Capitalism K Updates with Chinese

Characteristics
Capitalism K Updates with Chinese Characteristics......................................................................................................1
1NC Shells..................................................................................................................................................................2
1NCToxicity........................................................................................................................................................3
1NCChinese Exclusion Act...............................................................................................................................12
2NC Updates.............................................................................................................................................................20
AltMaoism........................................................................................................................................................21
AltEco-Marx (China Specific)..........................................................................................................................26
AltRevolutionary Optimism..............................................................................................................................32
A2: Dogmatic........................................................................................................................................................34
A2: Permutation....................................................................................................................................................36
ImpactUS-China War........................................................................................................................................37
Aff Answers..................................................................................................................................................................39
2ACAltCo-option DA (China Specific)........................................................................................................40
2ACAltCrackdowns......................................................................................................................................42
2ACAltParticularity......................................................................................................................................44
2ACAltColoniality DA.................................................................................................................................47
2ACAltCede the Political.............................................................................................................................50
2ACAltNo Class Solidarity...........................................................................................................................51
2ACPermComplexity/materialism................................................................................................................52
2ACPermState Reforms................................................................................................................................54
2ACPermCoalitions......................................................................................................................................55
2ACPermBenjamin.......................................................................................................................................56
A2Alt solves Warming......................................................................................................................................58

Cap K Updates 2

1NC Shells

Cap K Updates 3

1NCToxicity
The Chinese lead scare of 2007 is a story about the horrors of global
capitalism, not the abstract discourse of contagion or fantasies of sovereignty.
By renarrating this tale as one of celebratory toxicity and territorial invasion,
they mystify the material danger of lead paint and the political economy of
labor exploitation.
Walsh 2007 (David, Political Writer and Arts Editor at World Socialist Web Site, Millions of toxic toys
recalled: The nightmarish reality of global capitalism, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2007/08/toys-a16.html)
The worlds largest toy maker, Mattel Corporation, announced August 14 that it was recalling nearly 19 million
toys worldwide, half of them in the US, because of the dangers they pose to children. Some 436,000 toy cars
made in China were withdrawn because they are covered in lead paint, while more than 18,000,000 other toys, also
made in China, are being recalled because they contain small, powerful magnets that could do great damage if
swallowed. The company and the media are going to considerable lengths to downplay the incident and
minimize the risks involved, but the conditions exist for a potential human disaster. Millions of the toys have
already been sold. The magnetic toys were sold before January 2007 and had been produced since 2002. Some of
the lead-painted toys have been sold this summer. No one has any idea what damage has already been done. Many
of the toys will never be retrieved. Parents by the thousands around the US have already lined up at clinics organized
by local health departments to have their young children tested for lead poisoning. A 35-year-old mother of two,
waiting on line in the Indianapolis area, told the Indianapolis Star, We have enough to think about as it is with so
much that is going on in the world. ... The kids just deserve to have fun and play and be oblivious to the dangers and
things that are going on. I think its unfortunate that the kids have been pulled in to the same worries that the parents
have. Lead paint, even in small amounts, poses dangers for children. A spokeswoman at the US Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, Bernadette Burden, explained to the media, There is no acceptable level of lead exposure
for a child. The problems can be subtle, said Dr. Jonathan Fielding, Los Angeles Countys director of public
health and a professor of health services and pediatrics at UCLA. He commented to the Los Angeles Times, The
concern that we increasingly have is that relatively low levels of lead exposure can lead to reductions in IQ and
learning disabilities and behavioral problems. As for the other category of recalled toys, if more than one of the
magnets is swallowed, according to the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), they can attract each
other and cause intestinal perforation or blockage, which can be fatal. Since a previous recall of toys containing the
magnets in November 2006, Mattel has received more than 400 reports of magnets coming loose. While the lead
paint, whose use is banned in the US and China, is being linked to a Chinese subcontractor, the magnet
hazard is the result of Mattels own specifications. The Chinese factories simply manufactured what the toy
giant told them to. There is something especially dreadful and unnerving about childrens toys, meant to bring
delight, potentially doing physical damage or even causing death. The massive toy recall reveals essential and
ugly truths about the workings of the global profit system. The integration of newly emerging regions into the
world capitalist market has horrific social implications, both in countries such as China and the advanced
capitalist countries to which their goods are exported. Chinese workers face desperate conditions, while their
super-exploitation means the pumping out of marginal and even defective products at the least possible cost
and by the fastest possible means all to line the pockets of an international plutocracy.
Cutthroat global competition prevails in the toy business as in every other. The $50 billion industry has faced a
serious challenge in recent years from video games and consumer electronics. At the retail end, numerous specialty
chainsToys R Us and FAO, for examplehave suffered losses and closed stores in the face of discount outfits
such as Wal-Mart and Target. Rising oil prices have meant higher costs for resins used in plastic, the material of
many toys. Resin prices rose sharply between 2003 and 2005. In 2006, US sales of traditional toys increased slightly
for the first time in several years. Profit margins are narrow, and the drive to lower costs is relentless. In June
2007, the Buffalo News reported that Mattel wants profit margins to return to their 2003 levels by reducing
waste and using cheaper materials as US consumers purchase more dolls and electronic games. Toy
manufacturers have flocked to China, seeking reduced costs. Some 80 percent of global toy production now
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Cap K Updates 4
takes place there, centered in Guangdong province, home to more than 5,000 of Chinas 8,000 toy factories.
At peak times, noted USA Today in December 2006, some 1.5 million workers are making toys in Guangdong.
The newspaper describes mile upon mile of toy factories in the city of Dongguan, for example, housing mile
upon mile of uniformed young women toiling on production lines. The most ruthless methods are used to
extract profits from the workers efforts. In 2005, China Labor Watch, as the WSWS noted in March 2006,
carried out a survey of 13 toy factories in Dongguan. The WSWS article summed up the conditions: Excessive
working hours, debilitating temperatures of up to 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.7 degrees Celsius), dangerous
equipment, toxic glues, paints and solvents, cramped dormitories, abusive managers, crooked hiring practices
and wages below even Chinas legal minimum were the order of the day. The working week was gruelinga
13-hour to 15-hour day was common, with one day off a week or in some cases just one night off. During the peak
season, typically from September to the end of May, workers were allowed only one day off a month. In some
factories, mandatory all-night shifts of 16 to 19 hours were common during busy periods. Lunch and supper breaks
accounted for 2.5 hours each shift. Chinese labour law stipulates an eight-hour day with a maximum three hours of
overtime. All but one of the factories under investigation routinely flouted this law. Mattel, which came under
scrutiny for wretched conditions in its plants in Indonesia in the mid-1990s, claims to pay great attention to health
and safety issues. It owns many of the factories in China that produce its products, and an independent auditor
inspects the operations and posts reports on the Internet. However, China Labor Watch in September 2005 presented
the results of an investigation into conditions at the Kai Long factory in Dongguan, which produces toys for Mattel,
among other companies. Among the reports findings are work schedules that surpass the legal limit by at least 36.5
hours per week, said the group, pay rates as low as only 59 percent of the local minimum wage, unsanitary
cafeterias, dorm rooms housing 22 people each, and employees forced to foot the entire cost of their work-injury
insurance and, in some instances, lack of insurance of any kind. The hourly wage rate is 1.9 yuan, or 23 cents, for
both regular and overtime work hours, well below the legal minimum wage. There is no concept of paid overtime in
this factory. Overtime on Saturdays and Sundays is considered regular work time without any additional
compensation. China Labor Watch adds: Workers wages, already low by any standard, are often further reduced
after the factorys numerous deductions. Workers say that the factory has many ways of reducing wages, such as
deducting pieces produced by the workers from the workers overall piece calculation, reducing the wage rate per
piece, etc. Even if Mattels claims were taken at face value, the demands of the market are unceasing. The
New York Times noted August 15, Manufacturing experts say that companies have cut costs so much in China that
more toy testing is not affordable for many manufacturers. Mattels independent monitor, S. Prakash Sethi, a
professor at Baruch College in New York, commented, If Mattel, with all of its emphasis on quality and testing,
found such a widespread problem, what do you think is happening in the rest of the toy industry, in the apparel
industry and even in the low-end electronics industry? Sethi continued, There is something to be said about the
pressure that American and European and multinational companies put on Chinese companies to supply
cheap products. The operating margins are razor thin, so you really should not be surprised that there is
pressure to cut corners. Despite the general tendency of the American media to place the blame exclusively on the
Chinese for the most recent Mattel recall, the magnetic toys have been withdrawn, as the Times notes, because of a
design flaw on Mattels part, not a problem with its Chinese contractors. However, the use of lead paint, widely
accessible and cheaper than the lead-free variety, on some of the recalled toysallegedly by a subcontractor
does point to the specific character of feverish and unregulated capitalist development in China. The
discovery of lead paint on the toy cars at Mattel is only the latest in a series of scandals involving potentially
hazardous products made in China. Earlier this year more than 100 brands of pet food were removed from US
grocery stores after dozens of dogs and cats died from eating food tainted with the chemical melamine. In Panama,
cough syrup from China was discovered to contain diethylene glycol, an industrial solvent commonly used in antifreeze. The same chemical was found in Chinese-made toothpaste in the US, Canada, Italy, Mexico, France and the
UK. Mattels recall of toys is the second this month and the third time this summer that Chinese firms have been
accused of using lead paint on childrens toys. Certain vinyl baby bibs made in China are apparently contaminated
with lead. Wal-Mart removed the bibs from its stores earlier this year, but they are still on sale at Toys R Us. The
Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has not insisted the bibs be recalled, urging parents to discard the
vinyl bibs only if they are torn or otherwise deteriorated. It should be noted that the CPSC has just 420 employees,
including only about 100 field investigators, responsible for monitoring over 15,000 kinds of consumer products and
that its budget has come under systematic attack from the business-friendly Bush administration. Dr. Michael
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Shannon, a Childrens Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School pediatrician and toxicologist, told Reuters:
Frankly, I think the biggest story is the clear failure of federal agencies to protect us. Id call it a public health
disaster. In July, the former head of Chinas State Food and Drug Administration, Zheng Xiaoyu, was executed for
accepting bribes from eight pharmaceutical firms. He was accused of approving fake drugs and other substandard
items during his term in office from 1998 to 2005, including an antibiotic that killed 10 people. The manager of a
Chinese firm accused of shipping lead-tainted toys recalled earlier this year by Mattel apparently hung himself in the
companys warehouse in southern China this past weekend. China has become the cheap-labor workshop of the
world. A layer of backward, brutal parvenusowners and managers of factorieshas come into being,
often through ties to the ruling Communist Party. They view the subjugation of the mass of workers, whom
they despise and fear, as their means of enriching themselves. Protests over wages and conditions, such as one
that occurred at a factory in Dongguan in late July when 1,000 toy workers battled security guards and
police, are violently repressed. But the situation in China is merely the most extreme example of a universal
phenomenon: the suppression of wages, the gutting of benefits and the deterioration of living conditions for
tens of millions. Meanwhile, Mattels chairman and chief executive, Robert Eckert, who declared, while announcing
the recall, that the safety of children is our primary concern, earned $1.25 million in salary in 2006 and received
total compensation, including stock options, of nearly $6 million. The weekly pay of a worker at the Kai Long
factory in Dongguan, which produces toys for Mattel and other firms, is $18.50, or less than $1,000 a year. In 2006,
Mattel paid $160,095 alone for Eckerts use of its company airplanes.

The toxicity of global capitalism demands a call to collective struggle and

generative imaginaries of a revolution beyond capitalism. The affirmatives
identification with that toxicity leaves in place the structures of power that
unevenly distribute risk and mass death. While they speak of affect theory
and local discourse, the capitalist and colonialist drivers of destruction laugh
all the way to the bank.
Cornell and Seely 2015 (Drucilla, Professor of Womens Studies, Political Science, and Law @ Rutgers
University and the Director of the uBuntu Project; and Stephen, PhD Candidate in Womens and Gender Studies at
Rutgers University, The Spirit of Revolution: Beyond the Dead Ends of Man)
Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union it would seem that the idea of revolution
has been swept into the dustbin of history, or at least into the dustbin of the Euro-American academy. Even
within feminist and queer theory, two of the academic discourses ostensibly most devoted to sweeping
transformation, the word scarcely appears in most of the work written over the past three decades. Our
purpose here is not to offer an extensive investigation into the reasons for this post-revolutionary turn. Certainly
part of it is a general air of pessimism that has swept through critical theory in the face of the failures of the socalled Communist states to actualize the great socialist aspirations and the ruthlessness of advanced capitalism that
has created inequalities of world historical proportions, let alone the never-ending war, horrific structural violence,
and brutal suppression of revolutionary movements that plague our world today (see Cornell 2008). The Marxist
dream of a revolution toward an emancipated humanity and a classless planetary society is, we are told even
by supposedly leftist thinkers, a hopelessly romantic and impossible metanarrative that relies on bad
pretensions to scientific truth and problematic assumptions of an originary human nature. Moreover,
revolution, the story goes, is inextricably connected to a hubris of humanism that cannot survive the death of
Man in late-twentieth century European philosophy, a hubris that sees Man as the maker of his own world and
therefore as having the power to change it. Feminist and queer theory, of course, have long highlighted and
critiqued the phallocentrism and heteronormativity inherent to all forms of humanism and, as such, for several
decades now they too have largely relinquished revolution as a necessary part of overcoming Man. Unfortunately,
however, such reports of the death of Man seem, paraphrasing Mark Twain, to have been greatly exaggerated. This
is not, to be sure, for lack of trying. Indeed, there have been countless assaults on Man over the past centuries: from
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Cap K Updates 6
the attack on his false universalism by early feminists and abolitionists (Wollstonecraft 1992, Cugoano 1999) to
Nietzsches (1968) blistering assault on the nihilism he brings, from to the late twentieth century critique of his
metaphysical presuppositions (Derrida 1984, Foucault, 1994, Heidegger 2008a) to more recent feminist and decolonial challenges to the violent exclusions he relies on for his perpetuation (Irigaray 1985, Spivak 1999, Wynter
2003, Fanon 2004). This death of Man rhetoric has taken on an especially apocalyptic tenor in light of what
climate scientists have named the Anthropocene, that is, the geological epoch of the human dominance of
biological, chemical, and geological processes on Earth (Crutzen & Schwgerl 2011). The immense threat posed by
climate change, coupled with the limited ability of traditional frameworks in the humanities and sciences
(including Marxism) to appropriately address it, has called for a fundamental reconsideration of the place of the
human within nature and history and laid bare the profound vulnerability of Man (see Chakrabarty 2009). If
centuries of violent exploitation of his many Others has not been strong enough cause for his deposing, perhaps his
now-too-obvious destruction of the planet might be. That is, of course, if the planet doesnt get him first. (As always,
we hardly need to point out, Man will be the last casualty of his own destructive boomerang and, thus, we feminists
should not revel too much in watching him wince in the face of his own impending doom.) This seismic shift in the
geopoliticalbetter, cosmopoliticalscene has provoked some thinkers to call for a merciful end to Man. We
cannot possibly hope to address the monumental problems facing us today, they suggest, with the
traditional philosophy of ManHumanism. As such, posthumanist theorists have sought to move
beyond the many boundary projects of Humanism, which work to reconsolidate Man as the sovereign subject of
rational mastery, and to reconceptualize our place in the material universe in a more egalitarian and sustainable way
(Braidotti 2013). One can certainly see why posthumanism might be a palatable alternative to the old
Humanism for many feminist and queer theorists, given feminisms birth as a challenge to the universal
philosophy of Man, and indeed, there is much recent work that seeks to use posthumanism as a way of freeing
us from any lingering attachment to the humanist subject (Man) as crucial to feminist and queer politics and
from an enduring human exceptionalism in relation to animals and other forms of matter. Often juxtaposed to
the so-called linguistic turn (which is usually said to include both psychoanalysis and Foucauldian discourse
analysis as residual Humanisms), these thinkers in feminist-queer science studies, new materialism, and
affect theory, attempt to reconfigure humans as dynamic open systems embedded in a vital universe
characterized by the constant flux of matter-energy, perpetual transformation, and unpredictable forms of
entanglement (see Barad 2007, Giffney & Hird 2008, Coole & Frost 2010, Gregg & Seigworth 2010, Dolphijn &
van der Tuin 2012). From this perspective, it might seem that by even thinking about revolutionary socialism as
absolutely necessary for a cosmopolitical feminist and queer theory and politics, we are embracing an old-fashioned
Humanist dream, or what Rosi Braidotti refers to as Marxisms humanistic arrogance of continuing to place Man at
the centre of world history (2013: 23). While we wholeheartedly affirm the end of Man and the rethinking of our
relationships with the other forms of matter, both living and non, with which we share the universe, we do question
the increasing effort put into debunking the human and human agency at a time when neo-colonial and
neoliberal capitalism have perhaps never been more destructive to the vast majority of the worlds
inhabitants (human and non). Why does it seem, in other words, that posthumanism is necessarily postrevolutionary? While the joyous vitality that seems to characterize much of this posthumanist theory and its
celebration of our connectedness with the universe (including technology) would seem to put these thinkers very far
afield from Martin Heideggers pessimism about our ensnarement in modern technoscientific rationality (2008b),
in the end we are often left with something quite similar to Heideggers conviction that there is nothing humans can
actively do to make things better without intensifying our ensarement and we must therefore patiently hope that
Being (or the planet in this case) chooses to spare us in spite of our past sins. For posthumanism, any focus on
specifically human agency (such as that involved in the struggle against capitalism and colonialism) always
risks a reinstatement of the old humanist subject, effectively smuggling in the Man who fucked everything up in
the first place through the back door. Thus many posthumanist critics are engaged in a hypervigilant search for
Man in every form of theory and politics, and any trace of him must be sussed out and rejected in the name of
life itself and the future of the planet. When not a call for a more ecologically sustainable way of living based
on a reassessment of the integral linkages between all scales of existence, then, the most political (or, perhaps
better put, polemical) of posthumanisms are typically directed at deflating the humanistic arrogance of other
academics and political theories rather than at any forms of systemic violence such as capitalism, colonialism,
racism, or phallocentrism. We are not the first, to be sure, to register uneasiness over the often-blithe repudiation of
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Man and his premature burial in much posthumanist theory, especially considering how spectacularly Mans
handiwork is presently on display. Claire Colebrook (2014a, 2014b), for example, has put the brakes on any
celebratory posthumanism that would claim to have abdicated Mans throne atop the great chain of being. According
to Colebrook, posthumanism is a recuperative gesture which enables Man to continue surviving vampirically by
appearing to be dead while appropriating his previously excluded Others as his now-proper domain. As she
convincingly argues, we should not buy so easily into the sham of Mans self-effacement. While making atonement
for his past exclusion and exploitation of the rest of the universe (i.e., women, the colonized, nonhuman animals,
life itself, the Earth), Man redeems himself while simultaneously annexing these prior exclusions. Thus, when
posthumanists and feminists turn to something like life itself or to our interconnectedness with the material
universe as a way of overcoming Man, and while they spend their efforts diligently hunting down Man in all
his former guises, Man has made off with the goods once again. For Colebrook, then, posthumanism is
actually an ultrahumanism, which simply takes the world as Man had always made it in his (Euro-American,
Bourgeois, White) image and supposedly subtracts Man, leaving Mans old world masquerading as a new
posthuman one. As she puts it: Humanism posits an elevated or exceptional man to grant sense to existence,
then when man is negated or removed what is left is the human all too human tendency to see the world as one
giant anthropomorphic self-organizing living body (2014a: 164). Because it was always Man who had given the
world its sense, pronouncing Man dead ironically allows him to live on stronger than before because the world
continues on in his image while his former criticsfeminists, for examplenow content themselves with his
vacated world and devote themselves to tracking him down only in his old clothes (which he of course discarded
long ago). So far, so good. We agree that posthumanism is a bit too self-congratulatory in its self-conferred
status as the undertaker of Man. We also agree that it is often politically distractingdespite its best
intentionsand that while many of its theorists are busy having contests over which of quantum nonlocality
or bacterial sex is queerer and castigating the ancien rgime (i.e., Marxists and poststructuralists) for its
humanist dementia, Man is laughing all the way to the bank. This point, however, is also where we part
company with Colebrook. For Colebrook, while the urgent possibility of human extinction is not the occasion for
posthumanism, neither is it the occasion for revolutionary struggle. To quote her: What if social political revolution
among human beings were still to leave the relation between the human species and life in the same place? Todays
frequently cited Marxist cryit is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalismshould be read
as symptomatic. Should we not be more concerned with the worlds end than the relations among markets and
individuals? The Marxist premise that we cannot save the world ecologically until capitalism is dealt with, should be
questioned, and reversed: as long as we imagine life and the world to be primarily anthropogenic, or emerging from
human meaning and history, we will not confront the disjunction between the human species (in all its modes) and
the life that it regards as its own. A new mode of critique that would not be political would be required. Indeed, it is
the political gesture, or the understanding of conflicts as ultimately intra-human, that needs to be questioned. One
needs a hypo-Marxism or counter-Marxism whereby the very premise of Marxismman as a laboring animal who
furthers his own lifeneeds to be recognized as the limit of thinking. For what we cannot accept is the obvious
counter to this assumption: man is not an animal who furthers his own survival (2014a: 197-8). As such, Colebrook
asks us not to imagine a more just world, but rather what life would be like if one could abandon the fantasy
of ones own endurance.for beyond man one cannot figure the good life but only contingent, fragile, insecure,

Frankly, we have had quite enough of contingent, fragile,

insecure, and ephemeral lives. Indeed, this sounds not like the imagination of living
beyond Man, but rather like a meticulous description of the lives of the majority of
the world under conditions of advanced capitalism right now. Of course, her point here is

and ephemeral lives (2014b: 22).

that Man (and presumably capitalism) is an apotropaic charm that ensures (the fantasy of) survival for certain
members of the human speciesan immunological protection against the contingency, fragility, insecurity, and
ephemerality inherent to our existence as animals in an indifferent universe. For Colebrook, Man has convinced
himself through this fantasy that the Earth is his home. And it is precisely this fantasy, this protective bubble that
Man bought himself at the expense of all his others, that is now being burst by the impending climatological
catastrophe. Despite her astute critique, however, Colebrook ultimately leaves us in what is perhaps a worse position
than the posthumanists: dispossessing ourselves of our arrogant fantasy of survival and giving ourselves back over
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Cap K Updates 8
to the volatility of the universe, since any idea of enduring (and certainly flourishing) involves the reinstatement of
an anthropomorphic enframing of the worlds inhuman forces.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch

Approximately 95% of the world population (6.7 billion) lives on less than $10 a day and 3.14 billion live
on less than $2.50 a day (Ravallion, Chen & Sangraula 2008).

The richest eighty-five individuals (0.000001%) possess as much wealth as the poorest half of the
worlds population (i.e. 3,500,000,000 people) (Oxfam 2014).

Anywhere from five to twenty thousand Africans have died in the latest Ebola outbreak (S. Leone
Ebola Outbreak 2014) and the average annual mortality rate from malaria is 650,000 (90% of which are from subSaharan Africa) (Centers for Disease Control 2014).

Current animal extinction rates are one-thousand times higher than the Earths historical average
and one-third of all animal species are now either threatened or endangered as a result of what has been called
Anthropocene defaunation (Dirzo et al. 2014).

One in fifteen black men in the U.S. is imprisoned (Pew 2008) and thirty percent of all U.S. black men
will be imprisoned at least once in their lifetime (Sentencing Project 2013). Black men in the U.S. are twenty-one
times more likely to be killed by a police officer than white men (Gabrielson et al. 2014).

780 million people live without access to clean water and 3.4 million die annually due to water and
sanitation-related causes. Ninety-nine percent of these deaths occur in the global South. (Prss-stn et al.
2008, WHO/UNICEF 2012)

Approximately 21 million people are victims of forced labor and 1.2 million children are trafficked
annually (International Labour Organization 2012).
It is unclear how, without any ideal of collective survival or flourishing, we might be able to begin to address
these (and countless other) crises (see Cornell 2004). For us, it is not (as Colebrook perhaps rightfully
characterizes certain Marxist positions) that the ecological disaster cannot be addressed until after we have
ended capitalism, but rather, that the relentless pursuit of profit inherent to capitalism will never permit us to
address issues of the climate and ecology in any substantive way because all attempts to do so must remain
compatible with the dictates of surplus accumulation. The crises of advanced capital and of the climate (as
well as the others to which we have referred) are fundamentally linkeda point not lost on billions in the
global South. Furthermore, we refuse the forced choice (to borrow a phrase from Jacques Lacan) offered by
Colebrook and other posthumanist theorists. For Lacan, a forced choice is a result of the alienating or that
makes us see a choice when there really is not one. His example, quite pertinent here, is a thiefs threat: Your
money or your life! Either way, the victim loses the money (Lacan 1981: 212). By implying that we must choose
either to save life (our lives, endangered species lives or life itself) or to struggle against capitalism, these
theorists have accepted the alienating or of advanced capitalism. We insist on both life (human and non) and an
end to capitalism. And indeed this is precisely the position being taken by climate scientists and activists around the
world who are explicitly linking climate politics to counter-capitalist movements (see Klein 2013, 2014). As
geophysicist Brad Werner has suggested (in a lecture at the American Geophysical Union entitled Is Earth Fucked?
Dynamical Futility of Global Environmental Management and Possibilities for Sustainability via Direct Action
Activism,) the only dynamic in his statistical modeling that is cause for hope is resistance [or,
movements of] people or groups of people [who] adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the
capitalist culture[including] environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the dominant
culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by indigenous peoples, workers, anarchists and other activist
groups (quoted in Klein 2013). In on-the-ground movements against and serious scientific research into
climatological catastrophe, in other words, there is neither a call to renounce old Humanist fantasies of
agency or survival nor any pretense that capitalism must not be ended in order to save life and the planet.
What there is, however, is the idea that collective human action can transform the situation. Bad redemptive
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vision? Of course its possible. But perhaps we ought to try it first before being so sure that embracing
ephemerality and fragility is the best left for us. Surely we owe it to those who were forcibly made to subsidize
(often with their lives) Mans fantasy of survival over the last five centuriesthose who do not need academics
to help them divest themselves of their arrogant survival fantasies because they never had them in the first place, and
those who bear the least responsibility for the destruction that they now face most imminently (while Man plans his
next colonial vacation in the deep sea or in outer space). To us, all of this renunciation of survival and
transformative possibility by Euro-American academics sounds a little too much like the older sibling who refuses to
share his toy and then purposefully destroys it before being forced to hand it down: Oh you want this? I never liked
it anyway. To be clear, we are not suggesting that either the posthumanist theorists or Colebrook do not know or
care about the obvious disparity between those who benefit economically from the processes leading to climate
change and those who will have to pay for most of the environmental and social costs (Mora et al. 2013). Nor are
we engaged in a simple exercise in demystification in which we purport to reveal the workings of capital behind all
of todays contemporary problems to those who did not previously see it. We do wonder why, however, for many
posthumanist thinkers the claim that the destructivity of Man has reached its pinnacle seems to necessarily
involve a simultaneous refutation of revolutionary desires and possibilities rather than a more urgent call for
collective action. It should, perhaps, at least give us pause when scientists are more forcefully expressing the
political implications of their research and calling for collective responses than feminists and other political
theorists (see Mora et al 2013; Klein 2013, 2014). And on that note, neither is our point here a doomsday
jeremiad lamenting the lack of global political response at such a crucial moment; indeed, there is no dearth
of collective struggles against neo-colonialism, advanced capitalism, and ecological destruction around the
world today. In light of this, academics in the Euro-American humanities risk being more out of touch than
ever.

The alternative is to reject the affirmative as an act of revolutionary

optimism. It is our ethical duty to imagine a world beyond capitalism and to
actively intervene as if that world is possible.
Cornell and Seely 2015 (Drucilla, Professor of Womens Studies, Political Science, and Law @ Rutgers
University and the Director of the uBuntu Project; and Stephen, PhD Candidate in Womens and Gender Studies at
Rutgers University, The Spirit of Revolution: Beyond the Dead Ends of Man)
So does all of this mean that we are, to use Lauren Berlants (2011) term, cruel optimists? We would answer this
simply: there is surely nothing crueler than to say that there is no way out of the horrific and brutal
exploitation of advanced capitalism that leaves the majority of the worlds population in conditions of dire
poverty and targeted for extinction. Embracing the death drive, or what amounts to the same thing, abandoning
oneself to the impending doom of the species and the planet when you have no possibility of life is not such a

Kant
argued that we have a duty to be optimistic, not because things are necessarily going
to get better, but because they might. For Kant, we are not obligated to believe in any particular

big deal, and is certainly not an act of queer or posthumanist resistance. Centuries ago, Immanuel

vision of the future or its possibility, but that ideals such as perpetual peace (and we would add: the end of
capitalism) cannot be proven impossible obliges us to live as if (not necessarily believe) they were. To quote
Kant: for there can be no obligationto believe something [i.e., a specific end]. What is incumbent upon us as
a duty is to act in conformity with the idea of that end, even if there is not the slightest theoretical likelihood
that it can be realized, as long as its impossibility cannot be demonstrated either. Now morally practical reason
pronounces in us its irresistible veto: there is to be no warSo the question is no longer whether perpetual peace is
something real or a fiction, and whether we are not deceiving ourselves in our theoretical judgment when we assume
that it is real. Instead we must act as if it is something real, though perhaps it is notand even if the complete
realization of this objective always remains a pious wish, still we are certainly not deceiving ourselves in
adopting the maxim of working incessantly toward it. For this is our duty(1996: 490-1, emphasis added).
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And, moreover, as spectators (if not participants) in revolutionary struggle, we actually shape the way those
struggles will be read. So for Kant, the spectators who cheered on the French Revolution played a role in
history in that the significance that they gave to that revolution became part of the new reality that that
revolution constituted. And cannot the same be said for those who cheered on the Arab Spring, as well as
those who heroically participated in it? Can it not be said of those who stayed up all night watching the votes be
counted in recent elections in Greece, Spain, and South Africa to see if socialist governments would be voted in?
The deep irony of much recent feminist and queer theory is that it effectively tells us that, in the name of
queerness and posthumanism, everything must ultimately remain exactly as it is, given that the hope for
a different future is heteronormative and any idea of transforming the world is humanist delirium; that we
should instead embrace ephemerality, extinction, and the death drive (all of which capitalism has conveniently
made readily available); and that anyone who writes or claims otherwise is nothing but a nostalgic, humanist
fool providing deluded idiots with cruel optimism. How do these thinkers know that we are fated to fragility,
death, extinction, poverty, war, capitalism, depression, melancholia, and unbearable sex? In this book, we want to
show that the truth they tell us about the ultimate impossibility of a more just future can, and should, be
deconstructed in the name of a queer-feminist future beyond Man, a future that by the very appropriation of
the word queer tells us that nothing is ever what it seems and that the psychic and bodily prisons that we live
in are always in the process of being undone by collective revolutionary processes. Indeed, as the late queer theorist
Jos Esteban Muoz insisted in his disagreements with much recent queer theory, queerness is itself a form of
utopianism or revolutionary consciousness. As he put it: It is difficult to hold onto a phrase like revolutionary
consciousness. It seems stark, out-moded, universalizing, and prescriptive. Yet I nonetheless deploy it because I
want to link it specifically to the world of affect and feeling. Feeling Revolutionary is feeling that our current
situation is not enough, that something is indeed missing and we cannot live without it. Feeling revolutionary
opens up the space to imagine a collective escape, an exodus, a going-off script together. Practicing educated
hope, participating in a mode of revolutionary consciousness, is not simply conforming to one groups doxa at the
expense of anothers. Practicing educated hope is the enactment of a critique function. It is not about announcing
the way things ought to be, but, instead, imagining what things could be (Duggan & Muoz 2009: 278). We do
not wish to rehearse here the hope vs. hopelessness, future vs. anti-future debates that have dominated queer theory
over the past decade. We do, however, want to point out the resonances of Munozs contention that queerness is an
ideality (2009: 1) with the Kantian duty of optimism, explicitly putting queer politics on the side of revolution: that
we can imagine beyond what we can know both enables and obligates us to live according to ideals of freedom
as we also struggle to bring such a world into existence. Certainly, Kants point is that as we put ourselves
into the story, we are part of it and thus pessimism becomes just as much a part of that story as optimism.
And moreover, as we will discuss in Chapter Four, these stories have a profound power to materialize and
rematerialize the world that we live in together. Thus, if what many contemporary theorists tell us is not truth, then it
is just their own convictionitself a form of political faith. And why have the faith that we are thoroughly fucked if
there is any way for us to queer ourselves out of it? It would thus seem that many theorists have their own form of
cruel attachmenta cruel pessimism?to the idea that revolution is something we (can) no longer desire.
Perhaps this is a form of immunity to the inevitable disappointments of political struggle: we can no longer be
disappointed if we no longer hope for or believe that a more just future is possible. And yet, as political theorist
Jane Anna Gordon eloquently said at a recent event in New York City, Political theory is incoherent if we accept
that we are in a post-revolutionary time. All we can do then is poetically discuss resignation and impossibility
(2014). The philosophy of the limit means that the very limit to any idea of the impossible, that is, to any
metanarrative of post-revolutionary doom, leaves us with the responsibility to fight for a politics that is both
revolutionary and that is constantly challenging the reign of Man in the form of colonialism, capitalism,
racism, phallocentrism, and heterosexism (see Cornell 1992). As we have suggested, and will argue throughout
this book, thinkers in the global South have been engaged in precisely this project for centuries. These thinkers,
however, have been too involved in revolutionary struggles themselves to spend too much time handwringing about
the humanistic arrogance of politics and the failures of feminism and socialism, or debating the value of hope versus
pessimism, because there is simply too much work to be done in the struggle for total decolonization. They, in a
deep and profound sense, are on the side of life, understood not as abstract life itself, but as part of political
spirituality: the struggle for different ways of living individually, collectively, and with the other beings with which
we share the planet. And perhaps it is precisely to these thinkers that we must now look for the spirit of revolution
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and for a new practice of the human beyond Man. We close this introduction and open our book with the words of
Gilles Deleuze castigating the so-called New Philosophers of the 1970s who critiqued Marxism and
socialism for manipulating the supposedly ignorant masses: What I find really disgusting is that the New
Philosophers are writing a martyrology: the Gulag and the victims of history. They live off corpses.But there
never would have been any victims if the victims had thought or spoken like our New Philosophers. The victims had
to live and think in a totally different way to provide the material that so moves the New Philosophers, who weep in
their name, think in their name, and give us moral lessons in their name. Those who risk their life most often think
in terms of life, not death, not bitterness, and not morbid vanity. Resistance fighters are usually in love with
life. No one was ever put in prison for powerlessness and pessimismon the contrary! From the perspective of
the New Philosophers, the victims were duped, because they didnt yet grasp what the New Philosophers have
grasped. If I belonged to an association, I would bring a complaint against the New Philosophers: they show just a
little too much contempt for the inmates of the Gulag (2007: 144-5). With very little adjustment, could these
same words not be said of our new prophets of queer hopelessness, posthumanist renunciation, and postrevolutionary pessimism?

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1NCChinese Exclusion Act

Their theory of history divorces memory from revolutionary struggle, leaving
us with individual pessimism or technological determinism. Only the
alternative grounds historical inquiry in the concrete transformation of
society.
Nineham 2008 (Chris, Chris Nineham is a founder member and National Officer of the Stop the War Coalition
in the UK. He was one of the main organisers of the 15 February 2003 anti-war protest against the invasion on Iraq,
International Socialism, Issue 119, Benjamins Emergency Marxism, http://isj.org.uk/benjamins-emergencymarxism/)
Benjamins sense of urgency, and his insistence on the need for the left to actively break with capitalist logic are
important in todays unstable world in which so much of the mainstream left has capitulated to neoliberalism. But in
her enthusiasm to place Benjamin in the Marxist tradition and to promote the subversive strengths of his
approach to culture, Leslie tends to overlook the problems in his method. This matters because some on the far
left are making great claims for Benjamin. Michael Lwy has recently said that Benjamins work is central to
enabling us to conceive of a revolutionary project with a general mission to emancipate.19 As the American critic
Hannah Arendt pointed out in the 1960s, Benjamins intellectual method echoes the techniques of contemporary
artists. In the Arcades Project in particular, as Leslie notes, he followed the surrealist procedure to the letter,
montaging disparate industrially produced fragments, trash and parodies of natural form.20 The problem is that
montage is an artistic method. It can be effective in the hands of someone sensitive to the half hidden,
symbolic significance of appearances, but it does not add up to a method of analysing how society works or
the role of culture within it. At times this was the weight Benjamin tried to place on it. The Marxist writer
Theodor Adorno made this point in a criticism of an essay that was to introduce the Arcades Project. Leslie
summarises Adornos analysis: Motifs were assembled not developed. There was no theoretical interpretation of
various motifs of trace, flaneur, panorama, arcades, modernity and the ever-same. Ideas were blockaded
behind impenetrable walls of material. It lacked mediation.21 Benjamin never wrote the great theoretical
work that Adorno and others were hoping for, so theoretical assessments are difficult. But when he does discuss his
own method he sometimes suggests that being open to raw experience is the key to breaking through illusion.
At other times he comes close to a technological determinism which became more and more pessimistic as
reaction gained ground: The questions which mankind asks of nature are determined amongst other things by its
level of production. This is the point where positivism breaks down. In the development of technology it saw only
the progress of science, not the retrogression of society. It overlooked the fact that capitalism has decisively
conditioned that development. It also escaped the positivists among the theoreticians of social democracy that the
development of technology made it more and more difficult for the proletariat to take possession of itan act that
was seen to be more and more necessary. Benjamin explains the drive to war as a product of uncontrollable
technology: The energies that technology develops beyond their threshold are destructive. They serve primarily to
foster the technology of warfare, and the means to prepare public opinion for war.22 The danger of letting
determinism in via the back door is averted by Benjamins consistent commitment to class struggle. But the problem
is that he never grounds class struggle in any social or historical process. It is longed for, it is remembered, but
remembrance itself is suggested as the most likely source of renewal: The materialist presentation of history
leads the past to bring the present into a critical state.23 Of course, consciousness of history is an important
factor in current struggles. An unresolved history of repression and resistance can help stir up contemporary
battles. All kinds of resistance movements call on historical precedents to lend weight to their cause. And, of course,

A
correct interpretation of the past is a key element in shaping consciousness and is
crucial in orientating workers in present and future struggles . One of the most important

it is also true, in the words of historian Eduardo Galleano, that the past says things that concern the future.24

roles of the revolutionary party is to keep alive the memory of past struggles that the ruling class want to suppress,
and to fight for their revolutionary interpretation. When Benjamin says, in his sixth thesis on the concept of history,
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Every age must strive anew to wrest tradition away from the conformism that threatens to overpower it, we can
follow him.25 But, when he suggests that historical materialism wishes to hold fast that image of the past which
unexpectedly appears to the subject of history in a moment of danger, he is asking too much of history.26 By
itself, or even with the help of the best historians, history cannot make people struggle. The truth is that
Benjamin never completely solved the problem that haunted him. He correctly warned against blind faith in
progress. He knew the potential of the explosive struggles capitalism stores up, but he never arrived at a
rounded explanation of how those struggles could develop and mature. Sometimes he fell back on a
catastrophe theory of consciousness: Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of history. But perhaps it is
quite otherwise, perhaps revolutions are an attempt by passengers on this trainnamely the human raceto activate
the brake. This is characteristically thought provoking, but it is also voluntaristic. It is not clear where the action
arises from. Revolutions are always partly a response to a sense of emergency, but Benjamins own epoch
demonstrates all too vividly that impending catastrophe does not automatically mean the brake will be
applied. Revolutionary consciousness is made possible by the everyday contradictions of capitalism,

and

active intervention in them , not just a sense of the horror of its ultimate destination. What we do now
to develop it will effect what happens when the train approaches the bumpers.

Their critical legal approach founded on indeterminacy disarms political

transformation and undermines Marxist alternatives
Leiter 2004 (Brian, Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Chicago Law School and
founder and Director of Chicago's Center for Law, Philosophy & Human Values,
http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2004/07/why_marx_would_.html)
It has long amused me that many inside and outside law think of "Critical Legal Studies" as a Marxist movement.
Plainly, within the parochial context of American life, any ideas on the "left" are viewed as Marxist, but in this case
the association is particularly wrongheaded. Herewith what I wrote on the subject in my review essay of Neil
Duxbury's philosophically feeble Patterns of American Jurisprudence in the summer 1997 Oxford Journal of Legal
Studies: CLS writers...locate the source of "indeterminacy" in law in one of two sources: either in general
features of language itself (drawing here--not always accurately--on the semantic skepticism associated with
Wittgenstein and Derrida ); or in the existence of "contradictory" moral and political principles that they claim
underlie the substantive law, understood at a suitable level of abstraction. Duxbury himself recognizes this strand
of CLS, which he aptly describes as claiming, "...that liberal consciousness is somehow a false or corrupted
consciousness, that there exists within liberal thought--liberal legal thought included--a tension so fundamental, so
irresolvable, that it must ultimately implode and make way for radical social transformation." (455) This strategy of
argument signals the rather curious intellectual pedigree of CLS, a pedigree that Duxbury does not appear to
recognize. [Ed.-Most CLS writers don't appear to recognize it either, though I'm sure Unger knows!] For what CLS
has done in American legal thought is to revive a certain strategy of left-wing critique that dates back to the
Left Young Hegelians of the 1830's in Germany. Seizing upon the Hegelian notion that ideas are the engine of
historical change, the Left Hegelians sought to effect change by demonstrating that the prevailing
conservative ideas were inherently contradictory and thus unstable. To resolve these contradictions, it would
be necessary to change our ideas, and thus change the world. This strand of Hegelianism was a dead issue by the
1850's--in part because of Schopenhauer's devastating anti-Hegelian polemics, in part because of Marx's criticisms
(about which more below), and in part because of the more general "materialistic" and "positivistic" turn in German
intellectual life associated with Feuerbach and the so-called "German Materialists." It was not revived until 1922
when Georg Lukcs re-introduced Left Hegelian themes into the Marxist tradition of social critique in History and
Class Consciousness, especially in the central chapter on "The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought." CLS, however,
acquires the style of argument less from Lukcs--though he is a favorite figure in the footnotes of CLS articles--than
from Harvard Law School professor and CLS "founding father" Roberto Unger, whose 1975 book Knowledge and
Politics is quite obviously a replay of the central arguments and themes of History and Class Consciousness. What
is slightly ironic in this intellectual genealogy--one that most CLS writers seem only vaguely aware of--is that
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CLS should have revived precisely the tradition in left-wing thought that Marx had so viciously lampooned
150 years earlier! Indeed, with certain obvious emendations, we find Marx and Engels articulating (in The
German Ideology ) a critique one often hears, with some cause, of CLS: "Since [the Crits] consider conceptions,
thoughts, ideas, in fact all the products of consciousness...as the real chains of men...it is evident that [the Crits]
have to fight only against these illusions of the consciousness. Since, according to their fantasy, the
relationships of men, all their doings, their chains and their limitations are products of their consciousness,
[the Crits] logically put to men the moral postulate of exchanging their present consciousness for human,
critical or egoistic consciousness, and thus of removing their limitations. This demand to change
consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret reality in another way, i.e., to recognize it by means of another
interpretation....They forget, however, that to these phrases [constituting the old interpretation] they are only
opposing other phrases, and that they are in no way combating the real existing world when they are merely
combating the phrases of this world." Showing the right-wing professors that their ideas are incoherent and
demanding that they change their ideas is politically irrelevant for Marx: it is, of course, "contradictions" in
the material circumstances of life that are the real engine of historical change. What CLS has done is to revive
precisely this discredited strand of critical theory--the critique of ideas or "consciousness"--in the legal
domain. It is not obvious that these critiques are any more plausible or relevant now than they were in 1840.

Benjamins view of history destroys Left movements. Now is key to imagine

alternatives that invest in a specific vision beyond capitalism.
Farber 2015 (Samuel, Samuel Farber was born and raised in Cuba and has written extensively on that country.
His newest book, The Politics of Che Guevara: Theory and Practice, is out now from Haymarket Books, In Defense
of Progress, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/11/progress-ep-thompson-walter-benjamin-enlightenment-farbercuba-frankfurt-school/)
Prominent among these currents was the Frankfurt School, a part of the intellectual-political phenomenon of what Perry Anderson called
Western Marxism a diverse grouping of scholars that included people like Walter Benjamin, Lucio Colletti, Lucien Goldmann, and
Karl Korsch. Despite their varied perspectives, all of these thinkers had

one thing in common: their reaction to the defeat of

classical Marxism by fascism, Stalinism, and social democracy, and their tendency to shy away from politics and
economics and to concern themselves with philosophical questions, usually with an idealist bent divorced
from practice. The revolt against classical Marxism helps explain the gap that has developed between leftwing activists and organizers who share a practical belief in progress that conditions their involvement in
social struggles and many left-wing intellectuals and academics, who foreground a critique of these terms .
The most influential of those Western Marxists is perhaps Walter Benjamin (18921940), not only because of his profound pessimism that has
touched many contemporary left-wing thinkers disillusioned and shocked by the endless imperialist wars, neoliberal hegemony, and a resurgent
right, but also because he presents the most compelling and drastic critique of progress. Benjamins critique was, to a large extent,

a reaction to the social-democratic conception of progress, a conception that was highly influential in Germany during his life.
In his Theses on the Concept of History, Benjamin argued that progress is traditionally viewed as a gradual, irresistible, boundless, and automatic
process continuously ascending in a linear (or spiral) way. But these assumptions, he argued, did not hold up to reality based on his own
experiences in 1930s Germany and mistakenly and dogmatically equated the general progress of mankind with the growth of human ability
and knowledge. This dogma, argued Benjamin, recognized only the progress in the mastery of nature, not the retrogression of society, and had
led to the corruption of the working class through the perpetuation of the lie that factory work which was supposed to tend toward
technological progress constituted a political achievement. Benjamin not only criticized the social-democratic concept of

progress; he altogether negated the possibility of progress as he understood it. The concept of the historical progress of
mankind, he wrote, cannot be sundered from the concept of progression through a homogeneous, empty time. Progression, for
Benjamin, blew apart the whole notion of progress because according to him historical time is discontinuous,
made of sudden, catastrophic moments, when the oppressed revolutionary classes explode, and blast a
specific era out of its homogeneous course in history. It is in those moments, Benjamin averred, that revolutionaries, like
tigers leaping into the past, resurrect practices and ideas dating back hundreds of years from societies totally unrelated to theirs, thereby
bringing the past into the present. To be sure, Benjamin was a revolutionary. But he was influenced by Judaism as well as by Marxism; he
conceived of revolution as a sudden cataclysmic messianic event, that would put the brakes on the locomotive of history, avoiding new
disasters rather than opening up a new and brighter future. Unlike his contemporary Antonio Gramsci a leader of the Italian Communist Party,
active in the 1920 general strike in Italy, who spent years in a fascist prison Benjamin never belonged to a political party and

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had no experience in political movements. He had no conception of political action as a way to obtain power
or a method and process of organization, struggle, and education. In one of the darkest periods in history Benjamins views
were understandable; they expressed, paraphrasing Gramscis quote, not only a profound pessimism of the intellect but also of the political will.
But taking Benjamins view on progress to its logical conclusion would undermine, if not paralyze, the will

necessary for political mobilization and struggle. What is the point of political struggle, of revolution, if not to
build a liberated, better, and more egalitarian society? In negating progress, Benjamin the revolutionary
leaves the purpose of a revolution unanswered (at best). For the revolutionaries themselves, he argues, it is
not the future of their revolution, but the image of the memory of their enslaved ancestors that makes them
rebel and fight. Looking back rather than forward he wrote, Social democracy thought fit to assign to the working class the role
of the redeemer of future generations . . . This training made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are
nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren. Benjamins sentiment drives home how the historical
consciousness of oppression prevails in all kinds of movements ethnic, nationalist, or socialist and registers the need to vindicate injustice,
aggression, and even violations of honor and dignity underlying the anger that motivates struggle and sacrifice. There are no

revolutionary social movements without passion and hatred of oppression and exploitation . Although, as C. L. R.
James warned in The Black Jacobins, it is a tragedy when this turns into a desire for vengeance that has no place in
politics. But what is the point of revolution without the perspective of a better future? Is it only to avenge the
past? Romancing the Past Benjamin was not the only one looking backward. There is another left-wing current that has also oriented itself to the
past, not as a memory of oppression that feeds rebellion, but as a recollection of the past with which to criticize the present. Left-wing
romanticism looks backward and attempts to recreate elements of an idealized community lost centuries ago. Michael Lwy and Robert Sayre
identified various strands of left-wing romanticism in their study Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity. New Rousseauism, for example,
looks at the dawn of human history as an idealized Golden Age. Robert Caill, one of its exponents, argues that primitive societies were
characterized by key features limited needs and little interest in accumulation, which both resulted from less emphasis on work and production
and more on leisure devoted to sleep, play, conversation, or the celebration of rites that modern society should learn from. German Marxist
Ernst Bloch, an altogether different kind of romantic thinker, has also caught the attention of the Left once again. Condemning the hostile relation
with nature and greed for profit that overrides all other human motives in industrial capitalist society, he imagines the Middle Ages as a Golden
Age. Bloch singles out artisanal production which produced both superior quality products and intrinsic satisfaction for producers, in contrast
to modern workers lethargy and hatred of work as a cornerstone of the new society. Perhaps the most influential Romantic discussed by Lwy
and Sayre is Ferdinand Tnnies, considered the founder of German sociology. Tnnies penned the famous work Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft
(Community and Society) in the mid 1880s. Gemeinschaft referred to the face-to-face relationships of families, neighbors in small towns ruled by
custom, mutual assistance and concord, while gesellschaft consisted of the impersonal, transactional relations that characterize the social life of
cities, nation-states, and of technological and industrial progress driven by the competitive profit motive. Lwy and Sayre declared Tnnies a
resigned Romantic thinker whose nostalgia for rural and small town gemeinschaft with its family-based economy and its delight in creating and
conserving, was heightened by his realization that it couldnt be recreated and that the social decadence inherent in gesellschaft was inevitable.
The Real Middle Ages Yet in unearthing features of a bygone era and brandishing them as antidotes to the ills of capitalism, these left romantics
played down the nature of the societies that had generated those ostensibly positive features. In extolling limited needs and desires, for example,
they ignored their basis in precarious societies existing on the edge of hunger and subject to the vagaries of the weather and nature, and by severe
limitations in the means of transport and communication. Their simple needs were an expression of their confinement to a local, narrow world,
not an option that they chose. Similarly, artisanal work in the Middle Ages rested on primitive technology designed primarily to serve the needs
of the upper strata, and was often inadequate for feeding and clothing the population. The medieval artisan guilds whose strict regulation
controlled artisan production were an expression of a profoundly hierarchical society where the honors and riches bestowed on their feudal lords
and their retinues contrasted with the surrounding misery of the villages and countryside. The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, in his study of
France and the Netherlands in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, describes these societies as ruled by a violent tenor of life, pervaded by
illness, calamities, indigence, totally exposed to the vagaries of nature. Depicting in stark terms what that society was like, Huizinga writes that
lepers sounded their rattles and went about in processions while beggars exhibited their deformity and misery in churches while frequent
executions were the source of cruel entertainment and excitement. Moreover, Tnniess highly idealized rural and village gemeinschaft also
ignores how the elements he highlights personal relationships and mutual assistance regulated by custom and not the market were part and
parcel of an extremely oppressive society, intolerant of individuality and dissent. E.P. Thompson was highly skeptical of this romantic vein and
criticized communitarianism, which spurned material progress and strongly influenced the 1950s British New Left. In his 1959 essay
Commitment in Politics, Thompson viewed the British New Lefts communitarianism as a return to the old, cramped, claustrophobic
community which was based on the grim equality of hardship, and its disregard for privacy. Thompson also rejected the notion that privacy and
sense of community are necessarily opposed. Community, he wrote, if it arises in the present generation, will be far richer and more complex,
with far more insistence upon variety, freedom of movement, and freedom of choice. This doesnt mean there is nothing to learn from past
societies. It simply suggests that changing the problems and conditions of modern urban life must be done within the context of modern urban life
itself. All Thats Solid Jane Jacobs, who revolutionized the field of urban studies with her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities
explicitly opposed the views of thinkers hostile to cities, such as the influential Lewis Mumford, and, far from suggesting any kind of
gemeinschaft, she strongly criticized planning oriented to the creation of togetherness for Jacobs urban living required clear boundaries
between public and private spaces. Instead, Jacobs advocated a city that fostered mixed and diverse activity and an active street life through, for
example, the construction of short blocks and wide sidewalks that would lead people who had been strangers to behave in cooperative ways.
When people regularly see each other on the street and begin acknowledging each other they become public acquaintances. Some of these
acquaintances begin to develop relationships somewhere between stranger and friend, such as the shopkeeper who kept the keys to the apartments
of absent neighbors. This might not involve the intimate relations ensconced in a glorified gemeinschaft, but it certainly involves social ties that
can be engendered in real urban modern contexts. Contrary to the romantic communitarians, the anonymity inherent in urban life does not

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necessarily imply indifference and callousness towards fellow human beings. The concept and practice of solidarity offers a contemporary
alternative to the idea of the bygone community and to the extreme individualism and atomization of late capitalism. We can conceive of
solidarity as mutual aid and support among strangers with a social and political consciousness that drives them towards a new form of progressive
civic mindedness. It is not necessary to know or be the neighbor of people to engage with them in a wide range of activities ranging from
respecting and joining them in a labor or Black Lives Matter demonstration, supporting the local public school, and keeping quiet at night so
people can sleep. Moreover, a civic culture animated by the spirit of solidarity would in turn influence and be influenced by the strength of labor
and other progressive social movements in society at large. Reactionary Progress However, a critical attitude toward those who bring about or
support progress through oppressive and exploitative actions is as necessary as a critical attitude toward those who romance the past. German
Chancellor Bismarck, Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, and Augusto Pinochet of Chile to name a few all relied on highly exploitative,
oppressive methods, and even massacres, to pursue modernization and economic growth. The pursuit of modernization at all costs has proponents
on the Left as well. Russian socialist historian Roy Medvedev argued vehemently against Isaac Deutschers accolades for Stalin as one of
historys greatest reformers for his rapid industrialization and collectivization of the USSR, which, for Deutscher, realized many of the ideals of
the October Revolution. The price that the people paid the gulag, the purges, the deliberate creation of famines that led to the deaths of
millions of people were enormous, but only proved, according to Deutscher, the difficulty of the task. This objectivist analysis stands above
and outside history, ignoring how history was actually lived by its actors. Medvedevs critique highlights how efforts to modernize society or
speed up production, and whether theyre desirable in a given place and time, should be assessed by how change affects those who will be
impacted by it. Thompson uses this approach in his analysis of the machine breakers the Luddites of early nineteenth century England.
Viewing the Luddites through a supra-historical and abstract lens of progress paints the Luddites as a reactionary movement because they
opposed and resisted the inevitable development of industrial capitalism. But an analysis of that concrete historical moment that takes into
account what and why the Luddites were reacting to led Thompson to a very different conclusion. According to Thompson the Luddites arose at a
critical juncture in which paternalist legislation which had protected the working class was being abrogated in favor of laissez-faire
economic policies, against the will, and conscience, of working people. Although the previous paternalist legislation had been restrictive and even
punitive, it had elements of a benevolent corporate state with legislative and moral sanctions against unscrupulous manufacturers and unjust
employers. Even if allowances are made for the cheapening of products under industrial capitalism, it is impossible to designate as progressive
processes that brought about the degradation of the workers employed in the textile industry. The Luddites were reacting to this loss of protection.
Their movement included demands for a legal minimum wage, control of the sweating of women and juveniles, the involvement of the masters
to find work for skilled men made redundant by machinery, the prohibition of shoddy work, and the right to open trade union combinations.
These demands, argues Thompson, may have looked backwards, but they also contained the elements of a democratic community where
industrial growth is regulated according to ethical priorities, and the pursuit of profit is subordinated to human needs. So while the Luddites tried
to revive old customs and paternalist legislation that could never be revived, they also tried to revive ancient rights to establish new precedents for
the newly developing order. This isnt a call for restoring the working community that the Luddites were struggling to preserve. The triumph of
industrial capitalism has established a new kind of society with its own kind of contradictions, oppression, and exploitation, and has created a
working class with new organizing conditions and possibilities for the future. There Is an Alternative Todays left faces a substantially

different situation from the one that Benjamin confronted in 1940, when he wrote his theses on the concept of
history. At that time he was a man on the run with no political or personal options who ended up committing suicide, frustrated by his failed
attempt to escape Nazi-occupied France. So while the neoliberal epoch that began in the late seventies has dealt serious
defeats to the working class and the Left, it has not destroyed left and working-class organizations or physically
eliminated its militants in the way that fascism did. (Although the threat of the extreme right, evident in spreading Islamophobic and antiimmigrant sentiment, particularly in Europe, is real.) However, the triumph of capitalism after the Cold War has placed

the

future that Walter Benjamin refused to consider at the center of the current left political agenda. Margaret
Thatchers slogan of TINA (There is no Alternative) is precisely designed to indoctrinate people with the idea that laissez-faire capitalism is the
only possible and desirable future. The collapse of the Soviet bloc in the late eighties and early nineties was widely interpreted by the Right and
many liberals not as the failure of a bureaucratic economy run by an undemocratic one-party state, but as proof that socialism cant work,
resurrecting the arguments that Friedrich Hayek and many other conservative thinkers had brandished against the Left decades earlier. At the
same time, the defeats suffered by the working class have stoked a sense of fatalism, and large numbers of

workers are increasingly convinced that they are powerless to significantly change their situation through
collective action. Meanwhile, the expanding gap between the left intellectuals and academics who deny progress,
and the activists struggling for progress, has created a political-theoretical vacuum. This leaves activists on
the ground without a framework to which they can connect their activism and respond to both the left
currents that oppose progress (like some strands of left ecology) and to the ruling ideology that ignores what
progress means in a class society. To develop this framework we need a simple definition of progress: the elimination
of needless human suffering caused by material scarcity and inequality and the powerlessness of working
people over their lives. This definition should acknowledge that Rosa Luxemburgs fear of barbarism is
justified that barbarism is an ever-present possibility, not just in the distant future but also in the present .

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Capitalisms exploitation of labor and resources will collapse modern

civilizationradical redistribution of resources is necessary to avert
extinction.
Ahmed 14
Nafeez Ahmed. Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development. March 14 2014. NASA-funded study: industrial civilization headed for
irreversible collapse? The Guardian.

global industrial civilisation could collapse in

coming decades due to unsustainable resource exploitation and increasingly unequal wealth distribution . Noting
that warnings of 'collapse' are often seen to be fringe or controversial, the study attempts to make sense of compelling historical data showing that "the process
of rise-and-collapse is actually a recurrent cycle found throughout history." Cases of severe civilisational
disruption due to "precipitous collapse - often lasting centuries - have been quite common." The independent research
A new study partly-sponsored by Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center has highlighted the prospect that

project is based on a new cross-disciplinary 'Human And Nature DYnamical' (HANDY) model, led by applied mathematician Safa Motesharrei of the US National Science Foundation-supported

National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, in association with a team of natural and social scientists. The HANDY model was created using a minor Nasa grant, but the
study based on it was conducted independently. The study based on the HANDY model has been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed Elsevier journal, Ecological Economics. It finds

advanced, complex civilisations are susceptible to collapse, raising questions about

the sustainability of modern civilisation: "The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not more) advanced Han, Mauryan,
and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to the fact that advanced, sophisticated,
complex, and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent." By investigating the human-nature dynamics of these past
that according to the historical record even

cases of collapse, the project identifies the most salient interrelated factors which explain civilisational decline, and which may help determine the risk of collapse today: namely, Population,

These factors can lead to collapse when they converge to generate two crucial social
features: "the stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity"; and "the
economic stratification of society into Elites [rich] and Masses (or "Commoners") [poor]" These social
phenomena have played "a central role in the character or in the process of the collapse," in all such cases
over "the last five thousand years." Currently, high levels of economic stratification are linked directly to
overconsumption of resources, with "Elites" based largely in industrialised countries responsible for both: "...
accumulated surplus is not evenly distributed throughout society, but rather has been controlled by an elite.
The mass of the population, while producing the wealth, is only allocated a small portion of it by elites,
usually at or just above subsistence levels." The study challenges those who argue that technology will resolve these challenges by increasing efficiency:
"Technological change can raise the efficiency of resource use, but it also tends to raise both per capita resource consumption and
the scale of resource extraction, so that, absent policy effects, the increases in consumption often compensate for the
increased efficiency of resource use." Productivity increases in agriculture and industry over the last two
centuries has come from "increased (rather than decreased) resource throughput," despite dramatic efficiency gains over the
same period. Modelling a range of different scenarios, Motesharrei and his colleagues conclude that under conditions "closely reflecting the reality of the
world today... we find that collapse is difficult to avoid." In the first of these scenarios, civilisation: ".... appears to be on a sustainable path for quite a
long time, but even using an optimal depletion rate and starting with a very small number of Elites, the Elites eventually consume too much, resulting in a
famine among Commoners that eventually causes the collapse of society. It is important to note that this Type-L collapse is due to an
inequality-induced famine that causes a loss of workers, rather than a collapse of Nature." Another scenario focuses on the role of continued resource exploitation, finding that "with a
larger depletion rate, the decline of the Commoners occurs faster, while the Elites are still thriving, but eventually the Commoners collapse
completely, followed by the Elites." In both scenarios, Elite wealth monopolies mean that they are buffered from the most
"detrimental effects of the environmental collapse until much later than the Commoners", allowing them to
"continue 'business as usual' despite the impending catastrophe." The same mechanism, they argue, could explain how "historical
collapses were allowed to occur by elites who appear to be oblivious to the catastrophic trajectory (most clearly
Climate, Water, Agriculture, and Energy.

apparent in the Roman and Mayan cases)." Applying this lesson to our contemporary predicament, the study warns that: "While some members of society might raise the alarm that the system is
moving towards an impending collapse and therefore advocate structural changes to society in order to avoid it, Elites and their supporters, who opposed making these changes, could point to the

the worst-case scenarios are by no means inevitable,

structural changes could avoid collapse, if not pave the way toward a more stable civilisation. The two key
solutions are to reduce economic inequality so as to ensure fairer distribution of resources , and to dramatically reduce
resource consumption by relying on less intensive renewable resources and reducing population growth: " Collapse can be avoided and population can reach equilibrium if the
per capita rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion ."
long sustainable trajectory 'so far' in support of doing nothing." However, the scientists point out that
and suggest that appropriate policy and

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Voting negative refuses the affirmative in favor of Historical Materialist

Pedagogy as a method for understanding both society and waste. Without
revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary moment. Only a focus on
the structural antagonisms produced by capitalism can lead to transformative
politics.
Ebert 9 [Teresa, Associate Professor of English, State University of New York at Albany, THE TASK OF CULTURAL CRITIQUE, pp. 92-95]
materialist critique aims a t ending
class rule. It goes beyond description and explains the working of wage labor and the abstract structures that
cannot be experienced directly but underwrite it. Materialist critique unpacks the philosophical and
theoretical arguments that provide concepts for legitimizing wage labor and marks the textual representations that make it seem a normal
Unlike these rewritings, which reaffirm in a somewhat new language the system of wage labor with only minor internal reforms,

instead of focusing on micropractices (prison, gender, education, war, literature, and so on ) in

local and regional terms, materialist critique relates these practices to the macrostructures of
capitalism and provides the knowledges necessary to put an end to exploitation. At the center of these knowledges is class
part of life. In short,

Pedagogy of critique is a class critique of social relations and the knowledges they produce

critique.
. Its subject is wage
labor, not the body without organs . An exemplary lesson in pedagogy of critique is provided by Marx, who concludes chapter 6 of Capital, " The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power, " by
addressing the sphere within which wages are exchanged for labor power and the way this exchange is represented in the legal, philosophical, and representational apparatuses of capitalism as
equal . He provides knowledge of the structures of wage labor and the theoretical discourses that sustain it. I have quoted this passage before and will refer to it again and again. Here is the full
version: We now know how the value paid by the purchaser to the possessor of this peculiar commodity, labour-power, is determined. The use-value which the former gets in exchange, manifests
itself only in the actual usufruct, in the consumption of the labour-power. The money-owner buys everything necessary for this purpose, such as raw material, in the market, and pays for it at its
full value . The consumption of labourpower is at one and the same time the production of commodities and of surplus-value. The consumption of labour-power is completed, as is the case of
every other commodity, outside the limits of the market or the sphere of circulation. Accompanied by Mr. Moneybags and by the possessor of labour-power, we therefore take leave for a time of
this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in view of all men, and follow them both into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there stares us in the face
"No admittance except on business . " Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital is produced. We shall at last force the secret of profit making. This sphere that we are
deserting, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham.
Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labour-power, are constrained only by their own free will. They contract as free agents, and the agreement they come to, is but the
form in which they give legal expression to their common will. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent
for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself. The only force that brings them together and puts them in relation with
each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interests of each. Each looks to himself only, and no one troubles himself about the rest, and just because they do so, do they all, in
accordance with the pre-established harmony of things, or under the auspices of an all-shrewd providence, work together to their mutual advantage, for the common weal and in the interest of all.
On leaving this sphere of simple circulation or of exchange of commodities, which furnishes the "Free-trader vulgaris" with his views and ideas, and with the standard by which he judges a
society based on capital and wages, we think we can perceive a change in the physiognomy of our dramatis personae. He, who before was the money-owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the
possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other, timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to

Materialist critique is fundamental to a transformative feminist politics. Through

critique the subject develops historical knowledges of the social totality: she acquires, in other words, an
understanding of how the existing social institutions (motherhood, child care, love, paternity, taxation, family, . . . and so on ) are part of the
social relations of production, how they are located in exploitative relations of difference, and how they can be
changed. Materialist critique, in other words, is that knowledge practice that historically situates the conditions of
possibility of what empirically exists under capitalist relations of class difference -particularly the division of labor-and, more
important, points to what is suppressed by the empirically existing: what could be, instead of what actually is. Critique indicates , in other words, that what exists is
not necessarily real or true but only the actuality under wage labor. The role of critique in pedagogy is exactly
this: the production of historical know ledges and class consciousness of the social relations, knowledges that
mark the transformability of existing social arrangements and the possibility of a different social
organization--one that is free from necessity. Quite simply then, the pedagogy of critique is a mode of social knowing that inquires
into what is not said, into the silences and the suppressed or the missing, in order to unconceal operations of economic and political power
underlying the myriad concrete details and seemingly disparate events and representations of our lives . It shows how apparently disconnected zones of
culture are in fact linked by the highly differentiated and dispersed operation of the systematic, abstract logic
market and has nothing to expect but-a hiding.

of the exploitation of the division of labor that informs all the practices of culture and society. It reveals how seemingly unique concrete experiences are in fact the common effect of social
relations of production in wage labor capitalism. In sum, materialist critique both disrupts that which represents itself as natural and thus as inevitable and explains how it is materially produced.

Critique, in other words, enables us to explain how social differences, specifically gender, race, sexuality, and class, have been
systematically produced and continue to operate within regimes of exploitation-namely, the international
division of labor in global capitalism-so we can change them. It is the means for producing politically effective and transformative knowledges . The
claim of affective pedagogy is that it sets the subject free by making available to her or him the unruly force of pleasure and the unrestrained flows of desire, thereby turning her or him into an
oppositional subject who cuts through established representations and codings to find access to a deterritorialized subjectivity. But the radicality of this self, at its most volatile moment, is the
radicality of the class politics of the ruling class, a class for whom the question of poverty no longer exists. The only question left for it, as I have already indicated, is the question of liberty as the

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freedom of desire. Yet this is a liberty acquired at the expense of the poverty of others. The pedagogy of critique engages these issues by situating itself not in the space of the self, not in the space
of desire, not in the space of liberation, but in the revolutionary site of collectivity, need, and emancipation.

The core of the pedagogy of critique is that

not simply for enlightening the individual to see through the arbitrariness of
signification and the violence of established representations . It recognizes that it is a

education is

historical practice and, as such, it is always part of the larger forces of production and relations of
production. It understands that all pedagogies are, in one way or the other, aimed at producing an efficient
labor force. Unlike the pedagogy of desire, the pedagogy of critique does not simply teach that knowledge is another name for power, nor does it marginalize knowledge as a detour of
desire. It acknowledges the fissures in social practices-including its own-but it demonstrates that they are

historical and not textual or epistemological . It, therefore, does not retreat into mysticism by declaring the task of teaching to be the
teaching of the impossible and, in doing so, legitimate the way things are. Instead, the pedagogy of critique is a worldly teaching of the worldly.

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2NC Updates

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AltMaoism
The Maoist approach to dialectical materialism emphasizes that the universe,
history, and humans have endless potential, and stresses a concrete analysis
instead of the orthodox Marxist focus on laws, implying human agency
propels history and further empowering the revolution
Pang 16 (Laikwan, Scholar of East Asian Studies and PhD in Comparative Literature from Washington
University in St. Louis, Mao's Dialectical Materialism: Possibilities for the Future, Rethinking Marxism, 28:1 p.
115-116)//MNW
Let me turn to a polemic raised by Samir Amin (1998a, xxiiixxv; 1998b, 4956), a self- avowed Maoist, who introduces
the idea of underdetermination in response to Althusserian overdetermination in order to describe the making of
social history. Althusser proposed the concept of overdetermination to demonstrate that history is determined not
by any single factor but by many of them. He believed this idea could promote the liberation of human beings from the determinism of
the dominant orthodox dialectical materialism. It is important to articulate the active role played by human subjects in historical progression,
encouraging revolutionaries to have faith in their projects. As we know, Althussers conception of overdetermination is partly inspired by the
Maoist break with reductionist economic determinism, and he took the Cultural Revolution as a functional model for demonstrating the ways that
intellec- tuals can steer revolution against capitalism through culture and ideology (Robcis 2012). But Amin argues that even Althusser

cannot avoid the determinist trap because, according to the Althusserian model, all factorswhether economic, political, or cul- tural
work together to make change. As such, the model of overdetermination suggests, if only implicitly, a convergence of
historical forces in reproducing the system. Amin argues further that Althusser indirectly suggests that all factors
would adapt themselves to the requirements of the economic one. Amin thus proposes an alternative concept of
underdetermination, which more explicitly emphasizes that there are simply no determining factors in historical
progression. Amin (1998b, 51) argues that there are many conflicts, each of which expresses its own logic and is developed among many
distinct determining factors, and these conflicts lend history its own specific range of uncertainty so that history cannot be
understood in the same ways as fields governed by natural law. To me, Althusser and Amin share very similar concerns, and Amin
only wants to push Althusser one step further. Both Althussers overdetermination and Amins underdetermination testify to how these selfavowed Maoist thinkers reject any forms of fixed history. In his lecture on dialectical materialism, which is considered the

blueprint for his two lectures on contradiction and practice, Mao (1990a, 109) emphasizes that the uni- verse is open,
so that there is no end to history. Similarly, he never conceptualizes an end to revolution and instead insists that revolution
must be continually carried out in order to keep the power structure open (Mao 1999a, 349). With so much emphasis on practices, Maos
history can only be an unfinished one. Maos unyielding confi- dence in the human will rests on an awareness of the
ruthlessness of historical forces. In his Reading Notes on the Soviet Unions Political Economics, Mao (1974, 2745) openly
criticizes that Soviet Marxist orthodoxy focuses too much on historical laws, including the way the Soviet textbook always
starts from laws, tenets and definitions, an approach which has all along been opposed by Marxism. He argues that one must instead
perform concrete analysis before principles and tenets can be discovered and verified. As such, Maos understanding
of human subjective power, which can propel history, is both strong and weak because it faces the actual objective
materialist conditions that can never be properly predicted and theorized .

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Maoism holds that history is not a grand narrative, but that instead human
subjects rise above the tide of history to spark revolution. But at the same
time, Maoism is influenced by tradition Chinese thought and is humbled
before history, believing humans are the agents that can spark a change but
that they do not preside over history itself. Maoist dialectics open up the
possibility of revolutionary human agency while silmultaneously knowing the
revolution is greater than the subject
Pang 16 (Laikwan, Scholar of East Asian Studies and PhD in Comparative Literature from Washington
University in St. Louis, Mao's Dialectical Materialism: Possibilities for the Future, Rethinking Marxism, 28:1 p.
116-119)//MNW
Marxs historical materialism is already caught up in the dialectic of a history that progresses on its own and that
provides the conditions for peoples political action. When Mao adopted this dynamic, his theory exhibited a more

the human subject must rise above

history to lead history, but historical forces are so powerful that they can ultimately
bury all subjects . This dynamic is most readily detected in Maos creative and per- sonal writings, which often exhibit the authors

entangled set of ten- sions between the human subject and history:

yearning to become one with history and the universe. We also have to recognize the many sides of Mao, to understand that he is not only a CCP
leader but also a romantic artist. Particularly in his aes- thetic and affective impulses, Mao is truly rebellious, continually saying no

to the status quo and refusing all forms of domination in order to commit to a process of becoming. For example, in the
famous poem he wrote in 1949 when the CCP was defeating the GMD and was about to take over Chinese rule, we read: Rain and a windstorm
rage blue and yellow over Zhong the bell mountain as a million peerless troops cross the Great River. The peak is a coiled dragon, the city a
crouching tiger more dazzling than before. The sky is spinning and the earth upside down. We are elated. Yet we must use our courage to chase
the hopeless enemy. We must not stoop to fame like the overlord Xiang Yu. If heaven has feeling it will grow old and watch our seas turn into
mulberry fields. (Mao 2008, 75) In the first six lines of the poem, Mao describes the great victory of the Peoples

Liberation Army in the 1949 battle for Nanjing. The author learns from the failure of Emperor Xiang Yu and asserts
that the CCP must not be satisfied with partial victory. But in the last two lines, Mao shifts his tone suddenly and
asserts that changes and chaos are natural to the human world, which heaven only witnesses apathetically. Here we find Mao
simul- taneously occupying two positions: he is squarely in human history while also regarding this history from an elevated, transcendent
position. And this retreat from history shown in the last two lines allows Mao the poet to be humbled before history. The double identi-

fication clearly betrays a traditional Chinese approach in which human freedom can be realized only through the
dual recognition that, first, humanity occupies an extremely modest place in the larger scheme of things and that,
second, we must continue to engage in the double gesture of social engagement and social retreat, a gesture that
characterizes the key dynamics of Confucianism and Daoism in shaping traditional Chinese literati . As leader, Mao
clearly sees himself as the one who can change history, and the modest and retiring dimension of traditional Chinese thought is repressed more
than manifested in his political philosophy. But in his poetry we find a romantic individual aware of himself as part of an immense world in
which no one can claim control over the free will of every other living thing. Though Mao was not a prolific poet, his poems were extremely
influential among the Chinese people during his time. We could say that his poems are just as effective as, if not more effective than, his political
speeches and writing at interpellating the Maoist subject. Among the sixty-seven poems officially identified as his creation (Mao 1996), a
majority of them describe recent battles of the CCP, emphasizing the heroism of the soldiers and the supporting civilians. For Mao, the military
was poetic, amounting to an aestheticization of violence. He was keen on comparing himself and contemporary Chinese soldiers, peasants, and
workers with the great heroes of Chinese history. These poems, in turn, agitated his people, who quoted his lines profusely when engaging in
propaganda or actual struggle. But there are other poems written by Mao that reveal a different relation between people and

time. Let us read another short poem Mao (2008, 105) wrote in 1962, titled In Praise of the Winter Plum Blossom: Rain and winds bring
spring back, and it comes with flying snow. Ice hangs on a thousand feet of cliff yet at the tip of the topmost branch the plum blooms. The plum is
not a delicious girl showing off yet she heralds spring. When mountain flowers are in wild bloom she giggles in all the color.7 The plum

being praised in this poem is the harbinger of spring but is not the one who makes spring happen. It is not the ideal
Maoist subject like the foolish old man who turns the impossible into the possible through his cross-generational
will and labor (Mao 1965c); the plum instead simply witnesses and announces the change of time and the advent of a
new world. It functions primarily as a messenger, and it perishes, albeit gaily, seeing spring come. In fact, Zhou Enlai used this poem to
explain to Richard Nixon the historical significance of his visit to China in 1972: What this poem really means is that he who takes the initiative
is not one who will then reach out and stretch out his hand, because by the time the flowers are in full bloom, they are ready to wither and die

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Cap K Updates 23
(see Mao 2008, 115). The

plum can be seen as the agent, mentioned in the previous poem, who witnesses the seas
turning into mulberry fields, but this does not mean that it presides over history. It is instead caught up in history and takes an
active role in calling forth history, which, however, also foretells its death. It is important not to overemphasize the Maoist subject
who is able to change the world against all odds because there is a dialectical side of Maoism that stresses the
indeterminate nature of historical progression as beyond any single persons control. In a 1966 letter he wrote to his wife,
Jiang Qing, Mao remarked that he could see a new world developing upon his demise. As an onlooker (he was not in Beijing at the time), Mao
felt uneasy about the rapid development of the Mao cult. He knew that he was being used by others for political purposes and that for the moment
he could only follow the flow and be part of it: I am confident, yet not. When I was young, I told others that I believed I could live to two hundred
years old, and I could swim for three thousand li. I was very asser- tive. However, I am also not confident in myself, always believing that the
monkey, which is me, can become the king only because there are no tigers in the moun- tain ... I think their original intent is to use Zhong Kui to
bust down the ghosts, and I become the CCPs Zhong Kui in the 1960s. But things always go opposite direc- tions. The higher one is blown up,
the heavier one will fall down. I am ready to become pieces. (Mao 2013, 377; my translation) Although the letter seems to indicate

Maos reluctant willingness to play along with a plan instituted by someone else, he also discerns the larger
historical wave in which he is only a player. Mao is not the tiger: not only would he lose control but by embracing the tidal wave the
monkey would ultimately be swallowed up. We can now go back to the key argument and concern of Zizek, who criticizes that Mao is not able to
transgress himself. Against Mao, Zizek (2011, 681; italics in original) suggests that it is an inner necessity of the original teaching to submit to
and survive this so-called betrayal [that of Marx by Lenin and of Lenin by Mao], to survive this violent act of being torn out of ones original
context and thrown into a foreign land- scape where it has to reinvent itself because only in this way is universality born. The plum featured in
In Praise of the Winter Plum Blossom is the one who dies giggling, and it fulfills itself by seeing its original living environment transformed
into a comple- tely new one where it has no place. Along the same lines, being the king, the monkey will also be killed. Maos creative and

They bring us neither to the mechanical

progression of history nor to a bad infinity of struggle, but they depict an agent
calling forth a revolution that will also ultimately submerge the agent . This is the

personal writings offer a strong sense of self- transgression.

universality that Mao propagates, which probably is not that different from what Zizek proposes.

The Maoist approach to time and history allows for a master narrative that
can produce heroes and revolution, but also produces an open future that can
overcome anything. This duality of chronological time and infinite
opportunity makes Maoism a powerful critique for blasting down the
capitalist conception of time by mobilizing individuals agency toward a
collective, socialist future
Pang 16 (Laikwan, Scholar of East Asian Studies and PhD in Comparative Literature from Washington
University in St. Louis, Mao's Dialectical Materialism: Possibilities for the Future, Rethinking Marxism, 28:1 p.
119-121)//MNW
She then asserts that Benjamins concept of messianic time could be a productive alternative to the bipolar
understanding of Aufhebung as either simple negation or simple affirmation. Benjamin (1968, 25364) argues that
in order to rescue the past from being employed to legitimize the hegemonic present, we need to redeem historys
fullness and see history not as progress but as full of contingencies and possibilities. He proposes the alternative
model of messianic time as now-time, in opposition to the homo- geneous chronological time used by the ruling
class to present history as a continuum of progress. Messianic time is a time of the present because at any second the
Messiah might come. This concept of time forces us to focus on the here and now, which would effectively strip the
future of its magic and reinvest the past with its full potential. It is not my purpose here to celebrate Benjamins
concept of time to criticize the current Left. Instead, I want to borrow Buck-Morsss idea to engage with Maos
histori- cal thought. Reconnecting Benjamin and Mao, who are both heavily indebted to the dialectic, I hope to
rekindle the possibilities of history latent in Maoism and to chal- lenge the post-Mao Chinese state, whose
nationalist discourse is built entirely on a singular history of China. If the third meaning of the Hegelian Aufhebung
grounds Ben- jamins doomed but also open-ended messianic time,

Maos deep engagement with dia23

Cap K Updates 24

lectical materialism should also allow history to take over politics . For Benjamin, although
messianic time focuses on the here and now, its politics lies mostly in the past or in a present reconstruction of the
past. The future, if there is one, can only be altered through our rereading of history, of powers status quo. As
Benjamin (1996b, 402) claims, In reality, there is not a moment that would not carry with it its revolutionary
chance...The entrance into [a locked historical] chamber coincides in a strict sense with political action, and it is by
means of such entry that pol- itical action, however destructive, reveals itself as messianic. Here we find messianic
time to be both a time of the present and a time of the past. Present political action helps unlock a historical chamber
that has been closed. Conversely, by seizing hold of fleeting memories and of a disjointed past projected from the
present, we can also unlock the possibilities of the present. Messianic time is the time written by every one of us, so
that the individual produces his or her own time, which contributes yet is irre- ducible to the larger chronological
time (Agamben 2002, 114). Politics is embedded in the way each of us makes sense of our own lives. This concept
of the messianic invites us to locate alternative moments for unlocking alternative histories and politics. In contrast,
the dominant Maoist history is meant to justify socialist revolutions and communist utopia. Mao stresses the
revolutionary subject, evading incapable people and marginal events. Along with his emphasis on the mass line,
he also tends to treat the masses as a single hero, not a plurality of differences. As such, the Maoist era was one of
the most heroic periods in Chinas history, and there were invincible heroes and heroines doing all kinds of
impossible chores out of a sincere devotion to the people (see Mittler 2013, 2237). We could never effectively
locate alternative his- tories in the official Maoist discourse, no matter how Mao himself was fascinated with them.
But as I have also mentioned, Maoist historiography is heavily indebted to dialectics, so that this history is
antifoundational, with no inevitable relation between past and future. Simply speaking, Maoist historiography
contains contradic- tory elements: there is a master narrative based on a single chronological time, but we also find
an open future that can overwhelm everything. Another interesting point of comparison lies in aesthetics.
Benjamins aesthetic moment is of great transformative potential. As Benjamin (1996a, 323) claims in his analysis
of Goethes Elective Affinities: The literary work of art in the true sense arises only where the word liberates itself
from the spell of even the greatest task. Such poetry does not descend from God but ascends from what in the souls
is unfathomable; it has a share in mans deepest self. This deepest self represents the struggle of the life-form,
where art, history, and theology meet. Agamben (1999, 10) describes the relation between Benjamins aesthetics and
historiography in this way: By destroying the transmissibility of the past, aesthetics recuperates its negativity and
makes intransmissibility a value in itself in the image of aesthetic beauty, in this way opening up for man a space
between past and future, in which he can found his action and his knowledge. We can read this statement along
with Buck-Morsss criticism of the current Lefts inability to generate anything new. Benjamin urges us to rescue
the past, and this act of rescuing is also an act of liberation, requiring and breeding imaginations in the image of
aesthetic beauty. If Zizek criticizes Mao for not being able to get out of the bad infinity of endless nega- tion, I think
Maos poetics is evidence of his ability to generate the new. It is true that in his poems we find Mao caught between
his desire for control and his willingness to forgo. There is a clear aesthetic dimension to the grandiosity of the
Maoist hero com- mitting to foresight, knowing that it might ultimately fail. This historical view celebrating
freedom and will can become extremely manipulative and dangerous when pushed by a powerful authoritative
regime that aims to control both material reality and peoples subjective feelings. But at the same time, Mao also
indulged in his poetics, allowing himself to wrestle with history and the present, opening up an inde- terminate space
between past and future. Mao is a unique and self-contradictory thinker, and his poetics, historical view, and
political theories complexly intervene with each other. He writes poems to write history, and his political theories are
often so aestheticized that fiction and reality, imagination and fact, the rational and the sub- jective enmesh.
Maoism clearly contains more resources to blast open homogenous capitalist time
than what Zizek has concluded and what the current PRC state allows. Recently in the PRC we have observed the
resurgence of a new intellectual and populist force on the left, with many Chinese citizens expressing nostalgia for
the Maoist past in reaction to a post-Maoist China ridden with social inequality. Chinas new left wing is
undoubtedly composed of many different ideological interests and pos- itions. But a problematic common
manifestation of this re- or misappropriation of Maoism is its tendency to align with nationalism against the West by
way of identifi- cation with the global Left, with global capitalism understood as the root of all evil. Not only is this
leftist critique of Western hegemony a convenient way of circumvent- ing contemporary problems within China for
which the government itself should be held responsible, it also avoids a critical engagement with the PRCs own
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communist history and historiography. The current political reality in the PRC prevents any anti- statist arguments
from being articulated, thereby burying not only Maoist antifeudal discussions but also any messianic moments that
could be found within that history. Real political pressure causes the new left wing in the PRC to refrain from
addressing what is taboo, and the consequences are an endorsement of the status quo and an inability to offer a new
imagination for the future like Mao did. As Yiching Wu (2014, xviii) argues, among the vibrant debates and
criticisms of the PRCs late capitalist turn, there is an underdevelopment of self-critique. If we focus on the
dominant history, I agree with Zizek that Maoism is not able to offer an imagination that challenges its own

we can still locate potential seeds contained in Maoism that can give us a
different reading of the future . The giggling plum demon- strates a more nuanced dialectic relation

authority. But

between a people and a historical progression than Xi Jinpings repeated emphasis on China as a daguo (big
country). We should commit to the collective effort of locating these individual agents and repressed events
and allowing them to be heard, to the extent that they might construct a polyphony of tunes and rhythms to
make chronological history impossible. While Maoism constructs the myth that all legitimate Chinese citizens
are heroes, what we can do now is to unfas- ten individuals from the master chronology. A responsible
collective commitment to the future and to politics cannot be realized until we as a people each return to our
past and let our past speak again.

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AltEco-Marx (China Specific)

Ecological marxist thought is an innovation of Marxism in the Chinese
context, and it seeks to use dialectics of production and nature to explain
capitalist exploitation and translate that theory into a socialist revolution
based on production equality instead of distributive equality, as well as a
harmonious relationship with nature
Dongjie and Haiying 16 (Niu and Ming, reporters at The Chinese Social Sciences Today
interviewing Zhang Yunfei, professor at Remnin Universitys School of Marxism Studies,
The Greening of Marxism: Interview with Chinas Zhang Yunfei, http://www.ccds.org/2016/05/the-greening-of-marxism-interview-with-chinas-zhang-yunfei/, May 6
2016)//MNW
CSST: What are the connections between the ecological Marxism and Marxism? The connections between the two are viewed from three
perspectives. Some see ecological Marxism as orthodox Marxism. Based on Marxist texts and the history of the discipline, some theorists tried to
explore the resources involving ecological thought in Marxism and established a framework of ecological thinking within Marxism. Marxism
thus can serve to solve ecological issues. Others view it as revisionary Marxism. Some scholars thought that Marxism didnt offer solutions to the
issue of alienated consumption, which is the cause of ecological crisis. Therefore, a view on ecological issues should be supplementary to
Marxism. Other scholars contended that Marxism only dealt with the first contradictionbetween productive forces and productive relations
while neglecting the contradiction between them and production conditions, but the second contradiction is the source of ecological crisis. Hence,
the second contradiction became the starting point for ecological Marxism. In fact, Marx and Engels have touched upon these

issues. They just didnt give a clear and detailed explanation of them. To introduce an ecological approach is a
revision of Marxism, but the theory is not necessarily revisionism. The third perspective is that ecological
Marxism is an innovation of Marxism. After examining the ecological dilemmas facing mankind, some scholars have
proposed various theoretical schemas and practical plans to resolve ecological problems and strive for sustainable
development, sticking to the stance of Marxism while combining the viewpoints and methods of Marxism with
practice in environment protection. In this way, the ecological thinking in Marxism can be enriched and
developed. CSST: Can ecological problems be radically solved through ecological Marxism? Zhang: In terms of the means of production,
ecological Marxism opposes private ownership, especially capitalist private ownership . American scholar Joel Kovel
criticized the neoliberalism preached by advocates of the Tragedy of the Commons theory. For the purposes of production, John
Bellamy Foster, author of Marxs Ecology, argued that basic needs and long-term environmental protection should
be emphasized. When it comes to distribution, Foster held that only by adhering to environmental equality
can environmental movements avoid becoming alienated from the working class, who stand firm against capitalism in
terms of the means of production. James OConnor argued that the essence of bourgeois justice is distributive
justice, while productive justice is the aim of ecological socialism. Ecological Marxism replaces capitalism
with socialism as an economic model, which facilitates the ultimate solution of ecological problems . Only by
adhering to the notion of popular sovereignty can the ecological transformation of society be achieved. As for a cultural model, ecological
Marxism sees the impact of culture reforms on harmony between humans and nature. Mechanistic thinking,
a major factor that leads to ecological problems, should be converted to ecological thinking . Kovel held that to have
an ecological understanding is to recognize the fact that humans are part of nature and inseparable from their environment. In terms of values,
Foster pointed out that the perspective should be people oriented and focused on poor people in particular. Kovel argued that justice is essential to
the mission of liberating the workforce and relieving ecological crisis. As for social models, ecological Marxism has observed the

severity of ecological crisis brought by high consumption in capitalist consumer society, and thus calls for
reasonable and ecological consumption. In addition, as the basic unit of society and life, communities directly affect the efficiency of
ecological management. Therefore, ecological Marxism emphasizes community and advocates community justice. However, some eco-socialists
equte community with anarchism, which should be dealt with based on special cases. Socialist environmentalist Fred Magdoff put forth a general
model for harmony culture. Harmony culture is equal to socialism plus the economic goal of meeting the basic

needs of humanity while protecting the environment plus equality in essence plus simplicity in life . This model is
quite inspiring for the establishment of a sound ecological system in socialist society. CSST: Does ecological Marxism face any limitations or
dilemmas in theory and in practice? Zhang: There are several problems facing the development of Marxism. First, Marxist philosophical ontology
is not unified or clear. Realizing this, Kovel introduced the concept of intrinsic value of eco-centrism into Marxism, contending that ecological
Marxism refers to achieving intrinsic value through a socialist means. However, eco-centrism belongs to the realm of green thought, which does

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not involve politics, whereas ecological Marxism pertains to red thought, which is dedicated to political issues. Therefore, there are theoretical
and political barriers to integrating the two concepts. In addition, issues concerning ecological Marxism are mostly debated using historical
materialism, while dialectics of nature are seldom referenced. Second, emphasis should be placed on constructing a sound

ecological system in China. The perception of ecological civilization, the creation of Marxism in a Chinese
context, is an innovative development in Marxist ecological thought. Socialist ecological construction in China
is an innovation to achieve this goal. Therefore, as Chinese scholars need Marxism as guiding principle,
ecological Marxism need to be devoted to Chinese practices. Organic Marxism recently proposed by some American
scholars highlighted the construction of socialist ecological civilization in China.

Ecological marxism analyzes the material relations of production between

proletariat, capitalist, culture and ecology, and updates marxism to include
the vast quantity of modern knowledge to explain the destruction of natural
cycles through material dialectics. This historical analysis provides an
essential lens for understanding capitalist exploitation and how to bring it to
an end, thus converting theory into revolution aimed at ending capitalist
oppression and exploitation
Hollemann 15 (Hannah, assistant professor of sociology at Amherst College in
Massachusetts; this talk was given at a US-Sino conference on Chinese Marxism,
Method in Ecological Marxism, Monthly Review Issue 67 No. 5)//MNW
The strength of ecological Marxism, as it is practiced today amongst scholars associated with the third stage
of ecosocialist research, is that it takes as its objective the confrontation of reality with reason as the means with
which to draw the necessary conclusions for conscious action designed to bring about desirable change. This confrontation, as Sweezy and Paul
Baran discussed, inevitably involve[s] comparisons of what is with what would be reasonable.9 For Marx, what was reasonable was explained
not in abstract ethical terms or principles, but in terms of an understanding of the appropriate goals of socialism based on concrete, deep
investigation into existing social relations and the real barriers these presented to the development of a society in which the free development of
each is the condition for the free development of all and wherein the freely associated producers [could] govern the human metabolism with
nature in a rational way.'10 Marxs confrontation of reality, his investigation of what is, was based

philosophically and methodologically on a materialist conception of social and natural history. This made
possible his powerful critique of capitalist social relations and inherent class antagonisms , which result in an
irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism as prescribed by the natural laws of life itself.11 It also made
possible his recognition that the transcendence of class antagonisms is necessary, but not sufficient for
ecologically sustainable human development. Moving beyond socially and ecologically destructive social
organization requires the explicit integration of ecological and other communal concerns into the
anticapitalist revolutionary process itself.12 Because his methodology was rooted in a materialist conception of history, Marx
didnt take anything for granted, but rather looked for the historical development, consequences, and
interrelations of various aspects of the whole of social and biological evolutionary development. As a result of
this methodological approach, Marxs engagement with the natural and social sciences allowed his critique of
capitals class relations to develop as an ecological critique, while extending to a range of other concerns, including the
oppressive nature of the family and gender relations in bourgeois society, the structure of political power and the state, and specific technological
and legal developments, along with much else. The struggle against the exploitation and oppression of the working class

in Marx and Engels conception included the struggle against the oppression of women, imperialist aggression
and colonial exploitation, and the destruction of nature, all outcomes of a particular ensemble of historical
developments that must be transcended. A second essential feature of Marxs method is the critical use of abstraction. In the Preface
to Capital Marx wrote, in the analysis of economic forms neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of assistance. The force of abstraction
must replace both.13 His point was not that we do not need microscopes, but that we need to choose the appropriate

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Cap K Updates 28
tools of science for the problem under study. Abstraction in scientific investigation allows us to bring the
essential into relief and to make possible its analysis.14 Choices about our abstractions have to do with the problem we are
investigating and what we determine are its essential elements. Determining what is essential, however, is not a straightforward task. We make
provisional hypotheses about what constitutes the essential aspects of any problem and constantly check these against the data of experience, or
continued investigation into the actuality of historical development.15 For Marx, the determination of what was essential took

him into deep studies of natural and social history, which he describes in various places, including the Preface to A Contribution
to the Critique of Political Economy. Based on his intensive studies, he asserted, for example, that the capital relationan
antagonistic class relationwas the all-dominating economic power of bourgeois society, which conditioned
relations between people and between human society and the land.16 This class relation was the center of investigation and abstraction was
employed to isolate it, to reduce it to its purest form, to enable it to be subjected to the most painstaking analysis, free of all unrelated
disturbances.17 For different problems we apply the tool of abstraction in different ways. One may abstract from a difference which another is
trying to explain, yet each may be justified from the point of view of the problem which he is studying.18 The use of different levels of
abstraction, from low to high, also reflects the purpose of the investigation. Mediating factors may be removed from one level of analysis to
clarify a particular relation, and reintroduced at another, depending on the object of study. The legitimate purpose of abstraction in social
sciences, of course, is never to get away from the real world but rather to isolate certain aspects of the real world for intensive investigation.19
Along with our scientific concerns, our abstractions also reflect our prejudices and political commitments. As Marxist scientists Richard
Lewontin and Richard Levins wrote, Much abstraction is evasive of what matters, chosen for reasons of safety and

convenience. They use as an example neoclassical economics, which posits the individual making choices in ahistoric
markets. While this, they say, leads to elegant theorems about rational choice, it hides exploitation, monopoly, class conflict, and the
evolution of capitalism. They also cite Bertolt Brechts warning that we live in a terrible time when to talk about trees is a kind of silence about
injustice.' Today, of course, trees and nature more generally figure prominently in the study of justice. But not always, and the link is usually
insufficiently made. This point is so important, especially as a critique of environmental perspectives de-linked from critical social analysis. This

de-linking in thought of essential features that are linked in reality has the consequence of distorting
understanding of the specific social roots of ecological crises across societies, as well as the kind of change
necessary to resolve them.20 The goal for ecological Marxists today is to bring a Marxian methodology to bear
on the vast body of historical and scientific knowledge in its current stage of development and push this
knowledge forward under the conditions of contemporary social praxis.21 The critical use of abstraction is central to
this process. Upon determining the essential aspects of a problem, and therefore clarifying the matter at stake,
dialectical analysis allows one to steer a cautious path between the Scylla of reductionism and the Charybdis
of holism. Richard York and Philip Mancus write, as reductionism fails because of its focus on parts, holism without dialectics fails because
of its inability to recognize divisions, tensions, and internal contradictions, and its tendency toward functionalism.22 There are some tendencies
in green thought to go back to a conception of oneness, suggesting that because of the interconnectedness of phenomena, they are all One, an
important element of mystical sensibility that asserts our Oneness with the universe. But, as Lewontin and Levins write, of course we can
separate intellectual constructs. We have to in order to recognize and investigate them. But it is not sufficient. After separating them, we have
to join them again, show their interpenetration, their mutual determination, their entwined evolution, and yet also their distinctness. They are not
One.' They warn against the one-sidedness in holism that stresses the connectedness of the world but ignores the relative autonomy of
parts.23 This is an especially important point for ecological Marxists, interested in uncovering causality in

order to better direct our efforts at social change. There is no analytical rigor in treating the whole without
recognizing that, as York and Mancus write, while the social is rooted in and emergent from the biological,
the social also has causal efficacy upon the biological. As a result, for those engaged in social change efforts, it is critical to
study the dynamic dialectical interaction between nature and culture. 24 And, at another level of abstraction, it is
important to break down culture and the social to understand relations involved in the exploitation of nature and people, by specific classes,
for example. Then we might be interested in further specification of the gender, ethnic, and racial dynamics of class relations in the world today,
and so on, and how these shape the nature/culture dialectic. Marxs dialectical and materialist approach, as Lukcs said, is in its innermost
essence historical.25 For Marx, social reality is not so much a specified set of relations, still less a conglomeration of things. It is rather the
process of change inherent in a specified set of relations. In other words, social reality is the historical process, a process which,

in principle, knows no finality and no stopping places.26 The libratory nature of the historical character of
Marxs thought is the recognition of the possibility and actuality of change. But the direction of change is not determined
mechanically. Humans act, but part of the struggle of change, as Marx wrote, is that we do not make history just as [we] please, but under
circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.27 The only universal, transhistorical reality of the human condition for
Marx is that we are individually and collectively the sum total of social and natural history, and the joint development of these conditions shapes
how we live, the way we think, and what possibilities exist for change. On the biological side, he writes that the only

inevitability is that man lives from nature, i.e., nature is his body, and he must maintain a continuing
dialogue with it if he is not to die.28 This dialogue is the labor process, which is first of all, a process between man and nature, a
process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature.29 Through this
process humans transform nature and are in turn transformed. Altogether this represents the universal condition for the metabolic interaction
[Stoffwechsel] between man and nature, the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence.30 The historical character of Marxs
thought, the recognition that society both is changing and, within limits, can be changed, leads to a critical approach to every form of

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society.31 It also leads to a critical approach to every phenomena under investigation and poses a challenge to ahistorical conceptualizations of
existing conditions. For ecological Marxists, static and essentializing categories in mainstream bourgeois society

such as the binary man and womanare understood as the product of particular historical
developments, rather than as everlasting, inherent realities of human existence. Understanding the world through such an historical lens
makes possible what Marx calls the ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at
and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.32 A final feature of Marxs methodology uniting

the approaches of many third stage ecological Marxists is the commitment to living the eleventh thesis, or keeping at the
forefront that the goal is not merely to interpret the world, but to change it. This means our work, including
our theoretical development, must link philosophy, ethics, and critical social analysis . In Biology Under the Influence,
Lewontin and Levins wrote that any theory of society has to undergo a test, What does it do to Children?33 This was in the context of a
discussion of methodology, specifically Strategies for Abstractionthe title of the chapter in which the topic appears. Raising the question of
the implications for children of our work in developing social theory illustrated the impossibility of separating questions of reality from questions
of ethics. The impossibility arises because theories support practices that serve some and harm others. While philosophers go through great
contortions to separate questions of reality from questions of ethics, the historic process unites them. Ethicists may debate, [for example], over
dinner, the rational reasons for feeding the hungry, but for people in poverty food is not a philosophical problem.34 For ecological Marxists,
even the most committed investigation of ethics cannot be a substitute for a radical critique of politics in its frustrating and alienating
contemporary reality.35 For Marx, as Cornel West wrote, an adequate theoretic account of ethical notions, e.g., just or right, must
understand them as human conventional attempts to regulate social practices in accordance with the requirements of a specific system of
production.36 In the end, Istvn Mszros suggests, the measure of the success of our ethics in practice can only be their

to go beyond
capital in all its actually existing and feasible forms through the redefinition and practically viable
rearticulation of the labor process.37 The commitment to a materialist conception of natural and social
history, attention to critical and appropriate uses of abstraction, and the employment of dialectical analysis
and an historical approach, has led to path-breaking analyses in ecological Marxism. These analyses are able at once
ability to constantly maintain awareness of and reanimate practical criticism towards the real target of socialist transformation:

to deal with broad sweeps of human history, shed new light on concrete, emerging problems, and contribute to debates shaping movements for
change today. They transcend the divides between the natural and social sciences and between the scholar,

practitioner, and activist. An important recent example of such work is The Tragedy of the Commodity : Oceans,
Fisheries, and Aquaculture (2015) by Stefano B. Longo, Rebecca Clausen, and Brett Clark.38 This study illustrates the relationship
between the whole of capitalist development and the profound changes in the ecology of the oceans,
aquaculture, and fisheries engendered by the endless drive for accumulation. It provides a systematic critique of prevailing market
approaches to addressing ecological crises, as well as the associated tragedy of the commons school of thought. It ends with an important
chapter on Healing the Riftsurgent reading for all concerned with the planetary crisis of the oceans and building an alternative to this
ecologically and socially destructive social order. Other areas in which the method described here is applied by ecological

Marxists include, but are not limited to: soil fertility, fertilizers, agriculture, forest management, the carbon
and nitrogen metabolism, climate change, feminism and ecology, stockyards/meat-packing, environmental justice, unequal exchange,
ecological imperialism, public health, ecological economics, urban and rural development, and much more. For a compendium of examples
of some of the great work by ecological Marxists, please see the metabolic rift bibliography published online by Monthly Review. It is a
wonderful resource for scholars and activists alike.39 The Environment & Science section of the Haymarket Books online catalogue also lists
important contributions in this area.40 Conclusion: Importance of Method in the Struggle for Ecological Civilization Given the point of this
conference is consideration of the contribution of varieties of Marxism to the project of building Ecological Civilization, I will end by discussing
why Marxs method is so important in this task. As we all know, the ideological form of slogans, or statements of political principles and goals,
may differ widely from their substantive, practical content. Marx and Engels employed their critical method to take to task not only the
bourgeoisie, but also socialists, communists, anarchists, and others struggling for alternatives, through critical analyses of political goals and
strategies. They recognized contradictions between stated ideological commitment and practice, and highlighted the inevitable contradictions of
programs that did not take adequate account of existing material conditions or that would result in new forms of oppression, and so on. For all

of us involved in the struggle for a new world, we need a methodology for, and commitment to, critical social
analysis through which we constantly assess the direction in which we are headed , how this conforms to our goals, and
whether our goals should change. For Marx and Engels, and for ecological Marxists today, the struggle is only meaningful if
it, in social and ecological content, (1) promotes substantive material and political equality , in other words, aims for
the self-empowerment of the associated producers; (2) entails the end of oppression and exploitation in all its forms; and
(3) has the ultimate goal of the realization of a society in which the free development of each is the condition
of the free development of all, and in which the social metabolism connecting human beings to the universal metabolism of nature is
governed in a rational way.41 Whether we describe this struggle as one toward Ecological Civilization, or something else, critical social analysis
and investigation allows us to assess and overcome obstacles to movement in this direction. In contrast to green theory, or ecologism (which tends
to be idealistic and ethical in orientation, or even purely romantic) and to ecological modernization theory (which tends to defend the status quo
as a whole), Marxs method allows for the critical function of social analysis required by movements for effective

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social change. It moves us beyond the appearances of social realities to their essence, which Marx believed was the
reason for, and was only possible through, scientific investigation.

Ecological marxism and a radical class revolution are needed to stop China
from heading down the road of sustainable development, which will only
further exploitation with short term solutions
Foster 15 (John Bellamy, editor of Monthly Review and professor of sociology at the
University of Oregon, Marxism, Ecological Civilization, and China,
http://content.csbs.utah.edu/~mli/Economics%205420-6420/Foster-Ecological
%20Civilization%20and%20China.pdf, June 11)//MNW
On this basis, Marx developed in Capital what is perhaps the most radical conception of ecological
sustainability yet propounded: "From the standpoint of a higher socio-economic formation, the private property of
particular individuals in the earth will appear just as absurd as the private property of one man in other men. Even
an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the
earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding
generations, as boni patres familias [good heads of the household]." Marx and Engels addressed in their writings
most of the ecological problems of modern times: climate change (then seen as a regional phenomenon); soil
degradation; air and water pollution; overexploitation of natural resources; overpopulation; deforestation;
desertification; industrial poisons or toxins; and the destruction of species. In The Dialectics of Nature Engels
observed: "Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each
such victory nature takes its revenge on us. . . . Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over
nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature -- but that we, with flesh, blood
and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all of our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have
the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly." China's Ecological
Civilization and Marxism What is clear about the present Chinese emphasis on ecological civilization is that it
has emerged out of a broad socialist perspective, influenced by both Marxian analysis and China's own
distinct history, culture, and vernacular. In China, as opposed to the West, the land remains social or collective
property and cannot be sold. I believe it is wrong therefore to see China's initiative in the construction of ecological
civilization to be a direct outgrowth of Western-style ecological modernism, as some have supposed. At the 17th
National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), in 2007 it was officially proposed that China
should build an "ecological civilization," creating more sustainable relations between production, consumption,
distribution, and economic growth. At the18th National Congress of the CPC in 2012, "ecological civilization
construction" was written into the CPC Constitution. These principles were built into the latest five-year plan (20112015). Although many have questioned the seriousness of the CPC's commitment to the construction of an
ecological civilization, it is evident that this: (1) arose out of real needs in China, where there has been enormous
ecological devastation; (2) was a response to the growth of massive environmental protests throughout China; and
(3) has been followed up by massive government efforts in area of planning, production, and technological
development. Behind all of this of course is the fact that China's environmental problems are massive and
growing. This is the inevitable result of extremely rapid economic growth which has not sufficiently protected
the environment, coupled with other factors such as climate change. China's environmental concerns include: air
pollution in major cities amongst the world's most severe; deforestation; desertification, sandstorms contributing
massively to air pollution; loss of arable land; seizures of farmland for urban development; water shortages, water
pollution; unsafe drinking water; toxic waste dumping; urban congestion and overcrowding; overpopulation; overreliance on coal-fired plants, rising carbon dioxide emissions, potential energy shortages; and issues of food security.
Is China Moving in the Direction of Ecological Civilization? There is no doubt that Chinese leadership has made
significant steps toward a more sustainable development. Due to the large role of planning China has been able
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to make rapid changes in a number of areas, going at times against the logic of economic growth. Examples of such
efforts are: (1) targeted reductions in economic growth justified in terms of more environmentally balanced growth;
(2) the massive promotion of solar and wind technology; (3) a growing share of non-fossil-fuel energy consumption;
(4) creation of a red line to protect a minimum of 120 million hectares of farmland; (5) reduction of major air
pollutants by 8-10 percent in the 12th Five Year Plan (2011-2015); (6) removal of six million high-pollution vehicles
from the roads in 2014; (7) a 700 percent increase in the output of electric passenger cars (non-plug ins) in 2014; (8)
initiation of a government campaign for frugal lifestyles and against extravagance (conspicuous consumption) by
officials; (9) growing official criticism of GDP worship; and (10) a pledge to reduce the carbon intensity of GDP by
40-45 percent by 2020 from 2005 level, coupled with a pledge to reach peak carbon dioxide emissions by 2030, if
not sooner; and (11) the imposition of a new resource tax on coal. From the critical standpoint of ecological
Marxism, however, such developments are still overwhelmed by China's 7 percent economic growth rate , in
which the GDP will double in size in a decade, massively increasing environmental demands. Going along
with these growth projections is a plan to increase the number of permanent urban dwellers in the next five
years to 60 percent from the present 54 percent. This is to be accompanied by larger, more mechanized family
farms in rural areas, with the eventual disappearance of 60 percent of the country's villages, to be merged
into small towns and large cities. Chinese environmental laws have hitherto been characterized by weak
enforcement, suggesting the dominance of profits over environmental protection. Such an overall
development path is, if it should indeed continue on this same basis, is clearly non-sustainable, threatening to
replicate some of the worst aspects of Western capitalism. In the age of planetary climate change alternative
models must be found. This cannot be accomplished simply by technology but requires new ways of living . If
China is truly to succeed in creating a new ecological civilization it will have to go in an even more radical
direction, further removed from the regime of capital that has characterized the West and that is responsible
for today's planetary ecological emergency.

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AltRevolutionary Optimism
The alternative is to reject the affirmative as an act of revolutionary
optimism. It is our ethical duty to imagine a world beyond capitalism and to
actively intervene as if that world is possible.
Cornell and Seely 2015 (Drucilla, Professor of Womens Studies, Political Science, and Law @ Rutgers
University and the Director of the uBuntu Project; and Stephen, PhD Candidate in Womens and Gender Studies at
Rutgers University, The Spirit of Revolution: Beyond the Dead Ends of Man)
So does all of this mean that we are, to use Lauren Berlants (2011) term, cruel optimists? We would answer this
simply: there is surely nothing crueler than to say that there is no way out of the horrific and brutal
exploitation of advanced capitalism that leaves the majority of the worlds population in conditions of dire
poverty and targeted for extinction. Embracing the death drive, or what amounts to the same thing, abandoning
oneself to the impending doom of the species and the planet when you have no possibility of life is not such a

Kant
argued that we have a duty to be optimistic, not because things are necessarily going
to get better, but because they might. For Kant, we are not obligated to believe in any particular

big deal, and is certainly not an act of queer or posthumanist resistance. Centuries ago, Immanuel

vision of the future or its possibility, but that ideals such as perpetual peace (and we would add: the end of
capitalism) cannot be proven impossible obliges us to live as if (not necessarily believe) they were. To quote
Kant: for there can be no obligationto believe something [i.e., a specific end]. What is incumbent upon us as
a duty is to act in conformity with the idea of that end, even if there is not the slightest theoretical likelihood
that it can be realized, as long as its impossibility cannot be demonstrated either. Now morally practical reason
pronounces in us its irresistible veto: there is to be no warSo the question is no longer whether perpetual peace is
something real or a fiction, and whether we are not deceiving ourselves in our theoretical judgment when we assume
that it is real. Instead we must act as if it is something real, though perhaps it is notand even if the complete
realization of this objective always remains a pious wish, still we are certainly not deceiving ourselves in
adopting the maxim of working incessantly toward it. For this is our duty(1996: 490-1, emphasis added).
And, moreover, as spectators (if not participants) in revolutionary struggle, we actually shape the way those
struggles will be read. So for Kant, the spectators who cheered on the French Revolution played a role in
history in that the significance that they gave to that revolution became part of the new reality that that
revolution constituted. And cannot the same be said for those who cheered on the Arab Spring, as well as
those who heroically participated in it? Can it not be said of those who stayed up all night watching the votes be
counted in recent elections in Greece, Spain, and South Africa to see if socialist governments would be voted in?
The deep irony of much recent feminist and queer theory is that it effectively tells us that, in the name of
queerness and posthumanism, everything must ultimately remain exactly as it is, given that the hope for
a different future is heteronormative and any idea of transforming the world is humanist delirium; that we
should instead embrace ephemerality, extinction, and the death drive (all of which capitalism has conveniently
made readily available); and that anyone who writes or claims otherwise is nothing but a nostalgic, humanist
fool providing deluded idiots with cruel optimism. How do these thinkers know that we are fated to fragility,
death, extinction, poverty, war, capitalism, depression, melancholia, and unbearable sex? In this book, we want to
show that the truth they tell us about the ultimate impossibility of a more just future can, and should, be
deconstructed in the name of a queer-feminist future beyond Man, a future that by the very appropriation of
the word queer tells us that nothing is ever what it seems and that the psychic and bodily prisons that we live
in are always in the process of being undone by collective revolutionary processes. Indeed, as the late queer theorist
Jos Esteban Muoz insisted in his disagreements with much recent queer theory, queerness is itself a form of
utopianism or revolutionary consciousness. As he put it: It is difficult to hold onto a phrase like revolutionary
consciousness. It seems stark, out-moded, universalizing, and prescriptive. Yet I nonetheless deploy it because I
want to link it specifically to the world of affect and feeling. Feeling Revolutionary is feeling that our current
situation is not enough, that something is indeed missing and we cannot live without it. Feeling revolutionary
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opens up the space to imagine a collective escape, an exodus, a going-off script together. Practicing educated
hope, participating in a mode of revolutionary consciousness, is not simply conforming to one groups doxa at the
expense of anothers. Practicing educated hope is the enactment of a critique function. It is not about announcing
the way things ought to be, but, instead, imagining what things could be (Duggan & Muoz 2009: 278). We do
not wish to rehearse here the hope vs. hopelessness, future vs. anti-future debates that have dominated queer theory
over the past decade. We do, however, want to point out the resonances of Munozs contention that queerness is an
ideality (2009: 1) with the Kantian duty of optimism, explicitly putting queer politics on the side of revolution: that
we can imagine beyond what we can know both enables and obligates us to live according to ideals of freedom
as we also struggle to bring such a world into existence. Certainly, Kants point is that as we put ourselves
into the story, we are part of it and thus pessimism becomes just as much a part of that story as optimism.
And moreover, as we will discuss in Chapter Four, these stories have a profound power to materialize and
rematerialize the world that we live in together. Thus, if what many contemporary theorists tell us is not truth, then it
is just their own convictionitself a form of political faith. And why have the faith that we are thoroughly fucked if
there is any way for us to queer ourselves out of it? It would thus seem that many theorists have their own form of
cruel attachmenta cruel pessimism?to the idea that revolution is something we (can) no longer desire.
Perhaps this is a form of immunity to the inevitable disappointments of political struggle: we can no longer be
disappointed if we no longer hope for or believe that a more just future is possible. And yet, as political theorist
Jane Anna Gordon eloquently said at a recent event in New York City, Political theory is incoherent if we accept
that we are in a post-revolutionary time. All we can do then is poetically discuss resignation and impossibility
(2014). The philosophy of the limit means that the very limit to any idea of the impossible, that is, to any
metanarrative of post-revolutionary doom, leaves us with the responsibility to fight for a politics that is both
revolutionary and that is constantly challenging the reign of Man in the form of colonialism, capitalism,
racism, phallocentrism, and heterosexism (see Cornell 1992). As we have suggested, and will argue throughout
this book, thinkers in the global South have been engaged in precisely this project for centuries. These thinkers,
however, have been too involved in revolutionary struggles themselves to spend too much time handwringing about
the humanistic arrogance of politics and the failures of feminism and socialism, or debating the value of hope versus
pessimism, because there is simply too much work to be done in the struggle for total decolonization. They, in a
deep and profound sense, are on the side of life, understood not as abstract life itself, but as part of political
spirituality: the struggle for different ways of living individually, collectively, and with the other beings with which
we share the planet. And perhaps it is precisely to these thinkers that we must now look for the spirit of revolution
and for a new practice of the human beyond Man. We close this introduction and open our book with the words of
Gilles Deleuze castigating the so-called New Philosophers of the 1970s who critiqued Marxism and
socialism for manipulating the supposedly ignorant masses: What I find really disgusting is that the New
Philosophers are writing a martyrology: the Gulag and the victims of history. They live off corpses.But there
never would have been any victims if the victims had thought or spoken like our New Philosophers. The victims had
to live and think in a totally different way to provide the material that so moves the New Philosophers, who weep in
their name, think in their name, and give us moral lessons in their name. Those who risk their life most often think
in terms of life, not death, not bitterness, and not morbid vanity. Resistance fighters are usually in love with
life. No one was ever put in prison for powerlessness and pessimismon the contrary! From the perspective of
the New Philosophers, the victims were duped, because they didnt yet grasp what the New Philosophers have
grasped. If I belonged to an association, I would bring a complaint against the New Philosophers: they show just a
little too much contempt for the inmates of the Gulag (2007: 144-5). With very little adjustment, could these
same words not be said of our new prophets of queer hopelessness, posthumanist renunciation, and postrevolutionary pessimism?

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A2: Dogmatic
Ecological marxism combines traditional marxist analysis with the growing
ecological problems created by capitalism in the world, and specifically China.
This provides a marxist lens for analyzing and solving ecological and social
problems, thus updating marxism to be relevant to contemporary problems
and finding extreme appeal among Chinese marxists
Wang 12 (Zhihe, the director of the Center for Constructive Postmodern Studies and
professor of philosophy at Harbin Institute of Technology in China; as well as the director
of the Institute for Postmodern Development of China, in the United States, Ecological
Marxism in China, Monthly Review Volume 63 Issue 09, Feb 2012)//MNW
Today ecological Marxism is part of the totality of Marxism in China. Ecological Marxism is regarded by
some Chinese Marxists as not only one of the most influential movements in contemporary Western Marxism2 and a new
development of Marxism,3 but also as a very important force among various ecological theories.4 Some Marxist scholars even argue that
ecological Marxism is the most creative aspect of American Marxist Philosophy.5 Ecological Marxism has also, at least to some

extent, been accepted by the mainstream Marxist camp. For example, the article, The Ecological Implication of Marxs
Theory of Metabolism: J.B. Fosters Interpretation of Marxs Ecological Worldview written by Chen Xueming, a professor at Fudan University
and the president of the China Society for Contemporary Marxism Abroad Studies, was published in China Social Sciences, the top academic
journal in China. Wang Yuchens Ecological Critique and Green Utopia: A Study of Ecological Marxism was published in 2009 by People Press,
a top government-run publisher. Xihua Digest, a leading Digest journal, reprinted Michael Perelmans Claremont Ecological Civilization Forum
paper entitled An Ecological Future: Marx and Wu-Wei Ecology. In addition, Marxism and Reality, a top journal in Marxism studies run by the
Central Bureau of Compilation and Translation, has published numerous articles on ecological Marxism. All of this demonstrates that ecological
Marxism as a Western intellectual movement has been accepted within the mainstream in China. As with many other Western intellectual
movements, such as constructive postmodernism based on Whiteheadian philosophy (an intellectual movement which originated in the West
but now has considerable influence in China), the beginning of ecological Marxism in China can be called the period of

introduction or of the transmission of Western ideasto be followed eventually by their critical absorption
and transformation in a Chinese context. During the period of introduction, the following four theories (from among many
Western ideas, schools, and representative figures of ecological Marxism) have attracted the attention of Chinese Marxists: (1)
The ecological crisis theory of William Leiss and Ben Agger, which claims that the Marxist theory of
economic crisis is outdated because it not only fails to explain the continuous existence and development of
capitalism, but also fails to provide a theoretical guide for the shift from capitalism to socialist society . Hence, it
is necessary for Marxists to base their critique of capitalism on the new stage of ecological crisis, which has its source in alienated
consumption. (2) James OConnors theory of two contradictions of capitalism. If, as traditional Marxism points out, the

the second
contradiction is the one between capitalist productive forces, production relations, and production conditions.
It is the two contradictions that lead to economic, as well as ecological, crisis. (3) Joel Kovels theory of
ecological socialist revolution and construction. For Kovel, in order to solve the ecological crisis of capitalism, we
must liberate use values from exchange values, liberate labor from capital, and move toward an eco-socialist
society which must meet two conditions: public ownership of the means of production and freely associated
producers. (4) The theories of John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett on Marxs ecology. According to many
Chinese Marxists, all three of the preceding theories acknowledge that Marxist theory can provide a guide for
solving the ecological crisis of capitalism, but none of them publicly acknowledges (or for that matter denies) that Marxism,
first contradiction in capitalism is between capitalist productive forces and production relations, OConnor argues that

including Marx himself, provided the basis for an ecological worldview. It is Foster and Burkett who commenced to construct Marxs ecology,
which gives ecological Marxism a much greater theoretical value in dealing with the contemporary ecological

crisis.6 Foster finds Marxs ecology in his theory of metabolism while Burkett finds it in Marxs theory of labor value. Not every Chinese
Marxist obviously agrees with the four theories. There are different opinions about ecological Marxism in general and in relation to the four
theories in particular. For example, some Chinese Marxists who come from a traditional Marxist perspective point out that, since some ecological
Marxists like Ben Agger treat ecological crisis as the main crisis, they are trying to replace economic crisis with ecological crisis. They
improperly exaggerate the contradiction between humankind and nature in capitalist society by replacing the basic contradiction of capitalism
with the contradiction between humanity and nature.7 Some Chinese Marxist scholars find fault with ecological Marxism for its utopian
character, arguing that ecological Marxism has a romantic color.8 As Zhang Shijia wrote, The ecological socialism ecological Marxism
designs has some kind of romantic color and Utopian character, and lacks agenda.9 Some scholars point out the inner flaws or contradictions in

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ecological Marxism. One main inconsistency is that although ecological Marxism treats the capitalistic way of production as the cause of
ecological crisis, the solution it designs to the crisis is placed in the field of ideas. Namely it appeals to moral revolution. This limits ecological
Marxism to ethicism.10 However, despite these criticisms, the dominant attitude in China toward ecological Marxism is

Most Chinese Marxists believe that ecological Marxism makes it

possible for Marxism to diminish its dogmatism by allowing Marxism to face up to
this most pressing issue.11 Ecological Marxism can be viewed as helping to expand
the horizon of Chinese Marxists, not only in how they see contemporary capitalism,
but also in how they see socialism. For Chinese Marxists, ecological Marxism
enriches traditional Marxism by revealing its ecological dimension . Some scholars argue that

positive and affirmative.

ecological Marxism has actually added new elements to Marxism. According to Xu Qin, a researcher at the Shanghai Academy of Social
Sciences, The positive aspect of ecological Marxism lies in that it tries to combine Marxism and the

contemporary ecological theme, in doing so, it on the one hand, makes itself obtain powerful theoretical resources; on
the other hand, it highlights the contemporary relevance of Marxism to the world today.12 To Xi Jian, some of the
creative points of view and theories ecological Marxism proposes have positive meaning for us; enabling us to criticize capitalist reality, as well
as enrich and develop Marxist theory, thereby enhancing ecological harmony.13 Why Has Ecological Marxism Been So Well Received in
China? There are many practical, political, and theoretical reasons to explain Chinas acceptance of ecological

Marxism: (1) The pressing environmental issue facing China constitutes a practical reason to take ecological
Marxism seriously. Chinas achievements, especially its fast GDP growth, have amazed the worldbut the price has been extremely high.
This rapid and sustained growth has led to unparalleled environmental problems. Pollution is just one example: 70 percent of the
rivers and lakes in China are polluted, and the drinking water in half of Chinese cities fails to meet basic standards. Ecological
Marxisms emphasis on ecological crisis provides a way for China to solve its environmental problems. (2)
The Chinese government at the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China proposed creating
an ecological civilization with an aim toward the harmonious relationship between citizens and nature. The
governments primary stated goal is to form an energy- and resource-efficient and environment-friendly structure of industries, patterns of
growth and modes of consumption.14 This is consistent in principle with the ecological civilization the government calls for and should be
regarded as an important political reason for China to accept ecological Marxism. The number of articles on ecological Marxism increased
sharply in China after 2007; there is little doubt, therefore, that the governments call for ecological civilization has helped enhance the spread of
ecological Marxism in China. The governments support for Ecological Marxism Studies is also evidenced by Kang Ruihuas brand new book,
Critiques, Structuring and Inspiration: A Study of Fosters Eco-Marxism Ideas, published by China Social Sciences Press. Ruihua is a party
school professor who received a national research grant on Fosters Eco-Marxism Studies in 2005, and this book is the result of that research. (3)

Ecological Marxism shares many common characteristics with traditional Marxism, such as criticizing
capitalism, caring for the poor, defending justice, and pursuing the common good. Thus it is possible for
traditional Marxists to be open to ecological Marxism and still retain their allegiance to Marxist analysis. In the words of Huibin
Li, a leading Marxist scholar at the Central Bureau of Compilation and Translation, We need to protect the legally-established ecological rights
of individuals, families, communities, and nations, and defend ecological equality and ecological justice.15 He thinks this is not only an intrinsic
component of ecological Marxism, but also the ideal and goal traditional Marxists have struggled for. Yi Junqing, Minister of Central Bureau of
Compilation and Translation (a top government institution on Marxism Studies in China), believes that Marxism will lose its vitality if it does
not address the ecological crisis in the twenty-first century.16 (4) Ecological Marxism has provided support for Chinas

environmental movement. Its rejection of capitalism as an anti-ecological system, and its revelation of Marxs
ecology and ecological thoughts, have provided theoretical support for the environmental movement in China .
According to Hua Zhanglin and Cai Pin, one of the greatest contributions ecological Marxism made is to challenge us to think about how to
treat nature nicely.

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A2: Permutation
Engagement DA: The permutations engagement in a democratic state
perpetuates the impacts of capitalism and leads to greater violence.
Dean 16 (Jodi, political philosopher and professor in the Political Science department at Hobart and William
Smith Colleges, Crowds and Party)
The democratic claim for the crowd was powerful in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Democracy could name an opposition. Even as
communists registered the limits of bourgeois democracy in its use as an instrument of capitalist class rule, democracy could still register a
challenge to existing structures of power. In the twenty-first century, however, dominant nation-states exercise power as

democracies. They bomb and invade as democracies for democracys sake . International
political bodies legitimize themselves as democratic, as do the contradictory entangled media practices of
communicative capitalism.14 When crowds amass in opposition, they poise themselves against democratic practices,
systems, and bodies. To claim the crowd for democracy fails to register this change in the political setting of
the crowd. Democratic governments justify themselves as rule by the people. When crowds gather in opposition, they
expose the limits of this justification. The will of the majority expressed in elections stops appearing as the will of the people. That
not-all of the people support this government or those decisions becomes openly, physically, intensely manifest.15 Disagreement and
opposition start to do more than circulate as particular contributions to the production of nuggets of
shareable outrage in the never-ending flow of clickbait in which we drown one another. They index collective power,
the affective generativity that exceeds individual opinions. Many press back, using the strength of embodied number to install a gap in the
dominant order. They make apparent its biases, compromises, and underlying investments in protecting the processes through which the capitalist
class accumulates wealth. They expose the fragility of the separations and boxes upholding electoral politics. The crowd reclaims for the

people the political field democracy would try to fragment and manage. Under communicative capitalism, the
democratic claim for the crowd reinforces and is reinforced by the hegemony of ideals of
decentralization and self-organization. Early crowd theorists describe the crowd as primitive, violent, and suggestible. In our
present context, these descriptions are often inverted as smart mobs and the wisdom of crowds. 16 Such
inversions appropriate the crowd, enlisting it in support of capitalism as they strip away its radical political
potential.

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ImpactUS-China War
Capitalism makes US-China conflict inevitableprofit motivated militarism
ensures miscalculation
Symonds 16 (May 30th, Peter, World Socialist Web Site, Published by The International Committee of the
Fourth International: The danger of nuclear war between the US and China
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/05/30/pers-m30.html)
Last weeks G7 summit in Japan was dominated by two interconnected issues: the deepening crisis of global
capitalism and the drive to war, in particular the growing danger of a clash between China and the United States in
the South China Sea. The inability of the major powers to offer the slightest resolution of the economic
breakdown is fuelling national antagonisms and the slide toward conflict. The US and Japan pressed hard at the
G7 gathering for a strong communiqu critical of China that would justify the ramping up of provocative American
military incursions within the 12-nautical-mile territorial limit around Chinese-claimed islets. Earlier this month, the
US navy conducted a third so-called freedom of navigation operation near Fiery Cross Reef in the South China
Sea, producing an angry reaction from Beijing and declarations that it would beef up its defences in the area. In the
campaigns currently underway for the US presidency and the Australian federal election, a conspiracy of silence
reigns over the preparations for war, aimed at deadening the consciousness of the population to the rising danger of
nuclear conflict. Two nuclear-armed powers are facing off not only in the South China Sea, but other
dangerous flashpoints such as North Korea and Taiwan, each of which has been greatly exacerbated by
Washingtons pivot to Asia and aggressive military build-up throughout the region. An arms race is
underway that finds its most acute expression in the arena of nuclear weaponry, delivery systems and
associated technologies. Determined to maintain its supremacy in Asia and globally, the US is planning to spend
$1 trillion over the next three decades to develop a broader range of sophisticated nuclear weapons and
means for delivering them to their targets. The unstated aim of the Pentagon is to secure nuclear primacythat is,
the means for obliterating Chinas nuclear arsenal and thus its ability to mount a counter attack. The Chinese
response, which is just as reactionary, is to ensure it retains the ability to strike back in a manner that would kill tens
of millions in the United States. The reality of these dangers was underscored last week by the release of a report by
the US-based Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). It chillingly warned: Twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a
year, the governments of the United States and the Peoples Republic of China are a few poor decisions away
from starting a war that could escalate rapidly and end in a nuclear exchange. Mismatched perceptions
increase both the possibility of war and the likelihood it will result in the use of nuclear weapons.
Miscommunication or misunderstanding could spark a conflict that both governments may find difficult to
stop. While appealing for the two sides to acknowledge the risks and heighten diplomatic efforts to prevent
conflict, the UCS analysis offered not the slightest hope that such steps would be taken. The report bleakly declared:
Lack of mutual trust and a growing sense that their differences may be irreconcilable incline both governments to
continue looking for military solutionsfor new means of coercion that help them feel more secure. Establishing
the trust needed to have confidence in diplomatic resolutions to the disagreements, animosities, and suspicions that
have troubled leaders of the United States and the PRC [China] for almost 70 years is extremely difficult when both
governments take every effort to up the technological ante as an act of bad faith. The intensifying military
competition is an unequal one, which only heightens tensions and the danger of war. In the field of nuclear
armaments, China is outgunned and outnumbered. While desperately seeking to catch up, the Chinese military is
generations behind in the capability of its weaponry and fields an estimated 260 warheads, compared to about 7,000
for the US. Its prime objective is to ensure a credible nuclear deterrent would survive a US first strike. Unlike
Beijing, Washington has never ruled out the first use of nuclear weapons. The Guardian reported last week that
China is poised to send submarines armed with nuclear weapons on patrol in the Pacific for the first time. Such a
move signals a break with the current policy, under which warheads and missiles were stored separately under the
strict control of the top leadership. Armed missiles will now be loaded onto nuclear submarines to enable their
immediate launch against continental America in the event of war. The Chinese leadership has been driven to
such measures by the US military build-up in North East Asia, especially the deployment of anti-ballistic
missile systems aimed at neutralising Chinas ability to strike back. Chinas nuclear submarines, however, are
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comparatively noisy, making them vulnerable to detection and destruction by US attack subs. A new scenario is
unfolding in which a jittery Chinese commander could misunderstand an order and, fearing imminent attack, unleash
the submarines missiles against pre-determined targets. Nuclear war will not be averted through the diplomacy
of major powers, worthless posturing about international nuclear disarmament or the vain hope that nuclear
war is so terrible as to be unthinkable. Nuclear strategists have been thinking the unthinkable for more than half
a century. The last world war ended with the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing some 200,000
people. President Barack Obamas refusal last week in Hiroshima to offer an apology for those monstrous crimes of
US imperialism is a sure sign that new ones are being prepared. The relentless drive toward a new world war
between nuclear-armed combatants stems from the crisis of capitalism and its irresolvable contradictions.
Only the working class can end the danger of war by putting an end to the profit system and its outmoded
nation state system. That is the significance of the struggle being waged by the International Committee of the
Fourth International and all its sections to build a unified anti-war movement of the international working
class based on the perspective of socialist internationalism

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Aff Answers

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2ACAltCo-option DA (China Specific)

The alternative will be co-opted by Chinese ElitesXi Jinpings cult of
personality hi-jacks the movement
Huang 15 (Cary, reporter for South China Morning Post, The method in Xi Jinpings Marxism: Whats
behind the presidents push for the economic theory?, http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policiespolitics/article/1885100/method-xi-jinpings-marxism-whats-behind-presidents-push , Nov 30 2015)//MNW
Xi Jinpings call last week to promote Marxist economic philosophy was more about the presidents desire to
develop his own political theory and shape his legacy and less an attempt to return the country to communist
orthodoxy, analysts said. Xi has chaired three study sessions with Communist Party leaders on Marxism , most
recently one last Monday with the Politburo on Marxist political economy. In the sessions, he stressed both Marxism and traditional Chinese
culture and values as part of a broader push to fill a perceived ideological void in the country, analysts said. Addressing the Politburo last week,
Xi said Marxist political economy could help conduct economic analysis in a scientific way, improve the capability
of managing a socialist market economy, and better answer problems of economic development, in the face of the extremely complex economic
situation at home and abroad. He also said the party had enriched Marxist political economy by combining its basic principles with new
practices on the mainland. But Xi has also promoted market-oriented reforms, which run counter to Marxist

thought. Rather than public ownership of the means of production, China has become a major destination for
foreign capital and a centre for private enterprise. That is because Xis focus is not on the party but on
himself, according to Steve Tsang, professor of contemporary Chinese studies at the University of Nottingham in Britain. He is not
preaching Marxism as insisting that the party should continue to uphold its ideology, whatever it is, in a
pragmatic way, but as it is interpreted by him as leader, Tsang said. Tsang added that Marx would not recognise Xis ideas,
but China watchers realised that his take on Marxism was an attempt to make it relevant to the countrys development. Like his predecessors, Xi
apparently wants to have his own trademark theory Zhu Zhiqun, a political science professor and director at the China Institute
at Bucknell University in the United States, agreed that Xi was trying to form his own political theory and adapt Marxism
to highlight his thoughts on the countrys development. This was apparent in the use of political slogans such
as the Chinese dream and the new normal. So, like his predecessors, Xi apparently wants to have his own trademark theory,
even though its still too early to think about his legacy, Zhu said. With an officially approved theory, it will be easier to popularise and
implement his political and economic policies. Zhu said it would be interesting to see how Xi would try to reconcile

Marxism with market reforms down the track, especially in terms of private ownership and a mixed
economy. Also, why has the working class, the vanguard of the revolution, been left behind in Chinas
modernisation? Zhu said. University of Nevada political science professor Pu Xiaoyu said Xi was aiming to tie Marxism with
traditional Chinese thought. What this really emphasises is the so-called Sinicisation of Marxism, Pu said. For instance, Xis speeches
emphasise the dominant role of state firms, but also acknowledge the positive role of the non-public sector
and economic openness. Marxist political and economic theory had become increasingly irrelevant in China after three decades of
market-oriented reforms. City University associate professor Li Xigen said Marxist thought drove Chinas development in the first 30 years after
1949 but the next 30 years reversed many of those changes. While China still cant shake off the label of Marxism, it has embarked on a totally
different form of economic development.

Xi Jinpings cult of personality utilizes orthodox Marxism as the fuel for

authoritarian repression stifling grassroots organizing
Biao 16 (Teng, human rights lawyer in China, Is China Returning to the Madness of
Maos Cultural Revolution?, http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/05/16/is-china-returning-tothe-madness-of-maos-cultural-revolution/, May 16 2016)//MNW
The song most representative of Chinas Cultural Revolution the 10-year period between 1966 and 1976 of anarchy and
anti-authority mania, where students tortured their teachers, employees denounced their bosses, and children murdered their parents is The
East Is Red. A simple yet catchy song about the brilliance of Chairman Mao Zedong, The East Is Red is an unofficial anthem of that
decade; it articulated the brainwashed love people felt for the chairman. The sun is rising. From China comes Mao Zedong, the song lyrics go.

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[Mao] strives for peoples happiness. Hurrah, he is the peoples great savior! But over the

last few months, a modern version of

the song has been bouncing around the Internet. Titled The East Is Red Again, it proclaims with modified
lyrics: The sun again rises, and Xi Jinping succeeds Mao Zedong. Hes striving for the peoples rejuvenation. Hurrah, he is
the peoples great lucky star! And even though censors deleted mentions of the song on the Chinese Internet , Xi has not repudiated the
comparison. Indeed, an early May concert at Beijings massive legislative building, the Great Hall of the
People, featured a performance celebrating red, or Communist, songs, including Socialism Is Good and
Without the Communist Party, There Would Be No New China. Because of their popularity during the Cultural
Revolution, these songs, and the act of playing them, now glorify that horrifically tumultuous era, which began 50 years ago on May 16. Sadly,
the celebration of red songs is not the only similarity between Chinese politics today and in 1966 . This March,
during the annual meeting of the National Peoples Congress, an important gathering of the ruling Chinese Communist Party, the delegation
from Tibet wore badges showing Xis face. During the Cultural Revolution, people didnt leave their houses without Mao badges.
Like Mao, Xi has purged his political enemies through mass anti-corruption campaigns. Xi has strengthened the partys control
over the media and official ideology through the internal party communiqu Document No. 9, which warned
about the dangers of press freedom. He also emphasized the need for patriotism in creative works during an
influential October 2014 speech he delivered to important artists and propaganda officials . Xi has also
resurrected the calcified, blindly pro-Communist discourse of the Mao era; he regularly exhorts cadres to
participate in mass line campaigns, a hazily defined concept, and to bare their blades in the ideological struggle. The anti-vice
campaign reminiscent of Maos mania for mass movements that began in February 2014 in the southern city of Dongguan and spread
throughout the country is yet another example of Xis Maoist madness. In some ways, it feels like Xi is trying to turn back time

and relive the Cultural Revolution, where the party reigned supreme and invaded every aspect of Chinese life. Luckily, he cant, for
China and the world are different now. Even if Xi wanted to, he could never realize Maos Cultural Revolution-era disregard for all laws, human
and holy, nor could he create a pervasive cult of personality. Mao was historys harshest despot, its greatest persecutor of humanity. But he
wouldnt have been able to persecute hundreds of millions of Chinese people without the historical background, social structure, ideological
framework, and international environment of mid-20th-century China. After Maos 1976 death, the party gradually settled on a system of
collective dictatorship in which a small group of leaders rule for two five-year terms. Although the party operates above the law and seemingly
without any effective restriction, there are internal disagreements and even power struggles among members at the highest levels. Moreover, there
are divisions between the central leadership and local governments, which push back against orders from above. This so-called local tyranny
poses a great obstacle to Xis campaign to deify himself. The Cultural Revolution saw the mobilization of hundreds of millions of people into
opposing, often warring factions the complete destruction of Chinas legal system, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of
people. That is also entirely different from today. While there is a widening wealth gap between the rich and the poor, mass mobilization is a
thing of the past. Although totalitarianism makes an occasional appearance, todays China has a legal system that performs better than the chaosriven courts of the Cultural Revolution. Moreover, the arrests of high-level officials and political dissidents are at least packaged in legal terms
and implemented through ostensibly legal procedures. And the violence present in Chinese society today is on a much smaller scale than in the
1960s and 1970s. But if one defines the Cultural Revolution by its strict one-party rule, total control of the media,

thought control, religious oppression, and suppression of dissent, then today differs only in degree. Xi has
adopted a zero-tolerance policy toward political opposition and grassroots rights defense movements. Since Xi
assumed power in late 2012, hundreds, if not thousands, of human rights defenders have been imprisoned.
Civil society organizations like the pro-constitutionalism New Citizens Movement have been suppressed, and
more than 300 human rights lawyers have been detained or intimidated. Many NGOs have been shut down;
thousands of Christian crosses have been forcibly removed; Christian churches have been destroyed; and practitioners of small
religious groups such as Falun Gong have been persecuted. Feminist activists, defenders of labor rights, Internet celebrities,
and journalists who have dared to speak out have all been attacked. Meanwhile, in the name of
counterterrorism, Xi has cracked down on the people of Xinjiang and Tibet, even imposing martial law in
parts of those regions. In Hong Kong, he has delayed honoring Beijings promise of universal suffrage and suppressed the protest
movement known as the Umbrella Revolution. Xi has implemented the imperial tactic of punishing an individuals entire family for the acts of
that individual, detaining Mainland China-based family members of overseas Chinese activists and using them as political hostages . And in

complete disrespect for basic, internationally recognized human rights, Swedish bookseller Gui Minhai was
kidnapped from Thailand and forcibly transported to China all because he was connected to a book about
Xis romantic history.

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2ACAltCrackdowns
Revolutionary labor movements are being destroyed by the government with
law, repression, and the media, and its only going to get worse historical
materialism fails in China because the revolution cant even gain a foothold
Friedman et al. 16 (Eli Friedman is assistant professor of international and comparative labor at
Cornell University, Aaron Halegua is a research scholar of the U.S.-Asia Law Institute at NYU, Jerome A.
Cohen is director of the U.S.-Asia Law Institute, Cruel irony: Chinas Communists are stamping out
labor activism, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/cruel-irony-chinas-communists-are-stamping-outlabor-activism/2016/01/03/99e986f2-b0bb-11e5-b820-eea4d64be2a1_story.html, Jan 3)
They came for the feminists in the spring. In the summer, they came for the rights-defense lawyers. And on
Dec. 3, the eve of Chinas Constitution Day, Chinese authorities initiated a widespread crackdown on labor
activists in the industrial powerhouse of Guangdong province . Since they first appeared 20 years ago, Chinas
labor nongovernmental organizations have suffered regular rounds of repression and harassment , including tax
audits, mafia violence and continual interrogation by security officials. But this most recent repression is more serious. It seems
that the Communist Party is intent on stamping out labor activism in civil society once and for all. In this
campaign, dozens of individuals have been intimidated through police interrogations , and seven, including Zeng
Feiyang, the well-known leader of a Guangzhou labor group, have been detained on criminal charges. Their lawyers requests to meet with them
have been denied. These activists are reportedly being held for assembling crowds to disrupt social order, allegedly encouraging or even
tricking workers into making unreasonable demands and taking extreme actions. These unjust police measures completely miss the point.
Labor conflict in China has indeed been growing rapidly in recent years, with wildcat strikes, road blockades and even
riots becoming regular occurrences. But

workers are striking because labor laws are not enforced and there are no
effective means for legally resolving collective disputes not because workers are being duped by NGOs
with unspecified ulterior motives. For instance, in the Lide Footwear Factory strike, which state media has spotlighted as evidence of
Zengs guilt, workers protested their employers long-term failure to make legally required social security and other payments after learning of
plans to relocate the factory. NGOs did not provoke this conflict. In fact, labor NGOs play a productive role in resolving such disputes. Chinese

employers often handle strikes by ignoring workers demands and contacting the authorities, who
increasingly send in police to rough up workers and detain strike leaders. By contrast, as in the Lide case, labor NGOs
advise strikers on how to formulate their demands, elect representatives and engage in collective negotiations with employers to resolve the
underlying violations, and sometimes even assist in reaching agreements governing future relations. Indeed, Lides owners eventually agreed to
make overdue social security contributions, relocate some workers, pay severance to others and continue talking with workers. Such organized
collective negotiations between employers and employees are far more likely to achieve the harmonious labor relations China seeks than a
continuous cycle of worker protest and police repression. Unfortunately, the current criminal detentions are more about

government insistence on exclusive control than good labor- relations policy. NGOs are viewed as threatening
state power as well as the interests of employers. The government claims it wants to promote the rights and
interests of workers, but it is simply unwilling to allow civil society to play any role in this process. This is why it
has even gone beyond mass interrogations and criminal detentions for allegedly inciting workers. State
television has been broadcasting an intense smear campaign including claims of marital infidelity and embezzling
organizational funds for personal use to publicly discredit Zeng. Moreover, labor activists nationwide report heightened
harassment of not only themselves but also family members. Part of the problem is that the state-controlled
All-China Federation of Trade Unions claims an absolute monopoly on representing and advocating for
Chinas workers, but in reality does little of either. Unlike the labor NGOs, it seldom assists exploited workers or pushes
employers to comply with the law. This stems largely from the Communist Partys conception of the trade union as a harmonizing force
between employers and workers. Whats more, employers typically exert undue control over unions at the company level. Workers therefore do
not trust trade unions, creating a vacuum for someone to actually promote their interests which labor NGOs began to fill. But recognition

of civil- society actors positive contributions is not in Chinese authorities current playbook. Civil- society
groups are generally seen as threats. Receiving foreign funds is especially deemed to imply sinister motives .
This remains true regardless of how innocuous, or even helpful, NGO activities may be in promoting the stability and legitimacy of the regime. If
the government were serious about improving labor relations, it would require trade unions to learn from these NGO leaders. Instead, it has

42

Cap K Updates 43
decided on a campaign to harass, shame and imprison people who are striving to make Chinese workplaces
and society more lawful and just. The result will be greater lawlessness, conflict and repression.

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2ACAltParticularity
Historical materialism ignores social development, it reduces all of human
history to market spheres and fails to make distinctions between qualitative
aspects of life and the quantitative
Sdonline, 2014 (Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 3, 776-7, http://sdonline.org/61/critical-thinking-and-class-analysis-historical-materialism-and-social-theory-2/)
Unfortunately, far from being understood as an integral element of historical materialist social theory, the qualitative difference between capitalist and pre-capitalist class relationships stressed by
Marx is not even incorporated into most approaches to class analysis. There have, of course, been many good accounts of the critical analysis Marx offered with respect to specifically capitalist

Yet, consciously or not, such accounts can only exist in connection with a particular conception of
historical social change leading to modern capitalist society. It is Marxs understanding of the processes of social change during the history of class
class society.

societies, culminating in capitalism, that is the foundation for historical materialism. Ironically, however, Marxists on the whole have probably paid less attention to the nature of Marxs historical
materialism than have non-Marxist social theorists, and very few of either have recognized in its fundamentally critical character his most original contribution to social theory. It has certainly

Most Marxists, however, have been almost exclusively concerned with

the political and economic issues of capitalist society, and with the problem of socialist revolution. Very few
have given serious consideration to the central importance of a truly historical conception of social
development one not rooted anachronistically in the presuppositions of contemporary social life to Marxs critical theoretical project. A signal exception has emerged from the line
always been understood that Marxism included a theory of history.

of inquiry into the role of class struggle in history among British Marxist historians, from Maurice Dobb to E.P. Thompson. This inquiry has given rise to a conception of historical materialism,
often dubbed Political Marxism, which radically challenges the economic determinism so widely associated with Marxist thought. Otherwise, however, the predominant expressions of Marxist
theory remain bound by concepts drawn from specifically capitalist society. These theoretical elements have been incorporated both at the level of concrete social categories and in the central
paradigm of what is taken to constitute Marxist historical social theory. Ideas rooted in the social reality of capitalist class society are anachronistically projected into the past, forming the basis

This allegedly historical theory is inherently unable to depict the social

forms and relationships of capitalist society as anything other than natural and inevitable products of social
evolution, based on seemingly timeless principles drawn from capitalist social experience in the first place. It is
entirely appropriate, of course, that the conceptual categories with which capitalist society is described and theoretically analyzed should reflect the particularities of capitalism. Indeed, it is
essential to the analysis within Capital that Marx opens with the form of the commodity, not with history. But it
for what is then construed to be a historical dimension of analysis.

is an entirely different matter when such categories are applied to historical societies that differed from capitalism, or to the processes of historical transformation that led to the capitalisms

The latter approach precludes drawing meaningful distinctions between historical and contemporary
forms. Within the capitalist system of production, for example, competition compels capitalists to seek market advantage through technological innovation in the production process (in
emergence.

Marxs terms, increasing the rate of relative surplus-value). As Ellen Meiksins Wood stresses, this characteristic compulsion of the capitalist market does not exist where markets merely offer

It is thus wrong to project into history a type of pressure toward technological

innovation that is specific to capitalism. Neither can the generalized economic rationality of capitalist societies
be projected historically not because the peoples of pre-capitalist societies were ignorant, slothful, or ideologically blinkered, but because non-market
aspects of social life held greater material import. Nobles in ancien rgime France did not irrationally squander fortunes on conspicuous displays at Court
they played to the expectations of a King who dispensed the munificence of state revenue. When such distinctions are ignored, no methodological
basis exists for conceiving a process of development through qualitative social transformation. Fundamental categories
producers an opportunity to sell surplus product.

become timeless, and social change is limited to variations on a theme. Consider the state. If the very concept of the state is premised on fundamental separation between a sphere of strictly
political social action and an opposed sphere of economic social action, then a distinction between feudal and modern forms of state makes no sense. If the underlying premise of such separation
does not hold with respect to the feudal period and it does not the theoretical category of the state must be opened up, and the opposition between political and economic spheres must be
conceived as specific to the capitalist state.

Singular Focus DA: The alts totalizing claims of a historical materialist

revolution masks multiple problems of capitalism. Only the perm solves
through positive engagement
Gunn 08 (Richard, Richard Gunn (born 28 May 1971) is a freelance British author, journalist and photographer
with several transport-related books to his credit, as writer, editor or contributor. He has also written for a number of
magazines and websites, both in Britain and abroad, Against Historical Materialism: Marxism as a First Order
Discourse)
The last point calls for further discussion. First of all, totalizing

theory requires the notion of determinate abstraction.

Minus this notion, the conception of a mutual interaction taking place between different moments , as is the
case with every organic whole (Marx 1973, p. 100) amounts to banality: everything somehow affects everything else (cf Williams 1973). To put
bones into the flesh of totality we need to understand how terms can exist not just through one another but in and

through or, better, as one another. We need to understand how terms can form and reform, or constitute
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Cap K Updates 45
and reconstitute, other terms: how one terms mode of existence can be another term, without remainder.
This logically stronger conception redeems totality, and dialectics, from the vague notion of mere reciprocal
interaction (an action which could be causalist or not as the case may be). Not all interactions count as totalizing, on this logically stronger
approach. Of course in the light of the above argument it should go without saying a totality can exist in the mode of being
denied, for its part. Secondly, the notion of theory of: the programme of empiricist abstraction goes
something like this. Once we are in possession of the generic concept we can have a theory of species (for
instance, once we know the genus we can begin to frame causal explanations premised on universal laws: lightning belongs under the genus
electrical discharge rather than Gods anger, etc. ); metatheory underpins the generic concepts in their turn. A proper

fit, or mapping, as between concept and object is the result. We have seen already that this idea of theoretical
consonance is what defines general theory. What has now to be made clear is the, so to say, dissonance of
determinately abstract (totalizing, dialectical) theory in this regard. Determinately abstract theory can be a theory of nothing
because it situates its own terms within the practical field that it reports. It abnegates what Hegel terms the standpoint of consciousness (see
above). There is nothing standing over against determinately abstract theory for it to report. It throws the

movement of its concepts into the crucible of its object (practice or actuality: see earlier) at every turn, thus
undermining the separation of concept and object upon which ideas of consonance or mapping turn.

General
theory projects a theory (or metatheory) of its object first and a theory in its object only second. Determinately abstract theory reverses this
priority, so to say setting out from inside. This being so, positivism is quite right, from its own point of view, in pouring

ridicule on dialectics.

Much more suspect are the dialectical theorists as it were from Engels to Bhaskar who reckon that some
reapproachment between different species of abstraction can be reached.

Historical materialism is extremely simplistic in combatting problems of

capitalism Marxist views of capitalism prove that the perm solves better.
Gunn 08 (Richard, Richard Gunn (born 28 May 1971) is a freelance British author, journalist and photographer
with several transport-related books to his credit, as writer, editor or contributor. He has also written for a number of
magazines and websites, both in Britain and abroad, Against Historical Materialism: Marxism as a First Order
Discourse)
Secondly, historical materialism has to be dispensed with. Historical materialism, socalled, is the nearest approach to a general theory of society

The general character of

historical materialism can best be illustrated by reference to the problems to which it has given rise.
Extensively, there awaits a Marxist reckoning with the Asiatic mode of production (Wittfogel 1953; Lichtheim 1963;
cf. Hobsbawm 1964, Intro.), a reckoning made the more politically urgent by Bahros (1979) indication of the
Asiatic mode of production as the site where a crisis of Marxism might be expected to break out. Debates on
the status of an Asiatic mode refer, of course, within a historical materialistic framework, to historys
beginnings; no less logically powerful extensive considerations break out at historys end. An entire school of
which Marxs writings notably The German Ideology Part One and the 1859 Preface contain.

Marxism (Lukacs 1971, fifth essay; Marcuse 1941; Horkheimer 1972, p 229; Sartre n.d., p. 34) avers that historical determination is all very well
as a report of capitalism which is deterministic de facto, but no sure guide to the emancipatory existence towards which the antagonistic relation
of labour to capital clears the way. This latter school abusts on to intensive considerations even while foregrounding extensive ones: the problems
here concern the overt economic determinism of Marxs 1859 Preface. For instance, according to Lukacs (1971, p. 27): It is not the

primacy of economic motives in historical explanation that constitutes the decisive difference between
Marxism and bourgeois thought, but the point of view of totality . To be sure, formulations like
motives and points of view still remain too close to the Weberian paradigm in which Lukacs had been
educated; methodological individualism (the obverse, Weberian, side of the coin of structuralism) remains
their norm. But it is clear enough that Lukacs is saying along with, later, Marcuse, Horkheimer, Sartre and indeed Gramsci that
economic determinism (a) underdetermines social existence by assimilating it to the sort of society of
heavers alluded to by Marx in the 1844 Manuscripts, while at the same time (b) overdetermining it by
bracketing off, as superstructural, the entirety of the social realm in which men become conscious of

The equivocation within historical materialism

between totalizing and causalist perspectives (see fn. 12, below) throws into relief its

conflict and fight it out (Marx 1971, p. 21).

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Cap K Updates 46

problematic character along the intensive axis of generalizing thought. In other

words historical materialism falls victim to the Marxist critique (deriving from the thesis of a
theory/practice unity) of theory as theory of. The Leninist and Engelsian idea of Capital as a specific application of a generic historical
materialist conception goes by the board (along with genus/species relations themselves). So, too, do contemporary fordist/post-fordist
sociologies and for reasons quite other than those raised in debates concerning their Marxist provenance. Their historical materialist

provenance can be allowed, but, still, they fail. The critique of historical materialism here raised addresses
less its content than (as a general theory, intensively specified) its form. Debates within, and concerning,
historical materialism, have of course been numerous. For example there is the recurrent question of whether historical
materialism is totalizing or causalist; the connected question of whether an economic base can be conceptualized
independently of a political and legal and ideological superstructure; and a dispute in regard to the question
of whether forces and relations of production remains no less controversial. None of these debates addresses the
question of historical materialisms status, or form. Hence from the present point of view, they count as secondary. Perhaps the only sensible
word which has been spoken in the course of them is to the effect that Marxs 1859 Preface omits (in the course of describing the guiding thread
of his studies) and mention of class, whereas the opening sentence of the Communist Manifesto characterizes this thread exclusively as the
practice of class struggle.

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2ACAltColoniality DA
Economic accounts of colonialist and orientalist violence come from a
privileged european perspective that only considers race or gender as
footnotes - this perpetuates a cultural form of colonialism that locks in the
alternative to eurocentrism
Grosfoguel, 2007
(Ramon, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, Decolonizing political economy and postcolonial
studies, Online: http://www.humandee.org/spip.php?article111)
Coloniality of power as the power matrix of the modern/colonial world Globalization

studies, politicaleconomy paradigms

and worldsystem analysis, with only a few exceptions, have not derived the epistemological and theoretical
implications of the epistemic critique coming from subaltern locations in the colonial divide and expressed in
academia through ethnic studies and womens studies. They continue to produce knowledge from the
perspective of western mans "point zero" divine view. This has led to important problems in the way we
conceptualize global capitalism and the "worldsystem". These concepts are in need of decolonization, which
can only be achieved with a decolonial epistemology that overtly assumes a decolonial geopolitics and
bodypolitics of knowledge as points of departure for a radical critique. The following examples can illustrate this
point. If we analyze European colonial expansion from a Eurocentric point of view, what we get is a picture in
which the origins of the socalled capitalist worldsystem is primarily produced by interimperial
competition among European empires. The primary motive for this expansion was to find shorter routes to
the East, which led accidentally to the socalled discovery and, eventual, colonization of the Americas by
Spain. From this point of view, the capitalist worldsystem would be primarily an economic system that
determines the behaviour of the major social actors by the economic logic of making profits as manifested in
the extraction of surplus value and the ceaseless accumulation of capital at a worldscale . Moreover, the concept
of capitalism implied in this perspective privileges economic relations over other social
relations. Accordingly, the transformation in the relations of production produces a new class structure typical of
capitalism as opposed to other social systems and other forms of domination. Class analysis and economic
structural transformations are privileged over other power relations.Without denying the importance of the endless
accumulation of capital at a world scale and the existence of a particular class structure in global capitalism, I raise the following epistemic
question : What would the worldsystem looks like if we moved the locus of enunciation from the European

man to an Indigenous women in the Americas, to, say Rigoberta Menchu in Guatemala or to Domitila in Bolivia ? I do not pretend
to speak for or represent the perspective of these indigenous women. What I attempt to do is to shift the location from which these paradigms are
thinking. The first implication of shifting our geopolitics of knowledge is the recognition that what arrived in the

Americas in the late 15th century was not only an economic system of capital and labour for the production of
commodities to be sold for a profit in the world market. This was a crucial part of , but was not the sole element in, the
entangled "package." What arrived in the Americas was a broader and wider entangled power structure that
an economic reductionist perspective of the worldsystem is unable to account for. From the structural
location of an indigenous woman in the Americas, what arrived was a more complex worldsystem than what
politicaleconomy paradigms and worldsystem analysis portray. A
European/capitalist/military/christian/patriarchal/white/heterosexual/male arrived in the Americas and established simultaneously in time and
space several entangled global hierarchies that for purposes of clarity in this exposition I will list below as if they were separate from each other :
1) a particular global class formation where a diversity of forms of labour (slavery, semi serfdom, wage labour, pettycommodity production,
etc.) were to coexist and be organized by capital as a source of production of surplus value through the selling of commodities for a profit in the
world market ; 2) an international division of labour of core and periphery where capital organized labour at the periphery around coerced and
authoritarian forms (Wallerstein 1974 ; 3) ; 3) an interstate system of politicomilitary organizations controlled by European males and
institutionalized in colonial administrations (Wallerstein 1979) ; 4) a global racial/ethnic hierarchy that privileged European people over
nonEuropean people (Quijano 1993 ; 2000) ; 5) a global gender hierarchy that privileged males over females and European patriarchy over other
forms of gender relations (Spivak 1988 ; Enloe 1990) ; 6) a sexual hierarchy that privileged heterosexuals over homosexuals and lesbians (it is
important to remember that most indigenous peoples in the Americas did not consider sexuality among males a pathological behaviour and had
no homophobic ideology) ; 7) a spiritual hierarchy that privileged Christians over nonChristian/nonWestern spiritualities institutionalized in

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the globalization of the Christian (Catholic and later Protestant) Church ; 8) an epistemic hierarchy that privileged western knowledge and
cosmology over non Western knowledge and cosmologies, and institutionalized in the global university system (Mignolo 1995, 2000 ; Quijano
1991). 9) a linguistic hierarchy between European languages and nonEuropean languages that privileged communication and
knowledge/theoretical production in the former and subalternized the latter as sole producers of folklore or culture but not of knowledge/theory
(Mignolo 2000). It not accidental that the conceptualization of the worldsystem, from decolonial perspectives of

the South, will question its traditional conceptualizations produced by thinkers from the North. Following
Peruvian Sociologist Anbal Quijano (1991 ; 1998 ; 2000), we could conceptualize the present worldsystem as a historical structural
heterogeneous totality with a specific power matrix, which he calls a "colonial power matrix" ("patrn de poder colonial"). This matrix

affects all dimensions of social existence such as sexuality, authority, subjectivity and labour (Quijano 2000). The
16th century initiated a new global colonial power matrix that by the late 19th century came to cover the whole planet. Taking a step further from
Quijano, I conceptualize the coloniality of power as an entanglement or, to use US Third World feminist concept, intersectionality (Crenshaw
1989 ; Fregoso 2003) of multiple and heterogeneous global hierarchies ("heterarchies") of sexual, political, epistemic, economic, spiritual,
linguistic and racial forms of domination and exploitation. Here, the racial/ethnic hierarchy of the European/nonEuropean divide transversally
reconfigures all the other global power structures. What is new in the "coloniality of power" perspective is how the idea of race and racism
becomes the organizing principle that structures all of the multiple hierarchies of the worldsystem (Quijano 1993). For example, the

different forms of labour that are articulated to capitalist accumulation at a worldscale are assigned
according to this racial hierarchy ; coercive (or cheap) labour is done by nonEuropean people on the
periphery and "free wage labour" at the core. The global gender hierarchy is also affected by race : contrary to
preEuropean patriarchies, where all women were inferior to all men, in the new colonial power matrix some women (of European origin) have a
higher status and access to resources than some men (of nonEuropean origin). The idea of race organizes the worlds population into a
hierarchical order of superior and inferior people that becomes an organizing principle of the international division of labour and of the global
patriarchal system. Contrary to the Eurocentric perspective, race, gender, sexuality, spirituality, and epistemology

are not additive elements to the economic and political structures of the capitalist worldsystem, but an
integral, entangled and constitutive part of the broad entangled "package" called the European
modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal worldsystem(Grosfoguel 2002). European patriarchyand European
notions of sexuality, epistemology and spirituality were exported to the rest of the world through colonial
expansion as the hegemonic criteria to racialize, classify and pathologize the rest of the worlds population in
a hierarchy of superior and inferior races. This conceptualization has enormous implications that I can only briefly mention here :
1) The old Eurocentric idea that societies develop at the level of the nationstate in terms of a linear evolution of modes of production from
precapitalist to capitalist is overcome. We are all encompassed within a capitalist worldsystem that articulates

different forms of labour according to the racial classification of the worlds population (Quijano 2000 ; Grosfoguel
2002). 2) The old Marxist paradigm of infrastructure and superstructure is replaced by a
historicalheterogeneous structure (Quijano 2000) or a "heterarchy" (Kontopoulos 1993), that is, an entangled
articulation of multiple hierarchies, in which subjectivity and the social imaginary is not derivative but
constitutive of the structures of the worldsystem (Grosfoguel 2002). In this conceptualization, race and racism are not
superstructural or instrumental to an overarching logic of capitalist accumulation, but are constitutive of capitalist accumulation at a worldscale.
The "colonial power matrix" is an organizing principle involving exploitation and domination exercised in multiple dimensions of social life,
from economic, sexual, or gender relations, to political organizations, structures of knowledge, state institutions, and households (Quijano 2000).
3) The old division between culture and politicaleconomy as expressed in postcolonial studies and

politicaleconomy approaches is overcome (Grosfoguel 2002). Postcolonial studies conceptualize the capitalist worldsystem as
being constituted primarily by culture, while politicaleconomy place the primary determination on economic relations. In the "coloniality
of power" approach, what comes first, "culture or the economy", is a chickenegg dilemma that obscure the
complexity of the capitalist worldsystem (Grosfoguel 2002). 4) Coloniality is not equivalent to colonialism. It is not derivative
from, or antecedent to, modernity. Coloniality and modernity constitute two sides of a single coin. The same way as the European
industrial revolution was achieved on the shoulders of the coerced forms of labour in the periphery, the new
identities, rights, laws, and institutions of modernity such as nationstates, citizenship and democracy were
formed in a process of colonial interaction with, and domination/exploitation of, non Western people. 5)
To call the present worldsystem "capitalist" is misleading, to say the least. Given the hegemonic Eurocentric
"common sense", the moment we use the word "capitalism" people immediately think that we are talking
about the "economy". However, "capitalism" is only one of the multiple entangled constellations of colonial
power matrix of the "European modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal worldsystem". It is an important one,
but not the sole one. Given its entanglement with other power relations, destroying the capitalist aspects of the
worldsystem would not be enough to destroy the present worldsystem. To transform this worldsystem, it
is crucial to destroy the historicalstructural heterogenous totality called the "colonial power matrix" of the
"worldsystem". 6) Anticapitalist decolonization and liberation cannot be reduced to only one dimension of
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social life. It requires a broader transformation of the sexual, gender, spiritual, epistemic, economic, political,
linguistic and racial hierarchies of the modern/colonial worldsystem. The "coloniality of power" perspective
challenges us to think about social change and social transformation in a nonreductionist way.

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2ACAltCede the Political

Rather we should embrace politics to solve capitalism.
Lerner 14
(MICHAEL LERNER, PhD in philosophy from University of California, Berkeley; PhD in Clinical/Social Psychology from the Wright Institute; professor of philosophy at Trinity College until
1975; founded the Institute for Labor and Mental Health, Tikkun Volume: 25 Issue: 3 Pages: 7-11, Updated: 2014-05-25, Liberals and Progressives Need a New Strategy in the Obama Years)

We don't want the quasi-fascists

to take their place and we believe that joining in the chorus of Obama-bashing only encourages the media to highlight the biggest bashers: the extremist Right. We are not in control
of the media! But it's not just that we can't risk giving more aid to the Tea Party. It's that many of us still hope that the Democrats can play a valuable role. To be entirely cynical
about the chances of Congress pursuing progressive policies in a money-swamped corporate age is to be
exactly where the corporations want us to be: cynicism leads to passivity, and passivity is a form of
obethence. We assert that congressional reforms that deliver movement toward a caring society are still possible . After
all, the new health care legislation does insure another 32 million people and by some estimates will save as many as 30,000 lives a year. Nuclear arms are being reduced; the EPA is taking
So here is the problem for progressives: we have to protect the liberals from the anger their policies and their cowardice have generated.

science seriously; we are no longer afraid of imminent war with Iran ; and existing government services are being administered at the highest levels by people who want government to succeed,
not fail. We should also credit Obama for his willingness to challenge the settlement policies of Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing government in Israel. Taken together . . . well, by no means

gains, however, are not robust enough to provide an alternative to the

powerful onslaught that liberal and progressive ideas continue to face, an onslaught that threatens to bring the most conservative elements in both major
parties back into power. The only way we can effectively protect the liberals is to help put them back on the right path
by urging them to promote policies that embody the best in Uberai and progressive thought. If we are to assist them, we have
to openly criticize what is misguided about their current policies, as background to putting forward visionary
progressive ideas, even though those will at first be dismissed as "unrealistic" or "utopian" by the very liberals we
need to protect. Strategize With Us June 11-14 in Washington, D.C. TO SUCCESSFULLY SUPPORT AND CRITIQUE OUR LIBERAL
ALLIES will require a special kind of subtlety and sophistication on our part. We need you to come to D.C. June 11-14 to strategize with us on how best to build that
progressive movement- and to say "no" to the inside-the-Beltway realists and pragmatists who have led liberals and progressives into
their current mistaken and unpopular path. At that gathering we will present our proposal for a Environmental and Social
Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (ESRA). The amendment would not only overturn the Supreme Court's
Citizens United decision, which further enables corporate money to shape electoral outcomes, but would also
increase democratic control of the economy and empower Congress to take more dramatic steps to protect the environment. Taken together
with our previously developed Spiritual Covenant with America, Tikkun's Network of Spiritual Progressives provides a plausible vision of where America should be heading
in the twentyfirst century (a vision not defined by what is "realistic" but by what is necessary to save human life from wars and
environmental tragedy). Of course, central to our approach is also a commitment to see those with whom we disagree- even the warmakers, the racists, and the fascists- as
fundamentally valuable and deserving of respect, even as we vigorously contend against their ideas and critique their public behavior. We need you there not only to give feedback on the
specifics of the amendment (we'll reshape our final version in light of what we are hearing) but also to create a sufficient presence to command media
attention and give greater weight to the ideas we are advocating. If spiritual progressives are to play a role in shaping America's future, you need
what we had hoped for, but not to be imnimized either. These

to be there. You can register for the conference at spiritualprogressives.org by clicking on the picture of Obama in the left-hand column.

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2ACAltNo Class Solidarity

The Alternative cannot solve because the proletariat has devolved into
different entities of workers. Revolution will not occur because they are
indifferent to those who profit from their labor.
Hitchcock 12
(Peter, Professor of English at Baruch College. Author of Revolutionary Violence, A Critique,
Symplok 20: 1-2, 2012.

Since 1989-1991,

it has become commonplace to note that the proletariat is not revolting because it is no longer a
proletariat. There are all kinds of work - ers, industrial, agricultural, manual, service, informal, part-time,
guest, state, immaterial, etc. (in addition to the pivotal differentiation of gender, race, sex across and within
concepts of labor) but they do not simply share or express a class interest over and above or against those who
live predominantly from their labor. This does not mean there are no signs of class ressentiment, class warfare, or class antagonism
globally. On the contrary, what is remarkable is the extent of working-class action, particularly in newly-industrialized states, or by those living
the advanced exploitation of compressed modernity, like China (strikes, mass organization, factory occupations, urban autonomy, co-ops,
slowdowns, sabotage, etc.). It does underline, nevertheless, that the contradictions between the development of productive

forces and the social forces that exercise hegemony over them appear inadequate to class forma - tion as
opposition across states, or at least to a form sufficient to pursue its own interests absolutely over all others.
The paradox of proletarian class formation is that it is in the service of its dissolution; indeed, of the disso - lution of class per se. Within
globalization, however, the object of that dissolution, those for whom the extraction of surplus value from
labor is its lifeblood, appear correspondingly less diffuse, more assured that history has fortuitously ended
with them.

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2ACPermComplexity/materialism
Clayton 15 (Philip, Ingraham Professor at Claremont School of Theology, PhD from Yale
University, Organic Marxism, Process Philosophy, and Chinese Thought,
http://www.jesusjazzbuddhism.org/organic-marxism-process-philosophy-and-chinesethought.html)//MNW
One can identify four central features of process thinking. Each one has deep resonance with traditional
Chinese philosophy. When combined, they provide the conceptual foundation for

Organic Marxism .

( 1) A relational view of reality . Every event is constituted by its relationships to other events. There is
therefore no such thing as a discrete individual, existing by itself . The features of one event affect all other events. Alfred
North Whitehead expressed this insight by translating the Western language of things or entities into the language of events. Actual entities, he
explained, are really events; he also spoke of them as actual occasions. Thus, as Whitehead wrote in his great work Process and Reality, to
function means to contribute determination to the actual entities in the nexus of some actual world. Thus the determinateness and self-

identity of one entity cannot be abstracted from the community of the diverse functionings of all entities. [vii]
Like the ancient Chinese philosophical work, the I Jing, Whiteheads philosophy understands processes as more basic than
things. Things can only be externally related to each other. For example, two billiard balls can collide, but the effects will only
be superficial; the billiard balls themselves remain the same. By contrast, Whitehead affirmed that humans and other living
events are actually internally related to each other. Since we all exist in relationship (whether we admit it or not), he spoke of the
principle of universal relativity: The principle of universal relativity directly traverses Aristotles dictum, A substance is not present in a subject.
On the contrary, according to this principle an actual entity is present in other actual entities. In fact if we allow for degrees of relevance, and for
negligible relevance, we must say that every actual entity is present in every other actual entity.[viii] Process philosophy is thus at its

heart an ecological philosophywhich explains why process philosophy plays such a foundational role for
Organic Marxism. As the process eco-philosopher Jay McDaniel recognizes: all living beings have their existence and
identities in relation to, not apart from, all other living beings. This means that the very identity of a living being, including
each plant and animal, is partly determined by the material and cultural environment in which it is situated This means that all entities
are thoroughly ecological in nature and that human beings are themselves ecological in being persons-in-community,
not persons-in-isolation.[ix] Process philosophy takes this basic ecological insight and develops it into a
comprehensive philosophical view of the world. On this view, every event is constituted by the events of its
past. Each event takes in and synthesizes these past events to a greater or lesser degree. More complex events dont just repeat the past; they
integrate and transform earlier events in a novel way. To deny our relatedness to other events, or merely to repeat them, results in less beauty and
harmony. The great process philosophers John Cobb and David Griffin expand this insight into a comprehensive principle for all living things:

There is no moment that is not constituted by its synthesis of elements from the past. If to be free from the
past were to exclude the past, the present would be entirely vacuous. The power of the new is that it makes
possible a greater inclusion of elements from the past that otherwise would prove incompatible and exclude
each other from their potential contribution. Where the existentialist seems to see an antithesis between having the moment
controlled by the past and allowing the future to be determinative, Whitehead says that the more effective the future is, the more fully the
potential contribution of the past is realized.[x] Political theory over the centuries has fought an endless battle between

approaches centered on the individual (liberalism, libertarianism) and those centered on the community or society
(socialism, communism, communitarianism). In Organic Marxism, which weds Marxist thought and process thought,
this battle is circumvented. Following Whitehead, we prefer the middle way, whereby the two perspectives are
synthesized. According to Whiteheads solution, We reduce [our entire] past to a perspective, and yet retain it as the basis of our present
moment of realization. We are different from it, and yet we retain our individual identity with it. This is the mystery of personal identity, the
mystery of the immanence of the past in the present, the mystery of transcendence.[xi]

(2) Influence without

determinism . Each event is constituted by the past and deeply informed by the past, but none is
completely determined by its past. Process philosophy does not imply top-down or past-to-future control.
Indeed, as events and systems of events become more complex, this indeterminacy becomes more pronounced: [I]n each
concrescence whatever is determinable is determined, butthere is always a remainder [and hence an element of freedom] for the decision of the
subject-superject of that concrescenceThis final decision is the reaction of the unity of the whole to its own internal determination. This
reaction is the final modification of emotion, appreciation, and purpose. But the decision of the whole arises out of the determination of the parts,

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so as to be strictly relevant to it.[xii] In

contrast to determinism, indeterminacy is a source of novelty. After all, only in

open systems can new and creative developments occur. Novelty is therefore a key ingredient in process
aesthetics, because it is only through creative experimentation that humans find new solutions to global
challenges. Whitehead thus provides grounds for hope in history. As Cobb and Griffin note, First, the future is fully and radically
open. It must take account of all that has been, but the past never settles just how the future will take account
of it. Its freedom in relation to the present is not merely that it can readjust the elements in the present world with differing emphases. It can also
introduce wholly new elements that change the weight and meaning of those it inherits from the present.[xiii] With this new focus on
open systems ,

a major objection to Marxism is answered . The class struggle is not

overcome through an inexorable process of change; that picture makes of us mere
objects in a tide that no one can stem. Instead, political and economic actors
consciously form and foster communities of reform justice-based communities that bond

their members together in working for the greater good: The vision that is needed is of new communities that are not
experienced as restrictive of freedom. They must be voluntary communities, but that is not enough. Voluntarily to accept the oppression that was
felt in involuntary communities is not improvementThe voluntary community must be bound by different kinds of ties, ties that are

(3) Aesthetic value . The process view of reality is not value-free.

Every event has intrinsic value, which is measured by its capacity for relationship and creativity : Every unit of
experienced as fulfillment rather than limitation.[xiv]

process, whether at the level of human or of electronic events, has enjoymentTo be, to actualize oneself, to act upon others, to share in a wider
community, is to enjoy being an experiencing subject quite apart from any accompanying pain or pleasure.[xv] For process thinkers,

value is defined as cooperative and communal rather than competitive and individual . In Whiteheads words,
experience is the self-enjoyment of being one among many, and of being one arising out of the composition of many.[xvi] Or, as he writes
earlier in Process and Reality, experience is nothing other than what the actual entity is in itself, for itself.[xvii] This theory of value

has

deep parallels with traditional Chinese thought. Value cannot be understood without discerning beauty;
beauty cannot be understood without discerning harmony; and harmony cannot be understood without
considering the perspective of the whole. In the Chinese philosophical classic Dao de Jing of Lao Tzu, the word Dao is used to
express this underlying unity of all things. Whitehead links beauty, harmony, and unity in a very similar way: There is a unity in the universe,
enjoying value and (by its immanence) sharing value. For example, take the subtle beauty of a flower in some isolated glade of a primeval forest.
No animal has ever had the subtlety of experience to enjoy its full beauty. And yet this beauty is a grand fact in the universe. When we survey
nature and think however flitting and superficial has been the animal enjoyment of its wonders, and when we realize how incapable the separate
cells and pulsations of each flower are of enjoying the total effect then our sense of the value of the details for the totality dawns upon our
consciousness.[xviii] Those political theorists who define values only in terms of the individual are not just being

selfish; they are actually making a philosophical mistake. They neglect the holistic dimension of value, which
intrinsically extends beyond the individual: Everything has some value for itself, for others, and for the whole. This characterizes
the meaning of actuality. By reason of this character, constituting reality, the conception of morals arises. We have no right to deface the value
experience which is the essence of the universe.[xix]

(4) Balance between private and public . It follows directly

that events are characterized by a balance between private and public identities. Eventsand

therefore all personsare

constituted by their relationships with others. We are constituted by the ways that we influence and are
influenced by our environment. In short, process philosophy is inherently an ecological philosophy.

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2ACPermState Reforms
Perm solves- working within the state is key to challenge inequality
Mander, 13
(Jerry, Co-Founder, International Forum on Globalization, There Are Good Alternatives to US Capitalism, But No
Way to Get There, http://www.alternet.org/books/there-are-good-alternatives-us-capitalism-no-way-get-there?
page=0%2C0)
Some aspects of capitalism

could be easily reformed, if only the laissez-faire, anti-government capitalist fundamentalists werent
could be advanced to control pollution and resource use, to
prevent banking excess, to stop the buying of all politicians and government, and to promote equity.
Theoretically, we could quickly start mitigating inequity problems. We could require that the wealthy pay
taxes at the same rate as the middle class, or at surplus wealth rates (graduated rates that went as high as 90 percent) that rose
depositing gifts into the pockets of legislators. Regulations

from the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman through Dwight Eisenhower. We could/should have excess profits taxes on
corporations to cover their externalized costs, or their depletion of the public-resources commons. We could ban tax havens and the many
subsidized tax rates on financial transactions and inheritance. We could establish maximum and minimum guaranteed income levels. We could
place controls on salary ratios within corporations. Thats all good. We could have better guarantees for workers rights and better public services
for everyonehealth, education, transportation, childcare, elder care. We could prevent corporations from abandoning local communities and
moving to China. And we could establish a new, more realistic relationship with the natural world, one based on

equality, mutual dependence, and the full acknowledgment of limits. Mos tpeople would appreciate these
interventions. Theyre all good. Im sure they would make us a happier society. Maybe Americans would start
voting again and eating less junk food while permitting the natural world a deserved breather and long-term
protections. Only oligarchs and free-market fundamentalists would oppose them. Unfortunately, however, they are in charge . Those and
a hundred others ideas are all doable by relatively simple acts of Congress and the President. Many other
modern countries like Norway, Sweden, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Iceland, and Japan
already enjoy many of those practices within their own versions of a kind of hybrid economics, an active
collaboration of capitalist and socialist visions that most of these countries call social democracy. Of course, they have problems, toosome of
them caused, actually, by U.S. deregulation of finance under Clinton and Bush II but, according to friends in Europe and members of my own
family who live in Scandinavia, as well as the statistics we cited in the last chapter, these countries are in far better shape than we are in terms of
public satisfaction, economic balance, environmental awareness, levels of equality, quality of public discourse, freedom from ideological
domination, willingness to adapt, and happiness.

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2ACPermCoalitions
Perm-do bothsingular focus failswe need a coalition of resistance
Giroux 14-Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a
Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University [Henry, Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State, Truthout,
February 10, 2014, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21656-totalitarian-paranoia-in-the-post-orwellian-surveillance-state, DKP]

If the first task of resistance is to make dominant power clear by addressing critically and meaningfully the
abuses perpetrated by the corporate surveillance state and how such transgressions affect the daily lives of people in different ways, the
second step is to move from understanding and critique to the hard work of building popular movements that
integrate rather than get stuck and fixated in single-issue politics. The left has been fragmented for too long,
and the time has come to build national and international movements capable of dismantling the political,
economic and cultural architecture put in place by the new authoritarianism and its post-Orwellian surveillance industries. This is not a call
to reject identity and special-issue politics as much as it is a call to build broad-based alliances and
movements, especially among workers, labor unions, educators, youth groups, artists, intellectuals, students,
the unemployed and others relegated, marginalized and harassed by the political and financial elite . At best, such
groups should form a vigorous and broad-based third party for the defense of public goods and the establishment of a radical democracy. This is not a call
for a party based on traditional hierarchical structures but a party consisting of a set of alliances among
different groups that would democratically decide its tactics and strategies.

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Cap K Updates 56

2ACPermBenjamin
The 1NC re-affirms progress as dominating by nature, a history that piles on
top of the present, that has as its goal to provide narratives that result in a
victorious climax after continual struggle. It frames progress as the primary
objective of life and encourages conformism. Reject the 1NC and affirm a
historical materialism of losses and victories. (We do not endorse the gendered
language in the following card)
Lucero-Montano 10 (Alfredo, Holds a masters degree in philosophy from San Diego State University and a
bachelors degree in philosophy from Iberoamerican University (Mexico City), On Walter Benjamins Historical
Materialism)

The puppet, called historical materialism, is to win all the time. It can easily be a
match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is small and ugly and has to keep
out of sight. How then do the dwarf and the puppet, theology and historical materialism, relate to one another? It
seems that historical materialism and theology, which is the impulse that sets the apparatus of historical
materialism, are by no means identical. There is no identity between the separate figures. But it is the dwarf
(theology) who guides the puppets hand (historical materialism). In Benjamins interpretation, these relationships
seem to be shifted. Historical materialism is in control: it enlists the services of theology. Theology is the slave
who must do the work. Of course, the tasks undertaken by theology are not prescribed to it; on the contrary, it is
the expert. But it can only do anything when it is in the interest of its master. The master-slave relationship is
reversed: the living dwarf does not enlist the service of the lifeless puppet. This reduces the living
being to a mere object of domination and reveals the puppet to be, in reality, alive and active.
Although the two figures are clearly separated, they become unified, however, when they make up the image of the
automatic chess player. Only when theology and historical materialism have joined forces can the game begin. Only
as allies would the two be a match for any opponent on the field of history the class struggle. It seems that
Benjamin seeks a form of cooperation between historical materialism and theology in which they can do more than

There can be no doubt about the desired outcome of

the class struggle for one who has taken up the position of the oppressed
classes. But is not it a solely intentional standpoint. Benjamin might respond to the question: if historical
take up the struggle - they can win.

materialism enlists the services of theology, the victory of the oppressed classes must be objectively produced.

this question necessarily raises the

problem concerning the necessary conditions for winning the historical
match. At this point, Benjamin implicitly departs from the discussion of the concept of history to the possible
Historical materialism is to win all the time. But

historical praxis. Benjamins historical materialism would postulate the unity of theory and practice as has been
advocated since Marx. He attempts to develop the theory of a different practice, which might have a chance of

Historical
materialism once sought to realize philosophy by transforming it. But in the
meantime, for Benjamin, it has lost its relationship to reality. So in order to be able to catch
winning the match. Indeed this seems to be the intention of the historical-philosophical theses.

up with real history again, historical materialism must return beyond philosophy to theology. But the question
remains: Was Benjamins attempt successful? Is the alliance of historical and theology actually able to produce a
new unity of theory and practice? Benjamins theses closely connect the theory of historiography narrative-- with
the theory of history the nature and transformation of human society-- in the same way in which history itself is
referred to its political praxis. For Benjamin, it is necessary to have a certain conception of the present that allows

The concept of history intended by

Benjamin is meant to improve our position in the class struggle and historical
materialism in the process. He immediately begins to develop the conception of an alternate political
us to generate an interrelationship between history and politics.

praxis, which would pursue the cause of historical materialism. Benjamins critical revision of the theory and
practice of historical materialism has its starting point as a criticism of the concept of progress itself (thesis XIII).
Its theory and practice have been formed by a conception of progress, which bore little relation to reality but made
dogmatic claims (loc. cit.). Here Benjamin criticizes a vulgar historical materialism that

recognizes only the progress in mastering nature, not the retrogression of

society (thesis XI). The vulgar-historical materialist bypasses the question that

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the concept of progress and the notion of barbarism are two sides of one
and the same thing. Therefore, the task of historical materialism is to brush history against the grain
(thesis VII). It would be a mistake to understand that Benjamin is against progress; he is against that man
internalizes the logic of progress, and in this way he would indefinitely reproduce it. When the progress

turns into the objective of mankind and not mankind the objective of progress, we
reproduce a conformist and reified conception of history. In other words, the task of
historical materialism then is to blast out the continuum of historical succession, that is, to overcome the
concept of progress. Benjamin adopts a conception of history as discontinuity, as
interruption. Historical materialism aspires to neither a homogeneous nor a continuous exposition of
history [N7a,2], rather it leads the past to bring the present into a critical state [N7a,5].
The critical momentum of historical materialism is registered in that blasting of historical continuity [N10a,1].

The concept of progress had to run counter to the critical theory of history
[historical materialism] from the moment it ceased to be applied as criterion to the specific historical
Benjamin writes:

developments and instead was required to measure the span between a legendary inception and a legendary end
of historyas soon it becomes the signature of historical process as a whole, the concept of progress bespeaks an
uncritical hypostatization rather than a critical interrogation [N13,1]. For Benjamin, historical materialism
carries along with it an immanent critique of the concept of progress [N11,4]. So it must liquidate the continuum
of history: it blasts out the reified continuity of history [N9a,6], and constructs it as a discontinuum. That is,

historical materialism does not reconstruct history by repeating the

past, but constructing its interferences in the present. Its founding
concept is not progress but actualization [N2,2]. Benjamin attempts to establish the discontinuity of historical
time as the foundations of the materialistic view of history. This attempt terminates in the concept of history as a
catastrophe. The catastrophe is the continuum of history. For Benjamin, catastrophe is progress; progress is
catastrophe. Thereby, the concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are status
quo is the catastrophe [N9a,1]. That things continue on going is the catastrophe. However, Benjamin postulates a
true concept of progress versus its reified version: Progress has its seat not in the continuity of elapsing time but in
its interferences [N9a,7]. That is, in its discontinuities. These discontinuities are no less than the outcome of the

the task of historical materialism is

to construct an alternative history once it has annihilated within itself the
aporias, the historical contradictions, of the present. In short,

[reified] idea of progress [N2,2].

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A2Alt solves Warming

Alt cant solve warming- takes too long and empirics prove- the aff is key
Parenti, 2013
(Christian, professor of sustainable development at the School for International Training, A Radical Approach to
the Climate Crisis, Dissident Magazine, Summer, http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/a-radical-approach-tothe-climate-crisis)

Several strands of green thinking maintain that capitalism is incapable of a sustainable relationship with nonhuman nature because, as an economic system, capitalism has a growth imperative while the earth is finite. One finds versions of this
argument in the literature of eco-socialism, deep ecology, eco-anarchism, and even among many mainstream greens who, though typically
declining to actually name the economic system, are fixated on the dangers of growth. All this may be true. Capitalism, a system

in which privately owned firms must continuously out-produce and out-sell their competitors, may be
incapable of accommodating itself to the limits of the natural world. However, that is not the same question as
whether capitalism can solve the more immediate climate crisis. Because of its magnitude, the climate crisis
can appear as the sum total of all environmental problemsdeforestation, over-fishing, freshwater depletion, soil erosion, loss
of biodiversity, chemical contamination. But halting greenhouse gas emissions is a much more specific problem, the most
pressing subset of the larger apocalyptic panorama. And the very bad news is, time has run out . As I write this,
news arrives of an ice-free arctic summer by 2050. Scientists once assumed that would not happen for hundreds of years. Dealing with
climate change by first achieving radical social transformationbe it a socialist or anarchist or deepecological/neo-primitive revolution, or a nostalgia-based localista conversion back to a mythical small-town
capitalismwould be a very long and drawn-out, maybe even multigenerational, struggle. It would be
marked by years of mass education and organizing of a scale and intensity not seen in most core capitalist
states since the 1960s or even the 1930s. Nor is there any guarantee that the new system would not also
degrade the soil, lay waste to the forests, despoil bodies of water, and find itself still addicted to coal and oil.
Look at the history of actually existing socialism before its collapse in 1991. To put it mildly, the economy was
not at peace with nature. Or consider the vexing complexities facing the left social democracies of Latin
America. Bolivia, and Ecuador, states run by socialists who are beholden to very powerful, autonomous
grassroots movements, are still very dependent on petroleum revenue. A more radical approach to the crisis
of climate change begins not with a long-term vision of an alternate society but with an honest engagement
with the very compressed timeframe that current climate science implies. In the age of climate change, these
are the real parameters of politics.

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