1nc – AC – 10/17

1
Our interpretation is that the affirmative should have to defend the
implementation of a topical plan text under the resolution

USFG is the federal government of the USA, based in DC

Dictionary of Government and Politics ’98 (Ed. P.H. Collin, p. 292)

United States of America (USA) [ju:’naitid ‘steits av e’merike] noun independent country, a federation of states
(originally thirteen, now fifty in North America; the United States ode = book containing all the permanent laws of the USA, arranged
in sections according to subject and revised from time to time COMMENT: the federal government (based in
Washington D.C.) is formed of a legislature (the Congress) with two chambers (the Senate and House of
Representatives), an executive (the President) and a judiciary (the Supreme Court). Each of the fifty states making up the
USA has its own legislature and executive (the Governor) as well as its own legal system and constitution

“Should” means the debate is solely about a policy established by

governmental means
Ericson 3. Jon M., Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts – California Polytechnic U., et
al., The Debater’s Guide, Third Edition, p. 4

The Proposition of Policy: Urging Future Action In policy propositions, each topic
contains certain key elements, although they have slightly different functions from
comparable elements of value-oriented propositions. 1. An agent doing the acting ---“The
United States” in “The United States should adopt a policy of free trade.” Like the object
of evaluation in a proposition of value, the agent is the subject of the sentence. 2.
The verb should—the first part of a verb phrase that urges action. 3. An action verb to
follow should in the should-verb combination. For example, should adopt here means
to put a program or policy into action though governmental means. 4. A specification of
directions or a limitation of the action desired. The phrase free trade, for example,
gives direction and limits to the topic, which would, for example, eliminate
consideration of increasing tariffs, discussing diplomatic recognition, or discussing
interstate commerce. Propositions of policy deal with future action. Nothing has yet
occurred . The entire debate is about whether something ought to occur . What you agree
to do, then, when you accept the affirmative side in such a debate is to offer
sufficient and compelling reasons for an audience to perform the future action that
you propose.

Vote Neg:
1. Predictable Limits –
a. clash – changing the topic post facto manipulates balance of prep, which
structurally favors the aff because they speak last and use perms – key to
engage a prepared adversary and a target of mutual contestation.
b. prep – specific topics are key to reasonable expectations for 2Ns. Open
subjects create incentives for avoidance and monopolization of moral high
ground—that denies a role for the neg and turns accessibility.
c. Relevance isn’t enough—only a precise and limited rez creates deliberation
on a point of mutual difference
Steinberg and Freeley 13, David, Lecturer in Communication studies and rhetoric, advisor
to Miami Urban Debate League, Director of Debate at U Miami, former President of CEDA, and
Austin, attorney who focuses on criminal, personal injury and civil rights law, JD, Suffolk
University, Argumentation and Debate: Critical Thinking for Reasoned Decision Making, 121-4

Debate is a means of settling differences, so there must be a controversy, a difference of opinion or a

conflict of interest before there can be a debate. If everyone is in agreement on a feet or value or policy,
there is no need or opportunity for debate; the matter can be settled by unanimous consent. Thus, for example, it would be
pointless to attempt to debate "Resolved: That two plus two equals four,” because there is simply no controversy about this statement.

Controversy is an essential prerequisite of debate. Where there is no clash of ideas,

proposals, interests, or expressed positions of issues, there is no debate. Controversy invites decisive
choice between competing positions. Debate cannot produce effective decisions without clear
identification of a question or questions to be answered. For example, general argument may occur
about the broad topic of illegal immigration. How many illegal immigrants live in the United States? What is the impact of
illegal immigration and immigrants on our economy? What is their impact on our communities? Do they commit crimes? Do they take jobs from
American workers? Do they pay taxes? Do they require social services? Is it a problem that some do not speak English? Is it the responsibility of
employers to discourage illegal immigration by not hiring undocumented workers? Should they have the opportunity to gain citizenship? Does illegal
immigration pose a security threat to our country? Do illegal immigrants do work that American workers are unwilling to do? Are their rights as workers
and as human beings at risk due to their status? Are they abused by employers, law enforcement, housing, and businesses? How are their families
impacted by their status? What is the moral and philosophical obligation of a nation state to maintain its borders? Should we build a wall on the
Mexican border, establish a national identification card, or enforce existing laws against employers? Should we invite immigrants to become U.S.
citizens? Surely you
can think of many more concerns to be addressed by a conversation about the
topic area of illegal immigration. Participation in this “debate” is likely to be emotional and
intense. However, it is not likely to be productive or useful without focus on a particular
question and identification of a line demarcating sides in the controversy. To be discussed and
resolved effectively, controversies are best understood when seated clearly such that all
parties to the debate share an understanding about the objective of the debate. This enables
focus on substantive and objectively identifiable issues facilitating comparison of competing
argumentation leading to effective decisions. Vague understanding results in unfocused
deliberation and poor decisions , general feelings of tension without opportunity for resolution,
frustration, and emotional distress, as evidenced by the failure of the U.S. Congress to make

substantial progress on the immigration debate. Of course, arguments may be presented

without disagreement. For example, claims are presented and supported within speeches, editorials, and advertisements even without
opposing or refutational response. Argumentation occurs in a range of settings from informal to formal, and may not call upon an audience or judge to
make a forced choice among competing claims. Informal discourse occurs as conversation or panel discussion without demanding a decision about a
dichotomous or yes/no question. However, by definition, debate requires "reasoned judgment on a proposition. The proposition is a statement about
which competing advocates will offer alternative (pro or con) argumentation calling upon their audience or adjudicator to decide. The proposition pro-
vides focus for the discourse and guides the decision process. Even when a decision will be made through a process of compromise, it
is
important to identify the beginning positions of competing advocates to begin negotiation
and movement toward a center, or consensus position. It is frustrating and usually unproductive to
attempt to make a decision when deciders are unclear as to what the decision is about. The
proposition may be implicit in some applied debates (“Vote for me!”); however, when a vote or consequential decision is called for (as in the courtroom
or in applied parliamentary debate) it is essential that the proposition be explicitly expressed (“the defendant is
guilty!”). In academic debate, the proposition provides essential guidance for the preparation of the

debaters prior to the debate, the case building and discourse presented during the debate,
and the decision to be made by the debate judge after the debate. Someone disturbed by the problem of a
growing underclass of poorly educated, socially disenfranchised youths might observe, “Public schools are

doing a terrible job! They' are overcrowded, and many teachers are poorly qualified in their subject areas. Even the best teachers can do
little more than struggle to maintain order in their classrooms." That same concerned citizen, facing a complex range of

issues, might arrive at an unhelpful decision, such as "We ought to do something about this”
or, worse, “It’s too complicated a problem to deal with." Groups of concerned citizens worried about the state of
public education could join together to express their frustrations , anger, disillusionment, and emotions regarding the

schools, but without a focus for their discussions , they could easily agree about the sorry state of
education without finding points of clarity or potential solutions. A gripe session would
follow. But if a precise question is posed—such as “What can be done to improve public
education?”—then a more profitable area of discussion is opened up simply by placing a focus on
the search for a concrete solution step. One or more judgments can be phrased in the form of debate propositions,
motions for parliamentary debate, or bills for legislative assemblies, The statements "Resolved: That the federal government should implement a
program of charter schools in at-risk communities” and “Resolved; That the state of Florida should adopt a school voucher program" more

clearly identify specific ways of dealing with educational problems in a manageable form, suitable for
debate. They provide specific policies to be investigated and aid discussants in identifying
points of difference . This focus contributes to better and more informed decision making with
the potential for better results. In academic debate, it provides better depth of argumentation and
enhanced opportunity for reaping the educational benefits of participation. In the next section, we will consider the challenge of
framing the proposition for debate, and its role in the debate. To have a productive debate, which facilitates effective

decision making by directing and placing limits on the decision to be made, the basis for
argument should be clearly defined. If we merely talk about a topic, such as ‘"homelessness,”
or “abortion,” Or “crime,” or “global warming,” we are likely to have an interesting discussion
but not to establish a profitable basis for argument. For example, the statement “Resolved: That the pen is
mightier than the sword” is debatable , yet by itself fails to provide much basis for dear argumentation . If we
take this statement to mean Iliad the written word is more effective than physical force for some purposes, we can identify a problem area: the
comparative effectiveness of writing or physical force for a specific purpose, perhaps promoting positive social change. (Note that “loose” propositions,
such as the example above, may be defined by their advocates in such a way as to facilitate a clear contrast of competing sides; through definitions and
debate they “become” clearly understood statements even though they may not begin as such. There are formats for debate that often begin with this
sort of proposition. However, in
any debate, at some point, effective and meaningful discussion relies on
identification of a clearly stated or understood proposition.) Back to the example of the written word versus
physical force. Although we now have a general subject, we have not yet stated a problem. It is still too broad , too
loosely worded to promote well-organized argument. What sort of writing are we concerned with—poems, novels, government documents, website
development, advertising, cyber-warfare, disinformation, or what? What does it mean to be “mightier" in this context? What kind of physical force is
being compared—fists, dueling swords, bazookas, nuclear weapons, or what? A more specific question might be, “Would a mutual defense treaty or a
visit by our fleet be more effective in assuring Laurania of our support in a certain crisis?” The basis for argument could be phrased in a debate
proposition such as “Resolved: That the United States should enter into a mutual defense treaty with Laurania.” Negative advocates might oppose this
proposition by arguing that fleet maneuvers would be a better solution. This is not to say that debates should completely
avoid creative interpretation of the controversy by advocates, or that good debates cannot occur
over competing interpretations of the controversy; in fact, these sorts of debates may be very
engaging. The point is that debate is best facilitated by the guidance provided by focus on a
particular point of difference , which will be outlined in the following discussion.

2. Fairness – Debate is a game and their interpretation destroys competitive

equity and clash – this argument is procedural which means you filter all 2AC
answers through the lens of competition – they create a monopolizing strategy
that makes discussion one-sided and subverts inclusion of the neg – that
destroys procedural dialogue which is the only internal link to good debates.

3. Unlimited topics make assessing the validity of the 1ac’s truth claims
impossible AND cause concessionary ground which creates incentives for
avoidance. Our method of refinement via contestation challenges hegemonic
structures which I/L turns their method
Ruti 15 [Mari, Professor of Critical Theory at the University of Toronto, “Between Levinas and Lacan: Self, Other, Ethics”, pg 170-
176] AW

After the collapse of metaphysical justifications for universality, we do not have any choice but to admit that the
version of universality we conjure into existence – and the a priori norms that support this universality –
inevitably arises in a particular context : it is historically and culturally specific even as it strives to transcend this
specificity. But – and my point here mirrors the argument I made about rationality above – this does not mean that our

universalism is intrinsically worthless; while the loss of metaphysical foundations for our
normative systems complicates their claim to universality, it does not automatically invalidate
them. This is exactly what Allen is getting at in the passage I quoted at the beginning of this chapter: we make a mistake if
we assume that our only options are either the delusion of being able to transcend our
context into a realm of "pure" universality or a descent into "anything-goes" relativism. More
specifically, Allen argues that we can profess the universal validity of some of our principles – such as the principles of equality,
reciprocity, or mutual respect – as long as we remain aware that these principles are derived from the historical and cultural
resources of Western modernity. In this manner, Allen advocates what she calls "principled contextualism": we may take our norms
"to be universal and context transcendent, as long as we recognize that the notions of universalizability and context transcendence
are themselves situated in the context of late Western modernity" (PS 180). An important part of this recognition is the admission
that "it may turn out from some future vantage point that our normative ideals are themselves,
in some ways that we have yet to realize, pernicious and oppressive" (PS 180). That is, we need to be "more historically self-
conscious and modest about the status of our normative principles" (PS 180); among other things, we
need to be open to
the possibility that our principles can be contested. Yet this does not imply that "we are
incapable of making normative judgments in light of such principles" (PS 180). Allen is looking for a way
out of nihilistic relativism by proposing that our awareness that we must continuously interrogate our ethical principles does not
mean that these principles are devoid of all value. Nor does our recognition that our principles cannot be divorced from their
context mean that we cannot claim that they are capable of transcending their context; that is, our principles can be
context-transcending without being context-neutral. This, as we saw in Chapter 2, is Butler's argument in
Parting Ways, even if she ends up backpedaling on the univcrsalist implications of her approach. 14 More important for our present
purposes, this is how Allen arrives at the "historical a priori" I have referred to in passing. As Allen explains, "The historical
specificity of our a priori categories, their rootedness in historically variable social and linguistic practices and
institutions" (PS 31-2) does not cancel the power of these categories to order our existence. However,
if we want others to be convinced by our a priori ideals, we need to persuade them through a
democratic process. If the Enlightenment resorted to aggression to spread its views, the
Habermasian democratic method , according to Allen, relies on more collectively formed public
opinions. Allen's point is akin to the one Benhabib makes through her notion of "democratic iterations": rather than the
solitary Kantian subject trying to figure out in the abstract what everyone might conceivably
agree on, the Habermasian approach offers a model where social agents collaborate with
each other to forge a perspective that everyone can agree on. This junction of compatible views,
then, becomes the current "historical a priori," the current version of the universal. Any given "historical a
priori" can obviously take hegemonic forms. I grant, as does Allen, that we need to remain vigilant
about the constitutive exclusions that a priori norms often imply. Yet the merits of a normative system that is

brought into being through a continuous democratic process – a process that can
accommodate the tensions of rethinking, refinement, and renegotiation – also seem
considerable. Borrowing from Fraser, one could say that the historical a priori is always open to reframing. Such
reframing happens, for instance, when individuals or groups who have been excluded from a given
ethical frame demand admission to it, thereby automatically altering the parameters of the frame.
Proposing that "misframing" may be "the defining injustice of a globalizing age," Fraser advocates – echoing Butler's observations
about the necessity of revising the frames of perception that eliminate some populations from the status of the fully human – "an
enlarged, transnational sense of who counts as one's fellow subjects of justice." 15 This implies that when
the frame shifts –
say, from a national to a transnational one – so does the historical a priori: an a priori that was formulated
in a given national context might not be appropriate for a transnational one. There must thus be a
period of readjustment, but this does not imply the neutralization of the a priori – as some cultural relativists might assume – but
merely its reconfiguration. Or, to restate the larger argument I have tried to articulate, the
concept of the historical a
priori requires that we admit that an a priori principle can be normatively meaningful even as
it is open to alteration; the a priori – as I noted above – holds until it is deemed somehow flawed or unjust. In Fraser's
words, "The result would be a grammar of justice that incorporates an orientation to closure

necessary for political argument, but that treats every closure as provisional – subject to question,
possible suspension, and thus to reopening" (SJ72). The model Fraser advocates hence treats every ethical closure as provisional.
Fraser calls this model "reflexive justice," specifying that it scrambles the opposition between the
Habermasian democratic model on the one hand and the more poststructuralist, Marxist, and skeptical
model (which she calls "agonistic") – the model that dominates contemporary progressive criticism – on the other. If the
first of these is sometimes accused of being excessively normalizing, the second-which is essentially
the model I have been analyzing in this book (with the exception of Levinas) – is, as Fraser puts it, "often seen as
irresponsibly reveling in abnormality" (SJ73 ). Against this backdrop, the advantage of Fraser's model is the following:
Like agonistic models, reflexive justice valorizes the moment of opening , which breaches the
exclusions of normal justice, embracing claimants the latter has silenced and disclosing injustices the latter has
occluded-all of which it holds essential for contesting injustice. Like discourse ethics, however, reflexive justice

also valorizes the moment of closure, which enables political argument, collective decision-
making, and public action – all of which it deems indispensable for remedying injustice. (SJ73-4)
In this manner, Fraser declares the standard opposition between the Habermasians and the agonists
to be a false one, for it is possible to admit the best insights of both by acknowledging the value

of both opening (contestation) and closure (binding norms that enable ethical and political
decisions). Such an approach rejects relativism, enabling normative judgments and political
interventions, but without thereby locking the content of such judgments and interventions
into a fixed, immutable definition. All of this of course implies that there is one norm that stands
above every other: what Fraser calls "the overarching normative principle of parity of participation"
(SJ60). On this view, Fraser explains, "Overcoming injustice means dismantling institutionalized obstacles that prevent some people
from participating on a par with others, as full partners in social interaction" (SJ 60). In other words, for Fraser's paradigm to
function, one needs a base-level faith in the democratic process even as one acknowledges that
it is always going to fall short of its own ideals. Like Levinasian justice, which knows that it will never he able to
live up to the demands of ethics, concrete democratic formations are invariably guilty , humiliated by their
failures, but this cannot , for the Habermasians at least, discourage us to the point that we stop trying to
improve them. As Benhabib explains: As with any normative model, one can always point to prevailing
conditions of inequality, hierarchy, exploitation and domination, and prove that "this may be true in
theory but not so in practice" (Kant). The answer to this ancient conflict between norm and reality is simply to
say that if all were as it ought to be in the world, there would be no need to build normative
models , either. The fact that a normative model does not correspond to reality is no reason to
dismiss it , for the need for normativity arises precisely because humans measure the reality they inhabit in the light of principles
and promises that transcend this reality. The relevant question therefore is: Does a given normative
model enable us to analyze and distill the rational principles of existing practices and
institutions in such a fashion that we can then use these rational reconstructions as critical
guidelines for measuring really existing democracies? 16 Allen sums up the matter by noting that though
imbalances of power are important for Habermasian critical theory to grapple with, the
solution to this "can only be more discourse or debate" (PS 18). This continued faith in the perfectibility of
the democratic process is what distinguishes the Habermasian feminists I have cited in this chapter from the thinkers – perhaps,
again, with the exception of Levinas – I have discussed in earlier chapters of this book. The latter thinkers , as well as those
aligned with these thinkers, would in fact ridicule the Habermasian stance for its naive inability to
recognize how power corrupts the democratic process, how, for example, neoliberalism and
global capitalism have torn democracy into shreds. As Wendy Brown explains, "This is a political condition in
which the substance of many of the significant features of constitutional and representative democracy have been gutted,
jettisoned, or end- run, even as they continue to be promulgated ideologically, served as a foil and shield for their undoing and for
the doing of death elsewhere." 17 Indeed, what good can the ideal of participatory parity do in the context of biopolitical and other
invisible forces of power that constitute us as compliant subjects well before we understand the basic principles of such parity? If
our psychic lives, including our unconscious desires, fantasies, and motivations, are shaped by hegemonic
power, then participatory parity seems like a mere stopgap measure – something that makes us feel
slightly better about being nothing but the obedient marionettes of power. 5 To some degree I agree with such
pessimism about the Habermasian democratic process. But I am not convinced that the alternative
approaches I have analyzed in this book necessarily fare any better in terms of being capable of
addressing the problem of power. I have already explained my reservations about the ability of Zizek and Badiou to do
so. Butler may at first glance seem more competent in this regard, given that the critique of disciplinary power has always been
central to her theory. Yet, as I have demonstrated, I am not reassured by her assertion that opposing power is a matter of
negotiating with it. Nor am I persuaded by the haphazardness of her understanding of resistance – a haphazardness that arises from
her rejection of agency. Take her assertion that the Benjaminian messianic rupture of divine violence – outlined in Chapter 3 – offers
the possibility of a political intervention based on distraction: Perhaps we need to be more distracted, as Baudelaire was said to be,
in order to be available to the true picture of the past to which Benjamin refers. Perhaps, at some level that has implications for the
political point I hope to bring out here, a certain disorientation opens us to the chance to wage a fight for the history of the
oppressed.JS Butler here offers disorientation and chance – rather than action, choice, or decision –
as a political strategy. As she adds, "We have to be provisional situationists, seizing the chance to fight when it appears"
(PW 110). This is not a new problem, for long before Butler's turn to ethics, she wrote, in relation to our tendency to identify with
the power structures that subjugate us: "The very categories that arc politically available for identification restrict in advance the
play of hegemony, dissonance and rearticulation. It is not simply that a psyche invests in its oppression, but that the very terms that
bring the subject into political viability orchestrate the trajectory of identification and become, with luck, the site for a
disidentificatory resistance."19 I have already expressed my dissatisfaction with the idea that the psyche invariably "invests in its
oppression," but in the present instance I
want to call attention to Butler's reduction of resistance – here
configured as a practice of disidentification – to a kind of lucky break from the generalized
background of power. Allen has noted the same problem, arguing that luck is too flimsy a basis for political
resistance , and pointing out, furthermore, that Butler's reluctance to theorize the social world as anything
but hegemonic makes it difficult for her to envision the possibility of social solidarity, including
nonsubordinating, nonstrategic forms of mutual recognition. As Allen asserts: Without a more fully
developed and less ambivalent notion of recognition, Butler is left unable to explain the possibility of
collective or, ultimately, individual resistance .... Without an account of how the recognition of our commonality
provides the basis for political community and collective resistance, Butler is left suggesting that the transformation from
identification to disidentification, from signification to resignification, from subjectivation to a critical desubjectivation, is nothing
As complicated and potentially flawed as the democratic ideal
more than a matter of luck. (PS 93) Exactly.

of participatory parity may be, it still seems like a better basis for political action than dumb
[blatant] luck.
 2
The aff begins from the premise of the failure of state solutions and a refusal of
this world, which undermines the transition to communism
Parenti ‘16 (Christian, Clinical Assistant Professor of Liberal Studies @ New York University,
“Environment-Making in the Capitalocene Political Ecology of the State,” Anthropocene or
Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, pp. 181-183)

The unacknowledged centrality of the state to the functioning of capitalism is especially

relevant today, with a devastating climate crisis already upon us in the form of desertification, powerful storms,
ocean acidification, melting glaciers, incrementally rising sea levels, and mass migrations. The crisis requires immediate action

on a truly massive scale. I have laid out an analysis of the state rooted in a political ecological reading of value. As a central catalyst of

social nature, the capitalist state does not have a relationship to "nature" – it is a relationship with nature. The state is not merely
"part" of the Capitalocene but central to it. Why? Because the geopower of the capitalist state makes it possible for capital
to treat the surface of the earth as a warehouse of Cheap Nature. As we have seen, the history of capitalist development is

almost always the history of state-guided development. To reform capitalism - and to move
beyond it – the Left needs to place the state front and center in its strategic considerations.
Appeals to corporate social responsibility, attempts to shame capital into reform, strategies that declare
politics "broken" and seek to circumvent the state, or escapist hyperlocalism – all hallmarks of
American environmentalism – are fundamentally unrealistic. This argument has political implications. First, the state
cannot be avoided , as scholars like Holloway suggest (2002). For Left politics to become effective, especially in
the face of the climate crisis, they must come up with strategies that engage and attempt to
transform the state. The idea of escaping the state is to misrecognize the centrality and immutably fundamental nature of the state to the
value form and thus to capitalist society (Mazzucato 2013). The chairman of the Export-Import Bank of the United States (the export credit agency of
the federal government) tried to explain the centrality of the state to reporters after a business trip to the Czech Republic: "It's
time to drop
the fantasy that a purely free market exists in the world of global trade .... In the real world our private
enterprises are pitted against an array of competitors that are often government-owned,
government- protected, government-subsidized, government-sponsored or all of the above" (Economist 2013). In other words,

the legal frameworks of property are territorially fixed and states remain the crucial political
units of global capitalism. Managing, mediating, producing, and delivering nonhuman nature
to accumulation is a core function of the modern, territorially defined, capitalist state. When we speak of capital
having a metabolism, we must think of the state as an indispensable mediating membrane in that process. In that regard, the climate crisis

does not require a new role for the state, but merely a different and better version of the
environment-making that it already does. For that to happen, critical scholars need a renewed
theoretical engagement with the state. I have suggested that we begin by considering the state as the central environmental
actor within the larger world historical drama of capitalism. The state remains at the center of modern political

struggle. More specifically, the state's seemingly new role as an economically crucial, environmental
agent, which can appear to be merely a political by-product of climate change and the broader
ecological crisis, is actually not new at all. Climate change brings disasters and emergencies that call forth the state. How the state
responds is a different question: sometimes it fails, but always it is called.
Capitalism causes war, violence, environmental destruction and extinction
Robinson 14 (William I., Prof. of Sociology, Global and International Studies, and Latin American
Studies, @ UC-Santa Barbara, “Global Capitalism: Crisis of Humanity and the Specter of 21st
Century Fascism” The World Financial Review)
Cyclical, Structural, and Systemic Crises ¶ Most commentators on the contemporary crisis refer to the “Great Recession” of 2008 and
its aftermath. Yet the
causal origins of global crisis are to be found in over-accumulation and also in
contradictions of state power, or in what Marxists call the internal contradictions of the capitalist system. Moreover,
because the system is now global, crisis in any one place tends to represent crisis for the
system as a whole. The system cannot expand because the marginalisation of a significant portion of humanity from direct
productive participation, the downward pressure on wages and popular consumption worldwide, and the polarisation of income,
has reduced the ability of the world market to absorb world output. At the same time, given the particular
configuration of social and class forces and the correlation of these forces worldwide, national
states are hard-pressed to regulate transnational circuits of accumulation and offset the
explosive contradictions built into the system. ¶ Is this crisis cyclical, structural, or systemic? Cyclical crises are
recurrent to capitalism about once every 10 years and involve recessions that act as self-
correcting mechanisms without any major restructuring of the system. The recessions of the early 1980s, the early 1990s,
and of 2001 were cyclical crises. In contrast, the 2008 crisis signaled the slide into a structural crisis. Structural crises reflect deeper
contra- dictions that can only be resolved by a major restructuring of the system. The structural crisis of the 1970s was resolved
through capitalist globalisation. Prior to that, the structural crisis of the 1930s was resolved through the creation of a new model of
redistributive capitalism, and prior to that the struc- tural crisis of the 1870s resulted in the development of corpo- rate capitalism.
A systemic crisis involves the replacement of a system by an entirely new system or by an
outright collapse. A structural crisis opens up the possibility for a systemic crisis. But if it actually
snowballs into a systemic crisis – in this case, if it gives way either to capitalism being superseded or to a breakdown of global
civilisation – is not predetermined and depends entirely on the response of social and political forces to the crisis and on historical
contingencies that are not easy to forecast. This is an historic moment of extreme uncertainty, in which
collective responses from distinct social and class forces to the crisis are in great flux. ¶ Hence my
concept of global crisis is broader than financial. There are multiple and mutually constitutive dimensions –
economic, social, political, cultural, ideological and ecological, not to mention the existential
crisis of our consciousness, values and very being. There is a crisis of social polarisation, that is, of social reproduction.
The system cannot meet the needs or assure the survival of millions of people, perhaps a majority of
humanity. There are crises of state legitimacy and political authority, or of hegemony and domination. National states face spiraling
crises of legitimacy as they fail to meet the social grievances of local working and popular classes experiencing downward mobility,
unemployment, heightened insecurity and greater hardships. The legitimacy of the system has increasingly been
called into question by millions, perhaps even billions, of people around the world, and is facing
expanded counter-hegemonic challenges. Global elites have been unable counter this erosion of the system’s
authority in the face of worldwide pressures for a global moral economy. And a canopy that envelops all these
dimensions is a crisis of sustainability rooted in an ecological holocaust that has already begun, expressed in
climate change and the impending collapse of centralised agricultural systems in several regions of
the world, among other indicators. By a crisis of humanity I mean a crisis that is approaching systemic proportions,
threatening the ability of billions of people to survive, and raising the specter of a collapse of
world civilisation and degeneration into a new “Dark Ages.”2 ¶ This crisis of humanity shares a number of aspects with earlier
structural crises but there are also several features unique to the present: ¶ 1. The system is fast reaching the
ecological limits of its reproduction. Global capitalism now couples human and natural history
in such a way as to threaten to bring about what would be the sixth mass extinction in the known
history of life on earth.3 This mass extinction would be caused not by a natural catastrophe such as a meteor impact or by
evolutionary changes such as the end of an ice age but by purposive human activity. According to leading environmental scientists
there are nine “planetary boundaries” crucial to maintaining an earth system environment in
which humans can exist, four of which are experiencing at this time the onset of irreversible
environmental degradation and three of which (climate change, the nitrogen cycle, and biodiversity loss) are at
“tipping points,” meaning that these processes have already crossed their planetary boundaries. ¶ 2. The magnitude of
the means of violence and social control is unprecedented, as is the concentration of the means
of global communication and symbolic production and circulation in the hands of a very few powerful groups.
Computerised wars, drones, bunker-buster bombs, star wars, and so forth, have changed the face
of warfare. Warfare has become normalised and sanitised for those not directly at the
receiving end of armed aggression. At the same time we have arrived at the panoptical surveillance society and the
age of thought control by those who control global flows of communication, images and symbolic production. The world of Edward
Snowden is the world of George Orwell; 1984 has arrived; ¶ 3. Capitalism
is reaching apparent limits to its
extensive expansion. There are no longer any new territories of significance that can be
integrated into world capitalism, de-ruralisation is now well advanced, and the
commodification of the countryside and of pre- and non-capitalist spaces has intensified, that is,
converted in hot-house fashion into spaces of capital, so that intensive expansion is reaching depths never before seen.
Capitalism must continually expand or collapse. How or where will it now expand? ¶ 4. There is the rise of
a vast surplus population inhabiting a “planet of slums,”4 alienated from the productive
economy, thrown into the margins, and subject to sophisticated systems of social control and
to destruction - to a mortal cycle of dispossession-exploitation-exclusion. This includes
prison-industrial and immigrant-detention complexes, omnipresent policing, militarised
gentrification , and so on; ¶ 5. There is a disjuncture between a globalising economy and a nation-
state based system of political authority. Transnational state apparatuses are incipient and have
not been able to play the role of what social scientists refer to as a “hegemon,” or a leading nation-state that has
enough power and authority to organise and stabilise the system. The spread of weapons of mass destruction
and the unprecedented militarisation of social life and conflict across the globe makes it hard
to imagine that the system can come under any stable political authority that assures its
reproduction. ¶ Global Police State ¶ How have social and political forces worldwide responded to crisis? The crisis has resulted
in a rapid political polarisation in global society. Both right and left-wing forces are ascendant. Three responses seem to be in
dispute. ¶ One is what we could call “reformism from above.” This elite reformism is aimed at stabilising the system, at saving the
system from itself and from more radical re- sponses from below. Nonetheless, in the years following the 2008 collapse of the global
financial system it seems these reformers are unable (or unwilling) to prevail over the power of transnational financial capital. A
second response is popular, grassroots and leftist resistance from below. As social and political conflict escalates around the world
there appears to be a mounting global revolt. While such resistance appears insurgent in the wake of 2008 it is spread very unevenly
across countries and regions and facing many problems and challenges. ¶ Yet another response is that I term 21st century fascism.5
The ultra-right is an insurgent force in many countries. In broad strokes, this project seeks to fuse
reactionary political power with transnational capital and to organise a mass base among
historically privileged sectors of the global working class – such as white workers in the North and
middle layers in the South – that are now experiencing heightened insecurity and the specter of
downward mobility. It involves militarism, extreme masculinisation, homophobia, racism and
racist mobilisations, including the search for scapegoats, such as immigrant workers and, in the
West, Muslims. Twenty-first century fascism evokes mystifying ideologies, often involving
race/culture supremacy and xenophobia, embracing an idealised and mythical past. Neo-
fascist culture normalises and glamorises warfare and social violence, indeed, generates a
fascination with domination that is portrayed even as heroic.
The alternative is to affirm the form of the party—against the subjective
atomization of contemporary politics, only a vertical form of organization
aimed at transformation of constituted structures of power can actualize
change
Dean and Mertz ‘16 (Jodi and Chuck, Donald R. Harter ’39 Professor of Humanities and
Social Sciences @ Hobart and William Smith Colleges and Host at This is Hell!, “The JFRP: For a
New Communist Party,” aNtiDoTe Zine 1/23/16, https://antidotezine.com/2016/01/23/for-a-
new-communist-party/)
CM: Great to have you on the show.¶ Let’s start with Occupy. What, to you, explains the impact that the Tea Party had on
Republicans, relative to the impact that Occupy seems to have had on the Democratic Party? All of the sudden there were “Tea Party
Republicans.” There weren’t “Occupy Democrats.”¶ JD: That’s a good point. The
Tea Party took the Republican Party as its
target. They decided that their goal was going to be to influence the political system by getting people
elected and basically by trying to take over part of government. That’s why they were able to have good
effects. They didn’t regard the mainstream political process as something irrelevant to their
concerns. They thought of it as something to seize.¶ The problem with many—but not all—leftists
in the US is that they think the political process is so corrupted that we have to completely
refuse it, and leave it altogether . The Tea Party decided to act as an organized militant force, and too much of
the US left (we saw this in the wake of Occupy) has thought that to be “militant” means to refuse and
disperse and become fragmented .¶ CM: So what explains the left turning its back on the collective action of a political
party? It would seem like a political party would fit into what the left would historically want: an apparatus that can organize
collective action.¶ JD: There are multiple things. First, the fear of success: the left has learned from the excesses
of the twentieth century. Where Communist and socialist parties “succeeded,” there was violence and
purges and repression. One reason the left has turned its back is because of this historical experience of
state socialism. And we have taken that to mean that we should not ever have a state. I think
that’s the wrong answer. That we—as the left—made a mistake with some regimes does not have
to mean that we can never learn.¶ Another reason that the left has turned its back on the party
form has been the important criticism of twentieth century parties that have been too white,
too masculine, potentially homophobic; parties that have operated in intensely hierarchical
fashion. Those criticisms are real. But rather than saying we can’t have a party form because
that’s just what a party does, why not make a party that is not repressive and does not
exclude or diminish people on the basis of sex, race, or sexuality?¶ So we’ve got at least two historical
problems that have made people very reluctant to use the party. I also think that, whether or not you mark it as 1968 or 1989, the
left’s embrace of cultural individualism and the free flow of personal experimentation has
made it critical of discipline and critical of collectivity. But I think that’s just a capitalist sellout.
Saying everybody should just “do their own thing” is just going in the direction of the
dominant culture. That is actually not a left position at all.¶ CM: So does identity politics
undermine collectivism? And did that end up leading to fragmentation and a weakening of the left?
Because there are a lot of people we’ve had on the show—and one person in particular, Thomas Frank—who say that there is no left
in the United States.¶ JD: First I want to say that I disagree with the claim that there is no left. In fact, I think that “the left” is that
group that keeps denying its own existence. We’re always saying that we’re the ones who don’t exist. But the right thinks that we
exist. That’s what is so fantastic, actually. Did you see the New York Post screaming that Bernie Sanders is really a communist?
Great! They’re really still afraid of communists! And it’s people on the left who say, “Oh, no, we’re not here at all!”¶ The left denies
its own existence and it denies its own collectivity. Now, is identity politics to blame? Maybe it’s better to say that identity
politics has been a symptom of the pressure of capitalism. Capitalism has operated in the US
by exacerbating racial differences. That has to be addressed on the left, and the left has been addressing
that. But we haven’t been addressing it in a way that recognizes how racism operates to support capitalism. Instead, we’ve
made it too much about identity rather than as an element in building collective solidarity.¶ I’m
trying to find a way around this to express that identity politics has been important but it’s reached its
limits. Identity politics can’t go any further insofar as it denies the impact of capitalism . An
identity politics that just rests on itself is nothing but liberalism. Like all of the sudden everything will be better if
black people and white people are equally exploited? What if black people and white people
say, “No, we don’t want to live in a society based on exploitation?”¶ CM: You were saying that the left
denies its own collectivity. Is that only in the US? Is that unique to the US culture of the left?¶ JD: That’s a really important question,
and I’m not sure. Traveling in Europe, I see two different things. On the one hand I see a broad left discussion that is, in part,
mediated through social media and is pretty generational—people in their twenties and thirties or younger—and that there’s a
general feeling about the problem of collectivity, the problem of building something with
cohesion, and a temptation to just emphasize multiplicity. You see this everywhere. Everybody worries about this, as far as what
I’ve seen.¶ On the other hand, there are countries whose political culture has embraced parties much more, and fights politically
through parties. Like Greece, for example—and we’ve seen the ups and downs with Syriza over the last two years. And Spain also.
Because they have a parliamentary system where small parties can actually get in the mix and have a political effect—in ways that
our two-party system excludes—the European context allows for more enthusiasm for the party as a form for politics.¶ But there’s
still a lot of disagreement on the far left about whether or not the party form is useful, and shouldn’t we in fact retreat and have
multiple actions and artistic events—you know, the whole alter-globalization framework. That’s still alive in a lot of places. CM: You
mentioned the structure of the US electoral system doesn’t allow for a political party to necessarily be the solution for a group like
Occupy. Is that one of the reasons that activists dismiss the party structure as something that could help move their agenda
forward?¶ JD: We can think about the Black Panther Party as a neat example in the US context: A party
which was operating not primarily to win elections but to galvanize social power . That’s an
interesting way of thinking about what else parties can do in the US.¶ Or we can think about parties in terms of
local elections. Socialist Alternative has been doing really neat work all over the country, organizing around local elections with
people running as socialist candidates not within a mainstream party. I think that even as we come up against the limits of a two-
party system, we can also begin to think better about local and regional elections.¶ The left really likes that old saw: “Think Globally,
Act Locally.” And then it rejects parties—even though political parties are, historically, forms that do that, that
actually scale, that operate on multiple levels as organizations.¶ That we have a two-party system makes
sense as an excuse why people haven’t used left parties very well in the US, but that doesn’t have to
be the case.¶ And one more thing: there is a ton of sectarianism in the far left parties that exist. Many
still fight battles that go back to the twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, and haven’t let that go. That has to change. We don’t
need that kind of sectarian purity right now.¶ CM: You ask the question, “How do we move from the inert mass to organized
activists?” You mention how you were at Occupy Wall Street; you write about being there on 15 October 2011 as the massive crowd
filled New York’s Times Square. And you mention this one young speaker, and he addresses the crowd; they’re deciding if they
should move on to Washington Square Park or not, because they need to go somewhere where there are better facilities. You then
quote the speaker saying, “We can take this park. We can take this park tonight. We can also take this park another night. Not
everyone may be ready tonight. Each person has to make their own autonomous decision. No one can decide for you. You have to
decide for yourself. Everyone is an autonomous individual.Ӧ Did that kind of individualism kill
Occupy Wall Street
from the start?¶ JD: Yeah, I think so. A lot of times I blame the rhetorics of consensus and horizontalism, but
both of those are rooted in an individualism that says politics must begin with each individual,
their interests, their experience, their positions, and so on. As collectivity forms—which is not
easy when everyone’s beginning from their individual position—what starts to happen is that
people start looking for how their exact experiences and interests are not being recognized .¶
I think that the left has given in too much to this assumption that politics begins with an
individual. That’s a liberal assumption. Leftists, historically, begin with the assumption that politics
begins in groups. And for the left in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the operative group is class. Class
is what determines where our political interests come from.¶ I try to do everything I can in the book to
dismantle the assumption that politics, particularly left politics, should begin with the individual.
Instead I want people thinking about how the individual is a fiction, and a really oppressive fiction at that .
And one that’s actually, conveniently, falling apart.¶ CM: You write about Occupy Wall Street having been an opening but having had
no continuing momentum. You mention that the party could add that needed momentum. That’s one of the things that parties can
do. The structure of the party can continue momentum and keep the opening alive.¶ When you say
that a party could be a solution for a movement like Occupy, you don’t mean the Democratic Party, do you?¶ JD: I’ve got a lot of
layers on this question. My first answer is that no, I really mean the Communist Party. My friends call this “Jodi’s Fantasy
Revolutionary Party” as a joke, because the
kind of Communist Party I take as my model may not be real,
or may have only existed for a year and a half in Brooklyn in the thirties. And I don’t mean the real-
existing Communist Party in the US now, which still exists and basically endorses Democrats.¶ My idea is to think in terms of how
we can imagine the Communist Party again as a force—what it could be like if all of our left
activist groups and small sectarian parties decided to come together in a new radical left
party.¶ So no, I don’t envision the Democratic Party as being that. That’s not at all what I have in mind. I’m thinking of a
radical left party to which elections are incidental. Elections might be means for organizing, but the goal
isn’t just being elected. The goal is overthrowing capitalism. The goal is being able to build a
communist society as capitalism crumbles .¶ Second, it could be the case—as a matter of tactics
on the ground in particular contexts—that working for a Democratic candidate might be
useful. It could be the case that trying to take over a local Democratic committee in order to get communist/socialist/radical left
candidates elected could also be useful. But I don’t see the goal as taking over the Democratic Party. That’s way too
limited a goal, and it’s a goal that presupposes the continuation of the system we have, rather
than its overthrow.¶ CM: But how difficult would it be for a Communist Party to emerge free of its past associations with the
Soviet Union? Can we even use the word “communist” or is it impossibly taboo?¶ JD: We have to recognize that the right is still
scared of communism. That means the term is still powerful. That means it still has the ability to instill fear in its enemies. I think
that’s an argument for keeping the word “communism.”¶ It’s also amazing that close to half of Iowa participants in the caucuses say
that they are socialist. Four or five years ago, people were saying socialism is dead in the US. No one could even say the word. So I
actually think holding on to the word “communism” is useful not only because our enemies are worried about communism, but also
because it helps make the socialists seem really, really mainstream, and that’s good. We don’t want socialism to seem like
something that only happens in Sweden. We want it to seem like that’s what America should have at a bare minimum.¶ One last
thing about the history of communism: every political ideology that has infused a state form has done
awful things. For the most part, if people like the ideology, they either let the awful things slide, or they use the ideology to
criticize the awful things that the state does. We can do the same thing with communism. It’s helpful to recognize that the
countries we understand to have been ruled by Communist Parties were never really communist—
they didn’t even claim to have achieved communism themselves. We can say that state socialism
made these mistakes, and in so doing was betraying communist ideals.¶ I don’t think we need to
abandon these terms or come up with new ones. I think we need to use the power that they have. And people recognize this, which
is what makes it exciting.¶ CM: You write, “Some contemporary crowd observers claim the crowd for democracy. They see in the
amassing of thousands a democratic insistence, a demand to be heard and included. In the context of communicative capitalism,
however, the crowd exceeds democracy.¶ “In the 21st century, dominant nation-states exercise power as democracies. They bomb
and invade as democracies, ‘for democracy’s sake.’ International political bodies legitimize themselves as democratic, as do the
contradictory and tangled media practices of communicative capitalism. When crowds amass in opposition, they pose themselves
against democratic practices, systems, and bodies. To claim the crowd for democracy fails to register this change in the political
setting of the crowd.Ӧ So are crowds today, the protesters today, opposed to democracy? Or are they opposed to the current state
of, let’s say, representative democracy?¶ JD: Let’s think about our basic environment. By “our,” now, I mean basically English-
speaking people who use the internet and are listening to the radio and live in societies like the United States. In our environment,
what we hear is that we live in democracy. We hear this all the time. We hear that the network media makes democratic exchange
possible, that a free press is democracy, that we’ve got elections and that’s democracy.¶ When
crowds amass in this setting,
if they are just at a football game, it’s
not a political statement. Even at a march (fully permitted) that’s
registering opposition to the invasion of Iraq, for example, or concern about the climate—all of those
things are within the general environment of “democracy,” and they don’t oppose the system. They don’t
register as opposition to the system. They’re just saying that we want our view on this or that
issue to count.¶ But the way that crowds have been amassing over the last four or five years—Occupy Wall Street is one
example, but the Red Square debt movement in Canada is another; some of the more militant strikes of nurses and teachers are
too—has been to say, “Look, the process that we have that’s been called democratic? It is not. We want to change that.”¶ It’s not
that we are anti-democratic. It’s that democracy is too limiting a term to register our opposition. We
want something
more. We want actual equality. Democracy is too limiting. The reason it’s too limiting is we live in a context that
understands itself as “democratic.” So democracy as a political claim, in my language, can’t “register the gap that the crowd is
inscribing.” It can’t register real division or opposition. Democracy is just more of what we have.¶ CM: We are so dependent. We use
social media so much, we use Facebook so much, we use so many of these avenues of what you call communicative capitalism so
much. How can we oppose or reject this system without hurting ourselves and our ability to communicate our message to each
other? Can we just go on strike? Can we become the owners of the means of communicative production? ¶ JD: One of the ways that
Marxism historically has understood the political problems faced by workers is our total entrapment and embeddedness in the
capitalist system. What makes a strike so courageous is that workers are shooting themselves in the foot. They’re not earning their
wage for a time, as a way to put pressure on the capitalist owner of the workplace.¶ What does that mean under communicative
capitalism? Does it mean that we have to shoot ourselves in the foot by completely extracting ourselves from all of the instruments
of communication? Or does it mean that we change our attitude towards communication? Or does it mean that we develop our own
means of communication?¶ There’s a whole range here. I’m not a Luddite. I don’t think the way we’re going to bring down
capitalism is by quitting Facebook. I think that’s a little bit absurd. I think what makes more sense is to think of how we could
use the tools we have to bring down the master’s house. We can consolidate our message
together. We can get a better sense of how many we are. We can develop common modes of
thinking. We can distribute organizing materials for the revolutionary party.¶ I don’t think that an
extractive approach to our situation in communicative media is the right one. I think it’s got to be more tactical. How do we use the
tools we have, and how do we find ways to seize the means of communication? This would mean the collectivization of Google,
Facebook, Amazon, and using those apparatuses. But that would probably have to be day two of the revolution.¶ CM: Jodi, I’ve got
one last question for you, and it’s the Question from Hell, the question we might hate to ask, you might hate to answer, or our
audience is going to hate the response.¶ How much did the narrative that Occupy created, of the 99% and the 1%, undermine a of
collectivity? Because it doesn’t include everyone…¶ JD: Division
is crucial. Collectivity is never everyone. What
this narrative did was produce the
divided collectivity that we need. It’s great to undermine the stupid myth
of American unity, “The country has to pull together” and all that crap. It’s fantastic that Occupy Wall Street
asserted collectivity through division. This is class conflict. This says there is not a unified
society. Collectivity is the collectivity of us against them. It produced the proper collectivity:
an antagonistic one.
 Case
T is a procedural:
a) Demands that act to resolve injustice don’t reaffirm the state
Choat 16 - PhD in Political Science at Queen Mary University of London, member of the Political
Studies Association, Senior Lecturer in the School of Economics, Politics, and History
(Simon Choat, “Marxism and anarchism in an age of neoliberal crisis,”
2/15/16, http://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/32233/1/Choat-S-3223-AAM.pdf)

To claim, for example, that Stalinism can be explained by mistakes in Marx’s

methodology, or even that the former throws doubt on the latter, is to risk
the idealist and ultimately untenable argument that political or economic failures are
produced by incorrect or adequate theory. Historical events can never simply disprove
or discredit any ideological position, because ideas are always developed and applied
within a variety of social and historical contexts. The gulag does not result from
something that Marx wrote, but from a complex web of material causes . Anarchists in
particular should be especially wary of attempting to discredit Marxism in this way,
because practical experiments in anarchism have so seldom been successful : if we are to
judge an ideology or movement by its operation ‘in practice’, then anarchism does not fare much better than Marxism (Choat 2013: 337-8).
anarchists
It may be that Leninist tactics have not achieved a classless and stateless society, but so far neither have anarchist tactics:
may have cleaner hands than Marxists, but that is only because anarchists have had their
hands on so little . The anarchist critique of Marxist organisational forms is unconvincing, then, because it does not acknowledge
the diversity of Marxist approaches and it tends towards a theoreticism that sees a linear, causal, and continuous line from theory to
practice. Nonetheless, there are significant differences of strategy between anarchism and Marxism: it is just that these are less to do with
organisation as such, and are much more broadly to do with differing attitudes toward politics and the state. Although some (though by no
means all) anarchists have supported formal political organisations, with rules, membership criteria, and even internal discipline (Schmidt
and van der Walt 2009: 247-263), they have traditionally rejected any engagement with the
state – whether it be voting, demanding legal rights or protections, forming political parties, or
attempting the revolutionary seizure of government – on the basis that such
engagement can only end up replicating the oppressive hierarchies that they are
fighting: either it will lead to new forms of dictatorship and bureaucracy (such as developed in the Soviet Union); or it will
lead to parliamentary reformism and hence merely reinforce existing structures and relations of power. If
Marxists support (qualified) engagement with the state and even the formation of
political parties, however, it is not because they think that centralised hierarchies are
desirable or inevitable, but because they begin from a different understanding of
politics . They argue that the anarchist abstention from state politics denies us the most
effective means of political action : we disempower ourselves rather than the state
when we refuse to engage with it. Making demands on the state does
not necessarily entail an endorsement of the state, any more than the demands that
are made by employees during a strike are an endorsement of the employer or of the
system of wage-labour (Marx 1988).
Humanism good:
A positive orientation towards history and the ideals of radical humanist
freedom are key to global liberationist struggles. Only this can avert every
major existential crisis of our times.
Karenga 6 (Professor and Chair Department of Africa Studies at Cal State University and a
major figure in the Black Power movement [Maulana, Philosophy in the African Tradition of
Resistance: Issues or Human Freedom and Human Flourishing in Not Only The Master’s Tools,
2006, p. 242-5]

Surely, we are at a moment of history fraught with new and old fOnTIS of anxiety, alienation, and
antagonism; deepening poverty in the midst of increasing wealth; proposals and practices of ethnic
cleansing and genocide; pandemic diseases; increased plunder; pollution and depletion of the
environment; constant conflicts, large and small; and world-threatening delusions on the part of a
superpower aspiring to a return to empire, with spurious claims of the right to preemptive
aggression, to openly attack and overthrow nonfavored and fragile governments openly, and to seize
the lands and resources of vulnerable peoples and establish "democracy" through military
dictatorship abroad, all the while suppressing political dissent at home (Chang 2002; Cole et at. 2002). These
anxieties are undergirded by racist and religious chauvinism , by the self-righteous and veiled references of these rulers
to themselves as a kind of terrible and terrorizing hand of God, appointed to rid the world of evil (Ahmad 2002; Arnin 2001; Blum1995). At
the same time, in this context of turmoil and terror and the use and threatened use of catastrophic
weapons, there is the irrational and arrogant expectation that the oppressed will acquiesce,
abandon resistance, and accept the disruptive and devastating consequences of globalization,
along with the global hegemony it implies (Martin and Schumann 1997). There is great alarm among the white-supremicist
rulers of these globalizing nations, given the metical resistance rising up against them, even as globalization’s
technological, organizational, and economic capacity continues to expand (Barber 1996; Karenga
2002e, 2003a; Lusane 1997). There is great alarm when people who should "know" when they are defeated ridicule the
assessment, refuse to be defeated or dispirited, and, on the contrary, intensify and diversify their

struggles (Zepezauer 2002). Certainly the battlefields of Palestine, Venezuela, long suffering Haiti, and Chiapas,
Mexico, along with other continuing emancipatory struggles everywhere, reaffirm the indomitable
character of the human spirit and the durability and adaptive vitality of a people determined
to be free, regardless of the odds and assessments against them. Indeed, they remind us that the motive
force of history is struggle, informed by the ongoing quest for freedom, justice, power of the
masses, and peace in the world. Despite "end of history" claims and single-super- power resolve and resolutions, these
struggles continue. For still the oppressed want freedom, the wronged and injured want justice, the people want power
over their destiny and daily lives, and the world wants peace. And all over the world-especially in this U.S. citadel of aging
capitalism with its archaic dreams of empire-clarity in the analysis of issues, and in the critical determination of tasks and prospects,
requires the deep and disciplined reflection characteristic of the personal and social practice we call
philosophy. But this sense of added urgency for effective intervention is prompted not only by the critical juncture at

which we stand but also by an awareness of our long history of resistance as a people, because in
our collective strivings and social struggles we seek a new future for our people, our descendants, and the
world. Joined also to these conditions and considerations is the compelling character of our self-understanding as a people, as a
moral vanguard in this country and the world. For we have launched, fought, and won with our allies
struggles that not only have expanded the realm of freedom in this country and the world but also have
served as an ongoing inspiration and a model of liberation struggles for other marginalized
and oppressed peoples and groups throughout the world. Indeed, they have borrowed from and built on our moral
vocabulary and moral vision, sung our songs of freedom, and held up our struggle for liberation as a model to emulate. Now, self-
understanding and self-assertion are dialectically linked. In other words, how we understand
ourselves in the world determines how we assert ourselves in the world. Thus, an expansive
concept of ourselves as Africans-continental and diasporan-and as Africana philosophers
forms an essential component of our sense of mission and the urgency with which we approach it. It is
important to note that I have conceived and written this chapter within the framework of Kausaida philosophy (Karenga 1978, 1980,
1997) Kawaida is a philosophic initiative that was
forged in the crucible of ideological and practical
struggles around issues of freedom, justice, equalitys, self-determination, conullunal power,
self-defense, pan~African- ism, coalition and alliance, Black Studies, intellectual emancipation,
and cultural recovery and reconstlouction. It continued to develop in the midst of these ongoing struggies within
the life of the mind and stmggles iottbtn the life of the people, as well as within the context of the conditions of the world. Kawaida
is defined as an ongoing synthesis of the best of xAfrican thought and practice in constant exchange tuttb tl3e 'U)()ltd. It
characterizes culture as a unique, instructive and valuable way of being human in the world-as
a foundation and framework for self-understanding and self-assertion. As a philosophy of culture and
struggle, Kawaida maintains that our intellectual and social practice as Nricana activist scholars must be undergirded
and informed by ongoing efforts to (1) ground our- selves in our own culture; (2) constantly recover, reconstruct, .and
bring forth from our culture the best of what it means to be African and human in the fullest
sense ; (3) speak this special cultural truth to the world and (4) use our culture to constantly make our own unique contribution to
the reconception and reconstruction of this country, and to the forward flow of human history.

Hope is necessary to sustain black politics and visions, give meaning to struggles
for justice, and is worthwhile even if it fails to achieve all of its intentions –
totalizing ideologies are bad.
Dawson 1 (Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture @ University of Chicago
(Michael, BLACK VISIONS: THE ROOTS OF CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN-AMERICAN POLITICAL
IDEOLOGIES, pp. 322-3)

We must finally ask whether African Americans can rely on a totalizing ideology to shape our
visions of black justice and our future in America. My answer is no . I believe we need a more
flexible approach than ideologies such as black Marxism, black nationalism, and at least the Cold
War version of liberalism have allowed. We need a black critical theory that draws on and
combines liberalism’s concern with individual rights and autonomy, republican concerns with
community, socialist concern with an egalitarian society and economic justice for all, feminist
traditions such as resistance to suppressing intragroup differences in the name of a false and
oppressive unity, and blends these with recognition of the need for autonomous organization
and cultural pride. No single world view or ideology comfortably accommodates all of these. But a
critical theory can—and such a theory must be political. We’ve had a black aesthetic, black power, and a
plethora of black public policy pronouncements. But a black political theory has to embody a theory of the
state, power, human nature, and the good life. And such a theory must be based on the hope
for and potential of the improvement of human nature while recognizing the wickedness of the
world. Kantian pronouncements about systems that can be governed by devils have led us to a world where ethnic strife and
nuclear and other horrors proliferate. We must strive for something better, something democratic,
something cosmopolitan, not in the elite sense but in the sense that, since homogeneity is a thing of the
past, even within states, we must fall back on our basic humanness. It is no coincidence that within
American political thought this perspective appears most often in the black traditions and in black political thought,
at least in the contemporary period—most often in the black feminist tradition. Thus the best legacy of black
political ideologies for America is a tough, activist, inclusive democracy willing to challenge privileges of power and
resources in the name of a grander vision which asserts that we are more than the mere aggregation
of our individual preferences. Its morality, while democratic, would not be based on the latest consumer fad nor use the
return to stockholders as the final arbiter of the public good. That we often fail in living up to our standards of

justice within black activism as well as within America—that we are imperfect as individuals
and as communities—does not mean , as King so eloquently demonstrated, that the vision itself is not a
worthy goal . What black critical theory and each black ideology have demonstrated is that the doable, the mundane,
incremental reform of the workings of American society is not enough; only the full promise of America has the potential to be truly
liberating. Any other solution is not only unsatisfactory—it is likely to provoke the kind of deadly conflict most clearly seen in the
Civil War but also seen today in the rapid upward spiral of political and personal violence which results as people measure their
circumstances against what they see as the lies that fester at the center of the American Dream. A new, black, critical theory needs
to retain one aspect of black ideological visions. At
the heart of all of the black visions is a sense of
pragmatic optimism combined with a steadfast determination to gain black justice. Both the
optimism and the determination are needed now as ever to sustain the political projects and
new visions of African Americans.

Our politics is a decisive break with the aff’s apocalyptic politics that orients
hope solely towards the end of the world. Commitment to praxis in this world is
necessary to reclaim a radical humanism and equality.
Richard PITHOUSE, senior researcher, programme coordinator and supervisor at the Unit for
Humanities at Rhodes University, 16 [“Frantz Fanon: Philosophy, Praxis, and the Occult Zone,”
Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, Vol. XXIV, No 1, 2016, p. 116-138,
http://www.jffp.org/ojs/index.php/jffp/article/viewFile/761/723]

Racism, as ideology, is organised around the assertion that humanity is riven by an ontological
split. In the consciousness of the racist, and in the general intellect of racist social formations,
this ontological split is taken as part of what Immanuel Kant called the a priori, the categories through
which sense is made of experience.61 This deception of reason, this “racist rationality”62 results in
racist societies producing forms of knowledge that, while authorised as the most fully formed instances of
reason at work, are fundamentally irrational.

In The “North African Syndrome”, an essay first published in 1952, Frantz Fanon wrote that in the French medical
establishment:

(T)he attitude of medical personnel is very often an a priori attitude. The North African does not come with a substratum
common to his race, but on a foundation built by the European. In other words, the North Africa, spontaneously, by the
very fact of appearing in the scene, enters into a pre-existing framework.63

In other words medical

science in colonial France allowed a priori ontological assumptions to
prevent it from making rational sense of experience.
In Black Skin, White Masks, published in the same year, Fanon also offers a critique of philosophy in colonial France. He insists that
the lived experience of the black person is not congruent with any (philosophically orthodox) “ontological explanation” because “The
black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man.”64 Fanon
stresses that racism is not only
unreasonable but that it structures the a priori categories through which experience is
mediated in a manner that makes it impossible to recognise reason expressed from black
embodiment as reason: “[W]hen I was present, it was not; when it was there, I was no longer.”65

The inability to recognise black reason as reason produces an inability to recognise black
political agency – a distortion of reality all too evident in both historiography and contemporary attempts to think the
political. In his discussion of the evident fact that, in the colonial imagination, the Haitian Revolution
“entered history with the peculiar characteristic of being unthinkable as it happened” Michel-
Rolph Trouillot writes that:

the contention that enslaved Africans and their descendants could not envision freedom – let alone formulate strategies
for gaining and securing such freedom – was based not so much on empirical evidence as on an ontology, an implicit
organization of the world and its inhabitants.66

He goes on to show that racist

ontology continued to structure the historiography of the Haitian
Revolution for the next two centuries.

Lewis Gordon, riffing off Fanon as well as W.E.B. du Bois, uses

the idea of illicit appearance to theorise the
absence “of the right of appearance” beyond the right to appear as reasonable resulting in
invisibility and hypervisibility – “the effect of which is the erasure of individuating or contextualizing considerations -
that is, human invisibility.”67 “When you come down to it” Fanon wrote in The North African Syndrome, “the North African is a
simulator, a liar, a malingerer, a sluggard, a thief.”68

Lewis and Jane Anna Gordon, writing together, argue that across space and time elites generally assume that the system in which
they have prospered is ultimately good and that the people that disrupt its smooth functioning must be problem people – even
monsters. Gordon
and Gordon point out that in anti-black societies, black people are rendered
monstrous “when they attempt to live and participate in the wider civil society and engage in
processes of governing among whites...Their presence in society generally constitutes
crime.”69

Fanon begins the pivotal fifth chapter of Black Skin, White Masks with the cauterisation of an
affirmation of a desire for sociality: ““I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit
filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of
other objects.”70 The chapter concludes with the defeat of all attempts to attain recognition in a racist world: “I wanted to
rise, but the disemboweled silence fell back upon me, its wings paralyzed. Without responsibility, straddling Nothingness and
Infinity, I began to weep.”71

His response to the impossibility of a dialectic of recognition72 is not to give up on the

aspiration for a world of mutuality, of universal humanism (predicated on a universal
ontology) – he still aspires to a world that will recognise “the open door of every consciousness”73 - but to accept that
he has found himself in a world “in which I am summoned into battle”74 and to commit to
action : “To educate man to be actional, preserving in all his relations his respect for the basic values that constitute a human
world, is the prime task of him who, having taken thought, prepares to act.”75 In Gordon’s estimation the Fanonian
position is that “Legitimacy doesn’t emerge from the proof of cultural heritage or racial
authenticity, it emerges...[Fanon] argues, from active engagement in struggles for social
transformation and building institutions and ideas that nourish and liberate the formerly
colonized.”76
This commitment to praxis is a politics that, in Gordon’s formulation, requires a commitment to
“meeting people on the terrain where they live”77 with a view to forging what, as noted above,
Mbembe calls “a radical future orientated politics in this world and these times.”78 Such a
politics, it is asserted here, must be grounded in what S’bu Zikode first called a ‘living politics’79 and
what Lewis Gordon calls ‘living thought’ or ‘thinking as a living activity’.80 It requires a decisive
break with the idea , all too frequently present in South Africa, that radical politics is fundamentally a
matter of rallying ‘the masses’ to the authority of a group of people who, whether situated in a party, a
proto-party or an NGO, imagine themselves to be an enlightened vanguard.

This is not the apocalyptic politics that, as is sometimes the case in Aimé Césaire’s work, is more concerned
with eschatology than praxis. In the Notebook of Return to my Native Land Césaire, in a manner that in some
respects anticipates some currents in contemporary Afro-pessimism, affirms that the only thing work
starting is “The end of the world!”81 and anticipates the one glorious moment82, the brilliant new dawn
in which “the volcanoes will break out and the naked water will sweep away the ripe stains of
the sun and nothing will remain but a tepid bubbling pecked at by sea birds – the beach of dreams, and demented
awakening”83, a rising of a new sun that would “burst open the life of the shacks like an over-ripe pomegranate.”84 In this
vision, in which the political is sublimated into the theological, the authentic radical gesture is, ultimately, to
disavow the world as it is and to wait for the birth of a new world .

Again unlike Césaire

Fanon does not accept the ontological split introduced into the
conception of humanity authorised by colonial racism. His evident commitment to the
universal85, and action to affirm a universal humanism86, situates him in a line of black radical
thought that runs from Toussaint Louverture87 to Biko88, Jean-Bertrand Aristide89 and, arguably for that
matter, the constant insistence on the barricades on South African streets of words to the effect of ‘we are human not animal’.90

But like Césaire Fanon’s radical vision is not, at all, a commitment to what Césaire, writing in 1956, termed ‘abstract equality’.
Césaire remarks that:

To prevent the development of all national consciousness in the colonized, the colonizer pushes the colonized to desire
an abstract equality. But equality refuses to remain abstract. And what an affair it is when the colonized takes back the
word on his own account to demand that it not remain a mere word!'91

From a South African perspective this condemnation of ‘abstract equality’ sounds almost prophetic but it has always been a colonial
response to black insurgency. In in 1801 Napolean wrote, from St Helena, of the French policy, with regard to Haiti, of “disarming
the blacks while assuring them of their civil liberty, and restoring property to the [white] colonists.”92

For Fanon emancipation has many aspects. These include a spatial aspect,93 a material
aspect,94 the attainment of equality between women and men,95 but, also, and fundamentally,
the sovereignty of the human person. Liberation must, he insists, in Sekyi-Otu’s revised translation, "give
back their dignity to all citizens, fill their minds and feast their eyes with human things and
create a prospect that is human because conscious and sovereign persons dwell therein.”96 In
contemporary South Africa this cannot take the form of the sole defence of abstract rights, a politics primarily organised around
exploitation via the wage relation or the sort of nationalism that is nai ̈ve about the cleavages with the nation. It
must to, to
return to Mbembe, “take the form of a conscious attempt to retrieve life and ‘the human’
from a history of waste.”97