Capitalism k Index (1)

Capitalism K-Reagan Camp1

***CAPITALISM K INDEX***

***CAPITALISM K INDEX*** .................................................................................................. 1

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***LINKS*** ................................................................................................................................. 8

Link: ID PTX..............................................................................................................................................................9Link: ID PTX............................................................................................................................................................10Link: ID PTX............................................................................................................................................................11Link: Multiculturalism..............................................................................................................................................122NC Multiculturalism Link.......................................................................................................................................13Link: Standpoint Ptx.................................................................................................................................................14Link: Feminism.........................................................................................................................................................15A2: Patriarchy=Root of Cap.....................................................................................................................................16Link: Discourse First.................................................................................................................................................17Link: Discourse First.................................................................................................................................................18A2: Gibson Graham..................................................................................................................................................19A2: Turn-Include Excluded Voice............................................................................................................................20Link: Ethic to the Other............................................................................................................................................21Link: Ethic to the Other............................................................................................................................................22A2: Aff=Ethical Relationship...................................................................................................................................23Link: Postmodern K of Militarism............................................................................................................................24A2: Modernity=Root Cause of Violence..................................................................................................................25

***MPX*** .................................................................................................................................. 26

Cap=War...................................................................................................................................................................27Resist Cap=Key to Ethics.........................................................................................................................................28Cap=Bad for Enviro..................................................................................................................................................29Cap=NV2L................................................................................................................................................................30

***ALT*** ................................................................................................................................... 31

Alt Solves Cap..........................................................................................................................................................32Alt Prereq to Solve Case...........................................................................................................................................33Alt Prereq to Class Conc (A2: Perm Solves Cap).....................................................................................................34Case: Identity Ptx No Solve......................................................................................................................................36

***PERM*** ................................................................................................................................ 37

A2: Perm...................................................................................................................................................................38


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The affirmative’s rejection of truth claims about the material role of actors and structures in history conflates all knowledge with Enlightenment rationality-this ahistorical viewpoint precludes the most relevant and politicizing modes of analysis

Palmer, Canada Research Chair in Canadian Labour History and Canadian Studies @ Trent University, 1996(Bryan D., "Old Positions/New Necessities: History, Class, and Marxist Metanarrative," in "In Defense of History," Ed. by E. Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.65-72)On one level this is not particularly new. But postmodernists/poststruc-turalists have wrapped their antagonism to history in a series of intellectu ally seductive tautologies which beg the fundamental questions of the historical process. Central to this outlook is a refusal of post-Enlightenment systems of rational thought, which are reduced to a form—narration—and a substance—accommodation of bourgeois rule—that relegates such "knowledge" to complicity with various oppressions.2 It is as though poststructuralism, in an immense social reconstruction of the deep historical past, would like to see the entire eighteenth-century Age of Revolution, which was, to be sure, a bourgeois project, jettisoned. In some staggering leap of idealism, it seeks to pole-vault over the class contents and transformations of thought associated with 1776,1789,1792, and the Industrial Revolution,

leapfrogging the nineteenth century, the experience of colonial revolt, and the first workers' state (1917). Yet

all of these occurred as historical process and have rich narrative structures of meaning in the politics and culture of modern times, from Blake and Beethoven to Marx and Munch to Veblen and Van Gogh. However incomplete the Enlightenment project, compromised as it was in its origins in the bourgeois proclamation of egalitarianism as a property-based legal right rather than a

social condition of fulfillment, it was a revolutionary transcen dence of the feudal order, which had been confined for centuries in

castelike conceptions of social station and the incarcerating thought of superstition, divinity, and absolutism. It was the purpose of Marxism, as the maturing worldview of the emerging proletariat, to materialize and radicalize Enlightenment rationality, extending its potential not just to this or that privileged sector of society, but to all of humanity. Just as Mary Wollstonecraft took the possibilities inherent in the Enlightenment's Pandora's box of equality and extended her defense of the French Revolution and Thomas Paine's Rights of Man to a feminist articulation of the rights of woman, reaching well past patriarchy's powerful presence in bourgeois thought and

practice, so too did Marx build on Enlightenment idealism to construct its oppositional challenge, historical materialism. Poststructuralism allows no such reading of distinctions and developments within Enlightenment thought, condemn ing all post-En lightenment modes of discourse as hopelessly compromised with the pro ject of subordination . Particularly suspect in current theory is the Enlightenment "metanarra-tive," with its "explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth."3 This obsolete discourse, a supposed product of the modernist crisis of metaphysical philosophy, merely masks the disintegrations of such

narratives, and their dispersal into the unstable clouds of postmodernity's lofty discursiveness.4Postmodernists/poststructuralists thus disavow, in their formalist and ultimatist rejections, divergences of considerable, oppositional importance. They throw out Kant and Hegel as well as Marx, all of whom rely on metanarratives of one sort or another, little consideration being given to the funda mental differences separating such systems of thought. All states are simply states, and hence oppressive , an anarchist might argue (Down with the Bolsheviks!); all wars are to be condemned , asserts the pacifist (We take no sides in Vietnam!); all metanarratives are suspect and compromised, there being no master categories of explanatory authority, proclaims the post-structuralist (Away with all interpretive pests!). In the comment that follows I concentrate on the Marxist "metanarra-tive," an unfulfilled project of radicalizing Enlightenment

rationality that much contemporary theory refuses in its repudiation of historical materialism. Marxist metanarrative is rejected , ironically, at precisely the histori cal moment that it is critically necessary , its insistence on reading history in class terms , as a succession of identifiable structures and agencies propelled by material interests, being fundamental to the interpretation of the movement from past to present, especially in the context of contempo rary life, where humanity is more and more connected in the globaldimen sions ofexploitation and oppression. 5

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Capitalism is creating multiple scenarios for extinction—we must confront centralization of power within the economic elite to stop band-aid solutions to these massive problems

Shrivastava,Ph D in Economics at Univ of Massachusetts, 2006(Aseem, Tyranny, Empire, and the End of the World as We Know It?,http://www.stateofnature.org/tyrannyEmpire1.html)No serious person doubts that we live today in a world in which nobody has to die of hunger or curable diseases. All hunger and most of child and infant mortality are man-made. Moreover, all the millions of victims of wars of choice are actually victims of the entirely avoidable human lust for power . We are invited to feel (rightly) indignant at the hundreds of lives lost

to terrorism every week, but there is a stunning, numbed silence over the quiet genocides that have become routine in this cowardly old world, for which educated, privileged humanity is collectively, squarely responsible. No shame is felt by our species when we are collectively culpable for crimes of a magnitude incomparably greater in scale than the undoubted damage being done by bloodthirsty terrorists. Our thinking and moral sense has been corrupted by

the distortion of our audio-visual capacities: the sensational damage done by terrorists is shown to us every evening on our TV screens, but the colossal murderous routine of hunger and disease falls below the threshold of media sensation. This auto-censorship is also because those who bring us the news are also perhaps aware, at the back of their minds, thatthe reigning world order is to be held responsible for such crimes against humanity. In this sense, we are all like the "good Germans" of the early 1940s, looking the other way from obvious crimes, when we know better. This essay has sought to draw a detailed political map of the world as it appears today to a concerned observer. In conclusion, I would only like to draw attention to something which has escaped mention thus far: the force of cultural hegemony. We live under the dispensations of the US Empire today. And yet this empire is uniquely different from every other in history, in that while geography is still quite central to it, its decisive advantage, apart from being market-based, comes from the cultural hegemony it exercises over

how diverse peoples right across the world conceive and assess their way of life. For no matter where one looks today, " the American way of life" – of expressways and supermarkets, skyscrapers and giant corporations – has become the very norm for evaluating everything else. It is this, backed and underwritten by the rapidly encroaching institutions of state corporate capitalism, that everyday reinforces American dominance and what is arguably, the most predatory and ultimately self- destructive style of life known to humanity. Moreover, it is precisely this fact which accounts for the rise of consensual tyranny and the decline of substantive democracy. Will the American Empire collapse at some point in the not too distant future? No reading of history can miss the mortality of empires. So this one shall have its end too. There is a sharply accelerating convergence of crises, too many to go into here. But there is a saying in India that "even a dead elephant is worth a million bucks." It may well turn out that the American Empire, like a wounded tiger, kicks and screams its way to a slow death in the human jungle, bringing down much else besides itself. Maybe that is precisely what is beginning to happen before our eyes since the dawn of the present century. (After all, the golden age of US capitalism, by common agreement amongst economists, ended in the 1970s, best symbolized by the breakdown of the Bretton-Woods system.) Humanity has often been threatened in the past by the cumulative consequences of its own

follies, as much as by natural causes. What is new today is that these two forces of destruction are increasingly enhanced by the historically unprecedented powers of destructive technology, driving us collectively towards an abyss of perhaps historic proportions. It

is fair to say that humanity is threatened with extinction from multiple sources of its own making . And the peril is

heightened especially since cowboys are writing a "what can we get away with" foreign policy for the superpower. There is the looming threat of unprecedented crises and possiblespecies extinctionon accountof the changes in climate and other natural disastersthat ongoing industrial revolutions are precipitating. If China and India succeed even half-way in achieving American standards of living, there

is assuredly no planet left. Then of course, we may wipe ourselves out through nuclear war, a more distinct possibility today than perhaps at any point during the days of the Cold War, when American enemies could be more precisely located and targeted, and the

fear of "mutually assured destruction" (MAD) kept the superpowers well-behaved, a predicament which has changed substantially now. Finally, there is the danger of public health catastrophes – not excluding public outbreaks of madness – in a globalized world . All of this raises political temperatures around the globe and makes conflict between and within societies ever more likely . This makes physical security a matter of the highest concern for most people, a fact that

governments are always good at manipulating to their political advantage, exaggerating threats as and when necessary for their narrow purposes, often acting on them in order to retain the credibility of threats. This exacerbates the prevailing conflicts further, especially because of the growing speed and precision of technologies of destruction. Propaganda through action, one

might call it. [61] To face these crises-ridden times with courage and to make room for fresh hopes and new visions of human freedom,the manifold hypocrisies of the rulers of the world must be repeatedly shown up. Their compassion is selective, their morality cosmetic . Perhaps they should be reminded of a verse from William Blake every time they set about seeking to fix some wrong in an oil-producing nation: ‘O’er my sins thou sit and moan: Hast thou no sins of thy own? O’er my sins thou sit and weep, And lull thy own sins fast asleep. You can't be serious about bringing freedom and prosperity to others while torturing and killing people in your own prisons or letting your own people die in hurricanes. Freedom for the world is already there if America is free. The tragedy of our world is that it is, alas, confusing its power with its freedom. It is this confusion which has to be brought before the public eye for moral intelligence to be provoked and a new world to be sought.

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Our critique turns their impacts. The alternative is a pre-requisite to an understanding of power as contingent and to create effective resistance in the form of Marxist counter-hegemonies

Palmer, Canada Research Chair in Canadian Labour History and Canadian Studies @ Trent University,1996(Bryan D., "Old Positions/New Necessities: History, Class, and Marxist Metanarrative," in "In Defense of History," Ed. by E. Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.65-72)It is worth reiterating the obvious, since the obvious is precisely what poststructuralism/postmodernism often obfuscates, or even denies. Marx ist and historical materialist criticism of contemporary theory and its insis tence on the politics and historically central practices of class do not rest only on a series of denials. The significance of the knowledge/power cou pling, for instance, which is associated with Foucault, is hardly alien to the Marxist method. Marxism has always been attentive to the relationship of ideas, dominance, and social transformation. Representation, imagery, discourses, and texts can hardly be said to be understated in the theory and practice of historical materialism, which has consistently grappled, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, with the problematized meaning of the base-superstructure metaphor, most evident in the rich body of writing associated with British Marxist historians such as Christopher Hill, Edward Thompson,

Rodney Hilton, and V.G. Kiernan, and the tradition of histo-ricized literary criticism associated with Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton.6 Finally, to claim that Marxism is a metanarrative of explanatory importance, resting unambiguously on the causality of productive forces and the determinative boundaries set by fundamentally economic relations, such as class, does not necessitate refusing the significance of other points of self-identification, such as race and gender. What separates Marxism's metanarrative from postmodernist incredulity of all master categories is not, however, this or that particular. Rather, there is a critical parting of the analytic seas in the two traditions' approaches to historical context as a material force, within which all struggles for eman cipation and all acts of subordination take place. Poststructuralism/post-modernism sees history as an authorial creation, a conjuring up of the past to serve the discursive content of the present. Thus the past can only be textually created out of the imperatives of the ongoing instance. In its insistence

that history be contextualized in the material world of possibili ties of the past, rather than cut adrift to float freely in the cross-currents of attending to its obscured social relations and situating those corners of suppressed history within the larger ensemble of possibilities that were something more than the ideological fiction of the established archival record, attentive as it generally is to the instinctual preservationism of power. Moreover, Marxism's metanarrative tries to be true—believing that such a process can be located, just as it can be obscured or distorted—to the actors of the past, whatever side of the class divide their feet touch down upon. Thus, a major historiographical difference separates the essentially Marxist understanding of class formation, struggle, and consciousness evident in E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963) and Gareth Stedman Jones's poststructurally inclined reading of Chartism in The Languages of Class (1983). Thompson, whose political practice and theory ran headlong into Stalinist and mainstream social democratic containments, explores the opaque nooks and crannies of English popular radicalism, uncovering an underground insurrectionary tradition that flew in the face of constituted authority in the opening decades of the nineteenth century, as well as standing in stark revolutionary contrast to the stolid constitutionalism of later generations of working-class reformers and their Fabian historians. This is a long way from Stedman Jones, whose politics of the 1980s had been formed within the conservatizing and hostile drift of the Labour Party away from the working class. He reads Chartism's successes against the politics of mass upheaval in the 1830s and 1840s, seeing in the movement's ideas and actions not the class mobilizations of the time but the hangover of an eighteenth-century politics that somehow distanced itself from the class actualities of the historical context. There is no doubt that Thompson's Making is driven by a commitment to the revolutionary aspirations of the working class, past and present, but that does not undermine his text's authority precisely because it is, for all of its dissident commitments, engaged with the complexities of the material world of the early nineteenth century. Stedman Jones, in contrast, searches for ways to distance himself from the specificities of Chartism's times. The supreme irony is that the "present" of Stedman Jones's text is nothing more than an ideological adaptation to Thatcher's Britain, a displacement of the past that paints a major history of working-class mobilization into a derivative corner of denigration and denial. Thompson's "present," in striking contrast, is a moment of revolution thwarted, a "heroic" challenge that, whatever its failures, remains significant to both the history of the

working class and the class content of contemporary left politics.7 It is when postmodernist/poststructuralist readings of history are scruti nized to see how metanarrative is suppressed, resulting inevitably in a particular structuring of past, present, and future, that the costs and content of abandoning metanarrative are most evident. When the French Revolu tion is interpreted, not as a contest between aristocracy and bourgeoisie, mediated by the involvement of the sans-culottes, but as the unfolding symbolic will of a population galvanized as much by imagery as political principle, the condescending class dismissiveness of contemporary histo- riographic fashion is strikingly evident.8An ironic consequence of postcolo-nial deconstructive writing, with

its understandable refusal of the Orientalist metanarrative, and its unfortunate textualization of imperialist plunder and indigenous resistance, is the further silencing of those margi nalized "others," whose differences are celebrated, but whose umbilical link to class formation on a global sale is twisted in the obscured


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isolations of culture s and countries .9 In the words of David Harvey: Postmodernism has us accepting the reifications and partitionings,

actually celebrating the activity of masking and cover-up, all the fetishisras of locality, place, or social grouping, while deny ing the kind of meta-theory which can grasp the political-economic processes (money

flows, international divisions of labour, financial markets, and the like) that are becom ing ever more universalizing in their depth, intensity and reach over daily life. 10 Postmodernistic antagonism to metanarrative thus carries with it a particular price tag, one in which the significance of class is almost universally marked down. That this process is embedded less in theory and more in the material politics of the late twentieth century, with their "retreat from class,"11 a withdrawal hastened by new offensives on the part of capital and the state, and conditioned by "actually existing socialism's" Stalinist deformations and ultimate collapse, is evident in one historian's confident statement. Patrick Joyce claims that British history, once explained in terms of class struggle, must now be regarded differently: There is a powerful sense in which class may be said to have "fallen." Instead of being a master category of historical explanation, it has become one term among many, sharing rough equality with these others (which is what I meant by the "fall" of class). The reasons for this are not hard to find. In Britain, economic decline and restructuring have led to the disintegration of the old manual sector of employment, and of what was, mistakenly, seen to be a "traditional" working class. The rise of the right from the 1970s, and the decline of the left, together with that of the trade unions, pointed in a similar direction to that of economic change, towards a loosening of the hold class and work-based categories had, not only on the academic mind, but also on a wider public. Changes going on in Britain were mirrored elsewhere, but the greatest change of all was the disintegration of world communism, and with it the retreat of intellectual Marx-ism.12 To "deconstruct" such a statement is to expose the transparent crudeness of its content, which bears a disappointing likeness to Time magazine. Even if trends in the 1990s were unambiguously of the sort pointed to by Joyce, it is most emphatically not the case that the analytic meanings of this period of supposed change could be transferred wholesale to a past society quite unlike it—what possible relevance can the fall of a degenerated and deformed set of workers' states (the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, etc.) have on our exploration of the tangible class composition of early nineteenth-century society? Is it not rather unwholesome for supposed intellectuals to be bartering their interpretive integrity in the crass coin of political fashion, their supposedly pristine ideas dripping with the thoroughly partisan poli-tics of a particular historical period? Joyce's words, ironically, confirm rather than undermine historical materialism. As Joyce alludes to the "fall" of class as a product of global restructuring, trade union and left defeat, the implosion of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and the rise of the right, what are we to see but the actual

confirmation of "intellectual Marxism?" Did not Marx write that, "The ideas of the ruling class are in eveiy epoch the ruling ideas," and suggest that at moments of "enthusiastic striving for innovation"—which is certainly a characteristic of the postmodern—such ideas might well result in a "more deeply rooted domination of the old routine?"13 Historical materialism would suggest that there is a profound difference between the trajectory of political economy in one epoch, and its attendant ideologies, and the actual social relations of production and contestation in another historical period. Joyce collapses the two. In doing so he does disservice, again, to both past and present. For while his simplified catalogue-like listing of the onward march of left defeat has some resonance in terms of contemporary political economic development, Joyce conveniently understates the presence of other dimensions. His accounting is one-sided and distortingly one-dimensional. Yes, to be sure, the Stalinist economies and their ruling castes have, outside of Cuba and (less so) China, taken a headlong plunge into the privatization despotisms of the 1990s, which Marxists from the Trotskyist tradition have been predicting since the publication of The Revolution Betrayed (1937). Against those who saw in the bureaucratic grip of Stalinism a fundamental, if flawed, blockade against the restoration of market relations, Trotsky wrote: "In reality a backslide to capitalism is wholly possible."14 Class politics were dealt a severe blow in the capitalist counterrevolutions and Stalinist implosions of the post-1989 years. Nevertheless, there is no indication that this has lessened the importance of class as an agent of social transformation and human possibility (a master category of metanarrative). Indeed, it will be the revival of class mobilizations that will retrieve for socialized humanity what was lost over the course of the 1990s in Russia and elsewhere, or there will be no gains forced from the already all-too-apparent losses of recent capitalist restorationism. Almost a decade of tyrannical Yeltsin-like Great Russianism and the barbarism of small "nation" chauvinisms should have made it

apparent where the politics of national identity lead. Class, as both a category of potential and becoming and an agency of activism, has thus reasserted its fundamental importance. More and more of humanity now faces the ravages of capitalism's highly totalizing , essen-tializing, and homogenizing impulses, and these are currently unleashed with a tragic vengeance as even the once degenerate and deformed workers' states look to the ideological abstractions of the world market for suste nance rather than relying on proletarian powers. Mass strikes now routinely challenge capital and its states, from France to Canada, from Korea to Brazil. Once-Soviet workers, who saw socialism sour in the stale breath of generations of Stalinism, are voting Communist again, whatever the problematic connotations, in the 1990s. At the end of 1995, polls in the advanced capitalist economies of the West almost universally locate society's major discontents in the material failings of a social order that has visibly widened the gap between "haves" and "have-nots," undermining the mythical middle class and depressing the living conditions of those working poor fortunate enough to retain some hold on their jobs. There are no answers separate from those of class struggle, however much this metanarrative of materially structured resistance intersects

with special oppressions. Class has not so much fallen as it has returned. It had never, of course, gone anywhere. Identified as simply one of

many plural subjectivities, class has actually been obscured from analytic and political view by poststructuralism's analytic edifice, erected at just the moment that the left is in dire need of the clarity and direction that class, as a category and an agency, a structure and a politics, can provide. The legacy of Marxism in general, and of historical materialism in particular, is to challenge and oppose this obfuscation, providing an alternative to such material misreadings, building an oppositional worldview that can play some role in reversing the class struggle defeats and weakening of the international workers' movement that has taken place as capital and the state have been in the ascendant over the course of the last thirty years . Those thinkerswho have failed to see the transitory nature of postmodernism/poststructuralism, many of them academic fair-weather friends of Marxism, and have instead invested so much in recent proclamations of their discursively constructed identity politics , may well be among the last to acknowledge the blunt revival of class in the face of contemporary capitalism's totalizing materiality. They will no doubt find some variant of "difference" to cling to, the better to avoid the necessity of engaging subjec tivity and its oppressive objectification under capitalism, where class , in its


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singular capacity to assimilate other categories of being and congeal varieties of power, rules and is ruled, a metanarrative of exploitation within which all identities ultimately find their level of subordination/ domination . This is indeed an old way of looking

at the world. But postmodernism/post-structuralism notwithstanding, all that is old is not always without value. As one "Old Man" of Marxism, a lifelong defender of radicalized Enlightenment values, once proclaimed, in a maxim particularly suited to the linked fortunes of

materialism's past, present, and future: "Those who cannot defend old positions will never conquer new ones."

The alternative is historical materialism. This mode of analysis is epistemologically superior to post-modernism-it renders a historically cognizant scholarship that is more effective at organizing dissident discourses

Lapointe, 2007(Thierry. "Beyond an Historicism Without Subject: Agency and the Elusive Genealogies of State Sovereignty" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association 48th Annual Convention, Feb 28, http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p180176_index.html)

The primary objective of this volume is to bring social history back in IR in order to challenge its ahistorical and essentialist categories as much

as its core postulates. As this chapter has shown, it has also been Poststructuralistcontention to challenge IR selfimage in shedding light in its theoretical role as a practice of forgetting. Our contention is that despite their significant contributions in challenging the supremacist position

of mainstream IR, their method of analysis have impede d their capacity to think about IR in terms of historical process. As I have stressed in the first section, its anti-foundationalist conception of power, its endeavour to analyse power relations on the basis of de-centring of the human subject, and its own historical analysis which focuses solely on moment of epistemic ruptures without adventuring into an explanation of its causes have left us with an image of “history without subject”. If the imperative of thinking about social institutions— sovereignty —in dynamic terms necessitates that we abandon any attempt to fix meaningsinto rigid definitions, as suggested by Walker, we have to bring back agency at the heart of our theorizing since it is through its historically specific practices that human create and transform—albeit seldom as they have initially planed—their environments. As I have sought to highlight in the second and third part of this chapter, HM may develop better and richer analysis in thinking about the relationship between power relations, institutional and symbolic structures of enunciation in embedding them in a wider geopolitical environment. However, as I have argued, the focus on discourses and symbolic structures without a proper contextualization of the relations and dynamics of power they are an integral part of should be abandoned. Indeed, such method of investigation tends to reify language in giving too much unity to rules/structures of enunciation, which also tends to loose sight of the different ways in which different agents may mobilise discourses —make references to similar symbols and used them in following the same (proper) rules of enunciation—in order to achieve quite distinctive sets of objectives and reproducing quite different set of social practices.


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“Identity politics” are only conceivable against the backdrop of capitalist globalization this system appeases subgroups in order to calculate and control their existence. This cycle of deterritorialization and reterritorialization creates the preconditions that made Nazism possible we must reassert the dimension of the Universal against capitalist globalization

Zizek ‘99(Slavoj, Slovenian Critic, The Ticklish Subject, p. 209-211)

Here however one must fully endorse Badiou’s point that these “returns to the Substance” are themselves impotent in the face of the global march of capital: they are its inherent supplement, the limit/conditioning of its functioning, since - as Deleuze emphasized years ago – capitalist “deterritorialization” is always accompanied by re-emerging re-territorializations. More precisely, there is an inherent split in the field of particular identities themselves caused by the onslaught of capitalist globalization: on the one hand, the so-called ‘fundamentalisms’, whose basic formula is that of the Identity of one’s own group, implying the practice of excluding the threatening Other(s): France for the French (against Algerian immigrants), America for the Americans (against the Hispanic invasion), Slovenia for Slovenians (against the excessive presence of “southerners”, immigrants from the ex-Yugoslav provinces); on the other hand there is post-modern culturalist ‘identity politics’ groups, aiming at the tolerant coexisting of ever-shifting, ‘hybrid’ lifestyle groups, divided into endless subgroups (Hispanic women, black gays, white AIDS patients, lesbian mothers…) This ever flowering of groups and subgroups in their hybrid and fluid, shifting identities, each insisting on the right to assert its specific way of life and/or culture, this incessant diversification, is only possible and thinkable only against the background of capitalist globalization : it is the very way capitalist globalization affects our sense of ethnic and other forms of community belonging: the only link connecting these multiple groups is the link of capital itself, always ready to satisfy the demands of each group and subgroup (gay tourism, Hispanic music...). Furthermore the opposition between fundamentalism and postmodern pluralist identity politics is ultimately a fake, concealing a deeper solidarity (or, to put it in Hegelese, speculative identity): a multiculturalist can easily find even the most fundamentalist ethnic identity attractive, but only so much as it is the identity of the supposedly authentic Other (say, in the USA, Native American tribal unity); a fundamentalist group can easily adopt, in its social functioning, the postmodern strategies of identity politics, presenting itself as one of the threatened minorities, simply striving to maintain its specific way of life and cultural identity.The line of separation between postmodern identity politics and fundamentalism is thus purely formal; it often depends merely on the different prospective from which the observer views the movement for maintaining a group identity. Under these conditions, the event in the guise of a “return to the roots” can only be a semblance that fits the capitalist circular movement perfectly or – in the worst case – leads to a catastrophe like Nazism. The sign of today’s ideologico-political constellation is the fact that these kinds of pseudo-events which seem to pop up (it is only right-wing populism which today displays the authentic political passion of accepting the struggle, of openly admitting that, precisely in so far as one proclaims to speak from a universal standpoint, one does not aim to please everybody, but is ready to introduce a division of “us” versus “them”). It has often been remarked that, despite hating the guts of Buchanan in the USA, Le Pen in France or Haider in Australia, even leftists feel a kind of relief in their appearance – finally, there is someone who revives a proper political passion of division and confrontation, a complete belief in political issues, albeit in a deplorably repulsive form. We are thus more and more deeply locked into a claustrophobic space within which we can only oscillate between the non-event of the smooth running of the liberal-democratic capitalist New World Order and fundamentalist Events (the rise of local proto fascisms, etc) which temporarily disturb the calm surface of the capitalist ocean – no wonder that, in these circumstances, Heidegger mistook the Pseudo-event of the Nazi revolution as the Event itself. Today, more than ever, one has to insist that the only way open to the emergence of an Event is that of globalization-with-particularization by (re)asserting the dimension of Universality against capitalist globalization. Badiou draws an interesting parallel here between our time of American global domination and the late Roman Empire, also a ‘multiculturalist’ global state in which multiple ethnic groups were thriving, united (not by capital, but) by the non-substantial link of the Roman legal order – so what we need today is the gesture that would undermine capitalist globalization from the standpoint of universal Truth, just as Pauline Christianity did to the Roman global empire.


Link: ID PTX

Theorizing political action as conditioned by experience makes it impossible to understand racial oppression and makes effective resistance to capitalism impossible

Libretti ‘97(assistant professor in the English Department at Northeastern Illinois University, Forgetting Identity, Recovering Politics: Rethinking Chicana/o Nationalism, Identity Politics, and Resistance to Racism in Alejandro Morales's Death of an Anglo, Post Identity, liberalarts.udmercy.edu/pi/PI1.1/PI11_Libretti.pdf)The importance of this point lies in the fact that most frequently it is experience and not essence that is invoked as the sacred grounding of political authority. The experience of oppression is usually claimed as providing one with a privileged consciousness of the entire complex of sociohistorical forces that produce the oppressive conditions, which may be global in nature, and thus of a clearer insight into how to resist those conditions through political action. Careful distinctions, however, need to be made between knowledge and experience, distinctions which problematize the valorization of experience as the source or precondition of heightened political understanding and consciousness. We need to recognize, as Fredric Jameson has noted, that in the world under global capitalism we have witnessed “a growing contradiction between lived experience and structure” such that the truth of any experience “no longer coincides with the place in which it takes place. The truth of that limited daily experience of London lies, rather, in India or Jamaica or Hong Kong; it is bound up with the whole colonial system of the British empire that determines the very quality of the individual’s subjective life. Yet those structural coordinates are no longer accessible to immediate lived experience and are often not even conceptualizable for most people” (349). Thus, one’s experience of race in the U.S. might not provide one with an objective understanding of the mechanisms of racial oppression which would seem necessary for developing a cogent strategy of resistance against the objective conditions of racial capitalism. Indeed, viewing race as a political category, as the critic Gilroy and the writer Morales do, we see that, in Gilroy’s words, “its meanings are unfixed and subject to the outcomes of struggle. There can be no guarantee that conflicts over the meaning of ‘race’ will always be resolved in a politically radical or progressive direction” (24). Herein lies the importance of the separation of political consciousness from racial identity constituted by the distinction between the terms “Chicana/o” and “Mexican American.” We can then theorize radicalization and political action as not simply or only conditioned by the experience of oppression or as the exclusive domain of the oppressed. Rather, we can theorize political consciousness and action in much broader and complex ways, as rooted in historically determined objective interests that exceed a limited correspondence with a narrowly construed identity of oppression and as most efficaciously rooted, methodologically, in the category of totality as the carrier of revolutionary principle, following Lukacs insistence in History and Class Consciousness. It is thus we can understand Marx’s theory of how “a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole” (Marx, “Manifesto” 481); or Morales’s novelistic narrative of how an “Anglo” “goes over” to a Chicano nationalist and internationalist politics.

The particular struggle of identity politics compartmentalizes its resistance and allows for Capital to destroy its radical nature.

Jodi Dean, Associate Professor of Political Theory Hobart and William Smith College“Zizek’s Politics”2006Page 118 – 119We can approach the same point from another direction. Identity politics today emphasizes the specificity of each identity and experience. Particular differences are supposed to be acknowledged and respected. As Zizek points out, the notion of social justice that corresponds to this view depends on asserting the rights of and redressing the wrongs inflicted upon victims. Institutionally, then, identity politics “requires an intricate police apparatus (foridentifying the group in question, for punishing offenders against its rights ... for providing the preferential treatment which should compensate for the wrong this group has suffered.”51 Rather than opening up a terrain of political struggle, functioning as human rights that designate the very space of politicization, identity politics works through a whole series of depoliticizing moves to locate, separate, and redress wrongs.52 Systemic problems are reformulated as personal issues. No particular wrong or harm can then stand in for the “universal wrong.”53 Multiculturalism is thus a dimension of postpolitics insofar as it prevents the universalization of particular demands.


Link : ID PTX

Identity politics feed capitalism – it’s a safe way to ignore the class struggle and perpetuates oppression on a global scale

Anarchist News ‘05(Identity politics – capitalism in action!,http://www.anarchistnews.org/?q=node/48)3

I'm not going to spend time explaining Australian capitalism or how it adversely affects the ordinary working person; this is something that most people involved in some form of "alternative politics" already seem to understand. But what is lacking is a proper theoretical understanding of the role that identity, or social group-based, politics actually plays within capitalism. Australian capitalism uses division to maintain itself. It tries very hard to split us into opposing groups based on gender, ethnicity, sexuality, etc. It attempts division at every level, separating states and regions with football matches, and even individuals on the basis of mundane arguments such as whether Ford or Holden is better. More recently the Howard Liberal government has engaged in a campaign of division focused on welfare recipients somewhat reminiscent of the Nazi Party's propaganda war on Jewish people during the '30s. Naturally, whilst we are all opposing each other, and are divided, we are unable to effectively change anything. But just in case we still have a lingering desire to make a change, we are offered recycling and enviro-based pseudo-activism so that we can feel like we are making a change. It is in the best interests of Australian capitalism that we all remain divided by layer upon layer of identity-based differences. RACE During the arrival of Europeans into this country over successive generations, Australian governments virtually wiped out the Aboriginal people. What remains of the Koori people is a very small percentage of the total Australian population and, as such, they are unable to make any effective change on their own. It is in the interests of Australian capitalism that Kooris have a fierce national identity to separate them from the "white people". The distrust of white liberals and white politicians is something rife within Koori identity politics. GENDER The relationship between men and women in Australia has been severely damaged by the separatist excesses of the bourgeois women's movement in the late 1980s and 1990s. Conveniently, capitalism has thrived on increased divorce rates and the tendency of men and women to live separately, creating new markets for cars for women, home units for single people, etc. Of course, this has lead to a declining birth rate and raised concerns about where the next generation of working drones is going to come from - hence we are now foisted with the 'pro-family' politics of the National-Liberal coalition. SEXUALITY Someone's sexuality is someone's personal feelings. It is not relevant to anyone but the person involved, and those persons they sexually interact with. Australian capitalism seeks to create ghettos of Gay people by inadequately protecting Gays from the homophobic views and attacks of some members of the heterosexual "community". Mainly as a by-product of blunt necessity, a great many Gay people have traditionally been liberally-minded and tended to see beyond the differences in people, thus promoting a better understanding of their own sexuality within a hostile homophobic community. This, of course, is traditionally the enemy of capitalism. To break down the barriers between sexualities or, indeed, to acknowledge that such barriers are simply irrelevant might mean that other barriers between working people might also break down.By encouraging a gay identity as a means of self-protection and as a form of pride in one's self, gay people are encouraged to divide themselves from other workers and spend their lives attaining a capitalism-approved (consuming) "queer" identity. Identity-based political groups (often for example Trotskyist-type groups) pose a political solution to Australian capitalism in an identical fashion: they follow and assist capitalist ideas. This does not mean that they do this intentionally; for the most part they are well meaning but they are still helping capitalism along. RACE A great many persons involved in identity politics spend time on the "white" liberal side of Koori identity politics, seemingly oblivious to the fact that Koori indigenous law is completely patriarchal and, in many ways, just as authoritarian as Australian capitalism. Persons involved in this form of politics often follow the "black consciousness" approach, encouraging community amongst indigenous Australians as a separate group. GENDER Bourgeois feminism permeates virtually every left wing group, seeking to establish separate groupings within each of these - a counter culture exclusively for women. This, it is generally claimed, is necessary to counter the patriarchal tendencies of every left wing group (whether they actually exist or not) and a great deal of time is taken up philosophizing about whether such things are taking place and what form they take ... all, of course, reinforcing the division between men and women already fostered by Capitalism. SEXUALITY Sexual politics are often a regular feature of identity-based solutions. These groups feel that it is important that Gay people have their own exclusive input into the group and form their own sexuality-based grouping. But the approach of Capitalism is to divide us carefully within groups and to maintain tensions between us. Otherwise, we might try and see past our differences (and as human beings they will always be numerous), and try to find what we have in common; persons involved in identity-based politics would argue that they are doing just this. However, where they create any division, or exclude certain people solely because of their race,

gender or sexuality (i.e. because they are not a koori, not a woman, not gay), they will always work in the interest of Australian capitalism. CLASS So what type of grouping is there that does not divide us in any way? What do we all have in common outside these shallow capitalist-created social groups? All members of the working class work, seek work, or are supported by the benefits of work in order to live (welfare is provided by taxes from Australian workers, students are supported by their working families). All members of the ruling classes control work and contribute nothing to it. The fact that we subsist on the basis of work as a class is the one thing that we all have in common, whether we are Kooris, men, women, etc., and it is here that we can find the only common ground with which to deal with Australian capitalism. So why do so many people spend time engaged in the politics of identity? The reasons are varied but by and large I think it is because it is safe to do so. No real change ever takes place and social uprisings such as anti-war movements are very quickly simply ignored by capitalism as they have no solid basis upon which to force real and lasting change. So what if 3 million people march in the streets, tomorrow they will be back home feeling good about themselves, the news services will be able to increase their ratings (i.e., make more money) by reporting it, and it will be forgotten. Of course, if workers in the factories refused to make guns or filled the bullets with flour, or the wharfies refused to load the ships with war toys for Iraq and 3 million people marched in the streets to protect them from the capitalists trying to use force to get their own way, something would change. Providing the strike spread to other industries (it didn't just happen in isolation) and was maintained, Australian capitalism would have no choice but to capitulate. (For that matter if it spread among workers throughout the world there would be no wars at

all.) Of course, nothing like this will ever be possible whilst we continue to accept that identity-based politics is anything but a con job, and that a great many well-meaning political groups are attempting to encourage change in precisely the reverse direction to that which will bring it about. Identity Politics is an approach that is doomed to constant failure. If it wasn't, capitalism wouldn't allow it, and so many bourgeois people, who have a lot to lose by real change, wouldn't be engaged in it. Without beginning with what we have in common - rather than trying to find it later from "broad coalitions" of groups that are from the start structurally-based on exclusionary and fortress-like ideas - we are simply chasing our tails and John Howard and his mates are laughing their arses off as identity-based groups help capitalism divide working people.

http://www.anarchistnews.org/?q=node/48)3


Link: Multiculturalism

Multiculturalism is the ultimate ideology of global capitalism—its respect for the “other” mirror colonists respect for natives, learning about the “other” without escaping the racist society in which misrepresentations about the other are created in the first place

Zizek, professor of philosophy and psychoanalysis at the European Graduate School, Oct 1997[Slavoj, Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism, http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=1919]

How, then, does the universe of Capital relate to the form of Nation-State in our era of global capitalism? Perhaps, this relationship is best designated as ‘auto-colonization’: with the direct multinational functioning of Capital, we are no longer dealing with the standard opposition between metropolis and colonized countries; a global company as it were cuts its umbilical cord with its mother-nation and treats its country of origins as simply another territory to be colonized. This is what disturbs so much the patriotically oriented right-wing populists, from Le Pen to Buchanan: the fact that the new multinationals have towards the French or American local population exactly the same attitude as towards the population of Mexico, Brazil or Taiwan. Is there not a kind of poetic justice in this self-referential turn? Today’s global capitalism is thus again a kind of ‘negation of negation’, after national capitalism and its internationalist/colonialist phase. At the beginning (ideally, of course), there is capitalism within the confines of a Nation-State, with the accompanying international trade (exchange between sovereign Nation-States); what follows is the relationship of colonization in which the colonizing country subordinates and exploits (economically, politically, culturally) the colonized country; the final moment of this process is the paradox of colonization in which there are only colonies, no colonizing countries—the colonizing power is no longer a Nation-State but directly the global company. In the long term, we shall all not only wear Banana Republic shirts but also live in banana republics. And, of course, the ideal form of ideology of this global capitalism is multiculturalism, the attitude which, from a kind of empty global position, treats each local culture the way the colonizer treats colonized people—as ‘natives’ whose mores are to be carefully studied and ‘respected’. That is to say, the relationship between traditional imperialist colonialism and global capitalist self-colonization is exactly the same as the relationship between Western cultural imperialism and multiculturalism: in the same way that global capitalism involves the paradox of colonization without the colonizing Nation-State metropole, multi-culturalism involves patronizing Eurocentrist distance and/or respect for local cultures without roots in one’s own particular culture. In other words, multiculturalism is a disavowed, inverted, self-referential form of racism, a ‘racism with a distance’—it ‘respects’ the Other’s identity, conceiving the Other as a self-enclosed ‘authentic’ community towards which he, the multiculturalist, maintains a distance rendered possible by his privileged universal position. Multiculturalism is a racism which empties its own position of all positive content (the multiculturalist is not a direct racist, he doesn’t oppose to the Other the particular values of his own culture), but nonetheless retains this position as the privileged empty point of universality from which one is able to appreciate (and depreciate) properly other particular cultures—the multiculturalist respect for the Other’s specificity is the very form of asserting one’s own superiority.


2NC Multiculturalism Link

Multiculturalism distracts attention from fighting capitalism—focusing on individual struggles like ethnic rights fragments resistance

Zizek, professor of philosophy and psychoanalysis at the European Graduate School, Oct 1997[Slavoj, Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism, http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=1919]

And, mutatis mutandis, the same goes for today’s capitalist who still clings to some particular cultural heritage, identifying it as the secret source of his success—Japanese executives participating in tea ceremonies or obeying the bushido code—or for the inverse case of the Western journalist in search of the particular secret of the Japanese success: this very reference to a particular cultural formula is a screen for the universal anonymity of Capital. The true horror does not reside in the particular content hidden beneath the universality of global Capital, but rather in the fact that Capital is effectively an anonymous global machine blindly running its course, that there is effectively no particular Secret Agent who animates it. The horror is not the (particular living) ghost in the (dead universal) machine, but the (dead universal) machine in the very heart of each (particular living) ghost. The conclusion to be drawn is thus that the problematic of multiculturalism—the hybrid coexistence of diverse cultural life-worlds—which imposes itself today is the form of appearance of its opposite, of the massive presence of capitalism as universal world system: it bears witness to the unprecedented homogenization of the contemporary world. It is effectively as if, since the horizon of social imagination no longer allows us to entertain the idea of an eventual demise of capitalism—since, as we might put it, everybody silently accepts that capitalism is here to stay—critical energy has found a substitute outlet in fighting for cultural differences which leave the basic homogeneity of the capitalist world-system intact. So we are fighting our pc battles for the rights of ethnic minorities, of gays and lesbians, of different life-styles, and so on, while capitalism pursues its triumphant march—and today’s critical theory, in the guise of ‘cultural studies’, is doing the ultimate service to the unrestrained development of capitalism by actively participating in the ideological effort to render its massive presence invisible: in a typical postmodern ‘cultural criticism’, the very mention of capitalism as world system tends to give rise to the accusation of ‘essentialism’, ‘fundamentalism’ and other crimes.


Link: Standpoint Ptx

Locating political struggle within particular struggles masks capitalism’s universal nature—people can’t draw the lines between different forms of oppression

Zizek, professor of philosophy and psychoanalysis at the European Graduate School, 2001[Slavoj, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?, pg. 1-4]

On the ‘Celestial Seasonings’ green tea packet there is a short explanation of its benefits: ‘Green tea is a natural source of antioxidants, which neutralize harmful molecules in the body known as free radicals. By taming free radicals antioxidants help the body maintain its natural good health.’ Mutatis mutandis, is not the notion of totalitarianism one of the main ideological antioxidants, whose function throughout its carrer was to tame free radicals, and thus to help the social body to maintain its politico-ideological good health? No less than social life itself, today’s self-professed ‘radical’academia is permeated by unwritten rules and prohibitions—although such rules are never explicitly stated, disobedience can have dire consequences. One of these unwritten rules concerns the unquestioned ubiquity of the need to ‘contextualize’ or ‘situate’one’s position: the easiest way to score points automatically in a debate is to claim that the opponent’s position is not properly ‘situated’ in a historical context: ‘You talk about women—which women? There is no woman as such, so does not your generalized talk about women, in its apparent all-encompassing neutrality, privilege certain specific figures of feminity and preclude others?’Why is such radical historicizing false, despite the obvious moment of truth it contains? Because today’s (late capitalist global market) social reality itself is dominated by what Marx referred to as the power of ‘real abstraction’: the circulation of Capital is the force of radical ‘deterritorialization’ (to use Deleuze’s term) which, in its very functioning, actively ignores specific conditions and cannot be ‘rooted’ in them. It is no longer, as in the standard ideology, the universality that occludes the twist of its partiality, of its privileging a particular content; rather, it is the very attempt to locate particular roots that ideologically occludes the social reality of the reign of ‘real abstraction’.

The aff’s prioritization of subjective experience over objective analysis necessitates the abandonment of any higher goal – inward oriented politics are doomed to failure Lukacs ‘71(Philosopher, The Theory of the Novel, p. 117-118)

The inner importance of the individual has reached its historical apogee: the individual is no longer significant as the carrier of transcendent worlds, as he was in abstract idealism, he now carries his value exclusively within himself; indeed, the values of being seem to draw the justification of their validity only from the fact of having been subjectively experienced, from their significance to the individual’s soul The precondition and the price of this immoderate elevation of the subject is, however, the abandonment of any claim to participation in the outside world . The romanticism of disillusionment not only followed abstract idealism in time and history, it was also conceptually its heir, the next historico-philosophical step In a priori utopianism. There, the individual, the vehicle of the utopian challenge to reality, was crushed by the brute force of reality; here, defeat is the precondition of subjectivity. There, subjectivity gave rise to the heroism of its militant interiority; here, a man can become the hero, the center figure of a literary work, because he has the inner possibility of experiencing life as a literary creator. There, the outside world was to be created anew on the model of ideals; here, an interiority which protects itself in the form of a literary work demands from the outside world that it should provide it with suitable materials for thus forming itself. In romanticism, the literary nature of the a priori status of the soul vis a vis reality becomes conscious: the self, cut off from transcendence, recognizes itself as the source of the ideal reality, and, as a necessary consequence, as the only material worthy of self-realization. Life becomes a work of literature; but, as a result, man becomes the author of his own life and at the same time the observer of that life as a creative work of art. Such duality can only be given form by lyrical means. As soon as it is fitted into a coherent totality, the certainty of failure becomes manifest, the romanticism becomes skeptical, disappointed, and cruel towards itself and the world; the novel of the romantic sense of life is the novel of disillusionment. An interiority denied the possibility of fulfilling itself in action turns inwards, yet cannot finally renounce what it has lost forever, even if it wanted to do so, life would deny it such a satisfaction; life forces it to continue the struggle and suffer defeats which the artist anticipates and the hero apprehends.


Link: Feminism

Feminism only smooths the way for capitalism—even if it creates equality, massive violence and poverty still continue in the name of capitalist hegemony, only class focus serves to address these inequalities

Newinsky, eco-activist living in Germany, 2004[Peter, The Continuing Charm of Marx, http://www.stateofnature.org/theContinuingCharm.html]

One cogent argument against a facile or reductionist emphasis on class alone, however, has also been frequently made by the various adherents of ‘identity politics’. The importance of non-class factors like gender, ethnicity, culture and sexual orientation for understanding and changing socially oppressive structures has been a radical given since the 60s and 70s, and doubtless an over-focus on class can often obfuscate, distract from or gloss over such factors and their various forms of oppression. At times, such factors can undoubtedly override class factors. However, for social change activists to throw the baby of class and class struggle out with the bathwater of dogmatic ‘workerism’ or simplistic ‘class analysis’ comes at the great price of likely delusion. Beyond all theoretical argument, the sheer empirical facts would now seem to confirm the social (and thus heuristic) ‘ultimate’ predominance of class over all other factors underpinning ‘identity politics’. Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell and a plethora of black CEOs in the US may be taken as cases in point: neither being a female nor being black need now necessarily preclude one from becoming a member of the imperial ruling classes (nor, despite the froth of Christian fundamentalist backlash, would it any longer really matter if either of them were gay). Empirically, a black middle and upper class is no different in its material interests and prevailing aggregate consciousness to any other middle or upper class. A greater degree of civil rights for oppressed minorities as achieved in the US or South Africa will not change the class realities manifest in South Central LA or Soweto. A Nelson Mandela in power might well enable a new black bourgeoisie and middle class but will not touch the wealth and power base of the ruling classes and will symbolically bestow the highest national honours on a kleptocrat and genocidal dictator like Indonesia’s Soeharto. Unlike many a white liberal, a white steel worker might in all likelihood not be surprised at any of this. He may also have a different, since openly class-based, view of collective shame or guilt about the historical legacy of black slavery: I got no use for the black militant who’s gonna scream three hundred years of slavery to me while I’m busting my ass. You know what I mean? (Laughs.) I have one answer for that guy: go see Rockefeller. See Harriman. Don’t bother me. We’re in the same cotton field. So don’t just bug me. (Laughs.) [6] Similarly, mainstream feminism’s systemically naïve, class-neutral fixation on ‘gender equality’ within prevailing capitalist institutions has ‘succeeded’ to the extent that most corporate PR spokespeople are now women (perhaps because we somehow still tend to view women as more ‘sincere’) and the ubiquitous advertising image of a successful CEO now also tends to be that of a woman, preferably even of non-European background. The ‘feminism’ even within Chinese Stalinism has enabled China’s richest billionaire to be a woman, Zhang Yin, a paper recycling capitalist. Western feminism has also ‘succeeded’ to the extent that the torture and atrocities in US-occupied Iraq involved women in the immediate chain of command: from Rice at the top toMajor General Barbara Fast (top intelligence officer responsible for reviewing detainee condition before release) to General Janis Karpinski (director of Abu Ghraib prison) down to the three women Lynndie England, Megan Ambuhl and Sabrina Harman of the seven soldiers actually made to carry the can and be charged with abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib. [7] Thus, the defining criterion of ‘success’ within contemporary capitalism is not gender or race or sexual orientation but achieving the ‘equality’ of thoroughly espousing ruling class values and mind sets. Thus from a critical Marxist perspective, in the ‘post-modern’ age of intensified globalisation and cultural McDonaldisation, Capital has now manifestly become what it inherently always was: a powerful cosmopolitan levelling force that knows neither nation, gender nor race as a barrier to its drive to self-accumulate. As the Communist Manifesto so forcefully argued, Capital is an inherently revolutionary force that sweeps all before it, all non-monetary qualities, quirks, responses, institutions and identities are but grist for its all-levelling mill of expansion and accumulation.

http://www.stateofnature.org/theContinuingCharm.html


A2: Patriarchy=Root of Cap

Patriarchy exists as another form of domination from capitalist relations—focusing solely on abuse of women ignores capitalisms role in destroying women’s positions in the neo-liberal order

Otto Wolf, teaches philosophy at Free Univ of Berlin, June 2007[Frieder, The Missed Rendevous of Critical Marxism and Ecological Feminism, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, Vol 18 Iss 2, Proquest]

Von Werlhof sees "patriarchy" as the "deeper structure" of capitalism. This is, I am convinced, a profoundly ambivalent formulation. On the one hand, it blinds us to the very real dangers of capitalist accumulation as such-just as it simultaneously threatens to undermine human labor and nature. On the other hand, it misses the difference between different forms of domination, which is a central achievement of Marx. By this I mean that immediately personal forms of domination like patriarchy, slave ownership or feudal appropriation are inseparable from lived relations between dominating and dominated human beings. Conversely, objectively "reified," impersonal forms of domination - like the wage-capital relationship - really function in separation from the personal relations of those involved. To ignore this groundbreaking difference makes it impossible to understand why capitalist politics historically has always been capable of mobilizing active support for its projects from those oppressed by personal forms of domination slaves, serfs, and housewives. A recent example of this is the existence of active support from women-and not only career women - for the neoliberal politics of dismantling the fordist "welfare state." This reflects the neoliberal achievement in casting the welfare state as something explicitly patriarchal, while at the same time obscuring the implicit patriarchal functions of neoliberal strategies that create precarious situations for the majority of women around the world.


Link: Discourse First

Discursive focus doesn’t create social change—its focus on pure individualism leaves people trapped to fend off capitalist hegemony with their own devices, only materialist focus can challenge the system

Novack, served as the secretary of the American Committee for the Defence of Leon Trotsky, 1956[George, George Novack’s Understanding of History, http://www.marxists.org/archive/novack/works/history/ch12.htm]

The contrast between the idealistic subjectivity of the existentialist thinkers and the materialist objectivity of Marxism can be seen in the following assertion of Heidegger in An Introduction to Metaphysics : “It is in words and language that things first come into being and are.” In accord with the conception that other aspects of reality acquire existence only to the extent that they enter human experience, Heidegger makes not simply the meaning but the very existence of things emanate from our verbal expression of them. To a materialist such human functions as speech and thought reflect the traits of things but do not create them.

The external world exists regardless of our relations with it and apart from the uses we make of its elements.The whole of existentialism revolves around the absolute primacy of the conscious subject over everything objective, whether it be physical or social. The truth and values of existence are to be sought exclusively within the experiences of the individual, in our self-discovery and self-creation of what we authentically are.Marxism takes the reverse position. It gives existential priority, as any consistent materialism must, to nature over society and to society over any single person within it. Nature, society, and the individual coexist in the closest reciprocal relationship, which is characterised by the action of human beings in changing the world. In the process of subduing objective reality for their own ends they change themselves. The subjective comes out of the objective, is in constant interaction and unbreakable communion with it, and is ultimately controlled by it. These opposing conceptions of the object-subject relationship are reflected in the conflict between the two philosophies on the nature of the individual and the individual’s connections with the surrounding world. The category of the isolated individual is central in existentialism. The true existence of a person, it asserts, is thwarted by things and other people. These external forces crush the personality and drag it down to their own impersonal and commonplace level. The individual can attain genuine value only in contest with these external relationships.We must turn inward and explore the recesses of our beingin order to arrive at our real selves and real freedom. Only at the bottom of the abyss where the naked spirit grapples with the fearful foreknowledge of death are both the senselessness and the significance of existence revealed to us.Thus existentialism pictures the individual as essentially divorced from other humans, at loggerheads with an inert and hostile environment, and pitted against a coercive society. This desolation of the individual is the wellspring of inconsolable tragedy. Having cut off the individual from organic unity with the rest of reality, from the regular operation of natural processes and the play of historical forces,

existentialism is thereafter unable to fit the subjective reactions and reflections of the personality to the environing conditions of life. Indeed, says Sartre, our attempts to make consciousness coincide with “facticity”, the world of things, are a futile business.

By a grim paradox, the solitary human mind is completely sovereign in shaping its real existence. With nothing but its own forces to lean on and its own judgment as a guide, it must confront and solve all the problems of life. Existentialism is the most thoroughgoing philosophy of individualism in our time. “Be yourself at all costs!” is its first commandment. It champions the spontaneity of the individual menaced by the mass, the class, the state. It seeks to safeguard the dignity, rights, initiatives, even the vagaries of the autonomous personality against any oppressive authority, organised movement, or established institution. With individual liberty as its watchword and supreme good, existentialism is a creed of nonconformism. “I came to regard it as my task to create difficulties everywhere”, wrote Kierkegaard in describing how he turned to an existentialist view of life. The existentialists are averse to routine, externally imposed ideas, or disciplined modes of behaviour, and whatever is uncongenial to the desires of the ego. All submission to projects not freely chosen is evidence of bad faith, says Sartre. The targets of existentialism’s protest are as diversified as the interests and inclinations of its exponents. These have ranged from religious orthodoxies to philosophical systematising, from capitalist exploitation to Stalinist regimentation, from bourgeois morality to workers’ bureaucratism. Kierkegaard set about to disturb the peace of mind of the hypocritical Danish middle class. Nietzsche heralded the superman who was to rise above the herdlike crowd and transcend good and evil. The favoured heroes of Camus and Sartre are rebels and outsiders. Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre analyse writers such as the Marquis de Sade and Jean Genet, whose ideas and lives have outrageously flouted the ordinary canons of moral conduct. It must be said that theheresies of the existentialists do not always succeed in shedding completely the values of the society they rebel against.Kierkegaard assailed the sluggishness and self-deception of the smug citizens around him only to embrace the Christian God with more passionate intensity. And Sartre, who attacks stuffed shirts and stinkers for their egotism, clings to the concept of the totally free person beholden solely to himself as the pivot of his philosophy and moral theory. Existentialism proclaims the urge of the individual to develop without hindrance. Butits constitutional aversion to the organised action of mass movements determined by historically given circumstances renders it incapable of finding an effective solution of this problem for the bulk of humanity. That is why it is nonconformist rather than revolutionary. Historical materialism takes an entirely different approach to the relationship between individual and

environment. We are essentially social beings; we develop into individuals only in and through society. For Marxists, the isolated individual is an abstraction. All distinctive things about humans, from toolmaking, speech, and thought to the

latest triumphs of art and technology, are products of our collective activity over the past million years or so.Take away from


Link: Discourse First

the person all the socially conditioned and historically acquired attributes derived from the culture of the collectivity and little would be left but the biological animal. The specific nature of the individual is determined by the social content of the surrounding world. This shapes not only our relations with other people but our innermost emotions, imagination, and ideas.Even the special kind of solitude felt by people today is an outgrowth of the social system. One of the major contradictions of capitalism is that it has brought humans into the closest “togetherness” while accentuating conditions that pull them apart. Capitalism socialises the labour process and knits the whole world into a unit while separating people from one another through the divisive interests of private property and competition. Frederick Engels noted this when he described the crowds in the London streets in his first work, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 : “This isolation of the individual, this narrow self-seeking, is the fundamental principle of our society everywhere Ö The dissolution of mankind into monads, of which each has a separate principle , the world of atoms, is here carried out to its utmost extreme.” The “barbarous indifference, hard egotism and nameless misery” which he observed over a century ago still strongly permeate our acquisitive society. Like the existentialists, the socialist movement has made one of its chief aims and persistent concerns the defence and expansion of individuality—however much this has been violated in practice by bureaucratic powers speaking in the name of socialism. But Marxism differs from existentialism by denying that individualism as a philosophy can provide an adequate method of social change and political action. Since the social structure shapes and dominates the lives of individuals, it has to be transformed by the collective struggle of the working people in order to eliminate the conditions that repress individuality and create an environment suited to the unhampered cultivation of the capacities of each living human being.


A2: Gibson Graham

Gibson-Graham preclude revolutionary thinking – their blind faith in reformism leads to capitalist co-option of the aff/perm

Poetevin ‘01(member of the SR editorial collective, Socialist Review, end of anti-capitalism as we knew it: Reflections on postmodern Marxism, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3952/is_200101/ai_n8932891/pg_11)

My main point here is that throughout The Full Monty - and in J.K. Gibson-Graham's review of the film as well - property relations are never questioned or challenged. In the postmodern/post-Marxist "noncapitalist" world, corporations get to keep ownership of the means of production and their profits, while working class communities continue to lap dance their way through "identification across difference" rather than doing union organizing. That this kind of argument can be presented not only as "noncapitalist" but also as Marxist thinking should be enough to demonstrate the political bankruptcy of this paradigm . It is also interesting that JK Gibson-Graham maintain that challenging their analysis of The Full Monty, or not endorsing the politics of the film, "is inherently conservative and capitalocentric."48 I disagree strongly. The politics advocated by J.K. Gibson-Graham through their reading of The Full Monty is nothing but liberal politics with post-structuralist delusions of grandeur. It is one thing to say that we are at a political conjuncture in which the thing to do is to work hard for reform, not "revolution." But it is another thing to argue that revolutionary practice cannot happen on epistemological grounds, and that all we can do is make capitalism as user friendly as possible while obscuring and co-opting the Marxist tradition. J.K. Gibson-Graham's reading of The Full Monty is both liberal and reactionary. What the postmodern Marxist's reading of The Full Monty demonstrates is that in their desire to get rid of "capitalocentrism" - the alleged obsession of Marxists with seeing "capitalism" everywhere - they end up reconfiguring and consolidating capitalism back in. In their unreflective romanticizing of reform, and in their haughty contempt for revolutionary thinking and politics, J.K-.Gibson-Graham's style of postmodern/post-Marxism delivers what boils down to good old-fashioned liberalism: a mild, state-administered "economic justice" platform centered around individual private liberties, neatly packaged in postmodern gift wrapping. The bottom line is this: When one looks closely at what postmodern/post-Marxist theory actually offers, and after it is done "representing capitalism through the lens of overdetermination,"49 all one can strategize about is how to make capitalism more "user friendly." Gone is the project of getting rid of it. Strangely enough, postmodern/ post-Marxists do not regard these positions as a surrender of the Marxist project at all, but rather, as the exact fulfillment of that commitment.50

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3952/is_200101/ai_n8932891/pg_11


A2: Turn-Include Excluded Voice

There’s no risk of a link turn-elite groups will hijack notions of culture to reinforce their place in social hierarchy by offering their own counternarratives-cooption outweighs

Dunk, teaches in the Department of Sociology at Lakehead University, March 2002[Thomas, Hunting and the Politics of Identity in Ontario, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism Vol 13 Iss 1, Proquest]

The arguments employed by the OFAH and the NOTO exemplify a number of interesting developments in the ongoing struggles about identity, power, and relationships with nature. They indicate that culture is now recognized by these organizations as a form of political capital. The state, the legal profession and the lay public are picking up on the anthropological idea that everyone has culture - not only those odd, quaint immigrant groups, religious minorities, or remnant indigenous peoples. This may represent a n interesting side effect of the intellectual critique of whiteness and masculinity as hegemonic cultural forces. Those who have been the principal object of this critique are now recasting their own place in the social hierarchy as a cultural rather than a purely economic-political phenomenon. This is not to prejudge the nature of the intention that lies behind the arguments of white men's organizations regarding their culture. The extent to which the arguments about the relationship between hunting and culture utilized by the OFAH and the NOTO are politically motivated as opposed to sincerely felt by white hunters is impossible to know. Rather than engage in a futile debate about the honesty of white hunters' claims about the place of hunting in their culture and identity, it is more fruitful to think through how this case reveals some of the limitations of identity politics as a means of achieving social, economic, and environmental justice. A discursive strategy and ethical position similar to that employed by subaltern groups to defend endangered minority cultures is here being used to support the status quo . Many who have operated from a more explicitly Marxist-oriented perspective have long been wary of the potential implications of arguing and acting on primarily cultural grounds as opposed to political and economic terrain. The debates about hunting, culture, and rights reveal that, in the absence of a deeper engagement with the entire systemthat simultaneously involves the destruction of nature and the creation of social dislocations, alienation, and inequality, we end up in an endless cycle of claims and counter-claims about the linkages between the uses of nature, cultural traditions, and rights.


Link: Ethic to the Othe r

Ethics guarantees continuation of poverty and hunger—ethicists only manage social anatagonisms’ created by capitalism, not criticize them

DeFazio, Ph D Candidate in English at Stony Brook Univ, Spring 2003[Kimberly, The Imperialism of “Eating Well”, http://www.redcritique.org/Spring2003/theimperialismofeatingwell.htm]

The cultural imaginary in the West today is dominated by the discourse of "ethics". Ethics, in its privileging of the subjective over the objective, turns social structures into modes of personal behavior and thus sees social change

basically as a matter of changing individuals' minds and ideas. On these terms, hunger is not viewed as a structure of social relations tied to ownership of property (class)—a view based on the understanding that a transformation in property relation is

the necessary precondition of eradicating hunger. Rather, the primary solutions to hunger are individual and subjective ones that promote life-style changes and daily negotiations within existing unequal social structures. For instance: those with food give to those who do not; food pantries redistribute surpluses; understanding that the hungry are not in any fundamental way

"different" from the fed, etc. These and other similar reformist practices aimed at addressing only the most intolerable effects of hunger, not its material roots, are widely seen as the only "reasonable" solutions. Ethics, in other words, is one of the main manifestations of theoretical "savvy-ness" today. Ethical theorists regard transforming hunger by eradicating its roots in private property as highly "unreasonable" and "crude", if not deeply suspicious, since transformation of class relations is deemed a "totalitarian" imposition of one subjective will over another. Social change, to put it differently, is only ethical when it deals with one hungry person at a time. What is necessary to note about contemporary ethics is that unlike the "traditional" ("modernist") ethics of John Stuart Mill or Kant, for whom ethics involves the study of the "good society" (the "polis") and finding the ideal means of living a "good life", ethics today is post-foundational. It puts itself forward as a "radical" ethics because it does not essentialize or monolithize the subject.Ethics, in other words, is now "post-al" and, as Mas'udZavarzadeh explains, begins with the assumption that we have entered a post-historical, post-

class, post-industrial, post-historical moment of history; a moment in which capitalism has somehow broken free from its exploitative past (1-2). That is to say, in contemporary articulations of ethics the social is a series of autonomous, disparate, and aleatory events operating independently of any over-arching logic (such as the logic of exploitation), and, therefore, without

any common and underlying principles of judgment. As a result, whereas traditional ethics was at least formally committed to a notion of "equality", post-al ethics is resigned to inequality, and views all discussions of "equality" as totalizing fictions aimed at concealing over the fundamental "difference" that constitutes the social. As pragmatist Chris Barker succinctly puts it "The modernist goal of equality is beset with problems, and equality of outcome is neither possible nor desirable" (20). Post-al ethicists, he declares, have instead learned not to "mistake our ethical choices for radical public politics" (19). As a result, ethics today is more concerned with managing the effects of social inequalities. The shift from modern to postmodern or post-al ethics, it is necessary to emphasize, is not the result of a more "savvy", "sophisticated" or "radical democratic" understanding of ethics—the shift, in other words, did not come about due to the triumph of new or "better" ideas. This is a claim that Francis Moore Lappé makes in the new introductory chapter to the 20th Anniversary Edition of Diet For a Small Planet, a book that has maintained its ongoing popularity by appealing to activist sentiments yet at the same time effectively disconnecting hunger from any encompassing theory of hunger as a product of capitalism. She writes that through the sheer "power of ideas" a new ecological "myth" which recognizes the net of relationships in which humans are involved is coming to replace an older Cartesian "mechanical" myth that separated people into "atoms" and denied them agency (xix-xxvii). This, of course, is the dominant understanding of social change today, which turns the history of capitalism into the progress of ideas and erases the way in which the possibilities of social change are the product of human labor in order to obscure the fundamental exploitation of labor that is central to the organization of capitalist society. Post-al ethics, in other words, is a response to the new needs of capital in the era of cybercapitalism in which the material developments in production that have enabled the possibility of an economically just society are held back by private ownership and must instead be explained as a problem of "bad ideas" if this contradiction is to be secured.Ethics, to be more general, is an articulation of the way in which individuals are trained to deal with the contradictions of capitalism. In other words, changes in what constitutes "ethical" behavior are an effect of shifts in the needs of capital.Modern ethics, now deemed too "mechanical" by both activists like Lappé and "high theorists" like Derrida alike, responded to the needs of an emerging capitalist system; that is, it was focused on the aims of "integrating" social classes into the capitalist system at a time of deep unrest brought about by the conflict between dying feudal relations and industrialization. The "good society" was basically an attempt to assure the increasing numbers of dispossessed that the market could meet the common needs of all. Ethics in what is called "post-industrialism", on the contrary, is no longer aimed at "integrating", or including the excluded. With the generalization of capitalist relations throughout the world, and the resulting deepening divisions between the haves and the have-nots, ethics has instead become more interested in "recognizing" "difference" and the underlying alterity that, on post-al terms, subvert the "good society" (a concept that is, as a result, largely abandoned today as a modernist fantasy of wholeness that reduced the complexity of the social to a false unity).


Link: Ethic to the Other

Whereas the ethics of the "polis" emphasized collectivity and politics (albeit often in an idealist fashion), post-al ethics abandons both. It substitutes "community" for collectivity and emphasizes interpersonal relations and individual differences, in order to evacuate social(structural) contradictions from the scene of theory, and replace them with local ones which can be micro-managed.Ethics today is thus more concerned with managing the effects of growing divisions resulting from the concentration of capital in the hands of the few, and ongoing privatization of all aspects of social life. To be ethical today is to recognize class and other differences but to conclude at the same time that nothing can be done to address these contradictions.Post-al ethics, in short, is a manifestation of the growing cynicism of bourgeois society, resigned to deep inequalities.


A2: Aff=Ethical Relationship

Guarantees only link no link turn—the other is only incorporated to be a new market for capitalism—turning distinct cultures into parts of an autonomous machine

DeFazio, Ph D Candidate in English at Stony Brook Univ, Spring 2003[Kimberly, The Imperialism of “Eating Well”, http://www.redcritique.org/Spring2003/theimperialismofeatingwell.htm]

According to this logic, the ethical subject is one who no longer simply identifies with the self but respects the other by "identify[ing] with the other, who is to be assimilated, interiorized," (283). The self is never single but plural, and indeed the boundary between self and other is continually blurred. And it is precisely this ethical relation to the other that Derrida calls "infinite hospitality" (282): the idea that one gives to the other "infinitely"—without beginning or end, without boundaries or determinants. The "excessiveness" of hospitality in fact becomes even more explicit in Derrida's recent text Of Hospitality, where he writes: "To be what it 'must' be, hospitality must not pay a debt, or be governed by a duty [...] For if I practice hospitality 'out of duty' […] this hospitality of paying up is no longer an absolute hospitality, it is no longer graciously offered beyond debt and economy" (83). Hospitality, I argue, is like "ethics" and "eating well", a trope deployed to exceed class binaries. As Derrida emphasizes, hospitality cannot be the effect of existing relations of material inequality(i.e., to "repay" a social or economic debt); nor can it be "legislated". "Repaying" and "legislating" are textualist codes for the social praxis of changing objective historical structures—codes which are seen as "monolithic" and thus as stopping the play of differences that inherently undermine all attempts at conceptualization. Hospitality, instead, "negotiates" on subjective and local terms the already existing unequal relations among people. It is an act of ethical willfulness that must be

motivated spontaneously, without condition, obligation, or determination. But it is precisely this textual logic of "graciousness" and "hospitality" that enables corporations on the one hand to refuse to pay taxes on their profits—taxes on which working people are forced to rely for social services—and on the other to "donate" large (tax-free) sums to charity (to

be used at the discretion of local administrators). Corporations too are invested in precisely such notions of "hospitality"

because they function outside the "law". Rather than actually opening any space from which to examine the inherent

contradictions of language, Derrida's deconstruction of any connection between the local and the global operates to legitimate the suspension of all social structures such as regulation of the market and eliminates any conception that the state is required to ensure livable wages, support comprehensive healthcare, or to finance advanced educations for the working class. Hospitality is in effect a code, not so much for sophisticated reading, but for economic deregulation. It is the theoretical equivalent of free-trade agreements. That is, it is an ethical ruse for the complete privatization of social resources under imperialism. Derrida's entire argument is based on the assumption that, as he puts it, "one must eat". But in fact many worldwide do not eat , and even more do not "eat well". What appears to be a "beyond" class argument, in other words, is an alibi for the interests of the bourgeois subject, for whom food, like other social resources, is always already available. Not only does the trope of ethical eating naturalize the relation between the haves and the have-nots, but the very

availability of the food "eaten well" by the subject—that is, the conditions under which it is produced—is taken for granted. Derridean ethics,

which claims to resist essentializing social relations by appealing to the textual slippage of social codes, is in actuality a means of defending the interests of the ruling class by removing the ethical act from determination by material conditions.


Link: Postmodern K of Militarism

Poststructuralism’s characterization of the international system by inequalities in military power overlooks historical materialist conditions underlying militarism and war.

Lapointe, 2007(Thierry. "Beyond an Historicism Without Subject: Agency and the Elusive Genealogies of State Sovereignty" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association 48th Annual Convention, Feb 28, http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p180176_index.html)

It becomes clearer, in this context, thathierarchical relations of power in the international system may not solely rest on “objective” inequalities in military might as has been contended.As critical approaches generally argue, these hierarchical relations are themselves shaped through and conditioned by various institutionalised structures of power—material and discursive—that reproduce social relations of domination and subordination between human subjects across time and space. The question of their historical conditions of emergence and transformation appears to be the fundamental one for any critical approach in IR that seeks to avoid what John M. Hobson calls the fallacy of tempo-centrism and chronofetishism (Hobson 2002). Critical scholarship remains deeply divided on the way in which they problematize the relation between power and sovereignty. How to problematise the historical conditions of emergence of discourses and practices of state sovereignty remains a question that still needs to be debated. In this regard, it exists a fundamental line of fracture dividing Poststructuralism and Historical Materialism in their respective ways to theorise the articulation of power relations/dynamics of power with social discourses and social institutions across time and space. This paper seeks to critically explore the way in which Post-Structuralist scholars in IR have approached the question of the historicity of state sovereignty. While acknowledging their contributions in critiquing the a-historical and essentialist foundations of mainstream IR scholarship, it will be argued that the central weakness of Poststructuralism is that by understanding formation and transformation in state sovereignty as expression of shifting discursive paradigms, it tends to evacuate the specific, uneven and differentiated social relations that create the historical conditions for such discourses to emerge. It will be argued that Poststructuralism magnifies the internal coherence

of an epistemic paradigm—discursive rules of an historical era—and downplays the variety of ways in which specific discourses can be mobilized to produce, reproduce and transform different sets of social relations of power by human agents across space in a given historical period. Thus, I argue that Poststructuralism eschews an analysis of the historical process of formation and transformation of forms of knowledge/social power in relations with differentiated forms of institutionalized social practices.


A2: Modernity=Root Cause of Violence

Rejecting modernity and calculative thought lumps together capitalism’s distinct social relations and dehistoricizes the specific conditions enabling racism, colonialism, and the Holocaust

Malik,senior visting fellow at the Department of Political, International and Policy Studies at the University of Surrey, 1996(Kenan, "The Mirror of Race: Postmodernism and the Celebration of Difference," in "In Defense of History," Ed. by E. Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.127-131)

By conflating the social relations of capitalism with the intellectual and technological progress of “modernity,” the product of the former can be laid at the door of the latter. The specific problems created by capitalist social relations become dehistoricized. In postructuralist discourse racial theory, colonialism, or the Holocaust are not investigated in their specificity, as products of distinctive tendencies within capitalist society, but are all lumped together as the general consequence of “modernity.” In this way the positive aspects of “modern” society – its invocation of reason, its technological advancements, its ideological commitment to equality and universalism – are denigrated while its negative aspects – the inability of capitalism to overcome social divisions, the propensity to treat large sections of humanity as “inferior” or “subhuman,” the contrast between technological advance and moral turpitude, the tendencies towards barbarism – are seen as inevitable or natural.


***MPX***


Cap=War

Capitalism is the root cause of war-self interested states pursue economic prosperityChrisHarmon, editor of the Socialist Worker, Economics of the Madhouse p. 90 1995

The only sense in which Marx is 'outdated' is not that the system is more rational than he thought, but rather his picture understates the destructiveness of the system. Capitalists do not merely battle against each other on markets. They also use the state to force rival capitalists to accept their dictates, supplementing economic competition with displays of military prowess. American capitalism seeks to persuade European and Japanese capitalism to accept its dictates by proving that it alone has the power to wage war in the vital oil rich regions of the Middle East; Iranian and Turkish capitalists rely on the help of their states as they compete with each other for influence and contracts in the southern belt of the former USSR; Turkish and Greek capitalists encourage a mini - arms race as each seeks to establish a dominant role in the Balkan countries once controlled by Russia; Germany backs Croatia, the US backs the Bosnian Muslims, and Greece backs the Serbs in horrific wars in former Yugoslavia; the Russian military wage vicious wars to hang on to vital oil pipelines through Chechnya and influence in the Tadjik republic bordering Afghanistan; China, the Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam clash over control of the oil reserves thought to lie close to uninhabited islands in the China Sea; Israel tries to carve Egypt out from economic influence in the Arabian peninsular. The result is that at any point in time there are half a dozen wars or civil wars, using the most horrendous forms of 'conventional' weaponry, in one part of the world or another.


Resist Cap=Key to Ethics

You have an ethical obligation to reject capitalism – it’s costs are beyond calculation

Glyn Daly, Senior Lecturer in Politics in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at University College, Northhampton, Conversations with Zizek p. 14-16 2004

For Zizek it is imperative that we cut through this Gordian knot of postmodern protocol and recognize that our ethico-political responsibility is to confront the constitutive violence of today’s global capitalism and its obscene naturalization/ anonymization of the millions who are subjugated by it throughout the world. Against the standardized positions of postmodern culture – with all its pieties concerning ‘multiculturalist’ etiquette – Zizek is arguing for a politics that might be called ‘radically incorrect’ in the sense that it breaks with these types of positions and focuses instead on the very organizing principles of today’s social reality: the principles of global liberal capitalism . This requires some care and subtlety. For far too long, Marxism has been bedeviled by an almost fetishistic economism that has tended towards political morbidity. With the likes of Hilferding and Gramsci, and more recently Laclau and Mouffe, crucial theoretical advances have been made that enable the transcendence of all forms of economism. In this new context, however, Zizek argues that the problem that now presents itself is almost that of the opposite fetish. That is to say, the prohibitive anxieties surrounding the taboo of economism can function as a way of not engaging with economic reality and as a way of implicitly accepting the latter as a basic horizon of existence . In an ironic Freudian- Lacanian twist, the fear of economism can end up reinforcing a de facto economic necessity in respect of contemporary capitalism (i.e. the initial prohibition conjures up the very thing it fears). This is not to endorse any kind of retrograde return to economism. Zizek’s point is rather that in rejecting economism we should not lose sight of the systemic power of capital in shaping the lives and destinies of humanity and ou r very sense of the possible. In particular we should not overlook Marx’s central insight that in order to create universal global system the forces of capitalism seek to conceal the politico- discursive violence of its construction through a kind of gentrification of that system. What is persistently denied by neo-liberals such as Rorty (1989) and Fukuyama (1992) is that the gentrification of global liberal capitalism is one whose ‘universalism’ fundamentally reproduces and depends upon a disavowed violence that excludes vast sectors of the world ’s population. In this way, neo-liberal ideology attempts to naturalize capitalism by presenting its outcomes of winning and losing as if they were simply a matter of chance and sound judgment in a neutral marketplace. Capitalism does indeed create a space for a certain diversity, at least for the central capitalist regions , but it is neither neutral nor ideal and its price in terms of social exclusion is exorbitant. That is to say, the human cost in terms of inherent global poverty and degraded ‘life chances’ cannot be calculated within the existing economic rationale and, in consequence, social exclusion remains mystified and nameless (viz. the patronizing reference to the ‘developing world’). And Zizek’s point is that this mystification is magnified through capitalism’s profound capacity to ingest its own excesses and negativity: to redirect ( or misdirect ) social antagonisms and to absorb them within a culture of differential affirmation . Instead of Bolshevism, the tendency today is towards a kind of political boutiquism that is readily sustained by postmodern forms of consumerism and lifestyle.


Cap=Bad for Enviro

History proves expansion of capitalism destroys the environment—places profits before environmental sustainability

Hwang, Phd U of Conn, Winter 1999[Sung U-K, Ecological Panopticism: The Problematization of the Ecological Crisis, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3709/is_199901/ai_n8843780]

With these false causalities, the problematization of the ecological crisis, while attending exclusively the urgent predicament,

distracts the attention from the main culprit of ecological pillage. While attracting public gaze to the direst scenes of

ecological disasters, it turns a blind eye to those forces that have effected the plight. It questions neither how the population bomb was created, nor why the ecological equilibrium was destroyed. History proves that when capitalism rushes in, it capitalizes the rivers, forests, mountains, skies, birds, people of the pre-capitalist societies, and even the ideas of nature and culture on the model of the industrial factory. Whether incubated in a pre-

existing society or imposed forcibly from outside, capitalism always disrupts the social mediation of man-nature relations. Its market nexus precludes the reproduction of nature (both physical and human) which are not themselves subject to exchange valuation. Profitability, as the motor of capital, replaces social needs-and ecological sustainability-in determining what to produce and how to distribute. As growth

is the key to raising profits, the system continually engenders the expansion of production, consumption, and waste. The ecological crisis is not a surprising interlude to, but an ongoing process of capitalism.


Cap=NV2L

Life in capitalism not worth living—individuals have a negative view of life looking for more and better things to satisfy them, always living in an uncomplete and dismal state

Mies, formerly Professor in Applied Social Sciences at the Fachhochschule in Cologne, Dec 2006[Maria, Questioning Needs: A Rejoinder to Victor Wallis, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism Vol 17 Iss 4, Proquest]

I agree with Wallis that mainstream environmentalism has reflected on the way human needs are met rather than on the needs themselves. Mainstream ecologists want to solve all problems by new technological inventions; thus, they search for a kind of deus ex machina. But Wallis criticizes my position by saying, that I "simply wish artificial or excessive needs out of existence," that I do not take into account "people's present day starting points . . . which therefore cannot lead towards a realizable political strategy." And he continues: "The process of redefining needs that are experienced at the personal level cannot be the same for everyone . . ." Here I disagree strongly. I follow the Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef in his definition of needs.4 He says that the basic needs are the same for everyone in both poor and rich countries and poor and rich classes. And these basic needs are limited.They include the need for food and drink, shelter, clothing, etc., which he calls subsistence needs. But there are also needs for affection, love, respect, learning, fantasy,

adventure, company, friendship, enjoyment, pleasure, and work. All these needs are universal, and these latter needs I also

include as subsistence needs. Most importantly, Max-Neef distinguishes between needs and satisfiers. Whereas needs as such cannot be increased, satisfiers can. And capitalism has been able to increase satisfiers endlessly. Instead of drinking water when you are thirsty, you want Coca Cola, or beer or some other industrially produced beverage, which you have to buy on the market. I do not try to solve today's ecological problems by a moralistic appeal to people to curb their needs. Rather, I try to make them aware of capitalism's colonization of our deep needs by offering us a limitless amount of satisfiers from all over the world-satisfiers which are all commodities and must be bought. I ask people whether this abundance of industrially produced satisfiers in our global supermarkets has really satisfied them and really made them happy. And I find that increasingly even people from the wealthy classes in both the rich countries and the global South are not happy. That means their real needs are not satisfied. In spite of the wealth all around them, they feel alienated. And without understanding the source of their alienation, they seek ever more new satisfiers. One year when we discussed diese issues before Christmas, one of my students said: "I told my children that this year I shall give them Time to Tell Stories. I shall not buy any toys. And they were very happy." "Time to Tell Stories" is a satisfier that does not cost anything. It is not a commodity. It does not harm nature. But it strengthens human relationships, because it satisfies a whole range of needs of both the children and the mother: the need for attention, for love, for curiosity, adventure, fantasy, and closeness. And both the children and the mother will remember this storytelling time throughout their lives, because it is an unalienated satisfaction of needs. This does not mean that we should not buy anything as satisfiers. But if we keep in mind what we really need, we would look for different satisfiers, and many of them would not be commodities. I call this process "the non-commodified satisfaction of our needs."


***ALT***


Alt Solves Cap

Rejection critical to create space of non-commodified relations—only showing that capitalism isn’t inevitable opens up space for actions outside the system

Adrian Johnston, interdisciplinary research fellow in psychoanalysis at EmoryUniversity. “The Cynic's Fetish: SlavojZizek and the Dynamics of Belief” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society.Vol. 9, Iss. 3 Dec 2004.

Perhaps the absence of a detailed political roadmap in Zizek's recent writings isn't a major shortcoming. Maybe, at least for the time being, the most important task is simply the negativity of the critical struggle, the effort to cure an intellectual constipation resulting from capitalist ideology and thereby to truly open up the space for imagining authentic alternatives to the prevailing state of the situation. Another definition of materialism offered by Zizek is that it amounts to accepting the internal inherence of what fantasmatically appears as an external deadlock or hindrance (Zizek, 2001d, pp 22-23) (with fantasy itself being defined as the false externalization of something within the subject, namely, the illusory projection of an inner obstacle, Zizek, 2000a, p 16). From this perspective, seeing through ideological fantasies by learning how to think again outside the confines of current restrictions has, in and of itself, the potential to operate as a form of real revolutionary practice (rather than remaining merely an instance of negative/critical intellectual reflection). Why is this the case? Recalling the analysis of commodity fetishism, the social efficacy of money as the universal medium of exchange (and the entire political economy grounded upon it) ultimately relies upon nothing more than a kind of "magic," that is, the belief in money's social efficacy by those using it in the processes of exchange. Since the value of currency is, at bottom, reducible to the belief that it has the value attributed to it (and that everyone believes that everyone else believes this as well), derailing capitalism by destroying its essential financial substance is, in a certain respect, as easy as dissolving the mere belief in this substance's powers. The "external" obstacle of the capitalist system exists exclusively on the condition that subjects, whether consciously or unconsciously, "internally" believe in it - capitalism's life-blood, money, is simply a fetishistic crystallization of a belief in others' belief in the socio-performative force emanating from this same material. And yet, this point of capitalism's frail vulnerability is simultaneously the source of its enormous strength: its vampiric symbiosis with individual human desire, and the fact that the late-capitalist cynic's fetishism enables the disavowal of his/her de facto belief in capitalism, makes it highly unlikely that people can simply be persuaded to stop believing and start thinking (especially since, as Zizek claims, many of these people are convinced that they already have ceased believing). Or, the more disquieting possibility to entertain is that some people today, even if one succeeds in exposing them to the underlying logic of their position, might respond in a manner resembling that of the Judas-like character Cypher in the film The Matrix (Cypher opts to embrace enslavement by illusion rather than cope with the discomfort of dwelling in the "desert of the real"): faced with the choice between living the capitalist lie or wrestling with certain unpleasant truths, many individuals might very well deliberately decide to accept what they know full well to be a false pseudo-reality, a deceptively comforting fiction ("Capitalist commodity fetishism or the truth? I choose fetishism").


Alt Prereq to Solve Case

Historical materialism is an indispensable tool for the critical interrogation of language and identity—the affirmative risks being absorbed into the dominant cultural frameFoster, prof. of sociology @ Univ. Oregon, 1996(John, "In Defense of History," in "In Defense of History," Ed. by E. Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.185-193)The weaknesses of postmodernism—from an emancipatory perspective— thus far overshadow its strengths. Missing from Foucault's analysis, like that of postmodernism generally, is any conception of a counter-order to the disciplinary orders described. In the more extreme case of "textual postmodernists"—those postmodernist thinkers like Derrida, as distinct

from Foucault, who deny any reality outside the text—the political and historical weaknesses from a left perspective are even more glaring. By undermining the very concept of history —in any meaningful sense beyond mere story-telling—such theorists have robbed critical analysis of what has always been its most indispensable tool. 18 The denial within

postmodernist theory of the validity of historical cri tique covers up what is really at issue: the denial of the historical critique of capitalism, leading to a convergence between left thought infected by Nietzsche and the dominant liberal "end of history" conception. The danger of such ahistorical or anti-historical views, as E.P. Thompson observed, is that one loses sight not of "reason in history" in some abstract sense, but rather of "the reasons of power and the reasons of money."19 Historical materialism at its best provides a way out of this dilemma. This is not to ignore the fact that Marxism—which has sometimes given rise to its own crude interpretations and historical travesties, as in the case of Stalinism—has frequently been identified with the kind of "totalizations" and "essentialisms" that postmodernist theorists have singled out. As Thompson pointed out in a 1977 essay on Christopher Caudwell, Marxism has sometimes relied on " 'essentialist' tricks of mind," the "tendency to intellectualize the social process"—"the rapid delineation of the deep process of a whole epoch." These are things that the historian (and social scientists in general) should guard against. But to abandon theory and historical explanation entirely in order to avoid "essentialism" and "foun dationalism" is a bit like throwing out the baby in order to keep the bathwater clean . Marx himself provided another model, actively opposing theory (even "Marxist" theory) that purported to be "suprahistorical." In his Theses on Feuerbach, he presented what still ranks as the most thoroughgoing critique of what he called the "essentialist" conception of human beings and nature. Indeed, historical materialism has long engaged in its own self-critique, precisely in order to expel the kinds of "essentialisms," "positivisms," and "structuralisms" that have intruded on the philosophy of praxis itself—-a self-critique that has produced the insights of theorists like Gramsci, Sartre, Thompson, and Raymond Williams.20 These thinkers distanced themselves from the positivistic "official Marxism" that grew out of the Second International and later turned into a caricature of itself in the form of Stalinism. Yet they held firm to the critique of capitalism and their commitment to the struggles of the oppressed. Moreover, these particular examples tell us that if what has sometimes been called "the postmodern agenda"—consisting of issues like identity, culture, and language —is to be addressed at all, this can only be accomplished within a historical context. And here one might openly wonder with

Foucault "what difference there could ultimately be between being a historian and being a Marxist." When placed within a more holistic historical materialist context— ani mated by the concept of praxis —the problems raised by postmodernism look entirely different. As David McNally says, "Language is not a prison-house, but a site of struggle." What the contributions in this volume have in common is the insistence that issues like language, culture, nationality, race, gender, the environment, revolution, and history itself are only effectively analyzed within a context that is simultaneously historical in character, materialist (in the sense of focusing on concrete practices), and revolutionary. Such analyses do not abandon the hope of transcending capitalism, nor of the notion of human progress as a possible outcome of historical struggles. It is said that Nicholas I, Czar of Russia, issued an order banning the word "progress." Today we no longer believe, in a nineteenth century sense, in automatic human progress, embodying some definite content—the idea that the Czar found so threatening. But this does not mean, as the philosopher Michael Oakeshott contended with respect to political activity in the 1950s, that we "sail a boundless and bottomless sea" that has "neither starting-point nor appointed direction" and that our only task is "to keep afloat on an even keel." History—as centuries of struggle and indeed progress suggest—is more meaningful than that. To abandon altogether the concept of progress, in the more general sense of the possibility of progres sive human emancipation, would only be to submit to the wishes of the powers that be. Such political disengagement by intellectuals on the left in the present epoch could only mean one thing: the total obeisance to capital.21The irony of post-modernism is that while purporting to have transcended modernity, it abandons from the start all hope of transcending capitalism itself and entering a post-capitalist era. Postmodernist theory is therefore easily absorbed within the dominant cultural frame and has even given rise recently to texts such as Postmodern Marketing, which attempts to utilize the insights of thinkers like Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, and Baudillard to market goods within a capitalist economy. Perhaps this will be the final destiny of postmodernist theory—its absorption by the vast marketing apparatus of the capitalist economy, adding irony and color to a commercial order that must constantly find new ways to insinuate itself into the everyday lives of the population. Meanwhile, historical materialism will remain the necessary intellectual ground for all those who seek, not to revel in the "carnival" of capitalist productive and market relations, but to transcend them.22


Alt Prereq to Class Conc (A2: Perm Solves Cap)

Only by integrating the 1AC narrative into the ideological frame of materialism can we create counter-hegemonic movements strong enough to effect widespread change-class consciousness is key to unify fractured counter narratives that exist in the squoRosewarne, political economist in the School of Economics and Political Science at the University of Sydney, Dec 2006[Stuart, Socialist Ecology's Necessary Engagement with Ecofeminism, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism Vol 17 Iss 4, Proquest]For O'Connor, herein lies the qualification of the political purchase of the new social movements. "Particularity" defines their politics, whereas in contrast, working peoples are generally less likely to be in a position to quarantine themselves from the impact of the assault on the conditions of production. Working peoples across communities are considered more likely to be touched by the effects of capitalism's contradictions beyond the waged workplace in ways that other social groups are not. As varied as these impacts are, or could be, the effect will manifest as a generalized and more comprehensive erosion of the material well-being of working peoples compared with other social groups. The latter are more likely to feel the effects of "particular" incursions on their well-being. The corollary of this is that the generalized nature of working people's experienceis held to provide a more comprehensive foundatio n both for buildinga political force and for sustaining the unanimity of purpose that is necessary for mounting a challenge to capitalist hegemony . The political import of new social movements is limited, because1) they tend to be formed in response to particular material challenges, 2) their political organization is generally framed specifically to respond to environmental and/or other challenges, and 3) they tend to be form ed in given political spaces. The argument developed by O'Connor in CNS is that the capacity of the movements to forge broadly based and enduring coalitions that seek to build responses to both the first and second contradictions in the struggle against capital's hegemony will necessarily be precarious. It is in this context that the universality of the experience of working peoples is held to provide the most constructive axis around which those social movements campaigning against capitalist hegemony might coalesce . The working class oeuvre, because it is held to extend beyond particular issues and locales, is regarded as the most powerful instrument for marshalling the various oppositional forces, for sustaining the struggle of the coalition of the new social movements, and for assuming leadership in forging a transformative politics.



Case: Identity Ptx No Solve

Rejecting identity as a social construction takes it out of historical and social context, making it appear natural and justifying biological theories of race Malik, senior visting fellow at the Department of Political, International and Policy Studies at the University of Surrey, 1996(Kenan, "The Mirror of Race: Postmodernism and the Celebration of Difference," in "In Defense of History," Ed. by E. Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.112-117)"Poststructuralist thinking," sociologists David Bailey and Stuart Hall have argued, "opposes the notion that a person is born with a fixed iden tity—that all black people , for example, have an essential underlying black identity which is the same and unchanging. It suggests instead that identi ties are floating, that meaning is not fixed and universally true at all times for all people, and that the subject is constructed through the unconscious in desire, fantasy and memory." 1 The reminder that our identities are not naturally given but socially constructed is a useful antidote to the idea that human differences are fixed and eternal. Butby insisting that society is inherently and irreducibly heterogeneous and diverse, and by rejecting any idea of "totality" that might allow us to see the commonalities or connections among heterogeneous and diverse elements, poststructuralist discourse has undermined its own ca pacity to challenge naturalistic explanations of difference. The paradoxical result , I shall argue, is a conception of identity scarcely different from that of nineteenth-century racial theory. The problem can be seen in the very concept of "anti-essentialism" as understood by postmodernist thinkers. Sociologist Ali Rattansi has described anti-essentialism as a "manoeuvre cutting the ground from conceptions of subjects and social forms as reducible to timeless, unchanging, defining and determining elements or ensemble of elements—'human nature,' for example,

or in the case of the social, the logic of the market or mode of production." Rattansi seems at first to define anti-essentialism simply as opposition to an ahistorical understanding of social phenomena, hostile to the idea of timeless or unchanging social forms. But he slides from this

rejection of ahistorical explanation to a repudiation of social "determinants" altogether. He rejects any idea that social forms can be explained by reference to forces or pressures like the "logic of the market" or the "mode of production" which permeate and shape the social order, even if these determinants are con - ceived as historically specific. A non-essentialist understanding of society is apparently one that denies any unifying patterns or processes among the diverse and constantly shifting fragments that constitute society. In other words, Rattansi identifies anti-essentialism with an

insistence on indeterminacy. In this he reflects much postmodern thinking which finds the meaning of social forms not in relations but in differences. But this kind of indeterminacy is precisely the foundation of ahistorical

explanations. How, for instance, can we understand the historical nature of capitalism as a specific social form without identifying the specific determi nants that distinguish it from other social forms, in other times and places? We could argue about whether the "essence" of capitalism should be seen in the logic of the market, in the particular mode of production, in some other aspect, or in some combination of these. But unless we can charac terize the fundamental specificity—the "essence," if you will—of capitalist society, its distinctive "laws of motion" or systemic logic, we cannot distin guish it from other types of societies. How, then, should we analyze race in modern capitalist societies? If we treat race as just an "identity" detached from any specific social determinants, then race becomes not a historically specific social relation but an eternal feature of human society — just as it is in reactionary biological theories of race, in which racial divisions are a natural and permanent necessity. This may seem an odd conclusion to draw from postmodern anti-essentialism, because its roots lie precisely in a hostility to naturalistic explanations of social phenomena, particularly positivism, which reduce social laws to natural laws, treating the laws that govern human relations as quantifiable and permanent, just like the

laws of nature. Because the positivist view of society underpinned nineteenth century racial theories, opponents of racial theory have always been hostile to naturalistic theories of society.


***PERM***


A2: Perm

Mutually exclusive- there is no perm because:a) We PICd out of the way they framed the narrative in the 1AC. We’re impact

turning their methodology-their claims that case is a DA to the alternative’s historical lens proves competition

b) Cross apply any other links-these are all reasons why the implementation of or the rhetoric justifying the plan are incompatible with the alternative

Severance-our links are based on framing-severance is a voting issue because it makes stable neg ground impossible-destroys clash.

***This is uniquely abusive if they don’t defend the policy implications of the plan-this justifies links to parts of the plan that aren’t intrinsic to plan action, like epistemology

The alt solves case and outweighs-means perm isn’t net beneficial and you reject it on face

The direct call to action without the universalist element of our alternative leads to interpassivity which allows capitalism to subsume your movement. SlavojZizek, Senior Researcher at the University of Ljubljana Revolution at the gates p.169- 171 2002

Indeed , since the "normal" functioning of capitalism involves some kind of disavowal of the basic principle of its functioning (today's model capitalist is someone who, after ruthlessly generating profit, then generously shares )arts of it, giving large donations to churches, victims of ethnic or sexual abuse etc., posing as a humanitarian), the ultimate act of transgression is - to assert this principle directly , depriving it of its humanitarian mask. I am Therefore tempted to reverse Marx's Thesis 11: the first task today is Precisely not to succumb to the temptation to act , to intervene directly and Change things (which then inevitably ends in a cul - de - sac of debilitating impossibility: "What can we do against global capital? ") , but to question he hegemonic ideological coordinates. In short, our historical moment is ,till that of Adorno:To the question "What should we do?" I can most often truly answer only with "I don't know." I can only try to analyse rigorously what there is. Here people reproach me : When you practise criticism, you are also obliged to say how one should make it better. To my mind, this is incontrovertibly a bourgeois prejudice. Many times in history it so happened that the very works which pursued purely theoretical goals transformed consciousness, and thereby also social reality . 5If, today, we follow a direct call to act, this act will not be performed in an empty space - it will be an act within the hegemonic ideological coordinates - those who "really want to do something to help people" get - involved in (undoubtedly honourable) exploits like Medecins sans frontieres-,Greenpeace, feminist an d anti - racist campaigns, which are all not only tolerated but even supported by the media, even if they seemingly encroach an economic territory (for example, denouncing and boycotting companies which do not respect ecological conditions, or use child labour-they are tolerated and supported as long as they do not get too close to a certain limit . This kind of activity provides the perfect example of interpassivity: of doing things not in order to achieve something, bu t to prevent something from really happening, really changing. All this frenetic humanitaria n, politically Correct, etc., activity fits the formula of "Let's go on changing something all the time so that, globally, things will remain the same!". If standard Cultural Studies criticize capitalism, they do so in the coded way hat exemplifies Hollywood liberal paranoia: the enemy is "the system", the hidden "organization", the anti-democratic "conspiracy", not simply capitalism and state apparatuses. The problem with this critical stance is not only that it replaces concrete social analysis with a struggle against abstract paranoiac fantasies, but that - in a typical paranoiac gesture - it unnecessarily redoubles social reality, as if there were a secret Organization behind the "visible" capitalist and state organs. What we should accept is that there is no need for a secret " organization-within- an- organization": the "conspiracy" is already in the "visible" organization as such, in the capital system, in the way the political space and state apparatuses work.

Documents

Capitalism k Index (1)