Cal EM Neg v. Concordia SS – Texas R6
1NC
Framework
A – Interpretation:
Topical affirmatives must affirm the resolution through instrumental defense of action
by the United States government.
B – Definitions:
Should denotes an expectation of enacting a plan
American Heritage Dictionary 2000 (Dictionary.com)
should. The will to do something or have something take place: I shall go out if I feel like it.
The United States means government
Free Dictionary 14 (The Free Dictionary, http://www.thefreedictionary.com/United+States)
Includes the land area, internal waters, territorial sea, and airspace of the United States, including the
following: a. US territories, possessions, and commonwealths; and b. Other areas over which the US
Government has complete jurisdiction and control or has exclusive authority or defense responsibility.
Resolved implies a policy
Louisiana House 3-8-2005, http://house.louisiana.gov/house-glossary.htm
Resolution A legislative instrument that generally is used for making declarations, stating policies, and making
decisions where some other form is not required. A bill includes the constitutionally required enacting clause; a resolution uses the
term "resolved". Not subject to a time limit for introduction nor to governor's veto. ( Const. Art. III, §17(B) and House Rules 8.11 , 13.1
, 6.8 , and 7.4)
C – Standards:
First is Decisionmaking:
The primary purpose of debate should be to improve our skills as decision-makers.
We are all individual policy-makers who make choices every day that affect us and
those around us. We have an obligation to the people affected by our decisions to use
debate as a method for honing these critical thinking and information processing
abilities.
Austin J. Freeley and David L. Steinberg – John Carroll University / U Miami – 2009, Argumentation
and Debate: Critical Thinking for Reasoned Decision Making, p. 1-4, googlebooks
After several days of intense debate, first the United States House of Representatives and then the U.S. Senate voted
to authorize President George W. Bush to attack Iraq if Saddam Hussein refused to give up weapons of mass
destruction as required by United Nations's resolutions. Debate about a possible military* action against Iraq continued in various
governmental bodies and in the public for six months, until President Bush ordered an attack on Baghdad, beginning Operation Iraqi Freedom,
the military campaign against the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. He did so despite the unwillingness of the U.N. Security Council to support
the military action, and in the face of significant international opposition.¶ Meanwhile, and perhaps equally difficult for the parties
involved, a young couple
deliberated over whether they should purchase a large home to accommodate
their growing family or should sacrifice living space to reside in an area with better public schools; elsewhere a
college sophomore reconsidered his major and a senior her choice of law school, graduate school, or a job.
Each of these* situations called for decisions to be made. Each decision maker worked hard to make wellreasoned decisions.¶ Decision making is a thoughtful process of choosing among a variety of options for acting or thinking. It requires that the
decider make a choice. Life
demands decision making. We make countless individual decisions every day. To
families, groups
of friends, and coworkers come together to make choices, and decision-making bodies from committees
to juries to the U.S. Congress and the United Nations make decisions that impact us all. Every profession
requires effective and ethical decision making, as do our school, community, and social organizations.¶
We all make many decisions every day. To refinance or sell one's home, to buy a high-performance SUV or an
economical hybrid car. what major to select, what to have for dinner, what candidate to vote for, paper
or plastic, all present us with choices. Should the president deal with an international crisis through
military invasion or diplomacy? How should the U.S. Congress act to address illegal immigration?¶ Is the
defendant guilty as accused? The Daily Show or the ball game? And upon what information should I rely to make my
decision? Certainly some of these decisions are more consequential than others. Which amendment to vote for,
make some of those decisions, we work hard to employ care and consideration; others seem to just happen. Couples,
what television program to watch, what course to take, which phone plan to purchase, and which diet to pursue all present unique challenges.
At our best, we seek out research and data to inform our decisions. Yet even the choice of which
information to attend to requires decision making. In 2006, TIME magazine named YOU its "Person of the Year."
Congratulations! Its selection was based on the participation not of ''great men" in the creation of history, but rather on the contributions of a
community of anonymous participants in the evolution of information. Through blogs. online networking. You Tube. Facebook, MySpace,
Wikipedia, and many other "wikis," knowledge and "truth" are created from the bottom up, bypassing the authoritarian control of newspeople,
academics, and publishers. We
have access to infinite quantities of information, but how do we sort through it
and select the best information for our needs?¶ The ability of every decision maker to make good,
reasoned, and ethical decisions relies heavily upon their ability to think critically. Critical thinking
enables one to break argumentation down to its component parts in order to evaluate its relative
validity and strength. Critical thinkers are better users of information, as well as better advocates.¶
Colleges and universities expect their students to develop their critical thinking skills and may require students to take designated courses to
that end. The importance and value of such study is widely recognized.¶ Much of the most significant communication of our lives is conducted
in the form of debates. These may take place in intrapersonal communications, in which we weigh the pros and cons of an important decision
in our own minds, or they may take place in interpersonal communications, in which we listen to arguments intended to influence our decision
or participate in exchanges to influence the decisions of others.¶ Our
success or failure in life is largely determined by our
ability to make wise decisions for ourselves and to influence the decisions of others in ways that are
beneficial to us. Much of our significant, purposeful activity is concerned with making decisions. Whether to
join a campus organization, go to graduate school, accept a job oiler, buy a car or house, move to another city, invest in a certain stock, or vote
for Garcia—these are just a few of the thousands of decisions we may have to make. Often, intelligent self-interest or a sense of responsibility
will require us to win the support of others. We may want a scholarship or a particular job for ourselves, a customer for out product, or a vote
for our favored political candidate.
Specifically, through discussing paths of government action, debate teaches us to be
better organizational decision makers. Learning about the uniquely different
considerations of organizations is necessary to affecting change in a world
overwhelmingly dominated by institutions.
Algoso 2011 – Masters in Public Administration (May 31, Dave, “Why I got an MPA: Because
organizations matter” http://findwhatworks.wordpress.com/2011/05/31/why-i-got-an-mpa-becauseorganizations-matter/)
Because organizations
matter. Forget the stories of heroic individuals written in your middle school civics textbook. Nothing of
great importance is ever accomplished by a single person . Thomas Edison had lab assistants, George Washington’s
army had thousands of troops, and Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity had over a million staff and volunteers when she passed away. Even
Jesus had a 12-man posse. In different ways and in vastly different contexts, these were all organizations. Pick your
favorite historical
figure or contemporary hero, and I can almost guarantee that their greatest successes occurred as part
of an organization. Even the most charismatic, visionary and inspiring leaders have to be able to manage people, or find someone who
can do it for them. International development work is no different. Regardless of your issue of interest — whether private
sector investment, rural development, basic health care, government capacity, girls’ education, or democracy promotion — your work will
almost always involve operating within an organization. How well or poorly that organization functions will have dramatic implications for the
results of your work.
A well-run organization makes better decisions about staffing and operations; learns
more from its mistakes; generates resources and commitment from external stakeholders; and
structures itself to better promote its goals. None of this is easy or straightforward. We screw it up fairly often. Complaints
about NGO management and government bureaucracy are not new. We all recognize the need for improvement. In
my mind,
the greatest challenges and constraints facing international development are managerial and
organizational, rather than technical . Put another way: the greatest opportunities and leverage points lie in
how we run our organizations. Yet our discourse about the international development industry focuses largely on how much money
donors should commit to development and what technical solutions (e.g. deworming, elections, roads, whatever) deserve the funds. We
give short shrift to the questions around how organizations can actually turn those funds into the
technical solutions. The closest we come is to discuss the incentives facing organizations due to donor or political requirements. I think
we can go deeper in addressing the management and organizational issues mentioned above. This thinking led me to an MPA degree because it
straddles that space between organizations and issues. A
degree in economics or international affairs could teach you
all about the problems in the world, and you may even learn how to address them. But if you don’t learn how to
operate in an organization, you may not be able to channel the resources needed to implement
solutions . On the flip side, a typical degree in management offers relevant skills, but without the content knowledge necessary to
understand the context and the issues. I think the MPA, if you choose the right program for you and use your time well, can do both.
Institutional configurations exist independently of and shape micro-politics – means
only our method of political engagement solves.
Wight 6 – Professor of IR @ University of Sydney – 6
(Colin, Agents, Structures and International Relations: Politics as Ontology, pgs. 48-50
One important aspect of this relational ontology is that these relations constitute our identity as social actors. According to this relational model
of societies, one is what one is, by virtue of the relations within which one is embedded. A worker is only a worker by virtue of his/her
relationship to his/her employer and vice versa. ‘Our social being is constituted by relations and our social acts presuppose them.’ At any
particular moment in time an
causal effects. This
individual may be implicated in all manner of relations, each exerting its own peculiar
‘lattice-work’ of relations constitutes the structure of particular societies and endures despite changes in
the individuals occupying them . Thus, the relations, the structures, are ontologically distinct from the individuals who enter into
them. At a minimum, the social sciences are concerned with two distinct, although mutually interdependent, strata. There is an ontological
difference between people and structures: ‘people are not relations, societies are not conscious agents’. Any attempt to explain one in terms of
the other should be rejected. If there is an ontological difference between society and people, however, we need to elaborate on the
relationship between them. Bhaskar argues that we need a system of mediating concepts, encompassing both aspects of the duality of praxis
into which active subjects must fit in order to reproduce it: that is, a system of concepts designating the
‘point of contact’ between
human agency and social structures. This is known as a ‘positioned practice’ system. In many respects, the idea
of ‘positioned practice’ is very similar to Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus. Bourdieu is primarily concerned with what individuals do in their
daily lives. He is keen to refute the idea that social activity can be understood solely in terms of individual decision-making, or as determined by
surpa-individual objective structures. Bourdieu’s notion of the habitus can be viewed as a bridge-building exercise across the explanatory gap
between two extremes. Importantly, the notion of a habitus can only be understood in relation to the concept of a ‘social field’. According to
Bourdieu, a social field is ‘a network, or a configuration, of objective relations between positions objectively defined’. A
social field, then,
refers to a structured system of social positions occupied by individuals and/or institutions – the nature of which defines the situation
for their occupants. This is a social field whose form is constituted in terms of the relations which define it as a field of a certain type. A
habitus (positioned practices) is a mediating link between individuals’ subjective worlds and the socio-cultural world into which they are born
and which they share with others. The power of the habitus derives from the thoughtlessness of habit and habituation, rather than
consciously learned rules. The habitus is imprinted and encoded in a socializing process that commences during early childhood. It is
inculcated more by experience than by explicit teaching. Socially competent performances are
produced as a matter of routine, without explicit reference to a body of codified knowledge, and
without the actors necessarily knowing what they are doing (in the sense of being able adequately to
explain what they are doing). As such, the habitus can be seen as the site of ‘internalization of reality and the externalization of
internality.’ Thus social practices are produced in, and by, the encounter between: (1) the habitus and its dispositions; (2) the constraints and
demands of the socio-cultural field to which the habitus is appropriate or within; and (3) the dispositions of the individual agents located within
both the socio-cultural field and the habitus. When placed within Bhaskar’s stratified complex social ontology the model we have is as depicted
in Figure 1. The explanation of practices will require all three levels. Society,
as field of relations, exists prior to, and is
independent of, individual and collective understandings at any particular moment in time; that is, social
action requires the conditions for action. Likewise, given that behavior is seemingly recurrent, patterned, ordered,
institutionalised, and displays a degree of stability over time, there must be sets of relations and rules that govern
it. Contrary to individualist theory, these relations, rules and roles are not dependent upon either knowledge of them by particular individuals,
or the existence of actions by particular individuals; that is,
the attributes
their explanation cannot be reduced to consciousness
or to
of individuals . These emergent social forms must possess emergent powers. This leads on to arguments for the reality of
society baswed on a causal criterion. Society, as opposed to the individuals that constitute it, is, as Foucault has put it, ‘a complex and
independent reality that has its own laws and mechanisms of reaction, its regulations as well as its possibility of disturbance. This new reality is
society…It becomes necessary to reflect upon it, upon its specific characteristics, its constants and its variables’.
Conservative forces will always exist - only policy discussions can persuade them to
support change
Kerbel 9
(Susan G. Kerbel is a clinical psychologist and coufounder of Cognitive Policy Works, “From the Couch to
the Culture: How Psychological Analysis Can Strengthen the Progressive Agenda”, Cognitive Policy
Works, http://www.cognitivepolicyworks.com/trash/psychology-and-politics/)
The psychology of change: This is one of the great hidden powers of clinical psychological thinking that
the progressive movement would do well to understand. Clinical practice is all about creating change, in individuals,
couples, families, and groups of people; organizational change is sometimes a part of the equation as well. In all these instances, there is
a dynamic at work that is essential to understanding the nature of changing the beliefs and choices
of other people. There are the forces that seek change, and those that fear and resist it. Both
elements are always present. There is a constant interplay between those aspects of the individual, or
group, or society, that desire to do things differently, and those that do not. In our political lives,
we often act as if this is not the case, or wish that to be so, but it never is. Both impulses are always at work, and
both must be addressed before forward motion can occur. Being able to recognize and anticipate the presence of
resistance to change is at the heart of the psychological change process, and a tremendous strategic advantage if one can understand it
and work with it. This is part and parcel of the work of any competent clinician. If
you know where and how resistance will
play out in response to a given initiative for change, one can plan for it, address it, and harness the
power of resistance to eventually join the forces of change, if addressed effectively enough. At the very least,
resistant forces can be minimized or neutralized so that forward motion is not impeded. Progressives seem to have much to
learn about this. As a political body, we seem to be in a constant state of surprise when the forces
of resistance to change emerge, and often seem unprepared to respond to it. There is a predictable arc to the
process of creating change that is apparent once one knows how to read the signs of resistance. For activists who are
interested in generating social change, or in persuading others to consider a new viewpoint or policy
proposal, understanding the psychodynamics of creating change can and should be an essential tool.
Once one can understand the change process from a dynamic psychological perspective, one can
act to harness the inevitable drag of resistance, and minimize its impact on moving the agenda
forward.
Additionally, the best route to improving decision-making is through discussion about
public policy:
A. Mutually accessible information – There is a wide swath of literature on
governmental policy topics – that ensures there will be informed, predictable,
and in-depth debate over the aff’s decision. Individual policymaking is highly
variable depending on the person and inaccessible to outsiders.
B. Harder decisions make better decisionmakers – The problems facing public
policymakers are a magnitude greater than private decisions. We all know
plans don’t actually happen, but practicing imagining the consequences of our
decisions in the high-stakes games of public policymaking makes other
decisionmaking easier.
C. External actors – the decisions we make should be analyzed not in a vacuum
but in the complex social field that surrounds us and with discussion of
unintended consequences.
Without connection to a concrete policy goal, their method fails to address
institutional structures that prevent change – that abandons the only truly productive
endpoint of micropolitics.
Themba Nixon 2K Executive Director of The Praxis Project, Former California Staffer, Colorlines.
Oakland: Jul 31, 2000.Vol.3, Iss. 2; pg. 12
In essence, policies are the codification of power relationships and resource allocation. Policies are the rules of the
world we live in.
Changing the world means changing the rules . So, if organizing is about changing the rules
and building power, how can organizing be separated from policies? Can we really speak truth to power,
fight the right, stop corporate abuses, or win racial justice without contesting the rules and the rulers,
the policies and the policymakers? The answer is no-and double no for people of color. Today, racism subtly dominates
nearly every aspect of policymaking. From ballot propositions to city funding priorities, policy is increasingly about the control, defunding, and disfranchisement of communities of color. What Do We Stand For? Take the public conversation about welfare reform, for
example. Most of us know it isn't really about putting people to work. The right's message was framed around racial stereotypes of lazy,
cheating "welfare queens" whose poverty was "cultural." But the new welfare policy was about moving billions of dollars in individual cash
payments and direct services from welfare recipients to other, more powerful, social actors.
Many of us were too busy to tune
into the welfare policy drama in Washington, only to find it washed up right on our doorsteps . Our
members are suffering from workfare policies, new regulations, and cutoffs. Families who were barely
getting by under the old rules are being pushed over the edge by the new policies. Policy doesn't get
more relevant than this. And so we got involved in policy-as defense. Yet we have to do more than block
their punches. We have to start the fight with initiatives of our own . Those who do are finding offense a bit more fun
than defense alone. Living wage ordinances, youth development initiatives, even gun control and alcohol and tobacco policies are finding their
way onto the public agenda, thanks to focused community organizing that leverages power for community-driven initiatives. - Over
600
local policies have been passed to regulate the tobacco industry. Local coalitions have taken the lead by writing
ordinances that address local problems and organizing broad support for them. - Nearly 100 gun control and violence
prevention policies have been enacted since 1991. - Milwaukee, Boston, and Oakland are among the cities that have passed
living wage ordinances: local laws that guarantee higher than minimum wages for workers, usually set as the minimum needed to keep a family
of four above poverty. These
are just a few of the examples that demonstrate how organizing for local policy
advocacy has made inroads in areas where positive national policy had been stalled
by conservatives.
Increasingly, the local policy arena is where the action is and where activists are finding success. Of course,
corporate interests-which are usually the target of these policies-are gearing up in defense. Tactics include front groups, economic pressure,
and the tried and true: cold, hard cash. Despite these barriers,
grassroots organizing can be very effective at the smaller
scale of local politics . At the local level, we have greater access to elected officials and officials have a
greater reliance on their constituents for reelection. For example, getting 400 people to show up at city hall in just about
any city in the U.S. is quite impressive. On the other hand, 400 people at the state house or the Congress would have a less significant impact.
Add to that the fact that all 400 people at city hall are usually constituents, and the impact is even greater. Recent trends in government
underscore the importance of local policy. Congress has enacted a series of measures devolving significant power to state and local
government. Welfare, health care, and the regulation of food and drinking water safety are among the areas where states and localities now
have greater rule. Devolution has some negative consequences to be sure. History has taught us that, for social services and civil rights in
particular, the lack of clear federal standards and mechanisms for accountability lead to uneven enforcement and even discriminatory
implementation of policies. Still, there
are real opportunities for advancing progressive initiatives in this more
localized environment. Greater local control can mean greater community power to shape and
implement important social policies that were heretofore out of reach. To do so will require careful
attention to the mechanics of local policymaking and a clear blueprint of what we stand for. Getting It in
Writing Much of the work of framing what we stand for takes place in the shaping of demands. By getting into the policy arena in a
proactive manner, we can take our demands to the next level. Our demands can become law, with real
consequences if the agreement is broken. After all the organizing, press work, and effort, a group should leave a
decisionmaker with more than a handshake and his or her word. Of course, this work requires a certain
amount of interaction with "the suits," as well as struggles with the bureaucracy, the technical
language, and the all-too-common resistance by decisionmakers . Still, if it's worth demanding, it's
worth having in writing -whether as law, regulation, or internal policy. From ballot initiatives on rent control to laws requiring worker
protections, organizers are leveraging their power into written policies that are making a real difference in their communities. Of course, policy
work is just one tool in our organizing arsenal, but it is a tool we simply can't afford to ignore. Making
policy work an integral part
of organizing will require a certain amount of retrofitting. We will need to develop the capacity to translate our
information, data, and experience into stories that are designed to affect the public conversation. Perhaps most important, we will need
to move beyond fighting problems and on to framing solutions that bring us closer to our vision of how
things should be. And then we must be committed to making it so.
Second is Predictable Limits - The resolution proposes the question the negative is
prepared to answer and creates a bounded list of potential affs for us to think about.
Debate has unique potential to change attitudes and grow critical thinking skills
because it forces pre-round internal deliberation on a of a focused, common ground of
debate
Goodin & Niemeyer 3 Robert E. Goodin and Simon J. Niemeyer- Australian National University2003, When Does Deliberation Begin? Internal Reflection versus Public Discussion in Deliberative
Democracy, POLITICAL STUDIES: 2003 VOL 51, 627–649,
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.0032-3217.2003.00450.x/pdf
What happened in this particular case, as in any particular case, was in some respects peculiar unto
itself. The problem of the Bloomfield Track had been well known and much discussed in the local
community for a long time. Exaggerated claims and counter-claims had become entrenched, and
unreflective public opinion polarized around them. In this circumstance, the effect of the information
phase of deliberative processes was to brush away those highly polarized attitudes, dispel the myths and
symbolic posturing on both sides that had come to dominate the debate, and liberate people to act
upon their attitudes toward the protection of rainforest itself. The key point, from the perspective of
‘democratic deliberation within’, is that that happened in the earlier stages of deliberation – before the
formal discussions (‘deliberations’, in the discursive sense) of the jury process ever began. The simple process of jurors seeing the site for themselves,
focusing their minds on the issues and listening to what experts had to say did virtually all the work in changing jurors’ attitudes. Talking among themselves, as a jury,
did very little of it. However, the same might happen in cases very different from this one. Suppose that instead of highly polarized symbolic attitudes, what we have
at the outset is mass ignorance or mass apathy or non-attitudes. There again, people’s engaging with the issue – focusing on it, acquiring information about it, thinking
hard about it – would be something that is likely to occur earlier rather than later in the deliberative process. And more to our point, it is something that is most likely
to occur within individuals themselves or in informal interactions, well in advance of any formal, organized group discussion. There is much in the large literature on
attitudes and the mechanisms by which they change to support that speculation.31 Consider, for example, the literature on ‘central’ versus ‘peripheral’ routes to the
formation of attitudes. Before deliberation, individuals may not have given the issue much thought or bothered to engage in an extensive process of reflection.32 In
such cases, positions may be arrived at via peripheral routes, taking cognitive shortcuts or arriving at ‘top of the head’ conclusions or even simply following the lead
of others believed to hold similar attitudes or values (Lupia, 1994). These shorthand approaches involve the use of available cues such as ‘expertness’ or
‘attractiveness’ (Petty and Cacioppo, 1986) – not deliberation in the internal-reflective sense we have described. Where peripheral shortcuts are employed, there may
be inconsistencies in logic and the formation of positions, based on partial information or incomplete information processing. In contrast, ‘central’ routes to the
development of attitudes involve the application of more deliberate effort to the matter at hand, in a way that is more akin to the internal-reflective deliberative ideal.
Importantly for our thesis, there is nothing intrinsic to the ‘central’ route that requires group deliberation. Research in this area stresses instead the importance simply
of ‘sufficient impetus’ for engaging in deliberation, such as when an individual is stimulated by personal involvement in the issue.33 The same is true of ‘on-line’
versus ‘memory-based’ processes of attitude change.34 The
suggestion here is that we lead our ordinary lives largely on
autopilot, doing routine things in routine ways without much thought or reflection. When we come
across something ‘new’, we update our routines – our ‘running’ beliefs and pro cedures, attitudes and
evaluations – accordingly. But having updated, we then drop the impetus for the update into deepstored ‘memory’. A consequence of this procedure is that, when asked in the ordinary course of events
‘what we believe’ or ‘what attitude we take’ toward something, we easily retrieve what we think but we
cannot so easily retrieve the reasons why. That more fully reasoned assessment – the sort of thing we
have been calling internal-reflective deliberation – requires us to call up reasons from stored memory
rather than just consulting our running on-line ‘summary judgments’. Crucially for our present discussion, once again, what
prompts that shift from online to more deeply reflective deliberation is not necessarily interpersonal discussion. The impetus for fixing one’s attention on a topic, and
retrieving reasons from stored memory, might come from any of a number sources: group discussion is only one. And again, even in the context of a group discussion,
this shift from ‘online’ to ‘memory-based’ processing is likely to occur earlier rather than later in the process, often before the formal discussion ever begins. All this
elements of the pre-discursive
process are likely to prove crucial to the shaping and reshaping of people’s attitudes in a citizens’ jurystyle process. The initial processes of focusing attention on a topic, providing information about it and
is simply to say that, on a great many models and in a great many different sorts of settings, it seems likely that
inviting people to think hard about it is likely to provide a strong impetus to internal-reflective
deliberation, altering not just the information people have about the issue but also the way people
process that information and hence (perhaps) what they think about the issue. What happens once people have
shifted into this more internal-reflective mode is, obviously, an open question. Maybe people would then come to an easy consensus, as they did
in their attitudes toward the Daintree rainforest.35 Or maybe people would come to divergent conclusions; and they then may (or may not) be
open to argument and counter-argument, with talk actually changing minds. Our claim is not that group discussion will always matter as little as
it did in our citizens’ jury.36 Our claim is instead merely that the earliest steps in the jury process – the sheer focusing of attention on the issue at
hand and acquiring more information about it, and the internal-reflective deliberation that that prompts – will invariably matter more than
deliberative democrats of a more discursive stripe would have us believe. However much or little difference formal group discussions might
make, on any given occasion, the pre-discursive phases of the jury process will invariably have a considerable impact on changing the way jurors
approach an issue. From Citizens’ Juries to Ordinary Mass Politics? In a citizens’ jury sort of setting, then, it seems that informal, pre-group
deliberation – ‘deliberation within’ – will inevitably do much of the work that deliberative democrats ordinarily want to attribute to the more
formal discursive processes. What are the preconditions for that happening? To what extent, in that sense, can findings about citizens’ juries be
extended to other larger or less well-ordered deliberative settings? Even in citizens’ juries, deliberation will work only if people are attentive,
open and willing to change their minds as appropriate. So, too, in mass politics. In citizens’ juries the need to participate (or
the
anticipation of participating) in formally organized group discussions might be the ‘prompt’ that evokes
those attributes. But there might be many other possible ‘prompts’ that can be found in less formally
structured mass-political settings. Here are a few ways citizens’ juries (and all cognate microdeliberative processes)37 might be different from mass politics, and in which lessons drawn from
that experience might not therefore carry over to ordinary politics: • A citizens’ jury
concentrates people’s minds on a single issue. Ordinary politics involve many issues at once. • A
citizens’ jury is often supplied a background briefing that has been agreed by all stakeholders (Smith
and Wales, 2000, p. 58). In ordinary mass politics, there is rarely any equivalent common ground
on which debates are conducted. • A citizens’ jury separates the process of acquiring information from that of discussing the issues. In
ordinary mass politics, those processes are invariably intertwined. • A citizens’ jury is provided with a set of experts. They can be questioned, debated or
discounted. But there is a strictly limited set of ‘competing experts’ on the same subject. In ordinary mass politics, claims and sources of expertise often seem
virtually limitless, allowing for much greater ‘selective perception’. • Participating in something called a ‘citizens’ jury’ evokes certain very particular norms: norms
concerning the ‘impartiality’ appropriate to jurors; norms concerning the ‘common good’ orientation appropriate to people in their capacity as citizens.38 There is a
very different ethos at work in ordinary mass politics, which are typically driven by flagrantly partisan appeals to sectional interest (or utter disinterest and voter
apathy). • In
a citizens’ jury, we think and listen in anticipation of the discussion phase, knowing that we
soon will have to defend our views in a discursive setting where they will be probed intensively .39 In
ordinary mass-political settings, there is no such incentive for paying attention. It is perfectly true that
citizens’ juries are ‘special’ in all those ways. But if being special in all those ways makes for a better –
more ‘reflective’, more ‘deliberative’ – political process, then those are design features that we ought
try to mimic as best we can in ordinary mass politics as well. There are various ways that that might be done. Briefing books
might be prepared by sponsors of American presidential debates (the League of Women Voters, and such like) in consultation with the stakeholders involved.
Agreed panels of experts might be questioned on prime-time television. Issues might be sequenced for debate and resolution, to avoid too much competition for
people’s time and attention. Variations on the Ackerman and Fishkin (2002) proposal for a ‘deliberation day’ before every election might be generalized, with a day
every few months being given over to small meetings in local schools to discuss public issues. All that is pretty visionary, perhaps. And (although it is clearly beyond
the scope of the present paper to explore them in depth) there are doubtless many other more-or-less visionary ways of introducing into real-world politics
analogues of the elements that induce citizens’ jurors to practice ‘democratic deliberation within’, even before the jury discussion gets underway. Here, we have to
content ourselves with identifying those features that need to be replicated in real-world politics in order to achieve that goal – and with the ‘possibility theorem’
that is established by the fact that (as sketched immediately above) there is at least one possible way of doing that for each of those key features.
Third is Dogmatism – Most problems are not binary but have complex, uncertain
interactions. By declaring undebatable truths, they prevent us from understanding
the nuances of an incredibly important and complex issue. This is the epitome of
dogmatism.
Keller et al 1– Asst. professor School of Social Service Administration U. of Chicago (Thomas E., James
K., and Tracly K., Asst. professor School of Social Service Administration U. of Chicago, professor of Social
Work, and doctoral student School of Social Work, “Student debates in policy courses: promoting policy
practice skills and knowledge through active learning,” Journal of Social Work Education, Spr/Summer
2001, EBSCOhost)
John Dewey, the philosopher and educational reformer, suggested that the initial advance in the
development of reflective thought occurs in the transition from holding fixed, static ideas to an attitude
of doubt and questioning engendered by exposure to alternative views in social discourse (Baker, 1955, pp.
36-40). Doubt, confusion, and conflict resulting from discussion of diverse perspectives "force comparison,
selection, and reformulation of ideas and meanings" (Baker, 1955, p. 45). Subsequent educational theorists have contended
that learning requires openness to divergent ideas in combination with the ability to synthesize disparate
views into a purposeful resolution (Kolb, 1984; Perry, 1970). On the one hand, clinging to the certainty of one's
beliefs risks dogmatism, rigidity, and the inability to learn from new experiences. On the other hand, if one's
opinion is altered by every new experience, the result is insecurity, paralysis, and the inability to take effective action. The educator's role is to
help students develop the capacity to incorporate new and sometimes conflicting ideas and experiences into a coherent cognitive framework.
Kolb suggests that, "if the education process begins by bringing out the learner's beliefs and theories, examining and testing them, and then
integrating the new, more refined ideas in the person's belief systems, the learning process will be facilitated" (p. 28). The authors believe that
involving students in substantive debates challenges them to learn and grow in the fashion described by Dewey
and Kolb. Participation in a debate stimulates clarification and critical evaluation of the evidence, logic, and
values underlying one's own policy position. In addition, to debate effectively students must understand
and accurately evaluate the opposing perspective. The ensuing tension between two distinct but
legitimate views is designed to yield a reevaluation and reconstruction of knowledge and beliefs
pertaining to the issue.
Our method solves – Even if the resolution is wrong, having a devil’s advocate in
deliberation is vitally important to critical thinking skills and avoiding groupthink
Mercier & Landemore 11 (Hugo Mercier and Hélène Landemore- 2011 , Philosophy, Politics and
Economics prof @ U of Penn, Poli Sci prof @ Yale), Reasoning is for arguing: Understanding the
successes and failures of deliberation, Political Psychology,
http://sites.google.com/site/hugomercier/publications
Reasoning can function outside of its normal conditions when it is used purely internally. But it is not enough for reasoning to be
done in public to achieve good results. And indeed the problems of individual reasoning highlighted above, such as
polarization and overconfidence, can also be found in group reasoning (Janis, 1982; Stasser & Titus,
1985; Sunstein, 2002). Polarization and overconfidence happen because not all group discussion is
deliberative. According to some definitions of deliberation, including the one used in this paper,
reasoning has to be applied to the same thread of argument from different opinions for deliberation to
occur. As a consequence, “If the participants are mostly like-minded or hold the same views before they
enter into the discussion, they are not situated in the circumstances of deliberation.” (Thompson, 2008: 502). We
will presently review evidence showing that the absence or the silencing of dissent is a quasi-necessary condition for polarization or overconfidence to occur in
groups. Group polarization has received substantial empirical support. 11 So much support in fact that Sunstein has granted group polarization the status of law
(Sunstein, 2002). There is however an important caveat: group polarization will mostly happen when people share an opinion to begin with. In defense of his claim,
Sunstein reviews an impressive number of empirical studies showing that many groups tend to form more extreme opinions following discussion. The examples he
uses, however, offer as convincing an illustration of group polarization than of the necessity of having group members that share similar beliefs at the outset for
polarization to happen (e.g. Sunstein, 2002: 178). Likewise, in his review of the group polarization literature, Baron notes that “The crucial antecedent condition for
group polarization to occur is the presence of a likeminded group; i.e. individuals who share a preference for one side of the issue.” (Baron, 2005). Accordingly, when
groups do not share an opinion, they tend to depolarize. This has been shown in several experiments in the laboratory (e.g. Kogan & Wallach, 1966; Vinokur &
Burnstein, 1978). Likewise, studies of deliberation about political or legal issues report that many groups do not polarize (Kaplan & Miller, 1987; Luskin, Fishkin, &
Hahn, 2007; Luskin et al., 2002; Luskin, Iyengar, & Fishkin, 2004; Mendelberg & Karpowitz, 2000). On the contrary, some groups show a homogenization of their
attitude (they depolarize) (Luskin et al., 2007; Luskin et al., 2002). The contrasting effect of discussions with a supportive versus dissenting audience is transparent in
the results reported by Hansen ( 2003 reported by Fishkin & Luskin, 2005). Participants had been exposed to new information about a political issue. When they
discussed it with their family and friends, they learned more facts supporting their initial position. On the other hand, during the deliberative weekend—and the
exposition to other opinions that took place—they learned more of the facts supporting the view they disagreed with. The present theory, far from being contradicted
by the observation that groups of likeminded people reasoning together tend to polarize, can in fact account straightforwardly for this observation. When
people are engaged in a genuine deliberation, the confirmation bias present in each individual’s
reasoning is checked, compensated by the confirmation bias of individuals who defend another opinion.
When no other opinion is present (or expressed, or listened to), people will be disinclined to use
reasoning to critically examine the arguments put forward by other discussants, since they share their
opinion. Instead, they will use reasoning to strengthen these arguments or find other arguments
supporting the same opinion. In most cases the reasons each individual has for holding the same opinion will be partially non-overlapping. Each
participant will then be exposed to new reasons supporting the common opinion, reasons that she is unlikely to criticize. It is then only to be expected that group
members should strengthen their support for the common opinion in light of these new arguments. In fact ,
groups of like-minded people should
have little endogenous motivation to start reasoning together: what is the point of arguing with people
we agree with? In most cases, such groups are lead to argue because of some external constraint. These
constraints can be more or less artificial—a psychologist telling participants to deliberate or a judge asking a jury for a well supported verdict—but they have to be
factored in the explanation of the phenomenon. 4. Conclusion: a situational approach to improving reasoning We have argued that reasoning should not be evaluated
primarily, if at all, as a device that helps us generate knowledge and make better decisions through private reflection. Reasoning, in fact, does not do those things very
well. Instead, we rely on the hypothesis that the function of reasoning is to find and evaluate arguments in deliberative contexts. This evolutionary hypothesis explains
why, when reasoning is used in its normal conditions—in a deliberation—it can be expected to lead to better outcomes, consistently allowing deliberating groups to
reach epistemically superior outcomes and improve their epistemic status. Moreover, seeing reasoning as an argumentative device also provides a straightforward
account of the otherwise puzzling confirmation bias—the tendency to search for arguments that favor our opinion. The confirmation bias, in turn, generates most of
the problems people face when they reason in abnormal conditions— when they are not deliberating. This will happen to people who reason alone while failing to
entertain other opinions in a private deliberation and to groups in which one opinion is so dominant as to make all others opinions—if they are even present—unable
to voice arguments. In both cases, the confirmation bias will go unchecked and create polarization and overconfidence. We believe that the argumentative theory
offers a good explanation of the most salient facts about private and public reasoning. This explanation is meant to supplement, rather than replace, existing
psychological theories by providing both an answer to the why-questions and a coherent integrative framework for many previously disparate findings. The present
article was mostly aimed at comparing deliberative vs. non-deliberative situations, but the theory could also be used to make finer grained predictions within
deliberative situations. It is important to stress that the theory used as the backbone for the article is a theory of reasoning. The theory can only make predictions about
reasoning, and not about the various other psychological mechanisms that impact the outcome of group discussion. We did not aim at providing a general theory of
group processes that could account for all the results in this domain. But it is our contention that the best way to reach this end is by investigating the relevant
psychological mechanisms and their interaction. For these reasons, the present article should only be considered a first step towards more fined grained predictions of
when and why deliberation is efficient. Turning now to the consequences of the present theory, we can note first that our emphasis on the efficiency of diverse groups
sits well with another recent a priori account of group competence. According to Hong and Page’s Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem for example, under certain
plausible conditions, a diverse sample of moderately competent individuals will outperform a group of the most competent individuals (Hong & Page, 2004).
Specifically, what explains the superiority of some groups of average people over smaller groups of experts is the fact that cognitive diversity (roughly, the ability to
interpret the world differently) can be more crucial to group competence than individual ability (Page, 2007). That argument has been carried over from groups of
problem-solvers in business and practical matters to democratically deliberating groups in politics (e.g., Anderson, 2006; Author, 2007, In press). At the practical
level, the present theory potentially has important implications. Given that individual reasoning works best when confronted to different opinions, the present theory
supports the improvement of the presence or expression of dissenting opinions in deliberative settings. Evidently, many people, in the field of deliberative democracy
or elsewhere, are also advocating such changes. While these common sense suggestions have been made in the past (e.g., Bohman,
2007; Sunstein, 2003, 2006), the present theory provides additional arguments for them. It also explains why approaches focusing on individual rather than
collective reasoning are not likely to be successful. Specifically tailored practical suggestions can also be made by using departures from the normal conditions of
reasoning as diagnostic tools. Thus, different departures will entail different solutions. Accountability—having to defends one’s opinion in front of an audience—can
be used to bring individual reasoners closer to a situation of private deliberation. The use of different aggregation mechanisms could help identify the risk of
deliberation among like-minded people. For example, before a group launches a discussion, a preliminary vote or poll could establish the extent to which different
opinions are represented. If
this procedure shows that people agree on the issue at hand, then skipping the
discussion may save the group some efforts and reduce the risk of polarization. Alternatively, a
devil’s advocate could be introduced in the group to defend an alternative opinion (e.g.
Schweiger, Sandberg, & Ragan, 1986).
Public policy debates don’t assume a universal form of rational subjectivity –
intersubjective debate is possible and best under our interpretation because of agreed
norms.
Lincoln Dahlberg 5, The University of Queensland, Center for Critical and Cultural Studies, Visiting
Fellow, The Habermasian public sphere: Taking difference seriously?, Theory and Society (2005) 34:111126
I believe this critique of power, transparency, and the subject is largely based upon a poor characterization of
Habermas’ position. There are three main misunderstandings that need to be cleared up here, to do with power as negative, as able to
be easily removed, and as able to be clearly identified. First, Habermas does not define power as simply negative and as
therefore needing to be summarily removed from the public sphere. The public sphere norm calls for “coercionfree communication” and not power-free communication. Habermas emphasizes the positive power of
communicative interaction within the public sphere through which participants use words to do things and make
things happen.60 Communicative
rationality draws on the “ force of better argument ” to produce more
democratic citizens, culture, and societies. Subjects are indeed molded through this constituting power,
but their transformation is towards freedom and autonomy rather than towards subjugation and
normalization. As Jeffrey Alexander points out, to act according to a norm is not the same as to be
normalized .61 The public sphere norm provides a structure through which critical reflection on
constraining or dominating
social relations and possibilities for freedom can take place . As Chambers argues,
rational discourse here is about “the endless questioning of codes,” the reasoned questioning of normalization.62 This is
the very type of questioning critics like Lyotard, Mouffe, and Villa are engaged in despite claiming the
normalizing and repressive power of communicative rationality. These critics have yet to explain adequately
how they escape this performative contradiction, although they may not be too concerned to escape it.63 The form of
power that is to be excluded from discourse in the public sphere is that which limits and disables democratic
participation and leads to communicative inequalities . Coercion and domination are (ideally) excluded
from the public sphere, which includes forms of domination resulting from the maldistribution of material
and authoritative resources that
lead to discursive inequalities . This emphasis on the ideal exclusion of coercion
introduces the second point of clari- fication, that the domination free public sphere is an idealization for the purposes of critique.
Habermas is more than aware of the fact that, as Nancy Fraser, Mouffe, and Young remind us, coercive forms of power, including
those that result from social inequality, can never be completely separated from the public sphere.64 Claims that such
power has been removed from any really-existing deliberative arena can only be made by ignoring or hiding the operation of power.
However, this does not mean that a reduction in coercion and domination cannot be achieved. Indeed, this is
precisely what a democratic politics must do. To aid this project, the public sphere conception sets a
critical standard for evaluation of
everyday
communication . Chambers puts this nicely: Criticism requires a
normative backdrop against which we criticize. Crit-icizing the ways power and domination play themselves out in discourse
presupposes a conception of discourse in which there is no [coercive] power and domination. In other words, to defend the position that there
is a mean- ingful difference between talking and fighting, persuasion and coercion, and by extension, reason and power involves beginning with
idealizations. That is, it involves drawing a picture of undominated discourse.65 However, this discussion of the idealizing status of the norm
does notanswer claims that it invokes a transparency theory of knowledge. Iwould argue that such claims not only fall prey to another
performa-tive contradiction – of presupposing that the use of rational discourse can establish the impossibility of rational discourse revealing
truth and power – but are also based on a poor reading of Habermas’ theory of communicative rationality. This is the third point of clarification.
In contrast to the metaphysics of presence, the differentiation of persusion from coercion in the public
sphere does not posit a naive theory of the transparency of power, and meaning more generally. The
public sphere conception as based upon communicative rationality does not assume a Cartesian
(autonomous, disembodied, decontextualized) subject who can clearly distinguish between persuasion and
coercion, good
and bad reasons, true and untrue claims, and then wholly re-move themselves and their
communications from such influence. For Habermas, subjects are always situated within culture. The public
sphere is posited upon intersubjective rather than subject-centered rationality. It is through the
process of communicative rationality, and not via a Cartesian subject, that manipulation, deception,
poor reasoning, and so on, are identified and removed, and by which meanings can be understood and
communicated. In other words, it is through rational-critical communication that discourse moves away from
coercion or non-public reason towards greater rational communication and a stronger public sphere. The circularity here is not
a problem, as it may seem, but is in fact the very essence of democratization: throughthe practice of democracy, democratic practice is
advanced. This democratizing process can be further illustrated in the important and challenging case of social inequalities. Democratic
theorists (bothdeliberative and difference) generally agree that social inequalities al-ways lead to some degree of inequalities in discourse.
Thus, the ide-alized public sphere of full discursive inclusion and equality requires that social inequalities be eliminated. Yet how is social
inequality to befullyidentified,letaloneeliminated? The
idealization seems wholly in-adequate given contemporary
capitalist systems and associated social inequality . However, it is in the very process of
argumentation, even if flawed, that the identification and critique of social inequality, and thus of
communicative inequality, is able to develop.
Indeed, public sphere deliberation often comes into existence when and
where people become passionate about social injustice and publicly thematize problems of social inequality. Thus the “negative power” of
social inequality – as with other forms of coercion – is brought to light and critique by the very discourse it is limiting. This
is not to say
that subjects are merely effects of discourse, that there are no critical social agents acting in the process. It is not to say
that 125 subjects within discourse cannot themselves identify negative forms of power, cannot reflexively monitor their own
arguments, cannot rationally criticize other positions, and so on. They can, and in practice do, despite
the instability of meaning . The point is that this reasoning and understanding is (provisionally) achieved
through the subject’s situatedness in discourse rather than via a pre-discursive abstract subject. As Kenneth Baynes argues, it
is through
discourse that subjects achieve adegree of reflective distance
(what we could call autonomy) from
their
situations, “enabling them to revise their conceptions of what is valuable or worthy of pursuit,[and]to assess
various courses of action
with respect to those ends.” 66 Democratic
discourse generates civic-oriented selves,
inter-subjective meanings and understandings, and democratic agreements that can be seen as the basis
of public sovereignty. How-ever, the idea of communicatively produced agreements, which in the public sphere are known as public
opinions, has also come under ex-tensive criticism in terms of excluding difference, criticism that I wantto explore in the next section. The ends
of discourse: Public opinion formation The
starting point of discourse is disagreement over problematic validity
claims. However, a certain amount of agreement, or at least mutual understanding, is presupposed
when interlocutors engage in argumentation. All communication presupposes mutual understanding
on the linguistic terms used – that interlocutors use the same terms in the same way.67 Furthermore, in undertaking rationalcritical discourse, according to Habermas’ formal pragmatic reconstruction, interlocutors also presuppose the same
formal conditions of argumentation . These shared presuppositions enable rational-critical discourse
to be undertaken. However, as seen above, meaning is never fixed and understanding is always partial.
Understanding and agreement on the use of linguistic terms and of what it means to be reasonable, reflexive, sincere, inclusive,
non-coercive, etc. takes place within discourse and is an ongoing political process.
Marxism K
The aff’s replacement of stable knowledge with discursive resistance is ineffective and
a neoliberal tactic that renders a coherent struggle against capital impossible.
Zavarzadeh 1995 – professor at Syracuse (Mas’ud, Post-Ality: Marxism and Postmodernism)
The epistemological questioning of “totality,” which serves as the basis for rejecting post-ality as a
concept, is an ideological alibi to dismantle the theoretical foundation of a coherent knowledge of
capitalism as a “totality” – that is, as a systemic and complex set of interconnected economic, cultural,
political and theoretical practices. Derrida’s idea of differance (the founding concept of detotalizing)
informs the entire project of postmarxism in which the very notion of society as a totality is decentered
and in place of a collective subject of revolution is placed the decentralized, detotalized and differential
“hegemony of a loose coalition. This “War on totality” (Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition 82), thus is
not limited to poststructuralist writers but increasingly becomes the project of a generalized “left.” For
instance, following the announcement that the first issue of Transformation would focus on the
question of the “Post-al,” one “left” writer responded, in a letter to me, with a troping discrediting of
the concept, saying that the “Post” meant “mail” and concluded that “hence ‘hyper-post-ality’=(?) too
many stamps on the envelope, ‘post-al (flexi)workplace=all night sorting office?” One is hard pressed to
find a difference between the leftist discrediting of concepts and the poststructuralist deconstruction –
both marginalize the concepts necessary to grasp capitalism as a totality (the laws of modern capital).
The institutionalized “left” is equally invested in the erasure of concepts and the dispersion of the social
totality into an ensemble of the heterogenous and incommensurate experiences of “agents” in “social
movements.” When the “rigorous” arguments of the philosopher on behalf of capital fails, the State
jokester takes over and defends the rule of wage-labor through “phrases” and “puns” although the
“witty” writings of such pun(k)sters as Lacan, Derrida, Butler, Ulmer… the epistemological and the joke
are sutured into the post-al paralogy. Situated between the conservative theroists (Bell, the Tofflers)
and the ludic left (Derrida, Lyotard, Laclau) in this unified war of the ruling class against totality, are such
neo-humanist writers as Edward Said. Writing approvingly of Said’s rejection of totalization, for
example, one advocate of the post-al common sense, Bruce Robbins writes, “Unlike most Marxists,
[Said] has never found much use for “capitalism” as an explanatory term (Secular Vocations 166). The
reason for Said’s resistance, according to Robbins, is that such a use of “capitalism” (or other concepts)
“threatens to leave insufficient too for assertion of human will” (166). Behind the façade of difference
off all these seemingly diverse theoretical positions, there is a rigid singularity of purpose: to occlude
the understanding of the regime of wage labor and capital in its totality and thus enable
transformative practices to change it . As Marx and Engels argue: “the ideas of the ruling class are in
every epoch the ruling ideas” (The German Ideology 59). Different philosophical idioms (Bell’s
positivism; Derrida’s poststructuralism; Said’s pragmatic New humanism), in this, as in all contestations,
are simply discursive forms that the ruling ideas take in their local articulations as addressed to
different class fractions. Bell’s rejection of a totality such as “capitalism” on the ground that capitalism
is not “monolithic” (XX) and Derrida’s objection to “totality” are both informed by the ruling concept of
“difference” – the excessive, rich and plural local diversities. Behind the resistance to totality in the
name of differance – by the traditional, the postmoderna dn the positions between – however, is an
attempt to make it impossible to draw a line of demarcation between the exploited and the exploiter
and thereby turn the social into a series of (semi-)autonomous differences that cannot be
conceptualized but must be described in their own local terms. According to these arguments, with
some variations in their idioms, all concepts are violations of differance (whether differance is seen in
terms of “textuality” or the sheer excessive differance of “experience” and the surprising and
unexplainable human “agency”). In other words, concepts themselves are self-divided and unable to
provide a coherent knowledge (“truth”) of a totality such as “capitalism.” “Capitalism” as a totality,
according to these theories, is far from being a systematic set of practices; it is an ensemble of
unceasing differances: so much so that the “exploited” and the “exploiter” are both self-divided and
there are more differences “within” each than “between” the two. What is called “capitalism” then
emerges from these theories of differance, as a set of autonomous practices without any necessary
relations to one another. Bell thinks that local differences are so intense that the use of “capitalism” as a
coherent concept simply distorts the dynmaics of the social because no such concept can “explain the
complex structure” of a society (Bell, xx). Post-ality is, for the right-wing, a cybermarket whose flexibility
and ever expanding frontiers defy all regulations – it is a space of unbounded entrepreneurial zones. The
post-al theorists of desire also place the individual in a de-regulated space: a site in which no laws can
adequately explain or regulate its aleatory shifts and movements. However, they do so by deploying the
agency of desire; individuals are seen as free because their practices are motivated not by “reason” and
the laws of rationality but by the surprising and unrepresentable substitutions and jolts of desire which
defy all laws of reason and modes of explanation. The unmappable trajectories of desire especially
articulate themselves in the individual’s “consumption” – consumption which is not simply for meeting
basic needs but for “pleasure,” for stating one’s freedom.
Capitalism necessitates environmental catastrophe and governmental violence.
KOVEL (Alger Hiss Prof. At Bard) 2002 [Joel, The Enemy of Nature, Zed Books, p. 22-24]
The scenario of ecological collapse holds, in essence, that the cumulative effects of growth
eventually overwhelm the
integrity of ecosystems on a world scale, leading to a cascading series of shocks. Just how the blows will fall is
impossible to tell with any precision, although a number of useful computer models have been assembled. In general terms, we would
anticipate interacting calamities that invade and rupture the core material substrata of civilization —
food, water, air, habitat, bodily health. Already each of these physical substrata is under stress, and the logic of the crisis dictates
that these stresses will increase. Other shocks and perturbations are likely to ensue as resource depletion
supervenes for example, in the supply of petroleum, which is expected to begin levelling off and then decline after the next
ten years.’2 Or some unforeseen economic shock will topple the balance: perhaps climatic catastrophes will
trigger a collapse of the $2 trillion global insurance industry, with, as Jeremy Leggett has noted, ‘knock-on economic
consequences which are completely ignored in most analyses of climate change’.’3 Perhaps famines will incite wars in which
rogue nuclear powers will launch their reign of terror. Perhaps a similar fate will come through the
eruption of as yet unforeseen global pandemics, such as the return of smallpox, currently considered to be within the
range of possibilities open to terrorist groups. Or perhaps a sudden break-up of the Antarctic ice shelf will cause seas to
suddenly rise by several metres, displacing hundreds of millions and precipitating yet more violent
climatic changes. Or perhaps nothing so dramatic will take place, but only a slow and steady deterioration
in ecosystems, associated with a rise in authoritarianism. The apocalyptic scenarios now so commonly making the rounds
of films, best-selling novels, comic books, computer games and television are not so much harbingers of the future as inchoate renderings of
the present ecological crisis. With terror in the air, these
mass fantasies can become the logos of a new order of
fascism — a fascism that, in the name of making the planet habitable, only aggravates the crisis as it
further disintegrates human ecologies. Or maybe things will work out and we will all muddle through somehow. The notion of
limits to growth may have been shelved, but the system has not been sleeping. A vast complex of recuperative measures has been installed in
its place, remedies that seek to restore ecological balance without threatening the main economic engines. Given the skill and resources
devoted to the project, there is bound to be some good news to report. What is at issue, however, is adequacy: whether all the pollution
controls, efficiencies, trading of credits, resource substitutions, information-rich commodities, engineered biological products, ‘green business’
and the like can compensate for retaining a system whose very heartbeat is growth without boundaries. Remember, the point of all these
counter-measures is not just to protect against ecological breakdown, but to bring on line new sources of growth. This raises the spectre of a
world like a gigantic Potemkin village, where a green and orderly facade conceals and reassures, while accelerated breakdown takes place
behind its walls.
The alt is a historical materialist analysis that provides the fuel to a mass proletariat
movement to combat capitalist domination – rising up as a unified force is the only
way to solve oppression and must be informed by historical praxis.
Avakian 99 (Chairman of Revolutionary Communist Party)
[Bob, “We Have a New Millenium—What we Need is a New World”, Revolutionary Worker #1036, Dec. 26, p. online:
http://rwor.org/a/v21/1030-039/1036/millenium.htm]
The "New Millennium" is before us. But what awaits us and future generations, what will define the next thousand years? ¶ Will it be the same
old, same old--where a small handful continues to control the wealth and knowledge humanity as a whole has created? Where this handful
continues to rule over millions and billions, using the most brutal and destructive means to maintain a way of life in which the great majority of
humanity is kept in conditions of poverty and wretchedness. Where
the institutions of power...the machinery that
enforces "law and order"...the customs, traditions, values and ideas with which people are
indoctrinated...all serve to keep this kind of system going. Where 40 thousand children die every day
in the Third World from starvation and disease that could be prevented or cured. Where the
oppressed are treated like dogs and shot down in the streets, or even in their own homes, by the thugs in uniform who
"protect and serve" this system. Where discrimination and racism are the rule. Where every day women are
insulted and assaulted, and are constantly told it is their "natural role" to be under the domination of
"male authority." Where whole peoples and nations are plundered by a few "great powers." Where those
who rule over us can unleash massive destruction and war at their command, bringing great suffering to the people and threatening the future
of humanity, and this is all justified and glorified as "duty, honor, and righteousness." For
another thousand years, will people
have to witness the sickening celebration of this as "the best of all possible worlds" and the most
humanity can ever hope to achieve? ¶ NO. This new millennium will be a time unlike any before in
human history. It will be an era in which all of human society will be changed in radically new ways. It
will be a world-historical epoch in which there will be the chance, in a way there never has been
before, to put an end to oppression, to slavery in every form, in every part of the world. ¶ Looking at the world as
it is now, as it has been for thousands of years...seeing what the people are caught up in today...HOW CAN ANYONE CONFIDENTLY PROCLAIM THAT THE FUTURE IS BRIGHT, THAT THIS IS WHAT
THE NEW MILLENNIUM WILL BRING? ¶ AM I DREAMING? YES--BUT THESE DREAMS ARE BASED ON REALITY. ¶ Check out history. No empire has lasted forever. Even the mightiest have fallen:
the Roman Caesars and their descendants, the Pharaohs of Egypt, the empire of Alexander the Great, the ruling dynasties throughout thousands of years in China, and more recently the
empires of the Spanish, Portuguese and others in the Americas. This will also happen to today's empire-rulers, the imperialists, whose system is rooted in the "modern" form of slavery known
as capitalism. They may rule over large parts of the world today--and, like the empires of old, they challenge each other for the top-dog position--but they will be brought down. This will be
true of the German, the British, the Japanese, the French, the Russian, and other imperialists. And, even though they like to declare that they are invincible and will forever be "all-powerful,"
BUT the BIG QUESTION is: WHAT WILL REPLACE THE
RULE OF THESE IMPERIALISTS WHEN THEY FALL? ¶ This has everything to do with how these imperialists are brought down-in what way this is achieved and by whom. If, as in the past, empires are overthrown by other empires--if exploiters are
brought down to the dust only to have new exploiters arise in their place--then nothing fundamental will change and the
masses of people, living under the rule of these imperialists, will not see a new day . BUT that is NOT
the only way things can go--that is not the way imperialism will end. There is another road before us-the road of revolutionary struggle to overturn and uproot all imperialists, all systems of exploitation
and oppression, to sweep away all their garbage. And that revolutionary struggle will give birth to a
new society and a new world without exploitation and oppression. ¶ HOW CAN WE KNOW THIS IS POSSIBLE? ¶ The
this same fate awaits the mightiest of all world powers today, the U.S. imperialists. ¶
reason is that, as a result of thousands of years of historical development and creative activity and struggle by human beings in all parts of the
world, a fantastic amount of technology and knowledge has been brought forth. BUT this has taken place through various forms of society in
which the few have enslaved the many, in different ways, and have reaped for themselves the benefits of all this development. AND THE
PROBLEM TODAY IS THAT, IN THE HANDS OF THE CAPITALIST CLASS THAT RULES OVER US AND STILL CONTROLS HUMANITY'S FATE, THE
TREMENDOUS TECHNOLOGY AND KNOWLEDGE THAT IS CREATED CANNOT BE USED FOR THE BENEFIT OF HUMANITY AS A WHOLE AND
INSTEAD CAN ONLY SUBJECT THE GREAT MAJORITY OF US TO AGONY AND OPPRESSION. That is a problem for us, yet it is also a problem for
THEM, because it makes clear that THIS CLASS OF CAPITALIST EXPLOITERS CANNOT RUN SOCIETY IN THE INTERESTS OF THE PEOPLE. BUT
THERE IS A CLASS THAT CAN DO THIS. This class is the proletariat. The proletariat is all of us--of all
races and nationalities, in the U.S. and throughout the world--who, under this system, can live only so
long as we work, and can work only so long as our work enriches someone else--the capitalist class. Our
labor, collectively, is the foundation of society and produces tremendous wealth, but this wealth is stolen by a small number of capitalist
exploiters who turn this wealth into their "private property," into a means of further exploiting us. We are trapped in this cycle, where we have
to work in order to live but the more we work, the more wealth we create, the more it is stolen and turned into power over us.
Acting as
individuals, we cannot change this basic condition of enslavement, but as a class we do have a
revolutionary way out. ¶ Once we have risen up together and thrown off the rule of capital, we can
not only free ourselves, we can revolutionize all of society and the world. We can unleash the
tremendous creative potential of the masses of people--creative potential that is now wasted, or
distorted, or even destroyed under the capitalist-imperialist system. We can take hold of the means to produce and acquire wealth
and knowledge, make them the common property of the people and use them to benefit the people and society as a whole. We can transform all of the institutions and relations in society and
the culture and ideas so that the common good is promoted and served. This is our world-historic mission. In this, we represent the great majority of the people, and we can lead them to
change the world. ¶ This can happen--there is a powerful basis for this to happen --because this is the only way the needs and interests of the vast majority of humanity can be met and that
humanity can move forward together. And, until this revolution is brought about, the rule of capital will continue to create conditions that force people to rebel against it. As the great
communist revolutionary Mao Tsetung put it: wherever there is oppression, there will be resistance. And resistance can and will be transformed into revolutionary struggle, and ultimately
revolutionary war, to defeat the forces of oppression on the battlefield, to smash their machinery of oppression, and to create a new system that puts an end to this oppression. No matter
how many times this revolutionary struggle may be defeated, or turned back after winning some beginning victories, it will arise again and again until, finally, it triumphs completely and carries
out its mission worldwide. Mao Tsetung also powerfully expressed this great truth: Fight, fail; fight again, fail again; fight again...until final victory--that is the logic of the people. Make trouble,
But to make this a reality, the oppressed,
and in particular the class of proletarians, must become conscious of this historic revolutionary
mission. And those who come to see the need for revolution and are determined to fight for it must
be organized as a powerful force at the core of this world-changing struggle. This means that the proletariat must have its
fail; make trouble again, fail again...until their doom--that is the logic of the imperialists and all reactionaries. ¶
own vanguard party. A party that is continually strengthened by sinking its roots and its organization ever more deeply among the proletariat and other oppressed people and by recruiting into
the party those who come to the forefront in the revolutionary struggle. A party that is guided by communist ideology, by the scientific world outlook and method that today is called MLM (or
Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, after the three greatest leaders of the communist cause so far: Marx, Lenin, and Mao). This ideology of MLM, and only this ideology, represents the proletariat and
its revolutionary mission. The MLM party must take up and concretely apply this ideology to solve the practical problems of the revolution. ¶ In an imperialist country like the U.S., this means
leading the masses of people in fighting against the outrages and injustices of this system, and to do this in a way that prepares for the great revolutionary showdown ahead--the revolutionary
war that will finally overthrow this system. The party must develop, through all its work, and all the struggles of today, the fighting capacity and organization of the proletariat and its allies. It
must continually develop the class consciousness of the proletariat--an understanding of what is the problem and what is the solution, who is the enemy and who are friends and potential
allies, how the struggle has to be waged and what the final aim of that struggle is. It must enable growing numbers of people to see the necessity and possibility of the historic mission of
communism and train the revolutionary-minded people in the scientific world outlook and method of communism. ¶ In the U.S. today, there is such a party carrying out this revolutionary
work--the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA. And, in turn, our Party is part of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM), uniting MLM parties and organizations throughout the
world. The purpose and goal of all these parties and organizations who are united in the RIM is to develop the worldwide proletarian revolution toward the final aim of communism--a world
without exploitation, without inequality, without oppressive relations based on distinctions of class, or sex, or race or nationality. It is a tremendous achievement of the revolutionary struggle
of masses of people in the U.S. and all over the world that our Party and the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement exist; and this Party and this Movement are tremendously important
We call on our class, the proletarians, on all oppressed people, on
everyone who would love to see a radically different world, where the great creative potential of the
people is not beaten down and twisted into chains on the people themselves--where instead this
potential is unlocked and unleashed to serve humanity. We call on you to support this Party and this internationalist
forces for the masses of people in fighting for their liberation. ¶
Movement. We call on you to help build our Party, to work with the Party and to join the Party. Right now, our Party is carrying out a process of
sharpening our plan for developing the revolutionary movement under today's conditions and preparing for the showdown with the rulers of
this system and their forces of oppression and destruction. We are building on our work and the struggle of the people so far to bring forth a
new revolutionary Programme of the RCP,USA. This new Programme will strengthen our ability to rally the people to the revolutionary cause as
part of the worldwide proletarian revolution. Once again we issue the call: join with our Party in bringing forth this new Programme and in
carrying out the strategy and plan for seizing power from the imperialist oppressors and establishing the power of the proletariat in order to
revolutionize all of society and the world. ¶ This
revolution means shattering and casting off the material shackles-the economic, social, and political relations of exploitation and oppression--that bind us. These chains
are very real, even if they are not the literal slave chains of former times. And, together with that, this
revolution means casting away the mental chains that reinforce these material shackles.
2NC
Framework
Topical version of the aff solves stigma and the aff doesn’t.
Showden 12 – assistant professor at the University of North Carolina Greensboro
[Carisa R., “Theorising maybe: A feminist/queer theory convergence” Feminist Theory 2012 13:3, April
11, 2012]
One way to think about sex-positive queer feminist norms is that they are multiple and therefore must be balanced.
To balance them one must consider the various constraints on subjects in practice. If what is required to realise particular norms (antisubordination or sexual autonomy or economic stability) is different practices in similar institutions, and if the norms most
needed for
resistance are also variable, then one resulting argument is that some situations of prostitution are more
ethically defensible than others. A sex-positive queer feminism then leads us to think about sex generally and
prostitution specifically as multiple; rather than ‘prostitution’ we are led to think about ‘prostitutions’. This
is problematic, perhaps, from a legal perspective, which, as I noted above, might be one reason why Halley and others argue that
MacKinnon’s work ‘won’ the legal feminist sex wars. But politics and policy can be (slightly) more nuanced and contextsensitive. Here sex-positive queer feminism needs to be (warily) more governance-oriented. It needs to
infuse prostitution policy with a different ethics - to take the norms it brings to queer theory and make
them work for women, to fight the subordination produced by stigmatising ‘deviant’ sex as well as the subordination produced by
poverty and coercion into sex.
The epistemological shift I am endorsing matters ethically for public policy
debates, even recognising the inconsistent relationship between a policy’s goals and its actual
material effects, as these debates create frameworks of understanding and subjectification.
This
convergentist epistemology is neither precisely (dominance) feminist nor queer. While feminism
and queer theory ‘know’
sexuality differently - it either is or it is not heterosexual, subordinating, and the source of women’s social ills - they also know
sexuality the same: it is through either the rejection of sex or the embracing of sexual acts in all their
manifestations that we will be led to the new frontier of gender relations. In Elisa Glick’s formulation, queer theory says we can ‘fuck our way to
freedom’ (2000: 22) and, it seems, dominance feminism says we can not-fuck our way there. So there
between them,
is an epistemological break
but a break premised on an ontological agreement: sex, sexuality, sex acts are the be-all
and end-all of liberation or resistance.
Or at least ‘good' sex (however defined) is the personal practice leading to political
change. But what
if it is not? What if sexuality and sexual modalities can intervene in the consciousness of the
people fucking, but this consciousness raising has really quite mediated and distorted effects on the larger institutional
contexts within which these sexual actors live, work, and play? A more nuanced reading of sexuality, and one that accepts neither
epistemological framework of sex precisely as dominance and queer theorists have served it up so far, might make more modest claims for its
theory. Yes,
rights to sexual pleasure and sexual knowledge are essential
(following Cornwall, Correa, and Jolly, 2008) are fundamental to a human rights framework,
engage in are not , in and of themselves, essentially revelatory
to one’s health and well-being and
but the specific sex acts that people
or politically engaged.
Too much focus on
specific acts puts all the effort into self-styling and personal empowerment, and not enough into
securing more general collective rights to sexuality without stigma .29 Decentering sex as the central activity
of identity formation and political status does
not make it unimportant; it simply means that sex does not occupy the
vanguard position in identity construction, political subordination, or political resistance. This version of ‘sex-positive' feminism
is in some ways more ‘sex negative' than dominance feminism: it is less positive that sex is capable of producing subjectivity, at least in whole.
If sex is not all that and then some, there are still arguments to be had about how and why to regulate sex acts;
but taking the onus off the sex part of prostitution, for example, as either dooming women to oppression or freeing them to
reinvent themselves and the sexual order,
might just open up spaces to see other aspects of prostitution: the
material effects of legalisation or criminalisation on the prostitutes themselves . If, ironically, ‘sexpositive' queer feminism can take some of the ‘special' out of sex and make it one significant form of human
interaction among others, then perhaps policy makers can be guided by a sense that is both more and less ‘free
market'. More in that not all commodified sex is necessarily bad; less in arguing that regulating conditions of commodification is the role of
good government. This is the point at which my interlocutors have asked for a more forceful normative defence: why should feminists
shift to a sex-positive queer approach such as the one I have outlined here, particularly in thinking about prostitution? I
would say first, as Kimberly D. Krawiec convincingly argues, both commodification and coercion objections to prostitution
- based on the ‘special status' of sex - help feed its continued marginal legal status, and it is this marginal status that benefits
everyone except the women supposedly protected by the ‘tolerated, but not embraced’ sex market (2010: 1743).30
Further, surveys of sex workers across types of prostitution venues reveal that some prostitutes experience sex work much as abolitionists have
described it, but many do not.31 Given that many people,
including some sex workers, do not in fact experience sex
acts as significantly tied to their identity, it seems somehow wrong - anti-feminist, in fact - to insist on public
policies premised on precisely this assumption. Given also the normative power of the law, sex work’s illegality
contributes to a view of women as either ‘good girls’ or ‘bad girls’ based on promiscuity. Finally, a
discursive shift that describes sex as sometimes good and sometimes bad, but insists on attention to
women’s knowledge of sex from their own experiences of it, might eventually promote a legal regime that
takes women’s knowledge with similar seriousness, perhaps even eventually leading to changes in how rape
claims are taken up by judges and law enforcement officers. Listening to how the woman claiming rape frames the
encounter could become more central while beginning to marginalise currently hegemonic narratives about what indicates that a woman
‘wanted it’.
Discourse matters in the construction of subjectivity and consciousness, of jurists no less
than the rest of us. Even if the effects of theory on law and policy are highly mediated, a more
nuanced theory of sex is needed for its own sake in addition to policy purposes . With its more modest
‘epistemology of sex’, sex-positive
queer feminism provides a way of contesting that it is the sex itself that is the
problem with prostitution, arguing instead that it is when sex is combined with economic coercion, or violent
pimps, or desire only to feed a drug addiction, for example, that prostitution is a problem. This shift in conceptions of
power - where dominance is one, but not the primary, modality, and the production of subjectivities and normative assessment and material
weight of any acts one engages in is multivalent - reflects a complex reality more accurately. One can begin to articulate
the domination that exists in, for example, human trafficking without conflating human trafficking with
prostitution (thereby ignoring forms of human trafficking that aren’t for purposes of sex trafficking) or prostitution with
trafficking (thereby ignoring forms of prostitution that are more like sex work and less like forced labour or rape). Here, though, is the
epistemological break - within feminism - that simply cannot be bridged. Radical feminists say that sex ought not be commodified, because
their epistemology of sex is an epistemology of the self. The commission of sex acts cannot be separated from self-hood; therefore,
commodified sex is slavery. In this view, a ‘better’ marketplace of sexual transaction is, literally, inconceivable. But what sex-positive queer
feminism knows about sex it gets by looking at the world through lenses of both feminism’s definitional minima and queer theory’s power
plays: that sex can be a site of domination, but that it can also be a site of productive, opaque, and diffuse power relations. Given this, then, a
sex- positive queer feminism would know that sex ought not be commodified under particular circumstances. On this view, sex does not say
anything essential about women, but practices of commodified sex under certain conditions are indictments of unequal structural
opportunities.
The point of sex-positive queer feminist norms is to help activists challenge the conditions
producing political subordination, not to challenge women for having sex. And the only way to get to that
challenge is to stop putting so much identity-bearing weight on sex acts. Further, a queer feminism, as
opposed to ‘queer theory’, can also employ its Foucauldian power frame to approach prostitution in the way that many radical
feminists claim we ought to pay more attention to and that is not directly addressed by queer theory. Prostitution is often framed as a
question of why women choose to go into this line of work. But the answers are not terribly complicated in
most cases, and only for a minority of prostitutes is it specifically for reasons that follow directly from a queer theory position of destabilising
the meaning of sex acts. The
more interesting radical feminist question is why so many men use the services of
32 prostitutes.32 The Foucauldian power framework offers a more satisfying toehold on an answer because it asks how
men’s subjectivities are formed and points to ways of resisting the reading of political power out of sex
acts into gendered social relations. It also points to a more nuanced answer to the motives and political understandings of the farfrom-monolithic group of men who purchase sex from women.33 In the same way that moving away from a domination model of power makes
it possible to conceptualise women’s actions and motives in terms of constrained agency rather than forcing women into being either agents or
victims, productive,
subjectifying versions of power relations make men’s subjectivity both more
complicated and more open to potential reform. On the dominance view, there is no reason for men to
change given the benefits they currently receive. Further, a dominance frame where most sex is nearly
indistinguishable from rape makes dominance feminism all but useless in theorising a complex male sexuality. But
such work is an important aspect of a critical theory of sex given the number of women who seem to want to
continue to have sex with men, and the number of men and women who find various uses of power, but not over-arching structures
of dominance, erotic. Finally, much
feminist theory
decriminalisation maintains this focus
and sex worker activism that
in part
because
of the
is focused on legalisation or
critique of the stigma that surrounds sex
and sex work . The argument is that the more stigmatised that social norms make sex workers, the more sex
workers become legitimate targets of abuse, and the harder it is for them both to seek redress for harm and
to leave sex work.
that women’s
This stigma
is also problematic because of its function in
remind ing all of us that ‘good girls don’t’ and
sexuality needs to be monitored so that it continues to serve as the moral compass for the
national body.
Even if most forms of prostitution cannot be ethically defended as ‘good sex’ or even ‘good employment’,
criminalisation of prostitution is problematic as it serves as an effective strategy in the war for control over women’s
sexuality, sexual rights, and sexual pleasures. Structures of subordination are reinforced not only by what is permitted, but by
what is forbidden. Easing the legal restrictions on prostitution may be, in fact, more in line with dominance feminism and its ultimate
abolitionist project than many would like to admit.34 The deep incommensurability between radical feminism and queer theories of sex cannot
be overcome or merged into a happy (or even unhappy) middle ground. What the balance of freedom and equality require in one theory is
often antithetical to what is required in the other. But this deep incommensurability is not between feminism and queer theory, it is between
one version of feminism and queer theory. There
are ways to reconcile feminist critiques of subordination and
feminist desires to generate a more open habitus of sexuality for women with queer theory's reliance on
subversion, play, and resistance. This matters theoretically, as the way we see the world shapes how we understand what is
possible and desirable in it. So a sex-positive queer feminist theory claims, on the one hand, a more modest view of the future - one
where ‘freedom' isn't attainable, but degrees of openness and agency are - and, on the other hand, a more
expansive one, where ‘freedom’ is defined in myriad ways within a complex notion of equality in
difference. Whether this equality is based on multiple intersecting identities or not through identities at all, but
through practices and positionalities that shift and can be shifted is a question I have been able only to raise in this article but not
discuss in any detail. The question of identity politics and its necessity for a robust feminist theory is obviously fraught, but is
again being fought within feminism and not only between feminism and its ‘others'.35 This recognition of the
incommensurability of feminist and queer epistemologies of sex also matters politically, especially given the
rise of ‘governance feminism' over the last thirty years. It's not enough for voices of dissent within feminism to work
culturally; sex-positive feminist theorists must also engage in the specific political institutions that
help to produce the discursive and material vectors through which power flows . Such political
engagement is more difficult for non-dominance feminists. This is partly because dominance feminism (along with
liberal feminism) is already more solidly fixed as ‘the’ voice of feminism in US jurisprudence especially, but also because
governance violates both the anti-regulatory queer influence on sex-positive feminism, and the
poststructuralist feminist cautions against working in the state because it requires calcifying power
relations and identities, operates through false universals, and forces women to claim to be victims in order to be heard.36 Clearly, then
strategising about how to influence policy will be an on-going debate, but one that feminism beyond
dominance needs to be party to. Otherwise, the brief carried for F may too often be a brief against her.
1NR
Marxism K
Capitalist social relations create the condition of possibility for prostitution – no
meaningful reclamation of sex is possible absent dismantling capitalism.
Pritchard 10 (Jane Pritchard, “The sex work debate.” International Socialism: A Quarterly Journal of
Socialist Theory. Issue 125. 1/5/10, http://www.isj.org.uk/?id=618)
The scale and nature of prostitution and sex work have been and are conditioned by the poverty,
polarisation and dislocation endemic to global capitalism.
However, prostitution is not just another dimension of
exploitation, but has
to be understood in the context of women’s oppression. Women have not always been oppressed.
oppression developed with the emergence of private property and was
later transformed by the rise of the bourgeois family, which became the mechanism for transferring
property from one generation to the next.18 Modern women’s oppression was also shaped by the separation of
the home from the workplace during the industrial revolution and the resulting creation of a separate sphere of private life. Along
According to Frederick Engels women’s
with Engels, Bebel
argued that prostitution was the flip side of marriage and a “necessary social
institution of bourgeois society” .19 Prostitution played a specific role because sexual interest was removed from the bourgeois
family and assigned to prostitutes. Women
within the family were expected to endure sex as a means of
procreating, whereas men were deemed to have desires that could only be satiated outside the confines
of the family. Some Victorian moralists justified the existence of prostitution on this basis. As historian Leonore Davidoff has written:
Defenders of prostitution saw it as a necessary institution which acted as a giant sewer, drawing away
the distasteful, but inevitable waste products of male lustfulness, leaving the middle class household
and middle class ladies pure and unsullied.20 Alexandra Kollontai wrote that prostitution was “the inevitable shadow of the
official institution of marriage designed to preserve the rights of private property and to guarantee property inheritance through a line of lawful
heirs”.21 This attitude helps to explain why prostitution was morally condemned but tolerated and in some countries, such as France, highly
regulated by the state.
Marxist accounts of the roots of women’s oppression were revived by some strands in
the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In its early days the women’s movement sought
to challenge the economic exploitation of women with campaigns against discrimination and for equal
pay in the workplace. The movement also campaigned for 24-hour childcare, equal access to education
and jobs and the extension of women’s control over their own fertility through access to contraception
and abortion. Women challenged stereotypes about their appearance and the double standards applied
to their sexuality, which sanctioned men’s sexual activity while castigating women who exercised the
same freedom. However, the gains made by the women’s movement were not sustained. One wing of the movement
retreated into the politics of the personal and substituted individual lifestyles for collective struggle
while the other, the socialist-feminists, harnessed themselves to the Labour Party. The result of this was
to seriously weaken the movement’s ability to challenge inequality in the workplace and women’s
oppression in general. The demise of the women’s movement, coupled with the increased marketisation
of sex, laid the way open for a resurgence in new forms of sexism, the so-called ironic sexism which has
led to the normalisation of “lads’ mags”, pornography and lap dancing clubs. Today women participate more
widely in the workforce than ever before, and although some gains have been made, genuine equality is a long way off. Although the
ideology of the nuclear family is stronger than the reality, the family remains central to capitalism in
terms of reproducing labour and fulfilling welfare functions. The oppression of women and the
continued existence of the family are generated by the interests of capitalism
the burden of social welfare onto individual families. Women
which is best served by pushing
are left to cope with a post-feminist ideology that tells
them that they are equal and liberated, whereas the reality is one of unequal pay, responsibility for
childcare and sexist discrimination. Capitalism in the 21st century has increased the objectification of
women and the commodification of sex. Sex is used everywhere, to sell everything. The social
relationships that create the possibility of an industry for sex are deeply rooted in the structures of
capitalism itself. The dominance of market competition over personal relationships creates a situation
where human desires are transformed into commodities which can be sold for a profit. In his early writings Marx
described how, in capitalist society: Each attempt to establish over the other an alien power, in the hope of thereby achieving satisfaction of his
own selfish needs…becomes the inventive and ever calculating slave of inhuman, refined, unnatural and imaginary appetites. He places himself
at the disposal of his neighbour’s most depraved fancies, panders to his needs, excites unhealthy appetites in him, and pounces on every
weakness, so that he can then demand the money for his labour of love.22 Today we have become so used to a situation where all our human
needs have been transformed into commodities that it seems almost natural. In their rapacious search for new markets to exploit,
capitalist organisations probe more and more deeply into all aspects of our lives and in the process
transform them further. Thus money can buy anything, including the simulation of love , but on the
other side of the coin, all our human desires and abilities contract into a focus on consuming or what
Marx called a sense of having: Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it,
when it exists for us as capital or when we directly possess, eat, drink, wear, inhabit it, etc, in short, when we use it.23
Our ability to
experience sexual pleasure is alienated from us and turned into a commodity which we then desire
to consume. But this process transforms sexual confidence and satisfaction into goals which recede
further and further from our reach. In her book Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and The Rise of Raunch Culture, Ariel Levy shows
how the growing commodification of sex and objectification of women’s bodies has become increasingly
divorced and disconnected from sexual pleasure and fulfilment.24 The sex industry now appears to be setting the
agenda for numerous TV programmes, which show how women are encouraged to seek personal happiness by being
surgically, cosmetically and sartorially tweaked into conforming to certain sexual stereotypes. In the US
breast augmentation rose by 700 percent between 1992 and 2004. In some South American countries this procedure is a standard gift for a
daughter at 18.25Increasingly, women are even prepared to undergo a “vaginoplasty” in which their vulva and labia are surgically altered to
make them look like those of porn stars in Playboy. There could be no more graphic example of how women in particular are alienated from
their bodies to such an extent that they are prepared to pay for someone to cut and stitch them into a shape they are told will make them
desirable to others. Sex is not immune from the conditions which shape all aspects of our lives.
All sexuality is shaped by the
material conditions and social priorities of the society we live in , but the open treatment of sex as a
commodity to be sold on the market is not just another aspect of that process. Sexuality is regarded as one of the
last intimate aspects of ourselves. Sex is a part of our human nature, an experience that can be fulfilling and a
central part of an individual’s identity. As one economist put it: Prostitution is the classic example of
how commodification debases a gift’s value and its giver, as it destroys the kind of reciprocity
required to realise human sexuality as a shared good and the mutual recognition of each partner’s
needs.26 Openness about sex and expectations of sexual fulfilment were key demands of the women’s
liberation movement. However, the sexual freedom fought for in the 1960s and 1970s has been
distorted and repackaged as commodities. The selling of sexuality to clients transforms the body into an object, a thing for
someone else to use. All aspirations to autonomy and personal satisfaction are brutally stripped away by commercial sex which degrades both
women and men and reinforces the most backward prejudices against women.
Essentialization is key – the aff’s refusal to recognize a totalizing system prevents
strategies that accept exploitation as a concrete reality – this is key to effective class
struggle and acts as a diversion
Zavarzadeh 1995 – professor at Syracuse (Mas’ud, Post-Ality: Marxism and Postmodernism)
Class therefore is not just another “difference” in Marxism but the central force in the social organization
and dynamics of history itself. Even in such early materialist texts as The German Ideology, Marx and Engels emphasize that class is
not simply a cultural or political difference but the articulation of the material interests of people. As such,
it is an index of social antagonism – the very social reaction, by the way, that post-al theories of class attempt to
erase through reading class as a question of “difference” and thus society as a hegemonic organization
not of antagonism but of an ongoing conversation to produce consensus. “The separate individuals,” Marx and
Engels write:
form a class only insofar as they have to carry on a common battle against another class;
otherwise they are on hostile terms with each other as competitors . On the other hand, the class in its turn
achieves an independent existence over against the individuals, so that the latter find their conditions of existence predestined, and hence have
their position in life and their personal development assigned to them by their class, become subsumed under it. This is the same
phenomenon as the subjection of the separate individuals to the division of labour and can
only be removed by the abolition of
private property and of labour itself” (emphasis added, 77). This “subsuming of individuals under class,” they
make clear, “brings with it their subjection to all kinds of ideas” (77). Class, in other words, determines all aspects
of the life of the individual as part of a collectivity whose formation is economic and not volunteeristic
(“coalition”). In classical Marxist theory, class is, therefore, not the outcome of “income” or “status” or “occupation” (as it is in Weberian
bourgeois sociology that underlies post-al theories of class). Changes
that post-al theory regards to be radical structural
changes are, from a historical materialist perspective, superstructural
changes and
not changes in the material base
that, in fact, determines class formation. These superstructural changes represent complications in “how” the
social relations of production do what they have always done under capitalism: enforce the social
division of labor. At stake here is not “how” the exploited surplus value is distributed (as consumptionist
theories lead us to believe),
but rather the continued practice of exploitation itself. Complications and new
mediations in distribution should not obscure the fundamental laws of motion of capital which are the laws of
the social division of labor and class structure. In the “Working Day,” Marx argues (Capital, 1, 340-416), people either produce
surplus value, in which case they are part of the “proletariat,” or they exploit surplus value – that is they own
the means of production (the “bourgeois”) and are in a position to make other people work for them. Class in other words, is the effect of
the subject’s relation to the source of “profit” (surplus labor). The fact that the extracted surplus value gets distributed by capitalists through
such “new” relays as knowledge-workers and amanagers (or army officers, teachers, police persons) in no way obliterates the fundamental
social and economic division between capitalists and wage-laborers. All post-al theories of class are aimed at substituting the question of “how”
surplus value is distributed for the problem of “why” it is extracted: the extraction of surplus labor, in other words, is taken for granted as a
natural act because the existence of capitalism itself (which depends on surplus labor) is taken as a fact of nature.
We already know the world is messed up, now is the time to develop theory that
allows us to deal with it – if they corrupt the theory it allows bad revolutionary
practices and takeover by a misreading of communism – they cause the alternative to
turn into Soviet Russia
Healy 1995 - long-time activist in the Communist Party, one of the first union leaders to advocate for
the rights of Chicanos and blacks as factory and field workers (Dorothy, Post-Ality: Marxism and
Postmodernism)
My concept of what it means to be a revolutionary was based on a montage of the organizers from the Sinclair
novels, along with my childhood memories from Denver. I also began to read an enormous amount of history around this time. I was very
taken with Charles Beard – at that point his writing seemed to me to represent great Marxist truths because he talked about the things that
high school history never talked about, the underlying economic motives of history makers. I read everything he and his wife Mary Beard wrote.
I had started reading Marx and Lenin, but at that point I think Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau had more effect on me. What
I
responded to in my readings were emotional rather than theoretical questions. I was developing a hatred of the
brutality of the existing economic system, a hatred of the impersonal degradation of human beings. That’s what motivated me as a teenager,
and stayed with me… It
was action, not theory, that entranced me. I think I was very typical of young and even not-so-young
Communists in my attitude. Offhand I would guess that the great majority of Communists, maybe 60 to 70 percent of
the Party, never got around to reading much of Marx and Lenin. The Trotskyists were so good at theoretical debates
because they had more time to read; they weren’t doing the level of activity that we were. When I did get around to reading Lenin later in the
1930s, I read him strictly from my interest in history as history. I wasn’t at all interested in nor did I understand the theoretical questions that
were involved. It wasn’t until the birth of my son in the 1940s, when I was at home for a time, that I reread Marx and Lenin, and the power of
their ideas finally hit me. Then theory became exciting… There
was, as I’ve noted, a lack of genuine theoretical
understanding in the Party, for all our talk about theory. We were so busy with day-to-day organizing that we
could rarely consider the larger questions facing our movement; in the midst of the Party crisis in 1956 the charge that
was made over and over again was that
we had been deliberately kept so busy that nobody had time to think .
the Party lacked the kind of internal political structures
that might have encouraged us to ask substantive questions about the meaning of our own experience.
Whether it was deliberate policy or not, it was certainly true that
That led to the enshrining of the Party leadership , contributing to their aura of infallibility, and making
the likelihood of anyone’s challenging what came from them negligible. The fact that by the mid-1930s the
international leaders of the Communist movement were advocating changes that made sense in practical terms for American domestic politics
only enhanced their authority among us and increased the likelihood that in the future we would continue to accept their leadership – even
when they
were wrong, as was all too often
the case…
Localism – It’s structurally impossible to affirm local resistance without distracting
focus from global struggles
Hennessy 2K (Rosemary, Prof at SUNY Albany, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism)
Basic to the structure of late capitalism is a new global division of labor. Of course, capitalism has relied on an
international division of labor since its inception, and so strictly speaking it has always been global. The industrial take-off in early-nineteenthcentury Europe was possible because of the accumulation of wealth accrued from colonies all over the globe, and the development of
monopoly capitalism in Europe and the United States depended on finding sources of raw materials and expanding markets in far-flung colonial
territories. What distinguishes late capitalism’s global division of labor is the way new technologies have accelerated the speed and dispersed
the space of production to unprecedented levels. Although
late capitalism has magnified the homogenization of social
relations and cultural forms, it is also characterized by unprecedented fragmentation of the production
process into subnational localities. Since the end of World War II, and to an intensified degree since the 1970s, production
has become increasingly flexible as capital seeks out those spaces for production that offer the cheapest
labor source and the least political interference. This has meant that production is no longer centered entirely
in a single site, and it no longer takes place primarily on the assembly line. Instead, production relies on heightened
mobility, and on time and space compression— making use of profit-enhancing strategies like small batch, just-in-time production, and
outsourcing, with the manufacture and assembly of component parts sometimes spread over continents or diffused into “private” homework.
Late capitalism is also more intensely transnational in the sense that a network of industrial and service
formations rather than a single nation serves as its center, and the transnational corporation is now the prime determiner
of capital transmission. These changes in production have challenged and recast the post– World War II division of geopolitics into first, second,
and third worlds. The “second world” of the Soviet bloc has virtually disappeared; parts of the “undeveloped third world” are full and
competitive participants in transnational capital exchange and are saturated with first-world corporations and commodities, while parts of the
“first world” harbor relations of production and ways of life that are indistinguishable from conditions in many third-world countries. Flexible
production has made organized resistance by labor more difficult and the terms for those who do not participate
efficiently in late capitalist production more arrogant and absolute: nonplayers are simply moved out of capital’s pathways
(Dirlik 32). Culturally this interplay between global homogenization and subnational fragmentation has
registered in new forms of consciousness and transnational identity— multiculturalism for one, and
more gender-flexible sexual identities for another— that coexist with or are being articulated into the
prevailing values and norms of Europe and the United States (Dirlik 28– 31). Late capitalism’s new economic, political,
and cultural structures have also intensified the relationship between global and local situations. Global transnational corporations rely on
localities of many sorts as sites for capital accumulation through production, marketing, and knowledgemaking.
Global-localism has
become both the paradigm of production and an explicit new strategy by which the corporation
infiltrates various localities without forfeiting its global aims
(Dirlik 34). From corporate headquarters, CEOs
orchestrate the incorporation of particular localities into the demands of global capital at the same time that the corporation is domesticated
into the local society. Thus it
is in the interests of global capitalism to celebrate and enhance awareness of local
communities, cultures, and forms of identification. But this cannot be done in a way that makes evident
their exploitation, that is, in a way that makes visible the real material relationship between the global
and the local (Dirlik 35). Against capitalism’s penetration of local communities, many “local” groups—
indigenous people’s movements, ethnic and women’s organizations, lesbian, gay, and transgender rights
movements— have presented themselves as potential sites for liberation struggles. Undoubtedly, these
struggles have indeed accomplished changes that have enhanced the quality of life for countless people. But
the celebration of “the
local” as a self-defined space for the affirmation of cultural identity and the formation of political
resistance often also play into late capitalism’s opportunistic use of localizing — not just as an
arrangement of production but also as a structure of knowing. The turn to “the local” has also been the
characteristic talisman of a postmodern culture and politics that has repudiated the totalizing narratives
of modernity. The claims of indigenous and ethnic groups, of women, and of lesbian and gay people have been an important part of
postmodern challenges to the adequacy of cultural narratives— among them enlightened humanism and Eurocentric scholarship— that do not
address the histories of subaltern peoples. However, insofar
as their counter-narratives put forward an alternative
that de-links the interests of particular social groups from the larger collective that they are part of,
they tend to promote political projects that keep the structures of capitalism invisible.
Focusing on language as a means of emancipation erases the potential for revolution
and offers a discursive out from exploitation
Zavarzadeh 1995 – professor at Syracuse (Mas’ud, Post-Ality: Marxism and Postmodernism)
The matterist theories of consumptionism are all founded upon the ludic assumptions of the Foucauldian social theory in which “the
discurisive” is not simply a separate level or an isolated dimension of the social but as Laclau puts it, “coextensive with the social as such” (“Populist Rupture and Discourse” 87). This is another way of saying that “every social
practice is production of meaning” (Laclau 87). Consequently, in the post-al dogma, the social is constituted not
by forces of production and the social relations that they make possible, but by meaning. In other words, as
Fiske puts it, “All the commodities of late capitalism are ‘goods to speak with’ “ (Understanding Popular Culture 34). What matters for
ending capitalist domination, in other words, is not control of the means of production but the control
of the means of signification. The substitution of “consumption” for “production” then is really not an
epistemological move: it is done not because such a displacement (as it is claimed) will provide a more
accurate understanding of radical structural changes in capitalism but because such a reversal erases “revolution”
from the map of social struggle and puts in its place a discursive difference that can be negotiated.
Politics, in the “consumption paradigm,” is a matter of changing representations and meanings – discourses – which
are post-al nodes of power. This view of politics dematerializes power by decoupling “domination” from
“exploitation ” and retheroizing power as a diffuse and discursive practice. The post-al theory of power goes
beyond Foucault and is
based on the notion that the structures of post-al capitalism have become so layered,
complex, and abstract that one cannot locate a single fixed center from which power issues – moreover
power is not even “real.” Power in the post-al moment has become so abstract, it is believed, that not even
such classic postmodern theories of power (as diffused discourse) put forth by Foucault can account for it. In
Forget Foucault, one of Baudrillard’s main critiques of Foucault is that although Foucault responded to newer forms of power in his critiques of
Marxist notion of power, Foucault’s own idea of power has become irrelevant in the post-al moment since power, for Foucault, is still an
actuality: lines of force in his institutional analysis are treated as realities. However, in the “consumer society,” there are, according to
Baudrillard, no “real” lines of force but simply simulations of power: signs that parody power (61). This ludic power
is available to all
users of signs. The political conclusion is that not only is capitalism not growing more powerful but it has, in fact, become a source of
power-as-simulation for the people. Power in the post-al moment is simulational, and every instance of power is said to give
rise to “resistance” which leads to a new form of empowerment within the existing relations of
exploitation . Women, people of color, and the queer, in post-al theory, can be empowered without the
need to overthrow the system of exploitation that deploys socially produced differences (gender, sexuality,
race…) to legitimate higher and higher ratios of extraction of surplus labor. The displacing of “exploitation”
by “domination” is justified because, as Fiske puts it, “The productivity of consumption is detached from
wealth or class” (35).