Mukai 8
1NC
1NC
First, legalization reinforces Eurocentric notions of the law that objectify life and enables all
modern violence
Nunn 1997 [Kenneth B. "Law as a eurocentric enterprise." Law & Ineq. 15 (1997): 323. LEXISNEXIS//BlackMagic]
Dichotomous reasoning is a trait of Eurocentricity. n138 Not only are the usual dichotomies found within the law, n139 but the
law itself is one half of
a larger dichotomy. Law is set in opposition to "custom," which is then deemed inferior n140 since it is
produced by habit and not reason. n141 Although European societies have their customs, they are thought to be superior
to non-European societies, which do not have law, at least not in the European sense of the word. The
absence of law in non-Western societies implies the absence of reason. While Western "law" is for the
civilized, non-Western "custom" is for "savages" and "brutes." n142 Thus, dichotomy is central to the
mythology of modern law. To quote Peter Fitzpatrick: Modern law emerges, in a negative exaltation, as universal in
opposition to the particular, as unified in opposition to the diverse, as omnicompetent in contrast to the
incompetent, and as controlling of what has to be controlled ... Law is imbued with this negative
transcendence in its own myth of origin where it is imperiously set against certain "others" who concentrate
the qualities it opposes. n143 The hierarchical structuring n144 of the law is readily apparent. Hierarchy is inherent in the very
notion of positive law, which views law as a command from a superior kkto its inferiors. n145 But both positive and natural law n146 have
order as their first principle. n147 In the Eurocentric mind, law is equal to order. n148 Conse- [*346] quently, law takes
on a transcendent quality - it exists outside of and within the hierarchy it establishes. n149 There can be no
order outside of the law, and law's order is imposed from the top down. Analytic reasoning n150 and extreme rational thought
is also a key part of the law. This can be seen in the way in which court decisions are rendered in the form of some seemingly neutral test. n151 For example, in
Shaw v. Reno, n152 the Supreme Court upheld the challenge of a white voter to North Carolina's legislative
redistricting plan on the grounds that the plan violated his equal protection rights. n153 The Court held that
the majority Black electoral district was a constitutionally impermissible classification on the basis of race
by applying a three-part test. n154 The Court asked whether the state's concentration of a dispersed minority
population in a single district disregarded traditional districting principles including: (1) "compactness," (2)
"contiguity" and (3) "respect for political subdivisions." n155 In Shaw, it was the Court's reference to an
abstracted and allegedly neutral test that enabled it to pick its way through the thickets of racial politics and
determine that the North Carolina legislature's attempt to increase African American political representation
was presumptively unconstitutional. The Court, in an opinion by Justice O'Connor, stated, "We emphasize that these criteria are important not
because they are constitutionally required - they are not - but because they are objective factors that may serve to defeat a claim that a district has been
gerrymandered on racial lines." n156 Here the
Court privileges objectivity, as such, over subjectivity. The Court, however, fails to
establish any connection between [*347] the objective nature of the factors it has chosen and the capability of
those factors to illuminate whether a district has been gerrymandered on racial grounds. n157 It seems the
Court would have accomplished more if it had simply asked the central question posed in the case: "What
role did race play in the decision to create this district?" But such a straightforward approach would not be
recognizable as "legal." The objectification n158 of the law is evident in the way that it is possible to talk about
the law as an active force or separate and autonomous entity in Western societies. This gives rise to the mistaken belief
that there is no law in non-Western societies. n159 In fact there is law, it is simply not objectified to the degree one finds in the West. In African societies
the law is understood as part of the seamless web that binds the community together. n160 It is
inconceivable to think of the law as an object, separate and distinct from custom, culture and morality. n161
Eurocentricity, however, insists on "the elevation of "the objects' in a sense encompassing not just a separate
material thing but also a distinct constellation of action, such as law." n162 [*348] Consequently, to legalize is to
objectify. From there it is a short step to abstraction. n163 Human cooperation, for example, is objectified in the law of
contract. Once objectified, the legal document - the contract - becomes the reality. The contract takes
significance over the social relationships it supposedly represents. n164 It replaces those relationships in the eyes of the court
and becomes the sole or primary basis for the disposition of the case. n165 Although there is some room for the "intent of the parties" in contractual
interpretation, its influence is limited to mediating between the language on the face of the contract and the underlying rules of contract. n166 Another example of
the prevalence of abstraction within the law may be found
in the wide-spread use of such concepts as "consideration" n167 in
contracts or "reasonable doubt" n168 in criminal law. The common law itself is an abstraction. It results from the
restatement of Anglo-Saxon customs in the opinions of English courts. Once so recorded, what was formerly custom is transformed
into a "transcendent entity" - positive law - "operating and elaborated in officially contained systems which
are incompatible with custom, although ... some custom-like modalities, survive." n169 So, instead of referring directly to
custom, common law jurists refer to something derived from it, an abstraction of it. As law relies on abstraction, it also privileges
complexity. Complexity and abstraction go hand in hand. n170 The transformation of English custom into the
common law required a new professional class to navigate its complexity. n171 Indeed, "it was the extraordinary technicality
of the common law that provided lawyers with their claim to expertise and served, by its very artificiality, to distinguish legal reasoning from the "common-sense"
reason of the general populace." n172 Anyone
who has ever looked at a law treatise cannot help but be impressed with
the complexity of European-centered law. There are sections upon sections in any of the great multi-volumes works, such as Wigmore's
Evidence. n173 This complexity is the direct result of the Eurocentric desire to abstract, to rationalize and to
objectify. Finally, Eurocentric law is despiritualized and secular. n174 In fact, European positive law was impossible
to conceptualize until God had been banished from the material world. n175 The creation of the Eurocentric
concept of law was itself a process of desacralization. n176 God was no longer necessary to legitimate postEnlightenment law: Enlightenment replaces God with nature. In terms of the origin myths of modern science, the deific
obstacle to humanity's progress in knowledge is eliminated, constraining superstition gives way to
incandescent truth, man unaided at last dares to know, and so on. n177 The development of the law followed this general
account of the [*350] growth of European science. Positive law was viewed as a science, as the application of rational "laws" of jurisprudence. n178 In the post-
God became "captured by "his'
creation" n180 and positive law and reason reigned supreme. n181 Consequently, there are no bounds on the
Eurocentric rational will. European Man can do what he wants with his law. Within his world, there is no
higher authority than that of the law, which is his own creation. With the creation of the law, the European
male has become a self-policing entity - one that need answer to no other. n182 Thus far, this Article has demonstrated that
what has come to be known as "the law" in Western societies is really a particular social construction that
exhibits cultural attributes peculiar to European and European-derived societies. Law is an artifact of a
Eurocentric culture, and as such it reflects the cultural logic, epistemology, axiology, ontology, ethos and
aesthetic choice of Eurocentric culture. n183 The core attributes of Eurocentricity are readily discernible within the law. But law not only
reflects the [*351] character of Eurocentricity, it carries out the functions of Eurocentricity as well. Law organizes society, and
indeed the world, in ways that make it easier for Eurocentric culture to assert its dominance.
Enlightenment mind, divinity was as subject to these laws as it was to the laws of physics. n179 Thus,
And, the legalization of prostitution doesn’t solve the violence or stigma of prostitution, it
only conceals it behind legitimate state authority
Farley ’06 (Melissa, research and clinical psychologist at Prostitution Research & Education, a San Francisco nonprofit organization. She edited PROSTITUTION, TRAFFICKING, AND TRAUMATIC STRESS in 2003, which
contains contributions from important voices in the field, and she has authored or contributed to twenty-five peerreviewed articles. Farley is currently engaged in a series of cross-cultural studies on men who buy women in
prostitution, and she is also helping to produce an art exhibition that will help shift the ways that people see
prostitution, pornography, and sex trafficking, “Prostitution, Trafficking, and Cultural Amnesia: What We Must Not
Know in Order To Keep the Business of Sexual Exploitation Running Smoothly”,
http://projectrespect.org.au/system/files/FarleyYaleLaw2006.pdf, AO)
The effects of legalized prostitution can be observed in Australia, where researchers have found that it produces a
“prostitution culture”174 with increased illegal as well as legal prostitution, increased presence of organized
crime, increased demand for prostitution, increased child prostitution, and increased trafficking of women
for the purpose of prostitution.175 State sponsored prostitution provides a legal welcome to pimps,
traffickers, and johns.176 But does it protect women? Well-intentioned people are confused about how to address what they intuitively
understand to be the intrinsic harms of prostitution and trafficking. 177 It is misleading when right-to-prostitution advocates and pimps reframe prostitution as a
human rights issue. One organization even proposed that women’s civil rights would be violated if they were denied the “right to work” as a prostitute.178 Laws
against pimping or buying women are seen by sex workers’ rights groups as obstacles to conducting business. Another source of confusion about legal
prostitution is that sex industry advocates appropriate the names of legitimate human rights or public health organizations. Although their names are similar, the
Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women (GAATW) promotes prostitution as sex work, while the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) promotes
the abolition of prostitution.179 Legal
prostitution and decriminalized prostitution are both state-sanctioned
prostitution, but there are differences between them. In legalized prostitution, the state assumes the role of
pimp, collecting taxes and regulating the practice of prostitution. Decriminalized prostitution is a radical
removal of any and all laws regarding prostitution (including laws against pimping, pandering, purchasing,
and procuring) so that the buying and selling of people in prostitution is considered the legal equivalent of
buying candy. Although advocates allege that legalizing prostitution would remove its social stigma, in fact,
women in legalized prostitution are still physically and socially rejected, whether they are in rural brothels
ringed with razor wire or in urban brothels walled-off from the city.180 Zoning of the location of legal or state-tolerated
prostitution is a constant source of legal battles, since no one wants prostitution transactions taking place in his neighborhood. Legalization is not only
ineffective in removing the stigma of prostitution: it also fails to protect women from violence. Legal control of prostitution targets its “outward appearance rather
than the conditions in which women find themselves. On the whole,
governments are far more anxious about public order and
public health than about abuse and violence.”181 Many women in prostitution tell us that legalized prostitution will not make them any safer
than they were in illegal prostitution.182 Thus legal brothels in the Netherlands may have as many as three panic buttons in each room.183 Dutch, South African,
and Australian pimps have commented on the extreme physical violence that johns inflict on women in prostitution, 184 and Australian women in prostitution are
advised to take classes in hostage negotiation.185 When rapes occur, however, women in legal strip clubs are told to keep silence or be fired.186 Women
in
prostitution speak constantly of its violence.187
And, policymaking methods are structured by the assumptions of white, male elites. Their
analysis is predicated on an instrumental rationality that glosses over gender, race, class
and sexuality as being tied to the prevailing relations of power and systemic oppression
Shaw in 2004 (Kathleen M., “Using Feminist Critical Policy Analysis in the Realm of Higher Education: The Case
of Welfare Reform as Gendered Educational Policy”, Journal of Higher Education, Vol. 75, Issue 1, rcheek)
Feminist critical policy analysis has been most clearly articulated in the work of Catherine Marshall, whose two edited volumes both lay out the theoretical and
methodological underpinnings of this approach to policy research and also provide examples of the ways in which it can be used to examine both secondary and
postsecondary education (Marshall, 1997a, 1997b). Feminist critical policy analysis melds critical theory and feminism in a way that is designed to challenge the
traditional, mainstream approaches to policy analysis that have dominated policy research for the last fifty years (Marshall, 1997a). The
methods and
theoretical frameworks that dominate current policy analysis have been developed and implemented by
those in power who, particularly in the world of policy formation and analysis, are overwhelmingly white,
male, and well educated. Thus, traditional policy research has, according to Marshall, reflected the assumptions,
worldview, and values of this group.¶ As is the case with much mainstream research in the social sciences, traditional policy
analysis can be characterized by the following elements. Among the most important are a belief in a single concept of truth (truth
with a capital "T"); the assumption that objectivity on the part of the researcher is both achievable and desirable;
the assumption that all research subjects share the same relationship to their social environment, thereby
rendering such particularities as gender, race, social class, and sexuality unimportant; and the practice of
evaluating women on the basis of male norms (Bensimon & Marshall, 1997, p. 7-8). Since this positivist paradigm is so
widely accepted in the policy world, it allows policy analysts to assume a dispassionate, objective stance
and at the same time encourages the broader policy community to perceive the research enterprise in this
way. Thus, traditional policy analysis will-fully ignores the inherently political nature of all research, and
policy research in particular. As Marshall states, "Traditional policy analysis is grounded in a narrow, falsely
objective, overly instrumental view of rationality that masks its latent biases and allows policy elites and
technocrats to present analyses and plans as neutral and objective when they are actually tied to prevailing
relations of power" (1997a, p. 3).
And, the impact is constant war and violence
Burke in 2007 (Anthony, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at UNSW, Sydney, “Ontologies of
War: Violence, Existence and Reason”, Theory & Event, Volume 10, Issue 2, 2007, pMUSE, cheek)
# At the same time, Kissinger's
hubris and hunger for control was beset by a corrosive anxiety: that, in an era of
nuclear weapons proliferation and constant military modernisation, of geopolitical stalemate in Vietnam, and the emergence and militancy
of new post-colonial states, order and mastery were harder to define and impose. He worried over the way 'military bipolarity' between the
superpowers had 'encouraged political multipolarity', which 'does not guarantee stability. Rigidity is diminished, but so is
manageability...equilibrium is difficult to achieve among states widely divergent in values, goals,
expectations and previous experience' (emphasis added). He mourned that 'the greatest need of the contemporary international system is an agreed concept
of order'.57 Here were the driving obsessions of the modern rational statesman based around a hunger for stasis
and certainty that would entrench U.S. hegemony: For the two decades after 1945, our international activities were based on the assumption that
technology plus managerial skills gave us the ability to reshape the international system and to bring about domestic transformations in "emerging countries". This direct "operational"
concept of international order has proved too simple. Political multipolarity makes it impossible to impose an American design. Our
deepest challenge will be to evoke the creativity of a pluralistic world, to base order on political multipolarity even though overwhelming military strength will remain with the two
Kissinger's statement revealed that such cravings for order and certainty continually confront
chaos, resistance and uncertainty: clay that won't be worked, flesh that will not yield, enemies that refuse to
surrender. This is one of the most powerful lessons of the Indochina wars, which were to continue in a
phenomenally destructive fashion for six years after Kissinger wrote these words. Yet as his sinister, Orwellian exhortation to
superpowers.58
'evoke the creativity of a pluralistic world' demonstrated, Kissinger's hubris was undiminished. This is a vicious, historic irony: a desire to control nature, technology, society and human
beings that is continually frustrated, but never abandoned or rethought. By 1968 U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the rationalist policymaker par excellence, had already
decided that U.S. power and technology could not prevail in Vietnam; Nixon
and Kissinger's refusal to accept this conclusion, to abandon
their Cartesian illusions, was to condemn hundreds of thousands more to die in Indochina and the people of
Cambodia to two more decades of horror and misery.59 In 2003 there would be a powerful sense of déja vu as another Republican Administration
crowned more than decade of failed and destructive policy on Iraq with a deeply controversial and divisive war to remove Saddam Hussein from power. In this struggle
with the lessons of Vietnam, revolutionary resistance, and rapid geopolitical transformation, we are witness
to an enduring political and cultural theme: of a craving for order, control and certainty in the face of
continual uncertainty. Closely related to this anxiety was the way that Kissinger's thinking -- and that of
McNamara and earlier imperialists like the British Governor of Egypt Cromer -- was embedded in instrumental images of
technology and the machine: the machine as both a tool of power and an image of social and political order.
In his essay 'The Government of Subject Races' Cromer envisaged effective imperial rule -- over numerous societies and billions of human beings -- as best achieved by a central
authority working 'to ensure the harmonious working of the different parts of the machine'.60 Kissinger
analogously invoked the virtues of
'equilibrium', 'manageability' and 'stability' yet, writing some six decades later, was anxious that
technological progress no longer brought untroubled control: the Westernising 'spread of technology and its
associated rationality...does not inevitably produce a similar concept of reality'.61 # We sense the rational
policymaker's frustrated desire: the world is supposed to work like a machine, ordered by a form of power
and governmental reason which deploys machines and whose desires and processes are meant to run along
ordered, rational lines like a machine. Kissinger's desire was little different from that of Cromer who, wrote Edward Said: ...envisions a seat of power in the
West and radiating out from it towards the East a great embracing machine, sustaining the central authority yet commanded by it. What the machine's branches feed into it from the
East -- human material, material wealth, knowledge, what have you -- is processed by the machine, then converted into more power...the immediate translation of mere Oriental matter
This desire for order in the shadow of chaos and uncertainty -- the constant war with an
intractable and volatile matter -- has deep roots in modern thought, and was a major impetus to the
development of technological reason and its supporting theories of knowledge. As Kissinger's claims about the West's
Newtonian desire for the 'accurate' gathering and classification of 'data' suggest, modern strategy, foreign
policy and Realpolitik have been thrust deep into the apparently stable soil of natural science, in the hope of
finding immovable and unchallengeable roots there. While this process has origins in ancient Judaic and Greek thought, it crystallised in
into useful substance.62 #
philosophical terms most powerfully during and after the Renaissance. The key figures in this process were Francis Bacon, Galileo, Isaac Newton, and René Descartes, who all
combined a hunger for political and ontological certainty, a positivist epistemology and a naïve faith in the goodness of invention. Bacon sought to create certainty and order, and with it
a new human power over the world, through a new empirical methodology based on a harmonious combination of experiment, the senses and the understanding. With this method, he
argued, we can 'derive hope from a purer alliance of the faculties (the experimental and rational) than has yet been attempted'.63 In a similar move, Descartes
sought to
conjure certainty from uncertainty through the application of a new method that moved progressively out
from a few basic certainties (the existence of God, the certitude of individual consciousness and a divinely
granted faculty of judgement) in a search for pure fixed truths. Mathematics formed the ideal image of this method, with its strict logical
reasoning, its quantifiable results and its uncanny insights into the hidden structure of the cosmos.64 Earlier, Galileo had argued that scientists should privilege 'objective', quantifiable
Such doctrines
of mathematically verifiable truth were to have powerful echoes in the 20th Century, in the ascendancy of
systems analysis, game theory, cybernetics and computing in defense policy and strategic decisions, and in
the awesome scientific breakthroughs of nuclear physics, which unlocked the innermost secrets of matter
and energy and applied the most advanced applications of mathematics and computing to create the atomic
bomb. Yet this new scientific power was marked by a terrible irony: as even Morgenthau understood, the control over matter afforded
by the science could never be translated into the control of the weapons themselves, into political utility and
rational strategy.66
qualities over 'merely perceptible' ones; that 'only by means of an exclusively quantitative analysis could science attain certain knowledge of the world'.65
Finally, vote negative to reject the law. The state is only a fiction. Only the abandonment of
any notion of “legalization” can solve the worst forms of colonial violence
Nunn 1997 [Kenneth B. "Law as a eurocentric enterprise." Law & Ineq. 15 (1997): 323. LEXIS//BlackMagic]
The law supports Eurocentricity through its false universalism and its privileging of the European historical
experience. Eurocentric law presents itself as rational, transcendent, objective, without ideological content
and applicable to all. n211 The law is depicted as a necessity; without it, chaos would reign and civilization
would perish. Consider for example the following comments from a leading American legal historian: The rule of law is one of our culture's most important
concepts and one of the great forces in the history of western civilization... The rule of law meant that there existed a body of rules
and procedures governing human and governmental behavior that have an autonomy and logic of their own.
The rule of law - the rule of rules, if you will - proposed to make all persons equal before a neutral and
impartial authority. Its legitimacy derived largely from the possibility of applying it on a reasoned basis free from the whim and caprice of both individuals
and government [independent of considerations of] social position, governmental office, family of birth, wealth, and race ... n212 [*359] Notwithstanding
such heady rhetoric, the law's autonomy and universality may be brought into question. The law's claim to
universality is merely its thinly disguised cultural chauvinism. This is especially evident in the law's
treatment of the doctrine of precedent, or stare decisis. Stare decisis, or the assumption that the law is best built
piece by piece on the decisions of the past, supposedly guides and shapes the development of the law. n213 It
is assumed that reliance on past precedents gives a greater degree of certainty to legal decisions. n214 But the doctrine of precedent has an
ideological function as well. n215 This can be seen by considering the origins of legal precedents. In commonlaw jurisdictions, the precedents come from England. Thus, a link is established between United States
jurisprudence and England that gives English law priority and elevates it to a special place of privilege in the
decision-making process. n216 Precedent serves to tie United States jurisprudence to its place of origin. n217 If law were truly
universal, then courts in the United States would cast around and choose their precedents from among the
world's best reasoned decisions. By relying solely on English precedents, n218 United States law makes the ideological
assertion that English law - white law - is superior to all others. Looked at objectively, this reverence for the
common law seems bizarre. It is absurd to argue that the historical and cultural developments of English
landholders and peasants are so universal, and so transcendent that they can be called upon to resolve
problems and settle disputes in Nigeria, Ghana or Singapore. n219 This state of affairs is acceptable only if the culture of England is
accepted as a paradigm for all other cultures, everywhere. And English culture can only be accepted as paradigmatic if it is
believed in some way to be superior or "better" than others. In this way, the law becomes an instrument of
cultural hegemony. It celebrates the superiority of European culture in an allegedly multicultural world. This
problem is replicated in any attempt to address law as a discipline, whether one is in a common law or a civil law jurisdiction. To speak of law, one must pay
homage to all the great white thinkers who laid its foundation, or added to its reach: Cicero, Holmes, Pound, Hand, Austin, Rawls, to name but a few. No
matter how illustrious the career of a nonwhite jurist or how well-developed the legal philosophy of nonWestern cultures, they are not so acknowledged. To understand why, one need only consider the essentially
racist character of Eurocentric thought. Racism, Fitzpatrick shows, is the consequence of Eurocentricity's hunger
for dichotomy: n220 "With the creation of modern European identity ... the world was reduced to European terms and those terms were equated with
universality. That which stood outside of the absolutely universal could only be absolutely different to it." n221
Difference, however, can only be tolerated in European culture if it is subsumed in hierarchy. n222 That is what
Eurocentricity does with those it perceives as "other." This is done through the elevation of European standards to the level of
the universal. As European standards are elevated, non-European standards are lowered, n223 a process in which the law plays a central role. Again, to
quote Fitzpatrick: "True' nationalism ... resides with the nations of the West. It sets norms of performance which
other "newer' nations can [*361] seek to achieve but to which they only, so far and in varying degrees,
approximate. These norms exemplified by the West are transcendent and universal yet also specifically
national. So, the use of "objective' criteria, the achievement of a rational and "industrial' culture, "the
establishment of an anonymous, impersonal society,' institutional differentiation and the depersonalization
of power are all values and achievements which can both typify the West yet be universal because of their
ultimate constitution in the negation of what is local and personal, status-ridden, traditional, irrational,
undifferentiated, agricultural, and so on. n224 Over the course of their history, and even to this day, European and Europeandominated countries have shown no hesitancy in imposing their laws and customs on other peoples, usually
on the grounds that indigenous law was inferior. In 1900, President McKinley gave instructions to the Philippine Commission established
to revise the laws of the Philippines, then a colony of the United States. n225 He stated: The Commission should bear in mind, and the people of the Islands
should be made plainly to understand, that there are certain great principles of government which have been made the basis of our governmental system, ... and
that these principles and these rules of government must be established and maintained in their islands for the sake of their liberty and happiness, however much
they may conflict with the customs or laws of procedure with which they are familiar. n226 Thus, law
in European and European-derived
countries was considered to be part of a grand, transcendent tradition. Although it was different and considered superior to the
legal concepts found in the rest of the world, it was also considered universal. And so there was little reason not to export
this "gift," often through force of arms, to the majority peoples of the world. Although the European was liberal with his law,
he was parsimonious with his rights, and this is especially true in regard to the right of self-determination. n227 This potent combination is a
constant feature of European contact with other cultures and thus merits further attention. European
colonizers dominated the majority peoples of the [*362] world, took their land, and destroyed or corrupted their
cultures. n228 Yet these colonizers always proceeded "legally" through treaties or the dictates of international law.
n229 Ani argues convincingly that the European preoccupation with "legalizing" their conquests served the double
purpose of disarming their victims and bolstering the European self-image. n230 A key part of the European
belief system is faith in the linear notion of "progress," n231 the belief that later historical developments are
superior to preceding ones and that the course of human history flows from worse to better. This, in
combination with the European conviction that white culture was superior to the world's other cultures made
European conquest a matter of pride and self-esteem. n232 Their conquests needed to be "legal" in order to
provide the full psychological benefits. In addition, the export of European law was deemed as synonymous with the export of European
"civilization" and thus synonymous with progress: The concept of "codified law" is a definite ingredient of that of civilization;
for with civilization, according to European ideology, comes order and legality assures "lasting order" - not moral
conduct but consistent and predictable conduct. So that the "civilized" way - the European way - is to bring
laws, however forcibly, and the structures of European culture ("civilization") to those whom one treats immorally
and for whom one has no respect. n233 From a pragmatic perspective, then, the law cannot be viewed as a positive force
for change. The law must be viewed for what it is, a necessary component for the extension of white power
around the globe. Although the introduction of law into indigenous societies brought order, it did not - it
could not - bring peace. Instead "law was in the vanguard of what its own proponents saw as a "belligerent
civilization,' bringing "grim presents' with its penal regulation and, in the process, inflicting an immense
violence." n234 Consequently, the best choice for people of color who choose to resist white dominance is to
reject the law, to become "out/laws," since "by refusing to relate to Western order, these individuals [*363] ...
succeed in robbing [Europeans] of a potent tool for psychological and ideological enslavement." n235
1NC
GENDER POLITICS RENDER THE UNIVERSAL CONNECTIONS OF CLASS INVISIBLE,
INDIVIDUALIZING OPPRESSION
HENNESSY (Prof @ SUNY Albany) 2000
[Rosemary, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism, Routledge //wyo-tjc]
As I will argue throughout this book, these and other contradictions are not so disparate as they may seem. Yet the complex social structures and power relations they
span and that undergird the lived reality of late capitalism often remain invisible. This problem of visibility— which includes how we know and recognize certain identities
It is now a given that we cannot
see homosexualtiy as a monolithic or universal identity, and it has become axiomatic
that all sexual identities as they are lived and experienced are intimately inflected by
gender, race, nationality, ability, age. How these markers of difference have shaped lesbian and gay
(a very basic feature of the history of sexual identity)— will be one of the recurring issues in this book .
history and the history of sexuality in general is finally being studied, and in the process many of the cultural presuppositions and
divisions on which the very concept of sexual identity is premised are being questioned . But often this work still leaves
unexamined why the cultural differences that shape identities are organized as they
are, and the relationship between sexual identities and capitalism remains for the
most part an unexplored— even unspeakable— area of inquiry. 1 Against this trend, I begin
with the assumption that the history of sexual identity— in all of the varied ways it has been culturally differentiated and
lived— has been fundamentally, though never simply, affected by several aspects of
capitalism: wage labor, commodity production and consumption. 2 Because the relationship between
capitalism and sexual identity is complex, indirect, and historically variable, and because there is not a readily accessible conceptual vocabulary for explaining these
connections, I give some extended attention to concepts (late capitalism, gendered divisions of labor, ideology, patriarchal structures) that may not seem to be related to
sexual identity in any obvious way. I invite the reader to be patient with these seeming detours. I offer them because I hope they will serve as interventions into the
. Over the course of the past two decades, capital
expansion has increasingly eroded traditional social relations. The drive to
accumulate has drawn more and more women into waged work, more thoroughly
rerouted the state’s provision for human needs into the profit-making sector,
increased the transnational migration of people and capital, extended commodity
marketing farther than ever into the body and the unconscious, and heightened the
manipulation of human needs and desires for corporate profit. In the process, many
of the prevailing structures of family, gender, sexual, and national identity have been
altered. These changes are the effects of the historical condition of late capitalism. 3
power of more obvious and perhaps more compelling ways of seeing
“Late capitalism” is not just a vague abstraction; it is an array of contradictory global and local structural adjustments in the organization of production and consumption
that are altering the way life is lived. These adjustments have registered in the work people do and in the conditions under which they do it, in the state’s relationship to
While phrases like
“contradictory,” “structural adjustments,” and “late capitalism” may seem quite
abstract, the myriad ways they affect people’s lives are in fact concrete, immediate,
and palpable. Under capitalism, most people’s lives are laced with contradictions. For most of us, the contradiction between being “free” to work yet barred
the “private” sector, and in the forms of identity and the ways of knowing that make the world intelligible .
from reaping the full value of our labor is a very basic one, but it may not be the contradiction we experience as the most distressing. In fact, what we experience more
painfully may be the ways this contradiction is both compounded and played out in racist institutional practices, in the shaming effects of homophobia, or in any of the
other oppressive ways difference is made intelligible and translated into strategies of exclusion and abjection. These include mechanisms for closing some people out of
resources like food, housing, education, and health care, as well as the more amorphous but nonetheless vital array of material needs that also comprise one’s ability to
As an example of how identities are
affected by the contradictions of capitalism, we might consider what it means to be a
“woman.” The example of “woman” also indicates the ways sexual identity is sutured
onto hierarchical organizations of gender, even though women are differently positioned in relation to one another and to men.
Women are contradictorily positioned in capitalism as free workers and citizens, yet
devalued as females. For many women, adding to the unpaid value of our wage work is the socially necessary yet unvalued and appropriated labor
thrive— for example, the need to be safe, loved, and treated with dignity and respect .
we perform in feeding, clothing, and educating people in our households, in caring for children, the elderly, and the sick, and in the myriad forms taken by our unpaid and
In many developed and overdeveloped sectors of the world, the
traditional mandate that women serve others is contradicted by capitalism’s
prescriptions that we serve ourselves, be in control, and compete with others as fully autonomous individuals. While most women
underpaid caretaking in the workplace.
share some aspects of this contradictory structural position under capitalism, for many it is compounded by their position within social structures that organize racial
difference or by their position in the working class. Women provide most of the world’s socially necessary labor— that is, labor that is necessary to collective survival—
The
contradiction between the material realities that shape individual lives and our ways
of experiencing them (feeling we are “good” women for the exploited work we do, blaming ourselves when we fail to juggle the pressures to
compete and to serve, etc.) are inevitable in capitalism because capitalism relies on and
continually reproduces ways of knowing and feeling that conceal the exploitative
human relations that the accumulation of profit requires. Capitalism’s contradictory social arrangements affect
but much of it is rendered invisible, both in and outside the value system of commodity exchange, not least of all to women themselves.
societies across the globe differently and unevenly, and yet the ways these effects register and are known— or are distorted— in local communities and individual lives
. Many contradictions are not seen or experienced as local
instances of a global social system because the ways of knowing that are most
available do not allow them to be understood this way. Moreover, the social
mechanisms for keeping capitalism’s structures and abuses invisible are longstanding, widely shared, often unconscious, and very effective.
may often share common patterns
Prostitution is the commodification of bodies through the market system
Ericsson 1980 [Lars O. "Charges against prostitution: an attempt at a philosophical assessment." Ethics (1980): 335-366.JSTOR //BlackMagic]
V. THE MARXIST CHARGE Generally speaking, Marxist opposition to prostitution forms part and parcel of Marxist opposition to capitalism and to the property
and family relations created by it. Harlotry
is regarded as the offspring of class society, and, says Engels, it "is based on
private property and falls with it."7 One of the most refreshing and original features of the Marxist analysis and critique of prostitution is that it is
comparatively free from conventional moralism. At least this is true of the classics, Marx and Engels. Far from morally condemning the courtesan, they put
her on a par with the woman in the holiest of bourgeois institutions, the family: "In both cases [in Catholic and Protestant bourgeois
marriage], however, marriage is determined by the class position of the participants, and to that extent always remains marriage of
convenience. In both cases, this marriage of convenience often enough turns into the crassest prostitution- sometimes on
both sides, but much more generally on the part of the wife, who differs from the ordinary courtesan only in that she does not hire out her body, like a wageworker, on piece-work, but sells it prostitution and wage labor. Thus, for instance, Aleksandra Kollontai contends that
"bargaining over the female body is closely related to the bargaining over female working power. Prostitution
can only finally disappear when wage labor does."9 In a similar vein, a contemporary socialist, Sheila Rowbotham, writes: "Just as
the prostitute gives the substitute of love for money, the worker hands over his work and his life for a daily
wage."'0 What these passages suggest is that the difference between, on the one hand, courtesan and the married bourgeois woman
and, on the other, harlot and wage worker is one of degree and not one of kind. The general condition of women
and wage workers in capitalist society is an inhuman one. The specific condition of the prostitute does not consist in
her being morally depraved or "vicious" but in her being the most degraded and miserable of her class. The strength of the
Marxist analysis is, it seems to me, twofold. First, it resolutely brushes aside the moralistic veil, which lures us to place the
prostitute in a category of her own-a category that creates a barrier between her and ordinary, "decent"
people. Second, it does not regard prostitution as an isolated phenomenon but places it in its socioeconomic context. "To
fight prostitution," says Kollontai, "is to fight the foundations of capitalist society."" To her, prostitution is a tumor on
the unjust and inhuman economic system which is capitalism.
THE REDUCTION OF CLASS TO A NEUTRAL LEVEL AMONG A LIST OF OTHER
OPPRESSIONS DESTROYS THE EMANCIPATORY POTENTIAL OF CLASS TO REACH
ACROSS ALL LINES OF INDENTITY AND FORGE POLITICAL ACTION. CLASS MUST BE
RECOGNIZED AS QUALITATIVELY MORE IMPORTANT—OTHERWISE THE SYSTEM IS
ABLE TO SATISFY DEMANDS ON GROUNDS OF FORMAL EQUALITY
GIMENEZ (Prof. Sociology at UC Boulder) 2001
[Martha, “Marxism and Class; Gender and Race”, Race, Gender and Class, Vol. 8, p. online:
http://www.colorado.edu/Sociology/gimenez/work/cgr.html //wyo-tjc]
There are many competing theories of race, gender, class, American society, political
economy, power, etc. but no specific theory is invoked to define how the terms race,
gender and class are used, or to identify how they are related to the rest of the social
system. To some extent, race, gender and class and their intersections and interlockings have become a mantra to be invoked in any and all theoretical
contexts, for a tacit agreement about their ubiquitousness and meaning seems to have developed among RGC studies advocates, so that all that remains to be dome is
This pragmatic
acceptance of race, gender and class, as givens, results in the downplaying of
theory, and the resort to experience as the source of knowledge. The emphasis on
experience in the construction of knowledge is intended as a corrective to theories
that, presumably, reflect only the experience of the powerful. RGC seems to offer a subjectivist understanding
empirically to document their intersections everywhere, for everything that happens is, by definition, raced, classed, and gendered .
of theory as simply a reflection of the experience and consciousness of the individual theorist, rather than as a body of propositions which is collectively and
systematically produced under historically specific conditions of possibility which grant them historical validity for as long as those conditions prevail. Instead, knowledge
and theory are pragmatically conceived as the products or reflection of experience and, as such, unavoidably partial, so that greater accuracy and relative completeness
can be approximated only through gathering the experiential accounts of all groups. Such is the importance given to the role of experience in the production of
knowledge that in the eight page introduction to the first section of an RGC anthology, the word experience is repeated thirty six times (Andersen and Collins, 1995: 1-9).
I agree with the importance of learning from the experience of all groups, especially
those who have been silenced by oppression and exclusion and by the effects of
ideologies that mystify their actual conditions of existence. To learn how people
describe their understanding of their lives is very illuminating, for "ideas are the conscious expression -real or illusory -- of (our) actual relations and activities" (Marx, 1994: 111), because "social existence determines consciousness" (Marx, 1994: 211). Given that our
existence is shaped by the capitalist mode of production, experience, to be fully understood in its broader social and political implications, has to be situated in the
Experience in itself, however, is suspect because,
dialectically, it is a unity of opposites; it is, at the same time, unique, personal,
insightful and revealing and, at the same time, thoroughly social, partial, mystifying,
itself the product of historical forces about which individuals may know little or
nothing about (for a critical assessment of experience as a source of knowledge see Sherry Gorelick, "Contradictions of feminist methodology," in Chow,
context of the capitalist forces and relations that produce it.
Wilkinson, and Baca Zinn, 1996; applicable to the role of experience in contemporary RGC and feminist research is Jacoby's critique of the 1960s politics of subjectivity:
it is through the analytical tools of Marxist
theory that it can move forward, beyond the impasse revealed by the constant
reiteration of variations on the "interlocking" metaphor. This would require, however,
a) a rethinking and modification of the postulated relationships between race, class
and gender, and b) a reconsideration of the notion that, because everyone is located
at the intersection of these structures, all social relations and interactions are
"raced," "classed," and "gendered." In the RGC perspective, race, gender and class
are presented as equivalent systems of oppression with extremely negative
consequences for the oppressed. It is also asserted that the theorization of the
connections between these systems require "a working hypothesis of equivalency"
Jacoby, 1973: 37- 49). Given the emancipatory goals of the RGC perspective ,
(Collins, 1997:74). Whether or not it is possible to view class as just another system of oppression depends on the theoretical framework within class is defined. If
defined within the traditional sociology of stratification perspective, in terms of a gradation perspective, class refers simply to strata or population aggregates ranked on
the basis of standard SES indicators (income, occupation, and education) (for an excellent discussion of the difference between gradational and relational concepts of
Class in this non-relational, descriptive sense has no claims to being
more fundamental than gender or racial oppression; it simply refers to the set of
individual attributes that place individuals within an aggregate or strata arbitrarily
defined by the researcher (i.e., depending on their data and research purposes, anywhere from three or four to twelve "classes" can be
identified). From the standpoint of Marxist theory , however, class is qualitatively different from gender and race
and cannot be considered just another system of oppression. As Eagleton points out,
whereas racism and sexism are unremittingly bad, class is not entirely a "bad thing"
even though socialists would like to abolish it. The bourgeoisie in its revolutionary stage was
instrumental in ushering a new era in historical development, one which liberated the
average person from the oppressions of feudalism and put forth the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity.
Today, however, it has an unquestionably negative role to play as it expands and
deepens the rule of capital over the entire globe. The working class, on the other
hand, is pivotally located to wage the final struggle against capital and,
class, see Ossowski, 1963).
consequently, it is "an excellent thing" (Eagleton, 1996: 57). While racism and sexism
have no redeeming feature, class relations are, dialectically, a unity of opposites;
both a site of exploitation and, objectively, a site where the potential agents of social
change are forged. To argue that the working class is the fundamental agent of change does not entail the notion that it is the only agent of change.
The working class is of course composed of women and men who belong to different
races, ethnicities, national origins, cultures, and so forth, so that gender and
racial/ethnic struggles have the potential of fueling class struggles because, given
the patterns of wealth ownership and income distribution in this and all capitalist countries,
those who raise the banners of gender and racial struggles are overwhelmingly
propertyless workers, technically members of the working class, people who need to
work for economic survival whether it is for a wage or a salary, for whom racism, sexism and class exploitation matter . But this
vision of a mobilized working class where gender and racial struggles are not
subsumed but are nevertheless related requires a class conscious effort to link RGC
studies to the Marxist analysis of historical change. In so far as the "class" in RGC
remains a neutral concept, open to any and all theoretical meanings, just one
oppression among others, intersectionality will not realize its revolutionary potential.
Nevertheless, I want to argue against the notion that class should be considered
equivalent to gender and race. I find the grounds for my argument not only on the
crucial role class struggles play in processes of epochal change but also in the very
assumptions of RGC studies and the ethnomethodological insights put forth by West and Fenstermaker
(1994). The assumption of the simultaneity of experience (i.e., all interactions are
raced, classed, gendered) together with the ambiguity inherent in the interactions
themselves, so that while one person might think he or she is "doing gender,"
another might interpret those "doings" in terms of "doing class," highlight the basic
issue that Collins accurately identifies when she argues that ethnomethodology ignores power
relations. Power relations underlie all processes of social interaction and this is why
social facts are constraining upon people. But the pervasiveness of power ought not
to obfuscate the fact that some power relations are more important and
consequential than others. For example, the power that physical attractiveness might confer a woman in her interactions with her less
attractive female supervisor or employer does not match the economic power of the latter over the former. In my view , the flattening or erasure
of the qualitative difference between class, race and gender in the RGC perspective
is the foundation for the recognition that it is important to deal with "basic relations
of domination and subordination" which now appear disembodied, outside class
relations. In the effort to reject "class reductionism," by postulating the equivalence between
class and other forms of oppression, the RGC perspective both negates the fundamental
importance of class but it is forced to acknowledge its importance by postulating
some other "basic" structures of domination. Class relations -- whether we are referring to the relations
between capitalist and wage workers, or to the relations between workers (salaried and waged) and their managers and supervisors, those who are placed in
are of paramount importance, for most people's economic
survival is determined by them. Those in dominant class positions do exert power
over their employees and subordinates and a crucial way in which that power is used
is through their choosing the identity they impute their workers. Whatever identity
workers might claim or "do," employers can, in turn, disregard their claims and
"read" their "doings" differently as "raced" or "gendered" or both, rather than as
"classed," thus downplaying their class location and the class nature of their
grievances. To argue, then, that class is fundamental is not to "reduce" gender or
racial oppression to class, but to acknowledge that the underlying basic and
"contradictory class locations," (Wright, 1978) --
"nameless" power at the root of what happens in social interactions grounded in
"intersectionality" is class power.
THE DETERMINISM OF CAPITAL IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE INSTRUMENTALIZATION OF
ALL LIFE—IT IS THIS LOGIC THAT MOBILIZES AND ALLOWS FOR THE OPPRESSIONS
HIGHLIGHTED BY THE 1AC
DYER-WITHERFORD (professor of Library and Info. Sciences at the U of Western Ontario)
1999
[Nick. Cyber Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism.]
For capitalism, the use of machines as organs of “will over nature” is an imperative.
The great insight of the Frankfurt School—an insight subsequently improved and amplified by feminists and ecologists—was
that capital’s
dual project of dominating both humanity and nature was intimately tied
to the cultivation of “instrumental reason” that systematically objectifies, reduces,
quantifies and fragments the world for the purposes of technological control. Business’s
systemic need to cheapen labor, cut the costs of raw materials, and expand consumer markets gives it an inherent bias
toward the piling-up of technological power. This
priority—enshrined in phrases such as
“progress,” “efficiency,” “productivity,” “modernization,” and “growth”—assumes
an automatism that is used to override any objection or alternative, regardless of the
environmental and social consequences. Today, we witness global vistas of
toxification, deforestation, desertification, dying oceans, disappearing ozone layers,
and disintegrating immune systems, all interacting in ways that perhaps threaten the
very existence of humanity and are undeniably inflicting social collapse, disease, and
immiseration across the planet. The degree to which this project of mastery has backfired is all too obvious.
Vote negative to endorse a structural historical analysis of the material conditions
underlying heteropatriarchy
METHOD IS THE FOREMOST POLITICAL QUESTION—GROUNDING SITES OF POLITICAL
CONTESTATION OUTSIDE OF LABOR MERELY SERVE TO HUMANIZE CAPITAL AND
PREVENT A TRANSITION TO A SOCIETY BEYOND OPPRESSION
TUMINO (Prof. English @ Pitt) 2001
[Stephen, “What is Orthodox Marxism and Why it Matters Now More than Ever”, Red Critique, p. online //wyo-tjc]
Any effective political theory will have to do at least two things: it will have to offer
an integrated understanding of social practices and, based on such an interrelated
knowledge, offer a guideline for praxis. My main argument here is that among all contesting social theories now,
only Orthodox Marxism has been able to produce an integrated knowledge of the
existing social totality and provide lines of praxis that will lead to building a society
free from necessity. But first I must clarify what I mean by Orthodox Marxism. Like all other modes and forms of political theory, the
very theoretical identity of Orthodox Marxism is itself contested—not just from non-and anti-Marxists who question the very "real" (by which they
mean the "practical" as under free-market criteria) existence of any kind of Marxism now but, perhaps more tellingly, from within the Marxist
tradition itself. I will, therefore, first say what I regard to be the distinguishing marks of Orthodox Marxism and then outline a short polemical map
of contestation over Orthodox Marxism within the Marxist theories now. I will end by arguing for its effectivity in bringing about a new society
based not on human rights but on freedom from necessity. I will argue that to
know contemporary society—and to
be able to act on such knowledge—one has to first of all know what makes the
existing social totality. I will argue that the dominant social totality is based on inequality—
not just inequality of power but inequality of economic access (which then determines access to
health care, education, housing, diet, transportation, . . . ). This systematic inequality cannot be explained by
gender, race, sexuality, disability, ethnicity, or nationality. These are all secondary
contradictions and are all determined by the fundamental contradiction of capitalism
which is inscribed in the relation of capital and labor. All modes of Marxism now explain social inequalities
primarily on the basis of these secondary contradictions and in doing so—and this is my main
argument—legitimate capitalism. Why? Because such arguments authorize capitalism
without gender, race, discrimination and thus accept economic inequality as an
integral part of human societies. They accept a sunny capitalism—a capitalism
beyond capitalism. Such a society, based on cultural equality but economic
inequality, has always been the not-so-hidden agenda of the bourgeois left—whether
it has been called "new left," "postmarxism," or "radical democracy." This is, by the way, the
main reason for its popularity in the culture industry—from the academy (Jameson, Harvey, Haraway, Butler,. . . ) to daily politics (Michael
Harrington, Ralph Nader, Jesse Jackson,. . . ) to. . . . For
all, capitalism is here to stay and the best that
can be done is to make its cruelties more tolerable, more humane. This humanization
(not eradication) of capitalism is the sole goal of ALL contemporary lefts (marxism, feminism,
anti-racism, queeries, . . . ). Such an understanding of social inequality is based on the
fundamental understanding that the source of wealth is human knowledge and not
human labor. That is, wealth is produced by the human mind and is thus free from the actual objective
conditions that shape the historical relations of labor and capital. Only Orthodox
Marxism recognizes the historicity of labor and its primacy as the source of all
human wealth. In this paper I argue that any emancipatory theory has to be founded on
recognition of the priority of Marx's labor theory of value and not repeat the
technological determinism of corporate theory ("knowledge work") that masquerades as
social theory.
Systematic Violence
The sex industry is inherently violent and patriarchal. Their valorizing acceptance of
prostitution empties sexuality of eros and turns the aff
Faber 04 [Alyda, B.A., M.A., B.Th., M.Div., Ph.D Theology Associate Professor of Christian Theology and Ethics at
The Atlantic School of Theology “Eros and Violence” Feminist Theology 2004 12: 319 The Continuum Publishing
Group http://fth.sagepub.com/content/12/3/319.full.pdf+html c.shack]
Like many theories of violence, Carter Heyward’s Touching Our Strength is a return to human beginnings. Key to her theology is Martin Buber’s phrase, ’In
the
beginning is the relation’. Relation is the primordial and essential good in human life that may be
experienced as a sensual and immediate kind of knowing. From the shore of a possible return to our relational beginnings, Heyward
recounts the phantasie of feminist eros as a vision of profound yearning. This phantasie is utopian, and bears
expectant hope for material changes in a society riven by forms of violence : alienation, dispassion,
domination, submission, broken bonds. The formations of the shore where Heyward stands provokes her frustrations and her longings. In
the patriarchal, capitalist, heterosexist, misogynistic, and racist culture in which she finds herself, violence
and sexuality are confused in bodies and their practices. This culture accentuates boundaries as barriers
between discrete monadic and autonomous selves. Crossing these boundaries takes the form of male
domination and female submission, his ’power-over’ complimented by her ’power-under’. The word Heyward uses
most often to describe the social context of sexual violence is ’perversion’. She writes, ’to pervert is to turn something completely around
from itself. Sexual perversion is the complete twisting, the total misconstruction of erotic power’.9 A dictionary
definition may clarify some of Heyward’s connotations of the perversions of erotic power challenged by her elaboration of
erotic power as a moral good and the love of God: ’Disposed to be obstinately contrary to what is true or
good or to go counter to what is reasonable or required’ (OED). The ’praxis of death’1° that Heyward witnesses in
contemporary society (and in much of Christian theology) involves sadomasochism, antieroticism,
pornography, and erotophobia. It is a praxis turned away from the ’life force’ of erotic power in mutual
relation, and which takes the form of ’death-dealing distortions of what is real and good, of what is
possible’.11 This praxis reaches the depths of our personal and social existence, forming our physical,
spiritual and emotional being, through practices in which sex and violence mingle in dangerous embodied
confusion.12 We are socialized into these structures of alienated power, and restoration from such a
pervasive social evil requires ’revolutionary transformation’.13 This revolutionary transformation is anticipated through Heyward’s
model of eros, the ultimacy and dynamism of which immediately brings into question the pervasiveness of human formation through structures of perverted
sexual violence. Feminist
eros, for Heyward, represents a common good and a common vision, a testament of faith
that the good can be experienced in the sensual and erotic, and can energize justice seeking within social
alignments of power. Feminist eros, as an embodied expression of the goodness of God, unites the
intellectual, the physical, and the spiritual. By drawing the power of God within configurations of human
flesh, Heyward celebrates human efforts in the co-creation of goodness and justice in the world. A profound
experience of ’our bodyselves’ discovers a renewed hopefulness, an openness to flourishing in human life,
that she calls prayer. Heyward expresses this radical possibility as an invocation that takes the form of a prayer, not to God, but rather to human
capacities for receptiveness to growth and flowering: And you whose spirits are sad or unsure, try to remember the very best
parts of your life, the loveliest feelings in your bodyself, occasions of bold delight and quiet confidence,
moments of unambivalent commitment and unrestrained joy. Try to remember when you have believed
passionately in something or someone, human or divine. Try to imagine that someone now believes in you
because she trusts your loveliest feelings...commitments...confidence...joy... She comes in the knowledge
that together you, she, and others embody a moving image of sacred power, a fresh wellspring of relational
integrity.14
The sensationalized image of a prostitute sanitizes the horrific exploitation and misogyny
experienced by prostitutes and re-entrenches the violence done to them.
Fitzgerald 13 Laura is a leading Socialist Party organiser in Dublin, and an activist with ROSA, a pro-choice, anti-sexist campaign and discussion group
initiated by female members of the Socialist Party. A socialist perspective on the sex industry & prostitution. http://socialistparty.ie/2013/08/a-socialistperspective-on-the-sex-industry-a-prostitution/ {Shoell}
Media promotion of the sanitised ‘Belle de Jour’ image of a so-called high-class prostitute who is deeply
empowered is an anathema to the experiences of most prostitutes and bears no relation to their lives. The
promotion of this vision of prostitution is part of a backlash, minimising and even denying the continued
existence of the oppression of women in society and consciously aiming to sanitise a deeply sexist and
exploitative industry. If there was no question of a power gap between men and women, if women’s oppression was no longer a factor in society, if it
wasn’t the case that we live in a world that’s motivated by the quest for profits with those in power willing to commodify all in this pursuit, including sex and
women’s bodies, then perhaps we could believe the propaganda. Rachel Moran, Irish survivor of prostitution and author of Paid For: My Journey Through
Prostitution has very articulately challenged the myth of the ‘happy hooker’: The
first step to being a happy hooker is, of course,
consenting to be one. Consent to prostitution is viewed as a one-dimensional thing; in reality, it is anything
but… I have never come across an example of prostitution in any woman’s life that was not an attempt to get
out of a situation, rather than to get into one. In other words, the plethora of women I met over the years
were attempting to remove themselves from financial problems; not simply because they’d developed a penchant for expensive
handbags. The assumption of choice leads to the conclusion of consent, but choice and consent are erroneous
concepts here. Their invalidity rests on the fact that a woman’s compliance in prostitution is a response to
circumstances beyond her control, and this produces an environment which prohibits even the possibility of
true consent. There is a difference between consent and reluctant submission.
Data from the Netherlands spanning several years show consistent increases in human
trafficking that can only be attributed to result from legalizing prostitution.
James 12 [Marinova, Nadejda K. and Patrick James. (2012) The Tragedy of Human Trafficking: Competing
Theories and European Evidence. Foreign Policy Analysis, doi: 10.1111/j.1743-8594.2011.00162.x, BM]
Trafficking data from the Netherlands in Table 2 reveal an increase in victim numbers. The victims in 1998 and
1999, before legalization, are 228 and 287, respectively. The following years reveal no number lower than 257, in 2003. Finally,
for 2004, the number reaches 405. Data for 2006, 2007, and 2008 show a clear increase. The number of victims for
2008 is 3.6 times that in 1998. Additionally, for 2004–2008, the number of victims more than doubled, from 405
in 2004 to 826 in 2008. There is a twofold possible interpretation for this data: (1) there is an increase in the number of victims
trafficked into the Netherlands or, alternatively (2) when brothels are legal, there is increased police enforcement, and therefore,
the number of victims of trafficking discovered and registered is higher (Daalder 2007). The information shows a rising number of
investigations, which for 1998–2004 grew from 14 to 60. Nonetheless, investigations are not keeping pace with the
growth in victim numbers, which contradicts the argument about effective police activity.
Empirical concludes that legalizing prostitution increases trafficking and doesn’t result in
higher transparency
James 12 [Marinova, Nadejda K. and Patrick James. (2012) The Tragedy of Human Trafficking: Competing
Theories and European Evidence. Foreign Policy Analysis, doi: 10.1111/j.1743-8594.2011.00162.x, BM]
What can be said of the preceding cases, individually and collectively? Swedish policy epitomizes an abolitionist approach in
both domestic and foreign policy. While quantitative data are scarce, interview information with law enforcement officers and
traffickers in Sweden points toward the importance of state action in the policy and law enforcement realm. Swedish police
reports also underline that, in combating trafficking, the efforts and priority specifically accorded to the problem are crucial (NCID
2009:5). Research on the Netherlands and Germany finds that legalization of prostitution does lead to an
increase in trafficking. Thus, based on the comparative country studies, the implications of the abolitionist and
repressive theories for trafficking are confirmed. The data also challenge the laborist approach with regard
to its argument that legalization results in increased transparency and discovery of more trafficking victims.
It is concerted state action, in terms of adoption of an anti-trafficking legal framework, as well as active law enforcement, that
prove most important for combating trafficking. Overall, we conclude that legalization of prostitution does lead to an
increase in trafficking. However, swift, effective, and consistent law enforcement, as in the case of Germany, can reverse
that trend. Alternatively, when law enforcement efforts are insufficient, as in the Netherlands, the number of trafficking
victims continues to increase after that legalization. More intensive measures on the part of the Dutch state have been
seen in the past 2 or 3 years, yet strong law enforcement and consistency over time will be required to adequately curb this
trafficking increase. The secondary cases of Belgium, Greece, and Switzerland (see online Appendix for these cases in
addition to Norway and Iceland), all of which have legalized brothels, also indicate, based on the (limited) available data, that
legality of prostitution means higher trafficking. The preliminary information on Norway (which, like Sweden, has an
abolitionist regime) also appears to point out that outlawing the purchase of sex curbs trafficking. Our conclusions are in line with
the findings of the UNODC, which regarding human trafficking worldwide, underscores that progress is determined by individual
national initiative and that most of the trafficking convictions come from a few countries that undertake such initiatives (UNODC
2009a:9).
Doesn’t solve the double standard, empirics prove compulsory testing of women but never
men
Jeffreys ‘09 (Sheila, “The Industrial Vagina: The political economy of the global sex trade”, Book, Chapter 8, p.
173-197, AO)
Lie explains that prostitution
does not occur simply from ‘men’s sexual desires or “deviant” women’s willingness
to offer sex for money’ but from ‘the underlying structural conditions and concrete organizations’. After the end of
‘feudal relations’, ‘modern’ prostitution requires the ‘regulating or administrative state, urbanization and the
commodification of social life’. In fact, he points out, the state needs to play an active role because ‘prostitution usually entails organizations – be
it the state or private sexual entrepreneurs – to sustain relations of sexual exchange between prostitutes and their clients’ (Lie, 1997, p. 260). The history of
prostitution demonstrates that whilst some states, like Japan, set up licensed prostitution systems to service male citizens, others merely tolerated prostitution as
a ‘necessary evil’ through discriminatory legislation and practice in which male buyers were protected and women were persecuted (Frances, 2007). This was
effected through the
Contagious Diseases Acts, for instance, in the 19th century in the UK and Australia that
forced women suspected of being prostituted to undergo examination for venereal diseases and to be
incarcerated in lock hospitals if found to be infected (Jeffreys, 1985a). With the modernization of patriarchy in the
20th century in western states, more efficiency, and thus the legalization of the delivery of male sexual
privileges, was required. In legalized brothel systems today the women are assumed to be a threat to public
health, and once more compulsorily inspected, whilst the male buyers are exempt. This practice of compulsory
examination of women, but not male buyers, was identified by feminists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as one aspect of the ‘double standard’ in relation
to sexuality (Jeffreys, 1985a). This
‘double standard’ is the basis of legalization and toleration, in which women are
rostered on in warehouse brothels to service men’s sexual pleasures while the state benignly oversees or
looks the other way. Sequestration of ‘fallen’ women from ‘pure’ women has been, and continues to be,
necessary to the continuation of this double standard, which separates out women who may be treated as
the common property of all men from those whose bodies are the private perquisite of their male partners.
Solvency
Prostitute has negative connotations and is stigmatizing.
Ehrlich ’12 (Richard S., reported news for international media from Asia since 1978, based in Hong Kong, New
Delhi and now Bangkok, also co-author of a nonfiction book of investigative journalism titled: "Hello My Big Big
Honey!" Love Letters to Bangkok Bar Girls and Their Revealing Interviews, The Washington Times, “U.N. report calls
for decriminalizing prostitution”, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/oct/24/un-report-calls-decriminalizingprostitution/?page=1, AO)
The report also called for euphemisms. "The terms 'prostitution' and 'prostitute' have negative connotations
and are considered by advocates of sex workers to be stigmatizing," said the 210-page report, authored by
Australian human rights lawyer John Godwin. "The term 'sex work' is preferred," said the report, issued by
the UNDP, the U.N. Population Fund, the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and several
nongovernmental organizations across Asia. New Zealand and Australia's New South Wales province are
models of how decriminalization of prostitution boosted condom use and slowed the spread of HIV, resulting
in "extremely low or nonexistent" transmission of sexual diseases among prostitutes, said the report. "I would
like to be a sex worker in New Zealand," said Mandeep Dhaliwal, director of the UNDP's HIV, Health and
Development Practice, when asked which countries in Asia were the best places for them to earn a living as a
prostitute. Thailand is also a relatively safe place to be a prostitute. Although prostitution is illegal, authorities usually
ignore the sex trade, enabling many upmarket Thai and foreign sex workers to enjoy higher wages, cleaner
environments and less hassle compared with elsewhere in Asia, said Chantawipa Apisuk, who directs Empower, a
Thai foundation led by prostitutes. "In Thailand, although it's illegal, it's still open, and a lot of people, my friends, are
working," she added. Sex workers should enjoy the same labor conditions as factory workers or entertainers,
said Ms. Chantawipa, who wore a T-shirt emblazoned with her favorite slogan: "Good girls go to heaven. Bad girls
go everywhere." The report also studied call girls, street walkers and brothels and found that, in many Asian
countries, they were "illegal, illegal, illegal," said the report. Problems are exacerbated when reformers and
authorities voice shrill warnings about human-trafficking and forcibly "rescue" prostitutes who do not want to be
"saved," the report said. "The language of some international and regional instruments have either implied a
strong link between trafficking and sex work, or conflated these concepts," it said, referring to local laws,
international agreements and other formal legal arrangements.
Legalization of prostitution continues the violence the 1AC criticizes
Jeffreys ‘09 (Sheila, “The Industrial Vagina: The political economy of the global sex trade”, Book, Chapter 8, p.
173-197, AO)
In the post-World War II period, in response to a considerable campaign by feminist activists and abolitionist organizations to end state regulation of prostitution
and the base it provides for trafficking, both states which had signed up to the 1949 Convention against Trafficking in Persons and those which did not, closed
the brothels they had previously regulated or tolerated (Jeffreys, 1997). But in
the last 20 years, a campaign for legalization by sex
industry lobby groups has caused a normalization of prostitution and an acceptance by many states that it
should be treated as a legitimate business and state regulated once more. The policies of legalizing or
decriminalizing brothels have been suggested as cures for many of the other social harms that prostitution
brings in its train, besides the trafficking in women. These touted benefits do not eventuate. As Janice Raymond of
CATW puts it: ‘The alleged benefits of legalizing/decriminalizing prostitution sound a lot like the promised land
of trickle-down economics’ (Raymond, 2004, p. 1184). In states that ‘legalize’, the ordinary buying and selling of
sexual access to prostituted women is usually already legal and remains unchanged by ‘legalization’. Only
certain activities that are associated with prostitution have usually been subject to penalty, such as solicitation in the street by prostituted women and/or the male
buyers, and the extraction of third party profits from prostitution, known as pimping, ‘living off the earnings of prostitution’ or brothel keeping. There is usually no
decriminalization of street prostitution. All
that gets legalized is pimping, through the acceptance of a small minority of
brothels as legitimate businesses and the requirement that they apply for licences to operate. Most of the
industry of prostitution remains illegal, but the foundation is created for the industrialization of prostitution.
This is the system in the states of Victoria and Queensland in Australia (M. Sullivan, 2007).
Legalization decriminalization of prostitution does not enhance women’s choice.
Raymond ‘3 (Janice G., radical lesbian feminist activist known for her work against violence, sexual exploitation
and the "medical abuse" of women, she is also the author of five books and multiple articles, translated into several
languages, on issues ranging among transsexualism, violence against women, women’s health, feminist theory and
bio-medicine. She has published numerous articles on prostitution and sex trafficking, “Ten Reasons for Not
Legalizing Prostitution and a Legal Response to the Demand for Prostitution”, Journal of Trauma Practice, 2, 2003:
pp. 315-332; and in Prostitution, Trafficking and Traumatic Stress. Melissa Farley (Ed.). Binghamton: Haworth Press)
AO
Most women in prostitution did not make a rational choice to enter prostitution from among a range of other
options. They did not sit down one day and decide that they wanted to be prostitutes. They did not have other real options such as medicine, law, nursing or
politics. Instead, their “options” were more in the realm of how to feed themselves and their children. Such choices are better termed survival
strategies. Rather than consenting to prostitution, a prostituted woman more accurately complies with the
extremely limited options available to her. Her compliance is required by the fact of having to adapt to
conditions of inequality that are set by the customer who pays her to do what he wants her to do. Most of the
women interviewed in the studies authored by Raymond et al. reported that choice in entering the sex industry could only be discussed in the context of a lack of
other options. Many described prostitution as their last choice, or as an involuntary way of making ends meet (Raymond et al., 2001; Raymond et al., 2002). In
one study, 67%
of a group of law enforcement officials expressed the opinion that women did not enter
prostitution voluntarily. Similarly, 72% of social service providers did not think that women voluntarily
choose to enter the sex industry (Raymond et al 2001, p. 91). The distinction between forced and voluntary
prostitution is precisely what the sex industry is promoting because it will give the industry more legal
security and market stability if this distinction can be utilized to legalize prostitution, pimping and brothels.
Women who consider bringing charges against pimps and perpetrators will bear the burden of proving that they were “forced.” How will marginalized
women ever be able to prove coercion? If prostituted women must prove that force was used in recruitment
or in their “working conditions,” very few women in prostitution will have legal recourse, and very few
offenders will be prosecuted. Women in prostitution must continually lie about their lives, their bodies, and
their sexual responses. Lying is part of the job definition when the customer asks, “did you enjoy it?” The
very edifice of prostitution is built on the lie that “women like it.” Some prostitution survivors have stated that it took them years
after leaving prostitution to acknowledge that prostitution wasn’t a free choice because to deny their own capacity to choose was to deny themselves. There
is no doubt that a small number of women say they choose to be in prostitution, especially in public
contexts orchestrated by the sex industry. In the same way, some people choose to take dangerous drugs
such as amphetamine. However, even when some people consent to use dangerous drugs, we still recognize
that is harmful to them, and most people do not seek to legalize amphetamine. In this situation, it is harm to the
person, not the consent of the person that is the governing standard. A 1998 International Labor Organization (United Nations
ILO) report suggested that the sex industry be treated as a legitimate economic sector, but still found that …prostitution is one of the most alienated forms of
labour; the surveys [in 4 countries] show that women worked ‘with a heavy heart,’ ‘felt forced,’ or were ‘conscience-stricken’ and had negative self-identities. . A
significant proportion claimed they wanted to leave sex work [sic] if they could (Lim, 1998, p. 213). When
a woman remains in an abusive
relationship with a partner who batters her, or even when she defends his actions, concerned people now
understand that she is not there voluntarily. They recognize the complexity of her compliance. Like battered
women, women in prostitution may deny their abuse if they are not provided with meaningful alternatives.
2NC
And, roleplaying a state policymaker colludes with an imperialist agenda that maintains
status quo power, privilege, and oppression by distancing debaters from real world
participation in the political contexts we debate about.
Reid-Brinkley in 2008
(Dr. Shanara Reid-Brinkley, University of Pittsburgh Department of Communications, “THE HARSH REALITIES OF
“ACTING BLACK”: HOW AFRICAN-AMERICAN POLICY DEBATERS NEGOTIATE REPRESENTATION THROUGH
RACIAL PERFORMANCE AND STYLE” 2008)
Mitchell observes that the stance
of the policymaker in debate comes with a “sense of detachment associated with
the spectator posture.”115 In other words, its participants are able to engage in debates where they are able to
distance themselves from the events that are the subjects of debates. Debaters can throw around terms like
torture, terrorism, genocide and nuclear war without blinking. Debate simulations can only serve to distance
the debaters from real world participation in the political contexts they debate about. As William Shanahan remarks:
…the topic established a relationship through interpellation that inhered irrespective of what the particular political affinities of the debaters were. The relationship
was both political and ethical, and needed to be debated as such. When
we blithely call for United States Federal Government
policymaking, we are not immune to the colonialist legacy that establishes our place on this continent. We
cannot wish away the horrific atrocities perpetrated everyday in our name simply by refusing to
acknowledge these implications” (emphasis in original).116 118 The “objective” stance of the policymaker is an
impersonal or imperialist persona. The policymaker relies upon “acceptable” forms of evidence, engaging in
logical discussion, producing rational thoughts. As Shanahan, and the Louisville debaters’ note, such a stance is integrally
linked to the normative, historical and contemporary practices of power that produce and maintain varying
networks of oppression. In other words, the discursive practices of policy-oriented debate are developed within,
through and from systems of power and privilege. Thus, these practices are critically implicated in the
maintenance of hegemony. So, rather than seeing themselves as government or state actors, Jones and Green choose to perform themselves in
debate, violating the more “objective” stance of the “policymaker” and require their opponents to do the same.
Their method reproduces exceptionalist violence and oppression. Vote negative to join a
revolution in debate capable of instigating the critical consciousness necessary to avert
immanent global disaster.
Spanos in 2004
(William V., professor @ Binghamton, printed in Joe Millers’ book “Cross-X” (pg. 467) 2004 and on edebate)
Dear Joe MIller, Yes, the statement about the American debate circuit you refer to was made by me, though some years ago. I strongly believed then --and still
do, even though a certain uneasiness about "objectivity" has crept into the "philosophy of debate" -- that
debate in both the high schools and colleges in this
assumed to take place nowhere, even though the issues that are debated are profoundly historical, which
means that positions are always represented from the perspective of power, and a matter of life and death. I find
it grotesque that in the debate world, it doesn't matter which position you take on an issue -- say, the United States'
unilateral wars of preemption -- as long as you "score points". The world we live in is a world entirely
dominated by an "exceptionalist" America which has perennially claimed that it has been chosen by God or
History to fulfill his/its "errand in the wilderness." That claim is powerful because American economic and
country is
military power lies behind it. And any alternative position in such a world is virtually powerless. Given this
inexorable historical reality, to assume, as the protocols of debate do, that all positions are equal is to efface
the imbalances of power that are the fundamental condition of history and to annul the Moral authority
inhering in the position of the oppressed. This is why I have said that the appropriation of my interested work on education and empire to this
transcendental debate world constitute a travesty of my intentions. My scholarship is not "disinterested." It is militant and intended
to ameliorate as much as possible the pain and suffering of those who have been oppressed by the
"democratic" institutions that have power precisely by way of showing that their language if "truth," far from
being "disinterested" or "objective" as it is always claimed, is informed by the will to power over all manner
of "others." This is also why I told my interlocutor that he and those in the debate world who felt like him should call into question the
traditional "objective" debate protocols and the instrumentalist language they privilege in favor of a concept
of debate and of language in which life and death mattered. I am very much aware that the arrogant neocons who now saturate
the government of the Bush administration -- judges, pentagon planners, state department officials, etc. learned their "disinterested"
argumentative skills in the high school and college debate societies and that, accordingly, they have become
masters at disarming the just causes of the oppressed. This kind leadership will reproduce itself (along with
the invisible oppression it perpetrates) as long as the training ground and the debate protocols from which it
emerges remains in tact. A revolution in the debate world must occur. It must force that unworldly world
down into the historical arena where positions make a difference. To invoke the late Edward Said, only such a
revolution will be capable of "deterring democracy" (in Noam Chomsky's ironic phrase), of instigating the secular critical
consciousness that is, in my mind, the sine qua non for avoiding the immanent global disaster towards
which the blind arrogance of Bush Administration and his neocon policy makers is leading.
State-centricity makes critical understanding of the world impossible.
Shampa Biswas, Professor of Politics at Whitman College, December 2007, “Empire and Global Public
Intellectuals: Reading Edward Said as an International Relations Theorist,” Millennium: Journal of International
Studies, Vol. 36, No. 1, p. 125-126
In making a case for the exilic orientation, it
is the powerful hold of the nation-state upon intellectual thinking that Said
most bemoans. 31 The nation-state of course has a particular pride of place in the study of global politics. The state-centricity of
International Relations has not just circumscribed the ability of scholars to understand a vast ensemble of
globally oriented movements, exchanges and practices not reducible to the state, but also inhibited a critical
intellectual orientation to the world outside the national borders within which scholarship is produced. Said
acknowledges the fact that all intellectual work occurs in a (national) context which imposes upon one’s intellect
certain linguistic boundaries, particular (nationally framed) issues and, most invidiously, certain domestic
political constraints and pressures, but he cautions against the dangers of such restrictions upon the
intellectual imagination. 32 Comparing the development of IR in two different national contexts – the French and the German ones – Gerard Holden
has argued that different intellectual influences, different historical resonances of different issues, different domestic exigencies shape the discipline in different
contexts. 33 While this is to be expected to an extent, there is good reason to be cautious about how scholarly sympathies are expressed and circumscribed
when the reach of one’s work (issues covered, people affected) so obviously extends beyond the national context. For scholars of the global, the (often
unconscious) hold of the nation-state can be especially pernicious in the ways that it limits the scope and range of the intellectual imagination. Said argues that
the hold of the nation is such that even intellectuals progressive on domestic issues become collaborators of empire when it comes to state actions abroad. 34
Specifically, he critiques nationalistically based systems of education and the tendency in much of political commentary to frame analysis in terms of ‘we’, ‘us’
and ‘our’ - particularly evident in coverage of the war on terrorism - which automatically sets up a series of (often hostile) oppositions to ‘others’. He
points
in this context to the rather common intellectual tendency to be alert to the abuses of others while remaining
blind to those of one’s own. 35
Agency can only be articulated in opposition to the restrictive structuralisms of the status
quo—in other words, we can claim our agency only by rejecting the state-centric view of
politics.
Bleiker, 00 Ph.D. visiting research and teaching affiliations at Harvard, Cambridge, Humboldt, Tampere, Yonsei
and Pusan National University as well as the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and the Institute of Social Studies
in The Hague,(Roland, Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics, Cambridge University Press)
Questions of agency have been discussed extensively in international theory, mostly in the context of the
so-called structure—agency debate. Although strongly wedded to a state-centric view, this debate
nevertheless evokes a number of important conceptual issues that are relevant as well to an understanding of transversal
dynamics. The roots of the structure—agency debate can be traced back to a feeling of discontent about how traditional approaches to international theory have
dealt with issues of agency. Sketched in an overly broad manner, the point of departure looked as follows: At one end of the spectrum were neorealists, who
explain state identity and behaviour through a series of structural restraints that are said to emanate from the anarchical nature of the international system. At the
other end we find neoliberals, who accept the existence of anarchy but seek to understand the behaviour of states and other international actors in terms of their
individual attributes and their ability to engage in cooperative bargaining. If pushed to their logical end-point, the two positions amount, respectively, to a
structural determinism and an equally farfetched belief in the autonomy of rational actors. 24 The structure—agency debate is located somewhere between these
two poles. Neither
structure nor agency receive analytical priority. Instead, the idea is to understand the
interdependent and mutually constitutive relationship between them. The discussions that have evolved in the wake of this
assumption are highly complex and cannot possibly be summarised here. 25 Some of the key premises, though, can be recognised by observing how the work of
Anthony Giddens has shaped the structure—agency debate in international relations. Giddens speaks of the
'duality of structure,' of structural
properties that are constraining as well as enabling. They are both 'the medium and outcome of the
contingently accomplished activities of situated actors'. 26 Expressed in other words, neither agents nor
structures have the final word. Human actions are always embedded in and constrained by the structural
context within which they form and evolve. But structures are not immutable either. A human being, Giddens
stresses, will 'know a great deal about the conditions of reproduction of the society of which he or she is a
member'. 27 The actions that emerge from this awareness then shape the processes through which social
systems are structurally maintained and reproduced.
1NR
1NR---Alt
Merely the process of theorizing life outside of capital is enough to access all of our
impacts
Johnston ‘7 Adrian Johnston, interdisciplinary research fellow in psychoanalysis at Emory University, “The Cynic’s
Fetish: Slavoj Zizek and the Dynamics of Belief,” International Journal of Zizek Studies, Vol. 1 No. 0., 24 August
2007, pp. 93-94, accessed 1/27/10 http://www.zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/8/24
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").
Talking About the Other
Their abstract descriptions of others that we need to save are a product of capitalistabstraction that lets us ignore the most proximate and allow suffering to continue.
Zizek ‘2 Slavoj Zizek, Professor of Sociology at the Institute for Sociology, Ljubljana University, 2002, Revolution at
the Gates, p. 205-07
Atom Egoyan’s film Exotica tackles the fragile status of the frontier that separates public from private space. When we share a common space with outsiders —
say, when a delivery man or a repair man enters our apartment — we politely ignore each other, refraining from probing into the other’s privacy (what do they
desire, what are their secret dreams?); Exotica, however, constantly violates this frontier, suddenly establishing a more intimate contact between two people
brought together by some official duty. The Lacanian big Other is, among other things, one of the names for this Wall which enables us to maintain the proper
distance, guaranteeing that the other’s proximity will not overwhelm us — when we talk with a clerk, we “do not get personal”. (The paradox is that this very Wall
is not just negative: at the same time, it generates fantasies about what lurks behind it, about what the other really desires.70) Our
late capitalist daily
life involves an unprecedented disavowal of the other’s experience: In order to pass a homeless person
crouched in a doorway and keep walking, in order to enjoy dinner when children are hungry, in order to rest at night
when suffering is incessant — atomized daily function demands that we systematically foreclose our affections for and
connections with others (in the words of dominant culture, our economy is comprised of individuals who respect each other’s individuality). Behind
the caricature of the bleeding-heart liberal is the truth of politics: how you feel is how you act.71 Here we are
dealing not with individual psychology, but with capitalist subjectivity as a form of abstraction inscribed in and
determined by the very nexus of “objective” social relations: Indifference towards specific labours corresponds to a form of society
in which individuals can with ease transfer from one labour to another, and where the specific kind is a matter of chance for them, hence of indifference. Not only
the category, labour, but labour in reality has here become the means of creating wealth in general, and has ceased to be organically linked with particular
individuals in any specific form. Such a state of affairs is at its most developed in the most modern form of existence of bourgeois society, in the United States.
Here, then, for the first time, the point of departure of modern economics, namely the abstraction of the category “labour”, “labour as such”, labour pure and
simple, becomes true in practice.72 So, just as Marx described how, within the market economy, abstraction is inscribed into individual experience itself (a
worker directly experiences his particular profession as a contingent actualization of his abstract capacity to work, not as an organic component of his personality;
an “alienated” lover experiences his sexual partner as a contingent fill-in that satisfied his need for sexual and/or emotional gratification; etc.), abstraction
is also inscribed into the way we relate to others at the most immediate level: we ignore them in the
fundamental sense of the word, reducing them to bearers of abstract social functions. And the point here, of course, is
that “systems of power necessitate specific emotional configurations”: the fundamental “coldness” of the late capitalist subject is supplanted/concealed by the
phantom of a rich private emotional life which serves as a fantasy-screen protecting us from the shattering experience of the Real of other people’s suffering.
Today, the old joke about a rich man telling his servant “Throw out this destitute beggar — I’m so sensitive that I can’t stand seeing people suffer!” is more
appropriate than ever. The necessary price of this abstraction is that the very sphere of privacy gets “reified”, turned into a domain of calculated satisfactions: is
there anything more depressingly anti-erotic than the proverbial appeal of a yuppie to his partner: “Let’s spend some quality time together!”? No wonder, then,
that the obverse of this distance are brutal and humiliating intrusions into the other’s intimate space: from confessionary talk-shows to cam-websites where we
can observe other people defecating from the bottom of the toilet bowl.
AT---Gibson Graham
Their epistemology is incoherent—we have to make strong truth claims to change anything
Castree ’99 N. Castree, Professor of Geography, 1999 [Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, June
1999]
Capitalism (as we knew it) arguably suffers from serious epistemological, ontological and theoretical
problems. The epistemological problems are threefold. First, while Gibson-Graham is right to stress the performativity of
representation, she hades towards what Bhaskar (1989, 127) calls the ‘epistemic fallacy’, in which knowledge and the world
are conflated. Secondly, this links to a distinct and paradoxical reticence to make truth claims about the world. This
reticence arguably stems from the dual theoretical inspiration for Gibson-Graham’s ideas – Resnick and Wolff’s ‘overdeterminist Marxism’ and Derridean
deconstruction – both of which, in very different ways, see knowledge as non-mimetic. This
reticence is paradoxical, since GibsonGraham does, of course, argue for an economic ‘reality’ in which capitalism and class look quite different to
how we previously saw them. Thirdly, all this neglects that fact that, in certain circumstances, making strong claims to
‘truth’ is strategically and practically necessary and important. These epistemological issues feed into
several ontological complaints about Gibson-Graham’s position. First, after Resnick andWolff (1987), she is right that
capitalism does not exist in isolation but is ‘overdetermined’ by all other elements of social life.21 However, this fact does not
preclude attempts to specify theoretically the ‘essential’ characteristics of capitalism and class even though, in
practice, they do not exist in a ‘pure’ state (Albritton 1993). Second, in the absence of such specification, social analysis
declines into a flabby pluralism or explanatory ‘everythingism’. Third, in this respect Gibson-Graham’s charter for
a small c capitalism and a pluralized class category, while appealing, is much too general and inchoate to be serviceable as
an explanatory political economic analysis. This leads, finally, to the main theoretical – and arguably most
worrying – problem with The end of capitalism. In her concern to deconstruct Marxism, Capitalism and Class, we are
left with no effort of reconstruction beyond the otherwise important point that all three miss out a great deal.
What, if anything, can usefully be salvaged from Marx’s political economy – with its categories of use and exchange value, concrete and abstract labour, labour
power and surplus value – remains a mystery. Though
I quite appreciate that the intent of The end of capitalism is not to
rebuild Marxism, I would suggest that leaving things at the level of deconstruction is nonetheless
unsatisfactory. Notwithstanding the validity of parts of Gibson- Graham’s critique, Marx’s abstract account
of capitalism does not necessarily feature in an overblown vision of an no-longer-credible totality. There are
other alternatives.22
Gibson-Graham concede that capitalist globalization forces specific identities and
subjectivities upon people and that their alternative isn’t possible without the creation of
non-capitalist subjects
Gibson-Graham ‘2 J.K. Gibson-Graham, the pen name of Katherine Gibson, Senior Fellow of Human
Geography at Australian National University, and Julie Graham, professor of Geography at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst, 2002, online: http://www.communityeconomies.org/papers/rethink/rethinkp3.rtf, accessed
December 26, 2004
We are enticed to think not about how the world is subjected to globalization (and the global capitalist economy) but how
we are subjected to the
discourse of globalization and the identities (and narratives) it dictates for us . In The End of Capitalism (as we knew it),
we gained insight into how economic subjects might be subjected within globalization discourse by examining the work of Sharon Marcus on rape. Marcus
(1992) points to the important role of language, narrative, and discursive constructions of sexual identity in circumscribing women’s ability to act powerfully during
the rape event. This resonated for us with the limited options for economic identity and power offered to local subjects by a capitalocentric discourse of
globalization.14 We likened freeing ourselves from the discourse of globalization to women shaking away their embodied self-understanding as always already
It seems to us that a politics of the local (an anti-globalization politics that is not simply “grassroots
go nowhere without subjects who can experience themselves as free from capitalist
globalization. Our project of revaluing the local as a site of politics is not about “liberation” from subjection as such, but about creating new
discourses that subject in different ways, thus enabling subjects to assume power in new forms.15 Liberating the subject
victimized within the discourse of rape.
globalization”) will
from the economic identities provided by the discourse of globalization requires creating alternative
economic identities that subjects can take on (Gibson-Graham, 1994). Ultimately, then, the political project is one of
resubjectivation, a process that is both prior to, and concomitant with, the building of alternative economic
institutions and practices. Our strategies for resubjectivation involve two major steps. The first involves creating a discourse of the diverse economy,
where non-capitalist activities are visible and viable in the economic terrain. The second engages in the micropolitics of enabling subjects to inhabit that terrain—
taking on novel economic identities within a diverse economy and assuming the powers these new identities bestow.
AT---Perm
Perm’s co-opted—causes extinction—the alt alone is key to revolutionary agency
Parr ’13 Adrian Parr, The Wrath of Capital, 2013, p. 2-5
The fable provides an intriguing persp ective on freedom and autonomy. The golem has no freedom: it is the rabbi who brings it to life and sentences it to death. Yet by returning the
creature to earth, the rabbi holds the golem accountable for the destruction it wrought despite not being free. This is the basic premis e of this book. We
are not free, yet
we are autonomous. We are constrained by the historical circumstances into which we are born, along with the
institutions and structures that contain us. Nonetheless, each and every one of us also participates in and thereby confirms the
legitimacy of those selfsame institutions and structures that dominate us, along with the violence they sustain.3 In this way, we are both
the rabbi creator and the creature creation. Insofar as we are socially constituted, we are constrained by the historical and
institutional forces that construct us. As political agents, we realize our autonomy as we interrupt and
contest the historical and institutional conditions that regulate and organize the frames of reference through
which we think and act. This structure of rupture and continuity is the modern narrative par excellence. Fredric
Jameson neatly summarizes the narrative condition of modernity as the dialectic between the modality of
rupture that inaugurates a new period and the definition of that new period in turn by continuity.4 The ironical
outcome, as I describe it in the pages that follow, is that despite the narrative category driving change in the modern world, everything continues to stay the
same-perhaps because what this narrative produces is a virulent strain of amnesia. Every change or historical
rupture contains within it the dialectical narrative structure of modernity such that the New and the period it
launches into existence are mere ritual. What persists is the condition of violence embedded in neoliberal
capitalism as it robs each and every one of us (other species and ecosystems included) of a future. The narrative of
modernity and the optimistic feeling of newness it generates are merely a distraction. Distractions such as decarbonizing the freemarket economy, buying carbon offsets, handing out contraceptives to poor women in developing countries, drinking tap water in place of bottled water, changing personal eating
habits, installing green roofs on city hall, and expressing moral outrage at British Petroleum (BP) for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, although well meaning, are merely symptomatic of
the uselessness of free-market "solutions" to environmental change. Indeed, such widespread distraction leads to denial. With the proclamation of the twenty- first century to be the era
of climate change, the Trojan horse of neoliberal restructuring entered the political arena of climate change talks and policy, and a more virulent strain of capital accumulation began .
For this reason, delegates from the African nations, with the support of the Group of 77 (developing countries), walked out of the 2009 United Nations (UN) climate talks in Copenhagen,
accusing rich countries of dragging their heels on reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and destroying the mechanism through which this reduction can be achieved-the Ky oto
Protocol. In the absence of an internationally birfding agreement on emissions reductions, all individual actions taken to reduce emissions-a flat global carbon tax, recycling, hyb rid
cars, carbon offsets, a few solar panels here and there, and so on-are mere theatrics. In this book, I argue that underpinning
the massive environmental
changes happening around the world, of which climate change is an important factor, is an unchanging
socioeconomic condition (neoliberal capitalism), and the magnitude of this situation is that of a political crisis. So, at the risk
of extending my literary license too far, it is fair to say that the human race is currently in the middle of an earth-shattering historical
moment. Glaciers in the Himalayas, Andes, Rockies, and Alps are receding. The social impact of
environmental change is now acute, with the International Organization for Migration predicting there will be approximately two
hundred million environmental refugees by 2050, with estimates expecting as many as up to one billion.5 We
are poised between needing to radically transform how we live and becoming extinct. Modern (postindustrial) society
inaugurated what geologists refer to as the ''Anthropocene age;' when human activities began to drive environmental change, replacing the Holocene, which for the previous ten
thousand years was the era when the earth regulated the environment. 6 Since then people have been pumping GHGs into the atmosphere at a faster rate than the earth can reabsorb
them. If we remain on our current course of global GHG emissions, the earth's average climate will rise 3°C by the end of the twenty-first century (with a 2 to 4.5° probable range of
uncertainty) . The warmer the world gets, the less effectively the earth's biological systems can absorb carbon. The more the earth's climate heats up, the more carbon dioxide (C02)
plants and soils will release; this fe edback loop will further increase climate heating. When carbon feedback is factored into the climate equation, climate models predict that the rise in
average climate temperature will be 6°C by 2100 (with a 4 to 8°C probable range of uncertainty) .7 For this reason, even if emissions were reduced from now on by approximately 3
percent annually, there is only a fifty-fifty chance that we can stay within the 2°C benchmark set by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007. However, given
that in 2010 the world's annual growth rate of atmospheric carbon was the largest in a decade, bringing the world's C02 concentrations to 389.6 parts per million (ppm) and pushing
concentrations to 39 percent higher than what they were in 1750 at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (approximately 278 ppm), and that there is no sign of growth slowing, then
even the fifty-fifty window of opportunity not to exceed 2°C warming is quickly closing. If
we continue at the current rate of GHG emissions
growth, we will be on course for a devastating scenario.8 We need to change course now.9 Climate change poses several
environmental problems, many of which now have a clear focus. The scientific problem: How can the high amounts of C02 in the atmosphere causing the earth's climate to change be
lowered to 350 ppm? The economic problem: How can the economy be decarbonized while addressing global economic disparities? The social problem: How can human societies
change their climate-altering behaviors and adapt to changes in climate?10 The cultural problem: How can commodity culture be reigned in? The problem policymakers face: What
regulations can be introduced to inhibit environmental degradation, promote GHG reductions, and assist the people, species, and ecosystems most vulnerable to environmental
change? The
political problem is less clear, however, perhaps because of its philosophical implications. Political
philosophy examines how these questions are dealt with and the assumptions upon which they are
premised. It studies the myriad ways in which individuals, corporations, the world's leaders, nongovernmental organizations
(NGOs),
and communities respond to climate change and the larger issue of environmental change characteristic of the Anthropocene age.
philosophy considers how these responses reinforce social and economic structures of
More important, political
power. In light of this consideration, how do we make the dramatic and necessary changes needed to adapt equitably to environmental change without the economically powerful
claiming ownership over the collective impetus and goals that this historical juncture presents? By drawing attention to the political problem of equality in the context of environmental
change, I need to stress that I am not a market Luddite; rather, I am critical of the
neoliberal paradigm of economic activity that advances
deregulation, competition, individualism, and privatization, all the while rolling back on social services and
producing widespread inequities and uneven patterns of development and social prosperity. I am also not intending to
make negotiable the "non-negotiable planetary preconditions that humanity needs to respect in order to avoid the risk of deleterious or even catastrophic environmental change at
continental to global scales:'11 Indeed, my argument is that by
focusing too much on free-market solutions to the detriment of the
world's most vulnerable (the poor, other species, ecosystems, and future generations), we make these preconditions negotiable: the
free market is left to negotiate our future for us.
Capitalism generates internal contradictions erupting in imperialism, nuclear war, and
ecocide
Foster ‘5 John Bellamy Foster, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, "Naked Imperialism," Monthly
Review, Vol. 57 No. 4, 2005
From the longer view offered by a historical-materialist critique of capitalism, the direction that would be taken by U.S. imperialism following the fall of the Soviet
Union was never in doubt. Capitalism
by its very logic is a globally expansive system. The contradiction between its
transnational economic aspirations and the fact that politically it remains rooted in particular nation states is
insurmountable for the system. Yet, ill-fated attempts by individual states to overcome this contradiction are
just as much a part of its fundamental logic. In present world circumstances, when one capitalist state has a virtual
monopoly of the means of destruction, the temptation for that state to attempt to seize full-spectrum
dominance and to transform itself into the de facto global state governing the world economy is irresistible.
As the noted Marxian philosopher István Mészáros observed in Socialism or Barbarism? (2001)—written, significantly, before George W. Bush became
president: “[W]hat
is at stake today is not the control of a particular part of the planet—no matter how large—putting at a
the control of its totality by one hegemonic economic
and military superpower, with all means—even the most extreme authoritarian and, if needed, violent military
ones—at its disposal.” The unprecedented dangers of this new global disorder are revealed in the twin
cataclysms to which the world is heading at present: nuclear proliferation and hence increased chances of
the outbreak of nuclear war, and planetary ecological destruction. These are symbolized by the Bush administration’s refusal to
disadvantage but still tolerating the independent actions of some rivals, but
sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to limit nuclear weapons development and by its failure to sign the Kyoto Protocol as a first step in controlling global
warming. As former U.S. Secretary of Defense (in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations) Robert McNamara stated in an article entitled “Apocalypse Soon” in
the May–June 2005 issue of Foreign Policy: “The
United States has never endorsed the policy of ‘no first use,’ not during my seven years as secretary or
since. We have been and remain prepared to initiate the use of nuclear weapons—by the decision of one person, the president—
against either a nuclear or nonnuclear enemy whenever we believe it is in our interest to do so.” The nation with the greatest conventional
military force and the willingness to use it unilaterally to enlarge its global power is also the nation with the
greatest nuclear force and the readiness to use it whenever it sees fit—setting the whole world on edge. The
nation that contributes more to carbon dioxide emissions leading to global warming than any other (representing
approximately a quarter of the world’s total) has become the greatest obstacle to addressing global warming and the
world’s growing environmental problems—raising the possibility of the collapse of civilization itself if
present trends continue.
AT---Transition Wars
Capitalism will continually appeal to fear of collapse to justify its existence - these rely on a
logic that is epistemologically disabling and self-fulfilling
Zizek ’97 Slavoj Zizek, Senior Researcher in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana and
Codirector of the Center for Humanities at Birkbeck College, "Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational
Capitalism," New Left Review, No. 224, 1997, pp.25-27
Today, financial
crisis is a permanent state of things the reference to which legitimizes the demands to cut social
spending, health care, support of culture and scientific research, in short, the dismantling of the welfare state. Is, however, this
permanent crisis really an objective feature of our socio-economic life? Is it not rather one of the effects of
the shift of balance in the ‘class struggle’ towards Capital, resulting from the growing role of new
technologies as well as from the direct internationalization of Capital and the co- dependent diminished role
of the Nation-State which was further able to impose certain minimal requirements and limitations to
exploitation? In other words, the crisis is an ‘objective fact’ if and only if one accepts in advance as an
unquestionable premise the inherent logic of Capital—as more and more left-wing or liberal parties have done. We are thus witnessing
the uncanny spectacle of social-democratic parties which came to power with the between-the-lines message to Capital ‘we will do the necessary job for you in
an even more efficient and painless way than the conservatives’. The problem, of course, is that, in
today’s global socio-political
circumstances, it is practically impossible effectively to call into question the logic of Capital: even a modest
social-democratic attempt to redistribute wealth beyond the limit acceptable to the Capital ‘effectively’ leads
to economic crisis, inflation, a fall in revenues and so on. Nevertheless, one should always bear in mind how the
connection between ‘cause’ (rising social expenditure) and ‘effect’ (economic crisis) is not a direct objective causal one: it
is always-already embedded in a situation of social antagonism [MARKED] and struggle. The fact that, if one
does not obey the limits set by Capital, a crisis ‘really follows’, in no way ‘proves’ that the necessity of these
limits is an objective necessity of economic life. It should rather be conceived as a proof of the privileged
position Capital holds in the economic and political struggle, as in the situation where a stronger partner threatens that if you do X,
you will be punished by Y, and then, upon your doing X, Y effectively ensues.