***T-USFG***

1NC – T
Our interpretation is that the resolution should define the division of affirmative and negative
ground. It was negotiated and announced in advance, providing both sides with a reasonable
opportunity to prepare to engage one another’s arguments.

This does not require the use of any particular style, type of evidence, or assumption about the role
of the judge; only that the topic should determine the debate’s subject matter.

United States federal government means the three branches.

OECD 87—Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development Council [The Control and Management
of Government Expenditure, p. 179]
1. Political and organisational structure of government
of The United States America is a federal republic consisting of 50 states. States have their own constitutions and within each State there are at
least two additional levels of government, generally designated as counties and cities, towns or villages. The relationships between different levels of
government are complex and varied (see Section B for more information). The Federal Government is composed of three
branches: the legislative branch, the executive branch, and the judicial branch. Budgetary decisionmaking is shared
primarily by the legislative and executive branches. The general structure of these two branches relative to budget formulation and execution is as
follows.

NHI is government guarantee of coverage

Thomas BODENHEIMER AND Kevin GRUMBACH 12. *Professor of Family Medicine, UCSF School
of Medicine. **Chair, Department of Family Medicine, UCSF School of Medicine. Understanding Health Policy:
A Clinical Approach. 7th ed. McGraw Hill.
http://accessmedicine.mhmedical.com/content.aspx?bookid=1790&sectionid=121192308.
For more than 100 years, reformers in the United States argued for the passage of a national health insurance program, a
government guarantee that every person is covered for basic health care. Finally in 2010, the United States took a major,
though incomplete, step forward toward universal health insurance.
The subject of national health insurance has seen six periods of intense activity, alternating with times of political inattention. From 1912 to 1916, 1946 to 1949, 1963 to
1965, 1970 to 1974, 1991 to 1994, and 2009 to 2015 it was the topic of major national debate. In 1916, 1949, 1974, and 1994, national health insurance was defeated and
temporarily consigned to the nation’s back burner. Guaranteed health coverage for two groups—the elderly and some of the poor—was enacted in 1965 through Medicare
and Medicaid. In 2010, with the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as the Affordable Care Act (ACA) or “Obamacare,” the stage was
National health insurance means the guarantee of health insurance
set for the expansion of coverage to millions of uninsured people.
for all the nation’s residents—what is commonly referred to as “universal coverage.” Much of the focus, as well as the political contentiousness,
of national health insurance proposals concern how to pay for universal coverage . National health insurance proposals may
also address provider payment and cost containment.

Violation---they don’t defend instrumental evaluation of USFG action

Vote neg—

1. Prep and clash—post facto topic change alters balance of prep, which structurally favors the aff
because they speak last and use perms—key to engage a prepared adversary and a target of mutual
contestation.

2. Limits—specific topics are key to reasonable expectations for 2Ns—open subjects create
incentives for avoidance and monopolization of moral high ground—that denies a role for the neg
and turns accessibility.

3. Refinement—unlimited topics makes assessing the validity of the 1ac’s truth claims impossible
AND cause concessionary ground which creates incentives for avoidance
Breaking down predictability is self-defeating and impossible. Limits are both constraining and
enabling of creativity—the attempt to wish away limits collapses the very structure upon which their
aff depends.
Armstrong 2k—Professor of English and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the State University of
New York at Stony Brook [Paul B, “The Politics of Play: The Social Implications of Iser's Aesthetic Theory,”
New Literary History 31(1): 211-223, Emory Libraries]
Such a play-space also opposes the notion that the only alternative to the coerciveness of consensus must be to
advocate the sublime powers of rule-breaking. 8 Iser shares Lyotard's concern that to privilege harmony and agreement in a world of
heterogeneous language games is to limit their play and to inhibit semantic innovation and the creation of new games. Lyotard's endorsement
of the "sublime"--the pursuit of the "unpresentable" by rebelling against restrictions, defying norms, and smashing the
limits of existing paradigms--is undermined by contradictions, however, which Iser's explication of play recognizes and
addresses. The paradox of the unpresentable, as Lyotard acknowledges, is that it can only be manifested through a
game of representation. The sublime is, consequently, in Iser's sense, an instance of doubling. If violating norms creates new
games, this crossing of boundaries depends on and carries in its wake the conventions and structures it
oversteps. The sublime may be uncompromising, asocial, and unwilling to be bound by limits, but its pursuit
of what is not contained in any order or system makes it dependent on the forms it opposes . [End Page 220]
The radical presumption of the sublime is not only terroristic in refusing to recognize the claims of other games
whose rules it declines to limit itself by. It is also naive and self-destructive in its impossible imagining that it
can do without the others it opposes. As a structure of doubling, the sublime pursuit of the unpresentable requires a
play-space that includes other, less radical games with which it can interact. Such conditions of exchange
would be provided by the nonconsensual reciprocity of Iserian play.
Iser's notion of play offers a way of conceptualizing power which acknowledges the necessity and force of
disciplinary constraints without seeing them as unequivocally coercive and determining. The contradictory
combination of restriction and openness in how play deploys power is evident in Iser's analysis of "regulatory"
and "aleatory" rules. Even the regulatory rules, which set down the conditions participants submit to in order
to play a game, "permit a certain range of combinations while also establishing a code of possible play. . . . Since
these rules limit the text game without producing it, they are regulatory but not prescriptive. They do no more
than set the aleatory in motion, and the aleatory rule differs from the regulatory in that it has no code of its
own" (FI 273). Submitting to the discipline of regulatory restrictions is both constraining and enabling because it makes
possible certain kinds of interaction that the rules cannot completely predict or prescribe in advance. Hence the
existence of aleatory rules that are not codified as part of the game itself but are the variable customs, procedures, and practices for playing it.
Expert facility with aleatory rules marks the difference, for example, between someone who just knows the rules of a
game and another who really knows how to play it. Aleatory rules are more flexible and open-ended and more
susceptible to variation than regulatory rules, but they too are characterized by a contradictory combination of
constraint and possibility, limitation and unpredictability, discipline and spontaneity.
As a rule-governed but open-ended activity, play provides a model for deploying power in a nonrepressive
manner that makes creativity and innovation possible not in spite of disciplinary constraints but because of
them. Not all power is playful, of course, and some restrictions are more coercive than enabling. But thinking about the power of constraints on the
model of rules governing play helps to explain the paradox that restrictions can be productive rather than merely repressive.
Seeing constraints as structures for establishing a play-space and as guides for practices of exchange within it
envisions power not necessarily and always as a force to be resisted in the interests of freedom; it allows imagining
the potential for power to become a constructive social energy that can animate games of to-and-fro
exchange between participants whose possibilities for self-discovery and self-expansion are [End Page 221]
enhanced by the limits shaping their interactions . Whether the one or the other of these possibilities prevails in any particular
situation is not intrinsic to the structure of power; it depends, rather, on how games are played
 2NC – AT: Ressentiment

Whoever smelt it dealt it.

Fredric JAMESON, William A. Lane, Jr., Professor of Comparative Literature and Professor of Romance
Studies at Duke University, 82 [The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, 1982, p. 202]

What is most striking about the theory of ressentiment is its unavoidably autoreferential structure . In Demos,
certainly, the conclusion is inescapable: Gissing resents Richard, and what he resents most is the latter's ressentiment. We
are perhaps now far enough distant from this particular ideologeme to draw a corollary: namely, that this ostensible "theory" is itself little
more than an expression of annoyance at seemingly gratuitous lower-class agitation, at the apparently quite
unnecessary rocking of the social boat. It may therefore be concluded that the theory of ressentiment, wherever
it appears, will always itself be the expression and the production of ressentiment .
 2NC – AT: Predictability/Limits Bad (Nietzsche)

View T as a process of ostracism that both protects this agonistic space for the sake of the contest as
well as a commitment to (re)producing excellence. Voting neg on fairness isn’t a form of
ressentiment because bringing predictability to the agon does not deprive it of the capacity for flux.
Bonnie HONIG, Associate Professor of Government at Harvard University, 93 [“The Politics of Agonism:
A Critical Response to "Beyond Good and Evil: Arendt, Nietzsche, and the Aestheticization of Political
Action" by Dana R. Villa,” Political Theory, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Aug., 1993), p. 528-533, Accessed Online through
Emory Libraries]

Is Nietzsche's agonism excessive? In an early essay, "Homer's Contest," Nietzsche shows the same love of the world
and devotion to the contest as Arendt, the same fear that the agon's winners could shut down the agon and
fracture the forces that, united, have the power to maintain and preserve it. Here he espouses not a radical subjectism but a
commitment to the responsible maintenance of a public, shared space of appearances for the sake of the
contest it enables and secures. This agonism is not unrestricted. Nietzsche endorses the ancient Greek practice of
ostracism to protect the agon from domination by a single "individual who towers above the rest.”2 For him,
ostracism evidences not an intolerance of excellence but a commitment to its (re)production. By preserving
the agon, ostracism secured a structured opportunity for individuals to test themselves and develop their own
distinctive excellences. The agon provided the plurality, equality, and commonality the freedom from
domination-that both Nietzsche and Arendt posit as the necessary conditions of virtuosic action .
The Nietzsche who wrote "Homer's Contest" is still very much in evidence in his later works. In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche
endorses a conception of law whose virtue is its power to impose measure and limit an otherwise unrestricted
agonism, stabilizing an ordered site of contest without dominating it. And scattered throughout his work are
remarks that echo Machiavelli in their admiration for Rome and their reverence for institutions as well as for the human
capacity to found, organize, and maintain communities of knowledge or power.3 Villa makes no mention of these elements in
Nietzsche's thought. Indeed, his repeated references to Nietzsche's (and the postmodern Nietzscheans') thirst for will to
power and Dionysian flux do much to occlude them (pp. 276, 290-91, 299). They must be occluded if Villa is to sustain his claim that
Arendt's turn to taste judgment underlines the falseness of the "Nietzschean dichotomy between a universal, metaphysically grouned metadiscourse
and a fragmented, postmetaphysical discursive realm [driven by] the will to power" (p. 301). The dichotomy is, indeed, false, but it is not Nietzsche's:
Nietzsche's own reverence for agonistic institutions cuts across it.
And Arendt herself knew that, not in The Life of the Mind, where she wrongly accuses Nietzsche of emasculating the will, but in The Human
Condition, where she praises Nietzsche for seeing "with unequaled clarity the connection between human sovereignty and the faculty of making
promises." From Nietzsche, Arendt borrows not only the stabilizing practice of promising, theorized by Nietzsche in the second essay of Genealogy,
but also that of forgiveness, a process of "constant mutual release" theorized by Nietzsche as a practice of dismissing in the first essay of Genealogy.4
In the place of ostracism, promising and forgiveness protect the Arendtian agon—the space of free and meaning-generative action—from forces that
might overwhelm it, from the domination of a single great figure, passion, resentment, or ideology. Together
these practices bring some
predictability to the agon and soften the effects of action's boundlessness without domesticating the
contingency that is action's necessary condition and without depriving action of its exhilaration and
generative power. They do not "tame" the agon (no more than judgment does); they condition and structure it in ways
that are more internal to agonistic action than even taste judgment is.5
***Single Payer CP
 1NC – CP
Text: The United States federal government should establish a comprehensive national health
program.

Only single-payer can overcome the ‘death gap’ and allow marginalized communities total access to
coverage and care.
David ANSELL 17. Senior VP for Community Health at Rush University Medical Center, Social
Epidemiologist, MD/MPH. The Death Gap: How Inequality Kills. University of Chicago Press. 137-42.
There are three major structural flaws in the Affordable Care Act, all of which could be solved by a single-payer
system . The first flaw is [END PAGE 137] that the insurance expansion is neither universal nor equitable. For example,
because mandatory Medicaid expansion was blocked by the Supreme Court, nineteen states have left millions of poor
people uninsured .26 These states account for over half of poor uninsured blacks, single mothers, and the country's
uninsured working poor. For poor people in these states, it is as if Obamacare was never enacted. Note that for the most
part these states that have refused to expand Medicaid are the former Confederate slaveholding states,
accentuating the legacy of structural racism . Access to specialty care for those who receive Medicaid coverage is limited compared to
access for patients with private insurance.27 More than one-third of US doctors refuse to take Medicaid-another
structural barrier.28
The second flaw is that premiums, copays, and deductibles for private health insurance and products on the marketplaces
are prohibitively high for many people, especially the working poor. In 2015 average annual premiums for employer-
sponsored health insurance were $6,251 for single coverage and $17,545 for family coverage. Between 2014 and 2015, premiums
increased by 4 percent, while during the same period workers' wages increased 1.9 percent. Premiums for family
coverage increased 27 percent during the last five years, while cost sharing has skyrocketed.29 The average individual deductible across the marketplace
plans in 2016 was $5,765 for bronze plans. After the deductible is paid, an individual with such a plan will face 40 percent
copays for services.30 Insurance companies have reacted to their rising costs by creating narrow networks of
providers and hospitals.31 This limits choice of patients by restricting the doctors and hospitals whose services
they can use.
At the heart of the Affordable Care Act are subsidies for the working poor to pay for health insurance premiums.32 The goal was to keep these
premiums within reach of most Americans. It was a sweet deal for the insurance companies. The insurance companies are guaranteed to get their
premiums; the federal government poured billions of dollars into their coffers. In exchange, an individual gets an insurance card. But with that card
came unprecedented out-of-pocket expenses that kicked in before the insurance company paid one cent.33 The belief is [END PAGE 138] that
without "skin in the game;' the newly insured will overuse the system. As a result, coinsurance and deductibles that many Americans
now are forced to pay have skyrocketed across the insurance markets. Yet every study ever done on the impact
of copays and deductibles (even for middle-class people) is that they cause individuals to delay medical care .34 Under
a single-payer health care system there would be no copays or deductibles .
Obamacare Bullshit
The third flaw of the Affordable Care Act was that long-term
doctor patient relationships have been disrupted by
insurance restrictions. President Obama said, "No matter how we reform health care, I intend to keep this promise: If you like your doctor,
you'll be able to keep your doctor; if you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan:'35 This turned out to be untrue.
Windora Bradley, a year before her stroke, struggled to pay her health insurance premiums. Faced
with the dilemma to buy food or go
without medications, she chose to go without medications. At one of her office visits, she let loose.
'Tm tired about this Obamacare bullshit;' she shook her head, frowning as her jowls quivered. "I worked for thirty-five years. Those people on welfare
who never worked are getting free health care. I am paying $700 each month and there is not enough left for medicines and food. That's not right.
That's why I call it Obamacare bullshit:'
Windora lived on a pension of about $1,000 per month. Most went for the premiums on her health insurance,
which she still received through the Chicago Board of Education. She
scrimped and saved to pay for her medications for her
diabetes, hypertension, asthma, and vascular disease. Her situation is common among the working poor.
Windora was ultimately able to get insurance on the marketplace that reduced her premium costs but not her out-of-pocket expenses. At first she
purchased a Blue Cross insurance plan that she was told my hospital accepted, but this proved incorrect. She then had to purchase a more expensive
plan to stay with me. Meanwhile her two sisters, who [END PAGE 139] had also been my patients for over thirty years, had to switch doctors because
my group did not accept the insurance they enrolled in. A number of my long-term patients found themselves in this dilemma. In 2015, after her
stroke, Blue Cross dropped my hospital and many others from the plan Windora had just purchased. There was
only one plan, from United Health Care, in all of Cook County that included my hospital and me in the network. The week after Windora signed up
for it, United Health Care let it be known that it was considering withdrawing from all the exchanges in 2017.36
In three years of the Affordable Care Act, Windora had purchased three different insurance policies just to retain me as
her physician. In the fall of 2016, United Health Care announced it would drop my hospital from its network, and Windora, now
wheelchair bound and speechless, is forced to find another doctor (to say nothing of her many specialitsts) after thirty-six
years. For someone like Windora with complex medical and social obstacles, keeping a team of providers who
are familiar with her medical travails is essential to getting good care. For me, her longtime doctor, it is a gut-
wrenching experience.
The fact is that Obamacare, despite its modest benefits, does not remedy American health care inequity. It will
never achieve universal coverage. Eleven million noncitizen residents will never be eligible for its benefits.
Thirty million people will remain uninsured. While insurance coverage has increased for all races, there is still a large racial
and ethnic gap in insurance coverage, which will perpetuate health disparities. For those with health
insurance, spiraling copays and deductibles have made access to care more difficult. Finally, by allowing a
dizzying array of for-profit insurance carriers with high administrative overhead expenses, the Affordable Care
Act as currently configured will not control costs.
In 2016, the third year of Obamacare, insurance companies asked for double-digit increases in premium prices, as they claimed costs of delivery had
outstripped the revenues. Meanwhile, health insurance stocks are trading at all-time highs, while patients like Windora Bradley face rocketing expenses
and uncertainty about the future. 37 [END PAGE 140]
A Call for Single Payer
I speak for many of my health care colleagues across the nation when I say that the Affordable Care Act is a disappointment. In contrast, an
improved and expanded Medicare for All would achieve truly universal care, affordability, equity, and
effective cost control . It would put the interests of our patients-and our nation's health-first. By replacing
multiple private insurers with a single nonprofit agency like Medicare that pays all medical bills, the United States would
save approximately $400 billion annually. Administrative bloat in our current private-insurance-based system
would be slashed . That waste would be redirected to clinical care . Copays, coinsurance, and deductibles
would be eliminated. A single streamlined system would be able to rein in costs for medications and other
supplies through the system's strong bargaining clout-clout directed to benefit health, not profits . Finally, it
would create an equitable system of care that would provide equal access to rich, poor, black, and white. As a
result, life expectancy gaps between rich and poor would narrow. Hospitals that serve poor communities
would have access to capital investment based on need. It has been done in other countries, and it can be
done in the United States.
Single-payer health care stands in stark contrast to the ACAs incremental reform. Yet it is important to remember that
enactment of a single-payer system requires the defeat of deeply vested, deep-pocketed ideological opponents, health insurance conglomerates, and a
thick alliance of health care constituencies along with other interest groups. The Affordable Care Act, passed by a Democratic majority and signed by a
Democratic president, was a weak compromise that left the foundations of our flawed $2.9 trillion health care system intact. It will be some time
before political conditions are again right to tackle an improved Medicare for All. So why, given these hurdles, do I (and many other health
care providers) persist? I
persist because I have watched too many patients suffer and die because they lacked
health insurance or had the wrong insurance card. I persist because I have witnessed the racial and ethnic
death gaps enabled by our current health insurance arrangements. I persist because simple fairness dictates that
health care is a fundamental human right. I persist because of patients like Win-[END PAGE 141]dora and Sarai, who
deserve better. For those who counter that single payer is too expensive or politically unfeasible, we persist
because the American ideal of "life and liberty" cannot be achieved without an equitable and universal health care
system.
Winston Churchill reportedly said, "You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing ... after they have tried everything else:'38 We have
tried everything else. I look forward to being part of a single-payer health care system that values the health of
individuals, families, and communities as a common good-where health care is valued as a human right.
Someday.

Commitment to social solidarity through acknowledging a right to health is necessary to combat

inequality under neoliberalism.
Joseph M. SCHWARTZ 13, professor of Political Theory at Temple University [“A Peculiar Blind Spot:
Why did Radical Political Theory Ignore the Rampant Rise in Inequality Over the Past Thirty Years?” New
Political Science, Vol. 35, No. 3, 2013, p. 389-402, Accessed Online through Emory Libraries]
This article explores why self-defined radical and “subversive” political theory has, by and large, failed to examine the
rampant increase in inequality under thirty years of neoliberal capitalism as a major threat to democracy.1 During this period, the most
highly cited work in radical political thought focused on predominantly ontological and epistemological issues of
“difference” and “the fiction of the coherent self.”2 But just as post-structuralist and difference theorists attacked the rational
chooser of Rawlsian liberalism as a falsely universal subject and interrogated equality as a homogenizing
category, political elites of both the right and the moderate left achieved an ideological consensus in favor of a new,
neoliberal universal subject—the entrepreneurial, self-sufficient, competitive marketplace individual. Thus, it is rather ironic that during the
“Great Compression” of the 1960s, when income and wealth inequality moderately decreased—in part due to the power of the labor and social
democratic movements in advanced democracies—the revival of political theory focused on the challenge to democracy posed by economic inequality
and the absence of voice for employees in the workplace; think of the early work of Carole Pateman, C.B. Macpherson, Michael Walzer, and Sheldon
Wolin.3 Yet in the past several decades of rapidly growing inequality most radical theorists have focused on the
challenge difference poses to democratic societies or how
liberal democratic institutions of “governance” engage in the repressive
norming of the self. This is not to deny the role that difference plays within a democratic pluralist society, or the intellectual validity of
interrogating how dominant institutional norms can constrict individual identity. But the problem that vexed Rousseau, Mill, Marx, and the founders of
contemporary democratic theory remains more relevant than ever: how do inequalities in wealth, income, power, and life-opportunity contradict the
formal commitment of liberal democracy to the equal moral worth of persons?
Given the accentuated role that corporate power and wealth plays in American politics today, why also do few political
theorists examine the tension between corporate power and democracy? Not since Charles Lindblom's and Robert Dahl's
work in the late 1970s and early 1980s have students of politics focused on the anomalous role of corporations in a democratic society. As Dahl and
Lindblom argued, in a democratic society binding decisions should only be granted legitimacy if they are made democratically. Yet corporate
management regularly issues edicts that have binding, coercive effects on their employees and society at large.4 Nor have theorists focused
on how the weakening of democratic institutions of countervailing power, such as unions and grass-roots
social movements, has engendered a formal democracy that is de facto an oligarchy.5 Recently, mainstream—even
behavioral—American politics scholars have investigated the corrosive effects that the fungible nature of wealth into political power has upon
democracy, as well as the resulting dominance in decision-making of the political preferences of elites. But recent political theory has been
relatively silent on these issues.6.
By the late 1980s theorists of difference, such as Iris Marion Young and Carol Gilligan, shifted the focus of radical theory from economic democracy
to a critique of how one-size-fits-all social policies failed to meet the differential needs of members of particular groups.7 The turn to
difference offered important insights for both theorists and activists, as democratic public policies must
account for the differential needs of particular individuals and groups. But what the focus on difference
sometimes obscured is that the argument that each individual should receive the resources necessary to satisfy
their particular human needs still relies upon a universal democratic commitment to the equal standing of all
members of society.
In contrast to theories of difference, the post-structuralist turn in political theory in part arose as a reaction to fears that
identity and difference politics essentialized and homogenized the status of the self within groups.8 Post-structuralism rejected both
Rawlsian liberalism's belief in a coherent, rational chooser and identity politics' granting of primacy to the group as the shaper of individual identity.
Instead, post-structuralist analysis emphasized the labile, incoherent, shifting nature of a self constituted by, in Judith Butler's
terms, the “performative discursive iteration” of social norms.9 Post-structuralist theorists emphasized the agonal nature of politics and the ever-
present possibility that the discursive self could “performatively resist” hegemonic norms.10 That is, by refusing to perform according to the social
norms that allegedly inscribe the self, individuals could engage in “transgressive” resistance. Ironically, just as allegedly radical theorists
discerned the “radical Nietzschean” possibilities of individual resistance, the social and political options of working
class individuals and many people of color in the United States were being further constrained by increased social,
economic, and political inequality. This focus on individual resistance may have come about—as the literary theorist
Terry Eagleton argues—because the forward progress of the left had been reversed by the triumph of Thatcher and
Reagan and, thus, theorists lost faith in the possibility of democratic majoritarian political change.11
Given how divided the United States is, not only politically, but also geographically and socially on lines of race, class,
and citizenship status, democratic theorists perhaps should refocus their energies on defining the role solidarity
and equality of standing must play in the construction of a just society. For example, the political conflict likely to define
America's political future is how expeditiously undocumented workers and their dependents become full citizens. Unlike some who long for a return
to a class-based politics of social solidarity, I am well aware that forms of racial, national, and gender exclusion helped
construct past forms of political solidarity.12 Moreover, the working class has never been a truly homogeneous and
“universal class”; its identity and consciousness are constructed in complex ways that reflect the intersectionality of race,
class, gender, and sexuality and the role that ideology and culture play in social life.
Yet, absent a revival of a pluralist, majoritarian left it is hard to imagine how difference can be institutionalized in
an egalitarian manner. Theorists of difference are, in some ways, blind to the reality that difference (or “diversity”) can
be—and is being—institutionalized on a radically inegalitarian social terrain, in which some social groups have
much more power and opportunity than others. This blind spot mimics the weaknesses of the liberal pluralist theory
that dominated political science in the 1950s and 1960s. Then, radical theorists pointed out that liberal pluralist society failed to be fully democratic
because some groups had inordinate economic and political power as compared to their small numbers within the demos.13 Today, the same critique
of difference can be made.
Post-structuralist theorists' focus on the performative resistance of decentered, mutable selves also fails to
recognize that the performative options of working-class individuals, persons of color, women, and gays and
lesbians are constrained by the structural distribution of racial, economic, and gendered forms of power. Thus,
if the performative options of the vast majority are to be enhanced, left theorists have to recover a politics
and practice of solidarity and democratic equality; concepts which neither a pure politics of difference nor an
agonal politics of post-structuralist radical democracy can adequately ground .
Can a “Politics of Difference” Form the Basis for Radical Democracy?
Feminist advocates of a politics of difference question whether Rawls's theory of justice adequately considers the differentials in power and interest
that exist among the distinct communities or groups within a pluralist democracy. Thus, in a pluralist society, according to theorists of difference, if the
equal moral worth of persons is to be achieved, members of the community with differential needs should be treated according to their particular
needs (for example, single mothers). Marx made these points long ago (in an admittedly economistic fashion) in The Critique of the Gotha
Programme;14 and Joan Scott returned to these themes in her groundbreaking essay on the role difference must play within any pluralist theory of
equality.15 Feminist theorists who come out of a left tradition, such as Nancy Fraser and Seyla Benhabib, are careful to consider what type of
“generalized” norms or empathetic reasoning are necessary to construct a shared normative commitment to democratic equality across difference. We
can draw on these works by left feminists working out of a post-Habermasian or quasi-universalist tradition to help us ground a politics of pluralist
solidarity and equality.16
But, as Anne Phillips points out, the valuation of difference can, at times, obfuscate the dependence of democratic feminist theorists and activists upon
universal democratic norms, particularly when they oppose undemocratic inequalities across groups or anti-democratic practices within groups.17
According to theorists of difference, precautions need to be taken against deploying universal liberal
conceptions of human nature that mask particularist raced, gendered, or classed conceptions of human interests.
Iris Marion Young, the most cited theorist writing on the politics of difference, draws upon her experience of struggles within the feminist movement
against a falsely universalizing conception of “women” (that is, white and middle class) that would negate the distinct social experience and needs of
women of color, queer women, and working-class women.18 She argues that particular groups often embrace distinct concepts of politics, fairness,
and justice. Thus, she contends that imposing universal conceptions of justice upon particular groups may deny these groups the right to develop their
particular conceptions of the good.
Young, to her credit, acknowledges that a democratic version of identity politics must achieve some common
understandings—across group difference—of democratic procedural norms and policies. Yet in Young's most
influential work, Justice and the Politics of Difference, there exists an unresolved tension between her commitment to difference, on the one hand, and
to a democratic egalitarian polity that grants equal moral respect to each citizen, on the other. Ultimately Young's commitment to giving proportional
political voice to different groups (seemingly regardless of their character or political goals) contradicts her democratic commitment to treating each
individual as an equal member of a democratic community. Young fails to articulate clearly the democratic side of her commitment to difference by
never specifying the shared values and practices citizens must embrace across their differences in order to build a democratic society. For example,
should racist communities be given the particular consideration and even seemingly proportional representation that Young advocates for “oppressed”
groups? If not, then the very definition of “oppression” is parasitic on a belief that members of an oppressed group have been denied the universal
rights that should be accorded to all members of a democratic community.
In addition, Young fails to note that if
democratic citizens fail to conceive of others as sharing a common humanity,
then it will be extremely difficult to develop bonds of solidarity across difference. A quick example to illustrate the
dilemma: while many gay and lesbian people are African-American, the dominant political and cultural institution in that community—the church—
has a long (though receding) tradition of homophobia that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and queer (LGBTQ) members of the African-
American community and their supporters contest. Advocates within the black community of LGBTQ rights invariably
draw upon universal notions of human rights to critique the predominant practices of their particular
community.19
In Justice and the Politics of Difference, Young calls upon the state to institutionalize a “group-differentiated, participatory public” in which funding
from the state would aid “the self-organization” of group members. She also advocates granting veto power to groups on policies that affect their
members.20 But no democratic polity can survive if policy decisions are automatically controlled by particular communities or if unilateral group
vetoes are granted to any community that claims to be adversely affected by a policy (especially as there are often differences of opinions and interests
within any given group). In fact, American federalism has resulted in racial and class geographic segregation that undemocratically farms out policy to
particular advantaged groups, such as the funding and provision of an essential public good—education—to racially and class-exclusive communities.
This results in a peculiar American form of unequal access to public goods. That is, the United States has many “little suburban Swedens” that provide
high-quality universal public goods to all their affluent residents. But it is precisely such decentralized difference or local autonomy that thwarts
broader egalitarian policies and promotes stratified, unjust “difference.”
Perhaps due to belated recognition of some of the above difficulties, Young's later Inclusion and Democracy cautions against “fixing and reifying”
group membership and group representation. In clear distinction to her earlier “group representation” schemes, Young's later writings explicitly reject
fixing the number of legislative seats to be held by “oppressed groups” through the use of either quotas or special districts. She argues that quotas for
minorities—or special districts—tend to freeze representation and reify groups into homogenous entities. Nor does she revisit her decade-earlier call
for groups to have veto power over policies that affect their interests.21 Thus, in her later work, Young's Habermasian quasi-universalist side begins to
win out over the over-emphasis on difference in her earlier work.
In Identity and Democracy, Young continually reminds her readers of the need for groups to appeal to others outside their group; she repeatedly
asserts that her vision of “communicative democracy” requires groups to advance distinct narrative strategies (which
can be “translated” by others) within a common, public deliberative life. She favors a politics in which groups move beyond particularist
assertions of “I want” to “public, deliberative” appeals for “what I am entitled to” by just policies.22 But Young's
movement from the
“we” group appeals to the “I” of justice implicitly admits that to achieve a just distribution of goods and life
opportunities social movements have to build ties across groups based on appeals to shared egalitarian values
that underpin individual assertions for justice. Thus one can see from the tensions within Young's own work that while a pluralist
democracy must value culturally sustaining identities of “difference,” if that democracy is also to be an egalitarian one, a norm of
solidarity must exist among citizens. Only the shared embrace of this norm would lead democratic citizens to be
concerned with the well-being of their fellows, even if they are not members of their particular group.
Social Solidarity as the Road to Democratic Egalitarian Pluralism
Just as the right's growing hegemony from the 1980s onward eroded majoritarian support for progressive taxation and universal public goods,
radical theory, through its dominant concerns for difference and transgression, abandoned any intellectual
defense of the core democratic value of social solidarity. In the United States today, social solidarity is the forgotten sibling
among the troika of democratic values—“liberty, equality, and fraternity”—that suffused the democratic social revolutions
from the French Revolution onwards. The concept of “fraternity,” or, in gender neutral terms, “solidarity,” implies that citizens
develop a capacity for empathy toward others and for trust in their fellows. Democratic citizens act in
solidarity with one another because they recognize that their common project is an interdependent one and
thus each member of the community has both a moral and an instrumental interest in assuring a minimal level
of well-being for all.
For much of the twentieth century the left in capitalist democracies fought to expand social rights out of the belief that radical social inequality eroded
the value of equal political and civil rights. If democracy involves the making of binding laws by equal citizens, the left argued, there cannot exist a
group of citizens who are so socially excluded that they cannot participate politically. Universal public education emerged with the rise of democracy
precisely out of insurgent social movements' concern that all citizens gain a “civic education.” Over time, excluded social groups fought to be included
as full citizens; and the expansion of citizen rights to “others”—the essence of social solidarity—continues today in the fight for immigrant rights
across the globe. As the work of T.H. Marshall and Karl Polanyi demonstrates, the historic struggle between democratic left and right has revolved
around the extent to which social rights—public provision, social insurance, and labor rights—should constrain the inegalitarian outcomes of a
market-based economy.23
Thus, even the most classically liberal of democratic polities—the United States and the United Kingdom—provide minimal
levels of universal insurance against disability, unemployment, and old age. But among developed democracies only the
“liberal market” United States and United Kingdom do not provide universal forms of state-funded childcare or child
support. This reality enabled the right, in both countries, to deploy racialized “anti-welfare” politics that mobilized
a segment of the working class, whose formal market earnings rendered them ineligible for means-tested child support programs, against
both strong public provision and the relatively high rates of taxation that regressive tax policies impose upon
working families.
That is, in the dialectic of democracy and solidarity the bonds of fellowship are not naturally fixed. Democratic
social movements frequently struggle to expand the popular conception of who is part of the “we.” Often, in
times of national crisis and broad social vulnerability, bonds of solidarity expand and strengthen, as do social policies that
insure a universal economic and social floor under which citizens cannot fall. Hence, we associate the expansion of social and labor rights
during the New Deal and French Popular Front governments with the shared vulnerability of the Great Depression. The United States' GI Bill and the
post-World War II radical expansion of the British welfare state came immediately after a “total war” in which victory depended upon the military and
productive contributions of working-class men and women, recent immigrants, and oppressed minorities.
Thus far, strong bonds of social solidarity have only been constructed (and also eroded) at the level of the nation state, the community of “we” versus
“them.” In addition, radical theory and practice has yet to tackle the difficulty of expanding social rights—and of defending existing ones—during
periods of capitalist stagnation and global economic restructuring. This makes even more pressing, but also problematic, the project of expanding
solidarity across national borders. Today, the struggle for greater solidarity between the working people of northern Europe and southern Europe will
define whether the European project becomes more democratic or fragments on the shoals of anti-solidaristic austerity policies.
But the contraction of public provision under neoliberal capitalism is no more natural or inexorable than was its historical expansion. Today, the
struggle of undocumented workers for an expeditious path to citizenship should lead normative theorists to revisit arguments as to why political, civil,
and social rights should be extended to all those (and their dependents) who contribute productive labor to our society. And at a time when the
minimum wage is less than one-half of the real value it had in the 1960s, low-wage service workers—both native-born and immigrants—are beginning
to protest their inability to raise a family in dignity on their meager wages. Such protest will likely expand if undocumented immigrants gain secure legal
rights. In addition, as the baby boomers come to retirement with inadequate savings and radically underfunded or non-existent pensions, there is likely
to be resistance to neoliberal efforts to constrict, rather than expand, Social Security.
The dominant center-right opposes both the restoration of labor rights and an expeditious path to citizenship for the
undocumented. So it would be a timely public intellectual intervention for radical theorists to revisit the history of
how democratic majorities have used the power of the democratic state to restrict the alleged “freedom of
contract” so as to guarantee that the economy serves society rather than society serving the interests of
economic elites. How many political theorists today in their classrooms take on the elite consensus in favor of “austerity politics” that naturalizes modern society's
alleged inability to afford generous entitlement programs? The United States certainly could afford to do so—and even significantly expand public
provision—if we reintroduced progressive forms of corporate and income taxation, massively cut imperial “defense”
expenditure, and took the profit motive out of health insurance by creating a single-payer health care system.
Such policy commitments derive from the values of democratic equality and solidarity. Perhaps it is time that
political theorists examined how these concepts could be revised to be relevant to the politics of contemporary
neoliberal capitalism .
 2NC – CP Solves/AT: Becoming Turns

The surge of populism and evacuation of truth requires more attention to health policy details and
commitment to democratic processes, not abandonment. Their alt just entrenches status quo
trends, rather than enabling resistance.
Ewen SPEED AND Russell MANNION 17, *Graduate Director (Research) and a senior lecturer in
medical sociology the School of Health and Human Sciences at the University of Essex; ** the Chair in
Health Systems at the Health Services Management Centre, University of Birmingham [“The Rise of Post-
truth Populism in Pluralist Liberal Democracies: Challenges for Health Policy,” International Journal of Health
Policy and Management, Vol. 6, No. 5, May 2017, p. 249-251, Accessed Online through Emory Libraries]
Healthcare has benefitted enormously from international cooperation and agreements that allow the free flow of people, capital,
goods, and information.8,9 Populism, on the other hand, is concerned with national protectionism which limits
international cooperation and movement.6 A populism built on ‘walls’ and fear of ‘the other’ (for Trump read
Mexicans and Muslims, for Brexit read immigrants from Eastern Europe and Syrian refugees), discriminates against certain sub-sections
of the population and exacerbates existing national (and global) health inequalities. Populist leaders pursing such
policies typically try to avoid established institutional checks and balances (including the professionalised civil service) and seek to
implement public policies at more pace and scale than the traditional bureau-incrementalistic approaches associated with liberal-
democratic governments. This is clearly-evident in President Trump’s use of Twitter as a media platform to announce new policies and in so doing by-
passing the professional experts and civil service. But swift reforms may come at the expense of good policy design and mass
support, especiallyas populist policies tend to be shaped more by the personal whims and prejudices of a
demagogue than underpinned by a secure evidence base. In the United States, a clear example of this relates to
changes to policy in the realm of reproductive rights, with legislation already proposed which seeks to limit access
to abortion services. Similarly, the repeal of the Affordable Care Act may have very real consequences in terms of restricting access to
contraception and other birth control services.There are also concerns around the so-called conscience laws which enable individuals and companies to
use conscience objections against charges of sexual orientation discrimination.10 In the United Kingdom, there have been calls to
introduce charging mechanisms for ‘health tourists,’ with the effect that overseas patients are required to pay upfront for their care.
However, amid all the political clamour and rhetoric around ‘freeloading’ health tourists, it should not be lost that a greater principle is at stake – the
introduction of a formal charging mechanism into a Beveridge based health system.11 Indeed, some hospitals in the United Kingdom have already
started to charge for elective surgery,12 even though patients have already paid for access to care via direct taxation. Here we see the potency
of populist appeals, where the invocation of the freeloading ‘other’ can be used to justify a fundamental
change to the principle of universal healthcare and ultimately the dismantling of the National Health Service
(NHS).13
Terms such as ‘post-truth’ and ‘fake news’ have been used to describe the rapid transformations to the substance
of populist political discourse, both in relation to the election of president Trump and the Brexit campaign. As defined by the Oxford
English dictionary (which made it the 2016 international word of the year) post-truth “relates to or denotes circumstances in which
objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” And
this clearly links to sociological approaches since the 1980s which have explored the ways in which developments in mass
communication technology have created a sense of what Baudrillard14 described as ‘hyperreality’ – the
inability to distinguish the real from the false and a postmodern condition, where even supposedly hard economic
evidence can be contested.15 Populist politicians’ reliance on assertions that appear true, but have no basis in fact, creates a
false view of the world, not with the intention of convincing the elites that they are right, but in reinforcing prejudices among their targeted
pool of potential supporters. In the modern age of social media, fear, rumour and gossip can spread alarmingly fast with
feelings and emotions often carrying more weight than facts and evidence. Charismatic leaders spread a populist mood which creates
an additional emotional hook and which distinguishes populist political rhetoric from conventional politics. A common rhetorical device used in
populist post-truth politics is the repetition of a dominant motif – which may not be based on any reliable evidence. For example, during the British
EU referendum campaign, Vote Leave made repeated use of the claim that EU membership cost £350 million a week, but this claim was rejected in
fact-checks undertaken by BBC News and several independent experts. Indeed, this provoked the notorious rebuke by the pro-leave Secretary of State
for Justice, that “people in this country have had enough of experts.”16 It is not difficult to see that the disdain for policy experts
by politicians pursuing populist policies, may result in poorly designed and implemented health policies with
potentially serious dysfunctional consequences. Noveck aligns the recent surge in support for populism with the
rise of a professional ‘expertocratic’ political class which has served to disenfranchise ordinary citizens from
democratic decision making.17,18 But as she points out, expertise is clearly widely distributed in society, with citizens expert in everything
from restaurant reviews to medical advising. The challenge in post-truth societies is to harness the potential of new technology to support more
participatory styles of involvement in public affairs. These include taking advantage of the opportunities offered by new technological services such as
crowdsourcing, ‘open source’ systems and Bazaar forms of citizen governance.19 Such approaches help to challenge the notion, promulgated in
populist discourse, that expertise and wisdom are limited to professional bureaucrats and elite institutions.
What’s Wrong With Being Popular?
The recent upsurge in support of populism is challenging the historical divide between the political left and right and a new cleavage is
opening up between those clinging to conventional approaches to politics and those who are challenging
establishment institutions with the lure of populist appeals. There are clear parallels with the events in Europe in the
1930s, with populist claims of putting the people first, while promoting division and turning people against
one another. But there are also some key differences. Although populist leaders still use mass rallies and bombastic speeches, this new wave of
discriminatory populism is underpinned by a post-truth politics which is using social media (the Trump Tweet) as a mouthpiece to peddle ‘fake news’
and circulate ‘alternative facts’ with the specific intention of shaping voter opinion and exciting emotions through inciting fear and hatred of the
‘other.’ There are no simple solutions to these concerns. But specifically, in relation to healthcare, strategies need to
include challenging all forms of discrimination that limit access to services for marginalized social groups, as
well as harnessing the power of new media technology to foster better citizen participation and involvement in important
decisions that affect their health and healthcare. There can be little doubt that the ascendancy of a
discriminatory populist politics will serve to widen existing inequalities in society, identifying categories of the
deserving and undeserving ill. In such times, it is a pressing necessity that health policies in liberal democracies
continue to offer a breadth of coverage that ensures parity of access, based on the rigorous application of
research evidence, underpinned by robust processes of democratic engagement .
 2NC – AT: Becoming = Pos Health

Calling for single payer allows addressing the social determinants of health in a positive way 
Mohan J. DUTTA 15, Professor and Head of the Department of Communications and New Media at the
National University of Singapore, Adjunct Professor of Communication at the Brian Lamb School of
Communication at Purdue University [Neoliberal Health Organizing, 2015, p. 231-234]
Latin American social medicine depicts a distinct and long strand of theorizing of health systems that challenges
the liberal capitalist organizing of health, grounded in the organizing principles of social medicine and noting [END PAGE
231] that changing the overarching structures is central to transforming the conditions of poor health (Waitzkin, 1991,
2011; Waitzkin & Modell, 1974). That health is constituted within broader social conditions is the basis for research,
teaching, clinical practice, and activism in socialist medicine, with early roots in Latin America. Social medicine thus
connects health, healing, and health care delivery to the politics of social change and structural
transformation, clearly voicing an activist agenda directed at transforming the unequal social conditions.
One of the earliest influences of social medicine was evident in the work of the medical student activist Salvador Allende, who would
later become the president of Chile. In his book The Chilean Medico-Social Reality, Allende (1939) outlined the social conditions
in Chile that resulted in poor health outcomes, emphasizing the broader conditions of foreign debt
dependence, underdevelopment, international dependence, and resource consolidation in the hands of the local
elite. Proposing social rather than medical solutions to health, Allende emphasized “income redistribution,
state regulation of food and clothing supplies, a national housing program, and industrial reforms to address
occupational health problems” (Waitzkin, 2011, p. 160). In his political life, Allende sought reforms in the Chilean national health service,
complemented by reforms in the housing and nutrition areas, efforts at national income redistribution, and minimizing the role of multinational
corporations.
The individualized model of public health that sees health and illness as a dichotomy is interrogated by the
framework of social medicine that suggests that health and illness exist in a dialectical relationship that is
dynamic and is continually shifting on the basis of social conditions, structures, cultural practices, economic
production, reproduction, marginalizing practices, and processes of political participation. Thus, interventions in social
medicine point toward the necessity for transforming the underlying relationships of production and
resource distribution, resisting the public health narrative of interventions as mechanisms for improving
economic productivity. Taking a social-class-driven approach to health inequities, Latin American social medicine
sees the problems with health being situated within means of economic production, patterns of ownership of
means of production, and control over productive processes. Therefore, health is approached from the framework of
transforming the processes of economic production and labor processes.
The dominant framework of health as integral to growth and economic productivity is questioned by the
framework of social medicine that situates the relationship between health and illness amid the very processes
of economic organization, distribution of economic resources, and the pervasive effects of social class on
health services and health outcomes. [END PAGE 232] The innovations in organizing of health structures in Chile,
Cuba, Mexico, Bolivia, and Venezuela offer invaluable insights about the possibilities of alternative organizing
that seek to redo the entire structure of social organizing that constitute health. The strong health indicators
in Cuba demonstrate the effectiveness of a health system that is committed to addressing the structural
determinants of health, creating equitable contexts for the realization and delivery of health (Campion & Morrissey,
2013). Social medicine research has looked at the relations among work, reproduction, the environment, and
health, describing in-depth the material conditions that constitute health. For instance, researchers studying health
in Mexico within the context of unions and local communities have documented health problems that relate
to work processes and the environment. Similarly, researchers in Chile have documented the relations between
gender, work, and environmental conditions. A key strand of social medicine examines the relationship
between violence and health, connecting violence to poverty, the structures of organizing, and the inequities
in ownership of processes of economic production. Investigations of violence attached to the U.S.-supported
dictatorship in Chile, the violence connected to narcotics traffic and paramilitary operations, and the violence
within the broader structures of the state-imperial networks draw linkages to the broader political economic
configurations of neoliberalism .
Emerging from the broader framework of social medicine, the Barrio Adentro movement in Venezuela, started by former president
Hugo Chavez, offers insights into structures and processes of alternative organizing of health, connecting local
community structures, community ownership, and community solutions with state infrastructures and state-driven public health
resources and solutions (Briggs & Mantini-Briggs, 2009; Muntaner et al., 2006; Waitzkin, 2011). The state-driven referendum by the Chavez
government to create public health infrastructures and structures of delivery of integrated family medicine, build preventive infrastructures, and
develop community health resources in extremely marginalized communities is supported by massive mass-based participation in popular politics and
widespread community participation in developing local community infrastructures, community-based resources of problem solving, and community
decision-making capacities. The community health centers built within the barrios serve approximately 250 families and are staffed with one integrated
family care doctor, one community health worker, and one health promoter. The community health centers are stocked with medical supplies. The
health team not only provides health care but also conducts health surveys in the communities and makes home visits for patients that are too ill to
travel to the health centers. The Barrio Adentro is integrated with other missiones addressing education, food
insecurity, housing, and [END PAGE 233] unemployment, addressing health within a broader structural context
(Muntaner et al., 2006). Local community participatory processes are connected with state-driven processes of
building community health infrastructures at the local level.
The narrative of Barrio Adentro offers an alternative to the neoliberal narrative of the community in mainstream
health communication and yet is marked by its absence from disciplinary discourses. Similarly, social medicine and its tradition of
addressing the structural contexts of health is marked by its absence from the dominant discourses of health
communication. A review of the two major collections of health communication scholarship, The Routledge Handbook of Health Communication
and The Handbook of Global Health Communication, depicts the marked absence of the Latin American innovations of social medicine from the
discursive space. Opportunities for resistance to neoliberal organizing of health structures and the invitation to
imagine alternative possibilities is grounded in materially grounded concrete politics of popular participation
in supporting state policies for building public health and health care infrastructures, complemented by local
processes of participation in the creation of health solutions.
***CAPITALISM K***
 1NC – K
The aff is functional anarchism --- cedes the political to unaccountable elites and makes solidarity
impossible.
David CHANDLER 7, Professor of International Relations at the University of Westminster
[“Deconstructing Sovereignty: Constructing Global Civil Society,” in Politics Without Sovereignty: A Critique of
Contemporary International Relations, ed. by C. J. Bickerton, P. Cunliffe and A. Gourevitch, 2007, p. 164-5]
Global civil society theorists focus their ire on what they understand to be the narrow, exclusionary bias of the
sovereign state. In turn, they view a wide constellation of transnational actors, from the global mega-NGOs to local farming
cooperatives, as representing a radical alternative that opens up the space for new kinds of political organization and
activity. In fact, what the celebration of ‘bottom-up’ politics and the critique of the state really express is a
deep disenchantment with mass society and the demands of formal accountability that go along with representative
democracy.72 A consequence of rejecting the political sphere is that it leaves political struggles isolated from
any shared framework of meaning or from any formal processes of democratic accountability. The quest for
individual autonomy and the claim for the recognition of separate ‘political spaces’ and the ‘incommunicability’ of political
causes, each demonstrate the limits of these radical claims for the normative project of global civil society [END
PAGE 164] ‘from below’. Far from reflecting the emergence of new global political forces, the global civil society,
by virtue of its social isolation, is marked by political weakness . As such, the only strategy left to it is a retreat
into elite lobbying and individualized ethical postures .
It is important to stress that I am not claiming that the key problem with radical global civil society approaches is their
rejection of formal engagement per se in existing political institutions and established parties. The point I am
making here is that the rejection of state-based politics, which forces the individual to engage with and account
for the views of other members of society, reflects a deeper problem – an unwillingness to engage in political
contestation per se. Proponents of global civil society ‘from below’ therefore seek to legitimize their views as the
prior moral claims of others. This has the effect of transforming global civic actors into the advocates of those
unable to make moral claims themselves. Alternatively, they put themselves in harm’s way and would lead by inarticulate example.
What they avoid doing is pursuing their own interests or seeking to build political solidarity around shared interests.
What can actually be achieved through their chosen methods is limited . Radical lobbying and calls for recognition may in
some cases precipitate a generational turnover in the establishment. However, the rejection of social engagement is more likely
to lead to a further shrinking of the political sphere, reducing it to a small circle of increasingly
unaccountable elites. If the only alternative to the political ‘game’ is to threaten to ‘take our ball home’ – the
anti-politics of rejectionism – the powers that be can sleep peacefully in their beds.

Can’t use becoming to get out of capitalism --- solidarity is key.

Joseph M. SCHWARTZ 15, professor of Political Theory at Temple University [“Being Postmodern While
Late Modernity Burned: On the Apolitical Nature of Contemporary Self-Defined ‘Radical’ Political Theory”
in Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics, ed. by Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker and Michael J.
Thompson, 2015, p. 175-178]
But if a pure politics of "difference" cannot provide a complete moral foundation for a politics of pluralism, equality, and solidarity, can post-
structuralist theory aid intellectuals and political activists in developing such a compelling radical democratic public philosophy? Wendy Brown's States
of Injury, Judith Butler's work, particularly her more explicit political commentary in Feminist Contentions, and William E. Connolly’s The Ethos of
Pluralization, represent three now almost canonical works that attempt to theorize a politics of radical democratic solidarity that draws heavily upon
post-structuralist precepts. Each of these theorists embraces the "post-structuralist" critique of both liberal individualism and group-based identity
politics.32 Yet a profound tension remains between these theorists’ commitment to radical democracy and their post-
structuralist [END PAGE 175] theoretical orientation. For if efforts to construct communities of shared values and
interests are rejected as efforts to "norm" the self, then the possibility for human beings to transform political
reality remains dim indeed. If all forms of cohesive communities and coherent individual identities are suspect,
then the only form of "resistance" possible is that of isolated, “fragmented selves.”
The post-structuralist “deconstruction” of the concepts of human subjectivity and agency pose new intellectual
barriers to coherent theorizing about the activity of real human beings. As Susan Hekman points out, many feminist and
'radical' theorists embrace the post-structuralist orthodoxy that the concepts of "the subject" and "agency" are
"fictive universals" that negate the role that the "repressed other" plays within "fragmented selves."
According to this by-now standard post-structuralist narrative, coherent subjects do not exist and agency is a fictive
"norm" imposed upon individuals by "disciplinary institutions." Rather, human actors are "subject-positions"
that struggle, in a Sisyphean manner, to "fix" identities and institutions that are inherently unstable.33 Drawing
upon Foucault, these theorists imply that any recognition by the state of groups or even state-regulation of
economic or political behavior, "norms" individuals through the "discursive" constitution of "bio-power." That is, the state,
through bureaucratic and statistical classifications tries to "norm" citizens into coherent identities. As if to affirm Michael Walzer's view that
Foucauldian analysis yields a political sensibility of resigned resistance (resistance inevitably involves only a "rearranging of the bars on the cage" of
modern institutions),34 post-structuralist's most influential theorist, Judith Butler, counsels a strategy of "resistance" grounded
upon the “ironic” transmutation of the “performative” roles that power-knowledge discourses “norm” upon
us.
But an adequate theoretical understanding of how people practice policies must grapple with the social reality
that individuals in the modern world believe that they are capable of exercising individual choice. Post-structuralist
analysis offers no coherent theory of intersubjectivity and social action and appears to imply that a human
being who thinks they have agency and choice is deluded. In reality, the post-structuralist theory of the
"performative self" is a peculiar form of radical methodological individualism, as the "labile" self can
voluntaristically engage in "performative resistance" (although, in contrast to the "rational chooser" of public choice theory, here
the individual is incoherent and fragmented). In contrast to the post-structuralist ideology of "decenteredness," an [END
PAGE 176] adequate social theory would have to comprehend how individuals operate intersubjectively while
illuminating the institutional, cultural, and material constraints placed upon individual and group agency.
Many commentators note that neither Brown nor Butler analyze how social and group dynamics influence and help
shape the self .35 Butler’s holds that "resistance" only can come through an "ironic" and subversive choice to
"perform" outside the iterative norms that enables and constitutes the subject.36 Such a conception not only raises the now
longstanding question of whether she can define who is "the doer behind the deed " of resistance. It also raises
an ironic parallel between the methodological ("anti") individualist nature of Butler's world of discursively
constructed subjects and Rawls's "rational chooser." Social constructivists (from communitarians to deliberative democrats)
frequently criticize Rawls for deducing rules of justice from the representative thinking of one (deracinated and desexed) ideal chooser operating in the
original position and behind the veil of ignorance. In a similar manner, Butler's "performative" resister appears to be a
"representative" (incoherent) "subject" whose repertoire of "ironic," "performative," resistance seems to draw
upon disembodied discourse. (Seemingly one "incoherent self" can represent all "incoherent selves.")
Interaction among these "fragmented selves"

///MARKED///

never appears to affect the "performative" constitution of any given self. And language or "discourse" seems
to have a free-floating existence apart from the social, political, and cultural practices that influence the
behavior of social individuals.
In the actual world, one in which theorists live their daily lives, "discursive performance" is not the sole manner by which
individuals deal with (and express) the material and cultural realities that both empower and constrain their
choices and actions. For example, individuals cannot readily "discursively perform" themselves out of their
socioeconomic or class position. There is a certain materiality to poverty or to unemployment or to being "bossed" that
can't simply be "ironically" and "performatively" transformed. Class relations are structural, as well as
discursive. The greater difficulty in forming unions in the United States—as compared to other advanced industrial
democracies—has much to do with American legal, ideological, and political constraints and not simply with the
relative inefficacy of the "performative" "counter-hegemonic" behavior of (fragmented) individuals. Even the
"parodic" possibilities of "gender" reversal are constrained by the communities in which one resides. Is the
"reversal" of "drag" a viable public possibility in a violently [END PAGE 177] homophobic community? Were not the
"performative" options of a Matthew Shepard more brutally constrained than those of a gay or lesbian student at a "progressive" residential liberal arts
college (while recognizing that unsafe—and even degrading and violent—social spaces confront LGBTQ individuals, women, and students of color in
even the most allegedly "cosmopolitan" of social spaces). Simply put, distinct "social spaces" set differential constraints on
"performative" choices .
Our alternative is to build solidarity around anti-capitalist demands to build a better future. A
utopian vision is necessary to propel movements to challenge Trump and avoid catastrophic climate
change.
Klein 17—Award-winning journalist for NYT, the Intercept, Le Monde, The Guardian, and The Nation;
documentary filmmaker; and, author of several bestselling books [Naomi, No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s
Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need, Haymarket Books, pp. 251-6]
Utopia-Back by Popular Demand
The Leap is part of a shift in the political zeitgeist, as many are realizing that the
future depends on our ability to come together
[END PAGE 252] across
painful divides, and to take leadership from those who traditionally have been most
excluded. We have reached the limits of siloed politics, where everyone fights in their own corner without
mapping the connections between various struggles, and without a clear idea of the concepts and values that
must form the moral foundation of the future we need.
That recognition doesn't mean that resisting the very specific attacks-on families, on people's bodies, on communities, on individual rights-is suddenly
optional. There is no choice but to resist, just as there is no choice but to run insurgent progressive candidates at every level of
government, from federal down to the local school board. In the months and years to come, the various resistance tactics described in this book are
going to be needed more than ever: the street protests, the strikes, the court challenges, the sanctuaries, the solidarity across divisions of race, gender,
and sexual identity-all are going to be essential. And we
will need to continue pushing institutions to divest from the industries
that profit off various forms of dispossession, from
fossil fuels to prisons to war and occupation. And yet even if every one
of these resistance fights is victorious-and we know that's not going to be possible-we would still be standing
in the same place we were before the Far Right started surging, with no better chance of addressing the root
causes of the systemic crises of which Trump is but one virulent symptom.
A great many of today's movement leaders and key organizers understand this well, and are planning and
acting accordingly. Alicia Garza, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, said on the eve of Trump's inauguration that after five years of
swelling social movements,
whether it be Occupy Wall Street, whether it be the DREAMers movement or B lack L ives M atter ... there's a
particular hope that I have that all of those movements will join together to become [END PAGE 253]
the powerful force that we can be, that will actually govern this country . So that's what I'm focused on, and I
hope that everybody else is thinking about that too.
Many people are, and as they do, we're seeing a rekindling of the kind of utopian dreaming that has been sorely missing
from social movements in recent decades. More and more frequently, immediate, pressing demands-a $15-an-hour
living wage, an end to police killings and deportations, a tax on carbon-are being paired with calls for a future
that is not just better than a violent, untenable present, but ... wonderful.
In the U nited S tates, the boldest and most inspiring example of this new utopianism is the Vision for Black
Lives, a sweeping policy platform released in the summer of 2016 by the Movement for Black Lives. Born of a coalition of
over fifty Black-led organizations, the platform states, "We reject false solutions and believe we can achieve a complete transformation of
the current systems, which place profit over people and make it impossible for many of us to breathe." It goes on to place police
shootings and mass incarceration in the context of an economic system that has waged war on Black and
brown communities, putting them first in line for lost jobs, hacked-back social services, and environmental
pollution. The result has been huge numbers of people exiled from the formal economy, preyed upon by
increasingly militarized police, and warehoused in overcrowded prisons. And the platform makes a series of
concrete proposals, including defunding prisons, removing police from schools, and demilitarizing police. It
also lays out a program for reparations for slavery and systemic discrimination, one that includes free college
education and forgiveness of student loans. There is much more-nearly forty policy demands in all, spanning changes
to the tax code to breaking up the banks. The Atlantic magazine remarked that the platform -which was dropped smack in the middle
of the [END PAGE 254] US presidential campaign- "rivals even political-party platforms in thoroughness."
In the months after Trump's inauguration, the Movement for Black Lives played a central role in deepening connections with other movements,
convening dozens of groups under the banner "The Majority." The new formation kicked off with a thrilling month-long slate of actions
between April 4 (the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination) and May Day. Nationwide
"Fight Racism, Raise Pay"
protests linked racial justice to the fast-growing workers' campaign for a $15 minimum wage and the
mounting attacks on immigrants. "In the context of Trump's presidency," the new coalition argues, "it is imperative
that we put forth a true, collective vision of economic justice and worker justice, for all people."
And in June 2017, thousands of activists from diverse constituencies are descending on Chicago for the second annual
People's Summit, organized by National Nurses United, to continue hashing out a broad-based "People's Agenda." Several similar state-
level convergences are also under way, in Michigan as well as North Carolina, where "Moral Mondays" have been bringing movements
together for several years. As one of its founders, Reverend William Barber, has said, "You have to build a movement, not a moment ... I believe all
these movements--Moral Mondays, Fight for $15, B lack L ives M atter are signs of hope that people are going to
stand up and not stand down."
As it has in Canada, the climate crisis is pushing us to put plans for political transformation on a tight and
unyielding deadline. A powerful and broad coalition called New York Renews is pushing hard for the state to
transition entirely to renewable energy by 2050. If more US states adopt these kinds of ambitious targets, and other
countries do the same (Sweden, for instance, has a target of carbon neutrality by 2045), then [END PAGE 255] Trump and Tillerson's most
nefarious efforts may be insufficient to tip the planet into climate chaos.
It's becoming possible to see a genuine path forward-new political formations that, from their inception, will marry
the fight for economic fairness with a deep analysis of how racism and misogyny are used as potent tools to
enforce a system that further enriches the already obscenely wealthy on the backs of both people and the
planet. Formations that could become home to the millions of people who are engaging in activism and
organizing for the first time, knitting together a multiracial and intergenerational coalition bound by a
common transformational project .
The plans that are taking shape for defeating Trumpism wherever we live go well beyond finding a progressive savior to run for office and then
offering that person our blind support. Instead, communities and movements are uniting to lay out the core policies that
politicians who want their support must endorse.
The people's platforms are starting to lead-and the politicians will have to follow.
 1NR – O/V

Breaking down capitalism is a pre-requisite to make their self-expressionism possible.

Callinicos 90—Professor of European Studies at King's College London [Alex, Against Postmodernism: A
Marxist Critique, St. Martin Press, pp. 89-91]
As Foucault readily acknowledged in the interview from which this last quotation is taken, the idea of making one's life a work of art
comes straight from Nietzsche: 'To "give style" to one's character - a great and rare art! It is practised by those who survey all
the strength and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them
appears as part and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye.'101 Indeed, Nietzsche anticipated Foucault's analysis of the
Athenian ruling class, describing them as a 'leisure class' characterized by 'the will to give form to oneself' (see section 3.1 above). But how does
one 'give form to oneself' if, as Nietzsche and Foucault both seem to believe, there is no antecedently existing
self? This problem is explored in most depth by Nehemas in his discussion of Nietzsche's injunction 'to become what one is': 'if there is no such
thing as the self, there seems to be nothing that one can in any way become.' Nehemas argues that we must see 'becoming what one is' as a process, 'a
matter of incorporating more and more characteristics under a constantly expanding and evolving rubric.' This process of incorporation involves
above all assuming responsibility for one's properties and actions. 'The creation of the self therefore appears to be the creation,
or imposition, of a higher-order accord among our lower-level thoughts, desires, and actions. It is the development
of the ability, or the willingness, to accept responsibility for everything that we have done and to admit what is in any case true: that everything we have
done actually constitutes who each one of us is.'102 As we have seen (section 3.1 above), Nehemas's prime example of such self-creation is Nietzsche
himself, who declared in Ecce Homo: 'I do not want in the least that anything should be different than it is; I myself do not want to become
different.'103
The importance of the process which Nehemas describes seems to me unquestionable, but I doubt whether it can properly be called
'self-creation'. For one thing, some principle of individuation is required in order to allocate the right characteristics to the right persons.
Nietzsche, for example, would not have liked to 'accept [END PAGE 89] responsibility' for Wagner's life. Nehemas effectively concedes the point:
'Because it is organized coherently, the body provides the common ground that allows conflicting thoughts,
desires, and actions to be grouped together as features of a single subject.'104 This criterion of physical identity
(and continuity?) offers a means of distinguishing correct and incorrect ascriptions of properties and actions to
different individuals.105 By thus acknowledging the irreducible distinctness of persons, however, we have gone
a long way towards setting limits to the process of self-creation. My particular characteristics circumscribe my
likely achievements. If I am tone-deaf or blind then I cannot appreciate, let alone produce music or painting
respectively. My past actions – an act of personal or political betrayal, for example - may give a shape to the
rest of my life which is, quite simply, inescapable. My bad temper may bedevil my personal life, helping to
undermine my most important relationships with others. Of course, as the last example indicates, unalterable characteristics shade off into
those which can be modified. Nevertheless, the process of making sense of one's life, described by Nehemas as 'self-creation' is
constrained by the facts of one's character and history, Nietzsche, when talking in the passage cited above about giving style to
one's character, seems to have in mind a sort of balancing process in which strengths and weaknesses are integrated into an overall conception of
oneself - but these strengths and weaknesses are surely at least in part given independently of this conception.
There are other constraints, shared by all or many individuals. For one thing, the abilities particular to human
beings as a species - which the anti-humanism of '68 thought' allowed it to ignore - set limits to the scope of 'self-creation'.
Even with all the aid of technology, I cannot expect to include the kind of experiences had by a dolphin
among my own. For another, there is the matter of the brute inequalities in resources which find expression
above all in class divisions. Nietzsche argues that '[i]t will be the strong and domineering natures that enjoy their finest gaiety' in the self-
discipline involved in accepting 'the constraint of a single taste', while 'it is the weak characters without power over themselves that hate the constraint
of style.'106 As Nehemas points out, 'Nietzsche does not consider that every agent has a self.'107 Foucault, more democratic, asks
why 'everyone's life couldn't become a work of art?' The answer, of course, is that most
people's lives are still (contrary to the theories of
'post-capitalism' discussed in chapter 5) shaped
by their lack of access to productive resources and their consequent need
to sell their labour-power in order to live. To invite a hospital porter in Birmingham, a car-worker in Sao
Paolo, a social security clerk in Chicago, or [END PAGE 90] a street child in Bombay to make a work of art of
their lives would be an insult - unless linked to precisely the kind of strategy for global social change which,
as we saw in the previous section, poststructuralism rejects .
 1NR – Link

Can’t use becoming to get out of capitalism --- solidarity is key.

Joseph M. SCHWARTZ 15, professor of Political Theory at Temple University [“Being Postmodern While
Late Modernity Burned: On the Apolitical Nature of Contemporary Self-Defined ‘Radical’ Political Theory”
in Radical Intellectuals and the Subversion of Progressive Politics, ed. by Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker and Michael J.
Thompson, 2015, p. 175-178]

///MARKED///

never appears to affect the "performative" constitution of any given self. And language or "discourse" seems
to have a free-floating existence apart from the social, political, and cultural practices that influence the
behavior of social individuals.
In the actual world, one in which theorists live their daily lives, "discursive performance" is not the sole manner by which
individuals deal with (and express) the material and cultural realities that both empower and constrain their
choices and actions. For example, individuals cannot readily "discursively perform" themselves out of their
socioeconomic or class position. There is a certain materiality to poverty or to unemployment or to being "bossed" that
can't simply be "ironically" and "performatively" transformed. Class relations are structural, as well as
discursive. The greater difficulty in forming unions in the United States—as compared to other advanced industrial
democracies—has much to do with American legal, ideological, and political constraints and not simply with the
relative inefficacy of the "performative" "counter-hegemonic" behavior of (fragmented) individuals. Even the
"parodic" possibilities of "gender" reversal are constrained by the communities in which one resides. Is the
"reversal" of "drag" a viable public possibility in a violently [END PAGE 177] homophobic community? Were not the
"performative" options of a Matthew Shepard more brutally constrained than those of a gay or lesbian student at a "progressive" residential liberal arts
college (while recognizing that unsafe—and even degrading and violent—social spaces confront LGBTQ individuals, women, and students of color in
even the most allegedly "cosmopolitan" of social spaces). Simply put, distinct "social spaces" set differential constraints on
"performative" choices .

The aff’s politics are little more than lifestyle anarchism – their refusal of political engagement
becomes a model for rich liberals to avoid complicity in capitalist violence.
Bookchin 95—American anarchist and libertarian socialist author, orator, historian, and political theorist
[Murray, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm,
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bookchin/soclife.html]

Like the petty-bourgeois Stirnerite ego, primitivist lifestyle

anarchism allows no room for social institutions, political
organizations, and radical programs, still less a public sphere, which all the writers we have examined automatically identify with
statecraft. The sporadic, the unsystematic, the incoherent, the discontinuous, and the intuitive supplant the
consistent, purposive, organized, and rational, indeed any form of sustained and focused activity apart from
publishing a 'zine' or pamphlet – or burning a garbage can. Imagination is counterposed to reason and desire to
theoretical coherence, as though the two were in radical contradiction to each other. Goya's admonition that imagination without
reason produces monsters is altered to leave the impression that imagination flourishes on an unmediated experience with an unnuanced
'oneness.' Thus is social nature essentially dissolved into biological nature; innovative humanity, into adaptive
animality; temporality, into precivilizatory eternality; history, into an archaic cyclicity.
A bourgeois reality whose economic harshness grows starker and crasser with every passing day is shrewdly mutated
by lifestyle anarchism into constellations of self-indulgence, inchoateness, indiscipline, and incoherence. In the
1960s, the Situationists, in the name of a 'theory of the spectacle,' in fact produced a reified spectacle of the theory, but they at least offered
organizational correctives, such as workers' councils, that gave their aestheticism some ballast. Lifestyle anarchism, by assailing
organization, programmatic commitment, and serious social analysis, apes the worst aspects of Situationist
aestheticism without adhering to the project of building a movement. As the detritus of the 1960s, it wanders
aimlessly within the bounds of the ego (renamed by Zerzan the 'bounds of nature') and makes a virtue of bohemian
incoherence.
What is most troubling is that the self-indulgent aesthetic vagaries of lifestyle anarchism significantly erode the
socialist core of a left-libertarian ideology that once could claim social relevance and weight precisely for its
uncompromising commitment to emancipation -- not outside of history, in the realm of the subjective, but within history,
in the realm of the objective. The great cry of the First International -- which anarcho-syndicalism and anarchocommunism retained after
Marx and his supporters abandoned it -- was the demand: 'No rights without duties, no duties without rights.' For generations, this slogan adorned the
mastheads of what we must now retrospectively call social anarchist periodicals. Today, it stands radically at odds with the basically egocentric demand
for 'desire armed,' and with Taoist contemplation and Buddhist nirvanas. Where social anarchism called upon people to rise in
revolution and seek the reconstruction of society, the irate petty bourgeois who populate the subcultural
world of lifestyle anarchism call for episodic rebellion and the satisfaction of their 'desiring machines,' to use the
phraseology of Deleuze and Guattari.
The steady retreat from the historic commitment of classical anarchism to social struggle (without which self-realization
and the fulfillment of desire in all its dimensions, not merely the instinctive, cannot be achieved) is inevitably accompanied
by a disastrous
mystification of experience and reality. The ego, identified almost fetishistically as the locus of emancipation,
turns out to be identical to the 'sovereign individual' of laissez-faire individualism . Detached from its social
moorings, it achieves not autonomy but the heteronomous 'selfhood' of petty-bourgeois enterprise .
Indeed, far from being free, the ego in its sovereign selfhood is bound hand and foot to the seemingly anonymous
laws of the marketplace – the laws of competition and exploitation – which render the myth of individual freedom
into another fetish concealing the implacable laws of capital accumulation.
Lifestyle anarchism, in effect, turns out to be an additional mystifying bourgeois deception.

///MARKED///
Its acolytes are no more 'autonomous' than the movements of the stock market, than price fluctuations and the
mundane facts of bourgeois commerce. All claims to autonomy notwithstanding, this middle-class 'rebel,' with or without a
brick in hand, is entirely captive to the subterranean market forces that occupy all the allegedly 'free' terrains of
modern social life, from food cooperatives to rural communes.
Capitalism swirls around us – not only materially but culturally. As John Zerzan so memorably put it to a puzzled interviewer
who asked about the television set in the home of this foe of technology: 'Like all other people, I have to be narcotized.'[37]
That lifestyle anarchism itself is a 'narcotizing' self-deception can best be seen in Max Stirner's The Ego and His Own, where the
ego's claim to 'uniqueness' in the temple of the sacrosanct 'self' far outranks John Stuart Mill's liberal pieties.
Indeed, with Stirner, egoism becomes a matter of epistemology. Cutting through the maze of contradictions and woefully incomplete statements that
fill The Ego and His Own, one finds Stirner's 'unique' ego to be a myth because its roots lie in its seeming 'other' – society itself. Indeed: 'Truth cannot
step forward as you do,' Stirner addresses the egoist, 'cannot move, change, develop; truth awaits and recruits everything from you, and itself is only
through you; for it exists only – in your head.'[38] The Stirnerite egoist, in effect, bids farewell to objective reality, to the facticity of the
social, and thereby to fundamental social change and all ethical criteria and ideals beyond personal satisfaction
amidst the hidden demons of the bourgeois marketplace. This absence of mediation subverts the very
existence of the concrete, not to speak of the authority of the Stirnerite ego itself – a claim so all-encompassing as to exclude
the social roots of the self and its formation in history.
Nietzsche, quite independently of Stirner, carried this view of truth to its logical conclusion by erasing the facticity and reality of
truth as such: 'What, then, is truth?' he asked. 'A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human
relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically.' [39] With more forthrightness than Stirner, Nietzsche
contended that facts are simply interpretations; indeed, he asked, 'is it necessary to posit an interpreter behind the interpretations?' Apparently not, for
'even this is invention, hypothesis.' [40] Following Nietzsche's unrelenting logic, we are left with a self that not only
essentially creates it own reality but also must justify its own existence as more than a mere interpretation.
Such egoism thus annihilates the ego itself , which vanishes into the mist of Stirner's own unstated premises.
Similarly divested of history, society, and facticity beyond its own 'metaphors,' lifestyle anarchism lives in an
asocial domain in which the ego, with its cryptic desires, must evaporate into logical abstractions. But reducing the ego to
intuitive immediacy – anchoring it in mere animality, in the 'bounds of nature,' or in 'natural law' – would amount to ignoring the fact that the ego
is the product of an ever-formative history, indeed, a history that, if it is to consist of more than mere episodes,
must avail itself of reason as a guide to standards of progress and regress, necessity and freedom, good and
evil, and – yes! – civilization and barbarism. Indeed, an anarchism that seeks to avoid the shoals of sheer solipsism on
the one hand and the loss of the 'self' as a mere 'interpretation' one the other must become explicitly socialist or
collectivist . That is to say, it must be a social anarchism that seeks freedom through structure and mutual
responsibility, not through a vaporous, nomadic ego that eschews the preconditions for social life .
Stated bluntly: Between the socialist pedigree of anarcho-syndicalism and anarchocommunism (which have never denied the importance of self-
realization and the fulfillment of desire), and the basically liberal, individualistic pedigree of lifestyle anarchism (which fosters social ineffectuality, if not
outright social negation), there exits a divide that cannot be bridged unless we completely disregard the profoundly
different goals, methods, and underlying philosophy that distinguish them. Stirner's own project, in fact, emerged in a
debate with the socialism of Wilhelm Weitling and Moses Hess, where he invoked egoism precisely to counterpose to socialism. 'Personal
insurrection rather than general revolution was [Stirner's] message,' James J. Martin admiringly observes [41] – a
counterposition that lives on today in lifestyle anarchism and its yuppie filiations, as distinguished from social
anarchism with its roots in historicism, the social matrix of individuality, and its commitment to a rational
society.
The very incongruity of these essentially mixed messages, which coexist on every page of the lifestyle 'zines,' reflects the feverish voice of the
squirming petty bourgeois. If anarchism loses its socialist core and collectivist goal, if it drifts off into aestheticism,
ecstasy, and desire, and, incongruously, into Taoist quietism and Buddhist self-effacement as a substitute for a
libertarian program, politics, and organization, it will come to represent not social regeneration and a
revolutionary vision but social decay and a petulant egoistic rebellion. Worse, it will feed the wave of mysticism
that is already sweeping affluent members of the generation now in their teens and twenties. Lifestyle anarchism's exaltation of ecstasy,
certainly laudable in a radical social matrix but here unabashedly intermingled with 'sorcery,' is producing a dreamlike absorption with
spirits, ghosts, and Jungian archetypes rather than a rational and dialectical awareness of the world.
Characteristically, the cover of a recent issue of Alternative Press Review (Fall 1994), a widely read American feral anarchist periodical, is adorned with
a three-headed Buddhist deity in serene nirvanic repose, against a presumably cosmic background of swirling galaxies and New Age paraphernalia – an
image that could easily join Fifth Estate's 'Anarchy' poster in a New Age boutique. Inside the cover, a graphic cries out: 'Life Can Be Magic When We
Start to Break Free' (the A in Magic is circled) – to which one is obliged to ask: How? With what? The magazine itself contains a deep ecology essay by
Glenn Parton (drawn from David Foreman's periodical Wild Earth) titled: 'The Wild Self: Why I Am a Primitivist,' extolling 'primitive peoples' whose
'way of life fits into the pre-given natural world,' lamenting the Neolithic revolution, and identifying our 'primary task' as being to ''unbuild' our
civilization, and restore wilderness.' The magazine's artwork celebrates vulgarity – human skulls and images of ruins are very much in evidence. Its
lengthiest contribution, 'Decadence,' reprinted from Black Eye, melds the romantic with the lumpen, exultantly concluding: 'It's time for a real Roman
holiday, so bring on the barbarians!'
Alas, the barbarians are already here – and the 'Roman holiday' in today's American cities flourishes on crack, thuggery, insensitivity, stupidity,
primitivism, anticivilizationism, antirationalism, and a sizable dose of 'anarchy' conceived as chaos. Lifestyle anarchism must be seen in the present
social context not only of demoralized black ghettoes and reactionary white suburbs but even of Indian reservations, those ostensible centers of
'primality,' in which gangs of Indian youths now shoot at one another, drug dealing is rampant, and 'gang graffiti greets visitors even at the sacred
Window Rock monument,' as Seth Mydans reports in The New York Times (March 3, 1995).
Thus, a widespread cultural decay has followed the degeneration of the 1960s New Left into postmodernism
and of its counter'culture into New Age spiritualism. For timid lifestyle anarchists, Halloween artwork and incendiary
articles push hope and an understanding of reality into the ever-receding distance. Torn by the lures of
'cultural terrorism' and Buddhist ashrams, lifestyle anarchists in fact find themselves in a crossfire between the
barbarians at the top of society in Wall Street and the City, and those at its bottom , in the dismal urban ghettoes of
Euro-America. Alas, the conflict in which they find themselves, for all their celebrations of lumpen lifeways (to which
corporate barbarians are no strangers these days) has less to do with the need to create a free society than
with a brutal war over who is to share in the in the available spoils from the sale of drugs, human bodies,
exorbitant loans -- and let us not forget junk bonds and international currencies.
 1NR – Alt

Subversive universals are possible and necessary --- this also a link because they operate on the level
of the particular an difference.
Srnicek & Williams 15—Nick Srnicek is a Lecturer at City University London and a PhD from the London
School of Economics; Alex Williams is a Lecturer at City University London [Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism
and a World Without Work, Verso Books, p. 162-169]

SUBVERSIVE UNIVERSALS
Any elaboration of an alternative image of progress must inevitably face up to the problem of universalism –
the idea that certain values, ideas and goals may hold across all cultures.31 Capitalism, as we have argued, is an expansionary
universal that weaves itself through multiple cultural fabrics, reworking them as it goes along. Anything less
than a competing universal will end up being smothered by an all-embracing series of capitalist relations.32
Various particularisms – localised, specific forms of politics and culture – cohabitate with ease in the world of
capitalism. The list of possibilities continues to grow as capitalism differentiates into Chinese capitalism, American capitalism, Brazilian capitalism,
Indian capitalism, Nigerian capitalism, and so on. If defending a particularism is insufficient, it is because history shows us
that the global space of universalism is a space of conflict, with each contender requiring the relative
provincialisation of its competitors.33 If the left is to compete with global capitalism, it needs to rethink
the project of universalism.
But to invoke such an idea is to call forth a number of fundamental critiques directed against universalism in recent decades. While a universal politics
must move beyond any local struggles, generalising itself at the global scale and across cultural variations, it is for these very reasons that it has been
criticised.34 As a matter of historical record, European modernity was inseparable from its ‘dark side’ – a vast network of
exploited colonial dominions, the genocide of indigenous peoples, the slave trade, and the plundering of
colonised nations’ resources.35 In this conquest, Europe presented itself as embodying the universal way of life. All
other peoples were simply residual particulars that would inevitably come to be subsumed under the European way – even if this required ruthless
physical violence and cognitive assault to guarantee the outcome. Linked to this was a belief that the universal was equivalent to
the homogeneous. Differences between cultures would therefore be erased in the process of particulars being subsumed under the universal,
creating a culture modelled in the image of European civilisation. This was a universalism indistinguishable from pure
chauvinism. Throughout this process, Europe dissimulated its own parochial position by deploying a series of
mechanisms to efface the subjects who made these claims – white, heterosexual, property-owning males.
Europe and its intellectuals abstracted away from their location and identity, presenting their claims as
grounded in a ‘view from nowhere’.36 This perspective was taken to be untarnished by racial, sexual, national
or any other particularities, providing the basis for both the alleged universality of Europe’s claims and the
illegitimacy of other perspectives. While Europeans could speak and embody the universal, other cultures could only be represented as
particular and parochial. Universalism has therefore been central to the worst aspects of modernity’s history.
Given this heritage, it might seem that the simplest response would be to rescind the universal from our
conceptual arsenal. But, for all the difficulties with the idea, it nevertheless remains necessary. The
problem is partly that one cannot simply reject the concept of the universal without generating other significant
problems. Most notably, giving up on the category leaves us with nothing but a series of diverse particulars.
There appears no way to build meaningful solidarity in the absence of some common factor. The
universal also operates as a transcendent ideal – never satisfied with any particular embodiment, and always
open to striving for better.37 It contains the conceptual impulse to undo its own limits. Rejecting this
category also risks Orientalising other cultures, transforming them into an exotic Other. If there are
only particularisms, and provincial Europe is associated with reason, science, progress and freedom,
then the unpleasant implication is that non-Western cultures must be devoid of these. The old
Orientalist divides are inadvertently sustained in the name of a misguided anti-universalism. On the other hand,
one risks licensing all sorts of oppressions as simply the inevitable consequence of plural cultural forms. All
the problems of cultural relativism reappear if there are no criteria to discern which global
knowledges, politics and practices support a politics of emancipation. Given all of this, it is unsurprising to
see aspects of universalism pop up throughout history and across cultures,38 to see even its critics
begrudgingly accept its necessity,39 and to see a variety of attempts to revise the category.40
To maintain this necessary conceptual tool, the universal must be identified not with an established set of
principles and values, but rather with an empty placeholder that is impossible to fill definitively. Universals
emerge when a particular comes to occupy this position through hegemonic struggle:41 the particular (‘Europe’) comes
to represent itself as the universal (‘global’). It is not simply a false universal, though, as there is a mutual contamination:
the universal becomes embodied in the particular, while the particular loses some of its specificities in
functioning as the universal. Yet there can never be a fully achieved universalism, and universals are
therefore always open to contestation from other universals. This is what we will later outline in politico-
strategic terms as counter-hegemony – a project aimed at subverting an existing universalism in
favour of a new order. This leads us to our second point – as counter-hegemonic, universals can have a subversive
and liberating strategic function. On the one hand, a universal makes an unconditional demand – everything
must be placed under its rule.42 Yet, on the other hand, universalism is never an achieved project (even
capitalism remains incomplete). This tension renders any established hegemonic structure open to
contestation and enables universals to function as insurrectionary vectors against exclusions. For
example, the concept of universal human rights, problematic as it may be, has been put to use by numerous
movements, ranging from local housing struggles to international justice for war crimes. Its universal and
unconditional demand has been mobilised in order to highlight those who are left out of its protections and
rights. Similarly, feminists have criticised certain concepts as exclusionary of women and mobilised universal
claims against their constraints, as in the use of the universal idea that ‘all humans are equal’. In such cases, the
particular (‘woman’) becomes a way to prosecute a critique against an existing universal (‘humanity’). Meanwhile,
the previously established universal (‘humanity’) becomes revealed as a particular (‘man’).43 These examples show
that universals can be revitalised by the struggles that both challenge and elucidate them. In this regard, ‘to
appeal to universalism as a way of asserting the superiority of Western culture is to betray universality, but to
appeal to universalism as a way of dismantling the superiority of the West is to realize it’.44 Universalism, on
this account, is the product of politics, not a transcendent judge standing above the fray.
We can turn now to one final aspect of universalism, which is its heterogeneous nature.45 As capitalism makes clear,
universalism does not entail homogeneity – it does not necessarily involve converting diverse things into the
same kind of thing. In fact, the power of capitalism is precisely its versatility in the face of changing conditions
on the ground and its capacity to accommodate difference. A similar prospect must also hold for any
leftist universal – it must be one that integrates difference rather than erasing it. What then does all of this
mean for the project of modernity? It means that any particular image of modernity must be open to co-creation, and
further transformation and alteration. And in a globalised world where different peoples necessarily co-exist, it means building
systems to live in common despite the plurality of ways of life. Contrary to Eurocentric accounts and classic images of
universalism, it must recognise the agency of those outside Europe, and the necessity of their voices in building
truly planetary and universal futures. The universal, then, is an empty placeholder that hegemonic particulars
(specific demands, ideals and collectives) come to occupy. It can operate as a subversive and emancipatory
vector of change with respect to established universalisms, and it is heterogeneous and includes differences,
rather than eliminating them .
**1NC OTHER***
 1NC – Case
The affirmative’s embrace total autonomy in education is a laissez-faire model that ultimately
produces agents that are totally self-centered with no connection to broader social issues ---
anarchist pedagogues should direct students to focus on areas of social concern without instilling a
specific ideology or viewpoint --- this model is best represented by our model of debate.
Justin Mueller, 2012. Graduate student in political science, with a focus on political theory at Purdue University. “Anarchism, the
State, and the Role of Education,” in Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Action, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education, pp.
21-3, http://rebels-library.org/files/anarchistpedagogies.pdf.
The original Summerhill school and its founder A.S. Neill are regularly included in accounts of broadly
“libertarian” educational experiments and ideas. As one of the longest-running schools (founded in 1921 in the town of
Leiston, England, and still running) this should come as no surprise (Neill, 1992, p. 8). The similarities between Summerhill
and the anarchist approach to education are quite remarkable. The original intention, according to Neill was that of
“[making] the school fit the child—instead of making the child fit the school” (ibid., 9). The fundamental ideals of the school
are those of freedom for the child and equality among all members of Summerhill, stu-22 dents and teachers alike. The
freedom is that of individual autonomy. Lessons are not compulsory, play is celebrated and self-
directed, and creative originality is encouraged. Equality is understood and practiced in a way that every anarchist can
understand. At school-wide assembly meetings, everyone gets one vote, students and teachers alike. Teachers are called by their first
names or nicknames as the social equals of students and have no real institutional authority over them (Neill, 1977, pp. 4–8).
Summerhill is very much, in the words of Neill, a “self-governing community” (Neill, 1992, p. 3).
Structurally, then, Summerhill is very similar to examples and ideals of anarchist educational experiments. Pedagogically and
philosophically, however, there are important distinctions. One distinction is that of Neill’s understanding of human nature, which
rests on the belief that a child is an innately “good, not an evil being” and that “without adult suggestion of any kind” a child can
reach her potential (ibid., 9). While anarchist educators certainly don’t view children as evil, and share the same abhorrence of
traditional notions of “discipline” and institutional authority, they have been less enthusiastic about an individualized and abstract
notion of “freedom” that does not take into account the situational and dual nature of humanity. While a child may certainly be
freer and avoiding harm when protected from the regimentation and violence of traditional state schooling,
such “protection from” is insufficient to provide for a positive ideal and an emancipatory social alternative.
As Judith Suissa (2010) notes from her contemporary visits to Summerhill, “One has the impression of a lively
group of self-confident, happy children, who may, as one imagines, very well grow up to be happy, but
completely self-centred individuals . . . there is little attempt to engage with broader social issues or
confront present socio-political reality” (p. 96).
A laissez-faire pedagogy is insufficient, then, for the anarchist approach to education. While an anarchist
education does not imply any sort of dogmatic instruction, anarchist educators do view the open
encouragement and practice of values, like solidarity, as a virtue. Further, and more distinctively, anarchist
educators actively seek to engage with social and political questions, and to open for critique
perceived repressive institutions and practices of wider society. True “neutrality” on the part of antiauthoritarian
teachers in the face of an unjust and repressive social order is seen by anarchist educators as either impossible or “hypocrisy” (Ferrer,
1909, p. 6).
Desiring neither neutrality nor a dogmatic imposition of teachers’ beliefs upon students, the role of an
anarchist educator becomes that of a suggestive iconoclast and interlocutor with dominant social narratives.
Going beyond a simple laissez-faire approach to learning, anarchist pedagogical practice, in seeking to
encourage particular anarchist values (but not seeking to impose dogma, since this would be contrary to the
values themselves) openly challenges the “sacred” institutions of the dominant social order by desanctifying
their traditional justifications (Stirner, 2005, p. 19). The act of rendering the hegemonic or the sacred questionable and open to
dissection, and extending to students an invitation to this sacrilege represents anarchism’s primary pedagogical distinction. That it is
an open invitation—rather than an ideological or dogmatic disciplining of students’ minds, or a passive
nonengagement with broader social contexts, roles, problems, and conflicts—allows anarchism to (at least
partially) resolve the problematic paradox of attempting to develop free and critical minds without extensive
coercion in instruction.
Liberalism ‘global war’ is a bunk theory --- the modern alliance system and history disproves their
totalizing claims.
Teschke 11—Department of International Relations, School of Global Studies, University of Sussex [Benno
Gerhard, “Fatal attraction: a critique of Carl Schmitt's international political and legal theory,” International
Theory 3(2): 179-227, Emory Libraries]
For at the centre of the heterodox – partly post-structuralist, partly realist – neo-Schmittian analysis stands the conclusion of The Nomos:
the thesis of a structural and continuous relation between liberalism and violence (Mouffe 2005, 2007; Odysseos 2007).
It suggests that, in sharp contrast to the liberal-cosmopolitan programme of ‘perpetual peace’, the
geographical expansion of liberal modernity was accompanied by the intensification and de-formalization of
war in the international construction of liberal-constitutional states of law and the production of liberal
subjectivities as rights-bearing individuals. Liberal world-ordering proceeds via the conduit of wars for humanity, leading to Schmitt's
‘spaceless universalism’. In this perspective, a straight line is drawn from WWI to the War on Terror to verify Schmitt's long-term prognostic of the
20th century as the age of ‘neutralizations and de-politicizations’ (Schmitt 1993).
But this attempt to read the history of 20th century international relations in terms of a succession of confrontations
between the carrier-nations of liberal modernity and the criminalized foes at its outer margins seems unable
to comprehend the complexities and specificities of ‘liberal’ world-ordering, then and now. For in the cases of
Wilhelmine, Weimar and fascist Germany, the assumption that their conflicts with the Anglo-American liberal-capitalist heartland were grounded in an
antagonism between liberal modernity and a recalcitrant Germany outside its geographical and conceptual lines runs counter to the historical evidence.
For this reading presupposes that late-Wilhelmine Germany was not already substantially penetrated by capitalism and fully incorporated into the
capitalist world economy, posing the question of whether the causes of WWI lay in the capitalist dynamics of inter-imperial rivalry (Blackbourn and
Eley 1984), or in processes of belated and incomplete liberal-capitalist development, due to the survival of ‘re-feudalized’ elites in the German state
classes and the marriage between ‘rye and iron’ (Wehler 1997). It also assumes that the late-Weimar and early Nazi turn towards the construction of an
autarchic German regionalism – Mitteleuropa or Großraum – was not deeply influenced by the international ramifications of the 1929 Great
Depression, but premised on a purely political–existentialist assertion of German national identity. Against a reading of the early 20th
century conflicts between ‘the liberal West’ and Germany as ‘wars for humanity’ between an expanding liberal
modernity and its political exterior, there is more evidence to suggest that these confrontations were
interstate conflicts within the crisis-ridden and nationally uneven capitalist project of modernity.
Similar objections and caveats to the binary opposition between the Western discourse of liberal humanity
against non-liberal foes apply to the more recent period. For how can this optic explain that the ‘liberal West’
coexisted (and keeps coexisting) with a large number of pliant authoritarian client-regimes (Mubarak's Egypt,
Suharto's Indonesia, Pahlavi's Iran, Fahd's Saudi-Arabia, even Gaddafi's pre-intervention Libya, to name but a few), which
were and are actively managed and supported by the West as anti-liberal Schmittian states of emergency, with
concerns for liberal subjectivities and Human Rights secondary to the strategic interests of political and
geopolitical stability and economic access? Even in the more obvious cases of Afghanistan, Iraq, and, now,
Libya, the idea that Western intervention has to be conceived as an encounter between the liberal project and
a series of foes outside its sphere seems to rely on a denial of their antecedent histories as geopolitically and
socially contested state-building projects in pro-Western fashion, deeply co-determined by long histories of
Western anti-liberal colonial and post-colonial legacies. If these states (or social forces within them) turn against their imperial
masters, the conventional policy expression is ‘blowback’. And as the Schmittian analytical vocabulary does not include a conception of human agency
and social forces – only friend/enemy groupings and collective political entities governed by executive decision – it also lacks the categories of
analysis to comprehend the social dynamics that drive the struggles around sovereign power and the eventual
overcoming, for example, of Tunisian and Egyptian states of emergency without US-led wars for humanity .
Similarly, it seems unlikely that the generic idea of liberal world-ordering and the production of liberal
subjectivities can actually explain why Western intervention seems improbable in some cases (e.g. Bahrain,
Qatar, Yemen or Syria) and more likely in others (e.g. Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya).
Liberal world-ordering consists of differential strategies of building, coordinating, and drawing liberal and anti-liberal states into the Western orbit, and
overtly or covertly intervening and refashioning them once they step out of line. These are conflicts within a world, which seem to
push the term liberalism beyond its original meaning. The generic Schmittian idea of a liberal ‘spaceless
universalism’ sits uncomfortably with the realities of maintaining an America-supervised ‘informal empire’,
which has to manage a persisting interstate system in diverse and case-specific ways. But it is this persistence
of a worldwide system of states, which encase national particularities, which renders challenges to American
supremacy possible in the first place.
Liberalism isn’t a monolith—it can be rehabilitated to combat group subordination. Attempts to
abandon it entirely will fail.
Charles MILLS 12, the John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy at Northwestern
University [“Occupy Liberalism! Or, Ten Reasons Why Liberalism Cannot Be Retrieved for Radicalism,”
Radical Philosophy Review 15(2): 305-323,
http://pages.uoregon.edu/koopman/siap/readings/Mills_Charles_RPR.pdf]
From this perspective, it will be appreciated that liberalism is not a monolith but an umbrella term for a variety of
positions. Here are some examples-some familiar, some perhaps less so:¶ Varieties of Liberalism¶ Left-wing (social democratic) vs. Right-wing
(market conservative) Kantian vs. Lockean¶ Contractarian vs. Utilitarian Corporate vs. Democratic Social vs. Individualist Comprehensive vs. Political¶
Ideal-theory vs. Non-ideal-theory Patriarchal vs. Feminist Imperial vs. Anti-imperial Racial vs. Anti-racial Color-blind vs. Color-conscious¶ Etc.¶ It is
not the case, of course, that these different species of liberalism have been equally represented in the ideational
sphere, or equally implemented in the institutional sphere. On the contrary, some have been dominant while others have been
subordinate, and some have never, at least in the full sense, been implemented at all. But nonetheless, I suggest they all count as liberalisms and as such
they are all supposed to have certain elements in common, even those characterized by gender and racial exclusions. (My motivation for making these
last varieties of liberalism rather than deviations from liberalism is precisely to challenge liberalism's self- congratulatory history, which holds an
idealized Platonized liberalism aloft, untainted by its actual record of complicity with oppressive social systems.) So the initial question we should
always ask people making generalizations about "liberalism" is: What particular variety of liberalism do you mean?¶ And are your generalizations really
true about all the possible kinds of liberalism, or only a subset?¶ Here is a characterization of liberalism from a very respectable source, the British
political theorist, John Gray:¶ Common to all variants of the liberal tradition is a definite conception, distinctively modern in character, of man and
society.... It is individualist, in that it asserts the moral primacy of the person against the claims of any social collectivity; egalitarian, inasmuch as it
confers on all men the same moral status and denies the relevance to legal or political order of differences in moral worth among human beings;
universalist, affirming the moral unity of the human species and according a secondary importance to specific historic associations and cultural forms;
and meliorist in its affirmation of the corrigibility and improvability of all social institutions and political arrangements. It is this conception of man and
society which gives liberalism a definite identity which transcends its vast internal variety and complexity.2¶ What generate the different
varieties of liberalism are different concepts of individualism, different claims about how egalitarianism
should be construed or realized, more or less inclusionary readings of universalism (Gray's characterization sanitizes
liberalism's actual sexist and racist history), different views of what count as desirable improvements, conflicting normative
balancings of liberal values (freedom, equality) and competing theoretical prognoses about how best they can be realized
in the light of (contested) socio-historical facts. The huge potential for disagreement about all of these explains
how a common liberal core can produce such a wide range of variants. Moreover, we need to take into account not merely
the spectrum of actual liberalisms but also hypothetical liberalisms that could be generated through novel framings of some or all of the above. So one
would need to differentiate dominant versions of liberalism from oppositional versions, and actual from possible variants.¶ Once the breadth of
the range of liberalisms is appreciated-dominant and subordinate, actual and potential-the obvious question then raised is:
Even if actual dominant liberalisms have been conservative in various ways (corporate, patriarchal, racist) why
does this rule out the development of emancipatory, radical liberalisms? ¶ One kind of answer is the following (call
this the internalist answer): Because there is an immanent conceptual/normative logic to liberalism as a political
ideology that precludes any emancipatory development of it.¶ Another kind of answer is the following (call this the
externalist answer): It doesn't. The historic domination of conservative exclusionary liberalisms is the result of
group interests, group power, and successful group political projects. Apparent internal
conceptual/normative barriers to an emancipatory liberalism can be successfully negotiated by drawing on
the conceptual/normative resources of liberalism itself, in conjunction with a revisionist socio-historical
picture of modernity .¶ Most self-described radicals would endorse-indeed, reflexively, as an obvious truth-the first answer. But as indicated
from the beginning, I think the second answer is actually the correct one. The obstacles to developing a "radical
liberalism" are, in my opinion, primarily externalist in nature: material group interests, and the way they have shaped
hegemonic varieties of liberalism. So I think we need to try to justify a radical agenda with the normative resources
of liberalism rather than writing off liberalism. Since liberalism has always been the dominant ideology in the
United States, and is now globally hegemonic, such a project would have the great ideological advantage of
appealing to values and principles that most people already endorse. All projects of egalitarian social
transformation are going to face a combination of material, political, and ideological obstacles , but this strategy
would at least reduce somewhat the dimensions of the last. One would be trying to win mass support for policies that-and the
challenge will, of course, be to demonstrate this-are justifiable by majoritarian norms, once reconceived and put in
conjunction with facts not always familiar to the majority. Material barriers (vested group interests) and political
barriers (organizational difficulties) will of course remain. But they will constitute a general obstacle for all egalitarian
political programs, and as such cannot be claimed to be peculiar problems for an emancipatory liberalism.¶ But the
contention will be that such a liberalism cannot be developed. Why? Hereare ten familiar objections, variants of internalism, and my
replies to them.¶ Ten Reasons Why Liberalism Cannot Be Radicalized (And My Replies)¶ 1. Liberalism Has an Asocial, Atomic
Individualist Ontology¶ This is one of the oldest radical critiques of liberalism; it can be found in Marx's derisive comments, for example in the
Grundrisse, about the "Robinsonades" of the social contract theory whose "golden age" (1650-1800) had long passed by the time he began his
intellectual and political career:¶ The individual and isolated hunter or fisher who forms the starting-point with Smith and Ricardo belongs to the
insipid illusions of the eighteenth century. They are Robinson Crusoe stories .... no more based on such a naturalism than is Rousseau's contrat social
which makes naturally independent individuals come in contact and have mutual intercourse by contract .... Man is in the most literal sense of the word
a zoon politikon, not only a social animal, but an animal which can develop into an individual only in society. Production by individuals outside society
... is as great an absurdity as the idea of the development of language without individuals living together and talking to one another.3¶ But several
replies can be made to this indictment. To begin with, even if the accusation is true of contractarian liberalism, not all
liberalisms are contractarian. Utilitarian liberalism rests on different theoretical foundations, as does the late nineteenth-century British
liberalism of T. H. Green and his colleagues: a Hegelian, social liberalism. 4 Closer to home, of course, we have John Dewey's brand of liberalism.
Moreover, even within the social contract tradition, resources exist for contesting the assumptions of the Hobbesian/Lockean version of the contract.
Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (1755) (nowhere given proper credit by Marx5) rethinks the "contract" to make it a
contract entered into after the formation of society, and thus the creation of socialized human beings. So the
ontology presupposed is explicitly a social one . In any case, the contemporary revival of contractarianism initiated by John Rawls's
1971 A Theory of justice makes the contract a thought experiment, a "device of representation," rather than a literal or even metaphorical
anthropological account. The communitarian/ contractarian debates of the 1980s onwards recapitulated much of the "asocial" critique of contractarian
liberalism (though usually without a radical edge). But as Rawls pointed out against Michael Sandel, for example, one needs to distinguish the figures in
the thought experiment from real human beings.6 And radicals should be wary about accepting a communitarian ontology
and claims about the general good that deny or marginalize the dynamics of group domination in actual
societies represented as "communities." The great virtue of contractarian liberal individualism is the
conceptual room it provides for hegemonic norms to be critically evaluated through the epistemic and moral
distancing from Sittlichkeit that the contract, as an intellectual device, provides.¶ 2. Liberalism Cannot Recognize
Groups and Group Oppression in Its Ontology-I (Macro)¶ The second point needs to be logically distinguished from the first, since
a theory could acknowledge the social shaping of individuals while denying that group oppression is central to that shaping. (So #1 is necessary, but
not sufficient, for #2.) The Marxist critique, of course, was supposed to encapsulate both points: people were shaped by society and society (post-
"primitive communism") was class-dominated. The ontology was social and it was an ontology of class. Today radicals would demand a richer
ontology that can accommodate the realities of gender and racial oppression also. But whatever candidates are put
forward, the, key claim is that a liberal framework cannot accommodate an ontology of groups in relations of
domination and subordination. To the extent that liberalism recognizes social groups, these are basically
conceived of as voluntary associations that one chooses to join or not join, which is obviously very different from, say, class, race, and
gender memberships.¶ But this evasive ontology, which obfuscates the most central and obvious fact about all
societies since humanity exited the hunting-and-gathering stage-viz., that they are characterized by oppressions
of one kind or another-is not a definitional constituent of liberalism. Liberalism has certainly recognized
some kinds of oppression: the absolutism it opposed in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, the Nazism and Stalinism it
opposed in the twentieth century. Liberalism's failure to systematically address structural oppression in supposedly liberal-
democratic societies is a contingent artifact of the group perspectives and group interests privileged by those
structures, not an intrinsic feature of liberalism's conceptual apparatus.¶ In the preface to her recent Analyzing Oppression,
Ann Cudd makes a striking point: that hers is the first book-length treatment of the subject in the analytic tradition. 7 Philosophy, the discipline
whose special mandate it is to illuminate justice and injustice for us, has had very little to say about injustice and oppression because
of the social background of the majority of its thinkers. In political theory and political philosophy, the theorists who developed
the dominant varieties of liberalism have come overwhelmingly from the hegemonic groups of the liberal social order (bourgeois white males). So it is
really not surprising that, given this background, their socio- political and epistemic standpoint has tended to reproduce rather than challenge group
privilege.¶ Consider Rawls, famously weak on gender and with next to nothing to say about race. Rawlsian "ideal
theory," which has dominated mainstream political philosophy for the last four decades, marginalizes such concerns not
contingently but structurally. If your focus from the start is principles of distributive justice for a "well-
ordered society," then social oppression cannot be part of the picture, since by definition an oppressive
society is not a well-ordered one. As Cudd points out, A Theory of justice "leaves injustice virtually untheorized," operating on the
assumption "that injustice is merely the negation of justice." 8 But radically unjust societies-those characterized by major rather
than minor deviations from ideality-will be different from just societies not merely morally but metaphysically.
What Cudd calls "non- voluntary social groups" will be central to their makeup, so that a conceptualization of such groups must be central to any
adequate account of social oppression: "without positing social groups as causally efficacious entities, we cannot explain oppression." Contra the
conventional wisdom in radical circles, however, she is insistent that the ontology of such groups can be explained "[using] current social science, in
the form of cognitive psychology and modern economic theory, and situat[ing] itself in the Anglo-American tradition of liberal political philosophy."9
Identifying "intentionalist" and "structuralist" approaches as the two broad categories of competing theorizations of social groups, she recommends as
the best option¶ a compatibilist position, holding that while all action is intentionally guided, many of the constraints within which we act are socially
determined and beyond the control of the currently acting individual; to put a slogan on it, intentions dynamically interact within social structures ....
My theory of nonvoluntary social groups fits the description of what Philip Pettit calls "holistic individualism," which means that the social regularities
associated with nonvoluntary social groups supervene on intentional states, and at the same time, group membership in these and voluntary social
groups partly constitutes the intentional states of individuals. 10¶ If Cudd is right, then, such a theorization can indeed be developed
within a liberal framework, using the resources of analytic social and normative theory. But such a development
of the theory is not merely permissible, but should be seen as mandatory, given liberalism's nominal commitment to
individualism, egalitarianism, universalism, and meliorism. These values simply cannot be achieved unless the obstacles to
their realization are identified and theorized. Social-democratic (left) liberalism, feminist liberalism, black
liberalism, all historically represent attempts to take these structural realities into account for the purposes of
rethinking dominant liberalism. 11 They are attempts to get right, to map accurately, the actual ontology of the
societies for which liberalism is prescribing principles of justice. What Cudd's book demonstrates is that it is the ignoring
of this ontology of group domination that is the real betrayal of the liberal project. A well-ordered society will not have
nonvoluntary social groups as part of its ontology. So the path to the "realistic utopia" Rawls is supposedly outlining would crucially
require normative prescriptions for eliminating such groups. That no such guidelines are offered is undeniably
an indictment of ideal-theory liberalism, which is thereby exposed as both epistemologically and ontologically
inadequate. But that does not rule out a reconceptualized liberalism, a non-ideal-theory liberalism that,
starting from a different social metaphysic, requires a different normative strategy for theorizing justice.¶ 3.
Liberalism Cannot Recognize Groups and Group Oppression in Its Ontology-II (Micro)¶ But (it will be replied) liberalism suffers from
a deeper theoretical inadequacy. Even if it may be conceded that liberal theory can recognize oppression at the macro-level, it will be
argued that its individualism prevents it from recognizing how profoundly, at the micro-level, individuals are
shaped by structures of social oppression. Class, race, and gender belongings penetrate deeply into the
ontology of the individual in ways rendered opaque (it will be claimed) by liberalism's foundational individualism.¶ But what those
seeking to retrieve liberalism would point out is that we need to distinguish different senses of "individualism." The individualism that is
foundational to liberalism is a normative individualism (as in the Gray quote above), which makes individuals rather
than social collectivities the locus of value. But that does not require any denial that individuals are shaped in
their character (the "second nature" famously highlighted by left theory) by oppressive social forces and related group
memberships. Once the first two criticisms have been refuted-that liberal individuals cannot be "social," and
that the involuntary group memberships central to the social in oppressive societies cannot be accommodated
within a liberal framework-then this third criticism collapses with them also. One can without inconsistency affirm
both the value of the individual and the importance of recognizing how the individual is socially molded,
especially when the environing social structures are oppressive ones. As already noted, dominant liberalism tends
to ignore or marginalize such constraints, assuming as its representative figures individuals not merely morally equal,
but socially recognized as morally equal, and equi-powerful rather than group- differentiated into the privileged and
the subordinated. But this misleading normative and descriptive picture is a function of a political agenda
complicit with the status quo, not a necessary implication of liberalism's core assumptions. A revisionist,
radical liberalism would make the analysis of group oppression, the denial of equal standing to the majority of
the population, and their impact on the individual's ontology, a theoretical priority . Thus Cudd's book, after explicating
the ontology of involuntary groups, goes on to detail the various different ways, through violence, economic constraint, discrimination, group
harassment, and the internalization of psychological oppression, that the subordinated are shaped by group domination.12 But nothing in her
account is meant to imply either that they thereby cease to be individuals, or that
their involuntary group memberships preclude
a normative liberal condemnation of the injustice of their treatment.

We can tactically redeploy neoliberal discourse for own ends. The idea that our rhetoric makes us
‘unwitting agents of neoliberalism’ forefronts structural analysis while denying agency
Michael J. ROY 17, Yunus Centre for Social Business and Health/Glasgow School for Business and Society,
Glasgow Caledonian University, Glasgow, UK [“The assets-based approach: furthering a neoliberal agenda or
rediscovering the old public health? A critical examination of practitioner discourses,” Critical Public Health,
Vol. 27, No. 4, 2017, p. 455-464, Accessed Online through Emory Libraries]
Like the assets-based approach, social enterprise has also been accused of being an ‘embodiment of a neoliberal welfare logic’ (Garrow & Hasenfeld,
2014). In his analysis of social enterprise discourses, Teasdale (2012, p. 107) shows how social enterprise has been presented by critics as ‘one element
of a neoliberal grand narrative’. However, similar to Burkett’s (2011a, 2011b) argument earlier in response to critics of the assets-based approach,
Gibson-Graham (2008, p. 618) argue that experimental forays into building new economies, such as upon social
enterprise, are often dismissed as capitalism in another guise, already co-opted and/or judged to be inadequate
before they are explored ‘in all their complexity and incoherence’. Such arguments parallel the discussion in relation
to the assets-based approach to public health, and the question of whether or not the practitioners studied are
simply ‘unwitting tools’ of neoliberalism. However, rather than simply being yet ‘another reflection of neoliberal
hegemony’ (Bell & Green, 2016, p. 241) it was clear, at least to the practitioners in question, that their intention was to help
those most at risk in society from, and most affected by, the forces that we know to be responsible for health
inequalities , such as the ‘toxic combination of poor social policies and programmes, unfair economics, and bad politics’ (Commission on Social
Determinants of Health, 2008, p. 35).
In terms of the impact that social enterprises were having upon health, it was found that the Scottish Government’s ‘assets-based agenda’ was explicitly
or implicitly echoed in the discourses of many of the social enterprise practitioners. They presented a sophisticated explanation of
the impact their work was having; consistent, in fact, with a holistic and progressive conceptualisation of health
and well-being. Although this was initially thought to be a by-product of the assets policy discourse permeating
down and influencing their work, a different explanation was found: that many of them were, deliberately or otherwise,
simply following what they considered to be good community development practice. It was also considered
whether practitioners were employing tactics of ‘everyday’ micro-resistance (viz. de Certeau, 1984) such as through
reproducing or mimicking the policy discourse, a behaviour that Dey and Teasdale (2016) coined ‘tactical mimicry’
to mean that they were acting as if they were simply falling in with the prevailing policy discourse, perhaps for
reasons of securing legitimacy and/or resources. Such an idea becomes conceivable if the proximity between social enterprises and
the public sector in Scotland and Glasgow is considered, the seeming ubiquity of assets-based language and ideas across many areas of social policy in
Scotland, and the power of the message itself. On this latter point, Friedli (2013, p. 131) observes that ‘the emergence of asset-based approaches to
improving health is generating a level of evangelism not seen since the days when social capital, a not unrelated construct, inspired a similar fervour’.
However, the explanation from this research was found to be quite the opposite: the ideas were not being
reproduced, or indeed, resisted at all. Rather, the policy direction and discourse was instead found to have caught up with social enterprise
practice. The social enterprise practitioners studied were found to be very aware of the material realities of the
people they work to support; indeed, such first-hand knowledge is one of their principal strengths. So rather than ‘participating in
an individualisation agenda’, they were rather more interested in working to mitigate the worst effects of
poverty and social vulnerability at the local level, particularly through enhancing collectivism and solidarity,
bringing people together to address social cohesion in communities and recognising – often instinctively – that social ties are critical
to well-being. These are all facets that neoliberalism arguably seeks to disrupt.
Furthermore, rather than being novel, ‘assets-based ideas’ were simply seen as the latest iteration of a continuing focus on empowering people, and
supporting people to empower themselves, ideas that are commonplace within the social enterprise and social economy movement and (to their
recollection) always had been. The ideas presented as being ‘new’ in public health policy discourse, have, in fact, been
employed for many years – possibly even many decades – by organisations such as community-based social enterprises and predecessor
forms of organisation that have been around in Scotland for some considerable time. This notion of continuity of an old idea finds
its parallels with recent attempts to redirect the attention of public health theorists and practitioners back
towards structural and environmental influences on health and health behaviours. Rather than a new way of
working, this is, as Macintyre, Ellaway, and Cummins (2002, p. 127) point out, ‘actually a reorientation back to what some would
regard as “the old public health”, that is, the nineteenth and early twentieth century attempts to clean up dirty
cities, and to move away from the late twentieth century concern with chronic disease and contributory individual
lifestyles’. This is an idea also raised by Lomas (1998, p. 1187) who also recognised that re-balancing public health –
complementing individualistic biomedical and economic views of the world with a social science focus on community and
societal structures – is not a new idea, but actually a return to those of early nineteenth-century pioneers of public
health and epidemiology.
Conclusion
This study set out to critically examine the ways in which the ‘assets-based approach’ to public health has influenced the work of practitioners; whether
it was recognised as a potentially empowering means for communities to address the social determinants of health, or, in contrast, simply furthering a
neoliberal agenda. It was found that practitioners interact with the assets-based policy discourse in interesting ways: rather
than unwitting tools of neoliberalism, they considered their work to be about supporting communities to work
together to mitigate the worst effects of poverty and social vulnerability at the local level.
Framing the assets-based approach as simply furthering a neoliberal agenda downplays, or perhaps fails to
appropriately consider, the agency of practitioners in resisting, (de-) constructing and utilising policy ideas and
discourses – even those that could reasonably be argued as being ostensibly neoliberal in nature – to suit their
own agenda; to benefit the individuals and communities they exist to support.
Neoliberalism is not a monolith --- view it as partial --- their totalizing politics is demobilizing in the
context of health.
Kirsten BELL AND GREEN 16, Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology at the University
of British Columbia; AND Judith GREEN, Faculty of Public Health & Policy, Department of Health
Services Research & Policy, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, [“On the perils of invoking
neoliberalism in public health critique,” Critical Public Health, Vol. 26, No. 3, 2016, p. 239-243, Emory
Libraries]
Indeed, Ward and England (2007) have identified four distinct understandings of neoliberalism in the social
sciences: (1) neoliberalism as an ideological hegemonic project; (2) neoliberalism as policy and programme (e.g. policies
enacted under the banner of privatization, deregulation, liberalization, etc.); (3) neoliberalism as state form – i.e. the ‘rolling back’ and ‘rolling out’
of state formations in the name of reform; and (4) neoliberalism as governmentality – the ways in which the relations among and between
peoples and things are reimagined, reinterpreted and reassembled to effect governing at a distance.
In light of this eclectic usage, scholars are now examining the relationships between neoliberalism and everything from ‘cities to citizenship, sexuality
to subjectivity, and development to discourse to name but a few’ (Springer, 2012, p. 135). Although these versions of neoliberalism often
intersect with each other, they can also lead
to very different readings of the same phenomena. For example, taking a
political economy perspective, Otero, Pechlaner, Liberman, and Gürcan (2015, p. 48) use the term ‘neoliberal diet’ to
characterize the high levels of consumption of energy-dense, low-nutrition ‘pseudo foods’ amongst the working class;
however, Foucauldian governmentality perspectives are more likely to characterize a neoliberal diet as precisely
the opposite of this – as one that encourages the individual to take responsibility for his or her health by
consuming more fruits and vegetables (e.g. Ayo, 2012). When a concept can be used to describe such an
extraordinary – and even downright contradictory – array of phenomena, questions can clearly be asked about
how useful it actually is.
Perhaps a larger issue is the reductive ways neoliberalism often tends to be used. As Phelan (2007) observes, in a
number of accounts its effects are so totalizing and monolithic that it starts to assume causal properties in its
own right; ‘that is, it becomes the “it” which does the explaining, rather than the political phenomenon that
needs to be explained’ (Phelan, 2007, p. 328). Consider, for example, neoliberalism as governmentality – one of the more
common ways the term is employed by CPH authors. As Kipnis (2008) observes, the key defining features of this variant of
neoliberalism: governing from a distance; the emphasis on calculability; and the promotion of self-activating,
disciplined, individuated subjects, can be found in a variety of contexts that are historically and culturally
distant from Western neoliberal or liberal governing philosophies. In his words, ‘These three categories correspond to broad human
potentialities that have been imagined in a wide variety of ways in a broad range of settings and that have become more prevalent in all state-governed
and industrial societies’ (p. 284, emphasis added). Thus, characterizing such features exclusively in terms of neoliberalism
runs the risk of exaggerating its scope by reifying it into a globally dominant force or stage of history (Kipnis,
2008). It also runs the risk of eliding other processes that deserve analytic attention in their own right. For such
reasons, there have been growing calls to explore neoliberalism in terms of ‘concrete projects that account for
specific people, institutions and places’ (Kingfisher & Maskovsky, 2008, p. 118) – what Brenner and Theodore (2002) refer
to as ‘actually existing neoliberalism’.
Some suggestions for the way forward
Theoretical concepts such as neoliberalism clearly have their uses: they signal to readers the kind of argument a writer is making, and act as a shorthand
to summarize complex configurations of economic, political and cultural change that do, arguably, have some commonalities across different contexts.
It is the role of theory to provide abstracted explanations that hold across time and place, and the concept of neoliberalism has been a fruitful one for
thinking about some general implications of contemporary social change. However, over-extension has its risks, and there are now
diminishing returns in simply documenting how technologies, policies or products ‘illustrate’ neoliberalism.
To advance our understanding of how, specifically, public health is imbricated in the various manifestations of
neoliberalism requires a more critical, nuanced and reflexive approach.
First, we need far more clarity on how the term is being used, rather than taking its meaning for granted. With the over-
extension of ‘neoliberal’ to describe everything from welfare cuts to wearable health monitors, scholars need
to unpack more carefully the particular processes to which they are referring. Rather than assume a
deterministic role for those processes, the nature of the links between, say, welfare change and the impact on
subjectivities needs to be explicated. As Meershoek and Hortsman (2016) note in this issue, merely reporting how health
promotion reflects or contributes to neoliberalism does little to untangle the ‘material, technical and practical
dimensions’ of how what kinds of health, and whose, are prioritized. Taking the commodification of workplace health
promotion technologies as their case, they unpack how policies emphasizing employee health become legitimated within networks that include
knowledge institutes and private companies, but not the workers themselves. Importantly, this focus on the process itself enables their analysis to point
to not only the potential negative effects for public health of such commodification, but also ways forward, in political mobilization through workers’
organizations to incorporate different frameworks of well-being.
Second, we need more nuance and specificity in accounts. The question is not so much ‘what forms do public health outputs or
technologies take in neoliberal times?’ but ‘how,
where and in what forms do the various processes of neoliberalism
impact public health?’ Two papers in this issue illustrate the value of more specificity. Hervik and Thurston (2016), in their account of how
Norwegian men discuss their responsibilities for health, note that the specificities of the welfare state in Norway configure assumptions embedded in
talk about ‘responsibility’. Rather than simply reading off the espousal of ‘personal responsibility for health’ as another reflection of neoliberal
hegemony, Hervik and Thurston note that in this context, responsibility for health is rooted in a participatory model of the welfare state, in which
principles of egalitarianism and social democracy may have very different implications for public health than in welfare states where the focus is on
individual choice and self-sufficiency. Similarly, Nourpanah and Martin (2016) delineate both parallels and divergences between the discursive framings
of health promotion described in Western states and those they document in Iran, where there is an absence of focus on consumption, despite similar
orientations towards individual choice.
In general, rather than reifying neoliberalism as a monolithic entity, it may be more productive to speak of
‘neoliberalization’ as an always partial and incomplete process (Ward & England, 2007). This raises potentially fruitful
questions around when, where, and in what ways the economic, political and cultural intersect with health. We
need also to be reflexive about claims to neoliberalism, in that of course our critique is inevitably embroiled in the very processes it seeks to analyze.
Indeed, it may be productive to think of neoliberalism as a discourse as much as a reality (Springer, 2012). In sum, we are not calling for the
abandonment of the concept – paraphrasing Clifford (1988) on yet another troubled notion (‘culture’), neoliberalism seems to be a deeply
compromised idea we cannot yet do without. Thus, being more careful and mindful of how we use it seems a good place to start.

Ontology not prior --- problem-oriented approaches are necessary; starting with sweeping
philosophical concerns indefinitely brackets off social inequality.
Lois MCNAY 14. Professor of Political Theory at Oxford University and Fellow of Somerville College. The
Misguided Search for the Political. 214-5.
What other features might a radical democratic theory possess that takes seriously the critique of social suffering? It may be more fruitful to
adopt an approach that, at least in the first instance, is problem- rather than model-oriented. Radical
democrats might do better to develop principles from an initial focus on specific issues of social inequality,
rather than embark at the outset on a quest to distil the essence of the political and from this derive models
into which all concrete struggles are subsequently shoehorned . Of course, any problem-oriented approach will
unavoidably be 'influenced' by theoretical presuppositions, but it won't necessarily be as ‘driven’ by the rigid
logic of the model that seems to flow from a one-sided focus on political ontology (see Shapiro 2007). It is, after all, a
problem-oriented approach that has informed many other types of radical theorizing, such as feminism, and
has made them suspicious of the formal abstractions of theory that disregard the distinctiveness of certain
group experiences (e.g. Martineau and Squires 2012). Partly because of its established links with activism, feminist
theorizing has more often than not been propelled, in the first instance, by particular problems relating to
gender inequality and the marginalized experiences of women. Feminist political theorizing about justice, for instance, starts
with the problem of the gendered division of labour, and the undervaluing of women's care work. It uses this sociological perspective to
expose the conceptual deficiencies of asocial individualism as a device for deriving principles of justice
because of the way it obscures human vulnerability and dependency and thereby fails to recognize care as a
fundamental element of social justice (Bubeck 1995; Fraser 1997; Kittay 1999). Others feminists think through issues of democratic
participation starting from the problem of the underrepresentation of women in [END PAGE 214] established democratic structures, their effective
political invisibility, which is a consequence of their vulnerable position as workers in transnational production processes (e.g. Fraser 2008; Phillips
1991).
The hope is that a problem-oriented approach to radical democratic theorizing is less likely to result in the
marginalization of the actual and disregard of distinctive group experiences than are approaches oriented to
the issue of ontology. The difficulty with the latter approaches is that the strategy of temporarily bracketing
off social relations in order to capture the essence of the political turns into a theoretical inability to
reintroduce excluded issues of power without violating the pristine foundational logic that they claim to have
identified. Consequently, the logic of political ontology is given an unwarranted primacy that effectively occludes
the autonomy and specificity of social relations and practices. Differently put, in so far as it lacks a sense of mediation, this
political anti-essentialism becomes an essentialism . Thus, Mouffe is unable to address substantive issues about power that have a
direct bearing on her model of democratic agonism because of a misplaced fear of falling into an essentialism that would violate her rigid linguistic
constructivism. Arendtian ideas of political action as creative inauguration are famously empty, proscribing many issues of subordination and
oppression by relegating them to the realm of social necessity and, therefore, privacy. Although his ontology of abundance is more materialist in
nature, Connolly finds it hard to incorporate types of social experience or practice that do not conform to his
notions of creative becoming and dynamic assemblages. In all these cases, social being is treated in a tokenistic and
cipher-like fashion as simply yet another empirical exemplification of foundational dynamics of
indeterminacy. Although it is not abstraction per se that causes socially weightless thinking, it may be that
radical democratic theory may be better placed to think about oppression by deploying abstractions that are,
at least in the first instance, sociological rather than philosophical in nature. The aim of grounding political
theory in sociological reconstruction rather than ontological construction would be to, in Charles W. Mills’s words,
'reflect the specificities of group experience, thereby potentially generating categories and principles that illuminate
rather than obfuscate the reality of different kinds of subordination' (2005: 173; also Honneth 2012: 46-8).