1NC

(512, “# 12, Punctuation – The Colon and Semicolon”, http://usawocc.army.mil/IMI/wg12.htm)
The colon introduces the following: a. A list, but only after "as follows," "the following," or a noun for which the list is an appositive: Each scout will carry the following: (colon) meals for three days, a survival knife, and his sleeping bag. The company had four new officers: (colon) Bill Smith, Frank Tucker, Peter
Fillmore, and Oliver Lewis. b. A long quotation (one or more paragraphs): In The Killer Angels Michael
Shaara wrote: (colon) You may find it a different story from the one you learned in school. There have been many versions of that battle [Gettysburg] and that war [the Civil War]. (The quote continues for two more paragraphs.) c. A formal quotation or question: The President declared: (colon) "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." The question is: (colon) what can we do about it? d. A second independent clause which explains the first: Potter's motive is clear: (colon) he wants the assignment. e. After the introduction of a business letter: Dear Sirs: (colon) Dear Madam: (colon) f. The details following an announcement For sale: (colon) large lakeside cabin with dock g. A formal resolution, after the word
"resolved:"
Resolved: (colon) That this council petition the mayor.
(Jon M., Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts – California Polytechnic U., et al., The Debater’s
Guide, Third Edition, p. 4)
The Proposition of Policy: Urging Future Action In policy propositions, each topic contains certain key elements, although they have slightly different functions from comparable elements of value-oriented propositions . 1. An agent doing the acting --“The United States” in “The United States should adopt a policy of free trade.” Like the object of evaluation in a proposition of value, the agent is the subject of the sentence. 2. The verb should —the first part of a verb phrase that urges action. 3. An action verb to follow should in the should -verb combination. For example, should adopt here means to put a program or policy into action though governmental means . 4. A specification of directions or a limitation of the action desired. The phrase free trade , for example, gives direction and limits to the topic, which would, for example, eliminate consideration of increasing tariffs, discussing diplomatic recognition, or discussing interstate commerce. Propositions of policy deal with future action. Nothing has yet occurred. The entire debate is about whether something ought to occur .
What you agree to do, then, when you accept the affirmative side in such a debate is to offer sufficient and compelling reasons for an audience to perform the future action that you propose.
– MA in Criminal Justice and Criminology
Dana Lynn, “Systematic Approach to Prostitution Laws: A Literature Review and Further Suggestions”
[http://commons.emich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1230&context=theses] May 10
Under a legalization policy, a country removes all criminal penalties surrounding prostitution but implements forms of regulation towards certain aspects of prostitution. Weitzer (1999) explains,
“Legalization spells regulation of some kinds: licensing or registration, confining prostitution to red light districts, state-restricted brothels, mandatory medical exams, special business taxes, etc ” (p.
87). The main principle behind legalization is the notion of harm reduction, meaning that “regulation is necessary to reduce some of the problems associated with prostitution” (Weitzer, p. 87). Similar to Weitzer, Shaver (1985) explains, “The underlying assumption here [the legalization policy] is that prostitution serves the different sexual needs of men and women and must be regulated so as to

contain its worst side effects” (p. 494).
Essentially, the difference between legalization and decriminalization is that legalization focuses on making prostitution a licensable entity, complete with restrictions, rules, and regulations, whereas decriminalization only implies some regulations but does not involve licensing.
“Legalize” [http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/legalize.html] Accessed July 22, 2014 //
To make enforceable, justifiable, or lawful by judicial or legislative sanction .
– Professor of Philosophy @ Vandy
(Robert, Philosophy & Social Criticism, “Deliberativist responses to activist challenges,” 31(4) p. 429-431)
The argument thus far might appear to turn exclusively upon different conceptions of what reasonableness entails. The deliberativist view I have sketched holds that reasonableness involves some degree of what we may call epistemic modesty. On this view, the reasonable citizen seeks to have her beliefs reflect the best available reasons, and so she enters into public discourse as a way of testing her views against the objections and questions of those who disagree; hence she implicitly holds that her present view is open to reasonable critique and that others who hold opposing views may be able to offer justifications for their views that are at least as strong as her reasons for her own. Thus any mode of politics that presumes that discourse is extraneous to questions of justice and justification is unreasonable. The activist sees no reason to accept this. Reasonableness for the activist consists in the ability to act on reasons that upon due reflection seem adequate to underwrite action; discussion with those who disagree need not be involved. According to the activist, there are certain cases in which he does in fact know the truth about what justice requires and in which there is no room for reasoned objection. Under such cond itions, the deliberativist’s demand for discussion can only obstruct justice; it is therefore irrational. It may seem that we have reached an impasse. However, there is a further line of criticism that the activist must face. To the activist’s view that at least in certain situations he may reasonably decline to engage with persons he disagrees with (107), the deliberative democrat can raise the phenomenon that Cass Sunstein has called ‘group polarization’ (Sunstein, 2003; 2001a: ch. 3; 2001b: ch. 1). To explain: consider that political activists cannot eschew deliberation altogether; they often engage in rallies, demonstrations, teach-ins, workshops, and other activities in which they are called to make public the case for their views. Activists also must engage in deliberation among themselves when deciding strategy. Political movements must be organized, hence those involved must decide upon targets, methods, and tactics; they must also decide upon the content of their pamphlets and the precise messages they most wish to convey to the press. Often the audience in both of these deliberative contexts will be a self-selected and sympathetic group of like-minded activists. Group polarization is a well-documented phenomenon that has ‘been found all over the world and in many diverse tasks’; it means that ‘members of a deliberating group predictably move towards a more extreme point in the direction indicated by the members’ predeliberation tendencies’ (Sunstein, 2003: 81 –2). Importantly, in groups that ‘engage in repeated discussions’ over time, the polarization is even more pronounced (2003:
86 Hence discussion in a small but devoted activist enclave that meets regularly to strategize and protest
‘should produce a situation in which individuals hold positions more extreme than those of any individual member before the series of deliberations began’ (ibid.) 17 The fact of group polarization is relevant to our discussion because the activist has proposed that he may reasonably decline to engage in discussion

with those with whom he disagrees in cases in which the requirements of justice are so clear that he can be confident that he has the truth. Group polarization suggests that deliberatively confronting those with whom we disagree is essential even when we have the truth. For even if we have the truth, if we do not engage opposing views, but instead deliberate only with those with whom we agree, our view will shift progressively to a more extreme point , and thus we lose the truth . In order to avoid polarization, deliberation must take place within heterogeneous ‘argument pools’ (Sunstein, 2003: 93). This of course does not mean that there should be no groups devoted to the achievement of some common political goal; it rather suggests that engagement with those with whom one disagrees is essential to the proper pursuit of justice. Insofar as the activist denies this, he is unreasonable.
– Australian National University
(Robert and Simon, “When Does Deliberation Begin? Internal Reflection versus Public Discussion in
Deliberative Democra cy” Political Studies, Vol 50, p 627-649, WileyInterscience)
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 nonattitudes. 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 a rriving 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 p rocessing. 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 w e 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 i s 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 internalreflective deliberation – requires us to call up reasons from stored memory rather than just consulting our running online ‘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 is simply to say that, on a great many models and in a great many different sorts of settings, it seems likely that elements of the prediscursive process are likely to prove crucial to the shaping and reshaping of people’s attitudes in a citizens’ jury-style process. The initial processes of focusing attention on a topic , providing information about it and inviting people to think hard about it is likely to provide a strong impetus to internalreflective 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 dis cussion 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 findin gs about citizens’ juries be extended to other larger or less wellordered 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 politic s. 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 micro-deliberative 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 expe rtise 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 a nd 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 realworld 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.
http://static.sdu.dk/mediafiles/Files/Information_til/Studerende_ved_SDU/Din_uddannelse/phd_hum/afha ndlinger/2009/ThorkilHanghoej.pdf
Thorkild Hanghøj, Copenhagen, 2008
Since this PhD project began in 2004, the present author has been affiliated with DREAM (Danish
Research Centre on Education and Advanced Media Materials), which is located at the Institute of
Literature, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Southern Denmark. Research visits have taken place at the Centre for Learning, Knowledge, and Interactive Technologies (L-KIT), the
Institute of Education at the University of Bristol and the institute formerly known as Learning Lab
Denmark at the School of Education, University of Aarhus, where I currently work as an assistant professor.
Debate games are often based on pre-designed scenarios that include descriptions of issues to be debated, educational goals, game goals, roles, rules, time frames etc. In this way, debate games differ from textbooks and everyday classroom instruction as debate scenarios allow teachers and students to actively imagine, interact and communicate within a domain-specific game space . However, instead of mystifying debate games as a “magic circle” (Huizinga, 1950), I will try to overcome the epistemological dichotomy between “gaming” and “teaching” that tends to dominate discussions of educational games. In short, educational gaming is a form of teaching. As mentioned, education and games represent two different semiotic domains that both embody the three faces of knowledge: assertions, modes of representation and social forms of organisation (Gee, 2003; Barth, 2002; cf. chapter 2). In order to understand the interplay between these different domains and their interrelated knowledge forms, I will draw attention to a central assumption in Bakhtin’s dialogical philosophy. According to Bakhtin, all forms of communication and culture are subject to centripetal and centrifugal forces (Bakhtin, 1981). A centripetal force is the drive to impose one version of the truth, while a centrifugal force involves a range of possible truths and interpretations. This means that any form of expression involves a duality of centripetal and centrifugal forces: “Every concrete utterance of a speaking subject serves as a point where centrifugal as well as centripetal forces are brought to bea r” (Bakhtin, 1981: 272). If we take teaching as an example, it is always affected by centripetal and centrifugal forces in the on-going negotiation of “truths” between teachers and students. In the words of Bakhtin: “Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction” (Bakhtin, 1984a: 110). Similarly, the dialogical space of debate games also embodies centrifugal and centripetal forces. Thus, the election scenario of The Power
Game involves centripetal elements that are mainly determined by the rules and outcomes of the game, i.e. the election is based on a limited time frame and a fixed voting procedure. Similarly, the open-ended

goals, roles and resources represent centrifugal elements and create virtually endless possibilities for researching , preparing, presenting, debating and evaluating a variety of key political issues.
Consequently, the actual process of enacting a game scenario involves a complex negotiation between these centrifugal/centripetal forces that are inextricably linked with the teachers and students’ game activities. In this way, the enactment of The Power Game is a form of teaching that combines different pedagogical practices (i.e. group work, web quests, student presentations) and learning resources (i.e. websites, handouts, spoken language) within the interpretive frame of the election scenario. Obviously, tensions may arise if there is too much divergence between educational goals and game goals. This means that game facilitation requires a balance between focusing too narrowly on the rules or “facts” of a game (centripetal orientation) and a focusing too broadly on the contingent possibilities and interpretations of the game scenario (centrifugal orientation ). For Bakhtin, the duality of centripetal/centrifugal forces often manifests itself as a dynamic between “monological” and “dialogical” forms of discourse. Bakhtin illustrates this point with the monological discourse of the Socrates/Plato dialogues in which the teacher never learns anything new from the students , desp ite Socrates’ ideological claims to the contrary (Bakhtin, 1984a). Thus, discourse becomes monologised when
“someone who knows and possesses the truth instructs someone who is ignorant of it and in error”, where “a thought is either affirmed or repudiated” by the authority of the teacher (Bakhtin,
1984a: 81). In contrast to this, dialogical pedagogy fosters inclusive learning environments that are able to expand upon students’ existing knowledge and collaborative construction of “truths” (Dysthe, 1996). At this point, I should clarify that Bakhtin’s term “dialogic” is both a descriptive term (all utterances are per definition dialogic as they address other utterances as parts of a chain of communication) and a normative term as dialogue is an ideal to be worked for against the forces of “monologism” (Lillis,
2003: 197-8). In this project, I am mainly interested in describing the dialogical space of debate games. At the same time, I agree with Wegerif that “one of the goals of education, perhaps the most important goal, should be dialogue as an end in itself ” (Wegerif, 2006: 61).
http://www.flt.uae.ac.ma/elhirech/baktine/0521831059.pdf#page=331
Northwestern Professor, Prof. Morson's work ranges over a variety of areas: literary theory (especially narrative); the history of ideas, both Russian and European; a variety of literary genres (especially satire, utopia, and the novel); and his favorite writers -- Chekhov, Gogol, and, above all, Dostoevsky and
Tolstoy. He is especially interested in the relation of literature to philosophy.
A belief in truly dialogic ideological becoming would lead to schools that were quite different. In such schools, the mind would be populated with a complexity of voices and perspectives it had not known, and the student would learn to think with those voices, to test ideas and experiences against them, and to shape convictions that are innerly persuasive in response. This very process would be central . Students would sense that whatever word they believed to be innerly persuasive was only tentatively so: the process of dialogue continues.We must keep the conversation going, and formal education only initiates the process. The innerly persuasive discourse would not be final, but would be, like experience itself, ever incomplete and growing. As Bakhtin observes of the innerly persuasive word: Its creativity and productiveness consist precisely in the fact that such a word awakens new and independent words, that it organizes masses of our words from within, and does not remain in an isolated and static condition. It is not so much interpreted by us as it is further, that is, freely, developed, applied to new material, new conditions; it enters into interanimating relationships with new contexts. . . . The semantic structure of an innerly persuasive discourse is not finite, it is open; in each of the new contexts that dialogize it, this discourse is able to reveal ever newer ways to mean. (DI, 345 –6) We not only learn, we also learn to learn , and we learn to learn best when we engage in a dialogue with others and ourselves. We appropriate the world of difference, and ourselves develop new potentials. Those potentials allow us to appropriate yet more voices. Becoming becomes endless becoming. We talk, we listen, and we achieve an open-ended wisdom. Difference becomes an opportunity (see Freedman and Ball, this volume). Our world manifests the spirit that Bakhtin attributed to Dostoevsky: “nothing conclusive has yet taken place in the world, the ultimate word of the world and about the world has not yet been spoken, the world is open

and free, everything is in the future and will always be in the future.”3 Such a world becomes our world within, its dialogue lives within us, and we develop the potentials of our ever-learning selves. Letmedraw some inconclusive con clusions, which may provoke dialogue. Section I of this volume, “Ideologies in
Dialogue: Theoretical Considerations” and Bakhtin’s thought in general suggest that we learn best when we are actually learning to learn. We engage in dialogue with ourselves and others, and the most important thing is the value of the open-ended process itself. Section II, “Voiced, Double Voiced, and
Multivoiced Discourses in Our Schools” suggests that a belief in truly dialogic ideological becoming would lead to schools that were quite different. In such schools, the mind would be populated with a complexity of voices and perspectives it had not known, and the student would learn to think with those voices, to test ideas and experiences against them, and to shape convictions that are innerly persuasive in response. Teachers would not be trying to get students to hold the right opinions but to sense the world from perspectives they would not have encountered or dismissed out of hand. Students would develop the habit of getting inside the perspectives of other groups and other people. Literature in particular is especially good at fostering such dialogic habits. Section III, “Heteroglossia in a Changing World” may invite us to learn that dialogue involves really listening to others, hearing them not as our perspective would categorize what they say, but as they themselves would categorize what they say, and only then to bring our own perspective to bear. We talk, we listen, and we achieve an open-ended wisdom. The chapters in this volume seem to suggest that we view learning as a perpetual process.
That was perhaps
Bakhtin’s favorite idea: that to appreciate life, or dialogue, we must see value not only in achieving this or that result, but also in recognizing that honest and open striving in a world of uncertainty and difference is itself the most important thing. What we must do is keep the conversation going.
http://www.flt.uae.ac.ma/elhirech/baktine/0521831059.pdf#page=331
Northwestern Professor, Prof. Morson's work ranges over a variety of areas: literary theory (especially narrative); the history of ideas, both Russian and European; a variety of literary genres (especially satire, utopia, and the novel); and his favorite writers -- Chekhov, Gogol, and, above all, Dostoevsky and
Tolstoy. He is especially interested in the relation of literature to philosophy.
Bakhtin viewed the whole proces s of “ideological” (in the sense of ideas and values, however unsystematic) development as an endless dialogue. As teachers, we find it difficult to avoid a voice of authority, however much we may think of ours as the rebel’s voice, because our rebelliousness against society at large speaks in the authoritative voice of our subculture.We speak the language and thoughts of academic educators , even when we imagine we are speaking in no jargon at all, and that jargon, inaudible to us, sounds with all the overtones of authority to our students. We are so prone to think of ourselves as fighting oppression that it takes some work to realize that we ourselves may be felt as oppressive and overbearing, and that our own voice may provoke the same reactions that we feel when we hear an authoritative voice with which we disagree. So it is often helpful to think back on the great authoritative oppressors and reconstruct their self-image: helpful, but often painful. I remember, many years ago, when, as a rece nt student rebel and activist, I taught a course on “The Theme of the Rebel” and discovered, to my considerable chagrin, that many of the great rebels of history were the very same people as the great oppressors. There is a famous exchange between Erasmus and Luther, who hoped to bring the great Dutch humanist over to the Reformation, but Erasmus kept asking Luther how he could be so certain of so many doctrinal points. We must accept a few things to be Christians at all, Erasmus wrote, but surely beyond that there must be room for us highly fallible beings to disagree. Luther would have none of such tentativeness. He knew, he was sure. The Protestant rebels were, for a while, far more intolerant than their orthodox opponents. Often enough, the oppressors are the ones who present themselves and really think of themselves as liberators. Certainty that one knows the root cause of evil: isn’t that itself often the root cause? We know from Tsar Ivan the Terrible’s letters denouncing Prince
Kurbsky, a general who escaped to Poland, that Ivan saw himself as someone who had been oppressed by noblemen as a child and pictured himself as the great rebel against traditional authority when he killed masses of people or destroyed whole towns. There is something in the nature of maximal rebellion against authority that produces ever greater intolerance, unless one is very careful. For the skills of

fighting or refuting an oppressive power are not those of openness, self-skepticism, or real dialogue . In preparing for my course, I remember my dismay at reading Hitler’s Mein Kampf and discovering that his self-consciousness was precisely that of the rebel speaking in the name of oppressed Germans, and that much of his amazing appeal – otherwise so inexplicable – was to the
German sense that they were rebelling victims. In our time, the Serbian Communist and nationalist leader Slobodan Milosevic exploited much the same appeal. Bakhtin surely knew that Communist totalitarianism, the Gulag, and the unprecedented censorship were constructed by rebels who had come to power. His favorite writer, Dostoevsky, used to emphasize that the worst oppression comes from those who, with the rebellious psychology of “the insulted and humiliated,” have seized power – unless they have somehow cultivated the value of dialogue , as Lenin surely had not, but which Eva, in the essay by Knoeller about teaching The Autobiography of Malcolm X, surely had. Rebels often make the worst tyrants because their word, the voice they hear in their consciousness, has borrowed something crucial from the authoritative word it opposed, and perhaps exaggerated it: the aura of righteous authority. If one’s ideological becoming is understood as a struggle in which one has at last achieved the truth, one is likely to want to impose that truth with maximal authority; and rebels of the next generation may proceed in much the same way, in an ongoing spiral of intolerance .

Julie, “It Is Time To Give Up Liberal, Bourgeois Theories, Including New Materialist Feminism, And Take
Up Historical Materialist Feminism For The 21st Century”
[http://www.redcritique.org/WinterSpring2014/historicalmaterialistfeminismforthe21stcentury.htm]
Winter/Spring //
Recently, there has been a turn away from textualist and culturalist theory in feminism and the emergence of "new" materialist feminisms. Represented by the work of Elizabeth Grosz, Rosi
Braidotti, and others, this turn in theory has come in response to the deepening inequalities and crises of capitalism that are having profound effects on women worldwide — material problems outside the text and not resolvable by a change in cultural values . While it is important to see that the new materialist feminisms are responses to real problems, it is equally important to understand how these materialisms are limited by their conceptualization of the material. The new materialist feminisms are actually disenabling for feminism in that they are forms of spiritualism which displace critique with strategies of enchanted affective adaptation and survival and thus dismantle materialist feminism's primary conceptual tool for social transformation.
To avoid merely reproducing sophisticated forms of the survivalism and "prepperism" that have emerged as individualistic coping responses to economic crisis and austerity, I argue that feminism needs to return to historical materialism in the tradition of Marx, Engels and Kollontai to understand social life in terms of its root relations and aid in the struggles to bring about social transformation.
¶
Exemplary of the new materialist feminism is Rosi Braidotti's writing on
"the politics of 'life itself'," a theory which she organizes around the trope of "sustainability."
Sustainability, a concept in ecology for living within natural limits, becomes in these writings a means of reconceiving the historical social relations of capitalism as if they were the unchangeable, underlying existential limit-situation of "life itself." The politics of "life itself" and the new materialist focus on seeking a sustainable feminism within this new, more "realist" approach to material reality, is a form of feminist theory and politics which is ultimately the already familiar theory and politics of reparative reading. Why is this significant? As Ellis Hanson suggests in a review of Sedgwick,
"Faced with the depressing realization that people are fragile and the world hostile, a reparative reading focuses not on the exposure of political outrages that we already know but rather on the process of reconstructing a sustainable life in their wake" (105). In other words, reparative analysis begins not with critique of the so-called already known and presumably known to be unchangeable, but by focusing on how to live within the already-known-to-be hostile world.
Such a theory of the social begins and ends by reducing knowledge to a matter of how to cope, how to feel, how to exist, etc. within what is taken to be unchangeable. The effect of this focus on
"sustainability" within hostility is that social transformation — which requires the production of knowledge of what needs to be transformed — is treated as impossible . Abandoning the project of transformation, I argue, is a sign of the way dominant "materialist" feminism — under the guise of "new materialism" — has increasingly abandoned the project of women's emancipation from exploitation, and in the interests of capital instead translates austerity measures into a theoretical discourse of getting by on less.
¶
At the core of Braidotti's theory of "sustainable feminism" and "life politics" is a "new materialist" understanding of "life." For Braidotti, life is made up of two parts — zoē and bios. Zoē, "life as absolute vitality," is the spiritual and bios is the "bioorganic" body which sets limits on the spiritual life force (210). Braidotti writes:
¶
Zoē, or life as absolute vitality, however, is not above negativity, and it can hurt. It is always too much for the specific slab of enfleshed existence that single subjects actualize. It is a constant challenge for us to rise to the occasion, to catch the wave of life's intensities and ride it (210).
¶
Thus for Braidotti, the

source of social contradictions is the conflict between zoē, that is, absolute vitality or spiritual life force, and our bio-organic bodies. As a result, Braidotti's new materialism bypasses the ensemble of social relations and historical conditions that produce social contradictions in capitalism and presents contradictions as transhistorical and existential conditions of life as such. On this logic, our absolute vitality comes into the world and reaches the limit of the body and this causes us "pain." But (in this narrative) there is no real way to compensate for pain. This explanation of pain is an example of bypassing the social. As such it is an accomodationist block to changing the conditions that produce suffering.
¶
In fact, as with all the popular articulations of
"materialism" today, Braidotti's theory is not actually an extension of materialism, but a break from it. Materialism means determination by the mode of production because it is this materialism that explains sense experience. Materialism is not the experience that exceeds conceptuality — a
Kantian theory of the material that has come to dominate cultural theory, especially as it conceives of "life." This notion of materialism merely reifies sense experience, it cannot explain it. Braidotti is
Kantian about the material because she sees it as a sublime excess. Life, Braidotti writes,
¶ is experienced as inhuman because it is all too human, obscene because it lives on mindlessly. Are we not baffled by this scandal, this wo nder, this zoē, that is to say, by an idea of life that exuberantly exceeds bios and supremely ignores logos? Are we not in awe of this piece of flesh called our 'body,' of this aching meat called our 'self' expressing the abject and simultaneously divine potency of life? (208).
¶ According to Braidotti , what exceeds the individual body is zoē—the spiritual life force, which we should not understand conceptually (by seeking to explain the conditions that shape it) but worship. This is a sentimental anti-instrumental call for the reenchantment of life that obscures the way the individual is determined not by what Braidotti calls
"divine potency" but by the social relations of production. And like all anti-instrumental arguments,
Braidoitti's ends up affirming a species of the sublime: a mode of affective non-knowing that resists rationality.
¶ Thus, having rejected the necessity of being able to conceptualize (visible) effects to their (often invisible) causes , Braidotti proceeds to declare that the effects of living in the ruins of capitalism —especially disasters like 9/11—defy all reason and are impossible to understand, and she concludes that what is now necessary is not collective praxis to address the social relations which condition the unequal situations of tragedy, but an individual ethics of affirmation. She writes:
¶
This is the road to an ethics of affirmation, which respects the pain but suspends the quest for both claims and compensation. The displacement of the "zoē"-indexed reaction reveals the fundamental meaninglessness of the hurt, the injustice, or injury one has suffered. "Why me?" is the refrain most commonly heard in situations of extreme distress. The answer is plain: actually, for no reason at all. Why did some go to work in the World Trade Center on 9/11 while others missed the train? Reason has nothing to do with it. That's precisely the point.
We need to delink pain from the quest for meaning. (213-14)
¶
Following her predictable rejection of concepts and reason, in the guise of a sermon on "selflessness," Braidotti here once again rejects the abstract in favor of the errant concrete and takes as a presupposition the individual. For it is of course from the starting point of individuals and their loss that we cannot understand and explain such historical events as 9/11. From the perspective of the individual, such events are indeed random and inexplicable, but from a historical perspective they are determined. It was deep global inequities that provided the conditions of possibility for the 9/11 attacks. To celebrate the individual perspective and the inability to grasp historical necessity based on that individual perspective is not only to celebrate ignorance, but to naturalize the limits of workers and how they are thrust into the position of individuals who must compete on the market for work while leaving it the prerogative of the owners to organize the totality to the benefit of a few at the expense of the many.
¶
Central to
Braidotti's enchanted materialism is her claim that affectivity "is what activates an embodied subject, empowering him or her to interact with others" (210). However, she writes, "a subject can think/understand/do/become no more than what he or she can take or sustain within his or her embodied, spatiotemporal coordinates" (210). Thus, the ethical subject is the one who learns to endure his or her maximum zoē/bios intensity because such endurance leads to "sustainable transformations" (211), the degree of change an individual can bear.
¶
But the consequences of affirmative ethics are deeply problematic when considered in relation to the material conditions of working class families, who have been subject to a thirty year stagnation in real wages, even as worker productivity has sharply increased. In the wake of the more recent 2007 crisis, worker

productivity has sharply increased [1], while wages fell. Alongside of these trends, rates of violence against women have increased dramatically [2] and suicide is now the 10th leading cause of death in the US [3]. That the spouses in working class families are increasingly emotionally strained and often alienated from one another is not a transhistorical effect of their embodied state as it confronts a "divine" life force in zoē, but an effect of their deepening exploitation. To posit their connection and dis-connection as a transhistorical effect of the confrontation with bioszoē is to dehistoricize their pain and alienation as individuals and as a couple. It is to cut off affect from its social conditions and then insist on its affirmation.
¶
Working more hours is a matter of "making do," not existential intensity, and it is this making do under conditions of deepening exploitation that all working class families — gay and straight, white and of color, native and international —have been forced to do and which affects women profoundly . As Marx explains in his analysis of the global development of capitalism ¶ The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour... the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex. (Communist Manifesto 62).
¶ This is a particularly important argument because it explains the way that capitalism increasingly turns women into wage-workers.
Working class women and men form the "great camp" facing capital and it is thus increasing important to the prospects for revolution that women conceive of themselves as working class. This is daily confirmed in the era of global capitalism, when women workers make up the increasing majority of global workers, subject to extremely low wages and are particularly susceptible to the effects of austerity because they tend to work in and use the public sector more than men.
¶
As my discussion has, thus far, implied, "new materialism" is a ruling class movement in cultural theory in general and in feminist theory in particular. " New materialism" is aimed not only at ideologically and pragmatically adjusting exploited workers to the exigencies of capitalism in crisis and marginalizing struggles for social transformation by representing them as outside the realm of the "sustainable" (as we see in Braidotti's theory of "new materialism"), but it also serves as a means to shore up the class privileges of a small ruling class minority of men and women in capitalism by translating class contradictions into a new metaphysics of freedom.
¶
, assistant professor of English – William Jewell College, former research fellow – Center for the
Study of Women @ UCLA,
(Jennifer, “Bio-politics, Transspecies Love and/as Class Commons-Sense,” The Red Critique Vol. 14)
In fact, Hardt and Negri’s theory conceals that transnational capitalism necessitates new and different forms of love, sexuality and reproduction relations. It is not workers who —by economic necessity—adjust out of "free consent;" capital economically compels workers to do this in order to have a more easily exploitable workforce. The ruling class , Kollontai argues " seizes upon the new" family forms developed by workers (247).
Hardt and Negri’s celebration of "wasp-orchid" love and their rejection of collectivity and solidarity of workers (under the rubric of "love of worker bees") is just as much a private property concept of love as "marriage -family couple love." Its reliance
, for instance, on
"cruising" and "serial sex" as " antidotes
" to the bourgeois family form of
" marriage-couple and family love" is not a break from private property relations or love and sexuality under the capitalist mode of production, but a marker both of the extension of the market further and further into human sexual and love relations —that is, the commodification of love and sexuality —and, moreover, of historical shifts in production practices, but not production relations, which put pressure on old family forms as an institution useful for reproducing capitalism.
"Serial sex" and "cruising" are contemporary examples of what Kollontai calls the "passive adjustment of the working class to the unfavorable conditions of their existence" (247). Like "prostitution," serial sex and cruising with their market logics of "free and equal exchange" undergirded by structural relations of exploitation, are ruling class ideological resolutions to
the material contradictions and social alienation faced by the working class
under private property relations. Kollontai’s materialist analytics of the class contradictions of love under capitalism teaches

workers not to be fooled by the ruse that the ruling class puts forward in equating changes in cultural mores
and family values
—which capital necessitates of workers— with changes in material relations.
She points out that
" The champions of bourgeois individualism" routinely "say we ought to destroy all the hypocritical restrictions of the obsolete code of sexual behavior " (237). They do so when they find that older codes of sexual behavior begin to become fetters for profit. And this is the case today with the "marriage-couple" arrangement which, in many instances has come to serve as a hindrance to profit for capital. The key, for capital now , underlying the "new" post-nuclear forms of sex and love is that they are flexible families and kinship relations.
That is, they are families that are flexible in their practices and schedules, in their gender and sexual relations , in their understanding of what "companionship" and
"love" are —in short, they are flexible in the methods they use to reproduce labor-power to allow for greater pliability of the workforce to the dictates of production for profit in global capitalism. "Post-nuclear" forms of love, kinship, and family are commodified forms of love not in the sense of being morally "corrupt" as conservatives argue. The "new" forms of family are as commodified as the old forms because these family and love relations are shaped by the needs of capital today for a "flexible" labor force that has no permanent ties or commitments that will get in the way
of higher and higher levels of exploitation. Capital needs living labor, for example, to be able to pick up and move for a new job or position in another city, state, or nation.
, Distinguished Fellow – Critical Studies @ Chapman U and UCLA urban schooling prof, and
ScatamburloD’Annibale, associate professor of Communication – U Windsor,
(Peter and Valerie, “Class Dismissed? Historical materialism and the politics of ‘difference’,” Educational
Philosophy and Theory Vol. 36, Issue 2, p. 183-199)
For well over two decades we have witnessed the jubilant liberal and conservative pronouncements of the demise of socialism.
Concomitantly, history's presumed failure to defang existing capitalist relations has been read by many selfidentified ‘radicals’ as an advertisement for capitalism's inevitability.
As a result, the chorus refrain ‘There Is No
Alternative’
, sung by liberals and conservatives, has been buttressed by the symphony of post-Marxist voices recommending that we give socialism a decent burial and move on . Within this context, to speak of the promise of
Marx and socialism may appear anachronistic, even naïve, especially since the post-al intellectual vanguard has presumably demonstrated the folly of doing so. Yet we stubbornly believe that the chants of T.I.N.A. must be combated for they offer as a fait accompli, something which progressive Leftists should refuse to accept —namely the triumph of capitalism and its political bedfellow neo-liberalism, which have worked together to naturalize suffering, undermine collective struggle, and obliterate hope . We concur with Amin (1998), who claims that such chants must be defied and revealed as absurd and criminal, and who puts the challenge we face in no uncertain terms: humanity may let itself be led by capitalism's logic to a fate of collective suicide or it may pave the way for an alternative humanist project of global socialism. The grosteque conditions that inspired Marx to pen his original critique of capitalism are present and flourishing.
The inequalities of wealth and the gross imbalances of power that exist today are leading to abuses that exceed those encountered in Marx's day (Greider, 1998, p. 39). Global capitalism has paved the way for the obscene concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands and created a world increasingly divided between those who enjoy opulent affluence and those who languish in dehumanizing conditions and economic misery. In every corner of the globe, we are witnessing social disintegration as revealed by a rise in abject poverty and inequality.
At the current historical juncture, the combined assets of the 225 richest people is roughly equal to the annual income of the poorest 47 percent of the world's population, while the combined assets of the three richest people exceed the combined GDP of the 48 poorest nations (CCPA, 2002, p. 3). Approximately 2.8 billion people —almost half of the world's population— struggle in desperation to live on less than two dollars a day (McQuaig, 2001, p. 27). As many as 250 million children are wage slaves and there are over a billion workers who are either un- or under-employed. These are the concrete realities of our time —realities that require a vigorous class analysis , an unrelenting critique of capitalism and an oppositional politics capable of confronting what Ahmad (1998, p. 2) refers to as
‘capitalist universality.’
They are realities that require something more than that which is offered by the prophets of ‘difference’ and post-Marxists who would have us relegate socialism to the scrapheap of history and mummify Marxism along with Lenin's corpse. Never before has a
Marxian analysis of capitalism and class rule been so desperately needed.
That is not to say that everything Marx said or anticipated has come true, for that is clearly not the case. Many critiques of Marx focus on his strategy for moving toward socialism, and with ample justification; nonetheless Marx did provide us with fundamental insights into class society that have held true to this day. Marx's enduring relevance lies in his

indictment of capitalism which continues to wreak havoc in the lives of most. While capitalism's cheerleaders have attempted to hide its sordid underbelly, Marx's description of capitalism as the sorcerer's dark power is even more apt in light of contemporary historical and economic conditions. Rather than jettisoning Marx, decentering the role of capitalism, and discrediting class analysis, radical educators must continue to engage Marx's oeuvre and extrapolate from it that which is useful pedagogically, theoretically, and , most importantly, politically in light of the challenges that confront us. The urgency which animates Amin's call for a collective socialist vision necessitates , as we have argued, moving beyond the particularism and liberal pluralism that i nforms the ‘politics of difference.’ It
also requires challenging the questionable assumptions that have come to constitute the core of contemporary ‘radical’
theory, pedagogy and politics. In terms of effecting change, what is needed is a cogent understanding of the systemic nature of exploitation and oppression based on the precepts of a radical political economy approach (outlined above) and one that incorporates Marx's notion of ‘unity in difference’ in which people share widely common material interests. Such an understanding extends far beyond the realm of theory , for the manner in which we choose to interpret and explore the social world, the concepts and frameworks we use to express our sociopolitical understandings, are more than just abstract categories. They imply intentions, organizational practices, and political agendas. Identifying class analysis as the basis for our understandings and class struggle as the basis for political transformation implies something quite different than constructing a sense of political agency around issues of race, ethnicity, gender, etc.
Contrary to ‘Shakespeare's assertion that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,’ it should be clear that this is not the case in political matters. Rather, in politics
‘the essence
of the flower lies in the name by which it is called’
(Bannerji, 2000, p. 41). The task for progressives today is to seize the moment and plant the seeds for a political agenda that is grounded in historical possibilities and informed by a vision committed to overcoming exploitative conditions. These seeds , we would argue, must be derived from the tree of radical political economy. For the vast majority of people today
— people of all ‘racial classifications or identities, all genders and sexual orientations’—the common frame of reference
arcing across ‘difference’, the ‘concerns and aspirations that are most widely shared are those that are rooted in the common experience of everyday life shaped and constrained by political economy’
(Reed, 2000, p. xxvii). While post-
Marxist advocates of the politics of ‘difference’ suggest
that such a stance is outdated, we
would argue that the categories which they have employed to analyze ‘the social’ are now losing their usefulness, particularly in light of actual contemporary ‘social movements.’ All over the globe, there are large anti-capitalist movements afoot. In
February 2002, chants of ‘Another World Is Possible’ became the theme of protests in Porto Allegre. It seems that those people struggling in the streets haven’t read about
T.I.N.A., the end of grand narratives of emancipation, or the decentering of capitalism.
It seems as though the struggle for basic survival and some semblance of human dignity in the mean streets of the dystopian metropoles doesn’t permit much time or opportunity to read the heady proclamations emanating from seminar rooms. As E. P. Thompson (1978, p. 11) once remarked, sometimes ‘experience walks in without knocking at the door, and announces deaths, crises of subsistence, trench warfare, unemployment, inflation, genocide.’ This , of course, does not mean that socialism will inevitably come about, yet a sense of its nascent promise animates current social movements.
Indeed, noted historian Howard Zinn (2000, p. 20) recently pointed out that after years of single-issue organizing (i.e. the politics of difference), the WTO and other anti-corporate capitalist protests signaled a turning point in the ‘history of movements
of recent decades,’ for it was the issue of ‘class’ that more than anything ‘ bound everyone together .’ History, to paraphrase Thompson (1978, p. 25) doesn’t seem to be following Theory's script. Our vision is informed by Marx's historical materialism and his revolutionary socialist humanism, which must not be conflated with liberal humanism. For left politics and pedagogy, a socialist humanist vision remains crucial, whose fundamental features include the creative potential of people to challenge collectively the circumstances that they inherit.
This variant of humanism seeks to give expression to the pain, sorrow and degradation of the oppressed, those who labor under the ominous and ghastly cloak of ‘globalized’ capital. It calls for the transformation of those conditions that have prevented the bulk of humankind from fulfilling its potential. It vests its hope for change in the development of critical consciousness and social agents who make history , although not always in conditions of their choosing. The political goal of socialist humanism is, however, ‘not a resting in difference’ but rather ‘the emancipation of difference at the level of human mutuality and reciprocity.’
This would be a step forward for the ‘discovery or creation of our real differences which can only in the end be explored in reciprocal ways’ (Eagleton, 1996, p. 120). Above all else, the enduring relevance of a radical socialist pedagogy and politics is the centrality it accords to the interrogation of capitalism. We can no longer afford to remain indifferent to the horror and savagery committed by capitalist's barbaric machinations. We need to recognize that capitalist democracy is unrescuably contradictory in its own self-constitution.
Capitalism and democracy cannot be translated into one another without profound efforts at manufacturing empty idealism. Committed Leftists must unrelentingly cultivate a democratic socialist vision that refuses to forget the ‘wretched of the earth,’ the children of the damned and the victims of the culture of silence —a task which requires more than abstruse convolutions and striking ironic poses in the agnostic arena of signifying practices. Leftists must illuminate the little shops of horror that lurk beneath ‘globalization’s’ shiny façade; they must

challenge the true ‘evils ’ that are manifest in the tentacles of global capitalism's reach.
And, more than this, Leftists must search for the cracks in the edifice of globalized capitalism and shine light on those fissures that give birth to alternatives.
Socialism today, undoubtedly, runs against the grain of received wisdom, but its vision of a vastly improved and freer arrangement of social relations beckons on the horizon. Its unwritten text is nascent in the present even as it exists among the fragments of history and the shards of distant memories. Its potential remains untapped and its promise needs to be redeemed.
Eve, “I am a woman and a human: a Marxist feminist critique of intersectionality theory”
[http://libcom.org/library/i-am-woman-human-marxist-feminist-critique-intersectionality-theory-eve-mitchell]
September 12 //
Identity politics is rooted in a one-sided expression of capitalism, and is therefore not a revolutionary politics . As noted earlier, “identity” can be equated with alienated labor; it is a onesided expression of our total potential as human beings.
¶ Frantz Fanon discusses something similar in the conclusion to Black Skin White Masks. He writes, “The black man, however sincere, is a slave to the past. But I am a man, and in this sense the Peloponnesian War is as much mine as the invention of the compass” (200 – Philcox Translation, 2008). On the one hand, Fanon points to a particular, one-sided expression: blackness. On the other hand, he points toward the multi-sides of a potentially universal human. Fanon is at once both of these things: a black man, and a man (or, more generally, a human); a particular and a universal. Under capitalism, we are both the alienated worker and labor itself, except the universal has not been actualized concretely.
¶ fanon2
¶
The identity politics of the 60s and 70s conflates a particular moment, or a determinant point, in the relations of capitalism with the potential universal. Furthermore, it reproduces the schism between appearance and essence. Under capitalism there is a contradiction between the particular and the universal; appearance and essence. We appear to be alienated individuals (a bus driver, a hair stylist, a woman, etc.), though in essence we are multi-sided individuals capable of many forms of labor. Identity politics bolsters one side of this contradiction, arguing for collective struggle on the basis of “womanhood,” or “blackness,” or “black lesbianhood,” etc. To borrow from Fanon, identity politics states, “I am a black man,” “I am a woman,” or “I am a black lesbian,” etc. This is a key first step. As he writes in his critical chapter, “The Lived Experience of the Black Man:” “I finally made up my mind to shout my blackness” (101), “On the other side of the white world there lies a magical black culture. Negro sculpture! I began to blush with pride. Was this our salvation?” (102), and
¶
“So here we have the Negro rehabilitated, ‘standing at the helm,’ governing the world with his intuition, rediscovered, reappropriated, in demand, accepted; and it’s not a Negro, oh, no, but the Negro, alerting the prolific antennae of the world, standing in the spotlight of the world, spraying the world with his poetical power, ‘porous to the every breath in the world.’ I embrace the world! I am the world! The white man has never understood this magical substitution. The white man wants the world; he wants it for himself. He discovers he is the predestined master of the world. He enslaves it. His relationship with the world is one of appropriation. But there are values that can be served only with my sauce. As a magician I stole from the white man a ‘certain world,’ lost to him and his kind. When that happened the white man must have felt an aftershock he was unable to identify, being unused to such reactions” (106-107).
¶ For several pages, Fanon argues that black people must embrace blackness, and struggle on the basis of being black, in order to negate white supremacists social relations. But to stop there reproduces our one-sided existence and the forms of appearance of capitalism. Identity politics argues , “I am a black man,” or “I am a woman,” without filling out the other side of the contradiction “…and I am a human .” If the starting and ending point is one-sided, there is no possibility for abolishing racialized and gendered social relations . For supporters of identity politics (despite claiming otherwise), womanhood, a form of appearance within society, is reduced to a natural, static “identity.” Social relations such as

“womanhood,” or simply gender, become static objects, or “institutions.” Society is therefore organized into individuals, or sociological groups with natural characteristics. Therefore, the only possibility for struggle under identity politics is based on equal distribution or individualism (I will discuss this further below). This is a bourgeois ideology in that it replicates the alienated individual invented and defended by bourgeois theorists and scientists (and materially enforced) since capitalism’s birth.
¶
Furthermore, this individualism is characteristic of the current social moment. As left communist theorist Loren Goldner has theorized, capitalism has been in perpetual crisis for the last 40 years, which has been absorbed in appearance through neoliberal strategies (among others). Over time, capital is forced to invest in machines over workers in order to keep up with the competitive production process. As a result, workers are expelled from the production process. We can see this most clearly in a place like Detroit, where automation combined with deindustrialization left hundreds of thousands jobless. The effects of this contradiction of capitalism is that workers are forced into precarious working situations, jumping from gig to gig in order to make enough money to reproduce themselve s. Goldner refers to this condition as the “atomized individual worker.” As Goldner has written elsewhere, this increased individualism leads to a politics of difference, where women, queers, people of color, etc., have nothing in common with one another.
¶
Intersectionality theorists correctly identified and critiqued this problem with identity politics. For example, bell hooks, in a polemic against liberal feminist Betty Friedan, writes,
¶
“Friedan was a principal shaper of contemporary feminist thought. Significantly, the onedimensional perspective on women’s reality presented in her book became a marked feature of the contemporary feminist movement. Like Friedan before them, white women who dominate feminist discourse today rarely question whether or not their perspective on women’s reality is true to the lived experiences of women as a collective group. Nor are they aware of the extent to which their perspectives reflect race and class biases…” (3).
¶ hooks is correct to say that basing an entire politics on one particular experience, or a set of particular differences, under capitalism is problematic. However, intersectionality theory replicates this problem by simply adding particular moments, or determinant points ; hooks goes on to argue for race and class inclusion in a feminist analysis . Similarly, theories of an “interlocking matrix of oppressions,” simply create a list of naturalized identities, abstracted from their material and historical context. This methodology is just as ahistorical and antis ocial as Betty Friedan’s.
¶ Again, patriarchy and white supremacy are not objects or “institutions” that exist throughout history; they are particular expressions of our labor, our life-activity, that are conditioned by (and in turn, condition) our mode of production.
In Capital, Marx describes labor as the “metabolism” between humans and the external world; patriarchy and white supremacy, as products of our labor, are also the conditions in which we labor. We are constantly interacting with the world, changing the world and changing ourselves through our “metabolic” labor. So patriarchy and white supremacy, like all social relations of labor, change and transform.
¶
Patriarchy under capitalism takes a specific form that is different from gendered relations under feudalism, or tribalism , etc . There will be overlap and similarities in how patriarchy is expressed under different modes of production. After all, the objective conditions of feudalism laid the foundation for early capitalism, which laid the foundation for industrial capitalism, etc. However, this similarity and overlap does not mean that particular, patriarchal relations transcend the mode of production. For example, under both feudalism and capitalism there are gendered relations within a nuclear family, though these relations took very different forms particular to the mode of production. As Silvia Federici describes, within the feudal family there was little differentiation between men and women. She writes,
¶
“since work on the servile farm was organized on a subsistence basis, the sexual division of labor in it was less pronounced and less discriminating than the capitalist farm. … Women worked in the fields, in addition to raising children, cooking, washing, spinning, and keeping an herb garden; their domestic activities were not devalued and did not involve different social relations from those of men, as they would later, in a money-economy, when housework would cease to be viewed as real work ” (25).
¶
A historical understanding of patriarchy needs to understand patriarchy from within a set of social relations based on the form of labor.
In other words, we cannot understand the form of appearance, “womanhood,” apart from the essence, a universal human.
¶
A
Marxist Conception of Feminism.
¶
At this point, I should make myself very clear and state that the limitations of identity politics and intersectionality theory are a product of their time. There was no

revolution in the US in 1968. The advances of Black Power, women’s liberation, gay liberation, and the movements themselves, have been absorbed into capital . Since the
1970s, academia has had a stronghold on theory. A nonexistent class struggle leaves a vacuum of theoretical production and academic intellectuals have had nothing to draw on except for the identity politics of the past. A new politics that corresponds to a new form of struggle is desperately needed ; however, the Marxist method can provide some insight into the creation of a politics that overcomes the limitations of identity politics.
¶ Marx
offers a method that places the particular in conversation with the totality of social relations; the appearance connected to the essence. Consider his use of the concept of “moments.” Marx uses this concept in “The German Ideology” to describe the development of human history. He describes th e following three moments as the “primary social relations, or the basic aspects of human activity:” (1) the production of means to satisfy needs, (2) the development of new needs, and (3) reproduction of new people and therefore new needs and new means to satisfy new needs. What is key about this idea is that Marx distinguishes between a
“moment” and a “stage.” He writes, “These three aspects of social activity are not of course to be taken as three different stages, but just as three aspects, or, to make it clear to the Germans, three
‘moments,’ which have existed simultaneously since the dawn of history and the first men, and which still assert themselves in history today” (48). The particulars of this specific argument are not relevant; what is key is Ma rx’s use of “moments” juxtaposed to “stages.” Marx makes this distinction to distinguish himself from a kind of determinism that sees the development of history in a static, linear fashion, versus a fluid and dialectical historical development. Throughout many of
Marx’s writings, he refers back to this term, “moments,” to describe particular social relations in history, or, more precisely, particular expressions of labor. “Moments” also helps fill out Marx’s idea of fluid modes of production. As noted earlier, for Marx, there is no pure feudalism or pure capitalism; all relations of production move and must be understood historically.
¶ This concept is useful for understanding our various alienated existences under capitalism. For example, in the
Grundrisse, Marx writes,
¶
“When we consider bourgeois society in the long view and as a whole, then the final result of the process of social production always appears as the society itself, i.e. the human being itself in its social relations. Everything that has a fixed form, such as a product etc., appears as merely a moment, a vanishing moment, in this movement. The direct individuals, but individuals in a mutual relationship, which they equally reproduce and produce anew. The constant process of their own movement, in which they renew themselves even as they renew the world of wealth they create” (712).
¶
To be a “woman” under capitalism means something very specific ; it is even more specific for women in the US in 2013; it is even more specific for black lesbians in the US in 2013; it is even more specific for individual women. But, in a universal sense, to be a “woman” means to produce and reproduce a set of social relations through our labor, or self-activity.
Taking a cue from Fanon, our method must argue: I am a woman and a human.
We must recognize the particular in conversation with the totality; we must consider a moment, or a single expression of labor, in relationship to labor itself.
¶
It is important to note that identity politics and intersectionality theorists are not wrong but they are incomplete. Patriarchal and racialized social relations are material, concrete and real . So are the contradictions between the particular and universal, and the appearance and essence. The solution must build upon these contradictions and push on them. Again, borrowing from Fanon, we can say “I am a woman and a human,” or “I am a black perso n and a person.” The key is to emphasize both sides of the contradiction.
Embracing womanhood, organizing on the basis of blackness, and building a specifically queer politics is an essential aspect of our liberation. It is the material starting point of struggle. As noted earlier, Frantz Fanon describes this movement in “The Lived Experience of the Black Man” chapter of Black Skin, White Masks. However, at the end of the chapter, Fanon leaves the contradiction unresolved and leaves us searching for somethi ng more, stating, “Without a black past, without a black future, it was impossible for me to live my blackness. Not yet white, no longer completely black, I was damned” (117), and, “When I opened my eyes yesterday I saw the sky in total revulsion. I tried to get up but the eviscerated silence surged toward me with paralyzed wings. Not responsible for my acts, at the crossroads between Nothingness and infinity, I began to weep”

(119). Fanon points to the contradiction between the particular form of appearance (blackness) and the essence, the universal (humanness).
¶
In the conclusion, as noted earlier, Fanon resolves this contradiction, arguing for further movement toward the universal, the total abolition of race. He writes, ¶
“In no way does my basic vocation have to be drawn from the past of peoples of color. In no way do I have to dedicate myself to reviving a black civilization unjustly ignored. I will not make myself the man of any past. I do not want to sing the past to the detriment of my present and my future” (201).
¶ For Fanon then, and for Marx, the struggle for liberation must include both the particular and the universal, both the appearance and essence. We must build upon and push on both sides of these contradictions.
¶
Some Practical Consequences.
¶
Since identity politics, and therefore intersectionality theory, are a bourgeois politics, the possibilities for struggle are also bourgeois. Identity politics reproduces the appearance of an alienated individual under capitalism and so struggle takes the form of equality among groups at best, or individualized forms of struggle at worse .
¶
On the one hand, abstract “sociological” groups or individuals struggle for an equal voice, equal “representation,” or equal resources. Many have experienced this in organizing spaces where someone argues that there are not enough women of color, disabled individuals, trans*folks, etc., present for a campaign to move forward. A contemporary example of this is the critique of Slut Walk for being too white and therefore a white supremacist or socially invalid movement. Another example is groups and individuals who argue that all movements should be completely subordinate to queer people of color leadership, regardless of how reactionary their politics are. Again, while intersectionality theorists have rightly identified an objective problem, these divisions and antagonisms within the class must be address materially through struggle.
Simply reducing this struggle to mere quantity, equality of distribution, or “representation,” reinforces identity as a static, naturalized category.
¶ slutwalk
¶
On the other hand, identity politics can take the form of individualized struggles against heteropatriarchy, racism, etc., within the class. According to Barbara Smith, a majority of
Combahee River Collective’s work was around teaching white women to stop being racist by holding anti-racism workshops (95). Today, we might see groups whose only form of struggle is to identify and smash gendered, machismo, male-chauvinist, misogynist, and patriarchal elements within the left. Another example is Tumblr users’ constant reminder to “check your privilege.” Again, it is important to address and correct these elements; however, contradictions and antagonisms within the class cannot be overcome in isolation, and individual expressions of patriarchy are impossible to overcome without a broader struggle for the emancipation of our labor.
We will never free ourselves of machismo within the movement without abolishing gender itself, and therefore alienated labor itself.
¶
A truly revolutionary feminist struggle will collectively take up issues that put the particular and the form of appearance in conversation with the universal and the essence. Elsewhere, I have offered the following as examples of areas that would do that work:
¶
Grassroots clinic defense takeovers and/or nonprofit worker committees that build solidarity across worker“client” lines.
¶ Neighborhood groups engaged in tenant struggles with the capacity to deal directly with violence against women in the community.
¶ Parent, teacher, and student alliances that struggle against school closures/privatization and for transforming schools to more accurately reflect the needs of children and parents, for example on-site childcare, directly democratic classrooms and districts, smaller class sizes, etc.
¶
Sex worker collectives that protect women from abusive Johns and other community members, and build democratically women- and queer-run brothels with safe working conditions.
¶ Workplace organizations in feminized workplaces like nonprofits, the service industry, pink collar manufacturing, etc., or worker centers that specialize in feminized workplaces and take up issues and challenges specific to women.
¶
There are many, many others that I cannot theorize. As noted, we cannot project the forms of struggle and their corresponding theories without the collective and mass activity of the class, but it is our job as revolutionaries to provide tools that help overthrow the present state of affairs. To do so, we must return to Marx and the historical materialist method . We can no longer rely on the ahistorical, bourgeois theories of the past to clarify the tasks of today. For feminists, this means struggling as women but also as humans.

(David M, Professor of the History and Theory of Sexuality at the University of Michigan,
“The Normalization of Queer Theory”, Journal of Homosexuality, Vol. 45, No. 2/3/4, 2003, pp. 339-343)
The moment that the scandalous formula “queer theory” was uttered , however, it became the name of an already established school of theory, as if it constituted a set of specific doctrines, a singular, substantive perspective on the world, a particular theorization of human experience , equivalent in that respect to psychoanalytic or Marxist theory. The only problem was that no one knew what the theory was. And for the very good reason that no such theory existed. Those working in the field did their best, politely and tactfully, to point this out : Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, for example, published a cautionary editorial in PMLA entitled “What Does Queer Theory Teach Us About
X?” But it was too late. Queer theory appeared on the shelves of bookstores and in advertisements for academic jobs , where it provided a merciful exemption from the irreducibly sexual descriptors “lesbian” and “gay.” It also harmonized very nicely with the contemporary critique of feminist and gay/lesbian identity politics, promoting the assumption that “queer” was some sort of advanced, postmodern identity, and that queer theory had superseded both feminism and lesbian/gay studies.
Queer theory thereby achieved what lesbian and gay studies, despite its many scholarly and critical accomplishments, had been unable to bring about: namely, the entry of queer scholarship into the academy, the creation of jobs in queer studies, and the acquisition of academic respectability for queer work. Indeed, queer theory has been so successful in its dash to academic institutionalization that it has left tread marks all over earlier avatars of postmodern theory (who now even remembers The
New Historicism?). As such, queer theory was simply too lucrative to give up. Queer theory , therefore, had to be invented after the fact, to supply the demand it had evoked . (The two texts that, in retrospect, were taken to have founded queer theory, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the
Closet and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, were written well before anyone had ever heard of it.) All this would be merely amusing, if the hegemony of queer theory had n’t had the undesirable and misleading effect of portraying all previous work in lesbian and gay studies as under-theorized, as laboring under the delusion of identity politics, and if it hadn’t radically narrowed the scope of queer studies by privileging its theoretical register, restricting its range, and scaling down its interdisciplinary ambition .
(Adam Isaiah, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Toronto, Gay but Not Queer:
Toward a Post-Queer Study of Sexuality, Theory and Society, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Aug., 2002), pp. 521-545)
Yet, despite its laudable ambition and broad academic appeal, queer theory tends to lapse into a discursively burdened, textual idealism that glosses over the institutional character of sexual identity and the shared social roles that sexual actors occupy. This elision plagues the queer project by creating a theoretical cataract that permits only a dim view of the contribution of the
"social" to the sexual . As a consequence, queer theory constructs an undersocialized "queer" subject with little connection to the empirical world and the sociohistorical forces that shape sexual practice and identity. Applied to the study of sexuality, this theoretical shortcoming is particularly problematic in two ways. First, by rejecting categories of sexual orientation (i.e., gay and straight), queer theory obscures the ways in which sexological classifications are embodied in institutions and social roles - thereby underestimating straight and gay difference . Yet, secondly, by neglecting those social roles that both heterosexuals and homosexuals occupy, queer theory obscures processes of social ization that cut across sexual orientation - thereby overestimating straight and gay difference. In fact, an ample historical and sociological literature has documented the ways in which the sexological construction of heterosexualitya nd homosexualityh as broughtg ays and lesbians together in shared communities and political struggles;6 but also, the ways in which such categories mask social characteristics common to heterosexual and homosexual actors. Objections to queer theory

are not wholly unknown in the social sciences.8 Seidman, for instance, takes issue with the tendency of queer theorists to deteriorate into a vulgar anti-identity politics.9 And Edwards uses the work of two queer theorists to highlight the limitations of textual analysis in the study of sexuality.10T hese essays provide critical insights on their respective topics, yet they tend to be metatheoretical in their orientation or analytically delimited to the political arena. Hence, a systematic examination of queer theory as it applies to concrete historical and empirical cases has yet to be performed. In what follows, I identify two strains of queer theory and apply these to historically specific cases of homosexuality. I show that the first strain of queer theory - "radical deconstructionism" - superimposes a postmodern self-concept onto the homosexual subject, thereby glossing over the enduring institutional organization of sexuality ; I show that the second strain of queer theory - "radical subversion" - superimposes a politically marginal self-concept onto the homosexual subject, therebyg rossly oversimplifyingc omplex developmentalp rocesses attendant to sexual identification. Taken together, these deficiencies have the ironic effect of erasing the homosexual actors in these studies, either by contesting the epistemological grounds upon which their sexual identities are formed (in the first strain), or by inventing a transcendental queer that exists outside of culture and social structure (in both strains). From this analysis, I propose a reenergized sociological presence in the study of sexuality that recognizes the limits of poststructuralisma nd makes centralt he role of institutionsa nd socialization - i.e., the "social" - in shaping the "sexual."
(Guy, professor of philosophy at Monmouth, Straight Thinking about Queer Theory,
International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, Vol. 8, No. 3 (Spring, 1995),pp. 379-388)
Queer theory maintains that all social categories and conceptual schemes are social constructs, arbitrary fabrications that have no binding validity. Radical constructionism is, of course, a conceptual scheme as well, fabricated by social theorists who reject an empiricist and realist epistemology. But if radical constructionism is merely a social construct, it can make no claim to general validity. This means that there are no reasons for preferring radical constructionism to any other analysis of social reality , including all analyses with which it is inconsistent. Radical constructionism, the philosophical hammer of queer theory, is shattered in the very act of wielding it . The development of radical constructionism by queer theorists is intended to subvert the legitimacy of certain "hegemonic" categories and dichotomies —such as heterosexuality and the heterosexual/homosexual binary—by establishing that they are social constructs. However, queer theorists fail to appreciate the self-destructive power of their own argument. Radical constructionism, along with all other social constructs, is invalidated by this same logic. On this point, queer theory has no escape. The premises of radical constructionism entail that this doctrine is itself nothing but a social construct, from which it follows that its validity and the basis of queer theory collapse. Radical constructionism also generates an infinite regress. It entails that a given social category, such as heterosexuality, is socially constructed from certain practices and discourses. These practices and discourses are, in turn, socially constructed from other practices and discourses, which are themselves socially constructed . Heterosexuality, the practices and discourses on which it is based, and the further practices and discourses in which they are grounded are all revealed as arbitrary inventions by demonstrating that they are socially constructed. In principle, this chain of demonstrations is interminable. Either it produces an infinite regress that invalidates every category in the regression, or it terminates only by assigning a non-socially determined validity to some specially favored category —which becomes an epistemological unmoved mover. However, such an arbitrary decision would be inconsistent with radical constructionism , which cannot except itself from the fate of every other conceptual scheme. It is socially constructed from practices and discourses, which are also socially constructed from other practices and discourses that have the same status. The regression back to a generally valid practice or discourse that would provide a foundation for radical constructionism cannot succeed since, according to this doctrine, no such practice or discourse exists. Thus radical constructionism can escape this regress and claim its own validity —thereby differentiating itself from all other conceptual schemes and exempting itself from its own consequences — only by contradicting itself. The result is not a happy one. Radical social constructionism either generates an infinite regress that negates its claim to validity, or , in order to forestall this regress, commits a self-contradiction . Finally, radical constructionism reflexively

controverts not only its own claim to validity, but its intelligibility as well. If all social categories are invalidated by demonstrating that they are socially constructed, then this also holds true for the categories essential to the constitution of society, such as the concepts of social action, social meaning, and social relations. If these concepts are invalidated, the concept of a society cannot even be articulated. In that case, radical constructionism , which is possible only on the basis of some concept of society, is unintelligible . As a result, the doctrine undermines its own coherence .

2NC

, Critical Studies @ Chapman U, urban schooling prof @ UCLA,
(Peter, “Rage and Hope: The Revolutionary Pedagogy of Peter McLaren – an Interview with Peter
McLaren,” Currículo sem Fronteiras , v.1, n. 2, p. xlix-lix)
McLaren: Let me try. Calls for diversity by politicians and educators and social reformers have brought historically marginalized groups – Latino/as, African-Americans, Asians, indigenous populations – to the center of society in terms , at least, of addressing the importance of addressing their needs, rather than actually addressing their needs
, or addressing their actual needs. In other words, this call for diversity has been little more than
Enlightenment rhetoric, certainly not practice.
However, motivated by a lack of opposition to capitalist exploitation that has been fostered by neo-liberal policies worldwide, multicultural education continues to defang its most emancipatory possibilities by initiating what I believe are, for the most part, politically ‘empty’ calls for diversity – calls for diversity carried out in antiseptic isolation from an interrogation of capital ism’s center.
This center is what gives ballast to the production of sameness that I call the eternal recurrance of whiteness.
This sameness constitutes the distillate of colonialism, imperialism, and the ether of white lies that spikes the very air we breathe. It means that pluralism is secretly aligned with assimilation.
To be brought ‘into the center’ without being permitted to critique that center is tantamount to internalizing the codes of whiteness (without being granted the benefits of actually assuming the ‘social position’ of whiteness). There is a parallel here with some of the debates on social exclusion in the European Union. Eurocapitalist states advance a rhetoric of social inclusion – of the unemployed, of adults who can’t read, of the disabled and other groups – that simultaneously stigmatizes the ‘excluded’ as either victims or lacking in certain skills or attitudes, whilst claiming to want to include them as equals (with the whole question of equality left up in the air). But this is cruel fantasy. In a sense, there are no ‘socially excluded’ : everyone is included into capital’s social universe – but on
differentially, obscenely unequal grounds. Possession of capital in its money form excludes people – to vastly differing degrees – from buying all manner of goods, real human need going by the board. On the other hand, capital includes us all, only to generate incredible differences between us on the basis of money.
Gender, ‘race’ and other
social and cultural differences are grounds within bourgeois metaphysics and ‘ethics’ for differentiating and fragmenting us on the basis of money. Capital drives us , therefore, against ourselves.
Going back to postmodernism, postmodernists given over to identity politics frequently overlook the centrality of social class as an overarching identity that inscribes individuals and groups within social relations of exploitation.
What identity politics and pluralism fail to address is the fact that diversity and difference are allowed to proliferate and flourish, provided that they remain within the prevailing forms of capitalist social arrangements, including hierarchical property arrangements. Of course, I agree that class relations are most certainly racialized and gendered. I do not want to subordinate race, gender, or sexuality to that of social class; rather I want to emphasize that without overcoming capitalism, anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-homophobic struggles will have little chance at succeeding.
Slavoj Zizek has said that in the Left’s call for new
multiple political subjectivities (e.g., race, class, feminist, religious), the
Left in actuality asserts a type of all-pervasive sameness – a non-antagonistic society in which there room is made for all manner of cultural communities, lifestyles, religions, and sexual orientations. Zizek reveals that this Sameness relies on an antagonistic split. As far as this split goes, I believe that it results, at least to a large degree, from the labor-capital relation sustained and promoted by white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. In other words, I do not see the central tension as one between the autochthonous and the foreign – but between labor and capital. As you might be aware, I am very sympathetic to the movement here in the United States known as the ‘new abolitionists.’

, Critical Studies @ Chapman U, urban schooling prof @ UCLA,
(Peter, “Rage and Hope: The Revolutionary Pedagogy of Peter McLaren – an Interview with Peter
McL aren,” Currículo sem Fronteiras , v.1, n. 2, p. xlix-lix)
McLaren: Mitja, I like the way that you framed that question. The obviousness of conservative culture is precisely why it is so hidden from view. Much like those who controlled the paradis articificels of everyday life in the film, The Truman Show. I am struck each day by the manner in which predatory capitalism anticipates forgetfulness , nourishes social amnesia, smoothes the pillows of finality, and paves the world with a sense of inevitability and sameness. I am depressingly impressed by what a formidable opponent it has proven to be, how it fatally denies the full development of our human capacities, and inures us to the immutability of social life.
In other words, it naturalizes us to the idea that capital is the best of all possible worlds , that it may not be perfect, but it certainly is preferable to socialism and communism. Many leftists have unwittingly become apologists for capitalist relations of domination because they are overburdened by the seeming inability of North Americans to imagine a world in which capital did not reign supreme. To address this situation, I have turned to critical pedagogy.
Mitja: You are very much identified with the field of critical pedagogy. How would you define critical pedagogy? What is your position within this field today? McLaren: As you know, Mitja, critical pedagogy has been a central liberatory
current in education
of the last two decades. Critical pedagogy has served as a form of struggle within and against the social norms and forces that structure the schooling process. Most approaches to critical pedagogy are limited to disturbing the foundations upon which bourgeois knowledge is built, placing the term
‘schooling’ itself under scrutiny. Questions that arise in critical pedagogy often have to do with the relationship among schooling and the broader array of publics constructed by the marketplace and brought about by the secularization and the internationalization of the politics of consumption.
In other words, critical pedagogy most often deals with cultural manifestations of capital, and the norms and formations that are engendered by means of relations of exchange. This is a good strategy as far as it goes. However, the revolutionary pedagogy that I advocate , that I have built from the roots of
Freire’s and Marx’s work and the work of many others, such as the great revolutionary Che Guevara, involves the uprooting of these seeds of naturalization – planted through the reification of social relations and the subsumption of difference to identity by means of the law of value – and this means undressing the exploitative, sexist, racist, and homophobic dimensions of contemporary capitalist society. But it also means more than simply ‘uncovering’
these relations, or laying them bare
in all of their ideological nakedness.
It stipulates – and here it is important not to mince words – the total uprooting of class society in all of its disabling manifestations. Revolutionary pedagogy refers to taking an active part in a total social revolution , one in which acting and knowing are indelibly fused such that the object of knowledge is irrevocably shaped by the very act of its being contemplated. That is, emphasize that this act of contemplation is collective and dialogical) the very act of contemplation (I need to shapes – and is shaped by – the object under investigation. The knowers are shaped – through dialogue – by the known. Revolutionary pedagogy attempts to produce an excess of consciousness over and above our conditional or naturalized consciousness, to create , as it were, an overflow that outruns the historical conditions that enframe it and that seek to anchor it, so that we might free our thought and , by extension, our everyday social practices from its rootedness in the very material conditions that enable thinking and social activity to occur in the first place. In other words, revolutionary pedagogy teaches us that we need not accommodate ourselves to the permanence of the capitalist law of value. In fact, it reveals to us how we can begin to think of continuing Marx’s struggle for a revolution in permanence. A number of thinkers have helped to unchain the revolutionary implications of Freire’s thought in this regard – Donaldo Macedo, Henry Giroux, Ira Shor, Peter Mayo, among others. I have attempted to do this by iterating the protean potential of his work for social revolution and not just the democratizing of capitalist social relations. So much contemporary work on Freire has inflated its coinage for transforming classroom practices but devalued its potential for revolutionary social change outside of the classroom in the wider society. Revolutionary pedagogy requires a dialectical understanding of global capitalist exploitation.
Freire is often brought in to illuminate debates over
school reform that are generally structured around the conceit of
a dialogue
over equality of opportunity, which rarely go beyond momentous renunciations of corporatism or teeth-rattling denunciations of privatization. But such debates studiously ignore the key contradictions to which history has given rise – those between labor and capital.

Such debates are engineered in the United States to avoid addressing these contradictions. Mitja: What do you see as the most important challenge in the future for educational researchers? McLaren: The key to see beyond the choir of invisibilities that envelope us, and to identify how current calls for establishing democracy are little more than half-way house policies, a smokescreen for neo-liberalism
and for making capitalism governable and regulated – a “stakeholder” capitalism if you will. I do not believe such a capitalism will work, nor am I in favor of market socialism.
We need to chart out a type of positive humanism that can ground a genuine socialist democracy without market relations , a Marxist humanism that can lead to a transcendence of alienated labor.
Following Marx,
Eagleton claims that we are free when, like artists, we produce without the goad of physical necessity ; and it is this nature which for Marx is the essence of all individuals. Transforming the rituals of schooling can only go so far , since these rituals are embedded in capitalist social relations and the law of value. There are signs that research in the social sciences might be going through a sea-shift of transformation. I think we need to take the focus away from how individual identities are commodified in postmodern consumer spaces, and put more emphasis on creating possibilities for a radical reconstitution of society. I like the new public role of Pierre Bourdieu – a role that sees him taking his politics into the streets and factories of France, fighting the structural injustices and economic instabilities brought about by capitalism and neo-liberalism
– fighting what, in effect, are nothing short of totalitarian practices that are facilitating the exploitation of the world’s workers.
Bourdieu realizes that we haven’t exhausted all the alternatives to capitalism.
If that is the case, we need, as researchers, to bring our work to bear on the seeking out of new social relations around which everyday life can be productively and creatively organized.
In my view, this is social science – and politics – the way it should be practiced.

, Distinguished Fellow – Critical Studies @ Chapman U and UCLA urban schooling prof, and
ScatamburloD’Annibale, associate professor of Communication – U Windsor,
(Peter and Valerie, “Class Dismissed? Historical materialism and the politics of ‘difference’,” Educational
Philosophy and Theory Vol. 36, Issue 2, p. 183-199)
In stating this, we need to include an important caveat that differentiates our approach from those invoking the well-worn race/class/gender triplet which can sound, to the uninitiated, both radical and vaguely Marxian.
It is not.
Race, class and gender, while they invariably intersect and interact, are not co-primary. This ‘triplet’ approximates what the ‘philosophers might call a category mistake.
’ On the surface the triplet may be convincing—some people are oppressed because of their race, others as a result of their gender, yet others because of their class —but this ‘is grossly misleading’ for it is not that ‘some individuals manifest
certain characteristics known as “class” which then results in their oppression ; on the contrary, to be a member of a social class just is to be oppressed’ and in this regard class is ‘a wholly social category’
(Eagleton, 1998, p. 289). Furthermore, even though
‘ class’
is usually invoked as part of the aforementioned and much vaunted triptych , it is usually gutted of its practical, social dimension or treated solely as a cultural phenomenon — as just another form of
‘difference.’
In these instances, class is transformed from an economic and, indeed, social category to an exclusively cultural or discursive one or one in which class merely signifies a ‘subject position.’ Class is therefore cut off from the political economy of capitalism and class power severed from exploitation and a power structure ‘in which those who control collectively produced resources only do so because of the value generated by those who do not’ (Hennessy & Ingraham, 1997, p. 2). Such theorizing has had the effect of replacing an historical materialist class analysis with a cultural analysis of class.
As a result, many post-Marxists have also stripped the idea of class of precisely that element which , for Marx, made it radical —namely its status as a universal form of exploitation whose abolition required (and was also central to) the abolition of all manifestations of oppression (Marx, 1978, p. 60).
With regard to this issue, Kovel (2002) is particularly insightful, for he explicitly addresses an issue which continues to vex the Left —namely the priority given to different categories of what he calls ‘dominative splitting’—those categories of ‘gender, class, race, ethnic and national exclusion,’ etc. Kovel argues that we need to ask the question of priority with respect to what? He notes that if we mean priority with respect to time, then the category of gender would have priority since there are traces of gender oppression in all other forms of oppression. If we were to prioritize in terms of existential significance, Kovel suggests that we would have to depend upon the immediate historical forces that bear down on distinct groups of people
—he offers examples of Jews in 1930s Germany who suffered from brutal forms of anti-Semitism and Palestinians today who experience anti-Arab racism under Israeli domination. The question of what has political priority, however, would depend upon which transformation of relations of oppression are practically more urgent and, while this would certainly depend upon the preceding categories, it would also dep end upon the fashion in which all the forces acting in a concrete situation are deployed. As to the question of which split sets into motion all of the others
, the priority would have to be given to class since class relations entail the state as an instrument of enforcement and control, and it is the state that shapes and organizes the splits that appear in human ecosystems.
Thus class is both logically and historically distinct from other forms of exclusion
(hence we should not talk of ‘classism’ to go along with ‘sexism’ and ‘racism,’ and ‘species-ism’). This is, first of all, because class is an essentially man-made category, without root in even a mystified biology. We cannot imagine a human world without gender distinctions —although we can imagine a world without domination by gender. But a world without class is eminently imaginable —indeed, such was the human world for the great majority of our species’ time on earth, during all of which considerable fuss was made over gender. Historically, the difference arises because
‘class’ signifies one side of a larger figure that includes a state apparatus whose conquests and regulations create race s and shape gender relations.
Thus there will be no true resolution of racism so long as class society stands, inasmuch as a racially oppressed society implies the activities of a class-defending state. Nor can gender inequality be enacted away so long as class society, with its state, demands the superexploitation of women's labor. (Kovel, 2002, pp. 123 –124) Contrary to what many have claimed, Marxist theory does not relegate categories of ‘difference’ to the
conceptual mausoleum ; rather, it has sought to reanimate these categories by interrogating how they are refracted through material relations of power and privilege and linked to relations of production. Moreover, it has emphasized and insisted that the wider political and economic system in which they are embedded needs to be thoroughly understood in all its complexity. Indeed, Marx made clear how constructions of race and ethnicity ‘are implicated in the circulation process of variable capital.’ To the extent that ‘gender, race, and ethnicity are all understood as social constructions rather than as essentialist categories’ the effect of exploring their insertion into the ‘circulation of variable capital
(including positioning within the internal heterogeneity of collective labor and hence, within the division of labor and the class system)’ must be interpreted as a ‘powerful force reconstructing them in distinctly capitalist ways’ (Harvey, 2000, p. 106). Unlike contemporary narratives which tend to focus on one or another form of oppression , the irrefragable power of historical materialism
resides in its ability to reveal
(1) how
forms of oppression based on categories of difference do

not possess relative autonomy from class relations but rather constitute the ways in which oppression is lived/experienced within a class-based system
; and (2) how all forms of social oppression function within an overarching capitalist system. This framework must be further distinguished from those that invoke the terms ‘classism’ and/or
‘ class elitism’ to (ostensibly) foreground the idea that ‘class matters’
(cf. hooks, 2000) since we agree with Gimenez
(2001, p. 24) that ‘ class is not simply another ideology legitimating oppression.’
Rather, class denotes
‘exploitative relations between people mediated by their relations to the means of production.’ To marginalize such a conceptualization of class is to conflate an individual's objective location in the intersection of structures of inequality with people's
subjective understandings of who they really are based on their ‘experiences.’

http://www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumber=11336
Hanif Leylabi, NUS LGBT committee
President of the Unite Against Fascism organization
There is a long and hidden history of struggles where working people, rather than organising separately on the basis of their sexual identity, came together to create sexual freedom. It happened in the Russian
Revolution of October 1917, where workers took power, abolished homophobic laws and challenged accepted gender roles. It took place in South Africa in the 1990s: in the context of a near-revolutionary fight against apartheid, working people were won to the belief that equality should also include lesbian and gay equality. To carry on this tradition we need radical ideas. In the SWP we'd say that means understanding that the struggle for sexual liberation is part of a wider struggle for justice and freedom, not a single-issue campaign. The people with the power to create a just and free society are the working class, without whom capitalism grinds to a halt. We have to be activists, fighting back on every front, presenting radical ideas in a way that relates to people's everyday experience, but without diluting them.
The question is how far queer politics, or any other sort of politics, helps this process along. Obviously different people have different understandings of queer politics. But it's striking that use of the term
"queer" is restricted to certain areas, particularly among students and academics. Almost every trade union now has an LGBT group, and none of them use the word. The word itself isn't the main issue, it is the political strategy which the use of the word implies. It reflects anger at homophobia and transphobia, but also frustration with moderate groups like Stonewall and the male-dominated commercial scene. It suggests that the main battle to be waged is one against sexist and right wing LGBT people. I don't think that's true: I disagree with Stonewall's politics, but they aren't the enemy. The legal changes for which
Stonewall campaigned have made real improvements in the lives of millions of LGBT people. The main enemies right now are the Tories - when they were last in power they made massive cuts and passed homophobic laws. Now they pretend they're not homophobic, but Cameron supported Section 28. I don't think that identifying yourself as queer is how you unite people. Campaigns like Love Music Hate
Homophobia seek to bring everybody together - LGBT, queer, straight - on a radical agenda of fighting the Nazis. You create unity on a radical agenda. You don't separate yourself off. We share many ideas in common with queer activists, and we'll continue to work together. But the fundamental issue is how we win sexual liberation. Through the struggles of the oppressed? Or through a broader fight with the working class at its centre? That's the central disagreement between us.
(Dana, Head of Public Services at Columbia Law School Library and a New York attorney,
“The Wrongful Rejection of Big Theory (Marxism) by Feminism and Queer Theory: A Brief Debate”, http://law.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3060&context=expresso)
As identity theories, feminist and queer theories problematize the “connection of identity and politics .”40 They distance themselves from Marxism in every conceivable way. Methodologically, they focus on introducing noneconomic “identity as a factor in any political analysis ” rather than identifying a set of objective needs that had been ignored by previous theories and then trying to address them political ly. Feminist theories describe themselves as “middle range theories” that mediate “between the material circumstances of women’s lives and the grand realization that law is gendered, that law is a manifestation of power, that law is detrimental to women.”41 Undeniably, our laws are mainly the work of men, whether they are assembled in legislatures or members of the judiciary. This fact could pose grave danger for the wellbeing of women, but it does not necessarily prove a causal relation between the laws that are perceived as nefarious and the composition of the legislative and the judiciary body.42

Furthermore, if law is detrimental to women it does not necessarily mean that law is detrimental to all women. That being said, law remains a manifestation of power, which is detrimental to all who are economically in a position of subordination. Feminist theories represent a first wave of fragmentation of general theories . Feminist theories follow the current of “left thought that runs away from political economy ”43 toward issues of identity. Queer theories go a step further, beyond identity .
Queer theories tend to avoid any type of characterization, even a cultural one. If feminist theories famously emphasize that “the personal is political”44 and discuss identity politics, queer theories go further, and point out that any type of collective identity needs to be reexamined because identity “can be deployed to harm its own subjects.”45 In fact, the signifier queer can be viewed both as a term that defines a desire to be representative of both "lesbian" and "gay" groups and as a term used to replace identity as a monolithic characteristic with one that is multi-layered, which rests on the ways other types of cultural identity such as race, gender, and ethnicity influenced sexuality.46 A defiant refusal to use terms of the dominant discourse may also be interpreted as a desire to bring, under one conceptual umbrella, as many fragmented discussions as possible. So, more than anti-assimilationist and anti-separatist, it is, perhaps, an acknowledgment that coalitions can be made. Moreover, perhaps it is an opening for recognizing that very little can be achieved within the self-imposed and maybe even artificial walls of the category itself.

Marx offers a method that places the particular in conversation with the totality of social relations; the appearance connected to the essence. Consider his use of the concept of “moments.” Marx uses this concept in “The German Ideology” to describe the development of human history. He describes the following three moments as the “primary social relations, or the basic aspects of human activity:” (1) the production of means to satisfy needs, (2) the development of new needs, and (3) reproduction of new people and therefore new needs and new means to satisfy new needs.
What is key about this idea is that Marx distinguishes between a “moment” and a “stage.” He writes, “These three aspects of social activity are not of course to be taken as three different stages, but just as three aspects, or, to make it clear to the Germans, three ‘moments,’ which have existed simultaneously since the dawn of history and the first men, and which still assert themselves in history today” (48). The particulars of this specific argument are not relevant; what is key is Marx’s use of “moments” juxtaposed to “stages.” Marx makes this distinction to distinguish himself from a kind of determinism that sees the development of history in a static, linear fashion, versus a fluid a nd dialectical historical development. Throughout many of Marx’s writings, he refers back to this term, “moments,” to describe particular social relations in history, or, more precisely, particular expressions of labor. “Moments” also helps fill out Marx’s idea of fluid modes of production. As noted earlier, for Marx, there is no pure feudalism or pure capitalism; all relations of production move and must be understood historically.
¶
This concept is useful for understanding our various alienated existences under capitalism. For example, in the Grundrisse, Marx writes,
¶
“When we consider bourgeois society in the long view and as a whole, then the final result of the process of social production always appears as the society itself, i.e. the human being itself in its social relations. Everything that has a fixed form, such as a product etc., appears as merely a moment, a vanishing moment, in this movement. The direct individuals, but individuals in a mutual relationship, which they equally reproduce and produce anew. The constant process of their own movement, in which they renew themselves even as they renew the world of wealth they create” (712).
¶
To be a
“woman” under capitalism means something very specific ; it is even more specific for women in the US in 2013; it is even more specific for black lesbians in the US in 2013; it is even more specific for individual women. But, in a universal sense, to be a “woman” means to produce and reproduce a set of social relations through our labor, or self-activity.
Taking a cue from
Fanon, our method must argue: I am a woman and a human. We must recognize the particular in conversation with the totality; we must consider a moment, or a single expression of labor, in relationship to labor itself.
¶
It is important to note that identity politics and intersectionality theorists are not wrong but they are incomplete. Patriarchal and racialized social relations are material, concrete and real . So are the contradictions between the particular and universal, and the appearance and essence. The solution must build upon these contradictions and push on them.
Again, borrowing from Fanon, we can say “I am a woman and a human,” or “I am a black person and a person.” The key is to emphasize both sides of the contradiction. Embracing womanhood, organizing on the basis of blackness, and building a specifically queer politics is an essential aspect of our liberation. It is the material starting point of struggle. As noted earlier, Frantz Fanon describes this movement in “The Lived Experience of the Black Man” chapter of Black Skin, White
Masks. However, at the end of the chapter, Fanon leaves the contradiction unresolved and leaves us searching for something more, stating, “Without a black past, without a black future, it was impossible for m e to live my blackness. Not yet white, no longer completely black, I was damned”
(117), and, “When I opened my eyes yesterday I saw the sky in total revulsion. I tried to get up but the eviscerated silence surged toward me with paralyzed wings. Not responsible for my acts, at the crossroads between Nothingness and infinity, I began to weep” (119). Fanon points to the contradiction between the particular form of appearance (blackness) and the essence, the universal (humanness).
¶
In the conclusion, as noted earlier, Fanon resolves this contradiction, arguing for further movement toward the universal, the total abolition of race. He writes, ¶
“In no way does my basic vocation have to be drawn from the past of peoples of color. In no way do I have to dedicate myself to reviving a black civilization unjustly ignored. I will not make myself the man of

any past. I do not want to sing the past to the detriment of my present and my future” (201).
¶
For
Fanon then, and for Marx, the struggle for liberation must include both the particular and the universal, both the appearance and essence. We must build upon and push on both sides of these contradictions.
¶ Some Practical Consequences.
¶ Since identity politics, and therefore intersectionality theory, are a bourgeois politics, the possibilities for struggle are also bourgeois.
Identity politics reproduces the appearance of an alienated individual under capitalism and so struggle takes the form of equality among groups at best, or individualized forms of struggle at worse .
¶ O n the one hand, abstract “sociological” groups or individuals struggle for an equal voice, equal “representation,” or equal resources. Many have experienced this in organizing spaces where someone argues that there are not enough women of color, disabled individuals, trans*folks, etc., present for a campaign to move forward. A contemporary example of this is the critique of Slut Walk for being too white and therefore a white supremacist or socially invalid movement. Another example is groups and individuals who argue that all movements should be completely subordinate to queer people of color leadership, regardless of how reactionary their politics are. Again, while intersectionality theorists have rightly identified an objective problem, these divisions and antagonisms within the class must be address materially through struggle.
Simply reducing this struggle to mere quantity, equality of distribution, or “representation,” reinforces identity as a static, naturalized category.
¶ slutwalk
¶
On the other hand, identity politics can take the form of individualized struggles against heteropatriarchy, racism, etc., within the class. According to Barbara Smith, a majority of
Combahee River Collective’s work was around teaching white women to stop being racist by holding anti-racism workshops (95). Today, we might see groups whose only form of struggle is to identify and smash gendered, machismo, male-chauvinist, misogynist, and patriarchal elements within the left. Another example is Tumblr users’ constant reminder to “check your privilege.” Again, it is important to address and correct these elements; however, contradictions and antagonisms within the class cannot be overcome in isolation, and individual expressions of patriarchy are impossible to overcome without a broader struggle for the emancipation of our labor.
We will never free ourselves of machismo within the movement without abolishing gender itself, and therefore alienated labor itself.
¶
A truly revolutionary feminist struggle will collectively take up issues that put the particular and the form of appearance in conversation with the universal and the essence. Elsewhere, I have offered the following as examples of areas that would do that work: ¶
Grassroots clinic defense takeovers and/or nonprofit worker committees that build solidarity across worker“client” lines.
¶
Neighborhood groups engaged in tenant struggles with the capacity to deal directly with violence against women in the community.
¶
Parent, teacher, and student alliances that struggle against school closures/privatization and for transforming schools to more accurately reflect the needs of children and parents, for example on-site childcare, directly democratic classrooms and districts, smaller class sizes, etc.
¶
Sex worker collectives that protect women from abusive Johns and other community members, and build democratically women- and queer-run brothels with safe working conditions.
¶ Workplace organizations in feminized workplaces like nonprofits, the service industry, pink collar manufacturing, etc., or worker centers that specialize in feminized workplaces and take up issues and challenges specific to women.
¶
There are many, many others that I cannot theorize. As noted, we cannot project the forms of struggle and their corresponding theories without the collective and mass activity of the class, but it is our job as revolutionaries to provide tools that help overthrow the present state of affairs. To do so, we must return to Marx and the historical materialist method . We can no longer rely on the ahistorical, bourgeois theories of the past to clarify the tasks of today. For feminists, this means struggling as women but also as humans.

Earl
, American Ethnic Studies and Department of Sociology,
Angela
, associate profe ssor of sociology, “The Prison Industrial Complex,” Sociation Today Volume 4, Number 2
Fall
Incarceration has become a multi-billion dollar industry (2) that relies on incarcerating more than 2 million citizens on any given day in the United States. We are, in fact, addicted to incarceration (3). But why?
This paper utilizes the concept of the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC), first coined by either Eric Schlosser
(1998) or Angela Davis (1998) in order to examine the complex configuration comprised of the US prison system, multi-national corporations, small private businesses and the inmate population in the social and political economy of the 21st century United States (4) . Second, we rely on the theoretical framework provided by Erik O. Wright in order to examine the ways in which the PIC operates within the system of capitalism and thus benefits from the exploitation of labor. We examine the ways in which inmates, primarily African American men, provide a pool of highly exploitable labor that allows all types of industries from agriculture to multi-national corporations like Microsoft to turn record profits . Specifically we argue that the current system of incarceration in the United States mimics the slave plantation economy of the south . The Growth of Prisons: Institutions and Population The number of prisons has grown, as has the number of Americans incarcerated. In 2005 more than 2.3 million (5) Americans (or
.7% of the US population) were incarcerated, in nearly 1700 state, federal, and private prisons, with many more under other forms of custodial supervision including probation and parole (Harrison 2005). (See
Table 1 and Graph 1). Furthermore, despite the fact that we think of certain other countries as being dominated by incarceration, in relative terms, compared to other countries, the United States incarcerates a higher proportion of its population than all other developed countries and many in the developing world
(Mauer 2003). (See Tables 2 and 3 and Graph 2). The Role of Drug Laws in the Growth of Prisons Why do we incarcerate so many of our citizens? There are many answers to this question, and we will be exploring a variety of these reasons throughout this paper. Yet, the most straightforward answer is the changes in drug laws (King 2006; Western 2006). In summary, the "War on Drugs" officially began in
1972 with a formal announcement by President Richard Nixon. The "War on Drugs" officially heated up under the administration of President Ronald Reagan who added the position of "Drug Czar" to the
President's Executive Office. The "War on Drugs" did not so much criminalize substances as that had been happening across the early part of the 20th Century. What it did do was put into place rigid sentencing guidelines that required (1) longer sentences; (2) mandatory minimums; (3) some drug offenses were moved from the misdemeanor category to the felony category; and (4) the institution of the
"Three Strikes You're Out" policy (Mauer 2003; Roberts 2004). Longer sentences: Today most of the crack cocaine defendants receive an average sentence of 11 years (King 2006). Mandatory Minimums:
The most frequently cited example is the sentencing guidelines for possession of crack-cocaine. As part of the “War on Drugs”, a conviction of possessing 5 grams of crack now mandates a 5 year minimum sentence (Meierhoefer 1992). Felonizing Drug Offenses: Small possession convictions, particularly of crack cocaine, were re-categorized from misdemeanors to felonies in the 1986 Drug Abuse Act (King
2006). "Three Strikes You're Out:" This law requires life-sentences for convicts receiving a third felony conviction. Coupled with the re-categorizing of some drug possession offenses (i.e. crack cocaine) as felonies the result has been that many inmates serving life sentences are there for three drug possession offenses; in effect, they are serving life sentences for untreated addiction. (Haney 1998). One of the clearest outcomes of these changes in drug sentencing is the rapid increase in the number of inmates
(recall the data in Figure 9.1: Growth of Prisons). And, along with the increase in the number of inmates

has been the rise in the number of prisons built to house them. Again, we use an international comparison in order to contextualize the situation in the United States. Currently 450,000 of the more than 2 million inmates (45%) in state and federal prison are incarcerated for non-violent drug offenses. In contrast, this is more people than the European Union, an entity with a 100 million more people than the
United States, has in prison for all crimes combined. States and the federal government continue to spend about $10 billion a year imprisoning drug offenders. And, because inmates incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses are disproportionately likely to be African American the impact on the African
American community is devastating (Roberts 2004). Race and Incarceration Of the 2.6 million Americans who are incarcerated, one million or 43% are African American men. In other words, more than forty percent of all American prisoners , men and women, are African American men. Controlling for gender,
African Americans comprise nearly two thirds (62%) of the male prison population, yet they make up just
13% of the US male population (Roberts 2004). (See Graphs 3 and 4, and Tables 4 and 5). In terms of probability, 90 out of every 1000 men will be incarcerated in their lifetimes. When we break the data down by race only 44 out of every 1000 (4%) white men will be incarcerated but 285 out of every 1000 (28.5%)
African American men will be incarcerated in their lifetimes (6) (Harrison 2005). Put another way, nearly 1 in 3 African American men will be incarcerated during their lifetimes (7). As with any accumulation of disadvantage, such as the steep rise in incarceration for African American men, comes an accumulated advantage for someone else . For example, whites, implicitly or explicitly, benefit from the sending of hundreds of thousands of African American men to prison. One big advantage that can be measured empirically is that these high levels of incarceration effectively remove these men from the competitive labor force and upon release they are disenfranchised in the political system. Second, advantage can accrue to communities. For example, the prison boom, both in terms of the number of prisons built, and the escalating numbers of citizens sent to prison, and the locating of prisons in deindustrialized communities and rural communities is an economic advantage that accrues to whites in the form of jobs — as prison staff —and in terms of building contracts and other services that are necessary when a town builds a prison. These advantages by and large do not accrue to African American communities.
Furthermore, the prison boom has been coupled with an unprecedented collaboration with the capitalist economy in the United States such that in 2006 dozens of national and multinational corporations, as well as small townships and even colleges and universities, do business in or with prison industries. And, by and large, the individuals working to create the products are African American men who earn below market wages.
Theoretical Framework The Purpose of Prison: Rehabilitation or a Tool of Capitalism? Interestingly, whereas prison used to be a hidden institution, tucked away in the backwaters of American society, today they are found everywhere. This deliberate implementation over the last 2 decades of sentencing policy can be seen as using prisons as catchments for the undesirables in our society (8) . Furthermore, prisons provide a "captive" population, one that is highly vulnerable , and one that has increasingly been exploited for its labor .
Wisconsin sociologist
Professor Erik Olin Wright put it thus: In the case of labor power, a person can cease to have economic value in capitalism if it cannot be deployed productively. This is the essential condition of people in the
'underclass.' They are oppressed because they are denied access to various kinds of productive resources, above all the necessary means to acquire the skills needed to make their labor power salable.
As a result they are not consistently exploited. Understood this way, the underclass consists of human beings who are largely expendable from the point of view of the logic of capitalism. Like Native
Americans who became a landless underclass in the nineteenth century, repression rather than incorporation is the central mode of social control directed toward them. Capitalism does not need the labor power of unemployed inner city youth. The material interests of the wealthy and privileged segments of American society would be better served if these people simply disappeared . However, unlike in the nineteenth century , the moral and political forces are such that direct genocide is no longer a viable strategy. The alternative , then, is to build prisons and cordon off the zones of cities in which the underclass lives.
(9) (Wright 1997:153). According to Wright, prisons can be seen as a form of modern day genocide, a strategy for removing unwanted, unnecessary, un-useful members of a capitalist society. It is a system whereby the privileged can segregate or cordon-off these unwanted members of society without the moral burden of genocide. It is easy to see how prisons accomplish this goal: they remove individuals from society and they permanently (in many states) disenfranchise them from the political realm. Prisoners and ex-convicts become virtual non-citizens , unable to challenge the economic, social or political power structures. And, the very fact of cordoning off some individuals means

that the goods and riches of society are accessible only to those citizens who are not cordoned-off.
As
Baca Zinn and Thorton Dill note, every system of oppression has as its reflection a system of privilege
(Zinn, Hondagneu-Sotelo, and Messner 2005). That which cordons some off, "cordons" others in. We note here that many first time readers of Wright interpret his comments as suggesting that he is advocating the cordoning-off of poor, primarily African American citizens, those with few skills that can be utilized by capitalism, from the opportunity structure. Nothing could be further from the truth. As a neo-
Marxists, Wright is arguing that this desire to rid the society of individuals who have no skills to contribute to the insatiable and every expanding capitalist machine resulted in genocides such as that of the Native
Americans in our own country and the Holocaust in Europe. Today, with genocide being deemed morally objectionable, capitalism seeks new ways in order to accomplish this same goal. And, he argues that in the United States, prisons have provided a mechanism to meet this goal. We argue that while Wright was astute in his observations that prisons provided a mechanism for removing the "unexploitable" labor from society, we argue that this formerly “unexploitable” class of Americans has now been redefined as highly exploitable by national and multinational corporations . Taking the lead from prison labor that has been around for a century or more, from agricultural labor at prison farms like Parchman and Angola, to the license plate factories that were popular in the middle part of the 20th century, dozens of Fortune
500 companies have moved at least part of their operations into prisons. As the data will demonstrate, this transition to prison labor allows corporations to significantly cut their labor costs and thus presumably increase their profits , much like plantations, ship builders, and other industries did during the 200 plus years of slavery in the United States (10). Furthermore, we argue that this relationship between the capitalist economy and the prison system that characterizes the prison industrial complex (PIC) creates a feedback loop . The more prisons that are built for profit, rather than rehabilitation, the more people who must be incarcerated . Prisons only make money when the cells are occupied. Similarly, the more prisons provide labor for corporations, the more prisons will be built.
Thus, we suggest that the PIC and its attendant industries contribute to the increased rates of incarceration in the US and the continued exploitation of labor , primarily African American labor.
The Economics of the PIC: The Case of the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) The economic benefits a prison brings to a community, except for the possible increases associated with census discrepancies, are debatable. Though a few jobs are created, prisons are actually very expensive to run.
And, though the government pays part of the cost of incarceration, the inmates themselves seldom contribute to the cost of their own incarceration (11) . They don't pay rent. They don't pay for food and they obviously don't contribute toward upkeep and maintenance. This structure is a physical space that while providing housing for the convicted, receives little in return directly from the inhabitants themselves.
The Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) builds and staffs prisons. Currently they have 67,000 beds
(approximately 62,000 inmates) in 63 facilities – - from California to Oklahoma to Montana to the District of Columbia-- and have plans to build more. The CCA also provides food service and recreational services to their prisoners, at a cost. This private corporation, founded in 1983, trades on the New York
Stock Exchange (CXW) and employs approximately 15,000 personnel. And, it is quite expensive to house a single prisoner in a jail or prison. Rough estimates indicate that it costs most states more to house a prisoner per year than to educate a citizen in college for that same year. At an average cost per year to house a single prisoner at $23,183.69, when multiplied by approximately 2 million prisoners nationally, one arrives at the figure of $46.3 billion dollars per year for incarceration in the United States. Hence, there has to be another method to pay for, both in the public or private facility, the built environment of the prison? Even the most basic economic analysis would note that the prison loses money when there are empty cells. Thus, just like college campuses must enroll enough students to fill the dorms, prisons rely on being at "full capacity ." Thus, as some others have also suggested (See (Mauer 2002), part of the explanation for the rise in incarceration rates is the fact that building and expanding prisons means that we must continue to fill them. We must impose harsher and longer sentences and we must continue to funnel inmates into prisons . And, we argue here that this funnel is not being filled with white collar offenders such as Bernie Ebbs (WorldCom), Ken Lay (Enron), or Martha Stewart, but rather by vulnerable , unempowered populations , primarily young, poor, African American men. Second, and perhaps more interesting is the rise of prison industries. Whereas many prison farms, like Parchman and Angola, are self-sustaining (the inmates grow all their own food and produce all of the textiles, etc. that are needed within the prison), a new phenomenon is the entrance of prisons into the global economy.
Prisons that were once producing goods only for their own consumption are now producing goods for

multinational, multi-billion dollar corporations such as McDonalds, Microsoft, and Victoria's Secret. In some cases the prisons are paid a pittance and then charged, by the prison, for the costs of their incarceration. In other cases, the prisoners are not paid a wage, instead a portion of their "wages" is paid directly to the prison. Finally we note that as a result of paying prisoners a sub-minimum wage (often less than $1 per hour), the corporations are able to pocket extraordinary profits made by saving labor costs . We turn now to an examination of the wide range of prison industry that range from the manufacture of license plates for the state department of motor vehicles to the sewing of lingerie for
Victoria's Secret. The use of prisoners to make products has changed from the days that they made license plates (12) for the state where the prison is located, to being deeply embedded in the production and service economy of the nation. Private commerce that utilized prisoners as labor has been underway for centuries in Anglo societies, dating back to the 1600s and before (Hallett 2004). This fits with the findings of Oshinsky showing that on the backs of prison labor Post-Bellum capitalism flourished
(Oshinsky 1997). During the 20th century, penal capital moved from the raw convict leasing system characterized by Oshinsky to a service economy that mirrors the larger United States economy
(Oshinsky 1997). From an economic perspective, this penal capital allows a middleman like Signature
Packaging in Washington State that moves products such as Starbucks to win contracts and outbid other packagers because they use prison labor. They do not have to pay market wages, they do not pay health insurance or vacation benefits nor do they have to worry about severance pay or lay-offs. One aspect of the Prison Industrial Complex that has perhaps received less attention is the role that the use of prison labor plays in the post-industrial political economy of the United States at the beginning of the 21st
Century. Various legislation that began in the 1970s and was “beefed up” in the mid 1990s opened up the ways in which prison labor could be used in both public and private industry. There are at least 4 different industries in which prison labor may be used. We will briefly summarize these 4 different ways, provide examples of each, and conclude this section with a discussion of the outcomes of this form of economic production for inmates, prisons, and local communities. 1. Factory Work In many instances, for example in the case of the manufacture of license plates, factories are set up inside the prison and inmates work, for low wages, usually 40 or 50 cents an hour. The product is then shipped out to the “client.” Though this particular type of prison labor has been around for a long time, it has expanded significantly in the last 5 years. Today, many states and counties have “corrections businesses ” that allow them to produce goods on the inside and sell them to other state and local government agencies as well as to non-profit organizations. For example, in Iowa, students attending public schools may very well sit at desks made by felons. Furthermore, colleges like Grinnell have purchased all of their dorm furniture from the Iowa
"Inmate Labor Program." The bed that you sleep in, the dresser that you fill with your stuff, the desk that you study on all come from the Grinnell Group, a suite of furniture made by prison laborers being held by the State of Iowa and working for pennies on the hour. It's not slave labor, but it's really close [emphasis ours]. Prisoners are given the choice of working for Iowa Prison Industries for almost no pay or virtually never leaving their cells. Working for the prison doesn't really teach much in the way of real-world vocational skills, nor does it allow inmates to take care of their families on the outside. The only real purpose of Iowa Prison Industries is to make money for the state of Iowa through virtually forced labor (13). Examples like this illustrate one of the ways in which state prisons have gotten into the "for profit" business of factory work. In many states, such as Mississippi (14), a single prison produces all of the uniforms for inmates, corrections officers, and law enforcement officers, as well as holsters, and equipment for the entire staff of the state's department of corrections. By utilizing prison labor to produce all of their supplies the state is able to keep costs low for the entire department of corrections. 2. Manual
Labor The practice of partnering with the state and local DOT (Department of Transportation) has also been popular for many years. As you drive along interstate highway systems you may see inmates digging ditches, picking up trash, mowing, and doing other sorts of highway labor. As with "factory labor" this form of inmate labor is expanding. Inmates now use heavy construction equipment, such as jackhammers, in various projects, including the construction of tunnels in Pennsylvania. [These same inmates managed to take the jack-hammers "home" and use them to tunnel out of their home, the Western
Pennsylvania Penitentiary in Pittsburgh!] This form of inmate labor has been popular for decades, because the work is often back-breaking, it is difficult to find laborers, and if unionized would be very expensive . It is also reminiscent of, and most likely based on, the chain gangs popular in the 19th and
20th centuries, especially in the south. Many municipalities, counties, and states post significant savings to the tax payers by relying on inmate labor for these sorts of projects. This use of prison labor is not, however, without controversy. In communities that have recently suffered significant declines in

manufacturing jobs, local residents are becoming more vocal in their critique of these practices. In a rural
Iowa community, for exam ple, critics of this practice note that inmates have “taken” the jobs of countless citizens. In a community which has seen a decline in agricultural manufacturing (meat packing) this loss of jobs is serious and local citizens, many of whom are now unemployed or under-employed, resent the fact that jobs they could take are now being filled by prison inmates. In the case of the State liquor warehouse, 12 workers just lost good-paying jobs to prisoners who are paid 37 cents an hour. Currently,
500 state government jobs and 190 private sector positions are being filled by prisoners (15). Though prisons may bring some jobs into a community, especially jobs as corrections officers, this gain is off-set by the fact that the inmates may themselves be competing with local citizens for jobs in the free market. 3.
Direct Marketing to Local Communities For much of the last century, some prisons were engaged in industries that provided goods for local markets. For example, prison farms like Parchman in the
Mississippi Delta and Angola in Louisiana have for decades targeted a portion of their prison grown agricultural produce (mostly vegetables and more recently goods like catfish) to local merchants for sale and consumption in local communities. More recently, after loosening the laws that prohibited the direct competition between prisons and free enterprise, this prison enterprise has expanded to include goods that are produced in factory settings. At the Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution, a medium security state prison located in Pendleton, Oregon, that houses about 1,500 inmates, prisoners were engaged in textile factory work making the denim uniforms for all the inmates in the entire Oregon State Prison system (16) . The popularity of their denim grew and they now market their clothing line, sewn in the
Prison Blues Garment Factory, appropriately named “Prison Blues”® for purchase over the internet! (17)
At first glance this form of inmate labor seems nothing but positive. As extolled on the Prison Blues website, inmates learn a marketable trade that they can take with them when they re-enter the "free world." Also, they keep busy during the day, and they earn some money which is used to pay for their expenses in prison as well as for financial obligations such as child support that they have with the state.
However, we argue, that industries like this, be they agricultural or manufacturing or service, by definition, as with public works, take job opportunities away from local citizens. For example, the economy is quite depressed in the agricultural regions of the Mississippi Delta and the fact that the State of Mississippi, through the MSDOC, has a strong hold in the farm-raised catfish market means that local farmers have less of an opportunity to make a living with this agricultural commodity ("Profitability Remains Elusive for
Mississippi Catfish Farmers," 2004) (18). Furthermore, by paying wages that are significantly below market value, products produced by inmates can be sold at lower prices (and for a higher profit margin) often running “free world” business that pay a living wage out of the market.
Thus, the exploitation of inmate labor can contribute to unemployment and lower wages in local communities. 4. Service Sector
Work Perhaps the most recent change in inmate labor, and the one that seems to be the most controversial and disturbing, is the use of inmate labor for a variety of service sector work that is subcontracted through "middle-men" for some of the nations leading manufacturers. There are estimates that in any given day the average American uses 30 products that were produced, packaged, or sold out of a prison! Through this type of service sector work, prison industries have truly infiltrated the global market.
…other corporations benefit from the easy-hire, easy-fire and low-wage policies of prison employees. In
Michael Moore's movie “Roger and Me,” he broke the story of TWA using prisoners to book flights. Other companies such as McDonald's, Boeing, Microsoft, Sprint, Victoria's Secret (how was your bra made?),
Compaq, Toys R Us, and Revlon use prison labor for packaging, telemarketing, manufacturing, and distributing their products. Chances are, on any given day, you are the beneficiary of the work done by between ten and fifteen prison laborers. (19) Every year, inmates at Twin Rivers Corrections Unit in
Monroe, Washington are busy during the Holiday Season because inmates there package Starbucks
Coffee and Nintendo "GameCubes" for sale by retailers all over the nation. Twin Rivers, part of a four-unit prison that houses mentally ill inmates, high- security felons, and participants in the state's Sex Offender
Treatment Program, is also home to one of three facilities operated by Signature Packaging Solutions, one of 15 private companies that operate within the state prison system and use inmate labor to supplement their outside workforce (Barnett 2002). Prisoners are engaged in everything from making electronic cash registers for McDonalds to sewing lingerie for Victoria's Secret, to taking airline reservations for TWA to packing Starbucks coffee. As noted previously, one can easily come to the conclusion that this is a positive movement in the evolution of prisons because it provides work, it teaches job skills that are transportable, and it allows inmates to earn some money while they are on the inside.
However, critics, including many inmates at the Twin Rivers Corrections Unit, are skeptical of the underlying reasons for this evolution in prison industries. They do not necessarily believe it is indicative of

a rehabilitative movement in prisons, but rather is driven entirely by companies seeking another way to maximize their profits. Others suspect that DOC's motives are more pecuniary than pure-hearted, noting that by shaving nearly 50 percent off the top of an inmate's paycheck, the department slashes its own expenses while subsidizing the companies in the program, which aren't required to pay for inmates' health insurance or retirement. "They figure that if somebody's sitting around, doing their time and doing nothing, they don't make any money off them," Strauss says. …Richard Stephens, a Bellevue property rights attorney, is suing DOC on the grounds that the program is unconstitutional, allows businesses that use prison labor to undercut their competitors' prices, and unfairly subsidizes some private businesses at the expense of others... Private businesses are “paying prison workers less than they're paying on the outside, but they aren't reducing the markup to the consumer" they're pocketing the profits. Another key difference, Wright notes, is that prisoners can just be sent back to their cells whenever business goes through a lull; "on the outside, they have to lay off workers. It's much more difficult," Wright says (Barnett
2002). The use of inmate labor allows middle level companies like Signature Packaging to under-bid their competitors by cutting their labor costs. And prisons benefit as well because by engaging their inmates in this sort of economic production and then charging inmates for their own incarceration, they are able to keep the costs of running the prison down . Wright, an inmate at Twin Rivers, sums it up: They need to know that they are buying these products from a company that is basically getting rich off prisoners."
Wright, sent to Twin Rivers for first degree murder in 1987, believes parents would be disturbed to know that their child's GameCube was packaged by a murderer, rapist, or pedophile. These companies spend a lot of money on their public image," Wright says, "but then they're quick to make money any way they can (Barnett 2002). The PIC and the Exploitation of African American Labor Specifically, we have argued that the Prison Industrial Complex and its attendant "prison industries" mimics the slave mode of production. That in the end, wealthy whites (primarily men) are profiting by not paying a living wage to
African American inmates (also primarily men). Thus corporations are engaging in an exploitive labor practice, termed by Marx as the extraction of surplus value . By not paying what the labor is worth when inmates are working on farms, building furniture, assembling products for giant multi-national corporations like Microsoft and McDonalds, corporations make additional profits. And, when large corporations from
Microsoft to McDonalds engage in this practice they also receive an unfair advantage over their competitors. Finally, we must note here that the whole scene is reminiscent of the "plantation economy" of
17th, 18th, 19th century America. The slaves were Black chattel. They had no rights and they were a captive labor force. All of the above is the same for today's prisoner. The consent decree between prisons and private companies and government has been shattered. No longer would the private prison companies’ honor the agreement that prison goods be for use within prisons and sold only to government agencies. Now, the prison industries will sell to whomever, the highest bidder. With profits from this industry now soaring upwards to $2 billion a year, it is a monster fully out of control. We have shown in this paper that the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) exploits the labor of African American men (and women). Perhaps more devastating, however, is the evidence that the PIC is a modern form of slavery that has devastating consequences on the African American community as well. Families are separated, social capital ties broken, and whole communities left with few human and social capital resources. In fact, not only are individuals disenfranchised, but because of the relocation of inmates and census rules, communities of need see their citizens (and consequent resources) removed and transferred to other, more economically advantaged, primarily white communities. The Prison Industrial Complex disrupts not just the communities from which inmates come, but also the communities to which they are "relocated" for the purposes of incarceration. For example, in States like New York State with a large rural land mass, and many parts of Mississippi, itself a largely rural state, are excellent spots for the prison building boom.
Despite seeming to be geographically disparate, what these places share is that they are places where other modes of sustenance industries have vanished (e.g., farming, textiles, meat packing etc).
Economically depressed, local residents in these states, and others, see one thing and one thing only: jobs. What they don't see are the many pitfalls of having a prison nearby . One of these is the displacing of the resident economic base, many of which are in agriculture but also service. The American
Criminal Justice System (multi-layered, composed of public and private bureaucracies, and racially segregated at the top levels of management) has unleashed an unprecedented movement towards harsh, long-term incarceration on American citizens (but also overseas in such ghouls as the Abu
Ghraib military prison (20)) to punish them for breaking laws, not to rehabilitate the transgressors. But primarily to exploit their labor and extract their surplus value. This is especially apparent when we recall the fact that 40-50% of inmates are serving long sentences, sometimes life sentences for what

Haney and Zimbardo note is little more than untreated addition. Due to harsh new sentencing guidelines, such as 'three-strikes, you're out,' a disproportionate number of young Black and Hispanic men are likely to be imprisoned for life under scenarios in which they are guilty of little more than a history of untreated addiction and several prior drug-related offenses... States will absorb the staggering cost of not only constructing additional prisons to accommodate increasing numbers of prisoners who will never be released but also warehousing them into old age. (Haney & Zimbardo, 1998:718) We add to this by returning to the framework provided by Erik O. Wright. Not only are inmates housed into old age, but they have suddenly been identified and re-constituted as the latest, greatest captive group who's labor can be exploited . And, while inmates may see small benefits associated with the opportunities for labor that are created, as the inmates at Twin Rivers Correctional Facility so eloquently articulate, the PIC is a complex system that is not about rehabilitating inmates but is about making money for a host of national and multinational corporations. Private prison corporations, such as CCA, make money by housing prisons and "leasing" their labor to the multi-national corporations that make money and see soaring profits by paying below market wages to inmates who labor for them.

1NR

(Dana, Head of Public Services at Columbia Law School Library and a New York attorney,
“The Wrongful Rejection of Big Theory (Marxism) by Feminism and Queer Theory: A Brief Debate”, http://law.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3060&context=expresso)
However, Marxism remains relevant today. In addition to what has already been mentioned, Marxism can also help explain how the oppression of gays and lesbians ,66 as Stabile aptly noted, is expressed economically through "denial of employment, housing, health care."67 Any comprehensive demand for human rights, which would include social and economic rights in addition to civil and political ones, would have such discrimination addressed. Moreover, Marxism can help feminists to focus on issues that are meaningful to those who do not enjoy what Spivak defined as " the institutional privileges of power ."68 Marxism is able to unite feminists from different parts of the world whose interests otherwise may not intersect . For example, Marxism offers the tools to criticize the spurge of globalization69 and the end of garment trade quotas, who caused women in many regions of the globe to face the bleak choice of either work ing in “real sweatshops” 70 and earn “30 cents and hour”71 instead of
“$3.05”72 or becoming prostitutes.73 Recently, this choice was faced by Chinese women, who were previously employed in the American garment companies of Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands, which is also known as a “quiet little American territory.”74 Marxism is able to provide insights into a world divided into classes whose members form further alliances according to a wide set of interest and identities, including gender and sexuality. With its focus on class struggle, Marxism can provide theoretical guidance to those who want to organize social movements along other lines of social interest . For example, Marxists have contributed to struggles over reproductive rights by showing the links between feminist concerns about gender subordination and the rights of women and class issues about who does the work of child care and under what conditions or about who has access to reproductive technology and medical services and for what reasons.75 Marxism can also help explain the spread of HIV in economically deprived areas of the globe, or in riddled with prostitution. It can help, again, because it explains how the virus was brought in to a large extent by poverty and ignorance--often a result of poverty. However, as queer theorists have noted, there are "privileged forms of sexuality" such as "heterosexuality, marriage, and procreation--that are protected and awarded by the state and subsidized through social and economic incentives."76 They need to be addressed separately, and Marx did ignore them. Nevertheless, if making distinctions is intellectually necessary, similarly necessary is seeing commonality among differences. Especially if mass politics are to be involved, a singular focus on sexuality and gender may be ill-advised . For the last few decades, the Left and the
Right have played good cop/bad cop when it comes to regulating sexuality. Sexuality has been a "field of power, a category of identity" for the Left, but, equally so, the Right and the Left address it successfully as a "site of critique." Queer theory has been a critique of heterosexuality as a regulatory social practice. For the Right, sexuality is a place to criticize liberals, and we fear today that we was gained yesterday may be lost tomorrow. An answer to those uncertainties is Marxism, whose materialism remains useful both for feminist and for queer theories. A materialist queer critique , for example, explains how human capacities for reproduction and pleasure are "always historicized and organized under certain specific conditions across a complex ensemble of social relations --economic, political, ideological."77 Furthermore, it explains how sexuality mediates and traverses "other facets of social reproduction ." Understanding sexuality from a systemic social perspective has several implications. First of all, while it acknowledges that sexuality is always discursively constructed, it simultaneously insists that the materiality of sexuality is not just discursive . This perspective shift encourages us to address how the normative discursive construction of sexuality as heterosexuality has been imbricated in divisions of wealth and has helped organize state relations and formations or citizenship. But such a systemic materialist analysis also exerts critical pressure on lesbian, gay, and queer politics as well, raising questions about the relationship between the view of social life in most queer theory as so thoroughly and exclusively stylized, textual, and performative, and the increasing commodification of homosexuality as a new market niche, (life)style, or fashion statement. It questions as well the loosening of heterosexual gender codes among the professional/consumer class in "postindustrial" economies and the invisible

laborers elsewhere on which they depend. [...] materialist queer theory can both provoke the left to confront its blindness to heterosexuality and further develop a radical oppositional politics that speaks out not only for urban middle-class queers but also to those lesbians, gays, and queers in prisons and shelters, in factories and migrant camps, for whom the playful subversion of sexual identities is a much more limited option.78 Additionally, if the radical discourse today is about more detailed issues, such as eradication of HIV, expansion of reproductive rights, elimination of child abuse, and the battering of women, that does not negate the value of Marxism. On a different, but related note, the academe, as the creator of radical discourse, need to be wary of its proliferation. Boris Kagarlitsky called such discourse explosion "a projection onto social and political life of the market situation of redundant diversity."79 If "redundant diversity" is a characteristic feature of the capitalist market, which adds to the choice of goods, a choice between advertising symbols, which changes the discourse from one of a competent choice to one of manipulated choice by advertisers, in politics, something similar has happened. Kagarlitsky explained the process as the result of the "commercial propaganda," which demands that new goods constantly appear on the market.80 There are even rumors of the decline of women's studies in the academy, replaced by a more contemporary consideration of sexuality.81 The simple old formula of " class struggle," "social transformation," solidarity" and "popular power" are becoming "old fashioned" not because they are remote from the needs of present-day humanity, but because they are forced onto a subordinate level by new ideas formulated so as to accord exactly with the principles of modern advertising .82
[Sharon Smith is also the author of Women and Socialism: Essays on Women’s Liberation (Haymarket Books, 2005). Her writings appear regularly in Socialist Worker newspaper and the ISR. Race, class, and "whiteness theory" ISR Issue 46, March–
April 2006 http://isreview.org/issues/46/whiteness.shtml]
Meyerson counters this set of assumptions, proposing that Marx’s emphasis on the centrality of class relations brings oppression to the forefront, as a precondition for working-class unity:
Marxism properly interpreted emphasizes the primacy of class in a number of senses. One, of course, is the primacy of the working class as a revolutionary agent —a primacy which does not , as often thought, render women and people of color “secondary .” Such an equation of white male and working class, as well as a correspo nding division between a “white” male working class identity and all the others, whose identity is thereby viewed as either primarily one of gender and race or hybrid, is a view this essay contests all along the way. The primacy of class means that building a multiracial, multi-gendered international working-class organization or organizations should be the goal of any revolutionary movement: the primacy of class puts the fight against racism and sexism at the center. The intelligibility of this position is rooted in the explanatory primacy of class analysis for understanding the structural determinants of race, gender and class oppression. Oppression is multiple and intersecting but its causes are not.
18 Designating class as the primary antagonism in capitalist society bears no inference on the “importance” of racism , as Roediger claims. Marxism merely assumes a causal relationship —that white supremacy as a system was instituted by capital, to the detriment of labor as a whole. Marxist theory rests on the assumption that white workers do not benefit from a system of white supremacy. Indeed, Marx argued of slavery, the most oppressive of all systems of exploitation, “In the United States of America , every independent workers’ movement was paralyzed as long as slavery disfigured part of the republic. Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.”19 Marx was not alone in assuming that racism, by dividing the working class along ideological lines, harmed the class interests of both white and Black workers. Abolitionist
Frederick Douglass stated unambiguously of slaveholders , “They divided both to conquer each.”20
Douglass elaborated, “Both are plundered and by the same plunderers. The slave is robbed by his master, of all his earnings above what is required for his physical necessities; and the white man is

robbed by the slave system, because he is flung into competition with a class of laborers who work without wages .”21 Capitalism forces workers to compete with each other. The unremitting pressure from a layer of workers —be they low-wage or unemployed—is a constant reminder that workers compete for limited jobs that afford a decent standard of living. The working class has no interest in maintaining a system that thrives upon inequality and oppression. Indeed, all empirical evidence shows quite the opposite. When the racist poll tax was passed in the South, imposing property and other requirements designed to shut out Black voters, many poor whites also lost the right to vote.
After Mississippi passed its poll tax law, the number of qualified white voters fell from 130,000 to
68,000.22 The effects of segregation extended well beyond the electoral arena. Jim Crow segregation empowered only the rule of capital. Whenever employers have been able to use racism to divide Black from white workers, preventing unionization, both Black and white workers earn lower wages . This is just as true in recent decades as it was 100 years ago.
Indeed, as Shawki points out of the 1970s, “In a study of major metropolitan areas Michael Reich found a correlation between the degree of income inequality between whites and Blacks and the degree of income inequality between whites .”23 The study concluded: But what is most dramatic— in each of these blue-collar groups, the Southern white workers earned less than Northern Black workers. Despite the continued gross discrimination against Black skilled craftsmen in the North, the “privileged” Southern whites earned 4 percent less than they did. Southern male white operatives averaged…18 percent less than Northern Black male operatives. And Southern white service workers earned…14 percent less than Northern Black male service workers.”24 Racism against Blacks and other racially oppressed groups serves both to lower the living standards of the entire working class and to weaken workers’ ability to fight back. Whenever capitalists can threaten to replace one group of workers with another —poorly paid— group of workers, neither group benefits . Thus, the historically nonunion South has not only depressed the wages of Black workers, but also lowered the wages of Southern white workers overall —and prevented the labor movement from achieving victory at important junctures. So even in the short term the working class as a whole has nothing to gain from oppression.

, assistant professor of English – William Jewell College, former research fellow – Center for the
Study of Women @ UCLA,
(Jennifer, “Bio-politics, Transspecies Love and/as Class Commons-Sense,” The Red Critique Vol. 14)
Bio-politics more generally, and transspecies posthumanism in particular, are theories of "passive adjustment" to the ruins of capitalism. They spiritualize poverty and the subordination of love, kinship, and sexual relations to commodity exchange relations and production for profit. They reduce species life to a mere means of individual survival within capitalism. This is a far cry from the understanding of "love" produced by historical materialists such as Kollontai who argued that the basis of the "hypocritical morality" of capitalism is not in its failure to produce "ideal (post)human beings"
—what Haraway calls "companion species" or Hardt and Negri call " new and different subjectivities" —rather it is in its material relations of production. The hypocritical morality of capitalism is not an effect a specific kind of "love" or
"family" (these are its symptoms and articulations) but rests on "the structure of its exploitative economy " (Kollontai
263). Freedom of sexuality, love, desire cannot be produced unless emotional relations are , as Kollontai argues,
" freed from financial considerations ," which is to say, freed from class society and its privatized relations of production that produce dire economic necessity for the majority. This is not simply a matter of "meeting individual needs"
for the reproduction of capitalism. Rather, it requires freedom from necessity. Freedom
, that is, from social relations of production based on the exploitation of labor which , if left intact, will inevitably subordinate human relations including love and sexual relations to "financial considerations." " Love "
—of animals, of people, of differences , of the world
— does not evolve or transcend beyond capitalism without the material transformation of capitalist relations of production. Rather, it is in dialectical relation to the material relations of production in society. "Love" can only be "freed" if it is freed from class society and its privatized relations of production that subordinate the planet to production for profit while producing dire economic necessity for the majority.
For an emancipatory theory of love what is needed is a return to grasping the class relations that structure life under capitalism and understanding that ending alienation requires bringing about social relations of production in which class antagonisms have not only already been abolished
—because private property has been abolished—but have been , as Engels puts it, " forgotten in practical life " (AntiDühring 119).

William
, Professor in the Humanities and Chair of the Department of German and
Romance Languages and Literatures at the John Hopkins University , “Affective Disorder”, diacritics,
Volume 40, Number 4
The current deployment of the concept of affect suffers from a disjunction between its potential utility and the promise projected on it by contemporary theorists. Specifically, the power of the vocabulary inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's interventions of the 1970s—and stemming from Deleuze's earlier engagements with the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza —implicitly and at times explicitly invokes the promise that a critical perspective focused on affect can avoid the pitfalls of individual subjectivity and symbolic mediation in elucidating a dimension of relations between persons or beings that is direct or immediate. A coherent understanding of the concept of affect, however, demonstrates that its dimension is properly defined by the thorough interpenetration of bodies and mediation and, perhaps most strikingly, by how the limits imposed by subjectivity's horizon of opacity in turn affect the subject in corporeal ways.
To the extent that theories of affect have hoped for new ethical possibilities to emerge from a thinking oriented toward the affective dimension, those theories must grapple with the paradoxes of mediation that already bedeviled the attempts early modern thinkers like David Hume and Adam
Smith to understand how feelings are transferred from one individual to another . What these debates intuited was how ethical questions are, by their very nature, inextricably bound to the subject's blindness as to the desires and intentions of others and, ultimately, to important aspects of his or her own as well. While the transmission of affect is both real and a profoundly important quality of communication, the question the human being faces of what I ought to do not only cannot be relieved by such communications, it rebounds mercilessly on the affects and remains a relentless engine of our affective lives .
Nikolas
, social science, health, and medicine prof at King’s College London, The Human
Sciences in a Biological Age, http://logincms.uws.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/282484/ICS_Occasional_Paper_Series_3_1_Ros e_Final.pdf
Others have been less careful in their borrowing from the biological. This is especially the case with those who refer to biological arguments to support their claim that human beings are not individuated, conscious and rational, but rather enmeshed in sensations and contagions, and shaped by affective and non-cognitive force fields (Connolly, 2002; Massumi, 2002). 8 For example, Brian Massumi alludes
“fleetingly” – as Ruth Leys (2011) puts it – to various findings concerning the role of the autonomic nervous system supposed to derive from contemporary neuroscience, and supports his belief in the bodily character of thought with reference to the highly dubious conclusions that Benjamin Libet draws from his experiments on volition (Libet et al., 1983; Libet, Freeman and Sutherland, 1999). He uses
Libet’s argument – based on a highly simplistic laboratory set-up – that there is a half-second delay between a decision being manifested in brain process and it entering conscious awareness to give empirical support to a philosophical argument drawn from Spinoza and Deleuze, with added support from
Gilbert Simondon (Massumi, 2002). 9 Libet’s bizarre reasoning, and extrapolations to general claims about the absence of free will, remain unquestioned . Nigel Thrift also frames his ‘non-representational theory’ by criticising the way social theory previously rejected biology: “distance from biology is no longer seen as a prime marker of social and cultural theory…It has become increasingly evident that the biological constitution of being…has to be taken into account if performative force is ever to be understood, and in particular, the dynamics of birth (and creativity) rather than death” (2007: 174). 10 This is asserted via a mind-bending amalgam of the usual suspects from philosophy – Agamben, Bergson,
Deleuze and Guattari, William James, Spinoza and Whitehead – together with references to Simondon and von Uexküll and a few biologists or neuroscientists: LeDoux, Damasio, Ekman, the famous autist

Temple Grandin, Libet and, of course, Francisco Varela. Only, it seems, by recognising the true nature of human corporeality and the power of the affective will we be able to free ourselves from an overly intellectualist and rationalist account of contemporary politics, economics and culture; only then will we understand how we are bound in to our beliefs and desires through processes that operate at a nonconscious, non-intellectual level; and only then will we be able to grasp, and perhaps to intensify, the forces that inspire resistance, creativity and hope. Most of the advocates of these new ways of thinking use such pilferings from biology to justify a conceptual framework that satisfies their pregiven sociopolitical affiliations. In a strange form of conceptual gerrymandering, arguments from the life sciences seem to evade critical interrogation where they give support to claims that derive from a pre-existing kind of philosophical ethopolitics. Is there more intellectually honest way to connect the human sciences and the life sciences? A few sociologists have argued against the view they attribute to ‘discourse theorists’ – that human bodies are infinitely malleable by culture – and called for a ‘material-corporeal’ sociology that thinks in terms of an interplay between the biophysiological properties of human bodies, their shaping by social practices, and their organisation by cultural and linguistic forces which shape individual lived experiences and identities (Williams, 1999; Newton, 2003). But such modest sociological endeavours to discuss the role of such issues as emotion, stress and social inequality in accounting for ill health; to muster evidence from research on psychosomatic conditions and the role of hormones and the immune system, find it difficult to gain much traction. They tend merely to repeat the general claim that human bodies are simultaneously biological and social. So is there another way of approaching this issue of the relations between the human sciences and biology? Might things look different if we approached it from the direction of the life sciences themselves?
Ruth
, humanities and history prof at Johns Hopkins, The Turn to Affect: A Critique, Critical
Inquiry 37 (Spring 2011)
Now if it is true, as the authors I have just quoted affirm, that philosophers and critics have largely neglected the important role our corporealaffective dispositions play in thinking, reasoning, and reflection, then it seems to follow that an account of affect and its place in our lives and institutions is called for. The passages I have cited give a preliminary glimpse of what that account will look like. They suggest that the affects must be viewed as independent of, and in an important sense prior to, ideology —that is, prior to intentions, meanings, reasons, and beliefs — because they are nonsignifying, autonomic processes that take place below the threshold of conscious awareness and meaning. For the theorists in question, affects are "inhuman," "pre-subjective," "visceral" forces and intensities that influence our thinking and judgments but are separate from these. Whatever else may be meant by the terms affect and emotion — more on this in a moment —it seems from the remarks quoted above that the affects must be noncognitive, corporeal processes or states. For such theorists, affect is, as Massumi asserts, "irreducibly bodily and autonomic" (PV, p. 28).
This is an interesting claim, not least because in certain obvious ways it matches the way in which today's psychologists and neuroscientists tend to conceptualize the emotions. For the past twenty years or more the dominant paradigm in the field of emotions, stemming from the work of Silvan S. Tomkins and his follower, Paul Ekman, assumes that affective processes occur independently of intention or meaning.
According to that paradigm, our basic emotions do not involve cognitions or beliefs about the objects in our world. Rather, they are rapid, phylogenetically old, automatic responses of the organism that have evolved for survival purposes and lack the cognitive characteristics of the higher-order mental processes.
On this view, whose origins are frequently traced back to the work of Charles Darwin and William James, the affects can and do combine with the cognitive processing systems of the brain, but they are essentially separate from those. In contrast to Freud and "appraisal theorists/' for whom emotions are embodied, intentional states governed by our beliefs, cognitions, and desires, Tomkins and his followers interpret the affects as nonintentional, bodily reactions. They thus posit a constitutive disjunction between our emotions on the one hand and our knowledge of what causes and maintains them on the other, because according to them affect and cognition are two separate systems. As Tomkins has put it, there is

a gap or "radical dichotomy between the 'real' causes of affect and the individual's own interpretation of these causes."10
The result of Tomkins's approach is to suggest that the affects are only contingently related to objects in the world; our basic emotions operate blindly because they have no inherent knowledge of, or relation to, the objects or situations that trigger them. Unlike appraisal theorists, for whom emotions are intentional states directed toward objects and dependent on our beliefs and desires, Tomkins-inspired theorists consider the affects to be capable of discharging themselves in a self-rewarding or selfpunishing manner without regard to the objects that elicit them. On this model, the way to understand fear or joy is that they are "triggered" by various objects, but the latter are nothing more than tripwires for an inbuilt behavioralphysiological response.
Donald Nathanson, a leading exponent of Tomkins's ideas, observes that "the affects are... completely free of inherent meaning or association to their triggering source. There is nothing about sobbing that tells us anything about the steady-state stimulus that has triggered it; sobbing itself has nothing to do with hunger or cold or loneliness. Only the fact that we grow up with an increasing experience of sobbing lets us form some ideas about its meaning."" Or as philosopher of biology Paul Griffiths has likewise remarked in reference to Ekman's views, the basic affects are "sources of motivation not integrated into the system of beliefs or desires. The characteristic properties of the affect program system states, their informational encapsulation and their involuntary triggering, necessitate the introduction of a concept of mental state separate from the concepts of belief and desire."12
Such a view goes hand in hand with a conception of the emotions as comprising six or seven or eight or nine "affect programs" located subcortically in the brain and defined in evolutionary terms as universal or pancultural categories or "natural kinds." These basic emotions, which minimally include the emotions of fear, anger, disgust, joy, sadness, and surprise, are viewed as genetically hard-wired, reflexlike responses, each of which manifests itself in distinct physiological-autonomic and behavioral patterns of response, especially in characteristic facial expressions. On this conception, when our facial expressions are not masked by culturally determined or conventional "display" rules that control for appropriate social behavior, our faces express our affects, which is to say that our facial displays are authentic read-outs of the discrete internal states that constitute our basic emotions. The work of Joseph LeDoux and other neuroscientists has helped consolidate this view by suggesting that the basic emotions, such as fear, are subserved by neural circuits in the brain, such as the subcortical group of neurons known as the amygdalae, which operate automatically and more quickly than the higher, more slowly acting cognitive systems.'3 Throughout this essay I shall call this the Basic Emotions paradigm.
Many of the most influential researchers in the field of affective neuroscience, such as Antonio Damasio, accept the Basic Emotions paradigm. So do certain recent scholars in the humanities and social sciences. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Smail are two such scholars, and, directly or indirectly, they both are indebted to that paradigm precisely because it seems to provide the empirical evidence they seek for a nonintentionalist, corporeal account of the emotions.14 In a recent book and elsewhere, I have given my reasons for questioning the validity of the Basic Emotions view of the affects.1' Specifically, I have argued in relation to Sedgwick's take-up of Tomkins's ideas that the experimental evidence for the existence of six or seven (or is it eight or nine or even fifteen?) discrete emotions or "affect programs" located subcortically in the brain and characterized by distinct, universal facial expressions is seriously flawed and that the theory underlying the paradigm is incoherent. Nor am I alone in my criticisms. When a few years ago I began to assess Tomkins's and Ekman's work, I quickly developed some reservations about the soundness of their research program and was soon encouraged to discover that my suspicions were justified and that several scientists in the emotion field had already questioned that approach.
Ekman's former student Alan Fridlund and psychologists James A. Russell and Jose-Miguel Fernandez-
Dols are among those who have launched powerful critiques of the Tomkins-Ekman position by showing that the experimental evidence cited in its support is inadequate, and the interpretation given of the experimental results is unsupportable. Recently, building on the work of Fridlund, Russell, and others, psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett has published an impressive series of reviews of the growing body of empirical evidence inconsistent with the idea that there are six, or seven, basic emotions in nature. She concludes that the emotion categories posited by Tomkins and Ekman do not have an ontological status that can support induction and scientific generalization or allow for the accumulation of knowledge. The consensus among this group of well-informed scientists is that a new scientific paradigm for research on

the emotions is needed. All the indications are that, whatever new model or paradigm gains acceptance — if this indeed happens —it will be based on assumptions that make the question of affective meaning to the organism or subject of the objects in its world a central issue and concern.16 Nevertheless, the Basic
Emotions paradigm continues to dominate the research field.