Capitalism Critique Vs Non-Traditional Affirmatives - HSS 2014

***Capitalism Kritik***
Note: The file was primarily made against K affs- especially the race and queer/fem ones put our by HSS
labs. The 1NCs are first and then there are links, impacts, alternative stuff and then A2s. Thank you to the
HOP lab for putting out the impacts for this. A note for the Military Intellectualism alternative- the cards
have mostly the same author. They might seem very similar but 2nc cards make specific and tailored
warrants for the argument the aff reads. Aff answers put out separately. As a side note, read T
development as exploitation. When they read a meet, thats the link to the K of exploitation.
-Camila Reed-Guevara
1NCs
Race 1NC
Focusing on race and culture distracting from serious
challenges to capitalism in the status quo
Scatamburlo-DAnnibale and McLaren 4 Valerie Scatamburlo-DAnnibale,
Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor,
holds an M.A. in Communication Studies from the University of Windsor and a Ph.D. from York University,
and Peter McLaren, Professor in the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies at the University
of California-Los Angeles, holds a Ph.D. from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University
of Toronto, 2004 (Class Dismissed? Historical materialism and the politics of difference, Educational
Philosophy and Theory, Volume 36, Issue 2, April, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Wiley
Online Library, p. 183-191)
post-Marxists tend to assume that

the principal political points of departure in the current postmodern
world must necessarily be cultural. As such, most, but not all post-Marxists
have gravitated towards a politics of difference which is largely
premised on uncovering relations of power that reside in the
arrangement and deployment of subjectivity in cultural and ideological
practices (cf. Jordan & Weedon, 1995). Advocates of difference politics therefore posit their ideas as
Eager to take a wide detour around political economy,
bold steps forward in advancing the interests of those historically marginalized by dominant social and
cultural narratives. There is no doubt that post-Marxism has advanced our knowledge of the hidden
trajectories of power within the processes of representation and that it remains useful in adumbrating the
formation of subjectivity and its expressive dimensions as well as complementing our understandings of
postMarxists have been woefully remiss in addressing the constitution of

class formations and the machinations of capitalist social organization.
the relationships between difference, language, and cultural configurations. However,
In some instances, capitalism and class relations have been thoroughly otherized; in others, class is
summoned only as part of the triumvirate of race, class, and gender in which class is reduced to merely
Enamored with the cultural and seemingly blind to

the economic, the rhetorical excesses of post-Marxists have also
prevented them from considering the stark reality of contemporary
class conditions under global capitalism. As we hope to show, the radical displacement
another form of difference.
of class analysis in contemporary theoretical narratives and the concomitant decentering of capitalism, the
the culturalization of
politics, have had detrimental effects on left theory and practic e.
anointing of difference as a primary explanatory construct, and
Reconceptualizing Difference The manner in which difference has been taken up within post-al
frameworks has tended to stress its cultural dimensions while marginalizing and, in some cases,
This posturing has

been quite evident in many post-al theories of race and in the realm
of ludic cultural studies that have valorized an account of difference
particularly racial differencein almost exclusively superstructuralist
terms (Sahay, 1998). But this treatment of difference and claims about the relative
autonomy of race have been enabled by a reduction and distortion
of Marxian class analysis which involves equating class analysis with
some version of economic determinism. The key move in this distorting gesture
completely ignoring the economic and material dimensions of difference.
depends on the view that the economic is the base, the cultural/political/ideological the superstructure. It
is then relatively easy to show that the (presumably non-political) economic base does not cause the
political/cultural/ideological superstructure, that the latter is/are not epiphenomenal but relatively
In such formulations
the cultural is treated as a separate and autonomous sphere, severed
from its embeddedness within sociopolitical and economic
autonomous or autonomous causal categories (Meyerson, 2000, p. 2).
arrangements. As a result, many of these culturalist narratives have produced autonomist and
reified conceptualizations of difference which far from enabling those subjects most marginalized by racial
difference have, in effect, reduced difference to a question of knowledge/power relations that can
presumably be dealt with (negotiated) on a discursive level without a fundamental change in the relations
of production (Sahay, 1998). At this juncture, it is necessary to point out that arguing that culture is generally conditioned/shaped by material forces
does not reinscribe the simplistic and presumably deterministic base/superstructure metaphor which has plagued some strands of Marxist theory. Rather, we invoke
Marx's own writings from both the Grundrisse and Capital in which he contends that there is a consolidating logic in the relations of production that permeates society in
the complex variety of its empirical reality. This emphasizes Marx's understanding of capitalism and capital as a social relationone which stresses the interpenetration
of these categories, the realities which they reflect, and one which therefore offers a unified and dialectical analysis of history, ideology, culture, politics, economics and
society (see also Marx, 1972, 1976, 1977).2 Foregrounding the limitations of difference and representational politics does not suggest a disavowal of the importance of
cultural and/or discursive arena(s) as sites of contestation and struggle. We readily acknowledge the significance of contemporary theorizations that have sought to
valorize precisely those forms of difference that have historically been denigrated. This has undoubtedly been an important development since they have enabled
subordinated groups to reconstruct their own histories and give voice to their individual and collective identities. However, they have also tended to redefine politics as a
signifying activity generally confined to the realm of representation while displacing a politics grounded in the mobilization of forces against the material sources of
many postMarxists (who often ignore their own class privilege) have fallen prey to an ahistorical
form of culturalism which holds, among other things, that cultural
struggles external to class organizing provide the cutting edge of
emancipatory politics.3 In many respects, this posturing, has yielded an intellectual
political and economic marginalization.
In their rush to avoid the capital sin of economism,
pseudopolitics that has served to empower the theorist while explicitly disempowering real citizens
(Turner, 1994, p. 410). We do not discount concerns over representation; rather our point is that
progressive educators and theorists should not be straightjacketed by struggles that fail to move beyond
the politics of difference and representation in the cultural realm. While space limitations prevent us from
elaborating this point, we contend that culturalist arguments are deeply problematic both in terms of their
penchant for de-emphasizing the totalizing (yes totalizing!) power and function of capital and for their
attempts to employ culture as a construct that would diminish the centrality of class. In a proper historical
materialist account, culture
is not the other of class but, rather, constitutes

part of a more comprehensive theorization of class rule in different
contexts.4 Post-al theorizations of difference circumvent and undermine any systematic knowledge of the material dimensions of difference and tend to
segregate questions of difference from class formation and capitalist social relations. We therefore believe that it is necessary to (re)conceptualize difference by drawing
upon Marx's materialist and historical formulations. Difference needs to be understood as the product of social contradictions and in relation to political and economic
organization. We need to acknowledge that otherness and/or difference is not something that passively happens, but, rather, is actively produced. In other words, since
systems of differences almost always involve relations of domination and oppression, we must concern ourselves with the economies of relations of difference that exist in
specific contexts. Drawing upon the Marxist concept of mediation enables us to unsettle our categorical approaches to both class and difference, for it was Marx himself
who warned against creating false dichotomies in the situation of our politicsthat it was absurd to choose between consciousness and the world, subjectivity and social
organization, personal or collective will and historical or structural determination. In a similar vein, it is equally absurd to see difference as a historical form of
consciousness unconnected to class formation, development of capital and class politics (Bannerji, 1995, p. 30). Bannerji points to the need to historicize difference in
relation to the history and social organization of capital and class (inclusive of imperialist and colonialist legacies). Apprehending the meaning and function of difference in
this manner necessarily highlights the importance of exploring (1) the institutional and structural aspects of difference; (2) the meanings that get attached to categories of
difference; and (3) how differences are produced out of, and lived within specific historical formations.5
Capitalism leads to mass murder and genocide and the

systematic extermination of entire ethnic and social groupsturns the affirmative
IP, 2 (Internationalist Perspective, political organization basing itself on Marxism as a living theory, one
that can go back to its sources, criticize them, and develop hand in hand with the historical social
trajectory, #36, spring 2000, CAPITALISM AND
GENOCIDE,http://www.reocities.com/wageslavex/capandgen.html)-- CRG
Mass death, and genocide, the deliberate and systematic

extermination of whole groups of human beings, have become an
integral part of the social landscape of capitalism in its phase of decadence.
Auschwitz, Kolyma, and Hiroshima are not merely the names of discrete sites where human beings have
the death-world that is

a component of the capitalist mode of production in this epoch. In that
been subjected to forms of industrialized mass death, but synecdoches for
sense,
I want to argue that the Holocaust, for example, was not a Jewish catastrophe, nor an atavistic reversion to the barbarism of a past epoch, but rather an event
produced by the unfolding of the logic of capitalism itself. Moreover, Auschwitz, Kolyma, and Hiroshima are not "past", but rather futural events, objective-real possibilities
on the Front of history, to use concepts first articulated by the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch. The ethnic cleansing which has been unleashed in Bosnia and Kosovo, the
genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, the mass death to which Chechnya has been subjected, the prospect for a nuclear war on the Indian sub-continent, are so many
examples of the future which awaits the human species as the capitalist mode of production enters a new millenium. Indeed, it is just such a death-world that constitutes
the meaning of one pole of the historic alternative which Rosa Luxemburg first posed in the midst of the slaughter inflicted on masses of conscripts during World War I:
socialism or barbarism!
Yet, confronted by the horror of Auschwitz, Kolyma, and Hiroshima, Marxist theory has
While I am convinced that there can be no

adequate theory of mass death and genocide which does not link these
phenomena to the unfolding of the logic of capital, revolutionary
Marxists have so far failed to offer one. Worse, the few efforts of revolutionary Marxists
been silent or uncomprehending.
to grapple with the Holocaust, for example, as I will briefly explain, have either degenerated into a crude
economism, which is one of the hallmarks of so-called orthodox Marxism, or led to a fatal embrace of
Holocaust denial; the former being an expression of theoretical bankruptcy, and the latter a quite literal
crossing of the class line into the camp of capital itself.
Economism, which is based on a
crude base-superstructure model (or travesty) of Marxist theory, in which politics, for
example, can only be conceived as a direct and immediate reflection of
the economic base, in which events can only be conceived as a
manifestation of the direct economic needs of a social class, and in the
case of the capitalist class, the immediate need to extract a profit, shaped
Amadeo Bordiga's attempt to "explain" the Holocaust. Thus, in his "Auschwitz ou le Grand Alibi" Bordiga explained the extermination of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis,
as the reaction of one part of the petty bourgeoisie to its historical demise at the hands of capital by "sacrificing" its other -- Jewish -- part so as to save the rest, an
undertaking welcomed by big capital, which could thereby liquidate a part of the petty bourgeoisie with the support of the rest of that same class. Quite apart from an
economism which simply ignores the dialectic between the economy on the one hand, and the political and ideological on the other (about which more later), such an
"explanation" asks us to conceive of genocide not as the complex outcome of the unfolding of the operation of the law of value in the diverse spheres of social life, but as
the direct outcome of the utilitarian calculation of segments of the petty bourgeoisie and big capital. Auschwitz, the veritable hallmark of the fundamental irrationality of
late capital, is transformed by Bordiga into a rational calculation of its direct profit interests on the part of the capitalists. However, an undertaking which fatally diverted
the scarce resources (material and financial) of Nazi Germany from the battlefields of the imperialist world war, simply cannot, in my view, be comprehended on the basis
of a purely economic calculus of profit and loss on the part of "big capital."
While Bordiga's reaction to Auschwitz fails to provide even the minimal bases for its
adequate theorization, the reaction of the militants of La Vieille Taupe, such as Pierre Guillaume, constitutes a political betrayal of the struggle for communist revolution by
its incorporation into the politics of Holocaust denial. For Guillaume, Auschwitz can only be a myth, a fabrication of the allies, that is, of one of the imperialist blocs in the
inter-imperialist world war, because it so clearly serves their interests in mobilizing the working class to die in the service of democracy; on the alter of anti-fascism. Hence,
La Vieille Taupe's "fervor to contest the evidence of its [the Holocaust's] reality by every means possible, including the most fraudulent. For the evidence of genocide is just
so many deceptions, so many traps laid for anticapitalist radicality, designed to force it into dishonest compromise and eventual loss of resolve." It is quite true that capital
has utilized antifascism to assure its ideological hegemony over the working class, and that the Holocaust has been routinely wielded for more than a generation by the
organs of mass manipulation in the service of the myth of "democracy" in
the West (and by the state of Israel on behalf of its own
And just as surely the ideology of antifascism

and its functionality for capital must be exposed by revolutionaries.
imperialist aims in the Middle-East).
Nonetheless, this does not justify the claims of Holocaust denial, which not only cannot be dissociated from
anti-Semitism, but which constitutes a denial of the most lethal tendencies inherent in the capitalist mode
of production, of the very barbarism of capitalism, and thereby serves as a screen behind which the deathworld wrought by capital can be safely hidden from its potential victims. This latter, in its own small way, is
the despicable contribution of La Vieille Taupe, and the basis for my conviction that it must be politically
Marxism is in need of a theory of mass death

and genocide as immanent tendencies of capital, a way of comprehending the link (still obsure)
located in the camp of capital.
between the death-world symbolized by the smokestacks of Auschwitz or the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima and the unfolding of the logic of a mode of production based
on the capitalist law of value. I want to argue that we can best grasp the link between capitalism and genocide by focusing on two dialectically inter-related strands in the
social fabric of late capitalism: first, are a series of phenomena linked to the actual unfolding of the law of value, and more specifically to the completion of the transition
from the formal to the real domination of capital; second, are a series of phenomena linked to the political and ideological (this latter understood in a non-reductionist
sense, as having a material existence) moments of the rule of capital, specifically to the forms of capitalist hegemony. It is through an analysis of the coalescence of vital
elements of these two strands in the development of capital, that I hope to expose the bases for the death-world and genocide as integral features of capitalism in the
The real domination of capital is characterized by the

penetration of the law of value into every segment of social existence.
present epoch.
As Georg Lukcs put it in his History and Class Consciousness, this means that the commodity ceases to be
"one form among many regulating the metabolism of human society," to become its "universal structuring
principle."
From its original locus at the point of production, in the

capitalist factory, which is the hallmark of the formal domination of
capital, the law of value has systematically spread its tentacles to
incorporate not just the production of commodities, but their
circulation and consumption. Moreover, the law of value also penetrates and then comes to preside over the spheres of
the political and ideological, including science and technology themselves. This latter occurs not just through the transformation of the fruits of technology and science into
commodities, not just through the transformation of technological and scientific research itself (and the institutions in which it takes place) into commodities, but also, and
especially, through what Lukcs designates as the infiltration of thought itself by the purely technical, the very quantification of rationality, the instrumentalization of
reason; and, I would argue, the reduction of all beings (including human beings) to mere objects of manipulation and control. As Lukcs could clearly see even in the age of
Taylorism, "this rational mechanisation extends right into the worker's `soul'." In short, it affects not only his outward behavior, but her very internal, psychological,
makeup.
The phenomenon of reification, inherent in the commodity-form, and its tendential penetration into the whole of social existence, which Lukcs was one of the
first to analyze, is a hallmark of the real domination of capital: "Its basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a `phantom
objectivity', an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people." Reification,
the seeming transformation of social relations into relations between things, has as one of its outcomes what the German-Jewish thinker H.G.Adler designated as "the
administered man" [Der verwaltete Mensch]. For Adler, when human beings are administered, they are treated as things, thereby clearing the way for their removal or
elimination by genocide. The outcome of such a process can be seen in the bureaucractic administration of the Final Solution, in which the organization of genocide was
the responsibility of desk killers like Adolf Eichmann who could zealously administer a system of mass murder while displaying no particular hatred for his victims, no great
ideological passion for his project, and no sense that those who went to the gas chambers were human beings and not things. The features of the desk killer, in the person
of Eichmann, have been clearly delineated by Hannah Arendt. He is the high-level functionary in a vast bureaucratic organization who does his killing from behind a desk,
from which he rationally plans and organizes mass murder; treating it as simply a technical task, no different than the problem of transporting scrap metal. The desk killer
is the quintessential bureaucrat functioning according to the imperatives of the death-world. As a human type, the desk killer, that embodiment of the triumph of
instrumental reason, has become a vital part of the state apparatus of late capitalism.
Here, the Lukcsian concept of reification, the Adlerian concept of the
administered man, and the Arendtian portrait of the desk killer, can be joined to Martin Heidegger's concept of das Gestell, enframing, in which everything real, all beings,
including humans, are treated as so much Bestand, standing-reserve or raw material, to be manipulated at will. This reduction of humans to a raw material is the
antechamber to a world in which they can become so many waste products to be discarded or turned into ashes in the gas chambers of Auschwitz or at ground zero at
Hiroshima. While the reification which attains its culminating point in the real domination of capital may contain within itself the possibility of mass murder and its deathworld, it does not in and of itself explain the actual unleashing of the genocidal potential which, because of it, is now firmly ensconced within the interstices of the
capitalist mode of production. To confront that issue, I want to elucidate two concepts which, while not directly linked by their authors to the unfolding of the capitalist law
of value, can be refunctioned to forge such a link, and have already been effectively wielded in the effort to explain genocide: the concept of the obsolescence of man [Die
Antiquiertheit des Menschen], articulated by the German-Jewish philosopher Gnther Anders, and the concept of bio-politics, articulated by Michel Foucault.
For Anders,
the first industrial revolution introduced the machine
with its own source of power as a means of production, while
second industrial revolution saw the extension of commodity
the
production to the whole of society, and the subordination of man to the

machine. According to Anders, the third industrial revolution, in the epoch of which humanity now
lives, has made humans obsolete, preparing the way for their replacement by machines, and the end of history (Endzeit). For Anders, the Holocaust marked the first
attempt at the systematic extermination of a whole group of people by industrial means, opening the way for the extension of the process of extermination to virtually the
whole of the human species; a stage which he designates as "post-civilized cannibalism" [postzivilisatorischen Kannibalismus], in which the world is "overmanned", and in
which Hiroshima marks the point at which "humanity as a whole is eliminatable"[ttbar]. Anders's philosophy of technology is unabashedly pessimistic, leaving virtually no
room for Marxist hope (communist revolution). Nonetheless, his vision of a totally reified world, and technology as the subject of history, culminating in an Endzeit,
corresponds to one side of the dialectic of socialism or barbarism which presides over the present epoch. Moreover, Anders's concept of an overmanned world can be
fruitfully linked to the immanent tendency of the law of value to generate an ever higher organic composition of capital, culminating in the present stage of automation,
robotics, computers, and information technology, on the bases of which ever larger masses of living labor are ejected from the process of production, and, indeed, from the
cycle of accumulation as a whole, ceasing to be -- even potentially -- a productive force, a source of exchange-value, in order to become an insuperable burden for capital,
a dead weight, which, so long as it lives and breathes, threatens its profitability. This "obsolescence of man" can at the level of total capital thereby create the necessity for
mass murder; inserting the industrial extermination of whole groups of people into the very logic of capital: genocide as the apotheosis of instrumental reason! Reason
transmogrified into the nihilistic engine of destruction which shapes the late capitalist world.
Michel Foucault's concept of bio-power can also be refunctioned to
explicitly link it to the basic tendencies of the development of capitalism, in which case it provides a point of intersection between the triumph of the real domination of
capital economically, and the political and ideological transformation of capitalist rule, while at the same time making it possible to grasp those features of capital which
propel it in the direction of genocide. The extension of the law of value into every sphere of human existence, the culminating point of the real domination of capital, is
marked by the subordination of the biological realm itself to the logic of capital. This stage corresponds to what Foucault designates as bio-politics, which encapsulates
both the "statification of the biological", and the "birth of state racism". Bio-politics entails the positive power to administer, manage, and regulate the intimate details of
the life -- and death -- of whole populations in the form of technologies of domination: "In concrete terms ... this power over life evolved in two basic forms ... they
constituted ... two poles of development linked together by a whole intermediary cluster of relations. One of these poles ... centered on the body as a machine: its
disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and
economic controls, all this was ensured by the procedures of power that characterized the disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the human body. The second ... focused on
the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life
expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory
controls: a bio-politics of the population." Such a bio-politics represents the subjugation of biological life in its diverse human forms to the imperatives of the law of value. It
allows capital to mobilize all the human resources of the nation in the service of its expansion and aggrandizement, economic and military.
The other side of biopolitics, of this power over life, for Foucault, is what he terms "thanatopolitics," entailing an awesome power to inflict mass death, both on the population of one's enemy,
and on one's own population: "the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual's continued existence. .... If
genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers ... it is because power is situated at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population."
Nuclear, chemical, and biological, weapons make it possible to wield this power to condemn whole populations to death. Bio-politics, for Foucault, also necessarily entails
racism, by which he means making a cut in the biological continuum of human life, designating the very existence of a determinate group as a danger to the population, to
its health and well-being, and even to its very life. Such a group, I would argue, then, becomes a biological (in the case of Nazism) or class enemy (in the case of Stalinism,
though the latter also claimed that biological and hereditary characteristics were linked to one's class origins). And the danger represented by such an enemy race can
necessitate its elimination through physical removal (ethnic cleansing) or extermination (genocide).
The Foucauldian concept of bio-politics allows us to see how, on
the basis of technologies of domination, it is possible to subject biological life itself to a formidable degree of control, and to be able to inflict mass death on populations or
races designated as a biological threat. Moreover, by linking this concept to the real domination of capital, we are able to see how the value-form invades even the
biological realm in the phase of the real domination of capital. However, while bio-power entails the horrific possibility of genocide, it is Foucault's ruminations on the
binary division of a population into a "pure community" and its Other, which allows us to better grasp its necessity. Such a perspective, however, intersects with the
transformations at the level of the political and ideological moment of capital, and it is to these, and what I see as vital contributions to their theorization by Antonio
Gramsci and Ernst Bloch, that I now want to turn in an effort to better elucidate the factors that propel capital in the direction of mass death and genocide.
What is at
issue here is not Gramsci's politics, his political practice, his interventions in the debates on strategy and tactics within the Italian Communist Party, where he followed the
counter-revolutionary line of the Stalinist Comintern, but rather his theorization of the political and ideological moment of capital, and in particular his concept of the
"integral state", his understanding of the state as incorporating both political and civil society, his concept of hegemony, and his understanding of ideology as inscribed in
practices and materialized in institutions, which exploded the crude base-superstructure model of orthodox Marxism and its vision of ideology as simply false
In contrast to orthodox
Marxism which has equated the state with coercion, Gramsci's
insistence that the state incorporates both political and civil society,
and that class rule is instanciated both by domination (coercion) and
hegemony (leadership) allows us to better grasp the complex and
crisscrossing strands that coalesce in capitalist class rule, especially in
the phase of the real domination of capital and the epoch of state
capitalism. For Gramsci, hegemony is the way in which a dominant class installs its rule over society through the intermediary of ideology, establishing its
consciousness, all of which have enriched Marxist theory, and which revolutionaries ignore at their peril.
intellectual and cultural leadership over other classes, and thereby reducing its dependence on coercion. Ideology, for Gramsci, is not mere false consciousness, but rather
is the form in which humans acquire consciousness, become subjects and act, constituting what he terms a "collective will". Moreover, for him, ideology is no mere
superstructure, but has a material existence, is materialized in praxis. The state which rests on a combination of coercion and hegemony is what Gramsci designates as an
integral state. It seems to me, that one major weakness of the Gramscian concept of hegemony is that he does not seem to apply it to the control exercised over an
antagonistic class. Thus, Gramsci asserts that one dominates, coerces, antagonistic classes, but leads only allied classes. Gramsci's seeming exclusion of antagonistic
classes from the ideological hegemony of the dominant class seems to me to be misplaced, especially in the epoch of state capitalism, when the capitalist class, the
functionaries of capital, acquire hegemony, cultural and intellectual leadership and control, not just of allied classes and strata (e.g. the middle classes, petty bourgeoisie,
etc.), but also over broad strata of the antagonistic class, the working class itself. Indeed, such hegemony, though never total, and always subject to reversal (revolution),
is the veritable key to capitalist class rule in this epoch.
One way in which this ideological hegemony of capital is established over broad strata of the population,
including sectors of the working class, is by channeling the disatisfaction and discontent of the mass of the population with the monstrous impact of capitalism upon their
lives (subjection to the machine, reduction to the status of a "thing", at the point of production, insecurity and poverty as features of daily life, the overall social process of
atomization and massification, etc.), away from any struggle to establish a human Gemeinwesen, communism. Capitalist hegemony entails the ability to divert that very
disatisfaction into the quest for a "pure community", based on hatred and rage directed not at capital, but at the Other, at alterity itself, at those marginal social groups
which are designated a danger to the life of the nation, and its population.
One of the most dramatic effects of the inexorable penetration of the law of value into every
pore of social life, and geographically across the face of the whole planet, has been the destruction of all primitive, organic, and pre-capitalist communities. Capitalism, as
Marx and Engels pointed out in the Communist Manifesto, shatters the bonds of immemorial custom and tradition, replacing them with its exchange mechanism and
contract. While Marx and Engels stressed the positive features of this development in the Manifesto, we cannot ignore its negative side, particularly in light of the fact that
the path to a human Gemeinwesen has so far been successfully blocked by capital, with disastrous consequences for the human species. The negative side of that
development includes the relentless process of atomization, leaving in its wake an ever growing mass of rootless individuals, for whom the only human contact is by way of
the cash nexus. Those who have been uprooted geographically, economically, politically, and culturally, are frequently left with a powerful longing for their lost
communities (even where those communities were hierarchically organized and based on inequality), for the certainties and "truths" of the past, which are idealized the
more frustrating, unsatisfying, and insecure, the world of capital becomes. Such longings are most powerfully felt within what Ernst Bloch has termed non-synchronous
strata and classes. These are stata and classes whose material or mental conditions of life are linked to a past mode of production, who exist economically or culturally in
the past, even as they chronologically dwell in the present. In contrast to the two historic classes in the capitalist mode of production, the bourgeoisie and proletariat,
which are synchronous, the products of the capitalist present, these non-synchronous strata include the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie, and -- by virtue of their mental or
cultural state -- youth and white-collar workers. In my view, Bloch's understanding of non-synchronicity needs to be extended to segments of the working class, in
particular those strata of the blue-collar proletariat which are no longer materially synchronous with the high-tech production process upon which late capitalism rests, and
the mass of workers ejected from the production process by the rising organic composition of capital and its comcomitant down-sizing. In addition, the even greater mass
of peasants streaming into the shanty towns around the great commercial and industrial metropolitan centers of the world, are also characterized by their nonsynchronicity, their inability to be incorporated into the hyper-modern cycle of capital accumulation. Moreover, all of these strata too are subject to a growing nostalgia for
the past, a longing for community, including the blue-collar communities and their institutional networks which were one of the features of the social landscape of
capitalism earlier in the twentieth century.
However, no matter how powerful this nostalgia for past community becomes, it cannot be satisfied. The organic
communities of the past cannot be recreated; their destruction by capital is irreversible. At the same time, the path to a future Gemeinwesen, to which the cultural
material and longings embodied in the non-synchronous classes and strata can make a signal contribution, according to Bloch, remains obstructed by the power of capital.
So long as this is the case, the genuine longing for community of masses of people, and especially the nostalgia for past communities especially felt by the nonsynchronous strata and classes, including the newly non-synchronous elements which I have just argued must be added to them, leaves them exposed to the lure of a
"pure community" ideologically constructed by capital itself. In place of real organic and communal bonds, in such an ideologically constructed pure community, a racial,
ethnic, or religious identification is merely superimposed on the existing condition of atomization in which the mass of the population finds itself. In addition to providing
some gratification for the longing for community animating broad strata of the population, such a pure community can also provide an ideological bond which ties the bulk
of the population to the capitalist state on the basis of a race, ethnicity, or religion which it shares with the ruling class. This latter is extremely important to capital,
because the atomization which it has brought about not only leaves the mass of humanity bereft, but also leaves the ruling class itself vulnerable because it lacks any
basis upon which it can mobilize the population, physically or ideologically.
The basis upon which such a pure community is constituted, race, nationality, religion, even
a categorization by "class" in the Stalinist world, necessarily means the exclusion of those categories of the population which do not conform to the criteria for inclusion,
the embodiments of alterity, even while they inhabit the same geographical space as the members of the pure community. Those excluded, the "races" on the other side
of the biological continuum, to use Foucauldian terminology, the Other, become alien elements within an otherwise homogeneous world of the pure community. As a threat
to its very existence, the role of this Other is to become the scapegoat for the inability of the pure community to provide authentic communal bonds between people, for
its abject failure to overcome the alienation that is a hallmark of a reified world. The Jew in Nazi Germany, the Kulak in Stalinist Russia, the Tutsi in Rwanda, Muslims in
Bosnia, blacks in the US, the Albanian or the Serb in Kosovo, the Arab in France, the Turk in contemporary Germany, the Bahai in Iran, for example, become the
embodiment of alterity, and the target against which the hatred of the members of the pure community is directed. The more crisis ridden a society becomes, the greater
the need to find an appropriate scapegoat; the more urgent the need for mass mobilization behind the integral state, the more imperious the need to focus rage against
the Other. In an extreme situation of social crisis and political turmoil, the demonization and victimization of the Other can lead to his (mass) murder. In the absence of a
working class conscious of its historic task and possibilities, this hatred of alterity which permits capital to mobilize the population in defense of the pure community, can
The immanent tendencies of the capitalist mode of

production which propel it towards a catastrophic economic crisis, also
drive it towards mass murder and genocide. In that sense, the death-world,
become its own impetus to genocide.
and the prospect of an Endzeit cannot be separated from the continued existence of humanity's
subordination to the law of value. Reification, the overmanned world, bio-politics, state racism, the
constitution of a pure community directed against alterity, each of them features of the economic and
ideological topography of the real domination of capital, create the possibility and the need for genocide.
We should have no doubt that the survival of capitalism into this new
millenium will entail more and more frequent recourse to mass murder.
The alternative is to embrace radical militant intellectuality
that challenges the intellectual hegemony of capitalism
constructing new knowledge practices in academic forums like
debate is a prerequisite to emancipatory social change.
Sotiris 13 Panagiotis Sotiris, Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of
the Aegean, 2013 (Hegemony and mass critical intellectuality, International Socialism: A Quarterly
Journal of Socialist Theory, Issue 137, January 9th, Available Online at http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?
id=871&issue=137, Accessed 01-23-2013)
there can be militant forms of intellectuality,

both in the sense of critical and politically engaged theoretical
production oriented towards projects for emancipation and in the sense
of mass intellectuality and a change in common sense and mass
ideological practices. At the same time, we have to confront the whole process through which
All these examples show us that
1960s and 1970s theoretical radicalism lost both its momentum and its political engagement. The wellknown story about radical academics becoming self-entrenched within the confines of academia and all the
rituals of formal academic research, losing touch with urgent social and political exigencies, although in
most aspects a distortion of reality, did indeed capture some of the problems of post-1970s radical
theorising. Even today, with an impressive wave of young Marxist or more generally radical academics
(mainly in junior positions) in place, one can still sense the gap separating theoretical and political activity
or participation in movements. The standardisation of academic research, the quantification of research
assessment, both individually and institutionally, the pressure for immediate results, papers and
quantifiable research outcomes surely contributes to this. However, there have also been other forms. To
give one example: The edu-factory network has been more than instrumental in promoting both a radical
anti-capitalist agenda regarding the entrepreneurialisation of higher education and forms of coordination
between activists and activist networks.31 To give another example: all the international networks of
economists helping movements against globalisation, against Third World Debt, in favour of debt-auditing
processes.32 Recently the notion of mass intellectuality has gained new interest, especially in the work of
writers working in a post-workerist direction such as M Lazzarato and Paolo Virno.33 According to this
theme, the importance of intellectual immaterial labour in post-Fordist capitalism makes mass
intellectuality even more important, as is evident in the intellectual (in the sense of non-manual) character
of many work processes and in the need for capital to exploit not just labour time but also collective
knowledge, skills, representations. This follows the workerists emphasis on the Fragment on Machines
from the Grundrisse where Marx refers to the General Intellect.34 For this tradition mass intellectuality is
an analytical concept, a description of the objective and subjective conditions for post-Fordism, and follows
the workerist tendency to ground insurrectionary tendencies in the ontology of labour. However, it is not a
concept that can account for the complexity of the division between intellectual and manual labour in
capitalist production, of the recurring tendency both of the incorporation of scientific knowledge and
technique in the production process and of the trivialisation of tasks, and of the forms of the
transformation of science into a productive force. It is also a one-sided reading of Marx that stresses the
importance of the Grundrisse but tends to leave aside Marxs more elaborate confrontation with questions
of science and technology, especially in the Economic Manuscript of 1861-63.35 In those notes a more
complex conception emerges of the relation of science to capitalist production, one that, instead of a
simple image of a collective intellectual capacity being put under the command of capital, stresses the
importance of technology and machinery on the transformation of science into a production force and the
processes of skilling and deskilling associated with this process. Moreover, the post-workerist emphasis on
immaterial intellectual labour as the hegemonic form,36 can easily lead to an underestimation of all
other forms of labour and misrepresent capitalist exploitation as mainly some form of blocking the creative
capability of the multitude. By contrast, I am using intellectuality here much more in the sense that
Gramsci uses it, as a strategic concept describing a condition to be attained, the result of
(counter)hegemonic apparatuses and projects, the outcome of struggles and new forms of collective
this increased importance of intellectual labour

in modern capitalism (something that Gramsci also stressed) creates conditions for
collective practices and networks of militant intellectuality. In this sense
mass intellectuality is not something given in advance; it is a political stake of
social and political antagonism and of the collective practices of
social movements. In the light of the above, we can discuss some of the tasks facing us today.
We need more examples of critical intellectuality and of politically
engaged theoretical production. We need radical academics and
researchers providing theoretical material to activists. We want activists and
organisation. We have to see how
militants to have a much more theoretical background acquired not only through formal academic
channels. We want radical social movements to become also theoretical sites, to develop their own
knowledge institutions, both in the sense of producing and of disseminating knowledge and critical theory.
Social movements, especially when they are

politicised in a collective and non-hierarchical manner, are also knowledge processes.
People engaging in them have to know things, have to form
arguments, and at the same time they learn from the very collective
experience of struggle. The presence of radical theorists and researchers alongside militants
surely helps, but this is not enough. We need to go beyond this relation of externality between the
movement and critical theory and build new institutions of knowledge within
the movement itself, new knowledge practices, and new forms of
militant research. Only in this way will it be possible to actually not only
produce new readings of the conjuncture but also discuss new projects and alternative
social forms and arrangements, exactly what is more needed in order
to galvanise support for radical politics and social change. We also
The current protest cycle can only help this process.
need a new ethics of research and scientific engagement, stressing the importance of independence from
corporate interests, the work alongside the movement, the timely publication of results, especially
regarding dangers for society, the need for a critical popularisation of scientific findings, the acceptance of
Such a conception
also offers a way out for that growing segment of highly trained
scientific and technical workforce, employed in corporations or the state, that in a
period of radicalisation wants to find an outlet not only for political
activism, but also for its knowledge and expertise (a small example being all those
the questions and needs of people from the movement as legitimate concerns.
corporate economists who used intensive blogging in the period after the eruption of the current economic
crisis as a means to offer to the general public a critical perspective on economic developments, based on
The same goes for teachers in both primary and secondary

education, whose scientific training is usually used only for the
reproduction of the curriculum, whereas they could be at the forefront
of community based and localised collective forms of mass
intellectuality. Such a collective work will help us change the way
people think and consequently act. The emergence on a mass
scale of new collective representations, mentalities, worldviews
and discursive practices, of new ways for working people to
understand social reality and their place within it and realise the
collective potential to transform it, can never be simply a question of effective
propaganda. It must also be a collective effort to change common sense,
putting into practice the necessary dialectic of revolutionary theory on
their knowledge and expertise).
and the knowledge and collective experience that working

people get from their participation in struggle, in order to achieve new
forms of hegemony in the fight for radical social change. This is an
indispensable aspect of revolutionary politics today. Above all we must think of
the one hand
radical left parties, political fronts and organisations as knowledge practices and laboratories of new forms of mass critical
intellectuality. In a period of economic and political crisis but also of new possibilities to challenge capitalist rule, questions
of political organisation gain new relevance. Thinking of organisation simply in terms of practical or communicative skills
for mobilisation, or of electoral fronts and tactics is not enough. It would be better, in order to build todays parties and
united fronts, to revisit Gramscis (and Lenins) conception of the party as a democratic political and theoretical process
that produces knowledge of the conjuncture, organic intellectuals, new worldviews, social and political alternatives, as a
potential (counter)hegemonic apparatus. We need forms of organisation that not only enable coordination and
networking, democratic discussion and effective campaigning, but also bring together different
experiences, combine critical theory with the knowledge coming from the different sites of struggle, and
produce both concrete analyses but also mass ideological practices and new forms of radical common
Mass radical intellectuality is at the same time a prerequisite

and an expression of a new hegemony emerging. Contrary to the
tendency of many people on the left to think simply in terms of
electoral dynamics, we need to start thinking in terms of
hegemony and the construction of an alternative.
sense.
Ecofeminism 1NC
Ecofeminism refuses to come to terms with capitalism and its
impacts- further removing effective resistance to both
patriarchy and capitalism
Beder et al, 1 (Sharon, professor in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Wollongong in New
South Wales, Australia, and Jasmin Sydee, philosopher and blogger on the womans movement, July 2001),
Ecofeminism and Globalisation: A Critical Appraisal DEMOCRACY & NATURE: The International Journal of
INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY, vol.7, no.2,
http://www.democracynature.org/vol7/beder_sydee_globalisation.htm)--CRG
A materialist ecofeminist analysis has been developed, in part, as a critique of this spiritual ecofeminism.
It sees spiritual ecofeminism as failing to come to terms with the effects

of capitalism, such as the perpetuation of sexism and environmental
damage. In particular material ecofeminists are critical of the tendency of spiritual
ecofeminists to endorse essentialism, that is the view that men and
women are essentially and inherently different in character and nature.
For materialist ecofeminists the fundamental contradiction of capitalism is not
between capital and labour but between production and reproduction.
Valued and economically recognised male labour is separated off from invisible domestic female service.
This is thought to be the deepest contradiction of patriarchal capitalism

because womens reproductive labour remains in nature while mens
productive labour is removed from nature. It is their close connection with nature that
is said to put women in the position of being able to liberate humanity and nature from capitalist
domination in order to create new healthy societies.

systematic extermination of entire ethnic and social groupsEcofeminism does nothing to combat these atrocities


sense,

crude base-superstructure
model (or travesty) of Marxist theory, in which politics, for
can only be conceived as a direct and immediate reflection of

example,



present epoch.
principle."

makeup.
For Anders,
with its own source of power as a means of production, while the

What is at
of peasants streaming into the shanty towns around the great commercial and industrial metropolitan centers of the world, are also characterized by their nonsynchronicity, their inability to be incorporated into the hyper-modern cycle of capital accumulation. Moreover, all of these strata too are subject to a growing nostalgia for

The alternative is to embrace radical militant intellectuality
that challenges the intellectual hegemony of capitalism
constructing new knowledge practices in academic forums like
debate is a prerequisite to emancipatory social change.
Sotiris 13 Panagiotis Sotiris, Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of
the Aegean, 2013 (Hegemony and mass critical intellectuality, International Socialism: A Quarterly
Journal of Socialist Theory, Issue 137, January 9th, Available Online at http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?
id=871&issue=137, Accessed 01-23-2013)
there can be militant forms of intellectuality,

both in the sense of critical and politically engaged theoretical
production oriented towards projects for emancipation and in the sense
of mass intellectuality and a change in common sense and mass
ideological practices. At the same time, we have to confront the whole process through which
All these examples show us that
1960s and 1970s theoretical radicalism lost both its momentum and its political engagement. The wellknown story about radical academics becoming self-entrenched within the confines of academia and all the
rituals of formal academic research, losing touch with urgent social and political exigencies, although in
most aspects a distortion of reality, did indeed capture some of the problems of post-1970s radical
theorising. Even today, with an impressive wave of young Marxist or more generally radical academics
(mainly in junior positions) in place, one can still sense the gap separating theoretical and political activity
or participation in movements. The standardisation of academic research, the quantification of research
assessment, both individually and institutionally, the pressure for immediate results, papers and
quantifiable research outcomes surely contributes to this. However, there have also been other forms. To
give one example: The edu-factory network has been more than instrumental in promoting both a radical
anti-capitalist agenda regarding the entrepreneurialisation of higher education and forms of coordination
between activists and activist networks.31 To give another example: all the international networks of
economists helping movements against globalisation, against Third World Debt, in favour of debt-auditing
processes.32 Recently the notion of mass intellectuality has gained new interest, especially in the work of
writers working in a post-workerist direction such as M Lazzarato and Paolo Virno.33 According to this
theme, the importance of intellectual immaterial labour in post-Fordist capitalism makes mass
intellectuality even more important, as is evident in the intellectual (in the sense of non-manual) character
of many work processes and in the need for capital to exploit not just labour time but also collective
knowledge, skills, representations. This follows the workerists emphasis on the Fragment on Machines
from the Grundrisse where Marx refers to the General Intellect.34 For this tradition mass intellectuality is
an analytical concept, a description of the objective and subjective conditions for post-Fordism, and follows
the workerist tendency to ground insurrectionary tendencies in the ontology of labour. However, it is not a
concept that can account for the complexity of the division between intellectual and manual labour in
capitalist production, of the recurring tendency both of the incorporation of scientific knowledge and
technique in the production process and of the trivialisation of tasks, and of the forms of the
transformation of science into a productive force. It is also a one-sided reading of Marx that stresses the
importance of the Grundrisse but tends to leave aside Marxs more elaborate confrontation with questions
of science and technology, especially in the Economic Manuscript of 1861-63.35 In those notes a more
complex conception emerges of the relation of science to capitalist production, one that, instead of a
simple image of a collective intellectual capacity being put under the command of capital, stresses the
importance of technology and machinery on the transformation of science into a production force and the
processes of skilling and deskilling associated with this process. Moreover, the post-workerist emphasis on
immaterial intellectual labour as the hegemonic form,36 can easily lead to an underestimation of all
other forms of labour and misrepresent capitalist exploitation as mainly some form of blocking the creative
capability of the multitude. By contrast, I am using intellectuality here much more in the sense that
Gramsci uses it, as a strategic concept describing a condition to be attained, the result of
(counter)hegemonic apparatuses and projects, the outcome of struggles and new forms of collective
organisation. We have to see how
this increased importance of intellectual labour
in modern capitalism (something that Gramsci also stressed) creates conditions for
collective practices and networks of militant intellectuality. In this sense
mass intellectuality is not something given in advance; it is a political stake of
social and political antagonism and of the collective practices of
social movements. In the light of the above, we can discuss some of the tasks facing us today.
We need more examples of critical intellectuality and of politically
engaged theoretical production. We need radical academics and
researchers providing theoretical material to activists. We want activists and
militants to have a much more theoretical background acquired not only through formal academic
channels. We want radical social movements to become also theoretical sites, to develop their own
knowledge institutions, both in the sense of producing and of disseminating knowledge and critical theory.
Social movements, especially when they are

politicised in a collective and non-hierarchical manner, are also knowledge processes.
People engaging in them have to know things, have to form
arguments, and at the same time they learn from the very collective
experience of struggle. The presence of radical theorists and researchers alongside militants
surely helps, but this is not enough. We need to go beyond this relation of externality between the
movement and critical theory and build new institutions of knowledge within
the movement itself, new knowledge practices, and new forms of
militant research. Only in this way will it be possible to actually not only
produce new readings of the conjuncture but also discuss new projects and alternative
social forms and arrangements, exactly what is more needed in order
to galvanise support for radical politics and social change. We also
The current protest cycle can only help this process.
need a new ethics of research and scientific engagement, stressing the importance of independence from
corporate interests, the work alongside the movement, the timely publication of results, especially
regarding dangers for society, the need for a critical popularisation of scientific findings, the acceptance of
Such a conception
also offers a way out for that growing segment of highly trained
scientific and technical workforce, employed in corporations or the state, that in a
period of radicalisation wants to find an outlet not only for political
activism, but also for its knowledge and expertise (a small example being all those
the questions and needs of people from the movement as legitimate concerns.
corporate economists who used intensive blogging in the period after the eruption of the current economic
crisis as a means to offer to the general public a critical perspective on economic developments, based on
The same goes for teachers in both primary and secondary

whose scientific training is usually used only for the
reproduction of the curriculum, whereas they could be at the forefront
of community based and localised collective forms of mass
intellectuality. Such a collective work will help us change the way
people think and consequently act. The emergence on a mass
scale of new collective representations, mentalities, worldviews
and discursive practices, of new ways for working people to
understand social reality and their place within it and realise the
collective potential to transform it, can never be simply a question of effective
propaganda. It must also be a collective effort to change common sense,
putting into practice the necessary dialectic of revolutionary theory on
the one hand and the knowledge and collective experience that working
people get from their participation in struggle, in order to achieve new
forms of hegemony in the fight for radical social change. This is an
their knowledge and expertise).
education,
indispensable aspect of revolutionary politics today. Above all we must think of
radical left parties, political fronts and organisations as knowledge practices and laboratories of new forms of mass critical
intellectuality. In a period of economic and political crisis but also of new possibilities to challenge capitalist rule, questions
of political organisation gain new relevance. Thinking of organisation simply in terms of practical or communicative skills
for mobilisation, or of electoral fronts and tactics is not enough. It would be better, in order to build todays parties and
united fronts, to revisit Gramscis (and Lenins) conception of the party as a democratic political and theoretical process
that produces knowledge of the conjuncture, organic intellectuals, new worldviews, social and political alternatives, as a
potential (counter)hegemonic apparatus. We need forms of organisation that not only enable coordination and
networking, democratic discussion and effective campaigning, but also bring together different
experiences, combine critical theory with the knowledge coming from the different sites of struggle, and
produce both concrete analyses but also mass ideological practices and new forms of radical common
Mass radical intellectuality is at the same time a prerequisite

and an expression of a new hegemony emerging. Contrary to the
tendency of many people on the left to think simply in terms of
electoral dynamics, we need to start thinking in terms of
hegemony and the construction of an alternative.
sense.
Policy aff 1NC

Development and exploration of the oceans is inherently
capitalistic and exploitative
Clark and Clausen, 8 (Brett, teaches sociology at North Carolina State University in Raleigh,
Rebecca, teaches sociology at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, The Oceanic Crisis: Capitalism
and the Degradation of Marine Ecosystem, Volume 60, Issue 03 (July-August),
http://monthlyreview.org/2008/07/01/the-oceanic-crisis-capitalism-and-the-degradation-of-marineecosystem/) --CRG
Humans have long been connected to the oceans metabolic processes by harvesting marine fish and
vegetation. Harvesting methods and processes have varied depending on the structure of social
production. Subsistence fishing is a practice woven throughout human history, beginning with the
harvesting of shellfish along seashores and shallow lakes, and progressing with the development of tools
such as stone-tipped fishing spears, fishhooks, lines, and nets. This was originally based upon fishing for
Through the
process of fishing, human labor has been intimately linked to ocean
processes, gaining an understanding of fish migrations, tides, and
ocean currents. The size of a human population in a particular
region influenced the extent of exploitation. But the introduction of
commodity markets and private ownership under the capitalist system
of production altered the relationship of fishing labor to the resources of the
seas. Specific species had an exchange value. As a result, certain fish were seen as being
more valuable. This led to fishing practices that focused on catching as many of a particular fish,
use of the fish. What was caught was used to feed families and communities.
such as cod, as possible. Non-commercially viable species harvested indiscriminately alongside the target
As capitalism developed and spread, intensive

extraction by industrial capture fisheries became the norm. Increased demands were placed
species were discarded as waste.
on the oceans and overfishing resulted in the severe depletion of wild fish stocks. In Empty Ocean, Richard
Ellis states, Throughout the worlds oceans, food fishes once believed to be immeasurable in number are
now recognized as greatly depleted and in some cases almost extinct. A million vessels now fish the
worlds oceans, twice as many as there were twenty-five years ago. Are there twice as many fish as
The beginning of capitalist

industrialization marked the most noticeable and significant changes in
fisheries practices. Mechanization, automation, and mass
production/consumption characterized an era of increased fixed capital investments. Profitbefore? Hardly. How did this situation develop?10
driven investment in efficient production led to fishing technologies that for the first time made the
exhaustion of deep-sea fish stocks a real possibility. Such transformations can be seen in how
groundfishing, the capture of fish that swim in close proximity to the oceans bottom, changed through the
years.

systematic extermination of entire ethnic and social groupsEcofeminism does nothing to combat these atrocities


sense,


crude base-superstructure model (or travesty) of Marxist theory, in which politics, for
example, can only be conceived as a direct and immediate reflection of



present epoch.
principle."

makeup.
For Anders,
with its own source of power as a means of production, while
the

What is at
of peasants streaming into the shanty towns around the great commercial and industrial metropolitan centers of the world, are also characterized by their non-
synchronicity, their inability to be incorporated into the hyper-modern cycle of capital accumulation. Moreover, all of these strata too are subject to a growing nostalgia for

Reject the aff to validate and adopt the method of historical
materialism that is the 1NC.
Class first--one must understand the existing social totality
before one can act on itgrounding the sites of political
contestation or knowledge outside of labor and surplus value
merely serve to humanize capital and prevent a transition to a
society beyond oppression
Tumino 01(Stephen, Prof. English @ Pitt What is Orthodox Marxism and Why it Matters Now More
than Ever, Red Critique)
Any effective political theory will have to do at least two things: it will have to offer an
integrated understanding of social practices and, based on such an interrelated knowledge,
offer a guideline for praxis. My main argument here is that among all contesting social theories now,
only Orthodox Marxism has been able to produce an integrated knowledge of the existing
social totality and provide lines of praxis that will lead to building a society free from
necessity. But first I must clarify what I mean by Orthodox Marxism. Like all other modes and forms
of political theory, the very theoretical identity of Orthodox Marxism is itself contestednot just from
non-and anti-Marxists who question the very "real" (by which they mean the "practical" as under freemarket criteria) existence of any kind of Marxism now but, perhaps more tellingly, from within the
Marxist tradition itself. I will, therefore, first say what I regard to be the distinguishing marks of
Orthodox Marxism and then outline a short polemical map of contestation over Orthodox Marxism
within the Marxist theories now. I will end by arguing for its effectivity in bringing about a new society
based not on human rights but on freedom from necessity. I will argue that to know contemporary
societyand to be able to act on such knowledgeone has to first of all know what makes
the existing social totality. I will argue that the dominant social totality is based on inequalitynot
just inequality of power but inequality of economic access (which then determines access to health
care, education, housing, diet, transportation, . . . ). This systematic inequality cannot be
explained by gender, race, sexuality, disability, ethnicity, or nationality. These are all
secondary contradictions and are all determined by the fundamental contradiction of capitalism
which is inscribed in the relation of capital and labor. All modes of Marxism now explain social
inequalities primarily on the basis of these secondary contradictions and in doing soand
this is my main argumentlegitimate capitalism. Why? Because such arguments authorize
capitalism without gender, race, discrimination and thus accept economic inequality as an
integral part of human societies. They accept a sunny capitalisma capitalism beyond
capitalism. Such a society, based on cultural equality but economic inequality, has always been
the not-so-hidden agenda of the bourgeois leftwhether it has been called "new left,"
"postmarxism," or "radical democracy." This is, by the way, the main reason for its popularity in the
culture industryfrom the academy (Jameson, Harvey, Haraway, Butler,. . . ) to daily politics (Michael
Harrington, Ralph Nader, Jesse Jackson,. . . ) to. . . . For all, capitalism is here to stay and the
best that can be done is to make its cruelties more tolerable, more humane. This
humanization (not eradication) of capitalism is the sole goal of ALL contemporary lefts (marxism,
feminism, anti-racism, queeries, . . . ). Such an understanding of social inequality is based on the
fundamental understanding that the source of wealth is human knowledge and not human
labor. That is, wealth is produced by the human mind and is thus free from the actual objective
conditions that shape the historical relations of labor and capital. Only Orthodox Marxism
recognizes the historicity of labor and its primacy as the source of all human wealth. In
this paper I argue that any emancipatory theory has to be founded on recognition of the
priority of Marx's labor theory of value and not repeat the technological determinism of
corporate theory ("knowledge work") that masquerades as social theory.
Links 2NC
2NC- Queer/Ecofem links

Gender inequality is not the ahistorical product of an abstract
system of patriarchy its the result of classed societies
organized around the exploitation of surplus labor
Cloud 3 (Dana, Prof. Comm at UT, Marxism and Oppression, Talk for Regional Socialist Conference,
April 19, 2003)
to challenge oppression, it is important to know where it

comes from. Historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists tell
us that in pre-class societies such as hunter-gatherer societies, racism and sexism were unheard of.
In order
Because homosexuality was not an identifiable category of such societies, discrimination on that basis did
not occur either. In fact, it is clear that racism, sexism, and homophobia have arisen in
particular
kinds of societies, namely class societies. Womens oppression originated in the first class
societies, while racism came into prominence in the early periods of capitalism when colonialism and
slavery drove the economic system. The prohibition against gays and lesbians is a relatively modern
phenomenon. But what all forms of oppression have in common is that they did not always exist and are
not endemic to human nature. They were created in the interest of

ruling classes in society and continue to benefit the people at the top of society, while dividing
and conquering the rest of us so as to weaken the common fight against the oppressors. The work of
Marxs collaborator Friederich Engels on The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State in some
respects reflects the Victorian times in which in was written. Engels moralizes about womens sexuality and
doesnt even include gay and lesbian liberation in his discussion of the oppressive family. However,
anthropologists like the feminist Rayna Reiter have confirmed his most important and central argument
that it was in the first settled agricultural societies that women became an oppressed class. In societies
where for the first time people could accumulate a surplus of food and other resources, it was
possible for some people to hoard wealth and control its distribution. The first governments or state
structures formed to legitimate an emerging ruling class. As settled communities grew in size and became
more complex social organizations, and, most importantly, as the surplus grew, the distribution of wealth
became unequaland a small number of men rose above the rest of the population in wealth and power.
In the previous hunter-gatherer societies, there had been a sexual division of labor, but one
without
a hierarchy of value. There was no strict demarcation between the reproductive and
productive spheres. All of that changed with the development of private property in more settled
communities. The earlier division of labor in which men did the heavier work, hunting, and animal
agriculture, became a system of differential
control over resource distribution. The

maximize womens
new system required more field workers and sought to
reproductive potential. Production shifted away from the household over time and women
became associated with the reproductive role, losing control over the production
and distribution of the necessities of life. It was not a matter of male sexism, but of economic priorities of a
developing class system. This is why Engels identifies womens oppression as the first form of systematic
class oppression in the world. Marxists since Engels have not dismissed the oppression of women as
secondary to other kinds of oppression and exploitation. To the contrary, womens oppression has a
primary place in Marxist analysis and is a key issue that socialists organize around today. From this history
we know that sexism did not always exist, and that men do not have an inherent interest in oppressing
women as domestic servants or sexual slaves. Instead, womens oppression always has served a class
hierarchy in society. In our society divided by sexism, ideas about womens nature as domestic caretakers
or irrational sexual beings justify paying women lower wages compared to men, so that employers can pit
workers against one another in competition for the same work. Most women have always had to work
outside the home to support their families. Today, women around the world are exploited in sweatshops
where their status as women allows bosses to pay them very little, driving down the wages of both men
and women. At the same time, capitalist society relies on ideas about women to justify not providing very
much in the way of social services that would help provide health care, family leave, unemployment
insurance, access to primary and higher education, and so forthall because these things are supposed to
happen in the private family, where women are responsible. This lack of social support results in a lower
quality of life for many men as well as women. Finally, contemporary ideologies that pit men against
women encourage us to
fight each other
rather than
organizing together.
Formation of sex or gender as the basis of political identity is

the process by which capitalism divides the working class to
make resistance impossible. This guarantees that political
demands are not elevated past the level of particularism and
reaching the level of the bourgeoisie becomes the ultimate
objective
Brown 93 (Wendy, Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, Wounded
Attachments Political Theory, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Aug., 1993), pp. 392-395, JSTOR,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/191795)
Although this dtente between universal and particular within liberalism is potted with volatile conceits, it
is rather thouroughly unraveled by two features of late modernity, spurred by developments in what Marx
and Froucault, respectively, reveal as liveralisms compainion powers: capitalism and disciplinarity. On one
side, the state loses even its guise of universality as it becomes ever more transparently invested in
particular economic interests, political ends, and social formations. This occurs as it shifts from a relativley
minimalist night watchman state to a heavily bureacratized, managerial, fiscally complex, and highly
interventionist welfare-warfare state, a transmogrification occasioned by the combined imperatives of
capital and the autoproliferating characteristics of bureacracy. On the other side, a range of economic and
political forces increasingly disinter the liberal subject from substantive nation-state identification:
deterritorializing demographic flows; disintegration from within and invasion from without of family and
community as (relatively) autonomous sites of social production and identification; consumer capitalisms
marketing discourse in which individual (and subindividual) desires are produced, commodified, and
mobilized as identities; and disciplinary productions of a fantastic arry of behavior-based identities ranging
from recovering alchoholic professionals to unrepentant crack mothers. These disciplinary productions
work to conjure and regulate subjects through classificatory schemes, naming and normalizing social
behaviors as social positions. Operating through what Foucault calls an anatomy of detail,
disciplinary
power produces social identities (available for

politicization because they are deployed for purposes of political
regulation) that crosscut juridicial identities based on abstract right. Thus, for example, the
welfare states production of welfare subjects themselves subdivided
through the socially regulated categories of motherhood, disability,
race, age and so forth potentially produce political identity through
these categories, produce identities as the these categories. In this story, the
always imminent but increasingly politically manifest failure of liberal universalism to be universal the
transparent fiction of state universality combines with the increasing individuation of social subjects
they breed the

emergence of politicized identity rooted in disciplinary productions but
oriented by liberal discourse toward protest against exclusion from a
discursive formation of universal justice. This production, however, is not linear or even
through capitalist disinternments and disciplinary productions. Together,
but highly contradictory: although the terms of liberalism are part of the ground of production of a
politicized identity that reiterates yet exceeds these terms, liberal discourse itself also continuously
a conversion that recasts politicized

identitys substantive and often deconstructive cultural claims and critiques as generic
claims of particularism endemic to universalist political culture. Similarly,
recolonizes political identity as political interest
disciplinary power manages liberalisms production of politicized subjectivity by neutralizing (redepoliticizing) identity through normalizing practicies. As liberal discourse converts politcal identity into
essentialized private interest, disciplinary power converts interest into normativized social identity
manageable by regulatory regimes. Thus disciplinary power politicially neutralizes entitlement claims
generated by liberal individuation, whereas liberalism poltiically neutralize rights claims generated by
disciplinary identities. In addition to the formations of identity that may be the complex effects of
disciplinary and liberal modalities of power, I want to suggest one other historical strand relevant to the
production of politicized identity, this one hewn more specifically to recent developments in political
culture. Although sanguine to varying degrees about the phenomenon they are describing, many on the
European and North American Left have argued that identity politics emerges from the demise of class
politics consequent to post-Fordism or pursuant to May 1968. Without adjudicating the precise relationship
between the breakup of class politics and the proliferation of other sites of political identification, I want to
refigure this claim by suggesting that what we have come to call
identity politics is partly
dependent on the demise of a critique of capitalism and of bourgeois cultural and

economic values. In a reading that links the new identity cliams to a certain relegitimation of capitalism,
identity politics concerned with race, sexuality, and gender will appear not as a supplement to class
politics, not as an expansion of Left categories of oppression and emancipation, not as an enriching
complexification of progressive formulations of power and person all of which they also are but as
tethered to a formulation of justice which, ironically, reinscribes a bourgeois ideal as its measure. If it is
this ideal that signifies educational and vocational opportunity, upward mobility, relative protection against
arbitrary violence, and reward in proportion to effort, and if it is this ideal against which many of the
exclusions and privations of people of color, gays and lesbians, and women are articulated, then the
identity politics would seem to be

achieved in part through a certain discursive renaturalization of capitalism
political purchase of contemporary American
that can be said to have marked progressive discourse since the 1970s. What this suggests is that
identity politics may be partly configured by a peculiarly shaped and peculiarly

disguised form of resentment class resentment without class consiousness or class
analysis. This resentment is displaced onto discourses of injustice other
than class but, like all resentments, retains the real or imagined holding of its reviled
subject in this case, bourgeois male privileges as objects of desire. From this
perspective, it would appear that the articulation of politicized identities
through race, gender, and sexuality require, rather than
incidentally produce, a relatively limited identification though
class. They necessarily rather than incidentially abjure a
critique of class power and class norms precisely because the injuries
suffered by these identities are measured by bourgeois norms of social
acceptance, legal protection, relative material comfort, and social
independence. The problem is that when not only economic
stratification but other injuries to body and psyche enacted by
capitalism (alientation, commodificiation, exploitation, displacement, disintegration of sustain, albeit
contradictory, social forms such as familes and neighborhoods) are discursively normalized
and thus depoliticized, other markers of social difference may
come to bear an inordinate weight. Absent an articulation of capitlism in the
political discourse of identity, the marked identity bears all the weight of the
sufferings produced by capitalism in addition to that bound to the
explicity politicized marking.
While concentrating on decentering identity, queer theory
succeeds in promoting the very goals of global capitalism that
work against the formation of communities or provide the
means to destroy those that already exist
Kirsch 6 (Max, PhD Florida Atlantic University, Queer Theory, Late Capitalism and Internalized
Homophobia, Journal of Homosexuality, Harrington Park Press, Vol. 52, No. , 2006, pp. 19-45, DES.
Jameson has proposed that the concept of alienation in late capitalism

has been replaced with fragmentation (1991, p.14). Fragmentation highlights the it
also becomes more abstract: What we must now ask ourselves is whether it is precisely this semiautonomy of the cultural sphere that has been destroyed by the logic of late capitalism. Yet to argue
that culture is today no longer endowed with the relative autonomy is once enjoyed as one level among
others in earlier moments of capitalism (let alone in precapitalist societies) is not necessarily to imply
its disappearance or extinction. Quite the contrary; we must go on to affirm that the autonomous
sphere of culture throughout the social realm, to the point at which everything in our social lifefrom
economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure of the psyche itselfcan be said
to have become cultural in some original and yet untheorized sense. This proposition is, however,
substantially quite consistent with the previous diagnosis of a society of the image or simulacrum and a
transformation of the real into so many pseudoevents. (Jameson, 1991, p. 48)
The
fragmentation of social life repeats itself in the proposal that

sexuality and gender are separate and autonomous from
bureaucratic state organization. If, as in Jamesons terms, differences can be equated,
then this should not pose a problem for the mobilization of resistance to inequality. However, as
postmodernist and poststructuralist writers assume a position that
this equation is impossible and undesirable, then the dominant
modes of power will prevail without analysis or opposition. The danger, of
course, is that while we concentrate on decentering identity, we succeed
in promoting the very goals of global capitalism that work against
the formation of communities or provide the means to destroy those
that already exist, and with them, any hope for political action. For those
who are not included in traditional sources of community buildingin particular, kinship based
groupingsthe building of an affectional community . . . must be as much a part of our political
movement as are campaigns for civil rights (Weeks, 1985, p. 176). This building of communities
requires identification. If we cannot recognize traits that form the bases of our relationships with
others, how then can communities be built? The preoccupation of Lyotard and Foucault, as examples,
with the overwhelming power of master narratives, posits a conclusion that emphasizes
individual resistance and that ironically, ends up reinforcing the narrative itself.
Queerness reinforces the binaries of capitalism and it has

already been commodified and commercialized for that
purpose
Vargas, 10 (Yarma Velzquez, professor at California State University, Northridge, Aug 1, 2010
A Queer Eye for Capitalism: The Commodification of Sexuality in American Television,
http://www.cambridgescholars.com/a-queer-eye-for-capitalism-16)--CRG
This study uses critical discourse analysis to conduct an examination of the reality television program
the representations of queer

culture in the show reinforce the binaries of sex, gender and sexuality. By
Queer Eye. The goal is to help understand the manner in which
investigating the evolution of Queer Eye this study provides insights into American popular cultures
the strong link between

these representations and the commercial interests of the producers . In
understanding and depiction of sexual difference and evidences
the show Queer Eye, the male guests sell access to their lives for a makeover and in the process they are
indoctrinated into new patterns of consumption. The identity of both the five main characters and the
guest character is represented as a reflection of their aesthetic choices, and audiences are exposed to
In encouraging materialism, the

show transforms the term queer into a commodity sign and redefines
masculinity as represented through wealth and accumulation. Moreover,
numerous product placements and advertising messages.
consistent with the stereotypical representation of gay males in American culture the queerness of the Fab
is depicted as asexual and a form of aestheticism.
2NC- Race link- HOP lab

Basing politics on the gratuitous violence of racism usurps
understanding of political economythis legitimizes neoliberal
ideology and mystifies class antagonism
Reed 2013 professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in race and
American politics. He has taught at Yale, Northwestern and the New School for Social Research. An expert
on racial and economic inequality, he is a founding member of the Labor Party and a frequent contributor
to The Nation (2/25, Adolph, Nonsite, Django Unchained, or, The Help: How Cultural Politics Is Worse
Than No Politics at All, and Why, http://nonsite.org/feature/django-unchained-or-the-help-how-culturalpolitics-is-worse-than-no-politics-at-all-and-why)
In both films the bogus happy endings are possible only because they characterize their respective
regimes of racial hierarchy in the superficial terms of interpersonal transactions. In The Help
segregationisms evil was small-minded bigotry and lack of sensitivity; it was more like bad manners than
In Tarantinos vision, slaverys definitive injustice was its

gratuitous and sadistic brutalization and sexualized degradation. Malevolent,
ludicrously arrogant whites owned slaves most conspicuously to
degrade and torture them. Apart from serving a formal dinner in a plantation houseand
oppression.
Tarantino, the Chance the Gardener of American filmmakers (and Best Original Screenplay? Really?) seems
to draw his images of plantation life from Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind, as well as old Warner
Tarantinos slaves do no
actual work at all; theyre present only to be brutalized. In fact, the
cavalier sadism with which owners and traders treat them belies the
fact that slaves were, first and foremost, capital investments. Its not
for nothing that New Orleans has a monument to the estimated
20,000-30,000 antebellum Irish immigrants who died constructing the
New Basin Canal; slave labor was too valuable for such lethal work.
The Help trivializes Jim Crow by reducing it to its most superficial features
and irrational extremes. The master-servant nexus was, and is, a labor
relation. And the problem of labor relations particular to the segregationist
regime wasnt employers bigoted lack of respect or failure to hear the
voices of the domestic servants, or even benighted refusal to recognize their equal humanity. It was
that the labor relation was structured within and sustained by a
political and institutional order that severely impinged on, when it didnt
altogether deny, black citizens avenues for pursuit of grievances and
standing before the law. The crucial lynchpin of that order was neither
myopia nor malevolence; it was suppression of black citizens capacities for
direct participation in civic and political life, with racial disfranchisement and the
constant threat of terror intrinsic to substantive denial of equal protection and due process
before the law as its principal mechanisms. And the point of the regime
wasnt racial hatred or enforced disregard; its roots lay in the much
more prosaic concern of dominant elites to maintain their political and
economic hegemony by suppressing potential opposition and in the
linked ideal of maintaining access to a labor force with no options but
to accept employment on whatever terms employers offered. (Those who
Brothers cartoonsand the Mandingo fighters and comfort girls,
liked The Help or found it moving should watch The Long Walk Home, a 1990 film set in Montgomery,
Alabama, around the bus boycott. I suspect thats the film you thought you were watching when you saw
Django Unchained trivializes slavery by reducing it to its most

barbaric and lurid excesses. Slavery also was fundamentally a labor relation.
The Help.)
It was a form of forced labor regulatedsystematized, enforced and sustained

through a political and institutional order that specified it as a civil
relationship granting owners absolute control over the life, liberty, and fortunes of
others defined as eligible for enslavement, including most of all control of the conditions of their labor and
Historian Kenneth M. Stampp quotes a slaveholders

succinct explanation: For what purpose does the master hold the
servant? asked an ante-bellum Southerner. Is it not that by his labor, he, the
master, may accumulate wealth?1 That absolute control permitted
horrible, unthinkable brutality, to be sure, but perpetrating such brutality was neither
appropriation of its product.
the point of slavery nor its essential injustice. The master-slave relationship could, and did, exist
without brutality, and certainly without sadism and sexual degradation. In Tarantinos depiction, however,
It does not
diminish the historical injustice and horror of slavery to note that it was
not the product of sui generis, transcendent Evil but a terminus on a
continuum of bound labor that was more norm than exception in the Angloit is not clear that slavery shorn of its extremes of brutality would be objectionable.
American world until well into the eighteenth century, if not later. As legal historian Robert Steinfeld points
it is not so much slavery, but the emergence of the notion of free labor
as the absolute control of a worker over her personthat is the
historical anomaly that needs to be explained.2 Django Unchained
sanitizes the essential injustice of slavery by not problematizing it and
by focusing instead on the extremes of brutality and degradation it
permitted, to the extent of making some of them up, just as does The Help regarding Jim Crow. The
out,
Help could not imagine a more honest and complex view of segregationist Mississippi partly because it
uses the period ultimately as a prop for human interest clich, and Django Unchaineds absurdly ahistorical
view of plantation slavery is only backdrop for the merger of spaghetti western and blaxploitation hero
Neither film is really about the period in which it is set. Film critic
Manohla Dargis, reflecting a decade ago on what she saw as a growing
Hollywood penchant for period films, observed that such films are
typically stripped of politics and historical factand instead will find meaning in
movie.
appealing to seemingly timeless ideals and stirring scenes of love, valor and compassion and that the
Hollywood professionals who embrace accuracy most enthusiastically nowadays are costume designers.3
That observation applies to both these films, although in Django concern with historically accurate
representation of material culture applies only to the costumes and props of the 1970s film genres
Tarantino wants to recall. To make sense of how Django Unchained has received so much warmer a
reception among black and leftoid commentators than did The Help, it is useful to recall Margaret
Thatchers 1981 dictum that economics are the method: the object is to change the soul.4 Simply put,
Few observersamong opponents and boosters

alikehave noted how deeply and thoroughly both films are embedded
in the practical ontology of neoliberalism, the complex of unarticulated assumptions
she and her element have won.
and unexamined first premises that provide its common sense, its lifeworld. Objection to The Help has
been largely of the shooting fish in a barrel variety: complaints about the films paternalistic treatment of
the maids, which generally have boiled down to an objection that the master-servant relation is thematized
at all, as well as the standard, predictable litany of anti-racist charges about whites speaking for blacks,
the films inattentiveness to the fact that at that time in Mississippi black people were busily engaged in
liberating themselves, etc. An illustration of this tendency that conveniently refers to several other variants
of it is Akiba Solomon, Why Im Just Saying No to The Help and Its Historical Whitewash in Color
Lines,August 10, 2011, available
at:http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/08/why_im_just_saying_no_to_the_help.html. Defenses of
Django Unchained pivot on claims about the social significance of the narrative of a black
hero. One node of this argument emphasizes the need to validate a history of
autonomous black agency and resistance as a politico-existential
desideratum. It accommodates a view that stresses the importance of
recognition of rebellious or militant individuals and revolts in black American
Another centers on a notion that exposure to fictional black

heroes can inculcate the sense of personal efficacy necessary to
overcome the psychological effects of inequality and to facilitate upward mobility
history.
and may undermine some whites negative stereotypes about black people. In either register
assignment of social or political importance to depictions of black heroes rests on

presumptions about the nexus of mass cultural representation, social commentary,
and racial justice that are more significant politically than the controversy
about the film itself. In both versions, this argument casts political and economic problems in
psychological terms. Injustice appears as a matter of disrespect and denial of due recognition, and the
remedies proposedwhich are all about images projected and the distribution of
jobs associated with their projectionlook a lot like self-esteem engineering.
Moreover, nothing could indicate more strikingly the extent of
neoliberal ideological hegemony than the idea that the mass culture industry and
its representational practices constitute a meaningful terrain for
struggle to advance egalitarian interests. It is possible to entertain that view
seriously only by ignoring the fact that the production and consumption of
mass culture is thoroughly embedded in capitalist material and
ideological imperatives. That, incidentally, is why I prefer the usage mass culture to
describe this industry and its products and processes, although I recognize that it may seem archaic to
some readers. The mass culture v. popular culture debate dates at least from the 1950s and has continued
with occasional crescendos ever since.5 For two decades or more, instructively in line with the retreat of
possibilities for concerted left political action outside the academy, the popular culture side of that debate
has been dominant, along with its view that the products of this precinct of mass consumption capitalism
are somehow capable of transcending or subverting their material identity as commodities, if not avoiding
Despite the dogged commitment of several generations of

American Studies and cultural studies graduate students who want to valorize watching
television and immersion in hip-hop or other specialty market niches
centered on youth recreation and the most ephemeral fads as both intellectually avantgarde and politically resistive, it should be time to admit that that earnest
disposition is intellectually shallow and an ersatz politics. The idea of popular
culture posits a spurious autonomy and organicism that actually affirm
mass industrial processes by effacing them, especially in the putatively
rebel, fringe, or underground market niches that depend on the fiction
of the authentic to announce the birth of new product cycles. The power
of the hero is a cathartic trope that connects mainly with the sensibility of adolescent boys
of whatever nominal age. Tarantino has allowed as much, responding to black critics complaints
that identity altogether.
about the violence and copious use of nigger by proclaiming Even for the films biggest detractors, I
think their children will grow up and love this movie. I think it could become a rite of passage for young
black males.6 This response stems no doubt from Tarantinos arrogance and opportunism, and some
is hardly alone in
defending the film with an assertion that it gives black youth heroes, is
generically inspirational or both. Similarly, in a January 9, 2012 interview on the Daily
critics have denounced it as no better than racially presumptuous. But he
Show, George Lucas adduced this line to promote his even more execrable race-oriented live-action
cartoon, Red Tails, which, incidentally, trivializes segregation in the military by reducing it to a matter of
bad or outmoded attitudes. The ironic effect is significant understatement of both the obstacles the
Tuskegee airmen faced and their actual accomplishments by rendering them as backdrop for a blackface,
slapped-together remake of Top Gun. (Norman Jewisons 1984 film, A Soldiers Story, adapted from Charles
Fullers A Soldiers Play, is a much more sensitive and thought-provoking rumination on the complexities of
race and racism in the Jim Crow U.S. Armyan army mobilized, as my father, a veteran of the Normandy
invasion, never tired of remarking sardonically, to fight the racist Nazis.) Lucas characterized his film as
patriotic, even jingoistic and was explicit that he wanted to create a film that would feature real heroes
and would be inspirational for teenage boys. Much as Django Unchaineds defenders compare it on those
terms favorably to Lincoln, Lucas hyped Red Tails as being a genuine hero story unlike Glory, where you
have a lot of white officers running those guys into cannon fodder. Of course, the film industry is sharply
tilted toward the youth market, as Lucas and Tarantino are acutely aware. But Lucas, unlike Tarantino, was
not being defensive in asserting his desire to inspire the young; he offered it more as a boast. As he has
said often, hed wanted for years to make a film about the Tuskegee airmen, and he reports that he always
intended telling their story as a feel-good, crossover inspirational tale. Telling it that way also fits in
principle (though in this instance not in practice, as Red Tails bombed at the box office) with the
commercial imperatives of increasingly degraded mass entertainment. Dargis observed that the
ahistoricism of the recent period films is influenced by market imperatives in a global film industry. The
more a film is tied to historically specific contexts, the more difficult it is to sell elsewhere. That logic
selects for special effects-driven products as well as standardized, decontextualized and simplistic
universalstory lines, preferably set in fantasy worlds of the filmmakers design. As Dargis notes,
these films find their meaning in shopworn clichs puffed up as timeless verities, including uplifting and
inspirational messages for youth. But something else underlies the stress on inspiration in the black-
All these filmsThe Help, Red

a claim to public attention based partly on their
social significance beyond entertainment or art, and they do so because they
engage with significant moments in the history of the nexus of race and politics in the
interest films, which shows up in critical discussion of them as well.

Tails, Django Unchained, even Lincoln and Glorymake
United States. There would not be so much discussion and debate and no Golden Globe, NAACP Image, or
Academy Award nominations for The Help, Red Tails, or Django Unchained if those films werent defined
partly by thematizing that nexus of race and politics in some way. The pretensions to social significance
dont conflict with the mass-market film

industrys imperative of infantilization because those pretensions are only part of the show; they
that fit these films into their particular market niche
are little more than empty bromides, product differentiation in the patter of seemingly timeless ideals
which the mass entertainment industry constantly recycles. (Andrew OHehir observes as much about
Django Unchained, which he describes as a three-hour trailer for a movie that never happens.7) That
comes through in the defense of these films, in the face of evidence of their failings, that, after all, they are
Their substantive content is ideological; it is their

contribution to the naturalization of neoliberalisms ontology as they
propagandize its universalization across spatial, temporal, and social
contexts. Purportedly in the interest of popular education cum entertainment, Django Unchained and
just entertainment.
The Help, and Red Tails for that matter, read the sensibilities of the present into the past by divesting the
latter of its specific historicity. They reinforce the sense of the past as generic old-timey times
distinguishable from the present by superficial inadequaciesoutmoded fashion, technology, commodities
and ideassince overcome. In The Help Hillys obsession with her pet project marks segregations petty
apartheid as irrational in part because of the expense rigorously enforcing it would require; the
breadwinning husbands express their frustration with it as financially impractical. Hilly is a mean-spirited,
narrow-minded person whose rigid and tone-deaf commitment to segregationist consistency not only
reflects her limitations of character but also is economically unsound, a fact that further defines her, and
the cartoon version of Jim Crow she represents, as irrational. The deeper message of these films, insofar
as they deny the integrity of the past, is that there is no thinkable alternative to the ideological
order under which we live. This message is reproduced throughout the mass entertainment industry; it
shapes the normative reality even of the fantasy worlds that masquerade as escapism .
Even among
those who laud the supposedly cathartic effects of Djangos insurgent
violence as reflecting a greater truth of abolition than passage of the
Thirteenth Amendment, few commentators notice that he and
Broomhilda attained their freedom through a market transaction.8 This
reflects an ideological hegemony in which students all too commonly
wonder why planters would deny slaves or sharecroppers education
because education would have made them more productive as
workers. And, tellingly, in a glowing rumination in the Daily Kos, Ryan Brooke
inadvertently thrusts mass cultures destruction of historicity into bold
relief by declaiming on the segregated society presented in Django Unchained and babbling on
with the absurdly ill-informed and pontifical self-righteousness that the
blogosphere enablesabout our need to take responsibility for
preserving racial divides if we are to put segregation in the past and fully fulfill Dr. Kings
dream.9 Its all an indistinguishable mush of bad stuff about racial injustice in the old-timey days.
Decoupled from its moorings in a historically specific political economy, slavery becomes at bottom a
problem of race relations, and, as historian Michael R. West argues forcefully, race relations emerged as
has remained a discourse that substitutes etiquette for equality.10

This is the context in which we should take account of what inspiring the young means as a
and
justification for those films. In part, the claim to inspire is a simple platitude, more filler than substance. It
is, as Ive already noted, both an excuse for films that are cartoons made for an infantilized, generic
market and an assertion of a claim to a particular niche within that market. More insidiously, though, the
ease with which inspiration of youth rolls out in this context resonates with three related and disturbing
themes: 1) underclass ideologys narrativesnow all Americans common sensethat link poverty and
inequality most crucially to (racialized) cultural inadequacy and psychological damage; 2) the belief that
racial inequality stems from prejudice, bad ideas and ignorance, and 3) the cognate of both: the neoliberal
rendering of social justice as equality of opportunity, with an aspiration of creating competitive individual
minority agents who might stand a better fighting chance in the neoliberal rat race rather than a
positive alternative vision of a society that eliminates the need to fight constantly against
disruptive market whims in the first place.11 This politics seeps through in the chatter about Django
Los Angeles Times article in which Tarantino

asserts his appeal to youth, remarks that the most disturbing detail [about
slavery] is the emotional violence and degradation directed at blacks that
effectively keeps them at the bottom of the social order, a place they still
occupy today. Writing on the Institute of the Black World blog, one Dr. Kwa David Whitaker, a
Unchained in particular. Erin Aubry Kaplan, in the
1960s-style cultural nationalist, declaims on Djangos testament to the sources of degradation and
unending servitude [that] has rendered [black Americans] almost incapable of making sound evaluations
of our current situations or the kind of steps we must take to improve our condition.12 In its blindness to
notion of black cultural or psychological damage as

either a legacy of slavery or of more indirect recent origine.g., urban migration, crack
epidemic, matriarchy, babies making babiescomports well with the reduction of slavery and Jim
Crow to interpersonal dynamics and bad attitudes. It substitutes a politics of recognition and a
political economy, this
patter of racial uplift for politics and underwrites a conflation of political action and therapy. With respect
to the nexus of race and inequality, this discourse supports victim-blaming programs of personal
rehabilitation and self-esteem engineeringinspirationas easily as it does multiculturalist respect

for difference, which, by the way, also feeds back to self-esteem engineering and inspiration as nodes
within a larger political economy of race relations. Either way, this is a discourse
that displaces a politics challenging social structures that reproduce inequality with
concern for the feelings and characteristics of individuals and of categories of
population statistics reified as singular groups that are equivalent to individuals. This discourse has made it
possible (again, but more sanctimoniously this time) to characterize destruction of low-income housing as
an uplift strategy for poor people; curtailment of access to public education as choice; being cut adrift
from essential social wage protections as empowerment; and individual material success as socially
Neoliberalisms triumph is affirmed with

unselfconscious clarity in the ostensibly leftist defenses of Django Unchained that center on the
important role modeling.
theme of slaves having liberated themselves. Trotskyists, would-be anarchists, and psychobabbling
identitarians have their respective sectarian garnishes: Trotskyists see everywhere the bugbear of
bureaucratism and mystify self-activity; anarchists similarly fetishize direct action and voluntarism and
oppose large-scale public institutions on principle, and identitarians romanticize essentialist notions of
organic, folkish authenticity under constant threat from institutions. However, all are indistinguishable
from the nominally libertarian right in their disdain for government and institutionally based
political action, which their common reflex is to disparage as inauthentic or corrupt.
The continued existence of capitalism forms the basis for all

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

to divide the majority--racism and all oppressions under capitalism
serve this purpose. Moreover, oppression is used to justify and "explain"
unequal relationships in society that enrich the minority that live off the
majority's labor. Thus, racism developed initially to explain and justify the enslavement of
Africans--because they were less than human and undeserving of liberty and freedom. Everyone accepts
the idea that the oppression of slaves was rooted in the class relations of exploitation under that system.
wage slavery is the pivot around which all

other inequalities and oppressions turn. Capitalism used racism to
justify plunder, conquest and slavery, but as Karl Marx pointed out, it also used
racism to divide and rule--to pit one section of the working class
against another and thereby blunt class consciousness. To claim, as Marxists
do, that racism is a product of capitalism is not to deny or diminish its
importance or impact in American society. It is simply to explain its origins and
the reasons for its perpetuation. Many on the left today talk about class as if it is one of
Fewer recognize that under capitalism,
many oppressions, often describing it as "classism." What people are really referring to as "classism" is
elitism or snobbery, and not the fundamental organization of society under capitalism. Moreover, it is
popular today to talk about various oppressions, including class, as intersecting. While it is true that
oppressions can reinforce and compound each other, they are born out of the material
relations shaped by capitalism and the economic exploitation that is at the heart of
capitalist society. In other words, it is the material and economic structure of society that gave rise to a
range of ideas and ideologies to justify, explain and help perpetuate that order. In the United States,
racism is the most important of those ideologies.
Racism was create to protect the labor production of chattel

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

few centuries, owing largely to European imperialism, have the worlds
people been classified along racial lines. Here, in America, the idea of race emerged as
a means of reconciling chattel slavery- as well as the extermination of American Indians with the ideals of
freedom preached by whites in the new colonies.
In the early colonial period,
when
settlements remained relatively small, indentured servitude was the dominant means of securing cheap
whites and blacks struggled to survive against a

common enemy, what historian Lerone Bennett Jr. describes as the big planter
apparatus and a social system that legalized terror against black and white bondsmen. Initially,
blacks brought to this country were not all enslaved; many were treated as indentured servants. As
plantation farming expanded, particularly tobacco and cotton farming, demand
increased greatly for both labor and land. The demand for land was met by invading and
labor. Under this system,
conquering larger and large swaths of territory. American Indians became a growing impediment to white
European progress, and during this period, the images of American Indians promoted in books,
newspapers, and magazines became increasingly negative. As sociologists Keith Kilty and Eric Swank have
observed, eliminating savages is less of a moral problem than eliminating human beings, and therefore
American Indians came to be understood as a lesser race- uncivilized savages- thus providing a
justification for the extermination of the native peoples. The
growing demand for labor
on
plantations was met through slavery. American Indians were considered unsuitable as slaves,
largely because native tribes were clearly in a position to fight back. The fear of raids by Indian tribes left
plantation owners to grasp for an alternative source of free labor. European immigrants were also deemed
poor candidates for slavery, not because of their race, but rather because they were in short supply and
enslavement would, quite naturally, interfere with voluntary immigration to the new colonies. Plantation
owners thus view Africans, who were relatively powerless, as the ideal slaves. The systemic enslavement
of Africans, and the rearing of their children under bondage, emerged with all deliberate speed- quickened
Bacons Rebellion. Nathaniel Bacon was a white property owner in Jamestown,

Virginia, who managed to united slaves, indentured servants, and poor whites
in a revolutionary effort to overthrow the planter elite. Although slaves
clearly occupied the lowest position in the social hierarchy and suffered
the most under the plantation, the condition of indentured whites was barely better, and the
majority of free whites lived in extreme poverty. As explained by historian Edmund
Morgan, in colonies like Virginia, the planter elite, with huge land grants, occupied a vastly
superior position to workers of all colors. Southern colonies did not hesitate to invent
by events such as
ways to extend the terms of servitude, and the planter class accumulated uncultivated lands to restrict the
options of free workers. The
created conditions
simmering resentment against the planter class

that were ripe for revolt. Varying accounts of Bacons rebellion abound,
but the basic facts are these: Bacon developed plans in 1675 to seize Native American lands in order to
acquire more property for himself and others and nullify the threat of Indian raids. When the planter elite in
Bacon retaliated, leading to an attack on the

elite, their homes, and their property. He openly condemned the rich for their
oppression of the poor and inspired an alliance of white and black bond
laborers, as well as slaves, who demanded an end to their servitude. The attempted revolution
was ended by force and false promises of amnesty. A number of the people
who participated in the revolt were hanged. The events in Jamestown were alarming
to the planter elite, who were deeply fearful of the multiracial alliance of
bond workers and slave. Word of Bacons rebellion spread far and wide, and
several more uprisings of a similar type followed. In an effort to protect their
superior status and economic position, the planters shifted their
strategy for maintaining dominance. They abandoned their heavy reliance on indentured
Virginia refused to provide militia support for his scheme,
servants in favor of the importation of more black slaves. Instead of importing English-speaking slaves
from the West Indies, who were more likely to be familiar with European language and culture, many more
slaves were shipped directly from Africa. These slaves would be far easier to control and far less likely to
to protect their
interests, the planter class took an additional precautionary step, a step
that would later come to be known as a racial bribe. Deliberately and
strategically, the planter class extended special privileges to poor
whites in an effort to drive a wedge between them and black slaves.
form alliances with poor whites. Fearful that such measures might not be sufficient
White settlers were allowed greater access to Native American lands, white servants were allowed to
so that free labor

would not be placed in competition with slave labor. These measures
effectively eliminated the risk of future alliances between black slaves
and poor whites. Poor whites suddenly had a direct, personal stake in
the existence of a race-based system of slavery. Their own plight had
not improved by much, but at least they were not slaves. Once the
planter elite split the labor force, poor whites responded to the logic of
their situation and sought ways to expand their racially privileged
position. By the mid-1770s, the system of bond labor had been thoroughly
transformed into a racial caste system predicated on slavery. The degraded status of
police slaves through slave patrols and militias, and barriers were created
Africans was justified on the ground that Negros, like the Indians, were an uncivilized lesser race, perhaps
even more lacking in intelligence and laudable human qualities than the red-skinned natives. The notion of
white supremacy rationalized the enslavement of Africans, even as whites endeavored to form a new
nation based on the ideals of equality, liberty, and justice for all. Before democracy, chattel slavery was
born.
A few hundred years later the Populist movement offered a

chance to end racialized violence by uniting poor and working
class whites and blacks once again the corporate elite
mitigated the threat of revolt against the rigid and oppressive
class structures by fomenting racial tension through
segregation laws they made us think race was the problem
when really it was class
Alexander 10 (The new Jim Crow: mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness, Michelle
Alexander is an associate professor of law at Ohio State University and a civil rights advocate, who has
litigated numerous class action discrimination cases and has worked on criminal justice reform issues. She
is a recipient of a 2005 Soros Justice Fellowship of the Open Society Institute, has served as director of the
Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California, directed the Civil Rights Clinic at Stanford Law
School and was a law clerk for Justice Harry Blackmun at the U. S. Supreme Court.)
Three alternative philosophies of race relations were put forward to compete
for the regions support, all of which rejected the doctrines of extreme racism espoused by some
Redeemers: liberalism, conservatism, and radicalism. The liberal philosophy of race relations emphasized
the stigma of segregation and the hypocrisy of a government that celebrates freedom and equality yet
denies both on account of race. This philosophy, born in the North, never gained much traction among
Southern whites or blacks. The conservative philosophy, by contrast, attracted wide support and was
implemented in various contexts over a considerable period of time. Conservatives blamed liberals for
pushing blacks ahead of their proper station in life and placing blacks in positions they were unprepared to
fill, a circumstance that had allegedly contributed to their downfall. They warned blacks that some
Redeemers were not satisfied with having decimated Reconstruction, and were prepared to wage an
aggressive war against blacks throughout the South. With some success, the conservatives reached out to
African American voters, reminding them that they had something to lose as well as gain and that the
liberals preoccupation with political and economic equality presented the danger of losing all that blacks
The radical philosophy offered, for many African Americans,

the most promise. It was predicated on a searing critique of large
corporations, particularly railroads, and the wealthy elite in the North and South. The
radicals of the late nineteenth century, who later formed the Populist Party, viewed
the privileged classes as conspiring to keep poor whites and blacks
locked into a subordinate political and economic position. For many
African American voters, the Populist approach was preferable to the
paternalism of liberals. Populists preached an equalitarianism of want and poverty, the kinship
had so far gained.
of a common grievance, and a common oppressor. As described by Tom Watson, a prominent Populist
leader, in a speech advocating a union between black and white farmers: You
are kept apart
that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings. You are made to
hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the keystone of the
arch of financial despotism that enslaves you both. You are deceived
and blinded that you may not see how this race antagonism
perpetuates a monetary system which beggars both. In an effort to
demonstrate their commitment to a genuinely multiracial, working-class
movement against white elites, the Populists made strides toward racial integration, a
symbol of their commitment to class-bound unity. African Americans throughout the South
responded with great hope and enthusiasm, eager to be true partners
in a struggle for social justice. According to Woodward, It is altogether probable that
during the brief Populist upheaval in the nineties Negros and native whites
achieved a greater comity of mind and harmonyfff of political purpose
than ever before or since in the South. The challenges inherent in creating the alliance
sought by the Populists were formidable, as race prejudice ran the highest among the very white
populations to which the Populist appeal was specifically address- the depressed lower economic classes.
the Populist movement initially enjoyed remarkable success in

the South, fueled by a wave of discontent aroused by the severe agrarian
depression of the 1880s and 1890s. The Populists took direct aim at the
conservatives, who were known as comprising a party of privilege, and they
achieved a stunning series of political victories throughout the region. Alarmed
by the success of the Populists and the apparent potency of the alliance between
poor and working-class whites and African Americans, the
conservatives raised the cry of white supremacy and resorted to the
Nevertheless,
tactics they had employed in their quest for Redemption, including fraud, intimidation, bribery, and terror.
Segregation laws were proposed as part of a deliberate effort to drive a wedge

between poor whites and African Americans. These discriminatory
barriers were designed to encourage lower-class whites to retain a
sense of superiority over blacks, making it far less likely that they
would sustain inter-racial political alliances aimed at toppling the white
elite. The laws were, in effect, another racial bribe. As William Julius Wilson has noted, As
long as poor whites directed their hatred and frustration against the
black competitor, the planters were relieved of class hostility directed
against them. Indeed, in order to overcome the well-founded suspicions of poor and illiterate whites
that they, as well as blacks, were in danger of losing the right to vote, the leaders of the movement
pursued an aggressive campaign of white supremacy in every state prior to black disenfranchisement.
Ultimately, the
Populists caved to the pressure
and abandoned their former allies. While
the [Populist] movement was at the peak of zeal, Woodward observed, the
two races had

surprised each other and astonished their opponents by the harmony
they achieved and the good will with which they co-operated. But when it
became clear that the conservatives would stop at nothing to decimate their alliance, the biracial
partnership dissolved, and Populist leaders re-aligned themselves with conservatives. Even Tom Watson,
who had been among the most forceful advocates for an interracial alliance of farmers, concluded that
Populist principles could never be fully embraced by the South until blacks were eliminated from politics.
The agricultural depression, taken together with a series of failed reforms and broken political promises,
Dominant whites concluded that it was

in their political and economic interest to scapegoat blacks, and permission
had pyramided to a climax of social tensions.
to hate came from sources that had formerly denied it, including Northern liberals eager to reconcile with
the South, Southern conservatives who had once promised blacks protection from racial extremism, and
History
seemed to repeat itself. Just as the white elite had successfully driven a
Populists, who cast aside their dark-skinned allies when the partnership fell under siege.
wedge between poor whites and blacks following Bacons Rebellion by

creating the institution of black slavery, another racial caste system
was emerging nearly two centuries later, in part due to efforts by white elites to
decimate a multiracial alliance of poor people. By the turn of the twentieth century,
every state in the South had laws on the books that disenfranchised blacks and discriminated against them
in virtually every sphere of life, lending sanction to a racial ostracism that extended to schools, churches,
housing, jobs, restrooms, hotels, restaurants, hospitals, orphanages, prisons, funeral homes, morgues, and
cemeteries.
The aff's focus on race shatters class based coalitions against

capitalism - even if oppression is found within
intersectionality, capitalism is a much greater force to
fostering that inequality, which means we turn the case.
Dander & Torres 99(A. Darder and R. Torres, 1999.Darder is a University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign Professor of Educational Policy Studies and Latino/a Studies, Torres is Professor of Planning,
Policy, and Design, Chicano/Latino Studies, and Political Science. Shattering the Race Lens: Towards a
Critical Theory of Racism. Critical Ethnicity. P. 174-6)
[W]e work with raced identities on already reified ground. In the context of domination, raced
identities are imposed and internalized, then renegotiated and reproduced. From artificial to
natural, we court a hard-to-perceive social logic that reproduces the very conditions we strain
to overcome. Jon Cruz (1996)8. Over the last three decades, there has been an overwhelming
tendency among a variety of critical scholars to focus on the concept of race as a central
category of analysis for interpreting the social conditions of inequality and marginalization.9
As a consequence, much of the literature on subordinate cultural populations, with its emphasis on
such issues as racial inequality, racial segregation, racial identity, has utilized the construct of
race as a central category of analysis for interpreting the social conditions of inequality and
marginalization. In turn, this literature has reinforced a racialized politics of identity and
representation, with its problematic emphasis on racial identiy as the overwhelming impulse
for political action. This theoretical practice has led to serious analytical weaknesses and
absence of depth in much of the historical and contemporary writings on racialized
populations in this country. The politics of busing in the early 1970s provides an excellent
example that illustrates this phenomenon. Social scientists studying race relations
concluded that contact among Black and White students would improve race relations
and the educational conditions of Black students if they were bused to White (better)
schools outside their neighborhoods.10 Thirty years later, many parents and educators
adamantly denounce the busing solution (a solution based on the discourse of race) as not
only fundamentally problematic to the fabric of African American and Chicano communities,
but an erroneous social policy experiment that failed to substantially improve the overall
academic performance of students in these communities. Given this legacy, it is not surprising to
find that the theories, practices, and policies that have informed social science analysis of
racialized populations today are overwhelmingly rooted in a politics of identity, an approach
that is founded on parochial notions of race and representation which ignore the
imperatives of capitalist accumulation and the existence of class divisions within racialized
subordinate populations. The folly of this position is critiqued by Ellen Meiksins Wood11 in her article
entitled Identity Crisis, where she exposes the limitations of a politics of identity which fails
to contend with the fact that capitalism is the most totalizing system of social relations the
world has ever known. Yet, in much of the work on African American, Latino, Native American,
and Asian populations, an analysis of class and a critique of capitalism is conspicuously
absent. And even when it is mentioned, the emphasis is primarily on an undifferentiated
plurality of identity politics or an intersection of oppressions, which, unfortunately, ignores
the overwhelming tendency of capitalism to homogenize rather than to diversify human
experience. Moreover, this practice is particularly disturbing since no matter where one travels
around the world, there is no question that racism is integral to the process of capital
accumulation. For example, the current socioeconomic conditions of Latinos and other
racialized populations can be traced to the relentless emergence of the global economy and
recent economic policies of expansion, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
A recent United Nations report by the International Labor Organization confirms the negative
impact of globalization on racialized populations. By the end of 1998, it was projected that one
billion workers would be unemployed. The people of Africa, China, and Latin America have
been most affected by the current restructuring of capitalist development.12 This
phenomenon of racialized capitalism is directly linked to the abusive corporations as Coca Cola,
Walmart, Disney, Ford Motor Company, and General Motors. In a recent speech on global economic
apartheid, John Cavanagh,13 co-executive director of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C.,
comments on the practices of the Ford Motor Company. The Ford Motor Company has its state-of-the-art
assembly plant in Mexico where because it can deny basic worker rights, it can pay one-tenth
the wages and yet get the same quality and the same productivity in producing goods. The
same technologies by the way which are easing globalization are also primarily cutting more
jobs than theyre creating. The failure of scholars to confront this dimension in their analysis
of contemporary society as a racialized phenomenon and their tendency to continue treating
class as merely one of a mulitiplicity of (equally valid) perspectives, which may or may not
intersect with the process of racialization, are serious shortcomings. In addressing this issue,
we must recognize that identity politics, which generally gloss over class differences and/or
ignore class contradictions, have often been used by radical scholars and activists within
African American, Latino, and other subordinate cultural communities in an effort to build a
political base. Here, fabricated constructions of race are objectified and mediated as truth to
ignite political support, divorced from the realities of class struggle. By so doing, they have
unwittingly perpetuated the vacuous and dangerous notion that the political and economic are
separate spheres of society which can function independently- a view that firmly anchors and
sustains prevailing class relations of power in society.
The affirmative commodifies an essentialized notion of race to

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

tendency among a variety of critical scholars to focus on the concept
of "race" as a central category of analysis for interpreting the social conditions of
focus on notions of race. Over the last three decades,
inequality and marginalization. As a consequence, much of the literature on subordinate cultural

populations, with its emphasis on such issues as "racial inequality," "racial segregation," "racial identity,"
has utilized the construct of "race" as a central category of analysis for interpreting the social conditions of
this literature has reinforced a racialized

politics of identity and representation, with its problematic emphasis
on "racial" identity as the overwhelming impulse for political action.
This theoretical practice has led to serious analytical weaknesses
and absence of depth in much of the historical and
contemporary writings on racialized populations in this country. The
politics of busing in the early 1970s provides an excellent example that illustrates
this phenomenon. Social scientists studying "race relations" concluded that
contact among "Black" and "White" students would improve "race
relations" and the educational conditions of "Black" students if they were bused to
"White" (better) schools outside their neighborhoods! Thirty years later, many parents
and educators adamantly denounce the busing solution (a solution based on a discourse of
race") as not only fundamentally problematic to the fabric of African
American and Chicano communities, but an erroneous social policy experiment that
inequality and marginalization. ln turn,
failed to substantially improve the overall academic performance of students in these communities. Given
the theories, practices, and policies that

have informed social science analysis of racialized populations today
are overwhelmingly rooted in a politics of identity, an approach that is founded on
this legacy, it is not surprising to find that
which ignore the imperatives of

capitalist accumulation and the existence of class divisions within racialized
subordinate populations. The folly of this position is critiqued by Ellen Meiksins Wood in her article
entitled "Identity Crisis," where she exposes the limitations of a politics of identity
which fails to contend with the fact that capitalism is the most
totalizing system of social relations the world has ever known .
parochial notions of "race" and representation
Yet, in much of the work on African American, Latino, Native American, and Asian populations, an analysis
even when it is mentioned,

the emphasis is primarily on an undifferentiated plurality of identity politics or an
intersection of oppressions," which, unfortunately, ignores the
overwhelming tendency of capitalism to homogenize rather than
to diversify human experience. Moreover, this practice is particularly disturbing since no
matter where one travels around the world, there is no question that racism is
integral to the process of capital accumulation. For example, the current
socioeconomic conditions of Latinos and other racialized populations
can be traced to the reletless emergence of the global economy and
recent economic policies of expansion, such as the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA). A recent United Nations report by the International Labor Organization confirms
of class and a critique of capitalism is conspicuously absent. And
the negative impact of globalization on racialized populations. By the end of 1998, it was projected that
The people of Africa, China, and Latin

America have been most affected by the current restructuring of
capitalist development. This phenomenon of racialized capitalism is directly linked
to the abusive practices and destructive impact of the global factory 'a global
one billion workers would be unemployed.
financial enterprise system that includes such transnational corporations as Coca Cola, Walmart, Disney,
Ford Motor Company, and General Motors. In a recent speech on "global economic apartheid," John
Cavanagh," co-executive director of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., comments on the
practices of the Ford Motor Company. The Ford Motor Company has its state-of-the-art assembly plant in
Mexico . . . where because it can deny basic worker rights, it can pay one-tenth the wages and yet get the
same quality and the same productivity in producing goods. . . .The same technologies by the way which
are easing globalization are also primarily cutting more jobs than they're creating. The failure of
scholars to confront this dimension in their analysis of contemporary society as a racialized

phenomenon and their tendency to continue treating class as merely one of
a multiplicity of (equally valid) perspectives, which may or may not
"intersect" with the process of racialization, are serious shortcomings. In
addressing this issue, we must recognize that identity politics, which generally gloss
over class differences and/ or ignore class contradictions, have often been used by
radical scholars and activists within African American, Latino, and other subordinate cultural
communities in an effort to build a political base. Here, fabricated
constructions of "race" are objectified and mediated as truth to ignite
political support, divorced from the realities of class struggle. By so doing,
they have unwittingly perpetuated the vacuous and dangerous notion
that the political and economic are separate spheres of society which
can function independentlya view that firmly anchors and sustains
prevailing class relations of power in society.
The history of slavery proves that race is merely a symptom of

capitalany discussion of racism must first start at the violent
history of capital accumulation.
Keefer 3 (Tom, member of Facing Reality, New Socialist Magazine, January 2003, Constructs of
Capitalism: Slavery and the Development of Racism,
http://www.newsocialist.org/magazine/39/article03.html, RSR)
The brutality and viciousness of capitalism is well known to the oppressed and
exploited of this world. Billions of people throughout the world spend their lives incessantly toiling to enrich
the already wealthy, while throughout history any serious attempts to build alternatives to capitalism have
been met with bombings, invasions, and blockades by imperialist nation states. Although the modern day
ideologues of the mass media and of institutions such as the World Bank and IMF never cease to inveigh
against scattered acts of violence perpetrated against their system ,
they always neglect to

mention that the capitalist system they lord over was called into
existence and has only been able to maintain itself by the sustained
application of systematic violence. It should come as no surprise that
this capitalist system, which we can only hope is now reaching the era
of its final demise, was just as rapacious and vicious in its youth as it is
now. The "rosy dawn" of capitalist production was inaugurated by the process of slavery and genocide in
the western hemisphere, and this "primitive accumulation of capital" resulted in the largest systematic
murder of human beings ever seen. However, the rulers of society have found that naked force is often
most economically used in conjunction with ideologies of domination and control which provide a
Racism is such a construct and

it came into being as a social relation which condoned and secured the
initial genocidal processes of capitalist accumulation--the founding stones of
legitimizing explanation for the oppressive nature of society.
contemporary bourgeois society. While it is widely accepted that the embryonic capitalist class came to
what is comparatively
less well known is the crucial role that chattel slavery and the plunder
of the "New World" played in calling this class into being and providing
the "primitive accumulation of capital" necessary to launch and sustain
industrialization in Europe. The accidental "discovery" of the Western Hemisphere by the
power in the great bourgeois revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries,
mass murderer Christopher Columbus in 1492 changed everything for the rival economic and political
The looting and pillaging of the "New World"

destabilized the European social order, as Spain raised huge armies and built armadas
interests of the European states.
with the unending streams of gold and silver coming from the "New World", the spending of which
The only way Portugal, England, Holland,

and France could stay ahead in the regional power games of Europe
was to embark on their own colonial ventures. In addition to the extraction of
devalued the currency reserves of its rivals.
precious minerals and the looting and pillaging of indigenous societies, European merchant-adventurers
realized that substantial profits could also be made through the production of cash crops on the fertile
lands surrounding the Caribbean sea. The only problem was that as the indigenous population either fled
from enslavement or perished from the diseases and deprivations of the Europeans, there was no one left
to raise the sugar, tobacco, cotton, indigo, and other tropical cash crops that were so profitable .
A
system of waged labour would not work for the simple reason that with
plentiful land and easy means of subsistence surrounding them,
colonists would naturally prefer small scale homesteading instead of
labouring for their masters. As the planter Emanuel Downing of Massachusetts put it in 1645:
"I do not see how we can thrive until we get a stock of slaves sufficient to do all our business, for our
children's children will hardly see this great continent filled with people so that our servants will still desire
freedom to plant for themselves, and not stay but for very great wages." Capitalistic social relations have
always been based on compulsion, and they require as a precondition that workers possess nothing but
The would-be developers of the wealth of the "New

World" thus turned to forced labour in complete contradiction to all the
their capacity to labour.
theories of bourgeois economists because unfree labour was the only

kind of labour applicable to the concrete situation in the Americas.
Although slavery is now, and has almost always been equated with
unfree Black labour, it was not always, or even predominantly so.
Capitalists looked first to their own societies in order to find the population to labour in servitude on the
large-scale plantations necessary for tropical cash crop production. Eric Williams, in his groundbreaking
work Capitalism and Slavery, noted that in the early stages of colonialism "white slavery was the historic
Between 1607 and 1783 over a

quarter million "white" indentured servants arrived in the British
colonies alone where they were set to work in the agricultural and industrial processes of the time. The
base upon which Negro [sic] slavery was constructed."
shipping companies, ports, and trading routes established for the transport of the poor, "criminal", and
lumpen elements of European society were to form the backbone of the future slave trade of Africans.
Slavery became an exclusively Black institution due to the dynamics of

class struggle as repeated multi-ethnic rebellions of African slaves and
indentured European servants led the slaveholders to seek strategies
to divide and conquer. The fact that an African slave could be purchased for life with the same
amount of money that it would cost to buy an indentured servant for 10 years, and that the African's skin
color would function as an instrument of social control by making it easier to track down runaway slaves in
a land where all whites were free wage labourers and all Black people slaves, provided further incentives
for this system of racial classification. In the colonies where there was an insufficient free white population
to provide a counterbalance to potential slave insurgencies, such as on the Caribbean islands, an elaborate
hierarchy of racial privilege was built up, with the lighter skinned "mulattos" admitted to the ranks of free
The concept of a "white race" never

really existed before the economic systems of early capitalism made it
a necessary social construct to aid in the repression of enslaved
Africans. Xenophobia and hostility towards those who were different than one's own immediate family,
men where they often owned slaves themselves.
clan, or tribe were certainly evident, and discrimination based on religious status was also widespread but
the development of modern "scientific" racism with its view that there are physically distinct "races" within
humanity, with distinct attributes and characteristics is peculiar to the conquest of the Americas, the rise
of slavery, and the imperialist domination of the entire world. Racism provided a convenient way to explain
the subordinate position of Africans and other victims of Euro-colonialism, while at the same time providing
an apparatus upon which to structure the granting of special privileges to sectors of the working class
one of the key

component of modern racism was its utility in resolving the
contradiction as to how the modern European societies in which the
bourgeoisie had come to power through promising "freedom" and
"equality" were so reliant on slave labour and murderous, yet highly
profitable colonial adventures. The development of a concept like
racism allowed whole sections of the world's population to be
"excommunicated" from humankind, and then be murdered or worked to death with a
admitted as members of the "white race". As David McNally has noted,
clear conscience for the profit of the capitalist class. To get a sense of the scale of slavery and its economic
importance, and thus an understanding of the material incentives for the creation of ideological constructs
such as "race", a few statistics regarding the English slave trade from Eric Williams' book Capitalism and
Slavery help to put things in context. The Royal African Company, a monopolistic crown corporation,
transported an average of 5 000 slaves a year between 1680 and 1686. When the ability to engage in the
free trade of slaves was recognized as a "fundamental and natural right" of the Englishman, one port city
alone, Bristol, shipped 160 950 slaves from 1698-1707. In 1760, 146 slave ships with a capacity for 36 000
slaves sailed from British ports, while in 1771 that number had increased to 190 ships with a capacity for
47 000 slaves. Between 1700 and 1786 over 610 000 slaves were imported to Jamaica alone, and
conservative estimates for the total import of slaves into all British colonies between 1680 and 1786 are
put at over two million. All told, many historians place the total number of Africans displaced by the
Atlantic slave trade as being between twelve and thirty million people--a massive historical event and
These large numbers of slaves and the

success of the slave trade as jump starter for capitalist industrialization
came from what has been called the "triangular trade"--an intensely
forced migration of unprecedented proportions.
profitable economic relationship which built up European industry while

systematically deforming and underdeveloping the other economic
regions involved. The Europeans would produce manufactured goods that would then be traded to
ruling elites in the various African kingdoms. They in turn would use the firearms and trading goods of the
Europeans to enrich themselves by capturing members of rival tribes, or the less fortunate of their own
society, to sell them as slaves to the European merchants who would fill their now empty ships with slaves
destined to work in the colonial plantations. On the plantations, the slaves would toil to produce expensive
cash crops that could not be grown in Europe. These raw materials were then refined and sold at fantastic
profit in Europe. In 1697, the tiny island of Barbados with its 166 square miles, was worth more to British
capitalism than New England, New York, and Pennsylvania combined, while by 1798, the income accruing
to the British from the West Indian plantations alone was four million pounds a year, as opposed to one
million pounds from the whole rest of the world. Capitalist economists of the day recognized the super
profitability of slavery by noting the ease of making 100% profit on the trade, and by noting that one
the profits
of the slave trade were plowed back into further economic growth . Capital
African slave was as profitable as seven workers in the mainland. Even more importantly,
from the slave trade financed James Watt and the invention and production of the steam engine, while the
shipping, insurance, banking, mining, and textile industries were all thoroughly integrated into the slave
trade. What an analysis of the origins of modern capitalism shows is just how far the capitalist class will go
to make a profit. The development of a pernicious racist ideology, spread to justify the uprooting and
enslavement of millions of people to transport them across the world to fill a land whose indigenous
population was massacred or worked to death, represents the beginnings of the system that George W.
For revolutionaries today who seek to

understand and transform capitalism and the racism encoded into its
very being, it is essential to understand how and why these systems of
domination and exploitation came into being before we can hope to
successfully overthrow them.
Bush defends as "our way of life".
2NC- Policy link

Ocean policy is capitalistic in nature and dominates the ocean
The world is at a crossroads in regard to the ecological crisis. Ecological

degradation under global capitalism extends to the entire biosphere.
Oceans that were teeming with abundance are being
decimated by the continual intrusion of exploitive economic
operations. At the same time that scientists are documenting the complexity and interdependency
of marine species, we are witnessing an oceanic crisis as natural conditions, ecological processes, and
nutrient cycles are being undermined through overfishing and transformed due to global warming. The
expansion of the accumulation system, along with technological advances in fishing, have intensified the
exploitation of the world ocean; facilitated the enormous capture of fishes (both target and bycatch);
extended the spatial reach of fishing operations; broadened the species deemed valuable on the market;
The quick-fix solution of

aquaculture enhances capitals control over production without
resolving ecological contradictions. It is wise to recognize, as Paul Burkett has stated,
that short of human extinction, there is no sense in which capitalism
can be relied upon to permanently break down under the weight of its
depletion and degradation of natural wealth.44 Capital is driven by
the competition for the accumulation of wealth, and short-term
profits provide the immediate pulse of capitalism. It cannot operate
and disrupted metabolic and reproductive processes of the ocean.
under conditions that require reinvestment in the reproduction of nature, which may entail time scales of a
hundred or more years. Such requirements stand opposed to the immediate interests of profit.
Development and exploration of the ocean is a manifestation

of the ongoing pursuit of capitalism-which leads to ecological
devastation
The world ocean covers approximately 70 percent of the earth. It has been an integral part of human
history, providing food and ecological services. Yet conservation efforts and concerns with environmental
degradation have mostly focused on terrestrial issues. Marine scientists and oceanographers have recently
made remarkable discoveries in regard to the intricacies of marine food webs and the richness of oceanic
the excitement over these discoveries is dampened due

to an awareness of the rapidly accelerating threat to the biological
integrity of marine ecosystems.1 At the start of the twenty-first century marine
scientists focused on the rapid depletion of marine fish, revealing that 75
biodiversity. However,
percent of major fisheries are fully exploited, overexploited, or depleted. It is estimated that the global
The depletion of ocean fish stock

due to overfishing has disrupted metabolic relations within the oceanic
ecosystem at multiple trophic and spatial scales.2 Despite warnings of impending
collapse of fish stock, the oceanic crisis has only worsened. The severity is made
ocean has lost more than 90% of large predatory fishes.
evident in a recent effort to map the scale of human impact on the world ocean. A team of scientists
analyzed seventeen types of anthropogenic drivers of ecological change (e.g., organic pollution from
agricultural runoff, overfishing, carbon dioxide emissions, etc.) for marine ecosystems. The findings are
clear: No area of the world ocean is unaffected by human influence, and over 40 percent of marine
ecosystems are heavily affected by multiple factors. Polar seas are on the verge of significant change.
Coral reefs and continental shelves have suffered severe deterioration. Additionally, the world ocean is a
crucial factor in the carbon cycle, absorbing approximately a third to a half of the carbon dioxide released
into the atmosphere. The increase in the portion of carbon dioxide has led to an increase in ocean
temperature and a slow drop in the pH of surface watersmaking them more acidicdisrupting shellforming plankton and reef-building species. Furthermore, invasive species have negatively affected 84
percent of the worlds coastal watersdecreasing
biodiversity and further

undermining already stressed fisheries.3 Scientific analysis of oceanic
systems presents a sobering picture of the coevolution of human
society and the marine environment during the capitalist industrial era.
The particular environmental problems related to the ocean cannot be viewed as isolated issues or
aberrations of human ingenuity, only to be corrected through further technological development. Rather
these ecological conditions must be understood as they relate to the systematic expansion of capital and
the exploitation of nature for profit. Capital has a particular social metabolic orderthe material
interchange between society and naturethat subsumes the world to the logic of accumulation. It is a
system of self-expanding value, which must reproduce itself on an ever-larger scale.4 Here we examine the
social metabolic order of capital and its relationship with the oceans to (a) examine the anthropogenic
the ecological consequences of ongoing

capitalist production in relation to the ocean environment, and (c)
highlight the ecological contradictions of capitalist aquaculture.5
causes of fish stock depletion, (b) detail
Geoengineering
Geoengineering continues the subjection of the natural world
to capitalism- it fails to solve and only fills the pockets of
capitalists
ROHRICHT, 6/29/14 M.A. Candidate, Ethics, Peace and Global AffairsB.A., Professional Writing & B.A., Philosophy (Alyssa, Counter-Punch, Capitalism and Climate
Change, http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/06/27/capitalism-climate-change/)//jk
This is the idea of dematerializing the economy or reducing the throughput of raw materials and energy
into the system without decreasing the systems output of goods and services. Basically, the economy will
do more with less. By switching to more sustainable sources of energy like wind and solar, increasing the
efficiency of machinery and appliances, and through geoengineering, proponents of the technological
solution to climate change argue that mans ingenuity can pull us back from the brink of disaster.
Giddens writes in The Politics of Climate Change that we

must take bold action to combat climate change, and this means
taking the plunge on geoengineering projects that could save
humanity from the harmful effects of climate change. We have no
hope of responding to climate change unless we are prepared to take
bold decisions. It is the biggest example ever of he who hesitates is
lost. However, further investing in technologies and in geoengineering is
not a bold, new decision, as Giddens contends. It is doubling down on
exactly what we have been doing for decades. Solar Radiation Management (SRM)
Economist Anthony
techniques (one area of geoengineering) such as adding sulfate aerosols to the stratosphere to increase
the albedo effect the amount of the Suns energy that is reflected back into space and cool the planet
The absurdity of
pursuing massive projects that would greatly alter the natural systems
of the earth and that could have disastrous side effects is evident. Gavin
Schmidt, climate modeler at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, created
the following analogy for geoengineering: Imagine the climate as a
small boat on a choppy ocean, rocking back and forth. One of the
passengers in the boat decides to stand up and deliberately rock the
boat violently to the protests of the other passengers. Another
passenger suggests that with his knowledge of chaotic dynamics, he
can counterbalance the rocking of the first passenger. To do so, he
needs many sensors, computational resources, and so on so that he
can react efficiently, though he cannot guarantee that it will absolutely
stabilize the boat, and since the boat is already unsteady, it may make
things worse. Schmidt asks, So is the answer to a known and increasing
human influence on climate an ever more elaborate system to control
the climate? Or should the person rocking the boat just sit down?
Market reactions to large-scale geoengineering such as releasing
sulfate aerosols, would result in the continued acceleration of resource
use and further capital accumulation, not to mention, it would do little
to solve our problems. Sulfate injection, to start, doesnt actually help to remove any CO2 from
are being seriously considered by many scientists and policy makers.
the atmosphere. It also doesnt address other areas of climate change, including ocean acidification, which
has far-reaching implications for many species of marine life. Whats worse, since sulfate injection only
manages to reflect more of the suns energy without addressing any of the systematic causes of the
increase of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the atmosphere, further increases of GHGs can continue, thus
assuming the deployment of future sulfate injections and other geoengineering solutions to no end.
Renewable Energy
Technological fetishism fails to alter the conditions that cause
climate change and denies the role of capitalism in
environmental degradation
Foster, 10 -
professor of sociology at the University of Oregon (John, Why Ecological

Revolution, Monthly Review, http://monthlyreview.org/2010/01/01/why-ecological-revolution/,
February 3rd 2010)//jk
We are increasingly led to believe that the answers to climate change

are primarily to be found in new energy technology, specifically increased
energy and carbon efficiencies in both production and consumption. Technology in this sense,
however, is often viewed abstractly as a deus ex machina, separated
from both the laws of physics (i.e., entropy or the second law of thermodynamics) and
from the way technology is embedded in historically specific
conditions. With respect to the latter, it is worth noting that, under the present
economic system, increases in energy efficiency normally lead to
increases in the scale of economic output, effectively negating any
gains from the standpoint of resource use or carbon efficiency - a
problem known as the Jevons Paradox. As William Stanley Jevons observed in the
nineteenth century, every new steam engine was more efficient in the use of coal than the one before,
which did not prevent coal burning from increasing overall, since the efficiency gains only led to the
This relation between

efficiency and scale has proven true for capitalist economies up to the
present day.[8] Technological fetishism with regard to environmental
issues is usually coupled with a form of market fetishism. So widespread has
expansion of the number of steam engines and of growth in general.
this become that even a militant ecologist like Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature, recently stated:
There is only one lever even possibly big enough to make our system move as fast as it needs to, and
thats the force of markets.[9] Green-market fetishism is most evident in what is called cap and trade a catch phrase for the creation, via governments, of artificial markets in carbon trading and so-called
offsets. The important thing to know about cap and trade is that it is a proven failure. Although enacted
in Europe as part of the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol, it has failed where it was supposed to count:
in reducing emissions. Carbon-trading schemes have been shown to be full of holes. Offsets allow all sorts
of dubious forms of trading that have no effect on emissions. Indeed, the only area in which carbon trading
schemes have actually been effective is in promoting profits for speculators and corporations, which are
therefore frequently supportive of them. Recently, Friends of the Earth released a report entitled Subprime
Carbon? which pointed to the emergence, under cap and trade agreements, of what could turn out to be
the worlds largest financial derivatives market in the form of carbon trading. All of this has caused Hansen
to refer to cap and trade as the temple of doom, locking in disasters for our children and
grandchildren.[10] The masquerade associated with the dominant response to global warming is
illustrated in the climate bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in late June 2009. The bill, if
enacted, would supposedly reduce greenhouse gas emissions 17 percent relative to 2005 levels by 2020,
which translates into 4-5 percent less U.S. global warming pollution than in 1990. This then would still not
reach the target level of a 6-8 percent cut (relative to 1990) for wealthy countries that the Kyoto accord set
for 2012, and that was supposed to have been only a minor, first step in dealing with global warming - at a
time when the problem was seen as much less severe. The goal presented in the House bill, even if
reached, would therefore prove vastly inadequate. But the small print in the bill makes achieving even this
meager target unrealistic. The coal industry is given until 2025 to comply with the bills pollution reduction
mandates, with possible extensions afterward. As Hansen observes, the bill builds in approval of new coalfired power plants! Agribusiness, which accounts for a quarter of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, is
entirely exempt from the mandated reductions. The cap and trade provisions of the House bill would give
annual carbon dioxide emission allowances to some 7,400 facilities across the United States, most of them
handed out for free. These pollution allowances would increase up through 2016, and companies would be
permitted to bank them indefinitely for future use. Corporations would be able to fulfill their entire set of
obligations by buying offsets associated with pollution control projects until 2027. To make matters worse,
the Senate counterpart to the House bill, now under deliberation, would undoubtedly be more
conservative, giving further concessions and offsets to corporations. The final bill, if it comes out of
Congress, will thus be, in Hansens words, worse than nothing. Similar developments can be seen in the
preparation for the December 2009 world climate negotiations in Copenhagen, in which Washington has
played the role of a spoiler, blocking all but the most limited, voluntary agreements, and insisting on only
market-based approaches, such as cap and trade.[11] Recognizing that world powers are playing the role
of Nero as Rome burns, James Lovelock, the earth system scientist famous for his Gaia hypothesis, argues
that massive climate change and the destruction of human civilization as we know it may now be
irreversible. Nevertheless, he proposes as solutions either a massive building of nuclear power plants all
over the world (closing his eyes to the enormous dangers accompanying such a course) - or
geoengineering our way out of the problem, by using the worlds fleet of aircraft to inject huge quantities
of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to block a portion of the incoming sunlight, reducing the solar energy
reaching the earth. Another common geoengineering proposal includes dumping iron filings throughout the
ocean to increase its carbon-absorbing properties. Rational scientists recognize that interventions in the
earth system on the scale envisioned by geoengineering schemes (for example, blocking sunlight) have
their own massive, unforeseen consequences. Nor could such schemes solve the crisis. The dumping of
massive quantities of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere would, even if effective, have to be done again
and again, on an increasing scale, if the underlying problem of cutting greenhouse gas emissions were not
dealt with. Moreover, it could not possibly solve other problems associated with massive carbon dioxide
The dominant approach to the

world ecological crisis, focusing on technological fixes and market
mechanisms, is thus a kind of denial; one that serves the vested
interests of those who have the most to lose from a change in
economic arrangements. Al Gore exemplifies the dominant form of
denial in his new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis. For Gore, the
answer is the creation of a sustainable capitalism. He is not,
however, altogether blind to the faults of the present system. He
describes climate change as the greatest market failure in history
and decries the short-term perspective of present-day capitalism, its
market triumphalism, and the fundamental flaws in its relation to
the environment. Yet, in defiance of all this, he assures his readers that
the strengths of capitalism can be harnessed to a new system of
sustainable development.[13]
emissions, such as the acidification of the oceans.[12]
Technological approaches to climate change only pass the buck

on to future generations- failure to destroy the root cause of
climate change makes extinction inevitable and means
capitalists misuse the technology
ROHRICHT, 6/29/14 M.A. Candidate, Ethics, Peace and Global AffairsB.A., Professional Writing & B.A., Philosophy (Alyssa, Counter-Punch, Capitalism and Climate
Change, http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/06/27/capitalism-climate-change/)//jk
Pursuing sustainable energy sources is an equally dubious response to

the climate crisis. Just as with geoengineering, the thought is that human
ingenuity and investment in new technologies will lead to cleaner and
more efficient industrial practices, thus reducing our GHG emissions.
Yet this ignores the very nature of the capitalist system of endless
growth and accumulation, and given the opportunity to expand further
while expending less on energy and resources, capitalism will naturally
expand to fill the newly opened space. This concept is often called
Jevons Paradox, after William Stanley Jevons, a 19th century economist who sought to examine
why increased efficiency in the use of coal led to increased consumption. What Jevons noted was
a positive correlation between efficiency and resource consumption,
observing that as the use of coal became more efficient and thus more cost
effective, it became more desirable to consumers, creating more
demand and thus more production and consumption. On and on it
goes. This is called the rebound effect whereby gains in efficiency lead to a drop in
the price of a given commodity and a rise in demand and consumption .
Any gains in efficiency, then, do not lead to a decrease in consumption,
but often have the opposite effect. In fact, over the period of 1975 to 1996, carbon
efficiency increased dramatically in the US, Japan, the Netherlands, and Austria. However, studies show
that during the same period, total emissions of carbon dioxide and per capita emissions increased across
gains in fossil fuel efficiency have resulted in increased use

by the capitalist, industrialized societies. As Karl Marx noted, capitalism
prevents the rational application of technologies because gains are
only reinvested in the capitalist system and used to further expand and
grow capital accumulation. Renewable energy poses similar problems.
Drastic measures would need to be taken to change the entire
infrastructure currently built around fossil fuels. In order to keep global warming to
a 2C increase by purely technical means, about 80% of the worlds energy use
would have to be switched to carbon-neutral technologies like wind, solar, and bio-fuels. An
article in the New Yorker on inventor Saul Griffith noted that this would require building
the equivalent of all the following: a hundred square metres of new
solar cells, fifty square metres of new solar-thermal reflectors, and one
Olympic swimming pools volume of genetically engineered algae (for
biofuels) every second for the next twenty-five years; one three-hundred-footthe board. Thus
diameter wind turbine every five minutes; one hundred-megawatt geothermal-powered steam turbine
To construct all of
this carbon-neutral technology would require emitting huge amounts of
GHGs into the atmosphere, over and above what we are already
emitting to continue running the current system. Furthermore, large-scale
renewables can be just as destructive as other forms of energy. Largescale dams used for hydropower a supposedly clean energy have
led to destruction of habitats for both aquatic and land species,
destruction of flood plains, river deltas, wetlands, and ocean estuaries,
reduction of water quality and nutrient cycling and have been known to
cause earthquakes. Biofuels, similarly, cause huge environmental
damage, sometimes using more energy to grow and transport the
crops than energy gained from it, not to mention the issue of creating competition for
arable land with the food industry. Once again, a boon for the capitalist economy in
creating new industry in sustainable energy is to the great detriment
of the environment and the climate, so long as the harms caused by these new
technologies can be written off as externalities. Focusing on technology whether
through methods to increase efficiency, through sustainable energy, or
through geoengineering do nothing to change the underlying
capitalist system of unfettered growth that has been at the source of
the climate change problem from the beginning. They are merely
attempts at treating the symptoms of climate change, not the cause.
every eight hours; and one three-gigawatt nuclear power plant every week.
Karl Marx first employed the concept of metabolic interactions between humans and nature in the 19th
century, recognizing the complex interdependence between the two. Since man lives from nature and
derives the very necessities to survive from it, nature is his body. He is a part of nature and they are
inextricably linked and so man must be in dialogue with it in order to survive. This complex interchange
he likened to the metabolism or material exchange within the body. But as man began to adopt
practices that disrupted this interchange, a rupture occurred with the relations between man and the
natural world. This rupture, driven by capitalist expansion, intensified with large-scale agriculture, harmful
industries, and the global market. Marx saw this rupture, or metabolic rift, occur as populations began to
flock toward cities. In contrast to traditional agriculture, where waste from food is recycled back into the
soil, this new type of agriculture meant nutrients (food) were being shipped to cities to feed the growing
population, and thus not cycled back into the soil. This caused the natural fertility of the soil to decline and
nutrients in the city to accumulate as waste and pollution. As soil fertility worsened, more and more
intensive agricultural methods were needed, increasing the use of artificial fertilizers, further harming the
nutrient cycles of the soil. Capitalism continued to demand higher and higher yields, requiring more and
more intensive and harsh farming methods, greater fertilizer use, and so on, creating a cycle of
Humans have
disrupted the natural processes of the earth in unimaginable ways. The
deterioration of the natural processes, and a rift between man and nature.
very composition of the air we breathe is being altered by our ever-growing emissions of GHGs. The
system we have put our faith in for many years rests on a ceaseless hunger for accumulation, spurred on
As our energy sources become more and more scarce and

difficult to find and extract, instead of scaling back and recognizing
natures natural boundaries, capitalism doubles down and employs
even more dangerous methods. Searching for market-based solutions
to the climate crisis will not work. When capitalism attempts to put a
price on the natural world, it takes into account only the interests of
those with the greatest purchasing power. Capital accumulation is the
primary objective, and any costs that can be externalized onto nature
and the global poor will be. Technology in the capitalist system has
helped us to create ever-more energy-efficient processes, yet a
paradoxical relationship arises, where increased energy-efficiency leads to increased
by fossil fuels.
economic expansion, negating any reduction in resource-use. Likewise, transforming our infrastructure to
more sustainable energy sources would require a such massive output of GHGs from fossil fuels to build
that implementing the change would push us over the climate cliff .
Geoengineering, the
solution touted by many cheerleaders of the capitalist system as the
saving grace of humanity, absurdly argues for altering the earths
natural systems even further, hoping that capitalism can continue
undiminished. Technology may help pass the buck to future
generations, but it will not solve the problem. Capitalism would have us
grow indefinitely, but the earths natural carrying capacity would have
us reverse this trend. The interminable drive for accumulation on which
capitalism is solely focused has led humanity down a path of neardisaster with the very systems that we rely on to sustain life human
and otherwise. If we continue down this path of relentless
accumulation inherent in the capitalist system, we cannot stop the
climate disaster.
Aquaculture
Aquaculture expands the reach of capitalism by subjecting new
elements of nature to the logic of capitalism- the drive for
profit undermines fish stocks and decimates ocean ecosystems
turning case
Clark and Clausen, 08 - Assistant Professor, Sociology Department, University of Utah and
Assistant Professor of Sustainability, Environmental Humanities Graduate Program and Environmental &
Sustainability Studies Program, University of Utah, Rebecca Clausen is assistant professor of sociology at
Fort Lewis College, M.S., University of Oregon, 2003 Ph.D., Rutgers, (Brett and Rebecca, Monthly Review,
https://monthlyreview.org/2008/07/01/the-oceanic-crisis-capitalism-and-the-degradation-of-marineecosystem, July-August) //jk
The massive decline in fish stocks has led capitalist development to turn to a new way of increasing profits
Capitalist aquaculture represents not only a

quantitative change in the intensification and concentration of
production; it also places organisms life cycles under the complete
control of private for-profit ownership.31 This new industry, it is claimed, is the
fastest-growing form of agriculture in the world. It boasts of having ownership from
egg to plate and substantially alters the ecological and human
dimensions of a fishery.32 Aquaculture (sometimes also referred to as aquabusiness)
involves subjecting nature to the logic of capital. Capital attempts to
overcome natural and social barriers through its constant innovations . In
this, enterprises attempt to commodify, invest in, and develop new
elements of nature that previously existed outside the politicaleconomic competitive sphere: As Edward Carr wrote in the Economist, the sea is a resource
intensified production of fishes.
that must be preserved and harvested.To enhance its uses, the water must become ever more like the
land, with owners, laws and limits. Fishermen must behave more like ranchers than hunters.33 As
worldwide commercial fish stocks decline due to overharvest and other anthropogenic causes, aquaculture
is witnessing a rapid expansion in the global economy. Aquacultures contribution to global supplies of fish
increased from 3.9 percent of total worldwide production by weight in 1970 to 27.3 percent in 2000. In
2004, aquaculture and capture fisheries produced 106 million tons of fish and aquaculture accounted for
43 percent.34 According to Food and Agriculture Organization statistics, aquaculture is growing more
rapidly than all other animal food producing sectors. Hailed as the Blue Revolution, aquaculture is
frequently compared to agricultures Green Revolution as a way to achieve food security and economic
growth among the poor and in the third world. The cultivation of farmed salmon as a high-value,
carnivorous species destined for market in core nations has emerged as one of the more lucrative (and
the Blue
Revolution may produce temporary increases in yields, but it does not
usher in a solution to food security (or environmental problems). Food
security is tied to issues of distribution. Given that the Blue Revolution
is driven by the pursuit of profit, the desire for monetary gain trumps
the distribution of food to those in need.36 Industrial aquaculture intensifies
fish production by transforming the natural life histories of wild fish
stocks into a combined animal feedlot. Like monoculture agriculture, aquaculture
furthers the capitalistic division of nature, only its realm of operation is the marine
controversial) endeavors in aquaculture production.35 Much like the Green Revolution,
world. In order to maximize return on investment, aquaculture must raise thousands of fish in a confined
net-pen. Fish are separated from the natural environment and the various relations of exchange found in a
food web and ecosystem. The fishs reproductive life cycle is altered so that it can be propagated and
Aquaculture interrupts the most

fundamental metabolic processthe ability of an organism to obtain its
required nutrient uptake. Because the most profitable farmed fish are
carnivorous, such as Atlantic salmon, they depend on a diet that is high in
raised until the optimum time for mechanical harvest.
fishmeal and fish oil. For example, raising Atlantic salmon requires four pounds
of fishmeal to produce every one pound of salmon. Consequently, aquaculture
production depends heavily on fishmeal imported from South America to feed the farmed carnivorous
The inherent contradiction in extracting fishmeal is that

industries must increase their exploitation of marine fish in order to
feed the farm-raised fishthereby increasing the pressure on wild
stocks to an even larger extent. Such operations also increase the amount of bycatch.
species.37
Three of the worlds five largest fisheries are now exclusively harvesting pelagic fish for fishmeal, and
Rather than diminishing the

demands placed on marine ecosystems, capitalist aquaculture actually
increases them, accelerating the fishing down the food chain process. The environmental
degradation of populations of marine species, ecosystems, and tropic
levels continues.38 Capitalist aquaculturewhich is really aquabusiness
represents a parallel example of capital following the patterns of
agribusiness. Similar to combined animal feedlots, farmed fish are penned up in
high-density cages making them susceptible to disease. Thus, like in the
production of beef, pork, and chicken, farmed fish are fed fishmeal that contains
antibiotics, increasing concerns about antibiotic exposure in society . In
Silent Spring of the Sea, Don Staniford explains, The use of antibiotics in salmon
farming has been prevalent right from the beginning, and their use in
aquaculture globally has grown to such an extent that resistance is
now threatening human health as well as other marine species.
Aquaculturists use a variety of chemicals to kill parasites, such as sea
lice, and diseases that spread quickly throughout the pens. The
dangers and toxicities of these pesticides in the marine environment
are magnified because of the long food chain.39 Once subsumed into
the capitalist process, life cycles of animals are increasingly geared to
economic cycles of exchange by decreasing the amount of time
required for growth. Aquabusiness conforms to these pressures, as
researchers are attempting to shorten the growth time required for fish
to reach market size. Recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) has been added to some fish
these fisheries account for a quarter of the total global catch.
feeds to stimulate growth in fishes in aquaculture farms in Hawaii. Experiments with fish transgenicsthe
transfer of DNA from one species to anotherare being done to increase the rate of weight gain, causing
These growth
mechanisms illustrate capitalist aquacultures drive to transform
nature to facilitate the generation of profit. In addition, aquaculture alters
altered fish to grow from 60 percent to 600 percent larger than wild stocks.40
waste assimilation. The introduction of net-pens leads to a break in the natural assimilation of waste in the
marine environment. The pens convert coastal ecosystems, such as bays, inlets, and fjords, into
aquaculture ponds, destroying nursery areas that support ocean fisheries. For instance, salmon net-pens
allow fish feces and uneaten feed to flow directly into coastal waters, resulting in substantial discharges of
nutrients. The excess nutrients are toxic to the marine communities that occupy the ocean floor beneath
the net-pens, causing massive die offs of entire benthic populations.41 Other waste products are
concentrated around net-pens as well, such as diseases and parasites introduced by the caged salmon to
The Blue Revolution is not an environmental

solution to declining fish stocks. In fact, it is an intensification of the
social metabolic order that creates ruptures in marine ecosystems. The
the surrounding marine organisms.
coastal and marine support areas needed for resource inputs and waste assimilation [is]50,000 times the
of aquaculture places even

more demands upon ecosystems, undermining their resiliency. Although
cultivation area for intensive salmon cage farming.42 This form
aquabusiness is efficient at turning fish into a commodity for markets given the extensive control that is
executed over the productive conditions, it is even more energy inefficient than fisheries, demanding more
Confronted by declines in fish

stock, capital is attempting to shift production to aquaculture. However,
this intense form of production for profit continues to exhaust the
oceans and produce a concentration of waste that causes further
problems for ecosystems, undermining their ability to regenerate at all
levels.
fuel energy investment than the energy produced.43
Oil
Expansion of oil drilling subjects the world to corporate control
of resources and places profit above all at the expense of the
worker
Eley, 10 Tom is a contributor for World Socialist Website
(Tom, WSWS, The BP oil spill and American capitalism,
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/05/pers-m08.html , May
8th) //jk
These decisions led directly to the deaths of 11 workers aboard the Deepwater Horizon and the
The workers killed in the BP explosion are

only the latest casualties. According to data from the International Regulators Forum,
from 2004 through 2009 offshore oil workers on US rigs were four times more
likely to be killed in industrial accidents and 23 percent more likely to
be injured than oil workers in European waters. While there were 5 loss of well
environmental catastrophe in the Gulf.
control disasters on US drill rigs in 2007 and 2008, in five other major offshore drilling nationsthe UK,
Since 2001 there have been 69

deaths, 1,349 injuries and 858 fires or explosions on oil rigs operating
in the Gulf of Mexico alone, according to the International Association of Drilling Contractors.
Norway, Australia, and Canadathere were none.
The incestuous ties between the MMS and the oil industry have not been severed with the election of
Obama. Obama was in fact the top recipient of BP employee donations in the 2008 election cycle, and
the company has mobilized tens of millions in a massive lobbying campaign that has brought on board
such powerful Washington insiders as Democratic Party kingmaker John Podesta, former Democratic House
majority leader Thomas Daschle and former Republican Senator Alan Simpson (a key member of Obamas
bipartisan budget committee). Current CIA director Leon Panetta has also served on BPs external
advisory council.Only weeks before the Gulf disaster, in an open sop to the oil companies ,
Obama
declared his intention to make large regions of the US coastline
available for oil drilling.The Deepwater Horizon explosion is the result of decades of
deregulation, which proclaimed that the free market could best regulate its elf. Beginning in the late
the US government, under both Democratic and Republican

administrations, has worked to systematically eliminate all constraints
on corporate profit-making. The result has been disastrous for the
population of the US and the world. Corporations controlling vast social
resources make decisions affecting millions of people on the basis of
profit. Working hand in glove with regulators, little more than wholly owned
subsidiaries of industry, the corporate elite targets for elimination any outlay
that diminishes profit returns to the top executives and shareholders,
whether it be environmental protection, product safety, or workers
safetyas a spate of recent deadly workplace accidents has revealed.
1970s,
In industry after industry the story is the samemining, auto production, transportation,
the eruption of toxic oil

from the bottom of the sea has its parallel in the eruption of toxic
assets that set off a financial crisis in 2008. Led by the Obama
administraiton, national governments responded to this disaster by
bailing out those responsiblethe financial eliteand leaving the
working class to foot the bill. In this sense, the crisis in the Gulf and the crisis in Greece are
telecommunications and, of course, the finance industry. Indeed,
connected by a common social and economic system. The assets of BP, Transocean, Halliburton and their
executiveshundreds of billions of dollarsmust be appropriated and used to make the people of the Gulf
whole and to put in place a massive environmental cleanup program. The executives and regulators whose
The stranglehold of the

corporate and financial elite over society and its resources must be
broken. This requires the implementation of a socialist program for energy production. The big energy
policies caused the disaster should be criminally prosecuted.
corporations must be seized and converted into public utilities, democratically run by the working class in
the interest of social need.
Oil is the lifeblood of capitalism- a disruption of cheap oil

would collapse the entire system
Knight, 09 masters degree in Political Science from Lehigh
University (Alex, End of Capitalism, Why is it breaking
down?, http://endofcapitalism.com/about/3-why-is-it-collapsing/ )
//jk
Oil is the lifeblood of capitalism; there is literally nothing on this earth
that can replace it as the dominant fuel for the engine of global
capitalism. Its not just that 40% of energy comes from oil, making it the worlds #1 energy source,
the key point is that the particular applications of oil are vital to the entire economic structure. For
example, 99% of the worlds pesticides are chemically produced from oil (and almost all industrial
fertilizers derive from natural gas), which means the entire industrial mode of agriculture that has taken
dominance over the worlds farmland depends upon abundant cheap petroleum. In fact, including tractors,
chemicals, packaging, distribution, and cooking, every single calorie of food in the United States requires
at least 10 calories of fossil fuel energy to bring that food to the plate. The pharmaceutical industry,
In addition to being found in just

about everything we consume, petroleum is now also necessary for
fueling the extraction, production, packaging, and distribution of all
other resources. Most crucially, oil now powers 95% of all transportation, in the
form of gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. By definition the global economy depends on the
rapid transport of people and resources on a global scale, which means
burning oil and dumping billions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere, causing global warming and
chemical, plastics, and military are equally dependent.
destabilizing the Earths climate. Meanwhile, because oil is such a powerful resource, states necessarily
view it as a strategic imperative to maintain access to supplies. The quest for cheap and available oil
therefore becomes a prime motive for military action and warfare, as weve seen in the actions of the US in
the Middle East, where66% of the worlds remaining oil lies. Warfare and climate chaos stand out as
the reality is
that the entire global assault on human justice and natural ecosystems
would in many ways not be possible without being fueled by cheap and
abundant oil. Luckily, oil as a resource is limited in supply (imagine the destruction if it werent), and
particularly devastating consequences of the massive rate of oil consumption, but
in fact according to a growing chorus of geologists, the worldwide supply of oil is now reaching its ultimate
maximum level and will soon enter decline. The evidence shows that the global peak oil production is here
today. This historic event is occurring approximately 40 years after the peak discovery of oil, in the mid1960s. Since that time, less and less oil has been found worldwide, while demand has skyrocketed. This
isnt the place for a full explanation of Peak Oil, but it serves to point out that at least 54 countries have
already reached their domestic peak oil, including the United States. Data indicates that the immense runup of prices in 2007-2008 can best be explained as a result of global oil shortage, which certainly added
The
deepening oil shortage will affect the United States and its imperialist
project in a unique way. Having risen to power on a sea of oil in the first half of the 20th
century, the U.S. reached its peak oil in 1970 and now imports over 2/3 of its consumption. Still by far the
largest consumer of oil, using over 25% of global supply, the country is being
forced into deeper and deeper debt to pay for it. This enormous trade
deficit is only counteracted by the willingness of foreign countries from
whom the United States purchases most of its stuff (Saudi Arabia for its oil, China
for its consumer goods), to recycle their dollars back into the US by purchasing Treasury Bonds, stocks,
stress to the financial markets and likely helped trigger the current crisis. Can This Continue?
As U.S. financial markets crumble,

how long until these foreign countries decide their investments are safer elsewhere, and
pull the rug out from under the Empire?
real estate and other dollar-denominated assets.
Oil leases are capitalist to their core- they risk human life in
pursuit of profit
Siegmund, 11 Contributor for DailyKos (Fred, Daily Kos, Oil Spills and Capitalism,
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/03/05/952978/-Oil-Spills-and-Capitalism#, March 5th)//jk
The BP oil spill started so long ago it is hard to remember the details. It began with
the explosion and death of 11 employees, followed by a fire and the
sinking of the drilling platform. The pictures of the flaming platform and the
billowing smoke diverted our attention from the oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico. The early
the spill is much bigger than the early BP

reports when we read about a dead battery in the blow out equipment and one failed
reports down played the spill. We know
containment effort after another. To top that off we had to listen to company CEOs blame each
other in Congressional testimony. I list some of the failures of BP because I have not heard
politicians question capitalism or whether it is best way to explore and drill for oil. Nor have I
heard media commentary or anyone in Congress question leasing drilling rights to private
Capitalists complain government is wasteful, inefficient and

bureaucratic when private firms have the incentive to minimize costs
to compete with other firms. Minimizing costs also means ignoring the
environmental safety precautions that Congress and the public wants
in the leases, and also working to reduce enforcement. Oil leases are
usually discussed as an example of capitalism, but the continental shelf is the public domain
companies.
as much as the Washington Monument and Yellowstone Park. Capitalism requires private ownership with
transactions exclusively between private parties, not the government. When the government contracts
with firms in the construction industry to build roads or drill oil, the buyer side of the transaction is the
Leasing the drilling rights on the continental shelf is just one

way to recover the oil if Congress and the country decide to take the risk of a spill.
government.
Another way is to form a public corporation like Conrail, Amtrak, the Tennessee Valley Authority or the St.
Lawrence Seaway.
Exploration
Ocean exploration expands capitalism to new regions of the
world
Parrish, 13 - managing director of the World Wildlife Fund. His Ph.D. is in conservation ecology.
(Jeffrey, Slate, Pirates of the Colder Meridians, September 12th 2013,
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/09/a_wwf_scientist_on_exploring_the_post_cli
mate_change_arctic.html)//jk
Scientists saw it coming. Explorers who forecast change through satellite images or capture the
disappearance of glaciers on camera warned us that the massive ice sheets were melting. And in an
increasingly warmer and more crowded world, weve come to accept this as fact. Moreover, the just
released 2013 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report makes it clear (or at least should) to
even the most fervent doubters that these changes are the fault of humans, of you and me. Yet whats
surprised even the elite academy of climate scientists is the shockingly fast pace at which its happening.
climate change is erasing the big

white spot on top of the globe. And the gold rush has begun.
Exploration isnt dead here. In this newly accessible maritime realm,
treasure maps are being createdX marks the spot of new shipping
lanes, untold oil and gas reserves, lodes of rare precious metals, and
potential tourism destinations. Like pirates of the colder meridians, big
businesses and governments are swooping in to grab the booty from a
virtually unclaimed and weakly regulated region. Meanwhile environmental groups
Tragically, and some 30 to 50 years before we expected,
are partnering with local communities, the fishing industry, and others to help them chart their own
destinies in this fresh terrain, assuring protection for indigenous communities, local economies, and
stunningly iconic wildlife like whales and walruses, polar bears and pelagic birds. This is the norths new
normal.
Science Fiction
Theyre complicit with capital science fiction is merely profit
driven and distracts the working class which destroys any
transformative ethics
Elkins and Suvin 79 - Charles Elkins (former editor of Science Fiction Studies) and Darko Suvin
(Professor Emeritus at McGill University) (Science Fiction Studies Vol 6. No.3 Preliminary Reflections on
Teaching Science Fiction Critically 1979)//jk
SF shares with other paraliterary some aspects very important, indeed crucial, for the teacher and student.
First, a large number of people actually read it regardless of the official educational requirements.
Therefore, assigned texts will usually be presented to a group of students heterogeneous in respect of their
previous familiarity with that kind of text: some will be familiar with whatever books are chosen, some will
not. More importantly, some will have notions (sometimes strong opinions) about what kind of writingwhat characteristic genre or category - these books belong to. Second, the economically and indeed
crucial aspect SF shares with other

paraliterature is that it is primarily a commodity. (Every book published
anthropologically (philosophically)
under capitalism is a commodity; but remnants of pre-capitalist notions of prestige, glory, etc., qualify the
the book publishers and the

TV and movie producers have to enforce certain strongly
constricting lower-common-denominator cliches in strict
proportion to the capital invested and profits expected (rather than
to a mythical audience-taste); the constricted narrative patterns, plots,
characters, language, etc., in turn prevent paraliterature from
giving a full and lasting satisfaction to its consumer. However, this
also means that the book-as-commodity acquires a certain financial
independence of its ideological content: it will be subject to
promotion, hypes, etc., and conversely it will often be excused anything as long as it brings
in the profits. Third, this makes for its twofold dominant societal function:
financially, that of selling well (to many readers); ideologically, that of
momentarily entertaining and pacifying its readers. This helps the
social status quo both economically and politically, by addicting the
commodity status of much "high lit.") This means that
reader and/or viewer to further reading/viewing for further momentary compensation (see Joanna Russ's
"SF and Technology as Mystification," SFS No. 16 [Nov. 1978]) and by defusing active or at least radical
civic discontent, in favor of mass social mythologies of an anti-rational kind (see Roland Barthes'
Mythologies).
Exploitation
The commodification of nature as a resource to be exploited
provides the foundation for capitalism
ALH, ND - Animal Liberation Hamburg is a leading organizing of the animal liberation
movement. The organization is committed to the liberation of humanity and animals from exploitation
(Humans, Animals and Nature in the Crisis: On the need for an anti-capitalist critique of animal
exploitation, http://www.tierbefreiung-hamburg.org/texte/humans-animals-and-nature-in-the-crisis-on-theneed-for-an-anti-capitalist-critique-of-animal-exploitation)//jk
In capitalist economics, animals, like nature in general, are merely

commodities, means of production or resources that may be exploited.
The domination of nature is the basis of human society as humans need to produce in order to reproduce
the establishment of
capitalist production methods has triggered fatal dynamics that are
literally murderous. Capitalist economics require not only competition
but also permanent expansion in the form of advancing valorisation of
all natural foundations for life. Unbridled growth therefore necessarily
results in not only social but also ecological crises. Fukushima, the global effects
themselves, they have always needed to alter and use nature. But
of climate change and the industrialised killing of animals are some examples of the devastating
consequences of capitalist appropriation of nature. A critique of the systematic destruction of nature is
expressed by the social struggles of environment movements, e.g. against coal-fired power stations, or
genetic engineering. Protest movements against the privatisation of water or against land-grabbing are
also fighting for a collective and sustainable use of nature based on need and against the profit-orientated
The destruction of nature and with it the destruction of

the basis of human society are immediate consequences of production
relations that do not serve our needs but those of capitalist
accumulation. That fact that capitalist appropriation of nature does not
follow the principles of sustainability, conservation or care is not the
result of environmentally unfriendly attitudes but is actually the
logical consequence of turning nature into capital.
destruction of capital.
The systematic slaughter of animals and commodification of

them maintains the ontology of capitalist domination- this is
mutually exclusive with a liberated society
ALH, ND - Animal Liberation Hamburg is a leading organizing of the animal liberation
movement. The organization is committed to the liberation of humanity and animals from exploitation
(Humans, Animals and Nature in the Crisis: On the need for an anti-capitalist critique of animal
exploitation, http://www.tierbefreiung-hamburg.org/texte/humans-animals-and-nature-in-the-crisis-on-theneed-for-an-anti-capitalist-critique-of-animal-exploitation)//jk
Animals are the main victims of nature domination. Considered to be

nature, they are encaged and murdered in their billions, so their labour
power can be exploited and their dead bodies exchanged as
commodities. Animals are systematically made victims of socially
organised violence. Their bodies suffer injuries en masse in slaughterhouses, laboratories, or on
factory farms. A liberated society that really intends to overcome all
relations based on exploitation or servitude cannot ignore animals. No
victim of socially-caused violence is a legitimate one. With our current state of
productive forces the technological and social possibilities at our disposal there is no need for
violence against animals. The exploitation of animals is legitimised
backed up by a complex ideology which has come to be known as

speciesism. This means a way of thinking about animals that results
from the supposed necessity of their exploitation. A type of false
consciousness about animals, speciesism helps make the exploitation
of animals seem to be natural and unchangeable, obscuring the
historical development and social creation of the exploitation. This
obscuring of human domination of animals is expressed in various
ways: From the retort that its always been this way, it cant be
changed., the trivialisation of violence against animals and the
playing-down of any criticism of animal exploitation to attempts to
deny animals any consciousness, sentience or individuality. The idea
that animals can be used legitimately by people must be countered
with a critique that refutes the myths of animal exploitation. Animals are not
there for people, people have appropriated their bodies and their labour power by force! Animals cannot
be kept humanely, any form of exploitation whether in free-range or factory farms is against their
needs and interests. It is not the meaning of animal lives to land on a plate! Animals are not something,
they are someone! Current human-animal relations are the result of human actions and are historic.
The fact that animals are not

recognised as being victim to social relations of exploitation and
domination cements their catastrophic situation. Largely ignored, the system of
Therefore they can also be changed by humans!
industrial and institutionalized murder of animals carries on. The slaughterhouse can be taken as a place
where capitalist principles of production are realised. Under enormous time pressure, animals are killed
almost by the second, after being fattened up to their maximum weight. Fully technically rationalised,
animals bodies are sectioned and processed. Even the smallest scraps of flesh are used to generate
capital. The meat industrys path to big business is strewn with corpses. The human side of meat
production also has its victims: abattoir workers on minimum wages labour under precarious conditions
humans and animals necessarily fall

victim to exploitation under the rule of capitalism.
and at constant risk to their health. This show how
Impacts
Extinction Impact
The unchecked spread of neoliberal capitalism necessitates
extermination in the name of profit ensures poverty and
environmental and cultural destruction, culminating in
eventual extinction.
Cole 11 (Dr. Mike Cole is Emeritus Research Professor in Education and Equality at Bishop Grosseteste University
College Lincoln, Lincoln, UK. His most recent book is Racism and Education in the U.K. and the U.S.: towards a
socialist alternative (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011 RACISM AND EDUCATION IN THE U.K.
AND THE U.S. Palgrave Macmillan (June 7, 2011), pgs. 180-182)
Neo-liberal capitalism, in being primarily about expanding opportunities for large multinational
companies, has undermined the power of nationstates and exacerbated the negative
effects of globalization on such services as healthcare, education,
water and transport (Martinez and Garcia, 2000). However, the current hegemonic role of
business in schooling is paramount in convincing workers and future workers that socialism is off the
agenda. Marxist educators and other Left radicals should expose this myth. Students have a right to
discuss different economic and political systems such as twenty-first-century democratic socialism. This is
particularly pressing given the current economic recession. It is easier in general for discussion in schools
to embrace issues of gender, race, disability, sexual orientation, and social class when social class
relates just to attainment than to address social class in the context of overthrowing capitalism, and
replacing it with world democratic socialism, where participatory democracy is central. The latter may thus
be seen as the last taboo, and, of course, understandably so. It is time to move forward and bring such
discussions into schools, colleges, and universities, Marxist and other Left educators can make the case
Global capitalism is
out of control, and the very survival of our planet is dependent on
dialogical education that considers the socialist alternative , an alternative
that such considerations are a perfectly reasonable democratic demand.
distanced from the distortions of Marx by Stalinism. No longer can socialism be divorced from
environmental and ecological issues. McLaren and Houston (2005, p, 167) have argued that escalating
environmental problems at all geographical scales from local to global have become a pressing reality that
critical educators can no longer afford to ignore. They go on to cite the complicity between global
profiteering, resource colonization, and the wholesale ecological devastation that has become a matter of
everyday life for most species on the planet. Following Kahn (2003), they state the need for a critical
dialogue between social and eco-justice (McLaren and Houston 2005, p. 168). They call for a dialectics
of ecological and environmental justice to reveal the malign interaction between capitalism, imperialism,
and ecology that has created widespread environmental degradation that has dramatically accelerated
with the onset of neo-liberalism. World capitalisms environmentally racist (Bullard et al., 2007) effects in
both the developing and developed world should be discussed openly and freely in the educational
institutions. As far as the developing world is concerned, there are, for example, such issues as the
extraction of natural resources utilized by

multinational corporations in numerous developing countries that have devastated
eco-systems and destroyed cultures and livelihoods (World Council of Churches,
environmentally dev-astating method of
1994, cited in Robinson, 2000), with toxic waste polluting groundwater, soil and the atmosphere (e.g.,
Robinson, 2000). In addition, there is transboundary dumping of hazardous waste by developed countries
to developing nations, usually in sub-Sahara Africa (e.g., Ibitayo et al., 2008; see also Blanco, 2010 on
in the U.S., for example, people of

color are concentrated around hazardous waste facilities-more than
half of the nine million people living within two miles of such facilities are
minorities (Bullard et al., 2007). Finally, there is the ubiquitous issue of climate change, itself linked to
Latin America). As far as the developed world is concerned,
the totally destructive impact of capitalism. Joel Kovel (2010) has described cli-mate change as a menace
without parallel in the whole history of humanity. However, on a positive note, he argues that [it]s
spectacular and dramatic character can generate narratives capable of arousing general concern and thus
provide a stimulus to build movements of resistance. Climate change is linked to loss to the planet of
living thingsalso a rallying point for young people. For Marxist educators, this provides a good inroad for
linking environment, global capitalism, and arguments for the socialist alternative. As Kovel (2010) puts
it, only within the framework of a revolutionary ecoso- cialist society can we deal with the twinned crises of
climate change and species lossand others as wellwithin a coherent program centered around the
Capitalism and the destruction of the environment are

inextricably linked, to the extent that it is becoming increasingly apparent
that saving the environment is dependent on the destruction of
capitalism. Debate should therefore include a consideration of the connections between global
flourishing of life.
capitalism and environmental destruction, as well as a discussion of the socialist alternative. The need
for environmental issues to be allied to socialism is paramount. As Nick Beams (2009) notes, all the
green opponents of Marxism view the overthrow of the capitalist system by means of the socialist
revolution as the key to resolving the problems of global warming as either unrealistic, not immediate
enough, or believe that socialism is hostile to nature. Beams (ibid.) argues that, in reality, the system of
market relations is based on the separation of the producers from the means of production, and it is this
separation-the metabolic rift between [human beings] and nature that is the source of the crisis. In
other words, instead of the real producers of wealth (the working class) having control over what they
produce and rationally assigning this to human need, goods are irrationally produced for profit. Beams
(ibid.) quotes Marx (1894 [1966] p. 959) as follows: Freedom. ..can consist only in this, that socialised man,
the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under
their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least
expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature. As Beams
(2009) concludes, [f]ar from Marx being outdated, the world has, so to speak, caught up with Marx.
Root Cause
Class is the driver of all social and existential conditions. Only
emancipation from the status quo modes of production can
enact any form of human freedom
Ebert and Zavarzadeh in 2008(Teresa L., English, State University of New York, Albany, Masud, prolific
writer and expert on class ideology, Class in Culture, p.ix-xii)
Class is everywhere and nowhere. It is the most decisive condition of social life: it shapes the
economic and, consequently, the social and cultural resources of people. It determines their birth,
healthcare, clothing, schooling, eating, love, labor, sleep, aging, and death. Yet it remains invisible in
the every day and in practical consciousness because, for the most part, it is dispersed through
popular culture, absorbed in cultural difference, obscured by formal equality before the law or
explained away by philosophical arguments. Class in Culture attempts to trace class in different
cultural situations and practices to make its routes and effects visible. However, the strategies obscuring
class are cunning, complex, and subtle, and are at work in unexpected sites of culture. Consequently, this
is not a linear book: it surprises class in the segments, folds, vicinities, points, and divides of culture. It
moves, for example, from Abu Ghraib to the post-deconstructive proclamations of Antonio Negri, from
stem cell research to labor history, from theoretical debates on binaries to diets. It is also written in a
variety of registers and lengths: in the vocabularies of theory, the idioms of description and explanation, as
well as in the language of polemics, and in long, short, and shorter chapters. Regardless of the language,
the plane of argument, the length of the text, and the immediate subject of our critiques, our purpose has
been to tease out from these incongruous moments the critical elements of a basic grammar of class-one
that might be useful in reading class in other social sites. Our text on eating, for example, unpacks two
diets that, we argue, reproduce class binaries in the zone of desire. The point here is not only when one
eats, one eats class, but also class works in the most unexpected comers of culture, Eating as a sensuous,
even sensual corporeality, is seen as the arena of desire which is represented in the cultural imaginary as
autonomous from social relations. Desire is thought to be exemplary of the singularity of the
individual and her freedom from material conditions. One desires what one desires. Desire is
the absolute lack: it is the unrepresentable. We argue, however, that one desires what one can
desire; one's desire is always and ultimately determined before one desires it, and it is
determined by one's material (class) conditions. Our point is not that individuality and
singularity are myths but that they are myths in class societies. Individuality and singularity
become reality-not stories that culture tells to divert people from their anonymity in a culture of
commodities-only when one is free from necessity beyond which "begins that development of
human energy which is an end in itself' (Marx, Capita/III, 958-59). Class is the negation of human
freedom. A theory of class (such as the one we articulate) argues that class is the material logic of
social life and therefore it determines how people live and think. But this is too austere for many
contemporary critics. ("Determinism" is a dirty totalizing word in contemporary social critique.) Most
writers who still use the concept of class prefer to talk about it in the more subtle and shaded languages
of overdetermination, lifestyle, taste, prestige, and preferences, or in the stratification terms of
income, occupation, and even status. These are all significant aspects of social life, but they are
effects of class and not class. This brings us to the "simple" question: What is class? We skip the usual
review of theories of class because they never lead to an answer to this question. The genre of review
requires, in the name of fairness, "on the one hand, on the other hand" arguments that balance each
perspective with its opposite. The purpose of Class in Culture is not review but critique not a pluralism that
covers up an uncommitted wandering in texts but an argument in relation to which the reader can take a
position leading to change and not simply be more informed. This is not a book of information; it is a book
of critique. To answer the question (what is class?), we argue-and here lies the austerity of our theoryclass is essentially a relation of property, of owning. Class, in short, is a relation to labor because
property is the congealed alienated labor of the other. By owning we obviously do not mean owning
just anything. Owning a home or a car or fine clothes does not by itself put a person in one or another
class. What does, is owning the labor power of others in exchange for wages. Unlike a home or a
car, labor (or to be more precise "labor power") is a commodity that produces value when it is
consumed. Structures like homes or machines like cars or products such as clothes do not produce value.
Labor does. Under capitalism, the producers of value do not own what they produce. The
capitalist who has purchased the labor power of the direct producers owns what they produce. Class is this
relation of labor-owning. This means wages are symptoms of estranged labor, of the unfreedom of
humans, namely the exploitation of humans by humans-which is another way to begin explaining class. To
know class, one has to learn about the labor relations that construct class differences, that
enable the subjugation of the many by the few. Under capitalism labor is unfree, it is forced wagelabor that produces "surplus value"-an objectification of a person's labor as commodities that are
appropriated by the capitalist for profit. The labor of the worker, therefore, becomes "an object" that
"exits outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and it becomes a power on its own
confronting him" which, among other things, "means that the life which he has conferred on the
object confronts him as something hostile and alien" (Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts
of 1844,272). The direct producers' own labor, in other words, negates their freedom because it is used, in
part, to produce commodities not for need but for exchange. One, therefore, is made "to exist, first, as
a worker; and, second as a physical subject. The height of this servitude is that it is only as a worker
that he can maintain himself as a physical subject, and that it is only as a physical subject that he is a
worker" (273). Under wage labor, workers, consequently, relate to their own activities as "an alien
activity not belonging to [them]" (275). The estranged relation of people to the object of their labor
is not a local matter but includes all spheres of social life. ln other words, it is "at the same time the
relation to the sensuous external world, to the objects of nature, as an alien world inimically opposed to
[them]" (275). The scope of estrangement in a class society, of human unfreedom caused by wage
labor, is not limited to the alienation of the worker from her products. It includes the productive activity
itself because what is produced is a "summary of the activity, of production," and therefore it is
"manifested not only in the result but in the act of production, within the producing activity itself' (274).
The worker, in the act of production, alienates herself from herself because production activity
is "active alienation, the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation" (274)-an activity which
does not belong to her. This is another way of saying that the activity of labor-life activity-is turned against
the worker and "here we have self-estrangement" (275). In his theory of alienated labor, Marx
distinguishes between the "natural life" of eating, drinking, and procreating which humans share with other
animals and the "species life" which separates humans from animal. This distinction has significant
implications for an emancipatory theory of classless society. "Species life" is the life marked by
consciousness, developed senses, and a human understanding himself in history as a historical being
because "his own life is an object for him" (276}--humans, as "species beings," are self-reflexive. To be
more clear, "conscious life activity distinguishes man immediately from animal life activity" (276). The
object of man's labor is the actualization, the "objectification of man's species-life" (277). Alienated labor,
however, "in tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, ... tears from him his specieslife" (277). Consequently, "it changes for him the life of the species into a means of individual life ... it
makes individual life in its abstract form the purpose of life of the species, likewise in the abstract and
estranged form" (276). This is another way of saying that the larger questions that enable humans to
build their world consciously are marginalized, and sheer biological living ("individual life in the
abstract") becomes the goal of life in class society structured by wage labor. "Life itself appears
only as a means to life" (276). Class turns "species life" into "natural life." Since society is an
extension of the sensuous activities of humans in nature (labor), the alienation of humans from the
products of their labor, from the very process of labor, which is their life activity, and from
their species-being, leads to the estrangement of humans from humans (277)-the alienation in
class societies that is experienced on the individual level as loneliness. In confronting oneself, one
confronts others; which is another way of saying that one's alienation from the product of one's labor,
from productive activity, and from "species life" is at the same time alienation from other people,
their labor, and the objects of their labor. In class societies, work, therefore, becomes the negation
of the worker: he "only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself" (274).
Ending class structures is a re-obtaining of human freedom. Freedom here is not simply the
freedom of individuals as symbolized, for instance, in bourgeois "freedom of speech" but is a worldhistorical "freedom from necessity" (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme). Class struggle is the
struggle for human emancipation by putting an end to alienated labor (as class relations).
Alienated labor is the bondage of humans to production: it is an effect of wage labor (which turns labor into
a means of living) and private property (which is congealed labor). Emancipation from alienated labor
is, therefore, the emancipation of humans from this bondage because "all relations of
servitude," such as class relations, "are but modifications and consequences" of the relation of
labor to production (Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,280). Class, in short, is the
effect of property relations that are themselves manifestations of the alienation of labor as
wage labor. Wage labor alienates one from one's own product, from oneself, from other
humans, and, as Marx put it, "estranges the species from man" (276).
Root Cause of Race

Capitalism is the root cause of racism
McLaren and Torres 99 (Peter Mclaren, professor of education at U of California, and Rudolfo
Torres, Professor of Planning, Policy, and Design, Chicano/Latino Studies, and Political Science, Racism and
Multicultural Education: Rethinking Race and Whiteness in Late Capitalism, Chapter 2 of Critical
Multiculturalism: Rethinking Multicultural and Antiracist Education, edited by Stephen May, p.49-50,
Questia)
racial differences are invented. Racism occurs

when the characteristics which justify discrimination are held to be
inherent in the oppressed group. This form of oppression is peculiar to
capitalist societies; it arises in the circumstances surrounding industrial
capitalism and the attempt to acquire a large labour force. Callinicos
points out three main conditions for the existence of racism as outlined by
Marx: economic competition between workers; the appeal of racist
ideology to white workers; and efforts of the capitalist class to establish and
maintain racial divisions among workers. Capital's constantly changing
demands for different kinds of labour can only be met through
immigration. Callinicos remarks that 'racism offers for workers of the oppressing race the
According to Alex Callinicos (1993),
imaginary compensation for the exploitation they suffer of belonging to the ruling nation' (1993, p. 39).
Callinicos notes the way in which Marx grasped how 'racial' divisions between 'native' and 'immigrant'
workers could weaken the working-class. United States' politicians like Pat Buchanan, Jesse Helms and Pete
Wilson, to name but a few, take advantage of this division which the capitalist class understands and
you might
be asking yourselves: Doesn't racism pre-date capitalism? Here we agree with
manipulates only too well-using racism effectively to divide the working-class. At this point
Callinicos that the heterophobia associated with precapitalist societies was not the same as modern
Pre-capitalist slave and feudal societies of classical Greece and

Rome did not rely on racism to justify the use of slaves. The Greeks
and Romans did not have theories of white superiority. If they did, that must
have been unsettling news to Septimus Severus, Roman Emperor from Ad 193 to
211, who was, many historians claim, a black man. Racism emerged during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from a key development of
capitalism-colonial plantations in the New World where slave labour stolen from
Africa was used to produce tobacco, sugar, and cotton for the global
consumer market (Callinicos, 1993). Callinicos cites Eric Williams who remarks: 'Slavery was
not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery' (cited
racism.
in Callinicos, 1993, p. 24). In effect, racism emerged as the ideology of the plantocracy. It began with the
class of sugar-planters and slave merchants that dominated England's Caribbean colonies. Racism
The 'natural inferiority' of

Africans was a way that Whites justified enslaving them. According to
Callinicos: Racism offers white workers the comfort of believing
themselves part of the dominant group; it also provides, in times of crisis, a readymade scapegoat, in the shape of the oppressed group. Racism thus gives white workers a
particular identity, and one which unites them with white capitalists. We have
developed out of the 'systemic slavery' of the New World.
here, then, a case of the kind of 'imagined community' discussed by Benedict Anderson in his influential
to abolish racism in any substantive

sense, we need to abolish global capitalism.
analysis of nationalism. (1993, p. 38) In short,
War Impact
Capitalism makes war inevitableexcess capital is invested in
the militaryused to open new markets
Robinson, 7Professor of Sociology, Global and International Studies, Latin American and Iberian
Studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara (William I., The Pitfalls of Realist Analysis of Global
Capitalism: A Critique of Ellen Meiksins Woods Empire of Capital, Historical Materialism, 2007,
http://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/disciplines/politics/research/hmrg/activities/documents/Robins
on.pdf)
By the early twenty-first century, global capitalism was in crisis. This crisis
involves three interrelated dimensions. First it is a crisis of social polarization. The
system cannot meet the needs of a majority of humanity, or even
assure minimal social reproduction. Second is a structural crisis of over
accumulation. The system cannot expand because the marginalization
of a significant portion of humanity from direct productive
participation, the downward pressure on wages and popular
consumption worldwide, and the polarization of income, have reduced
the ability of the world market to absorb world output. The problem of
surplus absorption makes state-driven military spending and the
growth of military-industrial complexes an outlet for surplus and gives
the current global order a frightening built-in war drive. Third is a
crisis of HIMA legitimacy and authority. The legitimacy of the system has increasingly been called into
question by millions, perhaps even billions, of people around the world, and is facing an expanded counter-
Neoliberalism peacefully forced open new areas for global

capital in the 1980s and the 1990s. This was often accomplished through
economic coercion alone, as Wood would likely agree, made possible by the
structural power of the global economy over individual countries. But
this structural power became less effective in the face of the three-pronged crisis
mentioned above. Opportunities for both intensive and extensive expansion
dried up as privatizations ran their course, as the former socialist
countries became re-integrated into global capitalism, as the consumption of
high-income sectors worldwide reached a ceiling, and so on. The space for peaceful
expansion, both intensive and extensive, became ever more restricted.
Military aggression has become in this context an instrument for prying
open new sectors and regions, for the forcible restructuring of space in
order to further accumulation. The train of neoliberalism became latched on to
military intervention and the threat of coercive sanctions as a
locomotive for pulling the moribund Washington consensus forward.
The war on terrorism provides a seemingly endless military outlet for
surplus capital, generates a colossal deficit that justifies the everdeeper dismantling of the Keynesian welfare state and locks neoliberal
austerity in place, and legitimates the creation of a police state to
repress political dissent in the name of security. In the post 9/11
period, the military dimension appeared to exercise an over
determining influence in the reconfiguration of global politics. The Bush
rgime militarized social and economic contradictions, launching a
hegemonic challenge.
permanent war mobilization to try to stabilize the system through

direct coercion. But was all this evidence for a new US bid for hegemony? A US campaign to
compete with other major states? To defend its own domestic capital? To maintain a critical balance
and control major [state] competitors? I trust my reasons for rejecting such an argument have been made
clear in this critical article.
Capitalism ensures resource conflicts

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

corporate driven military might unleashes pre-emptive wars,
invasions and occupations and the UN system stands paralyzed , its
Charter disregarded , the Treaties and conventions signed and
ratified , flouted at every step . It is necessary for us to focus on the
stark truth that those treaties and conventions do not protect humanity
from the forces that want to dominate and exploit the resources of the
world using every weapon system and all mediums --be they land ,
sea , the seabed or space and if the world system does not create
a balance very soon than even from military bases that may be
established on the earths planetary system. Vladimir Putin, then President and now
the Prime Minister of Russia, speaking at the European Security Conference in Munich on 10th February
2007, said: The unipolar world refers to a world in which there is one master, one center of authority, one
center of force, one centre of decision making. At the end of the day this is pernicious not only for
those within the system , but also for the Sovereign himself from within ; what is more important is that
the model itself is flawed because as its basis there is and can be no moral foundation for modern
civilization ( and even less for democracy ). We are seeing a greater and greater disdain for the basic
principles of international law. We are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper use of force in international
relations , force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permament conflicts . I am convinced that we
have reached that decisive moment when we must seriously think about the architecture of global
security. We have to move heaven and earth , the might of humanity to dismantle that decision making
ruling elite in the joint corporate military board rooms , be they located underground in the Strategic
The
unlimited quest for establishing monopoly over the planet earths
resources and markets , has led the world to witness unending wars ,
sometimes referred to as long wars , if that phrase makes it seem less destructive , and the
unending pursuit of weapon platforms , for attaining full
spectrum dominance and the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI ) or the Star Wars
initiated by the free market of the Reagan administration and Thatcherism ,
accelerating the death and destruction that we have witnessed
, all across the globe be it in Angola , Congo, Somalia,
Afghanistan , Iraq , Palestine , Central and Latin America ,
Yugoslavia , Lebanon , Gaza and earlier in Korea, Vietnam and
Cambodia among other countries with the UN Security Council in some cases acquiescing and even
Command in Nebraska or at multi-locations in Wall Street , the City ( London ) or Tel a Viv .
assisting .
Overfishing
Capitalism is the root cause overfishing- the drive to
accumulate profit means theyll never respect regulations
WW, 06 Workers World is an online newspaper (Capitalist
Crisis of Overfishing, November 19th, 2006,
http://www.workers.org/crisis/overfishing-1123/index.html)//jk
29 percent of fish and seafood species have collapsedthat is, their
it is accelerating, Worm said. If the
long-term trend continues, all fish and seafood species are projected to collapse within
my lifetimeby 2048. Worm and the team he led were surprised at these results, which were far
At this point
catch has declined by 90 percent. It is a very clear trend, and
more drastic than they expected at the start of their study. The decline of fish stocks has had and will have
serious consequences for the people employed in fishing, as well as the people who eat seafood. The high
unemployment in Newfoundland, due to the collapse of the seafood industry in that province, has led tens
of thousands of Newfoundlanders to migrate to labor-short Alberta. The decline of fishing off of Senegal,
Gambia, Mauritania and Guinea-Bissau in West Africa has been an important factor in the perilous trips
West Africans make to Spains Canary Islands, looking for a better life in Europe. Worldwide fishing
provides $80 billion in revenue and 200 million people depend on it for their livelihoods. For more than 1
billion people, many of whom are poor, fish is their main source of protein. Reactions to this study and to
the problem have been mixed. Some voices, tied to the U.S. fishing industry, have tried blaming
Indigenous peoples or cultures, or claimed that what is happening is just a normal fluctuation in fish
stocks. Others have promoted a capitalist solution to the problemfor example, using a bidding process
for catching quotas. The Worldwatch Institute, which proclaims to provide independent research for an
environmentally sustainable and socially just society, has just published Catch of the Day: Choosing
Seafood for Healthier Oceans. The paper explains how buyers of seafoodincluding individual
consumers, school cafeterias, supermarket chains and large food distributorscan reverse fishery declines
and preserve the fresh catch of tomorrow. Yet this is throwing a worldwide crisis into the laps of
individuals, and many of the institutes suggestions, such as patronizing small-scale fishers, are a bit
idealistic in the context of a worldwide crisis. Certainly
there are approaches that have
some merit; fish farming is one of them. Chinese and Vietnamese peasants have been doing smallscale fish farming for 3,500 years. Quotas and licenses will limit the catch of
commercially viable stocks, but might not touch the destruction of
biologically important but commercially insignificant fish, which are
often thrown overboard instead of being landed. Add the fact that the oceans
are big and it is hard to catch or stop illegal fishing. But what is really
happening is the capitalist drive to maximize profits by maximizing
production and minimizing costs. No individual capitalist can respect
the limits imposed to preserve a sustainable yield, because their
competitors might not, which would mean less profit and more risk. Small
fishers have to grow larger or be ground up by floating factories.
Alternative 2NC
General overview/alt solves

Militant Intellectuality is key to solve problems within
academia and society and to confront capitalism- specific to
debate as an academic community
Sotiris, 13 (Panagiotis, Adjunct professor at the University of the Aegean, Sociology department, 9
January 13 Hegemony and mass critical intellectuality, International Socialist Journal, Issue: 137,
http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=871)-- CRG
This is a very important development. On the one hand, we should stress the renewed interest in the
political importance of theory. This has not only the sense of an apprehension of the politics of the theory,
in disciplines such as poststructuralist

literary and cultural studies, radical feminism and gender studies and
postcolonial studies, but also in the importance of theory for radical
politics today. On the other hand, we can see the emergence of new militant
forms of theoretical production on the margins (or even outside of)
academia. It is obvious that the divorce between theory and practice that Perry Anderson presented in
the 1970s as the distinctive feature of Western Marxism,3 and as the
condensation of the crisis of the Communist movement, for the first
time shows some signs that it can be overcome. That is why we
need to think of new forms of militant collective intellectuality,
new ways to articulate militant practice and theoretical work,
new synergies between theory and the movement. However, in order to
do that we need to go back to the traditions of the revolutionary
movement and radical theory and revisit their attempts to come to
terms with these major theoretical and political questions. That is why in this
something evident in the 1980s and 1990s
paper we will try to discuss attempts at presenting a theory of critical intellectuality.
The alternative has material consequences and helps to relieve

oppression of the working classes
The first has to do with the concept of workers inquiry. Karl Marx first
thought about a novel way to inquire about the actual condition of the
working classes. The result was a big questionnaire written by Marx and circulated through La
Revue Socialiste, a French socialist journal.4 The aim was to gather as many
completed questionnaires by workers, and then use them to study their
condition. The use of a militant journal, the attempt to get the help of the workers
themselves, making them active subjects and not simply objects under
observation, the form of the questionnaire that was designed to help
the researcher and at the same time to help the worker gradually come
by himself to the realisation of the conditions of exploitation, mark
the distinctive characteristics of Marxs Enqute Ouvrire
Militant Intellectualism allows for combined political solutions

and allows for the creation of long term programs in the future
after we engage the mindset of an MI
the workers inquiry served a double purpose. On the

it served the attempt actually to study the condition of the
working classes, the forms of neo-capitalism, the operations of capitalist power within the
workplace and especially the modern factory, and the forms of resistance. This created the
conditions for a militant sociology of advanced capitalism. At the
same time, it stressed the importance of workers resistance as the driving
force of capitalist rationalisation and modernisation. On the other hand, it served
In the case of the workerists,
one hand,
the attempt actually to relate to the workers, to create a form of a common practice that would be not only
theoretical or research oriented but also deeply political, a new way to help the formation of political
vanguards deeply rooted in the workplace and to overcome the exteriority of politicised students and
researchers to workers. As Stephen Wright has shown, taking the work of sociologists oriented toward field
researches, interviews and life stories, such as Danilo Dolci and Danilo Montaldi,6 the workerists thought of
the workers enquiry as both an analytical and a political tool. In the case of Panzieri this was linked to his
conception of Marxism as a sociology conceived as a political science, the science of revolution.7 The
aim of the inquiry must be to investigate the balance of forces but also to track the changes and the new
tendencies. The same conception is obvious in Dario Lanzardos long excursus on Marxs Enqute
For
Lanzardo the object of workers inquiry is exactly to help the workers
understand that the capitalist reality is historical and not natural.9 This
Ouvrire in Quaderni Rossi, still one of the most interesting readings of workers inquiry.8
was exemplified by the pioneering research by Romano Alquati in workplace conditions and struggles in
companies such as Fiat and Olivetti.10 The long cooperation of students, academics and workers around
the big chemical complex in Porto Maghera in the Veneto area and other sites of struggle exemplified this
combined
militant engagement and political oriented interventions with highly
sophisticated inquiries into questions of theory of value, history of the
labour movement, analyses of the changes and restructurings of
capitalism.12
tendency.11 It was also expressed in the richness of reviews such as Primo Maggio that
The process of MI allows for social emancipation from

capitalism
Finally, I come to a theorist who preceded the interventions discussed so far: Antonio Gramsci. I believe
Gramscis work one can find the most advanced confrontation

with the question of a new militant intellectuality able to serve the
purpose of social emancipation. Gramsci in such a reading was not simply a theoretician of
that in
the role of intellectuals. He was a theoretician of the articulation of politics, culture and knowledge,
exemplified in the richness and complexity of the theory of hegemony as a theory of social and political
question of mass militant

intellectuality was for Gramsci one of the main challenges for
emancipatory politics: For a mass of people to be led to think
coherently and in the same coherent fashion about the real present
world is a philosophical event, far more important and original than
the discovery by some philosophical genius of a truth which remains
the property of small groups of intellectuals.24
power in modern capitalist societies. Moreover, the
Militant intellectualism solves- Sudan proves

Hiwet, 85 (Addis, established author and reviewer specializing in revolutions, Apr., 1985,
Capitalism and Political Strategy in the Sudan: A Critical Review,
The Sudanese Bourgeoisie: Vanguard of Development? by Fatima Babiker Mahmoud
Review of African Political Economy Publication Info, Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/4005716)--CRG
One of the greatest political assets of the dominated classes in the Sudan is the existence of a communist
party - the second oldest in Africa and one of the best organised in the Arab world. Though the two
cultures intersect in the Sudan, the countrys political vocation has been predominantly Arab oriented, a
reflection of the dominant culture. This biased, at times chauvinist, orientation is all the more disastrous
for the Left. The incapacity of that Left to define the vocation of the Sudan has been like an albatross
The latest and most exciting Marxist study on the

reality of the country by a militant intellectual further confirms this. The
delineation of the vocation of the Sudan deserves serious debate. Furthermore, post-colonial
Sudan has been undergoing considerable capitalist transformation
which has engendered a flourishing and cohesive bourgeoisie. The current,
hanging round its political neck.
seemingly well-entrenched gangster bourgeois regime has, in the last 15 years defeated two communistinspired or supported coups. The regime is a living carapace for the ongoing capitalist transformation of
the Sudan. This context poses the issue of political strategy - and the only viable political opposition on the
Left is the Communist Party of the Sudan (CPS). The latters strategy in the class struggle has therefore
immense significance that goes beyond the Sudan. In neighbouring Ethiopia one of the greatest
bourgeois- democratic revolutions has occurred in the absence of a commumlst party .
The role a
long-established, organisationally resilient communist party will play in
the coming revolutionary struggle in the Sudan has yet to be seen: whether that party
will be a liability or an indispensable asset for the working class movement. Meanwhile the history of that
The ideological struggle for the

delineation of the appropriate political strategy is therefore a burning
question.
party has to be thoroughly and critically examined.
A2: Not feasible

MI is feasible and accessible to young academic and
individuals
All these examples show us that there can be militant forms of

intellectuality, both in the sense of critical and politically engaged
theoretical production oriented towards projects for emancipation and
in the sense of mass intellectuality and a change in common sense and
mass ideological practices. At the same time, we have to confront the whole process through
which 1960s and 1970s theoretical radicalism lost both its momentum and its political engagement. The
well-known story about radical academics becoming self-entrenched within the confines of academia and
all the rituals of formal academic research, losing touch with urgent social and political exigencies,
although in most aspects a distortion of reality, did indeed capture some of the problems of post-1970s
with an impressive wave of young Marxist or more

generally radical academics (mainly in junior positions) in place, one can still sense
the gap separating theoretical and political activity or participation in
movements. The standardisation of academic research, the quantification of research assessment,
radical theorising. Even today,
both individually and institutionally, the pressure for immediate results, papers and quantifiable research
outcomes surely contributes to this.
Try or Die
Try or die for the Alt- action now is key to resolve capitalisms
past exploitation of the ocean- the impact is extinction
PSL, 13 Party for Socialism and Liberation (The pillaging of the Earths oceans, Liberation News,
May 31st 2013, http://www.pslweb.org/liberationnews/newspaper/vol-7-no-7/the-pillaging-of-the-earthsoceans.html)//jk
The oceans of the world are vast and deep. They cover 71 percent of the Earths
surface and contain 97 percent of the planets water. The oceans seem boundless in
water, marine life and energy to sustain the planets life and
atmosphere. But the oceans are experiencing profound stress, due to
escalating factors directly related to capitalist production and the
degradation of the environment. Alarming reports by marine scientists
have been sounding the danger to the worlds oceans and the need for
urgent action. The International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) warns that
massive marine extinction already may be underway due to
rapidly worsening stresses on marine ecosystems. But, as capitalisms
search for profits intensifies, the devastation of the oceans is only
accelerating. Three main stresses global warming, acidification of the oceans, and decreased
oxygen have led to such declines in many of the marine ecosystems that the conditions have met or
surpassed worst-case scenarios predicted in the first decade of this 21st century. IPSO stated in 2011,
[W]e
now face losing marine species and entire marine ecosystems,

such as coral reefs, within a single generation. Unless action is taken
now, the consequences of our activities are at a high risk of
causing, through the combined effects of climate change,
overexploitation, pollution and habitat loss, the next globally significant
extinction event in the ocean. It is notable that the occurrence of
multiple high intensity stressors has been a prerequisite for all the five
global extinction events of the past 600 million years. Such a
catastrophe would, needless to say, affect humanity and all life on
Earth. Yet capitalists have rejected in international forums even basic
accords to limit the exploitation of the oceans or to slow down the
belching of fossil fuels into the environment. By far the biggest abuser
of the environment is the United States.
A2s Ecofem
A2: Perm
Queer theory and Marxist analysis cannot be combined
because they have been commodified and are antithetical to
each other
Sears, 5 (Alan, Professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology of University of Windsor,
January 2005, Queer Anti-Capitalism: What's Left of Lesbian and Gay Liberation,
Science & Society, Vol. 96, No. 1, January 2005, 92-112,
http://academic.evergreen.edu/curricular/pesm/QueerAntiCap.pdf) --CRG
the commodification of queer life poses

a problem for marxist theorizing, as it suggests that the sites of openly
lesbian and gay life are specifically products of highly developed
capitalism: Gay culture in this most visible mode is anything but external to
advanced capitalism and to precisely those features of advanced
capitalism that many on the left are most eager to disavow. It is indeed
Michael Warner (1993, xxxi, n. 28) argued that
challenging for mantist approaches to make sense of the contradiction that capitalist restructuring has
opened up certain spaces for lesbian and gay cultures.
Starting point/solves
We have the best starting point- the reproductive model of
heterosexuality was created by the capitalist division of labor
New Spaces and Capitalist Restructuring: The last 30 years have seen huge changes in social policy in the
The social programs of the broad welfare state

have been cut back at the same time as coercive policing activities
have increased. The broad welfare state was a particular mode of moral regulation
that sought to shape the reproduction of the population through
benefits and programs that provided some sense of security and
belonging to sections of the working class. Corrigan and Sayer (1985, 3) argue that
most developed capitalist states.
states deiine, in great detail, acceptable forms and images for social activity and individual and collective
The broad welfare state aimed to reproduce a heterosexual

family form that was based on a particular gendered and racialized
division of labor (lNilson, 1977; Ursel, 1989).
identity.
Queerness has already been commodified- only a focus on

capitalism can solve
process of intensified
commodification associated with contemporary restructuring." The
This limited moral deregulation is but one dimension of a broader
expansion of market relations is another. Mar- ket relations have penetrated much deeper into our daily
lives and alternatives to the market (such as social programs) have been eroded or eliminated .
Open
lesbian and gay life has thrived primarily in commodified forms: bars,
restaurants, stores, coffee shops, commercial publications, certain
styles of dress and personal grooming, commercialized Pride Day
celebrations with corporate sponsorship. The early period of the post-Stonewall
movement saw a variety of non- commercial spaces opened up, such as community centers, non-profit
community dances or
movement gatherings; but these have tended to wither with the
development of a gay and lesbian commercial sector.
A2: Perm
publications (e.g., Body Politics and Gay Community News),
A2s Race affs
A2: Permute / Our Criticism Of Racial

Oppression Is Not Mutually Exclusive With Your
Critique of Capitalism
1.
The permutation is impossible
Our alternative presents a competing theory of racismthe

judge cannot simultaneously accept the affirmatives
explanation of racism and the negatives explanation of
racism. If we win our thesisthat power is materialthen the
permutation is incoherent.
2.
There is no net-benefit to the permutation
The alternative provides the best framework for addressing

racial injusticeif we win our critique, there is a massive
materialism DA to the case.
3.
Their method of criticism is inherently conservative
only materialist critique can avoid reproducing dominant class
hierarchies.
Sahay 98 Amrohini Sahay, doctoral candidate in English at the State University of New York at
Stony Brook, 1998 (Transforming Race Matters: Towards a Critique-al Cultural Studies, Cultural Logic,
Volume 1, Number 2, Spring, Available Online at http://clogic.eserver.org/1-2/sahay.html, Accessed 02-172011)
4. In order to foreground the larger political issues at stake in the opposition to critique in appreciative
cultural studies it will be useful to briefly distinguish what I understand as "materialist critique" from other
available modes of "critique". It is necessary, in short, to distinguish materialist critique both from
traditional humanist "criticism" and from the currently predominant practice of "immanent critique".
Thus critique differs from "criticism" insofar as it breaks from the notion that the task of
criticism is that of appealing to transcendental (aesthetic or other) "values" and "norms" in order
to produce an "evaluation" of specific social or cultural phenomena. From the position of
materialist critique any such appeal to transhistorical criterion for the purpose of "judging"
particular practices or discourses is essentially a moral (as opposed to political) exercise
designed so to protect the interests of the dominant classes by rendering certain historically
produced categories (which correspond to these interests) as unassailably valid ("good for all time")
and thus beyond any political interrogation (which could indicate the constructedness, and thus
radical historicity, of these categories). "Criticism", in short, is inherently a conservative mode of
knowing which is aimed at inculcating in subjects a moral approach to political issues (for
example, "family values" as a response to the crisis of the bourgeois institution of the family), and like all
moralism is, in the last analysis, an apparatus of the state deployed to explain away and manage
social crises.
4.
The permutation is capitalism with a human faceit saps
our materialist critique of its revolutionary potential.
6. In contrast, radical materialist critique is above all a mode of knowing concerned with the
relation of the "inside" (that is, the immanent workings of any locality) to its "outside": that is, to the
material and historical structures of exploitation within which any local text, site, system, or
practice is located. As such it is a mode of cultural practice which enables a knowledge not only
of the "locality" but of the global social totality, a practice which is thus capable of explaining
conflicts manifested at the site of "culture" (the production and circulation of social meanings,
practices, and significations) in terms of the historical and material conditions under which they
are produced and which are necessary to transform in order to allow for the production of
radically new and different meanings, practices and significations. It is, then, precisely this
understanding of critique: as a mode of materialist praxis working for such a global
transformation that is called into question by appreciative cultural studies. As I shall indicate, it
is only by means of such rejection that the latter is enabled to advance a re-formist social
agenda, which, while attentive to the existing relations of unequal distribution of "power", is aimed
eventually at keeping intact the structures which produce these unequal relationswith minor
changes (capitalism with a "human face").
5.
Their mode of struggle is counterproductivegains at the
micro level are made at the expense of macro level
exploitation.
11. Under the alibi of "specificity" appreciative cultural studies shifts attention away from the
global workings of power. It thereby shields the system of domination from any global (i.e. nonlocal) interrogation and critique of its operation. At the core of this shift, as Fiske's text clearly
shows, is the attempt to keep the struggle for social change within "allowable" (local) limits:
that is, within the existing limits of the present organization of relations of production. In the
"practical" perspective, the limit text of struggle as set by the allowable is manifested in the rejection
(again on "immediate" "pragmatic" grounds) of "radical" struggle (i.e. struggle for the purpose of a
revolutionary overthrowing of existing structures) in favor of "popular" struggle. As Fiske explains, whereas
radical struggle calls for a "break" with the system, popular struggle
is an on-going process, aimed at maintaining or increasing the bottom-up power of the people
within the system. It results in the softening of the harsh extremities of power, it produces
small gains for the weak, it maintains their esteem and identity (188).
12. Of course, as Fiske establishes, advocates of the "practical" do not completely reject the necessity for
breaking with capitalist social relations (or at least those who not wish to completely relinquish their
credentials as "left"), maintaining, rather, an understanding in which the "incremental" micro-moves made
at the level of popular struggle form the pre-requisite for "radical" struggle. And yet, what this occludes is
the fact that far from being merely a question of linear progressionfirst, micro (i.e. "concrete")
changes and then macro (i.e. structural) changethe modes of struggle entailed under the
concepts of the "radical" and the "popular" (to use his terms) are in irreconcilable conflict. For
radical politics, far from ensuring a smooth progress to a revolutionary crisis, the "gains"
attained at the level of "popular" struggle are themselves effects of a global strategy of power
deployed under capitalism: a strategy aimed at allowing for the accomplishment of temporary,
local gains so to defer the arrival of any structural confrontation . The call for a popular
"pragmatic" politics of the "concrete" and the "immediately realizable", in other words, is
nothing other than a call to set the horizon of politics at a bourgeois politics of reform, a
reformist politics which is periodically presented by the latest bourgeois theories, in Lenin's words, "as if it
were something entirely new" (62) rather than "only a variation of the old song about adding a kopek to a
ruble" (72). The effect of this "everyday" politics, as Lenin explains, writing from within the
revolutionary tradition of Marxist materialist critique, is precisely to achieve the "softening of the
harsh extremities of power" (capitalism with a human face) so better to preserve the larger
system of exploitation. As such it is mode of ideological capitulation to the dominant by way of
which "the people" are inculcated not into "the revolutionary struggle for freedom and for
socialism" but merely towards "better terms" "in the sale of their labour power " (61-62), i.e.
towards "better terms" under which to continue be exploited!
A2: Racism Preceded Capitalism or

Recovery Of Cultural Practices Is Key
This is a link their position relies on the capitalist narrative of
historyappeals to the pre-history of racism legitimize class
exploitation.
25. And yet, even taken on its own terms, such a project is highly contradictory. If indeed the precapitalist cultural formations (of which "minority cultures" are purportedly only an extension) had
indeed been "irreversibly affected, if not eradicated, by the effects of their material
deracination from the historically developed social and economic structures in terms of which
alone they "made sense" (4), then the aim of "recovery" of these cultural practices and values,
would itself be an impossible as well as a "nonsensical" task. Underlying the claim of
"recovery" through a strategy of production of "affirmative" readings, in short, is an identitarian
cultural claim which denies cultural difference as "produced", thus projecting such difference
back into a pre-historical and "ideal" (undifferentiated) past of "pure" identities unrelated to any
wider structure of economic and social practices. As Madhava Prasad argues in his philosophical
elaboration of this issue, central to such a claim is a highly problematic historical proposition: namely,
that the pre- or non-capitalist economic systems are supposed to have already been marked
by a clear separation of the (politico-)economic sphere from the cultural sphere of identity.
Thus the differentiation of spheres and their autonomous development (art, literature, science,
humanities with their various subdivisions) which has been understood as a feature of
capitalist societies. . . is here read back into pre-capitalist historical and geographical sites"
(78).
In short, as Prasad 's argument establishes, underpinning the claim to "recovery" is a theory of
cultural difference which relies on a reified understanding of "culture" as a sphere
"ontologically" distinct from and thus autonomous from the politico-economic. Yet, as Prasad
makes clear, such an understanding, far from providing a "new" or "effective" view of the
historical process is itself part and parcel of a capitalist narrative of "history" as the history of
"interaction" between distinct and irreducible cultures (not class and modes of production) and
as such is part of the legitimating narrative of capitalist (class) exploitation.
They get causation wrong: material structures cause racism,

not the other way around.
Williams 5 Christopher J. Williams, Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Sociology at York
University in Toronto, 2005 (In Defence Of Materialism: A Critique Of Afrocentric Ontology, Race & Class,
Volume 47, Issue 1, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Sage Publications Online, p. 44-45)
In addition to asserting the primacy of culture in their analyses of intragroup dynamics, Afrocentric
scholars have posited culture as the key modality by which intergroup relations of domination are
maintained, especially those founded upon racial subordination. With the culture-as-infrastructure ontology
as a point of departure for theorising about contemporary racism, they have construed racism as an
ideological, theoretical, conceptual and discursive phenomenon, first and foremost, and,
peripherally, as a material and structural reality. Culture is considered the bedrock of racial
oppression, whereas political economy is essentially epiphenomenal and, accordingly, plays an
auxiliary role in the reproduction of racism. The central thrust of this perspective is summed up by
Asante, who states that, in reality, the entire social fabric of oppression is dictated by symbols of hierarchy
and intellectual theories rooted in Eurocentric viewpoints.28 From dominant images of Jesus Christ to the
pro-imperialist ruminations of Rudyard Kipling, to pseudo-intellectual screeds such as the Bell Curve, and
so on, racism is, from an Afrocentric standpoint,
nature.
overwhelmingly ideational in
What, then, is the Afrocentric approach to anti-racism? Not surprisingly (at least insofar as diagnoses
determine prescriptions), the battle against racism is understood to be principally about
nonmaterial counteraction strategies: pitting theories against theories, concepts

against concepts, discourses against discourses and images against images. So, for example,
those committed to a genuine antiracist agenda must create, innovate, and bombard the communication
channels with positive images, which will constitute a revolutionary response to racist repression.29
Putting aside this erroneous construal of racist expression and racist repression as consubstantial, the
point is that the view of racism as ideological hegemony has informed the formulation of a
reductive anti-racist position consisting of calls for cultural contestation: change the
cultural milieu and radical changes in other key spheres of social life will follow. This macroscopic focus
[end page 44] on culture has, as a key corollary, the quest to apprehend the psychological bases of
racism, an objective that follows quite logically from the proposition that consciousness determines being.
Accordingly, Asante offers this advice:
Our aggressive language must attack, not institutional or process racism [his term for
advanced forms of institutional racism] but personal racism. Scholars must study the psyches
of racists, their lifestyles and the value-beliefs systems in order to devise language strategies
to deal with reactionary postures.30
In sum, Afrocentric anti-racism is based on the notion that culture and consciousness constitute the
terrain upon which struggles for social justice either flourish or flounder.
From another perspective, however, racist culture is more a product of domination than its basis. The
consolidation of oppressive social relations is facilitated by various forms of cultural expression, such as
justificatory discourses and post factum rationales, which are just that: expressions rather than powerfully
determinative social forces. Hence, Eurocentric images of Christ follow colonialism, the White Mans
Burden follows imperialism, and the Bell Curve follows the post-civil rights era of racist reactionary politics.
This is precisely why the essence of racial oppression is not the distorted and malicious
stereotypes that whites have of blacks. These constitute the culture of oppression, not to be
confused with the thing itself. 31 While one does not want to theorise about the relationship between
structure and culture in terms of rigid, unilinear models of cause and effect, the assignment of
relatively dependent ontological status to culture is not without merit. For example,
corporate culture is clearly a consequence of capitalism and, though it plays an important role in shaping
contemporary business practices, core system imperatives are ultimately more fundamental. The need to
maximise profits is more important than corporate culture in explaining why executives, inter
alia, suppress the wages of their subordinates, undermine workplace safety standards and
violate environmental protection laws. A similar explanatory scheme would apply if one were
to consider the interactivity of neo-imperialist culture, the logic of transnational capital and
the ongoing exploitation of the developing world.
Their conception of racism as monolithic and autonomous

prevents material social change.
Furthermore, the Afrocentric tendency to minimise the importance of structural analysis
encourages the effacement of distinctions within and between economic systems.
Working under the assumption that taking economics seriously lends credence to Marxism and,
concomitantly, undercuts a focus on racism, Afrocentric scholars have construed racism as a
monolithic and autonomous social fact that shapes economic relations in a largely
unidirectional manner. This understanding of economics as epiphenomenal informs the practice of
casting intra-system economic changes, such as transitions from industrial to post-industrial orders, as
relatively inconsequential. To illustrate this point, I shall refer to a critique of African American Marxists,
presented by Asante, in which he contends that
the structural problems they identify in the American system are not primary causes of the
economic dislocation of African people. While it is true that the American system, with its new
technological thrust away from the old industrial order, is structurally organized by the energy
it gathers to dislocate and disorient African people, it is dependent on the cooperation of
systematic racism. In other words, the system exists because of the racism, not the other way
around. One cannot claim that the industrial age was any better for Africans than the new
structural situation.10
Given that racism, in its most potent forms, is exercised through the ensemble of major
institutions that comprise the social structure, this analytical attempt to (1) decouple racism
and structure, and (2) prioritise the former is inherently problematic. To
acknowledge economic dislocation and then downplay the relevance of structural change in
to grant racism a degree of independent

power that it does not possess. The profound materiality of racism stems
precisely from the fact that it is embedded within the same institutions
effecting this situation is
responsible for the racially disparate life chances that obtain in the contemporary US. Of
course, these life chances also have a class dimension, and the implicit notion that Africans comprise some
[end page 39] sort of undifferentiated collective is belied by this basic observation: although, for some
well-paid tenured professors come to mind the decline of industrial production has been of little
immediate consequence, significant numbers of African-Americans have been devastated by this

development. Critical scholarship such as The new economy, globalisation and the impact on African
Americans by Randolf B. Persuad and Clarence Lusane11 is but one example of research dedicated to
explicating how the current structural situation is indeed demonstrably worse for many.
And, their racism trumps capitalism arguments reduce

racism to a yes/no question, undermining attempts at
progressive reform.
Nonetheless, Haki Madhubutis pre-Afrocentric argument that capitalism, socialism and communism are
fundamentally the same because all are economic systems devised to perpetuate white supremacy12 set
the stage for later Afrocentric work articulating a similar thesis.13 What results is a situation in which one
can spend hours reading contemporary Afrocentric scholarship without encountering a single
statement critical of capitalism, even though imperatives specific to capitalism effectively
entrench US economic apartheid. Consider the consequences of the mainstream economic proposition
that inflation constitutes a greater evil than unemployment:
At the very time that one hand of the federal government attacks welfare and preaches the
virtues of work, the other hand sporadically engineers greater unemployment by increasing
interest rates in order to cool the economy and keep inflation under control. This is an old
story, of course. Whenever unemployment rates dip to the level where jobs might open up to
the last hired that is, the ghetto population this is construed as a sign of an overheated
economy requiring the intervention of the Federal Reserve.14 [end page 40]
Despite the radical implications of observations such as these, the relentlessly homogenising all
economic systems and arrangements are equally inimical to the interests of Africans
perspective has become dominant, thereby obscuring the insights contained within an early
Afrocentric essay by Maulana Karenga, which, among other things, gave due recognition to the specificity
racism
is not a zero (completely absent) or one hundred (all-encompassing)
phenomenon, and to dismiss non-capitalist economic systems on the grounds that they
do not preclude the existence of racism is to suggest, untenably, that any degree of
racism above zero is as consequential as any other, assuming differences
of racism under modern capitalism.15 At the risk of labouring a point that might be obvious,
of degree are even acknowledged. The claim that capitalism is no worse than alternative systems,
mitigates the ability of

Afrocentric scholars to explore fully the multifarious
dimensions of racism in the US and other parts of the world, but also makes their
and is therefore unworthy of special critiques, not only
declarations about standing in diametric opposition to the status quo seem somewhat
disingenuous.
Instead of ____, we embrace a pragmatic political agenda that
confronts the material conditions of racism and challenges the
institutions that sustain them.
Debates about ontology are often regarded as purely academic, but, as I have attempted to
demonstrate, the connection between ontology, paradigm formation and praxis has
important consequences for life beyond the ivory tower. Although
there is almost nothing insightful or revolutionary about the Afrocentric rejection of materialism, it is
profoundly untrue to the sociological concept of life chances,

which, in its non-bastardised form, is capable of guiding critical social research; profoundly
consonant with the dominant view that critiques of capitalism are hopelessly
wrongheaded; profoundly sanguine in its assumption that far-reaching shifts in
profound in certain ways:
African-American culture can occur while the broader structural context [end page 46] remains
unchanged; profoundly compatible with neo-conservative platitudes about cultural

pathology among African-Americans, and so on. What is especially ironic is that some of the same
people who were involved in the concrete struggles of the 1960s now, as Afrocentric scholars, struggle to
be above the concrete, all in the name of distancing their paradigm from materialism.
harsh materiality of inadequate food, substandard

housing, underfunded schools, chronic unemployment, police
truncheons and bullets, inaccessible health care, prison cells,
and so forth, Afrocentricity will not speak fully to the lived
experiences of people of African descent until the materialism and
Afrocentricity do not mix position is abandoned. Enforcing the putative purity of the
Given the
paradigm by espousing the view that consciousness determines being is an effective
boundary maintenance strategy; it keeps the materialist demons at bay, but

does little to challenge relations of dominance structured
along the axes of race, class and gender. Furthermore, the impact of cultural
struggle is bound to be negligible unless it occurs in conjunction with
struggles that are political, economic and, if necessary, armed;
this point has some strong affinities with Amilcar Cabrals position concerning the multiple modes of
resistance that may be effectuated by people working to challenge external domination.34 And, finally,
notwithstanding our opposition to many of the statements put forth by Afrocentrists, we are in complete
agreement with Ama Mazamas contention that the ultimate test will be our praxis.35 The ability of
greatly enhanced if the

rejection of materialism is rejected.
this praxis to bring about a just society will be
This is a more effective political strategy because structural

change mattersprogressive reforms are good even if they
cant eliminate all racism.
Volume 47, Issue 1, Available Online to Subscribing Institutions via Sage Publications Online, p. 40)
Going beyond intra-system analyses, one finds that within the Afrocentric paradigm, structural
differences between various economic systems are considered far from fundamental
insofar as these systems operate in ways that perpetuate racial oppression. The value of this
position is that it represents a departure from the rather facile contention that if society is reorganised in
accordance with the precepts of system X, then racism will soon be relegated to the dustbin of history. The
more
conducive to the generation of racial oppression than others. In
problem with this position is its denial of the reality that some economic arrangements are
a fully functional social democracy, for example, the presence of generous social programmes,
robust income supports, universal health care, progressive taxation, and so on could surely
coexist with racism, but
brutal
the effects of this racism would be far less
than in the US, a country where major economic policies are virtually dictated in
direct and indirect ways by corporate elites committed to the maximisation of profits at the
expense of people.
A2s Generic
A2: Gibson-Graham
This is a linkGibson-Grahams critique of capitalocentrism reentrenches capitalism and prevents revolutionary change.
Poitevin 1 Ren Francisco Poitevin, Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at the University of CaliforniaDavis, member of the Editorial Board of the Socialist Review, 2001 (The End of Anti-Capitalism As We
Knew It: Reflections on Postmodern Marxism, Socialist Review, Available Online at
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3952/is_200101/ai_n8932891/?tag=content;col1, Accessed 11-072011)
My main point here is that throughout The Full Monty - and in J.K. Gibson-Graham's review of the film as
never questioned or challenged. In the

postmodern/post-Marxist "noncapitalist" world, corporations get to keep ownership
of the means of production and their profits, while working class
well - property relations are
communities continue to lap dance their way through "identification across difference" rather
than doing union organizing. That this kind of argument can be presented not only as
political
bankruptcy of this paradigm. It is also interesting that JK Gibson-Graham maintain that
"noncapitalist" but also as Marxist thinking should be enough to demonstrate the
challenging their analysis of The Full Monty, or not endorsing the politics of the film, "is inherently
conservative and capitalocentric."48 I disagree strongly. The politics advocated by J.K. Gibson-Graham
nothing but liberal politics with poststructuralist delusions of grandeur. It is one thing to say that we are at a political
through their reading of The Full Monty is
conjuncture in which the thing to do is to work hard for reform, not "revolution." But it is another thing to
argue that revolutionary practice cannot happen on epistemological grounds, and that all we can do is
make capitalism as user friendly as possible while obscuring and co-opting the Marxist tradition. J.K.
Gibson-Graham's reading of The Full Monty is both liberal and reactionary. What the postmodern Marxist's
reading of The Full Monty demonstrates is that in their desire to get rid of "capitalocentrism" - the
alleged obsession of Marxists with seeing "capitalism" everywhere - they end up
reconfiguring
and consolidating capitalism back in. In their unreflective romanticizing of

reform, and in their haughty contempt for revolutionary thinking and politics, J.K. GibsonGraham's style of postmodern/post-Marxism delivers what boils down to
good old-
fashioned liberalism: a mild, state-administered "economic justice" platform

centered around individual private liberties, neatly packaged in postmodern gift wrapping. The
bottom line is this: When one looks closely at what postmodern/post-Marxist theory actually
offers, and after it is done "representing capitalism through the lens of overdetermination,"49 all one can
strategize about is how to make capitalism more "user friendly."
Gone is the project
of getting rid of it. Strangely enough, postmodern/ post-Marxists do not regard these positions
as a surrender of the Marxist project at all, but rather, as the exact fulfillment of that commitment.50
Gibson-Graham embrace the politics of surrenderonly the

revolutionary vision of the alternative can dismantle
capitalism.
Let me finish by addressing the "vision thing" in Marxist theory, and by putting forward some minimal
suggestions for how to proceed. The problem with the Left in this country is not Marx's theorizing of
profound poverty of vision. Simply put, we cannot think

"Revolution" anymore because we cannot think "Capitalism" anymore . What
capital, it is the Left's
passes for "radical democracy" nowadays is so timid and so willing to declare and settle for quick victories
that one has to wonder sometimes where exactly it is that the radicalism in radical democracy lies. And to
make matters worse, we are living in a period in which the Left itself is the one in charge of
convincing us that the "Revolution" is not only politically unfeasible, but also epistemologically
impossible. To paraphrase Marx's famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, postmodern Marxists have
interpreted the world for too longthe point is to change it. Do we need reform? Of
course we do, but to construct reform as a "sufficient" condition for social change is to engage
not in the politics of empowerment but in the practice of
a politics of surrender
with delusions of grandeur. Furthermore, in a post-structuralist epistemological

framework in which structural and systemic explanations are forbidden, all we are left with is
a blurred capacity to prioritize what is to be done. In short, in the

postmodern Marxist world, it is impossible to structurally explain how the top 1
percent of the world population has more wealth than the bottom 92 percent. To do that would
there is something called capitalism with a

logic to it. Recall that in the postmodern Marxist world, the political importance of "any
require the admission that
relationship... [is determined by] how we wish to think of the complex interaction"; it is not based on
institutional or systemic mechanisms of how inequality gets generated and reproduced.51 And given the
postmodern Marxists' insistence on defining capitalism from the get-go as having "no essential or coherent
identity,"52 it is no surprise that such academics are totally irrelevant to real people's struggles against
globalization, the IMF, the WTO, and NAFTA. It's the case of the chicken coming home to roost. It is time
to stop the politics of surrender and denial. It is time to stop pretending

that if we repeat things over and over again for long enough (this is called "performative" in
postmodern parlance), things will eventually change. The fact is that the Left has been getting
crushed for quite some time now. The fact is that it is going to take more than a
cadre of postmodern intellectuals and a new definition of
capitalism to establish a just economic and political system. And attempts to co-opt
and hijack Marxism for some reformist agenda is not going to do it either.
Gibson-Graham are wrongtheir postmodern Marxism
devastates revolutionary change.
The End of Capitalism (As We Know It) The first thing that jumps out after reading The End of Capitalism
(As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy is the way in which there are at least two ways
of smashing the capitalist state: we can have the Leninist revolution or we can change the
definition of capitalism and make it disappear. J.K. Gibson-Graham succeeds in doing the latter:
in a kind of theoretical abracadabra, capitalism is definitely gone by the end of

their book. But despite the theoretical sophistication of their worka no-holds barred embracing of poststructuralist theoryonce the epistemological fireworks dissipate, the argument of the book is actually
rather simple. If what is wrong with Left politics "is the way capitalism has been 'thought' that has made it
so difficult for people to imagine its supersession,"16 then it logically follows that what is to be done is to
change its definition so that it can be "thought" differentlyand therefore be made easier to get rid of. And
if the problem of why U.S. radical politics has been so ineffective for the last two decades is the stubborn
Marxist insistence upon "the image of two classes locked in struggle," a situation that "has in our view
become an obstacle to, rather than a positive force for, anticapitalist endeavors,"17 then how about
getting rid of this whole class struggle thing and "reimagine" labor and capital as allies rather than
enemies?18 Would not that make the whole task of social transformation much easier? Perhaps, but as we
will see shortly, getting rid of capitalism is easier said than done. The End of Capitalism
(As We Knew It) begs another question: Who are they going after? Is it capitalism or is it Marx? Their book
spends so much time on what is supposedly wrong with Marxism that at times it reads more like The End of
Marxism As We Knew It. This approach is typical of a pattern that, to quote Wendy Brown, "responds less to
the antidemocratic forces of our time than to a ghostly philosophical standoff between historically
abstracted formulations of Marxism and liberalism. In other words, this effort seeks to resolve a problem in
a (certain) history of ideas rather than a problem in history."19 Simply put, postmodern Marxist politics
has more to do with the micropolitics of the ivory tower than with the plight
of the workers who clean their campuses. However, once it becomes clear that a necessary condition
for the primacy of postmodern theory and politics is that Marxism has to go (otherwise you do not have to
become a postmodern to address their concerns), J.K. Gibson-Graham's anti-Marxist hostility, while actively
embracing the Marxist label in order to render it useless, makes a lot of sense. And once again, all this is
done with impeccable logic: Given that Marxism is still the only doctrine that calls for the systematic
overthrow of capitalism, getting rid of Marx(ism) is also to get rid of the need for revolution with a big
"R."20 One of the problems with trying to make the case for postmodern Marxism is that in order to get
rid of Marxism and declare its tradition obsolete, you have to distort its legacy by constructing a straw
man. This straw man-reading of Marx is predicated upon the double maneuver of collapsing Marxist history
into Stalinism, on the one hand, and reducing Marxist theory to "essentialism," "totality," and "teleology,"
on the other. As J.K. Gibson-Graham themselves acknowledge, without any regrets, "Indeed, as many of
our critics sometimes charge, we have constructed a 'straw man.'"21 What is left out of their quasihumorous dismissal of Marxism is the complicity of such a straw man in the long history of red-baiting and
anti-Marxist repression in this country and around the world. Also left out is the rich Marxist scholarship
that was addressing their concerns long before there was a postmodern Marxist school. The fact is that
postmodern Marxist's "contributions" are not as original nor as profound as they might have us believe. For
example, what about the bulk of the Western Marxist tradition since the Frankfurt School? Has it not been
predicated on a rejection of the economic reductionism embedded in the passage from the Preface to the
Introduction to A Critique of Political Economy in which the (in)famous base/superstructure metaphor of
society gets set in stone as the "official" definition of historical materialism? Or what about Horkheimer
and Adorno's relentless critique of instrumental rationality? Marxism, in spite of what the postmodern
Marxists want us to believe, has long been making the case for the centrality of culture and its
irreducibility to economic laws, as anybody who has read Walter Benjamin or Antonio Gramsci can certify.
Furthermore, postcolonial Marxism and critical theory have also been theorizing at more concrete levels of
analyses the irreducibility of subjectivity to class.22 And despite the postmodern Marxist excitement when
talking about class as a relational process, in fact it is impossible to tell that they are not the first ones to
talk about class as a relational process, lots of Marxists before the Amherst School have been theorizing
and clarifying the relational mechanisms embedded in class politics.23 Postmodern Marxism also ignores
Lefebvre's urban Marxist contribution: his emphasis on the importance of experience and the everyday in
accounting for social processes.24 And Marxist feminist contributions on the intersection of agency and
gender with race, class, and sexuality are conveniently erased from J.K. Gibson-Graham's reduction of
Marxism to a straw man.25 The fact is that when one looks at Marxism not as a distorted "straw man" but
on its own terms, taking into account its richness and complexity, Marxist theory starts to appear all of a
sudden less "totalizing," "essentializing," and "reductionist" and instead as more rich in possibilities and
more enabling. Excursion Filosofica A third feature of J.K. Gibson-Graham's work, in particular, and of
the whole radical democracy tradition, in general, is its post-structuralist extremism.26 For
postmodern Marxists it is not enough to point out that, as both Foucault and Habermas argue, we inhabit
an intellectual regime characterized by a paradigm shift from the "philosophy of consciousness" to the
"philosophy of language."27 Nor is it good enough for postmodern/post-Marxists to recognize the pitfalls
embedded in Hegelian epistemology and argue instead, as Spivak does, for strategic-- uses-of-essentialism
as a corrective to the excesses of teleological thinking and fixed notions of class.28 No way. As far as
postmodern Marxism is concerned, the only way to compensate for constructions of capitalism
that are too totalizing is through the
unconditional surrender of the Marxist
project. As J.K. Gibson-Graham themselves make clear, "to even conceive of 'capitalism' as
'capitalisms' is still taking 'capitalism' for granted."29 And to try to redistribute the heavy theoretical and
political burden placed upon the proletariat by reconfiguring political agency through "race-class-gender,"
as opposed to just class, is still a futile endeavor: essentialism is still essentialism whether one
essentializes around one or three categories. This strand of post-structuralism, one that once again, can
be directly traced back to Laclau and Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy,30 is predicated on the
faulty epistemological premise that what really matters is "discourse." As Laclau and Mouffe clarify, "our
analysis rejects the distinction between discursive and nondiscursive practices. It offirms that every object
is constituted as an object of discourse."31 The problem with this approach is that once we enter
this world of epistemological foundationalism predicated on the claim that there is "nothing
but discourse," we enter a world of relativism in which all we can do is "create discursive
fixings," as J.K. Gibson-Graham themselves prescribe, that will guarantee that "any particular analysis will
never find the ultimate cause of events."32 It is this ideological postmodern insistence on reducing
overloads its theoretical

apparatus and causes it to buckle beneath them. The Amherst School's
all of social reality to discourse that ultimately
"provisional ontology" is incapable of escaping the performative trap of trying to get rid of essentialism by
essentializing all of reality as "discursive." The postmodern Marxist approach to ontology boils down to
substituting in political practice every occurrence of "continuity" with "discontinuity" as a way to get rid of
essentialism and macro-narratives. Even Foucault, the great master of discontinuity, distances himself
from such mirror-reversal solutions when theorizing the limits of discourse and accounting for the
"divergence, the distances, the oppositions, the differences" that constitute the episteme of a period.33 In
a (rarely cited) interview titled "Power and the Study of Discourse," Foucault goes to great length to
emphasize the importance of the nondiscursive (which he defines as "a whole play of economic, political
and social changes"34) as a necessary condition for the successful application of "discourse" to Left
politics." When explicitly asked whether "a mode of thought which introduces discontinuity and the
constraints of system" does "not remove all basis for a progressive political intervention"36 (in other
words, is post-structuralist politics friend or foe of Left politics), Foucault does three things before he can
answer in the affirmative. First, he defends the need for "discourse" and "discontinuity" in unmasking the
hidden teleologies embedded in metanarratives of universal history and so forth, in other words, in
unmasking the myth of "the sovereignty of the pure subject." Next, and this is crucial in understanding
the role of discourse in post-structuralist analysis, Foucault proceeds to triangulate "discourse" as an
interplay between three separate levels of analysis: intradiscursive, interdiscursive, and extradiscursive
transformations. Taken together, these three levels of analysis constitute the basic "schemes of
dependence" that define the conditions that regulate discursive historical transformations and social
change. An example of the intradiscursive, for Foucault, is the relationship between the objects,
operations, and concepts that constitute a single discipline, let's say math. How "math" constitutes itself
with all its many subfields, rules, and definitions is an example of intradiscursive. Interdiscursive, on the
other hand, deals with the relationship between one discipline (Foucault uses the example of medical
discourse) and other disciplines, in this example other disciplines outside of medicine, such as economics
or natural history. And the extradiscursive level of analysis, the one relevant for us in our assessment of
postmodern Marxism, deals between the discursive and those "transformations outside of discourse."37
Foucault talks about the connections between "medical discourse and a whole play of economic, political,
and social changes" as an example of extradiscursive processes. Notice how careful and unequivocal
Foucault's analysis is in emphasizing and making sure that we do not reduce all of reality to some simple
notion of "discourse." The irreducibility of the nondiscursive cannot be summarily dismissed as irrelevant,
as postmodern/post-Marxists do. The key point in assessing the postmodern/post-Marxist epistemological
and ontological viability is this: None of Foucault's subtleties in theorizing the "nondiscursive" are present
in the postmodern/post-Marxist model. Not only is Foucault's notion of "discourse" more complex and
nuanced than the one presented in postmodern/post-Marxism, the "nondiscursive" is defined as
constituted by "institutions, social relations, economic and political conjuncture"and as explicitly
nonreducible to discourse.38 This is why the postmodern/post-Marxist's incapability and/or refusal
to account for the irreducibility of the nondiscursive aspects of institutions and the economy
ultimately disqualifies them from articulating a viable Left project.

To retort by saying that it is OK to not deal with the centrality of the nondiscursive (e.g., the institutional)
because "every object is constituted as an object of discourse"39 misses the point that the moment of the
nondiscursive and extradiscursive is both irreducible and essential. How many more Ptolemaic circles of
"discursive fixings" is it going to take before it becomes clear that postmodern Marxism's bankrupt
epistemology/ontology
politics?
cannot articulate a viable project for radical

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***Capitalism Kritik***

post-Marxists tend to assume that

postMarxists have been woefully remiss in addressing the constitution of

Enamored with the cultural and seemingly blind to

This posturing has

In their rush to avoid the capital sin of economism,

is not the other of class but, rather, constitutes

Capitalism leads to mass murder and genocide and the

Mass death, and genocide, the deliberate and systematic

the death-world that is

While I am convinced that there can be no

Economism, which is based on a

the West (and by the state of Israel on behalf of its own

And just as surely the ideology of antifascism

Marxism is in need of a theory of mass death

The real domination of capital is characterized by the

From its original locus at the point of production, in the

with its own source of power as a means of production, while

second industrial revolution saw the extension of commodity

production to the whole of society, and the subordination of man to the

The immanent tendencies of the capitalist mode of

there can be militant forms of intellectuality,

this increased importance of intellectual labour

Social movements, especially when they are

The same goes for teachers in both primary and secondary

and the knowledge and collective experience that working

Mass radical intellectuality is at the same time a prerequisite

It sees spiritual ecofeminism as failing to come to terms with the effects

This is thought to be the deepest contradiction of patriarchal capitalism

Capitalism leads to mass murder and genocide and the

Mass death, and genocide, the deliberate and systematic

the death-world that is

While I am convinced that there can be no

Economism, which is based on a

model (or travesty) of Marxist theory, in which politics, for

can only be conceived as a direct and immediate reflection of

the West (and by the state of Israel on behalf of its own

And just as surely the ideology of antifascism

Marxism is in need of a theory of mass death

The real domination of capital is characterized by the

From its original locus at the point of production, in the

with its own source of power as a means of production, while the

The immanent tendencies of the capitalist mode of

there can be militant forms of intellectuality,

this increased importance of intellectual labour

Social movements, especially when they are

The same goes for teachers in both primary and secondary

indispensable aspect of revolutionary politics today. Above all we must think of

Mass radical intellectuality is at the same time a prerequisite

Policy aff 1NC

As capitalism developed and spread, intensive

The beginning of capitalist

Capitalism leads to mass murder and genocide and the

Mass death, and genocide, the deliberate and systematic

the death-world that is

While I am convinced that there can be no

Economism, which is based on a

the West (and by the state of Israel on behalf of its own

And just as surely the ideology of antifascism

Marxism is in need of a theory of mass death

The real domination of capital is characterized by the

From its original locus at the point of production, in the

with its own source of power as a means of production, while

Capitalism Kritik