonce
talk of communities and actor networks;

heavily informed by intricate historical and social theorieshas narrowed. The ruthless criticism of all, as Karl
Marx once put it, has turned away from exploitative world systems to the pathologies of an over-regulated life. As
post-Marxists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe declared in 1985, Left-wing thought today stands at a crossroads.
The evident truths of the pastthe classical forms of analysis and political calculation, the nature of the forces in
conflict, the very meaning of the Lefts struggles and objectiveshave been seriously challenged.From Budapest

from Kabul to the sequels of Communist victory in Vietnam and

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

targets of the global justice movement of the late 1990s was the exploitative trade policies of the World Trade

its underlying critique was the alienating patterns of its

bureaucracy: the erosion of spaces for self-determination and expression .
Organization, then

The crisis of globalization was that it stripped individuals of their rights to participate, to act as free agents in a
society that was increasingly becoming shaped by a set of global institutions. What most troubled leftists over the
past three or four decades was not the increasingly unequal distribution of goods and services in capitalist societies
but the increasingly unequal distribution of power. As one frequently sighted placard from the 1999 Seattle protests

Occupy Wall Street has come to represent the latest turn in this
was, itself, a matter of
recovering local space: a way to repoliticize the square. And in a moment
read, No globalization without participation!

movement toward local and more horizontal spaces of freedom. Occupation

characterized by foreclosure, it was also symbolically, and sometimes literally, an attempt to reclaim lost homes

Occupy Wall Street sought

out not only new political spaces but also new ways to relate to them. By
resisting the top-down management of representative democracy as well as the
bottom-up ideals of labor movements, Occupiers hoped to create a new politics in
which decisions moved neither up nor down but horizontally. While embracing the new reach of
and abandoned properties. But there was also a deeper notion of space at work.

globalizationlinking arms and webcams with their encamped comrades in Madrid, Tel Aviv, Cairo, and Santiago
they were also rejecting its patterns of consolidation, its limits on personal freedom, its vertical and bureaucratic
structures of decision-making. Time was also to be transformed. The general assemblies and
general strikes were efforts to reconstruct, and make more autonomous, our experience of time as well as space.

assemblies insisted that

decision-making was an endless process. Who we are, what we do, what
we want to be are categories of flexibility, and consensus is as much about
repairing this sense of open-endedness as it is about agreeing on a particular set
Seeking to escape from the Taylorist demands of productivity, the

of demands. Life is a mystery, as one pop star fashionista has insisted, and Occupiers wanted to keep it that way.
Likewise, general strikes were imagined as ways in which workers could take back timeregain those parts of life
that had become routinized by work. Rather than attempts to achieve large-scale reforms, general strikes were
improvisations, escapes from the daily calculations of production that demonstrated that we can still be happy,
creative, even productive individuals without jobs. As one unfurled banner along New Yorks Broadway read during
this springs May Day protests, Why work? Be happy. In many ways, the Occupy movement was a rebellion

Equally skeptical of
corporate monopolies as it was of the technocratic tendencies of the state, it was
ultimately an insurgency against control, against the ways in which organized power and
against the institutionalized nature of twenty-first century capitalism and democracy.

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

For this reason, the

movement did not fit neatly into right or left, conservative or liberal, revolutionary or
reformist categories. On the one hand, it was sympathetic to the most classic of left
aspirations: to dismantle governing hierarchies. On the other, its language was
imbued with a strident individualism: a politics of anti-institutionalism and personal
freedom that has most often been affiliated with the Right. Seeking an alternative to the
homo ludenswho was capable of negotiating his interests outside the state.

bureaucratic tendencies of capitalism and socialism, Occupiers were to frequently invoke the image of autonomy: of

Their
aspiration was a society based on organic, decentralized
circuits of exchange and deliberationon voluntary
associations, on local debate, on loose networks of affinity
a world in which social and economic relations exist outside the institutions of the state.

groups. If political and economic life had become abstracted in the age of globalization and financialization,
then Occupy activists wanted to re-politicize our everyday choices . As David Graeber,
one of Occupys chief theoretical architects, explained two days after Zuccotti Park was occupied, The idea
is essentially that the system is not going to save us, so were going to
have to save ourselves. Borrowing from the anarchist tradition, Graeber has called this work direct

action: the practice of circumventing, even on occasion subverting, hierarchies through practical projects. Instead
of attempting to pressure the government to institute reforms or seize state power, direct actions seek to build

By creating spaces in which individuals take control over

their lives, it is a strategy of acting and thinking as if one is already free.
Marina Sitrin, another prominent Occupier, has offered another name for
this politicshorizontalism: the use of direct democracy, the striving
for consensus and processes in which everyone is heard and new
relationships are created. It is a politics that not only refuses
institutionalization but also imagines a new subjectivity from which one can project
the future into the present. Direct action and horizontal democracy are new
names, of course, for old ideas. They descend most directlyfrom the ideas and
a new society in the shell of the old.

tactics of the global justice movement of the 1990s and 2000s. Direct Action Network was founded in 1999 to help

the anti-WTO protests in Seattle; horizontalidad, as it was called in

Argentina, emerged as a way for often unemployed workers to organize during the financial crisis of 2001.
coordinate

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

But direct action and horizontal democracy also tap into a

longer, if often neglected, tradition on the left: the anarchism, syndicalism, and
autonomist Marxism that stretch from Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, and Rosa Luxemburg to C.L.R.
James, Cornelius Castoriadis, and Antonio Negri. If revolutionary socialism was a theory
about ideal possibilities, then anarchism and autonomism often focused
on the revolutionary practices themselves. The way in which the revolution was organized
globalizing capitalism.

was the primary act of revolution. Autonomy, as the Greco-French Castoriadis told Le Monde in 1977, demands not
only the elimination of dominant groups and of the institutions embodying and orchestrating that domination but
also new modes of what he calls self-management and organization. With direct action and horizontal
democracy, the Occupy movement not only developed a set of new tactics but also a governing ideology, a theory
of time and space that runs counter to many of the practices of earlier leftist movements. Unlike revolutionary
socialism or evolutionary social democracyMarxs Esau and JacobOccupiers conceived of time as more cyclical

than developmental, its understanding of space more local and horizontal than structural and vertical. The
revolution was to come but only through everyday acts. It was to occur only throughwhat Castoriadis obliquely
referred to asthe self-institution of society. The seemingly spontaneous movement that emerged after the first
general assemblies in Zuccotti Park was not, then, sui generis but an elaboration of a much larger turn by the Left.
As occupations spread across the country and as activists begin to exchange organizational tactics, it was easy to
forget that what was happening was, in fact, a part of a much larger shift in the scale and plane of Western politics:
a turn toward more local and horizontal patterns of life, a growing skepticism toward the institutions of the state,
and an increasing desire to seek out greater realms of personal freedom. And although its hibernation over the
summer has, perhaps, marked the end of the Occupy movement, OWS has also come to represent an important
and perhaps more lastingbreak. In both its ideas and tactics, it has given us a new set of desiresautonomy,

Its
occupations and general assemblies, its flash mobs and street performances, its
loose network of activists all suggest a bold new set of possibilities for the Left: a
horizontalist ethos that believes that revolution will begin by transforming our
everyday lives. It can be argued that horizontalism is, in many ways, a product
radical democracy, direct actionthat look well beyond the ideological and tactical tropes of socialism.

of the growing disaggregation and individuation of Western

society; that it is a kind of free-market leftism: a politics
jury-rigged out of the very culture it hopes to resist. For not
only does it emphasize the agency of the individual, but it draws
one of its central inspirations from a neoclassical image: that of
the self-managing societythe polity that functions best when the
state is absent from everyday decisions. But one can also find in its antiinstitutionalism an attempt to speak in todays language for yesterdays goals. If we
must live in a society that neither trusts nor feels compelled by collectivist visions,
then horizontalism offers us a leftism that attempts to be, at once, both individualist
and egalitarian, anti-institutional and democratic, open to the possibilities of selfmanagement and yet also concerned with the casualties born out of an age that has
let capital manage itself for far too long. Horizontalism has absorbed the crisis of knowledgewhat
we often call postmodernismand the crisis of collectivismwhat we often call neoliberalism. But instead of
seeking to return to some golden age before our current moment of fracture, it seeksfor better and worseto find
a way to make leftist politics conform to our current age of anti-foundationalism and institutionalism. As Graeber
argued in the prescriptive last pages of his anthropological epic, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Capitalism has
transformed the world in many ways that are clearly irreversible and we therefore need to give up the false
choice between state and market that [has] so monopolized political ideology for the last centuries that it made it

But herein
lies the problem. Not all possible forms of human existence and
social interaction, no matter how removed they are from the
institutions of power and capital, are good forms of social
organization. Although it is easy to look enthusiastically to those societiesancient or modern, Western or
difficult to argue about anything else. We need, in other words, to stop thinking like leftists.

non-Westernthat exist beyond the structures of the state, they, too, have their own patterns of hierarchy, their

to select one form of social

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

by working outside structures of power one may circumvent

coercive systems but one does not necessarily subvert them. Localizing politics
More problematically,

stripping it of its larger institutional ambitionshas, to be sure, its advantages. But without a larger structural

does not go far enough. Bubbles of freedom, as Graeber calls them, may
create a larger variety of non-institutional life. But they will always neglect other
vision, it

crucial avenues of freedom: in particular, those social and economic rights that can
only be protected from the top down. In this way, the anti-institutionalism of

horizontalism comes dangerously close to that of the libertarian

Right. The turn to previous eras of social organization, the desire
to locate and confine politics to a particular regional space, the
deep skepticism toward all forms of institutional life not only
mirror the aspirations of libertarianism but help cloak those
hierarchies spawned from non-institutional forms of power and
capital. This is a particularly pointed irony for a political ideology that claims
to be opposed to the many injustices of a non-institutional marketin particular,
its unregulated financial schemes. Perhaps this is an irony deeply woven into the theoretical quilt of autonomy: a
vision that, as a result of its anti-institutionalism, is drawn to all sites of individual liberationeven those that are to
be found in the marketplace. As Graeber concludes in Debt, Markets, when allowed to drift entirely free from their
violent origins, invariably begin to grow into something different, into networks of honor, trust, and mutual
connectedness, whereas the maintenance of systems of coercion constantly do the opposite: turn the products of
human cooperation, creativity, devotion, love and trust back into numbers once again. In many ways, this is the
result of a set of political ideas that have lost touch with their origins. The desire for autonomy was born out of the
socialistif not also often the Marxisttradition and there was always a guarded sympathy for the structures
needed to oppose organized systems of capital and power. Large-scale institutions were, for thinkers such as

To only try to
create spaces of freedom alongside of the State meant, as Castoriadis was to argue later in his life,
to back down from the problem of politics. In fact, this was, he believed, the failure of
1968: the inability to set up new, different institutions and recognize that there is no such thing as a
society without institutions. This isand will bea problem for the horizontalist
Left as it moves forward. As a leftism ready-made for an age in which all sides of the political spectrum are
Castoriadis, Negri, and C.L.R. James, still essential if every cook was truly to govern.

, it is always in danger of becoming absorbed

into the very ideological apparatus it seeks to dismantle. For it
aspires to a decentralized and organic politics that , in both
principle and practice, shares a lot in common with its central
target. Both it and the free market are anti-institutional. And the latter
arrayed against the regulatory state

Structures, not only everyday practices,

need to be reformed. The revolution cannot happen only on the ground; it must also happen from above.
A direct democracy still needs its indirect structures, individual freedoms still need to
be measured by their collective consequences, and notions of social and economic equality
still need to stand next to the desire for greater political participation.
Deregulation is another regulatory regime, and to replace it requires new
regulations: institutions that will limit the excesses of the market. As Castoriadis insisted
will remain so without larger vertical measures.

in the years after 1968, the Lefts task is not only to abolish old institutions but to discover new kinds of
relationship between society and its institutions. Horizontalism has come to serve as an important break from the
static strategies and categories of analysis that have slowed an aging and vertically inclined Left. OWS was to
represent its fullest expression yet, though it has a much longer back story and stillone hopesa promising
future. But horizontalists such as Graeber and Sitrin will struggle to establish spaces of freedom if they cannot
formulate a larger vision for a society. Their vision is notas several on the vertical left have suggestedtoo

in seeking out local spaces of freedom, they

have confined their ambitions; they have, in fact, come, at times,
to mirror the very ideology they hope to resist. In his famous retelling of the
utopian but not utopian enough:

the search of all-too-deep-lying turtles, we have

to be careful to not lose touch with the hard surfaces of lifewith the political,
economic, stratificatory realities within which men are everywhere contained. This is an ever-present
turtle parable, Clifford Geertz warned that in

temptation, and one that, in our age of ever more stratification, we must resist. Prefer boring politicskey to

prevent criticism from being an end in itselfwe alternative is war against capital Thomas, brilliant badass, author
of What's the Matter with Kansas? and editor of The Baffler "To the Precinct Station: How theory met practice and

Occupy itself is pretty

much gone. It was evicted from Zuccotti Park about two months after it beganan
utterly predictable outcome for which the group seems to have made inadequate preparation. OWS
drove it absolutely crazy" http://www.thebaffler.com/past/to_the_precinct_station

couldnt bring itself to come up with a real set of demands until after it got busted, when it finally agreed on a single

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

promise of its early days? Why do even the most popular efforts of the Left come to be mired in a gluey swamp of
academic talk and pointless antihierarchical posturing? The action certainly started with a bang. When the
occupation of Zuccotti Park began, in September 2011, the OWS cause was overwhelmingly popular; indeed, as
Todd Gitlin points out, hating Wall Street may well have been the most popular left-wing cause since the thirties.
Inequality had reached obscene levels, and it was no longer the act of a radical to say so. The bank bailouts of the
preceding years had made it obvious that government was captured by organized money. Just about everyone
resented Wall Street in those days; just about everyone was happy to see someone finally put our fury in those
crooks overpaid faces. People flocked to the OWS standard. Cash donations poured in; so did food and books.
Celebrities made appearances in Zuccotti, and the media began covering the proceedings with an attentiveness it
rarely gives to leftist actions. But these accounts, with a few exceptions here and there, misread that
overwhelming approval of Occupys cause as an approval of the movements mechanics: the camping out in the
park, the way food was procured for an army of protesters, the endless search for consensus, the showdowns with
the cops, the twinkles. These things, almost every writer separately assumes, are what the Occupy phenomenon
was really about. These are the details the public hungers to know. The building of a community in Zuccotti Park,
for example, is a point of special emphasis. Noam Chomskys thoughts epitomize the genre when he tells us that
one of the main achievements of the movement has been to create communities, real functioning communities
of mutual support, democratic interchange, et cetera. The reason this is important, he continues, is because
Americans tend to be very isolated and neighborhoods are broken down, community structures have broken down,
people are kind of alone. How building such communities helps us to tackle the power of high finance is left
unexplained, as is Chomskys implication that a city of eight million people, engaged in all the complexities of
modern life, should learn how humans are supposed to live together by studying an encampment of college
students. The actual sins of Wall Street, by contrast, are much less visible. For example, when you read Occupying
Wall Street, the work of a team of writers who participated in the protests, you first hear about the subject of
predatory lending when a sympathetic policeman mentions it in the course of a bust. The authors themselves never

if you want to know how the people in Zuccotti intended to block the
banks agendahow they intended to stop predatory lending, for example you
have truly come to the wrong place. Not because its hard to figure out how to stop predatory lending,
but because the way the Occupy campaign is depicted in these books , it seems to have had no
intention of doing anything except building communities in public spaces and
inspiring mankind with its noble refusal to have leaders. Unfortunately, though, thats
not enough. Building a democratic movement culture is essential for movements on the left, but its also just a
bring it up. And

starting point. Occupy never evolved beyond it. It did not call for a subtreasury system, like the Populists did. It
didnt lead a strike (a real one, that is), or a sit-in, or a blockade of a recruitment center, or a takeover of the deans

With Occupy, the

horizontal culture was everything. The process is the message , as the
office. The IWW free-speech fights of a century ago look positively Prussian by comparison.

protesters used to say and as most of the books considered here largely concur. The aforementioned camping, the

Beyond that
there seems to have been virtually no strategy to speak of, no agenda to transmit
to the world. * * * Whether or not to have demands, you might recall, was something that Occupy protesters
cooking, the general-assembling, the filling of public places: thats what Occupy was all about.

debated hotly among themselves in the days when Occupy actually occupied something. Reading these books a
year later, however, that debate seems to have been consensed out of existence. Virtually none of the authors
reviewed here will say forthrightly that the failure to generate demands was a tactical mistake. On the contrary: the
quasi-official account of the episode (Occupying Wall Street) laughs off demands as a fetish object of literal-minded
media types who stupidly crave hierarchy and chains of command. Chris Hedges tells us that demands were
something required only by the elites, and their mouthpieces in the media. Enlightened people, meanwhile, are
supposed to know better; demands imply the legitimacy of the adversary, meaning the U.S. government and its

Launching a protest with no formal demands is thought to be a great

accomplishment, a gesture of surpassing democratic virtue. And here we come to
the basic contradiction of the campaign. To protest Wall Street in 2011 was to
protest, obviously, the outrageous financial misbehavior that gave us the Great
Recession; it was to protest the political power of money , which gave us the bailouts; it was to
friends, the banks.

protest the runaway compensation practices that have turned our societys productive labor into bonuses for the 1

All three of these catastrophes, however, were brought on by deregulation

and tax-cuttingby a philosophy of liberation as anarchic in its rhetoric as
Occupy was in reality. Check your premises, Rand-fans: it was the bankers own
uprising against the hated state that wrecked the American way of life. Nor does it
require poststructuralism-leading-through-anarchism to understand how to reverse these
developments. You do it by rebuilding a powerful and competent regulatory
state. You do it by rebuilding the labor movement. You do it with
bureaucracy. Occupiers often seemed aware of this. Recall what you heard so frequently from protesters
lips back in the days of September 2011: Restore the old Glass-Steagall divide between investment and
commercial banks, they insisted. Bring back big government! Bring back safety! Bring
back boredom! But thats no way to fire the imagination of the world. So, how do
you maintain the carnival while secretly lusting for the CPAs? By
indefinitely suspending the obvious next step. By having no demands. Demands
would have signaled that humorless, doctrinaire adults were back in charge and
that the fun was over. This was an inspired way to play the situation in the beginning, and for a time it was
a great success. But it also put a clear expiration date on the protests. As long as demands and the rest
of the logocentric requirements were postponed, Occupy could never graduate to
the next level. It would remain captive to what Christopher Lasch criticizedway back in 1973as the
cult of participation, in which the experience of protesting is what protesting is all
about.
percent.

Gratuitous Violence
Basing politics on the gratuitous violence of racism usurps
understanding of political economythis legitimizes neoliberal
ideology and mystifies class antagonism

Reed 2013 professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania,

specializing in race and American politics. He has taught at Yale, Northwestern and
the New School for Social Research. An expert on racial and economic inequality, he
is a founding member of the Labor Party and a frequent contributor to The Nation
(2/25, Adolph, Nonsite, Django Unchained, or, The Help: How Cultural Politics Is
Worse Than No Politics at All, and Why, http://nonsite.org/feature/djangounchained-or-the-help-how-cultural-politics-is-worse-than-no-politics-at-all-and-why)
In both films the bogus happy endings are possible only because they characterize their respective regimes of racial hierarchy in the
superficial terms of interpersonal transactions. In The Help segregationisms evil was small-minded bigotry and lack of sensitivity; it

In Tarantinos vision, slaverys definitive injustice was

its gratuitous and sadistic brutalization and sexualized degradation. Malevolent, ludicrously
arrogant whites owned slaves most conspicuously to degrade and torture them. Apart
was more like bad manners than oppression.

from serving a formal dinner in a plantation houseand Tarantino, the Chance the Gardener of American filmmakers (and Best
Original Screenplay? Really?) seems to draw his images of plantation life from Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind, as well as

Tarantinos slaves do no actual

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

Home, a 1990 film set in Montgomery, Alabama, around the bus boycott. I suspect thats the film you thought you were watching
when you saw The Help.) Django

Unchained trivializes slavery by reducing it to its

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

Historian Kenneth M. Stampp quotes a slaveholders succinct explanation:

For what purpose does the master hold the servant ? asked an ante-bellum Southerner. Is it
its product.

not that by his labor, he, the master, may accumulate wealth?1 That absolute control
permitted horrible, unthinkable brutality, to be sure, but perpetrating such
brutality was neither the point of slavery nor its essential injustice . The masterslave relationship could, and did, exist without brutality, and certainly without sadism and sexual degradation. In Tarantinos

It does not
diminish the historical injustice and horror of slavery to note that it was not the
product of sui generis, transcendent Evil but a terminus on a continuum of
bound labor that was more norm than exception in the Anglo-American world until well into the
eighteenth century, if not later. As legal historian Robert Steinfeld points out, it is not so much slavery, but the
emergence of the notion of free laboras the absolute control of a worker over her
personthat is the historical anomaly that needs to be explained.2 Django
Unchained sanitizes the essential injustice of slavery by not problematizing it and by
focusing instead on the extremes of brutality and degradation it permitted, to the
depiction, however, it is not clear that slavery shorn of its extremes of brutality would be objectionable.

extent of making some of them up, just as does The Help regarding Jim Crow. The Help could not imagine a more honest and
complex view of segregationist Mississippi partly because it uses the period ultimately as a prop for human interest clich, and
Django Unchaineds absurdly ahistorical view of plantation slavery is only backdrop for the merger of spaghetti western and

Neither film is really about the period in which it is set.

Film critic Manohla Dargis, reflecting a decade ago on what she saw as a
growing Hollywood penchant for period films, observed that such films are
typically stripped of politics and historical fact and instead will find meaning in appealing to
blaxploitation hero movie.

seemingly timeless ideals and stirring scenes of love, valor and compassion and that the Hollywood professionals who embrace
accuracy most enthusiastically nowadays are costume designers.3 That observation applies to both these films, although in Django
concern with historically accurate representation of material culture applies only to the costumes and props of the 1970s film genres
Tarantino wants to recall. To make sense of how Django Unchained has received so much warmer a reception among black and
leftoid commentators than did The Help, it is useful to recall Margaret Thatchers 1981 dictum that economics are the method: the

Few observersamong
opponents and boosters alikehave noted how deeply and thoroughly
both films are embedded in the practical ontology of neoliberalism , the complex
object is to change the soul.4 Simply put, she and her element have won.

of unarticulated assumptions and unexamined first premises that provide its common sense, its lifeworld. Objection to The Help has
been largely of the shooting fish in a barrel variety: complaints about the films paternalistic treatment of the maids, which generally
have boiled down to an objection that the master-servant relation is thematized at all, as well as the standard, predictable litany of
anti-racist charges about whites speaking for blacks, the films inattentiveness to the fact that at that time in Mississippi black
people were busily engaged in liberating themselves, etc. An illustration of this tendency that conveniently refers to several other
variants of it is Akiba Solomon, Why Im Just Saying No to The Help and Its Historical Whitewash in Color Lines,August 10, 2011,
available at:http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/08/why_im_just_saying_no_to_the_help.html. Defenses

of Django
of a black

Unchained pivot on claims about the social significance of the narrative

hero. One node of this argument emphasizes the need to validate a history of
autonomous black agency and resistance as a politico-existential
desideratum. It accommodates a view that stresses the importance of recognition of
rebellious or militant individuals and revolts in black American history. Another centers
on a notion that exposure to fictional black heroes can inculcate the sense
of personal efficacy necessary to overcome the psychological effects of inequality
and to facilitate upward mobility and may undermine some whites negative stereotypes about black people. In either register

assignment of social or political importance to depictions of black heroes rests on

presumptions about the nexus of mass cultural representation, social commentary, and racial justice that
are more significant politically than the controversy about the film itself . In
both versions, this argument casts political and economic problems in psychological
terms. Injustice appears as a matter of disrespect and denial of due recognition, and the remedies proposed
which are all about images projected and the distribution of jobs associated with their projection
look a lot like self-esteem engineering. Moreover, nothing could indicate
more strikingly the extent of neoliberal ideological hegemony than the idea that
the mass culture industry and its representational practices constitute a meaningful terrain
for struggle to advance egalitarian interests. It is possible to entertain that view seriously only
by ignoring the fact that the production and consumption of mass culture is thoroughly
embedded in capitalist material and ideological imperatives. That, incidentally, is why I prefer
the usage mass culture to describe this industry and its products and processes, although I recognize that it may seem archaic to
some readers. The mass culture v. popular culture debate dates at least from the 1950s and has continued with occasional

crescendos ever since.5 For two decades or more, instructively in line with the retreat of possibilities for concerted left political
action outside the academy, the popular culture side of that debate has been dominant, along with its view that the products of this
precinct of mass consumption capitalism are somehow capable of transcending or subverting their material identity as commodities,

Despite the dogged commitment of several generations of American

graduate students who want to valorize watching television
and immersion in hip-hop or other specialty market niches centered on youth recreation and
the most ephemeral fads as both intellectually avant-garde and politically resistive, it
should be time to admit that that earnest disposition is intellectually shallow and an
ersatz politics. The idea of popular culture posits a spurious autonomy and
organicism that actually affirm mass industrial processes by effacing
them, especially in the putatively rebel, fringe, or underground market niches that
depend on the fiction of the authentic to announce the birth of new product cycles.
The power of the hero is a cathartic trope that connects mainly with the sensibility of adolescent boys
of whatever nominal age. Tarantino has allowed as much, responding to black critics complaints about the violence and
if not avoiding that identity altogether.
Studies and cultural studies

copious use of nigger by proclaiming Even for the films biggest detractors, I think their children will grow up and love this movie.
I think it could become a rite of passage for young black males.6 This response stems no doubt from Tarantinos arrogance and

is hardly alone in
defending the film with an assertion that it gives black youth heroes, is
generically inspirational or both. Similarly, in a January 9, 2012 interview on the Daily Show, George Lucas
opportunism, and some critics have denounced it as no better than racially presumptuous. But he

adduced this line to promote his even more execrable race-oriented live-action cartoon, Red Tails, which, incidentally, trivializes
segregation in the military by reducing it to a matter of bad or outmoded attitudes. The ironic effect is significant understatement of
both the obstacles the Tuskegee airmen faced and their actual accomplishments by rendering them as backdrop for a blackface,
slapped-together remake of Top Gun. (Norman Jewisons 1984 film, A Soldiers Story, adapted from Charles Fullers A Soldiers Play,
is a much more sensitive and thought-provoking rumination on the complexities of race and racism in the Jim Crow U.S. Armyan
army mobilized, as my father, a veteran of the Normandy invasion, never tired of remarking sardonically, to fight the racist Nazis.)
Lucas characterized his film as patriotic, even jingoistic and was explicit that he wanted to create a film that would feature real
heroes and would be inspirational for teenage boys. Much as Django Unchaineds defenders compare it on those terms favorably
to Lincoln, Lucas hyped Red Tails as being a genuine hero story unlike Glory, where you have a lot of white officers running those
guys into cannon fodder. Of course, the film industry is sharply tilted toward the youth market, as Lucas and Tarantino are acutely
aware. But Lucas, unlike Tarantino, was not being defensive in asserting his desire to inspire the young; he offered it more as a
boast. As he has said often, hed wanted for years to make a film about the Tuskegee airmen, and he reports that he always
intended telling their story as a feel-good, crossover inspirational tale. Telling it that way also fits in principle (though in this instance
not in practice, as Red Tails bombed at the box office) with the commercial imperatives of increasingly degraded mass
entertainment. Dargis observed that the ahistoricism of the recent period films is influenced by market imperatives in a global film
industry. The more a film is tied to historically specific contexts, the more difficult it is to sell elsewhere. That logic selects for special
effects-driven products as well as standardized, decontextualized and simplisticuniversalstory lines, preferably set in fantasy
worlds of the filmmakers design. As Dargis notes, these films find their meaning in shopworn clichs puffed up as timeless verities,
including uplifting and inspirational messages for youth. But something else underlies the stress on inspiration in the black-interest

these filmsThe Help, Red Tails, Django Unchained, even

a claim to public attention based partly on their social
significance beyond entertainment or art, and they do so because they engage
with significant moments in the history of the nexus of race and politics in the United States. There would
films, which shows up in critical discussion of them as well. All
Lincoln and Glorymake

not be so much discussion and debate and no Golden Globe, NAACP Image, or Academy Award nominations for The Help, Red Tails,
or Django Unchained if those films werent defined partly by thematizing that nexus of race and politics in some way. The

pretensions to social significance that fit these films into their particular market niche dont conflict
with the mass-market film industrys imperative of infantilization because those
pretensions are only part of the show; they are little more than empty bromides,
product differentiation in the patter of seemingly timeless ideals which the mass
entertainment industry constantly recycles. (Andrew OHehir observes as much about Django Unchained,
which he describes as a three-hour trailer for a movie that never happens.7) That comes through in the defense of these films, in

Their substantive content is

ideological; it is their contribution to the naturalization of neoliberalisms
ontology as they propagandize its universalization across spatial,
temporal, and social contexts. Purportedly in the interest of popular education cum entertainment, Django
the face of evidence of their failings, that, after all, they are just entertainment.

Unchained and The Help, and Red Tails for that matter, read the sensibilities of the present into the past by divesting the latter of its

They reinforce the sense of the past as generic old-timey times

distinguishable from the present by superficial inadequacies outmoded fashion, technology,
specific historicity.

commodities and ideassince overcome. In The Help Hillys obsession with her pet project marks segregations petty apartheid as
irrational in part because of the expense rigorously enforcing it would require; the breadwinning husbands express their frustration
with it as financially impractical. Hilly is a mean-spirited, narrow-minded person whose rigid and tone-deaf commitment to
segregationist consistency not only reflects her limitations of character but also is economically unsound, a fact that further defines

her, and the cartoon version of Jim Crow she represents, as irrational. The

deeper message of these films, insofar as

is that there is no thinkable alternative to the
ideological order under which we live. This message is reproduced throughout the mass entertainment
industry; it shapes the normative reality even of the fantasy worlds that masquerade as
escapism. Even among those who laud the supposedly cathartic effects of
Djangos insurgent violence as reflecting a greater truth of abolition than
passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, few commentators notice that he
and Broomhilda attained their freedom through a market transaction .8 This
reflects an ideological hegemony in which students all too commonly
wonder why planters would deny slaves or sharecroppers education
because education would have made them more productive as workers . And,
tellingly, in a glowing rumination in the Daily Kos, Ryan Brooke inadvertently thrusts mass
cultures destruction of historicity into bold relief by declaiming on the segregated society
presented in Django Unchained and babbling onwith the absurdly ill-informed and pontifical selfrighteousness that the blogosphere enablesabout our need to take
responsibility for preserving racial divides if we are to put segregation in the past and fully
fulfill Dr. Kings dream.9 Its all an indistinguishable mush of bad stuff about racial injustice in the old-timey days . Decoupled
from its moorings in a historically specific political economy, slavery becomes at
bottom a problem of race relations, and, as historian Michael R. West argues forcefully,
race relations emerged as and has remained a discourse that substitutes
etiquette for equality.10 This is the context in which we should take account of what inspiring the young
they deny the integrity of the past,

means as a justification for those films. In part, the claim to inspire is a simple platitude, more filler than substance. It is, as Ive
already noted, both an excuse for films that are cartoons made for an infantilized, generic market and an assertion of a claim to a
particular niche within that market. More insidiously, though, the ease with which inspiration of youth rolls out in this context
resonates with three related and disturbing themes: 1) underclass ideologys narrativesnow all Americans common sensethat

the belief that

racial inequality stems from prejudice, bad ideas and ignorance, and 3) the cognate
of both: the neoliberal rendering of social justice as equality of opportunity, with an aspiration of creating
competitive individual minority agents who might stand a better fighting chance
in the neoliberal rat race rather than a positive alternative vision of a
society that eliminates the need to fight constantly against disruptive
market whims in the first place.11 This politics seeps through in the chatter about Django Unchained in
particular. Erin Aubry Kaplan, in the Los Angeles Times article in which Tarantino asserts his appeal to youth,
remarks that the most disturbing detail [about slavery] is the emotional
violence and degradation directed at blacks that effectively keeps them at the bottom
of the social order, a place they still occupy today. Writing on the Institute of the Black World
link poverty and inequality most crucially to (racialized) cultural inadequacy and psychological damage; 2)

blog, one Dr. Kwa David Whitaker, a 1960s-style cultural nationalist, declaims on Djangos testament to the sources of degradation
and unending servitude [that] has rendered [black Americans] almost incapable of making sound evaluations of our current

In its blindness to political economy,

this notion of black cultural or psychological damage as either a legacy of
slavery or of more indirect recent origine.g., urban migration, crack epidemic, matriarchy, babies making babies
comports well with the reduction of slavery and Jim Crow to interpersonal
dynamics and bad attitudes. It substitutes a politics of recognition and a patter of
racial uplift for politics and underwrites a conflation of political action and therapy . With
respect to the nexus of race and inequality, this discourse supports victim-blaming programs of personal
rehabilitation and self-esteem engineering inspirationas easily as it does multiculturalist
respect for difference, which, by the way, also feeds back to self-esteem engineering and
inspiration as nodes within a larger political economy of race relations . Either
way, this is a discourse that displaces a politics challenging social structures
that reproduce inequality with concern for the feelings and characteristics
of individuals and of categories of population statistics reified as singular groups that are equivalent to individuals. This
discourse has made it possible (again, but more sanctimoniously this time) to characterize
situations or the kind of steps we must take to improve our condition.12

destruction of low-income housing as an uplift strategy for poor people; curtailment

of access to public education as choice; being cut adrift from essential social
wage protections as empowerment; and individual material success as socially important
role modeling.
Neoliberalisms triumph is affirmed with unselfconscious clarity in the ostensibly
leftist defenses of Django Unchained that center on the theme of slaves having liberated themselves. Trotskyists, wouldbe anarchists, and psychobabbling identitarians have their respective sectarian
garnishes: Trotskyists see everywhere the bugbear of bureaucratism and mystify
self-activity; anarchists similarly fetishize direct action and voluntarism and
oppose large-scale public institutions on principle, and identitarians romanticize
essentialist notions of organic, folkish authenticity under constant threat from
institutions. However, all are indistinguishable from the nominally libertarian
right in their disdain for government and institutionally based political
action, which their common reflex is to disparage as inauthentic or
corrupt.

Focus on slavery
Insisting on transhistorical primacy of slavery is intellectually
dangerous and should be rejected
Reed 2013 professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania,
specializing in race and American politics. He has taught at Yale, Northwestern and
the New School for Social Research. An expert on racial and economic inequality, he
is a founding member of the Labor Party and a frequent contributor to The Nation
(2/25, Adolph, Nonsite, Django Unchained, or, The Help: How Cultural Politics Is
Worse Than No Politics at All, and Why, http://nonsite.org/feature/djangounchained-or-the-help-how-cultural-politics-is-worse-than-no-politics-at-all-and-why)
That sort of Malcolm X/blaxploitation narrative, including the insistence that Birth of a Nation and Gone With the

a line of anti-racist
argument and mobilization that asserts powerful continuities between current racial
inequalities and either slavery or the Jim Crow regime. This line of argument has been most
popularly condensed recently in Michelle Alexanders The New Jim Crow, which analogizes contemporary
mass incarceration to the segregationist regime. But even she, after much
huffing and puffing and asserting the relation gesturally throughout the book, ultimately
acknowledges that the analogy fails.37 And it would have to fail because the
segregationist regime was the artifact of a particular historical and political moment in
a particular social order. Moreover, the rhetorical force of the analogy with Jim Crow or
slavery derives from the fact that those regimes are associated
symbolically with strong negative sanctions in the general culture because
they have been vanquished. In that sense all versions of the lament that its as if
nothing has changed give themselves the lie. They are effective only to the
extent that things have changed significantly. The tendency to craft political
critique by demanding that we fix our gaze in the rearview mirror appeals to an
intellectual laziness. Marking superficial similarities with familiar images of
oppression is less mentally taxing than attempting to parse the
multifarious, often contradictory dynamics and relations that shape racial inequality
in particular and politics in general in the current moment. Assertions that
phenomena like the Jena, Louisiana, incident, the killings of James Craig Anderson and Trayvon
Martin, and racial disparities in incarceration demonstrate persistence of oldschool, white supremacist racism and charges that the sensibilities of Thomas Dixon and
Margaret Mitchell continue to shape most Americans understandings of slavery do important, obfuscatory
ideological work. They lay claim to a moral urgency that, as Mahmood Mamdani
argues concerning the rhetorical use of charges of genocide, enables disparaging efforts either
to differentiate discrete inequalities or to generate historically specific causal
accounts of them as irresponsible dodges that abet injustice by temporizing in its face.38 But
more is at work here as well. Insistence on the transhistorical primacy of racism as a
source of inequality is a class politics. Its the politics of a stratum of the
professional-managerial class whose material location and interests, and thus whose
ideological commitments, are bound up with parsing, interpreting and administering
inequality defined in terms of disparities among ascriptively defined populations
reified as groups or even cultures. In fact, much of the intellectual life of this
stratum is devoted to shoehorning into the rubric of racism all manner of
inequalities that may appear statistically as racial disparities.39 And that project
shares capitalisms ideological tendency to obscure races foundations, as
well as the foundations of all such ascriptive hierarchies, in historically
Wind continue to shape Americans understandings of slavery, also is of a piece with

specific political economy. This felicitous convergence may help explain why proponents of cultural
politics are so inclined to treat the products and production processes of the mass entertainment industry as a
terrain for political struggle and debate. They dont see the industrys imperatives as fundamentally incompatible

they share its fetishization of

heroes and penchant for inspirational stories of individual Overcoming.
This sort of politics of representation is no more than an imagemanagement discourse within neoliberalism. That strains of an ersatz left imagine it
to be something more marks the extent of our defeat . And then, of course, theres that Upton
with the notions of a just society they seek to advance. In fact,

Sinclair point.

AT

AT: Perm
They don't get a perma perm is a test of competitiveness
between policy optionsthat model doesn't make sense when
the debate is between amorphous philosophical positions
because you can't really tie them down to anything. They can
always explain why in the abstract certain things they said are
compatible with Marxism but that just raises the question of
why they included the rest.
Even if cap is experienced racially for themthat doesnt deny
our argumenteven if they destabilize racecap ensures a
constant reshuffling of artificial divisionsperm is deck chairs
Dave Hill, teaches at Middlesex University and is Visiting Professor of Critical Education Policy and Equality Studies
at the University of Limerick, Ireland. Culturalist and Materialist Explanations of Class and "Race", Cultural Logic

2009 http://clogic.eserver.org/2009/Hill.pdf
In contrast to both Critical Race Theorists and revisionist socialists/left
liberals/equivalence theorists, and those who see caste as the primary form of
oppression, Marxists would agree that objectively- whatever our race or gender
or sexuality or current level of academic attainment or religious identity, whatever
the individual and group history and fear of oppression and attack- the
fundamental objective and material form of oppression in capitalism is
class oppression. Black and Women capitalists, or Jewish and Arab capitalists , or
Dalit capitalists in India, exploit the labour power of their multi-ethnic men and women
workers, essentially (in terms of the exploitation of labour power and the appropriation of surplus value) in
just the same way as do white male capitalists, or upper-caste capitalists. But the
subjective consciousness of identity, this subjective affirmation of one particular identity, while
seared into the souls of its victims, should not mask the objective nature of
contemporary oppression under capitalism class oppression that, of course, hits some
raced and gendered and caste and occupational sections of the working class harder than others. Martha

Gimenez (2001:24) succinctly explains that class is not simply another ideology
legitimating oppression. Rather, class denotes exploitative relations between
people mediated by their relations to the means of production. Apples
parallellist, or equivalence model of exploitation (equivalence of exploitation based on race, class and
gender, his tryptarchic model of inequality) produces valuable data and insights into aspects of and
the extent and manifestations of gender oppression and race oppression in capitalist USA. However, such
analyses serve to occlude the class-capital relation, the class struggle, to
obscure an essential and defining nature of capitalism, class conflict.
Objectively, whatever our race or gender or caste or sexual orientation or scholastic attainment,
whatever the individual and group history and fear of oppression and attack, the
fundamental form of oppression in capitalism is class oppression . While the
capitalist class is predominantly white and male, capital in theory and in practice
can be blind to colour and gender and caste even if that does not happen very often. African
Marxist-Leninists such as Ngugi wa Thiongo (e.g., Ngugi wa Thiongo and Ngugi wa Mirii, 1985) know very well that

when the white colonialist oppressors were ejected from direct rule over
African states in the 1950s and 60s, the white bourgeoisie in some African states
such as Kenya was replaced by a black bourgeoisie, acting in concert with
transnational capital and/or capital(ists) of the former colonial power. Similarly in

India, capitalism is no longer exclusively white . It is Indian, not white British alone. As Bellamy
observes, the diminution of class analysis denies immanent critique of any
critical bite, effectively disarming a meaningful opposition to the
capitalist thesis (Bellamy, 1997:25). And as Harvey notes, neoliberal rhetoric, with its
foundational emphasis upon individual freedoms, has the power to split off
libertarianism, identity politics, multiculturalism, and eventually narcissistic
consumerism from the social forces ranged in pursuit of justice through the
conquest of state power. (Harvey, 2005:41) To return to the broader relationship between race, gender,
and social class, and to turn to the USA, are there many who would deny that Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell
have more in common with the Bushes and the rest of the Unites States capitalist class, be it white, black or
Latina/o, than they do with the workers whose individual ownership of wealth and power is an infinetismal fraction

The various oppressions, of caste,

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

Even if inequality manifests in racial term, if we win race is a

flawed explanation for that inequality then their politics can
only stand in for class consciousnessthat makes the right
more influential and abandons any sort of political
accountability

Reed 2005 professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania,

specializing in race and American politics. He has taught at Yale, Northwestern and
the New School for Social Research. An expert on racial and economic inequality, he
is a founding member of the Labor Party and a frequent contributor to The Nation
(November, Adolph, The Real Divide, http://progressive.org/mag_reed1105)
Race in this context becomes a cheap and safely predictable alternative to
pressing a substantive critique of the sources of this horror in New Orleans and its
likely outcomes. Granted, the images projected from the Superdome, the convention center, overpasses,
and rooftops seemed to cry out a stark statement of racial inequality. But
thats partly because in the contemporary U.S., race is the most familiar
language of inequality or injustice. Its what we see partly because its what
were accustomed to seeing, what we look for. As I argued in The Nation, classas income,
wealth, and access to material resources, including a safety net of social
connectionswas certainly a better predictor than race of who evacuated
the city before the hurricane, who was able to survive the storm itself, who was warehoused in the
Superdome or convention center or stuck without food and water on the parched overpasses, who is marooned in
shelters in Houston or elsewhere, and whose interests will be factored into the reconstruction of the city, who will be

New Orleans is a predominantly black city, and it is a largely

poor city. The black population is disproportionately poor, and the poor population is
disproportionately black. It is not surprising that those who were stranded and forgotten, probably
those who died, were conspicuously black and poor. None of that, however, means that race
or even racism is adequate as an explanation of those patterns of inequality. And
race is especially useless as a basis on which to craft a politics that can
effectively pursue social justice. Before the yes, buts begin, I am not
able to return.

claiming that systemic inequalities in the United States are not significantly racialized.
The evidence of racial disparities is far too great for any sane or honest person to deny, and they largely emerge

Nor am I saying that we should overlook

that fact in the interest of some idealized nonracial or post-racial politics. Let me be
blunter than Ive ever been in print about what I am saying: As a political strategy, exposing
racism is wrongheaded and at best an utter waste of time. It is the political equivalent of an
from a history of discrimination and racial injustice.

appendix: a useless vestige of an earlier evolutionary moment thats usually innocuous but can flare up and

the language of race and racism

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

doesnt allow for politically significant distinctions; in fact, as a strategy, exposing racism requires subordinating the
discrete features of a political situation to the overarching goal of asserting the persistence and power of racism as

Many liberals gravitate to the

language of racism not simply because it makes them feel righteous but
also because it doesnt carry any political warrant beyond exhorting people not to
be racist. In fact, it often is exactly the opposite of a call to action. Such formulations as racism is our
national disease or similar pieties imply that racism is a natural condition. Further, it
implies that most whites inevitably and immutably oppose blacks and
therefore cant be expected to align with them around common political
goals. This view dovetails nicely with Democrats contention that the only way to win elections is to reject a
an abstraction. This leads to the second reason for my harsh judgment.

social justice agenda that is stigmatized by association with blacks and appeal to an upper-income white

Upper-status liberals
are more likely to have relatively secure, rewarding jobs, access to health care, adequate
housing, and prospects for providing for the kids education, and are much less likely to be in danger of
seeing their nineteen-year-old go off to Iraq. They tend, therefore, to have a higher
threshold of tolerance for political compromises in the name of electing this years sorry
pro-corporate Democrat. Acknowledging racismand, of course, being pro-choice
is one of the few ways many of them can distinguish themselves from their
Republican co-workers and relatives. As the appendix analogy suggests, insistence on understanding
constituency concerned exclusively with issues like abortion rights and the deficit.

inequality in racial terms is a vestige of an earlier political style. The race line persists partly out of habit and partly
because it connects with the material interests of those who would be race relations technicians. In this sense, race

The tendency to insist on the primacy of race itself

stems from a class perspective. For roughly a generation it seemed
reasonable to expect that defining inequalities in racial terms would
provoke some, albeit inadequate, remedial response from the federal government. But thats no
longer the case; nor has it been for quite some time. That approach presumed a federal government
that was concerned at least not to appear racially unjust. Such a government no
longer exists. A key marker of the rights victory in national politics is that the
discussion of race now largely serves as a way to reinforce a message to
whites that the public sector is there merely to help some combination of
black, poor, and loser. Liberals have legitimized this perspective through their own racial bad faith. For
is not an alternative to class.

many whites, the discussion of race also reinforces the idea that cutting public spending is justifiably aimed at
weaning a lazy black underclass off the dole orin the supposedly benign, liberal Democratic versionteaching

New Orleans is instructive. The right has a built-in

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

AT: Celebrating diversity good

Celebrating diversity cant resolve economic inequality ---serves as a distraction helping the rich --- poverty is
comparatively more unjust

Michaels 7 (Walter Benn, Professor of American Literature and Literary Theory at

University of Illinois at Chicago, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to
Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, 7/24/2007, pgs 16-17)//JL
Obviously, it didnt work out that way, either for labor (which is weaker than its ever been) or for Labor Day (which mainly marks the end of summer). You get bigger crowds, a lot livelier party and a much stronger sense of solidarity

celebrating diversity shouldnt be an acceptable

alternative to seeking economic equality In an ideal universe we wouldnt be
celebrating diversity at all we wouldnt even be encouraging it
in an ideal
universe the question of who you wanted to sleep with would be a matter of
concern only to you and to your loved (or unloved) ones. As would skin color;
Diversity of skin color is something we should
happily take for minted, the way we do diversity of hair color.
the question of whether youre black or white, straight or gay, a man or a woman
shouldn't matter
. An important issue of social justice hangs
on not discriminating against people because of their hair color or their skin color or
their sexuality
no issue of social justice hangs on
appreciating racial or cultural diversity If youre worried about the growing
economic inequality
that there may be something unjust as well as
unpleasant in the spectacle of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, no
cause is less worth supporting, no battle is less worth fighting than the
ones we fight for diversity
while
radicals of the tenured left continue to struggle for what they hope will finally
become a truly inclusive multiculturalism, the really radical idea of redistributing
wealth becomes almost literally unthinkable n the early 1930s,
Long
proposed a law making it illegal for anyone to earn more than a million dollars a
year and for anyone to inherit more than five million dollars
Such a
restriction today would seem as outrageous and unnatural as interracial-not to
mention gaymarriage seemed or would have seemed then we dont need to
purchase our progress in civil rights at the expense of a commitment to
economic justice.
we should not
phantasm of respect
for difference to take the place of that commitment to economic justice
the commitment to diversity is at best a distraction and at worst an
essentially reactionary position

for Gay Pride Day. But Gay Pride Day isnt about economic equality, and

because

some people

might like it, some people might not but it would have no political significance whatsoever.

When you go to school or to workjust like when you go to

vote

any more than the question of whether you are blond or brunette

. No issue of social justice hangs on appreciating hair color diversity;

;in American life, if you suspect

. While some cultural conservatives may wish that everyone should be assimilated to their fantasy of one truly American culture, and

the supposed

.I

Senator Huey

of Louisiana

. Imagine the response ifeven suitably adjusted for inflationany

senator were to propose such a law today, cutting off incomes at, say, $15 million a year and inheritances at $75 million. Its not just the numbers that wouldnt fly; its the whole concept.

. But

More fundamentally still,

allowor we should not continue to allowthe

. In short, this book is an effort to

move beyond diversityto make it clear that

and to help put equality back on the national agenda.

AT: Race is biological

The concept of race is biologically false --- its a social
construct
Michaels 7 (Walter Benn, Professor of American Literature and Literary Theory at
University of Illinois at Chicago, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to
Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, 7/24/2007, pg 32)//JL
In what way are people who have the one drop fundamentally like each
other and people who dont have it fundamentally different from the people who
do?
we talk about genes,
the more we know about
genetic heritage, the more skeptical most scientists have become about the
idea of race
the dominant scientific view now is that race is a myth, and that
as a biological rather than a social construct, race has ceased to be
seen as a fundamental reality characterizing the human species The reason for
this is not,
that there arent any physical differences
People clearly do
have different skin colors
genetic variation within populations belonging to what we call the same race is
often greater than genetic variation between races
a person from the
Congo and a person from Mali are more likely to be genetically different from each
other than either is from a person from Belgium Hence it doesnt make genetic
sense to think of people from Mali and the Congo as belonging to the same race
But what is this unity?

Today we dont talk so much about blood anymore,

and we are able to trace peoples ancestry with a specificity that would have amazed even the most passionate

nineteenth-century aficionados of physical difference and racial instincts. But it would also have disappointed them, because it has turned out that

. In fact,

, in

the words of R. W. Lewontin,

.4

of course,

between people.

and different textures of hair, and we all have ancestors who came from different places or who came out of Africa at different times. The problem is that

. So Joseph Graves puts it,

and of

Belgians as belonging to a different race. On the one hand, then, there are people whose ancestors came from Belgium and people whose ancestors came from Mali and people whose ancestors came from Thailand. But, on the other

its not that there arent physical differences (in

this sense the Court in Plessy had it right); its just that there arent physical
differences between races.
hand, there isnt (at least from the scientific standpoint) any white or black or Asian race. So

Race isnt biological --- its a social construction used to pit

groups against each other and prop up elite control

Michaels 7 (Walter Benn, Professor of American Literature and Literary Theory at

University of Illinois at Chicago, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to
Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, 7/24/2007, pgs 46-47)//JL

On the one hand, there are physical connections

between us and the past that distinguish us from one another: your ancestors are not
my ancestors. On the other hand, we cant really get much cultural mileage out of
these connections. If your ancestors lived in the tropics and mine lived in Eastern Europe, youre more likely to be born
Its not hard to see the general problem here.

with sickle cell and Im more likely to get Tay-Sachs. And youre also more likely to be taught Bantu than Yiddish, whereas for me its
the other way around. But youre not more likely to be born speaking Bantu, and Im not more likely to be born speaking Yiddish.16
We may inherit our diseases from our ancestors and our eye colors and our hair texture, but we dont inherit our languages. And,

what goes for languages goes also for books and music and art

naturally,
. If none of
the students in my class has read either Emerson or Douglass and if biology cant connect the white ones with Emerson or the black

does it really make

sense to say there is any such thing as heritage? There are some things we
inherit (our genes), and there are some things we learn (maybe Bantu or English, Emerson
and Douglass). But theres no necessary connection between them . Theres no
reason why people with a certain set of genes ought to be reading a certain
set of books and thinking of those books as part of their heritage, or why, when they read some other set of books, they
should think of them as part of someone elses heritage.17 There are just the things we learn and the
things we dont learn, the things we do and the things we dont do. We can
ones with Douglass, what sense does it make to say either one belongs to their heritage? Indeed,

make the same point about cultural identity, about acting black or white or Asian or Jewish.
If, say, acting black (belonging to black culture) were truly a function of being black
(having a biologically black body), then people who had black bodies would
inevitably act black, and we would have no need for the notion of cultural
identity. Acting black would be like acting tall (you can reach high things) or short (you cant reach high things). But as we
have seen, we need the idea of black culture precisely because being black is
not a physical fact in the way that being tall or short is. So, on the one hand, its because theres
no physical fact of blackness that, if we want to hang on to the idea of blackness, we need the
idea of black culture, but, on the other, its also because theres no physical fact of
blackness that we cant hang on to the idea of black culture. Why? Because
once we separate cultural diversity from racial diversity (the audiences at
concerts may have different-color skins, but they are by definition not culturally diverse), we see that cultural
diversity cannot serve as a stand- in for racial diversity. There are no boxes for
musical taste on your birth certificate. You cant keep race alive by translating it into culture.
We do it, but it makes no sense. Either race is a physical fact, dividing human beings into
biologically significant differences, or there is no such thing as race, whatever its
called.

AT: Hip-hop is inherently black

Nothing is inherently a part of black culture --- the people
make the culture black not the other way around
Michaels 7 (Walter Benn, Professor of American Literature and Literary Theory at
University of Illinois at Chicago, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to
Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, 7/24/2007, pgs 42-43)//JL
whats the behavior that makes black people black? There is no
answer You can
be black
and not do any or all of the things currently or
historically associated with black culture conversely, theres nothing you can do
that will make you black
If,
the only people who
listened to or performed hip-hop were white
hip-hop would be a part of
white culture and if every black kid in the country were into emo, emo would be a
part of black culture Its not the blackness of the culture that makes the
So

equivalent

and not like Jay-Z and not wear your hair in cornrows and not eat soul food

. And,

in the same way that same-sex desire makes gay people gay.

starting tomorrow,

(were already halfway there),

people black; its the blackness of the people that makes the culture
black

.15

AT: Black means oppressed

Having a historically contingent definition of a race precludes
the possibility of having a defined culture
Michaels 7 (Walter Benn, Professor of American Literature and Literary Theory at
University of Illinois at Chicago, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to
Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, 7/24/2007, pgs 47-48)//JL

The American version of Sartres the Jew is one whom others consider a Jew was produced, as we have already

Du Bois in 1940 when he wrote that the black man is a person who
must ride Jim Crow in Georgia. But the beliefs about race that underlay the Jim
Crow laws have turned out to be mistaken; we no longer believe them, and
we no longer have Jim Crow. So the true meaning of Du Boiss definition
should now be clear; if a black man is a man who has to ride Jim Crow,
noted, by W. E. B.

now that no one has to ride Jim Crow, there is no such thing as a
black man . Or a white man either. There are people with different colors of skin, different textures of hair,
different heights and different weights, different kinds of abilities and different kinds of disabilities. But there are no
people of different races.

AT: Poverty was created by racism

Capitalism has redefined the people that need to be excluded
from those with different cultural identities to the poor
Michaels 7 (Walter Benn, Professor of American Literature and Literary Theory at
University of Illinois at Chicago, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to
Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, 7/24/2007, pgs 64-65)//JL

money didnt always

function as an alternative to race; sometimes it was a way of insisting on
race. The poll tax, for example, was one of several devices used in the South for precisely
the purpose of drawing the color line where it was no longer legal to do so.
The Fourteenth Amendment had made it unconstitutional to keep black
people from voting because they were black, but it did not (and would not until the
passage of the Twenty-fourth Amendment in 1964) make it illegal to charge a fee for voting.
The poll tax could thus be used to deny most black people the right to
vote not because they were black but (ostensibly) because they were
poor. And if, in theory, the Jaw applied to poor whites too, the infamous grandfather clause
If, however, we look at the history of American apartheid, we will remember that

set that right. You were exempt from paying the tax if you could prove your grandfather had voted, a test that the

the supposedly race-neutral poll tax

was in fact one of the first in over a centurys worth of color-blind efforts to
draw the color line. And as the civil rights movement not only undid the apparatus of state-sponsored
children and grandchildren of slaves could never pass. So

discrimination but made serious inroads into the technologies of private discrimination as well, charging people a
lot of money (for your food, your school, your golf course and tennis courts) would be a handy way of enforcing the

The reason you cant get in here is not that your

skin is the wrong color; its that your bank account is too small. OUR PRICES
racialized hierarchies of American life.

DISCRIMINATE BECAUSE WE CANT, reads the sign at what an old episode of The Simpsons calls the rich peoples
mall.

What the state now refuses to do, the market will do for it. Part of the joke in
the banner tells the truth about racism: high prices can
achieve what the law forbids. But the real joke is the way in which the banner tells a quite
different truth, not so much about racism as about the new
The Simpsons, then, is the way

irrelevance of racism . After all, its the rich peoples mall, not the white peoples mall, and the
monetarization of the technology of discrimination involves not just a new
way of keeping the wrong people out but a new description of who the wrong
people arenot the blacks, not the Jews, but the poor . Its as if the poll tax were
being applied but without the grandfather clause. And when the point is put this way, we can go one step farther

High prices arent a clever

way of keeping out the poor. The purpose or charging high prices is not to find an indirect way of
excluding those whom the law no longer allows you to exclude. People who cant afford to ride in
first class, people who shop at (not to mention work at) Wal-Mart instead of at the rich peoples mall, are
and see that the whole idea of the wrong people has become irrelevant.

the victims of poverty, not of prejudice . This is what Chesnutt means when he suggests
that the money line is less arbitrary, more logical than the color line. No one even needs to draw the
money line; it draws itself.

AT: Race is the root cause

Poverty was the cause of people being left behind --- not
racism --- their representations blanket over economic
inequality

Michaels 7 (Walter Benn, Professor of American Literature and Literary Theory at

University of Illinois at Chicago, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to
Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, 7/24/2007, pg 79)//JL
The problem of the 20th century,
Du Bois observed
will be the problem of
the color line
the twenty-first century will also be fond of that problem The
difference is that the work that used to be done by racism the work of obscuring

W. E. B.

at its beginning,

. It looks like

class difference is now done by antiracism. The

controversy over
Katrina is,
, a case in point
Is the relevant thing about all those people abandoned in New
Orleans the fact that they are black or the fact that they are poor? We like blaming
racism, but
there werent too many rich black people left behind
Republican policies that left the poor behind were not racist
This doesnt mean, of course, that racism
didnt play a role in New Orleans. It just means that in a society without
racial discrimination, there would still have been poor people who couldnt
find their way out
ongoing

response to the catastrophe of Hurricane

as we noted in the introduction

the governments

. Its like an inverted version of the question about the rich Jew Leo Frank: was he

lynched because he was Jewish or because he was rich?

the truth is

Orleans did so. The

when everybody who could get out of New

party

, and the economic

inequality in American society has grown under Democratic presidents as well as Republicans.

any

of New Orleans. Whereas in a society without poor people (even a racist society without poor people), there wouldnt have been.

AT: Cultural discrimination is the same as class

discrimination
Class discrimination is fundamentally worse --- cant be
resolved at the institutional level

Michaels 7 (Walter Benn, Professor of American Literature and Literary Theory at

University of Illinois at Chicago, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to
Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, 7/24/2007, pgs 66-67)//JL
Thats why, for Chesnutt, the problem with segregation is that it interferes with
liberty of contract. And although, at the beginning of the twentieth century,
segregation wasnt a problem for most Americans or for the Supreme Court, interference
with freedom of contract was. In a famous case of 1905, for example, the Court struck down a New
York state law that prohibited employees in bakeries from being required or permitted to work more than ten

Lochner, the owner of Lochners Home Bakery, had been fined

for overworking an employee, and on appeal the Court overturned his conviction,
declaring that the Bakeshop Act infringed upon the right of the indi vidual to labor
for such time as he may choose and thereby violated both employers and employee's liberty of conhours a day or sixty hours a week. Joseph

tract. When Chesnutt protests against the infringement on his doctors ability to ride in the first-class car, he is just
asking that black doctors be guaranteed the same freedoms as white bakers.

By contrast, no ones

liberty of contract is violated when poor people dont shop at the rich
people's mall . Rather, the poor people who decline to shop there are like bakers who
decide not to work for Lochner. Theyre just exercising their freedom of contractin this case,
by refusing to enter into one. If you dont like the hours, you dont have to take the
job; if you dont like the price, you dont have to buy the product. The injustice in Chesnutt, then, is that racism
and the drawing of the color line interfere with the marke t. If youre forced to
ride with the malodorous farm laborers because youre poor, thats unfortunate but
not unfair. If youre forced to ride with them because youre black, thats another
story. So the poor are not victims of discrimination; they are the unfortunate byproducts of an essentially just mechanismthe market. Poverty, in other words, is not a civil
rights issue. The government kept black people from voting, and eventually the government
made it possible for black people to start voting. The government kept women
from voting, and it eventually allowed them to vote too . But you dont need the
government to keep poor people from shopping at the rich peoples mall. And you
cant get the government to enable poor people to start shopping there .

AT: Omi and Winant

Omi and Winants definition of racism promotes difference and
exclusion
Michaels 7 (Walter Benn, Professor of American Literature and Literary Theory at
University of Illinois at Chicago, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to
Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, 7/24/2007, pgs 48-49)//JL
Which is a conclusion that no one wants to accept those
who are critical of
racism
have continued to insist that race is a central and even
desirable factor in American life
Omi and
Winant write that there are two temptations to be avoided in
thinking about race. The first is
to think of it as something fixed,
concrete and objective
The second is the temptation to think of it as a
mere illusion which an ideal social order would eliminate Race, they say, will
always be at the center of the American experience,
people have gone about trying to make sure that
Omi and Winants prediction comes true and to guarantee that even if people cant
belong to concrete and objective races, they can still have (social or cultural) racial
identities
our commitment to diversity is deeply tied to
. Even

(the vast majority)

and who do not believe in the biology of racial identity

. Thus in what is certainly the most influential academic text on the social construction of race (Racial Formation in the United States), Michael

Howard

the temptation

, that is, a physical fact.

and its a good thing too because without a racial identity, one is in danger of

having no identity.18 What weve seen in this chapter are some of the ways in which

. And what weve also begun to see is how

keeping race alive

diversity is itself understood as racial
our commitment to diversity even with nonracialized groups (above all
cultures) depends on treating them as if they were races different
, partly because

and partly because (as subsequent chapters will

make clear)

respect.

but equal, worthy of our

AT: Mitchell
Mitchell concedes and changed his mind in 2002

Mitchell, 02 (11/9/02, Gordon, [eDebate] Adri and Ross,

http://www.ndtceda.com/pipermail/edebate/2002-November/044264.html)
Politically I have moved quite a bit since 1998, when I wrote that debate institutions
should pay more attention to argumentative agency, i.e. cultivation of skills that facilitate translation of critical thinking,
public speaking, and research acumen into concrete exemplars of democratic empowerment. Back then I was highly skeptical of the
"laboratory model" of "preparatory pedagogy," where students were kept, by fiat, in
the proverbial pedagogical bullpen. Now I respect much more the value of a
protected space where young people can experiment politically by taking imaginary
positions, driving the hueristic process by arguing against their convictions . In fact, the
integrity of this space could be compromised by "activist turn" initiatives designed
to bridge contest round advocacy with political activism. These days I have much
more confidence in the importance and necessity of switch-side debating, and the
heuristic value for debaters of arguing against their convictions. I think fashioning
competitive debate contest rounds as isolated and politically protected safe spaces
for communicative experimentation makes sense. However, I worry that a narrow diet of competitive contest round debating
could starve students of opportunities to experience the rich political valence of their debating activities

AT: Rejecting politics key

Politics is inevitable and cant simply be transcended its
necessary for any complicated society to function
Schwartz 95 (Joseph M. Schwartz is Professor of Political Science at Temple University, The Permanence
of the Political pages 9-10 \\ME)

Politics may well be the most underdefined and undertheorized concept

in political science, perhaps because metareflection on the nature of ones discipline is inherently contestable.
Although I do not offer a comprehensive treatise on the nature of politics, to clarify my critique of the radical
traditions desire to transcend politics, an explicit discussion of how I utilize the term politics may be in order.
Perhaps the best-known political science definition of politics is that it is those activities by which a society
authoritatively allocates its valuesmoral, economic, and culturalthrough conflict and cooperation among social
groups with both shared and divergent interests. 8 Yet does such a definition threaten to render politics
synonymous with all human social activity?9 The

uniqueness of political activity lies in its

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

politics is unavoidable in any society that is more than

minimally complex and diverse in social structure and that the only just
way of making such political decisions is through democratic politics and
democratic disagreement. The radical visions desire to transcend the messy
business of democratic disagreement through the instantiation of a solidaristic society
embodying truly universal human interests not only is profoundly antipolitical; it also
violates the very democratic impulses that inspired the radical critique of
argument is that

not only authoritarian, but also less-than-fully democratic regimes. Thus, this
work desires not only to highlight the necessity or unavoidability of politics but also to affirm radical democratic
pluralism as the most desirable of political regimes. Tragically, this goal was not the uneqivocal one of the radical
tradition in both theory and practice.11

Politics doesnt ignore individual experience. It consists of our

ontology of the world
Schwartz 95 (Joseph M. Schwartz is Professor of Political Science at Temple University, The Permanence
of the Political page 15 \\ME)

politics cannot adequately be

understood as a simple reflection of given material interests. Not only do
ideal interests play a critical role in politics (e.g., normative values and
sexual, racial, or national conceptions of identity); but as Max Weber argued in The
Sociology of World Religions, it is often our ideas, the laypersons ontology of how
the world works, that structure both our ideal and material interests:
Not ideas, but material and ideal interests directly govern mens
conduct. . . . Yet very frequently the world images that have been created by ideas have like switchmen,
In contrast to both the predominant liberal and radical conceptions,

determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest.17 For example, although
both Protestants and Hindus have an ideal interest in salvationand in acquiring the material status necessary for
salvationtheir distinct ideas of salvation, Protestant predestination versus Hindu reincarnation, lead to
radically divergent conceptions of the type of social action commensurate with the individuals ideal interests.

democratic politics involves not just collective deliberation on our

own material and ideal interests, but also deliberation about public ideas
and how those values can best be institutionalized. That is, we argue
politically about how the world functions and what moral purposes those
functions should serve.
Likewise,

Alt

Boring politics
Thats the only way to break the guilt and resentment cycle.
Political critique key to prevent the ballot from becoming a
palliative endorsement of catharsis
Enns 12Professor of Philosophy at McMaster University (Dianne, The Violence of
Victimhood, 28-30)
Guilt and Ressentiment We need to think carefully about what is at stake here. Why is this
perspective appealing, and what are its effects? At first glance, the argument appears simple: white, privileged
women, in their theoretical and practical interventions, must take into account the experiences and conceptual
work of women who are less fortunate and less powerful, have fewer resources, and are therefore more subject to
systemic oppression. The lesson of feminism's mistakes in the civil rights era is that this mainstream group must

effects, as I have argued, include a

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

operation of guilt in the misunderstanding that often divides Western feminists from women in the developing

The guilt of those who feel themselves deeply

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

racism and colonization. Nietzsche describes ressentiment as the overwhelming sentiment of slave morality, the

ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to

values. 19 The sufferer in this schema seeks out a cause for his suffering a guilty agent who
is susceptible to suffering someone on whom he can vent his affects and so procure
the anesthesia necessary to ease the pain of injury. The motivation behind ressentiment,
revolt that begins when

according to Nietzsche, is the desire to deaden, by means of a more violent emotion of any kind, a tormenting,
secret pain that is becoming unendurable, and to drive it out of consciousness at least for the moment: for that one
requires an affect, as savage an affect as possible, and, in order to excite that, any pretext at all. 20 In its

ressentiment acts as the righteous

critique of power from the perspective of the injured, which delimits a specific site of
contemporary manifestation, Wendy Brown argues that

blame for suffering by constituting sovereign subjects and events as responsible for the injury of social

Identities are fixed in an economy of perpetrator and victim, in

which revenge, rather than power or emancipation, is sought for the injured,
subordination.

making the perpetrator hurt as the sufferer does. 21 30 Such a concept is useful for understanding why an ethics
of absolute responsibility to the other appeals to the victimized. Brown remarks that, for Nietzsche, the source of

the triumph of a morality rooted in ressentiment is the denial that it has

any access to power or contains a will to power. Politicized identities arise
as both product of and reaction to this condition; the reaction is a substitute
for action an imaginary revenge, Nietzsche calls it. Suffering then becomes a social

virtue at the same time that the sufferer attempts to displace his suffering onto
another. The identity created by ressentiment, Brown explains, becomes invested in its
own subjection not only through its discovery of someone to blame, and a new
recognition and revaluation of that subjection, but also through the satisfaction of revenge .
22 The outcome of feminism's attraction to theories of difference and otherness is thus deeply contentious. First,

we witness the further reification reification of the very oppositions in

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

the other has been

uncritically exalted, which has led in turn to simplistic designations of marginal, othered status
and, ultimately, a competition for victimhood. Ultimately, this approach has led to a new moral
eagerness to rectify the mistakes of white, middle-class, liberal, western feminism,

code in which ethics is equated with the responsibility of the privileged Western woman, while moral immunity is
granted to the victimized other. Ranjana Khanna describes this operation aptly when she writes that in the field of

the reification of the other has produced separate ethical

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

Fear of the Oceans

Nick Lands appropriation of capitalism as an emancipative
inhuman construct contributes to a cult of capitalism that
shuts out any possibility of resistance, the alternative is a
cosmic reinscription of thanatropic regression
Negarestani 11 (Reza, Iranian contemporary philosopher, Drafting the

inhuman: Conjectures on capitalism and organic necrocracy,

http://aaaaarg.org/upload/reza-negarestani-drafting-the-inhuman-conjectures-oncapitalism-and-organic-necrocracy-1.pdf, hhs-nw)
As Nick Land elaborated in The Thirst for Annihilation
what brings
about the possibility of this weird marriage between human praxis and
inhuman emancipation is the tortuous economy of dissipation inherent to
capitalism as its partially repressed desire for meltdown
Capitalism in
this sense is not an attainable state but rather a dissipative
tendency
or process which moves along the detours of organizational complexity
increasing commodification
to ultimately deliver humans
conservative horizon into an unbound state of dissolution
impulses of
capitalism against its implicit desire for meltdown are doomed to fail as
capitalism fully gains it angular momentum by reaping planetary
resources and conceiving its irreparably schizophrenic image
that assigns
capitalism an inhuman emancipative role. This model of emancipation is
comparable with H.P. Lovecrafts fantastic concept holocaust of freedom
which celebrates the consummation of human doom with human
emancipation
Nick Land identifies capital as a
planetary singularity toward utter dissipation whose dynamism becomes
more complicated as it circuitously verges upon zero
Land
presents a
definition of capitalism which
is a
detoured and hence complex singularity toward the inorganic exteriority
which ultimately enforces an all-inclusive liberation from the conservative
nature of the organism and its confines for thought.
is
the
has

as well as his essays,

. Although the economy of dissipation can be captured by

humans through a libidinal materialist participation with the techno-capitalist singularity, it ultimately escapes the gravity of humans and entails their dissolution into the inorganic exteriority.

(anti-essence)

and convoluted syntheses of techn and physis so as

. Immunological

. It is this singularized deliverance of the

human to the state of dissolutionconcomitant with its pulverizing impact on the correlation between thought and the self-love of man (viz. organic survivalism)

. Thus through a politico-economic reappropriation of Freuds theory of the death-drive,

. Now compare Lands trenchant veneration of Freuds account of

the death-drive as a creativity that pushes life into its extravagances with the inhumanist model of capitalism wherein the affirmation of and demand for more is but a rivers search for the sea.
model or

here

despite its collusive entanglements with humans desires and interests

Yet the question we must ask

whether

capitalist dissipative singularity is really emancipative

?
does
the capitalist model of accelerating planetary dissipation really effectuate
an inhumanist model of emancipation that breaks away from the
conservative ambits of the human?
or not

And even more crucially,

The ambition of this essay is, accordingly, to renegotiate the definition of the capitalist singularity through a closer and

more extreme engagement with Freuds speculative thesis on thanatropic regression. Accordingly, we shall investigate if this emancipative conception of capitalism genuinely presents a radical model of the Inhuman or not.

The collusion between science and capitalism imparts an alarmingly

critical significance to such inspections into the relation between
capitalism and its image as an inevitable singularity
. The collusion of capitalism with science enables capitalism to
incorporate contemporary sciences continuous disenchantment of cosmos
as the locus of absolute objectivity
Capitalism is inevitable because it terrestrially coincides with and
converges upon the cosmic truth of extinction
t is emancipative
because it harbours the debacle of human and binds the enlightening
that coheres with the compulsive regression of the organism toward

the inorganic exteriority

and inevitable extinction. In doing so, capitalism can establish a concurrently inevitable and emancipative image of itself:

(Brassier); i

disenchantment implicit in dissolution as an objectifying truth.

capitalism provides capitalism
Whilst the former grants capitalism a vector of
participation, the latter constitutes capitalisms crafty model of
emancipation.
nothing has been more profitable for capitalism than
its clandestine alliance with science through whose support capitalism has
become increasingly elusive, more difficult to resist, harder to escap
Antihumanism
has
ironically become the formidable assassin of capitalism in that it connects
capitalism with an inhumanist model of emancipation or grants capitalism
9In other words, the complicity of

science and

with a speculative weapon capable of imposing capitalism as the universal horizon of politic economic problems as well as

the ultimate mode of departure from the restricting ambit of the terrestrial sphere.

In a sense, probably

e and more

seductive for those who await the imminent homecoming of scientific enlightenment or the advent of technological singularities.

, in this regard,

mythical powers against various manifests of humanist hubris

. Therefore, this essay can also be

read as a speculative reprisal against the supposedly anti humanist aspects of capitalism which contribute to its image as an irresistible singularity. This essay, consequently, shall attempt to wrest a radical conception of inhumanism
from the Capital-nurturing hands of antihumanism in its various forms. In the wake of the complicity between science and capitalism, it is becoming more evident that the inhumanist

resistance

against capitalism should not dabble in preaching against humanism and

its philosophical minions. Instead, it should dispose of the kind of
antihumanist thought that romanticallywhether willingly or not
contributes to the cult of Capital
In The Thirst for Annihilation
Land introduces an inhumanist model of capitalism
The reason for Lands emphatic recourse
is that the
extremity and terrestrial generality of Freuds account of the death-drive
are able to universally mobilize capitalism beyond its historic and
particular conditions
it is the death-drive that transcendentally and
from within universalizes capital
Land assumes that the
emancipative conception of capitalism requires a realist model capable of
positing the reality of emancipation exterior to ontological and subjective
privileges of human
and occludes both thinking and praxis.

and later in his numerous essays,

through a reappropriation of Freuds

energetic mod el of the nervous system.

to Freuds energetic model

. In other words,

as the all-encompassing capitalism. Furthermore, as Land points out, if death is already inherent to capital as a machine part, the

death of capitalism is a delusion either generated by anthropomorphic wishful thinking or neurotic indulgence in victimhood.10 In short,

. And it is Freuds energetic model that as a prototypical model of speculative thought revokes the enchanted ontological privileges of life by presenting life as a temporal

scission from its precursor exteriority qua inorganic. Both the life of thought and the life of the human body are externally objectified by the originary exteriority that pulls them back toward a dissolution which is posited in anterior
posteriority to life. The external objectification of the human hardwarecoincidental with the independent reality of dissolutionundermines the monopoly and hegemony of the human genetic lineage as the vehicle of social

On the other hand, the objectification of thought is traumatically

bound as a vector of disillusionment in regard to radical deficiencies of life
. Such disillusionment paves the road toward an
dynamics.

as the constitutive horizon of thoughts topology and dynamism

abyssal realm where thought must be armed with a speculative drive.

Accordingly for Land, Freuds
model is comprised of an emancipative
yet implicitly antihumanist front
Ray Brassier seems to be fully aware of the
threats that the Landian definition of capitalism poses
the emancipative energy of the truth of extinction
implicated in the theory of thanatropic regression is converted to an alien
and thus impartial justification for capitalist indulgences which conflate
energetic

in that it posits the anterior posteriority of dissolution as a radical truth determined to flush human faculties down the latrine of

pure objectivity. In his tour de force on nihilism and enlightenment, Nihil Unbound,

against the disenchanting potentials of Freuds account of

the death-drive. In the wake of such a definition,

anthropic interests with the ever more complicating paths of organic

survivalism
the inevitable truth of extinction as the apotheosis of the
enlightenments project of disenchantment is exploited by the Freudian
. In other words,

reformulation of capitalism

. In this way, the anterior posteriority of extinction as an ultimate disenchantment affirms and reenacts human not only as the participating

and accelerating element but also as something which deviously reconciles vitalism with the disenchanting truth of extinction.11 In order to purge Freuds theory of thanatropic regression from such manipulations and draw an

, Ray Brassier presents a

solution.12 Brassier
proposes that Freuds theory of thanatropic regression must be
intimate link between the will to know and the will to nothingness

genuinely speculative

reinscribed on a cosmic level so that not only the organic dissolves into
the inorganic but also the inorganic gains a dissipative or loosening
tendency toward the precursor exteriority qua the anterior posteriority of
extinction The cosmological re-inscription of Freuds account of the deathdrive unshackles the disenchanting and hence emancipative truth of
extinction from the capitalism-friendly horizon of vitalism
.
It is in loosening every index of interiority and deserting their domain of
influence that the truth of extinction forces thought to be a speculative
imagination for and of the cosmic abyss.
.

.13 Just as the organic interiority is deserted on

behalf of the inorganic, the in organic materials as conditions of embodiment are deserted on behalf of an unbound cosmic exteriority where even the elementary fabric of matter is an index of interiorization and must be undone

Impacts

McLaren (Alt included)

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

history's presumed failure to defang existing capitalist

relations has been read by many self-identified radicals as an advertisement for
capitalism's inevitability. As a result, the chorus refrain There Is No
Alternative, sung by liberals and conservatives, has been buttressed by the symphony
of post-Marxist voices recommending that we give socialism a decent burial and
move on. Within this context, to speak of the promise of Marx and socialism may appear anachronistic, even
of socialism. Concomitantly,

nave, especially since the post-al intellectual vanguard has presumably demonstrated the folly of doing so. Yet we
stubbornly believe that the chants of T.I.N.A. must be combated for they offer as a fait accompli, something which

Leftists should refuse to accept namely the triumph of capitalism

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

people is roughly equal to the annual income of the poorest 47 percent of the world's population, while the
combined assets of the three richest people exceed the combined GDP of the 48 poorest nations (CCPA, 2002, p. 3).

2.8 billion peoplealmost half of the world's populationstruggle in

desperation to live on less than two dollars a day (McQuaig, 2001, p. 27). As many as
250 million children are wage slaves and there are over a billion workers who are
either un- or under-employed. These are the concrete realities of our timerealities
that require a vigorous class analysis , an unrelenting critique of capitalism
and an oppositional politics capable of confronting what Ahmad (1998, p. 2) refers to as
capitalist universality. They are realities that require something more than that which is offered by
Approximately

the prophets of difference and post-Marxists who would have us relegate socialism to the scrapheap of history and

Never before has a Marxian analysis of

capitalism and class rule been so desperately needed. That is not to say that everything Marx
said or anticipated has come true, for that is clearly not the case. Many critiques of Marx focus on
mummify Marxism along with Lenin's corpse.

his strategy for moving toward socialism, and with ample justification;
nonetheless Marx did provide us with fundamental insights into class
society that have held true to this day. Marx's enduring relevance lies in his indictment of capitalism
which continues to wreak havoc in the lives of most. While capitalism's cheerleaders have attempted to hide its
sordid underbelly, Marx's description of capitalism as the sorcerer's dark power is even more apt in light of

Rather than jettisoning Marx, decentering

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

the questionable assumptions that have come to constitute the core of

contemporary radical theory, pedagogy

and politics.

In terms of effecting

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

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

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

which it is called (Bannerji, 2000, p. 41). The task for progressives today is to seize the
moment and plant the seeds for a political agenda that is grounded in
historical possibilities and informed by a vision committed to overcoming exploitative conditions.
These seeds, we would argue, must be derived from the tree of radical political
economy. For the vast majority of people todaypeople of all racial classifications or
identities, all genders and sexual orientationsthe common frame of
reference arcing across difference, the concerns and aspirations that are most widely shared are those that
are rooted in the common experience of everyday life shaped and constrained
by political economy (Reed, 2000, p. xxvii). While post-Marxist advocates of the
politics of difference suggest that such a stance is outdated, we would argue
that the categories which they have employed to analyze the social are now losing
their usefulness, particularly in light of actual contemporary social movements. All over the globe,
there are large anti-capitalist movements afoot. In February 2002, chants of Another World
Is Possible became the theme of protests in Porto Allegre. It seems that those people struggling in the
streets havent read about T.I.N.A., the end of grand narratives of
emancipation, or the decentering of capitalism. It seems as though the struggle for basic
case in political matters. Rather,

survival and some semblance of human dignity in the mean streets of the dystopian metropoles doesnt permit
much time or opportunity to read the heady proclamations emanating from seminar rooms. As E. P. Thompson
(1978, p. 11) once remarked, sometimes experience walks in without knocking at the door, and announces deaths,

This, of course, does not mean

socialism will inevitably come about, yet a sense of its nascent promise
animates current social movements. Indeed, noted historian Howard Zinn (2000, p. 20) recently
crises of subsistence, trench warfare, unemployment, inflation, genocide.
that

after years of single-issue organizing (i.e. the politics of difference), the

WTO and other anti-corporate capitalist protests signaled a turning point
in the history of movements of recent decades, for it was the issue of class that
more than anything bound everyone together. History, to paraphrase Thompson (1978, p. 25)
pointed out that

doesnt seem to be following Theory's script. Our vision is informed by Marx's historical materialism and his
revolutionary socialist humanism, which must not be conflated with liberal humanism. For left politics and

a socialist humanist vision remains crucial, whose fundamental features

include the creative potential of people to challenge collectively the
circumstances that they inherit. This variant of humanism seeks to give expression to the pain,
pedagogy,

sorrow and degradation of the oppressed, those who labor under the ominous and ghastly cloak of globalized
capital. It calls for the transformation of those conditions that have prevented the bulk of humankind from fulfilling

It vests its hope for change in the development of critical

consciousness and social agents who make history, although not always in conditions of
its potential.

their choosing. The political goal of socialist humanism is, however, not a resting in difference but rather the
emancipation of difference at the level of human mutuality and reciprocity. This would be a step forward for the
discovery or creation of our real differences which can only in the end be explored in reciprocal ways (Eagleton,

the enduring relevance of a radical socialist pedagogy

and politics is the centrality it accords to the interrogation of capitalism.
1996, p. 120). Above all else,

We can no longer afford to remain indifferent to the horror and savagery committed by capitalist's barbaric

We need to recognize that capitalist democracy is unrescuably

contradictory in its own self-constitution. Capitalism and democracy cannot be translated
into one another without profound efforts at manufacturing empty idealism. Committed Leftists must
unrelentingly cultivate a democratic socialist vision that refuses to forget the wretched of the
machinations.

earth, the children of the damned and the victims of the culture of silencea task which requires more than

Leftists must
challenge the
true evils that are manifest in the tentacles of global capitalism's reach. And, more than
this, Leftists must search for the cracks in the edifice of globalized
capitalism and shine light on those fissures that give birth to alternatives.
Socialism today, undoubtedly, runs against the grain of received wisdom, but its
vision of a vastly improved and freer arrangement of social relations
beckons on the horizon. Its unwritten text is nascent in the present even as it
abstruse convolutions and striking ironic poses in the agnostic arena of signifying practices.

illuminate the little shops of horror that lurk beneath globalizations shiny faade; they must

exists among the fragments of history and the shards of distant memories. Its potential remains untapped and its
promise needs to be redeemed.