Cap v. K Affirmatives - DDI 2015 SWS

1NCs
Historical Materialism vs. Race

Critical 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
oppression
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
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
Owing to the unrelenting ideological and political constraints of the Cold War,
Cold War stereotypes of economic determinism and class reductionism synonymous with Marxism tout
CRT served to remedy the inadequacies of the

intersectionality paradigm of gender, class, and race. Unfortunately, with the
court in the previous decades),
neoconservative resurgence in the Reagan/Bush administrations and the collapse of "actually existing
the deconstruction of bourgeois legal

discourse and its attendant institutions will no longer suffice. This is so not only
socialism" in the Soviet Union and arguably in China,
because of the reconfigured international situation and the emergence of neoliberal apologetics and
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
authoritarian decrees, but because of
by Derrick Bell and elaborated by, among others, Charles Mills in his theory of the United States as a
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
"racial polity."
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 historicalmaterialist 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 Neoliberalisms 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 everywherein the dismantling of the welfare state, the increasing role of corporate
money in politics, the assault on unions, the expansion of the corporate surveillancemilitary state, widening inequalities in wealth and income, the defunding of higher education, the
privatization of public education, and the war on womens reproductive rights. As Marxist geographer
neoliberalisms
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
centersvanish, 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
David Harvey, political theorist Wendy Brown, and others have observed,
public good is now repudiated by the privatizing and atomistic values at the heart of a hyper-market-driven
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
crueltyall of which portends a growing machinery of social death, especially
for those disadvantaged by a ruthless capitalist economy. Renowned economist
society.
Joseph Stiglitz is one of many public intellectuals who have repeatedly alerted Americans to the impending
Inequality is not simply about disproportionate

amounts of wealth and income in fewer hands, it is also about the
costs of gross social inequality.
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 freefloating class of ultra-rich and corporate powerbrokers as disposable, redundant, or a threat to the forces
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
of concentrated power.
that now is viewed as either quaint or a grim reminder of a socialist past. The Institutionalization of
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.
Injustice
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
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
has thoroughly documented in her book The New Jim Crow,
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
Under such circumstances, justice becomes synonymous with

privilege, as wealth and power dictate who benefits and who doesnt 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
generationa generation with zero hopes, jobs, or future possibilities. The plight
justice.
of the outcast now envelops increasing numbers of youth, workers, immigrants, and a diminishing middle
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, statesanctioned 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
class.
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
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 societyone that is stripped of the thick mesh of mutual
obligations and social responsibilities integral to any viable democracy . This
society and the economy.
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
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
Following the lead of Anderson and others,
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."
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
Linear functionalism yields to the dialectical analysis of concrete mediations.
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
attempts to legitimate the use of the underpaid services of women of color from the South,
manner and at the same time acquire the intelligible totality of knowledge that we need for formulating
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
strategies of radical social transformation.
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
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
present, 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 selfactivity, 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
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,
remarks concerning post-1945 Britain (Solomos 1986, 103).
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
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.
contradictions constituting the internal relations of the totality.
Cap vs Pomo
Postmodern 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 system
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 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 bte 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 laborpower 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
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.
epistemology for social justice.

neoliberalisms

society.




Injustice


justice.
class.

inoperative.
The alternative is to reject the 1ACs 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
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
reiterate that
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
Challenging this
climate requires courage, imagination and willpower inspired by the injustice
that surrounds us. Beneath the surface of our supposedly contented societies,
evoke from the privileged, but the belief that it is impossible' (2000, p. 128).
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
Biopower
Biopower is a symptom of capitalisms 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 capitalisms 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
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
outside of life.
Counterhegemonic action/Claims to individual

agency
Counterhegemonic theorization of agency obfuscates the
centrality of class to agency the only historical agent is
the wage-laborer, any other focus masquerades historical
agency
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
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
materiality. However,
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
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
always a code word for reform.
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
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
autonomous spaces.
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 Theory

Critical race theory and intersectional approaches
displace the essential focus on classs determinant
influence in relation to racial issues class is the only
structural antagonism determinant of practices
sanctioning racial and gender oppression
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
Owing to the unrelenting ideological and political constraints of the Cold War,
Cold War stereotypes of economic determinism and class reductionism synonymous with Marxism tout
CRT served to remedy the inadequacies of the

intersectionality paradigm of gender, class, and race. Unfortunately, with the
court in the previous decades),
neoconservative resurgence in the Reagan/Bush administrations and the collapse of "actually existing
the deconstruction of bourgeois legal

discourse and its attendant institutions will no longer suffice. This is so not only
socialism" in the Soviet Union and arguably in China,
because of the reconfigured international situation and the emergence of neoliberal apologetics and
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
authoritarian decrees, but because of
by Derrick Bell and elaborated by, among others, Charles Mills in his theory of the United States as a
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
"racial polity."
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 historicalmaterialist viewpoint, the only structural determinant of ideologies and
practices sanctioning racial and gender oppression in capitalist society.
Deleuze
Capitalism 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 ows through its unied body without organs is money. Money
is always in ux 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 ows through the veins of capitalism and unies the subsystems into the single market of the integrated world
system of the world economy(Braudels conomie-monde ).Marxfamouslylikenedcapitaltoavampire.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 xed 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 eeing, and may be understood in terms of the manner in which it deals with its
lignes de fuite , or lines of ight. There is always something that ees and escapes the system, something that
is not controllable, or at least not yet controlled. With their machinic analysis of becoming, Deleuze and Guattari 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,articial 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 ight 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). Deleuze and Guattari put their anti-capitalist hopes in the guerrilla tactics of the schizoid
minority that refuses to play the game (Marcuses 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 ight and indicated that capitalism knows no
internal limits, they nevertheless believed that capitalism would nd its logical conclusionintheschizophrenicproductionof
afreeowofdesire:Schizophreniaisthe external limit of capitalism itself (Deleuze and Guattari, 1972: 292).What they apparently
meant by that mad statement is that the nal crisis of capitalism would eventually be generated not by the regulation
or domestication of capitalism but by the complete commodication of the desiring machines that we are. Only by
accelerating the decadence of the present system, only through some kind of self-commodication ina consumerist potlatch, would
the capitalist system be beaten by its own game: Which is the revolutionary path, if theresone? Towithdraw from the worldma r ke t ... in a
cur ious rene wa l of the ec onomic solution of the fasc ists? 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 aint 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: 20227). Needless to say that I am not claiming that
Deleuzes 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 wont 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
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
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 antiessentialist - 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.
very logic of such a position.
Feminism
Feminist theories footnote transformative politics by
displacing the focus on class difference is always
determined by class
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
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
in the conviction that canonical
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
isolates them from history and reduces them to "events" in

performativities, thus cleansing them of labor . For Red Feminism, the local, the specific
doing so, it
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
I understand
difference as always and ultimately determined by class difference - that is,
by relations of property.
difference. I simply do not see difference as autonomous and immanent. Rather,
the gaze
Capitalism creates the illusion of neutrality within the
visible field capitalism will always coopt the gazes
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 Weirs 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 ones 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
What appears as substantial and preexisting

subjectivity depends for its substantiality on the subjects 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,
as Substance, but equally as Subject.19
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 Rands 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 crisisits reliance on state interventionexposes its unnaturalness and the decision that
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
permits its survival.
which the system cannot recover but rather that it will expose the systems 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
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-
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,
Weberian sense as life-chances in relation to the market.
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
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 antiracism 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
(the effect of selling one's labor power).
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.
historical materialism, supercedes this theory of autonomy and

argues for relating the several categories to each other, not by separate and
The other theory,
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-
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
American, woman, lesbian) as effects of oppression and power.
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.
Micropolitics
Advanced capitalism deploys micropolitics to restrict the
subject ability to question the range of its exploitation
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 Focus
Their myopic focus on a particular manifestation of
oppression does not provide a specific explanation for the
broader linking of struggles inhibits the possibility for
transformative politics.
Heideman 12 [Paul M. Heideman Rutgers University, Newark,
pmheideman@gmail.com Historical Materialism Volume 20, Issue 2, pages
210- 221 Beyond Black and White: Transforming African-American Politics,
Manning Marable, Second Edition, London: Verso, 2009; 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 Marables theory of transformative politics may possess.
Performance
The 1ACs 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 gographes Issue The Canadian Geographer / Le Gographe
canadien The Canadian Geographer / Le Gographe canadien Special Issue:
Critical Geographies of Education Volume 57, Issue 3, pages 381388,
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 Theory
Postmodernist theory substitutes regressive discursive
debate for material analysis only a focus on relations to
labor accurately explains history
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
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.
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
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
in place of postmodernity. I believe
able to supercede the well-worn categories of modernity/postmodernity, modernism/ postmodernism 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
their rehearsal in Habermas, Eagleton, Jameson, and Butler by returning to the main question. And
been transformed into another capitalism (that of postmodernity)? Or does capitalism remain the same
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
regime of exploitation - in which capitalists extract surplus labor from the wage earner?
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
Using the paradigms of modernity and

postmodernity to come to terms with what is essentially the unfolding history
to be simply a politics of phrases.
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
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
Asia, if not the rest of the world.
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 system
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 bte 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 laborpower 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
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.
epistemology for social justice.
A reliance on postmodern theories makes any meaningful

social change impossible this reifies systems of
exploitation and oppression under capitalism
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
Whereas for Marxists
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
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
Judith Baxter).
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).
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
Thus,
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,
After more than 200 pages of text, in which indications are

made of the need for emancipatory research praxis, in which proclamations are made
in fact, wasting her time.
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.
Impacts
neoliberalisms

society.



Injustice


justice.
class.

inoperative.
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
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
Following the lead of Anderson and others,
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."
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
Linear functionalism yields to the dialectical analysis of concrete mediations.
manner and at the same time acquire the intelligible totality of knowledge that we need for formulating
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
strategies of radical social transformation.
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
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
present, 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 selfactivity, 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
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,
remarks concerning post-1945 Britain (Solomos 1986, 103).
beliefs, and norms would produce changes in the economic, political, and social institutions, which would in
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
turn promote wide-ranging changes in social relations among all groups and sectors.
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 Pedagogy
an endorsement of critical pedagogy strategies is key to
crucial to address capitalisms diverse modes of control
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 capitalisms 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 prespecified 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
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 citizenshipa 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
views schooling as merely a private act of consumption.
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 ones relationship to oneself, others, and the larger world. This
the hands of teachers, textbook companies, corporate interests, the elite, or other forces?
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
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
Democracy needs a politics that not just restores hope, but also
envisions a different futureone 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.
environment.
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
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
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 worlds peoples. And the Left formation is needed to offer proposals on how to rebuild a
whether personal, political, or economic.
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
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
institutions and practices of a civil society and an aspiring democracy are essential in this project,
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 theory

postmodernism is incapable of macro-political reform
only a Marxist dialectical praxis can creates the
mobilization to challenge capitalism
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
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
reiterate that
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
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
evoke from the privileged, but the belief that it is impossible' (2000, p. 128).
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, 20 07(The postmodernist
sickness in the anticapitalist movement15/06/2007,
http://www.fifthinternational.org/content/postmodernist-sicknessanticapitalist-movement
http://www.fifthinternational.org/content/postmodernist-sicknessanticapitalist-movement, accessed 7/22/15) JH @ DDI
postmodern rhetoric, a grand narrative is clearly present here.
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
Despite lacing his approach with
What de Sousa does is
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
The
working class cannot take the decadent position of the philosophers : The final
conquest of political power remains the final goal and that final goal remains the soul of the struggle.
goal is nothing to me, the movement is everything. No, on the contrary, without relating the movement to
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
the final goal, the movement as an end in itself is nothing to me, the final goal is everything.
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
Marxism is perfectly
capable of understanding and developing strategies for addressing the
diversities of life on our planet, including the many economic, social and
peasantry, the differences within the working class, and so on. In short,
ideological survivals of previous modes of production. In this way it is capable in

Lenins 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
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.
production, the means with which to reproduce the social the workers or the rich?
As Marx said, to ask whether a world exists externally to thought is simply scholastic, as such a world is
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 .
presupposed and demonstrated in every example of human activity.1 It is because
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 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
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
make the world less and less comfortable for global capital.
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-withcompensation 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 first

Only 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-struggleon-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 reproductionthe latter involving the hegemonic rule
of the propertied bloc in each society profiting from the unequal division of labor and the unequal
distribution of social wealthon which the institutional practices of racism (apartheid, discrimination,
genocide) thrive. Race is the modality in which class is lived, as Stuart Hall remarks concerning post-
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
1945 Britain (Solomos 1986, 103).
revolutionary process that mobilizes a broad constituency based on substantive equality and social justice
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
as an essential part of the agenda to dissolve class structures;
material existence. The existence of any totality follows transformation rules whereby it is constantly being
Within this conflicted, determinate

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
totality,
production in question and the ideological-political class struggles defining it .

In his valuable treatise, The Invention of the White Race, Theodore Allen has demonstrated the precise
genealogy and configuration of racism in the U.S. It first manifested itself when the European colonial
settlers based on private property in land and resources subdued another social order based on collective,
tribal tenure of land and resources, denying the latter any social identitysocial death for Native
Americans. We then shift our attention to the emergence of the white race and its system of racial
oppression with the defeat of Bacons Rebellion in 1677 and the establishment of a system of lifetime
hereditary bond servitude (for African Americans): The insistence on the social distinction between the
poorest member of the oppressor group and any member, however propertied, of the oppressed group, is
the hallmark of racial oppression (Allen 1997, 243). In effect, white supremacy defining the nature of civil
society was constructed at a particular historical conjuncture demanded by class war. The result is a
flexible and adjustable system that can adjust its racial dynamics in order to divide the subordinates, resist
any critique of its ideological legitimacy, and prevent any counter-hegemonic bloc of forces from
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
overthrowing class rule.
constitute social blocks in a developed setting of mass society in which social types (instead of persons)
figure as basic units of economic and political managementThe crucial intervention of objectification, i.e.,
relational poles conceived as the intrinsic quality of objects in relation, must not be neglected here.
Racial formation in a country is an aspect of class formation, but the reason races
are not classes lies in this objectification process (or fetishization) (1985, 43).
Commodity fetishism enables the ideology of racism (inferiority tied to biology,
genetics, cultural attributes) to register its effects in common-sense thinking and routine
behavior in class-divided society (Lukacs 1971). Because market relations hide unequal power
relations, sustained ideological critique and transformative collective actions are imperative. This signifies
the heuristic maxim of permanent revolution (Lefevbre 1968, 171) in Marxist thought: any long-term
political struggle to abolish capitalism as a system of extracting surplus value through a system of the
unequal division of labor (and rewards) needs to alter the institutions and practices of civil society that
replicate and strengthen the fetishizing or objectifying mechanism of commodity production and exchange
(the capitalist mode of production). If racism springs from the reification of physical attributes (skin color,
the abolition of laborpower 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 classdivided formations. Racism is not an end in itself but, despite its seeming autonomy, an
instrumentality of class rule.
eye shape) to validate the differential privileges in a bourgeois regime, then
Alt solves universal liberation

Abolishing capitalism results in universal liberation and is
a prerequisite to that liberation
Llorente 13 [Renzo, Saint Louis University, Madrid Campus, Marxs concept
of Universal class: A Rehabilitation* Science & Society, Vol. 77, No. 4,
October 2013, 536560 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, 269270). 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 hierarchy

An historical materialist approach to history would result
in the abolition of patriarchic and hierarchical forms of
oppression
Llorente 13 [Renzo, Saint Louis University, Madrid Campus, Marxs concept
of Universal class: A Rehabilitation* Science & Society, Vol. 77, No. 4,
October 2013, 536560 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 ones 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 nonautonomous 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
***noteI 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
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,
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
must not be neglected here.
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-classand-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.
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 womens 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.
A2 Perm (the version where they dont get a

perm)
1) Permutation is impossiblehistorical 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 k
2) Perm doesnt solvelink 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 Affs 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 worldmeans err on negation theory in
method debates to avoid their shift that puts them ahead
in the 2ar
B) Reject the teamit 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 actconversely the
alts focus on causal analysis generates stable advocacy.
Voter for competitive equity
The noble intentions of the affirmatives 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
intending
arguments to be resistant or oppositional cannot make them so . Discursive
effects cannot be known in advance or assumed to reflect the intentions of
them, explore their contradictions, and work through them to open up new possibilities. Yet
our
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
The
specific arguments we make, their rhetorical form and evidence, and the
consequences we draw from them all can be points of resistance or stumbling
blocks that trap us into deploying dominant discourses when we think we are
resisting them. Yet these discourses are what we havethe sites, the circumstances, and the means
stumbling block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy (1980, 101).
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 elses (1981, 293). The scene of argument is populated by
many different writers, readers, reviewers, editors, and teachers. It is shaped by practices and processes
inside institutions that all of us help to construct, in graduate programs, journal and manuscript review
Rhetoric matters not

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
processes, panels at professional meetings, and informal prestige networks.
just because we want to present the ideas we already have eloquently and effectively but also
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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1NCs

Historical Materialism vs. Race

CRT served to remedy the inadequacies of the

the deconstruction of bourgeois legal

the accelerated class war manifest in ongoing

However, a tendency to juxtapose "class" as a classifying category

substitutes a static nominalism for concrete class analysis. It displaces a

Capitalism is the structural totality that underlies all

We live in a society that appears to embrace the vocabulary of

Inequality is not simply about disproportionate

monopolization of power by the financial and corporate elite. As power

A regime of repression, corruption, and dispossession has become the

young men and women of color

Under such circumstances, justice becomes synonymous with

ethical and moral considerations. What is left is a new kind of

As individual responsibility has been promoted as a

The alternative is a historical materialist analysis of the

A first step in this project of renewing critical

without understanding the continued domination of labor by capital

Without political power in the

historical-materialist framework, the starting point and end point for

Within this conflicted,

Ideology is not epistemology: to try to make ideology

Capitalism is the structural totality that underlies all

We live in a society that appears to embrace the vocabulary of

Inequality is not simply about disproportionate

accountable, and the elusiveness of illegitimate power makes it difficult to recognize.

responsibility, and justice are relegated to the dustbin of an older modernity

A regime of repression, corruption, and dispossession has become the

young men and women of color

Under such circumstances, justice becomes synonymous with

As individual responsibility has been promoted as a

The alternative is to reject the 1ACs relation to capital

postmodernism and poststructuralism could be liberating to

poststructuralism and postmodernism are about neither theory nor practice.

Cap Links to K stuff

The development of this valuation of life depends on the

Counterhegemonic action/Claims to individual

while localizing the subject, it theorizes the subject in an a

This notion of agency - local, discursive, coalitionist - is

Sexuality becomes a marker of social difference only in a class

Critical Race Theory

CRT served to remedy the inadequacies of the

the deconstruction of bourgeois legal

the accelerated class war manifest in ongoing

However, a tendency to juxtapose "class" as a classifying category

Marxian with a Weberian organon of knowledge . As Gregory Meyerson notes, the

Fluidity is something cap relies on. Reading history as

Essentialism (probably wont need this one but

To translate social struggle - which is always over

feminist understandings of gender and sexuality

isolates them from history and reduces them to "events" in

What appears as substantial and preexisting

The crisis confronts us with the possibility that capitalism

Identity politics (race, feminism, queer, other

The managerial class (which is

When the question of labor has been dealt with

historical materialism, supercedes this theory of autonomy and

If we limit our inquiry to this

poststructuralist theory of the social as the site of multi-oppression practices

Advanced capitalism deploys micropolitics to restrict the access of the

micropolitics has become the

To separate modernism and modernity, or for that matter

that the question is neither one of style nor of