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Historical Materialism vs. RaceCritical race theory and intersectional approaches displace the essential focus on class in relation to racial issues – class, as informed by patterns of labor and productivity, is the only structural antagonism determinant of practices sanctioning racial and gender oppressionSan Juan, Professor Emeritus of English/Comparative Literature/Ethnic Studies at Harvard, 2005 (Epifanio San Juan, Jr., Nature, Society, and Thought, Vol 3 Iss 18 2005 “From Race to Class Struggle: Marxism and Critical Race Theory” proquest; accessed 7/21/15)//JH @ DDI

Owing to the unrelenting ideological and political constraints of the Cold War, academic discourse on racism and ethnic/racial relations has erased the Marxian concept of class as an antagonistic relation , displacing it with neo-Weberian notions of status, life-style, and other cultural contingencies . Despite the civil rights struggles of the sixties, methodological individualism and normative functionalism continue to prevail in the humanities and social sciences. The decline of militant trade unionism and the

attenuation of "third world" liberation struggles contributed to the erasure of class conflicts. With the introduction of structuralist and poststructuralist paradigms in the last three decades, the concept of class struggle has been effectively displaced by the concept of power and differential relations . From the

viewpoint of the humanities and cultural studies (fields in which I am somehow implicated), the advent of critical race theory (CRT) in the eighties was salutary if not anticlimactic. For the strategic foregrounding of racism and the race problematic (following feminism's assault on the Cold War stereotypes of economic determinism and class

reductionism synonymous with Marxism tout court in the previous decades), CRT served to remedy the inadequacies of the intersectionality paradigm of gender, class, and race. Unfortunately, with the neoconservative resurgence in the Reagan/Bush administrations and the collapse of "actually existing socialism" in the Soviet Union and arguably in

China, the deconstruction of bourgeois legal discourse and its attendant institutions will no longer suffice. This is so not only because of the reconfigured international situation and the emergence of neoliberal apologetics and

authoritarian decrees, but because of the accelerated class war manifest in ongoing deindustrialization, huge income gaps, unemployment, destruction of welfare-state guarantees, and disabling of traditional challenges to corporate rule. Challenge of the epochal divide The advent of critical race theory marked a rediscovery of the primacy of the social relations of production and the division of labor in late modern industrial society. A historicizing perspective was applied by Derrick Bell and elaborated by,

among others, Charles Mills in his theory of the United States as a "racial polity." However, a tendency to juxtapose "class" as a classifying category with "race" and "gender" in an intersectional framework has disabled the Marxian concept of class relation as a structural determinant . This has led to the reduction of the relational dynamic of class to an economistic factor of identity , even though critical

race theory attacks capitalist relations of production and its legal ideology as the ground for racist practices and institutions. The intersectionality approach (where race, class, and gender function as equally salient variables) so

fashionable today substitutes a static nominalism for concrete class analysis. It displaces a Marxian with a Weberian organon of knowledge . As Gregory Meyerson notes, the "explanatory primacy of class analysis" is a theoretical requisite for understanding the structural determinants of race, gender, and class oppression (2003). Class as an antagonistic relation is, from a historical-materialist viewpoint, the only structural determinant of ideologies and practices sanctioning racial and gender oppression in capitalist society .

Capitalism is the structural totality that underlies all forms of oppression – the erosion of justice and values creates disparities that result in crime, disposability, incarceration, authoritarianism, excessive surveillance, exclusion, marginalization, and social death Giroux, Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson, University, 2014 (Henry A. Giroux,Tikkun, Volume 29, Number 3, Summer 2014, Duke University Press “Neoliberalism’s War Against the Radical Imagination” project muse; accessed 7/20/15)//JH @ DDI

Democracy is on life support in the United States. Throughout the social order, the forces of predatory capitalism are on the march. Their ideological and material traces are visible everywhere—in the

dismantling of the welfare state, the increasing role of corporate money in politics, the assault on unions, the expansion of the corporate surveillance-military state, widening inequalities in wealth and income, the defunding of higher education, the privatization of public education, and the war on women’s reproductive rights. As Marxist geographer David Harvey,

political theorist Wendy Brown, and others have observed, neoliberalism’s permeation is achieved through various guises that collectively function to undercut public faith in the defining institutions of democracy. As market mentalities and moralities tighten their grip on all aspects of society, public institutions and public spheres are first downsized, then eradicated. When these important sites of democratic expression— from public universities to community health care centers—vanish, what follows is a serious erosion of the discourses of justice, equality, public values, and the common good.

Moreover, as literary critic Stefan Collini has argued, under the regime of neoliberalism, the “social self” has been transformed into the “disembedded individual,” just as the notion of the university as a public good is now

repudiated by the privatizing and atomistic values at the heart of a hyper-market-driven society. We live in a society that appears to embrace the vocabulary of “choice,” which is ultimately rooted in a denial of reality.

In fact, most people experience daily an increasing limitation of choices, as they bear the heavy burden of massive inequality, social disparities, the irresponsible concentration of power in relatively few hands, a racist justice and penal system, the conversion of schools into detention centers, and a pervasive culture of violence and cruelty—all of which portends a growing machinery of social death, especially for those disadvantaged by a ruthless capitalist economy. Renowned economist Joseph Stiglitz is one of many public intellectuals who have repeatedly alerted Americans to the impending costs of gross social inequality.

Inequality is not simply about disproportionate amounts of wealth and income in fewer hands, it is also about the monopolization of power by the financial and corporate elite. As power becomes global and is removed from local and nation-based politics, what is even more alarming is the sheer number of individuals and groups who are being defined by the free-floating class of ultra-rich and corporate powerbrokers as

disposable, redundant, or a threat to the forces of concentrated power. Power, particularly the power of the largest corporations,

has become less accountable, and the elusiveness of illegitimate power makes it difficult to recognize. Disposability has become the new measure of a neoliberal society in which the only value that matters is exchange value. Compassion, social responsibility, and justice are relegated to the dustbin of an older modernity that now is viewed as either quaint or a grim reminder of a socialist past. The Institutionalization of Injustice

A regime of repression, corruption, and dispossession has become the organizing principle of society in which an ironic doubling takes place. Corporate bankers and powerbrokers trade with terrorists, bankrupt the economy, and commit all manner of crimes that affect millions, yet they go free. Meanwhile, across the United States, citizens are being criminalized for all sorts of behaviors ranging from dress code infractions in public schools to peaceful demonstrations in public parks. As Michelle Alexander has thoroughly documented in her

book The New Jim Crow, young men and women of color are being jailed in record numbers for

nonviolent offenses, underscoring how justice is on the side of the rich, wealthy, and powerful. And when the wealthy are actually convicted of crimes, they are rarely sent to prison, even though millions languish under a correctional system aimed at punishing immigrants, low-income whites, and poor minorities. An egregious example of how the justice system works in favor of the rich was recently on full display in Texas. Instead of being sent to prison, Ethan Couch, a wealthy teen who killed four people while driving inebriated, was given ten years of probation and ordered by the judge to attend a rehabilitation facility paid for by his parents. (His parents had previously offered to pay for an expensive rehabilitation facility that costs $450,000 a year.) The defense argued that he had “affluenza,” a “disease” that afflicts children of privilege who are allegedly never given the opportunity to learn how to be responsible. In other words, irresponsibility is now an acceptable hallmark of having wealth, enabling the rich actually to kill people

and escape the reach of justice. Under such circumstances, “justice” becomes synonymous with privilege, as wealth and power dictate who benefits and who doesn’t by a system of law that enshrines lawlessness. In addition, moral and political outrage is no longer animated by the fearful consequences of an

unjust society. Rather than fearing injustice at the hands of an authoritarian government, nearly all of us define our fears in reference to overcoming personal insecurities and anxieties . In this scenario,

survival becomes more important than the quest for the good life. The American dream is no longer built on the possibility

of social mobility or getting ahead. Instead, it has become for many a nightmare rooted in the desire to simply stay afloat and survive. One consequence of the vicissitudes of injustice is the growing number of people, especially young people, who inhabit zones of hardship, suffering, exclusion, and joblessness. As renowned sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has stated, this is the zero generation—a generation with zero hopes, jobs, or future possibilities. The plight of the outcast now envelops increasing

numbers of youth, workers, immigrants, and a diminishing middle class. They live in fear as they struggle to survive social conditions and policies more characteristic of authoritarian governments than democratic states.

Indeed, Americans in general appear caught in a sinister web of ethical and material poverty manufactured by a state that trades in suspicion, bigotry, state-sanctioned violence, and disposability. Democracy loses its character as a disruptive element, a force of dissent, and an insurrectional call for responsible change. In effect, democracy all but degenerates into an assault on the radical imagination, reconfigured as a force for whitewashing all ethical and moral considerations. What is left is a new kind of authoritarianism that thrives in such a state of exception, which in reality is a state of permanent war. A regime of greed, dispossession, fear, and surveillance has now been normalized. The ideological script recited by the disciples of neoliberalism is now familiar: there is no such thing as the common good; market values provide the template for governing all of social life, not just the economy; consumerism is the only obligation of citizenship; a survival-of-the-fittest ethic should govern how we think and behave; militaristic values should trump democratic ideals; the welfare state is the arch enemy of freedom; private interests should be safeguarded, while public values wane; law and order is the preferred language for mobilizing shared fears rather than shared

responsibilities; and war becomes the all-embracing organizing principle for developing society and the economy. As individual responsibility has been promoted as a weapon in order to tear up social solidarities, experiences that once resonated with public purpose and meaning have been transformed into privatized spectacles and fragmented modes of consumption that are increasingly subjected to the surveillance tactics of the military-security state. The endpoint is the emergence of what the late British

historian Tony Judt called an “eviscerated society”—“one that is stripped of the thick mesh of mutual obligations and social responsibilities” integral to any viable democracy . This grim reality has produced a failure in the power of the civic imagination, political will, and open democracy. It is also part of a politics that strips society of any democratic ideals and renders its democratic character inoperative.

The alternative is a historical materialist analysis of the relationship between race and class – this is the only starting point for effective solvency San Juan, Professor Emeritus of English/Comparative Literature/Ethnic Studies at Harvard, 2005 (Epifanio San Juan, Jr., Nature, Society, and Thought, Vol 3 Iss 18 2005 “From Race to Class Struggle: Marxism and Critical Race Theory” proquest; accessed 7/21/15)//JH @ DDI

Following the lead of Anderson and others, I would reaffirm the need to situate racism in late-capitalist society within the process of class rule and labor exploitation to grasp the dynamics of racial exclusion and subordination. Beyond the mode of production, the antagonistic relations between the capitalist class and the working class are articulated with the state and its complex bureaucratic and juridical mechanisms, multiplying cultural and political differentiations that affect the attitudes, sentiments, and actual behavior of groups. A critique of ideologies of racism and sexism operating in the arena of class antagonism becomes crucial in the effort to dismantle their efficacy. Moreover, as Bensaid observes in Marx for Our Times (2002), "the relationship between social structure and political struggle is mediated by the relations of dependence and domination between nations at the international level." Linear

functionalism yields to the dialectical analysis of concrete mediations. Viewed historically, the phenomenon of migrant labor, in particular Filipina domestics in North America and elsewhere, demonstrates how racial and gender characteristics become functional and discursively valorized when they are inserted into the dialectic of abstract and concrete labor, of use value and exchange value, in the production of commodities--in this case, domestic labor as a commodity. Contrary to any attempts to legitimate the use of the underpaid

services of women of color from the South, the racializing and gendering discourse of global capitalism can only be adequately grasped as the mode through which extraction of surplus value, wage differentiation, and control and representation of bodies are all negotiated. A study of racist practices and institutions, divorced from the underlying determinant structure of capital accumulation and class rule allowing such practices and institutions to exercise their naturalizing force, can only perpetuate an abstract metaphysics of race and a discourse of power that would reinforce the continuing reification or commodification of human relations in everyday life . We cannot multiply static determinations in an atomistic manner and at the same time acquire the intelligible totality of knowledge that

we need for formulating strategies of radical social transformation. A first step in this project of renewing critical race theory is simple: begin with the concept of class as an antagonistic relation between labor and capital, and then proceed to analyze how the determinant of "race" is played out historically in the class-conflicted structure of capitalism and its political/ideological processes of class rule. It is of course important to maintain vigilance concerning the mystifying use of "race" and the practice of racialization in any location, whether in the privacy of the family, home, school, factory, or state institutions (court, prison, police station, legislature). Grace Chang (2000) has meticulously documented how people of color, exploited immigrants and refugees, have themselves used racist images and rhetoric in their role as "gatekeepers" to the racialized class system. Nevertheless, without framing all these within

the total picture of the crisis of capital and its globalized restructuring from the late seventies up to the present, and without understanding the continued domination of labor by capital globally, we cannot effectively counteract the racism that underwrites the relation of domination and subordination among nationalities, ethnic communities, and gender groups. The critique of an emergent authoritarian state and questionable policies sanctioned by the USA Patriot Act is urgently necessary. In doing so, naming the system and understanding its operations would be useful in discovering precisely that element of self-activity, of agency, that has supposedly been erased in totalizing metanarratives such as the "New World Order," the "New American Century" that will end ideology and history, and in revolutionary projects of achieving racial justice and equality. As the familiar quotation goes, we do make history--but not under circumstances of our choosing. So the question is, as always, "What alternatives do we have to carry out which goals at what time and place?" The goal of a classless communist society and strategies to attain it envisage the demise of racist ideology and practice in their current forms. But progressive forces around the world are not agreed about this. For example, the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance-NGO Forum held in Durban, South Africa, from 31

August to 7 September, 2001 publicized the global problem of racism but was unable to formulate a consensus on how to solve it. Its final declaration highlighted the historic origin of racism in the slave trade, colonialism, and genocide, and it raised the possibility of reparations for its victims, but did not offer a concrete program of action (see Mann 2002). Because of its composition and the pervasive climate of reaction, the Forum could not endorse a radical approach that would focus on the elimination of the exploitation of labor (labor power as commodity) as a necessary first step. Given its limits, it could not espouse a need for a thoroughgoing change of the material basis of social production and reproduction--the latter involving the hegemonic rule of the propertied bloc in each society profiting from the unequal division of labor and the unequal distribution of social wealth--on which the institutional practices of racism (apartheid, discrimination, genocide) thrive. "Race is the modality in which class is lived," as

Stuart Hall remarks concerning post-1945 Britain (Solomos 1986, 103). Without political power in the hands of the democratic-popular masses under the leadership of the working class, the ideological machinery (laws, customs, religion, state bureaucracy) that legitimizes class domination, with its attendant racist practices, cannot be changed. What is required is a revolutionary process that mobilizes a broad constituency based on substantive equality and social justice as an essential part of the agenda to dissolve class structures. Any change in the ideas, beliefs, and norms would produce changes in the economic, political, and social institutions, which would in turn promote wide-ranging changes in social relations among all groups

and sectors. Within a historical-materialist framework, the starting point and end point for analyzing the relations between structures in any sociohistorical totality cannot be anything but the production and reproduction of material existence. The existence of any totality follows transformation rules whereby it is constantly being restructured into a new formation (Harvey 1973). These rules reflect the dialectical unfolding of

manifold contradictions constituting the internal relations of the totality. Within this conflicted, determinate totality, race cannot be reduced to class, nor can class be subsumed by race, since those concepts express different forms of social relations.

Cap vs PomoPostmodern concepts of ideology represent an erasure of materialism and a marginalization of labor – postmodern theorization of ideology and deconstruction only serve to re-legitimate the capitalist systemEbert, Professor of Critical and Cultural Theory, Marxist Theory, Feminist Critique, Globalization Theory at State University of New York at Albany, 05 (Teresa L, Science & Society 69.1 (Jan 2005): 33-55 “Rematerializing Feminism” proquest accessed 7/22/15)//JH @ DDI

The historical materialist concept of ideology seeks to account for the representations of this exchange as an equal and fair exchange. This, I want to emphasize, is the core of the materialist theory of ideology: how the relation between wage-labor and capital is represented as free and equal when it is anything but (it is "a tanning"). False consciousness (the bête noir of postmodern theories of ideology) is a "struggle concept" (to adopt Maria Mies' term) by which a materialist understanding marks the consciousness that regards this exchange to be an exchange among equals and conducted in freedom. It is a false consciousness, because it is seen as unfettered and uncoerced when, in fact, as Marx himself argues, this exchange takes place under "the silent compulsion of economic relations" - a compulsion that "sets

the seal on the domination of the capitalist over the worker" (Marx, 1977, 899). False consciousness is the consciousness that misrecognizes the compulsion of economic relations as free and therefore accepts the exchange of wages for labor-power as equal. Even a quick look at the post-Althusserian theories of

ideology will make clear that, far from being groundbreaking theories, the postmodern notion of ideology is simply an erasure of the materialist theory of ideology and a marginalization of the role of labor. It ends up essentially legitimizing the relation between wage-labor and capital. To say, as postmodern theories

of ideology say over and over again, that there is no space outside ideology is to say that it is impossible to mark any relation as a relation of inequality. Because to say that the exchange of wages for labor-power is unequal,

according to postmodern theory, is to set up a "true" (i.e., "equal") relation. This is "wrong," according to postmodern theory, because it establishes a binary in which a truthful relation masters a false relation. But this is exactly what happens under capitalism. The relation between wagelabor and capital is an unequal relation, and to simply say that drawing attention to its inequality is to fall into binaries is to substitute bourgeois

epistemology for social justice. Ideology is not epistemology: to try to make ideology part of epistemology and then deconstruct it through a maneuver in which right and wrong, correct and incorrect, truthful and untruthful are pitted against each other is to simply relegitimate capitalist relations. The crisis we are witnessing now in the theory of ideology is the crisis of this legitimization of an unjust relation in the discourses of intellectuals who, in their formal theories, declare themselves to be anti-capitalist and friends of the people.

Capitalism is the structural totality that underlies all forms of oppression – the erosion of justice and values creates disparities that result in crime, disposability, incarceration, authoritarianism, excessive surveillance, exclusion, marginalization, and social death Giroux, Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson, University, 2014 (Henry A. Giroux,Tikkun, Volume 29, Number 3, Summer 2014, Duke University Press “Neoliberalism’s War Against the Radical Imagination” project muse; accessed 7/20/15)//JH @ DDI










A regime of repression, corruption, and dispossession has become the organizing principle of society in which an ironic doubling takes place. Corporate bankers and powerbrokers trade with terrorists, bankrupt the economy, and commit all manner of crimes that affect millions, yet they go free. Meanwhile, across the United States, citizens are being criminalized for all sorts of behaviors ranging from dress code infractions in public schools to peaceful demonstrations in public parks. As Michelle Alexander has thoroughly documented in her

book The New Jim Crow, young men and women of color are being jailed in record numbers for nonviolent offenses, underscoring how justice is on the side of the rich, wealthy, and powerful. And when the wealthy are actually convicted of crimes, they are rarely sent to prison, even though millions languish under a correctional system aimed at punishing immigrants, low-income whites, and poor minorities. An egregious example of how the justice system works in favor of the rich was recently on full display in Texas. Instead of being sent to prison, Ethan Couch, a wealthy teen who killed four people while driving inebriated, was given ten years of probation and ordered by the judge to attend a rehabilitation facility paid for by his parents. (His parents had previously offered to pay for an expensive rehabilitation facility that costs $450,000 a year.) The defense argued that he had “affluenza,” a “disease” that afflicts children of privilege who are allegedly never given the opportunity to learn how to be responsible. In other words, irresponsibility is now an acceptable hallmark of having wealth, enabling the rich actually to kill people

and escape the reach of justice. Under such circumstances, “justice” becomes synonymous with privilege, as wealth and power dictate who benefits and who doesn’t by a system of law that

enshrines lawlessness. In addition, moral and political outrage is no longer animated by the fearful consequences of an








The alternative is to reject the 1AC’s relation to capital – postmodernism is incapable of macro-political reform – only a historical materialist praxis can creates the mobilization to challenge capitalism Cole, School of Education, University of Brighton, 2003 (Mike Cole, British Journal of Sociology of Education, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Sep., 2003), pp. 487-500 “Might It Be in the Practice That It Fails to Succeed? A Marxist Critique of Claims for Postmodernism and Poststructuralism as Forces for Social Change and Social Justice” JSTOR; accessed 7/22/15)//JH @DDI

Postmodernists and poststructuralists are clearly capable of asking questions but , by their own

acknowledgement, they have no answers. As Glenn Rikowski has put it, this leads one to ask: just what is the postmodernist

attitude to explanation? Truly political strategies require explanation (of what went wrong, why the analysis and/or

tactics failed etc.) so that improvements can be made. Do postmodernists have a notion of improvement (of society, of political strategies)? If they do, then they need explanation. I don't think they are interested in either, and hence can't have a

political strategy for human betterment. (cited in Cole, 2001, p. 77) To this I would reiterate that postmodernism and poststructuralism could be liberating to individuals and to localised groups. But to be politically valid, an analysis must link 'the small picture' to 'the big picture'. Postmodernism and

poststructuralism, again by their protagonists' acknowledgement, cannot do this. They are, thus, not merely unable to promote social justice and social change, but, albeit by default, act, as ideological supports for capitalism, both within nation states and globally. Bringing Marxism back to the forefront is not an easy task. Marxists must break through the 'bizarre ideological mechanism, [in which] every conceivable alternative to the market has been discredited by the collapse of Stalinism' (Callinicos, 2000, p. 122), whereby the fetishization of life makes capitalism seem natural and therefore unalterable, and where the market mechanism 'has been hypostatized into a natural force unresponsive to human

wishes' (Callinicos, 2000, p. 125) [13]. Capital presents itself 'determining the future as surely as the laws of nature

make tides rise to lift boats' (McMurtry, 2000, p. 2), 'as if it has now replaced the natural environment. It announces itself through its business leaders and politicians as coterminous with freedom, and indispensable to democracy such that any attack on capitalism as exploitative or hypocritical becomes an attack on world freedom and democracy itself (McLaren, 2000, p. 32) [14]. As Callinicos puts it, despite the inevitable intense resistance from capital, the 'greatest obstacle to change is not ...

the revolt it would evoke from the privileged, but the belief that it is impossible' (2000, p. 128). Challenging this climate requires courage, imagination and willpower inspired by the injustice that surrounds us. Beneath the surface of our supposedly contented societies, these qualities are present in abundance. Once mobilized, they can turn the world upside down. (Callinicos, 2000, p. 129) To reiterate,

Marxism is about dialectical praxis. Such praxis is outside the remit of poststructuralism and postmodernism. Neither is

able to address the global social injustices outlined at the beginning of this paper. By their very essence, poststructuralism and postmodernism are about neither theory nor practice. They fail in both and remain an academic practice, based on deconstruction alone, with no practical implications for social or educational transformation.

Indeed, deconstruction without reconstruction typifies the divorce of the academy from the reality of struggle on the ground (Cole & Hill, 1999b; Hill et al., 1999, 2002a).

Links

Cap Links to K stuff

BiopowerBiopower is a symptom of capitalism’s control of subjectivity – the authoritative valuation of life within biopolitical systems emerges from the dominance of capital McGowan teaches theory and film at the University of Vermont, 2013 (Todd, Discourse Volume 35, Number 1, Winter 2013 “The Capitalist Gaze” project muse; accessed 7/20/15)//JH@DDI

The emergence of biopower and even biopolitical analysis in contemporary social relations is a symptom of the full acceptance of capitalism’s existence as a substance providing ground for our subjectivity. Biopower takes the living body as its object , which represents a radical departure for the way that social authority functions. Rather than threatening death, authority constitutes itself through preserving, regulating, and even producing life.7 The concern for life develops

out of a sense that life is itself the source of all value and that nothing exists outside of life. The development of this valuation of life depends on the dominance of capitalism, an economic system that passes itself off as identical to the structure of natural life . 8

Counterhegemonic action/Claims to individual agencyCounterhegemonic theorization of agency obfuscates the centrality of class to agency – the only historical agent is the wage-laborer, any other focus masquerades historical agency Ebert, Professor of Critical and Cultural Theory, Marxist Theory, Feminist Critique, Globalization Theory at State University of New York at Albany, 05 (Teresa L, Science & Society 69.1 (Jan 2005): 33-55 “Rematerializing Feminism” proquest accessed 7/22/15)//JH @ DDI

Any mobilization of counterhegemonic agency requires that one first theorize "agency" itself. I think

there is a tendency in contemporary cultural theory to theorize agency in a rather idealist frame that, in a curious way, is then located in the specificity of situational actions. In other words, contemporary cultural theory argues that all effective actions have a strong local dimension - at times it even claims that this locality is a form of

materiality. However, while localizing the subject, it theorizes the subject in an a historical - what I call

idealist - fashion. It somehow thinks that the subject, by the sheer power of its spontaneous experience, can undertake "human praxis." In fact, the basis of coalition is this idealist, but localized, subject: a subject that can enter into negotiation (discursive practice) with other subjects and in a collaborative mode bring about change.

Change here is always a code word for reform. This notion of agency - local, discursive, coalitionist - is broadly supported by identity politics. Let me say what I have said in a different way: contemporary cultural theory avoids the question of class - which is the only site of historical agency. It does so by first representing class as a dated view and then proposing, as an updated position, the subject of coalition located in identity politics. We thus end up with a series of subjects: a feminist subject, an African American, a Latino, and a Queer subject. These fragmented subjects - celebrated in Deleuze and Guattari and their followers as nomadic subjects - are all , in my view, masquerading as subjects of agency. I believe that a productive notion of agency has to be highly critique-al of poststructuralist theories of agency which, in the final analysis, substitute life-style practices (informed by identity politics) for class and re-cognize this class-as-life-style as the main axis of human praxis. Obviously at this point I will be critiqued for misrecognizing poststructuralist theory or will be considered to be indifferent to the plight of the marginalized or unaware that class is not the only site of historical agency - that gender, sexuality, race are equally important. I am not in any way rejecting sexuality, gender or race as sites of struggle, but I do not regard them to be

autonomous spaces. Sexuality becomes a marker of social difference only in a class society. Race is the historical site of racism under capitalism where the cheap labor of the slave, the colonixed and the ethnically/racially different immigrant is the mainstay of the rate of profit. In other words,

although race, gender and sexuality are indeed spaces of historical agency and sites of social struggle, they become so because of the divisions of labor and property relations (class). Therefore, in a world penetrated by capital the only historical agent is the other of capital - the wage-laborer. Any counterhegemonic agency or human praxis that does not center itself along this contradiction and this class antagonism will produce masquerades of historical agency that might make the upper-middle-class intellectual feel empowered and enabled but will leave the existing social practices intact. To be very clear, the route to social transformation does not pass through coalition - it is firmly centered in revolution.

Critical Race TheoryCritical race theory and intersectional approaches displace the essential focus on class’s determinant influence in relation to racial issues – class is the only structural antagonism determinant of practices sanctioning racial and gender oppressionSan Juan, Professor Emeritus of English/Comparative Literature/Ethnic Studies at Harvard, 2005 (Epifanio San Juan, Jr., Nature, Society, and Thought, Vol 3 Iss 18 2005 “From Race to Class Struggle: Marxism and Critical Race Theory” proquest; accessed 7/21/15)//JH @ DDI

Owing to the unrelenting ideological and political constraints of the Cold War, academic discourse on racism and ethnic/racial relations has erased the Marxian concept of class as an antagonistic relation ,

displacing it with neo-Weberian notions of status, life-style, and other cultural contingencies .

Despite the civil rights struggles of the sixties, methodological individualism and normative functionalism continue to prevail in the humanities and social sciences. The decline of militant trade unionism and the

attenuation of "third world" liberation struggles contributed to the erasure of class conflicts. With the introduction of structuralist and poststructuralist paradigms in the last three decades, the concept of class struggle has been effectively displaced by the concept of power and differential relations. From the

viewpoint of the humanities and cultural studies (fields in which I am somehow implicated), the advent of critical race theory (CRT) in the eighties was salutary if not anticlimactic. For the strategic foregrounding of racism and the race problematic (following feminism's assault on the Cold War stereotypes of economic determinism and class

reductionism synonymous with Marxism tout court in the previous decades), CRT served to remedy the inadequacies of the intersectionality paradigm of gender, class, and race. Unfortunately, with the neoconservative resurgence in the Reagan/Bush administrations and the collapse of "actually existing socialism" in the Soviet Union and arguably in

China, the deconstruction of bourgeois legal discourse and its attendant institutions will no longer suffice. This is so not only because of the reconfigured international situation and the emergence of neoliberal apologetics and

authoritarian decrees, but because of the accelerated class war manifest in ongoing deindustrialization, huge income gaps, unemployment, destruction of welfare-state guarantees, and disabling of traditional challenges to corporate rule. Challenge of the epochal divide The advent of critical race theory marked a rediscovery of the primacy of the social relations of production and the division of labor in late modern industrial society. A historicizing perspective was applied by Derrick Bell and elaborated by,

among others, Charles Mills in his theory of the United States as a "racial polity." However, a tendency to juxtapose "class" as a classifying category with "race" and "gender" in an intersectional framework has disabled the Marxian concept of class relation as a structural determinant. This has led to the reduction of the relational dynamic of class to an economistic factor of identity , even though critical

race theory attacks capitalist relations of production and its legal ideology as the ground for racist practices and institutions. The intersectionality approach (where race, class, and gender function as equally salient variables) so

fashionable today substitutes a static nominalism for concrete class analysis. It displaces a Marxian with a Weberian organon of knowledge. As Gregory Meyerson notes, the "explanatory primacy of class analysis" is a theoretical requisite for understanding the structural determinants of race, gender, and class oppression (2003). Class as an antagonistic relation is, from a historical-materialist viewpoint, the only structural determinant of ideologies and practices sanctioning racial and gender oppression in capitalist society.

DeleuzeCapitalism has become Deleuzian by anticipating and coopting lines of flight. Be relying on a vanguard minority to oppose capitalism, Deleuze ignored that its nature is to feed off resistance.Vandenberghe, 8 (Frederic. Research professor in sociology at the Institute of Social and Political Studies (IESP, formerly known as IUPERJ), part of the State University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. "Deleuzian Capitalism." Philosophy & Social Criticism 34.8 (2008): 877-903. Web. 22 July 2015. <https://www.academia.edu/859731/Deleuzian_capitalism>.)TB

The machinic phylum that animates capitalism and flows through its unified body without organs is money . Money is always in flux and never rests. It is, as Simmel says in his Philosophy of Money, the objectivation of economic circulation in a symbol without substance that represents all possible goods and that, by substituting itself for them, speeds up the circulation of goods. Flowing through the subsystems of society, invading them from underneath, vivifying them from within, money is the bloodthat flows through the veins of capitalism and unifies the subsystems into the single market of the integrated world system of the world economy(Braudel’s économie-monde ). Marx famously likened capital to a vampire.‘Capital is dead labour which, like a vampire, only becomes alive by sucking out living labour , and the more it sucks, the more it is lively’ (Marx, 1968: 247). Marx had obviously understood the internal connec-tion between labour and capital when he predicted its enlarged repro-duction on a global scale, but fixed as he was on the category of work, he could not foresee that production would become post-industrial andthat capital could exist and reproduce itself without labour (Vanden-berghe, 2002). But capitalism is inventive and productive, and to capi-talize, it progressively leaves the factory and invades, like a parasite, allspheres of life and the life-world itself. At the end, it ends up, as we shall see, producing and consuming life itself. The basic principle of rhizomatic sociology is that society is always en fuite , always leaking and fleeing, and may be understood in terms of the manner in which it deals with its lignes de fuite , or lines of flight . There is always something that flees and escapes the system, something that is not controllable , or at least not yet controlled. With their machinic analysis of becoming, D eleuze and G uattari want to encourage leakages and ‘cause a run off – faire fuire – as when you drill a hole in the pipeor open up the abscess’ (Guattari, 1977: 120; Deleuze and Guattari,1980: 249; Deleuze, 1990: 32). The intention is obviously anti-systemic – draining the system, digging holes, continuing the work of the old mole. Yet, today, the capitalistic system itself thrives on anti-systematicity ,‘artificial negativity’ (Adorno), or ‘repetition and difference’ (Deleuze). It feeds, as it were, on its own problems and in the process it changesitself and mutates. The ‘repetition of the same’ eventually leads to ‘differ-ence’, which is tantamount to saying that the survival of capitalism means ‘continuity with difference’. Capitalism explores and anticipates the de-territorializing lines of flight to capture them from without , enter into symbiosis with them, and redirect them from within, like a parasite , towards its own ends. Capitalism is inventive; its creativity knows nolimits – ‘it is of the viral type’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980: 580). D eleuze and G uattari put their anti-capitalist hopes in the guerrilla tactics of the schizoid minority that refuses to play the game (Marcuse’s nicht mitmachen ) of the self-content majority. Although they know that the squirms of the dispersed minority accompany the war machine of the entrepreneurial companies like their ‘supplement’, although they realize that capitalism advances like a war machine that feeds on the lines of flight and indicated that capitalism knows no internal limits, they nevertheless believed that capitalism would find its logical conclusion in the schizophrenic production of a free flow of desire: ‘Schizophrenia isthe external limit of capitalism itself’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1972: 292).What they apparently meant by that mad statement is that the final crisis of capitalism would eventually be generated not by the regulation or domestication of capitalism but by the complete commodification of the desiring machines that we are. Only by accelerating the decadence of the present system, only through some kind of self-commodification ina consumerist potlatch, would the capitalist system be beaten by its own game: Which is the revolutionary path, if there’s one? To withdraw from the worldmarket . . . in a curious renewal of the ‘economic solut ion’ of the fascis ts? Or might it go in the opposite direction? To go still further in the movementof the market, of decoding and territorialisation? ... Not withdraw from theprocess, but going further, ‘accelerating the process’, as Nietzsche said. As amatter of fact, we ain’t seen nothing yet. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1972: 285) 1 A quarter of a century later, the process of accumulation has accelerated to the point that capitalism itself has become Deleuzian in form, in styleand in content . This junction is not accidental. As usual, an ironic and profoundly perverse relationship exists between the romantic ethic and the spirit of capitalism (Campbell, 1987: 202–27). Needless to say that I am not claiming that Deleuze’s libertarian critique of capitalism was anti-critical or phoney from the start and that Deleuze is somehow the Giddens of the 1970s: a neo-liberal disguised as a libertarian, or Thatcher on LSD. What I am claiming is, rather, that capitalism has progressively integrated the critique of capitalism into its mode of functioning, with the result that capitalism appears stronger than ever , whereas the critiqueof capitalism seems rather disarmed.

Fluidity is something cap relies on. Reading history as fluid ignores the concrete nature of production.

Essentialism (probably won’t need this one but who knows, this can be used as an answer to a criticism of a focus on class)

Essentialism/Anti-essentialism reifies micropolitical failure and severs the relation between the global and the local – this blurs the lines of class and fractures solidarity Ebert, Professor of Critical and Cultural Theory, Marxist Theory, Feminist Critique, Globalization Theory at State University of New York at Albany, 05 (Teresa L, Science & Society 69.1 (Jan 2005): 33-55 “Rematerializing Feminism” proquest accessed 7/22/15)//JH @ DDI

The move to put essentialism and anti-essentialism at the center of contemporary cultural theory is similar to the move that I described in my discussion of ideology. It is a move to translate social struggle and its materialist understanding into epistemology. Gayatri Spivak's objection is not so much an objection to whether one should, according to Laclau and Mouffe, be always anti-essentialist as it is an objection to the very logic of such a

position. To translate social struggle - which is always over surplus labor - into epistemology is to reiterate a Hegelian move, at the core of which is the explanation of history by ideas rather than by labor. Therefore, any materialist theory that insists on the primacy of labor over ideas, the primacy of materiality over spectrality, is bound to be seen by postmodern theory as essentialist. To be essentialist it seems, therefore, becomes necessary if one believes that a cultural theory must be rooted, in the final instance, in making sense of human labor. I am, of

course, not saying that cultural theory should end here. What I am saying is that cultural theory must always attend to this fundamental human practice, which is the practice of transforming the world through labor. Cultural theory accounts for the way this practice is mediated through innumerable cultural series. To insist that such an accounting should always already be anti-essentialist - that is, to always only deal with specific situationalist practices - is to reify micropolitics and, as I have already described, to cut off the relation between micropolitics and its underlying global logic of production. To put it another way, the postmodern debate on essentialism/anti-essentialism is a debate that eventually aims at severing the relation between the local and the global by positing the global as an essentialist abstraction. This blurs class lines and puts in place of class itself a series of fragmented, seemingly autonomous identities (race, gender, sexuality) - it marginalizes human solidarity, which is based on collective labor practices.

FeminismFeminist theories footnote transformative politics by displacing the focus on class – difference is always determined by classEbert, Professor of Critical and Cultural Theory, Marxist Theory, Feminist Critique, Globalization Theory at State University of New York at Albany, 05 (Teresa L, Science & Society 69.1 (Jan 2005): 33-55 “Rematerializing Feminism” proquest accessed 7/22/15)//JH @ DDI

Feminism after the “post” has become in theory and practice largely indifferent to material practices under capitalism - such as labor, which shapes the social structures of daily life - and has fetishized difference. It has, in other words, erased the question of "exploitation," diffusing knowledge of the root conditions of women's realities into a plurality of particularities of "oppressions." Feminism has embraced the cultural turn - the reification of culture as an autonomous zone of signifying practices - and put aside a transformative politics. The revival of a new feminism thus requires clearing out the undergrowth of bourgeois ideology that has limited the terms by which feminism understands the condition of women. A new (Red) Feminism, in short, is not only concerned with the "woman question," it is even more about the "other" questions that construct the "woman question": the issues of class and labor constituting the very conditions of knowing - and changing - the root realities of global capitalism. The present text is grounded in the conviction that

canonical feminist understandings of gender and sexuality institutionalized by "post" theories (as in

poststructuralism, postcolonialism, postmodernism, postmarxism) are - after one allows for all their local differences and family

quarrels (e.g., Benhabib, et al., 1995; Butler, et al., 2000) - strategies for bypassing questions of labor (as in the labor theory of value) and capital (the social relation grounded in turning the labor power of the other into profit) and instead dwell on matters of cultural differences (as in lifestyles). Reclaiming a materialist knowledge, I contest the cultural theory grounding canonical feminism. Specifically, I argue that language - "discourse" in its social circulations - "is practical consciousness" (Marx and Engels, German Ideology) and that culture, far from being autonomous, is always and ultimately a social

articulation of the material relations of production. Canonical feminism in all its forms localizes gender and sexuality in the name

of honoring their differences and the specificities of their oppression. In doing so, it isolates them from history and reduces them to "events" in performativities, thus cleansing them of labor . For Red Feminism, the local, the specific and the singular, namely the "concrete," is always an "imagined concrete" and the result of "many determinations and relations" that "all form the members of a totality, distinctions within a unity. Production (labor relations) predominates not only over itself . . . but over the other moments as well" (Marx, Grundrisse). Going against the grain of the canonical theories and instead of making woman "singular," I situate gender and sexuality in the world historical processes of labor and capital. My analysis of gender and sexuality will, predictably enough, be rejected by mainstream feminism as too removed, too abstract, too theoretical and, therefore, a form of exclusion of women as difference. I do not deny difference. I simply do not see difference as autonomous

and immanent. Rather, I understand difference as always and ultimately determined by class difference - that is, by relations of property.

“the gaze”Capitalism creates the illusion of neutrality within the visible field – capitalism will always coopt “the gaze’s” distortion of this objective reality McGowan teaches theory and film at the University of Vermont, 2013 (Todd, Discourse Volume 35, Number 1, Winter 2013 “The Capitalist Gaze” project muse; accessed 7/20/15)//JH@DDI

Although the structure of capitalism is not homologous with the structure of the visual field, thinking about capitalism in terms of the gaze follows from the apparent neutrality that both structures share. When we look at a visual field, it appears not as a field constructed around our desire but rather as a field already there to be seen. No background lights fall from the sky as in Peter Weir’s The

Truman Show (1998) in order to reveal to us that our look has informed what is visible to us. Visual reality successfully presents itself as a background against which and in which we desire rather than as a field thoroughly colored by our desire. In the same way, when we confront capitalism, it appears as a neutral economic system that simply exists in the absence of any political intervention. Capitalism passes itself off as the economic system given by being itself, just as the visual field does. It passes itself off as existing. The traumatic encounter with the gaze, the moment of confronting one’s own desire as a distortion of the world in which [End Page 17] one exists, renders this world unnatural and foreign. The world ceases to be a habitual space in which one can dwell and becomes a groundless field based solely on the desire of the subjects who exist within it. The gaze exposes the world itself as nothing but a presupposition of the desiring subject, a structure lacking any independent existence or substantive weight. The world is not the background in which we desire but emerges only through the force of desire. This is what Hegel means when he says in the Phenomenology of Spirit that “everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as

Subject.”19 What appears as substantial and preexisting subjectivity depends for its substantiality on the subject’s role in its constitution. This is not to say that there is no objective material reality, that everything

exists only in an ideal realm, but rather that this objective reality is inextricable from a subjective distortion, a gaze, that divides it from itself and on which it depends. The dependence of objectivity on this

subjective distortion makes the world unheimlich, which is why we seek refuge from the gaze. When the crisis occurs, capital ceases to flow smoothly, and the money necessary to buy commodities and restart this flow of capital remains dormant. The crisis causes capital to lose its productivity, and even Rand’s producers cannot rediscover it. We see that capitalism does not work like a neutral background but distorts social relations. The failure of capital itself to resolve the crisis—its reliance on state

intervention—exposes its unnaturalness and the decision that permits its survival. The crisis confronts us with the possibility that capitalism might fail, with evidence that it exists only through our efforts to bring it into being. The danger of the crisis for capitalism is not that it will bring about an economic catastrophe from which the system cannot recover but rather that it will expose the system’s nonexistence and thus create an opportunity for the encounter with the gaze. And this encounter would make possible another form of economic decision: an economic event.

Identity politics (race, feminism, queer, other poststructuralist social theory)

Limiting theorization to the level of identity displaces the necessary focus on class as the structural antagonism determinant of factors of identity Ebert, Professor of Critical and Cultural Theory, Marxist Theory, Feminist Critique, Globalization Theory at State University of New York at Albany, 05 (Teresa L, Science & Society 69.1 (Jan 2005): 33-55 “Rematerializing Feminism” proquest accessed 7/22/15)//JH @ DDI

Identity politics is the latest formation of the subject under capitalism. It mostly provides the managerial class (as it has come to be called in bourgeois sociology) with a way of understanding itself that completely bypasses class - or if it

runs into class, it understands class in a neo-Weberian sense as life-chances in relation to the market. The managerial class (which is really a class fraction) deploys identity politics to define itself in an idealist fashion that does not put pressure on or threaten the existing social relations of labor. Even when the question of labor cannot be avoided, for example, in discussions of feminism and anti-racist struggles - to take two prominent forms of identity politics - labor becomes mostly a question of jobs and employment, that is to say, of income (g.g., "equal pay"). But as Marxist theory has demonstrated, income, in and of itself, does not determine the relation of the subject of labor to the conflictual structures of labor. Income, to be more precise, can be from profit or from "wages." It makes a radical difference whether the income is from profit (that is to say, the result of the

surplus labor of the other) or from wages (the effect of selling one's labor power). When the question of labor has been dealt with in feminism or anti-racism, it has for the most part, been reduced to how to increase the income of the subject - even the issue of domestic labor has been largely understood in terms of "unpaid

labor" and income for housework. Rarely have feminism or anti-racism struggled against the existing labor relations based on the hegemony of capital. The few exceptions to this have been those historical materialist feminists and anti-racists who have engaged the historical constructions of gender, race and sexuality through the division of labor.

But this work, especially in the feminism of the 1970s and 80s, was largely cut off by the hegemonic rise of poststructuralism and identity politics. In fact, identity politics is the space in which the subject acquires a place in social relations through bypassing the fundamental issues involved in labor -

the issues, in short, of one's place in relation to the ownership of the means of production. "Difference" is acquired in identity politics by essentially culturalizing the social divisions of labor. The relation between race, class and gender is obviously a contested one. One arrives at radically different social theories by the way one relates these terms to each other. As a way of grasping this complex linking and interlinking, I will risk some simplification by saying there are two modes of understanding these complex relations. The poststructuralist mode grants autonomy or at least semiautonomy to each of these categories. In this view race, gender and sexuality have their own immanent logic, which is untranslatable into any other logic. And the relation that they have with each other, to use Althusser's term, is "overdetermined." In other words, according to this view, one cannot arrive at a knowledge of sexuality through race, or understand gender through class, etc., without excessive violence being done to the separate terms. Such a theory has spawned numerous books dealing with the internal logic and immanent strategies by which sexuality or race or gender are articulated. Another way of putting this question is that in this paradigm the main issue is how gender works, how race works; this, in effect, makes the macrologic of these relations secondary - the question why gender works

the way it does is usually quite marginal. The other theory, historical materialism, supercedes this theory of autonomy and argues for relating the several categories to each other, not by separate and multiple logics of race, gender and sexuality, etc. but through the single, inclusive logic of wage-labor and capital. Most feminists, anti-racists and queer theorists have been quick to dismiss materialist theory by saying that the logic of labor cannot explain desire in sexuality, oppression in racism and inequality in gender relations. However, gender, sexuality, and race become social differences only when they become part of the social division of labor, and each has a long and differentiated history as part of the social division of labor and thus as a significant social

difference. Racism, contrary to Foucauldian theory, is not simply a matter of asymmetrical power relations; nor is gender, or sexuality. Homophobia is not simply oppression - the exercise of power by

heterosexuals over homosexuals. Gay bashing is the articulation of a violence, that is to say, the effect of power, but it cannot be understood in terms of power without inquiring into the genealogy of power . Contrary to

poststructuralist theory, power is not the effect of discourse nor is it simply the immanent condition of all relations. Power is the social and political manifestation of the ownership of the means of production. In other words, power is always generated at the point of production, and its effects should also be examined in relation to the relations of production. Racism, in other words, is not simply oppression (the exercise of power by whites over blacks); sexism is not simply oppression (the exercise of power by men over women). It is true that racism, sexism, and

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

poststructuralist theory of the social as the site of multi-oppression practices will not lead to a productive understanding of relations among class, gender, race and sexuality. The more productive way is to place labor relations and their consequences - property relations - at the center of this complex network and understand gender, sexuality, and race as produced by the existing division of labor: that is, as contradictions produced by the fundamental antagonism under capitalism - the antagonism of wage-labor and capital.

MicropoliticsAdvanced capitalism deploys micropolitics to restrict the subject ability to question the range of its exploitationEbert, Professor of Critical and Cultural Theory, Marxist Theory, Feminist Critique, Globalization Theory at State University of New York at Albany, 05 (Teresa L, Science & Society 69.1 (Jan 2005): 33-55 “Rematerializing Feminism” proquest accessed 7/22/15)//JH @ DDI

The emergence of micropolitics marks the impact of the globalization of capitalist production and the way that the dimensions of this objective reality have become less and less graspable by a subject who, through the working of ideology, has been remapped as the subject of desire. The

subject of desire is, by its very formation, a local and localist subject. This desiring subject grasps the world through its identity and furthermore constructs this identity through the satisfactions that it acquires in its consuming relations to the world around it. Micropolitics is the politics of consumption , and consumption is always a matter of localities. Micropolitics does not have an inverse relation to universal objective reality, but rather is complementary to it: it preoccupies the subject with the here and now and, in doing so, distracts its attention from the all

encompassing objective reality that in fact determines the here and now. Advanced capitalism deploys micropolitics to restrict the access of the subject to the dynamics of traveling capital and its expanding range of exploitation. It is of course ironic that micropolitics is seen as enabling politics - a politics that attends to the connections and relations of the subject with its immediate conditions and serves as the basis for coalition and other

local practices. In fact, micropolitics has become the logic of activism in the new social movements. To say what I have said in a different way: micropolitics is the politics of bypassing class and putting in its place lifestyle and consumption. It is a politics that erases any examination of the structures of exploitation, substituting instead ethnographical studies of the behavior of the subject in its multiple consuming relations.

Oppression FocusTheir myopic focus on a particular manifestation of oppression does not provide a specific explanation for the broader linking of struggles – inhibits the possibility for transformative politics.Heideman 12 [Paul M. Heideman Rutgers University, Newark, [email protected] Historical Materialism Volume 20, Issue 2, pages 210- 221 Beyond Black and White: Transforming African-American Politics, Manning Marable, Second Edition, London: Verso, 2009; Date Accessed 7/27/15, JL @ DDI]

This theorisation of transformative politics is further weakened by its failure to specify any agency that could bring it about. Marable comes close to specifying such an agency with his repeated call to look to ‘the most oppressed sectors of our society’ for a vision of social transformation (pp. xv, 80, 310). Such a call is clearly inadequate. It simply does not follow that the most oppressed sectors of society are best positioned to carry out its most thorough remaking. The homeless, for example, are certainly among the most oppressed groups in the United States (especially in the age of the destruction of free public space and the social safety-net), yet this position does not automatically impart the most radical dynamics to their struggle. Indeed, struggles for squatters’ rights and shelters very rarely break out of localised confrontations with municipal authorities. 8 Additionally, Marable offers no account of how the disparate struggles of the oppressed (for example, the fight against anti-immigrant racism and the fight for the rights of the disabled) are to be unified, beyond the assertion that every confrontation with inequality automatically is linked to every other. Such an inadequate account of social-movement agency deeply weakens whatever strengths Marable’s theory of transformative politics may possess.

Performance

The 1AC’s performance is complicit with capital – their attempt to re-make politics accepts the neoliberal terrain and ideology as a given.Martin and Brown 13 [Gregory Martin1, Tony Brown2 Out of the box: Making space for everyday critical pedagogies Article first published online: 26 APR 2013 © Canadian Association of Geographers / L'Association canadienne des géographes Issue The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadien The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadien Special Issue: Critical Geographies of Education Volume 57, Issue 3, pages 381–388, Autumn / automne 2013, Date Accessed 7/27/15, JL @ DDI]

Neoliberalism is not only maintained through coercion: the imposition of governance structures either externally or internally (Slaughter and Rhoades 2004). It is also achieved through pragmatic acquiescence or even consent that is the effect of ideologies which interpellate or “hail” forth the subject into a particular set of performative relations (Althusser 1971, 174). Often characterized as unquestionable and inevitable, a growing area of scholarship provides compelling insights into how neoliberal reforms are “lived ‘on the ground’” as academics negotiate multiple and contradictory choices (Peterson 2006, 2). In attempting to re-make politics from the ground-up, Newman (2006, 62) quotes Turner (1980, 8) when he observes that while individuals have the power to make choices, they are often, “sucked into the future.” In fulfilling the performative futures laid out for us, Hodkinson (2009, 463) argues “it is important to acknowledge that in some way we are all complicit in these processes as neoliberalism's willing or unwilling executioners.” Yet, how can educators challenge the ubiquitous demands that constitute the means by which both the “ideological and affective regimes” of neoliberalism are deployed and reproduced as a world system (Giroux 2004, 494)?

Postmodernism TheoryPostmodernist theory substitutes regressive discursive debate for material analysis – only a focus on relations to labor accurately explains history Ebert, Professor of Critical and Cultural Theory, Marxist Theory, Feminist Critique, Globalization Theory at State University of New York at Albany, 05 (Teresa L, Science & Society 69.1 (Jan 2005): 33-55 “Rematerializing Feminism” proquest accessed 7/22/15)//JH @ DDI

Concepts of modernism/postmodernism and modernity/postmodernity are above all spaces of contradiction: they are concepts that have been used to come to terms with the history and shifts in capitalism. It seems to me that as long as we think about capitalism in these terms, we will continue to substitute what is basically a discursive debate for a materialist analysis. Modernity,

in other words, is the ensemble of all the conceptual strategies - from science to painting to music to sociology to

psychoanalysis - used by the modernist subject to locate itself in the contradictions between wage-labor and capital. There are no ("modernist") styles in isolation from the historical unfolding of wage-labor and capital - from

laissez faire capitalism to monopoly capitalism. To separate modernism and modernity, or for that matter postmodernism and postmodernity, may give the illusion of conceptual clarification and historical location, but it is eventually a species of what Marx and Engels in the German Ideology called "combating solely the phrases of this world" (1976, 36) - that is, a politics of phrases. Postmodernity's various forms - in jameson, in Lyotard, in Butler, in Zizek - are all continuations of the attempt to understand capitalism; all of them are based on what I call the "hearsay" that capitalism has changed: that there has been a fundamental structural change, a "break" in capitalism demanding a new set of conceptual categories to understand the impact of capitalism on culture and society. This view - that a fundamental structural change in capitalism requires us to abandon modernism/modernity - is a recurring theme even for writers like Habermas, who puts a

second modernity in place of postmodernity. I believe that the question is neither one of style nor of culture, because both style and culture are eventually the outcome of what I have already designated as the primary contradiction of capitalism: the conflict of wage-labor and capital. It seems to me that contemporary cultural theory would be able to supercede the well-worn categories of modernity/postmodernity, modernism/

postmodernism and their rehearsal in Habermas, Eagleton, Jameson, and Butler by returning to the main question. And the main question is capitalism. In place of positing - on the basis of very superlicial evidence, such as changes in management style, or increases in the number of people who speculate on the stock market, or the emergence of cybertechnologies - that capitalism has changed, it is necessary to return to the basic issue: in what way has capitalism changed? Has the capitalism of "modernity" really been transformed into another capitalism (that of postmodernity)? Or does capitalism remain the same regime of exploitation - in which capitalists

extract surplus labor from the wage earner? What has changed is not this fundamental factor of property relations but the way that exploitation is articulated. It is not exploitation that has been transformed - and this is the only index of the structure of change - but rather the mode of exploitation has changed. If this simple "fact" is recognized, then

the whole debate about modemity/postmodernity, modernism/ postmodernism turns out to be simply a politics of phrases. Using the paradigms of modernity and postmodernity to come to terms with what is essentially the unfolding history of capitalism is not the most effective conceptualization of the issues. To say, for example, that China is modem or postmodern or on the "margins of modernity and postmodernity" is to translate the emerging history of China - with all its immense complexity as well as its complex relations with Eurupe and the rest of Asia - into a hegemonic and imperialist paradigm. To define China in terms of modernity/postmodernity is to marginalize the relations within China and

between China and the rest of Asia, if not the rest of the world. In dealing with the question of history and the place of the human in history, the determining factor should not be modernity/ postmodernity but rather what cuts through the modern and post-modern and places the human in its densely

layered and complex history. This relationship - of the human history - is the relation of labor. The question of the situationality of China, to my mind, is much more effectively answered not by reference to modernity/postmodernity, west or east - these are all annotations of history rather than examinations of it - but by engaging the modalities of labor in China. China is not marginal but exemplary in its entanglement with the history of labor, and it is only through such an entanglement that one can look at its relation to the West. China's history of labor obviously has some resemblance to the history of labor in other parts of the

world, including Europe, but at the same time it has its own temporality - its own unevenness. In a sense, I am arguing for delocalizing current theories of history and for building a global history: a history that is the history of modes of labor (modes of production), and, as such, labor is the global logic of history regardless of the specificity of the site in which this logic unfolds. I take as my text here Marx's writing on India, where he argues for such a global history and refuses the usual liberal pieties about the local and the particular. Liberal pieties mystify the movement of human labor and its formation in capitalism by mis-taking capitalism and Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism is merely a particular form of capitalist imperialism and should be recognized as such.

Postmodern concepts of ideology represent an erasure of materialism and a marginalization of labor – postmodern theorization of ideology and deconstruction only serve to relegitimate the capitalist systemEbert, Professor of Critical and Cultural Theory, Marxist Theory, Feminist Critique, Globalization Theory at State University of New York at Albany, 05 (Teresa L, Science & Society 69.1 (Jan 2005): 33-55 “Rematerializing Feminism” proquest accessed 7/22/15)//JH @ DDI

The historical materialist concept of ideology seeks to account for the representations of this exchange as an equal and fair exchange. This, I want to emphasize, is the core of the materialist theory of ideology: how the relation between wage-labor and capital is represented as free and equal when it is anything but (it is "a tanning"). False consciousness (the bête noir of postmodern theories of ideology) is a "struggle concept" (to adopt Maria Mies' term) by which a materialist understanding marks the consciousness that regards this exchange to be an exchange among equals and conducted in freedom. It is a false consciousness, because it is seen as unfettered and uncoerced when, in fact, as Marx himself argues, this exchange takes place under "the silent compulsion of economic relations" - a compulsion that "sets

the seal on the domination of the capitalist over the worker" (Marx, 1977, 899). False consciousness is the consciousness that misrecognizes the compulsion of economic relations as free and therefore accepts the exchange of wages for labor-power as equal. Even a quick look at the post-Althusserian theories of

ideology will make clear that, far from being groundbreaking theories, the postmodern notion of ideology is simply an erasure of the materialist theory of ideology and a marginalization of the role of labor. It ends up essentially legitimizing the relation between wage-labor and capital. To say, as postmodern theories

of ideology say over and over again, that there is no space outside ideology is to say that it is impossible to mark any relation as a relation of inequality. Because to say that the exchange of wages for labor-power is unequal,

according to postmodern theory, is to set up a "true" (i.e., "equal") relation. This is "wrong," according to postmodern theory, because it establishes a binary in which a truthful relation masters a false relation. But this is exactly what happens under capitalism. The relation between wagelabor and capital is an unequal relation, and to simply say that drawing attention to its inequality is to fall into binaries is to substitute bourgeois

epistemology for social justice. Ideology is not epistemology: to try to make ideology part of epistemology and then deconstruct it through a maneuver in which right and wrong, correct and incorrect, truthful and untruthful are pitted against each other is to simply relegitimate capitalist relations. The crisis we are witnessing now in the theory of ideology is the crisis of this legitimization of an unjust relation in the discourses of intellectuals who, in their formal theories, declare themselves to be anti-capitalist and friends of the people.

A reliance on postmodern theories makes any meaningful social change impossible – this reifies systems of exploitation and oppression under capitalism Cole, School of Education, University of Brighton, 2003 (Mike Cole, British Journal of Sociology of Education, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Sep., 2003), pp. 487-500 “Might It Be in the Practice That It Fails to Succeed? A Marxist Critique of Claims for Postmodernism and Poststructuralism as Forces for Social Change and Social Justice” JSTOR; accessed 7/22/15)//JH @DDI

Whereas for Marxists the possibility of postmodernism leading to social change is a non sequitur, for Atkinson postmodernism is 'an inevitable agent for change' in that: it challenges the educator, the researcher, the social activist or the politician not only to deconstruct the certainties around which they might see as standing in need of change, but also to deconstruct their own certainties as to why they hold this view. (2002, p. 75) This sounds fine, but what do these constituencies actually do to effect meaningful societal change once their views have been challenged? What is constructed after the

deconstruction process? Atkinson provides no answer. Nor does Patti Lather (nor, as we shall see, does Judith Baxter). This is because neither postmodernism nor poststructuralism is capable of providing an answer (Hill,

2001, 2003; Rikowski, 2002, pp. 20-25). Deconstruction 'seeks to do justice to all positions ... by giving them the chance to be justified, to speak originarily for themselves and be chosen rather that enforced' (Zavarzadeh, 2002, p. 8). Indeed, for

Derrida (1990), 'deconstruction is justice' (cited in Zavarzadeh, 2002, p. 8; emphasis added). Thus, once the deconstruction process has started, justice is already apparent and there is no discernible direction in which to head. In declaring on the first page of the Preface of her book Getting Smart: Feminist Research and Pedagogy With/In the Postmodern, her 'longtime interest in how to turn critical thought into emancipatory action' (Lather, 1991, p. xv), Lather is, in fact,

wasting her time. After more than 200 pages of text, in which indications are made of the need for emancipatory research praxis, in which proclamations are made of how the goals of research should be to understand

the maldistribution of power and resources in society, with a view to societal change, we are left wondering how all this is to come about. Postmodernism cannot provide strategies to achieve a different social order and hence, in buttressing capitalist exploitation, it is essentially reactionary . This is

precisely what Marxists (and others) mean by the assertion that postmodernism serves to disempower the oppressed [7] According to Atkinson, postmodernism 'does not have, and could not have, a "single" project for social justice' (2002, p. 75). Socialism then, if not social change, is thus ruled out in a stroke [8]. Atkinson then rehearses the familiar postmodern position on multiple projects (2002, p. 75). Despite Atkinson's claims that postmodernism views 'the local as the product of the global and vice versa' and that postmodernism should not be interpreted as limiting its scope of enquiry to the local (2002, p. 81), since postmodernism rejects grand metanarratives and since it rejects universal struggle, it can by definition concentrate only on the

local. Localised struggle can, of course, be liberating for individuals and certain selected small groups, but postmodernism cannot set out any viable mass strategy or programme for an emancipated future. The importance of local as well as national and international struggle is recognised by Marxists, but the postmodern rejection of mass struggle ultimately plays into the hands of those whose interests lie in the maintenance of national and global systems of exploitation and oppression.

Furthermore, 'as regards aims, the concern with autonomy, in terms of organisation', postmodernism comprises 'a tendency towards network forms, and, in terms of mentality, a tendency towards self-limitation' (Pieterse, 1992). While networking can aid in the promotion of solidarity, and in mass petitions, for example (Atkinson, 2001), it cannot replace mass action, in the sense, for example, of a general or major strike; or a significant demonstration or

uprising that forces social change. Indeed, the postmodern depiction of mass action as totalitarian negates/renders illicit such action.

ImpactsCapitalism is the structural totality that underlies all forms of oppression – the erosion of justice and values creates disparities that result in crime, disposability, incarceration, authoritarianism, excessive surveillance, exclusion, marginalization, and social death Giroux, Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson, University, 2014 (Henry A. Giroux,Tikkun, Volume 29, Number 3, Summer 2014, Duke University Press “Neoliberalism’s War Against the Radical Imagination” project muse; accessed 7/20/15)//JH @ DDI










A regime of repression, corruption, and dispossession has become the organizing principle of society in which an ironic doubling takes place. Corporate bankers and powerbrokers trade with

terrorists, bankrupt the economy, and commit all manner of crimes that affect millions, yet they go free. Meanwhile, across the United States, citizens are being criminalized for all sorts of behaviors ranging from dress code infractions in public schools to peaceful demonstrations in public parks. As Michelle Alexander has thoroughly documented in her

book The New Jim Crow, young men and women of color are being jailed in record numbers for nonviolent offenses, underscoring how justice is on the side of the rich, wealthy, and powerful. And when the wealthy are actually convicted of crimes, they are rarely sent to prison, even though millions languish under a correctional system aimed at punishing immigrants, low-income whites, and poor minorities. An egregious example of how the justice system works in favor of the rich was recently on full display in Texas. Instead of being sent to prison, Ethan Couch, a wealthy teen who killed four people while driving inebriated, was given ten years of probation and ordered by the judge to attend a rehabilitation facility paid for by his parents. (His parents had previously offered to pay for an expensive rehabilitation facility that costs $450,000 a year.) The defense argued that he had “affluenza,” a “disease” that afflicts children of privilege who are allegedly never given the opportunity to learn how to be responsible. In other words, irresponsibility is now an acceptable hallmark of having wealth, enabling the rich actually to kill people

and escape the reach of justice. Under such circumstances, “justice” becomes synonymous with privilege, as wealth and power dictate who benefits and who doesn’t by a system of law that enshrines lawlessness. In addition, moral and political outrage is no longer animated by the fearful consequences of an








Alts

Cap Alts vs K affs

Historical Materialism (race specific)The alternative is a historical materialist analysis of the relationship between race and class – this is the only starting point for effective solvency San Juan, Professor Emeritus of English/Comparative Literature/Ethnic Studies at Harvard, 2005 (Epifanio San Juan, Jr., Nature, Society, and Thought, Vol 3 Iss 18 2005 “From Race to Class Struggle: Marxism and Critical Race Theory” proquest; accessed 7/21/15)//JH @ DDI

Following the lead of Anderson and others, I would reaffirm the need to situate racism in late-capitalist society within the process of class rule and labor exploitation to grasp the dynamics of racial exclusion and subordination. Beyond the mode of production, the antagonistic relations between the capitalist class and the working class are articulated with the state and its complex bureaucratic and juridical mechanisms, multiplying cultural and political differentiations that affect the attitudes, sentiments, and actual behavior of groups. A critique of ideologies of racism and sexism operating in the arena of class antagonism becomes crucial in the effort to dismantle their efficacy. Moreover, as Bensaid observes in Marx for Our Times (2002), "the relationship between social structure and political struggle is mediated by the relations of dependence and domination between nations at the international level." Linear

functionalism yields to the dialectical analysis of concrete mediations. Viewed historically, the phenomenon of migrant labor, in particular Filipina domestics in North America and elsewhere, demonstrates how racial and gender characteristics become functional and discursively valorized when they are inserted into the dialectic of abstract and concrete labor, of use value and exchange value, in the production of commodities--in this case, domestic labor as a commodity. Contrary to any attempts to legitimate the use of the underpaid

services of women of color from the South, the racializing and gendering discourse of global capitalism can only be adequately grasped as the mode through which extraction of surplus value, wage differentiation, and control and representation of bodies are all negotiated. A study of racist practices and institutions, divorced from the underlying determinant structure of capital accumulation and class rule allowing such practices and institutions to exercise their naturalizing force, can only perpetuate an abstract metaphysics of race and a discourse of power that would reinforce the continuing reification or commodification of human relations in everyday life . We cannot multiply static determinations in an atomistic manner and at the same time acquire the intelligible totality of knowledge that

we need for formulating strategies of radical social transformation. A first step in this project of renewing critical race theory is simple: begin with the concept of class as an antagonistic relation between labor and capital, and then proceed to analyze how the determinant of "race" is played out historically in the class-conflicted structure of capitalism and its political/ideological processes of class rule. It is of course important to maintain vigilance concerning the mystifying use of "race" and the practice of racialization in any location, whether in the privacy of the family, home, school, factory, or state institutions (court, prison, police station, legislature). Grace Chang (2000) has meticulously documented how people of color, exploited immigrants and refugees, have themselves used racist images and rhetoric in their role as "gatekeepers" to the racialized class system. Nevertheless, without framing all these within

the total picture of the crisis of capital and its globalized restructuring from the late seventies up to the present, and without understanding the continued domination of labor by capital globally, we cannot effectively counteract the racism that underwrites the relation of domination and subordination among nationalities, ethnic communities, and gender groups. The critique of an emergent authoritarian state and questionable policies sanctioned by the USA Patriot Act is urgently necessary. In doing so, naming the system and understanding its operations would be useful in discovering precisely that element of self-activity, of agency, that has supposedly been erased in totalizing metanarratives such as the "New World Order," the "New American Century" that will end ideology and history, and in revolutionary projects of achieving racial justice and equality. As the familiar quotation goes, we do make history--but not under circumstances of our choosing. So the question is, as always, "What alternatives do we have to carry out which goals at what time and place?" The goal of a classless communist society and strategies to attain it envisage the demise of racist ideology and practice

in their current forms. But progressive forces around the world are not agreed about this. For example, the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance-NGO Forum held in Durban, South Africa, from 31 August to 7 September, 2001 publicized the global problem of racism but was unable to formulate a consensus on how to solve it. Its final declaration highlighted the historic origin of racism in the slave trade, colonialism, and genocide, and it raised the possibility of reparations for its victims, but did not offer a concrete program of action (see Mann 2002). Because of its composition and the pervasive climate of reaction, the Forum could not endorse a radical approach that would focus on the elimination of the exploitation of labor (labor power as commodity) as a necessary first step. Given its limits, it could not espouse a need for a thoroughgoing change of the material basis of social production and reproduction--the latter involving the hegemonic rule of the propertied bloc in each society profiting from the unequal division of labor and the unequal distribution of social wealth--on which the institutional practices of racism (apartheid, discrimination, genocide) thrive. "Race is the modality in which class is lived," as

Stuart Hall remarks concerning post-1945 Britain (Solomos 1986, 103). Without political power in the hands of the democratic-popular masses under the leadership of the working class, the ideological machinery (laws, customs, religion, state bureaucracy) that legitimizes class domination, with its attendant racist practices, cannot be changed. What is required is a revolutionary process that mobilizes a broad constituency based on substantive equality and social justice as an essential part of the agenda to dissolve class structures. Any change in the ideas, beliefs, and norms would produce changes in the economic, political, and social institutions, which would in turn promote wide-ranging changes in social relations among all groups

and sectors. Within a historical-materialist framework, the starting point and end point for analyzing the relations between structures in any sociohistorical totality cannot be anything but the production and reproduction of material existence. The existence of any totality follows transformation rules whereby it is constantly being restructured into a new formation (Harvey 1973). These rules reflect the dialectical unfolding of

manifold contradictions constituting the internal relations of the totality. Within this conflicted, determinate totality, race cannot be reduced to class, nor can class be subsumed by race, since those concepts express different forms of social relations.

Critical PedagogyThe alternative is to reject the 1AC’s relation to capital – an endorsement of critical pedagogy strategies is key to crucial to address capitalism’s diverse modes of controlGiroux, Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson, University, 2014 (Henry A. Giroux,Tikkun, Volume 29, Number 3, Summer 2014, Duke University Press “Neoliberalism’s War Against the Radical Imagination” project muse; accessed 7/20/15)//JH @ DDI

The current crisis in public and higher education has made it alarmingly clear that educators, artists,

intellectuals, and youth need a new political and pedagogical language for addressing the changing contexts and issues facing a world in which capital draws upon an unprecedented convergence of resources—financial, cultural, political, economic, scientific, military, and technological—to exercise powerful and diverse forms of control. If educators and other cultural workers are to counter global capitalism’s increased ability to separate the traditional sphere of politics from the now-transnational reach of

power, it is crucial to develop educational approaches that reject the deliberate blurring of market liberties and civil liberties, a market economy and a market society. Nothing will change unless the Left and progressives take seriously the subjective underpinnings of neoliberal oppression. In

the current historical moment, politics must involve not only the struggle over power and economics, but also the struggle over particular modes of subjectivity and agency. Resisting the neoliberal assault on politics, education, and culture means developing forms of subjectivity capable of challenging casino capitalism and other antidemocratic forces, including the growing trend simply to

criminalize social problems such as homelessness. What is needed is a radical democratic project that provides the basis for imagining a life beyond the “dream world” of capitalism, beyond the socioeconomic institutions that produce ever-widening circles of misery, suffering, and immiseration. In opposition to the conservative assaults on critical thinking and the power of the imagination, it is crucial for educators, intellectuals, young people, artists, and others to resurrect the formative cultures necessary to challenge

the various threats being mobilized against the very ideas of justice and democracy, while also fighting for those public spheres, ideals, values, and policies that offer alternative modes of identity, social relations, and politics. At stake here is the educative nature of politics itself, and the development and protection of those institutions that make such a politics possible. In both conservative and progressive discourses today, education is often narrowed to the teaching of pre-specified subject matter and stripped-down skills that can be assessed through standardized testing. The administration of education is similarly confined to a set of corporate strategies rooted in

an approach that views schooling as merely a private act of consumption. In opposition to the instrumental reduction of education to an adjunct of corporate and neoliberal interests—which have no language for relating the self to public life, social responsibility, or the demands of citizenship — a critical approach to education illuminates the relationships among knowledge, authority, and power. Critical forms of pedagogy raise questions regarding who has control over the conditions for the production of knowledge. Is the production of knowledge and curricula in the hands of teachers, textbook

companies, corporate interests, the elite, or other forces? Central to the perspective informing critical pedagogy is the recognition that education is always implicated in power relations because it offers particular versions and visions of civic life, community, the future, and how we might construct representations of ourselves, others, and our physical and social environment. Critical pedagogy matters because it questions everything and complicates one’s relationship to oneself, others,

and the larger world. This unsettling process is what English professor Kristen Case has called “moments of classroom grace.” In her Chronicle of Higher Education article “The Other Public Humanities,” she writes, There is difficulty, discomfort, even fear in such moments, which involve confrontations with what we thought we knew, like why people have mortgages and what “things” are. These moments do not reflect a linear progress from ignorance to knowledge; instead they describe a step away from a complacent knowing into a new world in which, at least at first, everything is cloudy, nothing is quite clear. . . . We cannot be a democracy if this power to reimagine, doubt, and think critically is allowed to become a luxury commodity.

Radical Imagination (use against forms of pessimism arguments)The alternative is to embrace radical imagination that develops a discourse of both critique and possibility – this creates the agency and movements necessary to challenge capitalism Giroux, Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson, University, 2014 (Henry A. Giroux,Tikkun, Volume 29, Number 3, Summer 2014, Duke University Press “Neoliberalism’s War Against the Radical Imagination” project muse; accessed 7/20/15)//JH @ DDI

One of the most serious challenges facing teachers, artists, journalists, writers, youth, and other cultural workers is the challenge of developing a discourse of both critique and possibility. This means insisting that democracy begins to fail and political life becomes impoverished in the absence of vital public spheres such as higher education, where civic values, public scholarship, and social engagement allow for a more imaginative grasp of a future that takes seriously the demands of justice, equity, and civic courage. Democratic processes should always involve thinking about education—a kind of education that thrives on connecting equity to excellence, learning to ethics, and agency to the imperatives of social responsibility and the public good. Democracy, as Michael Lerner has argued in another context, needs a Marshall Plan in which funding is sufficient to make all levels of education free, while also providing enough social support to eliminate poverty, hunger,

inadequate health care, and the destruction of the environment. Democracy needs a politics that not just restores hope, but also envisions a different future—one in which the struggle for justice is never finished and the highest of values is caring for and being responsible to others. Neoliberalism is a toxin that is generating a class of predatory zombies who are producing what might be called dead zones of the imagination. These cannibalistic walking dead are waging a fierce battle against the possibility of a world in which the promise of justice and democracy is worth fighting for. We may live in the shadow of the authoritarian corporate state, but the future is still open. The time has come to develop a political language in which civic values and social responsibility—and the institutions, tactics, and long-term commitments that support them—become central to invigorating and fortifying a new era of civic engagement, a renewed sense of social agency, and an impassioned international social movement with the vision, organization, and set of strategies capable of challenging the neoliberal nightmare that now haunts the globe and empties out the meaning of politics and democracy.

Only the alt solves – radical imagination merges criticism and hope to construct a platform capable of opposing capitalism – engagement in educational sites such as debate is key Giroux, Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson, University, 2013 (Henry A. Giroux, symploke, Volume 21, Numbers 1-2, 2013, University of Nebraska Press “The Disimagination Machine and the Pathologies of Power” project muse; accessed 7/20/15)//JH @ DDI

Against the politics of disimagination, progressives, workers, educators, young people and others need to develop a new language of radical reform and create new public spheres that provide the pedagogical conditions for critical thought, dialogue, and thoughtful deliberation. At stake here

is a notion of pedagogy that both informs the mind and creates the conditions for modes of agency that are critical, informed, engaged, and socially responsible. The radical imagination can be nurtured around the merging of critique and hope, the capacity to connect private troubles with broader social considerations, and the production of alternative formative cultures that provide the precondition for political engagement and for energizing democratic movements for social change—movements willing to think beyond isolated struggles and the limits of a savage global capitalism. Stanley Aronowitz, Rick Wolff, and others point to such a project in their manifesto on the radical imagination. They write: This Manifesto looks forward to the creation of a new political Left formation that can overcome fragmentation, and provide a solid basis for many-side interventions in the current economic, political and social crises that afflict people in all walks of life. The Left must once again offer to young people, people of color, women, workers, activists, intellectuals and newly arrived immigrants places to learn how the

capitalist system works in all of its forms of exploitation whether personal, political, or economic. We need to reconstruct a platform to oppose Capital. It must ask in this moment of U.S. global hegemony what are the alternatives to its cruel power over our lives, and those of large portions of the world’s peoples. And the Left formation is needed to offer proposals on how to rebuild a militant, democratic labor movement, strengthen and transform the social movements; and, more generally, provide the opportunity to obtain a broad education that is denied to them

by official institutions. We need a political formation dedicated to the proposition that radical theory and practice are inextricably linked, that knowledge without action is impotent, but action without knowledge is blind.33 Matters of justice, equality, and political participation are foundational to any functioning democracy, but it is important to recognize that they have to be [End Page 265] rooted in a vibrant formative culture in which democracy is understood not just as a political and economic structure but also as a civic force enabling justice, equality, and freedom to flourish. While the institutions

and practices of a civil society and an aspiring democracy are essential in this project, what must also be present are the principles and modes of civic education and critical engagement that support the very foundations of

democratic culture. Central to such a project is the development of a new radical imagination both through the pedagogies and projects of public intellectuals in the academy and through work that can be done in other educational sites such as the new media. Utilizing the Internet, social media, and other elements of the digital and screen culture, public intellectuals, cultural workers, young people, and others can address larger audiences and present the task of challenging diverse forms of oppression, exploitation, and exclusion as part of a broader effort to create a radical democracy. There is a need to invent modes of pedagogy that release the imagination, connect learning to social change, and create social relations which people assume responsibility for each other. Such a pedagogy is not about methods or prepping students to learn how to take tests. Nor is such an education about imposing harsh disciplinary behaviours in the service of a pedagogy of oppression. On the contrary, it is about a moral and political practice capable of enabling students and others to become more knowledgeable while creating the conditions for generating a new vision of the future in which people can recognize themselves, a vision that connects with and speaks to the desires, dreams, and hopes of those who are willing to fight for a radical democracy. Americans need to develop a new understanding of civic literacy, education, and engagement, one capable of developing a new conversation and a new political project about democracy, inequality, and the redistribution of wealth and power and how such a discourse can offer the conditions for democratically inspired visions, modes of governance, and policy making. Americans need to embrace and develop modes of civic literacy, critical education, and democratic social movements that view the public good as a utopian imaginary, one that harbours a trace and vision of what it means to defend old and new public spheres that offer spaces where dissent can be produced, public values asserted, dialogue made meaningful, and critical thought embraced as a noble ideal.

Reject alt vs postmodern theoryThe alternative is to reject the 1AC’s relation to capital – postmodernism is incapable of macro-political reform – only a Marxist dialectical praxis can creates the mobilization to challenge capitalism Cole, School of Education, University of Brighton, 2003 (Mike Cole, British Journal of Sociology of Education, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Sep., 2003), pp. 487-500 “Might It Be in the Practice That It Fails to Succeed? A Marxist Critique of Claims for Postmodernism and Poststructuralism as Forces for Social Change and Social Justice” JSTOR; accessed 7/22/15)//JH @DDI

Postmodernists and poststructuralists are clearly capable of asking questions but , by their own

acknowledgement, they have no answers. As Glenn Rikowski has put it, this leads one to ask: just what is the postmodernist

attitude to explanation? Truly political strategies require explanation (of what went wrong, why the analysis and/or

tactics failed etc.) so that improvements can be made. Do postmodernists have a notion of improvement (of society, of political strategies)? If they do, then they need explanation. I don't think they are interested in either, and hence can't have a

political strategy for human betterment. (cited in Cole, 2001, p. 77) To this I would reiterate that postmodernism and poststructuralism could be liberating to individuals and to localised groups. But to be politically valid, an analysis must link 'the small picture' to 'the big picture'. Postmodernism and

poststructuralism, again by their protagonists' acknowledgement, cannot do this. They are, thus, not merely unable to promote social justice and social change, but, albeit by default, act, as ideological supports for capitalism, both within nation states and globally. Bringing Marxism back to the forefront is not an easy task. Marxists must break through the 'bizarre ideological mechanism, [in which] every conceivable alternative to the market has been discredited by the collapse of Stalinism' (Callinicos, 2000, p. 122), whereby the fetishization of life makes capitalism seem natural and therefore unalterable, and where the market mechanism 'has been hypostatized into a natural force unresponsive to human

wishes' (Callinicos, 2000, p. 125) [13]. Capital presents itself 'determining the future as surely as the laws of nature

make tides rise to lift boats' (McMurtry, 2000, p. 2), 'as if it has now replaced the natural environment. It announces itself through its business leaders and politicians as coterminous with freedom, and indispensable to democracy such that any attack on capitalism as exploitative or hypocritical becomes an attack on world freedom and democracy itself (McLaren, 2000, p. 32) [14]. As Callinicos puts it, despite the inevitable intense resistance from capital, the 'greatest obstacle to change is not ...

the revolt it would evoke from the privileged, but the belief that it is impossible' (2000, p. 128). Challenging this climate requires courage, imagination and willpower inspired by the injustice that surrounds us. Beneath the surface of our supposedly contented societies, these qualities are present in abundance. Once mobilized, they can turn the world upside down. (Callinicos, 2000, p. 129) To reiterate,

Marxism is about dialectical praxis. Such praxis is outside the remit of poststructuralism and postmodernism. Neither is

able to address the global social injustices outlined at the beginning of this paper. By their very essence, poststructuralism and postmodernism are about neither theory nor practice. They fail in both and remain an academic practice, based on deconstruction alone, with no practical implications for social or educational transformation.

Indeed, deconstruction without reconstruction typifies the divorce of the academy from the reality of struggle on the ground (Cole & Hill, 1999b; Hill et al., 1999, 2002a).

Only the alt solves – postmodernism forgoes material analysis of structural forms of oppressions and is inaccessible to the working class which is the only agent capable of an emancipatory movement against capitalism The League for the Fifth International, a revolutionary organization with the goal to build a world party of socialist revolution, fighting across the world for an end to capitalism, 2007(“The postmodernist sickness in the anticapitalist movement”15/06/2007,

http://www.fifthinternational.org/content/postmodernist-sickness-anticapitalist-movement http://www.fifthinternational.org/content/postmodernist-sickness-anticapitalist-movement, accessed 7/22/15) JH @ DDI

Despite lacing his approach with postmodern rhetoric, a grand narrative is clearly present here. What de Sousa does is

romanticize the social struggles, to the extent that they are seen as the goal – utopia – once a space is established that aggregates them together. What is missing is an analysis of the social and political forces these struggles oppose and how to get rid of them – indeed, such a goal-centred

approach is theorised away by de Sousa. Of course, the struggles against neoliberalism can be hugely inspiring but to describe them as the goal is to ignore the terrible conditions and injustices they are fighting. In short, to ignore the existence of capitalism as a system which is fundamentally exploitative and oppressive, and the role of the state in regulating it and defending it against those that challenge it. Of course this approach is not new. It is a historic feature of de Sousa Santos’ own political tradition, reformist Social Democracy. At the very birth of this tradition lies the famous dictum of Eduard Bernstein: “The final goal, whatever it may be, is nothing to me: the movement is everything!” Our reply to its latest reincarnation remains the one Rosa Luxemburg delivered as long ago as 1898: “The conquest of political power remains the final goal and that final goal remains the soul of the

struggle. The working class cannot take the decadent position of the philosophers: ‘The final goal is nothing to me, the movement is everything.’ No, on the contrary, without relating the movement to the final goal, the movement as

an end in itself is nothing to me, the final goal is everything.” Our anticapitalist goal – the expropriation of the exploiters and the destruction of their instrument of repression, the capitalist state, is no airy utopia

dreamed up by Marxists, but based upon an analysis of the actual reality – the real existing conditions – against which struggles take place. Far from slipping in to one-sidedness, it must recognize the contradictory

development of capitalism. The capitalist system has socialized production to a huge extent – creating great

industries, globally connected workforces, production networks and large productive units – but the benefits of these great developments accrue to a small class of exploiters. By creating a global working class and great

technological and industrial change, capitalism creates the material conditions for its own destruction because the exploited working class has both the interest and power to overthrow the system of exploitation. Pointing to the overall combined character of the capitalist system in no sense precludes understanding its unevenness, particularities and diversity. Likewise, it does not preclude but actually aids analysing such issues as national and racial oppression, indigenism, religion, the land question and the stratification of the peasantry, the differences within the working class,

and so on. In short, Marxism is perfectly capable of understanding and developing strategies for addressing the diversities of life on our planet, including the many economic, social and ideological survivals of previous modes of production. In this way it is capable in Lenin’s words of making a “concrete analysis of a concrete situation”. At the same time, by pointing to the systemic problem of the destructiveness of capitalist production and its systematic reproduction of inequalities, it is able to explain how the multiple forms of exploitation and oppression beside that of labour by capital can be tackled at root only if the “property question” is posed: who controls the means of

production, the means with which to reproduce the social – the workers or the rich? The analytical coherence and method of Marxism causes offense to postmodernists, who perceive it to be an extreme example of modernist thinking as it seeks to establish objective truth, through reason and empirical investigation, of both the natural and social worlds. For Marxism, uncovering such knowledge is a practical question. As Marx said, to ask whether a world exists externally to thought is simply scholastic, as such a world is

presupposed and demonstrated in every example of human activity.1 It is because Marxism is a philosophy of practice that it seeks to derive from this theoretical foundation a programme of political action for human emancipation – and this opens up the second great tension with the postmodernists of the social movements. Over the development of capitalist modernity a number of Marxists have tackled the question of how to turn the struggles of today into a struggle for socialism. As Marxist ideas have often dominated radical movements from the 19th century onwards, its history of development is not only a question of abstract theorising, but of the actual revolutions and counter-revolutions of the last century. As so many academics and postmodern theorists simply equate Marxism with Stalinism, they studiously ignore the historical fact that revolutionaries like Leon Trotsky challenged the counter-revolutionary theory and practice

http://www.fifthinternational.org/content/postmodernist-sickness-anticapitalist-movement

of Stalin and his supporters in the Communist International. An analysis of the history of the 20th century, far from revealing the death agony of Marxism, demonstrates the need for a revolution to rid humanity of class society. The experience of central and western Europe in the 1930s through to Chile and Argentina in the 1970s shows that no capitalist class has ever allowed its power to be eroded piecemeal to the point that it can no longer defend its property. Even at the level of the ‘commonsensical rather than theoretical knowledge’ that de Sousa Santos says he prefers, this is true. De Sousa Santos draws on the experience of the Zapatistas – what he calls “subaltern cosmopolitanism” – to declare the object of the movement “to make the world less and less comfortable

for global capital.” The idea that you can with impunity destabilise or make the world less comfortable for capitalism without suffering the repression of the state machine is frivolous. To give such advice to the workers and peasants is potentially disastrous – an example par excellence of the irresponsibility of a privileged intelligentsia socially cut off from the dangerous repercussions of its own incoherence. Nor is bourgeois state repression rendered impossible even when radicals assume governmental power within the structures of a bourgeois state: for instance, the radical reformist regime of Chavez, who despite his nationalisations-with-compensation has not systematically challenged the property rights of the bourgeoisie, has had to rely on the mobilisation of the masses to defend his regime against the counter-revolutionary forces of the state.

Alt comes firstOnly beginning with the premise of class relations can eliminate the ideological machinery which legitimizes and extends class domination and racist practices. Materialist critique of the historical relationship between the means of production and the process of racialization in the United States should mark the starting point of the transformation of exploitative class and market relations.San Juan 8 [E. San Juan, Jr., Filipino American literary academic, mentor, cultural reviewer, civic intellectual, activist, writer, essayist, video/film maker, editor, and poet whose works related to the Filipino Diaspora in English and Filipino languages have been translated into German, Russian, French, Italian, and Chinese.[2] As an author of books on race and cultural studies,[3] he was a “major influence on the academic world”.[2] He was the director of the Philippines Cultural Studies Center in Storrs, Connecticut in the United States.[1] In 1999, San Juan, Jr. received the Centennial Award for Achievement in Literature from the Cultural Center of the Philippines because of his contributions to Filipino and Filipino American Studies.[2] FROM RACE/RACISM TO CLASS STRUGGLE: On Critical Race Theory Posted on October 4, 2008 FROM RACE TO CLASS STRUGGLE: A RE-TURN OF CRITICAL RACE THEORY, THE PHILIPPINES MATRIX PROJECT http://philcsc.wordpress.com/2008/10/04/from-raceracism-to-class-struggle-on-critical-race-theory/, Date Accessed 7/27/15, JL @ DDI]

Given its composition, and the pervasive climate of reaction, the Forum could not of course endorse a radical approach that would focus on the elimination of the exploitation of labor (labor power as commodity) as a necessary first step. Given its limits, it could not espouse a need for a thoroughgoing change of the material basis of social production and reproduction—the latter involving the hegemonic rule of the propertied bloc in each society profiting from the unequal division of labor and the unequal distribution of social wealth—on which the institutional practices of racism (apartheid, discrimination, genocide) thrive. “Race is the modality in

which class is lived,” as Stuart Hall remarks concerning post-1945 Britain (Solomos 1986, 103). Without the political power in the hands of the democratic-popular masses under the leadership of the working class , the ideological machinery (laws, customs, religion, state bureaucracy) that legitimizes class domination, with its

attendant racist practices, cannot be changed. What is required is a revolutionary process that mobilizes a broad constituency

based on substantive equality and social justice as an essential part of the agenda to dissolve class structures; any change in the ideas, beliefs, and norms would produce changes in the economic, political and social institutions, which would in turn promote wide-ranging changes in social relations among groups, sectors,

and so on. Within a historical-materialist framework, the starting point and end point for analyzing the relations between structures in any sociohistorical totality cannot be anything else but the production and reproduction of material existence. The existence of any totality follows transformation rules whereby it is constantly being restructured into a new formation (Harvey 1973). These rules reflect the dialectical unfolding of manifold contradictions constituting

the internal relations of the totality. Within this conflicted, determinate totality, race cannot be reduced to class, nor can class be subsumed by race, since those concepts express different forms of social relations. What is the exact relation between the two? This depends on the historical character of the social production in question and the ideological-political class struggles defining it. In his valuable treatise, The Invention of the White Race, Theodore Allen has demonstrated the precise genealogy and configuration of racism in the U.S. It first manifested itself when the European colonial settlers based on private property in land and resources subdued another social order based on collective, tribal tenure of land and resources, denying the latter any social identity—“social death” for Native Americans. We then shift our attention to the emergence of the white race and its system of racial oppression with the defeat of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1677 and the establishment of a system of lifetime hereditary bond servitude (for African Americans): “The insistence on the social distinction between the poorest member of the oppressor group and any member, however propertied, of the oppressed group, is the hallmark of racial oppression” (Allen 1997, 243). In effect, white supremacy defining the nature of civil society was constructed at a particular historical conjuncture demanded by class war. The result is a flexible and adjustable system that can adjust its racial

http://philcsc.wordpress.com/2008/10/04/from-raceracism-to-class-struggle-on-critical-race-theory/

http://philcsc.wordpress.com/2008/10/04/from-raceracism-to-class-struggle-on-critical-race-theory/

dynamics in order to divide the subordinates, resist any critique of its ideological legitimacy, and prevent any counter-hegemonic

bloc of forces from overthrowing class rule. Class struggle intervenes through its impact in the ideological-political sphere of civil society. Racial categories operate through the mediation of civil society which (with the class-manipulated State) regulate personal relations through the reifying determinations of value, market exchange, and capital. Harry Chang comments on the social mediation of racial categories: “Blacks and whites constitute social blocks in a developed setting of ‘mass society’ in which social types (instead of persons) figure as basic units of economic and political management…The crucial intervention of objectification, i.e., relational poles conceived as the intrinsic

quality of objects in relation, must not be neglected here. Racial formation in a country is an aspect of class formation, but the reason races are not classes lies in this objectification process (or fetishization)”

(1985, 43). Commodity fetishism enables the ideology of racism (inferiority tied to biology, genetics, cultural

attributes) to register its effects in common-sense thinking and routine behavior in class-divided society (Lukacs 1971). Because market relations hide unequal power relations, sustained ideological critique and transformative collective actions are imperative. This signifies the heuristic maxim of “permanent revolution” (Lefevbre 1968, 171) in Marxist thought: any long-term political struggle to abolish capitalism as a system of extracting surplus value through a system of the unequal division of labor (and rewards) needs to alter the institutions and practices of civil society that replicate and strengthen the fetishizing or objectifying mechanism of commodity production and exchange (the capitalist mode of production). If racism springs from the

reification of physical attributes (skin color, eye shape) to validate the differential privileges in a bourgeois regime, then the abolition of labor-power as a commodity will be a necessary if not sufficient step in doing away with the conditions that require racial privileging of certain groups in class-divided formations .

Racism is not an end in itself but, despite its seeming autonomy, an instrumentality of class rule.

Alt solves universal liberationAbolishing capitalism results in universal liberation and is a prerequisite to that liberationLlorente 13 [Renzo, Saint Louis University, Madrid Campus, Marx’s concept of “Universal class”: A Rehabilitation* Science & Society, Vol. 77, No. 4, October 2013, 536–560 536, Date Accessed 7/27/15, JL @ DDI]

Let us begin with the first argument, or line of reasoning, which stresses the general oppression deriving from fettered forces of production. The general thrust of the argument is familiar enough. Capitalism, once a stimulus to social progress, has now become an impediment to the continued growth of the forces of production and so now hinders further social progress: capitalist relations of production now act to fetter the forces of production. Therefore, the abolition of capitalism in the form of a socialization of the means of production and an end to class divisions is an absolutely essential condition of further social progress, i.e., the attainment of a higher level of social (economic, technological, cultural, and even moral14) development. The emancipation of the proletariat necessarily entails the abolition of capitalism — the proletariat cannot put an end to its own existence without abolishing capitalism and class rule — and hence it cannot emancipate itself without producing a decisive advance in social development. This advance in some sense liberates everyone, including the capitalists themselves,15 in that it removes the main structural obstacle — capitalist relations of production — to “securing for every member of society . . . an existence not only fully sufficient materially, and becoming day by day more full, but an existence guaranteeing to all the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties” (Engels, 1987, 269–270). To the extent that the liberation of the universal class liberates everyone, from the oppressed proletarian to those who are only oppressed insofar as capitalism denies them opportunities for flourishing available under socialism and communism, it constitutes a universal liberation. By contrast, the liberation of, say, women or an oppressed racial minority would not generate, so the argument goes, a comparable systemic advance, would not remove a structural constraint hampering the progress of society as a whole, would not free nearly everyone of a decisive source of oppression, however much it might benefit a group of oppressed people and perhaps even some of their oppressors. In short, the emancipation of the working class from its oppression and the abolition of capitalism would put an end to a general oppression — society as a whole would be the beneficiary — rather than solely eliminating one or more particular oppressions. It would precipitate a momentous improvement in the overarching institutional framework of society, as opposed to “merely” eliminating certain oppressive practices — few of which now enjoy express institutional sanction — within the current, grossly oppressive framework of society.

Alt solves patriarchy and hierarchyAn historical materialist approach to history would result in the abolition of patriarchic and hierarchical forms of oppressionLlorente 13 [Renzo, Saint Louis University, Madrid Campus, Marx’s concept of “Universal class”: A Rehabilitation* Science & Society, Vol. 77, No. 4, October 2013, 536–560 536, Date Accessed 7/27/15, JL @ DDI]

How, then, might the elimination of non-autonomous labor in the formal economy serve to attenuate and undermine non-class forms of oppression, domination and exploitation? First of all, the abolition of a social arrangement within the formal economy in which some are permitted and enabled to control the labor of others will surely encourage and embolden women to reject non-autonomous labor in the domestic sphere as well. In other words, such a change is likely to have decisive psychological repercussions as regards expectations related to the use of one’s own labor: those who have become accustomed to fully autonomous labor “on the job” are unlikely to submit passively to external control of their labor “off the job” (in their homes, for instance). Apart from this psychological dividend for individual workers, the elimination of non-autonomous labor in the formal economy will also have the effect of delegitimizing non-autonomous labor in other spheres of social and private life. In capitalist societies, the enforcement of non-autonomous labor in the workplace inevitably serves to legitimate patterns of non-autonomous labor outside the workplace, just as hierarchical, inegalitarian social relations outside the private sphere also encourage the development and consolidation of hierarchical, inegalitarian interpersonal relations within this sphere. In short, the elimination of non-autonomous labor in the workplace will transform both individual expectations and social patterns with regard to the nature of work, and to this extent will help to undermine patriarchy and other non-class forms of oppression, exploitation and domination.21 Of course, quite apart from these considerations, the socially guaranteed provision of good work, adequate housing and so on discussed above would afford women the threat of “exit” needed to substantially enhance their bargaining power should men fail to shoulder their share of household labor, and this, too, would tend to prevent inegalitarian, hierarchical distributions of work in the domestic sphere.

Causality Arguments***note—I did not develop this section further because of the discussion in lab that said not to initiate root cause arguments. Most of the link or alt cards can be used to make root cause claims if you still want them***Cap is the root cause of racism – solving cap is a necessary precondition to addressing racism San Juan, Professor Emeritus of English/Comparative Literature/Ethnic Studies at Harvard, 2005 (Epifanio San Juan, Jr., Nature, Society, and Thought, Vol 3 Iss 18 2005 “From Race to Class Struggle: Marxism and Critical Race Theory” proquest; accessed 7/21/15)//JH @ DDI

Class struggle intervenes through its impact in the ideological-political sphere of civil society. Racial categories operate through the mediation of civil society that (with the class-manipulated state)

regulate personal relations through the reifying determinations of value, market exchange, and capital. Harry Chang comments on the social mediation of racial categories: Blacks and whites constitute social blocks in a developed setting of "mass society" in which social types (instead of persons) figure as basic units of economic and political management.... The crucial intervention of objectification, i.e., relational

poles conceived as the intrinsic quality of objects in relation, must not be neglected here. Racial formation in a country is an aspect of class formation, but the reason races are not classes lies in this objectification process (or fetishization). (1985, 43) Commodity fetishism enables the ideology of racism (inferiority tied to

biology, genetics, cultural attributes) to register its effects in common-sense thinking and routine behavior in class-divided society (Lukacs 1971). Because market relations hide unequal power relations, sustained ideological critique and transformative collective actions are imperative. This signifies the heuristic maxim of "permanent revolution" (Lefevbre 1968, 171) in Marxist thought: any long-term political struggle to abolish capitalism as a system of extracting surplus value through a system of the unequal division of labor (and rewards) needs to alter the institutions and practices of civil society that replicate and strengthen the fetishizing or objectifying mechanism of commodity production and exchange (the capitalist mode of production). If racism springs from the reification of physical attributes (skin color, eye shape) to validate the differential privileges in a bourgeois regime, then the abolition of labor power as a commodity will be a necessary if not sufficient step in doing away with the conditions that require racial privileging of certain groups in class-divided formations. Racism is not an end in itself but, despite its seeming autonomy, an instrumentality of class rule . Reification of nature and all social relations is the distinctive logic of the political economy of bourgeois domination. Racial differentiation and class antagonism converge in the revolutionary process when, as C. L. R. James states in a gloss on Lenin's thought, the colonized subalterns (such as the Irish in nineteenth-century Britain) and racially oppressed peoples/nations (African Americans, indigenous communities) begin to act as the "bacilli" or ferment that ushers onto the international scene "the real power against imperialism--

the socialist proletariat" (1994, 182). Socialist revolution is thus the requisite precondition for ending racism.

The continued existence of capitalism forms the basis for all inequalities and oppressions. We do not deny that racialized violence happens and is important to address, but absent a rejection of the class system racism will continue to be deployed as a means to divide and rule the working class and to preserve increasingly wide material disparities.Taylor 11 [Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, doctoral candidate in the department of African-American studies at Northwestern University, Race, class and Marxism, January 4, 2011 http://socialistworker.org/2011/01/04/race-class-and-marxism, Date Accessed 7/26/15, JL @ DDI]

Marxists argue that capitalism is a system that is based on the exploitation of the many by the few. Because it is a system based on gross inequality, it requires various tools to divide the majority--racism and all oppressions under capitalism serve this purpose. Moreover, oppression is used to justify and "explain" unequal relationships in society that enrich the minority that live off the majority's labor. Thus, racism developed initially to explain and justify the enslavement of Africans--because they were less than human and undeserving of liberty and freedom. Everyone accepts the idea that the oppression of slaves was rooted in the class relations of exploitation under that system. Fewer recognize that under capitalism, wage slavery is the pivot around which all other inequalities and oppressions turn. Capitalism used racism to justify plunder, conquest and slavery, but as Karl Marx pointed out, it also used racism to divide and rule--to pit one section of the working class against another and thereby blunt class consciousness.

http://socialistworker.org/2011/01/04/race-class-and-marxism

2NC

Framework (use generic file for most FW stuff)The role of the ballot is to endorse the best political strategy for addressing all manifestations of exploitation and oppression. Debates about transforming society must center on the question of what constitutes the most appropriate political avenue and method for addressing the multiplicity of ongoing struggles happening not only around us, but also those which are rendered imperceptible by the violence of neoliberalism.McGregor 13 [Sheila McGregor Marxism and women’s oppression today International Socialism Issue: 138 Posted: 10 April 13 http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=885&issue=138, Date Accessed 7/27/15, JL @ DDI]

Revolutionary socialists take part in all struggles against exploitation and oppression, whether they are against austerity measures, sexual violence, the impact of war, police racism or the growth of fascist organisations, attempting to unite the maximum number of forces in any given struggle. At the same time, revolutionary socialists are concerned not only with combatting the particular effects of exploitation and oppression, but also with taking the struggle forward so as to break the very chains of exploitation, which give rise to all forms of oppression. Thus involvement in struggle is both a practical question of how best to build a protest or strike and an ideological question of how to win those you are struggling alongside to an understanding that it is not enough to win over the particular struggle, but that what is required is a revolutionary transformation of society. When people embark on a struggle over an issue, they usually come with a mixture of ideas about the society they live in, what they are fighting for and how best to achieve their goal. Inherent in any struggle is a debate about how to take it forward. Struggles against sexism are no exception to this.

http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=885&issue=138

A2 Perm (the version where they don’t get a perm)1) Permutation is impossible—historical materialism provides foundationalist understandings of violence and the aff rejects this understanding —even if some of the aff appears anticapitalist, you are evaluating the methodology of the aff which is the inverse of the k2) Perm doesn’t solve—link debate proves if you think doing both is possible that the aff is incompatible with our historical approach 3) Perm is theoretically bankrupt – no perms in methods debates that the AFF chose to stake out in the 1ac —A) Advocacy stability— perms make the Aff’s advocacy fluid by allowing them to amend 1ac starting point for critical analysis. This always benefits the aff because debate becomes a whack-a-mole of starting points. Undermines critical education about the genesis of problems in the world—means err on negation theory in method debates to avoid their shift that puts them ahead in the 2arB) Reject the team—it makes their advocacy disingenuous because the 1ac gives primacy to a particular approach but perm shifts away destroying any potential pedagogical value to their 1ac speech act—conversely the alts focus on causal analysis generates stable advocacy. Voter for competitive equityThe noble intentions of the affirmative’s political approach do not absolve it of its sins of complicity with the violent project of capitalism. Any attempt to rectify the flaws of the 1AC as a rhetorical artifact are at best disingenuous and should be rejected.Tomlinson 13 [Barbara Tomlinson, Department of Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, To Tell the Truth and Not Get Trapped: Desire, Distance, and Intersectionality at the Scene of Argument, Signs, Vol. 38, No. 4, Summer 2013, Date Accessed 7/26/15, JL @ DDI]

Structures of dominance are the conditions of possibility for antisubordination arguments. Feminists cannot escape all the traps set by the racialized and gendered history of the disciplines, but we can destabilize them, explore their contradictions, and work through

them to open up new possibilities. Yet intending our arguments to be resistant or oppositional cannot make them so. Discursive effects cannot be known in advance or assumed to reflect the intentions of those who argue; we cannot know fully or control the consequences of our own roles in the circulation of discourses. Rather, as Michel Foucault argues, “We must make allowance for the complex and unstable process whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a stumbling block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy”

(1980, 101). The specific arguments we make, their rhetorical form and evidence, and the consequences we draw from them all can be points of resistance or stumbling blocks that trap us into deploying dominant discourses when we think we are resisting them. Yet these discourses are what we have—the sites, the circumstances, and the means—to understand ourselves and change our conditions. Because we lack a fully theorized understanding of the scene of argument as a shared social space, we often consign rhetorical choices to matters of private choice and personal style. Yet while much of the labor that goes into writing is conducted in solitude, writing is a quintessentially social act. All writers enter a dialogue already in progress. “The word in language,” Bakhtin observes, “is half someone else’s” (1981, 293). The scene of argument is populated by many different writers, readers, reviewers, editors, and teachers. It is shaped by

practices and processes inside institutions that all of us help to construct, in graduate programs, journal and manuscript review

processes, panels at professional meetings, and informal prestige networks. Rhetoric matters not just because we want to

present the ideas we already have eloquently and effectively but also because the scene of argument is a site where new ideas are produced and old ideas modified and rendered obsolete . My purpose here is not to scold or praise individual authors but instead to advance an understanding of the scene of argument as a shared social resource, as an entity for which we are all responsible, yet also as a terrain laden with traps. As Toni Cade Bambara explained three decades ago, principled political writing entails fusing together the diverse strands of knowledge that disciplinary frames tear apart. Such writing requires us to resist the predisposition that the disciplines promote “to accept fragmented truths and distortions as the whole” (1980, 154). Dominant modes of thinking and habits of academic life can authorize promoting and echoing partial truths with confidence, even certainty, as if they were the whole. Our job, as Bambara explains it, is “to tell the truth and not get trapped” (1983, 14). I demonstrate here that some critiques of intersectionality fall into patterned rhetorical frameworks and tropes that serve as traps to interfere with the ability to tell the truth.

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