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Capitalism K GSU 2014
WIlERE do pOSTMOdERNisTS COME FrOM? 1

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The 1AC tries to compensate for the totality of the modern capitalism
by affirming transgression and alterity. This degrades collective
humanist struggles while reinforcing libertarian pessimism.
Eagleton, Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University, Professor of Cultural Theory at the National
University of Ireland and Distinguished Visiting Professor of English Literature at The University of Notre Dame, 1997 (Terry,
Where do Postmodernists Come from? in In defense of history)
Imagine a radical movement that had suffered an emphatic defeat. So emphatic, in fact, that it
seemed unlikely to resurface for the length of a lifetime, if at all. As time wore on, the beliefs of this movement might begin to seem less
false or ineffectual than simply irrelevant. For its opponents, it would be less a matter of hotly contesting these doctrines than of contemplating them
with something of the mild antiquarian interest one might have previously reserved for Ptolemaic cosmology or the scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas.
Radicals might come to find themselves less overwhelmed or out-argued than simply washed
up, speaking a language so quaintly out of tune with their era that, as with the language of Platonism or courtly love, nobody even bothered any longer
to ask whether it was true. What would be the likely response of the left to such a dire condition? Many, no
doubt, would drift either cynically or sincerely to the right, regretting their earlier views as infantile idealism. Others might keep the faith purely out of
habit, anxiety, or nostalgia, clinging to an imaginary identity and risking the neurosis that that may bring. A small clutch of left triumphalists, incurably
hopeful, would no doubt carry on detecting the stirrings of the revolution in the faintest flicker of militancy. In others, the radical impulse would
persist, but would be forced to migrate elsewhere. One can imagine that theruling assumption of this period would be
that the system was, at least for the moment, unbreachable; and a great many of the
lefts conclusions could be seen to flow from this glum supposition. One might expect, for example,
that there would be an upsurge of interest in the margins and crevices of the systemin those
ambiguous, indeterminate places where its power seemed less secure. If the system could not be breached, one might at
least look to those forces which might momentarily transgress , subvert, or give it the slip. There would
be, one might predict, much celebration of the marginalbut this would be partly making a virtue out of
necessity, since the left would itself have been rudely displaced from the mainstream, and might thus come, conveniently enough, to suspect all
talk of centrality as suspect. At its crudest, this cult of marginality would come down to a simpleminded
assumption that minorities were positive and majorities oppressive. .Just how minorities like
fascist groups, Ulst 6 Unionists, or the international bourgeoisie fitted into this picture would not be entirely clear. Nor is it obvious how such a position
could cope with a previously marginal movementthe ANC, for examplebecoming p0]jtj cally dominant, given its formalist prejudice that dominance
was undesirable as such. The
historical basis for this way of thinking would be the fact that political
movements that were at once mass, central, and creative were by and large no longer in
business. Indeed, the idea of a movement that was at once central and subversive would now
appear something of a contradiction in terms. It would therefore seem natural to
demonize the mass dominant, and consensual, and romanticize whatever happened to
deviate from them. It would be, above all, the attitude of those younger dissidents who had
nothing much, politically speaking, to remember, who had no actual memory or
experience of mass radical politics, but a good deal of experience of drearily
oppressive majorities. If the system really did seem to have canceled all opposition to itself, then it would not be hard to generalize
from this to the vaguely anarchistic belief that system is oppressive as such. Since there were almost no examples of attractive political systems around,
the claim would seem distinctly plausible. The only genuine criticism could be one launched from outside the
system altogether; and one would expect, therefore, a certain fetishizing of otherness in such a
period. There would be enormous interest in anything that seemed alien, deviant, exotic, unincorporable, all the way from aard- varks to Alpha
Centauri, a passion for whatever gave us a tantalizing glimpse of something beyond the logic of the system altogether. But this romantic
ultra-leftism would coexist, curiously enough, with a brittle pessimismfor the fact is that if the
system is all-powerful, then there can be by definition nothing beyond it, any more than there
can be anything beyond the infinite curvature of cosmic space. If there were something outside the system, then it would be entirely unknowable and
thus incapable of saving us; but if we could draw it into the orbit of the system, so that it could gain some effective foothold there, its otherness would
be instantly contaminated and its subversive power would thus dwindle to nothing. Whatever
negates the system in
theory would thus be logically incapable of doing so in practice. Anything we can understand can by
definition not be radical, since it must be within itself; but anything which escapes the system could be heard by thC ^no more than a mysterious
murmur. llS ,S.| thinking has abandoned the whole notion of a system which is nally contradictorywhich has that installed at its heart which can '!lter
tially undo it. Instead, it thinks in the rigid oppositions of inside and u tside where to be on the inside is to be complicit and to be on the outside
to be impotent. The typical style of thought WofI lsuch a pperiod,
ERE do E R N imight
O S T M O d then, be
sTS COM E Fdescribed
rOM? 4 as libertarian
pessimismlibertarian, because one would not have given up on the dream of something quite other than what we have; pessimism, because
one would be much too bleakly conscious of the omnipotence of law and power to
believe that such a dream could ever be realized. If one still believed in subversion, but not in the existence of
any flesh-and-blood agents of it, then it might be possible to imagine that the system in some way subverted itself, deconstructed its own logic, which
would then allow you to combine a certain radicalism with a certain skepticism. If the system is everywhere, then it would seem, like the Almighty
himself, to be visible at no particular point; and it would therefore become possible to believe, paradoxically enough, that whatever was out there was
not in fact a system at all. It is only a short step from claiming that the system is too complex to be represented to declaring that it does not exist. In the
period we are imagining, then, some
would no doubt be found clamoring against what they saw as the
tyranny of a real social totality, whereas others would be busy deconstructing the whole idea of
totality and claiming that it existed only in our minds. It would not be hard to see this as, at
least in part, a compensation in theory for the fact that the social totality was proving
difficult to crack in practice. If no very ambitious form of political action seems for the
moment possible, if so-called micropolitics seem the order of the day, it is always
tempting to convert this necessity into a virtueto console oneself with the thought that
ones political limitations have a kind of objective ground in reality, in the fact that social
totality is in any case just an illusion. (Metaphysical illusion makes your position sound rather
more imposing.) It does not matter if there is no political agent at hand to transform the whole, because
there is in fact no whole to be transformed. It is as though, having mislaid the breadknife, one declares the loaf to be already sliced.
But totality might also seem something of an illusion because there would be no very obvious
political agent for whom society might present itself as a totality. There are those who need to grasp how it stands
with them in order to be free, and who find that they can do this only by grasping something of the overall structure with which their own immediate
situation intersects. Local and universal are not, here, simple opposites or theoretical options, as they might be for those intellectuals who prefer to
think big and those more modest academics who like to keep it concrete But if some of those traditional political agents are in trouble, then so will be
the concept of social totality, since it is those agents need of it that gives it its force. Grasping a complex totality involves some rigorous analysis; so it is
not surprising that such strenuously systematic thought should be out of fash- x ion, dismissed as phallic, scientistic, or what have you, in the sort of
period Cf J we are imagining. When there is nothing in particular in it for you to find out how you standif
you are a professor in Ithaca or Irvine , for example you can afford to be ambiguous,
elusive, deliciously indeterminate. You are also quite likely, in such circumstances, to wax
idealistthough in some suitably newfangled rather than tediously old-fashioned sense. For one
primary way in which we know the world is, of course, through practice; and if any very ambitious practice is denied us, it will not be long before we
catch ourselves wondering whether there is anything out there at all. One would expect, then, that in such an era a belief in reality as something that
resists us (History is what hurts, as Fredric Jameson has put it) will give way to a belief in the constructed nature of the world. This, in turn,
would no doubt go hand in hand with a full-blooded culturalism which underestimated what men
and women had in common as material human creatures, and suspected all talk of nature as an insidious
mystification. It would tend not to realize that such culturalism is just as reductive as, say, economism or biologism. Cognitive and realist accounts of
human consciousness would yield ground to various kinds of pragmatism and relativism, partly because there didnt any longer seem much politically
at stake in knowing how it stood with you. Everything would become an interpretation, including that
statement itself. And what would also gradually implode, along with reasonably certain knowledge, would
be the idea of a human subject centered and unified enough to take significant
action. For such significant action would now seem in short supply; and the result, once more, would be
to make a virtue out of necessity by singing the praises of the diffuse, decentered, schizoid human subjecta
subject who might well not be together enough to topple a bottle off a wall, let alone bring
down the state, but who could nevertheless be presented as hair-raisingly avant-garde in trast to
the smugly centered subjects of an older, more classical phase c0 pitalism. To put it another way: the subject as producer
(coherent, disciplined, self-determining) would have yielded ground to the subject as consumer (mobile, ephemeral,
constituted by insatiable desire). If the left orthodoxies of such a period were pragmatist, relativist, pluralistic, deconstructive, then one might well
see such thought-forms as dangerously radical. For does not capitalism need sure foundations, stable
identities, absolute authority, metaphysical certainties, in order to survive? And
wouldnt the kind of thought we are imagining put the skids under all this? The
answer, feebly enough, is both yes and no. It is true that capitalism, so far anyway, has felt the need to underpin its
authority with unimpeachable moral foundations. Look, for example, at the remarkable tenacity of religious belief in North America. On the other
hand, look at the British, who are a notably godless bunch. No British politician could cause anything other than acute embarrassment by invoking the
Supreme Being in public, and the British talk much less aboutWmetaphysical
IlERE do p abstractions
O S T M O d Elike
R N Britain
i s T S Cthan
OME those
F r OinMthe
? 5United States do about
something called the United States. It is not clear, in other words, exactly how much metaphysical talk the
advanced capitalist system really requires; and it is certainly true that its relentlessly secularizing, rationalizing
operations threaten to undercut its own metaphysical claims. It is clear, however, that without pragmatism and
plurality the system could not survive at all. Difference, hybridity, heterogeneity, restless
mobility are native to the capitalist mode of production, and thus by no means inherently radical
phenomena. So if these ways of thinking put the skids under the system at one level,
they reproduce its logic at another. If an oppressive system seems to regulate everything,
then one will naturally look around for some enclave of which this is less truesome place
where a degree of freedom or randomness or pleasure still precariously survives.
Perhaps you might call this desire, or discourse, or the body, or the unconscious.
One might predict in this period a quickening of interest in psychoanalysisfor
psychoanalysis is not only the thinking persons sensationalism, blending intellectual rigor with
the most lurid materials, but it exudes a general exciting air of radicalism without being
particularly so politically. If the more abstract questions of state, mode of

production, and civil society seem for the moment too hard to resolve, then one
might shift ones political attention to something more intimate and immediate,
more living and fleshly, like the body . Conference papers entitled Putting the Anus Back into Coriolanus would attract
eager crowds who had never heard of the bourgeoisie but who knew all about buggery. This state of affairs would no doubt be particularly marked in
those societies which in any case lacked strong socialist traditions; indeed, one could imagine much of the style of thought in question, for all its
suspiciousness of the universal, as no more than a spurious universalizing of such specific political conditions. Such a concern with
bodiliness and sexuality would represent, one imagines, an enormous political deepening and enrichment, at the same time as it would
signify a thoroughgoing displacement. And no doubt just the same could be said if one were to
witness an increasing obsession with language and culturetopics where the
intellectual is in any case more likely to feel at home than in the realm of material
production. One might expect that some, true to the pessimism of the period, would stress how
discourses are policed, regulated, heavy with power, while others would proclaim in more libertarian spirit how the
thrills and spills of the signifier can give the slip to the system. Either way, one would no doubt witness an immense
linguistic inflation, as what appeared no longer conceivable in political reality was still just
about possible in the areas of discourse or signs or textuality. The freedom of text or language
would come to compensate for the unfreedom of the system as a whole. There would
still be a kind of utopian vision, but its name now would be increasingly poetry. And it
would even be possible to imagine, in an extremist variant of this style of thought, that the future was here and nowthat utopia had already arrived
in the shape of the pleasurable intensities, multiple selfhoods, and exhilarating exchanges of the marketplace and the shopping mall. History
would then most certainly have come to an endan end already implicit in the
blocking of radical political action. For if no such collective action seemed
generally possible, then history would indeed appear as random and directionless, and
to claim that there was no longer any grand narrative would be, among other things, a way of
saying that we no longer knew how to construct one effectively in these conditions. For this
kind of thought, history would have ended because freedom would finally have been achieved; for Marxism, the achievement of freedom would be the
beginning of history and the end of all we have known to date: those boring prehisto- rical grand narratives which are really just the same old recycled
story of scarcity, suffering, and struggle. (17-22)
Ideologies of ascriptive difference serve to stabilize labor relations in
the class hierarchyMarxism is key to demystify the role of identity
within broader class conflictvoting aff only makes neolib more
efficient WIlERE do pOSTMOdERNisTS COME FrOM? 6
Reed 2013 professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in

race and American politics. He has taught at Yale, Northwestern and the New School for Social
Research. An expert on racial and economic inequality, he is a founding member of the Labor
Party and a frequent contributor to The Nation (Adolph, New Labor Forum 22.1, Marx, Race,
and Neoliberalism)
A Marxist perspective can be most helpful for understanding race and racism
insofar as it perceives capitalism dialectically, as a social totality that includes modes of production, relations of
production, and the pragmatically evolving ensemble of institutions and ideologies that
lubricate and propel its reproduction. From this perspective, Marxisms most
important contribution to making sense of race and racism in the United States may be
demystification. A historical materialist perspective should stress that racewhich
includes racism, as one is unthinkable without the otheris a historically specific ideology that
emerged, took shape, and has evolved as a constitutive element within a definite set of social relations anchored
to a particular system of production.
Race is a taxonomy of ascriptive difference, that is, an ideology that constructs populations as
groups and sorts them into hierarchies of capacity, civic worth, and desert based on natural or
essential characteristics attributed to them. Ideologies of ascriptive difference
help to stabilize a social order by legitimizing its hierarchies of wealth, power, and
privilege, including its social division of labor, as the natural order of things.1
Ascriptive ideologies are just-so stories with the potential to become self-fulfilling prophecies. They emerge
from self-interested common sense as folk knowledge: they are known to be true
unreflectively because they seem to comport with the evidence of quotidian experience.
They are likely to become generally assumed as self-evident truth, and imposed as such by law
and custom, when they converge with and reinforce the interests of powerful strata in the society.
Race and gender are the most familiar ascriptive hierarchies in the contemporary United States.
Ironically, that is so in part because egalitarian forces have been successful in the last half-
century in challenging them and their legal and material foundations. Inequalities based directly on claims of race and
gender difference are now negatively sanctioned as discrimination by law and prevailing cultural norms. Of course,
patterns of inequality persist in which disadvantage is distributed asymmetrically along racial and gender lines,
but practically no oneeven among apologists for those patterned inequalities openly admits to
espousing racism or sexism.
It is telling in this regard that Glenn Beck stretches to appropriate Martin Luther King,
Jr., and denounces Barack Obama as racist, and that Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Ann Coulter
accuse Democrats of sexism. Indeed, just as race has been and continues to be unthinkable
without racism, today it is also unthinkable without antiracism.
Crucially, the significance of race and gender, and their content as ideologies of essential difference have changed markedly over
time in relation to changing political and economic conditions. Regarding race in particular, classificatory
schemes
have varied substantially, as have the narratives elaborating them. That is, which
populations count as races, the criteria determining them, and the stakes attached
to counting as one, or as one or another at any given time, have been much more
fluid matters than our discussions of the notion would suggest.
And that is as it must be because race, like all ideologies of ascriptive hierarchy, is
fundamentally pragmatic. After all, these belief systems emerge as legitimations of
concrete patterns of social relations inWparticular contexts.
IlERE do pOSTMOdERNisTS COME FrOM? 7
Race emerged historically along with the institution of slavery in the New World. A rich
scholarship examines its emergence, perhaps most signally with respect to North America in Edmund Morgans American Slavery,
American Freedom and Kathleen Browns Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs. Both focus on the simultaneous
sharpening of distinctions between slavery and indentured servitude, and the institutional establishment of black and white, or
African and English, as distinct, mutually exclusive status categories over the course of the seventeenth century in colonial Virginia.2
Race and racism took shape as an ideology and material reality during the following century initially in the context of the contest
between free-and slave-labor systems and the related class struggle that eventually produced the modern notion of free labor as the
absolute control of a worker over her or his person.3
After defeat of the Confederate insurrection led to slaverys abolition, race as white supremacy evolved
in the South as an element in the struggle over what freedom was to mean and how
it would be harmonized with the plantocracys desired labor system and the social order required to
maintain it. That struggle culminated in the planter-dominated ruling classs victory,
which was consolidated in racialized disfranchisement and imposition of the codified white
supremacist regime of racial segregation.
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the West Coast fights over importation of Chinese
labor and Japanese immigration also condensed around racialist ideologies.
Railroad operators and other importers of Chinese labor imagined that Chinese
workers distinctive racial characteristics made them more tractable and capable of living
on less than white Americans; opponents argued that those very racial characteristics would degrade American labor and that
Chinese were racially unassimilable. Postbellum southern planters imported Chinese to the
Mississippi Delta to compete with black sharecroppers out of the same racialist
presumptions of greater tractability, as did later importers of Sicilian labor to the
sugarcane and cotton fields.
Large-scale industrial production in the latenineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, of course, depended
on mass labor immigration mainly from the eastern and southern fringes of
Europe. The innovations of race sciencethat is, of racialist folk ideology transformed into an academic professionpromised to assist
employers needs for rational labor force management and were present in the foundation of the fields of industrial relations and industrial psychology.
Hugo Mnsterberg, a founding luminary of industrial psychology, included race psychological diagnosis as an element in assessment of employees
capabilities, although he stressed that racial or national temperaments are averages and that there is considerable individual variation within groups.
He argued that assessment, therefore, should be leavened with consideration of individuals characteristics and that the influence of group psychology
would be significant only if the employment not of a single person, but of a large number, is in question, as it is most probable that the average
character will show itself in a sufficient degree as soon as many members of the group are involved.4
As scholarship on race science and its kissing cousin, eugenics, has shown, research that sets out to
find evidence of racial difference will find it, whether or not it exists. Thus, race science
produced increasingly refined taxonomies of racial groupsup to as many as sixty-three basic races. The apparent specificity of
race theorists just-so stories about differential racial capacities provided rationales for immigration restriction, sterilization,
segregation, and other regimes of inequality. It
also held out the promise of assisting employers in
assigning workers to jobs for which they were racially suited. John Bodnar and his coauthors reproduce a Racial
Adaptability Chart used by a Pittsburgh company in the 1920s that maps thirty-six different racial groups capacities for twenty-two
distinct jobs, eight different atmospheric conditions, jobs requiring speed or precision, and day or night shift work. For example,
Letts were supposedly fair with pick and shovel, and concrete and wheelbarrow, bad as hod carriers, cleaners and caretakers, and
boilermakers helpers; good as coal passers and blacksmiths as well as at jobs requiring speed or precision; and good in cool and dry,
smoky or dusty conditions; fair in oily or dirty processes; and good on both day and night shifts.5
Of course, all this was bogus, nothing more than narrow upper-class prejudices
parading about as science. It was convincing only if one shared the folk narratives of essential hierarchy that the
research assumed from the outset. But the race theories did not have to be true to be effective.
They had only to be used as if they were true to produce the material effects that gave the ideology an authenticating verisimilitude.
Poles became steel workers in Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Buffalo, Chicago, and Gary not for any
natural aptitude or affinity but because employers and labor recruiters sorted them into
work in steel mills.
Even the New Deal embedded premises W I l E R E dof
o p racial
O S T M O d Eand
R N i s Tgender
S C O M E F rhierarchy
OM? 8 in its most
fundamental policy initiatives. The longer-term implications of the two-tiered system of social
benefits thus created persist to the present day. This extensive history illustrates that, as
Marxist theorist Harry Chang observed in the 1970s, racial formation has always been an aspect of
class formation, as a social condition of production. Race has been a constitutive
element in a capitalist social dynamic in which social types (instead of persons)
figure as basic units of economic and political management.6 Chang perceptively analogized race
to what Marx described as the fetish character of money. Marx, he noted,
described money as the officiating object (or subject as an object) in the reification of a relation called value and as a
function-turned-into-an-object. Race is similarly a functiona relation of
hierarchy rooted in the capitalist division of laborturned into an object.7 Money
seeks gold to objectify itself gold does not cry out to be money. Similarly, the
cutting edge of racial determinations of persons is a social imposition on nature, which
on its own yields no such categories.8
Research that sets out to find evidence of racial difference will find it, whether or not it exists. Although
discussing
race specifically, Chang also puts his finger on the central characteristic of
ideologies of ascriptive hierarchy in general: In practice, the political economic
raison detre of racial categories lies in the ironclad social validity that is possible
if relations are objectified as the intrinsic quality of racial features. Blacks as the absence
of the minimum guarantee of bourgeois rights (against enslavement and bondage) presupposes Whites as a guarantee of immunity
from such social degradation.9
This formulation applies equally to populations stigmatized as feebleminded,

natural-born criminals, white trash, poverty cultures, the underclass, crack
babies, superpredators, and other narratives of ascriptive hierarchy. Each such
narrative is a species of the genus of ideologies that legitimize capitalist social
relations by naturalizing them. The characteristic linking the species of this genus of
ascriptive ideologies is that they are populations living, if not exactly outside the minimum
guarantee of bourgeois rights, at least beneath the customary floor of social worth and regard. In practice, the
latter devolves toward the former.
Changs perspective may help us see more clearly how ascriptive ideologies function. It certainly is
no surprise that
dominant classes operate among themselves within a common sense that
understands their dominance unproblematically, as decreed by the nature of things. At
moments when their dominance faces challenges, those narratives may be articulated
more assertively and for broader dissemination. This logic, for example, underlay the
antebellum shift, in the face of mounting antislavery agitation, from pragmatic
defenses of slavery as a necessary evila stance that presumed a ruling class speaking among itself aloneto
essentialist arguments, putatively transcending class interests, namely, that slavery
was a positive good. It also may be seen in the explosion of racialist ideology in its various forms, including eugenics, in
justifying imperialist expansionism and consolidating the defeat of populism and working-class insurgency in the years overlapping
the turn of the twentieth century. That same dynamic was at work displacing the language of class and political economy by culture
and culturology in the postwar liberalism that consolidated the defeat of CIO radicalism. Later, racial essentialism helped reify the
struggles against southern segregation, racial discrimination, inequality, and poverty during the 1960s by separating discussions of
injustice from capitalisms logic of reproduction. Poverty was reinvented as a cultural dilemma, and white racism singled out as the
root of racial inequality.
In this way, Changs perspective can be helpful in sorting out several important
limitations in discussions of race and class characteristic of todays left. It can also help to
make sense of the striking convergence between the relative success of identitarian understandings of social justice and the steady,
intensifying advance of neoliberalism. It suggests a kinship where many on the left assume an enmity. The
rise of
neoliberalism in particular suggests a serious problem with arguments that represent
race and class as dichotomous or alternative frameworks of political critique and action, as
well as those arguments that posit the dichotomy while attempting to reconcile its
elements with formalistic gestures, for example, the common race and class
construction.
This sort of historical materialist perspective throws into relief a fundamental
limitation of the whiteness notion that has been fashionable within the academic left for roughly
two decades: it reifies whiteness as a transhistorical social category. In effect, it treats
whiteness and therefore raceas existing prior to and above social context.10 Both who
qualifies as white and the significance of being white have altered over time.
Moreover, whiteness discourse functions as a kind of moralistic expos rather
than a basis for strategic politics; this is clear in that the program signally articulated in its name has been
simply to raise a demand to abolish whiteness, that is, to call on whites to renounce
their racial privilege. In fact, its fixation on demonstrating the depth of whites
embrace of what was known to an earlier generations version of this argument as white skin privilege and the inclination to slide
into teleological accounts in which groups or individuals approach or pursue whiteness erases the real historical
dynamics and contradictions of American racial history.
The whiteness discourse overlaps other arguments that presume racism to be a sui
generis form of injustice. Despite seeming provocative, these arguments do not go beyond the premises of the racial
liberalism from which they commonly purport to dissent. They differ only in rhetorical flourish, not
content. Formulations that invoke metaphors of disease or original sin reify racism by disconnecting it from the discrete
historical circumstances and social structures in which it is embedded, and treating it as an autonomous force.
Disconnection from political economy is also a crucial feature of postwar
liberalisms construction of racial inequality as prejudice or intolerance. Racism
becomes an independent variable in a moralistic argument that is idealist
intellectually and ultimately defeatist politically.
This tendency to see racism as sui generis also generates a resistance to precision in analysis. It is fueled by a tendency to inflate the
language of racism to the edge of its reasonable conceptual limits, if not beyond. Ideological
commitment to
shoehorning into the rubric of racism all manner of inequalities that may appear
statistically as racial disparities has yielded two related interpretive pathologies. One is
a constantly expanding panoply of neologisms institutional racism, systemic racism,
structural racism, color-blind racism, post-racial racism, etc. intended to graft
more complex social dynamics onto a simplistic and frequently psychologically inflected racism/anti-
racism political ontology. Indeed, these efforts bring to mind [Thomas S.] Kuhns account of attempts to accommodate
mounting anomalies to salvage an interpretive paradigm in danger of crumbling under a crisis of authority.11
A second essentialist sleight-of-hand advances claims for the primacy of race/racism as an explanation of
inequalities in the present by invoking analogies to regimes of explicitly racial subordination
in the past. In these arguments, analogy stands in for evidence and explanation of
the contemporary centrality of racism. Michelle Alexanders widely read and cited book, The New Jim Crow, is only the
most prominent expression of this tendency; even she has to acknowledge that the analogy fails because the historical circumstances are so radically
different.12 Rigorous pursuit of equality of opportunity exclusively within the terms of capitalist class relations has been fully legitimized under the
rubric of diversity.
From the historical materialist standpoint, the view of racial inequality as a sui generis injustice and dichotomous formulations of
the relation of race and class as systems of hierarchy in the United States are not only miscast but also fundamentally
counterproductive. It
is particularly important at this moment to recognize that the familiar taxonomy of
racial difference is but one historically specific instance of a genus of ideologies of
ascriptive hierarchy that stabilize capitalist social reproduction. I have argued previously that
entirely new race-like taxonomies could come to displace the familiar ones. For
instance, the underclass could become W I l E Reven
E d omore
p O S race-like Nia
T M O d E R as distinctive,
sTS C O M E F r O M ? 1 essentialized
0
population, by our current folk norms, multiracial in composition, albeit most likely including in
perceptibly greater frequencies people who would be classified as black and Latino
racially, though as small enough pluralities to preclude assimilating the group
ideologically as a simple proxy for nonwhite inferiors.13
This possibility looms larger now. Struggles for racial and gender equality have largely divested race and
gender of their common sense verisimilitude as bases for essential difference. Moreover, versions of racial and gender equality are
now also incorporated into the normative and programmatic structure of left neoliberalism. Rigorous pursuit of equality of
opportunity exclusively within the terms of given patterns of capitalist class relationswhich is after all
the ideal of racial liberalismhas been fully legitimized within the rubric of diversity. That ideal is realized through gaining rough
parity in distribution of social goods and bads among designated population categories. As Walter Benn Michaels has argued
powerfully, according to that ideal, the society would
be just if 1 percent of the population controlled
90 percent of the resources, provided that blacks and other nonwhites, women,
and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people were represented
among the 1 percent in roughly similar proportion as their incidence in the general population.14
Given the triumph of racial liberalism, it is entirely possible that new
discourses of ascriptive difference
might take shape that fit the folk common sense of our time and its cultural norms and sensibilities.
Indeed, the explosive resurgence in recent years of academically legitimated determinist discoursesall of which simply rehearse the
standard idealist tropes and circular garbage in/garbage out faux scientific narrativesreinforce that concern. The undergirding
premises of intellectual programs like evolutionary psychology, behavioral economics, genes and politics, and neurocriminology are
strikingly like straight-line extrapolations from Victorian race science although for the most part, though not entirely, scholars
operating in those areas are scrupulous, or at least fastidious, in not implicating the familiar racial taxonomies in their deterministic
sophistries. Some scholars imagine that epigeneticsa view that focuses on the interplay of genes and environment in producing
organisms and genotypesavoids determinism by providing causal explanations that are not purely biological. Recent research
purporting to find epigenetic explanations for socioeconomic inequality already foreshadows a possible framework for determinist
underclass narratives that avoid the taints associated with biological justifications of inequality and references to currently
recognized racial categories.15 Ironically, some enthusiasts for this epigenetic patter expressly liken it to Lamarckian evolutionary
theory, which stressed the heritability of characteristics acquired after birth, as though this were insulation against determinism. As
historian of anthropology George Stocking, Jr., and others have shown, Lamarckian race theory was no less determinist than its
Darwinian alternative, which posited strictly biological determinism. As Stocking notes, Lamarckians dependence on a vague
sociobiological indeterminism made it all the more difficult to challenge their circular race theories.16 In any event, narrow
approaches that reduce ascriptive ideology to reified notions of race/racism are not at all up to the challenge posed by this new
determinist turn.
Finally, the adamant commitment to a racefirst perspective on inequalities that show up as statistical disparities has a material
foundation. The
victories of the civil rights movement carried with them a more benign and
unavoidable political imperative. Legal remedies can be sought for injustices
understood as discrimination on the basis of race, gender, or other familiar
categories of invidious ascription; no such recourse exists for injustices generated through
capitalisms logic of production and reproduction without mediation through one of
those ascriptive categories. As I have argued elsewhere, this makes identifying racism a technical requirement for
pursuing certain grievances, not the basis of an overall strategy for pursuit of racial justice, or, as I believe is a clearer left
formulation, racial equality as an essential component of a program of social justice.17 Yet,
for those who insist that
racial reductionism is more than a pragmatic accommodation to the necessities of
pursuing legal or administrative grievances, something more is at play. A historical
materialist perspective can be helpful for identifying the glue that binds that
commitment to a race-first political discourse and practice.
All politics in capitalist society is class, or at least a class-inflected, politics. That is
also true of the political perspective that condenses in programs such as reparations, antiracism,
and insistence on the sui generis character of racial injustice. I submit that those
tendencies come together around a politics that is entirely consistent with the
neoliberal redefinition of equality and democracy along disparitarian lines. That politics reflects
the social position of those positioned to benefit from the view that the market is,
or can be, a just, effective, or even acceptable, Wsystem
I l E R Efor
d orewarding
p O S T M O talent
d E R N iand
s T S virtue
C O M Eand M ? 1 1 their opposites and
punishing
FrO
that, therefore, removal of artificial impediments to functioning like race and
gender will make it even more efficient and just.18
This is the politics of actual or would-be race relations administrators, and it is completely
embedded within American capitalism and its structures of elite brokerage. It is fundamentally antagonistic to
working-class politics, notwithstanding left identitarians gestural claims to the
contrary.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Refuse their ethical criteriait insulates protest from accountability

and trades off with collective struggleespecially true for war powers
Chandler 7 Researcher @ Centre for the Study of Democracy, Chandler. 2007. Centre for
the Study of Democracy, Westminster, Area, Vol. 39, No. 1, p. 118-119
This disjunction between the human/ethical/global causes of post-territorial political activism and the capacity
to 'make a difference' is what makes these individuated claims immediately abstract and
metaphysical there is no specific demand or programme or attempt to build a
collective project. This is the politics of symbolism. The rise of symbolic activism is highlighted in the
increasingly popular framework of 'raising awareness' here there is no longer even a formal connection
between ethical activity and intended outcomes (Pupavac 2006). Raising awareness about issues
has replaced even the pretense of taking responsibility for engaging with the world
the act is ethical in-itself. Probably the most high profile example of awareness raising is the shift from Live Aid,
which at least attempted to measure its consequences in fund-raising terms, to Live 8 whose goal was solely that of raising an
'awareness of poverty'. The struggle for 'awareness' makes it clear that the
focus of symbolic politics is the
individual and their desire to elaborate upon their identity to make us aware of their
'awareness', rather than to engage us in an instrumental project of changing or engaging with
the outside world. It would appear that in freeing politics from the constraints of territorial
political community there is a danger that political activity is freed from any
constraints of social mediation(see further, Chandler 2004a). Without being forced to test and
hone our arguments, or even to clearly articulate them, we can rest on the radical
'incommunicability' of our personal identities and claims you are 'either with us
or against us'; engaging with those who disagree is no longer possible or even desirable. It is this lack of desire to engage
which most distinguishes the unmediated activism of post-territorial political actors from the
old politics of territorial communities, founded on struggles of collective interests
(Chandler 2004b). The clearest example is old representational politics this forced engagement in order to win the votes of people
necessary for political parties to assume political power. Individuals with a belief in a collective programme knocked on strangers'
doors and were willing to engage with them, not on the basis of personal feelings but on what they understood were their potential
shared interests. Few people would engage in this type of campaigning today; engaging with people who do not share our views, in
an attempt to change their minds, is increasingly anathema and most people would rather share their individual vulnerabilities or
This paper is not intended to be a
express their identities in protest than attempt to argue with a peer.
nostalgic paean to the old world of collective subjects and national interests or a
call for a revival of territorial state-based politics or even to reject global
aspirations: quite the reverse. Today, politics has been 'freed' from the constraints
of territorial political community W Igovernments
l E R E d o p O S T M O d Ewithout coherent
RNisTS COM E F r O M ? 1 2 policy
programmes do not face the constraints of failure or the constraints of the
electorate in any meaningful way; activists, without any collective opposition to
relate to, are free to choose their causes and ethical identities; protest, from Al Qaeda, to
anti-war demonstrations, to the riots in France, is inchoate and atomized. When attempts
are made to formally organize opposition, the ephemeral and incoherent
character of protest is immediately apparent.
Thats the only way to break the guilt and resentment cycle. Were not
interested in the holier-than-thou approach of two white dudes from
Michigan calling them capitalistrather, political critique is
constructive collectivist engagementthats key to prevent the ballot
from becoming a palliative endorsement of identity
Enns 12Professor of Philosophy at McMaster University (Dianne, The Violence of
Victimhood, 28-30)
Guilt and Ressentiment We need to think carefully about what is at stake here. Why is this perspective
appealing, and what are its effects? At first glance, the argument appears simple: white, privileged women, in their theoretical and
practical interventions, must take into account the experiences and conceptual work of women who are less fortunate and less
powerful, have fewer resources, and are therefore more subject to systemic oppression. The lesson of feminism's mistakes in the civil
rights era is that this mainstream group must not speak for other women. But such a view must be interrogated. Its effects, as I
have argued, include a veneration of the other, moral currency for the victim, and an
insidious competition for victimhood. We will see in later chapters that these effects are also common in
situations of conflict where the stakes are much higher. We witness here a twofold appeal: otherness discourse in
feminism appeals both to the guilt of the privileged and to the resentment, or ressentiment, of
the other. Suleri's allusion to embarrassed privilege exposes the operation of guilt in the misunderstanding that often divides
Western feminists from women in the developing world, or white women from women of color. The guilt of those who
feel themselves deeply implicated in and responsible for imperialism merely
reinforces an imperialist benevolence, polarizes us unambiguously by locking us
into the categories of victim and perpetrator, and blinds us to the power and
agency of the other. Many fail to see that it is embarrassing and insulting for those
identified as victimized others not to be subjected to the same critical intervention
and held to the same demands of moral and political responsibility. Though we are
by no means equal in power and ability, wealth and advantage, we are all
collectively responsible for the world we inhabit in common. The condition of victimhood does
not absolve one of moral responsibility. I will return to this point repeatedly throughout this book. Mohanty's perspective
ignores the possibility that one can become attached to one's subordinated status,
which introduces the concept of ressentiment, the focus of much recent interest in the injury caused by racism
and colonization. Nietzsche describes ressentiment as the overwhelming sentiment of slave morality, the revolt that begins when
ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values. 19 The sufferer in this
schema seeks out a cause for his suffering a guilty agent who is susceptible to suffering someone on whom he
can vent his affects and so procure the anesthesia necessary to ease the pain of injury.
The motivation behind ressentiment, according to Nietzsche, is the desire to deaden, by means of a more violent emotion of any
kind, a tormenting, secret pain that is becoming unendurable, and to drive it out of consciousness at least for the moment: for that
one requires an affect, as savage an affect as possible, and, in order to excite that, any pretext at all. 20 In its contemporary
manifestation, Wendy Brown argues that ressentiment acts as the righteous critique of power
from the perspective of the injured, which delimits a specific site of blame for suffering by constituting
sovereign subjects and events as responsible for the injury of social subordination. Identities are fixed in an
economy of perpetrator and victim, in which revenge, rather than power or
emancipation, is sought for the injured, making the perpetrator hurt as the sufferer does. 21 30 Such a concept is
useful for understanding why an ethics of absolute responsibility to the other appeals to the victimized. Brown remarks that, for
Nietzsche, the source of the triumph of a morality rooted in ressentiment is the denial that
it has any access to power or contains a will to power. Politicized identities arise as
both product of and reaction to this condition; the reaction is a substitute for action
an imaginary revenge, Nietzsche calls it. Suffering then becomes a social virtue at the same time that the
sufferer attempts to displace his suffering onto another. The identity created by
ressentiment, Brown explains, becomes invested in its own subjection not only through its
discovery of someone to blame, and a new recognition and revaluation of that subjection, but also
through the satisfaction of revenge. 22 The outcome of feminism's attraction to theories of difference and
otherness is thus deeply contentious. First, we witness the further reification reification of the very
oppositions in question and a simple reversal of the focus from the same to the
other. This observation is not new and has been made by many critics of feminism, but it seems to have made no serious impact
on mainstream feminist scholarship or teaching practices in women's studies programs. Second, in the eagerness to rectify the
mistakes of white, middle-class, liberal, western feminism, the
other has been uncritically exalted,
which has led in turn to simplistic designations of marginal, othered status and, ultimately, a competition for
victimhood. Ultimately, this approach has led to a new moral code in which ethics is equated with the responsibility of the
privileged Western woman, while moral immunity is granted to the victimized other. Ranjana Khanna describes this operation aptly
when she writes that in the field of transnational feminism, the
reification of the other has produced
separate ethical universes in which the privileged experience paralyzing guilt and the neocolonized,
crippling resentment. The only overarching imperative is that one does not
comment on another's ethical context. An ethical response turns out to be a
nonresponse. 23 Let us turn now to an exploration of this third outcome.
1nc reed (gratuitous violence)
Framing politics around the gratuitous violence of racism blocks
recognition of political economythis entrenches neoliberal ideology
and overlooks class antagonism
Party and a frequent contributor to The Nation (2/25, Adolph, Nonsite, Django Unchained, or,
The Help: How Cultural Politics Is Worse Than No Politics at All, and Why,
http://nonsite.org/feature/django-unchained-or-the-help-how-cultural-politics-is-worse-than-
no-politics-at-all-and-why)
In both films the bogus happy endings are possible only because they characterize their respective regimes of racial hierarchy in the superficial terms of
interpersonal transactions. In The Help segregationisms evil was small-minded bigotry and lack of sensitivity; it was more like bad manners than
oppression. In
Tarantinos vision, slaverys definitive injustice was its gratuitous and sadistic
brutalization and sexualized degradation. Malevolent, ludicrously arrogant whites owned slaves most
conspicuously to degrade and torture them. Apart from serving a formal dinner in a plantation houseand Tarantino, the
Chance the Gardener of American filmmakers (and Best Original Screenplay? Really?) seems to draw his images of plantation life from Birth of a
Nation and Gone With the Wind, as well as old Warner Brothers cartoonsand the Mandingo fighters and comfort girls, Tarantinos
slaves
do no actual work at all; theyre present only to be brutalized. In fact, the cavalier sadism with
which owners and traders treat them belies the fact that slaves were, first and foremost,
capital investments. Its not for nothing that New Orleans has a monument to the estimated
20,000-30,000 antebellum Irish immigrants who died constructing the New Basin Canal; slave
labor was too valuable for such lethal work.
The Help trivializes Jim Crow by reducing it to its most superficial features and
irrational extremes. The master-servant nexus was, and is, a labor relation. And the
problem of labor relations particular to the segregationist regime wasnt employers bigoted lack
of respect or failure to hear the voices of the domestic servants, or even benighted refusal to recognize their equal
humanity. It was that the labor relation was structured within and sustained by a political
and institutional order that severely impinged on, when it didnt altogether deny, black citizens
avenues for pursuit of grievances and standing before the law. The crucial lynchpin of
that order was neither myopia nor malevolence; it was suppression of black citizens capacities for direct
participation in civic and political life, with racial disfranchisement and the constant threat of terror
intrinsic to substantive denial of equal protection and due process before the law as its principal mechanisms. And the point
of the regime wasnt racial hatred or enforced disregard; its roots lay in the much more
prosaic concern of dominant elites to maintain their political and economic hegemony by
suppressing potential opposition and in the linked ideal of maintaining access to a labor force with no options
but to accept employment on whatever terms employers offered. (Those who liked The Help or found it moving
should watch The Long Walk Home, a 1990 film set in Montgomery, Alabama, around the bus boycott. I suspect thats the film you thought you were
watching when you saw The Help.)
Django Unchained trivializes slavery by reducing it to its most barbaric and lurid
excesses. Slavery also was fundamentally a labor relation. It was a form of forced
labor regulatedsystematized, enforced and sustainedthrough a political and institutional order
that specified it as a civil relationship granting owners absolute control over the life, liberty, and
fortunes of others defined as eligible for enslavement, including most of all control of the conditions of their labor and appropriation
of its product. Historian Kenneth M. Stampp quotes a slaveholders succinct explanation: For what
purpose does the master hold the servant? asked an ante-bellum Southerner. Is it not that by his labor,
he, the master, may accumulate wealth?1
That absolute control permitted horrible, unthinkable brutality, to be sure, but perpetrating such
brutality was neither the point of slavery nor its essential injustice. The master-slave
relationship could, and did, exist without brutality, and certainly
W I lwithout
ERE do sadism
p O S and
T M Osexual
d E R Ndegradation.
i s T S C O M In
E Tarantinos
F r O M ? 1 5depiction, however, it is not
clear that slavery shorn of its extremes of brutality would be objectionable. It does not diminish the historical injustice and
horror of slavery to note that it was not the product of sui generis, transcendent Evil but
a terminus on a continuum of bound labor that was more norm than exception in the Anglo-
American world until well into the eighteenth century, if not later. As legal historian Robert Steinfeld points out, it is not so much slavery,
but the emergence of the notion of free laboras the absolute control of a worker over her person
that is the historical anomaly that needs to be explained.2 Django Unchained sanitizes the
essential injustice of slavery by not problematizing it and by focusing instead on the extremes
of brutality and degradation it permitted, to the extent of making some of them up, just as does The Help regarding Jim Crow.
The Help could not imagine a more honest and complex view of segregationist Mississippi partly because it uses the period ultimately as a prop for
human interest clich, and Django Unchaineds absurdly ahistorical view of plantation slavery is only backdrop for the merger of spaghetti western and
Neither film is really about the period in which it is set. Film critic
blaxploitation hero movie.
Manohla Dargis, reflecting a decade ago on what she saw as a growing Hollywood
penchant for period films, observed that such films are typically stripped of
politics and historical factand instead will find meaning in appealing to seemingly timeless ideals and stirring scenes of love,
valor and compassion and that the Hollywood professionals who embrace accuracy most enthusiastically nowadays are costume designers.3 That
observation applies to both these films, although in Django concern with historically accurate representation of material culture applies only to the
costumes and props of the 1970s film genres Tarantino wants to recall.
To make sense of how Django Unchained has received so much warmer a reception among black and leftoid commentators than did The Help, it is
useful to recall Margaret Thatchers 1981 dictum that economics are the method: the object is to change the soul.4 Simply put, she and her element
have won. Few
observersamong opponents and boosters alikehave noted how
deeply and thoroughly both films are embedded in the practical ontology of
neoliberalism, the complex of unarticulated assumptions and unexamined first premises that provide its common sense, its lifeworld.
Objection to The Help has been largely of the shooting fish in a barrel variety: complaints about the films paternalistic treatment of the maids, which
generally have boiled down to an objection that the master-servant relation is thematized at all, as well as the standard, predictable litany of anti-racist
charges about whites speaking for blacks, the films inattentiveness to the fact that at that time in Mississippi black people were busily engaged in
liberating themselves, etc. An illustration of this tendency that conveniently refers to several other variants of it is Akiba Solomon, Why Im Just
Saying No to The Help and Its Historical Whitewash in Color Lines,August 10, 2011, available
at:http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/08/why_im_just_saying_no_to_the_help.html.
Defenses of Django Unchained pivot on claims about the social significance of the narrative of a
black hero. One node of this argument emphasizes the need to validate a history of
autonomous black agency and resistance as a politico-existential desideratum. It
accommodates a view that stresses the importance of recognition of rebellious or militant
individuals and revolts in black American history. Another centers on a notion that exposure to
fictional black heroes can inculcate the sense of personal efficacy necessary to
overcome the psychological effects of inequality and to facilitate upward mobility and may undermine some whites negative
stereotypes about black people. In either register assignment of social or political importance to depictions of black
heroes rests on presumptions about the nexus of mass cultural representation, social commentary, and racial justice
that are more significant politically than the controversy about the film itself. In both
versions, this argument casts political and economic problems in psychological terms. Injustice
appears as a matter of disrespect and denial of due recognition, and the remedies proposedwhich are all about
images projected and the distribution of jobs associated with their projectionlook a lot like self-esteem
engineering. Moreover, nothing could indicate more strikingly the extent of neoliberal
ideological hegemony than the idea that the mass culture industry and its representational practices
constitute a meaningful terrain for struggle to advance egalitarian interests. It is possible to
entertain that view seriously only by ignoring the fact that the production and consumption of mass
culture is thoroughly embedded in capitalist material and ideological imperatives.
That, incidentally, is why I prefer the usage mass culture to describe this industry and its products and processes, although I recognize that it may
seem archaic to some readers. The mass culture v. popular culture debate dates at least from the 1950s and has continued with occasional crescendos
ever since.5 For two decades or more, instructively in line with the retreat of possibilities for concerted left political action outside the academy, the
popular culture side of that debate has been dominant, along W with
I l Eits
REview
d othat
p Othe
STMproducts
O d E R Nofi sthis
T S precinct
C O M E of
F rmass
O M ?consumption
16 capitalism are
somehow capable of transcending or subverting their material identity as commodities, if not avoiding that identity altogether. Despite
the
dogged commitment of several generations of American Studies and cultural studies graduate students who
want to valorize watching television and immersion in hip-hop or other specialty market
niches centered on youth recreation and the most ephemeral fads as both intellectually avant-garde and politically
resistive, it should be time to admit that that earnest disposition is intellectually shallow
and an ersatz politics. The idea of popular culture posits a spurious autonomy and
organicism that actually affirm mass industrial processes by effacing them,
especially in the putatively rebel, fringe, or underground market niches that depend on the
fiction of the authentic to announce the birth of new product cycles.
The power of the hero is a cathartic trope that connects mainly with the sensibility of adolescent boysof whatever nominal
age. Tarantino has allowed as much, responding to black critics complaints about the violence and copious use of nigger by proclaiming
Even for the films biggest detractors, I think their children will grow up and love this movie. I think it could become a rite of passage for young black
males.6 This response stems no doubt from Tarantinos arrogance and opportunism, and some critics have denounced it as no better than racially
presumptuous. But he is
hardly alone in defending the film with an assertion that it gives
black youth heroes, is generically inspirational or both. Similarly, in a January 9, 2012 interview on the
Daily Show, George Lucas adduced this line to promote his even more execrable race-oriented live-action cartoon, Red Tails, which, incidentally,
trivializes segregation in the military by reducing it to a matter of bad or outmoded attitudes. The ironic effect is significant understatement of both the
obstacles the Tuskegee airmen faced and their actual accomplishments by rendering them as backdrop for a blackface, slapped-together remake of Top
Gun. (Norman Jewisons 1984 film, A Soldiers Story, adapted from Charles Fullers A Soldiers Play, is a much more sensitive and thought-provoking
rumination on the complexities of race and racism in the Jim Crow U.S. Armyan army mobilized, as my father, a veteran of the Normandy invasion,
never tired of remarking sardonically, to fight the racist Nazis.) Lucas characterized his film as patriotic, even jingoistic and was explicit that he
wanted to create a film that would feature real heroes and would be inspirational for teenage boys. Much as Django Unchaineds defenders compare
it on those terms favorably to Lincoln, Lucas hyped Red Tails as being a genuine hero story unlike Glory, where you have a lot of white officers
running those guys into cannon fodder.
Of course, the film industry is sharply tilted toward the youth market, as Lucas and Tarantino are acutely aware. But Lucas, unlike Tarantino, was not
being defensive in asserting his desire to inspire the young; he offered it more as a boast. As he has said often, hed wanted for years to make a film
about the Tuskegee airmen, and he reports that he always intended telling their story as a feel-good, crossover inspirational tale. Telling it that way also
fits in principle (though in this instance not in practice, as Red Tails bombed at the box office) with the commercial imperatives of increasingly
degraded mass entertainment. Dargis observed that the ahistoricism of the recent period films is influenced by market imperatives in a global film
industry. The more a film is tied to historically specific contexts, the more difficult it is to sell elsewhere. That logic selects for special effects-driven
products as well as standardized, decontextualized and simplisticuniversalstory lines, preferably set in fantasy worlds of the filmmakers design.
As Dargis notes, these films find their meaning in shopworn clichs puffed up as timeless verities, including uplifting and inspirational messages for
youth. But something else underlies the stress on inspiration in the black-interest films, which shows up in critical discussion of them as well.
All these
filmsThe Help, Red Tails, Django Unchained, even Lincoln and Glorymake a claim to public attention
based partly on their social significance beyond entertainment or art, and they do so because
they engage with significant moments in the history of the nexus of race and politics in the United States. There
would not be so much discussion and debate and no Golden Globe, NAACP Image, or Academy Award nominations for The Help, Red Tails, or Django
Unchained if those films werent defined partly by thematizing that nexus of race and politics in some way.
The pretensions to social significance that fit these films into their particular market niche dont conflict with the
mass-market film industrys imperative of infantilization because those pretensions are only
part of the show; they are little more than empty bromides, product differentiation in the patter
of seemingly timeless ideals which the mass entertainment industry constantly recycles. (Andrew
OHehir observes as much about Django Unchained, which he describes as a three-hour trailer for a movie that never happens.7) That comes through
in the defense of these films, in the face of evidence of their failings, that, after all, they are just entertainment. Their
substantive
content is ideological; it is their contribution to the naturalization of
neoliberalisms ontology as they propagandize its universalization across spatial,
temporal, and social contexts.
Purportedly in the interest of popular education cum entertainment, Django Unchained and The Help, and Red Tails for that matter, read the
sensibilities of the present into the past by divesting the latter of its specific historicity. They reinforce the sense of the past as
generic old-timey times distinguishable from the present by superficial inadequaciesoutmoded
fashion, technology, commodities and ideassince overcome. In The Help Hillys obsession with her pet project marks segregations petty apartheid as
irrational in part because of the expense rigorously enforcing it would require; the breadwinning husbands express their frustration with it as
financially impractical. Hilly is a mean-spirited, narrow-minded person whose rigid and tone-deaf commitment to segregationist consistency not only
reflects her limitations of character but also is economically unsound, a fact that further defines her, and the cartoon version of Jim Crow she
represents, as irrational.
The deeper message of these films, insofar as they deny the integrity of the past, is that there is no thinkable
alternative to the ideological order under which we live. This message is reproduced throughout the mass
entertainment industry; it shapes the normative reality even of the fantasy worlds that masquerade as
escapism. Even among those who laud the supposedly cathartic effects of Djangos
insurgent violence as reflecting a greater truth of abolition than passage of the
Thirteenth Amendment, few commentators notice that he and Broomhilda
attained their freedom through a market transaction.8 This reflects an ideological
hegemony in which students all too commonly wonder why planters would deny
slaves or sharecroppers education because education would have made them more
productive as workers. And, tellingly, in a glowing rumination in the Daily Kos, Ryan Brooke inadvertently
thrusts mass cultures destruction of historicity into bold relief by declaiming on the segregated
society presented in Django Unchained and babbling onwith the absurdly ill-informed and pontifical self-
righteousness that the blogosphere enablesabout our need to take
responsibility for preserving racial divides if we are to put segregation in the past and fully fulfill Dr. Kings
dream.9 Its all an indistinguishable mush of bad stuff about racial injustice in the old-timey days. Decoupled from its moorings in
a historically specific political economy, slavery becomes at bottom a problem of race relations,
and, as historian Michael R. West argues forcefully, race relations emerged as and has remained
a discourse that substitutes etiquette for equality.10
This is the context in which we should take account of what inspiring the young means as a justification for those films. In part, the claim to
inspire is a simple platitude, more filler than substance. It is, as Ive already noted, both an excuse for films that are cartoons made for an infantilized,
generic market and an assertion of a claim to a particular niche within that market. More insidiously, though, the ease with which inspiration of youth
rolls out in this context resonates with three related and disturbing themes: 1) underclass ideologys narrativesnow all Americans common sense
that link poverty and inequality most crucially to (racialized) cultural inadequacy and psychological damage; 2) the
belief that racial
inequality stems from prejudice, bad ideas and ignorance, and 3) the cognate of both: the
neoliberal rendering of social justice as equality of opportunity, with an aspiration of creating competitive individual
minority agents who might stand a better fighting chance in the neoliberal rat race
rather than a positive alternative vision of a society that eliminates the need to
fight constantly against disruptive market whims in the first place.11
This politics seeps through in the chatter about Django Unchained in particular. Erin Aubry Kaplan, in the Los
Angeles Times article in
which Tarantino asserts his appeal to youth, remarks that the most disturbing detail [about slavery] is
the emotional violence and degradation directed at blacks that effectively keeps them at the
bottom of the social order, a place they still occupy today. Writing on the Institute of the Black World
blog, one Dr. Kwa David Whitaker, a 1960s-style cultural nationalist, declaims on Djangos testament to the sources of degradation and unending
servitude [that] has rendered [black Americans] almost incapable of making sound evaluations of our current situations or the kind of steps we must
take to improve our condition.12 In its blindness to political economy, this notion of black cultural or
psychological damage as either a legacy of slavery or of more indirect recent origine.g., urban migration,
crack epidemic, matriarchy, babies making babiescomports well with the reduction of slavery and Jim Crow
to interpersonal dynamics and bad attitudes. It substitutes a politics of recognition and a
patter of racial uplift for politics and underwrites a conflation of political action and therapy.
With respect to the nexus of race and inequality, this

discourse supports victim-blaming programs of personal rehabilitation
and self-esteem engineeringinspirationas easily as it does multiculturalist respect for difference,
which, by the way, also feeds back to self-esteem engineering and inspiration as nodes within a
larger political economy of race relations. Either way, this is a discourse that displaces a
politics challenging social structures that reproduce inequality with concern for
the feelings and characteristics of individuals and of categories of population statistics reified as singular groups
that are equivalent to individuals. This discourse has made it possible (again, but more sanctimoniously this time) to
characterize destruction of low-income housing as an uplift strategy for poor people;
curtailment of access to public education W I las
EREchoice;
d o p O S T Mbeing
O d E R N icut
s T S adrift
C O M E Ffrom essential
rOM? 1 8 social wage
protections as empowerment; and individual material success as socially important role modeling.
Neoliberalisms triumph is affirmed with unselfconscious clarity in the ostensibly leftist defenses
of Django Unchained that center on the theme of slaves having liberated themselves. Trotskyists, would-be anarchists, and
psychobabbling identitarians have their respective sectarian garnishes: Trotskyists see
everywhere the bugbear of bureaucratism and mystify self-activity; anarchists similarly
fetishize direct action and voluntarism and oppose large-scale public institutions on principle,
and identitarians romanticize essentialist notions of organic, folkish authenticity under constant
threat from institutions. However, all are indistinguishable from the nominally libertarian
right in their disdain for government and institutionally based political action,
which their common reflex is to disparage as inauthentic or corrupt.
1nc alt (scatamburlo)
Instead, the ballot should prioritize class strugglefixation on
representational politics weakens struggles against impersonal
structures and the root causes of violence
Valerie Scatamburlo-DAnnibale PhD, Prof University of Windsor AND Peter McLaren PhD, Prof University
of California, Los Angeles The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of Race and Difference Cultural Studies Critical
Methodologies, Volume 3 Number 2, 2003 148-175
It is remarkable, in our opinion, that so much of contemporary social theory has largely abandoned the problems
of labor and class analysis at a time when capitalism is becoming more universal, more ruthless,
and more deadly. The metaphor of a contemporary tower of Babel seems appropriate here
academics striking radical poses in seminar rooms while remaining oblivious to
the possibility that their seemingly radical discursive maneuvers do nothing to
further the struggles against oppression and exploitation which continue to be
real, material and not merely discursive problems of the contemporary world
(Dirlik, 1997, p. 176).Harvey (1998) has indicted the new academic entrepreneurs, the masters of theory-in-
and-for-itself whose discourse radicalism has deftly sidestepped the enduring conundrums
of class struggle and who have, against a sobering background of cheapened discourse and
opportunistic politics, been stripped of their self-advertised radicalism (pp. 29-31). For years, they
contested socialism, ridiculed Marxists, and promoted their own alternative theories of
liberatory politics, but now they have largely been reduced to the role of supplicants in
the most degraded form of pluralist politics imaginable (pp. 30-31). As they pursue the
politics of difference, the class war rages unabated, and they seem either unwilling or unable
to focus on the unprecedented economic carnage occurring around the globe (pp. 30-
31). Harveys searing criticism suggests that post-Marxists have been busy fiddling while Rome burns, and his
comments echo those made byMarx (1978) in his critique of the Young Hegelians who were, in spite of their allegedly world-
shattering statements, the staunchest conservatives (p. 149). Marx lamented that the Young Hegelians were simply fighting
phrases and that they failed to acknowledge that in offering only counterphrases, they were in no way combating the real existing
world but merely combating the phrases of the world. Taking a cue from Marx and substituting phrases with discourses or
resignifications, we would contend that the practitioners of ludic difference politics who operate within
exaggerated culturalist frameworks that privilege the realm of representation as the primary
arena of political struggle question some discourses of power while legitimating
others.16 In their anathema towards totalization and in their penchant for thematizing culture with a
particularizing impulse that domiciles class in the hinterland of a divertissement, they
reinscribe racial formations within the prevailing logic of capitalist social relations. Moreover,
because they generally lack a class perspective, their gestures of radicalism are belied by their
own class positions. We agree with Reed (2000) who contended that cultural politics are class politics insofar
as they are manifestations within the political economy of academic life and the
left-liberal public sphere of the petit bourgeois, brokerage politics of interest-group
pluralism (p. xxii). Regardless of the radical-sounding patina that such theorizing attempts to lay over this
all-too-familiar worldview and practice (p. xxii), the paralysis and inconsequentiality of postal, culturalist
discourses in the face of globalized capitalism are patently clear. As Ahmad (1997b) has contended, One
may speak of any number of disorientations and even oppressions, but one cultivates all kinds of
politeness and indirection about the structure of capitalist class relations in which those
oppressions are embedded. To speak of any of that directly and simply is to be vulgar. In this
climate of Aesopian languages it is absolutely essential to reiterate that most things are a
matter of class. That kind of statement is . . . surprising only in a culture like that
of the North American university. . . . But it is precisely in that kind of culture that people
need to hear such obvious truths. (p. 104) Ahmads provocative observations imply that substantive analyses of
globalized class exploitation have, for the most part, been marginalized by the kind of radicalism
that has been instituted among the academic W I l E R E Left
d o p Oin
S T North
M O d E R NAmerica
i s T S C O M E. He
FrOhas
M ?further
20 suggested that
although various post-Marxists have invited us to join their euphoric celebrations honoring the
decentering of capitalism and the abandonment of class politics in favor of a post-al tomorrow filled with the proliferation
of more and more forms of difference, such formulations will never be able to challenge let alone overturn
capitalist universality (Ahmad, 1998, p. 22). Indeed, such gestures often result in a pragmatic
fetishization of particularity and difference that precludes systemic critique, a
serious analysis of capitalism, and coherent action. As such, Ahmad invited us to ask anew, the
proverbial question, What then, must be done? To this question, we offer no simple theoretical or political
prescriptions. Yet we would argue that if social change is the aim, as it has traditionally been for the Left,
progressive educators and intellectuals must cease in displacing class analysis
with the politics of difference, they must resuscitate a sustained and unrelenting
interrogation of capitalism in its globalized forms, and they must overcome the
corrosive skepticism of those narratives that have rendered visions of social
transformation hopelessly impractical or obsolete.
The ballot is a choice between unrelenting critique of capitalist

ideology and collective suicide. Foregrounding collective humanist
alternatives is keypolitics of pure difference isnt a survival strategy,
its fatalism
Valerie Scatamburlo-DAnnibale PhD, Prof University of Windsor AND Peter McLaren PhD, Prof
University of California, Los Angeles The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of Race and Difference Cultural Studies
Critical Methodologies, Volume 3 Number 2, 2003 148-175
We will take our stand against the evils [of capitalism, imperialism, and racism] with a solidarity derived from a proletarian internationalism born of
socialist idealism. (National Office of the Black Panther Party, 1995, p. 220) For well more than two
decades, we have
witnessed the jubilant liberal and conservative pronouncements of the demise of socialism.
Concomitantly, historys presumed failure to defang existing capitalist relations has been read
by many self-identified radicals as an advertisement for capitalisms inevitability. As a result, the
chorus refrain of TINA sung by liberals and conservatives has been buttressed by the symphony of post-Marxist voices recommending that we give
socialism a decent burial and move on. Within this context, to speak of the promise of Marx and socialism may appear anachronistic, even naive,
especially because the post-al intellectual vanguard has presumably demonstrated the folly of doing so. Yet we defiantly believe that the
chants
of TINA must be combated for they offer as a fait accompli something that progressive leftists
should refuse to countenancenamely the triumph of globalized capitalism and its political bedfellow,
neoliberalism, which have worked together to naturalize suffering and obliterate hope. The
grotesque conditions that inspired Marx to pen his original critiques of capitalism are
present and flourishing. In fact, the inequalities of wealth and the gross imbalances of power that exist
today are leading to abuses that exceed those encountered in Marxs day (Greider, 1998, p.
39). These are the circumstances of our timescircumstances that require an unrelenting
critique of capitalism and an oppositional politics capable of confronting capitalist

universality. These are realities that require something more than the liberal pluralism of
difference politics, something more than the cries of post-Marxists who would have us relegate socialism to the rag-and-bone shop of
historical memory and mummify Marxism along with Lenins corpse.We concur with Amin (1998) who claimed that the politics of
historical inevitability sewn into the neoliberal undergarments of TINA supporters must be
defied and revealed as absurd and criminal and who put the challenge we face in no uncertain terms: Humanity may let
itself be led by capitalisms logic to a fate of collective suicide, or it may pave the
way for an alternative humanist project of global socialism. The urgency that animates Amins clarion
call for a collective socialist vision necessitates challenging the questionable assumptions that have come to constitute the core of radical theory and
practice. In terms of effecting change, what
is needed is a cogent understanding of the systemic nature of
exploitation and oppression based on the precepts of a radical critique of political economy . Seldom
before has a Marxian analysis of capitalism and class rule been so desperately needed. That is not to say that everything Marx anticipated has come
true, for that is clearly not the case.Nonetheless,Marxs enduring relevance lies in his indictment of capitalism that continues to wreak havoc in the lives
of most global citizens. Rather than jettisoning Marx, leftists must continue to engage his oeuvre
and extrapolate from it that which is useful pedagogically, theoretically, and, most important,
politically in light of the challenges that confront us in defeating capitalism and instituting a socialist alternative. The task for progressive
intellectuals is to seize the moment and plant the seeds for a political agenda that is grounded in an array of
historical possibilities, is informed by a vision committed to overcoming exploitative conditions,
and incorporates Marxs notion of unity in difference in which people share widely
common class and material interests. Such an understanding extends far beyond the realm of theory, for the manner in
which we choose to interpret and explore the social world and the concepts and frameworks we
use to express our sociopolitical understandings represents more than just a Faustian infatuation with abstract
categories. They imply intentions, organizational practices, and political agendas.
Identifying class analysis as the basis for our understandings and class struggle as the basis for
political transformation implies something quite different than constructing a sense of political
agency around issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and so forth. Contrary to Shakespeares assertion that a rose by any
other name would smell as sweet, it should be clear that this is not the case in political matters. Rather, in politics the essence of the flower lies in the
name by which it is called (Bannerji, 2000, p. 41). For the vast majority of people todaypeople of all racial classifications or
identities, all genders and sexual orientations, the common frame of reference arcing across difference,the
concerns and aspirations that are most widely shared are those that are rooted in the common experience of everyday
life shaped and constrained by political economy (Reed, 2000, p. xxvii).Does this mean that race
should be reduced solely to a question of class or that we should ignore racism and center our efforts on class
struggle? No. We acknowledge, along with Marable (2001), that socialist movements have been held
in suspicion or rejected outright by the Black community because of the manifestation of racism
by white workers, labor unions, and white progressives (p. 204). Furthermore, white
democratic socialists still seldom respect or even comprehend the African
Americans legitimate claim to unique national identity, culture, and tradition of struggle
(p. 204). Here, we support the perspective of C. L. R. James who wrote, The race question is subsidiary to the class
question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the
racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental. (as
cited in Marable, 2001, p. 205) Although post-Marxist advocates of the politics of difference suggest that
the project of class struggle is outdated, we would argue that the categories they have typically employed are now
losing their usefulness, particularly in light of actual social conditions and movements. The day-to-day realities of corporate
hegemony are increasingly suggesting promising possibilities for a shift beyond the difficulties of
identity and difference politics, for the experience of multiple oppressions no longer requires
multiple theories of oppression because corporations multiply oppress (Starr, 2000, pp. 166-167). The
current anticorporate globalization movements have redefined enemies in ways that do not
depend on identity as the basis of understanding and allies in ways that do not depend on a
subtle and fragile politics of difference. . . . What is at stake is political economic (Starr, 2000, pp. 166-
167). As such, notions of difference and identity may no longer be the most important organizing
principle for social movements; rather, they speak with clarity about the enemy, that is,
neoliberal, globalized corporate capitalism (Starr, 2000, pp. 166-167). The mantra another world is possible has become the
animating theme of recent global protests. It appears that those people struggling against tear gas, police batons, and
rubber bullets in the streets of Seattle, Genoa, Prague, and Quebec City have not read about TINA, the end of grand
narratives of emancipation, or the decentering of capitalism. It seems as though the struggle for basic survival and
some semblance of human dignity in the mean streets of the dystopian metropolis does not permit much time or opportunity to read the heady
proclamations emanating from the post-al academy. As E. P. Thompson (1978) once remarked, sometimes experience walks in without knocking at the
door, and announces deaths, crises of subsistence, trench warfare, unemployment, inflation, genocide (p. 11). History, to paraphrase Thompson
(p. 25), does not seem to be following theorys script. This, of course, does not mean that socialism will
inevitably come about; yet a sense of itsWburgeoning I l E R E d o p O S Tpromise
M O d E R N i s permeates contemporary
TS COME FrOM ? 22 protest
movements (Zinn, 2000). Committed Left intellectuals must work to cultivate a democratic socialist
vision that refuses to forget the wretched of the earth, the children of the damned, and the victims of the culture of
silencea task that requires more than abstruse convolutions and striking ironic poses in the
agnostic arena of signifying practices. Socialism in the United States remains a theory of social and
economic justice rooted in a ruthless critique of capitalism and exploitation. It must be made
into a living reality opposed to liberal democracy, which only serves to facilitate the
reproduction of capital. In advancing this struggle, we advocate the building of a multiracial, gender-
balanced, and anti-imperialist social movement dedicated to opposing racism, capitalism (both in
private property and state property forms), sexism, heterosexism, hierarchies based on social class, as well as
other forms of oppression. Whatever the misunderstandings or confusion surrounding the
notion of socialismlargely bound up with a mistaken identification ofMarxism with its opposite, Stalinismthe democratic and
internationalist principles of socialism need to be reinvigorated among those serious about
resisting the domination of capital and social relations that create inequality and oppression.
Socialism today, undoubtedly, runs against the grain of received wisdom, but its vision of a
vastly improved and freer arrangement of social relations beckons on the horizon. Its unwritten
text is nascent in the present even as it exists among the fragments of history and the shards of
distant memories. Its promise needs to be redeemed.
1nc alt (labor politics first)
The key question in the debate is how to build an egalitarian left
capable of challenging institutionalized neolibthats the root cause
of their impacts. Anything else is a distractionvoting aff justifies a
society where 1% controls everything, as long as the 1% is sufficiently
diverse. The moral questions they raise are secondary to how we can
build a robust labor movement
Frank and Reed 2014 *historian, author, and columnist for Harper's Magazine and Salon;
**professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in race and
American politics. He has taught at Yale, Northwestern and the New School for Social Research.
An expert on racial and economic inequality, he is a founding member of the Labor Party and a
frequent contributor to The Nation (3/9, Thomas Frank interviewing Adolph Reed, Jr., Salon,
We are all right-wingers now: How Fox News, ineffective liberals, corporate Dems and GOP
money captured everything,
http://www.salon.com/2014/03/09/we_are_all_right_wingers_now_how_fox_news_ineffecti
ve_liberals_corporate_dems_and_gop_money_captured_everything/)
Thats key: political economy. And you use the word egalitarian. Thats sort of whats completely missing
today. All of these victories on these other fronts, largely matters of identity politics, and
where is the egalitarian left?
Right, and my friend Walter Michaels has made this point very eloquently over and over again . . . that the problem with a notion of equality or social justice thats rooted in the
from those perspectives you can have a society thats

perspectives of multiculturalism and diversity is that
perfectly just if less than 1 percent of the population controls 95 percent of the
stuff, so long as that one percent is half women and 12 percent black, and 12
percent Latino and whatever the appropriate numbers are gay. Now thats a problem.
Do you remember those wealth-management ads in the 1990s that said Money: its just not what it used to be, and it would have a black-and-white photograph of rich white
people, rich white men, from a long time ago. And then they would have a photograph of what the rich look like now and its what you just described.
No. I didnt see that. But, yeah, its perfect. I wish I had. It would be a nice book jacket. Yeah, I think where we are now is, from one perspective, the result of either 30 or 60-plus
years, depending on how you want to count it, of a left that has been able to take only what the other side would make available . . . would permit them to take. And what thats
political strategies and

meant is that our political strategiesIm not saying this to fault activists; you can only do what you can do, but the
understandings that have constituted the Left have come increasingly to

accommodate with neoliberalism. And the only place that thats a conspicuous problem is in the labor movement because thats the one
interest group that basically cant be accommodated to neoliberal economic policy.
Interesting. So the other movements that make up the historical Left have
prospered
Right. Well thats true by some standard. Like in black politics, for instance, the subtle shift from a notion of equality thats anchored in the political economy to a notion of
equality that tends to a norm of parity has been a really important shift. And when we look around now at academics and others who plead the case for racial justiceMerlin
Chowkwanyun and I did an article on this in the 2012 Socialist Register, a challenge to the racial disparity discourse. The language through which briefs for racial justice are
crafted at this point are much more likelyI mean, vastly more likelyto point to the problem as a racial disparity instead of inequality. And that might sound
I dont get the difference
I was going to say, it might sound like a pedantic distinction. But the notion of disparity as the metric of racial justice means that blacks should be represented roughly in their
percentage of the population in the distribution of goods and bads in the society. So you can have 15 percent unemployment, but if blacks are only 12 percent of the 15 percent
that are unemployed basically
Then its OK?
the way in which the problem is posed leaves that implication and deflects
Yeah. And while no one actually says that would be okay,
discussion away from the underlying structural problems in the political economy
that put anyone in the exploited or oppressed position. I just saw an article in Labor Notes a month or so ago about
how Kelloggs is jerking workers around in a plant in Memphis. And the slant of the Labor Notes article is that the moves that the company is making disproportionately hurt
black workers. The logic of that argument, that type of argument is, in effect, that we can understand the costs of economic restructuring or whatever, but they need to be borne
on an equitable basis. Because it was Labor Notes, I know thats not the intent or the perspective of the magazine or presumably the author, but that just makes the trope stand
out even more.
Yeah, you hear that all the time.
Right, and my argument is: well, lets back up.

Maybe the whole project of economic restructuring should be called intoWquestion.
if youre concerned with the conditions of black Americans,

And the funny thing about it when you think about it, Tom, is that
most black people are working people. One might say even disproportionately. And what improves the
condition of the working class is going to improve the condition of more black
people than the disparity focus would. Thats not to say its either/or. But the fact is weve largely
dropped the one in favor of the other. You can see the same thing in the womens
movement. I made this point in the article. It wasnt that long ago when the political agenda of the womens
movement included stuff like comparable worth and universal child and elder care. And right
now, attention to that stuff is shriveled. The defense of reproductive rights is a constant, of course. But the political-economic
program that gets touted by the womens movement is directed toward the glass ceiling and the first woman president. Stuff like that.
I was thinking of Sheryl

Sandberg.
Right. She is the Alexandra Kollontai of our moment.
Who?
Or the Clara Zetkin. The radical Bolshevik theorist who was also a feminist. I guess I should say that Sandberg is the Alexandra Kollontai of the bourgeoisie at this point.
Wow. That is a tough metaphor.
Sorry (laughs).
You use this word electoralitis to describe whats happened to the left.
it just seemed somewhere in the mid-

Well, its a bizarre one, man. I wrote a progressive column on this 20 years ago or close to it. And
90s almost like I didnt set my alarm one night and woke up and the rules of being
on the left had changed. Everyone was focused on electoral politics. Thats a phenomenon thats like cause and symptom. Its certainly
a symptom of not having any other kind of traction in the social-movement world
as a left. And once again, I acknowledge there are all kinds of people out there
doing all kinds of good stuff. Who are trying to make peoples lives better. And to the limited
ways its possible to succeed, succeeding. But there is not a left social movement thats got any capacity to
do anything. That has any institutional capacity. And most of all, that has any capacity to alter the terms of political debate
at the national level, or for that matter even the local level.
So in the absence of that, what can you do? Well, voting has come to seem more important as a form of political practice. Weve lost the capacity to do anything else. And when
you think about it now weve got at least a generation of people who never had any experience with any other kind of politics.
What other kinds of politics is there than voting? Theres

Youre talking to one of those people.
protesting, I suppose
actually I think protesting is overrated. In fact, I think protesting was always kind of overrated in the sense that its not
Well,
protest that produced the change; its the movement that produces the
so much the
capacity for the protest to be effective. Thats the source of the change.
So it goes back to the movement?
Yeah. Yeah. But I would sayand a bunch of us have been saying for a whilethat I think its much more useful . . . to look at elections as vehicles for consolidating and
Ultimately, mass mobilization around

expressing power thats been created on the field of social-movement organizing around issues.
issues that connect with concerns that are broadly shared among the mass of people that live in the countrythose of us
who are expected to get up and go to work every day. And thats how the nature of the debate changes.
Heres a factoid: a Roper poll a month before the 1944 presidential election found that 68 percent of
respondents said that they would not favor a political and economic system no matter what it was called that didnt pivot off
of a fundamental right to a job, that didnt rest on the fundamental premise that everyone in a society who is willing and able to work should
have a right to a job.
Sixty-four
percent?
Sixty-eight percent. Thats a month before the 1944 presidential election.
What ever happened to that view?

Well, the other side won. Theres an interesting literature on the streams of the defeat. The public opinion industry was mobilized in the support of
selling the gospel of free enterprise, which itself was only invented in the late 1930s. The term wasnt even around before then. But there is a steady mobilization of bias, as
political scientist E. E. Schattschneider used to call it, against left ideas.
I wonder if you did a poll today what would happen?
Yeah, I wonder. The numbers might be higher than one might think. What full employment meant then in terms of the full-employment bill that passed the Senate and was
defeated in the House
Youre not talking about HumphreyHawkins are you?
No, no. Im talking about the full employment bill of 1945 that went down, despite passing the Senate so it wasnt a gimmick bill that would have mandated that the federal
government take action, both in public spending and public works job creation when unemployment crossed the 3 percent threshold with the goal of moving the full
employment threshold over a decade to 2 percent. By the Kennedy Administration the full-employment bill became four percent with fingers crossed. Now, I understand its 6
percent.
By that metric were almost there!
(laughs)
The problem is weve given up on movement building for elections. But not just elections, elections between the two parties. This was driven home for me most emphatically
after the 2000 election, when lots of people voted for Ralph Nader, and here Al Gore loses. Theoretically, the people who voted for Nader, if they had played by the rules of the
two-party system, Al Gore would have won. This frightened a lot of people.
Well, theres a lot of crap going on there, too. And Ill come clean. I voted for Nader in 2000 partly because I lived in Connecticut and it wasnt a big choice because I
knew the Democrat was going to take the state anyway. But partly also because I had lived in Connecticut in the 80s and I had a track record to maintain of not ever voting for
Joe Lieberman for anything.
I was struck, too by the incredible vitriol that the Dems directed at Nader and anyone
But
who supported Nader after that defeat. And it was a defeat that Gore wouldnt even fight against either, which they tend to forget. My response to them
was, the vitriol was a signal that they were looking for a scapegoat because their flawed candidate couldnt even carry his home state. I mean, if he could have carried his home
state he would have won the presidency. But I always said to them the best explanation of the defeat in 2000 came from a 1970s R&B singer named Ann Peebles with a song
called I Didnt Take Your Man, You Gave Him To Me.
it communicated that the Democrats felt entitled

The Nader thing. The vitriol of the reaction was striking to me because
to every left-of-center vote, but that they didnt have to do anything to get it. They didnt
have to appeal at all. And distaste for Lieberman notwithstanding, I would have voted for Gore if he wouldnt have run such a right wing campaign. Thats part of it. And this
goes back to Clintons first campaign too. I worked in the short-lived [Tom] Harkin campaign and the word we were getting in that campaign from people in the South in
particular was that Clintons people were coming through and saying, Our guys going to win the election so you better get on board if you want any consideration. And dont ask
for anything because if you ask for anything we probably arent going to give you any access. And thats pretty ugly. And thats the way they can be. And I think that
Clintonism basically polished off the purge of the left wing of the Democratic
party.
So it was a success in that regard.
So theres nothing to do at election time except vote

Yes it was. It was an utter success in that regard. But its the cycle though, right?
for the Democrat because the Republican is almost invariably going to be worse and despite the
Third Party votes Ive cast in my life, thats no response to anything. And that speaks to another problem thats an element of the electoralitis within the left and thats that the
same thing happens every four years. Around this time you begin to look around and see how the Democratic presidential field is shaping up. Then one strain of lefties will say,
So now theres talk about an Elizabeth Warren of the

God, Hillary Clinton? This looks terrible. We need to find a progressive candidate.
alternative to the corporatist Clinton wing, and theres even talk of Bernie Sanders running.
Democrats thats supposed to an
Well, at that point, its too late. You cant build a base for a candidacy in a year or two
years or even four years. The only way to get candidates worth having is to build the social force that will create candidates worth having.
So it comes back to movements again.
Yeah. It comes back to movements all the time really.
The two-party system is so frustrating for someone like me. I often wonder why the Republicans dont ever make a play for disaffected Democrats. They certainly could have in
2012 and they had almost no interest in that.
Well, no. There are a couple things going on. One of them isI think the capture by the Tea Party tale is overstated. Its true that that element has somea disproportionate
impact in the primaries, and I may be wrong about this, but Im still hard pressed to think that there is anything truly organic in the Tea Party movement that wasnt already the
sort of Birchite nut cases on the right flank. And now theyve been fueled by the most cynical kind of right-wing money.
But Republicans, why dont they play those guys the way Clinton and company played the Left?
Well, they did with Romney and McCain. They get their candidates. I remember back in 1996 when Pat Buchanan won in New Hampshire and he came out of there with a big
bounce and was moving down to South Carolina next which is where his real base was. His main bank roller was a mill operator down there named Milliken. So I was afraid
enough to begin to wonder what I was going to do if he won the presidency. Either head north or head south, across the border. But whats fascinating was that the Moral
Majority pulled the rug out from under him in South Carolina. The holy rollers backed [Bob] Dole. And thats where the field capacity was in South Carolina, among the holy
rollers. And youd wonder, well, why would they do that, right? Partly, its because they made the rational calculation that the interests that the elites in the right wing with
populist tendencies are fundamentally connected with right wing corporate and financial sector interests.
And they want the presidency. Theyre not fooling around.
Exactly. And they figured that in strategic terms theyd be better served by getting behind Dole and helping to deliver him the nomination than by going down in flames with
their version of Henry Wallace, I guess. Its interesting in that regard too that year when they had the big jamboree they had down in Dallas. I think it was Jerry Falwell. I often
get him and Pat Robertson confused. But he said that the two things God was most interested in that year were cutting capital gains taxes and I think the other may have been
the estate tax.
(Laughs) Thats what God wants them to do
Make it plain, why dont you. So in effect, and I think this gets to the point I was making in the article, that the choice is between two neoliberal parties, one of which
distinguishes itself by being actively in favor of multiculturalism and diversity and the other of which distinguishes itself as being actively opposed to multiculturalism and
diversity. But on 80 percent of the issues on which 80 percent of the population is concerned 80 percent of the time there is no real difference between them.
When people say things like that they often run into trouble. Because, you look at something like Fox News, and they talk about Obama as if he were a socialist or a communist
or a dictator. And as you point out in your article, Obamas entire career has been triangulation, conciliation, and compromise and yet they look at him and see red.
Well, yeah, kind of. This gets into another issue. In a way, I think their hysteria about Obama being a communist or a socialist is in a funny way a backhanded acknowledgment
of the success of the Civil Rights movement. Because they cant say hes a n in the White House. Right? And I dont even necessarily think that people are being consciously
disingenuous about it. I think they sell
So instead they say, theres a communist in the White House. Someone actually had a song that they would sing at these Tea Party rallies, Theres a Communist in the White
House.
Ill tell you, its that Birchite psychosis. This is the social base of fascism, really, is what they are.
They dont have the street gangs.
No, thank God. Not yet anyway. And I guess thats partly because a lot of them are pensioners.
Theyll get you with their golf carts.
But I still think theres a lot of astro-turf there. I go back to the founding moment of the Tea Party. And Ive watched this clip a number of time since then. That day that Rick
Santelli
Ive written about that at great length.
Oh good, I need to read that because when I watched it after the founding moment it seemed pretty clear to meI mean, you can tell me if Im wrongthat the co-host knew
what was coming. That this was not a spontaneous rant.
It might have been planned, I dunno. You know what got me about it, is that it was on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. And you think about Populist movements, like my
favorite one from the 1890s, where the Chicago Board of Trade was the pit of evil. And heres a guy launching his populist movement from that same spot. Remember, hes not
yelling at the traders, hes not chastising the traders, hes speaking on their behalf. What kind of populist movement is that? Its like they were trying to reverse the fundamental
symbolism (of populism). Because thats what the Tea Party movement is: it takes all of the classic populist symbolism and reverses it.
Right. Thats exactly right. Thats exactly right. Yeah.
Here we are in hard times, second only to the Great Depression itself and what are
the[y] demanding? An end to the welfare state. Destroy our unions.
Right. Thats exactly right. And it says something about the extent to which content has been drained out of our politics too.
The symbolism is quite persuasive to some people.
The Democrats dont have an alternative to offer. Right? I

Sure. Well yeah because theres nothing else.
mean, thats the problem. My son said in 04 that either, in the industrial Midwest in particular, either Kerry would talk about NAFTA and trade or
Bush would talk about gay marriage. And thats what happened. And I recall
Now the shoes on the other foot.
It sure is. Which is kind of funny. And frankly, it also says something about how successful an egalitariana reasonable egalitarian programcan be if it doesnt cost anybody
anything. If it doesnt raise the backs of upper-class economic interests.
Youve got to explain that a little more.
Well, in not much more than a decade, gayness has gone from being if not completely stigmatized, certainly not normalized. . . .
Yeah, youre right. Ten years ago, remember, those ballot initiatives all over the country in the election of 04 to outlaw gay marriage and it was instrumental to winning Bushs
reelection.
Thats right. And here we are like a decade later and thats. . . .
Going the other direction now. But the symbolism of this is all very interesting. In your Harpers article you talk about Obama as a symbol, that hes a cipher. I think youre
quoting someone
I think Im quoting Matt Taibbi I believe, but Ill take it. Ill take credit for it also. Because he is. Hes always been a cipher. You know that.
Obamas a highly intelligent man. Youve met him.
Yes.
Maybe hes a cipher in the sense that hes a symbol. But hes not a cipher of a human.
I dont know. Look, Ive taught a bunch of versions of him.
You mean youve had people like him as students?

Yeah. So his cohort in the Ivy League. His style. Theres superficial polish or theres a polish that may go down to the core. I dont know. A performance of a judicious
intellectuality. A capacity to show an ability to understand and empathize with multiple sides of an argument. Obama has described himself in that way himself in one or maybe
both of his books and elsewhere. Hes said that he has this knack for encouraging people to see a better world for themselves through him.
Yeah, hes like a blank slate.
Right. Which in a less charitable moment you might say is like a sociopath.
Come on now!
Im not saying that. But Im just saying. Im not saying hes a sociopath but
That (blank slate personality) seems like the classic the kind of people who lead the Democratic Party. Only hes got considerably more charisma than most of them.
any public figure, especially a politician or a

Hes better at it than most. And this is another point that I make. That
figure in a movement, is going to be like a hologram thats created by the array of

forces that he or she feels the need to respond to. Thats how it was that we got more out
of Richard Nixon from the left than weve gotten from either Clinton or Obama.
Thats a provocative point right
there.
Not that he liked us any more, to put it bluntly.

Yeah, he said terrible things. Right? Kent State, all that
but the labor movement and what are now called the social movements of the 60s had
Right,
enough traction within the society that, as part of his understanding of who he was as someone that had to govern the country, was that he had
to take them into account in some way. Clinton, as he pointed out, felt our pain, except for maybe Ricky Ray Rector. And when he dreamt of a world
he would like to see in his earnest moments Im sure it was closer to the world that you and I and others like us would yearn to see, than anything that Nixon ever wanted. But he
screwed us a lot more. And the same with Obama.
Thats interesting. If Nixon had to take the left into account and Clinton didnt, thats very interesting.
Well, in fact, I go a step further about Clinton. He not only didnt have to take the left into account, his presidency was in good measure about making that clear to the left.
Making it clear to the left that they were of no importance or significance?
Thats right. That they were cue-takers, and cue-takers only. NAFTA. Welfare reform. The effective elimination of the federal governments commitment to provide affordable
housing for the poor.
Yeah. Theres a long list: deregulated the airwaves, deregulated banking
Ive got the photo of him signing the repeal of Glass-Steagall.
With Larry Summers at his elbow I believe.
Indeed. Indeed. The 70s, and even to some extent the 80s, perhaps especially the 80s, were among other things a moment of contestation within the Democratic party between
what would later be understood as the neoliberal wing. You remember these guys
Sure. The new Democratsthe Democratic Leadership Council.
Them. And the Atari Democrats and that crowd. Clinton, who had been president of the DLC, as had Gore, that administration is what installed them basically.
Its funny though, now that people look back, younger peoplepeople younger than meI mean, I barely remember any Democrats other than Clinton myself. The Carter
Administration which was not exactly the greatest time in the world. Before that you got Johnson. Vietnam. People look back at the Clinton years and see success.
Yeah, but success by a really shallow standard. Just that he won.
Exactly, he won. Thats right. I live here in Washington now. For people here, thats it. Its one or zero and he got one.
Even then, yeah. Ill accept that hes a savvy pol and all that, but Kerry, I think, got a higher percentage of the vote losing in 04 than Clinton got winning. Maybe either time. I
know one of them for sure. Because in both cases the smartest move he made was when Ross Perot filed to run. Thats the only standard. But thats the other thing thats
As the left constituencies have shriveled and have been pushed to the side, the inside-the-beltway
happened.
types that we know and love set the agenda. I wrote this in a symposium years ago. Rick Perlstein did a symposium in the Boston Review that was later
published.
I believe Ive got a copy of that around here somewhere.
And one of the points I made was that the rise of the political consultants is an expression of the problem because the service that they sell is the alternative to popular electoral
mobilization. So of course they have no time for that. They dont think its necessary. They dont think its important. You target this. You target that. But on the other hand
Exactly. Im here among them and they, Democrats, dont think they dont need to worry aboutall the problems youve identified sort of making people angry, lose interest.
They dont need to worry about this. They think they have an iron clad coalition behind them. They have this term for it: the Coalition for the Ascendent. I forget what it is. Made
up of these groups, and labor is not one of them.
Really?
Generally, who do they mention? Women, minorities, and millennialsmeaning young people.
Which is not a group. Thats a demographic category. Its bullshit, like the other bullshit that theyve come up with. Remember the National Security Moms?
Yes. When was that? What year was that?

I think that was 04.
Yeah. And they were going to deliver the election for Karl Rove or something like that?
No, Kerry.
But theyve got it all figured out. You dont need movements like what youre describing. For the Democrats to continue to win you
dont need movements. WIlERE do pOSTMOdERNisTS COME FrOM? 28
Thats right. In fact, you dont want them.
Well they would only complicate things.

Thats right. And get in the way.
You started talking about the left itself,

You had so many fascinating passages in this article and I want to unpack them more.
and you say that they careen from this oppressed group to that one, from one
magical or morally pristine constituency or source of agency to another. You nailed it there.
But you need to tell us what you mean. That is fascinating.
Some peasants somewhere. The urban precariat. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida.
These are all real things though, right?
theyre real, but the problem is the fantasy of the spark. That theres something
Well
about the purity of these oppressed people that has the power to condense the
mass uprising. Ive often compared it to the cargo cults.
Ouch!
Well thats what its like. Frankly, what Ive come to describe as the Internet fundraising leftCommon Dreams, TruthOut, and all the rest of that stuff.
I probably get 10 solicitations a day.
Me too. Yeah. But I think the proliferation of that domain, no pun intended, has exacerbated this problem. Because there is always a crisis. There is always something thats
about to happen. I think, frankly, a lot of the demoralization and the fretting that followed in the wake of the UAWs defeat in the Tennessee plant was the product of
expectations that had been unreasonably stoked in advance. This was going to be the thing that reinvigorates the labor movement. It would be like the CIO going into the South.
It would be like the Flint sit-down strike. It was a 1500 member bargaining unit in a rabidly anti-union state for Gods sake. So you would expect that the greater likelihood
would be to lose, right? Thats whats happened.
Why do we put our hopes in these magical constituencies?

Theres a nice reason and an ugly reason. The nice
I think there is a good reason and a bad reason. Well, no.
reason is that people see how desperate the circumstances are and they feel a
sense of urgency and they want to have something happen that can begin to show signs of turning the tide. And when somebody
says, You know, we didnt get into this overnight. Were not going to get out of this
overnight, then people start to yell at them for being insensitive to the suffering and
the urgency. The other side of the coin by that reasoning is they dont want to do the
organizing or they cant figure out how to do it or their sense of how political change is made is so
underdeveloped that they cant conceptualize a strategic approach to politics. So
its like the bearing witness stuff basically.
Thats a fascinating term. So they want to bear witness. I think another word for what youre describing is, theyre fans.
For some as well its the expression of an earnest but nave, or too self-centered, inclination to
Yes. Exactly.
stand publicly against injustice.

They want to watch it. And we have this army of bloggers and everybody wants to be an op-ed columnist. I shouldnt complain here because I used to actually be one. And its
great and everything. But can you have a movement thats just made up of commentators?
I think thats corrosive in another way as well. Yes its true that any fool with a computer and internet access can call himself or herself a blogger. But to the extent that people
actually see the blogosphere as kind of like the audition hall or the minor leagues for getting onto MSNBC, then it encourages a lot of
individual posturing, the conceptual equivalent of ADHD, hyperbolic crap. And youre right. The answer is, no, you cant have a movement of just
commentators. But theres so much of that back and forth, so much of it, and it just seems to me like noise, the great bulk of it. Because it comes along
with a senseand I think this is also an artifact of the larger condition of

demobilization and defeat. But the notion that being on the Left means being seriously well-informed about everything thats going on with the
world, every travesty, and tragedy, outrage and victory. So Im sure there are a lot of people around now demanding that we do something about Ukraine. Like, what the fuck can
we do about Ukraine? Theres nothing. The only thing we could do is something bad which would be to join the chorus for the U.S. to invade.
Lord, please dont go there, Adolph Reed.
AR: Im telling you. The last time I actually talked to Chris Hitchens we got in an argument about this at a bar on Dupont Circle. It was during the Iraq War and I kind of stopped
him in his tracks, which didnt happen often, I said to him, Theres no place in the world thats been made better by the presence of the 82nd Airborne, not even Fayetteville,
North Carolina.
I was going to say, the town, wherever theyre based is probably WIlERE do pOSTMOdERNisTS COME FrOM? 29
Its horrible. I used to work down there. Although my son, who was actually born there when I was working there, pointed out to me that it was the 82nd that JFK sent to Oxford,
Mississippi, in 1962 to quell the riot after James Meredith integrated Ole Miss, where among other things they confiscated the arsenal from cheerleader Trent Lotts frat house.
So thats the one place in the world that has been made better by the presence of the 82nd Airborne.
Radicalism
So you make another point about the left thats very good, and were sounding very negative here, but theres also some victories. [You write:]
now means only a very strong commitment to anti-discrimination, a point from which Democratic
liberalism has not retreated. But then you say, you modify this: rather, this is the path Democrats have taken in
retreating from a commitment to economic justice. Explain, sir.

it is as
It goes back to the disparity thing. The Democrats have been very good in pursuit of the goal of reducing racial and gender disparities, which is a good thing. But
a small wheel, within the big wheel of pursuit of an economic policy that is all
about regressive upward transfer.
Right now the hot topic in D.C. is inequality. Theyre all talking about it. Larry Summers is talking about it.
Well, there you go. (laughs)
Upward transfer, that is inequality. Theyve signed on to this deliberately you think?
That theyve signed onto the upward transfer?
Yeah.
Well they certainly havent done anything to stop it. Look, stuff like thisthe Transpacific Partnership, financial sector deregulation, the transfer of subsidies from poor people
to employers of low-wage labor.
Thats in the Clinton years.
Well, the same thing with Obama. Heres the rub, too. Its one thing to talk about inequality. Most people who are not on the Fox list will at least nod and say, yeah, inequality,
tut tut. But then the question becomes: what approaches do we take for combating inequality? And thats where you look at stuff like cultivation of petty entrepreneurship,
human capital tales, breaking teachers unions and destroying the public schools to make them better.
So, these are all things that they have done? These are steps that theyve taken. They have all backfired.
No, they havent backfired. I mean, they wouldnt produce other than what they produced anyway. Thats whats creepy about it. There is an open question as to how genuine
they are in the belief that these market-based approachesthat are, at best, an attempt to dip the ocean with a thimble basicallycan produce anythingand to whatever extent
thats cynical. Its a tough call. My father used to always say that ideology in one sense is the mechanism that harmonizes the principles that you like to think you hold with what
advances your material interest. Then he would say something like, Ill bet you that God has paid off so well for Billy Graham that he probably even believes in Him by now.
Thats harsh.
So there is an element of true belief there. For instance, I believe that Obama truly believes that this kind of self-help twaddle that he talks is a way to combat inequality. I also
believe that he believes, in his heart of hearts, that public schools are for losers and that what you got to do is identify the bright kids from the ghetto and get them into the Lab
School or the Lab School equivalent. So in the ideological frame of reference that the dominant elites within the Democratic party operate now, this is the element that defines
the center of gravity of political liberalism and also sort of has captured the imagination of those who want to think of themselves as being on the left. They, often enough, will
invoke the same general principles at a high level of abstraction that we associate with the Democratic Party and its history back to FDR. But the content that they load into those
lofty symbols is neoliberal and reinforces the logic of a regressive transfer. If you cut public services and privatize and outsource, that hurts people at the bottom half of the
income queue, or the bottom two-thirds of the income queue. Theres no way around that. You can only talk about equality and support that kind of agenda if you are fully
committed to a neoliberal understanding of an equality of opportunity.
to reverse all this, it requires a vibrant labor movement. How on

The labor movement. You said
earth is that going to happen? Actually Ive made this point to progressives and they dont understand. Theyre like,
Whats so special about labor? They dont particularly like labor. Culturally, its not them. They dont really get it.
They like their workers when theyre brown and really abject and getting the shit
beaten out of them but they dont like them when they try to work through
institutions to build power for themselves as a class. Thats one way to put it.
These are people on the left that Im talking about.
Thats who Im talking about too. Thats exactly who Im talking about. Its a few things. One of them is the cult of the most oppressed that I mentioned a while back. And as my
If oppression conferred heightened political consciousness there would

dad used to say,
be a Peoples Republic of Mississippi. And the fact is all that oppression confers is oppression really. Theres that which connects
with the cargo cult aspect that kind of fills the whole of
Wait, stop for a second. Did you say, The fallacy of the most oppressed? Is that what you said?
Yeah.
So its like a logical fallacy?
Theres a conflation of the moral imperative and the strategic imperative. In fact, its not even conflation, its
Well, yeah in the sense that, Ill tell you what happens.
substitution of moral imperative for a strategic imperative.

So what do you mean? We choose the one that our heart goes out to and imagine that they are the ones who have the answer?
Exactly. In a way, from an organizing standpoint, that often means that W youre
I l E stacking
R E d o the
p Odeck
S T against
M O d Eyourself
R N i s TorS picking,
C O M Echoosing,
F r O M to
? focus
3 0 on the populations that have the
least in the way of resources, the least in the way of institutional capacity. Take a group like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida. Theyre really good organizers with
good, sharp politics doing that work, and they understand that those workers are so weak in their market position that they cant assert power on their own against the owners.
Theyre dependent on mobilizing middle-class consumers to bring pressure on the fast-food companies and supermarket chains to get the chains to get the growers to sign the
accord. Its a clever approach for marginally, or maybe more than marginally, improving the conditions of these highly exploited workers. But you cant generalize from that to a
strategy for political change.
So with labor, how is it going to happen? In my lifetime all theyve done is lose.
Well, theyve won some.
In the big picture
Look, Ive spent upwards of 15 years working in an effort to build an independent

No, thats right.
political party thats anchored in the labor movement. I wouldnt say that a political party is
the model. But I think that whats got to happen isand this may sound like doubletalk, but trust me, Im not a University of Chicago political theoristjust
as a revitalizing trade union movement is essential for a grounding of a real left, a
serious left is important for revitalizing the labor movement. There are a lot of
leftists with serious politics in responsible positions in the labor movement. I dont just mean the rank and file fetishist
guys. I mean people who are core leaders. And Im not talking necessarily about internationals, but at the district level. Big locals, and there are a lot of them around the country,
who function in something like that old CIO social movement unionism capacity around the country now. . . . So theres stuff like that going on.
1nc alt (black communism)
Class struggle is a better framework to address gratuitous violence,
even if its not sufficientwe have empirical support for our method
and a better explanation for patterns like segregation and police
brutality
Camp and Kelley 2013 *visiting scholar in the Institute of American Cultures and the
Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA; **PhD in History, Gary B. Nash Professor
of American History at UCLA (March, Interview of Robin D.G. Kelley by Jordan T. Camp,
American Quarterly, 65.1, Black Radicalism, Marxism, and Collective Memory: An Interview
with Robin D. G. Kelley, Project MUSE)
Camp
What is to be learned from the Alabama Communist Partys organizing around
unemployment, homelessness, evictions, and foreclosures during the period you call the
underground, 19291935?
Kelley
Some of their lessons are ones they learned in the process by making mistakes. For example, the
traditional way of organizing was mass protest. They had some demonstrationsone
attracted as many as five thousand people in 1933. But mass protests were not the most
effective forms of organizing. The most effective ones were invisible. That is why that
chapter is called an invisible army. People were being evicted constantly. The Chicago,
Detroit, New York, and Los Angeles approach was to confront the police in a kind of
street theater to say we are the Communist Party we are going to put the furniture
back in the house after youve been evicted. We are going to challenge the police who are
putting the furniture out, if we cant convince the police to let you stay there. This street theater
was not just to put people back in their homes but also to recruit new members. That is why
those scenes were so dramatic. In Alabama they couldnt do that. What they would do is
quietly approach the owner of the house being rented and say, Well look, we really hope
that you can let that person come back to the house, because if it is empty I can guarantee
you by the next morning the house is going to be firewood. People are so desperate
for fuel they will tear down your house piece by piece. Ill tell you what, why dont you
pay the person a dollar a month to take care of your house rather than throw them
out? That worked. Or when peoples electricity was cut off, the Communist Party
would show up with jumper cables and hook it up to public utilities to make sure
people had electricity.
Camp
Can you describe the role of the Communist Party in the mobilizations around the Scottsboro
case and the Angelo Herndon case, a black labor organizer whom James Baldwin calls the
George Jackson of the era?5
Kelley
Angelo Herndon actually cut his teeth in Alabama as a Communist. He was one of
the first rural organizers. He was a veteran when he was arrested on[End Page 219] this old
bogus conspiracy law in Georgia. The Herndon case became a kind of cause clbre because he
was incarcerated on trumped-up charges of conspiracy as a leading black
Communist. The Party took what looked W I l E R E d o like
p O S Ta
M Olocal
d E R N i sincident and
TS COME FrO M ? 3 made
2 it an
international scandal. Everyone knew Angelo Herndons name. You could walk around
Moscow, Johannesburg, and Peking, and they knew Angelo Herndon because the
Communist Party put the word out.
Similarly, the Scottsboro case was one in which the Partys international links
made what was essentially a local common casemeaning that many black men
have been legally lynched for being accused of raping or attempting to rape white
womena scandal. Nine young men, almost all minors, were just riding in a freight car
hoboing and looking for work. Two white women were also on the train. They were forced to
cry rape in some ways by the police. It is very probable that had it not been for the
Communist Party, the Scottsboro boys would have been executed or lynched. It is
significant that the Alabama Communists basically defined a class war prisoner or
political prisoner as any black person arrested under this unjust system. As a result,
a number of rape cases and lynchings were made into international cause clbres.
One of the tragedies is that there was another case of a young twelve-year-old woman Murdis
Dixon, who was raped and beaten by a white man. The Communist Party stepped in and said,
here is another case that we need to step in on and bring to the attention of the world.
Unfortunately the Party leadership didnt take up her case. The Garveyites took up her case and
tried to make something out of it, but it was a real failure. Not just a failure, because it also
spoke ideologically to one of the problems that the Party had. That is, at the national level at
least, the value of black women as a whole was not as great as that of white women or black men.
That is one of the lessons that I took from the case. I dont fault the local Communists per se
because they were the ones who investigated and tried to make it a story. They ran the story in
the Southern Worker, but nothing else happened after that.
Camp
What are the stakes involved in understanding the role of white supremacy and
anticommunism in crushing radical movements in the region?
Kelley
First, white supremacy has been fundamental in the structure of capitalist
exploitation in the South. It would not have worked without it. Here you had a budding
industrial center of Birmingham, Alabama, which was a fairly new city. It was not
fifty years old. The industrial core had been established for a generation, perhaps a generation
and a half. In order for industrial capitalists to be profitable they needed to lower
wages and maintain a more docile[End Page 220] workforce. They did not just use
race to reduce wages, they also used company towns that were highly policed to
keep workers enclosed and sequestered. These systems of white supremacy and
segregation made it almost impossible for white workers to see that uniting with
black workers was in their class interest.
Camp
Were the patterns of segregation different in Birmingham than other regions such as
Detroit?
Kelley
Yes, definitely. It was not modern segregation with slums, massive unemployment, and
warehousing people. The segregation was built around industrial parks where you had
steel, iron ore, and then mining where black and white workers lived in close proximity. In the
city itself there were alleyways with black people living behind white people or in very close
vicinity because whites depended on black female domestic labor. Industrial workers were
housed all together, maybe separated by a street or a particular building. Yet
segregation wasnt about separation at all. It was about being able to justify a
superior position for white workers that was only slightly superior to black
workers and also corralling all workers in a way that made them constantly
policed.
The Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company was a company town. It had local
private police agencies that patrolled with shotguns to make sure that people couldnt
escape. It was very similar to the mining compounds in South Africa where people on
contract labor were locked in barbed-wire fences and prevented from leaving until their
contracts were up. The whole system of economic exploitation was built on a very explosive
racial situation. People wanted to organize because conditions were so bad, but the
system could not tolerate any organization. The antiunion position in the South
was so severe that capitalists wouldnt even tolerate industrial organizations. Any
challenge to the system resulted in violence, both official police violence and extralegal violence.
You had police supporters in the form of the Ku Klux Klan, the White Legion, various
white supremacist organizations, and then vigilantes who did the dirty work of the police.
Camp
There was continuity between police and mob violence.
Kelley
Right. That was actually very common. It kept the police fairly clean by allowing some of the
most violent acts, such as people being kidnapped, to occur at night. The police would arrest
black workers and say, We dropped the charges. Then they would release them
in the middle of the night into[End Page 221] the hands of a waiting mob. These are the
conditions under which the Party operated.
Of course they imagined things were changing after 1935 with the Popular Front when several
developments converged. First, the Soviet Union took the position that they needed to build as
broad an alliance as possible of intellectuals, activists, and labor against fascism. That meant
reducing the sectarianism of the Party. It also meant fighting fascism not just abroad but at
home. It coincided with things like the La Follette Committee and the Senates investigations of
antiradical and antilabor violence; the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and its
industrial organizing campaign that was changing the nature of labor itself; the New Deals new
focus on protecting union rights; and meanwhile more intellectuals became involved with the
Party. The difference is that in Alabama most liberals were prosegregationist and extremely
anticommunist. In the Southand really throughout the rest of the country
prosegregationist and anticommunist sentiments were two sides of the same coin.
Evidence of procommunist sympathies included being for integration and against
segregation. If you were antiracist you are automatically a communist. J. Edgar
Hoover said that you could tell a Communist because they are the ones that have
Negroes coming into their house. Although that is kind of funny because when you think
about it, Negroes had Negroes coming into their house that were not Communist. You had to be
a white person for this to mean anything.
W I l But
E R E dthe fact
o pO S T M that
OdERNthe Party
isTS C O M E could
F r O M ? not
3 4 win a significant
white liberal following in Alabama meant that the Popular Front in the South was kind of a
disaster. The few liberals who came out got badly beaten. Joseph Gelders, a Jewish radical I
write about and whose daughter Marge Gelders and her husband were all radicals, got beaten so
badly he almost died. No one expected that. He was a professor and an intellectual. You had
antiblack racism, but anti-Semitism also justified beatings of liberals and radicals
in the South. Antiradical violence in Alabama actually did not subside after the Popular Front.
1nc horizontalism (marcus)
The aff reflects the ideology of Occupy. Claiming debate space as a
site for organic, horizontalist politics sells out radical change to the
private sphere of individual performance.
Marcus 2012 associate book editor at Dissent Magazine (Fall, David, The Horizontalists,
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-horizontalists)
There is a much-recycled and certainly apocryphal tale told of an ethnographer traveling in

India. Journeying up and down the Ganges Delta, he encounters a fisherman who claims to
know the source of all truth. The world, the fisherman explains, rests upon the back of an
elephant.
But what does the elephant stand on? the ethnographer asks.
A turtle.
And the turtle?
Another turtle.
And it?
Ah, friend, smiles the fisherman, it is turtles all the way down.
As with most well-circulated apocrypha, it is a parable that lacks a clear provenance, but has
a clear moral: that despite our ever-dialectical minds, we will never get to the
bottom of things; that, in fact, there is nothing at the bottom of things. What we define as
society is nothing more than a set of locally constructed practices and norms, and what we
define as history is nothing more than the passage of one set to the next. Although we might
find the picture of our universe as an infinite tower of tortoises rather ridiculous, as one
reteller admitted, it only raises the question, Why do we think we know better?
Since the early 1970s we have wonderedwith increasing anxietywhy and if we know better.
Social scientists, literary critics, philosophers, and jurists have all begun to turn from their
particular disciplines to the more general question of interpretation. There has been an
increasing uneasiness with universal categories of thought; a whispered suspicion and
then a commonly held belief that the sumsocieties, histories, identitiesnever amounts to
more than its parts. New analytical frameworks have begun to emerge, sensitive to both the
pluralities and localities of life. What we need, as Clifford Geertz argued, are not enormous
ideas but ways of thinking that are responsive to particularities, to individualities, oddities,
discontinuities, contrasts, and singularities.
This growing anxiety over the precision of our interpretive powers has translated into a variety
of political as well as epistemological concerns. Many have become uneasy with universal
concepts of justice and equality. Simultaneous toand in part because ofthe ascendance of
human rights, freedom has increasingly become understood as an individual
entitlement instead of a collective possibility. The once prevalent conviction that a
handful of centripetal values could bind society together has transformed into a
deeply skeptical attitude toward general statements of value. If it is, indeed, turtles
all the way down, then decisions can take place only on a local scale and on a
horizontal plane. There is no overarching platform from which to legislate; only a
local knowledge. As Michael Walzer argued in a 1985 lecture on social criticism, We have
to start from where we are, we can only ask, what is the right thing for us to do?
This shift in scale has had a significant impact on the Left over the past twenty to thirty years.
Socialism, once the name of our desire, has all but disappeared; new desires have
emerged in its place: situationism, autonomism, localism, communitarianism,

environmentalism, anti-globalism. Often spatial in metaphor, they have been more
concerned with where and how politics happen rather than at what pace and to what
end. Often local in theory and in practice, they have come to represent a shift in scale:
from the large to the small, from the vertical to the horizontal, and fromwhat Geertz
has calledthe thin to the thick.
Class, race, and genderthose classic left themesare, to be sure, still potent categories. But
they have often been imagined as spectrums rather than binaries, varying shades rather than
static lines of solidarity. Instead of society, there is now talk of communities and actor
networks; instead of radical schemes to rework economic and political
institutions, there is an emphasis on localized campaigns and everyday
practices. The critique of capitalismonce heavily informed by intricate historical and social
theorieshas narrowed. The ruthless criticism of all, as Karl Marx once put it, has turned
away from exploitative world systems to the pathologies of an over-regulated life. As post-
Marxists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe declared in 1985,
Left-wing thought today stands at a crossroads. The evident truths of the pastthe classical
forms of analysis and political calculation, the nature of the forces in conflict, the very meaning
of the Lefts struggles and objectiveshave been seriously challenged.From Budapest to
Prague and the Polish coup dtat, from Kabul to the sequels of Communist victory in Vietnam
and Cambodia, a question-mark has fallen more and more heavily over the whole
way of conceiving both socialism and the roads that should lead to it.
In many ways, the Left has just been keeping up with the times. Over the last quarter-century,
there has been a general fracturing of our social and economic relations, a multiplication of,
what one sociologist has called, partial societiesgrouped by age, sex, ethnicity, and
proximity. This has not necessarily been a bad thing. Even as the old Leftthe vertical Left
frequently bemoaned the growing differentiation and individuation, these new categories did, in
fact, open the door for marginalized voices and communities. They created a space for more
diversity, tolerance, and inclusion. They signaled a turn toward the language of recognition: a
politics more sensitive to difference. But this turn was also not without its disadvantages. Gone
was the Lefts hope for an emerging class consciousness, a movement of the people
seeking greater realms of freedom. Instead of challenging the top-down structures
of late capitalism, radicals now aspired to createwhat post-Marxists were frequently
callingspaces of freedom. If one of the explicit targets of the global justice movement of
the late 1990s was the exploitative trade policies of the World Trade Organization, then its
underlying critique was the alienating patterns of its bureaucracy: the erosion of
spaces for self-determination and expression. The crisis of globalization was that it
stripped individuals of their rights to participate, to act as free agents in a society that was
increasingly becoming shaped by a set of global institutions. What most troubled leftists over the
past three or four decades was not the increasingly unequal distribution of goods and services in
capitalist societies but the increasingly unequal distribution of power. As one frequently sighted
placard from the 1999 Seattle protests read, No globalization without participation!
Occupy Wall Street has come to represent the latest turn in this movement toward local and
more horizontal spaces of freedom. Occupation was, itself, a matter of recovering local
space: a way to repoliticize the square. And in a moment characterized by foreclosure, it
was also symbolically, and sometimes literally, an attempt to reclaim lost homes and abandoned
properties. But there was also a deeper notion of space at work. Occupy Wall Street sought
out not only new political spaces but also new ways to relate to them. By resisting
the top-down management of representative democracy as well as the bottom-up ideals
of labor movements, Occupiers hoped to create a new politics in which decisions
moved neither up nor down but horizontally. While embracing the new reach of
globalizationlinking arms and webcams with their encamped comrades in Madrid, Tel Aviv,
Cairo, and Santiagothey were also rejecting its patterns of consolidation, its limits on personal
freedom, its vertical and bureaucratic structures of decision-making.
Time was also to be transformed. The general assemblies and general strikes were efforts
to reconstruct, and make more autonomous, our experience of time as well as space. Seeking to
escape from the Taylorist demands of productivity, the assemblies insisted that decision-
making was an endless process. Who we are, what we do, what we want to be are
categories of flexibility, and consensus is as much about repairing this sense of
open-endedness as it is about agreeing on a particular set of demands. Life is a mystery, as
one pop star fashionista has insisted, and Occupiers wanted to keep it that way. Likewise,
general strikes were imagined as ways in which workers could take back timeregain those
parts of life that had become routinized by work. Rather than attempts to achieve large-scale
reforms, general strikes were improvisations, escapes from the daily calculations of production
that demonstrated that we can still be happy, creative, even productive individuals without jobs.
As one unfurled banner along New Yorks Broadway read during this springs May Day protests,
Why work? Be happy.
In many ways, the Occupy movement was a rebellion against the institutionalized nature of
twenty-first century capitalism and democracy. Equally skeptical of corporate
monopolies as it was of the technocratic tendencies of the state, it was ultimately an
insurgency against control, against the ways in which organized power and capital deprived
the individual of the time and space needed to control his or her life. Just as the vertically
inclined leftists of the twentieth century leveraged the public corporationthe welfare state
against the increasingly powerful number of private ones, so too were Occupy and, more
generally, the horizontalist Left to embrace the age of the market: at the center of their politics
was the anthropological man in both his formshomo faber and homo ludenswho was
capable of negotiating his interests outside the state. For this reason, the movement did
not fit neatly into right or left, conservative or liberal, revolutionary or reformist categories.
On the one hand, it was sympathetic to the most classic of left aspirations: to dismantle
governing hierarchies. On the other, its language was imbued with a strident individualism:
a politics of anti-institutionalism and personal freedom that has most often been affiliated with
the Right.
Seeking an alternative to the bureaucratic tendencies of capitalism and socialism, Occupiers
were to frequently invoke the image of autonomy: of a world in which social and economic
relations exist outside the institutions of the state. Their aspiration was a society
based on organic, decentralized circuits of exchange and
deliberationon voluntary associations, on local debate, on loose
networks of affinity groups.
If political and economic life had become
W I l abstracted inO dthe
ERE do pOSTM E R Nage
i s T S of
C Oglobalization
ME FrOM? 38 and
financialization, then Occupy activists wanted to re-politicize our everyday choices. As
David Graeber, one of Occupys chief theoretical architects, explained two days after Zuccotti
Park was occupied, The idea is essentially that the system is not going to save us,
so were going to have to save ourselves.
Borrowing from the anarchist tradition, Graeber has called this work direct action: the
practice of circumventing, even on occasion subverting, hierarchies through practical projects.
Instead of attempting to pressure the government to institute reforms or seize state power,
direct actions seek to build a new society in the shell of the old. By creating spaces in which
individuals take control over their lives, it is a strategy of acting and thinking as if one is
already free. Marina Sitrin, another prominent Occupier, has offered another
name for this politicshorizontalism: the use of direct democracy, the striving
for consensus and processes in which everyone is heard and new relationships
are created. It is a politics that not only refuses institutionalization but also imagines a new
subjectivity from which one can project the future into the present.
Direct action and horizontal democracy are new names, of course, for old ideas.
They descendmost directlyfrom the ideas and tactics of the global justice movement of
the 1990s and 2000s. Direct Action Network was founded in 1999 to help coordinate the anti-
WTO protests in Seattle; horizontalidad, as it was called in Argentina, emerged as a
way for often unemployed workers to organize during the financial crisis of 2001. Both emerged
out of the theories and practices of a movement that was learning as it went along. The ad hoc
working groups, the all-night bull sessions, the daylong actions, the decentralized planning were
all as much by necessity as they were by design. They were not necessarily intended at first. But
what emerged out of anti-globalization was a new vision of globalization. Local and horizontal in
practice, direct action and democracy were to become catchphrases for a movement that was
attempting to resist the often autocratic tendencies of a fast-globalizing capitalism.
But direct action and horizontal democracy also tap into a longer, if often neglected,
tradition on the left: the anarchism, syndicalism, and autonomist Marxism that stretch
from Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, and Rosa Luxemburg to C.L.R. James, Cornelius
Castoriadis, and Antonio Negri. If revolutionary socialism was a theory about ideal
possibilities, then anarchism and autonomism often focused on the revolutionary
practices themselves. The way in which the revolution was organized was the primary act of
revolution. Autonomy, as the Greco-French Castoriadis told Le Monde in 1977, demands not
only the elimination of dominant groups and of the institutions embodying and orchestrating
that domination but also new modes of what he calls self-management and organization.
With direct action and horizontal democracy, the Occupy movement not only developed a set of
new tactics but also a governing ideology, a theory of time and space that runs counter to many
of the practices of earlier leftist movements. Unlike revolutionary socialism or evolutionary
social democracyMarxs Esau and JacobOccupiers conceived of time as more cyclical than
developmental, its understanding of space more local and horizontal than structural and
vertical. The revolution was to come but only through everyday acts. It was to occur only
throughwhat Castoriadis obliquely referred to asthe self-institution of society.
The seemingly spontaneous movement that emerged after the first general assemblies in
Zuccotti Park was not, then, sui generis but an elaboration of a much larger turn by the Left. As
occupations spread across the country and as activists begin to exchange organizational tactics,
it was easy to forget that what was happening was, in fact, a part of a much larger shift in the
scale and plane of Western politics: a turnW I l Etoward
R E d o p Omore
S T M O d local
E R N i s Tand
S C Ohorizontal
M E F r O M ? 3 9patterns of life, a
growing skepticism toward the institutions of the state, and an increasing desire to seek out
greater realms of personal freedom. And although its hibernation over the summer has,
perhaps, marked the end of the Occupy movement, OWS has also come to represent an
importantand perhaps more lastingbreak. In both its ideas and tactics, it has given us a new
set of desiresautonomy, radical democracy, direct actionthat look well beyond the
ideological and tactical tropes of socialism. Its occupations and general assemblies, its flash
mobs and street performances, its loose network of activists all suggest a bold new set of
possibilities for the Left: a horizontalist ethos that believes that revolution will begin by
transforming our everyday lives.
It can be argued that horizontalism

is, in many ways, a product of the growing
disaggregation and individuation of Western society; that it is a kind of
free-market leftism: a politics jury-rigged out of the very culture
it hopes to resist. For not only does it emphasize the agency of the
individual, but it draws one of its central inspirations from a neoclassical
image: that of the self-managing societythe polity that functions best
when the state is absent from everyday decisions.
But one can also find in its anti-institutionalism an attempt to speak in todays language for
yesterdays goals. If we must live in a society that neither trusts nor feels compelled by
collectivist visions, then horizontalism offers us a leftism that attempts to be, at once, both
individualist and egalitarian, anti-institutional and democratic, open to the possibilities of self-
management and yet also concerned with the casualties born out of an age that has let capital
manage itself for far too long. Horizontalism has absorbed the crisis of knowledgewhat we
often call postmodernismand the crisis of collectivismwhat we often call neoliberalism.
But instead of seeking to return to some golden age before our current moment of fracture, it
seeksfor better and worseto find a way to make leftist politics conform to our current age of
anti-foundationalism and institutionalism. As Graeber argued in the prescriptive last pages of
his anthropological epic, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Capitalism has transformed the world in
many ways that are clearly irreversible and we therefore need to give up the false choice
between state and market that [has] so monopolized political ideology for the last centuries that
it made it difficult to argue about anything else. We need, in other words, to stop thinking like
leftists.
But herein lies the problem. Not all possible forms of human existence and
social interaction, no matter how removed they are from the institutions of
power and capital, are good forms of social organization. Although it is easy to
look enthusiastically to those societiesancient or modern, Western or non-Westernthat exist
beyond the structures of the state, they, too, have their own patterns of hierarchy, their own
embittered lines of inequality and injustice. More important, to select one form of social
organization over the other is always an act of exclusion. Instituting
and then protecting a particular way of life will always require a normative
commitment in which not every value system is respectedin which, in
other words, there is a moral hierarchy.
More problematically, by working outside W I l Estructures
R E d o p O S T Mof
O dpower
E R N i s T Sone
C O Mmay
E F r Ocircumvent
M? 40 coercive
systems but one does not necessarily subvert them. Localizing politicsstripping it of its
larger institutional ambitionshas, to be sure, its advantages. But without a larger structural
vision, it does not go far enough. Bubbles of freedom, as Graeber calls them, may
create a larger variety of non-institutional life. But they will always neglect other crucial avenues
of freedom: in particular, those social and economic rights that can only be protected from the
top down. In this way, the anti-institutionalism of horizontalism comes
dangerously close to that of the libertarian Right. The turn to previous eras
of social organization, the desire to locate and confine politics to a
particular regional space, the deep skepticism toward all forms of
institutional life not only mirror the aspirations of libertarianism but help
cloak those hierarchies spawned from non-institutional forms of power and
capital.
This is a particularly pointed irony for a political ideology that claims to be opposed
to the many injustices of a non-institutional marketin particular, its unregulated
financial schemes. Perhaps this is an irony deeply woven into the theoretical quilt of autonomy:
a vision that, as a result of its anti-institutionalism, is drawn to all sites of individual liberation
even those that are to be found in the marketplace. As Graeber concludes in Debt, Markets,
when allowed to drift entirely free from their violent origins, invariably begin to grow into
something different, into networks of honor, trust, and mutual connectedness, whereas the
maintenance of systems of coercion constantly do the opposite: turn the products of human
cooperation, creativity, devotion, love and trust back into numbers once again.
In many ways, this is the result of a set of political ideas that have lost touch with their origins.
The desire for autonomy was born out of the socialistif not also often the Marxisttradition
and there was always a guarded sympathy for the structures needed to oppose organized
systems of capital and power. Large-scale institutions were, for thinkers such as Castoriadis,
Negri, and C.L.R. James, still essential if every cook was truly to govern. To only try to
create spaces of freedom alongside of the State meant, as Castoriadis was to argue later in
his life, to back down from the problem of politics. In fact, this was, he believed, the
failure of 1968: the inability to set up new, different institutions and recognize that there is no
such thing as a society without institutions.
This isand will bea problem for the horizontalist Left as it moves forward. As a leftism ready-
made for an age in which all sides of the political spectrum are arrayed against the regulatory
state, it is always in danger of becoming absorbed into the very ideological
apparatus it seeks to dismantle. For it aspires to a decentralized and
organic politics that, in both principle and practice, shares a lot in common
with its central target. Both it and the free market are anti-institutional.
And the latter will remain so without larger vertical measures. Structures, not only
everyday practices, need to be reformed. The revolution cannot happen only on the
ground; it must also happen from above. A direct democracy still needs its indirect
structures, individual freedoms still need to be measured by their collective consequences,
and notions of social and economic equality still need to stand next to the desire
for greater political participation. Deregulation is another regulatory regime, and
to replace it requires new regulations: W I l E R E institutions
d o p O S T M O d E that
R N i s Twill
S C O limit
M E F r Othe excesses
M? 4 1 of the
market. As Castoriadis insisted in the years after 1968, the Lefts task is not only to abolish old
institutions but to discover new kinds of relationship between society and its institutions.
Horizontalism has come to serve as an important break from the static strategies and categories
of analysis that have slowed an aging and vertically inclined Left. OWS was to represent its
fullest expression yet, though it has a much longer back story and stillone hopesa promising
future. But horizontalists such as Graeber and Sitrin will struggle to establish spaces of freedom
if they cannot formulate a larger vision for a society. Their vision is notas several on the
vertical left have suggestedtoo utopian but not utopian enough: in seeking out local
spaces of freedom, they have confined their ambitions; they have, in fact,
come, at times, to mirror the very ideology they hope to resist. In his famous
retelling of the turtle parable, Clifford Geertz warned that in the search of all-too-deep-lying
turtles, we have to be careful to not lose touch with the hard surfaces of lifewith the political,
economic, stratificatory realities within which men are everywhere contained. This is an ever-
present temptation, and one that, in our age of ever more stratification, we must resist.
1nc alt (boring politics)
Our alternative is boring politicsits the only way to prevent
criticism from being an end in itself
Frank '12 Thomas, brilliant badass, author of What's the Matter with Kansas? and editor of
The Baffler "To the Precinct Station: How theory met practice and drove it absolutely crazy"
http://www.thebaffler.com/past/to_the_precinct_station
Occupy itself is pretty much gone. It was evicted from Zuccotti Park about two months after it
beganan utterly predictable outcome for which the group seems to have made
inadequate preparation. OWS couldnt bring itself to come up with a real set of demands until
after it got busted, when it finally agreed on a single item. With the exception of some residual
groups here and there populated by the usual activist types, OWS has today pretty much fizzled
out. The media storm that once surrounded it has blown off to other quarters.
Pause for a moment and compare this record of accomplishment to that of Occupys evil twin,
the Tea Party movement, and the larger right-wing revival of which it is a part. Well, under the
urging of this trumped-up protest movement, the Republican Party proceeded to win a
majority in the U.S. House of Representatives; in the state legislatures of the nation it
took some six hundred seats from the Democrats; as of this writing it is still purging
Republican senators and congressmen deemed insufficiently conservative and has even
succeeded in having one of its own named as the GOPs vice-presidential candidate.
* * *
The question that the books under consideration here seek to answer is: What is the magic
formula that made OWS so successful? But its exactly the wrong question. What we need to be
asking about Occupy Wall Street is: Why did this effort fail? How did OWS blow all the promise
of its early days? Why do even the most popular efforts of the Left come to be mired in a gluey
swamp of academic talk and pointless antihierarchical posturing?
The action certainly started with a bang. When the occupation of Zuccotti Park began, in
September 2011, the OWS cause was overwhelmingly popular; indeed, as Todd Gitlin points out,
hating Wall Street may well have been the most popular left-wing cause since the thirties.
Inequality had reached obscene levels, and it was no longer the act of a radical to say so. The
bank bailouts of the preceding years had made it obvious that government was captured by
organized money. Just about everyone resented Wall Street in those days; just about everyone
was happy to see someone finally put our fury in those crooks overpaid faces. People flocked to
the OWS standard. Cash donations poured in; so did food and books. Celebrities made
appearances in Zuccotti, and the media began covering the proceedings with an attentiveness it
rarely gives to leftist actions.
But these accounts, with a few exceptions here and there, misread that overwhelming approval
of Occupys cause as an approval of the movements mechanics: the camping out in the park, the
way food was procured for an army of protesters, the endless search for consensus, the
showdowns with the cops, the twinkles. These things, almost every writer separately assumes,
are what the Occupy phenomenon was really about. These are the details the public hungers to
know.
The building of a community in Zuccotti Park, for example, is a point of special emphasis.
Noam Chomskys thoughts epitomize the genre when he tells us that one of the main
achievements of the movement has been to create communities, real functioning communities
of mutual support, democratic interchange, et cetera. The reason this is important, he
continues, is because Americans tend to W I lbe
E R Every
d o p isolated
O S T M O d E Rand
N i s T neighborhoods
S C O M E F r O M ? 4 3 are broken down,
community structures have broken down, people are kind of alone. How building such
communities helps us to tackle the power of high finance is left unexplained, as is Chomskys
implication that a city of eight million people, engaged in all the complexities of modern life,
should learn how humans are supposed to live together by studying an encampment of college
students.
The actual sins of Wall Street, by contrast, are much less visible. For example, when you read
Occupying Wall Street, the work of a team of writers who participated in the protests, you first
hear about the subject of predatory lending when a sympathetic policeman mentions it in the
course of a bust. The authors themselves never bring it up.
And if you want to know how the people in Zuccotti intended to block the banks agendahow
they intended to stop predatory lending, for exampleyou have truly come to the wrong place.
Not because its hard to figure out how to stop predatory lending, but because the way the
Occupy campaign is depicted in these books, it seems to have had no intention of doing anything
except building communities in public spaces and inspiring mankind with its noble refusal to
have leaders.
Unfortunately, though, thats not enough. Building a democratic movement culture is essential
for movements on the left, but its also just a starting point. Occupy never evolved beyond it. It
did not call for a subtreasury system, like the Populists did. It didnt lead a strike (a real one,
that is), or a sit-in, or a blockade of a recruitment center, or a takeover of the deans office. The
IWW free-speech fights of a century ago look positively Prussian by comparison.
With Occupy, the horizontal culture was everything. The process is the message, as
the protesters used to say and as most of the books considered here largely concur. The
aforementioned camping, the cooking, the general-assembling, the filling of public places: thats
what Occupy was all about. Beyond that there seems to have been virtually no strategy to speak
of, no agenda to transmit to the world.
* * *
Whether or not to have demands, you might recall, was something that Occupy protesters
debated hotly among themselves in the days when Occupy actually occupied something.
Reading these books a year later, however, that debate seems to have been consensed out of
existence. Virtually none of the authors reviewed here will say forthrightly that the failure to
generate demands was a tactical mistake. On the contrary: the quasi-official account of the
episode (Occupying Wall Street) laughs off demands as a fetish object of literal-minded media
types who stupidly crave hierarchy and chains of command. Chris Hedges tells us that demands
were something required only by the elites, and their mouthpieces in the media. Enlightened
people, meanwhile, are supposed to know better; demands imply the legitimacy of the
adversary, meaning the U.S. government and its friends, the banks. Launching a protest with no
formal demands is thought to be a great accomplishment, a gesture of surpassing democratic
virtue.
And here we come to the basic contradiction of the campaign. To protest Wall Street in 2011 was
to protest, obviously, the outrageous financial misbehavior that gave us the Great Recession; it
was to protest the political power of money, which gave us the bailouts; it was to protest the
runaway compensation practices that have turned our societys productive labor into bonuses
for the 1 percent. All three of these catastrophes, however, were brought on by deregulation and
tax-cuttingby a philosophy of liberation as anarchic in its rhetoric as Occupy was
in reality. Check your premises, Rand-fans:
W I l E R E dit
o was
p O S T the
M O d bankers
E R N i s T S C Oown
M E F ruprising
OM? 44 against the hated
state that wrecked the American way of life.
Nor does it require poststructuralism-leading-through-anarchism to understand how to reverse
these developments. You do it by rebuilding a powerful and competent regulatory
state. You do it by rebuilding the labor movement. You do it with bureaucracy.
Occupiers often seemed aware of this. Recall what you heard so frequently from protesters lips
back in the days of September 2011: Restore the old Glass-Steagall divide between
investment and commercial banks, they insisted. Bring back big government! Bring back
safety! Bring back boredom!
But thats no way to fire the imagination of the world. So, how do you maintain the
carnival while secretly lusting for the CPAs? By indefinitely suspending the
obvious next step. By having no demands. Demands would have signaled that humorless,
doctrinaire adults were back in charge and that the fun was over.
This was an inspired way to play the situation in the beginning, and for a time it was a great
success. But it also put a clear expiration date on the protests. As long as demands and the rest
of the logocentric requirements were postponed, Occupy could never graduate to the next level.
It would remain captive to what Christopher Lasch criticizedway back in 1973as the cult of
participation, in which the experience of protesting is what protesting is all about.
linksgeneral

affect
The politics of affect cause mercurial alliances and image-driven
politicsthey trade off with an organized, unified left
Reed 2014 PhD in political science, professor of political science at the University of
Pennsylvania, specializing in race and American politics. He has taught at Yale, Northwestern
and the New School for Social Research. An expert on racial and economic inequality, he is a
founding member of the Labor Party and a frequent contributor to The Nation (March, Adolph
Jr., Harpers, Nothing Left, http://harpers.org/archive/2014/03/nothing-left-2/)
But if
the left is tied to a Democratic strategy that, at least since the Clinton Administration, tries to win
elections by absorbing much of the rights social vision and agenda, before long the
notion of a political left will have no meaning. For all intents and purposes, that is what has occurred. If the right
sets the terms of debate for the Democrats, and the Democrats set the terms of debate for the left, then what can it mean to be on the political left?
The terms left and progressive and in practical usage the latter is only a milquetoast version of the former now
signify a cultural sensibility rather than a reasoned critique of the existing social
order. Because only the right proceeds from a clear, practical utopian vision, left has come to mean little more than not right.
The left has no particular place it wants to go. And,
to rehash an old quip, if you have no destination,
any direction can seem as good as any other. The left careens from this oppressed
group or crisis moment to that one, from one magical or morally pristine constituency
or source of political agency (youth/students; undocumented immigrants; the Iraqi labor movement; the
Zapatistas; the urban precariat; green whatever; the black/Latino/LGBT community; the
grassroots, the netroots, and the blogosphere; this seasons worthless Democrat; Occupy; a Trotskyist software engineer elected to the
Seattle City Council) to another. It lacks focus and stability; its mtier is bearing witness, demonstrating solidarity,
and the event or the gesture. Its reflex is to send messages to those in power, to make
statements, and to stand with or for the oppressed.
This dilettantish politics is partly the heritage of a generation of defeat and
marginalization, of decades without any possibility of challenging power or influencing policy. So the left operates
with no learning curve and is therefore always vulnerable to the new enthusiasm. It long ago lost the
ability to move forward under its own steam. Far from being avant-garde, the self-styled left in the United States seems
content to draw its inspiration, hopefulness, and confidence from outside its own ranks, and lives only on the outer fringes of
American politics, as congeries of individuals in the interstices of more mainstream institutions.
With the two parties converging in policy, the areas of fundamental disagreement that separate them become too arcane and too remote from most
peoples experience to inspire any commitment, much less popular action. Strategies and allegiances
become mercurial and
opportunistic, and politics becomes ever more candidate-centered and driven by worshipful
exuberance about individuals or, more accurately, the idealized and evanescent personae the political holograms their packagers
project.
As the human cipher Taibbi described, Obama

is the pure product of this hollowed-out politics. He
is a triumph of image and identity over content; indeed, he is the triumph of
identity as content. Taibbi misreads how race figures into Brand Obama. Obama is
not without race; he embodies it as an abstraction, a feel-good evocation severed from
history and social relations. Race is what Obama projects in place of an ideology . His racial classification
combines with a narrative of self-presentation, including his past as a community organizer, to convey a sensation of a politics, much as advertising
presents a product as the material expression of inchoate desire. This
became the basis for a faith in his virtue
that largely insulated him from sharp criticism from the left through the first five
years of his presidency. Proclamation that Obamas election was, in ieks terms, a sign in which the memory of the long past of slavery and the
struggle for its abolition reverberates was also a call to suspend critical judgment, to ascribe to the event a significance above whatever Obama stood
for or would do.
In fact, Obama was able to win the presidency only because the changes his election supposedly signified had already taken place. His election, after all,
did not depend on disqualifying large chunks of the white electorate. As things stand, his commitments to an imperialist foreign policy and Wall Street
have only more tightly sealed the American lefts coffin by nailing it shut from the inside. Katrina vanden Heuvel pleads for the president to accept
W I l Ethrough
R E d o unprincipled
pOSTMOdE RNisTS CO
criticism from a principled left that has demonstrated its loyalty acquiescence toMhis
E administrations
FrOM? 47 initiatives; in a 2010
letter, the
president of the AFL-CIO railed against the Deficit Commission as a front
for attacking Social Security while tactfully not mentioning that Obama appointed
the commission or ever linking him to any of the economic policies that labor
continues to protest; and there is even less of an antiwar movement than there was under Bush, as Obama has expanded American
aggression and slaughter into Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and who knows where else.
Barack Obama has always been no more than an unexceptional neoliberal Democrat
with an exceptional knack for self-presentation persuasive to those who want to believe, and with solid
connections and considerable good will from the corporate and financial sectors. From his
successful wooing of University of Chicago and Hyde Park liberals at the beginning of his political career, his appeal has always
been about the persona he projects the extent to which he encourages people to feel good about their politics, the political future,
and themselves through feeling good about him than about any concrete vision or political program he has
advanced. And that persona has always been bound up in and continues to play off complex and contradictory representations of race in American
politics.
Particularly among those who stress the primary force of racism in American life, Obamas election called forth in the same breath competing impulses
exultation in the triumphal moment and a caveat that the triumph is not as definitive as it seems. Proponents
of an antiracist
politics almost ritualistically express anxiety that Obamas presidency threatens to
issue in premature proclamation of the transcendence of racial inequality, injustice, or conflict. It
is and will be possible to find as many expressions of that view as one might wish, just as lunatic and more or less openly racist birther and Tea Party
tendencies have become part of the political landscape. An
equal longer-term danger, however, is the
likelihood that we will find ourselves with no critical politics other than a
desiccated leftism capable only of counting, parsing, hand-wringing, administering, and making up Just So stories
about dispossession and exploitation recast in the evocative but politically sterile
language of disparity and diversity. This is neoliberalisms version of a left. Radicalism now means
only a very strong commitment to antidiscrimination, a point from which
Democratic liberalism has not retreated. Rather, its the path Democrats have
taken in retreating from a commitment to economic justice.
Confusion and critical paralysis prompted by the racial imagery of Obamas election prevented even sophisticated intellectuals like iek from
concluding that Obama was only another Clintonite Democrat no more, no less. It is how Obama could be sold, even within the left, as a hybrid of
Martin Luther King Jr. and Neo from The Matrix. The triumph of identity politics, condensed around the banal image of the civil rights insurgency and
its legacy as a unitary black liberation movement, is what has enabled Obama successfully to present himself as the literal embodiment of an
otherwise vaporous progressive politics. In this sense his election is most fundamentally an expression of the limits of the left in the United States its
decline, demoralization, and collapse.
The crucial tasks for a committed left in the United States now are to admit that no
politically effective force exists and to begin trying to create one. This is a long-
term effort, and one that requires grounding in a vibrant labor movement. Labor may
be weak or in decline, but that means aiding in its rebuilding is the most serious task for the
American left. Pretending some other option exists is worse than useless. There are no
magical interventions, shortcuts, or technical fixes. We need to reject the fantasy that some
spark will ignite the People to move as a mass. We must create a constituency for a left program and that
cannot occur via MSNBC or blog posts or the New York Times. It requires painstaking organization and building
relationships with people outside the Beltway and comfortable leftist groves. Finally, admitting our absolute impotence can be politically liberating;
acknowledging that as a left we have no influence on who gets nominated or elected, or what they do in office, should reduce the frenzied self-delusion
that rivets attention to the quadrennial, biennial, and now seemingly permanent horse races. It
is long past time for us to begin again
to approach leftist critique and strategy by determining what our social and
governmental priorities should be and focusing our attention on building the kind
of popular movement capable of realizing that vision. Obama and his top aides punctuated that fact by
making brutally apparent during the 2008 campaign that no criticism from the left would have a place in this regime of Hope and Change. The message
could not be clearer.
Affective approaches fail to mobilize or change politics

Jeff Pruchnic 8, Wayne State University, "The Invisible Gland: Affect and Political Economy",
Volume 50, Number 1, Winter, muse.jhu.edu/journals/criticism/v050/50.1.pruchnic.html
These chapters on affective labor also most explicitly foreground the difficulty of integrating affect into theories of political economy and possibilities for political action.
Although contributors ably map how affect creates value in contemporary capitalism, they
struggle somewhat with determining the value of affector, more precisely, the value of affect theoryin
changing our responses to economic and cultural practices. Granted, many of the authors explicitly position their projects as
diagnostic rather than prescriptive in nature. Wissinger concludes by suggesting that thinking about preindividual forces of affectivity and bodily energies provides a new
angle on how imagining technologies constitute bodies (255). [End Page 165] Ducey similarly defers focus on possible responses to affective labor, arguing that since affect is
The essays
not subject to the usual forms of measurement and analysis . . . the political responses its modulations call forth are emergent and unpredictable (205).
that do focus most explicitly on such responses are, ironically, those in which theories of
affective labor are a starting-off point rather than a consistent resource in their analysis. As such, their
conclusions tend to follow descriptions of the new importance of affect in economics and culture with fairly traditional suggestions for intervention based on collective
organization and political recognition. For example, Melissa Ditmore concludes her sharp analysis of the Dunbar Mahila Samanwanya Committee, an organization that
promotes the safety and welfare of its sixty thousand Indian sex workers, by noting irony in the fact that the DMSC works with immaterial affect laborers in the worlds oldest,
but as yet unrecognized, profession to advance their cause at a far deeper, more meaningful and effective level than has been achieved by recognized workers in affect labor
(184). However, the productive interventions identified here are fairly traditional, and because of the relative singularity of what Ditmore calls the worlds oldest form of
affective labor (both generally and particularly in India, where the laws governing sex work are fairly ambiguous), it is difficult to imagine how the examples given here might be
translated to other forms of affective labor (such as health care, womens work, and modeling, to use the other industries assayed in this subject cluster) (170). Similarly, David
Staples contributes a notable argument that affective labor is best approached through a Bataillean general economy rather than a restricted political economy, but his
conclusion suggests that the best response to the devaluation of womens work is to quantify the time of that labor; drawing on Derridas work on gift economies, Staples states
that although the ethical duty or responsibility implicit in child care cannot be measured, or estimated, or valorized as such, the time of child care can, and can also be
rewarded based on its duration, a measure he sees occurring in the commodification of child care generally and in the 1999 rewriting of the constitution of Venezuela in
particular (145). Both the conclusions marking the unpredictability of future response and those relying on fairly traditional strategies of intervention speak to the relative
difficulty of following up analyses of the operations of affect with techniques for mobilizing affect productively. All of which is to say, though Affective Turn does a better job of
introducing readers to the central issues surrounding the study of affect in the humanities and social sciences than any single work I am aware of, [End Page 166] its value comes
as much from the way it underscores sticking points or aporias in this work as from the individual accomplishments of its contributors. Indeed, the above concerns are perhaps
better taken not as criticisms of Affective Turn but of the segment of the affective turn to which the authors are most commonly respondingwork, notably that of Sedgwick
and Massumi, that has positioned affect theory as a productive alternative to critique in its traditional sense: a way out of the ostensibly moribund focus on relationships of
dominance and subversion and the identification of this or that phenomenon as ideologically or socially constructed. Certainly such an endeavor has had a salutary effect on the
contemporary critical terrain, both through its emphasis on the often-neglected role of human physiology and nervous processes in human subjectivity and ideation, as well as
the
its antagonism toward the idea that beliefs and predispositions can somehow be made privative or defused when exposed to rational critique. However,
question of how to deploy these insights within the traditionally rational ecology
of research in the humanities and social scientists has proven to be a thornier
issue. One could, for instance, abandon traditional registers of academic criticism, as do the more experimental and autoethnographical chapters in Affective Turn.
These works remain somewhat unsatisfying, however, because even though they
may succeed in producing a feeling of or for the affective phenomena under
review, the motivational or persuasive import to the work is much less clear. One
could also simply emphasize the importance of affect as a critique of critique
itself, as do Goldberg and Willse, who in their piece marvel that even after the impact of deconstruction, academic scholarship continues to engage media objects as
exterior, applying theory against them to interpret or reveal their meanings and truths (265). Similarly, Bianco positions her work as an intervention into the dominance of
Yet, I take it, though such paradigms have not

psychoanalytical and ideological approaches to film criticism.
necessarily entered straw man territory at this time, we are seeing diminishing
returns on such calls as they continue to multiply. Perhaps most telling is the emphasis, behind these approaches and
throughout much of the work within the volume, on affect as not only primary in many dimensions of experience but also, unlike experience itself, ultimately irreducible and
unrepresentable. Such an emphasis makes the critical edge of the majority of chapters more what we might code aesthetic than rhetorical, or more focused on the
description of affects and affective processes rather than their possible manipulation. The influence for this approach, it seems, is at least partially Massumis The Autonomy
[End Page 167] of Affect, which looms large over much of Affective Turn. The terms and phrases used there to describe affect and affective intensityunassimilable, outside
expectation and adaptation (85), in excess of any narrative or function line (87), irreducible excess (87)are recurrently paraphrased and alluded to throughout the
volume.2 In Affective Turn, as in Massumis article, such depictions, as much as they are meant to be in some way post-
postmodern, seem to take us back to
at least equally pseudo-modernist aestheticism
a certain type of . Indeed, the
references cited above ring most clearly as descriptions of the sublime more than anything else. Perhaps, as Negri contends in another oft-cited work that also emphasizes the
it seems we have yet to find the way to move

immeasurability of affect, the Sublime has become normal.3 However,
from describing affective processes in aesthetic terms to producing strategies for

mobilizing those processes, or, perhaps more precisely, how we might use our recognition of the
affective dimension of politics to leverage affect for political purposes.

debate
Focus on the debate space ensures nothing ever changesvoting aff
is a gesture of recognition that assumes alterity is equivalent to
freedom
Because post-al theories of difference often circumvent the material dimensions of difference and tend to
segregate questions of difference from analyses of class formation and capitalist social relations, we
contend that it is necessary to (re)conceptualize difference by drawing onMarxs materialist and historical formulations.
Difference needs to be understood as the product of social contradictions and in relation to political and economic
organization. Because systems of difference almost always involve relations of domination and oppression, we
must concern ourselves with the economies of relations of difference that exist in specific contexts. Drawing
on the Marxist concept of mediation enables us to unsettle the categorical (and sometimes overly rigid)
approaches to both class and difference for it was Marx himself who warned against creating false
dichotomies at the heart of our politicsthat it was absurd to choose between consciousness and the world, subjectivity and
social organization, personal or collective will, and historical or structural determination. In a similar vein, it is equally absurd to see difference as a
historical form of consciousness unconnected to class formation, development of capital and class politics (Bannerji, 1995, p. 30). Bannerji has pointed
to the need to historicize difference in relation to the history and social organization of capital and class (inclusive of imperialist and colonialist
legacies) and to acknowledge the changing configurations of difference and otherness. Apprehending the meaning and function of
difference in this manner necessarily highlights the importance of exploring (a) the institutional and structural aspects of difference; (b)
the meanings and connotations that are attached to categories of difference; (c) how differences are produced out of, and lived within, specific his-
torical, social, and political formations; and (d) the production of difference in relation to the complexities, contradictions, and exploitative relations of
capitalism. Moreover, it presents
a challenge to identitarian understandings of difference based almost
exclusively on questions of cultural and/or racial hegemony. In such approaches, the answer to
oppression often amounts to creating greater cultural space for the formerly excluded
to have their voices heard (represented). Much of what is called the politics of difference is little more
than a demand for an end to monocultural quarantine and for inclusion into the
metropolitan salons of bourgeois representationa posture that reinscribes a
neoliberal pluralist stance rooted in the ideology of free market capitalism. In short, the
political sphere is modeled on the marketplace, and freedom amounts to the liberty
of all vendors to display their different cultural goods. A paradigmatic expression of this position is
encapsulated in the following passage that champions a form of difference politics whose presumed aim is to make social groups appear. Minority and
immigrant ethnic groups have laid claim to the street as a legitimate forum for the promotion and exhibition of traditional dress, food, and culture. . . .
[This] is a politics of visibility and invisibility. Because it must deal with a tradition of
representation that insists on subsuming varied social practices to a standard
norm, its struggle is as much on the page, screen . . . as it is at the barricade and in
the parliament, traditional forums of political intervention before the postmodern. (Fuery & Mansfield, 2000, p. 150) This position
fosters a fetishized understanding of difference in terms of primordial and seemingly
autonomous cultural identities and treats such differences as inherent, as ontologically
secure cultural traits of the individuals of particular cultural communities. Rather than
exploring the construction of difference within specific contexts mediated by the conjunctural embeddedness of
power differentials, we are instead presented with an overflowing cornucopia of cultural
particularities that serve as markers of ethnicity, race, group boundaries, and so forth. In this instance, the discourse
of difference operates ideologicallycultural recognition derived from the rhetoric of
tolerance averts our gaze from relations of production and presents a strategy for
attending to difference as solely an ethnic, racial, or cultural issue. What advocates of such an
approach fail to acknowledge is that the forces of diversity and difference are allowed to flourish
provided that they remain within the prevailing forms of capitalist social
arrangements. The neopluralism of difference politics cannot adequately pose a substantive challenge
to the productive system of capitalism that is able to
W I accommodate
l E R E d o p O S T M O daE R
vast
N i s T pluralism of ?ideas
S COME FrOM 5 1 and cultural practices. In fact,
the post-al themes of identity, difference, diversity, and the like mesh quite nicely with
contemporary corporate interests precisely because they revere lifestylethe quest for,
and the cultivation of, the selfand often encourage the fetishization of identities in the marketplace as
they compete for visibility (Boggs, 2000; Field, 1997). Moreover, the uncritical, celebratory tone of various
forms of difference politics can also lead to some disturbing conclusions. For example, if we take to their logical
conclusion the statements that postmodern political activism fiercely contests the reduction of the other to the same, that post-al narratives believe
that difference needs to be recognized and respected at all levels (Fuery &Mansfield, 2000, p. 148), and that the recognition of different subject
positions is paramount (Mouffe, 1988, pp. 35-36), their political folly becomes clear. Eagleton (1996) sardonically commented on the implications:
Almost all postmodern theorists would seem to imagine that difference, variability and heterogeneity are absolute
goods, and it is a position I have long held myself. It has always struck me as unduly impoverishing of British social life that we can muster a mere
two or three fascist parties. . . . The opinion that plurality is a good in itself is emptily formalistic and alarmingly
unhistorical. (pp. 126-127) The liberal pluralism manifest in discourses of difference politics often means a
plurality without conflict, contestation, or contradiction. The inherent limitations of this position
are also evident if we turn our attention to issues of class. Expanding on Eagletons observations and adopting
the logic that seems to inform the unqualified celebration of difference, one would be compelled to champion class differences as well. Presumably, the
differences between the 475 billionaires whose combined wealth now equals the combined yearly incomes of more than 50% of the worlds population
are to be celebrateda posturing that would undoubtedly lend itself to a triumphant endorsement of capitalism and inequitable and exploitative
conditions. San Juan (1995) noted that the
cardinal flaw in current instantiations of culturalism lies in its
decapitation of discourses of intelligibility from the politics of antagonistic relations. He framed the question quite
pointedly: In a society stratified by uneven property relations, by asymmetrical allocation of resources and of power, can there be equality of cultures
and genuine toleration of differences? (pp. 232233).
Inclusion in the debate space is an empty act of tolerance that ensures

nothing really changes
Zizek 8Institute for Social Sciences, Ljubljana (Slavoj, The Prospects of Radical Politics
Today, Intl Journal of Baudrillard Studies, 5;1)
ellipses in orig
Let us take two predominant topics of to day's American radical academia: postcolonial and queer (gay) studies. The problem of
postcolonialism is undoubtedly crucial; however, "postcolonial
studies" tend to translate it into the
multiculturalist problematic of the colonized minorities' "right to narrate" their
victimizing experience, of the power mechanisms which repress "otherness," so
that, at the end of the day, we learn that the root of postcolonial exploitation is our
intolerance toward the Other, and, furthermore, that this intolerance itself is rooted in our
intolerance toward the "Stranger in Ourselves," in our inability to confront what
we repressed in and of ourselves. The politico-economic struggle is thus
imperceptibly transformed into a pseudo-psychoanalytic drama of the subject
unable to confront its inner traumas ... The true corruption of American academia
is not primarily financial, it is not only that they are able to buy many European
critical intellectuals (myself included up to a point), but conceptual: notions of
"European" critical theory are imperceptibly translated into the benign universe of Cultural Studies chic.
My personal experience is that practically all of the "radical" academics silently count on the
long-term stability of the American capitalist model, with the secure tenured position as their
ultimate professional goal (a surprising number of them even play on the stock market). If there is a thing they are
genuinely horrified of, it is a radical shattering of the (relatively) safe life
environment of the "symbolic classes" in the developed Western societies. Their
excessive Politically Correct zeal when dealing with sexism, racism, Third World
sweatshops, etc., is thus ultimately a defense against their own innermost identi-fication, a
kind of compulsive ritual whose hidden W I l E R E d logic is:
o pOSTM O d "Let's
E R N i s T S talk
C O M E as
F r Omuch
M? 52 as possible
about the necessity of a radical change to make sure that nothing will really
change!" Symptomatic here is the journal October: when you ask one of the editors to what the title refers, they will half-
confidentially signal that it is, of course, that October in this way, one can indulge in the jargonistic analyses of modern art, with
the hidden assurance that one is somehow retaining the link with the radical revolutionary past ... With regard to this radical chic,
the first gesture toward Third Way ideologists and practitioners should be that of praise: they at least play their game straight and
are honest in their acceptance of global capitalist coordinates, in contrast to the pseudo-radical
academic Leftists
who adopt toward the Third Way the attitude of utter disdain, while their own
radicality ultimately amounts to an empty gesture which obligates no one to
any-thing determinate.
II. From Human to Animal Rights
We live in the "postmodern" era in which truth- claims as such are dismissed as an expression of hidden power mechanisms as the
reborn pseudo-Nietzscheans like to emphasize, truth is a lie which is most efficient in asserting our will to power. The very question
"Is it true?" apropos of some statement is supplanted by another question: "Under what power con-ditions can this statement be
uttered?" What we get instead of the universal truth is a multitude of perspectives, or,
as it is fashionable to put it today, of "narratives" not only of literature, but also of politics, religion, science, they are all
different narratives, stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the ultimate goal of ethics is
to guarantee the neutral space in which this multitude of narratives can peacefully
coexist, in which everyone, from ethnic to sexual minorities, will have the right
and possibility to tell his/her story. The two philosophers of today's global capitalism are the two great Left-
liberal "progres-sives," Richard Rorty and Peter Singer honest in their respective stances. Rorty defines the basic coordinates: the
fundamental dimension of a human being is the ability to suffer, to experience pain and humiliation consequently, since humans
are symbolic animals, the fundamental right is the right to nar-rate one's experience of suffering and humiliation.2 Singer then
provides the Darwinian background.3
engage us
We did engageTHEY are the ones refusing to be accountable for the
implications of their 1acgame over
Bowman 2009 Director of Postgraduate Research Studies, Director of the Race,
Representation and Cultural Politics Research Group, founding editor of JOMEC Journal and
founder of The Centre for Interdisciplinary Film and Visual Culture Research at Cardiff
University (Paul, in Enduring Resistance: Cultural Theory after Derrida, Deconstruction is a
Martial Art, SAD)
Such resistance to deconstruction is familiar. It

is often couched as a resistance to theory made in
the name of a resistance to disengagement; a resistance to theory for the sake of
keeping it real. Such a rationale for the rejection of deconstruction (or indeed Theory as such) is
widespread. But when keeping it real relies upon a refusal to interrogate the
ethical and political implications of ones own rhetorical and conceptual coordinates* ones
own key terms*the price is too high. Chow points to some of the ways and places that this high price is paid, and reflects
on the palpable consequences of it. For instance, in politicized contexts such as postcolonial cultural studies,
there are times when deconstruction and theory are classified (reductively) as
being Western, and therefore as being just another cog in the Western hegemonic (colonial,
imperial) apparatus. As she puts it, in studies of non-Western cultural others, organized by postcolonial anti-
imperialism, all things putatively Western easily become suspect. Thus, the general
criticism of Western imperialism can lead to the rejection of Western
approaches, at the same time as the study of non- Western cultures easily assumes
a kind of moral superiority, since such cultures are often also those that have been colonized and ideologically
dominated by the West.46 In other words, theory*for all its fundamental questioning of Western
logocentrism*is too hastily lumped together with everything Western and
facilely rejected as a non-necessity.47 Unfortunately, therefore:
In the name of studying the Wests others, then, the critique of cultural politics that is an inherent part of both poststructural theory
and cultural studies is pushed aside, and culture
returns to a coherent, idealist essence that is
outside language and outside mediation. Pursued in a morally complacent,
antitheoretical mode, culture now functions as a shield that hides the positivism,
essentialism, and nativism*and with them the continual acts of hierarchization,
subordination, and marginalization*that have persistently accompanied the
pedagogical practices of area studies; cultural studies now becomes a means of
legitimizing continual conceptual and methodological irresponsibility in the name of cultural
otherness.48
experience
Experience: emphasizing lived experience obscures the conditions of
possibility for that experience. Their pedagogy robs class of
explanatory powerthat's key to sustainable challenges to the
relations of production
Mas'ud Zavarzadeh retired professor of English at Syracuse University jac 23.1 (2003) journal of Advanced Composition
Theory
The pedagogy of appearance focuses on cultural representation and the role of representation
in constructing the represented. By centering teaching in the machinery of "representation," it
obliterates the objective. Reducing pedagogy to lessons in cultural semiotics, it makes "experience" of
the pleasures of "depth less" surfaces the measure of reality and thus obscures the social relations of
production that are the material conditions of that experience. However, "This 'lived'
experience is not a given, given by a pure 'reality,' but the spontaneous 'lived experience' of
ideology in its peculiar relationship to the real" (Althusser 223). The ideological value of the concept of
"experience" in de-conceptualizing pedagogy will perhaps become more clear in examining the way bourgeois radical
pedagogues, such as Giroux, deploy experience as an instance of spontaneity to eviscerate
class as an explanatory concept by which the social relations of property are critiqued. In his
Impure Actsa book devoted to marginalizing explanatory concepts and popularizing "hybrids" and that, in effect, justifies political
opportunism in pedagogy-Giroux
repeats the claims of such other cultural
phenomenologists as Stuart Hall, Judith Butler, and Robin Kelley that "class" is "lived
through race" (28). Class, in other words, is an affect. He represents this affective view of class as epistemological
resistance against class which, he claims, is a universal category that takes the "difference" of race out of class. As I have already
argued,epistemology is used in mainstream pedagogy as a cover for a reactionary class politics
that does several things, as Giroux demonstrates. First, it segregates the "black" proletariat from
the "white" proletariat and isolates both :from other "racial" proletariats. In doing so,
Giroux's pedagogy carries out the political agenda of capital-to pit one segment of the
proletariat against the other and to turn the unity of the working class into contesting (race)
"differences." Second, it rewrites the system of wage labor itself into a hybrid. Giroux's experience-ism obscures the
systematicity of wage labor and argues that there is no capitalism operating with a single logic of exploitation.
Instead, there are many, aleatory, ad hoc, local arrangements between employees and employers depending on the color of the
worker not the laws of motion of capital. Third, it converts capitalism from an economic system based on the
"exploitation" of humans by humans (wage labor)through the ownership of the means of
production-into an institution of cultural "oppression" based on "power." Fourth, since class is
lived through race, it is not an objective fact (the relation of the worker to ownership ofthe means of production)
but a subjective experience. The experience of ("living") class through race, like all experiences, is
contingent, aleatory, and indeterminate. Class (lived through the experience of race) is thus reconstituted as
contingent-an accident not a necessity of wage labor. Fifth, since capitalism is not a system but a
series of ad hoc arrangements of exchange with various workers of diverse colors, it does not produce an objective
binary class system but only cultural differences. One cannot, therefore, obtain objective
knowledge of capitalism. There are, in short, no laws of motion of capital; there are only "experiences" of
work influenced by one's color. Consequently, to say-as I have said-that capitalism is a regime of exploitation is simply a
totalitarian closure. We cannot know what capitalism is because, according to Giroux's logic, it is fraught with
differences (of race) not the singularity of "surplus labor." In Giroux's pedagogy, there is no capitalism ("totality"),
only cultural effects of capitals without capitalism ("differences"). Giroux represents his gutting of class as a
radical and groundbreaking notion that will lead to liberation of the oppressed. However, he
never completes the logic of his argument because in the end it will deground his position and
turn it into epistemological nonsense and political pantomime. If class is a universal category
that obliterates the difference of race, there is (on the basis of such a claim) no reason not to say that
race is also a universal category because it obliterates the difference of sexuality (and other
differences), which is, by the same logic,W I l itself
ERE do a p Ouniversal
S T M O d E R N i s Tcategory since
S COME FrOM ? 55 it obliterates
the difference of age (and other differences), which is itself a universal category because it obliterates the difference of
(dis )ability (and other differences), which is itself a universal category because it obliterates the difference of class (and other
differences). In short, the social, in Giroux's pedagogy is a circle of oppressions, none of
whose components can explain any structural relations; each simply absorbs the other
("class is actually lived through race," paraphrasing Giroux) and thus points back to itself as a local knowledge of
the affective, difference, and contingency. Class explains race; it does not absorb it as an
experience (see Butler, "Merely"), nor does it reduce it to the contingencies of ethnicities (Hall, "New") or
urban performativities (Kelley, Yo '). To put it differently, since in this pluralism of oppressions each
element cancels out the explanatory capacity of all others, the existing social
relations are reaffirmed in a pragmatic balancing of differences. Nothing changes,
everything is resignified. The classroom of experience reduces all concepts (which it marks as
"grand narratives") to affects ("little stories") and, instead of explaining the social in order to
change it, only "interprets" it as a profusion of differences. Teaching becomes an affirmation of the singular-
as-is; its lessons "save the honor of the name" (see Lyotard, Postmodern 82). Giroux's program is a mimesis of the
logic of the ruling ideology: as in all pedagogies of affect, it redescribes the relation of the subject of
knowledge with the world but leaves the world itself intact by reifying the signs of
"difference" (see Rorty, Contingency 53, 73). The subject, as I will discuss later in my analysis of Cary Nelson's radical
pedagogy, feels differently about itself in a world that remains what it was Giroux is putting forth a class-cleansing
pedagogy: he erases class from teaching in the name of epistemology ("totalization"). But as I have already
argued, epistemology is not an issue for Giroux; it is an alibi for hollowing out from class its
economic explanatory power. Epistemology in bourgeois pedagogy is class politics represented
as "theory"-whose aim is to turn class into a cultural aleatory experience. In Giroux's phenomenological
experientialism, lived experience is an excuse for advancing the cause of capital in a
populist logic (respect for the ineluctable "experience" of the student) so that the student, the future worker,
is trained as one who understands the world only through the sense-able-his own "unique"
experience as black, white, or brown; man or woman; gay or straight-but never as a proletariat: a person who,
regardless of race, sexuality, gender, age, or (dis )ability has to sell his or her labor power to capital in order
to obtain subsistence wages in exchange. Experience, in Giroux's pedagogy, becomes a self-protecting
"inside" that resists world-historical knowledge as an intrusion from "outside"; it thus valorizes
ignorance as a mark of the authenticity and sovereignty of the subject-as independence and free
choice.
This collapses into a provincialist anti-politics where we are only

allowed to talk about ourselves
Gur-ze-ev, 98 - Senior Lecturer Philosophy of Education at Haifa, (Ilan, Toward a
nonrepressive critical pedagogy, Educational Theory, Fall 48,
http://haifa.academia.edu/IlanGurZeev/Papers/117665/Toward_a_Nonreperssive_Critical_Pe
dagogy)
From this perspective, the

consensus reached by the reflective subject taking part in the dialogue
offered by Critical Pedagogy is naive, especially in light of its declared anti-intellectualism on the
one hand and its pronounced glorification of "feelings", "experience", and self-evident
knowledge of the group on the other. Critical Pedagogy, in its different versions, claims to inhere and overcome the
foundationalism and transcendentalism of the Enlightenment's emancipatory and ethnocentric arrogance, as exemplified by
ideology critique, psychoanalysis, or traditional metaphysics. Marginalized feminist knowledge, like the marginalized,
neglected, and ridiculed knowledge of the Brazilian farmers, as presented by Freire or Weiler, is represented as legitimate and
relevant knowledge, in contrast to its representation as
W the
IlERhegemonic
E d o p O S instrument
T M O d E R N i of
s T representation
S C O M E F r O M and
? 5 6education. This
knowledge is portrayed as a relevant, legitimate and superior alternative to hegemonic

education and the knowledge this represents in the center. It is said to represent an identity that is desirable and promises to
function "successfully". However, neither the truth value of the marginalized collective memory nor knowledge is cardinal here.
"Truth" is replaced by knowledge whose supreme criterion is its self-evidence, namely the
potential productivity of its creative violence, while the dialogue in which adorers of "difference"
take part is implicitly represented as one of the desired productions of this violence. My argument is
that the marginalized and repressed self-evident knowledge has no superiority over the self-
evident knowledge of the oppressors. Relying on the knowledge of the weak, controlled, and
marginalized groups, their memory and their conscious interests, is no less naive and dangerous than relying
on hegemonic knowledge. This is because the critique of Western transcendentalism,
foundationalism, and ethnocentrism declines into uncritical acceptance of marginalized
knowledge, which becomes foundationalistic and ethnocentric in presenting "the truth", "the
facts", or ''the real interests of the group" - even if conceived as valid only for the group concerned. This position
cannot avoid vulgar realism and naive positivism based on "facts" of self-evident knowledge ultimately realized against the self-
evidence of other groups.
intersectionality
We link turn intersectionalitywe already know that oppressive
structures are interwoven, but class is more than just another
ideology. Framing their experience as an authentic truth beyond
political economy traps all agency in a million individual prisons of
difference
This framework must be further distinguished from those who invoke the terms classism
and/or class elitism to (ostensibly) foreground the idea that class matters (cf. hooks, 2000) because
we agree with Gimenez (2001) that class is not simply another ideology legitimating oppression (p.
24). Rather, class denotes exploitative relations between people mediated by their relations to the
means of production (p. 24). To marginalize such an understanding of class is to conflate
individuals objective locations in the intersection of structures of inequality with individuals
subjective understandings of how they are situated based on their experiences.7 Another
caveat. We are not renouncing the concept of experience. On the contrary, we believe that it is imperative to
retain the category of lived experience as a reference point in light of misguided post-Marxist critiques that
imply that all forms of Marxian class analysis are dismissive of subjectivity. We are not, however, advocating
the uncritical fetishization of experience that tends to assume that personal experience
somehow guarantees the authenticity of knowledge and that often treats experience as
self-explanatory, transparent, and solely individual. Rather, we advance a framework that seeks to make
connections between seemingly isolated situations and/or particular experiences by exploring how
they are constituted in, and circumscribed by, broader historical and social conditions. They are
linked, in other words, by their internal relations (Ollman, 1993). Experiential understandings, in and of
themselves, are initially suspect because dialectically they constitute a unity of oppositesthey are at
once unique, specific, and personal but also thoroughly partial, social, and the products of historical forces
about which individuals may know little or nothing. A rich description of immediate
experience can be an appropriate and indispensable point of departure, but such an understanding can easily
become an isolated difference prison unless it transcends the immediate perceived
point of oppression, confronts the social system in which it is rooted, and expands into a
complex and multifaceted analysis (of forms of social mediation) that is capable of mapping out the
general organization of social relations. That, however, requires a broad class-based
approach. Having a concept of class helps us to see the network of social relations
constituting an overall social organization which both implicates and cuts through
racialization/ethnicization and gender. . . . [A] radical political economy [class] perspective emphasizing
exploitation, dispossession and survival takes the issues of . . . diversity [and difference] beyond questions of
conscious identity such as culture and ideology, or of a paradigm of homogeneity and heterogeneity . . . or of ethical
imperatives with respect to the other. (Bannerji, 2000, pp. 7, 19) Various culturalist perspectives seem to
diminish the role of political economy and class forces in shaping the edifice of the socialincluding the
shifting constellations and meanings of difference. Furthermore, none of the differences valorized in
culturalist narratives alone, and certainly not race by itself, can explain the
massive transformation of the structure of capitalism in recent years. We agree with
Meyerson (2000) that race is not an adequate explanatory category on its own and that the use of
race as a descriptive or analytical category has serious consequences for the way in which
social life is presumed to be constituted and organized. The category of racethe conceptual framework that
the oppressed often employ to interpret their experiences of inequalityoften clouds the concrete reality of class,
and blurs the actual structure of power Wand I l E Rprivilege
E d o p O S T ;
MO in
d E this
R N i s T regard,
S C O M E F r Orace
M ? 5 8 is all too often a
barrier to understanding the central role of class in shaping personal and collective
outcomes within a capitalist society (Marable, 1995, pp. 8, 226).8
Refusal to foreground our objective common interest supports

fragmentation and reactionary politics of difference
Dave Hill, teaches at Middlesex University and is Visiting Professor of Critical Education Policy and Equality Studies at the
University of Limerick, Ireland. Culturalist and Materialist Explanations of Class and "Race", Cultural Logic 2009
http://clogic.eserver.org/2009/Hill.pdf
Postmodernisms rejection of metanarratives can be seen as symptomatic of the theoretical

inability to construct a mass solidaristic oppositional transformatory political
project, and that it is based on the refusal to recognise the validity or existence of solidaristic
social class. More importantly, this general theoretical shortcoming is politically disabling
because the effect of eschewing mass solidaristic policy is, in effect, supporting a reactionary
status quo. Both as an analysis and as a vision, post-modernism has its dangers but more so
as a vision. It fragments and denies economic, social, political, and cultural relations. In particular,
it rejects the solidaristic metanarratives of neo-Marxism and socialism. It thereby serves to
disempower the oppressed and to uphold the hegemonic Radical Right in their
privileging of individualism and in their stress on patterns and relations of
consumption as opposed to relations of production. Postmodernism analysis, in effect if not in
intention, justifies ideologically the current Radical Right economic, political, and
educational project.
Their use of intersectionality foregrounds inevitable human

differences instead of working toward collective struggles on the basis
of our shared interest in fighting Capital
Common Cause 2014 Common Cause is a specific anarchist-communist organization,
founded in 2007, with active branches in Hamilton, Kitchener-Waterloo and Toronto, Ontario.
We believe that anarchists must participate in campaigns for social, environmental and
economic justice as an organized force in order to help spread anarchist principles of direct
action, autonomy and self-organization amongst wider segments of the class. We believe that
the best way of spreading these principles is through active participation in struggle, and to this
end, our members are actively engaged in many different fronts of the class war, ranging from
labour and community struggles, to campus organizing, Indigenous solidarity and prison
abolition work (6/6, 2 Hamilton members, 1 Toronto member, With Allies Like These:
Reflections on Privilege Reductionism, http://linchpin.ca/?q=content/allies-these-reflections-
privilege-reductionism)
Relentless Articulation of Difference

As a component of anti-oppression politics, intersectionality accounts for the
complexity of domination by outlining the various ways in which different forms of
oppression intersect and reproduce each other. Rooted in feminist discussions of the
1970s and 1980s that sought to problematize the notion of universal "womanhood,"
intersectionality provides a framework W I l E R E dfor
o p Oconceptualizing
S T M O d E R N i s T S C O M E Fthe
r O M ?ways
59 in which
different positionalities (eg. gender, sexuality, race, class, ability, etc.) shape peoples subjective experiences, as
well as material realities. Patricia Hill Collins describes intersectionality as an analysis claiming that systems of race, social
class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, and age form mutually constructing features of social organization. In sum,
intersectionality provides a lens through which we can view peoples social locations as mutually constitutive and tied to systemic
inequalities.
Intersectionality is often evoked in a manner that isolates and reifies social

categories without adequately drawing attention to common ground. Crucial to its analysis
is an emphasis on a politics of differenceit is asserted that our identities and social locations
necessarily differentiate us from those who do not share those identities and social
locations. So, for example, a working class queer woman will not have the same experiences
and by extension, the same interests as an affluent woman who is straight. Similarly, a cis-man of colour will not
have the same experiences and by extension the same interests as a trans* man of colour, and so on and so forth. Within this
framework, difference is the fundamental unit of analysis and that which proceeds and defines
identity. This practice works to isolate and sever connections between people in that it
places all of its emphasis on differentiation.
There are seemingly endless combinations of identities that can be articulated. However,
these articulations of difference do not necessarily get at the root of the problem. As Collins argues:
Quite simply, difference is less a problem for me than racism, class exploitation and gender oppression. Conceptualizing
these systems of oppression as difference obfuscates the power relations and
material inequalities that constitute oppression."
It is absolutely true that our social locations shape our experiences, and may influence
our politics. Acknowledging difference is important, but it is not enough. It can obscure
the functioning of oppression, and act as a barrier to collective struggle. The experiences
of a female migrant who works as a live-in caregiver will not be the same as a male worker who has citizenship and works in a
unionized office. These differences are substantial and should not be ignored. However, in focusing only on difference we
lose
sight of the fact that both are exploited under capitalism, and have a shared
interest in organizing to challenge Capital. To be clear, this is not to say that divisions
can be put aside and dealt with after the revolution, but to highlight the importance of
finding common ground as a basis to bridge difference and organize collectively to challenge oppression. In the words of
Sherene Razack: speaking about differenceis not going to start the revolution. Moving beyond a politics of
difference, we need an oppositional politics that seeks to transform structural
relations of power.
Unique identity characteristics don't disprove the centrality of class-

its absolutely central to Marxist ontology and epistemology.
Ultimately, it is economically induced and it conditions and permeates all social reality in
capitalist systems. Marxists therefore critique postmodern and post-structural arguments that class
is, or ever can be, constructed extra-economically, or equally that it can be deconstructed politically an
epistemic position which has underwritten in the previous two decades numerous so-called
death of class theories, arguably the most significant of which are Laclau & Mouffe (1985) and Laclau (1996). I am not
arguing against the complexities of subjective identities. People have different subjectivities. Some individual
coalminers in Britain were gay, black, Betty W I lPage
E R E d or
o p Madonna
O S T M O d E R N fetishists,
i s T S C O M E Fheavily
r O M ? 6 0 influenced by
Biggles or Punk, their male gym teacher or their female History teacher, by Robert Tressell or by
Daily Porn masturbation, by Radical Socialists or by Fascist ideology. But the coal mining industry has
virtually ceased to exist in Britain, and the police occupation of mining villages such as Orgreave during the
Great Coalminers Strike (in Britain) of 1984-85 and the privatisation of British Coal and virtual wiping out of
the coal mining industry was motivated by class warfare of the ruling capitalist fraction. It was class
warfare from above. Whatever individuals in mining families like to do in bed, their dreams, and
in their transmutation of television images, they suffered because of their particular class
fraction position they were miners and historically the political shock troops of the British
manual working class.
lifestyle
Lifestyle politics only creates insular activist circles overly concerned
about language and granola
The Subcultural Ghetto and Lifestylism
The culture of anti-oppression politics lends itself to the creation and maintenance of insular
activist circles. A so-called "radical community" consisting of collective houses, activist spaces, book-fairs, etc.
premised on anti-oppression politics fashions itself as a refuge from the oppressive relations and interactions of the outside world.
This notion of community, along with anti-oppression politics intense focus on
individual and micro personal interactions, disciplined by "call-outs" and privilege
checking, allows for the politicization of a range of trivial lifestyle choices. This
leads to a bizarre process in which everything from bicycles to gardens to knitting are
accepted as radical activity.
Call-out culture and the fallacy of community accountability creates a disciplinary
atmosphere in which people must adhere to a specific etiquette. Spaces then
become accessible only to those who are familiar with, and able to express themselves
with the proper language and adhere to the dominant customs. Participation in the discourse which shapes and
directs this language and customs is mostly up to those who are able to spend too much time debating on activist blogs, or who are
academics or professionals well versed in the dialect. As mentioned previously, the containment of radical discourse to the university
further insulates the "activist bubble" and subcultural ghetto.
In addition to creating spaces that are alienating to those outside of our milieu, anti-oppression
discourse, call-
out culture, and the related "communities" leads activists to perceive themselves
as an "enlightened" section of the class (largely composed of academics, students, professionals, etc. who
have worked on their shit and checked their privilege) who are tasked with acting as missionaries to the
ignorant and unclean masses. This anarchist separatist orientation is problematic for any who believe in the possibility of
mass liberatory social movements that are capable of actually transforming society.
One example of this orientation is a recent tumblr blog maintained by Toronto activists entitled Colonialism Ain't Fashionable. The
blog encourages activists to use their smart phones to snap photos of people wearing Hudson Bay jackets in public and submit them.
Hudson Bay is a Canadian retailer which played a historically significant role in colonialism, and the jacket in particular is seen by
activists as an example of cultural appropriation. Photos are then published in a strange act of attempted public shaming, justified
with some high-minded language about "challenging colonialism at a cultural level," or "sparking discussion." What we actually see
on display here is the arrogant glee with which those within the activist bubble shake their finger at those outside it.
The retreat to subcultural bohemian enclaves and activist bubbles acknowledges

that revolutionary change is impossible, and as a substitute offers a counterfeit
new society in the here and now. We understand that such a proposition is appealing given the day-to-day
indignity and suffering that is life under our current conditions, but time
and time again we have seen these
experiments implode on themselves. Capitalism simply does not offer a way out
and we must face this reality as the rest of the class that we are a part of faces it
everyday. No amount of call-outs or privilege checking will make us into
individuals untainted by the violentW Isocial
l E R E d o relationships
p O S T M O d E R N i s T S Cthat
O M permeate
E F r O M ? our
6 2 reality.
neighborhood
Obvi we have offense against their use of neighborhood as an
identifier
Reed 2011 professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in race
and American politics. He has taught at Yale, Northwestern and the New School for Social
Party and a frequent contributor to The Nation (7/4, Adolph Jr., Nonsite, Three Trems,
http://nonsite.org/editorial/three-tremes)
Interesting and well done as it is, the Faubourg Trem documentary also hinges on two
primary touristic mystifications. It rehearses a sacralized image of neighborhood as
self-contained, organic community, and it indulges in the much more recent discourse of heritage tourism in
general and black heritage tourism in particular. References to neighborhood are commonplaces of
urban representation, but the idea of a neighborhood is not natural or given; it came
into existence in the U. S. with the emergence of markets for residential real estate
in the era of urban industrialization between the second half of the nineteenth century and first decades of the
twentieth. It has always been an artifact and engine of historically specific political-
economic and ideological forces that simultaneously fueled the growth of a real estate
industry and impelled spatial segmentation by class and race. The neighborhood
not only does not lie outside these processes; it is inseparable from them. Its
mystification, as is already playing out in the case of Trem, is itself a node in the logic of
redevelopment. That is, the aura of distinctive neighborhood, particularly when accompanied by
the cachet of cultural authenticity, is an element in the commercial valorization
that defines areas as hot and ripe for rent-intensifying redevelopment. In this
domain, as in tourism and many others, market forces depend on the fiction that
there is a territory of culture that lies pristinely outside the market.
The documentarys second crucial mystification is its indulgence in the much more recent discourse
of heritage tourism. Elie laments early in the documentary that Trem had lost its distinctive identity by the postwar
period and was known to most people prosaically as the 6th Ward. It is noteworthy in this regard that, in a street-parade scene that
features a young musician interviewee leading the crowd in call-and-response, the crowd represents itself as 6th Ward, not Trem.
This underscores the recentness of the invention. As with all such fixed or transcendent
narratives of identity attached to place Gabon, France, Chinatown, Little Italy (by 1930 there were or had
been 11 sections of Chicago known as Little Italy, none of which had a majority or even plurality Italian population, and Little Ireland
contained only about 3% of the citys Irish population and was only 30% Irish1) the
identity is hortatory
rhetoric, assertion of an organic ideal, not the reflection of an empirical reality.
This is no surprise, of course; its hardly news that the notion of an organic community is itself a modern construct and driven by
essentializing and prelapsarian assumptions. What is significant is how persistent and pervasive the notion remains. It
is a
default posture even among many of those who consider themselves part of a left
condensed around objection to neoliberalism or globalization. In fact much of
ostensibly left critique of neoliberalism or globalization takes as its normative
standard some version of communitarian fantasy. One such fantasy idealizes the brief moment of
capitalist accommodation in the postwar period as natural law. Other, more flamboyant ones imagine a smaller-scale, voluntaristic
capitalism, perhaps romanticized through some neologism like solidarity economy or a fetishized localism, as the idealized
alternative to globalization. In
general, community figures into this strain of leftism as
sacrosanct and reified, a monolithic entity that is treated as a natural unit, as politically
self-evident and self-justifying. Proliferation of multiculturalism/diversity and other strains of
essentializing identitarianism and their corollary hostility toward working-class politics and political-
economic critique within the left in the US and its imperial reach have only exacerbated
this tendency, not least by reinforcing authenticity and claims to Most-Oppressed status as the basis for
political legitimacy.2 WIlERE do pOSTMOdERNisTS COME FrOM? 64
nommo
We dont have to reject Nommo outrightthats an unrealistic
expectationour critique is about what we do with it and how we can
scrutinize the 1acs argumentative assumptions
Clarke, Communication Professor @ Vanderbilt, 2004
[Lynn, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol 18, No 4, p. 323-324]
Despite the risks that accompany the concept of Nommo as creative power, and those that attend a linguistic theory of AAL framed
within it, the promises of invention offer an important opportunity to rethink Nommo and the linguistic
theory of AAL in ways that reduce the risks. In this effort, the paradox of creativity may be a resource insofar
as it facilitates thinking Nommo in relation to what it appears to exclude: the argumentative dimensions
of public speech. Appealing, with some unease, to Benjamins (1986) linguistic theory, language speaks its potential to speak. With
Agamben (1999), the potential may begin to avail itself of accountability when figured not as an occasion for choice. If so, a choice
appears between defining Nommo as creative power unhinged from communicative reason or as
creative power linked to intersubjective speech by a middle that holds the two accountable to one
another, keeping them in mutually responsible play. Prematurely excluded by the law of
noncontradiction, the choice of linking Nommo to a middle deserves serious consideration. Figured as
an attitude, or ethos, the middle is a name that speaks to the generative, relational, and practical
rational potentials of logos (Doxtader 2000).6 In this speaking, the power to define reality and identity is both
enacted and deferred. The middle opens up a space for individuals, groups, and communities to
represent and debate competing definitions and identities, in the name of collective choice and
action. On this account of public speech, advocates of particular definitions of self and world are
expected to justify their terms by way of argument, and dissenting audience members are invited to
provide reasons to back their disagreement and the interpretive frame(s) of reference in which the
disagreement appears. Viewed from this perspective on Nommo, speakers and (individual) members of
audiences within an AAL community would have a conceptual and practical opportunity to define and
debate the warrants of definitions and identities offered in their name(s). Additionally, they may come to mutual
agreement. In the concluding pages of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon wrote of several wishes, one of which expressed hope That the tool
never possess the man (Fanon 1967, 371). Critically indebted to Hegel, who saw that language may be used practically in ways akin to a tool,
Fanon expressed longing for a world in which humans are emancipated from the forms of domination they create, forms that, as Hegel (1979)
also saw, can pit humans against each other as if in absolutely opposed relation. Fanon also named the danger of living
according to a language in which humankind appears to exist for the power of speech, and not the other
way around (Fanon 1967, 19192). Significantly, Yancy recognizes this danger and wants to survive it by talking
about AAL in a way that illumines the capacity of speech to resist powers terms. As crucial as this
attempt is to the lives and political possibilities of a socially disrespected people, accounting for it through a concept of
Nommo that removes itself from accountability to communicative reason creates a tool that may
thwart its own potential. An approach to conceptualizing AAL from the middle of public speech provides
one possible way out of the dig. Where the path may lead remains a question for talk and debate among those in whose name it is
proposed.
outrage porn
Their sanctimonious ad homs are actually reasons to vote for usyou
should deter their smear tactics with your ballot. Those claims are a
form of cynical outrage porn thats turning debate into Facebook.
Dougherty 3/13/2014 senior correspondent at The Week (Michael Brendan, The Week,
Why we're addicted to online outrage, http://theweek.com/article/index/257915/why-were-
addicted-to-online-outrage)
Why do we love to hate each other online? Over at Beta Beat Ryan Holiday writes about "outrage porn," the
steady stream of insincerely performed umbrage and gulping hysteria that seeps like
superconcentrated vinegar out of the web's pores every moment of every day. He writes, "'Outrage porn,' as we've come
to call it, checks all the boxes of compelling content it's high valence, it drives comments, it assuages
the ego, projects guilt onto a scapegoat, and looks good in your Facebook Feed."
Holiday points to stories about Steve Martin's "racist" Twitter joke, or the way Lena Dunham was photoshopped, and wonders if
the cynical manufacture of trivial outrage dulls our senses to real outrages that demand real
action, like the displacement of 2 million Syrians from civil war. Perhaps it does, but Holiday doesn't offer
an explanation of why we are addicted to outrage, only venturing that it is somehow selfish.
When faced citizen to citizen in real-life social situations with the notable exception of mass political demonstrations the
instincts that outrage porn tries to awaken in us are mostly suppressed or barely felt at all. Imaginetreating the
person sitting next to you at a bar with the touchy insolence of an internet flame
war, or re-interpreting his colloquial impressions about the world according to the tendentious and aggrieved norms of the
combox. It's almost impossible. A guy could get his ass kicked trying. We usually tolerate the
bar-stool ingrate, seek points of understanding (and often find a few), or dismiss him as
deluded and mostly harmless.
But bathed in the glow of our computers, we imagine that we are in a battle of titanic scale.
And it's either us, spotless and infallible, or them, dastardly and shameless.
On one level, "outrage porn" at least promises to stimulate an internet grazer who is bored at work, or perhaps even bored with life.
It makes him feel like an actor in a great moral struggle, either as victim or as triumphant voice of justice. Indeed, savvy media
organizations train their headline writers to find the "stakes" that matter to readers, and one way to do that is to generate anxiety
about being in the unfairly hated or the righteously hating parts of American life.
But I'd suggest tentatively that there

may be deeper trends at work. The desire for this kind of
participation in the drama of public life may be exacerbated by the decline of civic participation, and a
quiet despair that our precious franchise amounts to a mere 1-in100 million say in the
affairs of the nation. Constantly minded by others above us (managers, landlords, creditors) and feeling rather powerless as political
actors in the real world, the virtual mob seems attractive.
Another reason for our outrage addiction may be found in the way the norms of traditional
liberalism are dissolving before a more moralized politics. In a perceptive 2001 essay for National
Affairs, Thomas Powers argued that traditional liberalism sought "to lower the stakes of politics by removing contentious moral (and
religious) opinion to the private sphere. Political life thereby becomes a less morally charged matter of presiding over competing
'interest groups,' whose squabbling is amenable to compromise."
Powers went on to argue that when fundamental justice and morality are reintroduced into politics, and when the beliefs and
attitudes of citizens become the potential subject of state action (through amelioration, re-education, or official stigma), people are
more likely to fight and to fight with dread in their eyes.
It's notable that ongoing culture-war disputes are the particular habitu of elite media, white-collar job-havers who spend much of
their day sitting in front of the outrage generator. We spend all day worrying about who are the real bad guys, and the real victims.
Our ideological songs venture into ever higher falsettos, straining to sing our
laments above the noise.
As a result, when a politician utters a barely outdated clich, or the slightest impolitic word,
we no longer hear it as a faux pas or mere insensitivity. Instead it becomes the latest
menacing incarnation of the evil we oppose. Micro-aggression is no longer "micro"
at all, but the very real appearance of Patriarchy, or Anti-clericalism, or whatever evil you most fear. If your ideological
hearing aids are tuned correctly, a gaffe becomes a threat, returning you to witch-
trial-era Salem or the Vende before the massacre.
Worse, this kind of hypermoralized politics has some serious implications for how we
look at governance and power. As C.S. Lewis once wrote, "Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised
for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive." In other words, if we are simply doing good
in the world, and our enemies evil, then there's no limit to the power we ought to acquire. What a charming fantasy that can be.
Holiday is right to be concerned that our capacity for real outrage is dulled by the sort of "outrage" that we perform, or fake, or
convince ourselves to feel in our self-regard. But we should consider the possibility that fake-outrage is popular precisely because it
is an indulgence that requires so little from us. Fake
outrage allows us to hide within the mob, to feel
righteous without doing much of anything, to suffer like martyrs from words not spoken to us. If we
subtracted all the outrage porn tomorrow, most of us would continue to do what we already are doing about the Syrian refugee crisis,
or faraway famine, or unjust war: nothing.
privilege checking
Confronting privilege backfiresconfessionary demands only
position us as subjects capable of self-reflexivity
A. Smith 2013 PhD, Native American activist/antiviolence scholar, Assistant Professor of
Media and Cultural Studies at UC Riverside (8/14, Andrea, Andrea366, The Problem with
Privilege, http://andrea366.wordpress.com/2013/08/14/the-problem-with-privilege-by-
andrea-smith/)
In my experience working with a multitude of anti-racist organizing projects over the

years, I frequently found myself participating in various workshops in which
participants were asked to reflect on their gender/race/sexuality/class/etc. privilege. These
workshops had a bit of a self-help orientation to them: I am so and so, and I have x privilege. It was never quite clear
what the point of these confessions were. It was not as if other participants did not
know the confessor in question had her/his proclaimed privilege. It did not appear that
these individual confessions actually led to any political projects to dismantle the structures of
domination that enabled their privilege. Rather, the confessions became the political project
themselves. The benefits of these confessions seemed to be ephemeral. For the instant the confession took
place, those who do not have that privilege in daily life would have a temporary position
of power as the hearer of the confession who could grant absolution and forgiveness. The sayer of the
confession could then be granted temporary forgiveness for her/his abuses of power and relief
from white/male/heterosexual/etc guilt. Because of the perceived benefits of this ritual, there was generally little
critique of the fact that in the end, it primarily served to reinstantiate the structures of
domination it was supposed to resist. One of the reasons there was little critique of this practice is that it
bestowed cultural capital to those who seemed to be the most oppressed. Those
who had little privilege did not have to confess and were in the position to be the
judge of those who did have privilege. Consequently, people aspired to be
oppressed. Inevitably, those with more privilege would develop new heretofore unknown forms of oppression from which they
suffered. I may be white, but my best friend was a person of color, which caused me to be oppressed when we played together.
Consequently, the goal became not to actually end oppression but to be as oppressed as possible. These
rituals often
substituted confession for political movement-building. And despite the cultural
capital that was, at least temporarily, bestowed to those who seemed to be the most oppressed, these rituals ultimately
reinstantiated the white majority subject as the subject capable of self-reflexivity
and the colonized/racialized subject as the occasion for self-reflexivity.
These rituals around self-reflexivity in the academy and in activist circles are not without merit. They are informed by key insights
into how the logics of domination that structure the world also constitute who we are as subjects. Political projects of transformation
necessarily involve a fundamental reconstitution of ourselves as well. However, for this process to work, individual transformation
must occur concurrently with social and political transformation. That is, the
undoing of privilege occurs not
by individuals confessing their privileges or trying to think themselves into a new
subject position, but through the creation of collective structures that dismantle
the systems that enable these privileges. The activist genealogies that produced this response to racism and
settler colonialism were not initially focused on racism as a problem of individual prejudice. Rather, the purpose was for individuals
to recognize how they were shaped by structural forms of oppression. However,
the response to structural
racism became an individual one individual confession at the expense of
collective action. Thus the question becomes, how would one collectivize
individual transformation? Many organizing projects attempt and have attempted to do precisely this, such Sisters
in Action for Power, Sista II Sista, Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, and Communities Against Rape and Abuse, among
many others. Rather
than focus simply on ones individual privilege, they address
privilege on an organizational level. For instance, they might assess is everyone who is invited to speak a
college graduate? Are certain peoples always in the limelight? Based on this assessment, they develop structures to address how
privilege is exercised collectively. For instance, anytime a person with a college degree is invited to speak, they bring with them a co-
speaker who does not have that education level. They might develop mentoring and skills-sharing programs within the group. To
quote one of my activist mentors, Judy Vaughn, You W dont
I l E Rthink
E d o your
p O Sway
T M Ointo
d E RaNdifferent
i s T S C O way
M E Fofr O
acting;
M ? 6 9you act your way into a
different way of thinking. Essentially, the current social structure conditions us to exercise what privileges we may have. If we want
to undermine those privileges, we must change the structures within which we live so that we become different peoples in the
process.
Calling out our privilege is only recenters the confessing subject at the
expense of political struggle against the conditions that produce
privilege
The "checking of privilege" is a fundamental component of anti-oppression practice.

The analogy of unpacking the knapsack first used by Peggy McIntosch in White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack has been widely adopted
by anti-oppression advocates, who centralize recognizing and thinking about privilege. Part of this
practice includes the use
of the qualifierpeople preface statements with an acknowledgement of the ways
in which they are privileged ( i.e. As a white able-bodied settler who is university
educated). If someone is not adequately "checking their privilege," the
retaliation is "the call-out"an individual or group is informed (often publicly) that they need to "work on their shit" in order to
realize the ways in which they benefit, and are complicit in x oppression.
The "Good Ally"
The identity of ally (as someone who primarily identifies as engaging in struggle in support of others) is another cornerstone of anti-oppression politics.
According to a popular anti-oppression guide, an ally is a person who supports marginalized, silenced, or less privileged groups. The fundamental
pursuit of someone with privilege is the quest to become a "good ally." It is considered fundamental to take leadership (usually unquestionable) from
representatives of oppressed groups and act as an ally to their struggles. Innumerable lists, guides, and workshops have been produced to outline the
steps and necessary requirements for being an ally. The individual focus of the idea of ally in contrast to the collective response of solidarity which
used to occupy a similar place is symptomatic of the general denigration of collective action by anti-oppression politics.
III. Implications
Championing Individual Over Collective Action
While anti-oppression theory acknowledges that power relations operate at both

the micro and macro level, it places a disproportionate focus on the level of individual
interactions. Emphasis is placed on individual conduct and personal improvement, with little
attention given to challenging oppression at a structural level. Widely used by activist groups and NGOs,
the document Principles and Practices of Anti-Oppression is a telling example of this trend. The statement describes the operation of oppression and
outlines steps for challenging the unequal distribution of power solely in terms of individual behaviour. It puts forth the following suggestions for
confronting oppression: Keep space open for anti-oppression discussion Be conscious of how your language may perpetuate oppressionpromote
anti-oppression in everything you dodont feel guilty, feel motivated."
In a similar vein, the popular blog Black Girl Dangerous in a recent post 4 Ways to Push Back Against Your Privilege offers a simple four-step model.
The first step is to make the choice to relinquish powerif you are in a position of power, relinquish this position. Step two is "just dont go"If you
have access to something and you recognize that you have it partly because of privilege, opt out of it. The third step is to shut upif you are an
individual of privilege who is committed to anti-oppression you will sit the hell down and shut up. And finally, step four is to be careful with the
identities that you claim. The strategy for ending oppression is articulated as a matter of addressing power dynamics between individuals in a group
context, but within the confines of the State and Capitalism.
For the privileged subject, struggle W I is

l E Rpresented
E d o p O S T M O d as
E R Na
i s matter
T S C O M E Fof
r O Mpersonal
? 70 growth and
developmentthe act of striving to be the best non-oppressive person that you can be. An entire industry is built on
providing resources, guides, and trainings to help people learn to challenge oppression by means of
"checking their privilege." The underlining premise of this approach is the idea that
privilege can be willed away. At best this orientation is ineffective, and at worst it
can actually work to recenter those who occupy positions of privilege at the
expense of wider political struggle. Andrea Smith reflecting on her experiences with anti-oppression
workshops, describes this issue:
These workshops had a bit of a self-help orientation to them: I am so and so, and I
have x privilege. It was never quite clear what the point of these confessions
wereIt did not appear that these individual confessions actually led to any
political projects to dismantle the structures of domination that enabled their
privilege. Rather, the confession became the political project themselves.
Resulting in what Smith terms the "ally industrial complex," the
approach of challenging oppression via the
confession of ones privilege leads to a valorization of the individual actions of a
"confessing subject". Acknowledging the ways in which structures of oppression constitute who we are and how we
experience the world through the allocation of privilege is a potentially worthwhile endeavour.
However, it is not in and of itself politically productive or transformative.
Privilege is a matter of power. It equates benefits, including access to resources and positions of influence, and can be considered in terms of both
psychological or emotional benefits, as well as economic or material benefits. It is much more than personal behaviours, interactions, and language,
and can neither be wished, nor confessed away. The
social division of wealth and the conditions under
which we live and work shape our existence, and cannot be transformed through
individual actions. We must organize together to challenge the material infrastructure
that accumulates power (one result of which is privilege). Anything less leads to
privilege reductionismthe reduction of complex systems of oppression whose structural basis is material and institutional to a
mere matter of individual interactions and personal behaviours.
radical democracy
Radical democracy is a vague substitute for class politicsthey are
exactly the indeterminate universalism they criticize
Wood 1998 PhD, former political science professor at York University, served on editorial
committee of New Left Review (Ellen Meiskins, The Retreat from Class, 1988 recipient of the
Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize, 1998 Introduction to the New Edition)
Still, it would be a mistake to attribute this trajectory solely, or even primarily, to the dramatic events of the late 1980s. For that
matter, it
would be a mistake to exaggerate the changes in the intellectual and political configuration
of the post-Marxist
left 'after the fall. There is an unbroken continuity between early
post-Marxism and today's postmodernism - with, among other things, their
common emphasis on 'discourse' and 'difference, or on the fragmentary nature of
reality and human identity. Those continuities are, if anything, more remarkable than
the changes, and their roots can be traced even further back, to the 1950s and 60s, to the formative years of
the post-Marxist luminaries.
To put those continuities in perspective, let us first consider the changes. One of the constitutive contradictions of post-Marxism was
that even those who insisted most emphatically on 'difference', and who most forcefully
repudiated 'essentialism', 'universalism' and class politics, still professed a commitment
to certain inclusive and embarrassingly universalistic' political objectives, including socialism. In the
presence of so much 'difference', and in the absence of a unifying social base like class, these
universalistic objectives compelled post-Marxists to rely on very general and socially
indeterminate political principles. In particular, the post-Marxist concept of 'radical democracy',
which was meant to replace or subsume the traditional socialist project, had to be
defined in terms vague enough to serve as a kind of lowest common denominator
among irreducibly 'different' emancipatory projects with no significant common foundation.
The 'democracy' in 'radical democracy' was, in any case, always deeply ambiguous. At its worst, and in
default of a social
foundation, the post-Marxist doctrine of 'radical democracy' assigned an
inordinately large political role to intellectuals and their 'discursive practices', with
positively anti-democratic implications. The real democratic struggles to which post-Marxism professed
to be committed - struggles, for instance, against racial or sexual oppression - tended to
be overshadowed by the academic politics of discourse analysis. At its best, the
social indeterminacy of 'radical democracy' made it politically vacuous. For all its
anti-universalism, this post-Marxist concept turned out to be - could only be - far
more abstractly universalistic, and far less sensitive to social and historical
specificity, than the 'essentialist' Marxist conception of socialism it was meant to
replace.
renaming
Focusing on names and labels creates a slippery slope where we
assume that regulating speech makes us better people
Schram, Bryn Mawr College social theory and policy professor, 1995
(Sanford F. The Poverty of Social Science and the Social Science of Poverty, pg 20-26, ldg)
Renaming points to the profoundly political character of labels. Labels operate as sources of power that serve to frame identities and
interests. They predispose actors to treat the subjects in question in certain ways, whether they are street people or social policies.
This increasingly common strategy, however, overlooks at least three major pitfalls to the
politics of renaming." Each reflects a failure to appreciate language's inability to say all that is meant by any act of
signification. First, many renamings are part of a politics of euphemisms that conspires to
legitimate things in ways consonant with hegemonic discourse. This is done by stressing what is
consistent and de-emphasizing what is inconsistent with prevailing discourse. When welfare advocates
urge the nation to invest in its most important economic resource, its children, they are seeking to recharacterize efforts on behalf of
poor families as critical for the country's international economic success in a way that is entirely consonant with the economistic
biases of the dominant order. They are also distracting the economic-minded from the social democratic
politics that such policy changes represent." This is a slippery politics best pursued with
attention to how such renamings may reinforce entrenched institutional practices." Yet Walter Truett
Anderson's characterization of what happened to the "cultural revolution" of the 1960s has relevance here: One reason it is so
hard to tell when true cultural revolutions have occurred is that societies are terribly good at co-
opting their opponents; something that starts out to destroy the prevailing social construction of
reality ends up being a part of it. Culture and counterculture overlap and merge in countless ways. And the hostility,
toward established social constructions of reality that produced strikingly new movements and behaviors in the early decades of this
century, and peaked in the 1960s, is now a familiar part of the cultural scene. Destruction itself becomes
institutionalized." According to Jeffrey Goldfarb, cynicism has lost its critical edge and has
become the common denominator of the very society that cynical criticism sought to debunk .21 If
this is the case, politically crafted characterizations can easily get co-opted by a
cynical society that already anticipates the political character of such selective
renamings. The politics of renaming itself gets interpreted as a form of cynicism
that uses renamings in a disingenuous fashion in order to achieve political ends.
Renaming not only loses credibility but also corrupts the terms used. This danger is ever
present, given the limits of language. Because all terms are partial and incomplete
characterizations, every new term can be invalidated as not capturing all that needs to be said
about any topic. With time, the odds increase that a new term will lose its potency as it fails to
emphasize neglected dimensions of a problem. As newer concerns replace the ones that helped inspire the
terminological shift, newer terms will be introduced to address what has been neglected. Where disabled was once an
improvement over handicapped, other terms are now deployed to make society inclusive of all
people, however differentially situated. The "disabled" are now "physically challenged" or
"mentally challenged?' The politics of renaming promotes higher and higher levels of neutralizing language." Yet a
neutralized language is itself already a partial reading even if it is only implicitly biased in favor of some attributes over others.
Neutrality is always relative to the prevailing context As the context changes, what was once neutral becomes seen as biased. Implicit
moves of emphasis and de-emphasis become more visible in a new light. "Physically" and "mentally challenged" already begin to
look insufficiently affirmative as efforts intensify to include people with such attributes in all avenues of contemporary life.24 Not
just terms risk being corrupted by a politics of renaming. Proponentsof a politics of renaming risk their
personal credibility as well. Proponents of a politics of renaming often pose a double bind for
their audiences. The politics of renaming often seeks to highlight sameness and difference si-multaneously.25 It calls for
stressing the special needs of the group while at the same time denying that the group has needs
different from those of anyone else. Whether it is women, people of color, gays and lesbians, the disabled, or even "the
homeless:' renaming seeks to both affirm and deny difference. This can be legitimate, but it is surely almost
always bound to be difficult. Women can have special needs, such as during pregnancy, that make it unfair to hold them
to male standards; however, once those different circumstances are taken into account, it becomes inappropriate to assume that men
and women are fundamentally different in socially significant ways .21 Yet emphasizing special work arrangements for women, such
as paid maternity leave, may reinforce sexist stereotyping
W I l Ethat
R E dooms
d o p O Swomen
T M O d Eto
RNinferior
i s T S Cpositions
O M E F r Oin
M ?the
7 3labor force. Under these
circumstances, advocates of particular renamings can easily be accused of paralyzing their audience and immobilizing potential sup-
porters. Insisting that people use terms that imply sameness and difference simultaneously is a
good way to ensure such terms do not get used. This encourages the complaint that proponents
of new terms are less interested in meeting people's needs than in demonstrating who is more
sophisticated and sensitive. Others turn away, asking why they cannot still be involved in trying
to right wrongs even if they cannot correct their use of terminology," Right-minded, if wrong-
worded, people fear being labeled as the enemy; important allies are lost on the high ground of
linguistic purity. Euphemisms also encourage self-censorship. The politics of
renaming discourages its proponents from being able to respond to inconvenient
information inconsistent with the operative euphemism. Yet those who oppose it
are free to dominate interpretations of the inconvenient facts. This is bad politics .
Rather than suppressing stories about the poor, for instance, it would be much better to promote actively as many intelligent
interpretations as possible. The
politics of renaming overlooks that life may be more complicated than
attempts to regulate the categories of analysis. Take, for instance, the curious negative example of "culture?' Some scholars
have been quite insistent that it is almost always incorrect to speak about culture as a factor in explaining poverty, especially among African Americans
.211 Whereas some might suggest that attempts to discourage examining cultural differences, say in family structure, are a form of self-censorship,
others might want to argue that it is just clearheaded, informed analysis that deemphasizes culture's relationship to poverty.29 Still others suggest that
the question of what should or should not be discussed cannot be divorced from the fact that when blacks talk publicly in this country it is always in a
racist society that uses their words to reinforce their subordination. Open disagreement among African Americans will be exploited by whites to
delegitimate any challenges to racism and to affirm the idea that black marginalization is self-generated.3 Emphasizing cultural differences between
blacks and whites and exposing internal "problems" in the black community minimize how "problems" across races and structural political-economic
factors, including especially the racist and sexist practices of institutionalized society, are the primary causes of poverty. Yet it is distinctly possible that
although theories proclaiming a "culture of poverty" are incorrect, cultural variation itself may be an important issue in need of examination." For
instance, there is much to be gained from contrasting the extended-family tradition among African Americans with the welfare system of white society,
which is dedicated to reinforcing the nuclear two-parent family.32 A
result of self-censorship, however, is that an
important subject is left to be studied by the wrong people. Although analyzing cultural
differences may not tell us much about poverty and may be dangerous in a racist society, leaving
it to others to study culture and poverty can be a real mistake as well. Culture in their hands
almost always becomes "culture of poverty."" A politics of renaming risks reducing the
discussants to only those who help reinforce existing prejudices.
reparations
Our K captures the positive aspects of reparations without the petty
nominalism of a strategy that settles for disputative settlements
John Torpey 3, sociology prof at CUNY, Reparation Politics in the 21st Century, Third World
Legal Studies: Vol. 16, Article 3
Beyond these difficulties, reparations politics also has a curiously apolitical quality
about it. The notion of gaining compensation for those who have suffered injustice in the past
seems at first glance inherently uncontroversial - of course, why not? The decline of the
nation-state as a legitimate force promoting social and political integration and the
more or less simultaneous decline of the socialist project have weakened the appeal
of a transformative politics that speaks to the vast majority, as socialism once
attempted to do. Reparations politics presents itself in this climate as an appealing
alternative to the tribulations of coalition-building. Whatever the potential
benefits of reparations campaigns, they should not be mistaken for a broadly based
politics capable of challenging the fundamental distribution of wealth and power in
society.46
The recent flowering of "rights talk" and the pursuit of damages for historical injustices both
reflect and promote the "juridification" of politics. In the absence of a progressive political
project with broad cross-racial appeal, a politics of legal disputation rather than of
mass mobilization comes to the fore. Reparations politics is typically a politics of
courtrooms and legal briefs, not street demonstrations. It is consistent with an era
of "individualization," in which the expansive solidarities of the Fordist age increasingly
seem a thing of the past, and even mildly ameliorative responses to racial
inequality encounter strong political headwinds. Thus legal scholar Robert Westley
begins his recent analysis of reparations for black Americans by noting that affirmative action is
"almost dead," and that therefore "mapping a legal path to enforcement of Black reparations ...
remains a challenge for legal theorists and policymakers attempting to pursue alternative routes
to social justice." 47 It remains to be seen whether reparations politics will gain much
traction beyond the ranks of lawyers and intellectuals, who so far clearly dominate
the discussion of reparations for black Americans.
Finally, in many contexts reparations politics seem destined to generate their own
backlash, as with any politics that promises benefits for specific groups rather
than for "everyone" (though admittedly the latter is a rare bird). The likelihood of a backlash
is not necessarily a reason to forgo this avenue. Much politics provokes backlash of one
sort or another, and in the reigning absence of a convincing universalist project, the forward-
looking aspects of reparations politics may have much to offer in contemporary struggles
to enhance equality both within countries and on a global scale. The fact that there are many
who have suffered unjustly by no means insures, however, that everyone will regard
compensation to specific groups as appropriate, no matter how demonstrable the injustices
done to them. Indeed, some fear that the heightened attention to reparations
payments for former slave laborers may be adding fuel to a resurgence of anti-
Semitism in contemporary Germany, despite the fact that many of them were not
Jews at all but Slavic groups slated by the Nazis for a perpetual subaltern status.48
It makes sense to take seriously the possible backlash against those pursuing
reparations.

subaltern voices
Their appeal to alterity is a form of romantic ventriloquismits not
that they speak for others, its that they assume giving voice to the
other is revelation
Paul Routledge, PhD, Prof of Geo @ leeds Antipode 28:4 1996
The issue of representation is a vexed one which has received much attention within the social sciences. For
example, in discussing the academic strategy of polyphony Crang (1992) raises the issues of
how the voices of others are (re)presented; the extent to which these voices are interwoven with persona of narrator; the degree of
authorial power regarding who initiates the research, who decides on textual
arrangements, and who decides which voices are heard; and the power relations involved in the
cultural capital conferred by specialist knowledge. Moreover, Harrison (quoted in McLaren, 1995: 240) argues that polyphony
can end up being a form of romantic ventriloquism, "creating the magical illusion
of the Other's coming to voice." These questions have important political implications for research which must be
negotiated according to the specific circumstances of a particular project. It is all too easy for academics to claim solidarity with the
oppressed and act as relays for their voices within social scientific discourse. This
raises the danger of an
uncritical alignment with resisters on the assumption that they know all there is to
know without the intervention of intellectuals, and hence an academic's role becomes that of helping
them seize the right to speak.I6
trigger warnings
Being so offended by our use of language that the round depends on it
reflects a humorless politics of trauma, where post-political subjects
quarrel over hierarchies of woundedness. Voting for them gives more
venom to bad language while turning activism into sanctimonythe
impact is extinction
Halberstam 2014 Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity and Gender Studies
at USC (7/5, Jack, Bully Bloggers, a queer word art group, You Are Triggering me! The Neo-
Liberal Rhetoric of Harm, Danger and Trauma,
http://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2014/07/05/you-are-triggering-me-the-neo-liberal-
rhetoric-of-harm-danger-and-trauma/)
Humor, in fact, in general, depends upon the unexpected (No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!); repetition
to the point of hilarity you can have eggs, bacon and spam; spam, eggs, spam and sausage; or spam, spam, spam and spam!);
silliness, non-sequitors, caricature and an
anarchic blend of the serious and the satirical. And,
humor is something that feminists in particular, but radical politics in general, are
accused of lacking. Recent controversies within queer communities around
language, slang, satirical or ironic representation and perceptions of harm or offensive have created
much controversy with very little humor recently, leading to demands for bans,
censorship and name changes.
Debates among people who share utopian goals, in fact, are nothing new. I
remember coming out in the 1970s
and 1980s into a world of cultural feminism and lesbian separatism. Hardly an event
would go by back then without someone feeling violated, hurt, traumatized by
someones poorly phrased question, another persons bad word choice or even just the hint of perfume in the
room. People with various kinds of fatigue, easily activated allergies, poorly managed trauma were
constantly holding up proceedings to shout in loud voices about how bad they felt
because someone had said, smoked, or sprayed something near them that had fouled up
their breathing room. Others made adjustments, curbed their use of deodorant, tried to avoid
patriarchal language, thought before they spoke, held each other, cried, moped, and ultimately
disintegrated into a messy, unappealing morass of weepy, hypo-allergic, psychosomatic, anti-sex, anti-fun,
anti-porn, pro-drama, pro-processing post-political subjects.
Political times change and as the 1980s gave way to the 1990s, as weepy white lady feminism gave
way to reveal a multi-racial, poststructuralist, intersectional feminism of much longer provenance,
people began to laugh, loosened up, people got over themselves and began to talk and recognize
that the enemy was not among us but embedded within new, rapacious economic
systems. Needless to say, for women of color feminisms, the stakes have always
been higher and identity politics always have played out differently. But, in the
1990s, books on neoliberalism, postmodernism, gender performativity and racial capital turned the focus away
from the wounded self and we found our enemies and, as we spoke out and observed that
neoliberal forms of capitalism were covering over economic exploitation with language
of freedom and liberation, it seemed as if we had given up wounded selves for new formulations of
multitudes, collectivities, collaborations, and projects less centered upon individuals and
their woes. Of course, I am flattening out all kinds of historical and cultural variations within multiple histories of feminism,
queerness and social movements. But I am willing to do so in order to make a point here about the re-emergence of a
rhetoric of harm and trauma that casts all social difference in terms of hurt
feelings and that divides up politically allied subjects into hierarchies of
woundedness.
At this point, we should recall the four Yorkshire men skit from Monty Python where the four old friends reminisce about their
deprived childhoods one says we used to live in a tiny
W I lold
E R tumbledown
E d o p O S T Mhouse
O d E R N i sthe
T S next
C O Mcounters
E F r O M ?with
7 8 house!? You were lucky to
live in a house. We used to live in a room And the third jumps in with: room? You were lucky to have a room, we used to have to
live in a corridor. The fourth now completes the cycle: A corridor! We dreamed of living in a corridor! These
hardship
competitions, but without the humor, are set pieces among the triggered
generation and indeed, I rarely go to a conference, festival or gathering anymore without a
protest erupting about a mode of representation that triggered someone somewhere. And
as people call each other out to a chorus of finger snapping, we seem to be
rapidly losing all sense of perspective and instead of building alliances, we are
dismantling hard fought for coalitions.
Much of the recent discourse of offense and harm has focused on language, slang and naming. For example, controversies erupted in
the last few months over the name of a longstanding nightclub in San Francisco: Trannyshack, and arguments ensued about
whether the word tranny should ever be used. These debates led some people to distraction, and legendary queer performer, Justin
Vivian Bond, posted an open letter on her Facebook page telling readers and fans in no uncertain terms that she is angered by this
trifling bullshit. Bond reminded readers that many people are delighted to be trannies and not delighted to be shamed into silence
by the word police. Bond and others have also referred to the queer custom of re-appropriating terms of abuse and turning them
into affectionate terms of endearment. When
we obliterate terms like tranny in the quest for
respectability and assimilation, we actually feed back into the very ideologies that
produce the homo and trans phobia in the first place! In The Life of Brian, Brian finally refuses to
participate in the anti-Semitism that causes his mother to call him a roman. In a brave coming out speech, he says: Im not a
roman mum, Im a kike, a yid, a heebie, a hook-nose, Im kosher mum, Im a Red Sea pedestrian, and proud of it!
And now for something completely differentThe controversy about the term tranny is not a singular occurrence; such tussles
have become a rather predictable and regular part of all kinds of conferences and meetings. Indeed, it
is becoming
difficult to speak, to perform, to offer up work nowadays without someone, somewhere claiming to
feel hurt, or re-traumatized by a cultural event, a painting, a play, a speech, a casual use of slang, a
characterization, a caricature and so on whether or not the damaging
speech/characterization occurs within a complex aesthetic work. At one conference, a play that
foregrounded the mutilation of the female body in the 17th century was cast as trans-phobic and became the occasion for multiple
public meetings to discuss the damage it wreaked upon trans people present at the performance. Another piece at this performance
conference that featured a fortune teller character was accused of orientalist stereotyping. At another event I attended that focused
on queer masculinities, the organizers were accused of marginalizing queer femininities. And a class I was teaching recently featured
a young person who reported feeling worried about potentially triggering a transgender student by using incorrect pronouns in
relation to a third student who did not seem bothered by it! Another student told me recently that she had been triggered in a class
on colonialism by the showing of The Battle of Algiers. In many of these cases offended groups demand apologies, and promises are
made that future enactments of this or that theater piece will cut out the offensive parts; or, as in the case of Trannyshack, the
name of the club was changed.
As reductive as such responses to aesthetic and academic material have become, so have definitions of trauma been
over-simplified within these contexts. There are complex discourses on trauma readily available as a
consequence of decades of work on memory, political violence and abuse. This work has offered us
multiple theories of the ways in which a charged memory of pain, abuse, torture or imprisonment
can be reignited by situations or associations that cause long buried memories to flood back into the body with
unpredictable results. But all of this work, by Shoshana Felman Macarena Gomez-Barris, Saidiya Hartman, Cathy Caruth, Ann
Cvetkovich, Marianne Hirsch and others, has been pushed aside in the recent wave of the politics of the aggrieved.
Claims about being triggered work off literalist notions of emotional pain and cast
traumatic events as barely buried hurt that can easily resurface in relation to any
kind of representation or association that resembles or even merely represents the theme of the original painful
experience. And so, while in the past, we turned to Freuds mystic writing pad to think of memory as a palimpsest, burying material
under layers of inscription, now
we see a memory as a live wire sitting in the psyche waiting
for a spark. Where once we saw traumatic recall as a set of enigmatic symptoms moving through the body, now people
reduce the resurfacing of a painful memory to the catch all term of trigger,
imagining that emotional pain is somehow similar to a pulled muscle as
something that hurts whenever it is deployed, and as an injury that requires
protection.
Fifteen to twenty years ago, books like Wendy BrownsWStates
I l E R E of
d Injury
o p O S (1995)
T M O d Eand
R N iAnna
s T S CChengs
O M E F rThe
O M ?Melancholy
79 of Race:
Psychoanalysis, Assimilation and Hidden Grief (2001) asked readers to think about how grievances become grief, how politics comes
to demand injury and how a neoliberal rhetoric of individual pain obscures the violent sources of social inequity. But, newer
generations of queers seem only to have heard part of this story and instead of
recognizing that neoliberalism precisely goes to work by psychologizing political
difference, individualizing structural exclusions and mystifying political change,
some recent activists seem to have equated social activism with descriptive
statements about individual harm and psychic pain. Let me be clear saying that you feel harmed by another
queer persons use of a reclaimed word like tranny and organizing against the use of that word is NOT social activism. It is
censorship.
In a post-affirmative action society, where even recent histories of political violence like slavery and lynching are cast as a distant
and irrelevant past, all claims to hardship have been cast as equal; and some students,
accustomed to trotting out stories of painful events in their childhoods (dead pets/parrots, a bad
injury in sports) in college applications and other such venues, have come to think of
themselves as communities of naked, shivering, quaking little selves too vulnerable
to take a joke, too damaged to make one. In queer communities, some people are now committed to an It
Gets Better version of consciousness-raising within which suicidal, depressed and bullied young gays and lesbians struggle like
emperor penguins in a blighted arctic landscape to make it through the winter of childhood. With the help of friendly adults,
therapy, queer youth groups and national campaigns, these same youth internalize narratives of damage that they themselves may or
may not have actually experienced. Queer youth groups in particular install a narrative of trauma and encourage LGBT youth to see
themselves as endangered and precarious whether or not they actually feel that way, whether or not coming out as LGB or T
actually resulted in abuse! And then, once they age out of their youth groups, those same LGBT youth become hypersensitive to all
signs and evidence of the abuse about which they have learned.
What does it mean when younger people who are benefitting from several generations now of queer social activism by people in their
40s and 50s (who in their childhoods had no recourse to anti-bullying campaigns or social services or multiple representations of
other queer people building lives) feel abused, traumatized, abandoned, misrecognized, beaten, bashed and damaged? These
younger folks, with their gay-straight alliances, their supportive parents and their new right to marry regularly issue
calls for safe space. However, as Christina
Hanhardts Lambda Literary award winning book, Safe Space: Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence, shows, the safe
space agenda has worked in tandem with urban initiatives to increase the policing of poor neighborhoods and the gentrification of
others. Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence traces the development of LGBT politics in the US from
1965-2005 and explains how LGBT activism was transformed from a multi-racial coalitional grassroots movement with strong ties
to anti-poverty groups and anti-racism organizations to a mainstream, anti-violence movement with aspirations for state
recognition.
And, as
LGBT communities make safety into a top priority (and that during an era
of militaristic investment in security regimes) and ground their quest for safety in
competitive narratives about trauma, the fight against aggressive new forms of
exploitation, global capitalism and corrupt political systems falls by the way side.
Is this the way the world ends? When groups that share common cause, utopian dreams
and a joined mission find fault with each other instead of tearing down the banks and the bankers, the politicians and the
parliaments, the university presidents and the CEOs? Instead of realizing, as Moten and Hearny put it inThe Undercommons, that
we owe each other everything, we enact
punishments on one another and stalk away from projects that
should unite us, and
huddle in small groups feeling erotically bonded through our self-
righteousness.
I want to call for a time of accountability and specificity: not all LGBT youth are suicidal, not all LGBT people are subject to violence
and bullying, and indeed class and race remain much more vital factors in accounting for vulnerability to violence, police brutality,
social baiting and reduced access to education and career opportunities. Lets call an end to the finger
snapping moralism, lets question contemporary desires for immediately consumable
messages of progress, development and access; lets all take a hard long look at the privileges
that often prop up public performances of grief and outrage; lets acknowledge that being queer no longer
automatically means being brutalized and lets argue for much more situated claims to marginalization, trauma and violence.
Lets not fiddle while Rome (or Paris)Wburns, trigger while the water rises, weep while trash
piles up; lets recognize these internal wars for the distraction they have become. Once upon a time, the appellation queer named
an opposition to identity politics, a commitment to coalition, a vision of alternative worlds. Now it has become a weak umbrella term
for a confederation of identitarian concerns. It is time to move on, to confuse the enemy, to become illegible, invisible, anonymous
(see Preciados Bully Bloggers post on anonymity in relation to the Zapatistas). In the words of Jos Muoz, we have never been
queer. In the words of a great knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, we are now no longer the Knights who say Ni, we are
now the Knights who say Ekki-ekki-ekki-ekki-PTANG. Zoom-Boing, znourrwringmm.
unintelligibility
Radical inscrutability shuts down activism and lets the Right
dominate debates
Chibber and Farbman 2013 *associate professor of Sociology at NYU; **Foreign
Language/Area Studies Fellow at the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at NYU
(May, Interview of Vivek Chibber by Jason Farbman, International Socialist Review, Issue #89,
Marxism, postcolonial studies, and the tasks of radical theory,
http://isreview.org/issue/89/marxism-postcolonial-studies-and-tasks-radical-theory)
IN ACADEMIA, a simple and clear presentation of ideas oftentimes is the best way
to get yourself booted out. Its easier to criticize you when youre clear, and concise, and
you present your views in a way that makes them amenable to criticism.
Academics oftentimes couch their ideas in impenetrable

prose, indecipherable jargon, at a level of complexity that is so
dense nobody can penetrate it. This often
is a substitute for complexity of thought. What you get with postcolonial studies is
complexity of expression substituting for complexity of thought.
IF YOUR goal is to organize mass numbers of working people, a strategy that presents simple ideas in confounding ways seems
counterproductive.
HISTORICALLY ON the left, intellectuals always took it as their duty to take complex matters and present them in a simple and
clear way. Thats how you organize people. The
reality of capitalism seems to be overwhelming and
complicated, which people from the Right keep saying is not accessible to ordinary
people. They insist you need experts to understand the world and should therefore leave the
governing of society to managers and experts. The Right has always said that.
Intellectuals of the Left have always tried to show that in fact, realities can be
grasped by anybody with a reasonable intelligence, whether or not they are in college, as long as they think hard about it. And
theyve tried to exemplify that by taking highly complex ideas and making them simple.
Noam Chomsky likes to say that back in the 1930s, Communist intellectuals wrote books like Mathematics for the Millions and
Physics Made Simple. That was a good expression of the mission that intellectuals saw themselves on when they were on the Left.
What postcolonial studies has done is reverse this. You could forgive all of its sins, all of its intellectual
mistakes. You could forgive all of its grandstanding and its ignorance about what radical theory does. But what you cannot forgive is
importing into the culture of the Left the pretentious, empty verbosity that you find in the seminar room. And its
really in
the last twenty years that youve seen activist meetings turning into graduate
student seminars. I think its pretty destructive.
WHAT IS the outcome when activist meetings turn into graduate seminars?
IT TAKES confidence away from activists. It allows a few people to dominate

meetings. Typically its people who dont fully understand what theyve said, but who really enjoy dominating meetings. And of
course it drives sensible people out of activism. The people who are left are people who either dont mind this speaking in tongues or
people who care so little about understanding the world they dont care about what the discourse is thats being presented to them.
Imagine what this does to the culture of the Left.
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY is now well established in the academy. What are the prospects of repelling these attacks on Marxism, or
at least chipping away at some of the more pernicious assumptions made commonsense by postcolonial theory?
IF YOU look back over the last twenty-five to thirty years, this is probably the best time to push back against some of the silliness
and obscurantism that has been propagated by postcolonial theory. I say this for a couple of reasons.
One is the economic

crisis that swept across the world starting in 2007. It brought the concept of
capitalism back into political debates. Everybody now understands two things: were living in a world in which
the structuralcompulsion of capitalism is still the driving force; and that its global, because it
wasnt just the US or China or Germany or Greece that got caught in this maelstrom but it
was the entire world. Its shown in a very stark way that the category of capitalism that postcolonial theory has done so
much to obscure or make invisible, that its still a real force in the world around us.

linksgender

gender
Capitalism polices identity along gendered and sexual linesidentity
politics based on intersectional theories serve to atomize resistance
and limit the potential for abolishing alienated labor itself
Mitchell 2013 (12/2, Eve, I Am a Woman and a Human: A Marxist-Feminist Critique of
Intersectionality Theory, Unity and Struggle began in 2003 among a number of activists
primarily involved in anti-Israeli apartheid work. Searching for a means to deepen our
association and build on our experiences we formed a small grouping of people, which provided
the basis for further discussion and support organizing in other areas important to us. Some of
the areas of work we are or have been involved in include labor, anti-budget cuts in the schools,
anti-racist, anti-apartheid, queer liberation work, as well as around public transportation.
http://unityandstruggle.org/2013/09/12/i-am-a-woman-and-a-human-a-marxist-feminist-
critique-of-intersectionality-theory/)
In order to understand identity and intersectionality theory, we must have an

understanding of the movement of capital (meaning the total social relations of production in this current mode of production)
that led to their development in the 1960s and 1970s in the US. More specifically, since intersectionality theory primarily
developed in response to second wave feminism, we must look at how gender

relations under capitalism developed. In the movement from feudalism to
capitalism, the gendered division of labor, and therefore gender relations within the class
began to take a new form that corresponded to the needs of capital. Some of these new relations
included the following: (1) The development of the wage. The wage is the capitalist form of coercion. As Maria
Mies explains in her book, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, the wage replaced serf and slave ownership as the
method to coerce alienated labor (meaning labor that the worker does for someone else). Under
capitalism, those who produce (workers) do not own the means of production, so they must go to work for those who own the means of production (capitalists). Workers must
therefore sell the only thing they own, their ability to labor, or their labor power, to the capitalist. This is key because workers are not paid for their sensuous living labor, the act
of producing, but the ability to labor. The labor-labor power split gives rise to the appearance of an equal exchange of value; it appears as though the worker is paid for the
amount of value she produces but in essence she is paid only for her ability to labor for a given period of time. Furthermore, the working day itself is split into two parts:
necessary labor time and surplus labor time. Necessary labor time is the time it takes the worker (on average) to produce enough value to buy all the commodities he needs to
reproduce himself (everything from his dinner to his iPhone). Surplus labor time is the time the worker works beyond the necessary labor time. Since the going rate for labor
power (again, our capacity to labor not our actual living labor) is the value of all the commodities the worker needs to reproduce herself, surplus labor is
value that goes straight into the capitalists pocket. For example, lets say I work in a Furby factory. I get paid $10 a day
to work 10 hours, I produce 10 Furbies a day, and a Furby is worth $10 each. The capitalist is only paying me for my ability to work 1 hour each day to produce enough value to
The wage
reproduce myself (1 Furby = 1 hours labor = $10). So my necessary labor time is 1 hour, and the surplus labor time I give to the capitalist is 9 hours (10-1).
obscures this fact. Recall that under capitalism, it appears as though we are paid
the equivalent value of what we produce. But, in essence, we are paid only for our necessary labor time, or the minimum amount
we need to reproduce ourselves. This was different under feudalism when it was very clear how much time humans spent working for themselves, and how much time they spent
working for someone else. For example, a serf might spend five hours a week tilling the land to produce food for the feudal lord, and the rest of her time was her own. The
(2) A separation of production and

development of the wage is key because it enforced a gendered division of labor.
reproduction. Along with commodity production came a separation between production and reproduction. To be clear, reproduction does not
solely refer to baby making. It also includes meeting the many various needs we have under capitalism, from
cooking food and cleaning the home, to listening to a partner vent about their shitty day and holding their hand, to caring for the young, sick,
elderly and disabled members of society. As capitalism developed, generally speaking, productive (value-producing) labor
corresponded to the wage, and reproductive labor was unwaged (or extremely low waged), since
in appearance it produced no surplus value for the capitalist. This separation, characterized by the wage, took on a specific
gendered form under capitalism. Women were largely excluded from productive sphere and
therefore did not receive a wage for the reproductive work they did. This gave men a certain amount
of power over women, and created antagonisms within the class based on a gendered
division of labor. Silvia Federici, in Caliban and the Witch, calls this the patriarchy of the wage
(97-100).(3) The contradictory development of the nuclear family. With the development of capitalism and
On the one hand, as pointed out by theorists such as Selma James and
large-scale industry, the content of the nuclear family took a contradictory turn.
Mariarosa Dalla Costa in The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, the nuclear family was strengthened by
the gendered division of labor characterized by the wage. Women and children were excluded from the wage and
relegated to reproductive work; men W I l E Rreceived
E d o p O S T Ma
O dwage
E R N i s T Sand
C O M were
E F r O M ?relegated
85 to
productive work. This meant that men needed women and children to reproduce them, and women and children needed men to bring in a wage to reproduce
the family as a whole (of course this wage was sometimes supplemented by a womans low wage earnings as a domestic or other paid reproductive worker). And so on the one
On the other hand; however, capitalist relations also undermined the nuclear family.
hand, the development of capitalism strengthened the nuclear family.
the gendered division of labor is: rooted in the framework of capitalist society itself: women
As James and Dalla Costa point out,
at home and men in the factories and office, separated from the other the whole day Capital, while it elevates
heterosexuality to a religion, at the same time in practice makes it impossible for men
and women to be in touch with each other, physically or emotionally it undermines heterosexuality as a sexual, economic, and social discipline (James, Sex, Race and Class,
56).(4) The development of identity and alienation. John DEmilio runs with this
concept of the contradictory development of the nuclear family, arguing that gay identity (and we can infer female identity) as a category developed through this
contradictory movement of the nuclear family. He argues for a distinction between gay behavior and gay identity, stating, There was, quite simply, no
social space in the colonial system of production that allowed men and women to be gay. Survival was structured
around participation in the nuclear family. There were certain homosexual acts sodomy among men, lewdness among women in which individuals engaged, but family was
so pervasive that colonial society lacked even the category of homosexual or lesbian to describe a person By the second half of the nineteenth century, this situation was
Only when individuals began to make their living

noticeably changing as the capitalist system of free labor took hold.
through wage labor, instead of parts of an interdependent family unit, was it

possible for homosexual desire to coalesce into a personal identity an identity based on the ability
to remain outside the heterosexual family and to construct a personal life based on the attraction to ones own sex (Capitalism and the Gay Identity, 104-105). DEmilios
In
understanding of identity is key for understanding identity politics and intersectionality theory; however, I would slightly change his framework.
distinguishing between behavior, and identity, DEmilio is touching on what could be

broadened out to the Marxist categories, labor and alienation. I digress in order to fill out this idea. For Marx, labor is an
abstract category that defines human history. In his early texts, Marx refers to labor as self- or life-activity. In Estranged Labour, Marx writes, For in the first place labour,
life-activity, productive life itself, appears to man merely as a means of satisfying a need the need to maintain the physical existence. Yet the productive life is the life of the
species. It is life-engendering life. The whole character of a species its species character is contained in the character of its life activity; and free conscious activity is mans
species character. Life itself appears only as a means to life (76). Life-activity, or labor, is an abstraction that transcends a specific form, or a specific mode of production
it is through these forms, the social

(capitalism, feudalism, tribalism, etc.). However, labor can only be understood within the context of these forms;
organization of our labor, that humans engage in the ever-expanding process of

satisfying our needs, introducing new needs, and developing new ways of fulfilling our needs. Labor encompasses
everything from our jobs under capitalism to tilling the land under feudalism, to
creating art and poetry, to having sex and raising children. Through labor and its many expressions, or forms,
we engage with the world around us, changing the world and changing ourselves in the process. Under capitalism, there is a
separation between our labor and our conscious will. When Marx says Life itself appears only as a means to life, he
is pointing toward this contradiction. As noted above, under capitalism, labor is divorced from the means of production so we must work for those who own the means of
production. We engage in the same form of labor all day every day, and we receive a wage for this activity in order to exchange to meet our needs. We produce value in order to
exchange for the use-values we need to survive. So what appears under capitalism as a mere means to satisfy our needs (work), is in essence the activity of life itself (labor).
Because of this schism between our labor and our conscious will, our labor under
capitalism is alienated, meaning it is not used for our own enrichment, instead, we
give it away to the capitalist. Our multi-sided labor becomes one-sided; our labor is reduced to work. In The
German Ideology, Marx writes, as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and
from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood (53). We are
not fully enriched human beings, engaging in all forms of labor we wish to engage in, we are relegated into one form of labor in order to exchange to meet our needs. We are call
center workers, hair stylists, nurses, teachers, etc. This one-sidedness, as the precondition for meeting our needs, is unique to the capitalist mode of production. In applying
Marxs categories to DEmilios explanation of homosexuality, we could say that homosexual behaviors are an expression of labor, or self-activity, and homosexual identity is a
one-sided, alienated form of labor unique to capitalism. It distinguishes the difference between a person who consciously engages in homosexual acts, and one who is defined by
Women and people of color experience something similar in the

one form of labor: a homosexual.
development of capital; a shift from engaging in certain types of labor to engaging

in feminized, or racially relegated forms of labor. To put it another way, under
capitalism, we are forced into a box: we are a bus driver, or a hair stylist, or a
woman. These different forms of labor, or different expressions of our life-activity (the way
in which we interact with the world around us) limit our ability to be multi-sided human beings. There
were plenty of homosexual acts, many forms of gender expression, and some divisions
based on skin color in pre-capitalist societies. But identity as an individualistic
category is unique to capitalism. If we understand identity in this way, we will
struggle for a society that does not limit us as bus drivers, women, or queers,
but a society that allows everyone to freely use their multi-sided life activity in whatever
ways they want. In other words, we will struggle for a society that completely abolishes, or transcends, identities. I will explain more on this later. What is Intersectionality
Theory and How Did it Develop? The term intersectionality did not become commonplace until the early 1980s. According to most feminist historians, Kimberl Williams
Crenshaw was the first to coin the term, in a series of articles written between roughly 1989 and 1991 (for example, see Mapping the Margins).
Intersectionality theory was popularized by many critical race and gender
then
theorists. Despite where the term was coined, intersectionality theory has its roots in the 1960s and 70s class
struggle movements in the US and Europe (roughly speaking). This period was generally characterized by autonomous
struggles based on the gendered and racialized division of labor. Black folks were
the vanguard of this form of struggle, developing and leading many types of organizations from revolutionary parties
like the Black Panther Party, to majority black workplace organizations like the
Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement. These forms of struggle influenced other groups, such as white women, latinos, gays and
lesbians, to form similar organizations along race, gender and sexuality lines ( while there were multi-ethnic projects in this
time period, and many contradictions within these organizations themselves, it can be said that in this
specific time and place, there was a general tendency to organize along these lines). This was due to
the gendered and racialized division of labor; black folks were relegated to certain neighborhoods and certain forms of labor,
the value of a black persons labor was less than a white persons, and a socially constructed skin color hierarchy and corresponding antagonisms within the class was fully
To be black meant to be objectified, relegated into one form of

developed and materially enforced.
labor: producing and reproducing blackness. Black Power was therefore the
struggle against the alienation and one-sidedness of blackness, a struggle to liberate labor, releasing its
multi-sidedness, unifying labor with its conscious will. Similarly, women organized in
response to the gendered division of labor in effort to break free from the alienation of womanhood. For example, women
struggled for reproductive and sexual freedom in effort to gain control over the means of production (their bodies). Maria Mies describes
how womens bodies are their means of production under capitalism, stating, The first means of production with which human beings act upon nature is their own body, and
later, she writes, women can experience their whole body, not only their hands or their heads. Out of their body they produce new children as well as the first food for these
children (Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, 52 and 53). Since womens use of their bodies is a unique form of alienated labor for women under capitalism, it is
historically the site of struggle for liberation. However, there was also a tendency within second wave feminism that sought to reproduce capitalist relations, arguing for equal
wages for equal work. Both of these tendencies were acting in response to the gendered social relations under capital, and both shared a
methodology of identity politics, arguing that women could unite on the basis of a shared woman experience, or womanhood.
From this development, intersectionality theory took hold. As the autonomous struggles of the 60s and 70s
began to recede, groups like the Combahee River Collective responded to the material divisions within the movement. They argued that the
objectively white second wave feminist movement excluded women of color by

assuming the white womans experience could be extended to women of color, and that white women were adequate
spokespeople for women of color. In contrast, they argued that a revolutionary
praxis must be informed by the experience of black lesbian women, stating, This
focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and
potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody elses oppression. In the case of Black women this is a particularly
repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is
more worthy of liberation than ourselves (Combahee River Collective Statement). What developed in practice through the Combahee River Collectives specific set of identity
The intersectionality
politics (a black, lesbian, working class-based politics) was solidified theoretically with the development of intersectionality theory.
theorists who emerged in the late 70s and early 80s rightly expressed antagonisms within the class, arguing that one
cannot discuss gender without discussing race, class, sexuality, disability, age, etc.
Patricia Hill Collins describes intersectionality theory as an analysis claiming that systems of race, social class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, and age form mutually
constructing features of a social organization, which shape Black womens experiences and, in turn, are shaped by Black Women (Black Feminist Thought, 299). Using this
definition and the prominent intersectionality theorists writings, I have identified four core components of the theory: (1) a politics of difference, (2) a critique of womens
organizations and people of color organizations, (3) the need to develop the most oppressed as leaders and take the leadership from them, and (4) the need for a politics that
takes all oppressions into account. (1) A politics of difference. Intersectionality theorists argue that our various identities, such as race, class, gender, sexuality, etc., necessarily
differentiate us from people who do not have those identities. So a ruling class, gay, black man will have a different experience, and therefore, a different politics, than a straight,
white, working class woman. On the other hand, people with shared identities, such as being black or lesbian, will have a shared experience that organically unites the
individuals. Some of these shared identities are more likely to unite some people than others. As Collins explains, On the one hand, all African-American women face similar
challenges that result from living in a society that historically and routinely derogates women of African descent. Despite the fact that U.S. Black women face common
challenges, this neither means that individual African-American women have all had the same experiences nor that we agree on the significance of our varying experiences.
Thus, on the other hand, despite the common challenges confronting U.S. Black women as a group, diverse responses to these core themes characterize U.S. Black womens
group knowledge or standpoint. Despite differences of age, sexual orientation, social class, region, and religion, U.S. Black women encounter societal practices that restrict us to
inferior housing, neighborhoods, schools, jobs, and public treatment and hide this differential consideration behind an array of common beliefs about Black womens
intelligence, work habits, and sexuality. These common challenges in turn result in recurring patterns of experiences for individual group members (25). This is a cornerstone of
intersectionality theory: some individuals or groups are differentiated from other individuals or groups based on their experiences. This can be cut along many different identity
lines. (2) Critiques of womens organizations and people of color organizations. Women of color were marginalized in the 1960s and 70s womens, Black Power, Chicanismo, and
other people of color-led organizations. Most intersectionality theorists attribute this to a unique experience women of color (and particularly Black women) have around race,
class, gender, and other forms of oppression. For example, Collins argues that women of color have abstained from joining white feminist organizations on the grounds that they
have been racist and overly concerned with White, middle-class womens issues (5). Similarly, Collins argues that black studies is traditionally based on a male-defined ethos,
and contains a predominantly masculinist bias (7), despite historically joining and feeling marginalized in African American organizations. Again, this is an objective and
historical situation that intersectionality theorists attribute to difference along identity lines. (3) The need to develop the most oppressed as leaders, and take leadership from
intersectionality theorists argue that the experience of being an oppressed person

them. Following this analysis,
places individuals in a uniquely privileged position for struggle. In other words, if youve
experienced the multiple, identity-based oppressions, you are the vanguard of the struggle
against it. bell hooks writes, As a group, black women are in an unusual position in this society, for not only are we collectively at the bottom of
the occupational ladder, but our overall social status is lower than that of any other group. Occupying such a position, we bear the brunt of sexist, racist, and classist oppression.
At the same time, we are the same group that has not been socialized to assume the role of exploiter/oppressor in that we are allowed no institutional other that we can exploit
or oppress Black women with no institutionalized other that we may discriminate against, exploit, or oppress, often have a lived experience that directly challenges the
prevailing classist, sexist, and racist social structure and its concomitant ideology. This lived experience may shape our consciousness in such a way that our world view differs
It is essential for continued feminist

from those who have a degree of privilege (however relative within the existing system).
struggle that black women recognize the special vantage point our marginality
gives us and make use of this perspective to criticize the dominant racist, classist, sexist hegemony as well as to envision and
create a counter-hegemony (Feminist Theory from Margin to Center, 16). This point justifies the need to develop queer, women, and people of
color as movement leaders, and allows intersectionality theorists to explain why historically the most oppressed tend to be the most militant. (4) The need for a politics that
Finally, all intersectionality theorists argue the need to analyze

takes all oppressions into account.
every form of oppression, using the terms, interlocking system of oppressions,

matrix of domination, or some variation thereof. The idea is that it is impossible to view one identity or category of oppression without looking at all the
others. As Barbara Smith simply puts, the major isms are intimately intertwined (The Truth that Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom, 112); they cannot
be separated. While intersectionality theory seems to overcome the limitations of identity politics, it falls short. The next section will show how
intersectionality theory is, in fact, a bourgeois ideology. A Marxist Critique of Identity Politics and
Intersectionality Theory. Identity politics is rooted in a one-sided expression of capitalism, and is therefore not a revolutionary politics. As noted earlier, identity
can be equated with alienated labor; it is a one-sided expression of our total

potential as human beings. Frantz Fanon discusses something similar in the conclusion to Black Skin White Masks. He writes, The black man,
however sincere, is a slave to the past. But I am a man, and in this sense the Peloponnesian War is as much mine as the invention of the compass (200 Philcox Translation,
On the one hand, Fanon points to a particular, one-sided expression:

2008).
blackness. On the other hand, he points toward the multi-sides of a potentially

universal human. Fanon is at once both of these things: a black man, and a man (or, more generally, a human); a particular and a universal. Under
capitalism, we are both the alienated worker and labor itself, except the universal
has not been actualized concretely. The identity politics of the 60s and 70s conflates a particular moment, or a determinant point, in the
relations of capitalism with the potential universal. Furthermore, it reproduces the schism between appearance and essence. Under capitalism there is a contradiction between
the particular and the universal; appearance and essence. We appear to be alienated individuals (a bus driver, a hair stylist, a woman, etc.), though in essence we are multi-sided
Identity politics bolsters one side of this contradiction,

individuals capable of many forms of labor.
arguing for collective struggle on the basis of womanhood, or blackness, or

black lesbianhood, etc. To borrow from Fanon, identity politics states, I am a black man, I am a woman, or I am a black lesbian, etc.
This is a key first step. As he writes in his critical chapter, The Lived Experience of the Black Man: I finally made up my mind to shout my blackness
(101), On the other side of the white world there lies a magical black culture. Negro sculpture! I began to blush with pride. Was this our salvation? (102), and So here we have
the Negro rehabilitated, standing at the helm, governing the world with his intuition, rediscovered, reappropriated, in demand, accepted; and its not a Negro, oh, no, but the
Negro, alerting the prolific antennae of the world, standing in the spotlight of the world, spraying the world with his poetical power, porous to the every breath in the world. I
embrace the world! I am the world! The white man has never understood this magical substitution. The white man wants the world; he wants it for himself. He discovers he is
the predestined master of the world. He enslaves it. His relationship with the world is one of appropriation. But there are values that can be served only with my sauce. As a
magician I stole from the white man a certain world, lost to him and his kind. When that happened the white man must have felt an aftershock he was unable to identify, being
Fanon argues that black people must embrace

unused to such reactions (106-107). For several pages,
blackness, and struggle on the basis of being black, in order to negate white
supremacists social relations. But to stop there reproduces our one-sided
existence and the forms of appearance of capitalism. Identity politics argues, I am
a black man, or I am a woman, without filling out the other side of the
contradiction and I am a human. If the starting and ending point is one-sided, there is no possibility for abolishing racialized and
gendered social relations. For supporters of identity politics (despite claiming otherwise), womanhood, a form of appearance within society, is reduced to a natural, static
Social relations such as womanhood, or simply gender, become static

identity.
objects, or institutions. Society is therefore organized into individuals, or sociological groups with natural characteristics. Therefore, the only
possibility for struggle under identity politics is based on equal distribution or individualism (I will discuss this further below). This is a bourgeois ideology in that it replicates
Furthermore, this
the alienated individual invented and defended by bourgeois theorists and scientists (and materially enforced) since capitalisms birth.
individualism is characteristic of the current social moment. As left communist theorist Loren Goldner has
theorized, capitalism has been in perpetual crisis for the last 40 years, which has been absorbed in appearance through neoliberal strategies (among others). Over time, capital is
forced to invest in machines over workers in order to keep up with the competitive production process. As a result, workers are expelled from the production process. We can see
this most clearly in a place like Detroit, where automation combined with deindustrialization left hundreds of thousands jobless. The effects of this contradiction of capitalism is
that workers are forced into precarious working situations, jumping from gig to gig in order to make enough
Goldner refers to this condition as the atomized individual
money to reproduce themselves.
worker. As Goldner has written elsewhere, this increased individualism leads to a politics of
difference, where women, queers, people of color, etc., have nothing in common with one another. Intersectionality
theorists correctly identified and critiqued this problem with identity politics. For example, bell hooks, in a polemic against liberal feminist Betty Friedan, writes, Friedan was a
principal shaper of contemporary feminist thought. Significantly, the one-dimensional perspective on womens reality presented in her book became a marked feature of the
contemporary feminist movement. Like Friedan before them, white women who dominate feminist discourse today rarely question whether or not their perspective on womens
W are
reality is true to the lived experiences of women as a collective group. Nor I l Ethey
R E aware
d o pofOthe
S Textent
M O dto
ER N i stheir
which TS C OME FrO
perspectives M ? race
reflect 8 8 and class biases (3).
hooks is correct to say that basing an entire politics on one particular experience, or
a set of particular differences, under capitalism is problematic. However, intersectionality theory replicates
this problem by simply adding particular moments, or determinant points; hooks goes on to argue for race and class
inclusion in a feminist analysis. Similarly, theories of an interlocking matrix of oppressions,
simply create a list of naturalized identities, abstracted from their material and
historical context. This methodology is just as ahistorical and antisocial as Betty Friedans. Again, patriarchy and white
supremacy are not objects or institutions that exist throughout history; they are
particular expressions of our labor, our life-activity, that are conditioned by (and in turn, condition) our
mode of production. In Capital, Marx describes labor as the metabolism between humans and the external world; patriarchy and white supremacy, as
products of our labor, are also the conditions in which we labor. We are constantly interacting with the world, changing the world and changing ourselves through our
metabolic labor. So patriarchy and white supremacy, like all social relations of labor, change and transform. Patriarchy under capitalism takes a specific form that is different
from gendered relations under feudalism, or tribalism, etc. There will be overlap and similarities in how patriarchy is expressed under different modes of production. After all,
similarity
the objective conditions of feudalism laid the foundation for early capitalism, which laid the foundation for industrial capitalism, etc. However, this
and overlap does not mean that particular, patriarchal relations transcend the
mode of production. For example, under both feudalism and capitalism there are gendered relations within a nuclear family, though these relations took
very different forms particular to the mode of production. As Silvia Federici describes, within the feudal family there was little differentiation between men and women. She
writes, since work on the servile farm was organized on a subsistence basis, the sexual division of labor in it was less pronounced and less discriminating than the capitalist
farm. Women worked in the fields, in addition to raising children, cooking, washing, spinning, and keeping an herb garden; their domestic activities were not devalued and
did not involve different social relations from those of men, as they would later, in a money-economy, when housework would cease to be viewed as real work (25). A historical
understanding of patriarchy needs to understand patriarchy from within a set of social relations based on the form of labor. In other words, we cannot understand the form of
appearance, womanhood, apart from the essence, a universal human. A Marxist Conception of Feminism. At this point, I should make myself very clear and state that the
The advances of Black

limitations of identity politics and intersectionality theory are a product of their time. There was no revolution in the US in 1968.
Power, womens liberation, gay liberation, and the movements themselves, have
been absorbed into capital. Since the 1970s, academia has had a stronghold on theory. A nonexistent class struggle
leaves a vacuum of theoretical production and academic intellectuals have had
nothing to draw on except for the identity politics of the past. A new politics that
corresponds to a new form of struggle is desperately needed; however, the Marxist
method can provide some insight into the creation of a politics that overcomes the
limitations of identity politics. Marx offers a method that places the particular in
conversation with the totality of social relations; the appearance connected to the essence. Consider his use of the concept of moments. Marx
uses this concept in The German Ideology to describe the development of human history. He describes the following three moments as the primary social relations, or the
basic aspects of human activity: (1) the production of means to satisfy needs, (2) the development of new needs, and (3) reproduction of new people and therefore new needs
and new means to satisfy new needs. What is key about this idea is that Marx distinguishes between a moment and a stage. He writes, These three aspects of social activity
are not of course to be taken as three different stages, but just as three aspects, or, to make it clear to the Germans, three moments, which have existed simultaneously since the
what is key is
dawn of history and the first men, and which still assert themselves in history today (48). The particulars of this specific argument are not relevant;
Marxs use of moments juxtaposed to stages. Marx makes this distinction to

distinguish himself from a kind of determinism that sees the development of
history in a static, linear fashion, versus a fluid and dialectical historical
development. Throughout many of Marxs writings, he refers back to this term, moments, to describe particular social relations in history, or, more precisely,
particular expressions of labor. Moments also helps fill out Marxs idea of fluid modes of production. As noted earlier, for Marx, there is no pure feudalism or pure capitalism;
all relations of production move and must be understood historically. This concept is useful for understanding our various alienated existences under capitalism. For example, in
the Grundrisse, Marx writes, When we consider bourgeois society in the long view and as a whole, then the final result of the process of social production always appears as the
society itself, i.e. the human being itself in its social relations. Everything that has a fixed form, such as a product etc., appears as merely a moment, a vanishing moment, in this
movement. The direct individuals, but individuals in a mutual relationship, which they equally reproduce and produce anew. The constant process of their own movement, in
which they renew themselves even as they renew the world of wealth they create (712). To be a woman under capitalism means something very specific; it is even more
specific for women in the US in 2013; it is even more specific for black lesbians in the US in 2013; it is even more specific for individual women. But, in a universal sense, to be a
Taking a cue from Fanon, our

woman means to produce and reproduce a set of social relations through our labor, or self-activity.
method must argue: I am a woman and a human. We must recognize the particular
in conversation with the totality; we must consider a moment, or a single
expression of labor, in relationship to labor itself. It is important to note that
identity politics and intersectionality theorists are not wrong but they are
incomplete. Patriarchal and racialized social relations are material, concrete and
real. So are the contradictions between the particular and universal, and the appearance and
essence. The solution must build upon these contradictions and push on them. Again, borrowing from Fanon, we can say I am a woman and a human, or I am a black person
and a person. The key is to emphasize both sides of the contradiction. Embracing womanhood, organizing on the basis of blackness, and building a specifically queer politics is
an essential aspect of our liberation. It is the material starting point of struggle. As noted earlier, Frantz Fanon describes this movement in The Lived Experience of the Black
Man chapter of Black Skin, White Masks. However, at the end of the chapter, Fanon leaves the contradiction unresolved and leaves us searching for something more, stating,
Without a black past, without a black future, it was impossible for me to live my blackness. Not yet white, no longer completely black, I was damned (117), and, When I opened
my eyes yesterday I saw the sky in total revulsion. I tried to get up but the eviscerated silence surged toward me with paralyzed wings. Not responsible for my acts, at the
crossroads between Nothingness and infinity, I began to weep (119). Fanon W I l points
E R E to
d othepcontradiction
O S T M O d Ebetween
R N i s Tthe
S particular
C O M E Fform
rOMof ?appearance
89 (blackness) and the essence,
the universal (humanness). In the conclusion, as noted earlier, Fanon resolves this contradiction, arguing for further movement toward the universal, the total abolition of race.
He writes, In no way does my basic vocation have to be drawn from the past of peoples of color. In no way do I have to dedicate myself to reviving a black civilization unjustly
ignored. I will not make myself the man of any past. I do not want to sing the past to the detriment of my present and my future (201). For Fanon then, and for Marx, the
struggle for liberation must include both the particular and the universal, both the appearance and essence. We must build upon and push on both sides of these contradictions.
Some Practical Consequences. Since identity politics, and therefore intersectionality theory, are a bourgeois politics, the possibilities for struggle are also bourgeois. Identity
politics reproduces the appearance of an alienated individual under capitalism and so struggle takes the form of equality among groups at best, or individualized forms of
Many have
struggle at worse. On the one hand, abstract sociological groups or individuals struggle for an equal voice, equal representation, or equal resources.
experienced this in organizing spaces where someone argues that there are not
enough women of color, disabled individuals, trans*folks, etc., present for a campaign to
move forward. A contemporary example of this is the critique of Slut Walk for being too white and therefore a white supremacist or socially invalid movement.
Another example is groups and individuals who argue that all movements should be
completely subordinate to queer people of color leadership, regardless of how
reactionary their politics are. Again, while intersectionality theorists have rightly identified an objective problem, these divisions and
antagonisms within the class must be address materially through struggle. Simply reducing this struggle to mere quantity, equality of distribution, or representation, reinforces
identity as a static, naturalized category. On the other hand, identity politics can take the form of individualized struggles against heteropatriarchy, racism, etc., within the class.
According to Barbara Smith, a majority of Combahee River Collectives work was around teaching white women to stop being racist by holding anti-racism workshops (95).
Today, we might see groups whose only form of struggle is to identify and smash gendered, machismo, male-chauvinist, misogynist, and patriarchal elements within the left.
Another example is Tumblr users constant reminder to check your privilege.

Again, it is important to address and correct these elements; however,
contradictions and antagonisms within the class cannot be overcome in isolation,
and individual expressions of patriarchy are impossible to overcome without a
broader struggle for the emancipation of our labor. We will never free ourselves of
machismo within the movement without abolishing gender itself, and therefore alienated labor
itself. A truly revolutionary feminist struggle will collectively take up issues that put the particular and the form of appearance in conversation with the universal and the
essence. Elsewhere, I have offered the following as examples of areas that would do
that work: Grassroots clinic defense takeovers and/or nonprofit worker committees that build solidarity across worker-client lines. Neighborhood
groups engaged in tenant struggles with the capacity to deal directly with violence
against women in the community. Parent, teacher, and student alliances that struggle against school
closures/privatization and for transforming schools to more accurately reflect the
needs of children and parents, for example on-site childcare, directly democratic classrooms and districts,
smaller class sizes, etc. Sex worker collectives that protect women from abusive Johns and other community members, and build democratically
women- and queer-run brothels with safe working conditions. Workplace organizations in feminized workplaces like
nonprofits, the service industry, pink collar manufacturing, etc., or worker centers that specialize in feminized workplaces and take up issues and challenges specific to women.
There are many, many others that I cannot theorize. As noted, we cannot project the
forms of struggle and their corresponding theories without the collective and mass activity of the
class, but it is our job as revolutionaries to provide tools that help overthrow the
present state of affairs. To do so, we must return to Marx and the historical
materialist method. We can no longer rely on the ahistorical, bourgeois theories of the past to clarify the tasks of today. For feminists,
this means struggling as women but also as humans.
gender intersectionality
Intersectional gender theories failclass is more than just another
ism driving oppressionyour ballot should recognize the centrality
of material divisions, because those influence gender roles more than
our personal attitudes
IV. Moving Forward
We have identified the current regime of anti-oppression politics as inadequate in providing a way forward in the task of developing a revolutionary
movement capable of meaningfully challenging systems of oppression and exploitation. Not only are these politics inadequate, but ultimately regressive
and counter productive. Attempts to address the inadequacies of anti-oppression are often
met with accusations of class reductionism. While we acknowledge that class reductionism exists as an incorrect
political orientation, the accusation of such can be used as a straw[person] man attack on
those who transgress the dominant discourse within anarchist/radical circles.
Reducing the Class
As an actual political orientation, class reductionism can be largely described as a

tendency on the Left which prioritizes the economic struggle in the workplace as
the primary terrain of revolutionary or progressive action. Often this will go further to fetishize a particular segment of workplace
struggle, namely that of blue collar, industrial workers. Whether or not it is implicitly stated, the belief is held that the struggle
against other oppressions white supremacy, hetero-patriarchy, ableism, etc. are
incidental to the class struggle, to be engaged in as secondary, or that they are simply prejudices concocted by the ruling
class to be dealt with "after the revolution."
On the other hand, we have the proponents of anti-oppression politics attempting

to amalgamate class as another oppression alongside the rest, which "intersect"
with one another at various times and places in a person's life. Here we are presented with the grotesque
notion of "classism"the result of an attempt by anti-oppression theory to
reconcile inadequate politics with the entirety of capitalist social relations. The School Of
the Americas Watch Anti-Oppression Toolkit section on classism offers a prime example:
The stereotype is that poor and working class people are unintelligent, inarticulate, and "overly emotional." A good ally (a non-working class committed
supporter) will contradict these messages by soliciting the knowledge and histories of poor working class people, being a thoughtful listener, trying to
understand what is being said
Putting aside for a second the conflation of poor and working class which indicates this writer's lack of insight into the matter they seek to educate
about, there is truth in the descriptions of the stereotype.
We are reminded of the 2010 movie, Made in Daginham, where Eddie O'Grady attempts to ingratiate himself to his wife by pointing out that he does
not beat her or their children. Frustrated by her husband's lack of consideration of her struggle, Rita replies, That is as it should beYou don't go on
the drink, do ya? You don't gamble, you join in with the kids, you don't knock us about. Oh, lucky me. For Christ's sake, Eddie, that's as it should be!
You try and understand that. Rights, not privileges. It's that easy. It really bloody is.
Similarly, for
all the back-patting going on with regards to allies most of what is
advised and done constitutes nothing more than a minimal standard of behaviour. We do
not feel respected when someone in a position of power consults us before making a decision regarding our lives, no matter how attentive and probing
they may be. We see this emphasis on listening to rather thanW
creating-with
I l E R E d o as
p Ouncomradely
S T M O d E R Nand
i s Ttokenizing.
S COME FrOM? 91
In their essay Insurrections at the Intersections anarchists Jen Rogue and Abbey Volcano address so-called classism by writing:
Since everyone experiences these identities differently, many

theorists writing on intersectionality have
referred to something called classism to complement racism and sexism. This can lead
to the gravely confused notion that class oppression needs to be rectified by rich people treating poor people nicer while still maintaining class
society. This analysis treats class differences as though they are simply cultural differences. In turn, this leads
toward the limited strategy of respecting diversity [] This argument precludes a class struggle analysis which views
capitalism and class society as institutions and enemies of freedom. We dont wish to get along under capitalism by
abolishing snobbery and class elitism.
Both of these instances of reductionism point to a fundamental misunderstanding
of class and class struggle, as well as to the limits of intersectionality in
understanding social relationships under capitalism. The class reductionism we
should be critical of is that which attempts to reduce the class to a mere section of
it (whether it is simply the poorest, or the most blue collar), and that which attempts to hold up the interests
of that section as that of the entire class. The reality is that the majority of the planet is working class, and we must
recognize that the material obstacles within our class, and the manner by which they reproduce themselves must be attacked as a matter of necessity.
Not because we are good allies or because we want to check privileges or because we want to reduce everything to "class first!" but because we are
fucking revolutionaries and we have to.
The (Re)production of Division
If our intention is not strictly limited to maintaining activist enclaves, we are required to look for the means to understand the development of identity
and division under capitalism. In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici examines the position of women throughout the rise of capitalism. With an
emphasis on the incredibly violent subjugation necessary, witch burnings being an especially stark example, Federici outlines the historical process that
fostered the patriarchal social relationships which uphold, and define capitalism.
This process is one which ran alongside the period of primitive accumulation in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. The
enclosure
of the commons by a fledgling bourgeoisie and the imposition of private property
was the material basis for the proletarianization of populationswithout the land
base necessary for subsistence, peasants became workers who must sell their
labour for a wage in order to survive. Primitive accumulation is the subsumption of life into the
rubric of Capital land into property, time into wages, things into commodities
and by extension the transformation of social relationships necessary to maintain
and reproduce these categories. The subjugation of women to patriarchal
capitalism was a crucial element of this process. The construction of the nuclear family,
the assignment of domestic and reproductive labour as "women's work", and the
subsequent devaluation and erasure of that labour, were historic tasks achieved
through the development of capitalism. Attempting to understand patriarchy as
limited to individual attitudes or actions, or somehow isolated from capitalism (regardless of patriarchal
or gendered divisions of labour in pre-capitalist history) is therefore impossible. Speaking to the accomplishment of the
implementation of these new social relationships, Federici writes:
in the new organization of work every woman (other than those privatized by bourgeois men) became a communal good, for once women's activities
were defined as non-work, women's labor began to appear as a natural resource, available to all, no less than the air we breathe or the water we drink.
The social, economic, and political position of women was thus defined under
capitalism. This new reality meant that the class struggle, that is the struggle for the emancipation of the
working class, takes on a particular character whether or not this is recognized by its would-be
partisans. Federici further explains:
With their expulsion from the crafts and the devaluation of reproductive labor, a new patriarchal
order was constructed, reducing women to a double dependence: on employers
and on men.
This double dependence thus implies that the oppression of women under capitalism is not something that is incidental, nor something that can be
addressed in isolation. As having particular features and the product
W I l E R of
E (ongoing)
d o p O S Thistoric
MOdER N i s T S C O Mattacking
patriarchy
development, E FrOM? 92
demands that we attack the conditions which allow the perpetuation of the social
relationships by which it is constituted. As class struggle anarchists then we identify the class struggle as one against
this "double dependence" as we struggle against the conditions which are necessary for capitalism to reproduce itself.
Struggling at the Barricades, Struggling at Home
In 2006, the Mexican state of Oaxaca became engulfed in a popular uprising that lasted several months. What began as an annual teachers strike
developed into a popular conflict. Barucha Calamity Peller's Women in Uprising: The Oaxaca Commune, the State, and Reproductive Labour looks at
the revolt and the particular role women played. The essay shows us both what the disruption of the reproduction of patriarchal social relations can
look like and how the reinforcement of those relations from within the movement ultimately contributed to its limitation and defeat.
On April 1st, 2006, a march of the Cacerolas (later imitated in Quebec and across Canada) consisting of over ten thousand women, initiated the
takeover of TV station Canal Neuve. Several hundred women from the march occupied the building, which was repurposed as a communication hub
and resource to the ongoing struggle. Peller writes:
Besides transmitting, producing daily programming, and holding workshops, long hours were spent during nightly patrols of the transmitter and
defensive barricades in which the women of Canal Nueve spoke to each other while huddled around small fires drinking coffee to stay awake. The
dialogue and solidarity that emerged between the women was perhaps one of the most potent results of the takeover. What was before private and
personal became a site for resistance. It was during these conversations that women for the first time experienced a space not dominated by men, in
the absence of the market, in which they could organize freely and relate experiences, and talk to other women. This is where the idea of womens
autonomy emerged in Oaxaca, and it was to this formation of women, where there was no exploitation of their labor, no dominance of the market or the
family, that the women would refer throughout the struggle.
What we find important here is the implication that the creation of new, anti-
capitalist, anti-patriarchal relations requires the creation of the material basis to
do so. The creation of such a basis requires the negation and disruption of the conditions that produce the old ways of interacting. Here, the
occupation of the Canal Neuve could be understood as what a revolutionary women's movement in embryo might look likewhere the conditions were
created for the creation of a new subjectivity and the destruction of the former identity.
In the case of Oaxaca, patriarchy still persisted within the movement. Women who attempted to challenge traditional gender roles were subjected to
domestic abuse and/or forced to continue to take on the full burden of reproductive labour.
Rather than rely on limited class reductionist understandings, either limiting itself
to the factory floor or sociological definitions of "proles," we must strive for a class
struggle which directs us towards the abolition of the divisions within our class
that are necessary to uphold capitalism. We find the example of the Oaxaca uprising useful insofar as it provides us
with a glimpse of both the undoing of oppressive social relationships, and the defense of those relationships in a period of intensified struggle.
While this section has focused primarily on gendered division and oppression under capitalism, our
intention is to emphasize
that these categories and identities are historically constructed, and have a
material basis to their continued reproduction. We see the process of their destruction as one that is necessarily
part of the class struggle. To paraphrase Marx, this is the process of moving towards a class that is conscious of itself, and able to act in its own
interesta class for itself.
V. Conclusion
It is our belief that the ways in which humans are exploited, assaulted, pitted against one another, and robbed of individual and collective agency must
(and furthermore, can) be overcome and replaced with a liberatory existence. While some see anti-oppression politics as contributing to this endeavour,
we see these politics as a substantial hindrance to revolutionary organizing. We
would like to challenge our comrades
and fellow travellers to do better than this half-hearted liberal project that
facilitates the reduction of complex social and economic problems to interpersonal
dynamics and individual privileges. Our struggle is collective, and so too must be
our tools and analysis.
black feminism
Our alternative reflects both perspectives better than the permgoal-
oriented Marxist critique of labor alienation can acknowledge unique
black feminist experience, but their denial of historical materialist
approaches means they cant capture anticapany perm that attempts
to do so is severance
Angela Yvonne Davis (born January 26, 1944) is an American political activist, scholar, Communist and author. "Women and
Capitalism: Dialectics of Oppression and Liberation. The Angela Y. Davis Reader. Ed. Joy James & Angela Yvonne Davis. Wiley-
Blackwell, 1998. 161-209. Print.
Broader strategic questions about the character and direction of womens liberation may
now be posed. What ought not to be the strategy of female liberation can be clearly stated. It
ought not to be reduced and confined to the abstract and isolated attempt to shift the
balance of sexual politics. In conferring absolute primacy on the sexual dimensions of womans
oppression, the narrow bourgeois feminist approach distorts its social character and functions within
existing social conditions. This approach has correctly discerned the oppression of women to be a thread linking even the most disparate
eras of history. It is true that even the socialist countries have not achieved the emancipation of women.
But to conclude that therefore the structures of sexual oppression are primary is to ignore the
changing character of womens oppression as history itself has advanced. The narrow feminist
approach fails to acknowledge the specificity of the social subjugation of the women who
live outside the privileged class under capitalism. It is qualitatively different from the comparatively natural oppression
which was the lot of women in previous historical periods. And to the extent that some women continue to play subordinate roles in existing socialist
societies, their oppression assumes yet another, but far less dangerous character. Within the existing class relations of
capitalism, women in their vast majority are kept in a state of familial servitude and social
inferiority not by men in general, but rather by the ruling class. Their oppression serves to
maximize the efficacy of domination. The objective oppression of black women in
America has a class, and also a national origin. Because the structures of female oppression arc
inextricably tethered to capitalism, female emancipation must be simultaneously and explicitly the pursuit of black liberation and of
the freedom of other nationally oppressed peoples. An effective womens liberation movement must be
cognizant of the primacy of the larger social revolution: the capitalist mode of
production must be overturned, like the political and legal structures that sustain it. Conversely, the larger social revolution must be
cognizant of the vital place and role of the thrust towards womens emancipation. The socialist movement must never forget
that while the economic struggle is indispensable, it is by no means the sole terrain of significant
anti-capitalist activity. Thus, the unique features of the womens struggle cannot be restricted to economic agitation alone. A socialist
revolution will more or less reflect the struggles which led it to its triumphant phase. In this respect, the entire revolutionary
continuum must be animated by the consciousness that the real goal of socialism is to shatter
the automatism of the economic base. This, indeed, is the requisite condition for preparing the way for a sphere of freedom
outside, and undetermined by, the process of production. Perhaps eventually, even work can become an expression of freedom, but this would be far in
the distant future. However, even this total transfiguration of the nature of work would presuppose that the economy had long since ceased to be the
center of society. The edifice of the new society cannot spring sui generis from the economic and political reconstitution of its fabric. It is therefore
misleading to represent womens liberation under socialism as equivalent to the achievement of full and equal female participation in production.
Certainly women should perform a proportional part of social labor, but only as their necessary duties in a society oriented towards the satisfaction of
its members material and spiritual needs. Further, job discrimination under socialism attests to and fortifies the continued oppression of women.
Beyond this, women must be liberated from toilsome and timeconsuming household duties; the
private domestic economy
must be dissolved. They must be permitted a maximum range of control over their bodies -
exactly to the degree that this is objectively possible through science. These are but a few of the negative preconditions for an affirmative release of
womens human potentialities. That this release will demand an entirely new organization of the family is obvious. Most Marxists have been loath to
speculate about new forms the family can assume under socialism. But, as Marcuse has emphasized on numerous occasions, utopian projections at the
present phase of technological development must not necessarily lack a scientific and historical foundation. New theoretical approaches to the family -
at once scientific and imaginative - can be of immense assistance to the womens movement in the formulation of its long-range goals. Within the
present fabric of domination, the womens movement is confronted with urgent oppositional tasks. For if the material and ideological supports of
female inferiority are not to be carried over intact into the socialist order,51 they must be relentlessly attacked throughout the course of building the
revolutionary movement. Not only must there be agitation around the economic situation of women, but equally important, the entire superstructural
nexus of womens oppression must be met with constant criticism and organized assaults. While moving towards the overthrow of capitalism, the
ideology of female inferiority must be so thoroughly subverted that once the revolution is achieved, it will be impossible to refer with impunity to my
better half or to be the natural place of the woman as in the home. Perhaps the most significant message for the existing womens movement is this:
the ultimate face of womens oppression is revealed precisely there where it is most drastic. In
American society, the black woman is most severely encumbered by the male supremacist structures of
the larger society. {This does not contradict the fact that a greater sexual equality might prevail inside the oppressed black community.) Its
combination with the most devastating forms of class exploitation and national oppression clearly
unmasks the socio-historical function of the subjugation of women. Even as black women have acquired a greater
equality as women within certain institutions of the black community, they have always suffered in a far greater proportion and intensity the effects of
institutionalized male supremacy. In partial compensation for [a] narrowed destiny the white world has lavished its politeness on its womankind....
From black women of America, however, this gauze has been withheld and without semblance of such apology they have been frankly trodden under
the feet of [white] men.52 If
the quest for black womens liberation is woven as a priority into the larger bid for
female emancipation; if the womens movement begins to incorporate a socialist
consciousness and forges its practice accordingly; then it can undoubtedly become a
radical and subversive force of yet untold proportions. In this way the womens liberation movement
may assume its well-earned and unique place among the current gravediggers of capitalism.
linksindigeneity

2nc indigenous alt
Indigenous Marxist leaders like Howard Adams prove that
prioritizing class and labor doesnt weaken movements or paper over
identity but instead revitalizes collective struggle
Simmons 2002 tribute to Howard Adams, a Metis activist and leader of Red Power in
Canada who died in 2001 (Summer, Deborah, Carleton University, Studies in Political Economy
68, In Tribute to Howard Adams,
https://mediatropes.com/index.php/spe/article/viewFile/6693/3692)
During this period, Adams became involved in a number of battles at a grassroots level. This
experience became the foundation for the development of Adams's political ideas. Despite the eventual
disintegration of the Red Power movement in the 1970s, Adams was continually drawn
to reflect upon the lessons to be learned from the struggles of the movement at its peak. A failed struggle of
Aboriginal seasonal employees at Cochin Provincial Park in the summer of 1969 became a lesson in the relationship
between race and class, and the challenges of mobilizing class consciousness when
the labour movement is racially divided. A contrary example was the Flour Power Operation
of 1970, where the Saskatchewan Farmers' Union ground and trucked flour to hungry
Metis communities despite the vigorous opposition of the provincial government.
Adams saw this experience of solidarity among whites and Metis people in
organizing against poverty as a key turning point in the development of Metis
"counter-consciousness."[17]
As the Red Power movement went into decline in the 1970s, Adams was
increasingly attacked and marginalized by official leaderships of government-funded Aboriginal
organizations. Adams persisted in articulating a scathing critique of the corruption in these organizations. This was linked
to an analysis of class formation in Aboriginal communities, facilitated by government-imposed structures. For Adams, the
nationalist struggle had to be fought on a united class basis, crossing racial
boundaries. Unfortunately, the bureaucratism and racism of the white labour
movement at the time meant that this possibility receded into the future . Finally in 1974
Adams went into political exile, teaching Native American History at the University of California until his retirement to Vancouver in
1987.
The defeat of the Red Power movement did not lead Adams to reject Marxist
theory, as it did for many of his former Red Power comrades in Canada and the United States. A popular 1983
collection of essays attacking Marxism edited by Ward Churchill exemplified the
dominant attitude among Aboriginal intellectuals during that relatively quiescent period. Adams
responded with a six-page critique of the book, charging the authors with presenting a simplistic caricature of Marxist
thought, and pointing out the relevancy of Marxism to the understanding of Aboriginality.[18] He then proceeded to
deepen his understanding of critical Marxism in his reflections on the condition of "post-
coloniality" in Canada. In Tortured People, Adams explores the complex relationship between economics, ideology and
culture. While celebrating the dynamism of the cultural renaissance of the 1960s,
Adams describes the ways in which traditional culture has been commodified and
emptied of radical content.
In Prison of Grass, Adams concludes that the concrete and democratic practice of organizing for change at a local level is the greatest
task of Aboriginal activists, for only this immediate experience will lead to understanding broader contradictions in the capitalist
system: "We have to learn for ourselves through experience, rather than being dependent on the teaching and information of so-
called specialists and experts ... It is from locally based struggles that true revolutionary theory evolves, a revolutionary theory
functional for those people who must liberate themselves."[19] This perspective places Adams squarely in the socialism from below
tradition theorized by Hal Draper,[20] who was himself influenced by his involvement in the student movement at Berkeley in the
1960s.
Adams emphasized the particularity of Aboriginal experience and struggles, but at the same
time was a confirmed internationalist. Originally inspired by the American Black
Power movement and the anti-colonial struggles of the Third World, Adams
consistently stressed the linkages between local struggles and global capitalism.
Adams was enthusiastic in his support for the Zapatista uprising in response to
NAFTA in 1994, and spoke on the national question at a conference of Aboriginal activists entitled Contemporary Aboriginal
Struggles in North America in Mexico City in 1995. Adams had no sympathy for the kind of exclusive
nationalism advocated by state-sponsored Aboriginal leaderships. For him, authentic
nationalism is a moment in the journey from the colonized to critical consciousness, which he defined "in its ultimate sense" as "a
perception of the totality of an experience unencumbered by capitalist ideology."[21]
Adams's socialist politics were forged in the experience of political struggle. In the
decades of defeat, he steadfastly and unapologetically maintained his belief that
new struggles in the future would vindicate the socialist strategy. He glimpsed the possibility
for such a future in the young Aboriginal people whom he continued to teach in Vancouver and Saskatchewan for many years after
his retirement. And
he saw real hope in the new youth-led movement against globalization --
an international movement of unprecedented diversity. He believed that such a
mass movement would only help to strengthen Aboriginal struggles. In his words,
"Sovereignty or self-determination ... can only be realized by a mass political
movement which includes labour and other natural allies of First Nations."[22]
settler privilege
Prefer the altclass struggle solves better than confessionary self-
improvementwe can agree our position is steeped in privilege but
still win that focusing on the structures that create our privilege is
better
A. Smith 2013 PhD, Native American activist/antiviolence scholar, Assistant Professor of
Media and Cultural Studies at UC Riverside (8/14, Andrea, Andrea366, The Problem with
Privilege, http://andrea366.wordpress.com/2013/08/14/the-problem-with-privilege-by-
andrea-smith/)
Alternatives to Self-Reflection
Based on this analysis then, our

project becomes less of one based on self-improvement or even collective
self-improvement, and
more about the creation of new worlds and futurities for which we
currently have no language.
There is no simple anti-oppression formula that we can follow; we are in a constant state of trial and error and radical
experimentation. In that spirit then, I
offer some possibilities that might speak to new ways of undoing
privilege, not in the sense of offering the correct process for moving forward, but in the spirit of adding to our collective
imagining of a beyond. These projects of decolonization can be contrasted with that of the
projects of anti-racist or anti-colonialist self-reflexivity in that they are not based on the goal of
knowing more about our privilege, but on creating that which we cannot now know.
As I have discussed elsewhere, many of these models are based on taking power by making power models particularly prevalent in
Latin America. Thesemodels, which are deeply informed by indigenous peoples
movements, have informed the landless movement, the factory movements, and
other peoples struggles. Many of these models are also being used by a variety of social justice organization throughout the
United States and elsewhere. The principle undergirding these models is to challenge capital and state power by actually creating the
world we want to live in now. These groups develop alternative governance systems based on principles of horizontality, mutuality,
and interrelatedness rather than hierarchy, domination, and control. In beginning to create this new world, subjects are
transformed. These autonomous zones can be differentiated from the projects of many groups in the U.S. that
create separatist communities based on egalitarian ideals in that people in these making
power movements do not just create autonomous zones, but they proliferate them. These movements
developed in reaction to the revolutionary vanguard model of organizing in Latin America that became criticized as
machismo-leninismo models. These models were so hierarchical that in the effort to combat systems of
oppression, they inadvertently re-created the same systems they were trying to replace. In addition, this model of organizing was
inherently exclusivist because not everyone can take up guns and go the mountains to become revolutionaries. Women, who have to
care for families, could particularly be excluded from such revolutionary movements. So, movements began to develop organizing
models that are based on integrating the organizing into ones everyday life so that all people can participate. For
instance,
a group might organize through communal cooking, but during the cooking process,
which everyone needs to do anyway in order to eat, they might educate themselves on the nature of
agribusiness.
At the 2005 World Social Forum in Brazil, activists from Chiapas reported that this movement began to realize that one cannot
combat militarism with more militarism because the state always has more guns. However, if
movements began to build
their own autonomous zones and proliferated them until they reached a mass scale, eventually there
would be nothing the states military could do. If mass-based peoples movements begin to live life using
alternative governance structures and stop relying on the state, then what can the state do? Of course, during the process, there may
be skirmishes with the state, but conflict is not the primary work of these movements. And as we see these movements literally take
over entire countries in Latin America, it is clear that it is possible to do revolutionary work on a mass-scale in a manner based on
radical participatory rather than representational democracy or through a revolutionary vanguard model.
Many leftists will argue that nation-states are necessary to check the power of multi-national corporations or will argue that nation-
states are no longer important units of analysis. These groups, by contrast, recognize the importance of creating alternative forms of
governance outside of a nation-state model based on principles of horizontalism. In addition, these groups are taking on
multinational corporations directly. An
example would be the factory movement in Argentina
where workers have appropriated factories and seized the means of production themselves.
They have also developed cooperative W I l E R Erelationships
d o p O S T M O d E R N i swith other
TS COM appropriated
E FrOM? 99
factories. In addition, in many factories all of the work is collectivized. For instance, a participant
from a group I work with who recently had a child and was breastfeeding went to visit a factory. She tried to sign up for one of the
collectively-organized tasks of the factory, and was told that breastfeeding was her task. The factory recognized breastfeeding as
work on par with all the other work going on in the factory.
This kind of politics then challenges the notions of safe space often prevalent in
many activist circles in the United States. The concept of safe space flows naturally from
the logics of privilege. That is, once we have confessed our gender/race/settler/class
privileges, we can then create a safe space where others will not be negatively
impacted by these privileges. Of course because we have not dismantled heteropatriarchy, white
supremacy, settler colonialism or capitalism, these confessed privileges never actually disappear in
safe spaces. Consequently, when a person is found guilty of his/her privilege in these
spaces, s/he is accused of making the space unsafe. This rhetorical strategy
presumes that only certain privileged subjects can make the space unsafe as if
everyone isnt implicated in heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, settler colonialism and capitalism. Our focus
is shifted from the larger systems that make the entire world unsafe, to
interpersonal conduct. In addition, the accusation of unsafe is also levied against people of color who express anger
about racism, only to find themselves accused of making the space unsafe because of their raised voices. The problem with safe
space is the presumption that a safe space is even possible.
By contrast, instead of thinking of safe spaces as a refuge from colonialism, patriarchy,

and white supremacy, Ruthie Gilmore suggests that safe space is not an escape from the real, but a
place to practice the real we want to bring into being. Making power models follow this suggestion
in that they do not purport to be free of oppression, only that they are trying to create the world they would like to live in now. To
give one smaller example, when
Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, organized, we
questioned the assumption that women of color space is a safe space. In fact,
participants began to articulate that women of color space may in fact be a very dangerous space. We realized that we could not
assume alliances with each other, but we would actually have to create these alliances. One strategy that was helpful was rather than
presume that we were acting non-oppressively, we built a structure that would presume that we were complicit in the structures of
white supremacy/settler colonialism/heteropatriarchy etc. We then structured this presumption into our organizing by creating
spaces where we would educate ourselves on issues in which our politics and praxis were particularly problematic. The issues we
have covered include: disability, anti-Black racism, settler colonialism, Zionism and anti-Arab racism, transphobia, and many
others. However, in this space, while
we did not ignore our individual complicity in
oppression, we developed action plans for how we would collectively try to
transform our politics and praxis. Thus, this space did not create the dynamic of the
confessor and the hearer of the confession. Instead, we presumed we are all
implicated in these structures of oppression and that we would need to work together to undo
them. Consequently, in my experience, this kind of space facilitated our ability to integrate personal and social transformation
because no one had to anxiously worry about whether they were going to be targeted as a bad person with undue privilege who
would need to publicly confess. The space became one that was based on principles of loving rather than punitive accountability.
Conclusion
The politics of privilege have made the important contribution of signaling how the structures of oppression constitute who we are as
persons. However, as
the rituals of confessing privilege have evolved, they have shifted
our focus from building social movements for global transformation to individual
self-improvement. Furthermore, they rest on a white supremacist/colonialist notion of a subject that can constitute itself
over and against others through self-reflexivity. While trying to keep the key insight made in activist/academic circles that personal
and social transformation are interconnected, alternative projects have developed that focus less on
privilege and more the structures that create privilege. These new models do not hold the answer,
because the genealogy of the politics of privilege also demonstrates that our activist/intellectual projects of liberation must be
constantly changing. Our imaginations are limited by white supremacy, settler colonialism, etc., so all
ideas we have will
not be perfect. The ideas we develop today also do not have to be based on the
complete disavowal of what we did yesterday because what we did yesterday
teaches what we might do tomorrow. Thus, as we think not only beyond privilege,
but beyond the sense of self that claims privilege, we open ourselves to new
possibilities that we cannot imagine now for the future.
at: churchill
<<read whichever card is most responsive, then the indict at the top of this block>>
Err negChurchill misreadsWand homogenizes Marxist theories

Ali 2008 PhD candidate, political science, University of Toronto, writer for BASICS
Community News Service (2/10 on website but 1/15 according to Google, Noaman, People of
Color, Ward Churchill & Marxism: Anti-Critique,
http://peopleofcolor.tumblr.com/post/5108542025/ward-churchill-marxism-anti-critique)
I first came across this article by Noaman Ali a few years back, read it, thought it was spot on, and then completely forgot where I found it. Ive looked
for it again ever since, and well, now Ive found it again, so I reposting it here. In this article I think Ali does an amazing job exposing just where and
how Churchill is, frankly, full of shit when it comes to his critique of Marxism. It also seems
like fate that I found it again (and quite easily, after many a google search), the reason being that I happened to be talking about Ward Churchill with
my Masters advisor (I noticed she had a copy of the Churchill reader Acts of Rebellion on her shelf) and the topic of his critique of Marxism came up
briefly. I mentioned that I found his critique to be wanting, and she noted that despite that it was one of the main ones that had circulated amongst
indigenous activists and scholars. In his article False Promises: An Indigenist Perspective on Marxist Theory and Practice, Churchill
attempts to lay out his ideas on the incompatibility between Marxism and indigenous
liberatory projects. This critique falls flat though because it presents a straw [person] man
argument, presenting to the reader a simplistic caricature of Marxist thought. In fact, the way that Churchill
presents Marxism is such a ridiculous misrepresentation that it barely warrants a response of any kind. The problem then is not that he presents a
straw man argument against Marxism, or even whether or not his ignorance is purposeful or accidental, but rather that Churchills critique is one of
the most widely circulated ones among radical Native forces. Its publication in three collections of Churchills writings (Acts of Rebellion, From a
Native Son, and Marxism and Native Americans) has meant that is has been read and taken up my many Natives warriors. The result being that many
now see Marxism as something to be opposed, as much as the evils of settler-colonial society. Its made worse by the fact that serious Marxist criticism
of it is few and far between. For example, well
known Metis-Indian nationalist and Marxist Howard
Adams wrote a six page critique of Churchill and others caricature of Marxism in Marxism and Native Americans, but
it is not widely available these days. In that vacuum, Alis article fills in nicely. I came upon Ward Churchills critique of Marxism
from an indigenist perspective through a friends facebook note. I am going to do an anti-critique here, not because I disagree with everything
Churchill says, but because I disagree with a lot of it, and because on many counts hes just wrong. Its important to take stock of this, because what
Churchill is presenting might form the basis of mistaken critiques of Marxism. Now, I have no problem with anyone critiquing Marxism, whether the
critic is Marxist or non-Marxist or indigenist or religious or whatever. Id just prefer that the critic read Marx first and then present a coherent
argument (is that too much to ask?). Having said that, Id like to point out that Marxism is a many-splendoured thing. To quote my friend and
interlocutor, Nathanial Thomas: Like any Marxist, I have my own opinions on what is closer to Marxism and what is less so, but I feel inclined
to the view that Marxists define Marxism, rather than the other way round. In this vein, Im going to examine Churchills critique from my
own perhaps idiosyncratic Marxist perspective which is nevertheless solidly grounded in Marxian thought and, particularly, Marxs thoughtbut its
certainly not the kind of Soviet (orthodox?) Marxism that Churchill repeatedly
conflates with Marxism on the whole. Additionally, Im going to publish this anti-critique in pieces. Churchill
seems to have delivered this essay as a talk, sometime between 1985 and 1995. Thats
all I can tell. The historical perspective is important because it would give us a temporal
context in which to place this uneven critique. In that broad period we saw the decline of the Soviet Union and other satellite
states. No doubt, there were many Marxists who saw their reified, teleological and schematic approaches to revolutionary politics and theory as
universal and necessary.
Not all industrialization is bad, but capitalist control is the worst

possible formMarxism is key to embracing production when it can
improve outcomes for everyone
D. Smith 2013 PhD, professor of government at College of the Mainland (David Michael,
Marxism and Native Americans Revisited, p. 66-80, review of Ward Churchills 1983
collection of essays titled Marxism and Native Americans)
The view of most of the Native American contributors to Marxism and Native Americans that the
fundamental problem facing the contemporary world is industrialization itself, not capitalism,
also warrants critical scrutiny. As noted above, Marx and Engels were well aware of the contradictory nature of
capitalist development, and while they recognized and praised the historically unprecedented expansion of productive forces and
their potential for improving the human condition in postcapitalist society, Marx
and Engels were arguably the
harshest critics of capitalist industrialization in their time. They criticized the
expropriation of the masses of European peasants from the land as part of the primitive accumulation of capitalism;
the exploitation, alienation, and dehumanization of the majority of people in capitalist
society; the creation of vast wealth for a relative few through the immiseration of the masses of
people; the fetishism of commodities; the reduction of value or worth to exchange value or money; the effect of
capitalism on families; and much more.66 Interestingly, Marx and Engels also had a deeper awareness
of the environmental devastation brought about by capitalist industrial-ization than their critics in
this book allow. As John Bellamy Foster has found, Marx was quite concerned with the harm done to the land by
industrialization, especially with the general crisis of soil fertility in Europe between 1830 and 1870.67
Some of the Native American contributors to this book acknowledge that Marx and Engels were harshly critical of industrialization
but, as we have seen, they then proceed to criticize Marxism for its support of continued industrial development in postcapitalist
society. However, there are some solid grounds for disagreeing with the wholesale dismissal of modern industry as a synthetic
order that must be overcome and returned to the natural. And
while some of the criticisms of
industrialization in the Soviet Union may be accurate and insightful, there are solid grounds for
affirming that the Marxist perspective on industrialization is, in many important ways, quite
different than the perspective of the capitalists they are committed to
overthrowing. For many on the Left, the historical experiences and vision of Native Americans may have much to say to
contemporary Marxism, but the development of industry within a radically new social order , a
democratic and cooperative social order, need not be dehumanizing or dangerous.
Winona LaDukes view that the indigenous societies of the Americas were natural and her view
that their relationship to the land and the environment embodied a natural norm invite
many questions, and there is a growing, and increasingly divergent, literature on these issues.68 While this paper cannot
even begin to address these issues and questions, the grounds on which Marxists may object to the
dismissal of modern industry as synthetic rather than natural are not difficult
to identify. It seems clear that Marx and Engels and Marxism in general would agree with LaDuke that
under capitalism the developing technological society became ever more divorced from
nature. But Marxists may plausibly argue that the worst features of
industrialization and environmental devastation are caused by capitalists control
of the means of production, the production process, and the state. And while some Native
American critics of Marxism can rightly point to the persistence of the official values of
maximum production and industrial efficiency in postcapitalist society, it may be argued that the
forced march to industrialization in the Soviet Union was reluctantly
undertaken by workers states that were very much under siege by the major
imperialist powers. And many Marxists today strive to make clear that these
cannot and should not be the official values of socialism.
Although modern industry is certainly synthetic in the sense that it has been produced by human beings, Marxists
may
well reject LaDukes juxtaposition of synthetic and natural. For Marx and Engels, and
for the Marxist tradition, as well as for Native American traditions, individual human
beings and humanity as a whole are part of nature. And one of Marxisms most important
contributions is the recognition of labor, the capacity for productive work, as one of the essential, defining characteristics of the
human species.69 From the Marxist perspective, the rise of modern industryeven in its perverted, capitalist formembodies the
development of human productive powers that are, in this sense, an expression of human nature. And with the development of
advanced productive forces comes the possibility of enormous improvements in human society and human life. As Engels wrote in
Anti-Duhring,
The possibility of securing for every member of society, through social production, an existence which is not only fully sufficient
from a material standpoint and becoming richer day to day, but also guarantees to them the completely unrestricted development of
their physical and mental facultiesthis possibility now exists for the first time, but it does exist.70
Contemporary Marxists can agree that the horrendous human, social, and environmental
degradation inherent in capitalist forms of industrialization should be recognized and
rejected, but still affirm that people in a postcapitalist society have the potential to
create a radically different kind of industrialization under democratic and
cooperative control. On this view, Churchill errs in arguing What is needed at this
historical juncture is the abandonment of faith in the fundamental role of production.
Instead, Marxists may agree that faith in capitalism and in capitalist-led industrialization should
surely be repudiated, but also insist that human beings capacity to transform nature
and create advanced productive forces is integral to the development of a society
without material want, exploitation, repression, or war.
For contemporary Marxists, industrial
development in postcapitalist society should not be guided by
maximum production and industrial efficiency as those phrases as normally used. Although Marx and Engels
themselves sometimes assumed that continually increasing industrial production in postcapitalist society would be needed to satisfy
the needs of the global population, more than a century after their deaths, most contemporary Marxists reach
different conclusions. In addition, many contemporary Marxists have demonstrated increasing awareness of the need
for economic development in postcapitalist society to be environmentally sound and sustainable. It seems difficult to
deny that for Marx and Engels, and for the broader Marxist tradition, the aim of production in
postcapitalist society is to promote the well-being of the society as a whole, instead of
enriching and empowering a small ruling class. As Engels wrote in Anti-Duhring, this new society would feature the
replacement of the anarchy of social production by the socially planned regulation of production in accordance with the needs both
of society as a whole and of each individual.71 As noted above, Engels anticipated that in such a society not only would peoples
material needs be met, but the level of economic development would also make possible the completely unrestricted develop-ment
of their physical and mental faculties.
Marx and Engels also believed that continued advances in the productive forces in postcapitalist society would make possible the
reduction of time people have to engage in socially necessary production, the attenuation and eventual abolition of an oppressive
division of labor, and the expansion of time in which individuals can pursue the kinds of labor that provide meaning and joy in their
lives. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels had offered a glimpse of a communist society of the distant future as a society
in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.72 In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels
elaborated this idea further:
In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he
wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to
hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever
becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman, or critics.73
On this view, then, bringing production and economic activity under the democratic,
cooperative control of the people as a whole in postcapitalist society offers the
potential for abolishing the worst social and environmental features of capitalist
industrialization, and providing the material basis for the radical improvement of
life for both the individual human being and society as a whole.
Theyre wrong about Marxist perspective on nature

Churchill contends that Marx does not examine the human being as one relation
among several, most notably ignoring the role of nature. But for Marx, even the
concept of nature is social, because it is not a given but something that exists only in relation to human
beings. Consider that, for a moment: nature is a relation, not a reified and transhistorical category.
It exists because humans, or at least, some WIlER humans
E d o p O S T ,Mdefine
O d E R N i s it
T S as
C O Msuch.
E F r O M That
? 1 0doesnt
4 mean that things like
hurricanes and earthquakes will bend to the will of humanity, or anything like that. What it means is that the categories and
concepts humans use to understand the world are historical and relational. That is to say,
dialectical.
Of course, the course of human history is shaped by geography and territory and the various effects that nature hastemperature, landscape, etc. But
if theres something that we should realizeparticularly in light of recent developmentsits that we have managed to screw around with temperature
and landscape, i.e., nature, at unprecedented scales. Its still relational, still dialectical, and here, I mean on a practical level and not a conceptual or
theoretical one. Where is nature, if by that we mean something separate from humanity? In any case, whatever we define as nature isas Engels points
outsitself historical, continuously coming into being and changing, and again, not only on a conceptual level but on a practical level. Engels:
In nature nothing takes place in isolation. Everything affects and is affected by every other thing, and it is mostly because this manifold
motion and interaction is forgotten that our natural scientists are prevented from gaining a clear insight into the simplest things.
This may, or may not have anything to do with human agency.
Churchill is correct in that, ultimately, Marx is a humanist, and in many ways anthropocentric. Churchills
critique is that
Marxs humanism articulates itself as a drive to exercise dominion over nature. Indeed,
considering that Marxs vision of socialism was one where the productive
capacities of humans had advanced to such a level that all could be fed, clothed,
etc. (in other words, the conditions that do exist today), it would seem that Marx had little or no concern
for nature. Certainly, many Marxists didnt after the 1930s. But even Marxs
anthropocentrism is dialectical and does not ignore the myriad flows in which
humans existand certainly not that of nature. Marx isnt talking about reigning in
nature and beating it about to conform to the will of the humans at all costs. The best analysis I have had access to so far in this regard is
that of John Bellamy Foster, who wrote Marxs Ecology: Materialism and Nature. A summary of this books arguments are available in an article here.
For the sake of your timeyou are already, I suppose, reading this essay of minelet me pull out some choice quotations from Marx and Engels,
emphasis has been added by me. First, Marx on large-scale industry and agriculture:
all progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in
increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country starts
its development on the foundation of modern industry the more rapid is this process of destruction. Capitalist
production,
therefore, develops
technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social
whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealththe soil and the labourer.
Speaking about the reuse of waste products in industry, Marx points out:
Excretions of consumption are the natural waste matter discharged by the human body, remains of clothing in the form of rags, etc.
Excretions of consumption are of the greatest importance for agriculture. So far as their utilisation is concerned, there is an enormous waste
of them in the capitalist economy. In London, for instance, they find no better use for the excretion of four and a half million human beings
than to contaminate the Thames with it at heavy expense.
On deforestation, Marx:
The development of culture and of industry in general has evinced itself in such energetic destruction of forest that everything done by it
conversely for their preservation and restoration appearsinfinitesimal.
And, perhaps, most damningly for Churchills assertions, Engels is quite clear:
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. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings
about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too
often cancel the first. 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 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.
And this isnt a triumphalist declaration, Engels is clearly guarded: It required the labour of thousands of years for us to learn a little of how to
calculate the more remote natural effects of our actions in the field of production. The quotations speak for themselves, Marx and Engels were not
ignorant of the position of human beings as one relation existing dialectically among several others, not separate from nature, but in nature. And
that means that nature is eminently social. Additionally, they were concerned about what nowadays would be called
sustainable developmentthat is, they didnt want to screw up the environment; they were, indeed, quite critical of environmental destruction and
degradation. And as far as human dominion over nature goes, consider Marx:
Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its
possessors, its usufructuaries, and, likeboni patresWfamilias,
I l E R E they
d o pmust
O S T hand
M O d it
ERdown
N i s to
T Ssucceeding
C O M E F rgenerations
O M ? 1 0 5 in an improved condition.
When Churchill asserts that Marx and Engels saw the universe, in Judeo-
Christian fashion simply to be subordinated by humans willy nilly, he is clearly just
wrong.
Theyre wrong about historical materialism

The main idea of historical materialism is that history the course of development of human
societies, including ideas and consciousness is based on material realities. It is not
the ideas in our heads that determine the conditions of our existence; so much as it is the
conditions of our existence that largely contribute to the determination of the ideas in our
heads. This is not to say that ideas do not have an effect on reality, but they do so
when put into material action in whatever way. History is a chronology of changes: institutions,
cultures, values and so on change over time. None of these are immutable, all of these are eminently historical they exist, as
they do, in particular times and spaces and they are in constant flux. The Marxian method puts a theoretical emphasis on the role of economics in
analysing history and consciousness. What is meant by economics? The term mode of production is often-heard, e.g., capitalism is a
mode of production. Humans need to eat, drink, sleep, etc. To do this they have to produce things, in one way or another. The
mode organizes how production is carried out, and this organization is necessarily
social, and also has its tremendous impacts on other aspects of society, or, ideology: culture, politics, state, law, etc. That is to say, our social
relations of production (and exchange and consumption) play a significant role in organizing our social relations in general. However, its
not like a mode of production drops out of the sky, and then on top of this someone sets about to build things
like culture and ideas. These things develop together, and develop because of the course of human
actions and interactions. [] However and very importantly the behaviours and courses of action taken
by people are determined by the possibilities, limits, and imperatives of real-historical
conditions. Additionally, the economic is not the only determining factor in the course of human society (i.e., in determining history)
other factors can, and do play important roles. The point is that they cannot be
analyzed separately from each other, and certainly, one cannot ignore the foundational aspect of the material
social realities, i.e., of the economic: the relationship is dialectical. Moreover, modes of production can and do exist at the same time, over the
same spaces, but some often, one is clearly more dominant and determining than the others. Let us consider the example of capitalism, the dominant
mode of production today throughout the world. Here, the very first thing that should strike us is that we actually buy the things necessary for our
livelihoods with money. Moreover, we
rarely know under what conditions the things we buy are
produced. On the flip side, we work (for someone else) to acquire the money
necessary to buy the things we need or want for our livelihoods. This is just a basic enumeration of capitalist relations of
productions, of course, they are far more complicated. The point is that these things are determined by the mode of production: capitalism. We can also
see how historically contingent aspects of ideology, such as the theory of free trade and the free market or the legal right of private property, are
conjured or developed concurrently with the development of capitalism as a dominant mode of production. Indeed, if we were serfs living in a fief,
under the authority of some lord, in some medieval European place, no doubt the relations of production would be vastly different. How we came up
with the means of our subsistence indeed, exactly what would constitute subsistence would vary tremendously. And, how we related to these things
culturally and what kinds of legal systems were there to legitimate the existing power relations would also be rather different. To quote my medievalist
friend and interlocutor Nathaniel Thomas for the second time: a huge difference in social relations would be the sense of obligation. They could be
really greedy, but medieval European lords simply do not run their estates to maximize production and profit in a systematic way and dont think in
those terms. Not that they do anymore, because there arent any left, because the capitalist mode of production replaced the peasants with the
workers, and changed entirely the social function of the lords, and so on and so forth. Going back to Churchills critiques,
a few things should become apparent: Yes, the mass of human society is a set of
contradictions, but these contradictions form parts of the whole and are determined by the logic
of the whole which really isnt unified as such (what does that even mean?). Contradictions dont have to reconcile
themselves to production: production W I l E R Eitself
d o p O Sis
T M undergirded
O d E R N i s T S C O M E Fby
r O Ma? whole
106 set of
contradictions (for instance, the contradiction between the actual producer of a product, and the person who appropriates the profit off of
that product). Productive relations are not what determines all and everything, but they are fundamental. And yes, the consciousness of human
beings is determined by their existence, a great part of which has to do with their productive relations, which are there independent of their wills:
existence precedes essence, and not vice-versa. However,
that the productive relations people enter into
are independent of their wills doesnt mean it has to remain that way. Thats the
whole point of revolution.
at: decolonial not postcolonial
Their distinction is spuriouscolonization took different forms, but
the facets of postcolonial theory were critiquing are clearly present
Altschul 12 (Nadia R., Assistant Professor of Spanish Johns Hopkins University,
Geographies of Philological Knowledge, p. 19-22)
The background of settler postcolonial studies used in this book leads to positing
that the non-Indian inhabitants of Spanish America before and after Klor de Alva's
nineteenth-centurv "civil wars of separation" were indeed colonized subjects; they
were colonized vis-a-vis the metropolis, but as settler-colonists they were also
colonizers within the American context. Since I view postcolonial studies as the realm of post-contact societies
and do not consider political independence as a necessary break in postcoloniality,
the tact that the ninctccnth-ccntury wars of independence did not radically change
the composition and mind frame of Spanish America docs not disqualify
postcolonial theory from applicability. Moreover, whether Euro-Americans and other elite Westernized populations
were of "pure" European descent or "merely" culturally European, the)'were still in an intermediate situation, placed as both metropolitan and colonial,
Maz-zotti's early
European and not fully European, colonizing and colonized.40 In terms of Klor the Alva's great influence on the field,
work on Creole agencies explicitly questions the utility of postcolonial theory to the
Hispano-American field/1 Martinez-San Miguel likewise noted in 2008 that Latin Americanism had reached an apparent agreement "against the use of
colonialism as a productive disciplinary paradigm for the study of the preindependence period," leadingher to move away
from postcolonial studies and use instead the paradigm of minority [END PAGE 20]
discourse." Walter Mignolo has also argued that the term postcolonialism is only
appropriate to the domains of the second wave of European colonization and to
the independence of their colonies; for the understanding of Spanish Americapart of the first wave of both European
colonization and political independencethe appropriate term is post-Occidentalism: "Postcoloniality is unconsciously
employed when uprooted from the conditions of its emergence.... Thus
postcoloniality or the postcolonial becomes problematic when applied to cither
nineteenth- or twentieth-century cultural practices in Latin America.... Post-Occidentalism
better describes Latin American critical discourse on colonialism."'" My position
regarding postcolonial theory contrasts with this negative consensus and identifies instead with Jose Rabasa, who
remarked that the most productive results stem from the discussions on the
inapplicability of postcolonial theory to American culture, and that the use of
postcolonial theory did not translate into mindless application but into debates
leading to a deeper understanding of the specificities of Spanish American
colonialism.1* Certainly the postcolonial here is not considered inadequate outside the conditions of its emergence in the independence
struggles of those colonized by the European empires of the second generation, nor are the theorizations tailored to post-Enlightenment empires
expected to match Spanish America as a decontextualized truth. Likewise,
I do not see historical and temporal
differences as a meaningful reason for rejecting postcolonial theory cither for the Spanish American
context or ibr the study of colonization before 1492, as I have argued elsewhere.44 For those who require the ability to illuminate longer temporal
spans, terminological distinctions that rely on medieval/ modern peri odization, the post-1492 hegemony of the [END PAGE 21] Occident, or the first
and second waves of post-Enlightenment independence are not sufficient, and show an exclusionary thrust of their own. Despite
Mignolos influential terminological proposal, compounded by the general
perception of postcolonialism as a foreign colonialist imposition into Latin
American studies, this book subscribes instead to the more enabling outlook of Mary Louise Pratt, who views the
postcolonial as "a way of thinking about the scope of one's coloniality," and as a critical reflection that nevertheless
"requires some decolonizing of its own. Of particular interest for studying postindcpcndcncc criollos as postcolonial subjects, which is the topic under
discussion, despite distinguishing elementsfor instance, minority situations in certain areas that make it less desirable to claim native status against
the Amerindian majoritythe thcorization on white settler-colonists vis-a-vis American criollos shows enough traits in common to approach both
subjectivities as variants of a common settler-creole postcolonial situation and thus to take advantage of "white settler" theory for the study of American
Creoles.1, While
many consider that postcolonialism is not suitable to the study of
Spanish Americaagreeing in practice with Klor de Alvaand others view Spanish American
colonization as being too different from that of white settler colonists, this work
on Andres Bello goes against the grain of both of these more mainstream
perspectives. [END PAGE 22]
at: mignolo
The contrast theyre forcing between Mignolos approach and our
Eurocentric worldview is empty and self-fulfilling
Werbner 8 (Pnina, Professor Emerita in Social Anthropology Keele University,
Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism: Rooted, Feminist and Vernacular Perspectives, p.
295-7)
Our accustomed terms of analysis and. even more, of debates, tend lo make all this very difficult to see. This is true even of those
who are nothing if not sympathetic. Let me take as an example an author whose position is in many ways quite close to my own. In a
book called Cosmopolitanism (2002), literary theorist Walter Mignolo writes a response to an essay by Slavoj
Zizek that argues that those on the Left need to temper their critiques of
Eurocentrism in order to embrace democracy, since this is, he argues, 'the true European legacy from
ancient Greece onward' (1998: 1009). A remarkable statement in and of itself, of course. Mignolo's response is to
examine the cosmopolitanism of Vittoro and Kant (that Zizek praises), showing just
how much their ideas took shape within, and indeed presumed, the brutal violence of European
colonial empires. He then invokes Zapatista calls for democracy as a counter-
example:
The Zapatistas have used the word democracy, although it has a different
meaning for them than it has for the Mexican government. Democracy for the Zapatistas is
not conceptualised in terms of European political philosophy but in terms of
Maya social organisation based on reciprocity, communal (instead of individual) values, the value of
wisdom rather than epistemology, and so forth... The Zapatistas have no choice but to use the
word that political hegemony imposed, though using that word does not mean bending to its mono-logic interpretation.
Once democracy is singled out by the Zapatistas, it becomes a connector through which liberal concepts of democracy and
indigenous concepts of reciprocity and community social organisation for the common good must come to terms.
(Mignolo 2002: 180)
Mignolo calls this 'border thinking'. He suggests it might be taken as a model for
how to come up with a healthy, 'critical cosmopolitanism', as opposed to the
Eurocentric variety represented by Kant, or Zizek. It is an appealing idea. The problem though, it seems to
me, is that in doing so, Mignolo himself ends up falling into a more modest version
of the very essentialising discourse he's trying to escape.
First of all, to say 'the Zapatistas have no choice but to use the word (democracy]'
is simply untrue. Of course they have a choice. Other indigenous-based groups have
made very different choices, and insist their own traditions of egalitarian decision-
making as having nothing to do with democracy." The Zapatista decision to
embrace the term, it seems to me. was more than anything else a decision to reject
anything that smacked of a politics of identity, and to appeal for allies, in Mexico and
elsewhere, among those interested in a broader conversation about forms of self-organisation - in much the same way as they also
sought to begin a conversation with those interested in re-examining the meaning of the word 'revolution'. Second of all, and even
more serious, Mignolo
falls into the same trap as so many who invoke 'the West':
comparing Western theory with indigenous practice. Just like an anthropologist who compares
concepts derived from observing the way people act as 'dividuals' in India or Papua New Guinea with some philosopher's conception
of 'the Western individual' (rather than from, say. the way people act in a church in Florence or New Jersey), he
contrasts
democracy as 'conceptualised in terms of European political philosophy' with
democracy as it emerges in 'Maya social organisation." But in fact, Zapatismo is
not simply an emanation of traditional Maya practices. Its origins, rather, have to
be sought in a prolonged confrontation between those practices and, among other
things, the ideas of local Maya intellectuals (many, presumably, not entirely unfamiliar with tlx: work of
Kant), liberation theologists (who drew inspiration from prophetic texts written in ancient Judca), and mestizo
revolutionaries (who drew inspiration from the works of Chairman Mao, from China). Democracy, in turn,
did not emerge from anybody's discourse. WIlERE do pO ItS Tis
M Oas
d E Rif
N i simply
s T S C O M E taking
F r O M ? 1 1the
0 Western
literary tradition as one's starting point - even for purposes of critique - means
authors like Mignolo always somehow end up trapped inside it.
Dont be fooledeven if theyre right about the discourse of the

colonized, at best theyre just opportunistically rehashing that
discourse
Allesi 9 (Ryan, Materiality of Discourses on Decolonization,
massthink.wordpress.com/2009/10/20/materiality-of-discourses-on-decolonization/)
This begs the question as to what Mignolo is trying to do. Towards the end of the chapter, he writes
about the two types of representation (the European and the Amerindian) that they are constantly teaching us not only that maps
are not the territory, but also that the process of inventing and putting the Americas on the map was not an everlasting episode of
the past, but an open process toward the future (311). Because the link between the discursive representation (which has something
to do with the colonization of the imagination) and the material situation (of colonization) is not explicitly made, while from this
statement it is clear that Mignolo
is suggesting that a change of representations (a change in maps,
in identity) is
possible, it is not clear how that relates and what that does to the
material context, to (material) colonization itself. If the colonized change their
perspectives and their representations, what does that do to their colonized situation? If they
change their representations, does that mean that they are no longer colonized? In
contrast to his analysis of representation that encompasses both its imaginary and material aspects, is Mignolo concerned merely
with the colonization of the imagination and not material colonization, the fact that, in addition to suppressing and imposing
representations, colonizers aremateriallyoccupying and ruling the territory of the colonized? In Writing Without Words,
Elizabeth Hill Boone has a similar concern. Expandingthe definition of writing (beyond language)
to include non-phonetic types allows Boone to say that the Inca, even before the conquest, had a writing
culture (e.g. the quipu). This way, these Incan cultures become represented along with the other cultures that have writing.
Again, the question is: what does this do? Through discursive moves like Mignolo and Boone,
representations of the colonized become recognized and perhaps even adopted and
disseminated, yet without linking representation to the material context of colonization,
the discourse of Mignolo and Boone do not make clear what their move does to
material colonization itself. The discourse of the colonizers, as Mignolo chronicles,
contributed to the material act of colonization, in that way successfully performing the function of
discourses of colonization. Perhaps the assumption of scholars like Mignolo that aim to represent the
discourse of the colonized is that merely by having them represented, the discourse of the colonized
would, as discourses of decolonization, have equally potent effects. Mignolos is not a
discourse of decolonization, however. It is a discourse that talks about the
colonized and their representations (like the hybrid maps) that may lead to their decolonizationi.e. a
discourse on (discourses of) decolonization. It is not, like the discourses of
colonization, the discourse itself that, through its representations, contribute to
decolonization (that would be the Amerindian maps themselves), but merely the discourse that talks
about and attempts to make recognized those discourses of decolonization (a sort of meta-
discourse about a discourse). Is this a worthwhile move? What sort of material
potency does a discourse on decolonization like this have, especially when, despite being a meta-
discourse, it
does not really theorize the relation between the discursive and the
material?

linksrace

abolition of whiteness
Abolition of whiteness isn't a useful political concept- can't unify and
actively increases divisions
Mike Cole Centre for Education for Social Justice , Bishop Grosseteste University College Lincoln , UK British Journal of
Sociology of Education, 33:2, 167-183 March 2012
What then are the implications for educational practice? Prestons

pedagogical solutions are the abolition of
both whiteness and capitalism, of which the former, according to Preston, is perhaps capitalisms
weakest link (2010, 123). There are three major problems with the abolition of whiteness . First
it is too vague to have any practical implications (hardly surprising given the abstract theorizing
that preceded its announcement).12 Just how are white people to be persuaded to abolish their whiteness, and what
would follow such abolition? Second, given its vagueness, it is seriously open to misinterpretation.
While Preston clearly does not propose the abolition of white people, his advocacy of the abolition of whiteness is clearly open to
the abolition of whiteness
being interpreted as such. Third, and following on from the first and second problems,
is useless as a unifier and counter-productive as a political rallying point . Indeed, were
the abolition of whiteness to be routinely promoted in educational establishments, it would
most likely cause severe confusion and indeed mayhem. Unproductive divisions on grounds of
race, class and culture would undoubtedly accelerate.13 As far as the abolition of capitalism is
concerned, by its very nature, abstract academic Marxism, as developed by Postone and not linked to
practice, is not appropriate for Marxist pedagogy . Rather the urgent need is to partake in
Marxist praxis. This must entail a concrete engagement with the real possibilities of twenty-first-
century socialism (for example, Lebowitz 2006; Martinez, Fox, and Farrell 2010; Motta and Cole 2013, forthcoming).
Rather than abolish whiteness, however perceived, it is more appropriate to unite around a
common purpose . Central should be a theoretical exploration of the concept of participatory democracy, but linked to
concrete practice, such as in the communal councils and communes of Venezuela a country where people are directly involved in
decision-making and where Marxism, in the form of twenty-first-century socialism, is being considered seriously as a viable
alternative to capitalism.14
assata shakur
Assata Shakur herself cites Capitalism not racism as the central
issue in her oppression.
Greenberg 12 (Cheryl, Professor Trinity College, Of Black Revolutionaries and Whig
Histories: Using Assata in the Classroom, Journal of American Ethnic History, 32(1), Fall, pp.
90-94, JSTOR)
Assatas emphasis, however, lies less with history than with politics. She identifies two sometimes contradictory
factors undergirding oppression: race and class. Although she slips back and forth between the two with little
evident awareness of the shift, both sets of claims provide wonderful material for discussion, not only of each one separately, but of the relationship
between the two. Over and over in the book, Assata argues that race determines politics. On a personal level, she routinely distrusts white people,
including leftist lawyers who volunteer to advise her, and believes all black people are on her side, from black nurses to black jurors and prison guards. I
ask my students whether this is a legitimate position, using the opportunity to explain the notion of racial essentialism. To what extent are such claims
valid? More generally, Assata details the problems she believes face black people from every walk of life and identifies all people of color everywhere as
victims of white racist imperialism. This provides an ideal opening for a discussion of capitalism, radicalism, political alliance-building, racism, and
globalization, as well as the consequence (and the legitimacy) of viewing people solely as victims. What might she mean when she claims that, in or out
of prison, she has never felt freeindeed, that no black American has ever felt free? (60). Elsewhere, Assata
identifies
capitalism, not racism, as the primary culprit, even noting on occasion that one cannot
presume that all black people share interests. Instead, and with little apparent awareness that she herself
presumed this, she suggests instead that all working-class people suffer, and she calls on
radicals to welcome all who oppose colonialism, capitalism, and their evil consequences. (A
1973 radio broadcast she made from Cuba after she escaped from prison, reproduced on pp. 4950, concisely articulates both racial and class
arguments.) I ask my students not which argument is correct, but rather in what ways and to what extent each is persuasive. And I use this as an
opportunity to explore structural racism, the interrelationship of institutions of economic advancement and racism.
authentic n-word
The N-Word application to the Black Power movement prioritized
Lumpens as the base for the prolitereat, which led to the
abandonment of the political, rampant criminal behavior and police
backlash, which destroyed the movement. Focusing on authenticity
will continue to destroy revolutionary potential
**Kehinde Andrews uses both variants of the N-Word in this article; weve modified the card to
also say N-Word in lieu of saying either of them**
Andrews 14 lecturer in Childhood and Early Childhood Studies at Newman University
College, Birmingham (Kehinde, From the Bad Nigger to the Good Nigga: an unintended
legacy of the Black Power movement, Race Class January/March 2014 vol. 55 no. 3 22-37//JC)
Just as Malcolm X based his legitimacy on being able to speak for the Black
masses, the Black Panther Party rooted its authenticity in its connection to Black
people at the bottom of society. The Panthers had faith in recruiting prisoners and ex-convicts because, as Bobby
Seale recalled Huey Newtons words to him: The nigger out of prison knows The nigger out of prison has seen the man naked and
cold, the nigger out of prison, if hes got himself together, will come out just like Malcolm X came out of prison. You never have to
worry about him. Hell go with you.19 The
Panthers never questioned the authenticity of
prisoners because they had experienced the racism of society and, if politically educated, would
turn their anger against the system. It was also their disconnection from the system and the ability to openly reject the power
structure that attracted the Panthers to the convicts and hustlers. Seale explained his embrace of Stagolee, the mythic character from
the plantation who epitomises the Bad Nigger, and saw his descendants in the ghetto: Stagolee was a bad nigger off the block and
didnt take s**t from nobody. All you had to do was organise him, like Malcolm X, make him politically conscious Huey P Newton
showed me the nigger on the block was worth ten mother****as when politically educated, and if you got him organised.20 The
aim was therefore to educate and mobilise the Bad Niggers(N-Word) off the block to
create the revolutionary vanguard that would bring down the racist capitalist
system. From this perspective, Niggativity is not a corruption of Black identity but
becomes a form of resistance to indoctrination by mainstream society. Nigger was
seen very much as an identity of the Black oppressed as opposed to the middle-
class Negroes who wanted to integrate into White society. In the introduction to H. Rap Browns
Die Nigger Die! Don L. Lee (who later became Haki R. Madhubuti) explains: To be a nigger is to resist both
white and negro death. It is to be free in spirit, if not body. It is the spirit of resistance which has prepared Blacks for
the ultimate struggle. This word, nigger Among Blacks it is not uncommon to hear the
words my nigger (addressed to a brother as an expression of kinship and brotherhood
and respect for having resisted), or Hes a bad nigger!, meaning hell stand up for himself. He
wont let you down.21 Cleaver presented the most thorough analysis of the Panthers position in his criticism of Marxist theory.
He argued that Marx incorrectly identified the working class as the revolutionary
class, arguing that the Working Class has become as much a part of the system
that has to be destroyed as the capitalists themselves.22 For Cleaver, Black people in the
ghettoes of America were not part of the working class, but formed a
Lumpenproletariat, marginalised by society. Contrary to Marxs disdain for the Lumpenproletariat,
Cleaver argued that, because the Lumpen class felt the most oppression, it was they who
would lead the rebellion: The real revolutionary element of our era is the Lumpen
What is lacking is a Lumpen consciousness, consciousness of the basic condition of oppression being the Lumpen condition and
not the proletarian condition.23 Whilst Cleaver to some extent broadened the definition of Lumpen to include poor Black workers
such as nannies, for example, in reality this represents a theoretical anchoring of the Black
Panther Party to the Bad (N-Word)Nigger-cum-Hustler/Gangster. The Black Panthers themselves
are the clearest example of the power of the image of the educated Bad Nigger, refusing to bow down to Whites. One of the iconic
images of the Black Power movement is one that Seale describes as Niggers with guns marching into the State Capitol building in
Sacramento in 1967.24 Thiskind of open confrontation brought worldwide attention and
was based on the vision of Black people who do not back down, or restrict their
activism to appeal to Whites. TheirW Ipolitical mobilisation and demands, enshrined in the
lERE do pOSTMOdERNisTS COME FrOM? 116
10 Point Platform, were seen as dangerous and unacceptable to the state because of their
refusal to bow to the power system. The story of the campaign by the state to
destroy the Black Panthers is evidence of the threat they posed to mainstream
authority.25 Murdering Black Panthers was common practice by the police, along with
planting counterrevolutionaries into the movement.26 Such action against Black radicals was not limited to the 1970s, with one of
the most extreme cases of persecution taking place in Philadelphia in 1985, when the police dropped a bomb in the city on the
headquarters of a radical organisation called MOVE.27 In the face of such tactics, the
Black Power movement
faced little chance of succeeding and gradually radical politics were eroded,
receding to the margins of society. Alongside the government campaign to destroy the Panthers, Ogbar
argues that a contributing factor to their demise was the Lumpenisation of the
Party.28 He claims that the Panthers fell victim to myopic and simplistic notions of
ghetto authenticity and that the valorization of lumpenism was problematic on
various levels. It opened the way for rogue criminal behaviour, destabilizing the
party and inviting police aggression.29 The Lumpen character of the party
attracted what Seale refers to as do nothing terrorists who would use the Party as a base
for criminal activity and were not seen to be truly down for the cause.30 The Panthers also
ended up in battles with other organisations that, at times, escalated into shoot-outs. The battle between the Panthers and the
cultural US organisations is indicative of this feature of the party.31 It is clear from the history of the Black Panther Party that
connecting with the Lumpen was a central part of its appeal and programme. In
doing so it gave authenticity to the experiences and worldview of the Bad Niggers
from the block.
Andrews Continues....
The more dangerous problem with solely rooting authenticity in the experience of
the Field Negro is that, although the truth may lie with the oppressed, it cannot be
assumed that all of the Black poor have the best interests of the community at
heart. This second problem is one that is an unintended legacy of the Black Power
movement: the embrace of the perspective of the Bad Nigger. In the post-
enslavement world, the Bad Nigger became the crook/bandit, living outside the
bounds of society. Judy explains how, with the mass migration of Black people from the antebellum south of America to
northern cities, the Bad Nigger took on special meaning in the ghettos.14 The hustler, the dealer, the gangsta
are all descendants of the Bad Nigger from the plantation. The emergence of the
(N-Word) Nigga identity, popularised by Gangsta Rap, should therefore come as no
surprise. When NWA (Niggaz With Attitude) released their album Straight Outta Compton in 1990 with such controversial
tracks as F**k Da Police, they were continuing a feature of the Black experience, that of the Bad Nigger. In Black
America thousands of young men are murdered each year; the poverty and
unemployment rate is twice as high as average15 and there are almost one million
black men in prison.16 Images of hustling, drug-dealing and pimping in Gangsta Rap are
stories reflecting the reality of the situations many young Black people in America
find themselves in. In the same way that the Bad Nigger was a reaction to slavery, Nigga is a tool for surviving the
conditions of the ghetto. This is summed up by Cam, a student at Columbia University who is quoted as writing, Your average Nigga
in the ghetto is given 5 words at birth These 5 words constitute the ghetto newborns lifelong defense plan that is guaranteed to get
him or her through every problem they face. These 5 words are I dont give a f**k.17 Whilst embracing (N-
Word)Nigga as an identity is understandable, and traceable to material conditions and the history of the African
American experience, it is here argued that it has
taken on a particularly significant meaning in the
face of the collapse of the Black Power movement. Nigga stands out in the Black
Power movement because there was specific embrace of those whom Eldridge Cleaver defined as
lumpens and the term Nigger itself was utilised in this way, in particular by the Black
Panthers.18
black liberation
Anything short of explicit communism makes black liberation
impossible
Black Workers Congress 1982 ( The Black Liberation Struggle, the Black Workers
Congress, and Proletarian Revolution http://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-2/bwc-
1/section4.htm)
Despite oppression, exploitation and racial discrimination, the out-right murder

and imprisonment of our peoples by a handful of racist-imperialist, the Black
liberation movement has kept on pushing, like a powerful train headed for freedom. Through hundreds of years of
unremitting struggle the Black liberation movement has been steadily maturing despite
the class forces that have held the reign of leadership. In recent times the most
important and significant trend has been the dramatic awakening of the Black
working class in its fight for its own independent organization and ideological and
political leadership of the Black struggle. The Black Bourgeoisie (Uncle Toms) has
already proven to the masses of Black people that it is incapable of leading the
great struggle for Black emancipation, and not only are these Toms incapable of leading the struggle, they
themselves have proven to be one of its mortal enemies. The main forces of the Black Liberation
movement are the Black proletariat Black youth, revolutionary intellectuals and students, and other revolutionary nationalists in the Black community,
with the Black proletariat in the lead as the key and most through going revolutionary class. The political task of the Black
liberation movement is complete emancipation of Black people through a
revolutionary union with the entire U.S. working class, of which it is an important
part, to overthrow capitalism and imperialism in the U.S. In a word, Black Liberation
today means freedom for Black people through proletarian revolution. Which
road should the Black liberation struggle travel? Should it take the road of Jesse Jackson and Black
Capitalism? Should it rely on Mr. Muhammad and Allahs wheel in the sky to save the
Black Masses? Should it take the pork chop road of cultural nationalism Immamu Barakaism? Should it dream with
Stokely Carmichael of returning to Africa to free Ghana. Should it take the road
of electing the black Bourgeoisie to puppet, show-front, positions of mayor, City-
councilman, Legislators, and Congressmen? Or should it take the road of Pan-Africanism, where the Black masses
are asked to play first aid for the liberation struggles in Africa? Of all these roads which one is correct? Anyone who takes a
serious look at the world today cannot help but see that oppressed and exploited
peoples are locked in a death-bed struggle against international capitalism. Who
can deny that the major enemy of the peoples of Asia, Africa, Latin America, are a
gang of international imperialist, head by the two super-powers the U.S. and the Soviet Union? Who are the murderers of
the miners of South Africa? The peasants and workers of Vietnam? The Attica Brothers? The people of Chile? The Indians at Wounded Knee? Who is
responsible for police brutality in Detroit? In Chicago? In Atlanta? Who benefits from the high price of bread and meat? Who benefits from the lowest
possible wages? Whether we like it or not our position in the world as an oppressed people does not allow us to follow the bankrupt road of U.S.
imperialism which is heading for its doom. In
the present international situation, the Black masses
must line up with the heroic peoples of the world who have struck blow after blow
at imperialism, or we must line up with the imperialists themselves who send their
puppets into the Black communities to preach Black Capitalism. There is no
third path. Only the Black proletariat deserves to lead the Black liberation movement. As far as we are concerned, none of the
other classes in the Black community can do it. If none of the bourgeois and petty
bourgeois isms cited above is capable of lighting the road for the Black liberation
struggle, then what is? We say it is Marxism-Leninism and the Thought of Mao Tse Tung. All those who genuinely (in word and
deed) take up Marxism-Leninism and Maos Thought and put it into practice are communists. Chairman Mao runs it down like this:
Communism is at once a complete system of proletarian ideology and a new social
system. It is different from any other ideology and social system, and is the most
complete, progressive, revolutionary and rational system in human history. (New
Democracy) REVOLUTIONARY IDEOLOGY OF THE MODERN ERA Marxism-Leninism and the Thought of Mao Tse Tung is the ideology of the
working class in the present era. It takes its name from the great teachers of the working class and oppressed-Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao Tse
Tung. Without
Marxism-Leninism Mao W ITse
lER E do
Tung p O S T to
Thought MO N ithe
d E Rit,
guide s T S CBlack
O M E F r Oliberation
M? 119 movement
cannot possibly be victorious. And whom do we think is most hostile to this
ideology, proletarian ideology? What class and their lap dogs do the most to try
and poison our minds against communism? The very same class that is the cause
of our oppression and exploitationthe imperialist ruling class and their agents in
the Black Nation. While constantly preaching to us about the horrors and perils of communism, the imperialist
bourgeoisie and their lackeys in the U.S. have concocted the most insane
arguments possible for the rejection of communist ideology. Everyone, knows how the bourgeoisie
hates everything which hints of socialism and communism. We are even treated to the spectacle of a person like Senator Eastland of Mississippi,
practically a slaveholder today, talking about how communism is bad for the people. What people is this blood-sucker talking about? Certainly not
Black people, especially those who work on his plantation, or even the masses of white people for that matter. Eastland knows that communism is
bad for people like himself, ex-slaveholders and modern imperialists, who communists and communism seek to wipe off the face of the earth. No, it is
not so difficult to see the motives behind the massive anti-communist hysteria in the U.S.
The buffoons who really take the
cake are those among us. The Jesse Jacksons, Imamu Barakas, Thomas Mathews, Stokely
Carmichaels, and the jive Black politicians and sinister Black capitalists who roam about the Black
community. These people feel that Senator Eastland is not enough, he needs an echo. After the many years of bitter experience that Black
people have had in this country one would have thought, perhaps, that when massa says something is bad for you, that it is likely to be something
good. Malcolm summed it up this way: There are basically two kinds of Negroes. The first kind of Negro when he sees his master is sick he says good,
let him die. If he sees his masters house burning down he prays for a strong wind. He hates his master because he wants to be free. The other kind of
Negro is a fool. He identifies himself with his master. When the massa wants something, he runs and gets it. When the master gets sick, he says:
massa we sick? This Negro loves his master because he wants to stay a slave. So it is today. The Black Nation is and has always been divided into
classes, and each class has its own ism, and there are even different groups within the same class with different isms. The ruling circles of the U.S.
preach that capitalism is the best of all possible worlds. Black bourgeois forces echo and mimic the big bourgeoisie under the cover of
assimilationism integrationism and now and then, back to Africanism. This
same Black bourgeoisie spreads its
own form of nationalism, bourgeois nationalism. Mr. Muhammad talks about
meeting Allah on a street corner in Detroit one cold winter day. Therefore, Islamism is the road to
freedom and salvation, even though it hasnt served the Arabs too well in. the
Middle East; in fact it hinders their liberation. And there is the Black Christian Nationalism of certain Black
preachers who are trying to convince us how revolutionary Christianity can be if you only paint Jesus Black! And then theres Imamu Baraka (Swahili
for high priest) who loves to enlighten us by calling Marxism-Leninism a honky thing. There is the Pan-Africanism of the Black bourgeois and
petty bourgeois classes who want to fight the U.S. and Portugal in Africa, but who dont want to fight the rulers of the U.S. and Portugal who live in the
United States and who murder Black people right under their noses! And they do this without the blessings of the African revolutionaries who have
consistently told them that the best way to help Africa become free and independent is to take up the struggle against U.S. imperialism right inside the
U.S.A. Additionally, the Black bourgeois and petty bourgeois classes have the many other isms of cultural nationalism, communalism, lumpenism,
and etc., etc., etc.. Since
there are so many isms in the Black community representing
the interests of the Black bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, what is wrong with
the Black proletariat having Communism for its ideology, since it is the one
ideology which doesnt rely on magic, and the one ideology standing up to the
imperialists of the world, and the one ideology which has changed the material
conditions for over a billion of the worlds people? Clearly it is the only ideology
leading people to their liberation in the modern era. When Imamu Baraka claims that Marxism-Leninism-
Mao Tse Tung Thought is a Honky Thing, what is he really saying? Is he saying that the millions of dead Vietnamese workers and peasants who were
guided by this outlook were dying in the interest of a honky thing? Is he saying that the great Chinese revolution was led by a honky thing? Or
maybe he is saying that the great TANZAM Railway Project which is being built through Zambia and Tanzania, with the fraternal aid of the Chinese, is
a honky thing project. The
entire international anti-imperialist united front today depends
on the international proletariat and its ideology of Marxism-Leninism and the
Thought of Mao Tse Tung as a guiding light and an unshakable force. For Imamu Baraka
and his like to reject Marxism-Leninism means they are rejecting the leading role of the Black proletariat in the Black liberation movement, and in the
final analysis, selling out the Black liberation movement altogether. Despite their phrase-mongering, people
like Baraka cannot
possibly have the interests of the Black Nation at heart. These elements like Baraka
himself, accuse us communists of dividing Black people along class lines,
keeping us from all uniting as one, etc. But they are wrong. It is not us
communists who divide Black people along class lines, but the objective
development of society itself. Booker T. Washington preceded the Bolshevik Revolution by fifty years! Whether we like it or not,
class divisions exist in the Black community and they will not, be wished away by
rhetoric, only by the establishment W I lof
E R Eworld
d o p O S Tcommunism
M O d E R N i s T S C O Mand a?classless
E FrOM 120 society.
Black magic just will not do!
cornel west
Cornel West is a great example of why polemics based on a stylized
understanding of history are a poor substitute for political science
Chait 8/26/2014 commentator for New York Magazine, former senior editor at The New
Republic (Jonathan, New York Magazine, Cornel West and the Insular World of the Obama-
Hating Left, http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/08/cornel-west-and-the-insular-
obama-hating-left.html)
The political subculture of anti-Obama leftists has entered a phase by this point in the
Obama presidency where the truth of its worldview is so well-established to its own
adherents that it requires no exposition. Tom Frank, an anti-Obama leftist, interviews Cornel
West, another anti-Obama leftist, in a conversation so deeply marinated in shared
assumptions that, at one point, both interviewer and interviewee agree that
nobody disagrees with them. Frank asks West, Is there anybody who thinks hes
progressive enough today? West replies, Nobody I know. Not even among the progressive
liberals. What about maybe the 61 million people who voted for Mitt Romney? Some of them
may even think Obama is too progressive.
West and Frank are certainly correct about one thing: Obama does not fully subscribe
to their point of view, and he never has. When he ran as a pragmatist who
understood the value of the market, Obama was not lying. A world where Cornel
West could govern without any constraints would look very different from a world
where Obama could govern without constraints. In that one sense, the lefts mistrust of Obama has a
fully rational basis.
But West, and much of the American left, doesnt merely believe that. It also
believes that a world where Obama can govern without constraints is the actual
world we live in, or, at least, a reasonable approximation thereof. More inspiring speeches, harder fighting, or
some other unspecified application of willpower is all it would take to have forced
Olympia Snowe to vote for a larger stimulus or Scott Brown to go along with
tougher financial regulation. Because they cannot conceive of any limits to Obama's power, betrayal and
haplessness are the only causes they can imagine for their distress. (West: "What I hear is
that, '[Obama] pimped us.' I heard that a zillion times. 'He pimped us, brother West.')
The field of political science, with its firm grasp of multiple veto points, the limits
of rhetoric, and other structural realities of the federal government, is an alien field to the
anti-Obama left. Its chosen field is history. (Michael Kazin's anti-Obama polemic in the New Republic
likewise stays away from political science and lashes Obama with historical counterexamples.) Their version of history
offers hackneyed, romanticized tales rather than the real thing.
Here is West, in typical form, counterposing Obama against Abraham Lincoln:
You would think that we needed somebody a Lincoln-like figure who could revive some democratic spirit and democratic
possibility
You have to be able to speak to those divisions in such a way that, like FDR, like Lincoln, youre able to somehow pull out the best of
who we are, given the divisions. You dont try to act as if we have no divisions and were just an American family ...What is history
going to say about you? Counterfeit! Thats what theyll say, counterfeit. Not the real thing.
[Frank: Thats exactly what everyone was saying at the time.]
Thats right. Thats true. It was like, We finally got somebody who can help us turn the corner. And he posed as if he was a kind of
Lincoln.
So theLincoln of Wests imagination is a figure who would never act as if we have

no divisions and were just an American family. This is the same Lincoln who, in his inaugural
address delivered after seven states had already seceded from the Union
declared, We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained,
it must not break our bonds of affection.
In fact, the real Lincoln was a carefully calculating politician, always careful not to
step too far ahead of public opinion. Progressives distrusted and even loathed Lincoln
with an intensity that exceeds Wests own distrust of Obama. Here, from James McPhersons
Battle Cry of Freedom, is a brief summary of the disappointed left circa 1862: [photo omitted]
critical race theorists
Their 1AC isn't the kind of race theory their permutation evidence
describes- our alternative can endorse a MATERIALIST perspective
on race but their original arguments were IDEALIST race theory
Mike Cole Centre for Education for Social Justice , Bishop Grosseteste University College Lincoln , UK British Journal of
Sociology of Education, 33:2, 167-183 March 2012
My aim in this paper is not an overall Marxist response to CRT (but see Cole 2009a), but to address theoretical tensions between the
two paradigms, and to evaluate from a Marxist perspective the concepts of abstract racial domination, and the abolition of
whiteness. Critical race theorists such as Charles Mills (for example, Mills 2009) and David Gillborn (for example,
Gillborn 2008, 2009, 2010a, 2010b) are unappreciative of and hostile to Marxism. Others like Richard Delgado,
one of the founders of CRT, and of its most prominent advocates (for example, Delgado 2003), and Gloria Ladson-Billings (for
example, Ladson-Billings 2006) have retained a certain sympathy with Marxism and social class analysis.6
Indeed, as Richard Delgado (2001) points out, CRT has an idealist wing and a materialist wing . The
former, he argues, is concerned with discourse analysis, and maintains that racism and discrimination are matters
of thinking, attitude, categorization, and discourse (Delgado 2001). In focusing on words, symbols, stereotypes and categories
(Delgado 2003, 123), combating racism means that we have to rid ourselves of the texts, narratives, ideas and meaning that give rise
to it and convey negative messages about specific groups (2003, 123). Like post-structuralism the analytic tools are discourse
analysis (Delgado 2003, 123).
Materialist CRT, on the other hand, focuses on material factors and views
racism as a means by which society allocates privilege, status and wealth (Delgado
2001, 2). Materialist CRT scholars are interested in factors such as profits and the labor market
(Delgado 2003, 124). Such scholars are also interested in international relations and competition
and in the interests of elite groups, and the changing demands of the labor market and how this benefits or
disadvantages racial groups historically (Delgrado 2003, 124). The legal system is key in sanctioning or punishing racism,
depending on its larger agenda. Materialist
CRT, then, has an affinity with both Max Weber and Weberian analysis of
capitalism, and with Marxism. Delgado argues that CRT is almost entirely dominated by
the idealist wing of CRT and that this means that there are huge deficiencies in
our understanding of institutional racism and ways in which the law is being used
to serve dominant groups (2003, 124125). John Preston (for example, Preston 2007, 2010) has consistently argued
the case for utilizing Marxism and CRT. Thus it is surprising that he states that he agrees with Gillborn (2009) that Marxist critiques
of CRT are a sideshow (Preston 2010, 116). This underplays the importance that Marxists attach to getting the theory right in
order to get the practice right, to move forward from abstraction to concrete solutions for emancipation.
fanon
Their K misreads Fanonthe notion that we have to blow up
humanism to transcend it codes the world into false dichotomies
between Enlightenment colonizers and subalternsthats a bad
revolutionary praxisvote neg to affirm a revolutionary humanism
Pithouse, 3 Research Fellow at the Centre for Civil Society, University of Natal, Durban.
Richard Pithouse (2003) That the tool never possess the man: taking Fanon's
humanism seriously, Politikon: South African Journal of Political Studies, 30:1, 107-131,
DOI:10.1080/0258934032000147255)
Fanons reverence for the creative powers of the multitude does not mean that he
accepts things as they are or that he thinks that progress is easy or inevitable. Consciousness, he suggests, is
a process of transcendence and this transcendence is haunted by the problems of love and understanding.89 He argues
that it often requires a tremendous effort to rouse people from their lethargy and
tendency to objectify and therefore deny the humanity of both the self and the
other. But he retains a fundamental level of respect for all humanity and moves from
the assumption that every human being, no matter how wretched their
circumstances, carries the potential to be an authentic, self-actualising and productive being. His
thought is not egalitarian in the sense of aspiring to conformity, but Fanon does
share Marxs vision of a society in which everybody has, equally, the opportunity to develop
themselves freely. He presents any denial of the humanity of the self or the other as a serious moral failing: all the problems which
man faces on the subject of man can be reduced to this one question: Have I not, because of what I have done or failed to do,
contributed to an impoverishment of human reality? The question could also be formulated in this way: Have I at all times
demanded and brought out the man that is in me?90 There is a sense in which Fanons thought can be usefully described as an
immanent, in both senses of the term, synthesis of the Nietzschean valorisation of the struggle to be with the Marxist vision of
universal flourishing. So what? So
what if Fanon is a humanist? So what if, against the
positivists, we discover that that means something in the world of lived
experience? So what if Fanon developed a destalinised and radically democratic
radicalism before the poststructuralists? Fanon is not an end in himself. We do no justice to
his spirit by defending him while Bush bombs, the World Bank reorganises the
world so that the poor can step up their subsidisation of the rich and 600 of us die from a manageable
disease every day. Fanon did not invest his energies in the defence of Toussaint lOuverture. He made history.
Revolutionary humanism is the strongest current in the movement of movements
that seek to subordinate the market, state and empire to democratic control. In
Seattle and Chiappas and Namada and Vrygrond (Ons is nie fokken honde nie!) humanism is the
spontaneous, universal and enabling language of resistance. And it is at the core of the work of the great essayists
and scholars that inspire and are inspired in this movement of movements. Humanism animates a material force that is inventing
and tending and stealing hope. This matters. Everywherethe media, the academy, trade unions, non-governmental
organisations, government, business, social movementstranscendent ideas like The Market, The Leader, The Nation, Africa,
International Norms, The Party, Economic Fundamentals, The Struggle, The Foreign Investor, uBuntu, The International
Community, Competitiveness, Development and Professionalism slip into thought, so smoothly, as easy justification for choices that
inflict deprivation, suffering and death. This matters. We
are so constrained by colonial Manicheanism
that many of us think that we were born to take a side on the African potato versus anti-retrovirals
or Mugabe versus the white farmers or Bush versus Hussein; or that it is a crisis
when white policemen set their dogs on black Mozambicans but that Lindela is just
business. Business as usual. This matters. Humanism is just a way of saying that everybodys
right to self-creation matters. It is not even a map. Its just a signpost. It only matters when
we are lost.
Theyre wrong about Fanon

Will 13 (Dysophia is an Anarchist Magzine, http://dysophia.org.uk/dysophia-4-now-available/)
Fanon also left a puzzling legacy by writing Black

Skin, White Masks, which often is used to justify privilege
theory. However, two problems exist with such a treatment of BSWM. The first is that this
book was part of Fanons development; his working out of problems he saw and experienced. Second and more
importantly, almost all privilege theorists ignore the introduction and conclusion of the
work. This is strange considering those two chapters are the theoretical framework of the book. In
these two chapters Fanon expresses equality with all of humanity and denies anyone demanding
reparations or guilt of any kind for past historical oppressions. What else can Fanon mean by, I do not
have the right to allow myself to be mired in what the past has determined. I am
not the slave of the Slavery that dehumanized my ancestors. I as a man of color do not have the
right to hope that in the white man there will be a crystallization of guilt toward the past of my race. The gendered language aside,
this stands in stark contrast to privilege theory. Fanon stands at the heights of attempting to
reconcile the experiences of oppression with the need to develop human interactions and the
necessity of changing them through militant struggle. There is no doubt that Fanons attempt to have human
interactions with white people constantly clashed with white peoples racialized interactions with him. In other words, white people
do talk to people of color in condescending ways, dismiss POC issues as secondary, ignore POC etc. The issue is how to
address it when it happens and in that realm Privilege theory fails. Privilege theory puts too
much weight on consciousness and education . It ends up creating a politics of guilt by
birth. At the same time, there is no doubt that more education is needed on the history of white supremacy in the United States
and on a global level. Furthermore, the relationship of white supremacy and its effect on consciousness is
vital and a legitimate field of politics and philosophical inquiry. W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Michelle Wallace,
Frantz Fanon and others have all made vital contributions in the United States regarding this tradition. Re-framing the
debate along such a tradition is vital. New social relations can only be forged in collective
struggle of the most militant character. No amount of conversation and education can form new
relationships. It is only the mass involvement and struggle of oppressed people which can
ultimately destroy white supremacy, re-establish the humanity of people color, and create social
relationships between people as one among humans instead of the racially oppressed and white
oppressor.
house vs. field distinction
The house/field distinction and Uncle Tom accusations are
historically baseless and politically debilitating
In part, the inclination may stem from a corrosive legacy of Malcolm X. Malcolm was an
important cultural figure for most of the 1960s, before and perhaps even more so after his
death. He was not, however, an historian, and few formulations have done more to
misinform, distort and preempt popular understanding of American slavery than his
rhetorically very effective but historically facile house Negro/field Negro parable. It
doesnt map onto how even plantation slaverywhich accounted for only about half of
slaves by 1850operated. Not only was working in the house no major plum; it
hardly fit with the Uncle Tom stereotype, such as Tarantinos self-hating caricature,
Stephen. The well-known slave rebels Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey and
Robert Smalls all gainsay that image. Anyway, the Uncle Tom notion is not a useful
category for political analysis. It is only a denunciation; no one ever identifies under
that label. Yet its emptiness may be the source of its attractiveness. In disconnecting critique
from any discrete social practice and locating it instead in imputed pathological
psychologyWhy, that house Negro loved the master more than the master loved himself,
pace Malcolmthe notion individualizes political criticism on the (non-existent)
racially self-hating caricature, and, of course, anyone a demagogue chooses to
denounce. Because it centers on motives rather than concrete actions and stances, it
leaves infinite room both for making and deflecting ad hominem charges and, of
course, inscribes racial authenticity as the key category of political judgment.
malcolm x
Challenging capitalism is a prerequisite to the affMalcolm Xs
transition from religious nationalism to an explicit class focus proves
that the alt solves better
Socialist Alternative 5 (7/1. http://www.socialistalternative.org/2005/07/01/you-cant-have-
capitalism-without-racism-looking-back-at-malcolm-x-1925-1965/)
February 21 marked the 40th anniversary of Malcolm Xs assassination. Only 39 years old at the time of his murder, Malcolm X would have turned 80
in the
on May 19 of this year. Today, while the mass mobilizations of the civil rights movement in the 1960s did away with legally-codified racism,
40 years since Malcolms death the underlying economic roots of racial inequality
have not gone away. In fact, the social conditions facing many African Americans
have worsened. According to the U.S. census bureau, the official poverty rate for White Americans is a high 8.1%. However, the rate for
Black Americans is an enormous 24.1%. In the U.S., which has the worlds largest imprisoned population both in absolute numbers and as a percentage
of total population, black people account for just over 12% of the total population but over 44% of the prison population. Enduring
realities like these led Malcolm X to claim the system in this country cannot
produce freedom for an Afro-American. It is impossible for this system, this economic
system, this social system, this system period. More Than a Nationalist Malcolm X is most widely known as a leader of the black nationalist
Nation of Islam. What is less known is that in the last year of his life Malcolm left the Nation and his
political views changed drastically. As the civil rights movement began to pick up steam in the early 1960s,
Malcolms will to participate in politics ran up against the conservatism of Nation
leaders who wanted to remain a mostly religious and cultural organization. By 1964, the corruption
of Nation leader Elijah Muhammad and developments in Malcolms political thinking led him to leave the organization that had trained him as a leader
and an organizer. During the 50 weeks between Malcolms split from the Nation of Islam and his murder, his ideas and political methods changed
rapidly. Malcolm began to move away from the rigid black nationalism of the Nation of Islam. On
his trip to Africa in 1964,
Malcolm met non-blacks who he considered true revolutionaries dedicated to
overthrowing the system of exploitation that exists on this earth by any means
necessary. Reflecting on his experiences in foreign countries, Malcolm said, I
had to do a lot of thinking and reappraising of my definition of black nationalism.
Can we sum up the solution to the problems confronting our people as black
nationalism? And if you noticed, I havent been using the expression for several months. Malcolms Development as a Revolutionary During
the last year of his life, Malcolm moved towards recognizing the system of capitalism as the
root cause of the oppression and indignities suffered by African Americans.
Though he never rejected Islam, he stopped doing his political organizing on a
religious basis. In June 1964, he founded the secular Organization of Afro-American Unity. At the OAAUs founding rally, Malcolm stated
we want equality by any means necessary. In a 1964 speech, he said you cant have capitalism without racism. Malcolm never became a socialist and
he never broke with some of the conservative ideas he had acquired early in his life. However, at
the time of his death the
trajectory of his political thought was towards anti-capitalism, internationalism,
and revolution. Those who misrepresent Malcolm X as an anti-white racist do so only by ignoring much of what he actually said. In
January 1965, he said I believe that there will ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those that do the oppressing. I believe that there will be
a clash between those who want freedom, justice, and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the systems of exploitation It
is
incorrect to classify the revolt of the Negro as simply a racial conflict of black against white, or as a
purely American problem. Rather, we are today seeing a global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited
against the exploiter. Malcolms identification of the economic and political system of global
capitalism as the underlying basis of racial oppression and his arguments in favor
of international political struggle anticipated the worldwide growth of
revolutionary movements in the late 1960s. Malcolm was a leader with serious credibility among the most militant sections of
African Americans and with an uncompromising commitment to revolutionary change. Any movement he built was not likely to be placated by
tokenism or co-opted into big business political parties. Malcolms founding of a secular, radical political organization prepared to work within the
growing civil rights movement represented a real threat to the establishment. Only half of the 40,000 pages in FBI files on Malcolm X have been made
public. Manning Marable, a prominent historian who will soon complete a new biography of Malcolm based on previously unknown material, believes
evidence points clearly toward New York City Police and FBI involvement in Malcolms assassination (Democracy Now interview, 2/21/05). Marables
biography, to be published in 2008, also promises to shed important new light on Malcolms political trajectory at the end of his life. Opposition to
Imperialism and Independence From the Democratic Party Having learned first about the governments vicious treatment of black people in the U.S.,
Malcolm could not help but recognize similar underlying racism in the U.S. governments interventions overseas. A man who had always survived by
his wits, Malcolm understood why President Lyndon JohnsonWwas I l Esending
R E d o peace
p O S T corps
MOdE toRNigeria
N i s T S and
C O mercenaries
M E F r O M ?to1the
2 8 Congo. He judged U.S.
interventions around the world according to the material ambitions of the ruling class rather than the things that politicians said to drum up support.
He spoke out against colonialism and apartheid in Africa, the U.S. interventions in the Congo and in Vietnam, and in support of the Cuban Revolution.
usfg racism
Critique of state on racial grounds ultimately buttresses
libertarianismracism developed as a strategy to maintain the
economy of slaverythe problem with the right isnt abject racism so
much as insistence on a notion of property, which only our K
addresses
Forget about possible evocations of the Confederacy; this is Fireflys ideological milieu. Its vision is anti-government,
punto, a multiculturalist, and thus left-seeming, anti-statism. The main expression of the central authoritys
oppressiveness that affronts Serenitys band of inter-planetary smugglers is its exorbitant taxation and arbitrary, corrupt regulation
of trade. The captain and central character, also the most given to political declamation, is a committed free-trader. Fireflys
defenders describe its politics as libertarian. That is not only compatible with its multiculturalist egalitarianism; the two can fit
organically.
But, as Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedmanas well as their acolyte, Thatcherall
were very much aware, there is no such thing as a left libertarianism. The belief that
there is reflects the wishful thinking, or disingenuousness, of those who dont want to have to square their politics with
their desired self-perception.
Libertarianism is a shuck, more an aesthetics than a politics. Libertarians dont want the state to do anything
other than what they want the state to do. And, as its founding icons understood, it is fundamentally about property
rights ber alles. Mises and Hayek made clear in theory, and Thatcher and Friedman as Pinochets muse in Chile did in practice,
that a libertarian society requires an anti-popular, authoritarian government to make sure that property rights are kept sacrosanct.
Thats why its so common that a few bad days, some sweet nothings, and a couple of snazzy
epaulets will turn a libertarian into an open fascist. Whether or not Firefly contains more or less abstruse
secessionist allegory, the fact that that issue is the basis of concern about its politics is a window onto a core problem of the current
political situation. It
reflects a critical perspective that accepts neoliberal ideological
hegemony as nature and finds its own standard of justice in the rearview mirror. To the extent
that Firefly embraces a libertarian politics, what it would share with the slave South isnt racism but
something more fundamental. Insofar as the freedom the heroes yearn for includes destruction of
the regulatory apparatus of the state in favor of a market-fundamentalist idea of freedom or
liberty, no matter how racially diverse and egalitarian that world would be, it would be closer
than one might think to the essential normative premise of the social order of which
slavery was the cornerstone, the conviction that individual property rights are absolute and inviolable.
The southern political economy didnt become grounded on slavery because it was racist; it
became racist because it was grounded on slavery.30 That is, it was grounded on the
absolute right of property-owners to define and control their propertyincluding property in other human
beingsas they wished without any interference or regulation, except, of course, reliance on the police powers of the state to enforce
their rights to and in such property. This takes us back to the necessity for authoritarian government, about which there was little
disagreement within the dominant planter class.
Prominent pro-slavery ideologist George Fitzhugh was resolutely antagonistic to free-market, especially
free-labor, liberalism and would hardly be considered a philosophical libertarian. But neither would Hayek or Ron Paul have been
when describing the authoritarian regime essential for realizing property-based Liberty. As one of the most vocal proponents of the
argument that slavery was a positive good for all involved, Fitzhugh doubled down on the matter of holding property rights in people
as the sectional crisis intensified. His
1854 book, Sociology for the South, or, the Failure of a Free Society, argued for
enslavement of poor whites as well as blacks. James Henry Hammond, U.S. Senator and former governor of
South Carolina, memorialized this perspective in what came to be known as his Mudsill Speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate in
1858 (also Djangos big year). Speaking in Congress asWaI member
l E R E d o of
pa party
OS T M O that
d E R counted
N i s T S C northern
O M E F r Ofree
M ? white
1 3 0 workers among its core
constituencies, Hammond was politic enough not to propose enslaving them. However, he did underscore the essential reduction of
freedom to property rights, describing the slave South as enjoying an extent of political freedom, combined with entire security,
such as no other people ever enjoyed upon the face of the earth. And he argued that, in effect, freedom was more complete and
more secure in the South because slavery permitted suppression and absolute exclusion from civic voice of its mud-sills the
stratum necessary to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life [without which] you would not have that other class
which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. Thats what made the South more effectively free than the North. Freedom, or
liberty, meant the unbridled license of the propertied class.
The rhetoric of antebellum fire-eaters and the ordinances of secession they crafted stand out for the vehemence of their protests that
their essential liberties were under attack. The
secessionists framed their extravagant denunciations of the
national government for its potential infringement of their right to hold property in human
beings in language that from our historical location seems Freudian in the blatancy with which
they declared themselves as literally fearing enslavement by the United States. But it wasnt
psychological projection or reaction formation. They considered any potential infringement on
absolute property rights as indeed tantamount to enslavement. For them property is the only
real right; therefore, property-holders are the only people in the society with rights that count
for anything, and their rights trump all else.
This is a perspective that can provide some badly needed clarity on debates in contemporary
politics regarding the relation of race, racism and inequality. For example, Ron and Rand Paul, libertarians of the highest
order, do not oppose the 1964 Civil Rights Law because they hate, or even dont like, black
people. (And, for the record, whenever one finds oneself agreeing at all with Kanye West about anything, its time to take a step
back, breathe deeply and reassess.) They oppose it, as theyve made clear, because it infringes on
property rights. They dislike black people because they understand, correctly, that black people are very likely to be
prominent among those committed to pursuing greater equality. They oppose black peoples demands and
all others intended to mitigate inequality because any efforts to do so would
necessarily impinge on the absolute sanctity of property rights. I dont mean to suggest that
the Pauls arent racist; Im pretty confident they are, no matter how much they might protest the assessment. My point is that
determining whether theyre racist, then exposing and denouncing them for it, doesnt reach to
what is most consequentially wrong and dangerous about them or for that matter what makes their
racism something more significant than that of the random bigot who lives around the corner on
disability.
Returning to Firefly, we dont ever have to confront Captain Mals and his crews libertarianism beyond platitudes and the sort of
errant patter of an adolescent irked at being told to clean up her room. We dont because they arent in a position to demonstrate
what their libertarianism would look like in practice. What they do perform regularly is liberalmulticulturalism, which no
doubt reinforces a sense that the shows gestural anti-statism is at least consonant with an
egalitarian politics. And that is a quality that makes multiculturalist egalitarianism, or identitarianism, and its various
strategic programsanti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-heteronormativity, etc.neoliberalisms loyal opposition. Their focus is on
making neoliberalism more just and, often enough, more truly efficient. Their objective is that,
however costs and benefits are distributed, the distribution should not disproportionately harm
or disadvantage the populations for which they advocate. But what if neoliberalism really cant
be made more just? (And, to be clear, when I say neoliberalism, I mean capitalism with the gloves off and back on the
offensive.) What if the historical truth of capitalist class power is that, without direct,
explicit and relentless, zero-sum challenge to its foundations in a social order built on
its priority and dominance in the social division of labor, we will never be able to win more than
a shifting around of the material burdens of inequality, reallocating them and recalibrating their
incidence among different populations? And what if creation of such populations as given,
natural-seeming entitiesfirst as differentially valued pools of labor, in the ideological equivalent of an evolving game of
musical chairs, then eventually also as ostensibly discrete market niches within the mass consumption regimeis a crucial
element in capitalisms logic of social reproduction? To the extent that is the case,
multiculturalist egalitarianism and W I l the
E R E dpolitical
o p O S T M O d programs
E R N i s T S C O M E that
F r O M ?follow
131 from it
reinforce a key mystification that legitimizes the systemic foundation of the
inequalities to which those programs object.
Regimes of class hierarchy depend for their stability on ideologies that legitimize inequalities by
representing them as the result of natural differenceswhere you (or they) are in the society is where you (or
they) deserve to be. Folk taxonomies define and sort populations into putatively distinctive groups on the basis of characteristics
ascribed to them. Such taxonomies rely on circular self-validation in explaining the positions groups
occupy in the social order as suited to the essential, inherent characteristics, capabilities and limitations posited in the taxonomys
just-so stories. These ideological constructions and the social processes through which they are
reproduced, including the common sense that arises from self-fulfilling prophecy, are what
Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields call racecraft.31 An implication of the racecraft notion is that
the ideology, or taxonomy, of race is always as much the cover story as the source of even the
inequalities most explicitly linked to race.
James Henry Hammonds mudsill theory is instructive. The southern system was superior and afforded greater freedom, he argued,
because its mudsills were held to belong to an ascriptively distinct and naturally subordinate population. The North was a less secure
and stable society because its mudsills were of your own race; you are brothers of one blood. They are your equals in natural
endowment or intellect, and they feel galled by their degradation. Our slaves do not vote. We give them no political power. Yours do
vote, and, being the majority, they are the depositaries of all your political power. He in effect judged the Norths ruling class to be
more unstable than the Souths because it hadnt been able to turn its mudsills into a sufficiently different ascriptive population.
(Fitzhugh, the theorist, proposed a remedy for that problem; Hammond, the politician, understood that was easier said than done.)
Hammond was no doubt sincere in his conviction that blacks were by nature fit to be slaves, of
another and inferior race. But notwithstanding his sincerity, that view was relatively new as a
defense of slavery. Alexander Stephens indicated as much in the Cornerstone Speech and
noted that the dominant perspective of the Founding generation was that enslavement of the
African was in violation of the laws of nature. Of course, Stephens insisted that that perspective was
fundamentally wrong in that it rested upon the assumption of the equality of the races. The defense of slavery that he
and Hammond articulated dated only from the 1830s, when the combined pressures of a surge
in abolitionist activism and articulations of free labor ideology outside the South called for a
more robust defense of the peculiar institution than the fundamentally apologetic contention
that it was a necessary evil economically. South Carolinas father of the secessionist treason, John C. Calhoun, gave
the new argument its systematic expression in Slavery a Positive Good, an 1837 speech to the U. S. Senate.32
That argument aligned with the emergent race science that would provide the basic folk taxonomy through which Americans
apprehend race and categories of racial classification to this day. A central text of that nascent race science was the 1854 tome Types
of Mankind, co-authored by George R. Gliddon, a British-born Egyptologist, and Josiah C. Nott, a native South Carolinian and
wealthy slave-holding physician in Mobile, Alabama.33 In 1851 Samuel A. Cartwright, a plantation physician and pioneer in the
science of racial medicine, published in De Bows Review a paper, Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race, which he had
initially presented at a Louisiana medical convention and in which he examined, among other racial particularities, a condition he
called drapetomaniaa disease of the mind that induced slaves to run away from service.34 Race
theory, that is, took
shape as a defense of slavery only in the last decades of the institutions life; it was
the expression of a beleaguered slavocracy doubling down to protect its property rights in
human beings.
Hammond may have believed that hed always believed the positive good argument and that black slavery was natures racial decree.
If he did, he would only have been demonstrating the power of ascriptive ideologies to impose themselves as reality. Marxist theorist
Harry Changthus analogized race to Marxs characterization of the fetish character of money. Just
as money is the material condensation of the reification of a relation called value and a
function-turned-into-an-object, race is also a functiona relation in the capitalist division of
laborturned into an object.35
Race and gender are the ascriptive hierarchies most familiar to us because they have been most
successfully challenged since the second half of the last century; ideologies of ascriptive difference are most powerful when
they are simply taken as nature and dont require defense. The significant and lasting institutional victories that
have been won against racial and gender subordination and discrimination, as well as the cultural
victories against racism and sexism as ideologies, have rendered those taxonomies less potent as justifications for
ascriptive inequality than they had been. As capitalism has evolved new articulations of the social division
of labor, and as the victories against racial and gender hierarchy have been consolidated, the
causal connections between those ideologies and manifest inequality have become still more
attenuated.
Race and gender dont exhaust the genus of ascriptive hierarchies. Other taxonomies do and have done the same sort of work as
those we understand as race. The feebleminded and the born criminal, for example, were equivalent to racial taxa as ideologies of
ascriptive hierarchy but did not hinge on the phenotypical narratives that have anchored the race idea. Victorian British elites
ascribed essential, race-like difference to the English working class. The
culture of poverty and the underclass
overlap racially disparaged populations but arent exactly reducible to familiar racial
taxonomies. Somelike super predators and crack babieshave had more fleeting life spans.
Their common sense explanatory power hinges significantly on the extent to which they
comport with the perspectives and interests of the social orders dominant, opinion-shaping
strata; as Marx and Engels observed in 1845, the class which is the ruling material force of
society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.36
pessimism (wilderson)
Their understanding of inequality through the primacy of slavery is
intellectually dangerous and should be rejectedif youre looking for
good Wilderson answers, youve come to the right place
That sort of Malcolm X/blaxploitation narrative, including the insistence that Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind continue to
shape Americans understandings of slavery, also is of a piece with a
line of anti-racist argument and mobilization
that asserts powerful continuities between current racial inequalities and either slavery or the
Jim Crow regime. This line of argument has been most popularly condensed recently in Michelle Alexanders The New Jim
Crow, which analogizes contemporary mass incarceration to the segregationist regime. But
even she, after much huffing and puffing and asserting the relation gesturally throughout the book,
ultimately acknowledges that the analogy fails.37 And it would have to fail because
the segregationist regime was the artifact of a particular historical and political moment in a
particular social order. Moreover, the rhetorical force of the analogy with Jim Crow or
slavery derives from the fact that those regimes are associated symbolically with
strong negative sanctions in the general culture because they have been vanquished. In
that sense all versions of the lament that its as if nothing has changed give themselves the
lie. They are effective only to the extent that things have changed significantly.
The tendency to craft political critique by demanding that we fix our gaze in the rearview
mirror appeals to an intellectual laziness. Marking superficial similarities with familiar
images of oppression is less mentally taxing than attempting to parse the multifarious,
often contradictory dynamics and relations that shape racial inequality in particular and politics
in general in the current moment. Assertions that phenomena like the Jena, Louisiana, incident,
the killings of James Craig Anderson and Trayvon Martin, and racial disparities in incarceration
demonstrate persistence of old-school, white supremacist racism and charges that the sensibilities of
Thomas Dixon and Margaret Mitchell continue to shape most Americans understandings of slavery do important,
obfuscatory ideological work. They lay claim to a moral urgency that, as Mahmood
Mamdani argues concerning the rhetorical use of charges of genocide, enables disparaging efforts either to
differentiate discrete inequalities or to generate historically specific causal accounts
of them as irresponsible dodges that abet injustice by temporizing in its face.38 But more is at work here as well.
Insistence on the transhistorical primacy of racism as a source of inequality is a

class politics. Its the politics of a stratum of the professional-managerial class whose material
location and interests, and thus whose ideological commitments, are bound up with parsing,
interpreting and administering inequality defined in terms of disparities among ascriptively defined
populations reified as groups or even cultures. In fact, much of the intellectual life of
this stratum is devoted to shoehorning into the rubric of racism all manner of
inequalities that may appear statistically as racial disparities.39 And that project shares
capitalisms ideological tendency to obscure races foundations, as well as the
foundations of all such ascriptive hierarchies, in historically specific political
economy. This felicitous convergence may help explain why proponents of cultural politics are so inclined to treat the
products and production processes of the mass entertainment industry as a terrain for political struggle and debate. They dont see
the industrys imperatives as fundamentally incompatible with the notions of a just society they seek to advance. In fact, they
share its fetishization of heroes and penchant for inspirational stories of
individual Overcoming. This sort of politics of representation is no more than an
image-management discourse within neoliberalism. That strains of an ersatz left
imagine it to be something more marks the extent of our defeat. And then, of course, theres
that Upton Sinclair point.
race (reed 05)
Even if inequality manifests in racially, if we win race is a flawed
explanation for that inequality then their politics can only stand in for
classthat makes the right more influential and abandons political
accountability
Party and a frequent contributor to The Nation (November, Adolph, The Real Divide,
http://progressive.org/mag_reed1105)
Race in this context becomes a cheap and safely predictable alternative to pressing
a substantive critique of the sources of this horror in New Orleans and its likely outcomes.
Granted, the images projected from the Superdome, the convention center, overpasses, and rooftops seemed to
cry out a stark statement of racial inequality. But thats partly because in the
contemporary U.S., race is the most familiar language of inequality or injustice. Its
what we see partly because its what were accustomed to seeing, what we look for. As I argued
in The Nation, classas income, wealth, and access to material resources, including a
safety net of social connectionswas certainly a better predictor than race of who
evacuated the city before the hurricane, who was able to survive the storm itself, who was warehoused in the
Superdome or convention center or stuck without food and water on the parched overpasses, who is marooned in shelters in
Houston or elsewhere, and whose interests will be factored into the reconstruction of the city, who will be able to return. New
Orleans is a predominantly black city, and it is a largely poor city. The black population is
disproportionately poor, and the poor population is disproportionately black . It is not surprising that
those who were stranded and forgotten, probably those who died, were conspicuously black and poor. None of that,
however, means that raceor even racism is adequate as an explanation of those
patterns of inequality. And race is especially useless as a basis on which to craft a politics
that can effectively pursue social justice. Before the yes, buts begin, I am not
claiming that systemic inequalities in the United States are not significantly racialized. The evidence
of racial disparities is far too great for any sane or honest person to deny, and they largely emerge from a history of discrimination
and racial injustice. Nor am I saying that we should overlook that fact in the interest of some
idealized nonracial or post-racial politics. Let me be blunter than Ive ever been in print about what I am saying:
As a political strategy, exposing racism is wrongheaded and at best an utter waste
of time. It is the political equivalent of an appendix: a useless vestige of an earlier evolutionary moment thats usually innocuous
but can flare up and become harmful. There are two reasons for this judgment. One is that the language of race and
racism is too imprecise to describe effectively even how patterns of injustice and
inequality are racialized in a post-Jim Crow world. Racism can cover everything from
individual prejudice and bigotry, unself-conscious perception of racial stereotypes, concerted
group action to exclude or subordinate, or the results of ostensibly neutral market forces. It
can be a one-word description and explanation of patterns of unequal distribution of income and
wealth, services and opportunities, police brutality, a stockbrokers inability to get a cab,
neighborhood dislocation and gentrification, poverty, unfair criticism of black or Latino athletes,
or being denied admission to a boutique. Because the category is so porous, it doesnt
really explain anything. Indeed, it is an alternative to explanation. Exposing racism apparently
makes those who do it feel good about themselves. Doing so is cathartic, though
safely so, in the same way that proclaiming ones patriotism is in other circles. It is a
summary, concluding judgment rather than a preliminary to a concrete argument. It doesnt allow for politically significant
distinctions; in fact, as a strategy, exposing racism requires subordinating the discrete features of a political situation to the
overarching goal of asserting the persistence and power of racism as an abstraction. This leads to the second reason for my harsh
judgment. Many liberals gravitate to the language of racism not simply because it makes
them feel righteous but also because WIlERitE doesnt
d o p O S T M Ocarry
d E R N i s any
T S C O political
M E F r O M ? 1 3warrant
6 beyond
exhorting people not to be racist. In fact, it often is exactly the opposite of a call to action. Such
formulations as racism is our national disease or similar pieties imply that racism is a natural
condition. Further, it implies that most whites inevitably and immutably oppose
blacks and therefore cant be expected to align with them around common political
goals. This view dovetails nicely with Democrats contention that the only way to win elections is to reject a social justice agenda
that is stigmatized by association with blacks and appeal to an upper-income white constituency concerned exclusively with issues
like abortion rights and the deficit. Upper-status liberals are more likely to have relatively secure,
rewarding jobs, access to health care, adequate housing, and prospects for providing for the kids education, and are
much less likely to be in danger of seeing their nineteen-year-old go off to Iraq. They tend, therefore, to have a
higher threshold of tolerance for political compromises in the name of electing this years sorry
pro-corporate Democrat. Acknowledging racismand, of course, being pro-choiceis one of
the few ways many of them can distinguish themselves from their Republican co-
workers and relatives. As the appendix analogy suggests, insistence on understanding inequality in racial terms is a vestige of
an earlier political style. The race line persists partly out of habit and partly because it connects with the material interests of those
who would be race relations technicians. In this sense, race is not an alternative to class. The
tendency to insist on
the primacy of race itself stems from a class perspective. For roughly a generation
it seemed reasonable to expect that defining inequalities in racial terms would
provoke some, albeit inadequate, remedial response from the federal government. But thats no longer the case;
nor has it been for quite some time. That approach presumed a federal government that was
concerned at least not to appear racially unjust. Such a government no longer exists. A key
marker of the rights victory in national politics is that the discussion of race now largely
serves as a way to reinforce a message to whites that the public sector is there
merely to help some combination of black, poor, and loser. Liberals have legitimized this
perspective through their own racial bad faith. For many whites, the discussion of race also reinforces the idea that cutting public
spending is justifiably aimed at weaning a lazy black underclass off the dole orin the supposedly benign, liberal Democratic
versionteaching them personal responsibility. New
Orleans is instructive. The right has a built-in
counter to the racism charge by mobilizing all the scurrilous racial stereotypes that it has
propagated to justify attacks on social protection and government responsibility
all along. Only those who already are inclined to believe that racism is the source
of inequality accept that charge. For others, nasty victim-blaming narratives abound to explain away obvious
racial disparities. What we must do, to pursue justice for displaced, impoverished New Orleanians as well as for
the society as a whole, is to emphasize that their plight is a more extreme, condensed
version of the precarious position of millions of Americans today, as more and more
lose health care, bankruptcy protection, secure employment, affordable housing, civil liberties, and
access to education. And their plight will be the future of many, many more people in this
country once the bipartisan neoliberal consensus reduces government to a tool of
corporations and the investor class alone.
slavery
Slavery is rampant- fixation on past slavery misses the point -
neoliberalism drives the slave trade, not racial animus
Terrence McNally 8-24-09
http://www.alternet.org/story/142171/there_are_more_slaves_today_than_at_any_time_in_
human_history
The world suffers global recession, enormous inequity, hunger, deforestation,

pollution, climate change, nuclear weapons, terrorism, etc. To those who say were
not really making progress, many might point to the fact that at least weve
eliminated slavery. But sadly that is not the truth. One hundred forty-three years
after passage of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and 60 years after Article 4 of the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of
Human Rights banned slavery and the slave trade worldwide, there are more slaves than at any time in human
history -- 27 million. Todays slavery focuses on big profits and cheap lives. It is not
about owning people like before, but about using them as completely disposable
tools for making money. During the four years that Benjamin Skinner researched modern-day slavery, he posed as a buyer at illegal
brothels on several continents, interviewed convicted human traffickers in a Romanian prison and endured giardia, malaria, dengue and a bad
motorcycle accident. But Skinner is most haunted by his experience in a brothel in Bucharest, Romania, where he was offered a young woman with
Down syndrome in exchange for a used car. Currently a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School of Government,
and previously a special assistant to Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, Skinner has written for Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, Foreign Policy and
others. He was named one of National Geographics Adventurers of the Year 2008. His first book, now in paperback, is A Crime So Monstrous: Face to
Face with Modern-Day Slavery. Terrence McNally: What first got you interested in slavery? Benjamin Skinner: The fuel began before I was born. The
abolitionism in my blood began at least as early as the 18th century, when my Quaker ancestors stood on soapboxes in Connecticut and railed against
slavery. I had other relatives that werent Quaker, but had the same beliefs. My great-great-great-grandfather fought with the Connecticut artillery,
believing that slavery was an abomination that could only be overturned through bloodshed. Yet today, after the deaths of 360,000 Union soldiers,
after over a dozen conventions and 300 international treaties, there are more slaves than at any point in human history. TM: Is that raw numbers or as
a percentage of the population? BS: I
want to be very clear what I mean when I say the word
slavery. If you look it up in Webster's dictionary, the first definition is "drudgery
or toil." It's become a metaphor for undue hardship, because we assume that once
you legally abolish something, it no longer exists. But as a matter of reality for up
to 27 million people in the world, slaves are those forced to work, held through
fraud, under threat of violence, for no pay beyond subsistence. It's a very spare
definition. TM: Whose definition is that? BS: Kevin Bales's. [His Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global
Economy was nominated for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize, and he is the president of Free the Slaves ] I'm glad you asked because he's not given enough
credit. He originally
came up with the number 27 million, and it's subsequently been
buttressed by international labor organization studies. Governments will acknowledge estimates of some
12.3 million slaves in the world, but NGOs in those same countries say the numbers are more than twice as high. Kevin did a lot of the academic work
that underpinned my work. I wanted to go out and get beyond the numbers, to show what one person's slavery meant. In the process of doing that, I
met hundreds of slaves and survivors. TM: As an investigative reporter rather than an academic, you take us where the trades are made, the suffering
takes place and the survivors eke out their existences. BS: In an underground brothel in Bucharest, I was offered a young woman with the visible effect
of Down syndrome. One of her arms was covered in slashes, where I can only assume she was trying to escape daily rape the only way she knew how.
That young woman was offered to me in trade for a used car. TM: This was a Romanian used car? BS: Yes, and I knew that I could get that car for about
1,500 euros. While that may sound like a very low price for human life, consider that five hours from where I live in New York -- a three-hour flight
down to Port au Prince, Haiti, and an hour from the airport -- I
was able to negotiate for a 10-year-old girl for
cleaning and cooking, permanent possession and sexual favors. What do you think
the asking price was? TM: I don't know ... $7,500? BS: They asked for $100, and I
talked them down to $50. Now to put that in context: Going back to the time when my abolitionist ancestors were on their
soapbox, in 1850, you could buy a healthy grown male for the equivalent of about $40,000. TM: When I first read such big numbers, I was shocked. BS:
This is not to diminish the horrors that those workers would face, nor to diminish their dehumanization one bit. It was an abomination then as it is
today. But
in the mid-19th century, masters viewed their slaves as an investment. But
here's the thing: When a slave costs $50 on the street in broad daylight in Port au
Prince -- by the way, this was in a decent neighborhood, everybody knew where these men were and what they did -- such people
are, to go back to Kevin's term, eminently disposable in the eyes of their masters.
Slavery is a bad lens for modern oppressionour ev is comparative

suppresses class inquiry andWexports
I l E R E d o p O Sa
T MUSA-centric
O d E R N i s T S C O M E F r Onarrative
M? 138
One of two major tenets of CRT that Cole (2008a, b, 2009; see also Cole and Maisuria (2007, 2009)) critically examine is CRTs
idea that the concept of white supremacy better expresses oppression in contemporary societies based on
race than does the concept of racism. Cole and Maisuria (and Cole) argue that Critical Race Theory
homogenises all white people together in positions of class power and privilege, which, of course,
is factually incorrect, both with respect to social class inequality in general, and, as will be shown
in later in this paper, with reference to xenoracialization. Cole and Maisuria (2007) continue, it is
certainly not white people as a whole who are in this hegemonic position, nor white people as a whole
who benefit from current education policy, or any other legislation. Indeed the white working class, as part of the
working class in general, consistently fares badly in the education system. Cole (2008a) notes that, in
focusing on issues of color and being divorced from matters related to capitalist requirements
with respect to the labour market, CRT is ill-equipped to analyse the discourse of xenoracism and
processes of xenoracialization. McGary (1999:91) points out that Black people have been used in ways that
white people have not. Youngs (2001) comment (with which I and Cole and Maisuria would concur) is that
McGarys observation may be true, but it does not mean that whites have not also been used.
Young continues, yes, whites may be used differently, but they are still used because that is the logic of
exploitative regimes people are used, that is to say, their labor is commodified and exchanged for profit. Young
continues, in his critique of McGary, that such a view disconnects black alienation from other social
relations; hence, it ultimately reifies race, and, in doing so, suppresses materialist inquiries
into the class logic of race. That is to say, the meaning of race is not to be found within its own
internal dynamics but rather in dialectical relation to and as an ideological justification of the
exploitative wage-labor economy. Critical Race Theory, and other similar theories of race salience, such as (Molefi
Kete Asante, and of Paul Gilroy (2001), critiqued in Young, 2006) are understandable, as Leonardo (2004) notes, in the USA, as a
salient subjective lens and understanding/analysis of felt (and indeed, of course, actual and widespread) oppression. As Leonardo
(2004), Young (2006), Cole and Maisuria (2007), and Cole (2008b) note, Critical Race Theory, just as earlier
theories such as that of Fanon and Negritude, do draw into the limelight, do expose and represent black
experience, humilation, oppression, racism. But they collude, just as much as race equivalence theorists such as
Michael W. Apple, in super-elevating subjective consciousness of one aspect of identity and
thereby occluding the (raced and gendered) classessential nature of capitalism and the
labour-capital relation. As such it seeks social democratic reformism, the winning of equal rights and
opportunities within a capitalist (albeit reformed) economy and society. As Young (2006) puts it, unlike
many commentators who engage race matters, I do not isolate these social sites and view race as a local
problem, which would lead to reformist measures along the lines of either legal reform or a cultural-ideological
battle to win the hearts and minds of people and thus keep the existing socioeconomic
arrangements intact . . . the eradication of race oppression also requires a totalizing
political project: the transformation of existing capitalism a system which produces
difference (the racial/gender division of labor) and accompanying ideological narratives that justify the
resulting social inequality. Hence, my project articulates a transformative theory of race a theory that reclaims
revolutionary class politics in the interests of contributing toward a post-racist society. Critical Race Theory seems
analytically flawed, to be based on the category error of assigning race as the primary form of
oppression in capitalist society, and to be substantially situationally specific to the USA,
with its horrific experience and legacy of slavery. It also seems to me to be a form of left radical
United States imperialist hegemonizing, that is, of USA-based academics projecting
on to other countries those experiences W I l E R E d and
o p O S analyses
T M O d E R N i s T Sand
C O M policy
E F r O M ? perspectives
139 that
derive most specifically from the USA experience of slavery and its contemporary
effects. I am very much aware of the existence and horrors of racism in, for example, Britain and Europe in general.18
Notwithstanding those horrors, the Critical Race Theory analysis would appear to have less significance and applicability in, for
example, Western and Eastern Europe, or, for example, India, Pakistan, and Nepal, than in the USA.
white privilege
Fixation on white privilege is American exceptionalismmakes it
impossible to judge impersonal social structures across disparate
historiestheir method recreates colonialism and undermines
resistance
Dnal O'Driscoll PhD 13 (Dysophia is Anarchist Magzine, http://dysophia.org.uk/dysophia-4-now-available/)
Sticking with skin-colour as a useful example for the moment, what we have is a very simplistic view of race that is
used in many circles to overlook other issues. For instance, by focusing on skin colour, other
forms of racism and ethnic struggle are glossed over e.g. inter-'white' racism in
Northern Ireland; or against travellers and Eastern Europeans immigrants. The reliance
on particular forms of anti-racism theory has meant 'White' has become synonymous with the
privileged / hegemonic group which has the effect of creating the belief among some activists
that because some groups are white-skinned means they cannot know racism, so denying their
experience. In a similar process, this binary can treat all 'non-whites' as a homogenous group whose
experience is universal that is of being oppressed. Inter-group tensions and racism are likewise ignored. It allows people
to ignore how social class and national culture affects experience of racism for different peoples. Just because someone has an attribute that confers
privilege in some contexts, there are other factors which mean they don't get those benefits in others. Their experience is not so much devalued as
considered non-existent. This is something commonly seen in the way 'white male' is used as a set phrase, yet also is played on in a classist way, for
example in discussions of 'chavs'. Experiences
of patriarchy and economic powerlessness are relevant across
all situations of concern in privilege politics, and are just as destructive to people who fall into
the broadly drawn 'oppressor' groups as they are to those in the oppressed groups. I believe this is
in danger of becoming a form of cultural / academic imperialism centred on the
US experience, and emphasises why we need to develop our own anarchist theory and practice
of privilege theory. In particular, the notion of 'whiteness' is very much based on US racial
laws and is not applicable to the situation in other parts of the world. It is rarely
asked if the wholehearted application to Europe is actually appropriate. The irony is that, in the UK at least, it
is an imposition of identity by sections of the anti-racist Left on oppressed populations who do
not see themselves in those terms. Tariq Modood, in particular, points out how inappropriate the terminology of 'white' and 'black'
as political terms are for the experiences of Muslims and South Asians in Europe (albeit, he is a liberal intellectual who relies on laws and states for
solutions)8.
(continued)
This 'pacification of the oppressed' aspect of the implementation of privilege theory is pointed out in the article, Privilege Politics is Reformism,
published by the Black Orchid Collective.10 They argue it is being applied in a way that does not challenge the liberal-capitalist structure of society.
The aspirations of oppressed groups ceases to be to be about radical social change and a fair,
just society, but about getting access to the class ladder. A focus on the individual
makes it easier to ignore the wider impersonal social structures which are just as important
sources of oppression. So, apparently libratory politics end up reinforcing the very discriminations
they want to challenge through poor application of the politics, something that goes right back to anti-
colonisation struggles.11 Failure to recognise the role of class politics in shaping the theory is undermining it and is what Audrey Lorde
warned of when she famously wrote The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. Sadly, I see privilege theory
becoming a way of maintaining status in some activist circles, where advocates of identity
politics create in-groups based around a particular identity, rather than perceiving a wider
notion of solidarity (aka love & caring) or recognising contexts. In parallel to what has happened with consensus decision making in many
places, a particular form of the theory is being taken up dogmatically and is being applied
uncritically, undermining what it is seeking to achieve. We see implicit hierarchies of oppression
and a culture of seeing individuals as victims of oppression, thus denying them histories of
rebellion (many anarchist circles excepted) and even the ability to see themselves as agents of
change. People become entrenched in their positions and see those they are most
naturally allied with as a threat, rather than seeking to incorporate them in the
solution. This is often closer to home than we like to admit
W I l ERhow
E dmany
o p Oworking
S T M O dclass
E R N groups
i s T S Care
OM focused
E F r O around
M ? 1 4men,
1 implicitly excluding
women, arguing that class is more important than gender in revolutionary change? And vice versa...
white supremacy
Use of white supremacy as a rallying point entrenches racialized
capitalismfails to explain non-color-coded racismreject any perms
M. Cole, research professor in education and equality at Bishop Grosseteste University College Lincoln, 11-23-07
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=311222&sectioncode=26
The problem with standard critical race theory is the narrowness of its remit, says Mike Cole. One of the main
tenets of critical race theory is that "white supremacy" is the norm in societies rather than merely the province of
the racist right (the other major tenet is primacy of "race" over class). There are a number of significant problems
with this use of the term "white supremacy". The first is that it homogenises all white
people together in positions of power and privilege. Writing about the US, critical race theorist Charles
Mills acknowledges that not "all whites are better off than all non-whites, but ... as a statistical generalisation, the objective life
chances of whites are significantly better". While this is, of course, true, we should not lose sight of the life chances
of millions of working-class white people. To take poverty as one example, in the US, while it is the case that the
number of black people living below the poverty line is some three times that of whites, this still leaves more than 16 million "white
but not Hispanic" people living in poverty there. In the UK, there are similar indicators of a society underpinned by rampant colour-
coded racism, with black people twice as poor as whites, and those of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin more than three times as
poor as whites. Once again, however, this still leaves some 12 million poor white people in the UK. That such statistics are indicative
of racism, however, is beyond doubt, and to interpret them it is useful to employ the concept of "racialisation". Given that there is
widespread agreement among geneticists and social scientists that "race" is a meaningless concept, racialisation describes the
process by which people are falsely categorised into distinct "races". Statistics
such as these are indicative of
racialised capitalism rather than white supremacy. A second problem with "white
supremacy" is that it is inherently unable to explain non-colour-coded racism. In the UK,
for example, this form of racism has been and is directed at the Irish and at gypsy/traveller communities.
There is also a well-documented history of anti-Semitism, too. It is also important to underline the fact that
Islamophobia is not necessarily triggered by skin colour. It is often sparked by one or more
(perceived) symbols of the Muslim faith. Finally, a new form of non- colour-coded racism has manifested itself recently in
the UK. This has all the hallmarks of traditional racism, but it is directed towards newly arrived groups of people. It has been
described by A. Sivanandan, director of the Institute of Race Relations, as "xeno-racism". It appears that there are some similarities
in the xeno-racialisation of Eastern European migrant workers and the racialisation of Asian and black workers in the immediate
postwar period, a point I address in my latest book. "White supremacy" is counterproductive as a
political unifier and rallying point against racism. John Preston concluded an article in The
Times Higher advocating critical race theory ("All shades of a wide white world", October 19) by citing the US journal
Race Traitor , which seeks the "abolition of the racial category 'white'". Elsewhere, Preston has argued "the
abolition of whiteness is ... not just an optional extra in terms of defeating capitalism (nor something which will be necessarily
abolished post-capitalism) but fundamental to the Marxist educational project as praxis". Indeed, for
Preston, "the
abolition of capitalism and whiteness seem to be fundamentally connected in the current historical
circumstances of Western capitalist development". From my Marxist perspective, coupling the
"abolition of whiteness" to the "abolition of capitalism" is a worrying development
that, if it gained ground in Marxist theory, would most certainly further
undermine the Marxist project. I am not questioning the sincerity of the protagonists of "the abolition of
whiteness", nor suggesting in any way that they are anti-white people but merely questioning its extreme vulnerability to
misunderstanding. Anti-racists have made some progress in the UK at least in making antiracism a mainstream rallying point, and
this is reflected, in part, in legislation. Even
if it were a good idea, the chances of making "the abolition of
whiteness" a successful political unifier and rallying point against racism are virtually non-
existent. The usage of "white supremacy" should be restricted to its everyday meaning. To describe and analyse contemporary
racism we need a wide- ranging and fluid conception of racism. Only then can we fully understand its multiple manifestations and
work towards its eradication.
White supremacy has zero explanatory power outside a narrow North
American context
Daniel Townhead 1st class interdisciplinary Human Studies @ Bradford 13 (Dysophia is an Anarchist Magzine,
http://dysophia.org.uk/dysophia-4-now-available/)
International Perspective The above set of ideas are completely inadequate and counterproductive to
anyone who wants any form of international perspective or who wants to think or act regarding any localised
situation outside of 'the west'. Firstly, as you can see, the above perspective is completely obsessed with white
people. To have to tell far left/anarchists off for thinking the world revolves around white people
is simply embarrassing. Specifically, there are various racialised conflicts around the world
that have nothing to do with white people. Many who have done migrant solidarity work, for instance
helping out migrants on the ground in Calais, will be aware of sharp divisions and prejudices between different racial and ethnic
groups. This is apparent in this immediate situation, but also from the life experiences of many of the migrants themselves. A friend
of mine enquired after the story of a man who had a picture of himself wielding twin AK 47s; he replied he needed them to defend
against Arab slave traders who targeted black african villages. There are also reports of racism operating as of late 2012 in the
conflict in Mali.1 WPT holds that white privilege exists everywhere in the world, and some would say
that it has created racial prejudice in other places. This is true to an extent in for instance Africa. If it is true for
the Middle Eastern world it is to a much, much lesser extent. But neither aspect of the theory applies in Japan,
China, Korea and so on. They have never believed that whites were superior to themselves; on the
contrary they have their own conceptions of racial superiority that go back thousands of years .
Theories of white superiority have indeed affected much of the world, but do not be so blinkered
and obsessed with this specific race and culture to think that they hold sway and have
permeated everywhere, or that they were the first such ideas. Going back to the situation in for instance
Africa, ideas of white superiority have indeed made the situation worse, but being unable to talk
about specific situations without the discourse being centred around white people is not going to
help.
2nc camp and kelley alt
Our Camp and Kelley ev proves Marxism is a useful framing for
collective strugglein fact, black labor movements have used these
tropes to universalize the struggle, even in hostile conditions like
early 1900s Alabama
Robin D. G. Kelley
The timing is really important. The project was conceived in the early 1980s. My interest was
in southern Africa, specifically the South African Left. At the same time, the Jesse Jackson
campaign and the Rainbow Coalition was taking off, as was the idea of multiracial and
multiethnic organizing actually led by people of color. I was involved in campaigns at
UCLA and was simultaneously trying to write about an original rainbow coalition.
My dissertation began as a comparative study of radicalism in South Africa and the US South. I
ended up dropping the South Africa piece because I was denied access to the country. Yet with a
South African framing of what became a US story I was forced to think hard about things like
intraracial class tensions and conflicts. I had to look at Alabama differently. I couldnt
look at the black working class as a kind of solid whole, nor could I look at the white
working class in the same way. Part of what Hammer and Hoe tried to do was look at
Alabama society as whole, not just black workers. [End Page 215]
Camp
How have you felt about its reception over the past two decades?
Kelley
Its been interesting. I am really happy with that book. Looking over it again, I am not sure
what I would do differently because I said what I needed to say. The reviews over all have been
great, but more importantly the way a number of activists and organizers on the Left have talked
about that book has been very heartening. For many readers, the book does three things.
First, it demonstrates that substantial, effective organizing can occur under the
worst of circumstances; that immense poverty, depression, and violence werent
successful deterrents to movement building.
Second, that even the most ardent racists are not fixed in their ideology. People can be
transformed in the struggle. Racism is definitely a fetter to multiracial organizing, but
Hammer and Hoe shows how people built a movement across the color line in the
most racist place of all. Anyone watching footage of Bull Connor in Ingram Park in
1963 could not believe that thirty years before that there had been an interracial
group of five thousand people in Birmingham standing on the street demanding
relief, jobs, and an end to police brutality.
Third, that class politics are alive and well. But any class politics that pretend that
race and also gender get in the way of class organizing miss the point altogether.
You can actually build white support for antiracism, male support for antisexism, and
black support for white working-class justice. People can and do cross the
boundaries that historians and scholarsW I l Eimpose
R E d o p Oon
S T Mpeople.
O d E R N i s The levels
TS COM E F r O M of
? 1 4empathy
6 that
many of the people in Hammer and Hoe showedthe fact that people were willing to be
beaten or die for othersis an extremely important lesson. We spend so much time
theorizing race, class, and gender and wondering whether or not you can get people of a
particular identity to move, but we dont even ask the question Can you get Steve to risk his life
for Hosea Hudson? It is not that Steve is supporting Hosea Hudson because he is
black and male; Steve is supporting Hosea Hudson because he is part of a
movement that says, solidarity is the only answer. Collective struggle is the only
answer to solving all of our problems, and your problem is mine.
Even though the Alabama Communist Party faded out, their a priori
fatalism toward class struggle undercuts consideration of
alternativesthis card smokes their alt answers
Kelley I think the most important lessons are not the ones I recognize or acknowledged, but the lessons activist/readers take from
the book upon reflecting on their own experiences and dreams of the world they are trying to build. That said, I do think that the
book provesagainthat antiracism and class solidarity are not trade-offs or mutually
exclusive but mutually constitutive. The same holds true for all forms of oppression
sexism, homophobia, et cetera. Second, Hammer and Hoe should not be seen as a road map or a source of
strategic knowledge to be drawn on for current movements. Indeed, the biggest criticism of the book is that
the Communist Party lost in Alabama, and therefore it isnt worth even writing
about. I disagree: it matters because (1) these struggles do make a difference on a
small level, improving the lives of working-class African Americans on many
occasions (keeping them from being evicted, helping them survive by getting more
relief and electricity and coal, defending local people in court, et cetera); (2)
through a different analysis or theoretical framework, it placed what appeared to be
local and isolated struggles against mean bosses and landlords into a global context, one that
exposed the structural dimensions of capitalism as a system and offered a different
path; (3) the movement did, in some ways, lay the groundwork for the next generation of
activists who truly transformed the face of the South and the United States as a whole. Finally, this work reveals
something about how people think and how struggle changes their ideas about
what is possible, why they are poor and oppressed, and what are the alternatives to
Jim Crow capitalism. Ive come to realize that this task might have been the most important of all.
at: alt doesnt solve racism
Neither do theyits an absurd standard to expect either sider to
make people not be assholes everywherethe question is which side
has the best strategy to dismantle power relations that are the root
cause of systemic, institutionalized oppressiononly a focus on class
does that. Their emphasis on the particular is an independent link
because it diverts attention from those systemic harms.
Race is constructed form the raw materials furnished by class

relationstheir fatalism on that front makes both problems
inevitable
E. San Juan, Jr. , PhD harvard Marxism and the Race/Class Problematic: A Re-Articulation , Cultural Logic Vol 6 2003
No longer valid as a scientific instrument of classification, race today operates as a socio-political construction.
Differences of language, beliefs, traditions, and so on can no longer be sanctioned by biological science as permanent, natural, and
normal. Nonetheless they have become efficacious components of the racializing process, "inscribed through tropes of race, lending
the sanction of God, biology, or the natural order to even presumably unbiased descriptions of cultural tendencies and differences"
(Gates 1986, 5). It is evident that, as Colette Guillaumin (1995) has demonstrated, the class divisions of the feudal/tributary stage
hardened and became naturalized, with blood lineage signifying pedigree, status, and rank. Industrial
capital, however,
destroyed kinship and caste-like affinities as a presumptive claim to wealth. 26. The capitalist
mode of production articulated "race" with class in a peculiar way. While the stagnation of rural life
imposed a racial or castelike rigidity to the peasantry, the rapid accumulation of wealth through the ever more intensifying
exploitation of labor by capital could not so easily "racialize" the wage-workers of a particular nation, given the alienability of labor-
power--unless certain physical or cultural characteristics can be utilized to divide the workers or render one group an outcast or
pariah removed from the domain of "free labor." In
the capitalist development of U.S. society, African,
Mexican, and Asian bodies--more precisely, their labor power and its reproductive efficacy--
were colonized and racialized; hence the idea of "internal colonialism" retains explanatory
validity. "Race" is thus constructed out of raw materials furnished by class relations,
the history of class conflicts, and the vicissitudes of colonial/capitalist expansion
and the building of imperial hegemony. It is dialectically accented and operationalized not
just to differentiate the price of wage labor within and outside the territory of the metropolitan
power, but also to reproduce relations of domination-subordination invested with an aura of
naturality and fatality. The refunctioning of physical or cultural traits as ideological and
political signifiers of class identity reifies social relations. Such "racial" markers enter the field of
the alienated labor process, concealing the artificial nature of meanings and norms, and
essentializing or naturalizing historical traditions and values which are contingent on mutable
circumstances.
You lose
This comment, I might interject, is also relevant to the empirico-experientialist actuality of Caste oppression in India and the Indian
diaspora. Motala and Vally continue, And because the empirio-experiential trumps the theoretical, the root
cause of inequity is accepted as and ascribed to the empirical to race, in this case rather than to capitalist
relations. Ideology is rooted in and impacts on the material and cannot be reduced to falsehood.
Thus this analysis in this paper does not ignore the material reality of race oppression,
caste oppression, or gender oppression. The analysis I am putting forward is a Marxist argument located within Marxist
reproduction theory, the theory that education systems, together with other ideological and repressive state apparatuses, work to
reproduce existing patterns of economic, social and political life. While
not subscribing to an Althusserian relative
autonomy analysis (one developed, inter alia, by Michael W. Apple), this analysis is not an iron chain of
command from capital to government to state apparatuses to effective impact. The analysis offered here,
while it will no doubt be criticised as vulgar Marxism and as deterministic,
reductionist, and essentialist (for such critiques, see Apple, 2005, 2006), does recognizes developments
within neo-Marxist theory, especially state theory, that this cultural, economic, and
ideological reproduction is mediated and resisted. (See Hill, 2001, 2005a.) However, such an
analysis is more deterministic, reductionist, and essentialist than those of relative autonomy
culturalist (neo-)Marxists and, most certainly, postmodernists. But not in terms of the
vulgar Marxism attributed by its critics. Such an analysis sees class as central to the
social relations of production and essential for producing and reproducing the cultural and
economic activities of humans under a capitalist mode of production. Whereas the abolition of
racism and sexism or caste does not guarantee the abolition of capitalist social relations of
production, the abolition of class inequalities, or the abolition of class itself, by definition, denotes the
abolition of capitalism. As Motala and Vally (2009, n.p.) argue, the absence of class analysis leads to a
debilitating failure to appreciate the deeper characteristics of society; de-links poverty and
inequality from the political, economic and social system capitalism which underpins them;
obscures the class nature of the post-apartheid state; renders ineffective social and educational
reforms and denies the importance of class struggle and the agency of working communities in
the struggle for social transformation.
at: anti-ethical decisionmaker
Their card is from a former policy debater writing hyperbolically
about the need to disrupt Western Enlightenment notions of
humanityheres the issue
1. Doesnt solvedumping on these concepts is nothing newthe

notion that racism will come tumbling down after we discredit
humanism is laughable at best
2. Its good for literary and cultural criticism, but bad politics
intellectuals have a unique responsibility given the lack of
mainstream labor movement
Ahmad, Professorial Fellow at the Centre of Contemporary Studies, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi and is
visiting Professor of Political Science at York University, 1997
(Aijaz, Culture, Nationalism, And the Role of Intellectuals in In defense of history)
The role that intellectuals come to play, from one country to the next, from one generation to the next, is a very
intricate matter. It certainly involves the question of the agency and responsibility of particular
individuals, especially since a place in academe actually gives to the intellectuals very considerable
room to exercise their agency in society at large. But it is also a matter of how a given
political field is constituted in a given place, at a given time. The United States has not had a powerful
labor movement since the 1930s. In this situation, it becomes much easier for radical academics to
believe that they are accountable to none outside academe. They can now blame the
working class for its failures and need not take into account their own contribution to that failure.
After all, working class movements have always relied on key support from intellectuals, and
intellectuals, I think, need to be quite aware of what they have or have not done in solidarity with
those who rely on them and who do not command similar resources of intellectual culture. Do you
know that devastating poem by Brecht on the repressions in East Germany in 1953, where he ironically says that when a people loses
the confidence of its leaders, those leaders have the right to elect another people? Many U.S.
radicals sometimes strike
me as looking for another people they might thus elect. But the detachment from mass politics that
you speak of is true only at present, and especially among literary/cultural critics. It goes to the everlasting
credit of the United States 1968 that it organized historys largest peace movement that any counti-y lias ever witnessed against a
war that its own government was waging- People from a wide spectrum of the U.S. left played the key role in organizing that
movement, and it is a ghost that still haunts North America. U.S. radicals today are politically very isolated and
careerism is quite rampant, but the very many who are doing very honest, very good work are doing so because they wish to hon that
legacy. One of the most inspiring of them is of course Noam Chomsky, whose activism spans this whole phase since the mid-1960s;
but there are also many, many others, less famous or not well known at all. They deserve our admiration because, as Che once
famously put it, they are the ones living in the belly of the beast. That, you know, is not the best of habitats.(60-1)
at: django reference offensive
1. This is a mischaracterization of our evAdolph Reed is a renowned
Black political scholar using films to illustrate how resistance through
self-representation can be neoliberal. He cites Django, because that
movie in particular de-historicized slavery by positing comfort girl
and Mandingo fighter as useful job descriptions of slavery. This is
why you rarely see actual slave labor in the moviewhich denies the
historical fact that slaves were, first and foremost, capital
investments rooted in a specific political economy.
[for reference, here is the opening section of the Reed article]
On reflection, its possible to see that Django Unchained and The Help are basically different versions of the same movie. Both
dissolve political economy and social relations into individual quests and interpersonal transactions and thus effectively sanitize,
respectively, slavery and Jim Crow by dehistoricizing them. The problem is not so much that each film invents cartoonish fictions;
its that the point of the cartoons is to take the place of the actual relations of exploitation that anchored the regime it depicts. In The
Help the buffoonishly bigoted housewife, Hilly, obsessively pushes a pet bill that would require employers of black domestic servants
to provide separate, Jim Crow toilets for them; in Django Unchained the sensibility of 1970s blaxploitation imagines comfort girls
and Mandingo fighters as representative slave job descriptions. Its as if Jim Crow had nothing to do with cheap labor and slavery
had nothing to do with making slave owners rich. And the point here is not just that they get the past wrongits that the particular
way they get it wrong enables them to get the present just as wrong and so their politics are as misbegotten as their history.
Thus, for example, its only the dehistoricization that makes each films entirely neoliberal (they could have been scripted by Oprah)
happy ending possible. The Help ends with Skeeter and the black lead, the maid Aibileen, embarking joyfully on the new, excitingly
uncharted paths their bookan account of the master-servant relationship told from the perspective of the servantshas opened for
them. But dehistoricization makes it possible not to notice the great distance between those paths and their likely trajectories. For
Skeeter the book from which the film takes its name opens a career in the fast track of the journalism and publishing industry.
Aibileens new path was forced upon her because the book got her fired from her intrinsically precarious job, more at-whim than at-
will, in one of the few areas of employment available to working-class black women in the segregationist Souththe precise
likelihood that had made her and other maids initially reluctant to warm to Skeeters project. Yet Aibileen smiles and strides ever
more confidently as she walks home because she has found and articulated her voice.
2. The comparison WE draw is NOT between them as debaters and

anyone in that moviethat would obviously be offensiveour
argument is that focusing on the gratuitous violence aspect
mystifies racism as a class tension and forecloses political agency.
3. They really cant make this argument and cite people like
Wildersona FILM SCHOLAR who does the same analytical exercise
throughout his books
at: marx badrace
Wrong
Taylor 11 [Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, on the editorial board of the International Socialist Review and a doctoral student in
African American Studies at Northwestern University; Race, class and Marxism, SocialistWorker.org,
http://socialistworker.org/2011/01/04/race-class-and-marxism]
Marxists believe that the potential for that kind of unity is dependant on battles and struggles against racism today. Without a commitment by revolutionary organizations in the here and now to the fight against
racism, working-class unity will never be achieved and the revolutionary potential of the working class will never be realized. Yet despite all the evidence of this commitment to fighting racism over many decades,
Marxism has been maligned as, at best, "blind" to combating racism and, at worst,
"incapable" of it. For example, in an article published last summer, popular commentator and self-described "anti-racist" Tim Wise
summarized the critique of "left activists" that he later defines as Marxists. He writes: [L]eft
activists often marginalize people of color by operating from a framework of extreme class reductionism, which holds that the "real" issue is class, not race, that "the only color that matters is green," and that issues
like racism are mere "identity politics," which should take a backseat to promoting class-based universalism and programs to help working people. This reductionism, by ignoring the way that even middle class
and affluent people of color face racism and color-based discrimination (and by presuming that low-income folks of color and low-income whites are equally oppressed, despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary)
reinforces white denial, privileges white perspectivism and dismisses the lived reality of people of color. Even more, as we'll see, it ignores perhaps the most important political lesson regarding the interplay of race
and class: namely, that the biggest reason why there is so little working-class consciousness and unity in the Untied States (and thus, why class-based programs to uplift all in need are so much weaker here than in
the rest of the industrialized world), is precisely because of racism and the way that white racism has been deliberately inculcated among white working folks. Only by confronting that directly (rather than
sidestepping it as class reductionists seek to do) can we ever hope to build cross-racial, class based coalitions. In other words, for the policies favored by the class reductionist to work--be they social democrats or
Marxists--or even to come into being, racism and white supremacy must be challenged directly. Here, Wise accuses Marxism of: "extreme class
reductionism," meaning that Marxists allegedly think that class is more important than race;
reducing struggles against racism to "mere identity politics"; and requiring that
struggles against racism should "take a back seat" to struggles over economic
issues. Wise also accuses so-called "left activists" of reinforcing "white denial" and "dismiss[ing] the lived
reality of people of color"--which, of course, presumes Left activists and Marxists
to all be white. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - What do Marxists actually say? Marxists argue that
capitalism is a system that is based on the exploitation of the many by the few.
Because it is a system based on gross inequality, it requires various tools to divide the
majority--racism and all oppressions under capitalism serve this purpose. Moreover, oppression is used to justify
and "explain" unequal relationships in society that enrich the minority that live off the majority's labor. Thus, racism developed initially to explain
and justify the enslavement of Africans--because they were less than human and undeserving of liberty and freedom. Everyone accepts the idea that the
oppression of slaves was rooted in the class relations of exploitation under that system. Fewer recognize that
under capitalism, wage slavery is the pivot around which all other inequalities and
oppressions turn. Capitalism used racism to justify plunder, conquest and slavery, but as Karl Marx pointed out, it also used racism to divide and rule--to pit one section of the working
class against another and thereby blunt class consciousness. To claim, as Marxists do, that racism is a product of capitalism is not
to deny or diminish its importance or impact in American society. It is simply to explain its origins and the
reasons for its perpetuation. Many on the left today talk about class as if it is one of many oppressions, often describing it as "classism." What people are really referring to as
"classism" is elitism or snobbery, and not the fundamental organization of society under capitalism. Moreover, it is popular today to talk about various
oppressions, including class, as intersecting. While it is true that oppressions can

reinforce and compound each other, they are born out of the material relations shaped
by capitalism and the economic exploitation that is at the heart of capitalist society. In
other words, it is the material and economic structure of society that gave rise to a range of ideas and ideologies to justify, explain and help perpetuate that order. In the United States, racism is the most important
Marx himself was well aware of the centrality of race under

of those ideologies. Despite the widespread beliefs to the contrary of his critics, Karl
capitalism. While Marx did not write extensively on the question of slavery and its racial impact in societies specifically, he did write about the way in which European capitalism
emerged because of its pilfering, rape and destruction, famously writing: The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and
entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East
Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of Black skins, signalized the
rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. He also recognized the extent to which slavery was central to the world economy. He wrote: Direct slavery is just as much
the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that has given the colonies their value; it is the colonies that
have created world trade, and it is world trade that is the pre-condition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance. Without slavery North America, the most
progressive of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe out North America from the map of the world, and you will have anarchy--the complete decay of modern commerce and civilization.
Cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations. Thus slavery, because it is an economic category, has always existed among the institutions of the peoples. Modern nations have
been able only to disguise slavery in their own countries, but they have imposed it without disguise upon the New World. Thus, there is a fundamental understanding of the centrality of slave labor in the national
and international economy. But what about race? Despite the dearth of Marx's own writing on race in particular, one might look at Marx's correspondence and deliberations on the American Civil War to draw
conclusions as to whether Marx was as dogmatically focused on purely economic issues as his critics make him out be. One must raise the question: If Marx was reductionist, how is his unabashed support and
involvement in abolitionist struggles in England explained? If Marx was truly an economic reductionist, he might have surmised
that slavery and capitalism were incompatible, and simply waited for slavery to whither away.
W.E.B. Du Bois in his Marxist tome Black Reconstruction, quotes at length a letter penned by Marx as the head of the International Workingmen's Association, written to Abraham Lincoln in 1864 in the midst of
the Civil War: The contest for the territories which opened the epoch, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the immigrant or be prostituted by the tramp of
the slaver driver? When an oligarchy of 300,000 slave holders dared to inscribe for the first time in the annals of the world "Slavery" on the banner of armed revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century
ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first declaration of the rights of man was issued...when on the very spots counter-revolution...maintained "slavery to be a beneficial
institution"...and cynically proclaimed property in man 'the cornerstone of the new edifice'...then the working classes of Europe understood at once...that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a
general holy war of property against labor... They consider it an earnest sign of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through
Not only was Marx personally opposed to slavery

the matchless struggles for the rescue of the enchained race and the Reconstruction of a social order.
and actively organized against it, but he theorized that slavery and the resultant race
discrimination that flowed from it were not just problems for the slaves themselves, but for white workers who were constantly under the
threat of losing work to slave labor. This did not mean white workers were necessarily sympathetic to the cause of the slaves--most of them were not. But Marx was not addressing the issue of consciousness, but
objective factors when he wrote in Capital, "In the United States of America, every independent movement of the workers was paralyzed as long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labor cannot
Moreover, Marx understood the dynamics of racism in a modern sense as well--as

emancipate itself in the white skin where in the Black it is branded."
a means by which workers who had common, objective interests with each other could also
become mortal enemies because of subjective, but nevertheless real, racist and nationalist ideas. Looking at the tensions
between Irish and English workers, with a nod toward the American situation between Black and white workers, Marx wrote: Every industrial and commercial center in England possesses a working class divided
into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he feels
himself a member of the ruling nation and so turns himself into a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists of his country against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious,
social and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude is much the same as that of the "poor whites" to the "niggers" in the former slave states of the USA. The Irishman pays him back with interest in
his own money. He sees in the English worker at once the accomplice and stupid tool of the English rule in Ireland.This antagonism is artificially kept
alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class,
despite its organization. It is the secret by which the capitalist maintains its power. And that class is fully aware of it. Out of
this quote, one can see a Marxist theory of how racism operated in contemporary society, after slavery was ended. Marx was highlighting three things: first, that capitalism promotes
economic competition between workers; second, that the ruling class uses racist ideology to divide
workers against each other; and finally, that when one group of workers suffer oppression, it
negatively impacts the entire class.
at: no white allies (nopper)
Nopper isnt responsive
1. Were not posing as allies

W I lor
E R E white
d o p O S T M O anti-racistsour
dERNisTS COME FrOM? 153 claim is
merely that this is an academic debate and there are epistemic
problems with the aff that limit its potential. Remember that Nopper
is criticizing white anarchists doing stuff like growing dreadlocks and
making their own clothing as an attempt to disavow their privilege
you dont have to approve of those people to endorse our critique.
Debate isnt the type of activism they assumedont call us, well call
you makes no sense in an academic contest where were required to
disagree with their approach.
2. Even if we should just shut up and listen, there are always other
Others that frustrate their alternative toomake them explain why
researching Black scholars like Reed, Hutchinson, etc. is NOT a form
of engagement. The alt isnt colorblindness, its a strategic recognition
that commonalities other than color can be useful.
3. Its not enough to say that society is founded on white supremacy

without considering how race is mobilized as a tool to legitimize
contingent modes of production, you get hollow political strategies
like let whiteness die.
at: racism root cause
Even if racism is the root cause, that doesn't prove their racial politics
is the most effective means of combating global capitalismthis
argument is entirely reactionary.
The claim that race produced slavery is an empirical onethus you

should judge the evidence for it based on historical fact, not abstract
theory. Most aff evidence is solely conclusionaryconsensus goes neg
Drescher 97 [Seymour, Department of History, University of Pittsburgh; Slavery & Abolition, 18: 3, 212 227]
Perhaps the best point of departure is the collective volume that emerged from the fortieth anniversary conference on Capitalism
and Slavery, held at Bellagio, Italy, and was published in 1987. The editors, Barbara L. Solow and Stanley L. Engeriran, divided the
non-biographical contributions into three parts, corresponding to three major hypotheses on the relationship between economic
development and slavery in the British empire. We may appropriately test the first hypothesis most briefly. Williams only briefly
broached the subject and his assessment has not been of major historiographical interest in the subsequent literature. Williams took
the position thateconomic factors rather than racism occupied pride of place in the switch to
African labour in the plantation Americas, that slavery 'was not born of racism' but rather
slavery led to racism. Although some recent interpretations make racial preferences and inhibitions central to the choice of
African labour, Williams's order of priorities, if not his either-or approach, is supported by a survey of
hundreds of articles. They show virtual unanimity on the primacy of economics in
accounting for the turn toward slave labour. Non-economic factors, such as race or religion, entered
into the development of New World slavery only as a limiting parameter. Such factors affected the historical
sequence by which entire human groups (Christians, Jews, Muslim North Africans, Native Americans) were excluded from liability
to enslavement in the Atlantic system. Since Williams published his book, the main change in the historiographical context of origins
is an increase in the number and variety of actors brought into the process. That broader context complicates the role of any
exclusively 'African' racial component of the slave trade. From
the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries,
slavery, even the English colonial varieties, was hardly synonymous with Africans.
Nor were Africans synonymous with slaves. In the African sector of the Atlantic
system Europeans were forced to regard Africans (and Afro-Europeans) as autonomous
and even locally dominant participants in the slave trade. They were often dominant
militarily and were certainly dominant in terms of their massive presence and
limited vulnerability to local diseases. Even in the Americas, Africans did not arrive only as captives and
deracinated slaves.
Race is a product of capital, produced to justify disparate labor

practicesthey have it backwards
Tom Keefer, a member of Facing Reality, an anti-imperialist, anti-racist collective in Montreal , 2003
http://newsocialist.org/old_mag/magazine/39/article03.html
The brutality and viciousness of capitalism is well known to the oppressed and exploited of this world. Billions
of people throughout the world spend their lives incessantly toiling to enrich the already wealthy, while throughout
history any serious attempts to build alternatives to capitalism have been met with bombings, invasions, and blockades by imperialist nation states.
Although the modern day ideologues of the mass media and of institutions such as the World Bank and IMF never cease to inveigh against scattered
acts of violence perpetrated against their system, they always neglect to mention that the capitalist system they lord over was called into
existence and has only been able to maintain itself by the sustained application of systematic violence .
It should come as no surprise that this capitalist system, which we can only hope is now reaching the era of its final demise, was just as rapacious and
vicious in its youth as it is now. The "rosy dawn" of capitalist production was inaugurated by the process of
slavery and genocide in the western hemisphere, and this "primitive accumulation of capital" resulted in the
largest systematic murder of human beings ever seen. However, the rulers of society have found that naked
force is often most economically used in conjunction with ideologies of domination and control
which provide a legitimizing explanation for the oppressive nature of society. Racism is
such a construct and it came into beingWas I l Ea
R Esocial
d o p O S relation
T M O d E R N i s Twhich
S C O M E Fcondoned
rOM? 155 and secured
the initial genocidal processes of capitalist accumulation--the founding stones of contemporary bourgeois society.
While it is widely accepted that the embryonic capitalist class came to power in the great bourgeois revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries, what
is comparatively less well known is the crucial role that chattel slavery and the plunder of the "New World" played
in calling this class into being and providing the "primitive accumulation of capital" necessary to
launch and sustain industrialization in Europe. The accidental "discovery" of the Western Hemisphere by the mass murderer
Christopher Columbus in 1492 changed everything for the rival economic and political interests of the European states. The looting and pillaging of the
"New World" destabilized the European social order, as Spain raised huge armies and built armadas with the unending streams of gold and silver
coming from the "New World", the spending of which devalued the currency reserves of its rivals. The only way Portugal, England, Holland, and France
could stay ahead in the regional power games of Europe was to embark on their own colonial ventures. In addition to the extraction of precious
minerals and the looting and pillaging of indigenous societies, European merchant-adventurers realized that
substantial profits could also be made through the production of cash crops on the fertile lands surrounding
the Caribbean sea. The only problem was that as the indigenous population either fled from enslavement
or perished from the diseases and deprivations of the Europeans, there was no one left to raise the sugar, tobacco,
cotton, indigo, and other tropical cash crops that were so profitable. A system of waged labour would not work for the simple
reason that with plentiful land and easy means of subsistence surrounding them, colonists would naturally prefer small scale
homesteading instead of labouring for their masters. As the planter Emanuel Downing of Massachusetts put it in 1645: "I
do not see how we can thrive until we get a stock of slaves sufficient to do all our business, for our children's children will hardly see this great continent
filled with people so that our servants will still desire freedom to plant for themselves, and not stay but for very great wages." Capitalistic
social relations have always been based on compulsion, and they require as a precondition that
workers possess nothing but their capacity to labour. The would-be developers of the wealth of the "New World"
thus turned to forced labour in complete contradiction to all the theories of bourgeois economists because unfree labour was the only kind of labour
applicable to the concrete situation in the Americas. Although slavery is now, and has almost always been equated with unfree
Black labour, it was not always, or even predominantly so. Capitalists looked first to their
own societies in order to find the population to labour in servitude on the large-scale plantations necessary for
tropical cash crop production. Eric Williams, in his groundbreaking work Capitalism and Slavery, noted that in the early stages
of colonialism "white slavery was the historic base upon which Negro [sic] slavery was
constructed." Between 1607 and 1783 over a quarter million "white" indentured servants arrived
in the British colonies alone where they were set to work in the agricultural and industrial processes of the time. The shipping companies,
ports, and trading routes established for the transport of the poor, "criminal", and lumpen
elements of European society were to form the backbone of the future slave trade of Africans.
Slavery became an exclusively Black institution due to the dynamics of class struggle as repeated
multi-ethnic rebellions of African slaves and indentured European servants led the
slaveholders to seek strategies to divide and conquer. The fact that an African slave could be
purchased for life with the same amount of money that it would cost to buy an indentured
servant for 10 years, and that the African's skin color would function as an instrument of
social control by making it easier to track down runaway slaves in a land where all whites
were free wage labourers and all Black people slaves, provided further incentives for this system of
racial classification. In the colonies where there was an insufficient free white population to provide a counterbalance to potential slave
insurgencies, such as on the Caribbean islands, an elaborate hierarchy of racial privilege was built up, with the
lighter skinned "mulattos" admitted to the ranks of free men where they often owned slaves
themselves. The concept of a "white race" never really existed before the economic
systems of early capitalism made it a necessary social construct to aid in the
repression of enslaved Africans. Xenophobia and hostility towards those who were
different than one's own immediate family, clan, or tribe were certainly evident, and
discrimination based on religious status was also widespread but the development of modern
"scientific" racism with its view that there are physically distinct "races" within humanity, with
distinct attributes and characteristics is peculiar to the conquest of the Americas, the
rise of slavery, and the imperialist domination of the entire world. Racism provided a
convenient way to explain the subordinate position of Africans and other victims of Euro-colonialism, while at the
same time providing an apparatus upon which to structure the granting of special privileges to sectors of the working class admitted as members of the
"white race". As David McNally has noted, one
of the key component of modern racism was its utility in
resolving the contradiction as to how the modern European societies in which the bourgeoisie
had come to power through promising "freedom" and "equality" were so reliant on slave labour
and murderous, yet highly profitable colonial adventures. The development of a concept like
racism allowed whole sections of the world's population to be "excommunicated" from
humankind, and then be murdered or worked to death with a clear conscience for the profit of
the capitalist class.
Ev from every context shows slavery predates the concept of racial

division - blackness emerged as a unique historical product of
economic relations
McLaren and Torres 99 (Peter Mclaren, professor of education at U of California, and Rudolfo Torres, Professor of
Planning, Policy, and Design, Chicano/Latino Studies, and Political Science, Racism and Multicultural Education: Rethinking Race
and Whiteness in Late Capitalism, Chapter 2 of Critical Multiculturalism: Rethinking Multicultural and Antiracist Education,
edited by Stephen May, p.49-50, Questia)
According to Alex Callinicos (1993), racial differences are invented. Racism occurs when the characteristics
which justify discrimination are held to be inherent in the oppressed group. This form of oppression is peculiar to
capitalist societies; it arises in the circumstances surrounding industrial capitalism and the
attempt to acquire a large labour force. Callinicos points out three main conditions for the existence of
racism as outlined by Marx: economic competition between workers; the appeal of racist ideology to
white workers; and efforts of the capitalist class to establish and maintain racial divisions among
workers. Capital's constantly changing demands for different kinds of labour can only be met through immigration. Callinicos
remarks that 'racism offers for workers of the oppressing race the imaginary compensation for the
exploitation they suffer of belonging to the ruling nation' (1993, p. 39). Callinicos notes the way in which
Marx grasped how 'racial' divisions between 'native' and 'immigrant' workers could weaken the
working-class. United States' politicians like Pat Buchanan, Jesse Helms and Pete Wilson, to name but a few,
take advantage of this division which the capitalist class understands and
manipulates only too well-using racism effectively to divide the working-class. At this
point you might be asking yourselves: Doesn't racism pre-date capitalism? Here we agree with Callinicos that
the heterophobia associated with precapitalist societies was not the same as modern racism.
Pre-capitalist slave and feudal societies of classical Greece and Rome did not rely
on racism to justify the use of slaves. The Greeks and Romans did not have theories of white
superiority. If they did, that must have been unsettling news to Septimus Severus, Roman Emperor from Ad 193 to 211, who
was, many historians claim, a black man. Racism emerged during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
from a key development of capitalism-colonial plantations in the New World where slave labour
stolen from Africa was used to produce tobacco, sugar, and cotton for the global consumer market (Callinicos, 1993).
Callinicos cites Eric Williams who remarks: 'Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery' (cited in
Callinicos, 1993, p. 24). In effect, racism emerged as the ideology of the plantocracy. It began with the class of
sugar-planters and slave merchants that dominated England's Caribbean colonies. Racism developed out of the 'systemic slavery' of
the New World. The 'natural inferiority' of Africans was a way that Whites justified enslaving them. According to Callinicos: Racism
offers white workers the comfort of believing themselves part of the dominant group; it also provides, in times of crisis, a ready-
made scapegoat, in the shape of the oppressed group. Racism
thus gives white workers a particular identity,
and one which unites them with white capitalists. We have here, then, a case of the kind of
'imagined community' discussed by Benedict Anderson in his influential analysis of nationalism. (1993, p. 38) In short, to
abolish racism in any substantive sense, we need to abolish global capitalism.
Marxist analysis of class includes race and explains the emergence of

racial oppression as a response
W I l E R to
E d oslavery
pOSTMOdERNisTS COME FrOM? 157
Selfa 2 (Lance, on the editorial board of the International Socialist Review, the author of The Democrats: A Critical History, a
socialist analysis of the Democratic Party, and editor of The Struggle for Palestine, a collection of essays by leading solidarity
activists, Slavery and the Origins of Racism, International Socialist Review, Issue 26,
http://www.isreview.org/issues/26/roots_of_racism.shtml)
IT IS commonly assumed that racism is as old as human society itself. As long as human beings have been
around, the argument goes, they have always hated or feared people of a different nation or skin color. In other words, racism is just
part of human nature. Representative John L. Dawson, a member of Congress after the Civil War, insisted that racial prejudice was
implanted by Providence for wise purposes. Senator James Doolittle of Wisconsin, a contemporary of Dawsons, claimed that an
instinct of our nature impelled us to sort people into racial categories and to recognize the natural supremacy of whites when
compared to people with darker skins.1 More than a century later, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray produced The Bell Curve,
an 800-page statistics-laden tome that purported to prove innate racial differences in intelligence. Todays racists might don the
mantel of science to justify their prejudices, but they are no less crude or mistaken then their 19th century forebears. If
racism is
part of human nature, then socialists have a real challenge on their hands. If racism is hard-wired into
human biology, then we should despair of workers ever overcoming the divisions between them to fight for a socialist society free of
racial inequality. Fortunately, racism isnt part of human nature. The best evidence for this assertion is the fact that racism
has not always existed. Racism is a particular form of oppression. It stems from discrimination
against a group of people based on the idea that some inherited characteristic, such as skin
color, makes them inferior to their oppressors. Yet the concepts of race and racism are modern
inventions. They arose and became part of the dominant ideology of society in the context of the African slave
trade at the dawn of capitalism in the 1500s and 1600s. Although it is a commonplace for academics and opponents of
socialism to claim that Karl Marx ignored racism, Marx in fact described the processes that created modern
racism. His explanation of the rise of capitalism placed the African slave trade, the European
extermination of indigenous people in the Americas, and colonialism at its heart. In Capital, Marx
writes: The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the indigenous
population of the continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the
commercial hunting of black skins are all things that characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production.2 Marx connected his
explanation of the role of the slave trade in the rise of capitalism to the social relations that produced racism against Africans. In
Wage Labor and Capital, written twelve years before the American Civil War, he explains: What is a Negro slave? A man of the black
race. The one explanation is as good as the other. A Negro is a Negro. He
only becomes a slave in certain relations.
A cotton spinning jenny is a machine for spinning cotton. It only becomes capital in certain
relations. Torn away from these conditions, it is as little capital as gold by itself is money, or as
sugar is the price of sugar.3 In this passage, Marx shows no prejudice to Blacks (a man of the black race, a Negro is a
Negro), but he mocks societys equation of Black and slave (one explanation is as good as another). He shows how the
economic and social relations of emerging capitalism thrust Blacks into slavery (he only becomes a slave
in certain relations), which produce the dominant ideology that equates being African with being a
slave. These fragments of Marxs writing give us a good start in understanding the Marxist explanation of the origins of racism. As
the Trinidadian historian of slavery Eric Williams put it: Slavery was not born of racism: rather,
racism was the consequence of slavery.4 And, one should add, the consequence of modern slavery at the dawn of
capitalism. While slavery existed as an economic system for thousands of years before the conquest
of America, racism as we understand it today did not exist.
at: white slaves cheaper (eltis)
1. Their ev is based on an article by Eltiszero proof of that thesis
Schmidt-Nowara 02 [Christopher, Professor of History and Associate Chair at the Lincoln Center campus at Fordham
University, Big Questions and Answers: Three Histories of Slavery, the Slave Trade and the Atlantic World typos because of
OCRing, Social History, Vol. 27, No. 2 (May, 2002), pp. 210-217]
Bold, but not always convincing. This

reader found the volume's most controversial thesis, that the use of
African slavery was an uneconomic decision guided by European racial and gender ideologies, particularly weak in its
demonstration. Eltis wants to show that the social and institutional factors that would have permitted widespread European enslavement were
in place in the early modern period (57-84). In doing so, he marshals impressive evidence about the various forms of coercive labour existing in early
modern western Europe, such as indenture and convict labour. Given the prevalence of overt coercion in Europe, he asks, why did European elites not
take the next step and enslave and transport Europeans in vast numbers? In doing so, he also examines and finds wanting explanations for African
slavery based on epidemiological and economic assumptions. Europeans adapted as well as Africans to New World climates, while the shipping costs
from Europe would have been cheaper than those from Africa. For Eltis, the explanation for this uneconomic behaviour lies in the realm of cultural
values that bound all Europeans regardless of their class position: What seems incontestable is that in regard to slavery the sense of the appropriate was
shared across social divisions and cannot easily be explained by ideological differences or power relationships among classes. Outrage at the treatment
of Africans was rarely expressed at any level of society before the late eighteenth century. . . . For elite and non-elite alike enslavement remained a fate
for which only non-Europeans were qualified. (83-4) Eltis's conclusion regarding a shared European racial identity and sense of racial supremacy is
evocative and cannot be dismissed easily, if at all. But what
this account lacks is sustained consideration of
alternative types of sources and historical approaches that might reinforce or modify it. Eltis makes an
inelegant leap from his counter-factual of mass European enslavement to his explanation of why
it did not take place; his claim of homogeneity of racial values reads more like an assertion than
a proof. For instance, there is little effort to flesh out the values he attributes to Europeans of the period,
largely because his study is short on the types of sources that historians employ to plumb the
beliefs of human cultures, such as pamphlets, broadsheets, autobiographies and memoirs, philosophical tracts or records of political and
religious rituals. It would be foolish to demand of Eltis that he use these sources himself after such meticulous research into economic history. But it is
quite reasonable to expect a more sophisticated engagement with historians who have reached alternative conclusions about early modern European
culture through different sources and methods. Readers of E. P. Thompson, Natalie Zemon Davis or Carlo Ginzburg will be surprised to learn that early
modern European society was so cohesive and homogenous in its values. They will also be dismayed by the indifference Eltis displays towards
questions of resistance and agency and his glib dismissal of class conflict and consciousness as useful analytical categories (84). Historians working in
the broader field of Atlantic history have also tended to see Europe as a contentious society, most notably Seymour Drescher, who sees class
conflict in the industrialization process as a major factor in the rise of British anti-slavery. Peter
Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker have expanded the temporal and spatial dimensions of that conflict in their recent account of popular anti-slavery
sentiment and cross-racial alliances against slavery in the early modern Atlantic.5 This is not to say categorically that these scholars are correct and
Eltis wrong. Rather, to make his argument more robust and persuasive, Eltis needs to engage, not sidestep, the important scholarly literature that belies
his conclusions. Any explanation of the absence of European enslavement and the apparent indifference towards African slavery must take into account
the balance of political and social forces that produced some semblance of autonomy and liberty among the European working classes as well as
cultural assumptions about race and gender. Eltis s instinct about the cultural origins of African slavery in the Americas is plausible but, given the
narrow perspective from which he addresses the issue, his conclusion is not. Robin Blackburn's The Making of New World Slavery is more varied in its
approach and interpretation. While insisting, unlike Eltis, upon the driving force of 'civil society' in the construction of the plantation complex (6-12),
Blackburn none the less handles questions of ideology and politics with great care and insight. This multipronged explanatory method was also evident
in his earlier volume, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848, which today reads as perhaps the most cogent narrative of the forces at work in the
Atlantic world's 'age of revolution'. One of the qualities that makes The Overthrow so attractive is the intermixture of a trenchant analysis of the
political economy of war, empire, decolonization, abolitionism and slave rebellion with the invocation of a 'usable past' with which Blackburn
introduces the volume: Despite the mixed results of anti-slavery in this period the sacrifices of slave rebels, of radical abolitionists and of revolutionary
democrats were not in vain. They show how it was possible to challenge, and sometimes defeat, the oppression which grew as the horrible obverse of
the growth of human social capacities and powers in the Atlantic world of the early modern period. More generally they are of interest in illuminating
the ways in which, however incompletely or imperfectly, emancipatory interests can prevail against ancient law and custom and the spirit of ruthless
accumulation.6 The task of the present volume is to explain the construction of the powerful political and economic complex that was undone in the
nineteenth century. Like Eltis, Blackburn emphasizes European actions and decision-making in the process. The book's first section is tided 'The
Selection of New World Slavery' and ranges from medieval Europe to the eighteenth-century Caribbean. It follows the tracks of the Iberian conquerors
and their northern European imitators and inheritors, thus cutting effectively across the different European empires (the same is true of the works of
Eltis and Thornton), unlike many Atlantic histories which exclude Iberia and Latin America.7 The selection of African slavery in
the Americas was a tortuous process which involved experiments with indentured European
labour and Indian slavery. Numerous factors made these alternatives unsatisfactory for the various
European colonizers. Spain found a viable labour source in Indian waged labour and forms of coercion associated with
the mita, encomienda and repartimiento in its imperial core, the mining centres of Peru and Mexico. Given the emphasis on bullion,
rather than sugar, Spain found less use for African slave labour than did the other European colonizers (though
African slavery was important in virtually every branch of the Spanish colonial economy). Not
until the Cuban plantation
economy took off in the later eighteenth century did the Spanish empire see the intensive use of slave
labour for sugar cultivation that was the magnet for the Atlantic slave trade.8 The Portuguese, Dutch, English and French American
colonies, in contrast, came to be based on the sugar plantation from north-eastern Brazil to the Caribbean. From the later sixteenth through the later
seventeenth centuries these
powers tested European and Indian labour before turning full-force to the
African slave trade. Blackburn coincides with Eltis in that he acknowledges important ideological motives in the selection of African
slavery, finding precedents for European practices in Roman law and Europeans' early association of Africans with slavery and servitude (31-93). Also,
like Eltis, he notes the virtual absence of European criticism of African slavery, figures like the Spanish clerics Bartolome de las Casas and Alonso de
Sandoval being few and far between. However, he places
more explanatory power in existing economic and
political forces. Not only was slavery entrenched in West Africa (as Thornton carefully discusses), but the
development of class relations in late medieval and early modern western Europe precluded the
mass enslavement and especially the hereditary enslavement - of Europeans, an explanation that Blackburn
synchronizes with the arguments of Edmund Morgan, Richard Dunn and K. G. Davies.9 Blackburn sees ideas regarding race, or what Eltis calls
'cultural values', in Weberian terms as '"switchmen", selecting different paths of historical development' (357). Racism was a cause of the
implantation of African slavery in the Americas and, therefore, more than an epiphenomenon of the master-slave relationship. But it was
not the primary one. For Blackburn, the explanations of the rise of slavery by historians like Morgan, Davies and
Dunn, who emphasize economic, political and institutional factors, are more convincing than Eltis s
depiction of racism as the motive force behind American slavery, a thesis Blackburn rebuts at length and counters with his own
counter-factual construction of an Atlantic system built on free, instead of bonded, labour (350-63).10 Blackburn's discussion of the selection of African
slavery is wide-ranging and comprehensive. It is surely the single best place to read about the early phase of African slavery in the Americas. Many of
his conclusions in this section will be familiar to scholars of slavery and colonialism, something Blackburn himself acknowledges through references to
the works of Morgan and Dunn and his own reworking of the FreyreTannenbaum thesis regarding the differences between Iberian and northern
European, especially English, slave societies. The former Blackburn calls 'baroque','an alternative modernity to that associated with the Puritan ethic'
(20-1). This modernity was more inclusive (though hierarchical and exploitative) than the British and French plantation colonies, where slaves were not
treated as members of a stratified yet organic community beholden to Crown and Church, but as mere factors of production in a ruthlessly capitalistic
vision of modernity.11 The latter, however, won out, as Blackburn argues in the second half of the book, 'Slavery and Accumulation'. Barbados, Jamaica
and St Domingue were the pinnacle of the early modern Atlantic plantation complex, importing hundreds of thousands of slaves and exporting vast
quantities of sugar in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. England, in particular, emerged triumphant, in part because of the victorious slaves of
St Domingue/Haiti who overthrew their bondage at the end of the eighteenth century, but also because England settled on a more successful colonial
policy that encouraged investment and innovation both in the metropolis and the colonies. In Blackburn's characterization, English colonialism was
'orchestrated by an inverted mercantilism - that is to say, not by financiers and merchants serving raison d'etat but by the state serving capitalist
purposes. . . . The colonial and Adantic regime of extended primitive accumulation allowed metropolitan accumulation to break out of its agrarian and
national limits and discover an industrial and global destiny' (515). In the chapter entided 'New World slavery, primitive accumulation and British
industrialization', Blackburn takes the exact opposite position from Eltis, arguing that colonial slavery was the foundation of England's industrial
revolution, a labyrinthine account that takes him through the works of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Eric Hobsbawm, Charles Kindelberger, Paul Bairoch
and Stanley Engerman, among others (510-80). The length and care of that chapter indicates one of the major purposes of The Making of New World
Slavery. This work is not just about the rise of African slavery in the Americas; it is also about the rise of the 'West'. How and why did Europe emerge as
the world's dominant power? For Blackburn, Europe's ascendancy led directly through the early modern Atlantic world. Indeed, while his two volumes
have come to occupy centre stage in the historiography of the rise and fall of Atlantic slavery, his work must also be seen in relationship to the recent
revisions in British sociology of the ideas of Marx and Weber concerning the origins and nature of capitalist modernity and the nation-state. Michael
Mann, Perry Anderson, Ernest Gellner, John Hall and Anthony Giddens - as much as C. L. R. James and Fernando Ortiz - are his peers.12 The most
comparable figure is Paul Gilroy. Like Gilroy's The Black Atlantic, The Making of New World Slavery seeks to demonstrate that the Atlantic slave
complex was the wheelhouse and slaughterhouse - of modernity. Whereas Gilroy focuses on the Black experience of modernity forged in the Atlantic
world and Black reflections on that experience, Blackburn approaches the slave complex as the pivot of European industrialization and state formation.
Though his work builds up to an evaluation of European modernity, it would be a gross simplification to call the work of Blackburn, or Eltis,
Eurocentric. However, it is correct to say that the two works do focus on European actions, interests and decisions and conclude with incisive
arguments about the impact of slavery on European economic, political and social development. Just such a focus John Thornton seeks to displace by
emphasizing the actions, interests and decisions of Africans in the making of the Atlantic world. How Africans influenced the origins and management
of the Atlantic slave trade and how Africans affected the culture of the New World colonies are his major concerns. A reader like myself who works on
Europe and the Americas will find this work indispensable both as a conceptual tool and as an introduction to various historiographies pertaining to
Africa and to Africans in the Americas. The book's most provocative and counter-intuitive section,' Africans in Africa', discusses the origins and
development of the slave trade and is most comparable to the other works discussed here. Thornton makes a strong case that the
decisive players in the process were not Europeans but Africans. He constructs his argument through various
considerations. Slavery was a fundamental institution in most West African societies , though it differed greatly
from the plantation slavery of the Americas. Slaves in West Africa, usually captured in the endemic wars among
the myriad polities of the region, fulfilled a wide variety of roles, from menial labour to administrative and military
leadership. Slavery was not necessarily associated with a society's most debased tasks, as it was in the American plantation zone. It was not
based on colour, nor was it hereditary, the most pernicious of changes in slavery as it crossed the Atlantic (72-97). Moreover,
Thornton takes great pains to show that the European presence on the west coast of Africa, with the possible exception of the
Portuguese in Angola, was weak and completely dependent on the interests and goodwill of African
states and merchants. These latter were the true masters of the slave trade. In making this argument, Thornton is consciously inverting the
terms of dependency theory explanations of the origins and impact of the slave trade. Pointing specifically to the work of Walter Rodney (43), Thornton
disputes the view that the origins of the slave trade lay in European military and commercial superiority, that the immediate consequences of the
European presence were an escalation of African warfare, and that the longer term consequences were a drain on African human capital and the
bending of the African economy to European interests (a description captured in the title of Rodney's influential work How Europe Underdeveloped
Africa).,3 Thornton, in contrast, argues that Africans
held the upper hand. Different African states possessed
sophisticated naval technologies well adapted to the coastal environment that made effective
penetration impossible for the Europeans. European efforts to subdue African kingdoms through force of arms met with
repeated failure. Confronted with a military and naval foe of equal or greater strength, Europeans had no choice but to establish small trading forts on
islands off the coast of Africa. Such a weak presence, Thornton holds, had very little effect on the nature of African politics. The same was true of
Europe's economic impact on the region. In the lengthy chapter 'The process of enslavement and the slave trade', Thornton argues that it was not the
temptation of European commodities such as guns that stoked the slave trade and African warfare. Rather, war
among African states
responded more frequently to internal political pressures, while African slave traders had
various markets open to them, so that selling to Europeans was only one option among others.
Economic decisions regarding the pace and volume of the slave trade were made by Africans.
Europeans, therefore, and not Africans, were in a dependent position: 'African participation in the slave trade was voluntary and under the control of
African decision makers. This was not just at the surface level of daily exchange but even at deeper levels. Europeans possessed no means, either
economic or military, to compel African leaders to sell slaves' (125). Thornton bases his arguments on an extensive scholarly literature and on close
readings of primary sources. Those sources were produced almost exclusively by Europeans in European languages. This situation thus opens an
intriguing question that Thornton does not directly address: what does it mean that an argument about African primacy in military and economic
encounters with Europeans relies heavily on the European perspective? Thornton's method of interpreting documents relevant to the slave trade and to
African cultures in the Americas is familiar: frequently he checks them against contemporary anthropological studies of African cultures and societies
and reads those back into the historical sources. Such a method is generally convincing, but it also implies a historical hierarchy. In the written record,
Europeans are the active agents, Africans their objects of description and contemplation. The prevalence of the European perspective in the writing of
the history of the slave trade thus led this reader to puzzle over Thornton's virtual effacement of colonialism from his explanation of Atlantic slavery's
rise (and of the legacies of colonialism in the writing of history). His argument about African autonomy and agency is forceful and persuasive, and he
demonstrates spectacularly that the history of Atlantic slavery is not only the history of the rise of the West. But by inverting the terms of the
dependency theory approach of Rodney and others, Thornton eclipses Europe's role in the making of both the Atlantic slave trade and the American
plantation, without which the slave trade would never have existed. Should he have presented a more balanced account? Maybe not; balance is not
necessarily the only virtue of the Atlantic historian. To argue with rigour, imagination and over a broad canvas are the marks of the great histories of
Atlantic slavery. Thornton, Blackburn and Eltis are squarely in that tradition and, like C. L. R. James, Fernando Ortiz, David Brion Davis, Seymour
Drescher and others before them, they have produced works that incite the reader to ask big questions and reach for big answers about a history whose
legacies continue to shape the Atlantic world.
*2. This is offensetrying to explain away the historical record of

capitalism through appeals to race is a main component of the
neoliberal strategy of sanitation
Adolph Reed, Jr., University of Pennsylvania http://nonsite.org/editorial/django-unchained-or-the-help-how-cultural-politics-
is-worse-than-no-politics-at-all-and-why 2-25-13
The tendency to craft political critique by demanding that we fix our gaze in the rearview mirror
appeals to an intellectual laziness. Marking superficial similarities with familiar images of
oppression is less mentally taxing than attempting to parse the multifarious, often
contradictory dynamics and relations that shape racial inequality in particular and politics in
general in the current moment. Assertions that phenomena like the Jena, Louisiana, incident, the
killings of James Craig Anderson and Trayvon Martin, and racial disparities in incarceration
demonstrate persistence of old-school, white supremacist racism and charges that the
sensibilities of Thomas Dixon and Margaret Mitchell continue to shape most Americans understandings of slavery do
important, obfuscatory ideological work. They lay claim to a moral urgency that, as
Mahmood Mamdani argues concerning the rhetorical use of charges of genocide, enables disparaging efforts to
differentiate discrete inequalities and appropriate to generate historically specific causal
accounts of them as irresponsible dodges that abet injustice by temporizing in its face.38 But more is
at work here as well. Insistence on the transhistorical primacy of racism as a source of
inequality is a class politics. Its the politics of a stratum of the professional-managerial
class whose material location and interests, and thus whose ideological commitments, are bound up with
parsing, interpreting and administering inequality defined in terms of disparities among
ascriptively defined populations reified as groups or even cultures. In fact, much of the intellectual
life of this stratum is devoted to shoehorning into the rubric of racism all manner of
inequalities that may appear statistically as racial disparities.39 And that project shares
capitalisms ideological tendency to obscure races foundations, as well as the
foundations of all such ascriptive Whierarchies,IlERE do pOSTMO in
d E historically
RNisTS COME FrO specific
M? 161 political
economy. This felicitous convergence may help explain why proponents of cultural politics are so inclined to treat the
products and production processes of the mass entertainment industry as a terrain for political struggle and debate. They dont see
the industrys imperatives as fundamentally incompatible with the notions of a just society they seek to advance. In fact, they share
its fetishization of heroes and penchant for inspirational stories of individual Overcoming. This
sort of politics of
representation is no more than an image-management discourse within neoliberalism.
That strains of an ersatz left imagine it to be something more marks the extent of our
defeat. And then, of course, theres that Upton Sinclair point.
3. Slavery was an economic strategy to grow crop margins, which was

the comparative advantage of the Americasour understanding is a
prerequisite to successful resistance
Tom Keefer, a member of Facing Reality, an anti-imperialist, anti-racist collective in Montreal , 2003
http://newsocialist.org/old_mag/magazine/39/article03.html
These large numbers of slaves and the success of the slave trade as jump starter for capitalist industrialization came from what has
been called the "triangular trade"--an intensely profitable economic relationship which built up
European industry while systematically deforming and underdeveloping the other economic
regions involved. The Europeans would produce manufactured goods that would then be traded
to ruling elites in the various African kingdoms. They in turn would use the firearms and trading
goods of the Europeans to enrich themselves by capturing members of rival tribes, or the less
fortunate of their own society, to sell them as slaves to the European merchants who would fill their now empty ships with
slaves destined to work in the colonial plantations. On the plantations, the slaves would toil to produce
expensive cash crops that could not be grown in Europe. These raw materials were then refined
and sold at fantastic profit in Europe. In 1697, the tiny island of Barbados with its 166 square miles, was
worth more to British capitalism than New England, New York, and Pennsylvania combined,
while by 1798, the income accruing to the British from the West Indian plantations alone was four million pounds a year, as opposed
to one million pounds from the whole rest of the world. Capitalist
economists of the day recognized the super
profitability of slavery by noting the ease of making 100% profit on the trade, and by noting that
one African slave was as profitable as seven workers in the mainland. Even more
importantly, the profits of the slave trade were plowed back into further economic growth. Capital from the slave trade financed
James Watt and the invention and production of the steam engine, while the shipping, insurance, banking, mining, and textile
industries were all thoroughly integrated into the slave trade. What an analysis of the origins of modern capitalism shows is just how
far the capitalist class will go to make a profit. The development of a pernicious racist ideology, spread to justify the uprooting and
enslavement of millions of people to transport them across the world to fill a land whose indigenous population was massacred or
worked to death, represents the beginnings of the system that George W. Bush defends as "our way of life". For
revolutionaries today who seek to understand and transform capitalism and the racism encoded
into its very being, it is essential to understand how and why these systems of
domination and exploitation came into being before we can hope to successfully
overthrow them.
4. That's why early African enslavement was couched in terms of their
racial superiority, not inferiority
Sullivan 2013 former editor of The New Republic, influential blogger and editor of Dish
(3/13, Andrew, Dish, How Racism WasW IMade, Ctd,
http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/03/13/how-racism-was-made-ctd-2/)
One of the most surprising revelations of Hugh Thomass great book, The Slave Trade, is the
persistence and continuity of slavery in the Mediterranean world from classical times through
the nineteenth century. For most of that time racism was not an ideology used to justify slavery,
which was seldom thought to require justification. A religious prohibition emerged among Christians and
Muslims not to enslave members of their own faith, but for most of history the accidents of conquest, not a philosophy of racial
inferiority, determined who served whom. In fact, as Thomas describes it,
the movement of the slave trade down the
African coast was accompanied by admiration for the physical and mental hardiness of the
slaves who thereby became available because they were better able to survive the rigors of the
transatlantic trade and American plantation slavery than North Africans. In the writings of sixteenth and
seventeenth century slavers, it is the superiority of these southerly people, not their inferiority, that
rendered them appropriate objects for purchase.
5. Slave trade not originally motivated by race- Europeans were taking

advantage of a market distortion
Sullivan 2013 former editor of The New Republic, influential blogger and editor of Dish
(3/13, Andrew, Dish, How Racism Was Made, Ctd,
http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2013/03/13/how-racism-was-made-ctd-2/)
As you speak to this topic, you continue to state things that are completely at odds with the historic record. I dont dispute this, but
equally,
the slave trade itself, along with colonialism everywhere, presumed a racial inferiority before the
Southern states codified it so precisely along Nuremberg lines. That is simply false. The slave trade was
owned and operated by Africans! Europeans tapped into it as an easy supply of necessary
labor for the brutal conditions of plantation staple crops (specifically sugar), but Europeans were
entirely incapable of penetrating beyond the coastline due to the disease environment. European
involvement altered a long standing slave trade along the Slave Coast, with fascinating political
and economic dynamics. However, racism had nothing to do with the enslavement of Africans.
at: slave not worker
1. This is a misread of MarxismMarx is discussing the working
class, not the worker even people who dont technically have jobs
are still subjects to alienation. You dont have to be in a factory to not
own the means of production. The factory is a metaphor for capitalist
class relationsin reality its not war on actual workers, its a total
war against the working CLASSthose who arent bourgeoisie.
2. Independent linkattempting to differentiate segments of the

working class and pit them against one another is part and parcel of
the divide and conquer strategylike saying we can't unite with you
because technically the slave is owned and the worker is not.
Marxism doesnt deny that slaves faced different brutality, but it does
try to focus on ways in which elements of the working class share
fundamental common ground to organize revolution.
3. Fixed elements of the labor theory of value are important for

revolution- attempts to reshape definitionally, like their distinction
between slave and worker, obscure capitalist warfare
Tumino 1 [Stephen, Prof English at Pitt, What is Orthodox Marxism and Why it Matters Now More than Ever, Red Critique,
p. online]
Orthodox Marxism has become a test-case of the "radical" today. Yet, what passes for orthodoxy on the leftwhether
like Smith and Zizek they claim to support it, or, like Butler and Rorty they want to "achieve our country" by excluding it from "U.S.
Intellectual life" ("On Left Conservatism"),
is a parody of orthodoxy which hybridizes its central concepts and
renders them into flexodox simulations. Yet, even in its very textuality, however, the orthodox is a resistance to the
flexodox. Contrary to the common-sensical view of "orthodox" as "traditional" or "conformist" "opinions," is its other meaning:
ortho-doxy not as flexodox "hybridity," but as "original" "ideas." "Original," not in the sense of epistemic "event," "authorial"
originality and so forth, but, as in chemistry, in its opposition to "para," "meta," "post" and other ludic hybridities: thus "ortho" as
resistance to the annotations that mystify the original ideas of Marxism and hybridize it for the "special interests" of various groups.
The "original" ideas of Marxism are inseparable from their effect as "demystification" of
ideologyfor example the deployment of "class" that allows a demystification of daily life from
the haze of consumption. Class is thus an "original idea" of Marxism in the sense that it
cuts through the hype of cultural agency under capitalism and reveals how culture
and consumption are tied to labor, the everyday determined by the workday: how the amount of time workers
spend engaging in surplus-labor determines the amount of time they get for reproducing and cultivating their needs. Without
changing this division of labor social change is impossible. Orthodoxy is a rejection of the
ideological annotations: hence, on the one hand, the resistance to orthodoxy as "rigid" and "dogmatic" "determinism," and, on the
other, its hybridization by the flexodox as the result of which it has become almost impossible today to
read the original ideas of Marxism, such as "exploitation"; "surplus-value"; "class"; "class
antagonism"; "class struggle"; "revolution"; "science" (i.e., objective knowledge); "ideology" (as "false consciousness"). Yet, it is
these ideas alone that clarify the elemental truths through which theory ceases to be a gray
activism of tropes, desire and affect, and becomes, instead, a red, revolutionary guide to praxis for a
new society freed from exploitation and injustice. Marx's original scientific discovery was his labor theory of value.
Marx's labor theory of value is an elemental truth of Orthodox Marxism that is rejected by the flexodox left as the central dogmatism
of a "totalitarian" Marxism. It is only Marx's labor theory of value, however, that exposes the mystification of the wages system that
disguises exploitation as a "fair exchange" between capital and labor and reveals the truth about this relation as one of exploitation.
Only Orthodox Marxism explains how what the workers sell to the capitalist is not labor, a
commodity like any other whose price is determined by fluctuations in supply and demand, but
their labor-powertheir ability to labor in a system which has systematically "freed" them from the means of production so
they are forced to work or starvewhose value is determined by the amount of time socially necessary to
reproduce it daily. The value of labor-power is equivalent to the value of wages workers consume daily in the form of
commodities that keep them alive to be exploited tomorrow. Given the technical composition of production today this amount of
time is a slight fraction of the workday the majority of which workers spend producing surplus-value over and above their needs. The
surplus-value is what is pocketed by the capitalists in the form of profit when the commodities are sold. Class is the antagonistic
division thus established between the exploited and their exploiters. Without
Marx's labor theory of value one
could only contest the after effects of this outright theft of social labor-power rather than its
cause lying in the private ownership of production. The flexodox rejection of the labor theory of value as the
"dogmatic" core of a totalitarian Marxism therefore is a not so subtle rejection of the principled defense of the (scientific) knowledge
workers need for their emancipation from exploitation because only the labor theory of value exposes the opportunism of
knowledges (ideology) that occult this exploitation. Without
the labor theory of value socialism would
only be a moral dogma that appeals to the sentiments of "fairness" and "equality"
for a "just" distribution of the social wealth that does the work of capital by
naturalizing the exploitation of labor under capitalism giving it an acceptable
"human face."
4. Specifically, the distinction between slave and worker was created

to gain the allegiance of poor whites - the idea was they would say "at
least we aren't slaves" and accept capitalist brutality
Selfa 3 (on the editorial board of the International Socialist Review, Lance, the author of The Democrats: A Critical History, a
socialist analysis of the Democratic Party, and editor of The Struggle for Palestine, a collection of essays by leading solidarity
activists, Slavery and the Origins of Racism, International Socialist Review, Issue 26,
http://www.isreview.org/issues/26/roots_of_racism.shtml)
Within a few decades, the ideology of white supremacy was fully developed. Some of the greatest minds
of the daysuch as Scottish philosopher David Hume and Thomas Jefferson, the man who wrote the Declaration of
Independencewrote treatises alleging Black inferiority. The ideology of white supremacy based on the natural inferiority of Blacks,
even allegations that Blacks were subhuman, strengthened throughout the 18th century. This was the way that the leading
intellectual figures of the time reconciled the ideals of the 1776 American Revolution with slavery. The American Revolution of 1776
and later the French Revolution of 1789 popularized the ideas of liberty and the rights of all human beings. The Declaration of
Independence asserts that all menare created equal and possess certain unalienable rightsrights that cant be taken awayof
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As the first major bourgeois revolution, the American Revolution sought to establish the
rights of the new capitalist class against the old feudal monarchy. It started with the resentment of the American merchant class that
wanted to break free from British restrictions on its trading partners. But its challenge to British tyranny also gave expression to a
whole range of ideas that expanded the concept of liberty from being just about trade to include ideas of human rights, democracy,
and civil liberties. It legitimized an assault on slavery as an offense to liberty, so that some of the leading American revolutionaries,
such as Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin, endorsed abolition. Slaves and free Blacks also pointed to the ideals of the revolution
to call for getting rid of slavery. But because the
revolution aimed to establish the rule of capital in America,
and because a lot of capitalists and planters made a lot of money from slavery, the revolution
compromised with slavery. The Declaration initially contained a condemnation of King George for allowing the slave trade,
but Jefferson dropped it following protests from representatives from Georgia and the Carolinas. How could the founding
fathers of the U.S.most of whom owned slaves themselvesreconcile the ideals of liberty for which they were fighting
with the existence of a system that represented the exact negation of liberty? The ideology of
white supremacy fit the bill. We know today that all men didnt include women, Indians, or most
Blacks. But to rule Black slaves out of the blessings of liberty, the leading head-fixers of the time
argued that Blacks werent really men, they were a lower order of being. Jeffersons Notes from
Virginia, meant to be a scientific catalog of the flora and fauna of Virginia, uses arguments that anticipate the scientific racism of
the 1800s and 1900s. With few exceptions, no major institutionsuch as the universities, the churches, or the newspapers of the
timeraised criticisms of white supremacy or of slavery. In fact, they helped pioneer religious and academic
justifications for slavery and Black inferiority. As C.L.R. James put it, [T]he conception of dividing
people by race begins with the slave trade. This thing was so shocking, so opposed to all the
conceptions of society which religion and philosophers had that the only justification by which
humanity could face it was to divide people W I l E Rinto
E d o races
p O S T M and
O d E decide
R N i s T Sthat
C Othe
M E Africans
F r O M ? were
1 6 5 an inferior race.23
White supremacy wasnt only used to justify slavery. It was also used to keep in line the two-
thirds of Southern whites who werent slaveholders. Unlike the French colony of St. Domingue or the British
colony of Barbados, where Blacks vastly outnumbered whites, Blacks represented a minority in the slave South. A tiny
minority of slave-holding whites, who controlled the governments and economies of
the Deep South states, ruled over a population that was roughly two-thirds white farmers and workers and
one-third Black slaves. The slaveholders ideology of racism and white supremacy helped
to divide the working population, tying poor whites to the slaveholders. Slavery afforded
poor white farmers what Fields called a social space whereby they preserved an illusory
independence based on debt and subsistence farming while the rich planters continued to dominate Southern politics and
society. A caste system as well as a form of labor, historian James M. McPherson wrote, slavery elevated all whites to
the ruling caste and thereby reduced the potential for class conflict.24 The great abolitionist
Frederick Douglass understood this dynamic: The hostility between the whites and blacks of the
South is easily explained. It has its root and sap in the relation of slavery, and was incited on
both sides by the poor whites and the blacks by putting enmity between them. They divided both
to conquer each.[Slaveholders denounced emancipation as] tending to put the white working man on an equality with
Blacks, and by this means, they succeed in drawing off the minds of the poor whites from the real fact, that by the rich slave-master,
they are already regarded as but a single remove from equality with the slave.25
impact cards

harman
Globalized capitalism is fueling inequality and destruction on a
continually growing scale
Harman 97 [Chris Harman 97, Editor of the Socialist Worker 1997 Economics of the
madhouse, Pg 99-100]
A reprise in the early 21st century of the conditions in the early part of this century. Such is the danger that confronts the world if we cannot deal with
the present crisis concludes Will Hutton in his book The State Were In. Those conditions included two
world wars, the rise of
Nazism, the collapse o democracy across most of Europe, the victory of Stalinism, the death camps
and the gulag. If they were to be repeated in a few years time there is no doubt it would be on a
much more horrific scale that even Hitler could not imagine. We would indeed be facing a future of
barbarism, if not the destruction of the whole of humanity. Warnings of such a future are not to be treated lightly.
Already the crisis of the 1990s has begun to unleash the same barbaric forces we saw in the 1930s. In one country after another political adventurers
who support the existing system are making careers for themselves by trying to scapegoat ethnic or religious minorities. In the Russia, the Hitler
admirer, racist, and proponent of nuclear war, Zhirinovsky got 24 percent of the vote in the November 1993 poll. In Bombay, another Hitler admirer,
Bal Thackercey, runs the state government, threatening to wage war against the Muslim minority. In turkey the government and the military wage a
war against the Kurdish fifth of the population, while the fascists try to incite Sunni Muslims to murder Alawi Muslims. In Rwanda the former dictator
unleashed a horrific slaughter of Tutsis by Hutus, while in neighboring Burundi there is the threat of slaughter of Hutus by Tutsis. All
this
horror has its origins in the failure of market capitalism to provide even minimally satisfactory
lives for the mass of people. Instead is leaves a fifth of the worlds population under nourished and most of the rest doubting whether
they will be able to enjoy tomorrow the small comforts that allowed to them today Both the out and out defenders of ruling class
power and todays timid cowed reformists tell us there is no alternative to this system. But if that is
true then there is no hope for humanity. Politics becomes merely about having the deckchairs on
the titanic while making sure no one disturbs the rich and privileged as they dine at the captains
table. But there is an alternative. The whole crazy system of alienated labor is a product of what we
do. Human beings have the power to seize control of the ways of creating wealth and to subordinate
them to our decisions, to our values. We do not have to leave them to the blind caprice of the market to the mad rush of the rival
owners of wealth in their race to keep ahead of each other. The new technologies that are available today, far from making out lives worse have the
potential to make this control easier. Automated work processes could provide us with more leisure, with more time for creativity and more change to
deliberate where the world is going. Computerism could provide us with the unparalleled information about the recourses available to satisfy our needs
and how to deploy them effectivly But
this alternative cannot come from working within the system, from
accepting the insane logic of the market, of competitive accumulation, of working harder in order to
force someone else to worker harder or lose their job. The alternative can only come from fighting
against the system and the disastrous effect its logic has on the lives of the mass of people.
marko
Short term profit-focus necessitated by globalized capitalism corrupts
decisionmaking and makes extinction inevitable
Marko 03 (Anarchism and Human Survival: Russells problem., May 14, 2003,
https://www2.indymedia.org.uk/en/2003/05/68173.html)
nuclear war, ecological change and north-south conflict. All three

There exist three threats to survival namely
can be traced to a single source that being the pathological nature of state capitalism.
I would argue
What is frightening is that eventual self induced extinction is a rational consequence of our
system of world order much like the destruction of the system of world order prior to 1914 was a
rational consequence of its internal nature. I shall focus in this essay on nuclear war, the most
immediate threat. In doing so we will come to appreciate the nexus between this threat, globalisation and north-south
conflict. Currently we are witnessing a major expansion in the US global military system. One facet of this expansion is the
globalisation of US nuclear war planning known as "adaptive planning". The
idea here is that the US would be able
to execute a nuclear strike against any target on Earth at very short notice. For strategic planners the
world's population is what they refer to as a "target rich environment". The Clinton era commander of US nuclear forces, Admiral
Mies, stated that nuclear ballistic missile submarines would be able to "move undetected to any launch point" threatening "any spot
on Earth". What
lies at the heart of such a policy is the desire to maintain global strategic
superiority what is known as "full spectrum dominance" previously referred to as "escalation dominance". Full
spectrum dominance means that the US would be able to wage and win any type of war ranging from a small scale contingency to
Strategic nuclear superiority is to be used to threaten other states so that they
general nuclear war.
toe the party line. The Bush administration's Nuclear Posture Review stipulated that nuclear weapons are needed in case of
"surprising military developments" not necessarily limited to chemical or biological weapons. The Clinton administration was more
explicit stating in its 2001 Pentagon report to Congress that US nuclear forces are to "hedge against defeat of conventional forces in
defense of vital interests". The passage makes clear that this statement is not limited to chemical or biological weapons. We have
just seen in Iraq what is meant by the phrase "defense of vital interests". Washington
is asserting that if any nation
were to have the temerity to successfully defend itself against US invasion, armed with
conventional weapons only, then instant annihilation awaits. "What we say goes" or you go is the message
being conveyed. Hitler no doubt would have had a similar conception of "deterrence". It should be stressed that this is a message
offered to the whole world after all it is now a target rich environment. During the cold war the US twice contemplated using nuclear
weapons in such a fashion both in Vietnam, the first at Dien Bien Phu and during Nixon administration planning for "operation duck
hook". In both cases the main impediments to US action were the notion that nuclear weapons were not politically "useable" in such
a context and because of the Soviet deterrent. The Soviet deterrent is no more and the US currently is hotly pursuing the
development of nuclear weapons that its designers believe will be "useable" what the Clinton administration referred to as low yield
earth penetrating nuclear weapons and what the Bush administration refers to as the Rapid Nuclear Earth Penetrator. Such
strategic reforms are meant to make nuclear war a more viable policy option, on the basis that lower yields will not immediately kill
as many innocent people as higher yield weapons. This is known as the lowering of the threshold of nuclear war. The
development of the RNEP draws us closer to the prospect of nuclear war, including accidental
nuclear war, because lower yields will lower the barrier between conventional and nuclear war.
There will exist no real escalatory firewall between these two forms of warfare which means that in any conventional crisis involving
nuclear powers, there will exist a strong incentive to strike first. A relationship very similar to the interaction between the
mobilisation schedules of the great powers prior to 1914. There exist strong parallels between US nuclear planning and the German
Imperial Staffs Schlieffen plan. Lowering
the threshold of nuclear war will also enhance pressures for
global nuclear proliferation. If the US is making its arsenal more useable by working towards achieving a first strike
capability, then others such as Russia and China must react in order to ensure the viability of their deterrents. Moreover, the
potential third world targets of US attack would also have greater incentive to ensure that they also have a nuclear deterrent. It is
also understood that the development of these nuclear weapons may require the resumption of nuclear testing, a key reason for the
Administration's lack of readiness to abide by the CTBT treaty, which is meant to ban nuclear testing. The CTBT is a key feature of
contemporary global nuclear non proliferation regimes for the US signed the CTBT in order to extend the nuclear non proliferation
treaty (NPT) indefinitely. Abandoning the CTBT treaty, in order to develop a new generation of more "useable" nuclear weapons that
will lower the threshold of nuclear war, will place the NPT regime under further strain and greatly increase the chances of further
nuclear proliferation. There exists a "deadly connection" between global weapons of mass destruction
proliferation and US foreign policy. One may well ask what has all this to do with state
capitalism? Consider the thinking behind the militarisation of space, outlined for us by Space
Command; historically military forces have evolved to protect national interests and
investments both military and economic. During the rise of sea commerce, nations built navies to protect and
enhance their commercial interests. During the westward expansion of the continental United States, military outposts and the
cavalry emerged to protect our wagon trains, settlements and roads. The document goes on, the emergence of space power follows
both of these models. Moreover, the globalization of the world economy will continue, with a widening between haves and have
nots. The demands of unilateral strategic superiority, long standing US policy known as "escalation" or "full spectrum" dominance,
compel Washington to pursue space control". This means that, according to a report written under the chairmanship of Donald
Rumsfeld, "in the coming period the US will conduct operations to, from, in and through space" which includes "power projection in,
from and through space". Toward this end, Washington has resisted efforts in the UN to create an arms control regime for space. As
a result there will inevitably arise an arms race in space. The importance of this simply cannot be over-emphasised. Throughout the
nuclear age there have been a number of close calls, due to both human and technical error, that almost lead to a full scale nuclear
exchange between Washington and Moscow. These glitches in command and control systems were ultimately benign because both
sides had early warning satellites placed in specialised orbits which could be relied upon to provide real time imagery of nuclear
missile launch sites. However the militarisation of space now means that these satellites will become open game; the benign
environment in space will disappear if the militarisation of space continues. Thus if the US were to "conduct operations to, from in
and through space" it will do see remotely. Technical failure may result in the system attacking Russian early warning satellites.
Without question this would be perceived by the Russian's as the first shot in a US nuclear first strike. Consider for instance a
curious event that occurred in 1995. A NASA research rocket, part of a study of the northern lights, was fired over Norway. The
rocket was perceived by the Russian early warning system as the spear of a US first strike. The Russian system then began a
countdown to full scale nuclear response; it takes only a single rocket to achieve this effect because it was no doubt perceived by
Russian planners that this single rocket was meant to disable their command and control system as a result of electromagnetic pulse
effects. To
prevent the loss of all nuclear forces in a subsequent follow on strike the Russian's
would need to launch a full scale response as soon as possible. Because the US itself has a hair
trigger launch on warning posture a Russian attack would be followed by a full scale US attack;
the US has a number of "reserve options" in its war plans, thus such an accidental launch could
trigger a global chain of nuclear release around the globe. Calamity was averted in 1995 because Russia's early
warning satellites would have demonstrated that there was no launch of US nuclear forces. If these satellites were to be taken out
then this ultimate guarantee disappears; the Russian ground based radar system has a number of key holes that prevent it from
warning of an attack through two key corridors, one from the Atlantic the other from the Pacific. In the future if an event such as
1995 were to occur in space the Russians no longer would have the level of comfort provided by its space based assets. The
militarisation of space greatly increases the chances of a full scale accidental nuclear war. The
militarisation of space is intimately linked with US strategic nuclear forces, for the previous command covering space, known as
Space Command, has merged with the command responsible for nuclear forces, Strategic Command. Upon merger, the commander
of Strategic Command stated, "United States Strategic Command provides a single war fighting combatant command with a global
perspective, focused on exploiting the strong and growing synergy between the domain of space and strategic capabilities." The
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff added, "this new command is going to have all the responsibilities of its predecessors, but an
In other
entirely new mission focus, greatly expanded forces and you might even say several infinite areas of responsibility."
words, we are witnessing the integration of strategic conventional, nuclear and space planning
into the command responsible for overseeing US nuclear forces. In turn these forces become an ordinary
facet of US strategic planning, severing the break between conventional and nuclear war. The link between the increase in threats to
survival and state capitalism (as well as globalisation) was provided for us by the old Space Command as noted above. We may justly
also conclude that US nuclear weapons provide a shield, or shadow, enabling the deployment of offensive military firepower in
what Kennedy era commander General Maxwell Taylor referred to as the key theatre of war, namely "under-developed areas". This
shield was made effective by "escalation dominance", as noted above, now known as "full spectrum dominance". It is this facet of US
strategic policy that compels Washington place such a premium on nuclear superiority and nuclear war fighting.The link
between US nuclear strategy and the global political economy is intimate. US nuclear weapons,
both during and after the cold war, have acted as the ultimate guarantors of US policy, which is
concerned with managing the world capitalist system in the interests of dominant domestic
elites. Nuclear weapons provide the umbrella of power under which the system is able to function in much the same way that Karl
Polanyi in his classic work, The Great Transformation, argued that the balance of power functioned in the service of the world
capitalist system in the 19th century. The great restoration of the world capitalist system, under the rubric of liberal
internationalism, and the onset of the nuclear age in the wake of the second world war, are not merely coincidental. To understand
the contours of contemporary world order is to appreciate the deep nexus between the two. Military superiority is necessary because
of threats to "stability". It is to be expected that a system of world order constructed for the benefit of an elite core of corporate
interests in the US will not go down well with the world's population, especially in key regions singled out for capital extraction such
as the Middle East and Latin America. Planners recognise that the pursuit of capital globalisation and the
consequent widening of the gap between rich and poor would be opposed by the globe's
population. Absolute strategic superiority is meant to keep the world's population quite and
obedient out of sheer terror, as Bush administration aligned neo-conservative thinkers have argued it is better that
Washington be feared rather than loved. As they have asserted, after world war two US hegemony had to be "obtained", now it must
be "maintained" (Robert Kagan and William Kristol). It
is only natural that this "maintenance operation"
should be a militaristic one given that the US has a comparative advantage in the use of force; a
nuclear global first strike capability would give Washington an absolute advantage. Should
anyone get out of line, possibly threatening to spread the "virus" of popular social and economic
development, force is to be used to restore "credibility" to beat down the threat of a better
example. The US pursues a dangerous nuclear strategy because such a strategy in its terms is "credible". Anarchists are well
aware of this important aspect of international relations given the events of the Spanish Civil War. Such a situation is no joke, for
this was precisely the fear of Kennedy era planners that led to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Washington sought to return Cuba to the
"Latin American mode" fearing that Cuba would set an example to the population of Latin America in independent social and
economic planning conducted in the interests of the population rather than US capital. In response to the Castro takeover the US
engaged in one of the most serious terrorist campaigns of recent times, meant as a prelude to invasion in order to ensure "regime
change" thereby teaching the people of the region the lesson that "what we say goes". One of the key reasons why Khrushchev sought
to place nuclear missiles in Cuba was to deter a US invasion and to achieve strategic parity with Washington. Throughout the Cuban
Missile Crisis many potential flashpoints almost lead to a full-scale nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and the US, how
close we came to annihilation is only now being fully realised. These are not matters for idle speculation: destruction almost
occurred in the past and may very well occur in the future; even cats have only nine lives. This is a matter of great contemporary
significance because of the current geographical expansion of the US military system. One of the most significant results of the
invasion of Afghanistan was the expansion of the US military system into Central Asia, including into some former Soviet republics.
The Russians have traditionally considered this to be their version of the Western hemisphere. If a "great game" were to develop in
the region between Russia and the US (perhaps also Pakistan, China and India all nuclear powers, Turkey which sits under US
"extended deterrence" and Iran, a potential nuclear power) then such a "great game" may become a nuclearised great game. Indeed
the standoff in Kashmir may have global consequences if a system of alliance politics were to develop in the region between the
globe's nuclear powers, especially as the threshold of nuclear war is being lowered. In this sense Central Asia may develop into a
global version of the link between the Balkans and central alliance systems prior to 1914. Of even greater concern is the further
expansion of the US military system into the Middle East following the invasion of Iraq. Washington has already foreshadowed a
desire to construct permanent military bases in Iraq in order to facilitate intervention into the region. Both Iran and Syria are
potential targets of US attack. Iran may decide upon the nuclear option in order to deter the globes leading rogue state. This could
be potentially explosive because it is well known that Israel posses a significant nuclear force. Israel has always feared that its
paymaster would ultimately abandon it. In response Israel has reportedly developed a "samson option" nuclear targeting strategy.
The idea is that Israel would target Russia with its nuclear weapons (Israel has developed delivery systems with an excessive range
capability), which would lead to a full-scale nuclear exchange between Moscow and Washington. In essence Israel is saying: we
should be allowed to continue repressing the Palestinians if not we have the "samson option". Furthermore, in order to facilitate
intervention into these regions the US has began a programme to shift the basing of its military forces into "new Europe" that is
Eastern Europe. Washington for instance pushed Romania into NATO for this very reason. Placing military forces in Eastern Europe
no doubt would give the Russians some cause for concern. After Kosovo Russia conducted large-scale war games assuming an
invasion through "new Europe". The game ended with the release of nuclear weapons. Indeed, expanding the US military system up
to the border of Belarus may be dangerous for it is quite possible that Russia extends nuclear deterrence to Minsk; for instance
Russia is building a new ground based strategic early warning radar in Belarus. This may all become a series problem in the future
because of what the US Geological Survey refers to as "the big rollover": the time at which the world oil market changes from a
buyers market into a sellers market (which may occur in the next 15-20 years). Washington has always regarded the oil resources of
the Middle East as "the most stupendous material prize in world history" which is a key lever of US global dominance. The big
rollover will ensure that Middle Eastern oil reserves will become an even more significant lever of world control placing greater
premium on US control over the political development of the Arab world. In 1967, 1970 and 1973 strategic developments in the
Middle East were overshadowed by nuclear weapons. In fact the events of 1970 and 1973 convinced many, such as Henry Kissinger,
that the US needed to strive to retain nuclear superiority and reverse the condition of strategic parity with Moscow. This ultimately
lead to the Carter-Reagan build-up of the late 1970s and early 1980s; a build-up which easily could have been disastrous. The
militarisation of space, the development of so called "useable" nuclear weapons, the globalisation of the US nuclear planning system,
the hair trigger alert status of the globe's nuclear forces and the expansion of the US military system into Central Asia and the
Middle East possibly triggering a "great game" in these regions between nuclear powers, not to mention military expansion into
"new Europe", all seriously increase the threats to our long term (indeed short term) survival. Washington's aggressive nuclear
strategy is not only meant to deter democracy abroad; it is also meant to deter democracy at home. In 1956 the author of NSC 68 and
one of the chief ideologues behind the Carter-Reagan nuclear build-up, Paul Nitze, made a distinction between what he referred to as
"declaratory" nuclear weapons policy and "actual" nuclear weapons policy. For anybody interested in unravelling truth from fiction
the distinction is critical. In Nitze's words, "the word 'policy' is used in two related but different senses. In one sense, the action
sense, it refers to the general guidelines, which we believe should and will govern our actions in various contingencies. In the other
sense, the declaratory sense, it refers to policy statements which have as their aim political and psychological effects". The most
important target audience of declaratory policy is the American population, the so-called "internal deterrent". Consider for instance
the key nuclear proliferation planning document of the cold war era, the Gilpatric report delivered to President Johnson. In it
Gilpatric spelt out the threat that nuclear proliferation poses to US security: "as additional nations obtained nuclear weapons our
diplomatic and military influence would wane, and strong pressures would arise to retreat to isolation to avoid the risk of
involvement in nuclear war". So if it were seen by the population that the pursuit of foreign policy, conducted in the interests of
domestic elites, would increase the threat of nuclear war then the internal deterrent may become dangerously aroused possibly
calling off the show. In the strategic literature this is referred to as self-deterrence. In other words US non proliferation policy was
meant to lock in US strategic dominance so that the domestic population would not become dangerously aroused whilst providing
Washington the freedom of action necessary to brandish W I lits
E Rnuclear
E do pO superiority
S T M O d E Rover
N i s Tothers.
S C O MThis
E F r sentiment
O M ? 1 7 1 was reflected in the Bush
administrations Nuclear Posture Review, nuclear capabilities also assure the US public that the United States will not be subject to
coercion based on a false perception of U.S. weakness among potential adversaries. Many strategic thinkers have argued that the
greatest threat to US hegemony or "unipolarity" is the internal "welfare role" and the populations lack of understanding for the
burdens of Empire, in other words popular democracy. One of the reasons that the Reagan administration pursued "Star Wars" a
programme to render nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete" was to outflank the domestic and global peace movements that were
gathering pace as a result of the administration's pursuit of potentially apocalyptic nuclear policies (the very same people have their
fingers on the button again). It was well recognised that the Star Wars programme would have increased the chances of a nuclear
exchange between Moscow and Washington, just as today the pursuit of short term interests is known to have potentially serious
international consequences, such as increase in conflict and global weapons of mass destruction proliferation. The
ruling class
is well aware of the adverse impact the pursuit of its own sectional interests will have on
international order. It pursues those interests with renewed zeal anyway. As far as the ruling
class is concerned the greatest threat we face is not nuclear war, it is popular democracy. As Adam
Smith observed of a previous mercantile system, applicable to today's system of state-corporate mercantilism, "it cannot be very
difficult to determine who have been the contrivers of this whole mercantile system; not the consumers, we may believe, whose
interest has been entirely neglected; but the producers, whose interest has been so carefully attended to; and among this latter class
our merchants and manufacturers have been by far the principal architects." Policy Smith observed, "comes from an order of men,
whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the
public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it." This
raises an interesting
issue, namely that the pursuit of Armageddon is quite rational. The dominant institutions of
capitalism place a premium on short-term greed. Rational participatory planning
incorporating long-term concerns such as human survival are of no interest to these
pathological institutions. What matters is short-term profit maximisation. One can see this most
clearly in the case of such externalities as ecological change where the desire to pursue short-
term profit undermines the long-term viability of the system itself (also us as a species; indeed
many have surmised that we are in the era of the sixth great extinction of life on Earth this time
human induced). The fact that the institutional structures of society compel the ruling classes to
pursue highly dangerous security policies that are another externality of the system of state
capitalism compels the population to constrain and eventually overthrow these institutions
because apocalypse is institutionally rational.
blocks

2nc perm
They dont get a permour K is competitive:
A. The perm isnt just some word

W I l E R E dthat
o p O S Tmeans
M O d E R N i s T we
S C O M Ecan
F r O M ?agree
173 with you,
its shorthand for a test of opportunity cost between political
choicesthis debate already discarded that model when it became
about competing methodologies. If we win the 1ac failed to diagnose
and address the problem, the perm is a reason to vote neg because it
proves they havent met the burden of proof and are insufficient.
B. Coherencevalue hierarchies are inherently competitive, thats

Marcus, which uses the language of mutual exclusivityin other
words, the analytical frame theyve chosen mystifies class and the
model of we can both be right obscures the uniqueness of alienation
from means of production.
C. Offense-defensethe case isnt offense if our collectivist framing

obviates the need for itif we win a link, then their advocacy isnt
productivethis isnt a situation where the perm can shield the link.
We dont have to deny that capitalism is experienced differently by
specific identity groupsthat doesnt deny our critiqueclass politics
has to be the starting point or else the system will continue to
reshuffle social divisionsthe perm is deck chairs
In contrast to both Critical Race Theorists and revisionist socialists/left liberals/equivalence

theorists, and those who see caste as the primary form of oppression, Marxists would
agree that objectively- whatever our race or gender or sexuality or current level of academic
attainment or religious identity, whatever the individual and group history and fear of
oppression and attack- the fundamental objective and material form of oppression in
capitalism is class oppression. Black and Women capitalists, or Jewish and Arab capitalists, or
Dalit capitalists in India, exploit the labour power of their multi-ethnic men and women workers,
essentially (in terms of the exploitation of labour power and the appropriation of surplus value) in just the same way as
do white male capitalists, or upper-caste capitalists. But the subjective consciousness of identity, this
subjective affirmation of one particular identity, while seared into the souls of its victims,
should not mask the objective nature of contemporary oppression under capitalism class
oppression that, of course, hits some raced and gendered and caste and occupational sections of the working class harder than
others. Martha Gimenez (2001:24) succinctly
explains that class is not simply another ideology
legitimating oppression. Rather, class denotes exploitative relations between people
mediated by their relations to the means of production. Apples parallellist, or
equivalence model of exploitation (equivalence of exploitation based on race, class and gender, his tryptarchic model
of inequality) produces valuable data and insights into aspects of and the extent and manifestations of gender oppression
and race oppression in capitalist USA. However, such analyses serve to occlude the class-capital
relation, the class struggle, to obscure an essential and defining nature of capitalism, class
conflict. Objectively, whatever our race W I or
l E Rgender
E d o p O Sor
T Mcaste
O d E or
R Nsexual
i s T S Corientation
O M E F r O Mor
? scholastic
174 attainment,
whatever the individual and group history and fear of oppression and attack, the fundamental
form of oppression in capitalism is class oppression. While the capitalist class is
predominantly white and male, capital in theory and in practice can be blind to colour and
gender and caste even if that does not happen very often. African Marxist-Leninists such as Ngugi wa Thiongo (e.g., Ngugi
wa Thiongo and Ngugi wa Mirii, 1985) know very well that when the white colonialist oppressors were
ejected from direct rule over African states in the 1950s and 60s, the white bourgeoisie in some
African states such as Kenya was replaced by a black bourgeoisie, acting in concert with
transnational capital and/or capital(ists) of the former colonial power. Similarly in India,
capitalism is no longer exclusively white. It is Indian, not white British alone. As Bellamy observes, the
diminution of class analysis denies immanent critique of any critical bite, effectively
disarming a meaningful opposition to the capitalist thesis (Bellamy, 1997:25). And as Harvey
notes, neoliberal rhetoric, with its foundational emphasis upon individual freedoms, has the
power to split off libertarianism, identity politics, multiculturalism, and eventually narcissistic
consumerism from the social forces ranged in pursuit of justice through the conquest of state
power. (Harvey, 2005:41) To return to the broader relationship between race, gender, and social class, and to turn to the USA,
are there many who would deny that Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell have more in common with the Bushes and the rest of the
Unites States capitalist class, be it white, black or Latina/o, than they do with the workers whose individual ownership of wealth and
power is an infinetismal fraction of those individual members of the ruling and capitalist class? The
various oppressions,
of caste, gender, race, religion, for example, are functional in dividing the working class and securing
the reproduction of capital; constructing social conflict between men and women, or black and
white, or different castes, or tribes, or religious groups, or skilled and unskilled, thereby tending
to dissolve the conflict between capital and labor, thus occluding the class-capital relation, the
class struggle, and to obscure the essential and defining nature of capitalism, the labor-capital
relation and its attendant class conflict.
Collapsing class into a general identity category is the worst form of

methodological individualism
E. San Juan, Jr. , PhD harvard Marxism and the Race/Class Problematic: A Re-Articulation ,
Cultural Logic Vol 6 2003
The implacably zombifying domination of the Cold War for almost half a century has made almost everyone
allergic to the Marxian notion of class as a social category that can explain inequalities of power and wealth
in the "free world." One symptom is the mantra of "class reductionism" or "economism" as a weapon to
silence anyone who calls attention to the value of one's labor power, or one's capacity to work in order to
survive, if not to become human. Another way of nullifying the concept of class as an epistemological
tool for understanding the dynamics of capitalist society is to equate it with status, life-style, even an entire
"habitus" or pattern of behavior removed from the totality of the social relations of production in any given historical formation.
Often, class is reduced to income, or to voting preference within the strict limits of the bourgeois (that is, capitalist) electoral order.
Some sociologists even play at being agnostic or nominalist by claiming that class displays countless meanings and designations
relative to the ideological persuasion of the theorist/researcher, hence its general uselessness as an analytic tool. This has become
the orthodox view of "class" in mainstream academic discourse. 2. Meanwhile, with
the victory of the Civil Rights
struggles in the sixties (now virtually neutralized in the last two decades), progressive forces
relearned the value of the strategy of alliances and coalitions of various groups. These coalitions have demonstrated
the power of demanding the recognition of group rights, the efficacy of the politics of identity. Invariably, ethnic
or cultural
identity became the primordial point of departure for political dialogue and action. Activists learned
the lesson that Stuart Hall, among others, discovered in the eighties: the presumably Gramscian view that "there is no automatic
identity or correspondence between economic, political and ideological processes" (1996, 437). This
has led to the gradual
burgeoning of a "politics of ethnicity predicated on difference and diversity." Nonetheless, Hall
insisted that for people of color, class is often lived or experienced in the modality of race; in short,
racism (racialized relations) often function as one of the factors that "overdetermine" (to use the Althusserian term) the formation of
class consciousness. While
this trend (still fashionable today in its version of cosmopolitanism, post-national or postcolonial
criticism, eclectic transnationalism of all sorts) did
not completely reject the concept of class, it rendered it
superfluous by the formula of subsuming it within the putative "intersectionality" of race,
gender, and class as a matrix of identity and agency. 3. One of the systematic ideological rationalizations of this approach is David
Theo Goldberg's Racist Culture. Goldberg argues that class cannot be equated with race, or
race collapsed into class; in short, culture cannot be dissolved into economics. That move "leaves unexplained those
cultural relations race so often expresses, or it wrongly reduces these cultural relations to more or less veiled instantiations of class
formation" (1993, 70). Race
then becomes primarily an affair of race relations. It acquires an
almost fetishistic valorization in this framework of elucidating social reality. A less one-sided
angle may be illustrated by Amy Gutman's belief that class and race interact so intimately that we need a more nuanced calibration
of the specific moments in which the racial determinant operates over and above the class determinant: "What we can say with near
certainty is that if blacks who live in concentrated poverty, go to bad schools, or live in single-parent homes are also stigmatized by
racial prejudice as whites are not, then even the most complex calculus of class is an imperfect substitute for also taking color
explicitly into account" (2000, 96). What is clear in both Goldberg's and Gutman's analysis is that class (taken as a rigid
phenomenal feature of identity) is
only one aspect or factor in explaining any dynamic social situation, not
the salient or fundamental relation. Unlike the Marxian concept of class as a relation of group
antagonisms (more precisely, class conflict) that is the distinctive characteristic of the social totality in
capitalism, class in current usage signifies an element of identity, a phenomenon whose
meaning and value is incomplete without taking into account other factors like race,
gender, locality, and so on. Neoliberal pluralism and the discourse of methodological
individualism reign supreme in these legitimations of a reified world-system, what Henri Lefebvre (1971) calls "the
bureaucratic society of controlled consumption."
Broadening the notion of class robs it of explanatory power

Apples accusation is that classical Marxists privilege class and marginalise race,
gender, and sexuality. But the concept of class, the existence of class, the awareness of class, is itself
sometimes buried beneath, hidden by, suffocated, displaced, in the recent (though not the early)
work of Michael W. Apple. As Kelsh and Hill (2006) critique, What is masked from workers, because the
capitalist class and its agents work to augment ideology in place of knowledge, is that some
workers are poor not because other workers are wealthy, but because the capitalist class exploits
all workers, and then divides and hierarchizes them, according capitalist class needs for
extracting ever more surplus value (profit). Kelsh and Hill argue that the Marxist concept of class,
because it connects inequitable social relations and explains them as both connected
and rooted in the social relations of production, enables class consciousness and the
knowledges necessary to replace capitalism with socialism. They continue, the Marxist
concept of class, however, has been emptied of its explanatory power by theorists in the field of
education as elsewhere who have converted it into a term that simply describes, and cannot
explain the root causes of, strata of the population and the inequities among
them.

2nc boring politics
Our alternative is boring politicsextend 1nc Frank and Marcusall
their arguments about our failure to do anything radical are WHY the
alt is necessary. They have no empirical defense of their method as
politics, but we do have a defense of bureaucracy. Their arg basically
is a sequencing claim, that we have to build these autonomous spaces
BEFORE offering concrete demands. Thats why the aff is like
Occupyits an infinite deferral of political responsibilitythe reality
is the more boring, unsatisfying demands like re-instating Glass
Steagall, and closing tax loopholes for industries like oil and gas
these are the only ways to put the politics back in identity politics.
Concrete political demands are necessary despite the evil of the

statetheir approach bears a strange equivalence to Rands
philosophy
Frank '12 Thomas, brilliant badass, author of What's the Matter with Kansas? and editor of The
Baffler "To the Precinct Station: How theory met practice and drove it absolutely crazy"
http://www.thebaffler.com/past/to_the_precinct_station
Leaderlessness is another virtue claimed by indignados on the right as well as left. In fact, theres
even a chapter in the 2010 Tea Party manifesto written by Dick Armey that is entitled, We are a Movement of Ideas, Not Leaderswhich is ironic,
since Armey is commonly referred to as Leader Armey, in recognition of the days when he was majority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives.
The reasoning, though, is the same here as it is with Occupy. As Armey puts it, If they knew who was in charge, they could attack him or her. They
could crush the inconvenient dissent of the Tea Party. Occupiers, of course, say pretty much the same thing: if you have leaders, they can be co-opted.
Surely, though, the distinctive Occupy idea that protesting is an end in itselfthat the process is the messagesurely that is unique, right? After all,
Occupiers and their chroniclers have spent so much brainpower theorizing and explicating and
defending the idea that horizontalism is a model and a demand and a philosophy rolled into one
that it cant possibly be shared by their political opposite. But of course it iswith the theory
slightly modified. We call this complex and diverse movement beautiful chaos, writes Leader
Armey in his Tea Party manifesto. By this we reference what is now the dominant
understanding in organizational management theory: decentralization of personal knowledge is
the best way to maximize the contributions of people. While the glorious decentralization of OWS was supposed to
enact some academic theory of space-creating, the glorious decentralization of the Tea Party enacts the principles of the market; it enacts the latest in
management theory; it enacts democracy itself. Big-government liberals, on the other hand, are in Armeys account drawn to hierarchy as surely as are
the big-media dumbshits scorned by Occupys chroniclers: They cant imagine an undirected social order, Armey declares. Someone needs to be in
charge. Armeys coauthor, Matt Kibbe, then grabs this idea and gallops downfield. This is not a political party, he insists; it is a social gathering.
Tea Party events dont have drum circles, as far as I know, but Kibbe nevertheless says he is reminded of the sense of community you used to
experience in the parking lot before a Grateful Dead concert: peaceful, connected, smiling, gathered in common purpose. It is a revolt from the
bottom up, he declares. It is a community in the fullest sense of the word. If
you look closely enough at Tea Party culture,
you can even find traces of the Occupiers refusal to make explicit demands. Consider movement
inamorata Ayn Rand (a philosopher every bit as prolix as Judith Butler) and her 1957 magnum
opus Atlas Shrugged, where demands are something that government makes on behalf of
its lazy and unproductive constituents. Businessmen, by contrast, deal in contracts; they act only via the supposedly consensual
relations of the market. As John Galt, the leader of the books capital strike, explains in a lengthy speech to the American people Rand clearly loathed:
We have no demands to present to you, no terms to bargain about, no compromise to reach. You have nothing to offer us. We do not need you. A
strike with no demands? Wha-a-a-a? Why not? Because demands would imply the
legitimacy of their enemy, the state. Rands fake-sophisticated term for this is the sanction of the victim. In the course of
actualizing himself, the business tycoonthe victim, in Rands distorted worldviewis supposed to learn to withhold his blessing from the society
that exploits him via taxes and regulations. Once enlightened, this billionaire is to have nothing to do with the looters and moochers of the liberal
world; it is to be adversarial proceedings only. So how do Rands downtrodden 1 percent plan to prevail? By building a model community in the shell of
the old, exactly as Occupy intended to do. Instead of holding assemblies in the park, however, her persecuted billionaires retreat to an uncharted valley
in Colorado where they practice perfect noncoercive capitalism, complete with a homemade gold standard. A high-altitude Singapore, I guess. Then,
when America collapsesan eventuality Rand describes in hundreds of pages of quasi-pornographic detailthe tycoons simply step forward to take
over. One last similarity. The distinctive ideological move of the Tea Party was, of course, to redirect the publics fury away from Wall Street and toward
government. And Occupy did it too, in a more abstract and theoretical way. Consider, for example, the words anthropologist
Jeffrey Juris chooses when telling us why occupying parks was the thing to do: the occupations
contested the sovereign power of the state to regulate and control the distribution of bodies in
space [five citations are given here], in part, by appropriating and resignifying particular urban spaces such as public parks and squares as arenas for
public assembly and democratic expression [three more citations]. This kind of rhetoric is entirely typical of both
Occupy and the academic Leftalways fighting the state and its infernal power to regulate
and controlbut it doesnt take a very close reading of the text to notice that this language, with
a little tweaking, could also pass as a libertarian protest against zoning. Since none of the books described here take
seriously the many obvious parallels between the two protests, none of them offers a theory for why the two were so strikingly similar. Allow me, then,
to advance my own. The reason Occupy and the Tea Party were such uncanny replicas of one another is
because they both drew on the lazy, reflexive libertarianism that suffuses our idea of protest
these days, all the way from Disney Channel teens longing to be themselves to punk rock teens
vandalizing a Starbucks. From Chris Hedges to Paul Ryan, every dissenter imagines that they
are rising up against the state. Its in the cultural DNA of our times, it seems; our rock n roll rebels, our Hollywood heroes, even
our FBI agents. They all hate the stateprotesters in Zuccotti Park as well as the Zegna-wearing
traders those protesters think theyre frightening. But heres the rub: only the Right manages to
profit from it.
2nc prior question
We dont have to win all racism/sexism is expressly economiconly
that capitalism is responsible for those antagonismsour critique is a
prior question
Zizek, senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy, University of Ljubljana,
Slovenia, international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities and a professor of
philosophy and psychoanalysis at the European Graduate School , 2012
(Slavoj, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, p.32-4 )
The first thing to note here is that it

takes two to fight a culture war: culture is also the
dominant ideological topic of the enlightened liberals whose politics is focused
on the fight against sexism, racism, and fundamentalism, and for multicultural
tolerance. The key question is thus: why has culture emerged as our central life-
world category? With regard to religion, we no longer really believe, we simply follow (some of the) religious rituals and
mores as part of our respect for the lifestyle of the community to which we belong (non-believing Jews obeying kosher rules out of
respect for tradition, etcetera). I dont really believe in it, it s just part of my culture seems to be the predominant mode of the
disavowed or displaced belief characteristic of our times. Perhaps, then, the non-fundamentalist notion of culture as
distinguished from real religion, art, and so on, is in its very core the name for the field of disowned or impersonal beliefs
culture as the name for all those things we practice without really believing in them, without taking them seriously. The second
thing to note is how, while professing their solidarity with the poor, liberals encode their
culture war with an opposed class message. More often than not, their fight for
multicultural tolerance and womens rights marks the counter-position to the
alleged intolerance, fundamentalism, and patriarchal sexism of the lower
classes One way to unravel this confusion is to focus on the mediating terms
whose function is to obfuscate the true lines of division. The way the term modernization has
been used in the recent ideological offensive is exemplary here: first, an abstract opposition is constructed
between modernizers (those who endorse global capitalism in all its aspects, from the economic to the
cultural) and traditionalists (those who resist globalization). Into this category of those-who-resist is then thrown
everyone from traditional conservatives and populists to the Old Left (those who continue to advocate the welfare state, trade
unions, and so on). This categorization obviously does capture an aspect of social reality. Recall the
coalition between the Church and trade unions in Germany in early 2003, which prevented the legalization of Sunday opening for
shops. However, it is not enough to say that this cultural difference traverses the
entire social field, cutting across different strata and classes; it is also inadequate to say that it can be combined in
different ways with other oppositions (so that we get conservative traditional values resisting global capitalist modernization, or
moral conservatives who fully endorse capitalist globalization). In short, it
is useless to claim that this
cultural difference is one in a series of antagonisms operative in contemporary
social processes. The failure of this opposition to function as the key to the social
totality means not only that it should be articulated with other differences. It
means that it is abstract, and the wager of Marxism is that there is one
antagonism (class struggle) which overdetermines all the others and which is as
such the concrete universal of the entire field. The term overdetermination is here
used in its precise Althusserian sense: it does not mean that class struggle is the
ultimate referent and horizon of meaning of all other struggles; it means that class
struggle is the structuring principle that allows us to account for the very
inconsistent plurality of ways in which other antagonisms can be articulated into
chains of equivalences For example, the feminist struggle can be articulated into
a chain with the progressive struggle for emancipation, or it can (as it certainly often
does) function as an ideological tool with which the upper-middle classes assert their
superiority over the patriarchal and intolerant lower classes. The point is not
only that the feminist struggle can be articulated in different ways with the class
antagonism, but that the class antagonism W I l E R E d o p Ois
S T, M E R N i sdoubly
asOitd were, T S C O M E Finscribed
rOM? 180 here: it is the
specific constellation of the class struggle itself that explains why the feminist
struggle was appropriated by the upper classes. (The same goes for racism: it is the
dynamics of class struggle itself that explain why open racism is more prevalent
among the lowest strata of white workers.) Class struggle is here concrete
universality in the strict Hegelian sense: in relating to its otherness (other
antagonisms), it relates to itself, it (over)determines the way it relates to other
struggles. The third thing to underline is the fundamental difference between
feminist, anti-racist, anti-sexist and other such struggles and the class struggle. In the
first case, the goal is to translate antagonism into difference (the peaceful coexistence of sexes,
religions, ethnic groups), while the goal of the class struggle is precisely the opposite, to turn
class differences into class antagonisms. The point of subtraction is to reduce the
overall complex structure to its antagonistic minimal difference. What the series
race-gender-class obfuscates is the different logic of the political space in the case
of class: while anti-racist and anti-sexist struggles are guided by a striving for the
full recognition of the other, the class struggle aims at overcoming and subduing,
annihilating even, the othereven if not a direct physical annihilation, it aims at wiping out the
others socio-political role and function. In other words, while it is logical to say that
antiracism wants all races to be allowed to freely assert and to realize their
cultural, political, and economic strivings, it is obviously meaningless to say that the aim of
the proletarian class struggle is to allow the bourgeoisie to fully assert its identity
and realize its goals. In the one case, we have a horizontal logic of the recognition of
different identities, while in the other we have the logic of the struggle with an
antagonist. The paradox here is that it is populist fundamentalism that retains this logic of
antagonism, while the liberal left follows the logic of recognition of difference, of
defusing antagonisms into coexisting differences. In their very form, conservative-populist grassroots
campaigns took over the old leftist-radical stance of popular mobilization and struggle against upper-class exploitation. Insofar as, in
the US two-party system, red designates Republicans and blue Democrats, and insofar as populist fundamentalists (of course) vote
Republican, the old anti-Communist slogan Better dead than red! now acquires a new and ironic meaningthe irony residing in
the unexpected continuity between the red attitude of the old-style leftist grassroots mobilization and the new Christian
fundamentalist populism.
2nc debate as resistance bad
The 1ac model of debate-as-resistance-politics is a palliative. They sell
out debates potential to generate positive agendas for change by
making the ballot about affirming their voices as suchour counter-
role of the ballot is to refuse those terms as a starting point to reclaim
the political
In addition to knee-jerk anti-statism, the objection that the slaves freed themselves, as it shows up in favorable comparison of
Django Unchained to Lincoln, stems from a racial pietism that issued from the unholy union of cultural studies and black studies in
the university. More
than twenty years of resistance studies that find again and again,
at this point ritualistically, that
oppressed people have and express agency have contributed
to undermining the idea of politics as a discrete sphere of activity directed toward
the outward-looking project of affecting the social order, most effectively through
creating, challenging or redefining institutions that anchor collective action with
the objective of developing and wielding power. Instead, the notion has been
largely evacuated of specific content at all. Politics can refer to whatever one
wants it to; all thats required is an act of will in making a claim.
The fact that there has been no serious left presence with any political capacity in this
country for at least a generation has exacerbated this problem. In the absence of
dynamic movements that cohere around affirmative visions for making the society
better, on the order of, say, Franklin Roosevelts 1944 Second Bill of Rights, and that organize and agitate
around programs instrumental to pursuit of such visions, what remains is the fossil
record of past movementsthe still photo legacies of their public events, postures, and outcomes. Over time,
the idea that a left is defined by commitment to a vision of social transformation and
substantive program for realizing it has receded from cultural memory. Being on
the left has become instead a posture, an identity, utterly disconnected from any specific practical
commitments.
Thus star Maggie Gyllenhaal and director Daniel Barnz defended themselves against complaints
about their complicity in the hideously anti-union propaganda film Wont Back Down by adducing their identities
as progressives. Gyllenhaal insisted that the movie couldnt be anti-union because Theres no world in which I would ever,
EVER make an anti-union movie. My parents are left of Trotsky.15 Barnz took a similar tack: Im a liberal Democrat, very pro-
union, a member of two unions. I marched with my union a couple of years ago when we were on strike.16 And Kathryn Bigelow
similarly has countered criticism that her Zero Dark Thirty justifies torture and American
militarism more broadly by invoking her identity as a lifelong pacifist.17 Being a progressive is
now more a matter of how one thinks about oneself than what one stands for or does in the
world. The best that can be said for that perspective is that it registers acquiescence in defeat. It amounts to
an effort to salvage an idea of a left by reformulating it as a sensibility within
neoliberalism rather than a challenge to it.
Gyllenhaal, Barnz, and Bigelow exemplify the power of ideology as a mechanism
that harmonizes the principles one likes to believe one holds with what advances
ones material interests; they also attestW to the fact that the transmutation of leftism into pure self-
image exponentially increases the potential power of that function of ideology. Upton Sinclairs quip
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding ittakes on all the more
force when applied not merely to actions or interpretations of an external world but to devoutly savored self-perception as well. That
left political imagination now operates unself-consciously within the practical ontology of neoliberalism is also the most important
lesson to be drawn from progressives discussion of Django Unchained and, especially, the move to compare it with Lincoln. Jon
Wiener, writing in The Nation, renders the following comparisons: In Spielbergs film, the leading black female character is a
humble seamstress in the White House whose eyes fill with tears of gratitude when Congress votes to abolish slavery. In Tarantinos
film, the leading female character (Kerry Washington) is a defiant slave who has been branded on the face as a punishment for
running away, and is forcedby Leonardo DiCaprioto work as a prostitute. In Spielbergs film, old white men make history, and
black people thank them for giving them their freedom. In Tarantinos, a black gunslinger goes after the white slavemaster with
homicidal vengeance.18
Never mind that, for what its worth, Kerry Washingtons character, as she actually appears in the film, is mainly a cipher, a
simpering damsel in distress more reminiscent of Fay Wray in the original King Kong than heroines of the blaxploitation eras
eponymous vehicles Coffy or Foxy Brown. More problematically, Wieners
juxtapositions reproduce the
elevation of private, voluntarist action as a politicssomehow more truly true or
authentic, or at least more appealing emotionallyover the machinations of government
and institutional actors. That is a default presumption of the
identitarian/culturalist left and is also a cornerstone of neoliberalisms practical
ontology.
In an essay on Lincoln published a month earlier, Wiener identifies as the central failing of the film its dedication to the proposition that Lincoln freed the slaves and
concludes, after considerable meandering and nit-picking ambivalence that brings the term pettifoggery to mind, slavery died as a result of the actions of former slaves.19 This
either/or construct is both historically false and wrong-headed, and it is especially surprising that a professional historian like Wiener embraces it. The claim that slaves actions
were responsible for the death of slavery is not only inaccurate; it is a pointless and counterproductive misrepresentation. What purpose is served by denying the significance of
the four years of war and actions of the national government of the United States in ending slavery? Besides, it was indeed the Thirteenth Amendment that abolished slavery.
Slaves mass departure from plantations was self-emancipation, by definition.

Their doing so weakened the southern economy and undermined the secessionists
capacity to fight, and the related infusion of black troops into the Union army provided a tremendous lift both on the battlefield and for
northern morale. How does noting that proximity of Union troops greatly emboldened that
self-emancipation diminish the import of their actions? But it was nonetheless the Thirteenth
Amendment that finally outlawed slavery once and for all in the United States and provided a legal basis for preempting efforts to reinstate it in effect.
Moreover, for all the debate concerning Lincolns motives, the sincerity of his commitment to emancipation, and his personal views of blacks, and
notwithstanding its technical limits with respect to enforceability, the Emancipation Proclamation emboldened black people, slave and free, and
encouraged all slaverys opponents. And, as Wiener notes himself, the proclamation tied the war explicitly to the elimination of slavery as a system.
Firefly, or The Road to Serfdom
So why is a tale about a manumitted slave/homicidal black gunslinger more palatable to a contemporary leftoid sensibility than
either a similarly cartoonish one about black maids and their white employers or one that thematizes Lincolns effort to push the
Thirteenth Amendment through the House of Representatives? The answer is, to quote the saccharine 1970s ballad, Feelings,
nothing more than feelings. Wieners juxtapositions reflect the political
common sense that gives pride of
place to demonstrations of respect for the voices of the oppressed and
recognition of their suffering, agency, and accomplishments. That common sense informs
the proposition that providing inspiration has social or political significance. But it
equally shapes the generic human-interest message of films like The Help that represent injustice as an issue
of human relationsthe alchemy that promises to reconcile social justice and
capitalist class power as a win/win for everyone by means of attitude adjustments
and deepened mutual understanding.
That common sense underwrites the tendency to reduce the past to a storehouse of encouraging post-it messages for the present. It must, because the
presumption that the crucial stakes of political action concern recognition and respect for the oppresseds voices is a presentist view, and mining the
past to reinforce it requires anachronism. The large struggles against slavery and Jim Crow were directed toward altering structured patterns of social
relations anchored in law and state power, but stories of that sort are incompatible with both global marketing imperatives and the ideological
predilections of neoliberalism and its identitarian loyal opposition. One can only shudder at the prospect of how Gillo Pontecorvos 1966 film, The
Battle of Algiers, or Costa-Gavrass State of Siege (1972) would be remade today. (Guy Ritchies and Madonnas execrable 2002 remake of Lina
Wertmllers 1974 film Swept Away may provide a clue; their abomination completely erases the original films complex class and political content and
replaces it with a banalaka universalstory of an encounter between an older woman and a younger man, while at the same time meticulously,
almost eerily, reproducing, scene by scene, the visual structure of Wertmllers film.)
Particularly as those messages strive for universality as well as inspiration, their least common denominator tends toward the
generic story of individual triumph over adversity. ButWthe
I l E R Eimagery
d o p O S T M Oof
dERthe
N i s Tindividual
S C O M E F r O M ? overcoming
odds 183
to achieve fame, success, or recognition also maps onto the fantasy of limitless upward
mobility for enterprising and persistent individuals who persevere and remain true to their dreams. As
such, it is neoliberalisms version of an ideal of social justice, legitimizing both success and failure as
products of individual character. When combined with a multiculturalist rhetoric of difference that
reifies as autonomous culturesin effect racializeswhat are actually contingent
modes of life reproduced by structural inequalities, this fantasy crowds inequality
as a metric of injustice out of the picture entirely. This accounts for the popularity of reactionary dreck like Beasts of the Southern
Wild among people who should know better. The denizens of the Bathtub actively, even militantly, choose their poverty and cherish
it and should be respected and appreciated for doing so. But no one ever supposed that Leni Riefenstahl was on the left.
The tale type of individual overcoming has become a script into which the great social struggles of the last century and a half have commonly been
reformulated to fit the requirements of a wan, gestural multiculturalism. Those movements have been condensed into the personae of Great Men and
Great WomenBooker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, George Washington Carver, Martin Luther King, Jr., Harriet Tubman,
Frederick Douglass, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer and otherswho seem to have changed the society apparently by virtue of manifesting their own
greatness. The different jacket photos adorning the 1982 and 1999 editions of Doug McAdams well known sociological study of the civil rights
movement, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970, exemplify the shift. The first editions cover was a photo of an
anonymous group of marching protesters; the second edition featured the (staged) photomade iconic by its use in an Apple advertising campaignof
a dignified Rosa Parks sitting alone on the front seat of a bus looking pensively out the window.20
Ironically, the scholarly turn away from organizations and institutional processes to valorize
instead the local and everyday dimensions of those movements may have
exacerbated this tendency by encouraging a focus on previously unrecognized individual figures and celebrating
their lives and contributions. Rather than challenging the presumption that
consequential social change is made by the will of extraordinary individuals, however,
this scholarship in effect validates it by inflating the currency of Greatness so much that it
can be found any and everywhere. Giving props to the unrecognized or underappreciated
has become a feature particularly of that scholarship that defines scholarly production as a
terrain of political action in itself and aspires to the function of the public intellectual. A perusal of the rosters
of African American History Month and Martin Luther King, Jr. Day speakers at any random sample of colleges and universities
attests to how closely this scholar/activist turn harmonizes with the reductionist individualism of prosperity religion and the
varieties of latter-day mind cure through which much of the professional-managerial stratum of all races, genders, and sexual
orientations, narrates its understandings of the world.
at: engage us
If this isnt engagement, what is? Their accusations are a ploy to shut
down debate and wall off criticism
IF YOU look at the history of Marxism in the twentieth century, its actually a history of
an unceasing engagement with the realities of the nonwestern world. If you think about it,
how could it be otherwise? Starting with the revolution in Russia in 1905, the experience of socialism in the twentieth century has
been that the countries where revolutionary movements became the most powerful oftentimes were countries that were not
advanced capitalist.
Theres Russia 1905; Germany (which was an industrializing but still predominantly peasant country) in 1918; China in
the 1930s; India in the 1930s; Latin American in the 1940s and 50s; Vietnam; the entire
spectrum of decolonizing countries. Everywhere movements took off which had a powerful
anticapitalist thrust, they were in the nonwestern and less-developed world.
It was of necessity then, that the leaders of these movements and the intellectuals associated with them, had to make sense of
realities that didnt conform to the central pillars of Marxist theory. It is true that Marx developed his theory focusing on the most
advanced countries. But throughout the twentieth century, as revolutionary movements took off in less-developed countries,
Marxists right from the start had to try and modify the theory to make sense of
realities that departed from the predictions of the theory.
In fact, Marxism is the only theory on the left that has relentlessly and unceasingly
engaged with the nonwestern world. The idea that it is a theory that ignores the nonwest or that it imposes
western categories artificially, or that it is blind to the realities of the nonwestern world, is pretty far-fetched.
THIS CONCEPTION of Marxism is so different from how were constantly told it is. Can
you give some examples
of a relentless and unceasing engagement with the nonwestern world?
WHAT IS Trotskys theory of combined and uneven development? Its a theory about what happens when capitalism comes late to a
less-developed country. What is Maos theory of new democracy? Now you may agree or disagree with it, but its a theory about what
to do in a peasant country.
What was Lenins first contribution to Marxist theory, before anything else? It was a theory of late-developing capitalism in his first
book, The Development of Capitalism in Russia. What is Lenins major contribution to agrarian sociology? Its his theory of classes
within agrarian capitalism, which Mao developed. What was Amilcar Cabrals contribution to revolutionary theory? It was the notion
of the revolutionary proletariat in backwards settings. What
about Che Guevara? Or Walter Rodneys pathbreaking
work on colonial Africa, or C.L.R James analysis of the Black Jacobins? These
were all attempts to concretize and modify Marxist theories in the South. What is odd is
that people like Rodney and James are now being presented as post-colonial
theorists. Thats really quite wrong. They thought of themselves as belonging to the Marxist tradition.
One can just add to this list unceasingly. From as early as 1905 to as late as the 1980s, if there was one thing
Marxists have done, it is to focus on the nonwestern world.
IF CLAIMS of Eurocentricism are so baseless, why do postcolonial theorists accuse Marxism of this all the time?
ITS CREDENTIAL building. If

you want to establish yourself as a radical in academia, and
you dont want any of the hits to your career that come with being a Marxist, the
first thing you have to do is say something negative about Marxism. It establishes
that even though youre on the left youre not one of them.
SO MARXISTS have nothing to be embarrassed about on this score?
ITS EXACTLY the opposite. If what Im saying is right, then the reality is that some of the most important insights into the
modernization of the global south have come out of Marxist
W I l E R theories
E d o p Oor
S Ttheories
MOdERN inspired
isTS CObyMMarxism.
E F r O M ? In
1 8the
5 1950s and 60s even the
mainstream theories that were coming out, trying to explain development, political modernization, they all drew upon Marxs
theories even if they werent themselves Marxists. Alexander Gerschenkrons theory; Albert Fishlows work on Latin America; Albert
Hirschmans work, all these people were drawing on Marxist theory. That was true into the 1980s.
The theories they generated might have been wrong, but all of these intellectuals
were dedicated to asking the question, How do you explain the divergent
experiences of the East and West? The accusation that a commitment to universalizing
theories blinds you to social difference is just false.
Not only is there nothing to be embarrassed about, Marxists should in fact turn the tables. In
settings when youre in
a political debate or in a seminar or something and someone tries to make these accusations, just
ask them what they make of all these half dozen to a dozen theoretical contributions that came
out of the Marxist tradition. Ask them to explain exactlyexactlyhow theyre
Eurocentric.
AS YOU pointed out earlier, for most of the modern era Marxism was the driving force in radical intellectual thought. How do you
explain its disappearance over the past two or three decades?
THE DISAPPEARANCE of Marxism is not that hard to explain. Marxism was only around as long as Marxist parties and an
organized, anticapitalist layer of the working class was around. The defeats of the past twenty-five years are unprecedented in
modern history: there was never a time when there wasnt a really powerful current of socialists within the working class, where
there were not parties that at least in their rhetoric were anticapitalist. Now we have neither.
In a situation like that, its just not very realistic that Marxism as an intellectual current would survive. Once
you take
Marxist intellectuals out of the labor movement, the only institution thats left that
might be creating intellectual work is the university. Universities are just not a hospitable place for
Marxism. Universities are places where upwardly mobile professionals do what they have to do to move up on the career
ladder. They are middle class, and they have the same aspirations as any middle-class person.
Mostly, they succeed if they fall into line with power and power structures.
So youre going to find a downsizing/downscaling of Marxists in the intellectual world
once they are taken out of the labor movement, and once anticapitalist political
parties become as tiny as they are right now.
WHERE DOES postcolonial theory come from?
THATS A good question. What you could have had once Marxism declined was just liberalism and conservatism, a return to those
two doctrines. Why do you get something like postcolonial theory? I think you get it for two reasons. One is the aging
lefties
from the 1960s, who gave up being anticapitalist, still saw themselves as radicals.
And still do. Starting from the late 1980s and early 1990s, theyre radicals, but they dont want to talk about capitalism. So they turn
towards other issues. Theyre antiracist, antisexist. They turn to whats called oppression studies.
Secondly, universities have changed a lot. Theyre a lot more heterogeneous, a lot more diverse than they used to be. Students
coming into those universities are very keen on having the same chances as students who are more privileged. A
lot of the
students in these universities face difficulties because of the sexism and racism
they encounter. So theres a supply factor pushing towards oppression studies, but without any attention to capitalism. And
theres a demand factor, from these students who want to understand why they dont fit in as well with the other kids and why they
dont have the same chances.
Whats left out of this whole equation is the issue of capitalism, precisely because
in universities you have people who are either themselves upwardly mobile and
comfortable like professors or who aspire to be upwardly mobile, like most of the
students. What you get, therefore, is a setting in which youre going to have people
interested in being critical of the dominant order but without being anticapitalist.
And thats what postcolonial theory gives you.
YOU PRESENT a pretty damning account of postcolonial theory. Have postcolonial theorists made any positive contributions?
YES, THERES some positive work empirically. And they have kept alive the idea that colonialism was highly destructive and
generated a baleful ideology. But when we turn to the culture of the Left, I think postcolonial theory has been very debilitating.
What is the mission of any radical intellectual? By

intellectual I dont mean someone who works in
a university and has a pointy head. An intellectual is just someone who helps
articulate ideas. Professors sometimes do that. They usually dont. But organizers always do. Without fail. If
you cant do that youre not an organizer.
How has postcolonial studies affected the culture of intellectual work in the way Ive just defined it? Its been pretty negative.
Postcolonial studies has imbibed some of the worst aspects of academic culture, because its a product of the academy. It is not a
product of movements. They
say they are a product of movements and are linked up to
them, but that is not true. Postcolonial studies comes right out of the academy. What
it has internalized and spread across the left is a culture in which valuing a simple and direct and clear presentation of ideas has
simply been pushed off the table.
at: fetish label bad
Their evidence indicts the psychoanalytic concept of fetish- Marx's
commodity fetishism doesn't link and solves the impact
Matt Wray is a Ph.D candidate in Comparative Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. Issue #41,
December 1998 http://bad.eserver.org/issues/1998/41/wray.html
Marx's Fetish There is, however, a non-sexual sense of the term fetish which hardly ever gets
invoked outside of those increasingly narrow circles of people who are familiar with Marx. Ever since 1867 when Marx first
borrowed the concept and pressed it in to service in his analysis of commodities, the term fetish has carried a
precise, non-sexual meaning in critical theory, one that has tended to disappear
from popular view due to the widespread attachment to the psycho-sexual version
of the fetish. What is the Marxist conception of the fetish? Like the psychologists who appropriated the term a decade later, Marx
thought the idea of the fetish was a good metaphor for describing certain kinds of magical
thinking not only in primitive cultures, but his own modern, enlightened culture as well. In fact, Marx used this term to denote a practice that he
believed was universal within all capitalist societies. Marx argued that the most pervasive and widespread kind of fetishism had to do not with strange
objects of sexual desire but with necessary objects of everyday life what we call commodities. Marx called this magical thinking the fetishism of
commodities. This is the first thing to notice, a point not so minor as it might at first seem: for Marx,
fetishistic thinking is not
some bizarre and unusual practice to be associated with primitives and sexual
deviants. Instead, it is a characteristic of everyday life under capitalist social relations
that appears to be perfectly normal and natural, but in actuality is rather bizarre and unusual. His argument
goes something like this. In capitalist society, material objects are given value by people we construct hierarchies of value, placing more value on
some objects for instance, gold than others. But strangely, we forget our part in constructing the hierarchies and the object like gold come to seem
naturally valuable. We praise gold for its natural properties and prize it most highly of the precious metals. But, Marx insists, the properties which
make gold valuable are not primarily natural, even though gold is extremely useful for some things. No, what makes gold valuable is a specific set of
social relations. This is easily proven when one considers that only a minority of cultures have considered gold to be a precious metal. Thus, the powers
bestowed upon gold are social, not natural. This is true not just of gold, but of all commodities. But this is not how it appears to us. And this is the
second important point to notice: the appearance of commodities as valuable, while not exactly false, masks an important truth which can only be
disclosed through theoretical analysis. Yes, commodities are valuable, but we are routinely deceived about where the value comes from. We think these
things have value in and of themselves, but in reality, they have value because somebody, somewhere made them their labors were exploited for
profit. In
the act of fetishizing commodities, in imagining them to have natural
powers above and beyond what they actually have, we lose sight of and forget the
processes of exploitative production which create commodities in the first place .
Marx discusses the fetishism of commodities in the opening chapter of Capital and then he drops it. But subsequent Marxist theorists have made a great
deal of this concept, demonstrating as Marx implied that it
is the most simple example of how the economic
and material forms of capitalist production understood as relations between things obscure,
conceal and otherwise distort the underlying and more fundamental relations
between people. Enjoy Your Fetish! In several respects, the fetishes as described by Freud and Marx are similar: both describe kinds of
magical thinking; both describe acts of forgetting and repression; and both are used as analytical means for exposing unseen causes and for explaining
unusual effects. But for me the important difference is that, in
current public discourse in the US, while a
wide range of cultural observers readily discuss and even take time to explain and
debate the idea of the sexual fetish (does Clinton have a cigar fetish?), the idea of the commodity
fetish is hardly ever mentioned. This is not surprising, given the reputation that Marx has in this country and given that he
was arguing that this is a fundamental blind spot in all capitalist cultures. But it is worth remarking upon for those very same reasons. In addition, I
want to mention three other reasons why I think wetend to like our fetishes to be "sexy" rather than
"classy." One of the reasons we tend to favor the psycho-sexual fetish is that it fits the US ideology of
individualism so well. The psycho-sexual fetish is basically a concept which
attempts to explain the behavior of specific individuals it even allows for a very strong form of
individuation, where someone can develop the most unusual forms of fetishism and receive fame or at least notoriety for the uniqueness of their kink.
Marx's fetish, on the other hand, is a theory which attempts to explain social
behavior the behavior of a group, a culture. That kind of does not fit well with many Americans we like to think of ourselves as individuals
first. Second, the popularity of the sexual fetish in critical theory might also be
understood as the unfortunate ascendancy of psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on language and
symbols, over political economy, with its emphasis on economic institutions such as markets and political structures such as the State. Third, that
the sexualized notion of fetishism has dominated public discourse to the exclusion
of commodity fetishism is indicative W I l E of the
RE d o p Odegree
STMOdERN toi s Twhich
S C O M E Fsex
r O M ?and
1 8 8 sexuality is
widely considered to be more determinative of our social and private identities
than capitalism is. This cultural condition confuses us pretty badly about both sex and money. The sexual fetish
masks the commodity fetish in our public culture and conflicts and questions
about sexual morality displace equally important moral questions about the
unethical inequalities of markets and economic practices. It's fine to rape the
planet and exploit the global proletariat through overconsumption and
overaccumulation, but if you are going to be a sexually pervert, we're going to
crucify you!! I want to suggest that, as critical thinkers on the Left, we need to find ways to
make the commodity fetish as intelligible, as popular, and as useful as the idea of
the sexual fetish has become. To draw attention to commodity fetishism is to
subvert our normal, everyday thinking about ourselves as a consumerist society
and to perhaps make us think more deeply about what kinds of injustices and
inequalities lurk behind every item in every store on every shelf. This is not as depressing as it
may at first sound. The pains of thinking critically are matched only by the pleasures or reaching new understandings and transforming one's own
consciousness, the possibilities of learning to see the invisible realms and imperceptible patterns of everyday life. So, I tell myself, don't despair there
are such things as x-ray glasses after all.
Marx re-appropriated fetishism from its derogatory context- it was

used to denigrate "primitives", Marx revealed the same logic operated
in industrial western society
III no date (http://www.iii.co.uk/investment/detail?code=cotn:UKX.L&display=discussion&id=3872385&action=detail)
In Marxist theory, commodity fetishism is a state of social relations, said to arise in

capitalist market based societies, in which social relationships are transformed into
apparently objective relationships between commodities or money. The term is
introduced in the opening chapter of Karl Marx's main work of political economy, Capital, of
1867 . Marx's use of the term fetish can be interpreted as an ironic comment on the
"rational", "scientific" mindset of industrial capitalist societies. In Marx's day, the
word was primarily used in the study of primitive religions; Marx's "fetishism of
commodities" might be seen as proposing that just such primitive belief systems
exist at the heart of modern society. In most subsequent Marxist thought, commodity
fetishism is defined as an illusion arising from the central role that private
property plays in capitalism's social processes. It is a central component of the dominant
ideology in capitalist societies.
at: marx deterministic
Theyre wrong about
determinism
It is true that Marx and Engels, especially in their earlier work, sometimes
embraced a notion of historic inevitability that can be reasonably criticized. Bill Tabb agrees with some of
the Native American contributors to this book and acknowledges that indigenous peoples rightly resist the
notion that their main role in world history is to be transformed into
impoverished wage-workers, who can then join with other proletarians in
revolting against capitalism.42 However, neither Tabb nor the Native American
contributors appear to recognize that Marx and Engels theory of historical development
evolved over time. While maintaining their critique of capitalism as an increasingly global phenomenon, Marx and
Engels increasingly abandoned the view that all or most societies will undergo the same
sequence of historical stages. They came to more deeply understand what David Bedford and Danielle Irving call the tragedy of
progress inherent in capitalist development.43 Marx and Engels also increasingly supported non-European peoples resistance to
European colonialism and developed a greater appreciation of the right of oppressed nations to self-determination.
As Michael Handelman, V.G. Kiernan, and other scholars have pointed out, Marx and Engels views on the stages of historical development underwent
significant change between the 1850s and the 1880s.44 The
German Ideology, written in 1845 and focusing
on European history, identified the main stages of historical development as communal or tribal society, ancient or
classical society based on slavery, feudal society, and capitalist society.45 In the years that followed, Marx recognized much of the world had not under-
gone this sequence of historical stages, and he developed a conception of the Asiatic mode of production based on his research in the history of Asia.
Still later, bythe late 1850s, Marx abandoned this conception when he recognized that
the diverse historical developments of different parts of Asia could not be
explained in terms of a single Asiatic mode of production.46 As Handelman explains, This is
very important because it indicates that Marx and Engels had begun to abandon Eurocentric notions
[and] started to realize the essential plurality (and non-static) nature of non-European societies and
not conceive of them in such a monolithic and unchanging way.47
As Handelman, Kiernan, and others have emphasized, Marx and Engels increasingly repudiated the view
that all peoples and all countries must inevitably pass through the same sequence of historical
stages. In a famous letter to a Russian publication in 1877, Marx reminded readers that the chapter on
primitive accumulation in Capital, Vol. I, published a decade before, does not pretend to do more than trace
the path by which, in Western Europe, the capitalist order of economy emerged from
the womb of the feudal order of society.48 Marx insisted here that it would be wrong to metamorphose my historical sketch of the
genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into an historico-philosophical theory of the marche generale (general path) imposed by
fate on every people, whatever the historic circumstances in which it finds itself.49
You can affirm Marxism without blocking self-d

Although this paper has called into question both the dismissal of Marxism as just another Eurocentric ideology and the wholesale rejection of modern
industrialization, the persistence of differences on these issues between Native American activists and Marxist activists need not pose an insuperable
barrier to reaching common ground. Arguably the single most persuasive argument presented by the Native American contributors to this book centers
on the right of Native Americans to control their own destiny and to decide for themselves how they will relate not only to the present capitalist order,
but also to the struggle for revolutionary change and a new social order. As
several of these contributors eloquently point out,
Native Americans must have the freedom to speak for themselves; no one else can speak for
them. And if Marxists want to forge common ground with Native Americans, this fundamental principle is
an indispensable, non-negotiable starting point. Signally, there is a solid basis in Marxist theory for accepting this
fundamental principle. As David Bedford and Danielle Irving, among others, have pointed out, the potential theoretical and practical basis for a
principled, enduring alliance between Native American activists and Marxist activists is the recognition of the right of Native American nations to
sovereignty and self-determination.
As noted above, the incipient recognition by Marx and Engels of oppressed nations right to self-determination was further developed by Lenin. In The
Right of Nations to Self-Determination and other writings, Lenin
insisted that the European working class
movement must recognize and respect the right of oppressed nations to full sovereignty and
even secession from the empires in which they are geographically located.74 And Lenin took this matter so seriously that he modified the
traditional Marxist slogan, Workers of the world, unite! preferring the slogan, Workers and oppressed of the world, unite!75 As Phil Heiple
acknowledges in his essay in this book, it
may be rightly pointed out that the record of the Soviet
Union and other postcapitalist societies on national self-determination has not been entirely positive.76 But
the rather mixed record of twentieth-century socialist countries on this issue arguably stands in marked contrast with
the almost uniformly horrendous historical experience of oppressed nations under
capitalism.77 And even if some observers reach harsher conclusions about the national question in socialist societies, it seems clear that
Marxism theory provides the basis for the rectification of shortcomings and
mistakes on this essential matter in practice.
As Bedford and Irving have argued, the
starting point for Marxists who want to develop a theoretical
understanding of, and practical relationship with, indigenous people is recognition of, and
respect for, the national question.78 To be sure, contemporary Marxists must do more than offer rhetorical support for
this principle. And Churchill and Larson are right when they observe that the RCPs support for autonomy for the Native nations stipulates that these
nations must remain within the larger socialist state.79 This is arguably unacceptable not only from the vantage point of Native Americans but also
from the perspective of Marxists who are truly committed to the right of nations to self-determination, including full sovereignty and secession.
Furthermore, Marxists are undoubtedly obligated to answer the concrete questions raised by Russell Means. Would
revolutionary
Marxists abandon the extraction of uranium? Would they guarantee the Native
nations real control over the land and resources they have left? Would they be
committed to Native Americans right to maintain our values and traditions?80
Contemporary Marxists must answer these questionsin theory and in practicein the affirmative.
If twenty-first century Marxists in North America can demonstrate a principled, sustained commitment to support for the Native nations right to
sovereignty and self-determinationin deeds as well as wordsan alliance between Native American activists and Marxist activists may indeed be
possible. As David Muga
emphasizes, capitalism and imperialism threaten both Native
Americans and the working class. And both self-determination for indigenous peoples and the emancipation of workers
must be achieved.81 Of course, the extraordinary obstacles facing the struggle for revolutionary change should not be underestimated, and solidarity
between Native American activists and Marxist activists must be actively forged and carefully nourished on a continuing basis. But the
potential for common ground is there.
India provesyou have to start by recognizing how different Marx

and Engels were from their historical peers
Although Marx and Engels believed that European colonialism was introducing the economic and social basis for capitalist
transformationand beyond this, socialist transformationin other parts of the world, it
cannot be said that they
generally rooted for the colonialist powers.56 Indeed, as Marx and Engels learned
more about the horrors of colonialism and the growing resistance to it by non-
European peoples, they came to back these struggles, and they came to understand that the
oppressed peoples of the world would rightly insist on the right to national self-
determination. When the people of India revolted against the British in 1857, Marx
and Engels supported these uprisings W I l E R Eand
d oexpressed
p O S T M O the
d E Rhope
N i s Tthat
S C Othe
M Epeople
F r O M of
? 1India
9 1 could be an ally to the
European working class movement.57 Engels came to believe that anti-colonial revolutions in India, Algeria, and Egypt would be the
best thing for us.58 And Engels suggested that if the European working class came to power, it would have to renounce any
attempts to recolonize countries in which such revolutions were developing.59 Indeed, Engels argued that one of the responsibilities
of the European working would be leading the colonized countries toward independence as soon as possible.60
While the notion of anyone, even communist workers, from the colonialist powers
leading oppressed nations to freedom may be problematic in some ways, it should be
recognized that Marx and Engels views here are remarkably different, and much more
progressive, than the views of their European contemporaries who staunchly defended
colonialism. Engels in particular rejected speculation about the future historical stages through which the colonized countries
may pass as rather idle hypotheses.61 Marx and Engels expected the peoples of these countries to follow the example of the
working class revolution in Europe of their own accord, primarily for the sake of meeting their own economic needs.62 Engels
emphasized that the victorious proletariat can force no blessings of any kind
upon any foreign nation without undermining its own victory by so doing.63 In his
Confidential Communication on Bakunin to the International Workingmens Association in 1870, Marx declared, A
nation that enslaves others forges its own chains.64 And in his Polish Proclamation in 1874, Engels
emphasized that No nation can be free if it oppresses other nations.65 Such affirmations hardly seem Eurocentric. And, as we will
see below, the incipient recognition by Marx and Engels of oppressed nations right to self-determination would be further
developed by Lenin as the potential basis for common ground between workers in the European capitalist countries and the peoples
of the colonized countries.
at: marx eurocentric
Their Eurocentrism claim is shoddy scholarshipwe straight turn it
because Marxism is key to check Eurocentrism in practice
The charge that Marxism is Eurocentric has been categorically rejected by some
contemporary writers on the Left.31 Others have acknowledged that some elements of Eurocentrism may be
found in the work of Marx and Engels, but emphasize that in the course of their lives,
their research, and their political activities, the founders of modern communism
increasingly abandoned any Eurocentric tendencies.32 Still others have argued that
while some elements of Eurocentrism are found in Marxism, they can be
identified, analyzed, and eliminated.33 The preponderance of evidence reviewed by the present
author suggests that while Marx and Engels were definitely creatures of their time and
as such, occasionally made remarks which were arguably Eurocentricthe heart of their critique of capitalism and
their vision of postcapitalist society are not Eurocentric or racist, and the elements
of Eurocentrism which do appear in their work or the work of their successors may be criticized and
transcended.
Churchills claim that Marxism possesses little conceptual utility beyond its original European cultural paradigm appears
unpersuasive in the light of the history of the past one hundred and fifty years. As Lewis Feuer wrote in 1959:
The magnetic power of Marxism, unparalleled in the history of mankind, has
drawn into its ideological orbit peoples of
different continents and races, from China to Burma to Ghana, Moscow to
Belgrade to Djakarta.34
Although Marxism originated in Europe, hundreds of millions of people from diverse
countries and cultures have supported Marxist-led movements for national liberation, socialist revolution, and the
construction of new societies informed by the insights of Marxism. The Soviet Union, the first socialist
country, was a Eurasian state which included more than one hundred and twenty different
national and ethnic groups. And the majority of peoples who lived in countries attempting to build socialism in the
middle of the twentieth century were Asians, not Europeans. Today, the Soviet Union no longer exists and Chinas rulers are
imposing so-called free-market reforms on the population. But new struggles against capitalism are being waged
by workers, small farmers, progressive intellectuals, andyesindigenous peoples,
tooin countries such as Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Mexico, and Nepal.
Apparently, a great many non-Europeans have found more than a little conceptual utility in Marxism. And with the
present corporate-led globalization process, that is, the globalization of capitalism, Marxism is
arguably more relevant than ever before.
As various writers on the Left have pointed out, Marx

and Engels focused their studies on Europe because
it was the geographical location of the origins of capitalism, not because of any innate or inherent
superiority of the people or ideology or culture of Europe. In this important respect, Marx and Engels were not Eurocentric or
racist.35 Moreover, Churchill and Larson go too far when they argue that Marxism views
production and industrialization as the measure by which all human
advancement can be calculated. For Marx and Engels, capitalist industrialization led to historically unpreced-
ented production and scientific advances, and the extraordinary productive forces unleashed by capitalism contained the potential
for the historically unprecedented satisfaction of human needs once capitalism could be abolished. But Marx and Engels also
recognized that capitalist
industrialization, colonialism, and what later Marxists would
call imperialism, also produced historically unprecedented levels of death,
destruction, degradation, and misery for the masses of people both at home and abroad.
Awareness of Marx and Engels views on the contradictory nature of capitalist development should make clear that the founders of
modern Communism did not view Europe as an idealWagainst
I l E R E which
d o p Oall
S T people
M O d E Rand
N i sall
T S things
C O M Eare
FrOmeasured
M ? 1 9 3 or the rightful source of
ultimate leadership and hegemony in the world. Marx and Engels understood that this most advanced stage of capitalist
production was based on barbarism, that is, on genocidal violence and plunder. In Capital, Marx wrote,
The discovery of gold and silver in America; the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines
of the aboriginal population; the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies; the
turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy
dawn of the era of capitalist production.36
profound hypocrisy and

In an article published in the New York Daily Tribune on August 8, 1853, Marx wrote, The
inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, moving from its
home, to the colonies, where it goes naked.37 Also in Capital, Marx quotes approvingly from the book Colonization and
Christianity by William Howett:
The barbarities and desperate outrages of the so-called Christian race, throughout every region of the world, and upon every people
they have been able to subdue, are not to be paralleled by those of any other race, however fierce, however untaught, and however
reckless or mercy and of shame, in any age of the earth.38
For Marx and Engels, this most advanced kind of society fortunately contained the seeds of its own destruction.
Marx and Engels developed a theoretical overview of the historical development of societies based on the dialectical relationsand
contradictionsbetween the development of productive forces and the social relations of production. It is true that Marx
and Engels used terms like primitive and barbarian to refer to societies which had relatively
limited productive capacity and social relations of production associated with such productive forces.39 Contemporary analysts
are understandably sensitive to the possible pejorative connotations of such
labels, and it may well be that some of the nineteenth-century Eurocentrism
prevalent among European historians and social scientists of that era finds occasional
expression in Marx and Engels, especially in their earlier work. Nonetheless, Churchill and Larsons
claim that such terms are inevitably racist and arrogant terms, unsupported by fact is far
from convincing. As we have just noted, Marx and Engels clearly believed that the rise of
European capitalist development brought with it a historically unprecedented level of
barbarism, along with the most advanced productive forces yet known to humankind. Moreover, as J.M. Blaut has
argued, Marx and Engels did not use terms like primitive and barbarian to
refer to any innate or inherent inferiority of non-European peoples, ideologies, or cultures.40
Postcolonial scholars always accuse Marxism of Eurocentrism

because they cant develop a theory that explains universal economic
forcestheir arg is a deflection tactic that obliterates the common
ground we do have
Much of postcolonial theory argues that the concepts of Western social theory are
inapplicable outside of Europe; that projecting European thought and history onto the
rest of the world ignores the real history of the world outside the West. Much of
this work has put Marxism and Marxists in the crosshairs, holding it as just another
form of Eurocentric thought, incapable of analyzing or contributing to the
liberation of postcolonial societies. In Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital Vivek
Chibber takes up these claims and systematically
W I l E R E d o p critiques
O S T M O d E R Nwhat
i s T S Chas
O M E to this
FrO M ? 1point
94 become
accepted wisdom for a large section of the academic left.
Jason Farbman spoke with Vivek Chibber, an associate professor of Sociology at New York
University, about Marxism and postcolonial theory, their different approaches to explaining
capitalism and anti-capitalist strategy, engaging with the nonwestern world, and the role of
radical intellectuals.
WHY SHOULD socialists care about postcolonial studies?
IN THE last twenty to twenty-five years, postcolonial theory has taken its place as
the replacement for Marxist theory in university settings and among intellectuals.
Throughout the twentieth century, Marxism was the theory that socialists relied upon to explain
the world, and to make sense of how to organize against capitalism. With the fall of the Soviet
Union and the decline of movements, with Marxism becoming marginal in intellectual life, and
with a socialist left being kicked out of the labor movement, this is the first time in the
modern era when you find an absence of Marxist intellectuals both within the
labor movement and within the intelligentsia. Whats taken its place now is
postcolonial theory, which purports to do two things: to explain how capitalism
works, and to criticize the injustices of capitalism. Socialists have a lot at stake in putting
that theory to the test and seeing whether its worthwhile or not.
YOUR NEW book, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, offers harsh criticisms of
postcolonial theory. Why do you think it falls short as a radical theory?
IM CRITICAL because postcolonial theory tries to do what Marxism does, which is
both to explain the world and tell us how to change it. I think it fails in both those
respects.
In terms of explaining the world, even though the theory talks about capitalism a lot, its
conception of capitalism is one that either obscures how it works or presents a mythologized,
sanitized version of it. The kind of version the bourgeois apologists tend to put forward.
With regard to its role as a critical theory; well, first of all, as Marx said, you cant criticize
something if you dont understand it. If they dont understand how capitalism works,
they cant really help us criticize it.
Postcolonial theory presents itself as being not just anticapitalist, but antiimperialist and
anticolonial. In fact, as I show in my book, its a theory that resurrected and made respectable
what we now call orientalismthat is, ideas that the East is different from the West in some
deep, unchanging way. In my view, the theory not only fails, but has some pretty conservative
implications.
POSTCOLONIAL THEORISTS often criticize the universalism of Marxism. What
do they mean by that?
SOCIALISTS HAVE always held on to the belief that capitalismwherever it is
submits people to what Marx called the dull compulsion of economic relations. It
forces people into highly exploitative relations; and it does so regardless of their culture, their
background. All it is interested in is profits.
So as capitalism spreads around the world, it spreads these properties into every community,
every culture, every society. Capitalism doesnt care if those societies are Hindu,
Muslim, or Christian. In so doing itWsubmits the entire world to one set of structural and
economic forcesthe same forces. And it brings the entire world into a common
struggle against those forces.
Postcolonial theory often denies this. It often insists that when capitalism is
implanting itself in Calcutta, or in Nairobi, you cant understand it the way you
understand the capitalism in Detroit or Manchester. You need an entirely different
theory, a theory that looks nothing like what Marxs theory was. Well, okay, maybe you do. So
what is that theory?
WHAT IS that theory? What do postcolonial theorists propose as a replacement?
I HAVENT seen them provide one. The argument is typically pitched in the
negativeto the effect that existing theories have to be rethought. But what the
alternative theory is, about how capitalism actually works, is hard to find.
BUT ITS not hard to observe clear cultural differences in various parts of the world. How do we
account for these differences?
WE CAN admit what is clearly true: that most people are governed by their habits, by norms, by
custom, by others expectations of them, in much of what they do. That amounts to admitting
that socialization and cultural orientation have a huge bearing on peoples choices and
behavior. I dont wish to dispute that at all. And if that is what postcolonial theorists
claimed, one would have no disagreement with them.
But their claim is stronger. It is not that people are influenced by their culture; their claim is that
people are constituted by their cultureall the way down. That means their socialization is so
strong, their culture and cultural indoctrination so overriding, that it can even erase their
understanding of their basic needs and interests, like the importance of physical well-being or
individual harm.
Theres a lot at stake in accepting this. If it is true, there is a lot that goes out the window, like
any conception of human rights.
HOW DO you get from explanations based on culture to the impossibility of human rights?
YOU CANNOT assign rights if you dont have interests. Culture has a lot of importance.
But is it so important that it can get people to ignore their own well-being? If the cultural
relativism of postcolonial studies is right, it undermines our motivation to oppose the
expropriation of peasants in Bolivia, the exploitation of workers in Nigeria, the immiseration of
rickshaw drivers in Calcutta. Because for all you know their cultures might value these things,
think these things are good for them. Who gave you the right to say that these things are
bad? On what grounds would you say they would ever oppose them?
AND THIS is distinctly different than socialist theory?
SOCIALISTS, ALONG with saying that capitalism submits the whole world to a common set of
forces, have also held that working people all around the world have a common
interest against capitalism. Again, regardless of whether they are Hindu, Muslim or
Christian, or Black or white. Regardless of these makeups, they all have certain common
interests. And thats why the struggle against capitalism is an international and
universal struggle.
Here too, postcolonial theory often undermines this. Its calling card has been to
say that laboring people in non-western societies are not motivated by the same
concerns as those in the West; they dont even think in terms of their interests. They have a
whole different consciousness than people in the West do. This is very reminiscent of what
colonizing and imperial countries said when they denied rights to Asians and to Africans.
THERE IS an important distinction between the way Marxism and postcolonial studies
theorizes difference. Whats at stake here?
WHATS AT stake is whether we think that when a worker or a poor person is bossed around in
Calcutta, that he has the right to the same grievances and redress that somebody in Manchester
or Detroit does. That when a woman in Nigeria is the victim of gender oppression she ought to
have the same recourse as a woman in Los Angeles.
It comes down to this: If you think people in post-colonial cultures deserve the same rights as
people in rich countries do, you can only make that argument if you also believe they have the
same needs and interests as the latter. To deny this is to insist that Easterners and Westerners
live in different worlds. Such a theory cant possibly sustain and support international
movements and internationalism within the working class.
at: not our identity
Spotlighting identity features doesnt disprove our Kyes, most of
our ev is about race because thats a big debate in Marxismbut
likewise, they fail to account for veteran status and geographic
privilege and other forms of differenceusing identity as a trump
card reinscribes racism by positing it as a personal disposition
Malik, Neurobiologist, 1997
(Kenan, The Mirror of Race: Postmodernism and the Celebration of Difference in In defense of history)
Poststructuralists deny the concept of an essential" identity and stress instead the phenomenon of multiple social identities." As
Robin Cohen puts it, "the modern study of identity has... dished the old essentialisms for example the
Marxist idea that all social identity could essentially be reduced to class identity. Instead it
holds that there are
competing claims for affiliation that cannot be reduced to epiphenomena" and that gender, age,
disability, race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, civil status, even musical styles and dress codes
are all very potent axes of organization and identification."4 The recognition that human beings
are subject to conflicting claims and identities is clearly important. The problem arises, however,
when all identities, of whatever form, are treated as equivalent, so that personal lifestyle
preferences such as musical styles are given the same weight and significance as physical attributes such as
disability" or social products such as race and class, while, at the same time, each identity is conceived in
isolation from specific social relations. In fact, there is already a problem in conceiving race
or class as an identity in the first place. Social relations such as racial oppression become not
social relations at all but personal attributes, or even lifestyle choices. When race is equated with
musical styles" or dress codes, the social seems to mean nothing more than a particular decision that
any individual may make, and society is reduced to the aggregate of individual identities . The
consequence of the poststructuralist notion of society is that many contemporary writers treat social
distinctions as personal or political choices. There is a scene in Woody Allens film Bananas, in which our luckless hero,
played by Allen, bemoans the fact that he dropped out of college. What would you have been if you had finished school? someone
asks him. 1 dont know, sighs Allen. I was in the black studies program. By now I could have been black. This seems to be the
essence of the contemporary view of identity. As Robin Cohen observes, postmodernists seem to believe that an individual
constructs and presents any one of a number of possible social identities, depending on the situation. Like
a player
concealing a deck of cards from the other contestants, the individual pulls out a
knaveor a religion, or an ethnicity, a lifestyleas the context deems a particular choice desirable or
appropriate.5 In this spirit an increasing number of writers now view racial division as the result of a
deliberately chosen cultural exclusiveness. Winston James, employing Benedict Andersons notion of an imagined
community, argues that, Like all nations, nationalities and ethnic groups, Afro-Caribbean people in Britain have erected
boundaries in relation to those with whom they identify.6 The suggestion is that Afro-Caribbeans have chosen to establish
distinctive cultural patterns, that they have asserted their right to be different, as a way of confirming their imagined community,"
of estab-lishing what James calls a new sense of fellowship. If
this were true, however, racism would not be a
problem. If we could choose identities in the way we choose our clothes eveiy morning, if we could erect social
boundaries from a cultural Lego pack, then racial hostility might be no different from
disagreements between lovers of Mozart and those who prefer Charlie Parker, or between supporters of
different football J clubs. In other words, racial differences would not be social relations which exist apart
from the preferences of any given individual. They would simply represent
prejudices born out of a plurality of tastes. But we know that in reality racial divisions are social
relations, that they are not simply the product of personal preferences, and that blackness amounts to more than a
semester on a black studies program. It is not Afro-Caribbeans, or any other racialized group, who have "erected
boundaries separating them from the rest of society. These boundaries are socially constructed not just in the
sense that they are culturally specific, like personal tastes in music or clothes, but in the sense that society
has systematically racialized certain social groups and signified them as different'as James himself
acknowledges when he notes the powerful centripetal forces of British racism.7 Black youth in Brixton or the Bronx have 110
more chosen their difference than Jews did in Nazi Germany. Certainly oppressed communities have often reacted to racial
division by adopting particular cultural forms. In his autobiography, Miles Davis recounts how black jazz musicians in the forties
responded to racism by o t developing bebop as a style that would exclude white players. Similarly many Jews today continue to
observe Jewish cultural rituals less out of religious faith than in response to anti-Semitism and in memory of the victims of the
Holocaust. But such cultural assertion is not the cause of racial identification, it is its product. This is one of the fundamental
contradictions at the heart of postmodernism. Insisting
on the discursive or social construction of all
knowledge and identity, under the cover of anti-essentialism it ends by effectively denying
determinate historical relations altogether and thus effectively abandons its original
principle that identity and the human subject are socially constructed. Poststructuralist
discourse reduces (or deconstructs) society to the accidental interaction of individuals and removes the subject from the terrain of
the social.
Determinate social relations are reduced to individual, personal attributes or at best to
contingent relations between individuals. There can be no social construction when the
social itself has no existence apart from discursively constructed individual identities.^) (115-
117)
at: occupy good
Empirics are conclusive
Greenber, 11 WIlERE do pOSTMOdERNisTS COME FrOM? 199
David Greenberg, contributing editor to The New Republic, teaches history at Rutgers University, 10/19/11, "Why Liberals Need
Occupy Wall Street, and Vice-Versa ," www.tnr.com/article/politics/96412/occupy-wall-street-criticism-liberalism-obama
But if the spark of excitement that Occupy Wall Street ignites should be contained before it spreads into a mania, neither should it be
stamped out in fear.
It should be fanned skillfully and judiciously, its flames controlled, its energy
harnessed toward goals that leftists and liberalsand indeed most Americanscan endorse. Yes,
there is reason to wince at the ideology emanating from some quarters (though, we should stress, only
some) of Occupy Wall Street. Yes, there is something excruciating about watching the human mike in actionand even one of
the twenty-something activists I drank with the other night attacked that ritual as part of the fetishization of process and a
promoter of Stalinist groupthink because it made people repeat words before knowing what they were going to be saying. Myself, I
find it rather less threatening than all that, evoking above all the balcony scene from Monty Pythons Life of Brian. (Youre all
individuals! Yes, were all individuals! Youre all different! Yes, were all different.) But this is silly stuff. The main and perhaps
obvious point is that the protesters are doing something very right and very important. They have gotten the nation to focus on the
costs and injustice of inequality, on the need for financial regulation, on the problem of job creation, and on other urgent concerns
that, but for a brief spell in late 2008 and early 2009, Washington has largely avoided addressing. Theyve rekindled a feeling of
hope, and created a sense of political possibility. Most important, theyve begun to put pressure on our political leaders, including
President Obama, who as Ron Suskinds devastating Confidence Men confirms, has been far too timid in challenging the banks and
financial firms. All of this liberals should applaud. Liberals and the left have had a troubled relationship in American history, as
often pitted in opposition as yoked in alliance. Liberals deserve credit for those occasions when theyve repudiated radical cadres
that have strayed from humane valuesrejecting Communists who sought to co-opt labor unions, renouncing the violence of the
late-1960s New Left. But each period of progressive change in the last centurythe Progressive Era, the New
Deal, the New Frontier and Great Societygained energy and power from a left-liberal coalition. The radicalism
of the anarchists was not reason to spurn the liberals push for regulatory government at the turn of the last century; the anti-
capitalism of the communists did not lead New Deal liberals to forget that their immediate adversaries were the protectors of
privilege; the fringe sympathizers with the North Vietnamese hoisting NLF flags did not stop the mainstream, middle-class
Moratorium movement of 1969 from mounting an anti-Vietnam War protest of unprecedented size. Shared enthusiasms and
common goals have overcome, if provisionally, persistent tensions and conflicts. If
this history should make liberals
see that the reasonable left can and should be a partner in achieving reform, it should also help
todays radicals see some important patterns. I am not bothered that Occupy Wall Street hasnt presented any
concrete list of demands; their concerns are self-evident enough, and besides, the protesters who flock under their banner are too
heterogeneous and too diffuse to be expected to speak with one voice (human microphones notwithstanding). What they do
need, however, is politicswithout which radical reform efforts have almost always run aground.
More troubling to me than the anti-capitalist cant I hear from the movement is the contempt for politics and the two-
party system. History again: Radicals have traditionally fared best when theyve worked within the
Democratic party, not against itkeeping up pressure but not tearing down the organization
that has been, for better or worse, the most reliable instrument for liberal change over the last
century. Perhaps the protesters can be forgiven for not knowing the history of the 30s or the
60s, but none is too young to know the consequences of Ralph Naders 2000 campaign. And so
Occupy Wall Street should hold the Democrats feet to the fire; it should force Obama to run in 2012 as the tribune
of the 99 percent. (Pulling this off will be hard, although running against Mitt Romney will make it much easier.) It would be
folly, however, for this burgeoning movement to train its fire chiefly on the party of its potential
allies. Tim Geithner is not the only obstacle to reform in Washington. And so I would urge the protesters to find political targets as
worthy of occupation as Wall Street itself. Is there a hashtag for Occupy the Republican Debates?
Anti-political approach of OWS guarantees ideas are never

implemented and society isnt transformed
Kazin, 11
Michael Kazin, history professor at Georgetown University and co-editor of Dissent.,
10/20/11,How Occupy Wall Street Offers a Promising New Model for the Left,
www.tnr.com/article/politics/96458/occupy-wall-street-new-left-media

But due to its very breadth and openness, this proudly leaderless uprising may be difficult to
sustain. Even if it endures, such an insurgency is unlikely to grow into a movement that can
bend politics in its direction. Forty years ago, the feminist activist Jo Freeman presciently
warned of the severe limits that structurelessness imposes on an anti-authoritarian
movement: The more unstructured a movement is, the less control it has over the directions in
which it develops and the political actions in which it engages. This does not mean that its ideas
do not spread. Given a certain amount of interest by the media and the appropriateness of social
conditions, the ideas will still be diffused widely. But diffusion of ideas does not mean they are
implemented; it only means they are talked about. Insofar as they can be applied individually
they may be acted on; insofar as they require coordinated political power to be implemented,
they will not be. Before too long, without either elected leaders or a semblance of a common
program, radicals with tired but durable dogmas may imperil the young movements support
among Americans who dislike ideologues of any persuasion. Already, the idea that corporate
donations and Tim Geithners Wall Street background make the Democrats nothing but
servants to big business slips too easily off the tongues of some of the Occupiers I have spoken
with in New York City and Washington. They believe a President Romney, Perry, or Cain and a
Republican Congress would simply mean that one set of malefactors had succeeded another.
Kevin Zeese is a key organizer of one of the two separate, but quite amicable, occupations in
Washington. In 2006, Zeese, who is in his mid-50s, ran for the U.S. Senate in Maryland as the
candidate of three tiny partiesthe Greens, the Libertarians, and the Populists. He received all
of 1.5 percent of the vote. Despite that result, Zeese continues to argue that the new movement
should start to assemble a third party of its own. So Occupy Wall Street has given American
leftists a chance to appeal to millions of their fellow citizens who care about the same crisis they
do and are open, at least for now, to egalitarian solutions. But the open-ended nature of the
movement and, to paraphrase a greybearded activist named Marx, the incubus of failed ideas
and strategies on the left still weighs on these vital and growing protests. What will the
Occupiers do once the media frenzy has passed? Whether they will be remembered as the
beginning of a newer, better, more inclusive left or a spirited remnant of an older, less attractive
one depends on their answer.
at: offensive language voter
<<Consider reading the longer version Halberstam card or the Dougherty card
in the link section>>>
Using the round as a corrective for our individual shortcomings shuts
down debate
Wagner 2k5 (Anne, Unsettling the academy: working through the challenges of anti-racist
pedagogy Race Ethnicity and Education Vol. 8, No. 3, September 2005, pp. 261275)
Another way in which the pedagogue may begin to establish the climate of the class involves stressing the importance of both
acknowledging fears and anxieties and of speaking from ones own experiences. A working assumption may be that racism affects
everyone and dealing with the impact of racism is a lifelong process, one with which the educator, too, is still engaged (Romney et
al., 1992). Hence, asmany people are only learning to overcome the racism with which they have
been socialized their entire lifetime, scathing critiques and aggressive attacks will not be
rewarded by the professor. Too often in academia, students equate such practices with superior
scholarship, as they have never truly learned how to engage in meaningful critical dialogue. As
Paulo Friere (1970) has written, dialogue is central to the project of education. Only through such an
exchange of ideas can we hope to work towards transformative change. However, as noted previously,
we can not taker for granted the fact that students will enter the classroom with such skills.
Often, attacks are motivated by a desire to demonstrate ones mastery of antiracism, which is
demonstrated by verbally eviscerating another student. In such instances, it becomes an
individual pursuit of excellence, where one may seek to demonstrate their competence by
undermining and attacking another. Clearly, such practices hinder the development of a
collaborative learning project and may unalterably affect individual students
willingness to take further risks, causing some to retreat into silence as a
protective measure. In fact, numerous researchers have reported that concerns about being
labeled racist have resulted in a culture of fear, which leaves many students feeling estranged
and silenced (Martin, 2000; Schick, 2000). Hence, I suggest that misconceptions regarding academic dialogue
and debate need to be explicitly addressed at the outset, to avoid such problematic encounters.
Given the contentious nature of the material, it is crucial that we prepare students to succeed in
the class. All too often, I have witnessed scenes in classrooms where students are ill-equipped to
deal with differing perspectives and the resulting recriminations and emotionally charged
confrontations result in permanent rifts, which cause some students to withdraw,
either in anger or fear, often in an attempt to protect themselves from what they perceive to be
the potential for further attacks. Aggressive critiques are not only unproductive, they also
quickly dissolve any sense of community which may have been established. Consequently,
explicating expectations for classroom behaviour will also be an important tool for establishing a
sense that a communal project is being undertaken. In this way, the process of learning is
framed as being of utmost importance, rather than transcending all tensions and contradictions,
to arrive at universal truths.
Voting us down on the basis of personal harm professed by a team
with a competitive interest results in a hierarchy of woundedness,
which destroys activism and perversely gives more venom to those
words in the first place WIlERE do pOSTMOdERNisTS COME FrOM? 202
Halberstam 2014 Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity and Gender Studies
at USC (7/5, Jack, Bully Bloggers, a queer word art group, You Are Triggering me! The Neo-
Liberal Rhetoric of Harm, Danger and Trauma,
http://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2014/07/05/you-are-triggering-me-the-neo-liberal-
rhetoric-of-harm-danger-and-trauma/)
Political times change and as the 1980s gave way to the 1990s, as weepy white lady feminism gave
way to reveal a multi-racial, poststructuralist, intersectional feminism of much longer provenance,
people began to laugh, loosened up, people got over themselves and began to talk and recognize
that the enemy was not among us but embedded within new, rapacious economic
systems. Needless to say, for women of color feminisms, the stakes have always
been higher and identity politics always have played out differently. But, in the
1990s, books on neoliberalism, postmodernism, gender performativity and racial capital turned the focus away
from the wounded self and we found our enemies and, as we spoke out and observed that
neoliberal forms of capitalism were covering over economic exploitation with language
of freedom and liberation, it seemed as if we had given up wounded selves for new formulations of
multitudes, collectivities, collaborations, and projects less centered upon individuals and
their woes. Of course, I am flattening out all kinds of historical and cultural variations within multiple histories of feminism,
queerness and social movements. But I am willing to do so in order to make a point here about the re-emergence of a
rhetoric of harm and trauma that casts all social difference in terms of hurt
feelings and that divides up politically allied subjects into hierarchies of
woundedness.
At this point, we should recall the four Yorkshire men skit from Monty Python where the four old friends reminisce about their
deprived childhoods one says we used to live in a tiny old tumbledown house the next counters with house!? You were lucky to
live in a house. We used to live in a room And the third jumps in with: room? You were lucky to have a room, we used to have to
live in a corridor. The fourth now completes the cycle: A corridor! We dreamed of living in a corridor! These
hardship
competitions, but without the humor, are set pieces among the triggered
generation and indeed, I rarely go to a conference, festival or gathering anymore without a
protest erupting about a mode of representation that triggered someone somewhere. And
as people call each other out to a chorus of finger snapping, we seem to be
rapidly losing all sense of perspective and instead of building alliances, we are
dismantling hard fought for coalitions.
Much of the recent discourse of offense and harm has focused on language, slang and naming. For example, controversies erupted in
the last few months over the name of a longstanding nightclub in San Francisco: Trannyshack, and arguments ensued about
whether the word tranny should ever be used. These debates led some people to distraction, and legendary queer performer, Justin
Vivian Bond, posted an open letter on her Facebook page telling readers and fans in no uncertain terms that she is angered by this
trifling bullshit. Bond reminded readers that many people are delighted to be trannies and not delighted to be shamed into silence
by the word police. Bond and others have also referred to the queer custom of re-appropriating terms of abuse and turning them
into affectionate terms of endearment. When
we obliterate terms like tranny in the quest for
respectability and assimilation, we actually feed back into the very ideologies that
produce the homo and trans phobia in the first place! In The Life of Brian, Brian finally refuses to
participate in the anti-Semitism that causes his mother to call him a roman. In a brave coming out speech, he says: Im not a
roman mum, Im a kike, a yid, a heebie, a hook-nose, Im kosher mum, Im a Red Sea pedestrian, and proud of it!
And now for something completely differentThe controversy about the term tranny is not a singular occurrence; such tussles
have become a rather predictable and regular part of all kinds of conferences and meetings. Indeed, it
is becoming
difficult to speak, to perform, to offer up work nowadays without someone, somewhere claiming to
feel hurt, or re-traumatized by a cultural event, a painting, a play, a speech, a casual use of slang, a
characterization, a caricature and so on whether or not the damaging
speech/characterization occurs within a complex aesthetic work. At one conference, a play that
foregrounded the mutilation of the female body in the 17th century was cast as trans-phobic and became the occasion for multiple
public meetings to discuss the damage it wreaked upon trans people present at the performance. Another piece at this performance
conference that featured a fortune teller character was accused of orientalist stereotyping. At another event I attended that focused
on queer masculinities, the organizers were accused of marginalizing queer femininities. And a class I was teaching recently featured
a young person who reported feeling worried about potentially triggering a transgender student by using incorrect pronouns in
relation to a third student who did not seem bothered by it! Another student told me recently that she had been triggered in a class
on colonialism by the showing of The Battle of Algiers. In many of these cases offended groups demand apologies, and promises are
made that future enactments of this or that theater piece will cut out the offensive parts; or, as in the case of Trannyshack, the
name of the club was changed.
As reductive as such responses to aesthetic and academic material have become, so have definitions of trauma been
over-simplified within these contexts. There are complex discourses on trauma readily available as a
consequence of decades of work on memory, political violence and abuse. This work has offered us
multiple theories of the ways in which a charged memory of pain, abuse, torture or imprisonment
can be reignited by situations or associations that cause long buried memories to flood back into the body with
unpredictable results. But all of this work, by Shoshana Felman Macarena Gomez-Barris, Saidiya Hartman, Cathy Caruth, Ann
Cvetkovich, Marianne Hirsch and others, has been pushed aside in the recent wave of the politics of the aggrieved.
Claims about being triggered work off literalist notions of emotional pain and cast
traumatic events as barely buried hurt that can easily resurface in relation to any
kind of representation or association that resembles or even merely represents the theme of the original painful
experience. And so, while in the past, we turned to Freuds mystic writing pad to think of memory as a palimpsest, burying material
under layers of inscription, now
we see a memory as a live wire sitting in the psyche waiting
for a spark. Where once we saw traumatic recall as a set of enigmatic symptoms moving through the body, now people
reduce the resurfacing of a painful memory to the catch all term of trigger,
imagining that emotional pain is somehow similar to a pulled muscle as
something that hurts whenever it is deployed, and as an injury that requires
protection.
Fifteen to twenty years ago, books like Wendy Browns States of Injury (1995) and Anna Chengs The Melancholy of Race:
Psychoanalysis, Assimilation and Hidden Grief (2001) asked readers to think about how grievances become grief, how politics comes
to demand injury and how a neoliberal rhetoric of individual pain obscures the violent sources of social inequity. But, newer
generations of queers seem only to have heard part of this story and instead of
recognizing that neoliberalism precisely goes to work by psychologizing political
difference, individualizing structural exclusions and mystifying political change,
some recent activists seem to have equated social activism with descriptive
statements about individual harm and psychic pain. Let me be clear saying that you feel harmed by another
queer persons use of a reclaimed word like tranny and organizing against the use of that word is NOT social activism. It is
censorship.
at: state obsolete
Theories that ignore the central role of the state fail to improve
material conditions
Todd Gordon PhD Poli Sci York, Towards an anti-racist Marxist state theory: A Canadian case study Capital & Class 2007
31: 1
Neoliberalism, imperialist war and the states ongoing, aggressive reordering of peoples lives
renders untenable the tired claim made by post-structuralists, social democrats and the new Right that the
state has receded in importance. The state plays a central role in global affairs as
well as in many peoples daily lives , through immigration controls and through labour-market and welfare
restructuring. This throws into sharp relief the limitations of social commentary that is
premised on a rejection of the theoretical study of the state , whether that rejection is
done in the name of micro- power or in a reluctant capitulation to the view that the
internationalisation of capital has made the theoretical study of the state obsolete. Questions
about the nature, role and limits of the capitalist statequestions that have guided Marxist theoryare as
important today as they have ever been, and demand our continued reflection. While
significant advances have been made in Marxist state theory, particularly by those writing in what is referred to in this article as the
Open Marxist tradition1, there are important gaps that need to be addressed if we hope to achieve a more complete understanding
of the state and the implications of its power today. One of the weaknesses of Marxist state theory, including amongst Open Marxist
contributions, is its near-silence on questions of race and racism. This theoretical lacuna is addressed here in the hopes of further
advancing a Marxist theory of the state that better reflects the racist nature of capitalist society.
at: zizek plagiarized racists
Theyre wrong about Zizek
Doughart 2014 editor of the PrinceWArthur Herald (7/21, Jackson, National Post, The fetish
of plagiarism-outing, http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2014/07/21/jackson-doughart-
the-fetish-of-plagiarism-outing/)
It seems every few months, the news cycle produces the name of a well-reputed journalist or
academic who has been accused and presumed guilty of plagiarism. That P-word is
the worst label that a writer can receive. I do not know anyone who would take the charge
lightly.
We would like to believe that objective concern for intellectual integrity is the primary
motivation of the accuser. Often, it is not. Indeed, the seeming uptick in revelations of
plagiarism is not the fruit of a revolution of moral concern. Rather, its the product
of gotcha journalism, made ever easier by Google, which can be as easily employed by the
hack investigator as it is by the principled critic.
The somewhat obscure Marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek a hero to many young students and a
notable postmodernist was recently accused of plagiarism by two conservative writers who
found that his essay in a 1999 academic journal contained an unattributed and unquoted
passage. Zizek weighed in on the incident and a familiar story was revealed: the
passage in question was a summary of another authors work that preceded an
analysis and rebuttal, and was not, in fact, the theft of someone elses ideas.
Zizeks situation arose from a legitimate misunderstanding. Someone sent him the
summary in question and permitted him to use it without attribution. The problem
was that this friend had lifted directly from the original and not summarized,
leading to the stolen texts appearance in Zizeks own essay.
This case bears striking resemblance to that of Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente from
a couple of years ago. Wente was outed for having reproduced passages of summary from
other writers, and received a thorough lashing in print for her troubles. As well, foreign policy
commentator Fareed Zakaria didnt even bother to defend himself against charges of plagiarism,
despite it being quite arguable that he did nothing wrong.
Yet the defendable nature of these offenses has done nothing to dissuade fellow writers from
coming down on those accused like a ton of bricks. Plagiarism is plagiarism, they say. Full stop.
That incidents like this ought to be avoided is clear: journalists should write their own prcis
and not simply repurpose those of others. But the sin here is absolutely not of plagiarism, but
sloppiness. Anyone who thinks that lifting a summary of an idea or event, even
intentionally, is morally equal to cutting and pasting someones original argument or
analysis doesnt understand the nature or the stakes of academic dishonesty.
Slates Rebecca Schuman has written that, Zizeks defensethat lifting [a] purely informative
summary does not count as real plagiarism is not correct. But isnt it? If the distinction
between thieving original work and recycling a summary is real, shouldnt the definition of real
plagiarism account for it?
All of this would be less concerning if the motivation for plagiarism-outing were
indeed a concern for integrity. Unfortunately and commonly, though, the accusers have an
ulterior reason for their pursuit: usually a difference of opinion or worldview with the author in
question. Would anyone doubt that the two conservatives who discovered Zizeks
mistake were not delighted by their W I l find,
E R E d o as
p O Sit
T Mcould
O d E R N i sserve
T S C O M to
E F rmake
O M ? 2 0 6their ideological
opponent appear illegitimate?
for other critiques
dolorology (dustin)

biopolitics
The personal narrative of pain becomes intelligible as a descriptor for

a broader social categoryi.e. the pain of a black woman becomes the
pain of black womenthis caesura of social bodies enables a racist
biopolitics of the worst form
Strick 14Postdoctoral Researcher at the Center for Literary and Cultural Research Berlin
(Simon, WHAT IS DOLOROLOGY?, American Dolorologies pg 9-11, dml)
The concept of biopolitics aims at grasping those technologies of power that not so much exert discipline on individual bodies,
but differentiate and comprise bodies and subjects into populations. Contrary to his earlier
texts,11 Foucaults genealogy of biopolitics has explicitly acknowledged the crucial function of categories of difference within power
regimes. As he argues on the figuration12 of racism, which emerges in the eighteenth century, these axes enable to
establish the state as an assemblage of racially differentiated populations. Power
seizes on these by observing, measuring, and managing their composition,
degeneration, mixture, purity, etc. With the emergence of biopolitics, Foucault writes,
[R]acism is inscribed as the basic mechanism of power, as it is exercised in modern States. . . . It

is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under powers control: the
break between what must live and what must die. The appearance within the biological continuum of
the human race or races, dis tinction among races, the hierarchy of races . . . all this is a way of
fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls. It is a way of separating out
the groups that exist within a popula tion. It is, in short, a way of establishing a
biological type caesura within a population that appears to be a biological domain. This
will allow power to treat that population as a mixture of races, or to be more accurate, to treat
the species, to subdivide the species it controls, into the subspecies known, precisely, as races. That is the first function of racism: to
fragment, to create caesuras within the biological continuum addressed by biopower. (1997, 25455)
The discourse of dolorology enacts this caesura by constructing racial ized and
gendered bodies. It differentiates and compares their relative capaci ties for pain
and distributes different entitlements to socially significant suffering on behalf of
this capacity. As Simpsons quote indicates, it does so by evoking a highly individualizing
recognition of pain (e.g., the anonymous slave girls personal story). However, the body in
pain within dolorology always signifies a collective of bodies among others, which
are differentiated or aligned with each other by their access to pain. While thus
producing seemingly personal narratives of suffering and compassion, these are
made intelligible primarily as speaking for a socially suffering group.
Simpsons broad generalization of birthpain and slave pain and their comparison illus trates how pain fragments the
broad field of traumatic experience in liberal societies and establishes prototypical
bodies in pain: the slave girls pain can, for instance, be recognized as the pain of
slavery, of womanhood, or of black femininity. The corporeal body therefore
metonymically embodies different populations constructed via their simultaneous
political suffering and natural/biological pain. By determining which racial and
gendered bodies feel which pain, and relating this to the social and political
entitlements of generalized populations, dolorology enables the collapse of
biological and political discourses into each other. Or, as Foucault puts it, biological exis tence [is]
reflected in political existence (1990, 143), which is to say that political entitlements are negotiated in biological and biologizing
terms, and biological
circumscriptions of pain in bodies work to regulate how subjects
are recognized as suffering within the political domain.

recognition
The demand for recognition Wof the affs articulation of suffering by a

ballot creates a wounded attachmentidentity constituted by a
vengeful redress for injuries caused by the same dominant structures
they demand recognition fromthis reestablishes the hegemony of
whiteness as necessary to comprehend and address the suffering of
subjugated bodies and maintains the violence of humanism
--articulation of pain=humanismreinscribes power
--recognition=palliative
--criticizing power on basis of injury constitutes subject as ontologically and irreversibly
injuredmaintains hierarchy
(Simon, WHAT IS DOLOROLOGY?, American Dolorologies pg 11-13, dml)
Apart from these historical frames, which will be investigated in the fol lowing chapters, my analysis of the discursive mobilization
of pain further implies a crucial epistemological consideration that speaks to contemporary theoretical and political constellations.
While American Dolorologies pri marily proposes a historicizing genealogy to presentday diagnoses such as wound culture or
trauma culture, the ambivalences of pains evocation also partakes in debates that surround late modern narratives of pain and
their political deployment. One crucial aspect concerns the ongoing identi fication of painful experience with the nondiscursive
what Elaine Scarry in her classic book The Body in Pain has called pains unspeakability (1985, 4).17 As pointed out in relation to
James Young Simpsons compassionate recognition of slave pain and female pain, sentimental discourse installs a fundamental
discontinuity between being in pain and speaking it: the sympathetic doctor articulates an experience, which those suffering can
only utter in shrieking. Pain, in other words, is
discursively mobilized on behalf of bodies that
are constructed as unable to speak their pain. Humanitarian discourse in other words
risks to affirm the speechlessness of those suffering under its exclusionary
mechanisms precisely through the discursive articula tion of unspeakable pain in
other bodies. The articulation and recogni tion of pain and suffering within the
intimate public sphere therefore is not tantamount to the oppressed subjects
emancipation from it, as Lauren Berlants polemic points out: [T]he recognition by the dominant
culture of certain sites of publicized subaltern suffering is frequently (mis)taken as a big
step toward the amelioration of that suffering. It is a baby step, if that (2000, 33).
Recognition, I propose, is rather a doubleedged process of promise and damage (Seitler 2003, 83)
within discourse itselfa rhetorical maneu ver that simultaneously constructs pain as
an exceptional and unspeak able phenomenon changing the rules of discourse
toward inclusion, and reinscribes the norms of recognition, experience, and the intelligibility of bodies and subjects. This
perspective takes up contemporary criticism of the problematic linkage of minority discourses with narratives of trauma and the
representational and political dilemmas arising from this connection. Feminist scholars18 have diagnosed and criticized this nexus
termed by some as the victimologytradition of feminism19and its function within late modern cultural economies. All detect a
fundamental ambivalence that emerges when identities and their claims to social
recognition are predomi nantly depending on a logics of pain (Bell 2000, 60). Especially
Wendy Browns influential States of Injury (1995) has explored the nexus of pain and subjectivity as the central problem of
contemporary identity politics. In her argument, minority
discourses and the hegemonic institutions
recognizing them increasingly pursue a moralizing politics that aims at
developing a righteous critique of power from the perspective of the injured [and
thus] delimits a specific site of blame for suffering by constituting sovereign
subjects and events as responsible for the injury of social subordination. It fixes the identities
of the injured and the injuring as social positions. (Brown 1995, 27)
Both marginalized and hegemonicW Idiscourses therefore rely on the politicization of
personal experiences of pain, a strategy that for Brown leads to a problematic

wounded attachment within identitarian discourse, an equation of identity and
trauma: Politicized identity . . . enunciates itself, makes claims for itself, only by entrenching,
restating, dramatizing, and inscribing pain in its politics. . . . a politics of recrimination that seeks
to avenge the hurt even while it reaffirms it, discursively codifies it (ibid., 74; my italics).
Claims to pain not only may intervene in hegemonic discourse (and thus empower the project of identity politics), but
also produce subjec tivities that are identified, normalized, and ultimately
marginalized through that pain.20 While this dialectic is crucial to the historical mobilizations of pain within
sentimental discourse,21 Browns observation on the discursive codification happening in testimonies of
hurt, pain, and suffering points to a mechanism intrinsic to the performative process of
articulating pain. As she argues on narratives of painful experience articulated within vari ous strands
of feminism, these always evoke a particular notion of the body that is nondiscursive: Within
the confessional frame, even when social construction is adopted as method . . . feelings and
experiences acquire a status that is politically if not ontologically essentialist
beyond hermeneu tics (ibid., 42). While the evocation of pain as something beyond discourse or hermeneutics poses an intricate
problematic to antiessentialist politics,22 the same mechanismthe
mobilization of pain as
nondiscursiveinterests my project as a crucial discursive maneuver within hegemonic
recognitions of pain in marginalized bodies.
photographic abolitionism
Tying the aff to the act of casting a ballot enables a form of

photographic abolitionismrequiring a system that theyve indicted
as built on slavery and fundamentally anti-black to validate the
intensity of their suffering is a palliative for the white guilt of the
forces of powerit locks blackness into an ontology defined by
victimization that serves as a stand-in for White America to reclaim
its legitimacy through a perceived alleviation of black suffering
[NOTE: This article is in the context of a case study of two 19th century pictures that depict two
former male slaves and the wounds they received from whippings. When the card speaks of
particular gender formations, its often speaking in the context of those pictures and less in
terms of generalized political statements.]
(Simon, PICTURING RACIAL PAIN, American Dolorologies pg 113-115, dml)
Abolitionisms compassionate maneuver of recognizing the black body as a human body

that has been in pain resonates with Judith But lers argument on the discursive prescription
implicit in recognition itself: [V]ulnerability is one precondition for humanization, [and] vulnerability is
fundamentally dependent on existing norms of recognition if it is to be attributed to any human subject (2004b, 43). The
rhetoric of humanization, which these pictures subscribe to, is complicit with a thoroughly
racialized logic of evidence, memory, and the body; the black body serves as evidence of an
injured humanity. Its constitutive vulnerability, however, is only rec ognized by the
white onlooking subject. The white photographer/viewer is both viscerally moved by
the pain of the other and remains fundamentally invisible and discreet within the
images setup. The black subject articulated in the image, on the other hand, is removed from
the experiences that con stitute vulnerability and thus humanity, relying on the
white photographer/ viewer to confirm, interpret and present29 the experience. The
embodied black subject is thus constituted as fundamentally split in two: it is caught
between a generalized (Typical Negro) and an allegorized (Scourged Back) corporeal
vulnerability. gordon and peter are produced as subjects that can neither fully attach themselves to that vulnerability nor
detach from its violation.
Furthermore, theblack subject is separated from itself temporally, as vulnerability

always resides in an eternally past corporeal memory (the scars), whereas black
political subjectivity is articulated as either caught up in a present loss of memory
(peter), or disappears in a national futurity that dresses the wound in uniform to
make it disappear (gordon). The decisively present moment of remembering slavery,
which allows the pain of black bodies to enter the political realm and to circulate as
evidence, is in this configuration reserved for the exclusively white and upperclass
audience of the photographs. Within the logic of evidence and memory, the privilege to in the present
moment perceive, verify, remember, interpret, act upon, and ultimately feel the pain of
slavery rests with white sensibility and its compassionate, yet disembodied gaze.
The black subject, on the other hand, is equated with a traumatic embodiment: the body
cannot forget what the subject cannot remember.30
Photographic abolitionism, in trying to denounce at once white vio lence against
bodies and (re)capture the black body as suffering,31 therefore substitutes the
systematized corporeal violence governing the racial institu tion of the plantation
for an epistemological violence. This violence locks liberated black
subjectivity in the paradox of an eternally hurt body con nected to the past and an
eternally displaced memory. The photography of abolitionism articulates a double
movement of inclusion and exclusion, or humanization and simultaneous
dehumanization, which Lauren Berlant has pointedly described: The humanization strategies of sentimentality always
traffic in clich, the reproduction of a person as a thing and thus indulge in the confirmation of the marginal subjects embodiment
of inhumanity (2008, 35; my italics). Abolitionist
photography, even as it tries forcefully to
articu late pain to argue the humanity of abjected black bodies, remains caught in a
racializing and racist logic. According to Laura Wexler, this logic is amplified by the silencing effects these shocking
images have both on the viewer and the portrayed/betrayed subject: [P]hotographic anekphrasis itself is an institutionalized form
of racism and sexism (1997, 163).32
gordons and peters paratexts articulate a temporality of events and movements that allow their stories to be told as before/after
scenarios, the photos having been taken after their escape from enslavement. At the same time, the images fundamentally
undermine this liberating and sentimental formula of transformation from thing to man: the photograph freezes the
body in a state of hurt, and forces a passive, nonrelational display of pain onto the
photographic subject. While the display of pain in black bod ies as trace of American trauma
thus may be aimed at producing African American citizens that have been healed by visual inclusion, it reduces their
bodies at the same time to mementos of that trauma, defined always and only through
the remembrance of failed democracy that their bod ies evidence to white
audiences. Black bodies simultaneously reference the failure and selfhealing of
white American democracy, without entitlement to heal themselves. The bodies
of gordon and peter become everyday signs of suffering (King 2008, 5) and work as memorial sites of an
always already lost black integrity and humanity. Looking at them means primari
ly to heal self and nation conceptualized as white: whiteness becomes the only
witness of slavery, while black experience and testimony is displaced by still
trauma. The scar, as these white looking relations (Gaines 1986) bring it into view, functions as an
ideological figuration that arrests black subjects in past pain and severs them from
political and visual autonomy. Moreover, the photographed scar as proof of slaverys injuries relies on a rhetoric
of the black body as evidence, which not only substitutes African American testimony with speechlessness, but further reiterates
conventions of objectivity and truth that racial science had earlier connected to the black body.
These two photographic evocations of racial pain bring into view a racializing dolorology
that empowers white subjects and pathologizes and objectifies black bodies. Pain
is enclosed in the mute, male, and black body, circumscribed as the object of the white
scientific/sentimental gaze. Utilizing the visual conventions of racial photography, the abolitionist images
produce a black body that (in its humanization) remains locked in a racialized notion of pain, manifested in the
visually fetishized scar. The photographs of gordon and peter may bring the injurious practices of slavery
to the intimate public sphere, but they do so by employing a dolorological discourse of
the other in which pain materializes the racial body not as (equally) human, but
rather as cut off from its own vulnerability and thus humanity. In this
dolorological logisticswhere pain distributes and materializes racial difference
white com passion and humanitarian politics are enacted in the process of visualizing and
viewing black pain, which is attached to a temporal pathology.
Looking at these pictures for white audiences instantiates heroic occa sions of
[simultaneous] recognition, rescue, and inclusion (Berlant 2008, 35). Visual authority, or the
politics of visualization, equate the white com passionate subject with a
fundamentally disembodied subjectivity that looks at hurt(ing) black bodies; a
subjectivity that at the same time Winvests I l E R E d o itself
p O S T M Owith
d E R N i total affective
sTS COM E F r O M ? 2 1(feel
5 with) and
universal political (deal with) power. The black subjectivity these white humanitarian
discourses produce figures as an included exclusion: while humanized by a
disembodied yet sympa thetic whiteness, the wounded black body is walled off . .
. to protect the national body from [pains] contamination (King 2008, 5). While enlisting male
black bodies in the registry of human suffering (and excluding black women), photographic abolitionism, in other
words, simultaneously produces subjectivities that are isolated within the
sentimental community, locked in a traumatically racialized body. Isabell Lorey calls this
strategy of inclusive exclusion the strategic immunization of hegemonic discourse (2008): an absorption of the other without
integration. The white gaze simultaneously incorporates black suffering in the national
public sphere, and seals off the pain of slavery within the black bodythus,
abolitionist discourse is able both to obscure the continuities of white supremacy
(i.e., the complicity or similarities of Northern and Southern racial regimes), and to regulate the possibility of
African American participation in national citizenship and emotional
universalism (Berlant 2008, 37) after slavery. This process of visual immunization is at
the same time orchestrated by a rearticulation of white male subjectivity and its
relation to pain, slavery, and the nation. The next reading will look at this comparative representation of
white pain, which regulates gordons and peters entry into a national dolorology, the discourse that distributes national meanings to
bodies in pain.
wendy brown/nietzsche

2nc brown alt
Dont call it an alternativewe think debate should be a site for
contingent struggles beyond the irrefutable Truth of identity
excessively local strategy hinders collectivist challenges
Brown 95prof at UC Berkeley (Wendy, States of Injury, 47-51)
The postmodern exposure of the imposed and created rather than discovered character of all knowledgesof the power-surtuscd,
struggle-48produced quality of all truths, including reigning political and scientific onessimultaneously exposes the
groundlessness of discovered norms or visions. It also reveals the exclusionary and regulatory function of these norms: white
women who cannot locate themselves in Nancy Hartsocks account of womens
experience or women s desires, African American women who do not identify with Patricia
Hill Collinss account of black womens ways of knowing, are once again excluded
from the Party of Humanismthis time in its feminist variant. Our alternative to
reliance upon such normative claims would seem to be engagement in political struggles in
which there are no trump cards such as morality or truth."Our alternative, in other
words, is to struggle within an amoral political habitat for temporally bound and fully
contestable visions of who we are and how we ought to live. Put still another way, postmodernity unnerves
feminist theory not merely because it deprives us of uncomplicated subject standing, as Christine Di Stefano suggests, or of settled
ground for knowledge and norms, as Nancy Hartsock argues, or of "centered selves and emancipatory knowledge," as Seyla
Bcnhabib avers. Postmodernity unsettles feminism because it erodes the moral ground that the subject, truth, and normativity
coproduce in modernity. When contemporary feminist political theorists or analysts complain about the antipolitical or unpolitical
nature of postmodern thoughtthought that apprehends and responds to this erosionthey arc protesting, inter' aha, a Nictzschcan
analysis of truth and morality as fully implicated in and by power, and thereby dplegiti- mated qua Truth and Morality Politics,
including politics with passionate purpose and vision, can thrive without a strong theory of the subject, without Truth, and without
scientifically derived normsone only need reread Machiavelli, Gramsci, or Emma Goldman to see such a politics flourish without
these things. The question is whether fnninist politics can prosper without a moral
apparatus, whether feminist theorists and activists will give up substituting Truth and Morality for
politics. Are we willing to engage in struggle rather than recrimination, to develop
our faculties rather than avenge our subordination with moral and
epistemological gestures, to fight for a world rather than conduct process on the
existing one? Nictzschc insisted that extraordinary strengths of character and mind would be necessary to operate in thce
domain of epistemological and religious nakedness he heralded. But in this heexcessively individualized a challenge that more
importantly requires the deliberate development of postmoral and antirelativist political
spaces, practices of deliberation, and modes of adjudication.49The only way through a crisis of
space is to invent a new space Fredric Jameson. Postmodernism"Precisely because of its incessant revelation of settled practices
and identities as contingent, its acceleration of the tendency to melt all that is solid into air. what
is called
postmodernity poses the opportunity to radically sever the problem of the good
from the problem of the true, to decide what we want rather than derive it from
assumptions or arguments about who we are. Our capacity to exploit this
opportunity positively will be hinged to our success in developing new modes and
criteria for political judgment. It will also depend upon our willingness to break certain modernist radical
attachments, particularly to Marxisms promise (however failed) of meticulously articulated connections betwreen a com-
prehensive critique of the present and norms for a transformed futurea science of revolution rather than a politics of
oneResistance, the practice most widely associated with postmodern political discourse, responds to without fully meeting the
normativity challenge of postmodernity. A vital tactic in much political work as wrcll as for mere survival, resistance by itself does
not contain a critique, a vision, or grounds for organized collective efforts to enact either. Contemporary affection for the politics of
resistance issues from postmodern criticisms perennial authority problem: our heightened consciousncss of the will to power in all
political positions and our wrariness about totalizing analyses and visions. Insofar
as it eschews rather than
revises these problematic practices, resistance-as-politics does not raise the
dilemmas of responsibility and justification entailed in affirming political
projects and norms. In this respect, like identity politics, and indeed sharing with identity politics an
excessively local viewpoint and tendency toward positioning without mapping, the
contemporary vogue of resistance is more a symptom of postmodernitys crisis of political
space than a coherent response toWit. I l E RResistance
E d o p O S T M O d Egoes nowhere
RNisTS C O M E F r O M in particular,
? 21 8 has
no inherent attachments, and hails no particular vision; as Foucault makes clear, resistance
is an effect of and reaction to power, not an arrogation of it.What postmodernity disperses
and postmodern feminist politics requires are cultivated political spaces for posing and
questioning feminist political norms, for discussing the nature of the good for women. Democratic political space
is quite undcrtheonzed in contemporary feminist thinking, as it is everywhere in latc-twentieth-ccntury political theory, primarily
bccausc it is so little in evidence. Dissipated by the increasing tcchnologizing of would-be political conversations and processes, by
the erosion of boundaries around specifically political domains50and activities, and by the decline of movement politics, political
spaces are scarcer and thinner today than even in most immediately prior epochs of Western history. In this regard, their condition
mirrors the splayed and centrifuged characteristics of postmodern political power. Yet precisely because of postmodernitys
disarming tendencies toward political disori- entation, fragmentation, and technologizing, the creation of spaces where political
analyses and norms can be proffered and contested is supremely important.Political space is an old theme in Western political
theory, incarnated by the polis practices of Socrates, harshly opposed by Plato in the Repub- lic, redeemed and elaborated as
metaphysics by Aristotle, resuscitated as salvation for modernity by Hannah Arendt. jnd given contemporary spin in Jurgen
Habermas's theories of ideal speech situations and communicative rationality. The project of developing feminist postmodern
political spaces, while enriched by pieces of this tradition, necessarily also departs from it. In contrast with Aristotles formulation,
feminist political spaces cannot define themselves against the private sphere, bodies, reproduction and production, mortality, and
all the populations and issues implicated in these categories. Unlike Arendts, these spaces cannot be pristine, ratified, and policed
at their boundaries but are necessarily cluttered, attuned to earthly concerns and visions, incessantly disrupted, invaded, and
reconfigured. Unlike Habermas, wc can harbor no dreams of nondistorted communication unsullied by power, or even of a com-
mon language,* but wc recognize as a permanent political condition par- tiality of understanding and expression, cultural chasms
whose nature may be vigilantly identified but rarely resolved, and the powers of words and images that evoke, suggest, and
connote rather than transmit meanings.42 Our spaces, while requiring some definition and
protection, cannot be clean, sharply bounded, disembodied, or permanent: to engage postmodern modes
of power and honor specifically feminist knowledges, they must be heterogenous, roving, relatively
noninstitutionalized, and democratic to the point of exhaustion.Such spaces are
crucial for developing the skills and practices of postmodern judgment, addressing the problem
of how to produce a discourse on justicc . . . when one no longer relies on ontology or epistemology.43 Postmodemitys
dismantling of metaphysical foundations for justice renders us quite vulnerable to
domination by technical reason 51unless we seize the opportunity this erosion
also creates to develop democratic processes for formulating postepistemelogical and
postontological judgments. Such judgements require learning how to have public
conversations with each other, arguing from a vision about the common (what I
want for us") rather than from identity (who I am), and from explicitly
postulated norms and potential common values rather than false essentialism or
unreconstructed private interest.44 Paradoxically, such public and comparatively
impersonal arguments carry potential for greater accountability than arguments
from identity or interest. While the former may be interrogated to the ground by
others, the latter are insulated from such inquiry with the mantle of truth worn by
identity-based speech. Moreover, post identity political positions and conversations potentially
replace a politics of difference with a politics of diversitydifferences grasped from
a perspective larger than simply one point in an ensemble. Postidentity public
positioning requires an outlook that discerns structures of dominance within
diffused and disorienting orders of power, thereby stretching toward a more politically potent
analysis than that which our individuated and fragmented existences can generate. In contrast to Di Stefano's claim that 'shared
identity may constitute a more psychologically and politically reliable basis for attachment and motivation on the part of potential
activists, I am suggesting that political
conversation oriented toward diversity and the common, toward
world rather than self, and involving a conversion of ones knowledge of the world
from a situated (subject) position into a public idiom, offers us the greatest
possibility of countering postmodern social fragmentations and political
disintegrations.Feminists have learned well to identify and articulate our "subject positions we have become
experts at politicizing the I that is produced through multiple sites ofpower and
subordination. But the very practice so crucial to making these elements of power
visible and subjectivity political may WIlER be o p O Sat
E dpartly T Modds
O d E R N iwith
s T S C Othe
M E F rrequisites
OM? 219 for
developing political conversation among a complex and diverse we. We may
need to learn public speaking and the pleasures of public argument not to
overcome our situatedness, but in order to assume responsibility for our
situations and to mobilize a collective discourse that will expand them. For the political
making of a feminist future that does not reproach the history on which it is borne, we may need to loosen our
attachments to subjectivity, identity, and morality and to redress our
underdeveloped taste for political argument.
altbhambra
Grounding politicizes identity in the original sin of past violence forecloses any
notion of community in favor of vengeful recrimination
Margree, 10 Victoria, school of humanities at the University of Brighton, and Gurminder K Bhambra, University of
Warwick (Identity Politics and the Need for a Tomorrow, Economic & Political Weekly, vol. xlv, no. 15, 4/10/10, online //Red)
2 The Reification of Identity
We wish to turn now to a related problem within identity politics that can be best described as the problem of the reification
of
politicised identities. Brown (1995) positions herself within the debate about identity politics by seeking to elaborate
on the wounded character of politicised identitys desire (ibid: 55); that is, the problem of
wounded attachments whereby a claim to identity becomes over-invested in its own
historical suffering and perpetuates its injury through its refusal to give up its
identity claim. Browns argument is that where politicised identity is founded upon an experience of
exclusion, for example, exclusion itself becomes perversely valorised in the continuance of
that identity. In such cases, group activity operates to maintain and reproduce the identity created
by injury (exclusion) rather than and indeed, often in opposition to resolving the
injurious social relations that generated claims around that identity in the first place. If things have to
have a history in order to have a future, then the problem becomes that of how history is constructed in order to make the future.
To the extent that, for Brown, identity is associated primarily with (historical) injury, the future for
that identity is then already determined by the injury as both bound to the history that produced
it and as a reproach to the present which embodies that history (ibid 1995: 73). Browns suggestion that as it
is not possible to undo the past, the focus backwards entraps the identity in reactionary practices, is, we believe, too stark and we will
pursue this later in the article.
Politicised identity, Brown maintains, emerges and obtains its unifying coherence through the politicisation of
exclusion from an ostensible universal, as a protest against exclusion (ibid: 65).
Its continuing existence requires both a belief in the legitimacy of the universal ideal (for example,
ideals of opportunity, and reward in proportion to effort) and enduring exclusion from those ideals. Brown draws
upon Nietzsche in arguing that such identities, produced in reaction to conditions of disempowerment and inequality, then
become invested in their own impotence through practices of, for example, reproach, complaint, and
revenge. These are reactions in the Nietzschean sense since they are substitutes for actions or can be seen as
negative forms of action. Rather than acting to remove the cause(s) of suffering, that suffering is instead
ameliorated (to some extent) through the establishment of suffering as the measure of social virtue
(ibid 1995: 70), and is compensated for by the vengeful pleasures of recrimination. Such
practices, she argues, stand in sharp distinction to in fact, provide obstacles to practices that would
seek to dispel the conditions of exclusion.
Brown casts the dilemma discussed above in terms of a choice between past and future, and adapting Nietzsche, exhorts the
adoption of a (collective) will that would become the redeemer of history (ibid: 72) through its
focus on the possibilities of creating different futures. As Brown reads Nietzsche, the one thing that
the will cannot exert its power over is the past, the it was. Confronted with its
impotence with respect to the events of the past, the will is threatened with becoming simply an
angry spectator mired in bitter recognition of its own helplessness. The one hope for the will is that it may,
instead, achieve a kind of mastery over that past such that, although what has happened
cannot be altered, the past can be denied the power of continuing to determine the
present and future. It is only this focus on the future, Brown continues, and the capacity to make a
future in the face of human frailties and injustices that spares us from a rancorous decline into
despair. Identity politics structured by ressentiment that is, by suffering caused by past events
can only break out of the cycle of slave morality by remaking the present against the terms of the past, a
remaking that requires a forgetting of that past. An act of liberation, of self-affirmation, this
forgetting of the past requires an overcoming of the past that offers identity in relationship to
suffering, in favour of a future in whichWidentityI l E R E d o is
p Oto
STMbe
O ddefined
E R N i s T S Cdifferently.
OME FrOM? 221
In arguing thus, Browns work becomes aligned with a position that sees the way forward for emancipatory politics as residing in a
movement away from a politics of memory (Kilby 2002: 203) that is committed to articulating past injustices and suffering. While
we agree that investment in identities premised upon suffering can function as an obstacle to alleviating the causes of that suffering,
we believe that Browns argument as outlined is problematic. First, following Kilby (2002), we share a concern about any turn to the
future that is figured as a complete abandonment of the past. This is because for those who have suffered oppression and exclusion,
the injunction to give up articulating a pain that is still felt may seem cruel and impossible to meet. We would argue instead that the
turn
to the future that theorists such as Brown and Grosz call for, to revitalise feminism and other emancipatory politics,
need not be conceived of as a brute rejection of the past. Indeed, Brown herself recognises
the problems involved here, stating that
[since] erased histories and historical invisibility are themselves such integral elements of the pain inscribed in most subjugated
identities [then] the counsel of forgetting, at least in its unreconstructed Nietzschean form, seems
inappropriate if not cruel (1995: 74).
She implies, in fact, that the demand exerted by those in pain may be no more than the
demand to exorcise that pain
through recognition: all that such pain may long for more than revenge is
the chance to be heard into a certain
release, recognised into self-overcoming, incited into possibilities for triumphing over, and
hence, losing itself (1995: 74-75). Brown wishes to establish the political importance of
remembering painful historical events but with a crucial caveat: that the purpose of
remembering pain is to enable its release. The challenge then, according to her, is to create a political
culture in which this project does not mutate into one of remembering pain for its own sake.
Indeed, if Brown feels that this may be a pass where we ought to part with Nietzsche (1995: 74), then Freud may be a more suitable
companion. Since his early work with Breuer, Freuds writings have suggested the (only apparent) paradox that remembering is
often a condition of forgetting. The hysterical patient, who is doomed to repeat in symptoms and compulsive actions a past she
cannot adequately recall, is helped to remember that traumatic past in order then to move beyond it: she must remember in order to
forget and to forget in order to be able to live in the present.7 This model seems to us to be particularly helpful for the dilemma
articulated by both Brown (1995) and Kilby (2002), insisting as it does that forgetting (at least, loosening the hold of the past, in
order to enable the future) cannot be achieved without first remembering the traumatic past. Indeed, this would seem to be similar
to the message of Beloved, whose central motif of haunting (is the adult woman, Beloved, Sethes murdered child returned in
spectral form?) dramatises the tendency of the unanalysed traumatic past to keep on returning, constraining, as it does so, the
present to be like the past, and thereby, disallowing the possibility of a future different from that past.
As Sarah Ahmed argues in her response to Brown, in

order to break the seal of the past, in order to
move away from attachments that are hurtful, we must first bring them into the
realm of political action (2004: 33). We would add that the task of analysing the traumatic past, and thus opening
up the possibility of political action, is unlikely to be achievable by individuals on their own, but
that this, instead, requires a community of participants dedicated to the serious epistemic work of remembering
and interpreting the objective social conditions that made up that past and continue in the present. The pain of historical injury is
not simply an individual psychological issue, but stems from objective social conditions which perpetuate, for the most part, forms of
injustice and inequality into the present.
Identity arguments are just implicit explanations of social power
relations. Identity is never formed by experience alone or some
metaphysical statusits produced and interpreted in concert with
others. Instead of privileging their singular experience, our alt uses
collective political commitment as the basis for negotiating
differences.
Bhambra 10U WarwickANDVictoria MargreeSchool of Humanities, U Brighton
(Identity Politics and the Need for a Tomorrow,
http://www.academia.edu/471824/Identity_Politics_and_the_Need_for_a_Tomorrow_)
We suggest that alternative models of identity and community are required from those put forward by essentialist theories, and that
these are offered by the work of two theorists, Satya Mohanty and Lynn Hankinson Nelson. Mohantys ([1993] 2000) post-positivist,
realist theorisation of identity suggests a way through the impasses of essentialism, while avoiding the excesses of the
postmodernism that Bramen, among others, derides as a proposed alternative to identity politics. For Mohanty ([1993] 2000),
identities must be understood as theoretical that enable subjects to read the world
in particular ways; as such, substantial claims about identity are, in fact, implicit
explanations of the social world and its constitutive relations of power. Experience
that from which identity is usually thought to derive is not something that simply occurs, or announces its
meaning and signicance in a self-evident fashion: rather, experience is always a work of interpretation that
is collectively produced (Scott 1991). Mohantys work resonates with that of Nelson (1993), who similarly insists upon
the communal nature of meaning of knowledge-making. Rejecting both foundationalist views of knowledge and the postmodern
alternative which announces the death of the subject and the impossibility of epistemology, Nelson argues instead that, it
is
not individuals who are the agents of epistemology, but communities. Since it is not
possible for an individual to know something that another individual could not also (possibly) know, it must be that the ability
to make sense of the world proceeds from shared conceptual frameworks and
practices. Thus, it is the community that is the generator and repository of knowledge. Bringing Mohantys work on identity as
theoretical construction together with Nelsons work on epistemological communities therefore suggests that, identity is one of the
knowledges that is produced and enabled for and by individuals in the context of the communities within which they exist. The post-
positivist reformulation of experience is necessary here as it privileges understandings that emerge through the processing of
experience in the context of negotiated premises about the world, over experience itself producing self-evident knowledge (self-
evident, however, only to the one who has had the experience). This
distinction is crucial for, if it is not the
experience of, for example, sexual discrimination that makes one a feminist, but rather,
the paradigm through which one attempts to understand acts of sexual
discrimination, then it is not necessary to have actually had the experience oneself
in order to make the identication feminist. If being a feminist is not a given fact of a particular social
(and/or biological) location that is, being designated female but is, in Mohantys terms, an achievement that is, something
worked towards through a process of analysis and interpretation then two implications follow. First, that not all women are
feminists. Second, that feminism is something that is achievable by men. 3 While it
is accepted that
experiences are not merely theoretical or conceptual constructs which can be transferred from
one person to another with transparency, we think that there is something politically self-
defeating about insisting that one can only understand an experience (or then
comment upon it) if one has actually had the experience oneself. As Rege (1998) argues, to
privilege knowledge claims on the basis of direct experience, or then on claims of
authenticity, can lead to a narrow identity politics that limits the emancipatory
potential of the movements or organisations making such claims. Further, if it is not possible to
understand an experience one has not had, then what point is there in listening to
each other? Following Said, such a view seems to authorise privileged groups to ignore
the discourses of disadvantaged ones, or, we would add, to place exclusive responsibility
for addressing injustice with the oppressed themselves. Indeed, as Rege suggests, reluctance to
speak about the experience of others has led to an assumption on the part of some white feminists that confronting racism is the
sole responsibility of black feminists, just as today issues of caste become the sole responsibility of the dalit womens
organisations (Rege 1998). Her argument for a dalit feminist standpoint, then, is not made in terms solely of the experiences of dalit
women, but rather a call for others to educate themselves about the histories, the preferred social relations and utopias and the
struggles of the marginalised (Rege 1998). This, she l E R E dallows
W Iargues, o p O S T M Otheir
d E R N i s T cause
S C O M E F rto
O M become
our
? 223
cause, not as a form of appropriation of their struggle, but through the transformation
of subjectivities that enables a recognition that their struggle is also our
struggle. Following Rege, we suggest that social processes can facilitate the understanding of experiences, thus making those
experiences the possible object of analysis and action for all, while recognising that they are not equally
available or powerful for all subjects. 4 Understandings of identity as given and essential,
then, we suggest, need to give way to understandings which accept them as socially
constructed and contingent on the work of particular, overlapping, epistemological
communities that agree that this or that is a viable and recognised identity. Such an understanding avoids
what Bramen identies as the postmodern excesses of post-racial theory, where in this world
without borders (racism is real, but race is not) one can be anything one wants to be: a
black kid in Harlem can be Croatian-American, if that is what he chooses, and a
white kid from Iowa can be Korean-American(2002: 6). Unconstrained choice is not possible to the
extent that, as Nelson (1993) argues, the concept of the epistemological community requires any individual knowledge claim to
sustain itself in relation to standards of evaluation that already exist and that are social. Any claim to identity, then, would have to be
recognised by particular communities as valid in order to be successful. This further shifts the discussion beyond the limitations of
essentialist accounts of identity by recognising that the communities
that confer identity are
constituted through their shared epistemological frameworks and not necessarily
by shared characteristics of their members conceived of as irreducible . 5 Hence, the
epistemological community that enables us to identify our-selves as feminists is one that is built up out of a broadly
agreed upon paradigm for interpreting the world and the relations between the sexes: it is not one that is premised upon possessing
the physical attribute of being a woman or upon sharing the same experiences. Since at least the 1970s, a key aspect of black and/or
postcolonial feminism has been to identify the problems associated with such assumptions (see, for discussion, Rege 1998, 2000).
We believe that it is the identication of injustice which calls forth action and thus allows for the construction of healthy solidarities.
6 While it is accepted that
there may be important differences between those who
recognise the injustice of disadvantage while being, in some respects, its beneciary (for
example, men, white people, brahmins), and those who recognise the injustice from the
position of being at its effect (women, ethnic minorities, dalits), we would privilege the
importance of a shared political commitment to equality as the basis for
negotiating such differences. Our argument here is that thinking through identity claims from the basis of
understanding them as epistemological communities militates against exclusionary politics (and its associated problems) since the
emphasis comes to be on participation in a shared epistemological and political project as opposed to notions of xed characteristics
the focus is on the activities individuals participate in rather than the
characteristics they are deemed to possess. Identity is thus dened further as a
function of activity located in particular social locations (understood as the complex of objective
forces that inuence the conditions in which one lives) rather than of nature or origin (Mohanty 1995:109-10). As
such, the communities that enable identity should not be conceived of as imagined since they are produced by very real actions,
practices and projects.
Independently turns casethey create attachment to categorical
oppressionfocus on exclusion from white liberal subjectivity
perversely recreates those ideals
Bhambra 10U WarwickANDVictoria W I l E R EMargreeSchool
d o p O S T M O d E R N i s T Sof
COHumanities,
M E F r O M ? 2 2 4 U Brighton
(Identity Politics and the Need for a Tomorrow,
http://www.academia.edu/471824/Identity_Politics_and_the_Need_for_a_Tomorrow_)
the reication of
2 The Reification of Identity We wish to turn now to a related problem within identity politicsthat can be best described as the problem of
politicised identities. Brown (1995) positions herself within thedebate about identity politics by seeking to elaborate on the
wounded character of politicised identitys desire (ibid: 55); that is, the problem of
wounded attachments whereby a claim to identity becomes over-invested in its
own historical suffering and perpetuates its injury through its refusal to give up its
identity claim. Browns argument is that where politicised identity is founded upon an experience of
exclusion, for example, exclusion itself becomes perversely valorised in the continuance of
that identity. In such cases, group activity operates to maintain and reproduce the identity created by
injury (exclusion) rather than and indeed, often in opposition to resolving the injurious social
relations that generated claims around that identity in the rst place. If things have to have a
history in order to have af uture, then the problem becomes that of how history is con-structed in order to make the future. To the extent that, for Brown,
identity is associated primarily with (historical) injury, the future for that identity is then
already determined by the injury as both bound to the history that produced it and as a reproach to the
present which embodies that history (ibid 1995: 73). Browns sug-gestion that as it is not possible to undo the past, the focus backwards entraps the identity in reactionary
Politicised identity, Brown maintains, emerges and obtains its

practices, is, we believe, too stark and we will pursue this later in the article.
unifying coherence through the politicisation of exclusion from an ostensible

universal, as a protest against exclusion (ibid: 65). Its continuing existence requires both a belief
in the legitimacy of the universal ideal (for example, ideals of opportunity, and reward in proportion to effort) and enduring
exclusion from those ideals. Brown draws upon Nietzsche in arguing that such identities, produced in reaction
to conditions of disempowerment andinequality, then become invested in their own
impotence through practices of, for example, reproach, complaint, and revenge. These are reactions in the
Nietzschean sense since they are substitutes for actions or can be seen as negative forms of action.
Rather than acting to remove the cause(s) of suffering, that suffering is instead
ameliorated (to some extent) through the estab-lishment of suffering as the measure of
social virtue (ibid 1995:70), and is compensated for by the vengeful pleasures of
recrimnation. Such practices, she argues, stand in sharp distinction to in fact, provide obstacles to
practices that would seek to dispel the conditions of exclusion. Brown casts the dilemma discussed above in
terms of a choicebetween past and future, and adapting Nietzsche, exhorts theadoption of a (collective) will that would become the redeemer of history (ibid: 72) through its
focus on the possibilities of creat-ing different futures. As Brown reads Nietzsche, the one thingthat the will cannot exert its power over is the past, the it was.Confronted with
its impotence with respect to the events of thepast, the will is threatened with becoming simply an angry spec-tator mired in bitter recognition of its own helplessness. The
onehope for the will is that it may, instead, achieve a kind of mastery over that past such that, although what has happened cannotbe altered, the past can be denied the power
of continuing to de-termine the present and future. It is only this focus on the future, Brown continues, and the capacity to make a future in the face of human frailties and
injustices that spares us from a rancorous decline into despair. Identity politics structured by ressentiment that is, by suffering caused by past events can only break outof
the cycle of slave morality by remaking the present againstthe terms of the past, a remaking that requires a forgetting of that past. An act of liberation, of self-afrmation, this
forgettingof the past requires an overcoming of the past that offers iden-tity in relationship to suffering, in favour of a future in whichidentity is to be dened differently. In
arguing thus, Browns work becomes aligned with a posi-tion that sees the way forward for emancipatory politics as re-siding in a movement away from a politics of memory
(Kilby 2002: 203) that is committed to articulating past injustices andsuffering. While we agree that investment in identities prem-ised upon suffering can function as an
we share a concern
obstacle to alleviating the causes of that suffering, we believe that Browns argument as outlined is problematic. First, following Kilby (2002),
about any turn to the future that is gured as a complete abandonment of the past. This is because for
those who have suffered oppression and exclusion, the injunction to give up articulating a pain that is
still felt may seem cruel and impossible to meet. We would argue instead that the turn to the future that theorists such as
Brown and Grosz callfor, to revitalise feminism and other emancipatory politics, need not be conceived of as a brute rejection
of the past. Indeed, Brown herself recognises the problems involved here, stating that [since] erased histories and historical invisibility are themselves suchintegral
elements of the pain inscribed in most subjugated identities[then] the counsel of forgetting, at least in its unreconstructedNietzschean form, seems inappropriate if not cruel
(1995: 74). She implies, in fact, that the demand exerted by those in painmay be no more than the demand to exorcise that pain throughrecognition: all that such pain may long
for more than revenge is the chance to be heard into a certain release, recognised intoself-overcoming, incited into possibilities for triumphing over, and hence, losing itself
(1995: 74-75). Brown wishes to establish the political importance of remembering painful historical events but with a crucial caveat: that the purpose of remembering pain is to
enable its release . The challenge then, according to her,is to create a political culture in which this project does not mutate into one of remembering pain for its own sake.
this may be a pass where we ought to part with Nietzsche (1995: 74), then Freud may be a more
Indeed, if Brown feels that
remember-ing is often a
suit-able companion. Since his early work with Breuer, Freuds writ-ings have suggested the (only apparent) paradox that
condition of forgetting. The hysterical patient, who is doomed to repeat in symptoms and
compulsive actions a past she cannot adequately recall, is helped to remember that trau-matic
past in order then to move beyond it: she must remember in order to forget and to forget in
order to be able to live in the present. 7 This model seems to us to be particularly helpful for thedilemma articulated by both Brown (1995) and
Kilby (2002),insisting as it does that forgetting (at least, loosening the holdof the past, in order to enable the future) cannot be achieved without rst remembering the
traumatic past. Indeed, this wouldseem to be similar to the message of Beloved , whose central motif of haunting (is the adult woman, Beloved, Sethes murderedchild returned
in spectral form?) dramatises the tendency of theunanalysed traumatic past to keep on returning, constraining, asit does so, the present to be like the past, and thereby, disallow-
in order to break the seal of the

ing the possibility of a future different from that past. As Sarah Ahmed argues in her response to Brown,
past, in order to move away from attach-ments that are hurtful, we must rst bring them into the realm of political
action (2004: 33). We would add that the task of analys-ing the traumatic past, and thus opening up the
possibility of political action, is unlikely to be achievable by individuals on their own, but that
this, instead, requires a community of participants dedicated to the serious epistemic work of rememberingand interpreting the
objective social conditions that made up thatpast and continue in the present. The pain of historical injury is not simply an
individual psychological issue, but stems from objective social conditions which
perpetuate, for the most part, forms of injustice and inequality into the present. In sum, Brown presents too
stark a choice between past andfuture. In the example of Beloved with which we began thisarticle, Paul Ds acceptance of Sethes experiences of slavery asdistinct from his own,
enable them both to arrive at new under-standings of their experience. Such understanding is a way of partially undoing the (effects of) the past and coming to terms with the
locatedness of ones being in the world (Mohanty 1995). As this example shows, opening up a future, and attending to theongoing effects of a traumatic past, are only incorrectly
under-stood as alternatives. A second set of problems with Browns critique of identity poli-tics emerge from what we regard as her tendency to individualise social problems as
the problems associated with identity

problems that are the possession and theresponsibility of the wounded group. Brown suggests that
politics can be overcome through a shift in the character of political expression and politi-cal claims common
to much politicised identity (1995: 75). She denes this shift as one in which identity would be expressed in terms of
desire rather than of ontology by supplanting the language of I am with the

language of I want this for us (1995:75). Such a reconguration, she argues, would create an opportu-nity to rehabilitate the memory of
desire within identicatory processesprior to [their] wounding (1995: 75). It would fur-ther refocus attention on the
future possibilities present in the identity as opposed to the identity being

foreclosed through its attention to past-based grievances.
altnietzschean forgetting
Embrace a politics of Nietzschean forgettingthis type of futurity
doesnt require ignoring or rejecting identity, but rather using debate
for agonistic engagementthat's key to avoid ressentiment and the
defensive closure of identity
Brown 93prof at UC Berkeley (Wendy, Wounded Attachments, Political Theory, Vol. 21, No.
3 (Aug., 1993), pp. 390-410)
What might be entailed in transforming these investments in an effort to fashion a

more radically democratic and emancipatory political culture? One avenue of exploration may
lie in Nietzsche's counsel on the virtues of "forgetting," for if identity structured in part by ressentiment
resubjugates itself through its investment in its own pain, through its refusal to
make itself in the present, memory is the house of this activity and this refusal. Yet
erased histories and historical invisibility are themselves such integral elements of
the pain inscribed in most subjugated identities that the counsel of forgetting, at
least in its unreconstructed Nietzschean form, seems inappropriate, if not cruel.33
Indeed, it is also possible that we have reached a pass where we ought to part with Nietzsche, whose skills as diagnostician usually
reach the limits of their political efficacy in his privileging of individual character and capacity over the transformative possibilities
of collective political invention, in his remove from the refigurative possibilities of political conversation or transformative cultural
practices. For if I am right about the problematic of pain installed at the heart of many contemporary contradictory demands for
political recognition, all that such pain may long for more than revenge is the chance to be heard into a certain reprieve, recognized
into self-overcoming, incited into possibilities for triumphing over, and hence losing, itself. Our
challenge, then,
would be to configure a radically democratic political culture that can sustain such
a project in its midst without being overtaken by it, a challenge that includes
guarding against abetting the steady slide of political into therapeutic discourse,
even as we acknowledge the elements of suffering and healing we might be
negotiating.
What if it were possible to incite a slight shift in the character of political expression and political claims common to much politicized
identity? What
if we sought to supplant the language of "I am"-with its defensive
closure on identity, its insistence on the fixity of position, and its equation of social
with moral positioning-with the language of reflexive "wanting"? What if it were possible to
rehabilitate the memory of desire within identificatory processes, the moment in desire-either "to have" or "to be"-prior to its
wounding and thus prior to the formation of identity at the site of the wound? What
if "wanting to be" or "wanting to
have" were taken up as modes of political speech that could destabilize the
formulation of identity as fixed position, as entrenchment by history, and as having
necessary moral entail- ments, even as they affirm "position" and "history" as that which
makes the speaking subject intelligible and locatable, as that which contributes to a hermeneutics for
adjudicating desires? If every "I am" is something of a resolution of desire into fixed and
sovereign identity, then this project might involve not only learning to speak but to
read "I am" this way, as in motion, as temporal, as not-I,as deconstructable according
to a genealogy of want rather than as fixed interests or experiences. The subject understood
as an effect of a (ongoing) genealogy of desire, including the social processes constitutive of, fulfilling, or frustrating desire, is in this
way revealed as neither sovereign nor conclusive even as it is affirmed as an "I." In short, this
partial dissolution of
sovereignty into desire could be that which reopens a desire for futurity where Nietzsche saw it
sealed shut by festering wounds expressed as rancor and ressentiment. 'This instinct for freedom pushed
back and repressed . . . incarcerated within."'
Such a slight shift in the character of the political discourse of identity eschews the kinds of ahistorical or
utopian turns against identity politics made by a nostalgic and broken humanist Left as
well as the reactionary and disingenuous assaults on politicized identity tendered by the Right.
Rather than opposing or seeking to transcend identity investments, the
replacement- even the complex admixture-of WIlERE do pOSTM the
OdER language
N i s T S C O M E of
F r O"being"
M? 227 with
"wanting" would seek to exploit politically a recovery of the more expansive
moments in the genealogy of identity formation. It would seek to reopen the moment prior to its own foreclosure against its
want, prior to the point at which its sovereign subjectivity is established through such foreclosure and through eternal repetition of
its pain. How
might democratic discourse itself be invigorated by such a shift from
ontological claims to these kinds of more expressly political ones, claims which,
rather than dispensing blame for an unlivable present, inhabited the necessarily
agonistic theater of discursively forging an alternative future.
linkconsciousness raising
Its equivocation to say gender/race norms are constructed AND
THEN claim consciousness raising gets at the truth of the hierarchy.
The 1ac only strengthened the disciplinary power to condition ones
status as oppressed
In fact, postmodern decentcring, disunifying, and denaturalizing of the subject is far more threatening to the status of feminism's well of truth than to
feminisms raison detre. While often cast as concern with retaining an object of political struggle, feminist attachment
to the
subject is more critically bound to retaining women's experiences, feelings, and voices
as sources and certifications of postfoundational political truth. When the notion of a
unified and coherent subject is abandoned, we not only cease to be able to speak, of woman
or of women in an unproblematic way, we forsake the willing, deliberate, and consenting "I" that liberalism's rational-
actor model of the human being proffers, and we surrender the autonomous, rights-bearing fictional unity that liberalism promises to secure. Yet each
of these terms and practiceswoman, willing, deliberate. consenting, an I," rational actors, autonomy, and rightshas been challenged by various
modernist feminisms as masculinist, racist, ethnocentric. heterosexist, culturally imperialist, or all of the above. More- over. dispensing with the
unified subject does not mean ceasing to be able to speak about our experiences as women, only that our words cannot be legitimately
deployed or construed as larger or longer than the moments of the lives they speak from; they cannot
be anointed as
41authentic or true" since the experience they announce is linguistically
contained, socially constructed, discursively mediated, and never just individually
had. But this is precisely the point at which many contemporary North Atlantic feminists
hesitate and equivocate: while insisting on the constructed character of gender,
most also seek to preserve some variant of consciousness-raising as a mode of
discerning and delivering the truth" about women. Consider Catharine MacKinnons insistence that
women are entirely the products of mens construction and her ontologicallv
contradictory project of developing a jurisprudence based on an account of the
world from womens point of view.-1 Consider the similar problematic in other theories
of the feminist standpoint. The sharp but frequently elided tensions between adhering
to social construction theory on one hand, and epistemologically privileging
womens accounts of social life on the other. The world from womens point of view and the feminist standpoint
attempt resolution of the postfoundational cpiste- mologv problem by deriving from within womens cxpcricncc the grounding for women's accounts.
But this
resolution requires suspending recognition that womens experience is
thoroughly constructed, historically and culturally varied, and interpreted without
end. Within feminist standpoint theory as well as much other modernist feminist theory. consciousness-
raising thus operates as feminisms epistemologically positivist moment. The
material excavated there, like the material uncov- ered in psychoanalysis or delivered in confession, is valued as the
hidden truth of womens existencetrue because it is hidden, and hidden because
women's subordination functions in part through silencing, marginalization, and
privatization. Indeed, those familiar with Foucaults genealogy of confession will have discerned in this argument an implied homology between the
cpistcmological-political operations of consciousness-raising and those he assigns to confcssional discourse. In his account of modem sexuality as
structured by such discourse.Foucault argues that confession inaugurated by the Catholic Church
as a technique of power that works42 by exposure and individuationproduces
"truth" as a secret contained within.23 Confessional revelations are thus construed as
liberation from repression or secrecy, and truth-telling about our desires or experiences is
construed as deliverance from the power that silences and represses them (rather than as itself a site and
effect of regulatory power). What Foucault terms the "internal ruse of confession" is reducible to this reversal of power and
freedom: "Confession frees, but power reduces one to silence; truth does not belong to the order of power, but shares an original affinity with
freedom."24 In believing truth-telling about our experiences to be our liberation. Foucault suggests, we
forget that this truth has
been established as the secret to our souls not by us but by those who would
discipline us through that truth. Since women's subordination is partly achieved through the construction and positioning
of us as privatesexual, familial, emotionaland is produced and inscribed in the domain of both domestic and psychic inte- riors, then within
modernity the voicing of women's experience acquires an inherently confessional cast. Indeed, breaking silence" is a standard feminist metaphor for
what occurs in consciousness-raising sessions, speak-outs against
W I l Esexual
R E d violence,
o p O S T and
M O dother
E R Nforums
i s T S Cfor
OM feminist
E F r O truth
M ? 2telling.
29 Consciousness-raising,
as/like confession, delivers the "hidden truth" of women and womens experience, which accounts for those symptomatically modernist paradoxes
represented in Catharine MacKin- non's work: while women are socially constructed to the core, women's words about their experience, because they
issue from an interior spacc and against an injunction to silence, are anointed as 1 ruth, and constitute the foundations of feminist knowledge.
Within the confessional frame, even when social construction is adopted as
method for explaining the making of gender, "feelings" and "experiences" acquire a status
that is politically if not ontologically essentialistbeyond hermeneutics. This strand
of feminist foundationalism transports the domain of Truth from reason to
subjectivity, from Geist to inner voice, even while femininity itself is submitted to a
methodology elaborating its fully fabricated nature.
linkembodiment
Corporeal politics are coopted by the dominant orderstarting
politics with the markers of the 1ac can never achieve emancipation
Terry Eagelton 90, Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University,

The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Pages 27-8
The aesthetic, then, is from the beginning a contradictory, double-edged concept, On the one
hand, it figures as a genuinely emancipatory force as a community of subjects
now finked by sensuous impulse and fellow-feeling rather than by heteronomous law, each
safeguarded in its unique particularity while bound at the same time into social
harmony. The aesthetic offers the middle class a superbly versatile model of their political
aspirations, exemplifying new forms of autonomy and self-determination, transforming the relations between
law and desire, morality and knowledge, recasting the links between individual and totality, and revising social relations on the basis of custom,
affection and sympathy. On
the other hand, the aesthetic signifies what Max Horkheimer has called a kind of
`internalised repression', inserting social power more deeply into the very bodies
of those it subjugates, and so operating as a supremely effective mode of political
hegemony. To lend fresh significance to bodily pleasures and drives, however, if only for the purpose
of colonizing them more efficiently, is always to risk foregrounding and
intensifying them beyond one's control. The aesthetic as custom, sentiment, spontaneous impulse may consort well
enough with political domination; but these phenomena border embarrassingly on passion, imagination, sensuality, which are not always so easily
incorporable. As Burke put it in his Appeal from the NM to the Old Wags: 'There is a boundary to men's passions when they act from feeling; none
when they are under the influence of imagination.'" `Deep'
subjectivity is just what the ruling social order
desires, and exactly what it has most cause to fear. If the aesthetic is a dangerous,
ambiguous affair, it is because, as we shall see in this study, there is something in the body which can
revolt against the power which inscribes it; and that impulse could only be
eradicated by extirpating along with it the capacity to authenticate power itself.
linknarrative
Exchanging personal narrative for the ballot commodifies identity
and fails to impact culturewhen that narrative wins, it subverts its
radical intentions by becoming an exemplar of the culture under
indictment
Coughlin 95associate Professor of Law, Vanderbilt Law School. (Anne, REGULATING THE
SELF: AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PERFORMANCES IN OUTSIDER SCHOLARSHIP, 81 Va. L. Rev.
1229)
Although Williams is quick to detect insensitivity and bigotry in remarks made by

strangers, colleagues, and friends, her taste for irony fails her when it comes to reflection
on her relationship with her readers and the material benefits that her
autobiographical performances have earned for her. n196 Perhaps Williams should be more inclined
to thank, rather than reprimand, her editors for behaving as readers of autobiography invariably do. When we examine this literary
faux pas - the incongruity between Williams's condemnation of her editors and the professional benefits their publication secured
her - we detect yet another contradiction between the outsiders' use of autobiography and their desire to transform culture radically.
Lejeune's characterization of autobiography as a "contract" reminds us that autobiography is a lucrative
commodity. In our culture, members of the reading public avidly consume personal stories, n197
which surely explains why first-rate law journals and academic presses have been eager to market outsider narratives. No
matter how unruly the self that it records, an autobiographical performance
transforms that self into a form of "property in a moneyed economy" n198 and into a
valuable intellectual [*1283] asset in an academy that requires its members to publish. n199 Accordingly, we
must be skeptical of the assertion that the outsiders' splendid publication record is itself
sufficient evidence of the success of their endeavor. n200
Certainly, publication of a best seller may transform its author's life, with the resulting commercial success and academic renown.
n201 As one critic of autobiography puts it, "failures do not get published." n202 While
writing a successful
autobiography may be momentous for the individual author, this success has a
limited impact on culture. Indeed, the transformation of outsider authors into "success
stories" subverts outsiders' radical intentions by constituting them as exemplary
participants within contemporary culture, willing to market even themselves to literary and academic consumers. n203
What good does this transformation do for outsiders who are less fortunate and
less articulate than middle-class law professors? n204 Although they style themselves cultural critics, the [*1284]
storytellers generally do not reflect on the meaning of their own commercial success, nor
ponder its entanglement with the cultural values they claim to resist. Rather, for the most part,
they seem content simply to take advantage of the peculiarly American license, identified by Professor Sacvan
Bercovitch, "to have your dissent and make it too." n205
Even if their aff is distinct from the performances we criticize, that's

just a re-assertion of individualism to be understood by a consuming
audience in the intelligible terms of liberalism. This recreates the
violence at the root of Western conquest
Coughlin 95associate Professor of Law, Vanderbilt Law School. (Anne, REGULATING THE
SELF: AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PERFORMANCES IN OUTSIDER SCHOLARSHIP, 81 Va. L. Rev.
1229)
The outsider narratives do not reflect on another feature of autobiographical discourse that is perhaps the most significant obstacle to their goal to
bring to law an understanding of the human self that will supersede the liberal individual. Contrary to the outsiders' claim that their personalized
discourse infuses law with their distinctive experiences and political perspectives, numerous historians and critics of autobiography have insisted that
those who participate in autobiographical discourse speak not in a different voice,
but in a common voice that reflects W I ltheir
E R E d o membership
p O S T M O d E R N i s T S in aE culture
COM F r O M ? 2 3 2devoted to
liberal values. n206 As Sacvan Bercovitch puts it, American cultural ideals, including specifically the mythic connection between the "heroic
individual ... [and] the values of free enterprise," are "epitomized in autobiography." n207 In his seminal essay on the subject, Professor Georges
Gusdorf makes an observation that seems like a prescient warning to outsiders who would appropriate autobiography as their voice. He remarks that
the practice of writing about one's own self reflects a belief in the autonomous individual,
which is "peculiar to Western man, a concern that has been of good use in his systematic conquest
of the [*1285] universe and that he has communicated to men of other cultures; but those men will thereby have been annexed by a sort of
intellectual colonizing to a mentality that was not their own." n208 Similarly, Albert Stone, a critic of American autobiography, argues that
autobiographical performances celebrate the Western ideal of individualism,
"which places the self at the center of its world." n209 Stone begins to elucidate the prescriptive character of
autobiographical discourse as he notes with wonder "the tenacious social ideal whose persistence is all the more significant when found repeated in
personal histories of Afro-Americans, immigrants, penitentiary prisoners, and others whose claims to full individuality have often been denied by our
society." n210 Precisely because it appeals to readers' fascination with the self-sufficiency, resiliency
and uniqueness of the totemic individual privileged by liberal political theory, there is a risk
that autobiographical discourse is a fallible, even co-opted, instrument for the social
reforms envisioned by the outsiders. By affirming the myths of individual success in our culture, autobiography
reproduces the [*1286] political, economic, social and psychological structures that attend such success. n211 In this light, the outsider
autobiographies unwittingly deflect attention from collective social responsibility
and thwart the development of collective solutions for the eradication of racist and
sexist harms. Although we may suspect in some cases that the author's own sense of self was shaped
by a community whose values oppose those of liberal individualism, her decision to
register her experience in autobiographical discourse will have a significant effect
on the self she reproduces. n212 Her story will solicit the public's attention to the life of one individual, and it will privilege her
individual desires and rights above the needs and obligations of a collectivity. Moreover, literary theorists have remarked the tendency of
autobiographical discourse to override radical authorial intention. Even
where the autobiographer self-
consciously determines to resist liberal ideology and represents her life story as the occasion to announce an
alternative political theory, "the relentless individualism of the genre subordinates" her political
critique. n213 Inevitably, at least within American culture, the personal narrative engrosses the readers' imagination. Fascinated by the travails
and triumphs of the developing autobiographical self, readers tend to construe the text's political and social
observations only as another aspect of the author's personality. Paradoxically, although
autobiography is the product of a culture that cultivates human individuality, the genre seems to make available only a limited number of
autobiographical protagonists. n214 Many theorists have noticed that when an author assumes the task of defining her own, unique subjectivity, she
invariably reproduces herself as a character with whom culture already is well-acquainted. n215 While a variety of forces coerce the autobiographer
[*1287] to conform to culturally sanctioned human models, n216 the pressures exerted by the literary market surely play a significant role. The
autobiographer who desires a material benefit from her performance must adopt a
persona that is intelligible, if not enticing, to her audience. n217 As I will illustrate in the sections that follow, the
outsider narratives capitalize on, rather than subvert, autobiographical protagonists that serve the values of
liberalism.
linkperformance
Performance fails when it gives power to the audience, because the
performer lacks control of the (re)presentation of their
representations. Even if the 1ac has value, appealing to the ballot
relinquishes that value to the reproductive economy that underwrites
liberalism
Phelan 96chair of New York University's Department of Performance Studies (Peggy,
Unmarked: the politics of performance, ed published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005,
146-9)
146
Performances only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded,
documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of
representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance.
To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it
betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology. Performances being, like the ontology of
subjectivityproposed here, becomes itself through disappearance.
The pressures brought to bear on performance to succumb to thelaws of the reproductive

economy are enormous. For only rarely in this culture is the now to which
performance addresses its deepest questions valued. (This is why the now is
supplemented and buttressed by the documenting camera, the video archive.) Performance
occursover a time which will not be repeated. It can be performed again, butthis repetition itself marks it as different. The
document of a performance then is only a spur to memory, an encouragement of
memory to become present.
The other arts, especially painting and photography, are drawnincreasingly toward performance. The French-born artist Sophie Calle,for example, has
photographed the galleries of the Isabella StewartGardner Museum in Boston. Several valuable paintings were stolen fromthe museum in 1990. Calle
interviewed various visitors and membersof the muse um staff, asking them to describe the stolen paintings. She then transcribed these texts and
placed them next to the photographs of the galleries. Her work suggests that the descriptions and memories of the paintings constitute their continuing
presence, despite the absence of the paintings themselves. Calle
gestures toward a notion of the interactive
exchange between the art object and the viewer. While such exchanges are often recorded as the
stated goals of museums and galleries, the institutional effect of the gallery often seems to put the
masterpiece under house arrest, controlling all conflicting and unprofessional
commentary about it. The speech act of memory and description (Austins constative utterance) becomes a performative expression
when Calle places these commentaries within the
147
representation of the museum. The descriptions fill in, and thus supplement (add to, defer, and displace) the stolen paintings. The factthat these
descriptions vary considerablyeven at times wildlyonlylends credence to the fact that the interaction between the art objectand the spectator is,
essentially, performativeand therefore resistantto the claims of validity and accuracy endemic to the discourse of reproduction. While the art
historian of painting must ask if thereproduction is accurate and clear, Calle asks where seeing and memoryforget the object itself and enter the
subjects own set of personalmeanings and associations. Further her work suggests that the forgetting(or stealing) of the object is a fundamental energy
of its descriptiverecovering. The description itself does not reproduce the object, it ratherhelps us to restage and restate the effort to remember what is
lost. Thedescriptions remind us how loss acquires meaning and generatesrecoverynot only of and for the object, but for the one who remembers.The
disappearance of the object is fundamental to performance; itrehearses and repeats the disappearance of the subject who longs alwaysto be
remembered.
For her contribution to the Dislocations show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1991, Calle used the same idea but this time she asked
curators, guards, and restorers to describe paintings that were on loan from the permanent collection. She also asked them to draw small pictures of
their memories of the paintings. She then arranged the texts and pictures according to the exact dimensions of the circulating paintings and placed
them on the wall where the actual paintings usually hang. Calle calls her piece Ghosts, and as the visitor discovers Calles work spread throughout the
museum, it is as if Calles own eye is following and tracking the viewer as she makes her way through the museum.1 Moreover, Calles work seems to
disappear because it is dispersed throughout the permanent collectiona collection which circulates despite its permanence. Calles artistic
contribution is a kind of self-concealment in which she offers the words of others about other works of art under her own artistic signature. By making
visible her attempt to offer what she does not have, what cannot be seen, Calle subverts the goal of museum display. She exposes what the museum does
not have and cannot offer and uses that absence to generate her own work. By placing memories in the place of paintings, Calle asks that the ghosts of
memory be seen as equivalent to the permanent collection of great works. One senses that if she asked the same people over and over about the
same paintings, each time they would describe a slightly different painting. In this sense, Calle demonstrates the performative quality of all seeing.
148 WIlERE do pOSTMOdERNisTS COME FrOM? 234
I Performance in a strict ontological sense is nonreproductive. It is this quality which makes

performance the runt of the litter of contemporary art. Performance
clogs the smooth machinery of
reproductive representation necessary to the circulation of capital. Perhaps nowhere was the
affinity between the ideology of capitalism and art made more manifest than in the debates about the funding policies for the National Endowment for
the Arts (NEA).2 Targeting both photography and performance art, conservative politicians sought to prevent endorsing the real bodies implicated
and made visible by these art forms. Performance implicates the real through the presence of living bodies. In performance art spectatorship there is an
element of consumption: there are no left-overs, the gazing spectator must try to take everything in. Without a copy, live performance plunges into
visibilityin a maniacally charged presentand disappears into memory, into the realm of invisibility and the unconscious where it eludes regulation
and control. Performance resists the balanced circulations of finance. It saves nothing; it only spends. While photography is vulnerable to charges of
counterfeiting and copying, performance art is vulnerable to charges of valuelessness and emptiness. Performance indicates the possibility of revaluing
that emptiness; this potential revaluation gives performance art its distinctive oppositional edge.3 To attempt to write about the undocumentable event
of performance is to invoke the rules of the written document and thereby alter the event itself. Just as quantum physics discovered that macro-
instruments cannot measure microscopic particles without transforming those particles, so too must performance critics realize that the labor to write
about performance (and thus to preserve it) is also a labor that fundamentally alters the event. It does no good, however, to simply refuse to write
about performance because of this inescapable transformation. The challenge raised by the ontological claims of performance for writing is to re-mark
again the performative possibilities of writing itself. The act of writing toward disappearance, rather than the act of writing toward preservation, must
remember that the after-effect of disappearance is the experience of subjectivity itself. This is the project of Roland Barthes in both Camera Lucida and
Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. It is also his project in Empire of Signs, but in this book he takes the memory of a city in which he no longer is, a city
from which he disappears, as the motivation for the search for a disappearing performative writing. The trace left by that script is the meeting-point of a
mutual disappearance; shared subjectivity is possible for Barthes because two people can recognize the same Impossible. To live for a love whose goal is
to share the Impossible is both a humbling project and an exceedingly ambitious one, for it seeks to find connection only in that which is no longer
there. Memory. Sight. Love. It must involve a full seeing of the Others absence (the ambitious part), a seeing which also entails the acknowledgment of
the Others presence (the humbling part). For to acknowledge the Others (always partial) presence is to acknowledge ones own (always partial)
absence. In the field of linguistics, the performative speech act shares with the ontology of performance the inability to be reproduced or repeated.
Being an individual and historical act, a performative utterance cannot be repeated. Each reproduction is a new act performed by someone who is
qualified. Otherwise, the reproduction of the performative utterance by someone else necessarily transforms it into a constative utterance.4
149
Writing, an activity which relies on the reproduction of the Same(the three letters cat will repeatedly signify the four-legged furry animalwith whiskers)
for the production of meaning, can broach the frame of performance but cannot mimic an art that is nonreproductive. Themimicry of speech and
writing, the
strange process by which we put words in each others mouths and others
words in our own, relies on a substitutional economy in which equivalencies are
assumed and re-established. Performance refuses this system of exchange and
resists the circulatory economy fundamental to it. Performance honors the idea
that a limited number of people in a specific time/space frame can have an
experience of value which leaves no visible trace afterward. Writing about it necessarily
cancels the tracelessness inaugurated within this performative promise.
Performances independence from mass reproduction, technologically, economically, and
linguistically, is its greatest strength. But buffeted by the encroaching ideologies of capitaland reproduction, it frequently
devalues this strength. Writing aboutperformance often, unwittingly, encourages this weakness and falls inbehind the drive of the document/ary.
Performances challenge to writingis to discover a way for repeated words to become
performative utterances, rather than, as Benveniste warned, constative utterances.
linkresistance
Affirming politics of resistance via the ballot instills a harmonious
relationship with dominationvoting aff effaces the power to shape
the terms of social life/death, which reproduces structural violence
For some, fueled by opprobrium toward regulatory norms or other mo- dalities of domination, the language of
"resistance" has taken up the ground vacated by a more expansive practice of freedom. For others, it is
the discourse of empowerment that carries the ghost of freedom's valence 22. Yet as many have noted,
insofar as resistance is an effect of the regime it opposes on the one hand, and insofar as
its practitioners often seek to void it of normativity to differentiate it from the
(regulatory) nature of what it opposes on the other, it is at best politically rebellious; at
worst, politically amorphous. Resistance stands against, not for; it is re-action to
domination, rarely willing to admit to a desire for it, and it is neutral with regard to possible political
direction. Resistance is in no way constrained to a radical or emancipatory aim. a fact that emerges clearly as soon as one
analogizes Foucault's notion of resistance to its companion terms in Freud or Nietzsche. Yet in some ways this point is less a critique
of Foucault, who especially in his later years made clear that his political commitments were not identical with his theoretical ones
(and unapologetically revised the latter), than a sign of his misappropriation. For Foucault, resistance marks the presence of power
and expands our understanding of its mechanics, but it is in this regard an analytical strategy rather than an expressly political one.
"Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance
is never in a position
of exteriority to power. . . . (T]he strictly relational character of power relationships .
. . depends upon a multiplicity of points of resistance: these play the role of
adversary, target, support, or handle in power relations.*39 This appreciation of the
extent to which resistance is by no means inherently subversive of power also
reminds us that it is only by recourse to a very non-Foucaultian moral evaluation of power as
bad or that which is to be overcome that it is possible to equate resistance with that
which is good, progressive, or seeking an end to domination. If popular and academic notions of
resistance attach, however weakly at times, to a tradition of protest, the other contemporary substitute for a discourse of freedom
empowermentwould seem to correspond more closely to a tradition of idealist reconciliation. The
language of
resistance implicitly acknowledges the extent to which protest always transpires
inside the regime; empowerment, in contrast, registers the possibility of
generating ones capacities, ones self-esteem, ones life course, without capitulating to constraints by particular
regimes of power. But in so doing, contemporary discourses of empowerment too often signal
an oddly adaptive and harmonious relationship with domination insofar as they
locate an individuals sense of worth and capacity in the register of individual feelings, a
register implicitly located on something of an other worldly plane vis-a-vis social and
political power. In this regard, despite its apparent locution of resistance to subjection,
contemporary discourses of empowerment partake strongly of liberal solipsismthe radical
decontextualization of the subject characteristic of 23 liberal discourse that is key to the fictional sovereign individualism of
liberalism. Moreover, in
its almost exclusive focus on subjects emotional bearing and self-
regard, empowerment is a formulation that converges with a regimes own legitimacy
needs in masking the power of the regime. This is not to suggest that talk of empowerment is always only
illusion or delusion. It is to argue, rather, that while the notion of empowerment articulates that feature of freedom concerned with
action, with being more than the consumer subject figured in discourses of rights and economic democracy, contemporary
deployments of that notion also draw so heavily on an undeconstructed subjectivity that
they risk establishing a wide chasm between the (experience of) empowerment
and an actual capacity to shape the terms of political, social, or economic life.
Indeed, the possibility that one can feel empowered without being so forms an
important element of legitimacy for the antidemocratic dimensions of liberalism.

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Capitalism K GSU 2014

WIlERE do pOSTMOdERNisTS COME FrOM? 1

WIlERE do pOSTMOdERNisTS COME FrOM? 2

particularly so politically. If the more abstract questions of state, mode of

Reed 2013 professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in

This formulation applies equally to populations stigmatized as feebleminded,

Refuse their ethical criteriait insulates protest from accountability

With respect to the nexus of race and inequality, this

The ballot is a choice between unrelenting critique of capitalist

critique of capitalism and an oppositional politics capable of confronting capitalist

from those perspectives you can have a society thats

political strategies and

understandings that have constituted the Left have come increasingly to

I dont get the difference

Then its OK?

Yeah, you hear that all the time.

Right, and my argument is: well, lets back up.

if youre concerned with the conditions of black Americans,

I was thinking of Sheryl

Right. She is the Alexandra Kollontai of our moment.

Wow. That is a tough metaphor.

it just seemed somewhere in the mid-

What other kinds of politics is there than voting? Theres

Ultimately, mass mobilization around

Sixty-eight percent. Thats a month before the 1944 presidential election.

What ever happened to that view?

I wonder if you did a poll today what would happen?

Youre not talking about HumphreyHawkins are you?

By that metric were almost there!

it communicated that the Democrats felt entitled

So theres nothing to do at election time except vote

So now theres talk about an Elizabeth Warren of the

Yeah. It comes back to movements all the time really.

And they want the presidency. Theyre not fooling around.

They dont have the street gangs.

Theyll get you with their golf carts.

Ive written about that at great length.

Right. Thats exactly right. Thats exactly right. Yeah.

The symbolism is quite persuasive to some people.

The Democrats dont have an alternative to offer. Right? I

Now the shoes on the other foot.

Youve got to explain that a little more.

Obamas a highly intelligent man. Youve met him.

I dont know. Look, Ive taught a bunch of versions of him.

You mean youve had people like him as students?

Yeah, hes like a blank slate.

any public figure, especially a politician or a

figure in a movement, is going to be like a hologram thats created by the array of

Not that he liked us any more, to put it bluntly.

Making it clear to the left that they were of no importance or significance?

Yeah. Theres a long list: deregulated the airwaves, deregulated banking

Ive got the photo of him signing the repeal of Glass-Steagall.

With Larry Summers at his elbow I believe.

Sure. The new Democratsthe Democratic Leadership Council.

Yeah, but success by a really shallow standard. Just that he won.

I believe Ive got a copy of that around here somewhere.

Yes. When was that? What year was that?

Thats right. In fact, you dont want them.

Well they would only complicate things.

You started talking about the left itself,

I probably get 10 solicitations a day.

Why do we put our hopes in these magical constituencies?

stand publicly against injustice.