Historical Materialism

Top Shelf
 1nc (Regular)

<<<<Insert Link>>>>
Capitalism is the worst turns case and causes extinction
Brown, 05 (Charles, Professor of Economics and Research Scientist at the
University of Michigan, 05/13/2005, http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pen-
l/2005w15/msg00062.htm)

The capitalist class owns the factories, the banks, and transportation-the means of
production and distribution. Workers sell their ability to work in order to acquire the
necessities of life. Capitalists buy the workers' labor, but only pay them back a portion of the wealth they
create. Because the capitalists own the means of production, they are able to keep the surplus wealth created by
workers above and beyond the cost of paying worker's wages and other costs of production. This surplus is called
These
"profit" and consists of unpaid labor that the capitalists appropriate and use to achieve ever-greater profits.
profits are turned into capital which capitalists use to further exploit the producers
of all wealth-the working class. Capitalists are compelled by competition to seek to
maximize profits. The capitalist class as a whole can do that only by extracting a
greater surplus from the unpaid labor of workers by increasing exploitation. Under
capitalism, economic development happens only if it is profitable to the individual
capitalists, not for any social need or good. The profit drive is inherent in capitalism,
and underlies or exacerbates all major social ills of our times . With the rapid advance of
technology and productivity, new forms of capitalist ownership have developed to maximize profit. The
working people of our country confront serious, chronic problems because of
capitalism. These chronic problems become part of the objective conditions that
confront each new generation of working people. The threat of nuclear war, which
can destroy all humanity, grows with the spread of nuclear weapons, space-based
weaponry, and a military doctrine that justifies their use in preemptive wars and
wars without end. Ever since the end of World War II, the U.S. has been constantly involved in aggressive
military actions big and small. These wars have cost millions of lives and casualties, huge material losses, as well as
Threats to the environment continue to spiral, threatening
trillions of U.S. taxpayer dollars.
all life on our planet. Millions of workers are unemployed or insecure in their jobs,
even during economic upswings and periods of "recovery" from recessions . Most
workers experience long years of stagnant real wages, while health and education costs soar. Many workers are
forced to work second and third jobs to make ends meet. Most workers now average four different occupations
during their lifetime, being involuntarily moved from job to job and career to career. Often, retirement-age workers
are forced to continue working just to provide health care for themselves. With capitalist globalization, jobs move as
Millions of people continuously
capitalists export factories and even entire industries to other countries.
live below the poverty level; many suffer homelessness and hunger. Public and
private programs to alleviate poverty and hunger do not reach everyone, and are
inadequate even for those they do reach. Racism remains the most potent weapon
to divide working people. Institutionalized racism provides billions in extra profits for
the capitalists every year due to the unequal pay racially oppressed workers receive
for work of comparable value. All workers receive lower wages when racism succeeds in dividing and
disorganizing them. In every aspect of economic and social life, African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, Asian
other nationally and racially oppressed
a nd Pacific Islanders, Arabs and Middle Eastern peoples, and
people experience conditions inferior to that of whites. Racist violence and the
poison of racist ideas victimize all people of color no matter which economic class
they belong to. The attempts to suppress and undercount the vote of the African
American and other racially oppressed people are part of racism in the electoral
process. Racism permeates the police, judicial and prison systems, perpetuating
unequal sentencing, racial profiling, discriminatory enforcement, and police
brutality. The democratic, civil and human rights of all working people are
continually under attack. These attacks range from increasingly difficult procedures for union recognition
and attempts to prevent full union participation in elections, to the absence of the right to strike for many public
workers. They range from undercounting minority communities in the census to making it difficult for working
people to run for office because of the domination of corporate campaign funding and the high cost of advertising.
These attacks also include growing censorship and domination of the media by the
ultra-right; growing restrictions and surveillance of activist social movements and
the Left; open denial of basic rights to immigrants; and, violations of the Geneva
Conventions up to and including torture for prisoners. These abuses all serve to
maintain the grip of the capitalists on government power . They use this power to ensure the
economic and political dominance of their class. Women still face a considerable differential in
wages for work of equal or comparable value. They also confront barriers to
promotion, physical and sexual abuse, continuing unequal workload in home and
family life, and male supremacist ideology perpetuating unequal and often unsafe conditions. The
constant attacks on social welfare programs severely impact single women, single
mothers, nationally and racially oppressed women, and all working class women.
The reproductive rights of all women are continually under attack ideologically and
politically. Violence against women in the home and in society at large remains a
shameful fact of life in the U.S.

Reject the aff to validate and adopt the method of historical

materialism that is the 1NC.
Class first--one must understand the existing social totality
before one can act on itgrounding the sites of political
contestation or knowledge outside of labor and surplus value
merely serve to humanize capital and prevent a transition to a
society beyond oppression
Tumino 01(Stephen, Prof. English @ Pitt What is Orthodox Marxism and Why it
Matters Now More than Ever, Red Critique)

Any effective political theory will have to do at least two things: it will have to offer an
integrated understanding of social practices and, based on such an
interrelated knowledge, offer a guideline for praxis. My main argument here is that among all
contesting social theories now, only Orthodox Marxism has been able to produce
an integrated knowledge of the existing social totality and provide
lines of praxis that will lead to building a society free from necessity .
But first I must clarify what I mean by Orthodox Marxism. Like all other modes and forms of political theory,
the very theoretical identity of Orthodox Marxism is itself contestednot just from non-and anti-Marxists who
question the very "real" (by which they mean the "practical" as under free-market criteria) existence of any
kind of Marxism now but, perhaps more tellingly, from within the Marxist tradition itself. I will, therefore, first
say what I regard to be the distinguishing marks of Orthodox Marxism and then outline a short polemical map
of contestation over Orthodox Marxism within the Marxist theories now. I will end by arguing for its effectivity
to
in bringing about a new society based not on human rights but on freedom from necessity. I will argue that
know contemporary societyand to be able to act on such knowledge
one has to first of all know what makes the existing social totality . I will
argue that the dominant social totality is based on inequalitynot just inequality of power but inequality of
economic access (which then determines access to health care, education, housing, diet, transportation, . . . ).
This systematic inequality cannot be explained by gender, race,
sexuality, disability, ethnicity, or nationality. These are all secondary
contradictions and are all determined by the fundamental contradiction of capitalism which is
inscribed in the relation of capital and labor. All modes of Marxism now explain social
inequalities primarily on the basis of these secondary contradictions
and in doing soand this is my main argumentlegitimate capitalism. Why? Because
such arguments authorize capitalism without gender, race,
discrimination and thus accept economic inequality as an integral part
of human societies. They accept a sunny capitalisma capitalism
beyond capitalism. Such a society, based on cultural equality but economic inequality, has
always been the not-so-hidden agenda of the bourgeois leftwhether it has
been called "new left," "postmarxism," or "radical democracy." This is, by the way, the main reason for its
popularity in the culture industryfrom the academy (Jameson, Harvey, Haraway, Butler,. . . ) to daily politics
For all, capitalism is here to
(Michael Harrington, Ralph Nader, Jesse Jackson,. . . ) to. . . .
stay and the best that can be done is to make its cruelties more
tolerable, more humane. This humanization (not eradication) of capitalism is the sole goal of ALL
contemporary lefts (marxism, feminism, anti-racism, queeries, . . . ). Such an understanding of
social inequality is based on the fundamental understanding that the source
of wealth is human knowledge and not human labor. That is, wealth is produced by
the human mind and is thus free from the actual objective conditions that shape the historical relations of
labor and capital. Only Orthodox Marxism recognizes the historicity of labor
and its primacy as the source of all human wealth. In this paper I argue that any
emancipatory theory has to be founded on recognition of the priority of Marx's
labor theory of value and not repeat the technological determinism of
corporate theory ("knowledge work") that masquerades as social
theory.
 1nc (K Based)
<<<<Insert Link>>>>>
Capitalism is the worst turns case and causes extinction
Brown, 05 (Charles, Professor of Economics and Research Scientist at the
University of Michigan, 05/13/2005, http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pen-
l/2005w15/msg00062.htm)

The capitalist class owns the factories, the banks, and transportation-the means of
production and distribution. Workers sell their ability to work in order to acquire the
necessities of life. Capitalists buy the workers' labor, but only pay them back a
portion of the wealth they create. Because the capitalists own the means of
production, they are able to keep the surplus wealth created by workers above and
beyond the cost of paying worker's wages and other costs of production. This
surplus is called "profit" and consists of unpaid labor that the capitalists appropriate
and use to achieve ever-greater profits. These profits are turned into capital which
capitalists use to further exploit the producers of all wealth-the working class.
Capitalists are compelled by competition to seek to maximize profits. The capitalist
class as a whole can do that only by extracting a greater surplus from the unpaid
labor of workers by increasing exploitation. Under capitalism, economic
development happens only if it is profitable to the individual capitalists, not for any
social need or good. The profit drive is inherent in capitalism, and underlies or
exacerbates all major social ills of our times. With the rapid advance of technology
and productivity, new forms of capitalist ownership have developed to maximize
profit. The working people of our country confront serious, chronic problems
because of capitalism. These chronic problems become part of the objective
conditions that confront each new generation of working people. The threat of
nuclear war, which can destroy all humanity, grows with the spread of nuclear
weapons, space-based weaponry, and a military doctrine that justifies their use in
preemptive wars and wars without end. Ever since the end of World War II, the U.S.
has been constantly involved in aggressive military actions big and small. These
wars have cost millions of lives and casualties, huge material losses, as well as
trillions of U.S. taxpayer dollars. Threats to the environment continue to spiral,
threatening all life on our planet. Millions of workers are unemployed or insecure in
their jobs, even during economic upswings and periods of "recovery" from
recessions. Most workers experience long years of stagnant real wages, while health
and education costs soar. Many workers are forced to work second and third jobs to
make ends meet. Most workers now average four different occupations during their
lifetime, being involuntarily moved from job to job and career to career. Often,
retirement-age workers are forced to continue working just to provide health care
for themselves. With capitalist globalization, jobs move as capitalists export
factories and even entire industries to other countries. Millions of people
continuously live below the poverty level; many suffer homelessness and hunger.
Public and private programs to alleviate poverty and hunger do not reach everyone,
and are inadequate even for those they do reach. Racism remains the most potent
weapon to divide working people. Institutionalized racism provides billions in extra
profits for the capitalists every year due to the unequal pay racially oppressed
workers receive for work of comparable value. All workers receive lower wages
when racism succeeds in dividing and disorganizing them. In every aspect of
economic and social life, African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, Asian a nd
Pacific Islanders, Arabs and Middle Eastern peoples, and other nationally and
racially oppressed people experience conditions inferior to that of whites. Racist
violence and the poison of racist ideas victimize all people of color no matter which
economic class they belong to. The attempts to suppress and undercount the vote
of the African American and other racially oppressed people are part of racism in
the electoral process. Racism permeates the police, judicial and prison systems,
perpetuating unequal sentencing, racial profiling, discriminatory enforcement, and
police brutality. The democratic, civil and human rights of all working people are
continually under attack. These attacks range from increasingly difficult procedures
for union recognition and attempts to prevent full union participation in elections, to
the absence of the right to strike for many public workers. They range from
undercounting minority communities in the census to making it difficult for working
people to run for office because of the domination of corporate campaign funding
and the high cost of advertising. These attacks also include growing censorship and
domination of the media by the ultra-right; growing restrictions and surveillance of
activist social movements and the Left; open denial of basic rights to immigrants;
and, violations of the Geneva Conventions up to and including torture for prisoners.
These abuses all serve to maintain the grip of the capitalists on government power.
They use this power to ensure the economic and political dominance of their class.
Women still face a considerable differential in wages for work of equal or
comparable value. They also confront barriers to promotion, physical and sexual
abuse, continuing unequal workload in home and family life, and male supremacist
ideology perpetuating unequal and often unsafe conditions. The constant attacks on
social welfare programs severely impact single women, single mothers, nationally
and racially oppressed women, and all working class women. The reproductive
rights of all women are continually under attack ideologically and politically.
Violence against women in the home and in society at large remains a shameful fact
of life in the U.S.

Our alternative is to return the priority of political contestation

to class. Only beginning with class relations can eliminate the
ideological machinery which legitimizes and extends class
domination and racist practices. Materialist critique of the
historical relationship between the means of production and
the process of racialization in the United States should mark
the starting point of the transformation of exploitative class
and market relations.
San Juan 8 (E. San Juan, Jr., Filipino American literary academic, mentor, cultural reviewer, civic intellectual, activist,
writer, essayist, video/film maker, editor, and poet whose works related to the Filipino Diaspora in English and Filipino languages
have been translated into German, Russian, French, Italian, and Chinese.[2] As an author of books on race and cultural studies,[3]
he was a major influence on the academic world.[2] He was the director of the Philippines Cultural Studies Center in Storrs,
Connecticut in the United States.[1] In 1999, San Juan, Jr. received the Centennial Award for Achievement in Literature from the
Cultural Center of the Philippines because of his contributions to Filipino and Filipino American Studies.[2] FROM
RACE/RACISM TO CLASS STRUGGLE: On Critical Race Theory Posted on October 4, 2008 FROM RACE TO CLASS
STRUGGLE: A RE-TURN OF CRITICAL RACE THEORY, THE PHILIPPINES MATRIX PROJECT
http://philcsc.wordpress.com/2008/10/04/from-raceracism-to-class-struggle-on-critical-race-theory/)

Given its composition, and the pervasive climate of reaction, the Forum could not of course endorse a radical
approach that would focus on the elimination of the exploitation of labor (labor power as commodity) as a
necessary first step. Given its limits, it could not espouse a need for a thoroughgoing change of the material
basis of social production and reproductionthe latter involving the hegemonic rule of the propertied bloc in
each society profiting from the unequal division of labor and the unequal distribution of social wealthon
which the institutional practices of racism (apartheid, discrimination, genocide) thrive. Race is the modality in
which class is lived, as Stuart Hall remarks concerning post-1945 Britain (Solomos 1986, 103). Without the
political power in the hands of the democratic-popular masses under the leadership of the working
class, the ideological machinery (laws, customs, religion, state bureaucracy) that legitimizes class
domination, with its attendant racist practices, cannot be changed. What is required is a revolutionary
process that mobilizes a broad constituency based on substantive equality and social justice as an essential
part of the agenda to dissolve class structures; any change in the ideas, beliefs, and norms would
produce changes in the economic, political and social institutions, which would in turn promote wide-
ranging changes in social relations among groups, sectors, and so on. Within a historical-materialist
framework, the starting point and end point for analyzing the relations between structures in any
sociohistorical totality cannot be anything else but the production and reproduction of material
existence. The existence of any totality follows transformation rules whereby it is constantly being
restructured into a new formation (Harvey 1973). These rules reflect the dialectical unfolding of manifold
contradictions constituting the internal relations of the totality. Within this conflicted, determinate totality, race
cannot be reduced to class, nor can class be subsumed by race, since those concepts express different forms of
social relations. What is the exact relation between the two? This depends on the historical character of the
social production in question and the ideological-political class struggles defining it. In his valuable treatise,
The Invention of the White Race, Theodore Allen has demonstrated the precise genealogy and
configuration of racism in the U.S. It first manifested itself when the European colonial settlers
based on private property in land and resources subdued another social order based on collective,
tribal tenure of land and resources, denying the latter any social identitysocial death for Native
Americans. We then shift our attention to the emergence of the white race and its system of racial
oppression with the defeat of Bacons Rebellion in 1677 and the establishment of a system of lifetime
hereditary bond servitude (for African Americans): The insistence on the social distinction between
the poorest member of the oppressor group and any member, however propertied, of the oppressed
group, is the hallmark of racial oppression (Allen 1997, 243). In effect, white supremacy defining the
nature of civil society was constructed at a particular historical conjuncture demanded by class war.
The result is a flexible and adjustable system that can adjust its racial dynamics in order to divide the
subordinates, resist any critique of its ideological legitimacy, and prevent any counter-hegemonic bloc of
forces from overthrowing class rule. Class struggle intervenes through its impact in the ideological-political
sphere of civil society. Racial categories operate through the mediation of civil society which (with the class-
manipulated State) regulate personal relations through the reifying determinations of value, market exchange,
and capital. Harry Chang comments on the social mediation of racial categories: Blacks and whites constitute
social blocks in a developed setting of mass society in which social types (instead of persons) figure as basic
units of economic and political managementThe crucial intervention of objectification, i.e., relational poles
conceived as the intrinsic quality of objects in relation, must not be neglected here. Racial formation in a
country is an aspect of class formation, but the reason races are not classes lies in this objectification process
(or fetishization) (1985, 43). Commodity fetishism enables the ideology of racism (inferiority tied to biology,
genetics, cultural attributes) to register its effects in common-sense thinking and routine behavior in class-
divided society (Lukacs 1971). Because market relations hide unequal power relations, sustained
ideological critique and transformative collective actions are imperative. This signifies the heuristic
maxim of permanent revolution (Lefevbre 1968, 171) in Marxist thought: any long-term political struggle to
abolish capitalism as a system of extracting surplus value through a system of the unequal division of labor
(and rewards) needs to alter the institutions and practices of civil society that replicate and strengthen the
fetishizing or objectifying mechanism of commodity production and exchange (the capitalist mode of
production). If racism springs from the reification of physical attributes (skin color, eye shape) to validate the
differential privileges in a bourgeois regime, then the abolition of labor-power as a commodity will be a
necessary if not sufficient step in doing away with the conditions that require racial privileging of certain
groups in class-divided formations. Racism is not an end in itself but, despite its seeming autonomy, an
instrumentality of class rule.
Links
 Animals Links
Animal advocacy in the current capitalist economic and
political climate will be anti-systemic in its effect. your project
will inevitably make huge concessions to appear politically
powerful
FOTOPOULOS, a political philosopher and economist who founded the inclusive
democracy movement, Senior Lecturer in Economics at the Polytechnic of North
London & SARGIS, has taught secondary school biology in the inner city for
twenty-four years. He is a political activist and union leader, 2006 (Takis and John,
The International Journal of INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY, vol.2, no.3, June)
Primarily, then, the very composition of AAM, enhanced by the fact that there is no
clear political project of an antisystemic nature to back this movement, means that
it is bound to be a single-issue reformist movement. This is because, as is the
case with every popular front and every forum-type movement, any common
political platform that could possibly emerge from it would have to
represent the lowest common denominator of its varied components. And
this is exactly the fundamental weakness which could make the development of an
antisystemic consciousness out of a philosophy of rights almost impossible.

The 1AC shrugs off the position of the proletariat in order for a
more egaltarian position amoung the animals - this reproduces
the status quo.
Power 10 (Nina Power, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Roehampton University.
Theory and Event Volume 13, Issue 1, 2010)
But this generic universality, the experience of the species in production, is not
enough to break with the generalities of metaphysics: the collective practice of
work does not do enough to separate out man from the beasts, it merely places
him in another natural category. But Gattung shouldn't be understood merely
naturally; Virno's historically specific claim about the point at which we can
identify the major features of human nature and our troubled interaction with the
environment is a claim about our generic being, but it is also a material and a
historical claim about the situation we find ourselves in now. We should
remember, too, that the original reception of the idea of Gattungswesen by the
Young Hegelians sought to reconcile the alienated individual with the universal in
the social, in light of the fact that the universality promised by the Hegelian
system appeared nowhere in reality. This absence is the reason why the young
Marx could write of the proletariat that it "can lay claim to no particular right
because the wrong it suffers is not a particular wrong but wrong in general."39
But Agamben equates the living being with its political, linguistic and natural
capture by the state so completely that there seems to be no room for any kind
of historically anomalous or collectively unprecedented subject, the proletariat or
anything else, one that would break with history or disrupt everyday order. For
Agamben, Marx moves too quickly to conceive of man as a natural being,
neglecting the role of art, in particular. The real break in history as Agamben sees
it is not recent transformations in the nature of work (from Fordism to post-
Fordism, for instance), but the advent of nihilism. The historical event that a
rethinking of praxis, poiesis and work must encounter is thus a cultural-
metaphysical break, and not an economic one. The importance of nihilism for
Agamben explains to some extent his continued emphasis on the State (for
example, in terms of the commonalities he discerns between Nazism and modern
democracies), and the West's biopolitical mode of governance. If class has gone,
if what we are left with is a "single planetary petty bourgeoisie" as the form in
which "humanity has survived nihilism,"40 it is because, for Agamben, we exist
still under the "sign" of Nazism. But does it make sense to speak of the camp,
and of homo sacer as the primary images of contemporary politics? Certainly we
cannot ignore the fact that illegal detention centers exist, that immigrants are
simultaneously social scapegoats and exploited workers, but Agamben runs the
risk of totalizing these images into seemingly insurmountable conditions of
contemporary life. There is something exceedingly ominous about the following
two statements, made in Means Without End, the first with reference to
Tiananmen: "the tanks will appear again"41 and the second more general claim
that "[t]he camp ... is the new biopolitical nomos of the planet."42

Their reform of the worst aspects of animal exploitation

makes them complicit in the genocide they try to eliminate
the only way to end animal suffering is with capitalism as the
starting point
Hagen, 2008 (Jamie, will be attending Brooklyn College as a graduate student in the Political Science program in the fall of 2007, A
look at the political economy of animal rights, February 16, http://animalethicsandtheory.blogspot.com/)

Crucial to understanding how to get out of a particular paradigm and mindset is

understanding how one got there - understanding the framework from which
people have developed a view of animals as mere property ("Animals are nothing
more than the means to an end of profit in contemporary capitalist production.
Their particularity, their interests in not suffering, their desires to be free and to
live as beings in the world are all subjugated-en masse- to the productive ends of
agriculture capital." - pp 58) better allows us to understand the ways in which
people will need to reinterpret and understand the world to imagine a world in
which animals are treated as living beings with interests and desires who must be
acknowledged and treated as such, rather than dominated. ("In short,
hierarchical thinking creates prejudices which are reinforced and reproduced by
economic and ideological structures." - pp 87) Often Torres references Gary
Francione, another abolitionist writer to whom I've referred in the past. The two
address the fundamental flaws in the current efforts of the animal rights and
welfarist movements: As the movement is structured today, there is a deep and
abiding disconnect between means and ends. By pursuing the means of reform,
animal protection organizations assume that somehow, at some point, in some
way in the future we will reach an end where animals are no longer exploited. It is
almost reminiscent of the talk of the left about life after the revolution. The
problem is that the primary means of activism today simply supports the basic
relations which commodify animals and damn them to bloody exploitation. As
long as animal rights activists are stuck on pursuing an agenda to reform the
worst practices of animal agriculture, they will remain little more than
consultants. It is an industry that will likely accept their demands in some
measure, provided they either make for a good marketing opportunity or stall the
actual abolition of animal property and animal exploitation. Worse still,
organizations that engage in this kind of activism are profiting from it and
maintaining their bureaucracies on the backs of the "humanely raised" animal
they care so much for. This makes them a party to the animal suffering they are
supposedly against. - pp 105 The criticism of the modern animal rights
movement's avoidance of any real work to address common problems faced
along with non-human movements stemming from the same hegemonic ideology
is priceless commentary too often left undone and unsaid. (And I for one can
appreciate the acknowledgment of the irrational, unproductive hostility and lack
of appreciation and understanding experienced by those interested in theory
expressed from the "real activists" of the movement!) While I have severe
reservations about the position of the social anarchist, the use of a Marxist
critique to understand the alienation of various species (separate post to follow),
and the commodification of animals, is essential grounding for any successful
ventures to be made in animal rights .
 Cultural Studies Link
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 anti-
political 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
Eventually, the popular culture of marginal groups
the New Left symbiosis with popular culture.
(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 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
Perhaps the millions had
cultural innovation was daily insinuating itself into the activity of ordinary people.
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
Is this musical style or that
import of cultural practices and pinpointing their potentials for "resistance."
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 ruling group" or "the
hegemonic bloc," and by the same token, that culture is "resistant" that is affirmed by groups assumed (because of
The process of
class position, gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, and so on) to be "marginalized" or "resistant."
labeling is circular, since it has been predetermined whether a particular group is, in
fact, hegemonic or resistant. The populism of cultural studies is fundamental to its allure, and to the
political meaning its adherents find there, for cultural studies bespeaks an affirmation of popularity tout court. To
say that popular culture is "worth attention" in the scholarly sense is, for cultural
studies, to say something pointed: that the people who render it popular are not
misguided when they do so, not fooled, not dominated, not distracted, not passive . If
anything, the reverse: the premise is that popular culture is popular because and only because the people find in it
channels of desire pleasure, initiative, freedom. It is this premise that gives cultural studies its aura of political
engagement-or at least political consolation. To unearth reason and value, brilliance and energy in popular culture is
to affirm that the people have not been defeated. The cultural student, singing their songs, analyzing their lyrics, at
However unfavorable the balance of political forces, people
the same time sings their praises.
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 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-American world, including Australia, these
conditions scarcely obtain. Here, in a discouraging time, 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 electoral defeats. One need not be preoccupied by
the ways in which the political culture's center of gravity has moved rightward-or rather, one can put this down to
One need not even be rigorous about what one
the iron grip of the established media institutions.
opposes and what one proposes in its place. Is capitalism the trouble? Is it the particular
form of capitalism practiced by multinational corporations in a deregulatory era? Is it patriarchy (and is that the
proper term for a society that has seen an upheaval in relations between women and men in the course of a half-
Racism? Antidemocracy? Practitioners of cultural studies, like the rest of the
century)?
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 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
insofar as cultural studies makes claims for itself as an insurgent
already in force. Still,
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 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
A chastened, realistic cultural
studies, free of the burden of imagining itself to be a political practice.
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 be researchedand changed. We would learn more about politics, economy, and society,
If we wish to do
and in the process, appreciate better what culture, and cultural study, do not accomplish.
politics, let us organize groups, coalitions, demonstrations, lobbies, whatever; let us
do politics. Let us not think that our academic work is already that.
Culture studies are the ultimate legitimizing tool of late-
capitalism assaulting meta-narratives has resulted in a
privileging of the local over the global making class
consciousness impossible.
Katz, 2000 (Adam, English Instructor at Onodaga Community College.
Postmodernism and the Politics of Culture. Pg. 34-35.)

cultural studies has in the last instance updated and reinforced the
So far, I will argue,
traditional function of the humanities , rather than transforming it. Cultural studies has
accommodated itself to existing practices, by producing new modes of fetishizing
texts and preserving conservative modes of subjectivity . In this way, it continues to advance
the ideological function of the modern humanities in a changed social environment. In particular, cultural studies
has maintained the primacy of experience as the limit to critique, thus reworking rather than displacing the liberal
subject. The right wing attacks the changes introduced by cultural studies, chargingas in the ongoing PC scare
and the culture warsthat the humanities are abandoning their commitment to objectivity and the universal
values of Western culture. These commitments and values have, of course, been undermined by social
developments that have socialized subjects in new ways while concentrating global socioeconomic power within an
intellectual and political tendencies
ever shrinking number of transnational corporations. The
are responding to these transformations by providing
coordinated by cultural studies, meanwhile,
updated and therefore more useful modes of legitimation for capitalist society . At the
same time, regardless of the explicit opposition on the part of many leading figures within cultural studies to
privatization and the assaults on culture critique within the academy (which I will discuss in Chapter 4), the most
concepts of cultural studies (such as destabilization, articulation,
fundamental
interdisciplinarity, and so forth) provide ideological justi fications for institutional
streamlining and downsizing along with the sup pression of critique. These
developments in the mode of knowledge production must be un derstood within the
framework of the needs of the late-capitalist social or der. The emergence of theory and
(post)Althusserian understandings of ideology reflected and contributed strongly to the undermining of liberal
humanism (in both its classical and its social-democratic versions) as the legitimating ideology of capitalism. The
discrediting of liberal humanism, first under the pressures of anticolonialist revolts and then as a result of the
antihegemonic struggles in the advanced capitalist heartlands, revealed a deep crisis in authority and hegemony in
late-capitalist society. This discrediting also revealed the need for new ideologies of legitimation, free from what
could now be seen as the naivete of liberal humanist universalism, which has come to be widely viewed as a cover
for racist, sexist, and antidemocratic institutions. The institutional tendencies producing the constellation of
practices that have emerged as cultural studies have, then, participated both in the attack on liberal
understandings and in the development of new discourses of legitimation. The liberal humanism predominant in the
academy has increasingly been seen as illegitimate because it depends upon an outmoded notion of private
individualitythat is, the modern notion of the immediacy with which the privileged text is apprehended by the
knowing subject. In this understanding, literature is taken to be in opposition to science and technology, as a site
where what is essential to our human nature can be preserved or recovered in the face of a social reality where this
human essence (freedom) is perpetually at risk. However, the more scientific methods (such as narratology) that
initially undermined the hegemony of new criticism in the American academy, largely through the use of modes
of analysis borrowed from structuralist anthropology and linguistics, were themselves discredited by postmodern
theories as largely conservative discourses interested in resecuring disciplinary boundaries (for example, through
the classification of genres) and protecting an empiricist notion of textuality. Cultural studies, then, is the result of
the combination of the introduction of theory and the politicization of theory enabled by these social and
However, the postmodern assault on master narratives (theory) has
institutional changes.
responded to the discrediting of both structuralism and Marxism in a conservative
political environment by redefining the term politics to mean the resistance of the
individual subject to modes of domination located in the discursive and disciplinary
forms that constitute the subject. This has opened up the possibility of a new line of
development for cultural studiesone in which the local supplants the global as the
framework of analysis and description or one in which redescription replaces explanation as the purpose of
theoretical investigations. I will argue that the set of discourses that have congealed into what I will call postmodern
cultural studies represents the definitive subordination of cultural studies to this line of development. That is, the
ideological struggles carried out throughout the 1970s in such sites as the Birmingham Center for Cultural Studies
in England and the French journal Tel Quel have now been stabilized into a different type of project: the full-scale
reconstruction of liberalism on terms appropriate to late-capitalist social relations.
 Debate Space Links
Our argument is not that the 1ac wasnt authentic or radical
enough, but rather that this model of debate-as-resistance-
politics is a palliative. They sell out debates potential to
generate positive agendas for change by making the ballot
about affirming their voices as suchour counter-role of the
ballot is to refuse those terms as a starting point to reclaim
the political
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/django-
unchained-or-the-help-how-cultural-politics-is-worse-than-no-politics-at-all-and-why)

In addition to knee-jerk anti-statism, the objection that the slaves freed themselves,
as it shows up in favorable comparison of Django Unchained to Lincoln, stems from
a racial pietism that issued from the unholy union of cultural studies and black
studies in the university. More than twenty years of resistance studies that find
again and again, at this point ritualistically, that oppressed people have and express
agency have contributed to undermining the idea of politics as a discrete sphere of
activity directed toward the outward-looking project of affecting the social order,
most effectively through creating, challenging or redefining institutions that anchor
collective action with the objective of developing and wielding power. Instead, the
notion has been largely evacuated of specific content at all. Politics can refer to
whatever one wants it to; all thats required is an act of will in making a claim. The
fact that there has been no serious left presence with any political capacity in this
country for at least a generation has exacerbated this problem. In the absence of
dynamic movements that cohere around affirmative visions for making the society
better, on the order of, say, Franklin Roosevelts 1944 Second Bill of Rights, and
that organize and agitate around programs instrumental to pursuit of such visions,
what remains is the fossil record of past movementsthe still photo legacies of
their public events, postures, and outcomes. Over time, the idea that a left is
defined by commitment to a vision of social transformation and substantive
program for realizing it has receded from cultural memory. Being on the left has
become instead a posture, an identity, utterly disconnected from any specific
practical commitments. Thus star Maggie Gyllenhaal and director Daniel Barnz
defended themselves against complaints about their complicity in the hideously
anti-union propaganda film Wont Back Down by adducing their identities as
progressives. Gyllenhaal insisted that the movie couldnt be anti-union because
Theres no world in which I would ever, EVER make an anti-union movie. My
parents are left of Trotsky.15 Barnz took a similar tack: Im a liberal Democrat,
very pro-union, a member of two unions. I marched with my union a couple of years
ago when we were on strike.16 And Kathryn Bigelow similarly has countered
criticism that her Zero Dark Thirty justifies torture and American militarism more
broadly by invoking her identity as a lifelong pacifist.17 Being a progressive is
now more a matter of how one thinks about oneself than what one stands for or
does in the world. The best that can be said for that perspective is that it registers
acquiescence in defeat. It amounts to an effort to salvage an idea of a left by
reformulating it as a sensibility within neoliberalism rather than a
challenge to it. Gyllenhaal, Barnz, and Bigelow exemplify the power of ideology as
a mechanism that harmonizes the principles one likes to believe one holds
with what advances ones material interests; they also attest to the fact that
the transmutation of leftism into pure self-image exponentially increases the
potential power of that function of ideology. Upton Sinclairs quipIt is difficult to
get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not
understanding ittakes on all the more force when applied not merely to actions
or interpretations of an external world but to devoutly savored self-perception as
well. That left political imagination now operates unself-consciously within the
practical ontology of neoliberalism is also the most important lesson to be drawn
from progressives discussion of Django Unchained and, especially, the move to
compare it with Lincoln. Jon Wiener, writing in The Nation, renders the following
comparisons: In Spielbergs film, the leading black female character is a humble
seamstress in the White House whose eyes fill with tears of gratitude when
Congress votes to abolish slavery. In Tarantinos film, the leading female character
(Kerry Washington) is a defiant slave who has been branded on the face as a
punishment for running away, and is forcedby Leonardo DiCaprioto work as a
prostitute. In Spielbergs film, old white men make history, and black people thank
them for giving them their freedom. In Tarantinos, a black gunslinger goes after the
white slavemaster with homicidal vengeance.18 Never mind that, for what its
worth, Kerry Washingtons character, as she actually appears in the film, is mainly a
cipher, a simpering damsel in distress more reminiscent of Fay Wray in the original
King Kong than heroines of the blaxploitation eras eponymous vehicles Coffy or
Foxy Brown. More problematically, Wieners juxtapositions reproduce the elevation
of private, voluntarist action as a politicssomehow more truly true or authentic, or
at least more appealing emotionallyover the machinations of government
and institutional actors. That is a default presumption of the
identitarian/culturalist left and is also a cornerstone of neoliberalisms
practical ontology. In an essay on Lincoln published a month earlier, Wiener identifies as the central failing of the film its dedication
to the proposition that Lincoln freed the slaves and concludes, after considerable meandering and nit-picking ambivalence that brings the term
pettifoggery to mind, slavery died as a result of the actions of former slaves.19 This either/or construct is both historically false and wrong-headed, and
it is especially surprising that a professional historian like Wiener embraces it. The claim that slaves actions were responsible for the death of slavery is
not only inaccurate; it is a pointless and counterproductive misrepresentation. What purpose is served by denying the significance of the four years of war
and actions of the national government of the United States in ending slavery? Besides, it was indeed the Thirteenth Amendment that abolished slavery.

Slaves mass departure from plantations was self-emancipation, by definition. Their

doing so weakened the southern economy and undermined the secessionists
capacity to fight, and the related infusion of black troops into the Union army provided a tremendous lift both on the
battlefield and for northern morale. How does noting that proximity of Union troops greatly
emboldened that self-emancipation diminish the import of their actions? But it was
nonetheless the Thirteenth Amendment that finally outlawed slavery once and for all in the United States and provided a legal basis
for preempting efforts to reinstate it in effect. Moreover, for all the debate concerning Lincolns motives, the sincerity of his
commitment to emancipation, and his personal views of blacks, and notwithstanding its technical limits with respect to
enforceability, the Emancipation Proclamation emboldened black people, slave and free, and encouraged all slaverys opponents.
And, as Wiener notes himself, the proclamation tied the war explicitly to the elimination of slavery as a system. Firefly, or The Road
 So why is a tale about a manumitted slave/homicidal black gunslinger more
to Serfdom
palatable to a contemporary leftoid sensibility than either a similarly cartoonish one
about black maids and their white employers or one that thematizes Lincolns effort
to push the Thirteenth Amendment through the House of Representatives? The
answer is, to quote the saccharine 1970s ballad, Feelings, nothing more than
feelings. Wieners juxtapositions reflect the political common sense that gives
pride of place to demonstrations of respect for the voices of the oppressed and
recognition of their suffering, agency, and accomplishments. That common sense
informs the proposition that providing inspiration has social or political significance.
But it equally shapes the generic human-interest message of films like The Help
that represent injustice as an issue of human relationsthe alchemy that promises
to reconcile social justice and capitalist class power as a win/win for everyone by
means of attitude adjustments and deepened mutual understanding. That common sense
underwrites the tendency to reduce the past to a storehouse of encouraging post-it messages for the present. It must, because the
presumption that the crucial stakes of political action concern recognition and respect for the oppresseds voices is a presentist
view, and mining the past to reinforce it requires anachronism. The large struggles against slavery and Jim Crow were directed
toward altering structured patterns of social relations anchored in law and state power, but stories of that sort are incompatible with
both global marketing imperatives and the ideological predilections of neoliberalism and its identitarian loyal opposition. One can
only shudder at the prospect of how Gillo Pontecorvos 1966 film, The Battle of Algiers, or Costa-Gavrass State of Siege (1972)
would be remade today. (Guy Ritchies and Madonnas execrable 2002 remake of Lina Wertmllers 1974 film Swept Away may
provide a clue; their abomination completely erases the original films complex class and political content and replaces it with a
banalaka universalstory of an encounter between an older woman and a younger man, while at the same time meticulously,
Particularly as those
almost eerily, reproducing, scene by scene, the visual structure of Wertmllers film.)
messages strive for universality as well as inspiration, their least common
denominator tends toward the generic story of individual triumph over adversity.
But the imagery of the individual overcoming odds to achieve fame, success, or
recognition also maps onto the fantasy of limitless upward mobility for enterprising
and persistent individuals who persevere and remain true to their dreams. As such,
it is neoliberalisms version of an ideal of social justice, legitimizing both success
and failure as products of individual character. When combined with a
multiculturalist rhetoric of difference that reifies as autonomous culturesin
effect racializeswhat are actually contingent modes of life reproduced by
structural inequalities, this fantasy crowds inequality as a metric of injustice out of
the picture entirely. This accounts for the popularity of reactionary dreck like Beasts
of the Southern Wild among people who should know better. The denizens of the
Bathtub actively, even militantly, choose their poverty and cherish it and should be
respected and appreciated for doing so. But no one ever supposed that Leni
Riefenstahl was on the left. The tale type of individual overcoming has become a script into which the great social
struggles of the last century and a half have commonly been reformulated to fit the requirements of a wan, gestural
multiculturalism. Those movements have been condensed into the personae of Great Men and Great WomenBooker T. Washington,
W. E. B. Du Bois, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, George Washington Carver, Martin Luther King, Jr., Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Ella
Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer and otherswho seem to have changed the society apparently by virtue of manifesting their own
greatness. The different jacket photos adorning the 1982 and 1999 editions of Doug McAdams well known sociological study of the
civil rights movement, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970, exemplify the shift. The first editions
cover was a photo of an anonymous group of marching protesters; the second edition featured the (staged) photomade iconic by
its use in an Apple advertising campaignof a dignified Rosa Parks sitting alone on the front seat of a bus looking pensively out the
Ironically, the scholarly turn away from organizations and institutional
window.20
processes to valorize instead the local and everyday dimensions of those
movements may have exacerbated this tendency by encouraging a focus on
previously unrecognized individual figures and celebrating their lives and
contributions. Rather than challenging the presumption that consequential social
change is made by the will of extraordinary individuals, however, this scholarship in
effect validates it by inflating the currency of Greatness so much that it can be
found any and everywhere. Giving props to the unrecognized or underappreciated
has become a feature particularly of that scholarship that defines scholarly
production as a terrain of political action in itself and aspires to the function of the
public intellectual. A perusal of the rosters of African American History Month and
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day speakers at any random sample of colleges and
universities attests to how closely this scholar/activist turn harmonizes with the
reductionist individualism of prosperity religion and the varieties of latter-day mind
cure through which much of the professional-managerial stratum of all races,
genders, and sexual orientations, narrates its understandings of the world.

We dont have to win everyone suffers from or experiences

capitalism equallyrather, oppression is fundamentally
mediated by relations to means of productionhistory of
colonial rule proves our offense and applies directly to their
stance
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,
of those individual members of the ruling and capitalist class?
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.

The aff replicates the ideology of Occupy Wall Street. Claiming

the debate space as a site for organic, horizontalist politics
can only sell out radical change to the private sphere of
individual performance.
Marcus 2012 associate book editor at Dissent Magazine (Fall, David, The
Horizontalists, http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-horizontalists)
an ethnographer traveling in India. Journeying up
There is a much-recycled and certainly apocryphal tale told of
and down the Ganges Delta, he encounters a fisherman who claims to know the source of all truth.
The world, the fisherman explains, rests upon the back of an elephant. But what does
the elephant stand on? the ethnographer asks. A turtle. And the turtle? Another turtle.
And it? Ah, friend, smiles the fisherman, it is turtles all the way down. As with most well-
circulated apocrypha, it is a parable that lacks a clear provenance, but has a clear moral: that despite
our ever-dialectical minds, we will never get to the bottom of things ; that, in fact, there is
nothing at the bottom of things. What we define as society is nothing more than a set of
locally constructed practices and norms, and what we define as history is nothing more than
the passage of one set to the next. Although we might find the picture of our universe as an infinite tower
of tortoises rather ridiculous, as one reteller admitted, it only raises the question, Why do we think we know
better? Since the early 1970s we have wonderedwith increasing anxietywhy 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 ofthe 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 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 talk of communities and actor networks;
instead of radical schemes to rework economic and political institutions, there is an
emphasis on localized campaigns and everyday practices. The critique of capitalismonce 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
to Prague and the Polish coup dtat, 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 create what post-Marxists were
frequently callingspaces of freedom. If one of the explicit targets of the global justice movement of the
late 1990s was the exploitative trade policies of the World Trade Organization, then its underlying critique
was the alienating patterns of its bureaucracy: the erosion of spaces for self-determination and
expression. 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 read, No globalization without participation! Occupy Wall Street has come to represent
the latest turn in this movement toward local and more horizontal spaces of freedom. Occupation was, itself, a
matter of recovering local space: a way to repoliticize the square . And in a moment characterized
by foreclosure, it was also symbolically, and sometimes literally, an attempt to reclaim lost homes and abandoned
 Occupy Wall Street sought out not only new
properties. But there was also a deeper notion of space at work.
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 globalizationlinking arms and webcams with their encamped comrades in Madrid, Tel
Aviv, Cairo, and Santiagothey 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. Seeking to escape from the Taylorist demands of productivity, the 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 of demands. Life is a mystery, as one pop star
fashionista has insisted, and Occupiers wanted to keep it that way. Likewise, general strikes were imagined as ways
in which workers could take back timeregain those parts of life that had become routinized by work. Rather than
attempts to achieve large-scale reforms, general strikes were improvisations, escapes from the daily calculations of
production that demonstrated that we can still be happy, creative, even productive individuals without jobs. As one
unfurled banner along New Yorks Broadway read during this springs May Day protests, Why work? Be happy. In
many ways, the Occupy movement was a rebellion against the institutionalized nature of twenty-first century
capitalism and democracy. Equally skeptical of corporate monopolies as it was of the technocratic
tendencies of the state, it was ultimately an insurgency against control , against the ways in which
organized power and capital deprived the individual of the time and space needed to control his or her life. Just as
the vertically inclined leftists of the twentieth century leveraged the public corporationthe welfare stateagainst
the increasingly powerful number of private ones, so too were Occupy and, more generally, the horizontalist Left to
embrace the age of the market: at the center of their politics was the anthropological man in both his forms
homo faber and homo ludenswho was capable of negotiating his interests outside the state. 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 bureaucratic tendencies of capitalism and
socialism, Occupiers were to frequently invoke the image of autonomy: of a world in which social and economic
relations exist outside the institutions of the state. Their aspiration was a society based on
organic, decentralized circuits of exchange and deliberationon voluntary
associations, on local debate, on loose networks of affinity 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 a new society in the shell of the old. 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 politics
horizontalism: 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 descendmost directlyfrom the ideas and tactics of the global justice
movement of the 1990s and 2000s. Direct Action Network was founded in 1999 to help coordinate 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. 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 anti-globalization 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-globalizing capitalism. 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 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 importantand perhaps more lastingbreak. In
both its ideas and tactics, it has given us a new set of desiresautonomy, radical democracy, direct actionthat
look well beyond the ideological and tactical tropes of socialism. 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 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 anti-institutionalism 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 self-management
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 difficult to argue about
anything else. We need, in other words, to stop thinking like leftists. 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 non-Westernthat exist beyond the
structures of the state, they, too, have their own patterns of hierarchy, their own embittered lines of inequality and
injustice. More important, 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. More problematically, by working outside structures of power
one may circumvent coercive systems but one does not necessarily subvert them. Localizing
politicsstripping it of its larger institutional ambitionshas, to be sure, its advantages. But without a larger
structural vision, it does not go far enough. Bubbles of freedom, as Graeber calls them, may create
a larger variety of non-institutional life. But they will always neglect other crucial avenues of
freedom: in particular, those social and economic rights that can 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 Castoriadis, Negri, and C.L.R. James, still essential if every cook
was truly to govern. To only try to create spaces of freedom alongside of the State meant, as
to back down from the problem of politics. In fact, this was, he
Castoriadis was to argue later in his life,
there is no
believed, the failure of 1968: the inability to set up new, different institutions and recognize that
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 arrayed against the regulatory state, 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 will remain so without larger
vertical measures. Structures, not only everyday practices, need to be reformed . The revolution
cannot happen only on the ground; it must also happen from above. A direct democracy still needs its
indirect structures, individual freedoms still need to be measured by their collective consequences, and
notions of social and economic equality still need to stand next to the desire for greater
political participation. Deregulation is another regulatory regime, and to replace it requires
new regulations: institutions that will limit the excesses of the market. As Castoriadis insisted in
the years after 1968, the Lefts task is not only to abolish old institutions but to discover new kinds of relationship
between society and its institutions. Horizontalism has come to serve as an important break from the static
strategies and categories of analysis that have slowed an aging and vertically inclined Left. OWS was to represent
its fullest expression yet, though it has a much longer back story and stillone hopesa promising future. But
horizontalists such as Graeber and Sitrin will struggle to establish spaces of freedom if they cannot formulate a
larger vision for a society. Their vision is notas several on the vertical left have suggestedtoo utopian but not
utopian enough: 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 turtle parable, Clifford Geertz warned that in 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
temptation, and one that, in our age of ever more stratification, we must resist.
 Deconstruction Link
Postmodernism and the deconstruction process reinforce
capitalism this methodology fails to produce any type of
social change and serves to disempower the oppressed
Cole 3 (Mike, Professor of Communication and Psychology at Bishop Grosseteste
University College Lincoln, United Kingdom, Might It Be in the Practice That It Fails
to Succeed? A Marxist Critique of Claims for Postmodernism and Poststructuralism
as Forces for Social Change and Social Justice, British Journal of Sociology of
Education, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Sep., 2003), pp. 491-493,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3593317)

for Marxists the possibility of postmodernism leading to social change is a

Whereas
non sequitur, for Atkinson postmodernism is 'an inevitable agent for change' in that: it challenges the educator,
the researcher, the social activist or the politician not only to deconstruct the certainties around which they might
see as standing in need of change, but also to deconstruct their own certainties as to why they hold this view.
(2002, p. 75) This sounds fine, but what do these constituencies actually do to effect meaningful societal change
once their views have been challenged? What is constructed after the deconstruction process?
Atkinson provides no answer. Nor does Patti Lather (nor, as we shall see, does Judith Baxter). This is because
neither postmodernism nor poststructuralism is capable of providing an answer (Hill,
2001, 2003; Rikowski, 2002, pp. 20-25). Decon-struction 'seeks to do justice to all positions ... by
giving them the chance to be justified, to speak originarily for themselves and be chosen rather that enforced'
(Zavarzadeh, 2002, p. 8). Indeed,for Derrida (1990), 'deconstruction is justice' (cited in Zavarzadeh,
2002, p. 8; emphasis added). Thus, once the deconstruction process has started, justice is
already apparent and there is no discernible direction in which to head . In declaring on
the first page of the Preface of her book GettingSmart:FeministResearchand Pedagogy With/In the Postmodern,her
'longtime interest in how to turn critical thought into emancipatory action' (Lather, 1991, p. xv), Lather is, in fact,
wasting her time. After more than 200 pages of text, in which indications are made of the need for emancipatory
research praxis, in which proclamations are made of how the goals of research should be to understand the
maldistribution of power and resources in society, with a view to societal change, we are left wondering how all this
Postmodernism cannot provide strategies to achieve a different social
is to come about.
order and hence, in buttressing capitalist exploitation, it is essentially reactionary.
This is precisely what Marxists (and others) mean by the assertion that postmodernism
serves to disempower the oppressed [7] According to Atkinson, postmodernism 'does not have, and
could not have, a "single" project for social justice' (2002, p. 75). Socialism then, if not social change, is thus ruled
out in a stroke [8]. Atkinson then rehearses the familiar postmodern position on multiple projects (2002, p. 75).
Despite Atkinson's claims that postmodernism views 'the local as the product of the global and viceversa'and that
since post
postmodernism should not be interpreted as limiting its scope of enquiry to the local (2002, p. 81),
modernism rejects grand meta- narratives and since it rejects universal struggle, it
can by definition concentrate only on the local . Localised struggle can, of course, be liberating for
individuals and certain selected small groups, but postmodernism cannot set out any viable mass strategy or
programme for an emancipated future. The importance of local as well as national and international struggle is
the postmodern rejection of mass struggle ultimately plays into
recognised by Marxists, but
the hands of those whose interests lie in the maintenance of national and global
systems of exploitation and oppression. Furthermore, 'as regards aims, the concern with autonomy,
in terms of organisation', postmodernism comprises 'a tendency towards network forms, and, in terms of mentality,
a tendency towards self-limitation' (Pieterse, 1992). While networking can aid in the promotion of solidarity, and in
it cannot replace mass action, in the sense, for
mass petitions, for example (Atkinson, 2001),
example, of a general or major strike; or a significant demonstration or uprising that
forces social change. Indeed, the postmodern depiction of mass action as totalitarian
negates/renders illicit such action. Allied to its localism is postmodernism's non-dualism
(Lather, 1991). This does have the advantage of recognising the struggles of groups oppressed on grounds in
addition to or other than those of class. However,non-dualism prevents the recognition of a major
duality in capitalist societies, that of social class (Cole & Hill, 1995, pp. 166-168, 2002; McLaren &
Farahmandpur, 1999; Sanders et al., 1999: Hill et al., 2002b). This has, I believe, profoundly reactionary
implications, in that it negates the notion of class struggle . Marxism, on the other hand, allows
a future both to be envisioned and worked towards . This vision can and has been extended
beyond the 'brotherhood of man' concept of early socialists, to include the complex subjectivities of all
(subjectivities which the postmodernists are so keen to bring centre stage). Socialism can and should be conceived
of as a project where subjective identities, such as gender, 'race', disability, non-exploitative sexual preference and
age all have high importance in the struggle for genuine equality (Cole & Hill, 1999a, p. 42). In her attempt to
present the case that '[p]ostmodern deconstruction ... is not the same as destruction' (Atkinson, 2002, p. 77),
Butler (1992), who argues that: [t]o deconstruct is not to negate or to
Atkinson cites Judith
dismiss,but to call into question and, perhaps most importantly, to open up a term ... to a reusage or
redeployment that previously has not been authorized. (cited in Atkinson, 2002, p. 77 ) This is precisely
what Marxism does. The difference is that Marxist concepts such as, for example, the
fetishism inherent in capitalist societies, whereby the relationships between things or commodities assume a
provide a means of
mystical quality hiding the real (exploitative) relation- ships between human beings,
both analysing that society, understanding its exploitative nature and pointing in the direction
of a non-exploitative society. The Marxist concept of the Labour Theory of Value is a good
example (see later for a discussion).

Deconstruction is an ineffective means of breaking down

capitalist structure

DavidBedggood,(DepartmentofSociology,UniversityofAuckland),1999

SaintJacques:DerridaandtheGhostofMarxism,http://eserver.org/clogic/22/bedggood.htmlCulturalLogic,ISSN1097
3087,Volume2,Number2,Spring1999)

Derrida invokes, as a
What is the meaning of Derrida's "new International" as his answer to globalisation and its 10 plagues?
counter-conjuration, a worldwide social movement with no organising features to reform international
law! As an idealist fix, this is no more than a hollow call for social justice which joins with Soros and Giddens et
al. in appeals to a spontaneous "millenarian" power of bourgeois citizens to fight "responsibly" for a democratic capitalism
against the totalitarian spectres of speculative capital, fundamentalist ideas and totalising dogma. But without necessarily
subscribing to the whole Marxist discourse (which moreover, is complex, evolving, heterogeneous) on the State and its
appropriation by a dominant class, on the distinction between State power and State apparatus, on the end of the political, on "the
end of politics", or on the withering away of the State, and, on the other hand without suspecting the juridical ideas in itself, one
may still find inspiration in the Marxist "spirit" to criticise the presumed autonomy of the juridical and to denounce endlessly the
de facto take-over of international authorities by powerful National-states, by concentrations of techno-scientific capital,
symbolic capital, and financial capital, of State capital and private capital. A "new international" is being sought
through these crises of international law; it already denounces the limits of a discourse on human rights
that will remain inadequate, sometimes hypocritical, and in any case formalistic and inconsistent with
itself as long as the law of the market, the "foreign debt", the inequality of techno-scientific, military, and
economic development maintain an effective inequality as monstrous as that which prevails today, to a
greater extent than ever in the history of humanity. For it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to
neo-evangelise in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realised itself as the ideal of human history: never
have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the
earth and of humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria
of the end of history, instead of celebrating the "end of ideologies" and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never
neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to
ignore that never before, in absolute figures, never have so many men, women, and children been subjugated, starved, or
exterminated on the earth. . . . The concerns of the "new International" are those of liberal democracy -- poverty, ecological
destruction, crimes against humanity -- and so on -- which are caused by the "de facto takeover of international authorities" by
nation states and capital. Thus the authority of the law which is being 'taken over' is that which represents bourgeois right as
freedom and equality ie. bourgeois citizenship rights and civil society. While Soros can talk of the aberration of finance capital,
and Giddens of fundamentalism against citizenship, Derrida provides the political philosophy of the hyper-
decadent bourgeois ego. Like Stirner in his day Derrida conjures up a philosophical apology for private
property and the "freedom of labour". And as with any common liberal it seems that Derrida subscribes to
such norms and conventions of bourgeois society when he defends them against the challenge of "crimes"
and "oppression" of capital. However, in rejecting the method and theory of Marxism as "totalitarian",
and wishing to renew Marxism as a "weak messianic power", Derrida is advocating a "new" reformist
International that subscribes to an ideology of distributional social justice posing as "natural" justice.
Since this is the way the fetishised social relations of capital appear in daily life, there is no necessity for a
"new International" which is organised around a revolutionary programme. . . . The "New International" is not
only that which is seeking a new international law through these crimes. It is a link of affinity, suffering, and hope, a still discreet,
almost secret link, as it was around 1848, but more and more visible, we have more than one sign of it. It is an untimely link,
without status, without title, and without name, barely public even if it is not clandestine, without contract, "out of joint", without
coordination, without party, without country, without national community (International before, across, and beyond any national
determination), without co-citizenship, without common belonging to a class. The name of the new International is given here to
what calls to the friendship of an alliance without institution among those who, even if they no longer believe or never believed
in the socialist-Marxist International, in the dictatorship of the proletariat, in the messiano-eschatological role of the universal
union of the spirits of Marx or Marxism (they now know that there is more than one) and in order to ally themselves, in a new,
concrete, and real way, even if this alliance no longer takes the form of a party or a workers' international, but rather of a kind of
counter-conjuration, in the (theoretical and practical) critique of the state of international law, the concepts of State and nation,
and so forth: in order to renew this critique, and especially to radicalise it.106 Derrida's new International is nothing
like a Marxist international and more like a Masonic order.107 By basing itself on the ideal to which
capitalism aspires in its fetishised form of equal exchange, he seeks to render this ideal real for each
individual. The spirit of Marx he has recovered is actually that of Stirner's "free ego" who is alienated not by society-in-
general, but by capitalist social relations. To express this freedom as a intellectual critique or a "radicalisation" of
Marxism is a retreat to a subjective idealism in which the bourgeois subject aspiring to Stirner's "unique"
remains trapped in performativity as consumption of its alienated identity. So in his misappropriation of
Marx, Derrida offers the young idealists of today a brand of anarchism they can consume in the belief that
their actions constitute a rebellion for "democracy" and "emancipation" against the dehumanising norms
and conventions that alienate them. Just as Stirner's "association of egoists" was a figment of his
"Thought", Derrida's new International has the potential to divert a new generation of alienated youth into
discursive acts against the symptomatic phrases rather than the materialist substance of capitalist crisis.
 Difference Link
Fetishizing difference naturalizes capitalist domination of
material conditions it hides a foundation of exploiting surplus
labor guaranteeing perpetual oppression
Teresa Ebert and Masud Zavarzadeh, 2008, Class in Culture, p. 15-18

In materialist theory, class is constructed at the point of production which, among

other things, means it is based on labor relations in history. With the rise of private
property, ownership of the means of producing commodities-which embody surplus
labor-enables some to exploit the labor of others. The materialist theory of class is,
therefore, a binary theory: it argues that people in class societies are divided
between those who sell (or are forced to give free) their labor power to live, and
those who purchase (or appropriate by force) the labor Power of others and profit
from it. In their Multitude, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call the classical
materialist theory a "unity" theory and place it in opposition to "plurality" theories of
class that "insist on the ineluctable multiplicity of social classes" (103). In their
usual manner, they take an eclectic path out of the binary .and write "that both of
these seemingly contradictory positions are true should indicate that the alternative
itself may be false" (104). In the end they, like Derrida, formally concede that
class is indispensable for understanding the social (Derrida, "Marx & Sons"), but
at the same time they undermine its very materialist possibility, which is the
only possibility that actually matters. Hardt and Negri demolish class, in other
words, not by giving up class--in fact they say that the "multitude" is a class
concept (l03}-but by the inversion of class from an economic category to a political
concept: "Class is determined by class struggle"(l04). It is not the materialism of the
relations of property that produce classes, which in turn start class struggle; instead
the subjectivity of people lead them to struggle and through that struggle form
classes (103-104). Hardt and Negri actually find that "the old distinction between
economic and political" is an obstacle to understanding class relations (105). Their
dismissal of the binary, here and in their class theory, is in part based on Negri's
call for a "post-deconstructive" ontology ("The Specter's Smile" 12), which implies
that the binaries are undone by a capitalism that travels on the Internet.
Thus, they can no longer account for its singularities which constitute not only its
cultural practices but also its class formations. There are as many singular classes
as there 'are class struggles, and there are as many class struggles as there are
subjectivities. Class, for Hardt and Negri, is an effect of the multitude which is "an
irreducible multiplicity; the singular social differences that constitute the multitude
must always be expressed and can never be flattened into' sameness, unity,
identity, or indifference" (105). Class in the new capitalism is another name for
singularity which is the undoing of the collective. Using different languages, the
contemporary discourses on class repeat this narrative in which the classical
materialist binary theory of class is represented as essentialist and in need of
deconstruction. One of the most influential critiques of binary class theory, as we
have already indicated, is by Jacques Derrida, whose general theory of class and
specifically his deconstruction of binary class theory we will discuss and critique at
several points in this book. Here, however, we would like to outline what is often
called the "class-as-process" theory and point to its underlying logic and class
politics, The class-as-process theory is the work of Stephen A. Resnick and Richard
D. Wolff who, in their groundbreaking book Knowledge and Class, critique the
"dichotomous theory of class" (112) for its determinism and
foundationalism (109-163) and propose an anti-essentialist and
"overdeterminate" (I 14, 116) class theory situated in the multiple processes
involved in the extraction and distribution of surplus labor. Their views are
reinterpreted under the strong influence of poststructuralist social theory by J. K.
Gibson-Graham in The End of Capitalism (as we knew it) (49-56), who repeat their
argument for a theory of class "without an essence" (55). We leave aside here how
their version of antiessentialism, like all other versions, collapses and becomes
a new essentialism in which a trans-historical notion of surplus labor
becomes the foundation of a new pro-capital social theory. Since class-as-
process theory views class as an effect of "producing and appropriating surplus
labor" (52), and because in all societies surplus labor is produced and appropriated,
class-as-process theory makes class the immanent feature of all societies
throughout history (58), Even in such societies as early communism and post-
capitalist socialism, in which the social surplus labor produced is appropriated not
by private owners but by society as a collective, there is class according to this
view. There is no outside to class-- ever, anywhere. Class-as-process is a rather
crude translation of Althusser's post-class theory of ideology into class theory. For
Althusser ideology is not a "false consciousness" by which the exchange of labor
power for wages is seen as being a fair exchange. Instead, he writes that ideology is
"the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence" (Lenin
and Philosophy 162). Ideology for Althusser, who draws on Lacan and Freud for his
main concepts, is basically a theory of subjectivity (170-177). This is another way of
saying that, for Althusser, "ideology has no history" (159) because "human societies
secrete ideology as the very element and atmosphere indispensable to their
historical respiration and life" (For Marx 232). Similarly, for Gibson-Graham, class is
an organic part of all societies and not a specific historical stage in them (The End of
Capitalism 58-59). All societies, they contend, secrete class. Given their
affirmation that capitalism is here to stay (263), it would be "unrealistic," to
use Gibson-Graham's word, to struggle to end class rule. The practical thing
to do is to learn to live with it. Consequently, the mark of an activist agency in the
class-as-process theory is not a militancy to overthrow class because that requires a
revolutionary act, which they claim is "outmoded" (The End of Capitalism 263).
Instead, they call for an intervention in the homogeneity of class to make it
heterogeneous and plural (52, 58). Class stays; its modalities and forms
multiply (52, 58). This view of class, which is represented as cutting edge
(Gibson-Graham, A Postcapitalist Politics 1-21,66-68,90-92), is interesting not
because of its arguments but mostly for what it says about the way the Left in
the global North has accommodated and normalized the class interests of
capital. The goal of class-as-process, for example, as Gibson-Graham state, is
not to "eradicate all or even specifically capitalist forms of exploitation" but to
contribute to "self-transformative class subjectivity"-and change the
emotional components of exploitation (53). As always, there is more. Class-as-
process is a discursive device for dis- Solving what Marx calls "the antithesis
between lack of property and property." He argues that this antithesis "so long as it
is not comprehended as the antithesis of labour and capital, still remains an
indifferent antithesis, not grasped in its active connection, in its internal relation,
not yet grasped as a contradiction" (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of
1844,293-94). Grasping this contradiction is grasping the binary theory of class and
realizing that class is a relation of owning: the owning of labor by capital. As such, it
is the other of human freedom because it is grounded in the exploitation of humans
by humans-private property is the congealed alienated labor of the other. Using
the epistemological alibi of anti-essentialism, class-as-process obscures
the constitutive role of private property (ownership of the means of
production) In the construction of class divisions. Thus, in the name of opposing
economism, It actually protects the economic interests of capital: "class in our
conception is overdetermined, rather than defined by property ownership and other
sorts of social relations" (Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism 179). Private
property, they contend, is only one of many factors that make class (55,
179), and it is no more significant in this construction than, for example,
"affects and emotions" (A Postcapitalist Politics 1-21). But private property is the
sensuous "expression of estranged human life," and class is its concrete effect in
the every day. "The positive transcendence of private property as the appropriation
of human life is therefore the positive transcendence of all estrangement-that is to
say the return of man from religion, family, state, etc. to his human, i.e. social,
existence" (Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of J 844, 297). Ending the
contradiction of the binary of property and propertyless is the end of class and the
end of alienation: it is the beginning of human freedom from necessity. Class-as-
process naturalizes private property and the estrangement of humans-
from their work, from others and from themselves-by making class the plural
effect of "the intersection of all social dimensions or processes-economic,
political cultural, natural" (Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism 55). By
pluralizing class, the class-as-process theorists undermine the importance
of private property in constructing class relations and thus absolve capital-
whose history is a history of accumulation of private property and is "dripping from
head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt" (Marx, Capital I, 926). Other
critics, who argue class has become irrelevant to contemporary society, claim that,
owing to changes in technology and structural transformations in . capitalism, the
differences within classes have so proliferated they have exceeded the differences
between classes, thereby making the binary labor theory of class obsolete. These
views go even further and state that the very premise of hinary theories of class-
namely, private ownership as determining class relations- has lost its significance in
shaping class relations. We live, they argue, in post-property times in which
property has been displaced by access (Rifkin, The Age of Access). The increasing
differences within classes, however, do not demolish the binary class structures
under capital. The "differences that flourish within classes," as John O'Neill argues,
"do not challenge but even confirm the differences between classes. Poverty is
colorless and genderless however much it marks women and racial minorities" ("Oh,
My Others, There Is No Other!" 81).
 Discourse Link
Their use of language as a model for politics obscures class
conflict.
Anderson, 83 (Perry, is a member of the editorial committee of New Left Review,
and the author of Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (1974), Lineages of the
Absolutist State (1974), Considerations on Western Marxism (1976), and Arguments
within English Marxism (1980). In the Tracks of Historical Materialism. P 90-93)

These local objections, conclusive as they may be for the disciplines in question, nevertheless do not in themselves convey the general
reason why language is no fitting model for any other human practice. We can see the distance between them most clearly, perhaps, if we
recollect Levi-Strauss's argument in The Savage Mind that language provides an apodictic experience of a totalizing and dialectical reality
anterior and exterior to the consciousness and will of any speaking subject, whose utterances on the contrary are never conscious totaliz
ations of linguistic laws. But in fact the relation between langue and parole is a peculiarly aberrant compass for
plotting the diverse positions of structure and subject in the world outside language . This is so for at least
three basic reasons. Firstly, linguistic structures have an ex ceptionally low coefficient of historical
mobility, among social institu tions. Altering very slowly and, with few and recent exceptions, unconsciously,
they are in that respect quite unlike economic, political or religious structures, whose rates of change -
once the threshold of class society has been reached - have generally been incomparably faster. Secondly, however, this
characteristic immobility of language as a structure is accompanied by a no less exceptional inventivity of the
subject within it: the obverse of the rigidity of langue is the volatile liberty of parole. For utterance has
no material constraint whatever: words are free, in the double sense of the term. They cost nothing to
produce, and can be multiplied and manipulated at will , within the laws of meaning. All other major social practices
are subject to the laws of natural scarcity: persons, goods or powers cannot be generated ad libitum and ad infinitum. Yet the very freedom
of the speaking subject is curiously inconsequential : that is, its effects on the structure in return are in normal
circumstances virtually nil. Even the greatest writers, whose genius has influenced whole cultures, have
typically altered the language relatively little. This, of course, at once indicates the third peculiarity of the structure-subject
relationship in language: namely, the subject of speech is axiomatically individual- 'don't speak all together'
being the customary way of saying that plural speech is non-speech, that which cannot be heard . By
contrast, the relevant subjects in the domain of economic, cultural, political or military structures are first and foremost
collective: nations, classes castes, groups, generations . Precisely because this is so, the agency of these subjects is
capable of effecting profound transformations of those structures. This fundamental distinction is an
insurmountable barrier to any transposition of linguistic models to historical processes of a wider
sort. The opening move of structuralism, in other words, is a speculative aggrandisement of language that lacks any comparative
credentials.

The focus on the primacy of discourse ruptures this. Post-

structuralist criticism makes lack of objectivity natural but
there are objective truths, like the oppression of workers
globally and you prevent real, radical change from occurring
in addition to reifying capitalism.
Zavarzadeh 94 (Mas'ud Department of English, Syracuse University, editor of
Transformation: Marxist Boundary Work in Theory, Economics, Politics and Culture
a biquarterly published by the not-for-profit Maisonneuve Press, College Literature
Vol 21 Issue 3, The Stupidity That Consumption is Just as Productive as Production:
In the Shopping Mall of the Post-Al Left http://www.jstor.org/stable/25112139)
The unsurpassable objectivity which is not open to rhetorical interpretation and constitutes the decided foundation
of critique is the "outside" that Marx calls the "Working Day" (Capital 1: 340-416). ([France] willfully misrecognizes
my notion of objectivity by confusing my discussion of identity politics and objectivity.) The working day is not what
the reality of all capitalist practices, is an alienated reality--there is
it seems: its reality, like
a contradiction between its appearance and its essence . It "appears" as if the worker, during
the working day, receives wages that are equal compensation for his labor. This mystification originates in the fact
thatthe capitalist pays not for "labor" but for "labor power": when labor power is put
to use it produces more than it is paid for. The "working day" is the site of the unfolding of this
fundamental contradiction: it is a divided day, divided into "necessary labor"--the part in which the worker produces
value equivalent to his wages--and the "other," the part of "surplus labor"--a part in which the worker works for free
and produces "surplus value." The second part of the working day is the source of profit and accumulation of
capital. "Surplus
labor" is the OBJECTIVE FACT of capitalist relations of production:
without "surplus labor" there will be no profit, and without profit there will be no accumulation of
capital, and without accumulation of capital there will be no capitalism. The goal of bourgeois economics is to
conceal this part of the working day, and it should therefore be no surprise that, as a protector of ruling class
interests in the academy, [Hill], with a studied casualness, places "surplus value" in the adjacency of "radical bible-
studies" and quietly turns it into a rather boring matter of interest perhaps only to the dogmatic. To be more
concise: "surplus
labor" is that objective, unsurpassable "outside" that cannot be made
part of the economies of the "inside" without capitalism itself being transformed into socialism.
Revolutionary critique is grounded in this truth--objectivity--since all social institutions and practices of capitalism
The role of a revolutionary pedagogy of critique
are founded upon the objectivity of surplus labor.
is to produce class consciousness so as to assist in organizing people into a new vanguard party that
aims at abolishing this FACT of the capitalist system and transforming capitalism into a
communist society. As I have argued in my "Postality" [Transformation 1], ( post)structuralist theory,
through the concept of "representation," makes all such facts an effect of interpretation and
turns them into "undecidable" processes . The boom in ludic theory and Rhetoric Studies in the
bourgeois academy is caused by the service it renders the ruling class: it makes the OBJECTIVE reality
of the extraction of surplus labor a subjective one --not a decided fact but a matter of
"interpretation." In doing so, it "deconstructs" (see the writings of such bourgeois readers as Gayatri Spivak,
Cornel West, and Donna Haraway) the labor theory of value, displaces production with
consumption, and resituates the citizen from the revolutionary cell to the ludic
shopping mall of [France]. Now that I have indicated the objective grounds of "critique," I want to go back to
the erasure of critique by dialogue in the post-al left and examine the reasons why these nine texts locate my
critique-al writings and pedagogy in the space of violence, Stalinism, and demagoguery. Violence, in the post-al left,
is a refusal to "talk." "To whom is Zavarzadeh speaking?" asks [ Williams], who regards my practices to he
demagogical, and [ Bernard-Donals] finds as a mark of violence in my texts that "The interlocutor really is absent"
from them. What is obscured in this representation of the non-dialogical is, of course, the violence of the dialogical.
I leave aside here the violence with which these advocates of non-violent conversations attack me in their texts,
the post-al left, through dialogue, naturalizes
and cartoon. My concern is with the practices by which
(and eroticizes) the violence that keeps capitalist democracy in power. What is violent?
Subjecting people to the daily terrorism of layoffs in order to maintain high rates of
profit for the owners of the means of production or redirecting this violence (which gives annual
bonuses, in addition to multi-million-dollar salaries, benefits, and stock options, to the CEOs of the very corporations
against the ruling class in order to end class societies?
that are laying off thousands of workers)
What is violent? Keeping millions of people in poverty, hunger, starvation, and
homelessness, and deprived of basic health care, at a time when the forces of
production have reached a level that can, in fact, provide for the needs of all people,
or trying to overthrow this system? What is violent? Placing in office, under the alibi of
"free elections," postfascists (Italy) and allies of the ruling class (Major, Clinton, Kohl, Yeltsin) or struggling to
end this farce? What is violent? Reinforcing these practices by "talking" about them in a
"reasonable" fashion (that is, within the rules of the game established by the ruling class for limited reform
from "within") or marking the violence of conversation and its complicity with the status
quo, thereby breaking the frame that represents "dialogue" as participation , when in
fact it is merely a formal strategy for legitimating the established order? Any society in
which the labor of many is the source of wealth for the few-- all class societies--is a society of
violence, and no amount of "talking" is going to change that objective fact. "Dialogue"
and "conversation" are aimed at arriv-ing at a consensus by which this violence is made more tolerable, justifiable,
and naturalized.
 Gender Link
Gender inequality is not the ahistorical product of an abstract
system of patriarchy its the result of classed societies
organized around the exploitation of surplus labor
CLOUD 3 (Dana, Prof. Comm at UT, Marxism and Oppression, Talk for Regional
Socialist Conference, April 19, 2003)

In order to challenge oppression, it is important to know where it

comes from. Historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists tell us
that in pre-class societies such as hunter-gatherer societies, racism and sexism
were unheard of. Because homosexuality was not an identifiable category of such
societies, discrimination on that basis did not occur either. In fact, it is clear that
racism, sexism, and homophobia have arisen in particular kinds of societies,
namely class societies. Womens oppression originated in the first class societies,
while racism came into prominence in the early periods of capitalism when
colonialism and slavery drove the economic system. The prohibition against gays
and lesbians is a relatively modern phenomenon. But what all forms of oppression
have in common is that they did not always exist and are not endemic to
human nature. They were created in the interest of ruling classes in
society and continue to benefit the people at the top of society, while dividing and
conquering the rest of us so as to weaken the common fight against the oppressors.
The work of Marxs collaborator Friederich Engels on The Origins of the Family,
Private Property, and the State in some respects reflects the Victorian times in
which in was written. Engels moralizes about womens sexuality and doesnt even
include gay and lesbian liberation in his discussion of the oppressive family.
However, anthropologists like the feminist Rayna Reiter have confirmed his most
important and central argument that it was in the first settled agricultural societies
that women became an oppressed class. In societies where for the first time people
could accumulate a surplus of food and other resources, it was possible for
some people to hoard wealth and control its distribution. The first governments or
state structures formed to legitimate an emerging ruling class. As settled
communities grew in size and became more complex social organizations, and,
most importantly, as the surplus grew, the distribution of wealth became unequal
and a small number of men rose above the rest of the population in wealth and
power. In the previous hunter-gatherer societies, there had been a sexual division of
labor, but one without a hierarchy of value. There was no strict demarcation
between the reproductive and productive spheres. All of that changed with the
development of private property in more settled communities. The earlier division of
labor in which men did the heavier work, hunting, and animal agriculture, became a
system of differential control over resource distribution. The new system
required more field workers and sought to maximize womens reproductive
potential. Production shifted away from the household over time and women
became associated with the reproductive role, losing control over the
production and distribution of the necessities of life. It was not a matter of male
sexism, but of economic priorities of a developing class system. This is why Engels
identifies womens oppression as the first form of systematic class oppression in the
world. Marxists since Engels have not dismissed the oppression of women as
secondary to other kinds of oppression and exploitation. To the contrary, womens
oppression has a primary place in Marxist analysis and is a key issue that socialists
organize around today. From this history we know that sexism did not always exist,
and that men do not have an inherent interest in oppressing women as domestic
servants or sexual slaves. Instead, womens oppression always has served a class
hierarchy in society. In our society divided by sexism, ideas about womens nature
as domestic caretakers or irrational sexual beings justify paying women lower
wages compared to men, so that employers can pit workers against one another in
competition for the same work. Most women have always had to work outside the
home to support their families. Today, women around the world are exploited in
sweatshops where their status as women allows bosses to pay them very little,
driving down the wages of both men and women. At the same time, capitalist
society relies on ideas about women to justify not providing very much in the way of
social services that would help provide health care, family leave, unemployment
insurance, access to primary and higher education, and so forthall because these
things are supposed to happen in the private family, where women are responsible.
This lack of social support results in a lower quality of life for many men as well as
women. Finally, contemporary ideologies that pit men against women encourage us
to fight each other rather than organizing together.

Formation of sex or gender as the basis of political identity is

the process by which capitalism divides the working class to
make resistance impossible. This guarantees that political
demands are not elevated past the level of particularism and
reaching the level of the bourgeoisie becomes the ultimate
objective
Brown 93 (Wendy, Professor of Political Science at the University of California,
Berkeley, Wounded Attachments Political Theory, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Aug., 1993), pp.
392-395, JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/191795)

Although this dtente between universal and particular within liberalism is potted
with volatile conceits, it is rather thouroughly unraveled by two features of late
modernity, spurred by developments in what Marx and Froucault, respectively,
reveal as liveralisms compainion powers: capitalism and disciplinarity. On one side,
the state loses even its guise of universality as it becomes ever more transparently
invested in particular economic interests, political ends, and social formations. This
occurs as it shifts from a relativley minimalist night watchman state to a heavily
bureacratized, managerial, fiscally complex, and highly interventionist welfare-
warfare state, a transmogrification occasioned by the combined imperatives of
capital and the autoproliferating characteristics of bureacracy. On the other side, a
range of economic and political forces increasingly disinter the liberal subject from
substantive nation-state identification: deterritorializing demographic flows;
disintegration from within and invasion from without of family and community as
(relatively) autonomous sites of social production and identification; consumer
capitalisms marketing discourse in which individual (and subindividual) desires are
produced, commodified, and mobilized as identities; and disciplinary productions of
a fantastic arry of behavior-based identities ranging from recovering alchoholic
professionals to unrepentant crack mothers. These disciplinary productions work to
conjure and regulate subjects through classificatory schemes, naming and
normalizing social behaviors as social positions. Operating through what Foucault
calls an anatomy of detail, disciplinary power produces social identities
(available for politicization because they are deployed for purposes of political
regulation) that crosscut juridicial identities based on abstract right. Thus, for
example, the welfare states production of welfare subjects themselves subdivided
through the socially regulated categories of motherhood, disability, race, age and so
forth potentially produce political identity through these categories, produce
identities as the these categories. In this story, the always imminent but
increasingly politically manifest failure of liberal universalism to be universal the
transparent fiction of state universality combines with the increasing individuation
of social subjects through capitalist disinternments and disciplinary productions.
Together, they breed the emergence of politicized identity rooted in disciplinary
productions but oriented by liberal discourse toward protest against exclusion from
a discursive formation of universal justice. This production, however, is not linear or
even but highly contradictory: although the terms of liberalism are part of the
ground of production of a politicized identity that reiterates yet exceeds these
terms, liberal discourse itself also continuously recolonizes political identity as
political interest a conversion that recasts politicized identitys substantive and
often deconstructive cultural claims and critiques as generic claims of particularism
endemic to universalist political culture. Similarly, disciplinary power manages
liberalisms production of politicized subjectivity by neutralizing (re-depoliticizing)
identity through normalizing practicies. As liberal discourse converts politcal identity
into essentialized private interest, disciplinary power converts interest into
normativized social identity manageable by regulatory regimes. Thus disciplinary
power politicially neutralizes entitlement claims generated by liberal individuation,
whereas liberalism poltiically neutralize rights claims generated by disciplinary
identities. In addition to the formations of identity that may be the complex effects
of disciplinary and liberal modalities of power, I want to suggest one other historical
strand relevant to the production of politicized identity, this one hewn more
specifically to recent developments in political culture. Although sanguine to varying
degrees about the phenomenon they are describing, many on the European and
North American Left have argued that identity politics emerges from the demise of
class politics consequent to post-Fordism or pursuant to May 1968. Without
adjudicating the precise relationship between the breakup of class politics and the
proliferation of other sites of political identification, I want to refigure this claim by
suggesting that what we have come to call identity politics is partly dependent on
the demise of a critique of capitalism and of bourgeois cultural and economic
values. In a reading that links the new identity cliams to a certain relegitimation of
capitalism, identity politics concerned with race, sexuality, and gender will appear
not as a supplement to class politics, not as an expansion of Left categories of
oppression and emancipation, not as an enriching complexification of progressive
formulations of power and person all of which they also are but as tethered to a
formulation of justice which, ironically, reinscribes a bourgeois ideal as its measure.
If it is this ideal that signifies educational and vocational opportunity, upward
mobility, relative protection against arbitrary violence, and reward in proportion to
effort, and if it is this ideal against which many of the exclusions and privations of
people of color, gays and lesbians, and women are articulated, then the political
purchase of contemporary American identity politics would seem to be achieved in
part through a certain discursive renaturalization of capitalism that can be said to
have marked progressive discourse since the 1970s. What this suggests is that
identity politics may be partly configured by a peculiarly shaped and peculiarly
disguised form of resentment class resentment without class consiousness or class
analysis. This resentment is displaced onto discourses of injustice other than class
but, like all resentments, retains the real or imagined holding of its reviled subject
in this case, bourgeois male privileges as objects of desire. From this perspective,
it would appear that the articulation of politicized identities through race,
gender, and sexuality require, rather than incidentally produce, a
relatively limited identification though class. They necessarily rather than
incidentially abjure a critique of class power and class norms precisely
because the injuries suffered by these identities are measured by bourgeois norms
of social acceptance, legal protection, relative material comfort, and social
independence. The problem is that when not only economic stratification but other
injuries to body and psyche enacted by capitalism (alientation, commodificiation,
exploitation, displacement, disintegration of sustain, albeit contradictory, social
forms such as familes and neighborhoods) are discursively normalized and thus
depoliticized, other markers of social difference may come to bear an
inordinate weight. Absent an articulation of capitlism in the political discourse of
identity, the marked identity bears all the weight of the sufferings produced by
capitalism in addition to that bound to the explicity politicized marking.
 Hip-Hop
Hip hop cant build coalitions in capitalism capitalism hijacks
your resistance to essentialize stereotypes and fill your spaces
of resistance with caricatures that reify racial divides causes
universal complicity in racism.

Hip Hop In Urban America 10 (Ghettocentrismand Capitalism - Tues

Group 1 Annotated Playlist July 5, 2010.
http://hiphopinurbanamerica.blogspot.com/2010/07/ghettocentrism-capitalism-tues-
group-1.html)

David Samuels explains the popularity of gangsta rap with a term that Nelson
George originally definedGhettocentrism, a style-driven cult of blackness
defined by crude stereotypes (Samuels, 152). Samuels is saying that the popularity
of rap music in the white suburbs of middle America is an obsession with the
lower class, black community representation of blackness. Furthermore, Samuels
argues that the more ghetto a rapper, whether it is her/his lyrics or criminal
record, the more authentic s/he is considered by listeners. Middle-class listeners are
especially prone to authenticity judgments based on ghetto-ness because they have
no real experience with the ghetto or underground hip-hop, and therefore only have
stereotypes to gauge authenticity. Samuel goes even further to argue that the
popularization of rap among middle-class white youth speak not of cross-cultural
understanding, musical or otherwise, but of voyeurism and tolerance of racism
in which black and white are both complicit (Samuels, 153). Hip-hop artists often
play to the black ghetto stereotype because it sells albums. For example, one of
Rihannas latest songs, G4L (Gangsta for Life), is about seeking revenge through
gang-like acts of violence. Rihanna has no history as a gang membershe is
basically asserting machismo as a black woman through this song. The line
following lines exemplify the hard role that Rihanna plays: We drivin by with
them headlights off, we know where you stay; Know what you did, we dont play
that shit nigga, we dont play Rihanna is basically portraying that she is a ruthless
killer, not to be messed with. In light of her recent violent relationship with Chris
Brown, its not surprising that Rihanna might legitimately put on a front as a
gansta for life. For our purposes, its important to realize how well Rihannas latest
album and image as hard has sold. Rihannas current popularity fits into Samuels
and Georges definition of ghettocentrism. Rihanna is playing to the stereotype of a
ghetto black person. Its interesting to note that at the same time Rihanna plays to
one stereotypeghetto blackshe defies anotherhelpless woman. Because
Rihanna is a woman, her hard act is a contrast to the emotionally-charged
portrayal of women both in hip-hop and society. http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=Cj8A5H8jEbs Mock, Janet, and Julia Wang. "Biography: Rihanna." People. Web. 4
Jul 2010. Capitalism has hijacked hip hop, isolating it from its artistic
purpose. Since becoming a lucrative commodity, the market demands a
certain kind of hip hop, and as with any product made for mass production, the
industry adjusts that product to sell rather than to reflect the aesthetic of
the art form. The subsequent effect of capitalism on hip hop is that the artist is
alienated from the art, so the art is not necessarily representative of the artist. The
song Apartment 223 by Dr. Dooom represents the displacement and alienation that
capitalism wreaks upon hip hop, leading artists to adopt marketable characteristics.
In Apartment 223, Dr Dooom describes his penchant for oddity and violence, and
how his apartment is the center of his machinations. Showing the extent of his
appetite for blood, Dr. Dooom suggests that he even engages in quasi Satanic ritual
to get more victims: I chant while candles burn/with robes on you will learn/
Christian no Hebrew/ on the balcony I see you/ the devils coffin with a corpse of
course/ in a mental state earthquake (Dooom). The capitalist demand for rappers to
fill a particular profile impels artists to create caricatures of negative black
stereotypes. In Dr. Doooms case, he creates a character who is so intensely
violent that not only is he not governed by good sense, but even earthly powers. It
is telling that Dr. Dooom has consciously assumed this violent persona; while
fictional, the choice is toward violence, a marketable quality. The capitalist influence
on hip hop distorts the art so that it doesnt necessarily represent the artist
anymore, but is a collection of stereotypical images that please a largely white,
voyeuristic market.
 Identity Link
You have one concrete identity - proletariat. Capitalism
requires a subject that continues to reinvent itself.
Zizek 4 (Slavoj, senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of
Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a professor at the European Graduate School. July 2004.
http://www.believermag.com/issues/200407/?read=interview_zizek)

Now with the antiglobalism movement, they are still, in a limited way, reemerging .
But the idea is that the
fundamental conflicting areas are no longer those of vertical up-vs.-down social struggle, but more
horizontal differences between me and you, between different social groups: the problem of tolerance;
the problem of tolerance of other races, religious minorities, and so on . So then the basic problem
becomes that of tolerating differences. I am not saying this is bad, of course we should fight for this,
but I dont think that this horizonwithin which the ultimate ethical value is then that of tolerating
differenceis the fundamental place for question. My problem with liberalism is in principle. This
move of the new Left, or new radicals, towards a problem of identity politics (minority politics, gay
rights, etc.) lacks a certain more radical insight into the basically antagonistic character of society. This
radical questioning has simply disappeared. For example, take my friend Judith Butler. Of course from time
to time, she pays lip service to some kind of anticapitalism, but its totally abstract, what its basically saying is
just how lesbians and other oppressed sexual minorities should perceive their situation not as the assertion of
some kind of substantial sexual identity, but as constructing an identity which is contingent, which means that
also the so-called straight normal sexuality is contingent, and everybody is constructed in a contingent way, and
so on, and in this way, nobody should be excluded. There is no big line between normality identity and multiple
roles. The problem I see here is that there is nothing inherently anticapitalist in this logic. But even worse is that
what this kind of politically correct struggling for tolerance and so on advocates is basically not only not
in conflict with the modern tendencies of global capitalism, but it fits perfectly. What I think is that
todays capitalism thrives on differences. I mean even nave positivist psychologists propose to describe
todays subjectivity in terms like multiple subject, fixed-identity subject, a subject who constantly reinvents
itself, and so on. So my big problem with this is the painting of the enemy as some kind of self-
identified stable substantial patriarch to which these multiple identities and constant reinventing
should be opposed. I think that this is a false problem; I am not impressed by this problem . I think that this is
a certain logic, totally within the framework of todays capitalism, where again, capitalism, in order to
reproduce itself, to function in todays condition of consumption society, the crazy dynamics of the
market, no longer needs or can function with the traditional fixed patriarchal subject. It needs a subject
constantly reinventing himself.
 Individual Experience Link
Appeals to individual experiences of oppression mark a turn
away from collective material economic violence papers over
the real of history by producing a faade of specific resistance.
McLaren 10 (Peter, Professor in the Division of Urban Schooling, the Graduate School of Education and Information
Studies, UCLA, Peer Reviewed Title: Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy Journal Issue: InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education
and Information Studies, 6(2) Author: McLaren, Peter, University of California, Los Angeles Publication Date: 2010)

New mechanisms of accumulation have spurred the development of a model in which transnational
fractions of capital have become dominant . They include a cheapening of labor and the growth of flexible,
deregulated and deunionized labor where women always experience super-exploitation in relation to men; the
dramatic expansion of finance capital; the creation of a global and regulatory structure to facilitate the
emerging global circuits of accumulation; and neoliberal structural adjustment programs which seek to create
the conditions for frictionless operations of emerging transnational capital across borders and between
countries. The role of the nation-state has changed to meet globally uniform laws that protect capital against
the interests of the international working class. The nation-state still serves local capital, but it can no longer
fetter the transnational movement of capital with its endless chains of accumulation. The cultural turn in
much of current postmodern and postcolonial criticism is not a passing trend but rather a structural feature of
capitalism. Particularly during times of crisis, capitalism turns to culture to solve the contradictions that
it cannot resolve in its actual material practices (Ebert & Zavardadeh, 2008). Through the medium of
experience, the individual is mistaken as the source of social practices and this process of
misidentification becomes a capitalist archestrategy that marginalizes collectivity and protects the
individual as the foundation of entrepreneurial capitalism. Consequently, the well-being of the
collectivity is replaced by a politics of consumption that champions the singularities of individuals
by ennobling the desire to obtain and consume objects of pleasure. Experience in this view becomes non-
theoretical and beyond the real of history. This is precisely why we need to locate all human
experience in a world-historical frame ; that is, within specific social relations of production.
 Local Change Link
Local changes are doomed for achieving global change, this
prevents anti-capitalist action.
Adam Katz, English Instructor at Onodaga Community College. 2000.
Postmodernism and the Politics of Culture. Pg. 146-147

Habermass understanding of undistorted communication is situated within the same problematic as the
postmodernism of Lyotard in a much more fundamental sense than would be indicated by the apparent opposition
between them. Both locate emancipatory knowledges and politics in the liberation of language from technocratic
imperatives. And the political consequences are the same as well. In both cases, local transformations
(the deconstruction and reconstruction of distorted modes of communication) that create more
democratic or rational sites of intersubjectivity are all that is seen as possible ,
with the goal, as Brantlinger says, of at least local emancipations from the structure of economic, political and
cultural domination (1990, 191192, emphasis added). The addition of at least to the kinds of changes sought
suggests a broader, potentially global role for critique , such as showing how lines of
force in society can be transformed into authentic modes of participatory decision making (19711. However,
the transition from one mode of transformation to anotherwhat should be the
fundamental task of cultural studiesis left unconceptualized and is implicitly
understood as a kind of additive or cumulative spread of local democratic
sites until society as a whole is transformed. What this overlooks, of course, is the
way in which, as long as global economic and political structures remain
unchanged and unchallenged, local emancipations can only be
redistributionsredistributions that actually support existing social relations by
merely shifting the greater burdens onto others who are less capable of
achieving their own local emancipation. This implicit alliance between the defenders of modernity and
their postmodern critics (at least on the fundamental question) also suggests that we need to look for the roots and
consequences of this alliance in the contradictions of the formation of the cultural studies public intellectual.
 Movements Link
Intersectionality/particular movements has historically
footnoted the criticism of Capitalismonly a PRIORITIZATION
of class struggle has the potential of universalizing our form of
politics
McLaren and DAnniballe 4 (Peter, Professor at the Graduate School of
Education at UCLA, and Valerie Class Dismissed? Historical materialism and the
politics of difference, Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia)

we need to include an important caveat that differentiates our

In stating this,
approach from those invoking the well-worn race/class/gender triplet which can
sound, to the uninitiated, both radical and vaguely Marxian. It is not. Race, class and
gender, while they invariably intersect and interact , are not co-primary. This triplet
approximates what the philosophers might call a category mistake. On the surface the triplet may be
convincingsome people are oppressed because of their race, others as a result of their gender, yet others
because of their classbut this is grossly misleading for it is not that some individuals manifest certain
to be a member of a
characteristics known as class which then results in their oppression; on the contrary,
social class is to be oppressed and in this regard class is a wholly social category
just
(Eagleton, 1998, p. 289). Furthermore, even though class is usually invoked as part of the
aforementioned and much vaunted triptych, it is usually gutted of its practical, social
dimension or treated solely as a cultural phenomenonas just another form
of difference. In these instances, class is transformed from an economic and, indeed,
social category to an exclusively cultural or discursive one or one in which class merely
signifies a subject position. Class is therefore cut off from the political economy of capitalism
and class power severed from exploitation and a power structure in which those who
control collectively produced resources only do so because of the value generated by those who do not (Hennessy
Such theorizing has had the effect of replacing an historical
& Ingraham, 1997, p. 2).
materialist class analysis with a cultural analysis of class . As a result, many post-
Marxists have also stripped the idea of class of precisely that element which, for Marx, made
it radicalnamely its status as a universal form of exploitation whose abolition
required (and was also central to) the abolition of all manifestations of
oppression (Marx, 1978, p. 60). With regard to this issue, Kovel (2002) is particularly insightful, for he
explicitly addresses an issue which continues to vex the Leftnamely the priority given to different categories of
what he calls dominative splittingthose categories of gender, class, race, ethnic and national exclusion, etc.
Kovel argues that we need to ask the question of priority with respect to what? He notes that if we mean priority
with respect to time , then the category of gender would have priority since there are traces of gender oppression in
all other forms of oppression. If we were to prioritize in terms of existential significance , Kovel suggests that we
would have to depend upon the immediate historical forces that bear down on distinct groups of peoplehe offers
examples of Jews in 1930s Germany who suffered from brutal forms of anti-Semitism and Palestinians today who
experience anti-Arab racism under Israeli domination. The question of what has political priority ,
however, would depend upon which transformation of relations of oppression are
practically more urgent and, while this would certainly depend upon the preceding categories, it would also
depend upon the fashion in which all the forces acting in a concrete situation are deployed. As to the
question of which split sets into motion all of the others, the priority
would have to be given to class since class relations entail the state as an
instrument of enforcement and control, and it is the state that shapes and
organizes the splits that appear in human ecosystems . Thus class is both logically
and historically distinct from other forms of exclusion (hence we should not talk of
classism to go along with sexism and racism, and species-ism). This is, first of all, because class is an
essentially man-made category, without root in even a mystified biology. We cannot imagine a human world without
gender distinctionsalthough we can imagine a world without domination by gender. But a world without class is
eminently imaginableindeed, such was the human world for the great majority of our species time on earth,
during all of which considerable fuss was made over gender. Historically, the difference arises because class
signifies one side of a larger figure that includes a state apparatus whose conquests and regulations create races
there will be no true resolution of racism so long as class
and shape gender relations. Thus
society stands, inasmuch as a racially oppressed society implies the activities of a class-defending state.
Nor can gender inequality be enacted away so long as class society, with its state, demands the super-exploitation
of womens labor. (Kovel, 2002, pp. 123124)
 Particularism
Their myopic focus on a particular manifestation of oppression
does not provide a specific explanation for the broader linking
of struggles inhibits the possibility for transformative
politics.
Heideman 12 (Paul M. Heideman Rutgers University, Newark, pmheideman@gmail.com Historical Materialism Volume 20,
Issue 2, pages 210- 221 Beyond Black and White: Transforming African-American Politics, Manning Marable, Second Edition,
London: Verso, 2009)

This theorisation of transformative politics is further weakened by its failure to specify any agency that could bring it about. Marable
comes close to specifying such an agency with his repeated call to look to the most oppressed sectors of our society
for a vision of social transformation (pp. xv, 80, 310). Such a call is clearly inadequate. It simply does not
follow that the most oppressed sectors of society are best positioned to carry out its most thorough
remaking. The homeless, for example, are certainly among the most oppressed groups in the United States (especially in the age of the
destruction of free public space and the social safety-net), yet this position does not automatically impart the most radical dynamics to their
struggle. Indeed, struggles for squatters rights and shelters very rarely break out of localised confrontations with municipal authorities. 8
Additionally, Marable offers no account of how the disparate struggles of the oppressed (for example, the fight
to be unified, beyond the assertion that
against anti-immigrant racism and the fight for the rights of the disabled) are
every confrontation with inequality automatically is linked to every other. Such an inadequate
account of social-movement agency deeply weakens whatever strengths Marables theory of
transformative politics may possess.
 Queer Theory Link
While concentrating on decentering identity, queer theory
succeeds in promoting the very goals of global capitalism that
work against the formation of communities or provide the
means to destroy those that already exist
Kirsch 6 (Max, PhD Florida Atlantic University, Queer Theory, Late Capitalism
and Internalized Homophobia, Journal of Homosexuality, Harrington Park Press, Vol.
52, No. , 2006, pp. 19-45, DES.
Jameson has proposed that the concept of alienation in late capitalism
has been replaced with fragmentation (1991, p.14). Fragmentation
highlights the it also becomes more abstract: What we must now ask ourselves is
whether it is precisely this semi-autonomy of the cultural sphere that has been
destroyed by the logic of late capitalism. Yet to argue that culture is today no
longer endowed with the relative autonomy is once enjoyed as one level among
others in earlier moments of capitalism (let alone in precapitalist societies) is not
necessarily to imply its disappearance or extinction. Quite the contrary; we must
go on to affirm that the autonomous sphere of culture throughout the social
realm, to the point at which everything in our social lifefrom economic value and
state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itselfcan be said
to have become cultural in some original and yet untheorized sense. This
proposition is, however, substantially quite consistent with the previous diagnosis
of a society of the image or simulacrum and a transformation of the real into so
many pseudoevents. (Jameson, 1991, p. 48) The fragmentation of social life
repeats itself in the proposal that sexuality and gender are separate
and autonomous from bureaucratic state organization. If, as in Jamesons
terms, differences can be equated, then this should not pose a problem for the
mobilization of resistance to inequality. However, as postmodernist and
poststructuralist writers assume a position that this equation is
impossible and undesirable, then the dominant modes of power will
prevail without analysis or opposition. The danger, of course, is that while
we concentrate on decentering identity, we succeed in promoting the
very goals of global capitalism that work against the formation of
communities or provide the means to destroy those that already exist,
and with them, any hope for political action. For those who are not included
in traditional sources of community buildingin particular, kinship based
groupingsthe building of an affectional community . . . must be as much a part
of our political movement as are campaigns for civil rights (Weeks, 1985, p.
176). This building of communities requires identification. If we cannot
recognize traits that form the bases of our relationships with others, how then
can communities be built? The preoccupation of Lyotard and Foucault, as
examples, with the overwhelming power of master narratives, posits a
conclusion that emphasizes individual resistance and that ironically,
ends up reinforcing the narrative itself.
 Race Link
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/django-
unchained-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
was more like bad manners than oppression.
its gratuitous and sadistic brutalization and sexualized degradation. Malevolent, ludicrously
arrogant whites owned slaves most conspicuously to degrade and torture them. Apart
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
old Warner Brothers cartoonsand the Mandingo fighters and comfort girls,
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 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 regulated
systematized, enforced and sustainedthrough 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 its product. Historian
Kenneth M. Stampp quotes a slaveholders succinct explanation: For what purpose
does the master hold the servant? asked an ante-bellum Southerner. Is it not that
by his labor, he, the master, may accumulate wealth?1 That absolute control permitted
horrible, unthinkable brutality, to be sure, but perpetrating such brutality was
neither the point of slavery nor its essential injustice . The master-slave relationship could,
and did, exist without brutality, and certainly without sadism and sexual degradation. In Tarantinos depiction, however, it is not
It does not diminish the historical
clear that slavery shorn of its extremes of brutality would be objectionable.
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 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
Neither film is
plantation slavery is only backdrop for the merger of spaghetti western and blaxploitation hero movie.
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 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
Few
dictum that economics are the method: the object is to change the soul.4 Simply put, she and her element have won.
observersamong opponents and boosters alikehave noted how deeply and
thoroughly both films are embedded in the practical ontology of neoliberalism , the
complex of unarticulated assumptions and unexamined first premises that provide its common sense, its lifeworld. Objection to The
Help has been largely of the shooting fish in a barrel variety: complaints about the films paternalistic treatment of the maids, which
generally have boiled down to an objection that the master-servant relation is thematized at all, as well as the standard, predictable
litany of anti-racist charges about whites speaking for blacks, the films inattentiveness to the fact that at that time in Mississippi
black people were busily engaged in liberating themselves, etc. An illustration of this tendency that conveniently refers to several
other variants of it is Akiba Solomon, Why Im Just Saying No to The Help and Its Historical Whitewash in Color Lines,August 10,
2011, available at:http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/08/why_im_just_saying_no_to_the_help.html. Defenses
of Django
Unchained pivot on claims about the social significance of the narrative of a black hero.
One node of this argument emphasizes the need to validate a history of autonomous black
agency and resistance as a politico-existential desideratum. It accommodates a view that
stresses the importance of recognition of rebellious or militant individuals and
revolts in black American history. Another centers on a notion that exposure to fictional black
heroes can inculcate the sense of personal efficacy necessary to overcome the
psychological effects of inequality and to facilitate upward mobility and may undermine some whites negative
stereotypes about black people. In either register assignment of social or political importance to depictions
of black heroes rests on presumptions about the nexus of mass cultural representation, social
commentary, and racial justice that are more significant politically than the controversy about
the film itself. In both versions, this argument casts political and economic problems in
psychological terms. Injustice appears as a matter of disrespect and denial of due recognition, and the
remedies proposedwhich are all about images projected and the distribution of jobs associated with
their projectionlook 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
if not avoiding that identity altogether.
graduate students who want to valorize watching television and
Studies and cultural studies
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 boysof whatever nominal age. Tarantino
has allowed as much, responding to black critics complaints about the violence and 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 opportunism, and some critics have denounced
is hardly alone in defending the film with an
it as no better than racially presumptuous. But he
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 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
these
else underlies the stress on inspiration in the black-interest films, which shows up in critical discussion of them as well. All
filmsThe Help, Red Tails, Django Unchained, even Lincoln and Glorymake 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 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
dont conflict with the mass-market film industrys imperative of infantilization
niche
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
Their
defense of these films, in the face of evidence of their failings, that, after all, they are just entertainment.
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
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
specific historicity.
distinguishable from the present by superficial inadequacies outmoded fashion, technology,
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
they deny the integrity of the past, 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
self-righteousness 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 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 link poverty and inequality most
the belief that racial inequality stems
crucially to (racialized) cultural inadequacy and psychological damage; 2)
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 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
In its blindness
sound evaluations of our current situations or the kind of steps we must take to improve our condition.12
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
babiescomports 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 engineeringinspirationas easily as it does multiculturalist
respect for difference, which, by the way, also feeds back to self-esteem engineering and
inspiration as nodes within a larger political economy of race relations. Either way, this is
a discourse that displaces a politics challenging social structures that
reproduce inequality with concern for the feelings and characteristics of
individuals and of categories of population statistics reified as singular groups that are equivalent to individuals. This
discourse has made it possible (again, but more sanctimoniously this time) to characterize
destruction of low-income housing as an uplift strategy for poor people; curtailment
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,
would-be 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.

The continued existence of capitalism forms the basis for all

inequalities and oppressions. We do not deny that racialized
violence happens and is important to address, but absent a
rejection of the class system racism will continue to be
deployed as a means to divide and rule the working class and
to preserve increasingly wide material disparities.
Taylor 11 (Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, doctoral candidate in the department of African-American studies at Northwestern
University, Race, class and Marxism, January 4, 2011 http://socialistworker.org/2011/01/04/race-class-and-marxism)

Marxists argue that capitalism is a system that is based on the exploitation of the many by the few. Because it
is a system based on gross inequality, it requires various tools to divide the majority--racism and all
oppressions under capitalism serve this purpose. Moreover, oppression is used to justify and "explain"
unequal relationships in society that enrich the minority that live off the majority's labor. Thus, racism
developed initially to explain and justify the enslavement of Africans--because they were less than human and
undeserving of liberty and freedom. Everyone accepts the idea that the oppression of slaves was rooted in the
class relations of exploitation under that system. Fewer recognize that under capitalism, wage slavery is the
pivot around which all other inequalities and oppressions turn. Capitalism used racism to justify
plunder, conquest and slavery, but as Karl Marx pointed out, it also used racism to divide and rule--to pit
one section of the working class against another and thereby blunt class consciousness. To claim, as
Marxists do, that racism is a product of capitalism is not to deny or diminish its importance or impact in
American society. It is simply to explain its origins and the reasons for its perpetuation. Many on the
left today talk about class as if it is one of many oppressions, often describing it as "classism." What people are
really referring to as "classism" is elitism or snobbery, and not the fundamental organization of society under
capitalism. Moreover, it is popular today to talk about various oppressions, including class, as intersecting.
While it is true that oppressions can reinforce and compound each other, they are born out of the material
relations shaped by capitalism and the economic exploitation that is at the heart of capitalist society. In other
words, it is the material and economic structure of society that gave rise to a range of ideas and ideologies to
justify, explain and help perpetuate that order. In the United States, racism is the most important of those
ideologies.

Racism was create to protect the labor production of chattel

slavery it was manufactured by elites as a means of
protecting their interests anti-racism strategies are co-opted
and divide resistance universal consciousness is key
Alexander 10 (The new Jim Crow: mass incarceration in the age of
colorblindness, Michelle Alexander is an associate professor of law at Ohio State
University and a civil rights advocate, who has litigated numerous class action
discrimination cases and has worked on criminal justice reform issues. She is a
recipient of a 2005 Soros Justice Fellowship of the Open Society Institute, has served
as director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California, directed
the Civil Rights Clinic at Stanford Law School and was a law clerk for Justice Harry
Blackmun at the U. S. Supreme Court.)

The concept of race is a relatively recent development. 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 slavery- as well as the extermination of American Indians
with the 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, particularly tobacco and cotton farming, demand
increased greatly for both labor and land. The demand for land was met by invading
and conquering larger and large swaths of territory. American Indians 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 race-
uncivilized savages- thus providing a justification for the extermination of the native
peoples. 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 left
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 view Africans, who were relatively powerless, as the ideal slaves. The
systemic 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 united 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, 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 to 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 the 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 slave. Word of Bacons rebellion spread far and wide, and several more
uprisings of a similar type followed. In an effort to protect their superior status and
economic position, the planters shifted their strategy for maintaining dominance.
They abandoned their heavy reliance on 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 come to be
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 labor would not be placed in competition with
slave labor. 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 . By the mid-1770s, the system of bond
labor had been thoroughly transformed into a racial caste system predicated on
slavery. The degraded status of Africans was justified on the ground that Negros,
like the Indians, were an uncivilized lesser race, perhaps even more lacking in
intelligence and laudable human qualities than the red-skinned natives. The notion
of white supremacy rationalized the enslavement of Africans, even as whites
endeavored to form a new nation based on the ideals of equality, liberty, and justice
for all. Before democracy, chattel slavery was born.

A few hundred years later the Populist movement offered a

chance to end racialized violence by uniting poor and working
class whites and blacks once again the corporate elite
mitigated the threat of revolt against the rigid and oppressive
class structures by fomenting racial tension through
segregation laws they made us think race was the problem
when really it was class
Alexander 10 (The new Jim Crow: mass incarceration in the age of
colorblindness, Michelle Alexander is an associate professor of law at Ohio State
University and a civil rights advocate, who has litigated numerous class action
discrimination cases and has worked on criminal justice reform issues. She is a
recipient of a 2005 Soros Justice Fellowship of the Open Society Institute, has served
as director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California, directed
the Civil Rights Clinic at Stanford Law School and was a law clerk for Justice Harry
Blackmun at the U. S. Supreme Court.)

Three alternative philosophies of race relations were put forward to compete for the
regions support, all of which rejected the doctrines of extreme racism espoused by
some Redeemers: liberalism, conservatism, and radicalism. The liberal philosophy of
race relations emphasized the stigma of segregation and the hypocrisy of a
government that celebrates freedom and equality yet denies both on account of
race. This philosophy, born in the North, never gained much traction among
Southern whites or blacks. The conservative philosophy, by contrast, attracted wide
support and was implemented in various contexts over a considerable period of
time. Conservatives blamed liberals for pushing blacks ahead of their proper station
in life and placing blacks in positions they were unprepared to fill, a circumstance
that had allegedly contributed to their downfall. They warned blacks that some
Redeemers were not satisfied with having decimated Reconstruction, and were
prepared to wage an aggressive war against blacks throughout the South. With
some success, the conservatives reached out to African American voters, reminding
them that they had something to lose as well as gain and that the liberals
preoccupation with political and economic equality presented the danger of losing
all that blacks had so far gained. The radical philosophy offered, for many African
Americans, the most promise. It was predicated on a searing critique of large
corporations, particularly railroads, and the wealthy elite in the North and South.
The radicals of the late nineteenth century, who later formed the Populist Party,
viewed the privileged classes as conspiring to keep poor whites and blacks locked
into a subordinate political and economic position. For many African American
voters, the Populist approach was preferable to the paternalism of liberals. Populists
preached an equalitarianism of want and poverty, the kinship of a common
grievance, and a common oppressor. As described by Tom Watson, a prominent
Populist leader, in a speech advocating a union between black and white farmers:
You are kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings. You are
made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the
arch of financial despotism that enslaves you both. You are deceived and blinded
that you may not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system
which beggars both. In an effort to demonstrate their commitment to a genuinely
multiracial, working-class movement against white elites, the Populists made strides
toward racial integration, a symbol of their commitment to class-bound unity.
African Americans throughout the South responded with great hope and
enthusiasm, eager to be true partners in a struggle for social justice. According to
Woodward, It is altogether probable that during the brief Populist upheaval in the
nineties Negros and native whites achieved a greater comity of mind and
harmonyfff of political purpose than ever before or since in the South. The
challenges inherent in creating the alliance sought by the Populists were formidable,
as race prejudice ran the highest among the very white populations to which the
Populist appeal was specifically address- the depressed lower economic classes.
Nevertheless, the Populist movement initially enjoyed remarkable success in the
South, fueled by a wave of discontent aroused by the severe agrarian depression of
the 1880s and 1890s. The Populists took direct aim at the conservatives, who were
known as comprising a party of privilege, and they achieved a stunning series of
political victories throughout the region. Alarmed by the success of the Populists
and the apparent potency of the alliance between poor and working-class whites
and African Americans, the conservatives raised the cry of white supremacy and
resorted to the tactics they had employed in their quest for Redemption, including
fraud, intimidation, bribery, and terror. Segregation laws were proposed as part of a
deliberate effort to drive a wedge between poor whites and African Americans.
These discriminatory barriers were designed to encourage lower-class whites to
retain a sense of superiority over blacks, making it far less likely that they would
sustain inter-racial political alliances aimed at toppling the white elite. The laws
were, in effect, another racial bribe. As William Julius Wilson has noted, As long as
poor whites directed their hatred and frustration against the black competitor, the
planters were relieved of class hostility directed against them. Indeed, in order to
overcome the well-founded suspicions of poor and illiterate whites that they, as well
as blacks, were in danger of losing the right to vote, the leaders of the movement
pursued an aggressive campaign of white supremacy in every state prior to black
disenfranchisement. Ultimately, the Populists caved to the pressure and abandoned
their former allies. While the [Populist] movement was at the peak of zeal,
Woodward observed, the two races had surprised each other and astonished their
opponents by the harmony they achieved and the good will with which they co-
operated. But when it became clear that the conservatives would stop at nothing
to decimate their alliance, the biracial partnership dissolved, and Populist leaders
re-aligned themselves with conservatives. Even Tom Watson, who had been among
the most forceful advocates for an interracial alliance of farmers, concluded that
Populist principles could never be fully embraced by the South until blacks were
eliminated from politics. The agricultural depression, taken together with a series of
failed reforms and broken political promises, had pyramided to a climax of social
tensions. Dominant whites concluded that it was in their political and economic
interest to scapegoat blacks, and permission to hate came from sources that had
formerly denied it, including Northern liberals eager to reconcile with the South,
Southern conservatives who had once promised blacks protection from racial
extremism, and Populists, who cast aside their dark-skinned allies when the
partnership fell under siege. History seemed to repeat itself. Just as the white elite
had successfully driven a wedge between poor whites and blacks following Bacons
Rebellion by creating the institution of black slavery, another racial caste system
was emerging nearly two centuries later, in part due to efforts by white elites to
decimate a multiracial alliance of poor people. By the turn of the twentieth century,
every state in the South had laws on the books that disenfranchised blacks and
discriminated against them in virtually every sphere of life, lending sanction to a
racial ostracism that extended to schools, churches, housing, jobs, restrooms,
hotels, restaurants, hospitals, orphanages, prisons, funeral homes, morgues, and
cemeteries.

The aff's focus on race shatters class based coalitions against

capitalism - even if oppression is found within
intersectionality, capitalism is a much greater force to
fostering that inequality, which means we turn the case.
Dander & Torres 99(A. Darder and R. Torres, 1999.Darder is a University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Professor of Educational Policy Studies and Latino/a
Studies, Torres is Professor of Planning, Policy, and Design, Chicano/Latino Studies,
and Political Science. Shattering the Race Lens: Towards a Critical Theory of
Racism. Critical Ethnicity. P. 174-6)

[W]e work with raced identities on already reified ground. In the context
of domination, raced identities are imposed and internalized, then
renegotiated and reproduced. From artificial to natural, we court a hard-
to-perceive social logic that reproduces the very conditions we strain to
overcome. Jon Cruz (1996)8. Over the last three decades, there has been
an overwhelming tendency among a variety of critical scholars to focus
on the concept of race as a central category of analysis for
interpreting the social conditions of inequality and marginalization.9 As
a consequence, much of the literature on subordinate cultural
populations, with its emphasis on such issues as racial inequality, racial
segregation, racial identity, has utilized the construct of race as a
central category of analysis for interpreting the social conditions of
inequality and marginalization. In turn, this literature has reinforced a
racialized politics of identity and representation, with its problematic
emphasis on racial identiy as the overwhelming impulse for political
action. This theoretical practice has led to serious analytical
weaknesses and absence of depth in much of the historical and
contemporary writings on racialized populations in this country. The
politics of busing in the early 1970s provides an excellent example that
illustrates this phenomenon. Social scientists studying race relations
concluded that contact among Black and White students would
improve race relations and the educational conditions of Black
students if they were bused to White (better) schools outside their
neighborhoods.10 Thirty years later, many parents and educators
adamantly denounce the busing solution (a solution based on the
discourse of race) as not only fundamentally problematic to the fabric
of African American and Chicano communities, but an erroneous social
policy experiment that failed to substantially improve the overall
academic performance of students in these communities. Given this
legacy, it is not surprising to find that the theories, practices, and policies
that have informed social science analysis of racialized populations
today are overwhelmingly rooted in a politics of identity, an approach
that is founded on parochial notions of race and representation which
ignore the imperatives of capitalist accumulation and the existence of
class divisions within racialized subordinate populations. The folly of this
position is critiqued by Ellen Meiksins Wood11 in her article entitled
Identity Crisis, where she exposes the limitations of a politics of
identity which fails to contend with the fact that capitalism is the most
totalizing system of social relations the world has ever known. Yet, in
much of the work on African American, Latino, Native American, and
Asian populations, an analysis of class and a critique of capitalism is
conspicuously absent. And even when it is mentioned, the emphasis is
primarily on an undifferentiated plurality of identity politics or an
intersection of oppressions, which, unfortunately, ignores the
overwhelming tendency of capitalism to homogenize rather than to
diversify human experience. Moreover, this practice is particularly
disturbing since no matter where one travels around the world, there is
no question that racism is integral to the process of capital
accumulation. For example, the current socioeconomic conditions of
Latinos and other racialized populations can be traced to the relentless
emergence of the global economy and recent economic policies of
expansion, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). A
recent United Nations report by the International Labor Organization
confirms the negative impact of globalization on racialized populations.
By the end of 1998, it was projected that one billion workers would be
unemployed. The people of Africa, China, and Latin America have been
most affected by the current restructuring of capitalist development.12
This phenomenon of racialized capitalism is directly linked to the
abusive corporations as Coca Cola, Walmart, Disney, Ford Motor Company, and
General Motors. In a recent speech on global economic apartheid, John
Cavanagh,13 co-executive director of the Institute for Policy Studies in
Washington, D.C., comments on the practices of the Ford Motor Company. The
Ford Motor Company has its state-of-the-art assembly plant in Mexico where
because it can deny basic worker rights, it can pay one-tenth the wages
and yet get the same quality and the same productivity in producing
goods. The same technologies by the way which are easing
globalization are also primarily cutting more jobs than theyre
creating. The failure of scholars to confront this dimension in their
analysis of contemporary society as a racialized phenomenon and their
tendency to continue treating class as merely one of a mulitiplicity of
(equally valid) perspectives, which may or may not intersect with the
process of racialization, are serious shortcomings. In addressing this issue,
we must recognize that identity politics, which generally gloss over
class differences and/or ignore class contradictions, have often been
used by radical scholars and activists within African American, Latino,
and other subordinate cultural communities in an effort to build a
political base. Here, fabricated constructions of race are objectified
and mediated as truth to ignite political support, divorced from the
realities of class struggle. By so doing, they have unwittingly
perpetuated the vacuous and dangerous notion that the political and
economic are separate spheres of society which can function
independently- a view that firmly anchors and sustains prevailing class
relations of power in society.

The affirmative commodifies an essentialized notion of race to

frame inequality, replicating racism and shattering class-based
coalitions, ensuring the capitalist social relations that build the
ghettoes and favells that imprison racialized populations
become inevitable, turning the case
Darder and Torres 99 (Antonia Darder, Professor of Educational Policy Studies
and Latino/a Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Rodolpho
D. Torres, Professor of Planning, Policy & Design and Political Science at UC Irvine,
Shattering the Race Lens: Toward a Critical Theory of Racism, Chapter 7 of the
book Critical Ethnicity: Countering the Waves of Identity Politics, edited by Robert
H. Tai and Mary L. Kenyatta, p. 174-176)

Over the last three decades, there has been an overwhelming tendency among
social science scholars to focus on notions of race. Over the last three decades,
there has been an overwhelming tendency among a variety of critical scholars to
focus on the concept of "race" as a central category of analysis for interpreting the
social conditions of inequality and marginalization. As a consequence, much of the
literature on subordinate cultural populations, with its emphasis on such issues as
"racial inequality," "racial segregation," "racial identity," has utilized the construct of
"race" as a central category of analysis for interpreting the social conditions of
inequality and marginalization. ln turn, this literature has reinforced a racialized
politics of identity and representation, with its problematic emphasis on "racial"
identity as the overwhelming impulse for political action. This theoretical practice
has led to serious analytical weaknesses and absence of depth in much of
the historical and contemporary writings on racialized populations in this
country. The politics of busing in the early 1970s provides an excellent example that
illustrates this phenomenon. Social scientists studying "race relations" concluded
that contact among "Black" and "White" students would improve "race relations"
and the educational conditions of "Black" students if they were bused to "White"
(better) schools outside their neighborhoods! Thirty years later, many parents and
educators adamantly denounce the busing solution (a solution based on a discourse
of race") as not only fundamentally problematic to the fabric of African American
and Chicano communities, but an erroneous social policy experiment that failed to
substantially improve the overall academic performance of students in these
communities. Given this legacy, it is not surprising to find that the theories,
practices, and policies that have informed social science analysis of racialized
populations today are overwhelmingly rooted in a politics of identity, an approach
that is founded on parochial notions of "race" and representation which ignore the
imperatives of capitalist accumulation and the existence of class divisions within
racialized subordinate populations. The folly of this position is critiqued by Ellen
Meiksins Wood in her article entitled "Identity Crisis," where she exposes the
limitations of a politics of identity which fails to contend with the fact that
capitalism is the most totalizing system of social relations the world has
ever known. Yet, in much of the work on African American, Latino, Native
American, and Asian populations, an analysis of class and a critique of capitalism is
conspicuously absent. And even when it is mentioned, the emphasis is primarily on
an undifferentiated plurality of identity politics or an intersection of oppressions,"
which, unfortunately, ignores the overwhelming tendency of capitalism to
homogenize rather than to diversify human experience. Moreover, this practice is
particularly disturbing since no matter where one travels around the world, there is
no question that racism is integral to the process of capital accumulation. For
example, the current socioeconomic conditions of Latinos and other racialized
populations can be traced to the reletless emergence of the global economy and
recent economic policies of expansion, such as the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA). A recent United Nations report by the International Labor
Organization confirms the negative impact of globalization on racialized
populations. By the end of 1998, it was projected that one billion workers would be
unemployed. The people of Africa, China, and Latin America have been most
affected by the current restructuring of capitalist development. This phenomenon
of racialized capitalism is directly linked to the abusive practices and destructive
impact of the global factory 'a global financial enterprise system that includes
such transnational corporations as Coca Cola, Walmart, Disney, Ford Motor
Company, and General Motors. In a recent speech on "global economic apartheid,"
John Cavanagh," co-executive director of the Institute for Policy Studies in
Washington, D.C., comments on the practices of the Ford Motor Company. The Ford
Motor Company has its state-of-the-art assembly plant in Mexico . . . where because
it can deny basic worker rights, it can pay one-tenth the wages and yet get the
same quality and the same productivity in producing goods. . . .The same
technologies by the way which are easing globalization are also primarily cutting
more jobs than they're creating. The failure of scholars to confront this dimension in
their analysis of contemporary society as a racialized phenomenon and their
tendency to continue treating class as merely one of a multiplicity of (equally valid)
perspectives, which may or may not "intersect" with the process of racialization, are
serious shortcomings. In addressing this issue, we must recognize that identity
politics, which generally gloss over class differences and/ or ignore class
contradictions, have often been used by radical scholars and activists within African
American, Latino, and other subordinate cultural communities in an effort to build a
political base. Here, fabricated constructions of "race" are objectified and mediated
as truth to ignite political support, divorced from the realities of class struggle. By so
doing, they have unwittingly perpetuated the vacuous and dangerous notion that
the political and economic are separate spheres of society which can function
independentlya view that firmly anchors and sustains prevailing class relations of
power in society.

The history of slavery proves that race is merely a symptom of

capitalany discussion of racism must first start at the violent
history of capital accumulation.
Keefer 3 (Tom, member of Facing Reality, New Socialist Magazine, January 2003,
Constructs of Capitalism: Slavery and the Development of Racism,
http://www.newsocialist.org/magazine/39/article03.html, RSR)

The brutality and viciousness of capitalism is well known to the oppressed and
exploited of this world. Billions of people throughout the world spend their lives
incessantly toiling to enrich the already wealthy, while throughout history any
serious attempts to build alternatives to capitalism have been met with bombings,
invasions, and blockades by imperialist nation states. Although the modern day
ideologues of the mass media and of institutions such as the World Bank and IMF
never cease to inveigh against scattered acts of violence perpetrated against their
system, they always neglect to mention that the capitalist system they lord over
was called into existence and has only been able to maintain itself by the sustained
application of systematic violence. It should come as no surprise that this capitalist
system, which we can only hope is now reaching the era of its final demise, was just
as rapacious and vicious in its youth as it is now. The "rosy dawn" of capitalist
production was inaugurated by the process of slavery and genocide in the western
hemisphere, and this "primitive accumulation of capital" resulted in the largest
systematic murder of human beings ever seen. However, the rulers of society have
found that naked force is often most economically used in conjunction with
ideologies of domination and control which provide a legitimizing explanation for the
oppressive nature of society. Racism is such a construct and it came into being as a
social relation which condoned and secured the initial genocidal processes of
capitalist accumulation--the founding stones of contemporary bourgeois society.
While it is widely accepted that the embryonic capitalist class came to power in the
great bourgeois revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries, what is comparatively
less well known is the crucial role that chattel slavery and the plunder of the "New
World" played in calling this class into being and providing the "primitive
accumulation of capital" necessary to launch and sustain industrialization in Europe.
The accidental "discovery" of the Western Hemisphere by the mass murderer
Christopher Columbus in 1492 changed everything for the rival economic and
political interests of the European states. The looting and pillaging of the "New
World" destabilized the European social order, as Spain raised huge armies and built
armadas with the unending streams of gold and silver coming from the "New
World", the spending of which devalued the currency reserves of its rivals. The only
way Portugal, England, Holland, and France could stay ahead in the regional power
games of Europe was to embark on their own colonial ventures. In addition to the
extraction of precious minerals and the looting and pillaging of indigenous societies,
European merchant-adventurers realized that substantial profits could also be made
through the production of cash crops on the fertile lands surrounding the Caribbean
sea. The only problem was that as the indigenous population either fled from
enslavement or perished from the diseases and deprivations of the Europeans,
there was no one left to raise the sugar, tobacco, cotton, indigo, and other tropical
cash crops that were so profitable. A system of waged labour would not work for the
simple reason that with plentiful land and easy means of subsistence surrounding
them, colonists would naturally prefer small scale homesteading instead of
labouring for their masters. As the planter Emanuel Downing of Massachusetts put it
in 1645: "I do not see how we can thrive until we get a stock of slaves sufficient to
do all our business, for our children's children will hardly see this great continent
filled with people so that our servants will still desire freedom to plant for
themselves, and not stay but for very great wages." Capitalistic social relations
have always been based on compulsion, and they require as a precondition that
workers possess nothing but their capacity to labour. The would-be developers of
the wealth of the "New World" thus turned to forced labour in complete
contradiction to all the theories of bourgeois economists because unfree labour was
the only kind of labour applicable to the concrete situation in the Americas.
Although slavery is now, and has almost always been equated with unfree Black
labour, it was not always, or even predominantly so. Capitalists looked first to their
own societies in order to find the population to labour in servitude on the large-scale
plantations necessary for tropical cash crop production. Eric Williams, in his
groundbreaking work Capitalism and Slavery, noted that in the early stages of
colonialism "white slavery was the historic base upon which Negro [sic] slavery was
constructed." Between 1607 and 1783 over a quarter million "white" indentured
servants arrived in the British colonies alone where they were set to work in the
agricultural and industrial processes of the time. The shipping companies, ports,
and trading routes established for the transport of the poor, "criminal", and lumpen
elements of European society were to form the backbone of the future slave trade
of Africans. Slavery became an exclusively Black institution due to the dynamics of
class struggle as repeated multi-ethnic rebellions of African slaves and indentured
European servants led the slaveholders to seek strategies to divide and conquer.
The fact that an African slave could be purchased for life with the same amount of
money that it would cost to buy an indentured servant for 10 years, and that the
African's skin color would function as an instrument of social control by making it
easier to track down runaway slaves in a land where all whites were free wage
labourers and all Black people slaves, provided further incentives for this system of
racial classification. In the colonies where there was an insufficient free white
population to provide a counterbalance to potential slave insurgencies, such as on
the Caribbean islands, an elaborate hierarchy of racial privilege was built up, with
the lighter skinned "mulattos" admitted to the ranks of free men where they often
owned slaves themselves. The concept of a "white race" never really existed before
the economic systems of early capitalism made it a necessary social construct to
aid in the repression of enslaved Africans. Xenophobia and hostility towards those
who were different than one's own immediate family, clan, or tribe were certainly
evident, and discrimination based on religious status was also widespread but the
development of modern "scientific" racism with its view that there are physically
distinct "races" within humanity, with distinct attributes and characteristics is
peculiar to the conquest of the Americas, the rise of slavery, and the imperialist
domination of the entire world. Racism provided a convenient way to explain the
subordinate position of Africans and other victims of Euro-colonialism, while at the
same time providing an apparatus upon which to structure the granting of special
privileges to sectors of the working class admitted as members of the "white race".
As David McNally has noted, one of the key component of modern racism was its
utility in resolving the contradiction as to how the modern European societies in
which the bourgeoisie had come to power through promising "freedom" and
"equality" were so reliant on slave labour and murderous, yet highly profitable
colonial adventures. The development of a concept like racism allowed whole
sections of the world's population to be "excommunicated" from humankind, and
then be murdered or worked to death with a clear conscience for the profit of the
capitalist class. To get a sense of the scale of slavery and its economic importance,
and thus an understanding of the material incentives for the creation of ideological
constructs such as "race", a few statistics regarding the English slave trade from
Eric Williams' book Capitalism and Slavery help to put things in context. The Royal
African Company, a monopolistic crown corporation, transported an average of 5
000 slaves a year between 1680 and 1686. When the ability to engage in the free
trade of slaves was recognized as a "fundamental and natural right" of the
Englishman, one port city alone, Bristol, shipped 160 950 slaves from 1698-1707. In
1760, 146 slave ships with a capacity for 36 000 slaves sailed from British ports,
while in 1771 that number had increased to 190 ships with a capacity for 47 000
slaves. Between 1700 and 1786 over 610 000 slaves were imported to Jamaica
alone, and conservative estimates for the total import of slaves into all British
colonies between 1680 and 1786 are put at over two million. All told, many
historians place the total number of Africans displaced by the Atlantic slave trade as
being between twelve and thirty million people--a massive historical event and
forced migration of unprecedented proportions. These large numbers of slaves and
the success of the slave trade as jump starter for capitalist industrialization came
from what has been called the "triangular trade"--an intensely profitable economic
relationship which built up European industry while systematically deforming and
underdeveloping the other economic regions involved. The Europeans would
produce manufactured goods that would then be traded to ruling elites in the
various African kingdoms. They in turn would use the firearms and trading goods of
the Europeans to enrich themselves by capturing members of rival tribes, or the
less fortunate of their own society, to sell them as slaves to the European
merchants who would fill their now empty ships with slaves destined to work in the
colonial plantations. On the plantations, the slaves would toil to produce expensive
cash crops that could not be grown in Europe. These raw materials were then
refined and sold at fantastic profit in Europe. In 1697, the tiny island of Barbados
with its 166 square miles, was worth more to British capitalism than New England,
New York, and Pennsylvania combined, while by 1798, the income accruing to the
British from the West Indian plantations alone was four million pounds a year, as
opposed to one million pounds from the whole rest of the world. Capitalist
economists of the day recognized the super profitability of slavery by noting the
ease of making 100% profit on the trade, and by noting that one African slave was
as profitable as seven workers in the mainland. Even more importantly, the profits
of the slave trade were plowed back into further economic growth. Capital from the
slave trade financed James Watt and the invention and production of the steam
engine, while the shipping, insurance, banking, mining, and textile industries were
all thoroughly integrated into the slave trade. What an analysis of the origins of
modern capitalism shows is just how far the capitalist class will go to make a profit.
The development of a pernicious racist ideology, spread to justify the uprooting and
enslavement of millions of people to transport them across the world to fill a land
whose indigenous population was massacred or worked to death, represents the
beginnings of the system that George W. Bush defends as "our way of life". For
revolutionaries today who seek to understand and transform capitalism and the
racism encoded into its very being, it is essential to understand how and why these
systems of domination and exploitation came into being before we can hope to
successfully overthrow them.

Race and class are reproduced within capitalist relations

capitalism racializes subjects to force competition and divides
social groups by obfuscating labor consciousness this is a
way to mask contradiction and maintain capital accumulation
San Juan 3 (E, Fullbright lecturer @ U of Leuven, Belgium, Marxism and the
Race/Class Problematic: A Re-Articulation,
http://clogic.eserver.org/2003/sanjuan.html)

It seems obvious that racism cannot be dissolved by instances of status mobility

when sociohistorical circumstances change gradually or are transformed by
unforeseen interventions. The black bourgeoisie continues to be harassed and
stigmatized by liberal or multiculturalist practices of racism, not because they drive
Porsches or conspicuously flaunt all the indices of wealth. Class exploitation cannot
replace or stand for racism because it is the condition of possibility for it. It is
what enables the racializing of selected markers, whether physiological or cultural,
to maintain, deepen and reinforce alienation, mystifying reality by modes of
commodification, fetishism, and reification characterizing the routine of quotidian
life. Race and class are dialectically conjoined in the reproduction of capitalist
relations of exploitation and domination. 30. We might take a passage from Marx as
a source of guidelines for developing a historical-materialist theory of racism which
is not empiricist but dialectical in aiming for theorizing conceptual concreteness as
a multiplicity of historically informed and configured determinations. This passage
comes from a letter dated 9 April 1870 to Meyer and Vogt in which Marx explains
why the Irish struggle for autonomy was of crucial significance for the British
proletariat: . . . Every industrial and commercial center in England possesses a
working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish
proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who
lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he feels himself a member
of the ruling nation and so turns himself into a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists
of his country against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He
cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His
attitude towards him is much the same as that of the 'poor whites' to the 'niggers'
in the former slave states of the USA. The Irishman pays him back with interest in
his own money. He sees in the English worker at once the accomplice and stupid
tool of the English rule in Ireland. This antagonism is artificially kept alive and
intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short by all the means at
the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of
the English working class, despite its organization. It is the secret by which the
capitalist class maintains its power. And that class is fully aware of it (quoted in
Callinicos 1993). Here Marx sketches three parameters for the sustained viability of
racism in modern capitalist society. First, the economic competition among workers
is dictated by the distribution of labor power in the labor-market via differential
wage rates. The distinction between skilled and unskilled labor is contextualized in
differing national origins, languages and traditions of workers, which can be
manipulated into racial antagonisms. Second, the appeal of racist ideology to white
workers, with their identification as members of the "ruling nation" affording--in
W.E.B. DuBois's words--"public and psychological wage" or compensation. Like
religion, white-supremacist nationalism provides the illusory resolution to the real
contradictions of life for the working majority of citizens. Third, the ruling class
reinforces and maintains these racial divisions for the sake of capital accumulation
within the framework of its ideological/political hegemony in the metropolis and
worldwide. 31. Racism and nationalism are thus modalities in which class struggles
articulate themselves at strategic points in history. No doubt social conflicts in
recent times have involved not only classes but also national, ethnic, and religious
groups, as well as feminist, ecological, antinuclear social movements (Bottomore
1983). The concept of "internal colonialism" (popular in the seventies) that
subjugates national minorities, as well as the principle of self-determination for
oppressed or "submerged" nations espoused by Lenin, exemplify dialectical
attempts to historicize the collective agency for socialist transformation. Within the
framework of the global division of labor between metropolitan center and colonized
periphery, a Marxist program of national liberation is meant to take into account the
extraction of surplus value from colonized peoples through unequal exchange as
well as through direct colonial exploitation in "Free Trade Zones," illegal traffic in
prostitution, mail-order brides, and contractual domestics (at present, the
Philippines provides the bulk of the latter, about ten million persons and growing).
National oppression has a concrete reality not entirely reducible to class exploitation
but incomprehensible apart from it; that is, it cannot be adequately understood
without the domination of the racialized peoples in the dependent formations by the
colonizing/imperialist power, with the imperial nation-state acting as the exploiting
class, as it were (see San Juan 1998; 2002). 32. Racism arose with the creation and
expansion of the capitalist world economy (Wolf 1982; Balibar and Wallerstein,
1991). Solidarities conceived as racial or ethnic groups acquire meaning and value
in terms of their place within the social organization of production and reproduction
of the ideological-political order; ideologies of racism as collective social evaluation
of solidarities arise to reinforce structural constraints which preserve the exploited
and oppressed position of these "racial" solidarities. Such patterns of economic and
political segmentation mutate in response to the impact of changing economic and
political relationships (Geshwender and Levine 1994). Overall, there is no denying
the fact that national-liberation movements and indigenous groups fighting for
sovereignty, together with heterogeneous alliances and coalitions, cannot be fully
understood without a critical analysis of the production of surplus value and its
expropriation by the propertied class--that is, capital accumulation. As John Rex
noted, different ethnic groups are placed in relations of cooperation, symbiosis or
conflict by the fact that as groups they have different economic and political
functions.Within this changing class order of [colonial societies], the language of
racial difference frequently becomes the means whereby men allocate each other to
different social and economic positions. What the type of analysis used here
suggests is that the exploitation of clearly marked groups in a variety of different
ways is integral to capitalism and that ethnic groups unite and act together because
they have been subjected to distinct and differentiated types of exploitation. Race
relations and racial conflict are necessarily structured by political and economic
factors of a more generalized sort (1983, 403-05, 407). Hence race relations and
race conflict are necessarily structured by the larger totality of the political
economy of a given society, as well as by modifications in the structure of the world
economy. Corporate profit-making via class exploitation on an
international/globalized scale, at bottom, still remains the logic of the world system
of finance capitalism based on historically changing structures and retooled
practices of domination and subordination.
Impacts
 Extinction Impact
The unchecked spread of neoliberal capitalism necessitates
extermination in the name of profit ensures poverty and
environmental and cultural destruction, culminating in
eventual extinction.
Cole 11 (Dr. Mike Cole is Emeritus Research Professor in Education and Equality at Bishop Grosseteste University College
Lincoln, Lincoln, UK. His most recent book is Racism and Education in the U.K. and the U.S.: towards a socialist alternative
(New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011 RACISM AND EDUCATION IN THE U.K. AND THE U.S. Palgrave
Macmillan (June 7, 2011), pgs. 180-182)

Neo-liberal capitalism, in being primarily about expanding opportunities for large multinational companies, has undermined the
power of nationstates and exacerbated the negative effects of globalization on such services as healthcare,
education, water and transport (Martinez and Garcia, 2000). However, the current hegemonic role of business in schooling is
paramount in convincing workers and future workers that socialism is off the agenda. Marxist educators and other Left radicals should
expose this myth. Students have a right to discuss different economic and political systems such as twenty-first-century democratic
socialism. This is particularly pressing given the current economic recession. It is easier in general for discussion in schools to embrace
issues of gender, race, disability, sexual orientation, and social class when social class relates just to attainment than to address social
class in the context of overthrowing capitalism, and replacing it with world democratic socialism, where participatory democracy is
central. The latter may thus be seen as the last taboo, and, of course, understandably so. It is time to move forward and bring such
discussions into schools, colleges, and universities, Marxist and other Left educators can make the case that such considerations are a
perfectly reasonable democratic demand. Global capitalism is out of control, and the very survival of our
planet is dependent on dialogical education that considers the socialist alternative , an alternative
distanced from the distortions of Marx by Stalinism. No longer can socialism be divorced from environmental and ecological issues.
McLaren and Houston (2005, p, 167) have argued that escalating environmental problems at all geographical scales from local to global
have become a pressing reality that critical educators can no longer afford to ignore. They go on to cite the complicity between global
profiteering, resource colonization, and the wholesale ecological devastation that has become a matter of everyday life for most species on
the planet. Following Kahn (2003), they state the need for a critical dialogue between social and eco-justice (McLaren and Houston
2005, p. 168). They call for a dialectics of ecological and environmental justice to reveal the malign interaction between capitalism,
imperialism, and ecology that has created widespread environmental degradation that has dramatically accelerated with the onset of neo-
liberalism. World capitalisms environmentally racist (Bullard et al., 2007) effects in both the developing and developed world should
be discussed openly and freely in the educational institutions. As far as the developing world is concerned, there are, for example, such
issues as the environmentally dev-astating method of extraction of natural resources utilized by multinational
corporations in numerous developing countries that have devastated eco-systems and destroyed cultures and
livelihoods (World Council of Churches, 1994, cited in Robinson, 2000), with toxic waste polluting groundwater, soil and the
atmosphere (e.g., Robinson, 2000). In addition, there is transboundary dumping of hazardous waste by developed countries to
developing nations, usually in sub-Sahara Africa (e.g., Ibitayo et al., 2008; see also Blanco, 2010 on Latin America). As far as the
developed world is concerned, in the U.S., for example, people of color are concentrated around hazardous
waste facilities-more than half of the nine million people living within two miles of such facilities are
minorities (Bullard et al., 2007). Finally, there is the ubiquitous issue of climate change, itself linked to the totally destructive impact of
capitalism. Joel Kovel (2010) has described cli-mate change as a menace without parallel in the whole history of humanity. However, on
a positive note, he argues that [it]s spectacular and dramatic character can generate narratives capable of arousing general concern and
thus provide a stimulus to build movements of resistance. Climate change is linked to loss to the planet of living thingsalso a rallying
point for young people. For Marxist educators, this provides a good inroad for linking environment, global capitalism, and arguments for
the socialist alternative. As Kovel (2010) puts it, only within the framework of a revolutionary ecoso- cialist society can we deal with the
twinned crises of climate change and species lossand others as wellwithin a coherent program centered around the flourishing of
life. Capitalism and the destruction of the environment are inextricably linked, to the extent that it
is becoming increasingly apparent that saving the environment is dependent on the destruction of
capitalism. Debate should therefore include a consideration of the connections between global capitalism and environmental
destruction, as well as a discussion of the socialist alternative. The need for environmental issues to be allied to socialism is paramount. As
Nick Beams (2009) notes, all the green opponents of Marxism view the overthrow of the capitalist system by means of the socialist
revolution as the key to resolving the problems of global warming as either unrealistic, not immediate enough, or believe that
socialism is hostile to nature. Beams (ibid.) argues that, in reality, the system of market relations is based on the separation of the
producers from the means of production, and it is this separation-the metabolic rift between [human beings] and nature that is the
source of the crisis. In other words, instead of the real producers of wealth (the working class) having control over what they produce and
rationally assigning this to human need, goods are irrationally produced for profit. Beams (ibid.) quotes Marx (1894 [1966] p. 959) as
follows: Freedom. ..can consist only in this, that socialised man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a
rational way, bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least
expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature. As Beams (2009) concludes, [f]ar from
Marx being outdated, the world has, so to speak, caught up with Marx.
 Root Cause
Class is the driver of all social and existential conditions. Only
emancipation from the status quo modes of production can
enact any form of human freedom
Ebert and Zavarzadeh in 2008(Teresa L., English, State University of New York,
Albany, Masud, prolific writer and expert on class ideology, Class in Culture, p.ix-
xii)

Class is everywhere and nowhere. It is the most decisive condition of social

life: it shapes the economic and, consequently, the social and cultural
resources of people. It determines their birth, healthcare, clothing, schooling,
eating, love, labor, sleep, aging, and death. Yet it remains invisible in the every
day and in practical consciousness because, for the most part, it is dispersed
through popular culture, absorbed in cultural difference, obscured by
formal equality before the law or explained away by philosophical
arguments. Class in Culture attempts to trace class in different cultural situations
and practices to make its routes and effects visible. However, the strategies
obscuring class are cunning, complex, and subtle, and are at work in unexpected
sites of culture. Consequently, this is not a linear book: it surprises class in the
segments, folds, vicinities, points, and divides of culture. It moves, for example,
from Abu Ghraib to the post-deconstructive proclamations of Antonio Negri, from
stem cell research to labor history, from theoretical debates on binaries to diets. It is
also written in a variety of registers and lengths: in the vocabularies of theory, the
idioms of description and explanation, as well as in the language of polemics, and in
long, short, and shorter chapters. Regardless of the language, the plane of
argument, the length of the text, and the immediate subject of our critiques, our
purpose has been to tease out from these incongruous moments the critical
elements of a basic grammar of class-one that might be useful in reading class in
other social sites. Our text on eating, for example, unpacks two diets that, we
argue, reproduce class binaries in the zone of desire. The point here is not only
when one eats, one eats class, but also class works in the most unexpected comers
of culture, Eating as a sensuous, even sensual corporeality, is seen as the arena of
desire which is represented in the cultural imaginary as autonomous from social
relations. Desire is thought to be exemplary of the singularity of the
individual and her freedom from material conditions. One desires what
one desires. Desire is the absolute lack: it is the unrepresentable. We
argue, however, that one desires what one can desire; one's desire is always
and ultimately determined before one desires it, and it is determined by
one's material (class) conditions. Our point is not that individuality and
singularity are myths but that they are myths in class societies. Individuality
and singularity become reality-not stories that culture tells to divert people from
their anonymity in a culture of commodities-only when one is free from
necessity beyond which "begins that development of human energy which
is an end in itself' (Marx, Capita/III, 958-59). Class is the negation of human
freedom. A theory of class (such as the one we articulate) argues that class is
the material logic of social life and therefore it determines how people live
and think. But this is too austere for many contemporary critics. ("Determinism" is
a dirty totalizing word in contemporary social critique.) Most writers who still use the
concept of class prefer to talk about it in the more subtle and shaded languages of
overdetermination, lifestyle, taste, prestige, and preferences, or in the
stratification terms of income, occupation, and even status. These are all
significant aspects of social life, but they are effects of class and not class.
This brings us to the "simple" question: What is class? We skip the usual review of
theories of class because they never lead to an answer to this question. The genre
of review requires, in the name of fairness, "on the one hand, on the other hand"
arguments that balance each perspective with its opposite. The purpose of Class in
Culture is not review but critique not a pluralism that covers up an uncommitted
wandering in texts but an argument in relation to which the reader can take a
position leading to change and not simply be more informed. This is not a book of
information; it is a book of critique. To answer the question (what is class?), we
argue-and here lies the austerity of our theory-class is essentially a relation of
property, of owning. Class, in short, is a relation to labor because property is
the congealed alienated labor of the other. By owning we obviously do not
mean owning just anything. Owning a home or a car or fine clothes does not by
itself put a person in one or another class. What does, is owning the labor power
of others in exchange for wages. Unlike a home or a car, labor (or to be more
precise "labor power") is a commodity that produces value when it is
consumed. Structures like homes or machines like cars or products such as clothes
do not produce value. Labor does. Under capitalism, the producers of value do
not own what they produce. The capitalist who has purchased the labor power of
the direct producers owns what they produce. Class is this relation of labor-owning.
This means wages are symptoms of estranged labor, of the unfreedom of humans,
namely the exploitation of humans by humans-which is another way to begin
explaining class. To know class, one has to learn about the labor relations
that construct class differences, that enable the subjugation of the many by the
few. Under capitalism labor is unfree, it is forced wage-labor that produces
"surplus value"-an objectification of a person's labor as commodities that are
appropriated by the capitalist for profit. The labor of the worker, therefore,
becomes "an object" that "exits outside him, independently, as something
alien to him, and it becomes a power on its own confronting him" which,
among other things, "means that the life which he has conferred on the
object confronts him as something hostile and alien" (Marx, Economic and
Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,272). The direct producers' own labor, in other
words, negates their freedom because it is used, in part, to produce commodities
not for need but for exchange. One, therefore, is made "to exist, first, as a
worker; and, second as a physical subject. The height of this servitude is that it
is only as a worker that he can maintain himself as a physical subject, and that it is
only as a physical subject that he is a worker" (273). Under wage labor, workers,
consequently, relate to their own activities as "an alien activity not
belonging to [them]" (275). The estranged relation of people to the object of
their labor is not a local matter but includes all spheres of social life. ln other
words, it is "at the same time the relation to the sensuous external world, to the
objects of nature, as an alien world inimically opposed to [them]" (275). The scope
of estrangement in a class society, of human unfreedom caused by wage labor,
is not limited to the alienation of the worker from her products. It includes the
productive activity itself because what is produced is a "summary of the activity, of
production," and therefore it is "manifested not only in the result but in the act of
production, within the producing activity itself' (274). The worker, in the act of
production, alienates herself from herself because production activity is
"active alienation, the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation"
(274)-an activity which does not belong to her. This is another way of saying that
the activity of labor-life activity-is turned against the worker and "here we have self-
estrangement" (275). In his theory of alienated labor, Marx distinguishes between
the "natural life" of eating, drinking, and procreating which humans share with other
animals and the "species life" which separates humans from animal. This distinction
has significant implications for an emancipatory theory of classless society. "Species
life" is the life marked by consciousness, developed senses, and a human
understanding himself in history as a historical being because "his own life is an
object for him" (276}--humans, as "species beings," are self-reflexive. To be more
clear, "conscious life activity distinguishes man immediately from animal life
activity" (276). The object of man's labor is the actualization, the "objectification of
man's species-life" (277). Alienated labor, however, "in tearing away from man the
object of his production, therefore, ... tears from him his species-life" (277).
Consequently, "it changes for him the life of the species into a means of individual
life ... it makes individual life in its abstract form the purpose of life of the species,
likewise in the abstract and estranged form" (276). This is another way of saying
that the larger questions that enable humans to build their world
consciously are marginalized, and sheer biological living ("individual life in
the abstract") becomes the goal of life in class society structured by wage
labor. "Life itself appears only as a means to life" (276). Class turns
"species life" into "natural life." Since society is an extension of the sensuous
activities of humans in nature (labor), the alienation of humans from the
products of their labor, from the very process of labor, which is their life
activity, and from their species-being, leads to the estrangement of
humans from humans (277)-the alienation in class societies that is
experienced on the individual level as loneliness. In confronting oneself, one
confronts others; which is another way of saying that one's alienation from the
product of one's labor, from productive activity, and from "species life" is at the
same time alienation from other people, their labor, and the objects of their
labor. In class societies, work, therefore, becomes the negation of the worker:
he "only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself" (274).
Ending class structures is a re-obtaining of human freedom. Freedom here is
not simply the freedom of individuals as symbolized, for instance, in bourgeois
"freedom of speech" but is a world-historical "freedom from necessity" (Marx,
Critique of the Gotha Programme). Class struggle is the struggle for human
emancipation by putting an end to alienated labor (as class relations).
Alienated labor is the bondage of humans to production: it is an effect of wage labor
(which turns labor into a means of living) and private property (which is congealed
labor). Emancipation from alienated labor is, therefore, the emancipation
of humans from this bondage because "all relations of servitude," such as
class relations, "are but modifications and consequences" of the relation
of labor to production (Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of
1844,280). Class, in short, is the effect of property relations that are
themselves manifestations of the alienation of labor as wage labor. Wage
labor alienates one from one's own product, from oneself, from other
humans, and, as Marx put it, "estranges the species from man" (276).
 Root Cause of Race
Capitalism is the root cause of racism
McLaren and Torres 99 (Peter Mclaren, professor of education at U of
California, and Rudolfo Torres, Professor of Planning, Policy, and Design,
Chicano/Latino Studies, and Political Science, Racism and Multicultural Education:
Rethinking Race and Whiteness in Late Capitalism, Chapter 2 of Critical
Multiculturalism: Rethinking Multicultural and Antiracist Education, edited by
Stephen May, p.49-50, Questia)

According to Alex Callinicos (1993), racial differences are invented. Racism occurs
when the characteristics which justify discrimination are held to be inherent in the
oppressed group. This form of oppression is peculiar to capitalist societies; it arises
in the circumstances surrounding industrial capitalism and the attempt to acquire a
large labour force. Callinicos points out three main conditions for the existence of
racism as outlined by Marx: economic competition between workers; the appeal of
racist ideology to white workers; and efforts of the capitalist class to establish and
maintain racial divisions among workers. Capital's constantly changing demands for
different kinds of labour can only be met through immigration. Callinicos remarks
that 'racism offers for workers of the oppressing race the imaginary compensation
for the exploitation they suffer of belonging to the ruling nation' (1993, p. 39).
Callinicos notes the way in which Marx grasped how 'racial' divisions between
'native' and 'immigrant' workers could weaken the working-class. United States'
politicians like Pat Buchanan, Jesse Helms and Pete Wilson, to name but a few, take
advantage of this division which the capitalist class understands and manipulates
only too well-using racism effectively to divide the working-class. At this point you
might be asking yourselves: Doesn't racism pre-date capitalism? Here we agree with
Callinicos that the heterophobia associated with precapitalist societies was not the
same as modern racism. Pre-capitalist slave and feudal societies of classical Greece
and Rome did not rely on racism to justify the use of slaves. The Greeks and
Romans did not have theories of white superiority. If they did, that must have been
unsettling news to Septimus Severus, Roman Emperor from Ad 193 to 211, who
was, many historians claim, a black man. Racism emerged during the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries from a key development of capitalism-colonial plantations
in the New World where slave labour stolen from Africa was used to produce
tobacco, sugar, and cotton for the global consumer market (Callinicos, 1993).
Callinicos cites Eric Williams who remarks: 'Slavery was not born of racism: rather,
racism was the consequence of slavery' (cited in Callinicos, 1993, p. 24). In effect,
racism emerged as the ideology of the plantocracy. It began with the class of sugar-
planters and slave merchants that dominated England's Caribbean colonies. Racism
developed out of the 'systemic slavery' of the New World. The 'natural inferiority' of
Africans was a way that Whites justified enslaving them. According to Callinicos:
Racism offers white workers the comfort of believing themselves part of the
dominant group; it also provides, in times of crisis, a ready-made scapegoat, in the
shape of the oppressed group. Racism thus gives white workers a particular identity,
and one which unites them with white capitalists. We have here, then, a case of the
kind of 'imagined community' discussed by Benedict Anderson in his influential
analysis of nationalism. (1993, p. 38) In short, to abolish racism in any substantive
sense, we need to abolish global capitalism.
 War Impact
Capitalism makes war inevitableexcess capital is invested in
the militaryused to open new markets
Robinson, 7Professor of Sociology, Global and International Studies, Latin
American and Iberian Studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara (William
I., The Pitfalls of Realist Analysis of Global Capitalism: A Critique of Ellen Meiksins
Woods Empire of Capital, Historical Materialism, 2007,
http://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/disciplines/politics/research/hmrg/activi
ties/documents/Robinson.pdf)

By the early twenty-first century, global capitalism was in crisis. This

crisis involves three interrelated dimensions. First it is a crisis of social
polarization. The system cannot meet the needs of a majority of
humanity, or even assure minimal social reproduction. Second is a
structural crisis of over accumulation. The system cannot expand
because the marginalization of a significant portion of humanity from
direct productive participation, the downward pressure on wages and
popular consumption worldwide, and the polarization of income, have
reduced the ability of the world market to absorb world output. The
problem of surplus absorption makes state-driven military spending and
the growth of military-industrial complexes an outlet for surplus and
gives the current global order a frightening built-in war drive . Third is a
crisis of HIMA legitimacy and authority. The legitimacy of the system has
increasingly been called into question by millions, perhaps even billions, of
people around the world, and is facing an expanded counter-hegemonic
challenge. Neoliberalism peacefully forced open new areas for global
capital in the 1980s and the 1990s. This was often accomplished through
economic coercion alone, as Wood would likely agree, made possible by the
structural power of the global economy over individual countries. But
this structural power became less effective in the face of the three-pronged
crisis mentioned above. Opportunities for both intensive and extensive
expansion dried up as privatizations ran their course, as the former
socialist countries became re-integrated into global capitalism, as the
consumption of high-income sectors worldwide reached a ceiling, and so on. The
space for peaceful expansion, both intensive and extensive, became
ever more restricted. Military aggression has become in this context an
instrument for prying open new sectors and regions, for the forcible
restructuring of space in order to further accumulation. The train of
neoliberalism became latched on to military intervention and the threat of
coercive sanctions as a locomotive for pulling the moribund Washington
consensus forward. The war on terrorism provides a seemingly endless
military outlet for surplus capital, generates a colossal deficit that
justifies the ever-deeper dismantling of the Keynesian welfare state and
locks neoliberal austerity in place, and legitimates the creation of a
police state to repress political dissent in the name of security. In the
post 9/11 period, the military dimension appeared to exercise an over
determining influence in the reconfiguration of global politics. The Bush
rgime militarized social and economic contradictions, launching a
permanent war mobilization to try to stabilize the system through direct
coercion. But was all this evidence for a new US bid for hegemony? A US
campaign to compete with other major states? To defend its own domestic
capital? To maintain a critical balance and control major [state] competitors? I
trust my reasons for rejecting such an argument have been made clear in this
critical article.

Capitalism ensures resource conflicts

Bhagwat, 11 (Vishnu, former Chief of the Naval Staff of India, Thee Weaponization of
Space: Corporate Driven Military Unleashes Pre-emptive Wars, July 13, 2011,
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=21432)

We must understand the reality of our present lawless world, where

corporate driven military might unleashes pre-emptive wars, invasions
and occupations and the UN system stands paralyzed , its Charter
disregarded , the Treaties and conventions signed and ratified , flouted
at every step . It is necessary for us to focus on the stark truth that
those treaties and conventions do not protect humanity from the forces
that want to dominate and exploit the resources of the world using
every weapon system and all mediums --be they land , sea , the seabed
or space and if the world system does not create a balance very
soon than even from military bases that may be established on the
earths planetary system. Vladimir Putin, then President and now the Prime
Minister of Russia, speaking at the European Security Conference in Munich on
10th February 2007, said: The unipolar world refers to a world in which there is
one master, one center of authority, one center of force, one centre of decision
making. At the end of the day this is pernicious not only for those within the
system , but also for the Sovereign himself from within ; what is more important
is that the model itself is flawed because as its basis there is and can be no moral
foundation for modern civilization ( and even less for democracy ). We are seeing
a greater and greater disdain for the basic principles of international law. We are
witnessing an almost uncontained hyper use of force in international relations ,
force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permament conflicts . I am
convinced that we have reached that decisive moment when we must
seriously think about the architecture of global security. We have to move
heaven and earth , the might of humanity to dismantle that decision making
ruling elite in the joint corporate military board rooms , be they located
underground in the Strategic Command in Nebraska or at multi-locations in Wall
Street , the City ( London ) or Tel a Viv . The unlimited quest for establishing
monopoly over the planet earths resources and markets , has led the
world to witness unending wars , sometimes referred to as long wars , if
that phrase makes it seem less destructive , and the unending pursuit of
weapon platforms , for attaining full spectrum dominance and the
Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI ) or the Star Wars initiated by the free
market of the Reagan administration and Thatcherism , accelerating the
death and destruction that we have witnessed , all across the globe be it in
Angola , Congo, Somalia, Afghanistan , Iraq , Palestine , Central and Latin
America , Yugoslavia , Lebanon , Gaza and earlier in Korea, Vietnam and
Cambodia among other countries with the UN Security Council in some cases
acquiescing and even assisting .
Alternatives
 Class 1st
Class is a key starting pointnot to obscure intersecting
inequalities, but to historicize them and address the engines of
mass immiseration
Taylor 11 (Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, on the editorial board of the International
Socialist Review and a doctoral student in African American Studies at Northwestern
University; Race, class and Marxism, SocialistWorker.org,
http://socialistworker.org/2011/01/04/race-class-and-marxism)

Marxists believe that the potential for that kind of unity is dependant on battles and struggles against racism today. Without a commitment by
revolutionary organizations in the here and now to the fight against racism, working-class unity will never be achieved and the revolutionary potential of

Marxism has
the working class will never be realized. Yet despite all the evidence of this commitment to fighting racism over many decades,

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

Wise accuses Marxism of: "extreme class

racism and white supremacy must be challenged directly. Here,

reductionism," meaning that Marxists allegedly think that class is more important
than race; reducing struggles against racism to "mere identity politics"; and
requiring that struggles against racism should "take a back seat" to struggles over
economic issues. Wise also accuses so-called "left activists" of reinforcing "white denial" and
"dismiss[ing] the lived reality of people of color"--which, of course, presumes Left
activists and Marxists to all be white. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - What do Marxists actually say?
Marxists argue that capitalism is a system that is based on the exploitation of the
many by the few. Because it is a system based on gross inequality, it requires
various tools to divide the majority--racism and all oppressions under capitalism
serve this purpose. Moreover, oppression is used to justify and "explain" unequal relationships in society that enrich the minority that live
off the majority's labor. Thus, racism developed initially to explain and justify the enslavement

of Africans--because they were less than human and undeserving of liberty and freedom. Everyone accepts the idea that the
oppression of slaves was rooted in the class relations of exploitation under that
system. Fewer recognize that under capitalism, wage slavery is the pivot around which
all other inequalities and oppressions turn. Capitalism used racism to justify plunder, conquest and slavery,
but as Karl Marx pointed out, it also used racism to divide and rule--to pit one section of the working class against another and thereby blunt class

To claim, as Marxists do, that racism is a product of capitalism is not to

consciousness.

deny or diminish its importance or impact in American society. It is simply to explain its origins and
the reasons for its perpetuation. Many on the left today talk about class as if it is one of many oppressions, often describing it as
"classism." What people are really referring to as "classism" is elitism or snobbery, and not the fundamental organization of society under capitalism.

it is popular today to talk about various oppressions, including class, as

Moreover,

intersecting. While it is true that oppressions can reinforce and compound each
other, they are born out of the material relations shaped by capitalism and the
economic exploitation that is at the heart of capitalist society. In other words, it is the material and
economic structure of society that gave rise to a range of ideas and ideologies to justify, explain and help perpetuate that order. In the United States,
 Marx himself was well
racism is the most important of those ideologies. Despite the widespread beliefs to the contrary of his critics, Karl

aware of the centrality of race under capitalism. While Marx did not write extensively on the question of slavery
and its racial impact in societies specifically, he did write about the way in which European capitalism emerged because of its pilfering, rape

and destruction, famously writing: The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and

entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East
Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of Black skins, signalized
the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. He also recognized the extent to which slavery was central to the world
economy. He wrote: Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without
cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that has given the colonies their value; it is the colonies that have created world trade, and it is world
trade that is the pre-condition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance. Without slavery North America, the
most progressive of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe out North America from the map of the world, and you will have
anarchy--the complete decay of modern commerce and civilization. Cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations.
Thus slavery, because it is an economic category, has always existed among the institutions of the peoples. Modern nations have been able only to
disguise slavery in their own countries, but they have imposed it without disguise upon the New World. Thus, there is a fundamental understanding of the
centrality of slave labor in the national and international economy. But what about race? Despite the dearth of Marx's own writing on race in particular,
one might look at Marx's correspondence and deliberations on the American Civil War to draw conclusions as to whether Marx was as dogmatically focused
on purely economic issues as his critics make him out be. One must raise the question: If Marx was reductionist, how is his unabashed support and

If Marx was truly an economic reductionist, he

involvement in abolitionist struggles in England explained?

might have surmised that slavery and capitalism were incompatible, and simply
waited for slavery to whither away. W.E.B. Du Bois in his Marxist tome Black Reconstruction, quotes at length a letter penned
by Marx as the head of the International Workingmen's Association, written to Abraham Lincoln in 1864 in the midst of the Civil War: The contest for the
territories which opened the epoch, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the immigrant or be
prostituted by the tramp of the slaver driver? When an oligarchy of 300,000 slave holders dared to inscribe for the first time in the annals of the world
"Slavery" on the banner of armed revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung
up, whence the first declaration of the rights of man was issued...when on the very spots counter-revolution...maintained "slavery to be a beneficial
institution"...and cynically proclaimed property in man 'the cornerstone of the new edifice'...then the working classes of Europe understood at once...that
the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy war of property against labor... They consider it an earnest sign of the epoch to come
that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggles for the rescue of

Not only was Marx personally opposed to slavery

the enchained race and the Reconstruction of a social order.

and actively organized against it, but he theorized that slavery and the resultant
race discrimination that flowed from it were not just problems for the slaves themselves, but for white
workers who were constantly under the threat of losing work to slave labor. This did not mean white workers were necessarily sympathetic to the cause of
the slaves--most of them were not. But Marx was not addressing the issue of consciousness, but objective factors when he wrote in Capital, "In the United
States of America, every independent movement of the workers was paralyzed as long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labor cannot
emancipate itself in the white skin where in the Black it is branded." Moreover, Marx understood the dynamics of racism in a modern sense as well--as a
means by which workers who had common, objective interests with each other could also become mortal enemies because of subjective, but nevertheless
real, racist and nationalist ideas. Looking at the tensions between Irish and English workers, with a nod toward the American situation between Black and
white workers, Marx wrote: Every industrial and commercial center in England possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English
proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish
worker he feels himself a member of the ruling nation and so turns himself into a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists of his country against Ireland, thus
strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude is much the same
as that of the "poor whites" to the "niggers" in the former slave states of the USA. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in
the English worker at once the accomplice and stupid tool of the English rule in Ireland. This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the
press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the
English working class, despite its organization. It is the secret by which the capitalist maintains its power. And that class is fully aware of it. Out of this
quote, one can see a Marxist theory of how racism operated in contemporary society, after slavery was ended. Marx was highlighting three things: first,

capitalism promotes economic competition between workers ; second, that the ruling class
that

uses racist ideology to divide workers against each other ; and finally, that when one group
of workers suffer oppression, it negatively impacts the entire class .

The aim of our alternative makes the production of social

relations, capitalism and class, the starting point for
resistance and criticism.
McLaren & D'Anniable 4 (Peter, Valerie Scatamburlo, Educational Philosophy
and Theory, Vol. 36, No. 2, 2004, 2004 Philosophy of Education Society of
Australasia April 2004, Class Dismissed? Historical materialism and the politics of
difference)

The real problem is the internal or dialectical relation that exists between capital and labor within the capitalist production process itselfa social
relation in which capitalism is intransigently rooted. This social relationessential to the production of abstract labordeals with how already
existing value is preserved and new value (surplus value) is created (Allman, 2001). If, for example, the process of actual exploitation and the
accumulation of surplus value is to be seen as a state of constant manipulation and as a realization process of concrete labor in actual labor time
within a given cost-production system and a labor marketwe cannot underestimate the ways in which difference (racial as well as gender
difference) is encapsulated in the production/reproduction dialectic of capital. It is this relationship that is mainly responsible for the inequitable
and unjust distribution of resources. A deepened understanding of this phenomenon is essential for understanding the emergence of an acutely
polarized labor market and the fact that disproportionately high percentages of people of color are trapped in the lower
rungs of domestic and global labor markets (McLaren & Farahmandpur, 1999). Difference in the era of global capitalism
is crucial to the workings, movements and prot levels of multinational corporations but those types of complex relations cannot be
mapped out by using truncated post-Marxist, culturalist conceptualizations of difference. To sever issues of difference from class
conveniently draws attention away from the crucially important ways in which people of color (and, more specically,
women of color) provide capital with its superexploited labor poolsa phenomenon that is on the rise all over the world. Most
social relations constitutive of racialized differences are considerably shaped by the relations of production and there is
undoubtedly a racialized and gendered division of labor whose severity and function vary depending on where one is situated in the capitalist
global economy (Meyerson, 2000).6 In stating this, we need to include an important caveat that differentiates our approach from those invoking
the well-worn race/class/gender triplet which can sound, to the uninitiated, both radical and vaguely Marxian. It is not. Race, class and
gender, while they invariably intersect and interact, are not co-primary. This triplet approximates what the philosophers might
call a category mistake. On the surface the triplet may be convincingsome people are oppressed because of their race, others as a
result of their gender, yet others because of their classbut this is grossly misleading for it is not that some individuals manifest certain
characteristics known as class which then results in their oppression; on the contrary, to be a member of a social class just is to be
oppressed and in this regard class is a wholly social category (Eagleton, 1998, p. 289). Furthermore, even though class is
usually invoked as part of the aforementioned and much vaunted triptych, it is usually gutted of its practical, social dimension or
treated solely as a cultural phenomenonas just another form of difference. In these instances, class is transformed from an economic and,
indeed, social category to an exclusively cultural or discursive one or one in which class merely signies a subject position.
Class is therefore cut off from the political economy of capitalism and class power severed from exploitation and a power
structure in which those who control collectively produced resources only do so because of the value generated by those who do not (Hennessy
& Ingraham, 1997, p. 2). Such theorizing has had the effect of replacing an historical materialist class analysis with a cultural analysis of class. As
a result, many post-Marxists have also stripped the idea of class of precisely that element which, for Marx, made it radicalnamely its status as a
universal form of exploitation whose abolition required (and was also central to) the abolition of all manifestations of oppression (Marx, 1978, p.
60). With regard to this issue, Kovel (2002) is particularly insightful, for he explicitly addresses an issue which continues to vex the Left
namely the priority given to different categories of what he calls dominative splittingthose categories of gender, class, race,
ethnic and national exclusion, etc. Kovel argues that we need to ask the question of priority with respect to what ? He notes
that if we mean priority with respect to time, then the category of gender would have priority since there are traces of gender oppression in all
other forms of oppression. If we were to prioritize in terms of existential signicance, Kovel suggests that we would have to depend upon the
immediate historical forces that bear down on distinct groups of peoplehe offers examples of Jews in 1930s Germany who suffered from brutal
forms of anti-Semitism and Palestinians today who experience anti-Arab racism under Israeli domination. The question of what has
political priority, however, would depend upon which transformation of relations of oppression are practically more
urgent and, while this would certainly depend upon the preceding categories, it would also depend upon the fashion in which all
the forces acting in a concrete situation are deployed. As to the question of which split sets into motion all of the others, the
priority would have to be given to class since class relations entail the state as an instrument of enforcement and
control, and it is the state that shapes and organizes the splits that appear in human ecosystems. Thus class is both
logically and historically distinct from other forms of exclusion (hence we should not talk of classism to go along with sexism and
racism, and species-ism). This is, rst of all, because class is an essentially (hu)man-made category, without root in even a
mystied biology. We cannot imagine a human world without gender distinctionsalthough we can imagine a
world without domination by gender. But a world without class is eminently imaginableindeed, such was the human world for
the great majority of our species time on earth, during all of which considerable fuss was made over gender. Historically, the difference arises
because class signies one side of a larger gure that includes a state apparatus whose conquests and regulations create races
and shape gender relations. Thus there will be no true resolution of racism so long as class society stands, inasmuch as a racially oppressed
society implies the activities of a class-defending state. Nor can gender inequality be enacted away so long as class society, with its state,
demands the super-exploitation of womens labor. (Kovel, 2002, pp. 123124) Contrary to what many have claimed, Marxist theory does
not relegate categories of difference to the conceptual mausoleum; rather, it has sought to reanimate these
categories by interrogating how they are refracted through material relations of power and privilege and linked to
relations of production. Moreover, it has emphasized and insisted that the wider political and economic system in which they are embedded
needs to be thoroughly understood in all its complexity. Indeed, Marx made clear how constructions of race and ethnicity are implicated in the
circulation process of variable capital. To the extent that gender, race, and ethnicity are all understood as social constructions
rather than as essentialist categories the effect of exploring their insertion into the circulation of variable capital (including positioning
within the internal heterogeneity of collective labor and hence, within the division of labor and the class system) must be interpreted as a
powerful force reconstructing them in distinctly capitalist ways (Harvey, 2000, p. 106). Unlike contemporary narratives which tend
to focus on one or another form of oppression, the irrefragable power of historical materialism resides in its ability to
reveal (1) how forms of oppression based on categories of difference do not possess relative autonomy from class
relations but rather constitute the ways in which oppression is lived/experienced within a class-based system; and (2)
how all forms of social oppression function within an overarching capitalist system. This framework must be further
distinguished from those that invoke the terms classism and/or class elitism to (ostensibly) foreground the idea that class matters (cf. hooks,
2000) since we agree with Gimenez (2001, p. 24) that class is not simply another ideology legitimating oppression. Rather , class denotes
exploitative relations between people mediated by their relations to the means of production . To marginalize such a
conceptualization of class is to conate an individuals objective location in the intersection of structures of inequality with peoples subjective
understandings of who they really are based on their experiences. Another caveat. In making such a claim, we are not renouncing the concept of
experience. On the contrary, we believe it is imperative to retain the category of lived experience as a reference point in light of misguided post-
Marxist critiques which imply that all forms of Marxian class analysis are dismissive of subjectivity. We are not, however, advocating the
uncritical fetishization of experience that tends to assume that experience somehow guarantees the authenticity of
knowledge and which often treats experience as self-explanatory, transparent, and solely individual. Rather, we advance a
framework that seeks to make connections between seemingly isolated situations and/or particular experiences by
exploring how they are constituted in, and circumscribed by, broader historical and social circumstances. Experiential
understandings, in and of themselves, are suspect because, dialectically, they constitute a unity of oppositesthey are at once unique, specic,
and personal, but also thoroughly partial, social, and the products of historical forces about which individuals may know little or nothing
(Gimenez, 2001). In this sense, a rich description of immediate experience in terms of consciousness of a particular form of oppression
(racial or otherwise) can be an appropriate and indispensable point of departure. Such an understanding, however, can easily become an
isolated difference prison unless it transcends the immediate perceived point of oppression, confronts the social
system in which it is rooted, and expands into a complex and multifaceted analysis (of forms of social mediation) that is
capable of mapping out the general organization of social relations. That, however, requires a broad class-based
approach. Having a concept of class helps us to see the network of social relations constituting an overall social
organization which both implicates and cuts through racialization/ethnicization and gender [a] radical political economy [class] perspective
emphasizing exploitation, dispossession and survival takes the issues of diversity [and difference] beyond questions of conscious identity such
as culture and ideology, or of a paradigm of homogeneity and heterogeneity or of ethical imperatives with respect to the other. (Bannerji,
2000, pp. 7, 19) A radical political economy framework is crucial since various culturalist perspectives seem to diminish the role of political
economy and class forces in shaping the edice of the socialincluding the shifting constellations and meanings of difference. Furthermore,
none of the differences valorized in culturalist narratives alone, and certainly not race by itself can explain the massive transformation of the
structure of capitalism in recent years. We agree with Meyerson (2000) that race is not an adequate explanatory category on its own and that the
use of race as a descriptive or analytical category has serious consequences for the way in which social life is presumed to be constituted and
organized. The category of racethe conceptual framework that the oppressed often employ to interpret their experiences of inequality often
clouds the concrete reality of class, and blurs the actual structure of power and privilege. In this regard, race is all too often a barrier to
understanding the central role of class in shaping personal and collective outcomes within a capitalist society
(Marable, 1995, pp. 8, 226). In many ways, the use of race has become an analytical trap precisely when it has been employed in antiseptic
isolation from the messy terrain of historical and material relations. This, of course, does not imply that we ignore racism and racial
oppression; rather, an analytical shift from race to a plural conceptualization of racisms and their historical
articulations is necessary (cf. McLaren & Torres, 1999). However, it is important to note that race doesnt explain racism and
forms of racial oppression. Those relations are best understood within the context of class rule, as Bannerji, Kovel, Marable and
Meyerson implybut that compels us to forge a conceptual shift in theorizing, which entails (among other things) moving beyond the ideology
of difference and race as the dominant prisms for understanding exploitation and oppression. We are aware of some potential implications for
white Marxist criticalists to unwittingly support racist practices in their criticisms of race-rst positions articulated in the social sciences. In
those instances, white criticalists wrongly go on high alert in placing theorists of color under special surveillance for downplaying an analysis of
capitalism and class. These activities on the part of white criticalists must be condemned, as must be efforts to stress class analysis primarily as a
means of creating a white vanguard position in the struggle against capitalism. Our position is one that attempts to link practices of
racial oppression to the central, totalizing dynamics of capitalist society in order to resist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy
more fully.7
 Class Solves Experience
Centering class in our analysis does not deny individuals
experiences of racism and violence. Instead, beginning from
the question of class as primary antagonism enables more
effective struggles against race and other manifestations of
oppression.
Smith 6 (Sharon Smith is also the author of Women and Socialism: Essays on Womens Liberation (Haymarket Books, 2005).
Her writings appear regularly in Socialist Worker newspaper and the ISR. Race, class, and "whiteness theory" ISR Issue 46,
MarchApril 2006 http://isreview.org/issues/46/whiteness.shtml)

Meyerson counters this set of assumptions, proposing that Marxs emphasis on the centrality of class relations brings oppression to the
forefront, as a precondition for working-class unity: Marxism properly interpreted emphasizes the primacy of class in a number of senses.
One, of course, is the primacy of the working class as a revolutionary agent a primacy which does not, as often
thought, render women and people of color secondary. Such an equation of white male and working class, as well as a
corresponding division between a white male working class identity and all the others, whose identity is thereby viewed as either
primarily one of gender and race or hybrid, is a view this essay contests all along the way. The primacy of class means that
building a multiracial, multi-gendered international working-class organization or organizations should be
the goal of any revolutionary movement: the primacy of class puts the fight against racism and
sexism at the center. The intelligibility of this position is rooted in the explanatory primacy of class analysis
for understanding the structural determinants of race, gender and class oppression. Oppression is
multiple and intersecting but its causes are not. 18 Designating class as the primary antagonism in
capitalist society bears no inference on the importance of racism , as Roediger claims. Marxism merely
assumes a causal relationshipthat white supremacy as a system was instituted by capital, to the
detriment of labor as a whole. Marxist theory rests on the assumption that white workers do not benefit from a
system of white supremacy. Indeed, Marx argued of slavery, the most oppressive of all systems of exploitation, In the United
States of America, every independent workers movement was paralyzed as long as slavery disfigured part of the republic. Labor cannot
emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.19 Marx was not alone in assuming that racism, by dividing the
working class along ideological lines, harmed the class interests of both white and Black workers. Abolitionist Frederick Douglass stated
unambiguously of slaveholders, They divided both to conquer each.20 Douglass elaborated, Both are plundered and by the same
plunderers. The slave is robbed by his master, of all his earnings above what is required for his physical necessities; and the white man is
robbed by the slave system, because he is flung into competition with a class of laborers who work without wages.21 Capitalism
forces workers to compete with each other. The unremitting pressure from a layer of workersbe they low-wage or
The working
unemployedis a constant reminder that workers compete for limited jobs that afford a decent standard of living.
class has no interest in maintaining a system that thrives upon inequality and oppression. Indeed, all
empirical evidence shows quite the opposite. When the racist poll tax was passed in the South, imposing property and other requirements
designed to shut out Black voters, many poor whites also lost the right to vote. After Mississippi passed its poll tax law, the number of
qualified white voters fell from 130,000 to 68,000.22 The effects of segregation extended well beyond the electoral arena. Jim Crow
segregation empowered only the rule of capital. Whenever employers have been able to use racism to divide Black from white workers,
preventing unionization, both Black and white workers earn lower wages. This is just as true in recent decades as it was 100 years ago.
Indeed, as Shawki points out of the 1970s, In a study of major metropolitan areas Michael Reich found a correlation between the degree
of income inequality between whites and Blacks and the degree of income inequality between whites.23 The study concluded: But what is
most dramaticin each of these blue-collar groups, the Southern white workers earned less than Northern Black workers. Despite the
continued gross discrimination against Black skilled craftsmen in the North, the privileged Southern whites earned 4 percent less than
they did. Southern male white operatives averaged18 percent less than Northern Black male operatives. And Southern white service
workers earned14 percent less than Northern Black male service workers.24 Racism against Blacks and other racially
oppressed groups serves both to lower the living standards of the entire working class and to weaken
workers ability to fight back. Whenever capitalists can threaten to replace one group of workers with anotherpoorly paid
group of workers, neither group benefits. Thus, the historically nonunion South has not only depressed the wages of Black workers, but
also lowered the wages of Southern white workers overalland prevented the labor movement from achieving victory at important
junctures. So even in the short term the working class as a whole has nothing to gain from oppression.
 A2: Non-Class Oppression
Reference to oppression not grounded in relations of
production is a tool of the ruling class provides the
proletariat with a method of illusory emancipation masking the
oppression of surplus labor.
Cotter, Winter/Spring, 2012 (Jennifer "Bio-politics, Transspecies Love and/as
Class Commons-Sense," Red Critique,
http://www.redcritique.org/WinterSpring2012/biopoliticstransspeciesismandclasscom
monssense.htm)

I argue that biopolitics and transspecies posthumanism, in displacing "class" with "life," "production" with
affective and ultimately spiritualist understandings of material
"reproduction," "labor" with "love," are
contradictions that articulate what Marx calls an "inverted world-consciousness ." In "A
Contribution to a Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right: Introduction," Marx critiques religion for the way in which it
articulates an inverted world consciousness because, on the one hand, it is "an expression of and protest against
real suffering" and, on the other hand, it provides an "illusory happiness" for "real suffering." By "illusory happiness"
Marx means that religion provides an illusory resolution of the material contradictions of
exploitation in capitalism that cause the "real suffering " to which religion is both an effect and
a response. In this way, rather than providing a material solution to problems of social
alienation whose origin are in material relations of production , religion ends up
providing a "spiritual aroma" for capitalism that helps to ideologically blur material
relations of class and culturally adjust exploited workers to ruling class interests. It is on
this basis that Marx argues that "The call [to workers] to abandon illusions about their condition is the call to
posthumanism articulate
abandon a condition which requires illusions" (131). Biopolitics and transspecies
the "spiritual aroma"the cultural imaginaryof transnational capital now. They do so by
putting forward a "common share" in the "immaterial" of a new "global" culture
under capitalism in place of transformation of the material relations of production in
capitalism and freedom from exploitation. In doing so they serve to naturalize the
material relations of exploitation and culturally adjust the contemporary workforces to the
needs of capitalism now. In this respect, bio-political and transspecies posthumanist theories of love
are a continuationin a new historical formof updating the working class into a new morality .
George Sampson, in his 1921 book on British national education, English for the English, provides a telling historical
example of this practice in his comments on the role of teaching "English" literature and culture to the working-
class: "Deny to working-class children any common share in the immaterial, and
presentlythey will grow into the (humans) men who demand with menaces a
communism of the material" (as qtd in Eagleton 21). To put this another way, the "common
share" in the "immaterial" of "culture" for all, was proposed by representatives of
ruling class interests, such as Sampson, in order to ideologically smooth over severe
material contradictions which were leading British workers to increasingly call into
question the basis of ruling class wealth in their own exploitation . More generally,
moreover, these comments are symptomatic of the fact that it is in the material interests of capital
to provide "immaterial" and "spiritual" resolutions to deflect attention away from
the economic and at the same time maintain the cultural cohesion of social bonds that
are necessitated by social relations of production founded on exploitation .
 A2: Race First
Insisting on transhistorical primacy of slavery is intellectually
dangerous and should be rejectedif youre looking for good
Wilderson answers, youve come to the right place
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/django-
unchained-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 Wind continue to shape Americans understandings of
slavery, also is of a piece with 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 old-school, white supremacist racism and
charges that the sensibilities of Thomas Dixon and Margaret Mitchell continue to
shape most Americans understandings of slavery do important, obfuscatory
ideological work. They lay claim to a moral urgency that, as Mahmood Mamdani
argues concerning the rhetorical use of charges of genocide, enables disparaging
efforts either to differentiate discrete inequalities or to generate historically specific
causal accounts of them as irresponsible dodges that abet injustice by temporizing
in its face.38 But more is at work here as well. Insistence on the transhistorical
primacy of racism as a source of inequality is a class politics. Its the politics of a
stratum of the professional-managerial class whose material location and interests,
and thus whose ideological commitments, are bound up with parsing, interpreting
and administering inequality defined in terms of disparities among ascriptively
defined populations reified as groups or even cultures. In fact, much of the
intellectual life of this stratum is devoted to shoehorning into the rubric of racism
all manner of inequalities that may appear statistically as racial disparities.39 And
that project shares capitalisms ideological tendency to obscure races foundations,
as well as the foundations of all such ascriptive hierarchies, in historically specific
political economy. This felicitous convergence may help explain why proponents of
cultural 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 with the notions
of a just society they seek to advance. In fact, 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 image-management 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 Sinclair point.
 A2: Gibson-Graham
This is a linkGibson-Grahams critique of capitalocentrism re-
entrenches capitalism and prevents revolutionary change.
Poitevin 1 Ren Francisco Poitevin, Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at the
University of California-Davis, member of the Editorial Board of the Socialist Review,
2001 (The End of Anti-Capitalism As We Knew It: Reflections on Postmodern
Marxism, Socialist Review, Available Online at
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3952/is_200101/ai_n8932891/?
tag=content;col1, Accessed 11-07-2011)

My main point here is that throughout The Full Monty - and in J.K. Gibson-
Graham's review of the film as well - property relations are never questioned
or challenged. In the postmodern/post-Marxist "noncapitalist" world,
corporations get to keep ownership of the means of production and their
profits, while working class communities continue to lap dance their way
through "identification across difference" rather than doing union
organizing. That this kind of argument can be presented not only as
"noncapitalist" but also as Marxist thinking should be enough to
demonstrate the political bankruptcy of this paradigm. It is also interesting
that JK Gibson-Graham maintain that challenging their analysis of The Full Monty, or
not endorsing the politics of the film, "is inherently conservative and
capitalocentric."48 I disagree strongly. The politics advocated by J.K. Gibson-
Graham through their reading of The Full Monty is nothing but liberal politics
with post-structuralist delusions of grandeur. It is one thing to say that we are
at a political conjuncture in which the thing to do is to work hard for reform, not
"revolution." But it is another thing to argue that revolutionary practice cannot
happen on epistemological grounds, and that all we can do is make capitalism as
user friendly as possible while obscuring and co-opting the Marxist tradition. J.K.
Gibson-Graham's reading of The Full Monty is both liberal and reactionary. What the
postmodern Marxist's reading of The Full Monty demonstrates is that in their
desire to get rid of "capitalocentrism" - the alleged obsession of Marxists with
seeing "capitalism" everywhere - they end up reconfiguring and consolidating
capitalism back in. In their unreflective romanticizing of reform, and in
their haughty contempt for revolutionary thinking and politics, J.K. Gibson-
Graham's style of postmodern/post-Marxism delivers what boils down to
good old-fashioned liberalism: a mild, state-administered "economic
justice" platform centered around individual private liberties, neatly
packaged in postmodern gift wrapping. The bottom line is this: When one
looks closely at what postmodern/post-Marxist theory actually offers, and
after it is done "representing capitalism through the lens of overdetermination,"49
all one can strategize about is how to make capitalism more "user
friendly." Gone is the project of getting rid of it . Strangely enough,
postmodern/ post-Marxists do not regard these positions as a surrender of the
Marxist project at all, but rather, as the exact fulfillment of that commitment.50
Gibson-Graham embrace the politics of surrenderonly the
revolutionary vision of the alternative can dismantle
capitalism.
Poitevin 1 Ren Francisco Poitevin, Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at the
University of California-Davis, member of the Editorial Board of the Socialist Review,
2001 (The End of Anti-Capitalism As We Knew It: Reflections on Postmodern
Marxism, Socialist Review, Available Online at
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3952/is_200101/ai_n8932891/?
tag=content;col1, Accessed 11-07-2011)

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

Gibson-Graham are wrongtheir postmodern Marxism

devastates revolutionary change.
Poitevin 1 Ren Francisco Poitevin, Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at the
University of California-Davis, member of the Editorial Board of the Socialist Review,
2001 (The End of Anti-Capitalism As We Knew It: Reflections on Postmodern
Marxism, Socialist Review, Available Online at
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3952/is_200101/ai_n8932891/?
tag=content;col1, Accessed 11-07-2011)

The End of Capitalism (As We Know It) The first thing that jumps out after reading The End of Capitalism (As We
there are at least two ways
Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy is the way in which
of smashing the capitalist state: we can have the Leninist revolution or
we can change the definition of capitalism and make it disappear . J.K.
Gibson-Graham succeeds in doing the latter: in a kind of theoretical
abracadabra, capitalism is definitely gone by the end of their book. But
despite the theoretical sophistication of their worka no-holds barred embracing of post-structuralist theory
once the epistemological fireworks dissipate, the argument of the book is actually rather simple. If what is
wrong with Left politics "is the way capitalism has been 'thought' that has made it so difficult for people to
imagine its supersession,"16 then it logically follows that what is to be done is to change its definition so that it
can be "thought" differentlyand therefore be made easier to get rid of. And if the problem of why U.S. radical
politics has been so ineffective for the last two decades is the stubborn Marxist insistence upon "the image of
two classes locked in struggle," a situation that "has in our view become an obstacle to, rather than a positive
force for, anticapitalist endeavors,"17 then how about getting rid of this whole class struggle thing and
"reimagine" labor and capital as allies rather than enemies?18 Would not that make the whole task of social
transformation much easier? Perhaps, but as we will see shortly, getting rid of capitalism is
easier said than done. The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It) begs another question: Who are they
going after? Is it capitalism or is it Marx? Their book spends so much time on what is supposedly wrong with
Marxism that at times it reads more like The End of Marxism As We Knew It. This approach is typical of a pattern
that, to quote Wendy Brown, "responds less to the antidemocratic forces of our time than to a ghostly
philosophical standoff between historically abstracted formulations of Marxism and liberalism. In other words,
this effort seeks to resolve a problem in a (certain) history of ideas rather than a problem in history."19 Simply
postmodern Marxist politics has more to do with the micropolitics of
put,
the ivory tower than with the plight of the workers who clean their
campuses. However, once it becomes clear that a necessary condition for the primacy of postmodern
theory and politics is that Marxism has to go (otherwise you do not have to become a postmodern to address
their concerns), J.K. Gibson-Graham's anti-Marxist hostility, while actively embracing the Marxist label in order to
render it useless, makes a lot of sense. And once again, all this is done with impeccable logic: Given that
Marxism is still the only doctrine that calls for the systematic overthrow of capitalism, getting rid of Marx(ism) is
also to get rid of the need for revolution with a big "R."20 One of the problems with trying to make the case for
postmodern Marxism is that in order to get rid of Marxism and declare its tradition obsolete, you have to distort
its legacy by constructing a straw man. This straw man-reading of Marx is predicated upon the double maneuver
of collapsing Marxist history into Stalinism, on the one hand, and reducing Marxist theory to "essentialism,"
"totality," and "teleology," on the other. As J.K. Gibson-Graham themselves acknowledge, without any regrets,
"Indeed, as many of our critics sometimes charge, we have constructed a 'straw man.'"21 What is left out of
their quasi-humorous dismissal of Marxism is the complicity of such a straw man in the long history of red-
baiting and anti-Marxist repression in this country and around the world. Also left out is the rich Marxist
scholarship that was addressing their concerns long before there was a postmodern Marxist school. The fact is
that postmodern Marxist's "contributions" are not as original nor as profound as they might have us believe. For
example, what about the bulk of the Western Marxist tradition since the Frankfurt School? Has it not been
predicated on a rejection of the economic reductionism embedded in the passage from the Preface to the
Introduction to A Critique of Political Economy in which the (in)famous base/superstructure metaphor of society
gets set in stone as the "official" definition of historical materialism? Or what about Horkheimer and Adorno's
relentless critique of instrumental rationality? Marxism, in spite of what the postmodern Marxists want us to
believe, has long been making the case for the centrality of culture and its irreducibility to economic laws, as
anybody who has read Walter Benjamin or Antonio Gramsci can certify. Furthermore, postcolonial Marxism and
critical theory have also been theorizing at more concrete levels of analyses the irreducibility of subjectivity to
class.22 And despite the postmodern Marxist excitement when talking about class as a relational process, in fact
it is impossible to tell that they are not the first ones to talk about class as a relational process, lots of Marxists
before the Amherst School have been theorizing and clarifying the relational mechanisms embedded in class
politics.23 Postmodern Marxism also ignores Lefebvre's urban Marxist contribution: his emphasis on the
importance of experience and the everyday in accounting for social processes.24 And Marxist feminist
contributions on the intersection of agency and gender with race, class, and sexuality are conveniently erased
from J.K. Gibson-Graham's reduction of Marxism to a straw man.25 The fact is that when one looks at Marxism
not as a distorted "straw man" but on its own terms, taking into account its richness and complexity, Marxist
theory starts to appear all of a sudden less "totalizing," "essentializing," and "reductionist" and instead as more
Gibson-Graham's
rich in possibilities and more enabling. Excursion Filosofica A third feature of J.K.
work, in particular, and of the whole radical democracy tradition, in general, is its post-structuralist
extremism.26 For postmodern Marxists it is not enough to point out that, as both Foucault and Habermas
argue, we inhabit an intellectual regime characterized by a paradigm shift from the "philosophy of
consciousness" to the "philosophy of language."27 Nor is it good enough for postmodern/post-Marxists to
recognize the pitfalls embedded in Hegelian epistemology and argue instead, as Spivak does, for strategic--
uses-of-essentialism as a corrective to the excesses of teleological thinking and fixed notions of class.28 No way.
As far as postmodern Marxism is concerned, the only way to
compensate for constructions of capitalism that are too totalizing is
through the unconditional surrender of the Marxist project. As J.K. Gibson-
Graham themselves make clear, "to even conceive of 'capitalism' as 'capitalisms' is still taking 'capitalism' for
granted."29 And to try to redistribute the heavy theoretical and political burden placed upon the proletariat by
reconfiguring political agency through "race-class-gender," as opposed to just class, is still a futile endeavor:
essentialism is still essentialism whether one essentializes around one or three categories. This strand of post-
structuralism, one that once again, can be directly traced back to Laclau and Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy,30 is predicated on the faulty epistemological premise that what really matters is "discourse." As
Laclau and Mouffe clarify, "our analysis rejects the distinction between discursive and nondiscursive practices. It
offirms that every object is constituted as an object of discourse."31 The problem with this
approach is that once we enter this world of epistemological
foundationalism predicated on the claim that there is "nothing but
discourse," we enter a world of relativism in which all we can do is
"create discursive fixings," as J.K. Gibson-Graham themselves prescribe, that will guarantee that
"any particular analysis will never find the ultimate cause of events."32 It is this ideological
postmodern insistence on reducing all of social reality to discourse that
ultimately overloads its theoretical apparatus and causes it to buckle
beneath them. The Amherst School's "provisional ontology" is incapable of escaping the performative
trap of trying to get rid of essentialism by essentializing all of reality as "discursive." The postmodern Marxist
approach to ontology boils down to substituting in political practice every occurrence of "continuity" with
"discontinuity" as a way to get rid of essentialism and macro-narratives. Even Foucault, the great master of
discontinuity, distances himself from such mirror-reversal solutions when theorizing the limits of discourse and
accounting for the "divergence, the distances, the oppositions, the differences" that constitute the episteme of a
period.33 In a (rarely cited) interview titled "Power and the Study of Discourse," Foucault goes to great length
to emphasize the importance of the nondiscursive (which he defines as "a whole play of economic, political and
social changes"34) as a necessary condition for the successful application of "discourse" to Left politics." When
explicitly asked whether "a mode of thought which introduces discontinuity and the constraints of system" does
"not remove all basis for a progressive political intervention"36 (in other words, is post-structuralist politics
friend or foe of Left politics), Foucault does three things before he can answer in the affirmative. First, he
defends the need for "discourse" and "discontinuity" in unmasking the hidden teleologies embedded in
metanarratives of universal history and so forth, in other words, in unmasking the myth of "the sovereignty of
the pure subject." Next, and this is crucial in understanding the role of discourse in post-structuralist analysis,
Foucault proceeds to triangulate "discourse" as an interplay between three separate levels of analysis:
intradiscursive, interdiscursive, and extradiscursive transformations. Taken together, these three levels of
analysis constitute the basic "schemes of dependence" that define the conditions that regulate discursive
historical transformations and social change. An example of the intradiscursive, for Foucault, is the relationship
between the objects, operations, and concepts that constitute a single discipline, let's say math. How "math"
constitutes itself with all its many subfields, rules, and definitions is an example of intradiscursive.
Interdiscursive, on the other hand, deals with the relationship between one discipline (Foucault uses the
example of medical discourse) and other disciplines, in this example other disciplines outside of medicine, such
as economics or natural history. And the extradiscursive level of analysis, the one relevant for us in our
assessment of postmodern Marxism, deals between the discursive and those "transformations outside of
discourse."37 Foucault talks about the connections between "medical discourse and a whole play of economic,
political, and social changes" as an example of extradiscursive processes. Notice how careful and unequivocal
Foucault's analysis is in emphasizing and making sure that we do not reduce all of reality to some simple notion
of "discourse." The irreducibility of the nondiscursive cannot be summarily dismissed as irrelevant, as
postmodern/post-Marxists do. The key point in assessing the postmodern/post-Marxist epistemological and
ontological viability is this: None of Foucault's subtleties in theorizing the "nondiscursive" are present in the
postmodern/post-Marxist model. Not only is Foucault's notion of "discourse" more complex and nuanced than
the one presented in postmodern/post-Marxism, the "nondiscursive" is defined as constituted by "institutions,
social relations, economic and political conjuncture"and as explicitly nonreducible to discourse.38 This is why
the postmodern/post-Marxist's incapability and/or refusal to account for
the irreducibility of the nondiscursive aspects of institutions and the
economy ultimately disqualifies them from articulating a viable Left
project. To retort by saying that it is OK to not deal with the centrality of the nondiscursive (e.g., the
institutional) because "every object is constituted as an object of discourse"39 misses the point that the
moment of the nondiscursive and extradiscursive is both irreducible and essential. How many more Ptolemaic
postmodern Marxism's
circles of "discursive fixings" is it going to take before it becomes clear that
bankrupt epistemology/ontology cannot articulate a viable project for
radical politics?
Perms
 Cap 1st
Our method cant be permuted Marxist theory must be an
axiom not an add on injection of any other theory denies
commitment to TOTALITY
Lukacs, 1967 (George The Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg,
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/ch02.htm)

Rosa Luxemburgs major work The Accumulation of Capital takes up the problem at this juncture after decades of
vulgarised Marxism. The trivialisation of Marxism and its deflection into a bourgeois science was expressed first,
most clearly and frankly in Bernsteins Premises of Socialism. It is anything but an accident that the chapter in this
book which begins with an onslaught on the dialectical method in the name of exact science should end by
branding Marx as a Blanquist. It is no accident because the moment you abandon the point of view
of totality, you must also jettison the starting-point and the goal, the assumptions
and the requirements of the dialectical method . When this happens revolution will
be understood not as part of a process but as an isolated act cut off from the
general course of events. If that is so it must inevitably seem as if the revolutionary aspects of Marx are
really just a relapse into the primitive period of the workers movement, i.e. Blanquism. The whole system
of Marxism stands and falls with the principle that revolution is the product of a
point of view in which the category of totality is dominant . Even in its opportunism Bernsteins
criticism is much too opportunistic for all the implications of this position to emerge clearly.[2] But even though the
opportunists sought above all to eradicate the notion of the dialectical course of history from Marxism, they could
not evade its ineluctable consequences. The economic development of the imperialist age had made it
progressively more difficult to believe in their pseudo-attacks on the capitalist system and in the scientific analysis
It was not enough to declare a
of isolated phenomena in the name of the objective and exact sciences.
political commitment for or against capitalism. One had to declare ones
theoretical commitment also. One had to choose: either to regard the whole
history of society from a Marxist point of view, i.e. as a totality, and hence to come to
grips with the phenomenon of imperialism in theory and practice. Or else to evade
this confrontation by confining oneself to the analysis of isolated aspects in one or other
of the special disciplines. The attitude that inspires monographs is the best way to place a
screen before the problem the very sight of which strikes terror into the heart of a Social-Democratic
movement turned opportunist. By discovering exact descriptions for isolated areas and eternally valid laws for
specific cases they have blurred the differences separating imperialism from the preceding age. They found
themselves in a capitalist society in general and its existence seemed to them to correspond to the nature of
human reason, and the laws of nature every bit as much as it had seemed to Ricardo and his successors, the
bourgeois vulgar economists.
 A2: Intersectionality
Unique identity characteristics don't disprove the centrality of
class-its absolutely central to Marxist ontology and
epistemology.
Hill, 2009 (Dave, 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
http://clogic.eserver.org/2009/Hill.pdf)

Ultimately, it is economically induced and it conditions and permeates all social

reality in capitalist systems. Marxists therefore critique postmodern and post-
structural arguments that class is, or ever can be, constructed extra-economically,
or equally that it can be deconstructed politically an epistemic position which
has underwritten in the previous two decades numerous so-called death of class
theories, arguably the most significant of which are Laclau & Mouffe (1985) and
Laclau (1996). I am not arguing against the complexities of subjective identities.
People have different subjectivities. Some individual coalminers in Britain were gay,
black, Betty Page or Madonna fetishists, heavily influenced by Biggles or Punk, their
male gym teacher or their female History teacher, by Robert Tressell or by Daily
Porn masturbation, by Radical Socialists or by Fascist ideology. But the coal mining
industry has virtually ceased to exist in Britain, and the police occupation of mining
villages such as Orgreave during the Great Coalminers Strike (in Britain) of 1984-85
and the privatisation of British Coal and virtual wiping out of the coal mining
industry was motivated by class warfare of the ruling capitalist fraction. It was class
warfare from above. Whatever individuals in mining families like to do in bed, their
dreams, and in their transmutation of television images, they suffered because of
their particular class fraction position they were miners and historically the
political shock troops of the British manual working class.

Our turn outweighs their offense- even if the intent of their

project is good, the political effect would be disastrous
Hill, 2009 (Dave, 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
http://clogic.eserver.org/2009/Hill.pdf)

Postmodernisms rejection of metanarratives can be seen as symptomatic of the

theoretical inability to construct a mass solidaristic oppositional
transformatory political project, and that it is based on the refusal to recognise
the validity or existence of solidaristic social class. More importantly, this general
theoretical shortcoming is politically disabling because the effect of
eschewing mass solidaristic policy is, in effect, supporting a reactionary status
quo. Both as an analysis and as a vision, post-modernism has its dangers but
more so as a vision. It fragments and denies economic, social, political, and
cultural relations. In particular, it rejects the solidaristic metanarratives of neo-
Marxism and socialism. It thereby serves to disempower the oppressed and to
uphold the hegemonic Radical Right in their privileging of individualism
and in their stress on patterns and relations of consumption as opposed to
relations of production. Postmodernism analysis, in effect if not in intention,
justifies ideologically the current Radical Right economic, political, and
educational project.
 Artifact DA
The noble intentions of the affirmatives approach do not
absolve it of its sins of complicity with the violent project of
capitalism. Any attempt to rectify the flaws of the 1AC as a
rhetorical artifact are at best disingenuous and should be
rejected.
Tomlinson 13 (Barbara Tomlinson, Department of Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, To Tell the
Truth and Not Get Trapped: Desire, Distance, and Intersectionality at the Scene of Argument, Signs, Vol. 38, No. 4, Summer
2013)

Structures of dominance are the conditions of possibility for antisubordination arguments. Feminists cannot escape all the traps set by the
racialized and gendered history of the disciplines, but we can destabilize them, explore their contradictions, and work through them to open up
new possibilities. Yet intending our arguments to be resistant or oppositional cannot make them so. Discursive
effects cannot be known in advance or assumed to reflect the intentions of those who argue; we cannot know
fully or control the consequences of our own roles in the circulation of discourses. Rather, as Michel Foucault argues,
We must make allowance for the complex and unstable process whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a
stumbling block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy (1980, 101). The specific arguments we make,
their rhetorical form and evidence, and the consequences we draw from them all can be points of resistance or
stumbling blocks that trap us into deploying dominant discourses when we think we are resisting them. Yet
these discourses are what we havethe sites, the circumstances, and the meansto understand ourselves and change our conditions. Because
we lack a fully theorized understanding of the scene of argument as a shared social space, we often consign rhetorical choices to matters of
private choice and personal style. Yet while much of the labor that goes into writing is conducted in solitude, writing is a quintessentially social
act. All writers enter a dialogue already in progress. The word in language, Bakhtin observes, is half someone elses (1981, 293). The scene
of argument is populated by many different writers, readers, reviewers, editors, and teachers. It is shaped by practices and processes inside
institutions that all of us help to construct, in graduate programs, journal and manuscript review processes, panels at professional meetings, and
informal prestige networks. Rhetoric matters not just because we want to present the ideas we already have eloquently and effectively but also
because the scene of argument is a site where new ideas are produced and old ideas modified and rendered obsolete. My purpose here is not to
scold or praise individual authors but instead to advance an understanding of the scene of argument as a shared social resource, as an entity for
which we are all responsible, yet also as a terrain laden with traps. As Toni Cade Bambara explained three decades ago, principled political
writing entails fusing together the diverse strands of knowledge that disciplinary frames tear apart. Such writing requires us to resist the
predisposition that the disciplines promote to accept fragmented truths and distortions as the whole (1980, 154). Dominant modes of
thinking and habits of academic life can authorize promoting and echoing partial truths with confidence, even certainty, as
if they were the whole. Our job, as Bambara explains it, is to tell the truth and not get trapped (1983, 14). I demonstrate here that some
critiques of intersectionality fall into patterned rhetorical frameworks and tropes that serve as traps to interfere with the ability to tell the truth.
 Autonomy DA
Autonomy affs focus on individualism obscures the
commonality of workers movements making coalition building
impossible. The impact to this outweighs the aff.
Smith 94 (Sharon, columnist for Socialist Worker and author of Womens
Liberation and Socialism, Mistaken Identity: or Can Identity Politics Liberate the
Oppressed, http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj62/smith.htm)

In the context of oppression the demand for 'autonomy' entails a deep

sense of pessimism about the possibility of the working class movement
fighting for the interests of all workers, and for all who suffer oppression in society. In
the framework of identity politics, it involves a pessimism about the possibility
for building solidarity even amongst the oppressed. Yet, as experience has shown,
elevating the notion of autonomy to a principle, as identity politics does,
makes it virtually impossible to build the kind of movement which can end
oppression. Class provides the only unifying basis for fighting against
oppression. Only a movement organized on the basis of genuine solidarity
between all who are exploited and oppressed by capitalism, under the leadership of
the working class, holds the potential to wipe out oppression in all its forms .
The Marxist view is that the working class cannot hope to win a socialist society
unless the working class movement is united on the basis of ending all forms of
oppression and exploitation. Thus it is in workers' objective interests to fight oppression in all its forms.
 Cooption DA
Aff understates importance of capital and focuses attention on
meaningless struggles that prop up the status quo Trade off
-- Aff understates importance of capital and focuses attention
on meaningless struggles that prop up the status quo
Smith 94 (Sharon, columnist for Socialist Worker and author of Womens
Liberation and Socialism, Mistaken Identity: or Can Identity Politics Liberate the
Oppressed, http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj62/smith.htm)

Following this logic, the struggles against exploitation and oppression do not correspond. Within the
politics of identity notions of radicalism and class politics more often than not are
mutually exclusive. In practice this has meant replacing class politics with
a politics of cross class alliances, and a strategy based upon 'direct action'
tactics attention getting actions carried out by the enlightened few, the aim being to shock and disturb the
ignorant masses. In the US the very names of some organizations reflect this aim Queer Nation, the Lesbian
Avengers, YELL, and Random Pissed Off Women. Some of these groups, along with more conventionally named
organizations, such as the Women's Action Coalition (WAC), use a variety of direct action tactics. Often these
actions resemble guerilla theatre more than anything else. Queer Nation, for example, has been known for its
lesbian and gay 'kiss-ins', while WAC members sometimes remove their shirts as a way of getting attention.
Sometimes these actions can seem quite radical even a bit over the top. For example, as one
of its first activities New York WAC protested at the opening of the new Guggenheim museum because of its 'racism,
2
sexism, classism, ageism, Eurocentrism, nepotism, elitism, phallocentrism, and homophobia'. But beneath
a bold veneer the program is often standard liberalism. Thus at a Chicago
WAC meeting in the autumn of 1992 members vowed defiantly to fight for
'patriarchal demolition', yet most adopted tacit support for the Democratic
presidential candidate, Bill Clinton. Within these milieux it is currently in vogue to
dismiss any attempt to draw a causal connection between economics and
politics, or between class society and oppression, as mechanical economic determinism, or 'reductionism'. And
although undoubtedly many, if not most, of those active around identity politics are unaware of its theoretical
is heavily influenced by the particular offshoot of
underpinnings, it
postmodernism3 calling itself 'post-Marxism', for which the explicit
rejection of the centrality of class is something of an obsession
 Hybridization DA
The perm denies the central theory of Marxist which is the
TOTALITY of production hybridization denies the primacy of
surplus labor.
Tumino, prof. of English at Pitt, Spring 2001 (Stephen, What is Orthodox
Marxism and Why it Matters Now More Than Ever Before, The Red Critique 1,
Spring, http://www.redcritique.org/spring2001/whatisorthodoxmarxism.htm)

The "original" ideas of Marxism are inseparable from their effect as

"demystification" of ideologyfor example the deployment of "class" that allows
a demystification of daily life from the haze of consumption. Class is thus an
"original idea" of Marxism in the sense that it cuts through the hype of cultural
agency under capitalism and reveals how culture and consumption are
tied to labor, the everyday determined by the workday: how the amount of time
workers spend engaging in surplus-labor determines the amount of time
they get for reproducing and cultivating their needs. Without changing this
division of labor social change is impossible. Orthodoxy is a rejection of the
ideological annotations: hence, on the one hand, the resistance to orthodoxy as
"rigid" and "dogmatic" "determinism," and, on the other, its hybridization by the
flexodox as the result of which it has become almost impossible today to
read the original ideas of Marxism, such as "exploitation"; "surplus-value";
"class"; "class antagonism"; "class struggle"; "revolution"; "science" (i.e.,
objective knowledge); "ideology" (as "false consciousness"). Yet, it is these
ideas alone that clarify the elemental truths through which theory ceases
to be a gray activism of tropes, desire and affect, and becomes, instead, a red,
revolutionary guide to praxis for a new society freed from exploitation and
injustice.
 Reactionary Conservatism DA
The permutation is reactionary conservatism----their appeal to
real suffering abandons the flux of politics in favor their
survival tactic
Wendy Brown 95, prof at UC Berkely, States of Injury, 37-8

When these precepts without which we cannot survive issue from the intellectual or
political Right, they are easy enough to identify as both reactionary and
fundamentalist.It is fairly clear what they oppose and seek to foreclose: inter alia, democratic
conversation about our collective condition and future . But when they issue
from feminists or others on the "Left, they are more slippery , especially insofar as
they are posed in the name of caring about political things, caring about
actual women* or about women's 'actual condition in the world. and
are lodged against those who presumably do not or cannot care, given their postmodern or
poststructurahst entanglements.The remainder of this essay turns this argument on its head. I will
suggest that feminist wariness about postmodernism may ultimately be coterminous
with a wariness about politics, when politics is grasped as a terrain of struggle
without fixed or metaphysical referents and a terrain of power's irreducible and pervasive ce in human affairs.
Contrary to its insistence that it speaks in name of the political, much feminist anti-
postmodernism betrays a preference for extrapolitical terms and practices: for
Truth (unchanging, incontestable) over politics (flux, contest. instability ): for
certainty and security (safety, immutability, privacy) over freedom (vulnerability, publicity); for discoveries (science)
over decisions (judgments);for separable subjects armed with established rights and
identities over unwieldy and shifting pluralities adjudicating for themselves and
their future on the basis of nothing more than their own habits and arguments.This
particular modernist reaction to postmoder- nism makes sense if we recall that the promise of the
Enlightenment was a revision of the old Platonic promise to put an end to politics by
supplanting it with Truth. In its modern variant, this promise was tendered through the multiple technologies of
nature's rationality in human affairs (Adam Smith); science, including the science of administration (Hobbes); and universal reason
(Kant. Hegel. Marx). Modernity could not make goud on this promise, of course, but modernists do not surrender thc dream it
instilled of a world governed by reason divested of power.** Avowed ambivalence about Western reason and rationality notwith-
standing. feminist modernists are no exception, but the nature of our 38 attachment to this ironically antipolitical vision is
distinctively colored by feminist projects. To thc particulars of this attachment wc now turn.
 Reformism DA
Reformism Their attempt to circumscribe political change
within the realm of the possible confines the perm to the
status quo and is incorporated into the smooth functioning of
capitalism
Slavoj Zizek, Senior Researcher at the University of Ljubljana, Repeating Lenin
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/zizek1.htm 1999

Today, we already can discern the signs of a kind of general unease recall the
series of events usually listed under the name of Seattle. The 10 years
honeymoon of the triumphant global capitalism is over, the long-overdue seven
years itch is here witness the panicky reactions of the big media, which from
the Time magazine to CNN all of a sudden started to warn about the Marxists
manipulating the crowd of the honest protesters. The problem is now the
strictly Leninist one how to ACTUALIZE the medias accusations: how to
invent the organizational structure which will confer on this unrest the
FORM of the universal political demand. Otherwise, the momentum will be
lost, and what will remain is the marginal disturbance, perhaps organized
as a new Greenpeace, with certain efficiency, but also strictly limited
goals, marketing strategy, etc. In other words, the key Leninist lesson
today is: politics without the organizational FORM of the party is politics
without politics, so the answer to those who want just the (quite adequately
named) New SOCIAL Movements is the same as the answer of the Jacobins to the
Girondin compromisers: You want revolution without a revolution! Todays
blockade is that there are two ways open for the socio-political
engagement: either play the game of the system, engage in the long
march through the institutions, or get active in new social movements,
from feminism through ecology to anti-racism. And, again, the limit of
these movements is that they are not POLITICAL in the sense of the
Universal Singular: they are one issue movements which lack the
dimension of the universality, i.e. they do not relate to the social
TOTALITY. Here, Lenins reproach to liberals is crucial: they only EXPLOIT the
working classes discontent to strengthen their position vis-a-vis the conservatives,
instead of identifying with it to the end.52 Is this also not the case with todays Left
liberals? They like to evoke racism, ecology, workers grievances, etc., to
score points over the conservatives WITHOUT ENDANGERING THE SYSTEM.
Recall how, in Seattle, Bill Clinton himself deftly referred to the protesters on the
streets outside, reminding the gathered leaders inside the guarded palaces that
they should listen to the message of the demonstrators (the message which, of
course, Clinton interpreted, depriving it of its subversive sting attributed to the
dangerous extremists introducing chaos and violence into the majority of peaceful
protesters). Its the same with all New Social Movements, up to the Zapatistas in
Chiapas: the systemic politics is always ready to listen to their demands,
depriving them of their proper political sting. The system is by definition
ecumenical, open, tolerant, ready to listen to all even if one insist on
ones demands, they are deprived of their universal political sting by the
very form of negotiation. The true Third Way we have to look for is this third way
between the institutionalized parliamentary politics and the new social movements.
The ultimate answer to the reproach that the radical Left proposals are utopian
should thus be that, today, the true utopia is the belief that the present
liberal-democratic capitalist consensus could go on indefinitely, without
radical changes. We are thus back at the old 68 motto Soyons realistes,
demandons l'impossible!": in order to be truly a realist, one must consider
breaking out of the constraints of what appears possible (or, as we
usually out it, feasible)