GHJPM Neoliberalism
Supplement
By Zach Babat, Matt Cole, Scotty P, Kevin Ryu, Chait Sayani,
Madi Stephens, Erica Tashma.
America Bad Links
Simplistic politics about the US being bad hurts conceptual
clarity. We need to focus struggle on specific criticisms.
North 1 David North and David Walsh 22 September 2001 http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2001/09/rads-s22.html
A case in point is an article that appeared in the Guardian, the British daily newspaper, on September 18, authored by
Charlotte Raven, a former member of the Militant Tendency, editor of the now-defunct Modern Review and currently a
semi-celebrity and professional cynic. The piece is headlined, “A bully with a bloody nose is still a bully,” the bully in
question being the US. In the first place, the September 11 tragedy was not “a bloody nose,” it was a catastrophe.
Thousands of people were incinerated instantly when the airplanes hit the buildings, thousands more died when tons of
rubble collapsed on them. Anyone who was emotionally unaffected by the terror and suffering experienced by tens of
thousands as a result of this attack has no right to call himself or herself a socialist. Raven writes: “It is perfectly possible
to condemn the terrorist action and dislike the US just as much as you did before the WTC went down. Many will have
woken up on Wednesday with that combination of emotions... America is the same country it was before September 11. If
you didn’t like it then, there’s no reason why you should have to pretend to now.” Raven’s references to “the US,” full stop,
is no slip of the pen. It is repeated throughout the article. She never once uses the phrase “the US government” or “the US
ruling elite”, or an equivalent. Using nationality as an epithet is always reactionary. Confronted with the most
monstrous government in history, Hitler’s Nazi regime, socialists never descended to referring with contempt to
“Germany” or “the Germans.” To present “the US” as some predatory imperialist monolith, as Raven and others do,
can only confuse and disorient. It not only serves as a barrier to genuine internationalism, it overlooks the
contradictory character of American history and society. What does it mean to “dislike the US”? What sort of social
element speaks like this? The United States is a complex entity, with a complex history, elements of which are distinctly
ignoble, elements of which are deeply noble. The US has passed through two revolutions—the American Revolution and
the Civil War—the mass battles of the Depression and the struggle for Civil Rights. The contradiction between the
democratic ideals and revolutionary principles on which the nation was founded and its social and political realities has
always been the starting point of the struggle for socialism in the United States. The US was, if one considers the
relationship between theory and politics, the product of the great Enlightenment. It established political principles,
embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, rather than religion or ethnicity, as the basis of
national identity. This origin of the nation in the struggle for abstract ideals—democracy, republicanism—reverberated
across the globe. The American Revolution played no small role in inspiring the events that transformed France a decade
later. Even after 200 years, the United States is still fighting through the political and historical implications of its own
founding principles. The American population, polyglot and highly diverse, is obsessed with ideological problems,
although its approach is often maddeningly pragmatic. As the popular response to the Bush hijacking of the 2000 election
demonstrated, there remains a deep commitment to elementary democratic principles. A low level of class consciousness
and the failure of masses of Americans to generalize from their experiences, however, provides the ruling elite the
opportunity to play on precisely these democratic notions in order to blind layers of the population temporarily as to the
true nature of its plans. For Bush and his ilk “defending freedom and democracy” is merely a code phrase for the right of
the American elite to have its way around the world. To the ordinary American citizen, these words mean something quite
different. The sinister reality of the US government’s new “war against terrorism,” with its grandiose aim of reorganizing
an entire region of the world in line with American geopolitical interests, will make its way into popular consciousness
providing the necessary work is conducted by socialist internationalists. In many ways all the vast problems in the struggle
for socialism find their most complex expression in America. How could that not be the case? If one cannot find points of
departure for a higher form of social organization in the US, in what corner of the globe are they to be found? What’s
more, the individual who sees no basis for socialism in America clearly has given up on the prospects of world socialism
altogether. The Marxist has always been distinguished from the common or garden variety radical by his or her deep
confidence in the revolutionary potential of the American working class. In this regard, the US ruling elite has a much
greater insight into the true nature of American society than the blinkered radical. The American bourgeoisie inveighs
night and day against socialism and communism, in a manner far out of proportion to the threat currently posed by the
socialist movement in the US, because it understands or at least senses instinctively that in the most advanced capitalist
society, all things being equal, socialism offers such a rational and attractive alternative. America is, at once, the most
advanced and the most backward of societies. Its culture attracts and repels, but always fascinates. Official society and
many ordinary Americans deny the very existence of distinct social classes, and yet the country is riven by the most
profound and ever-deepening social differentiation. These social contradictions will only be exacerbated, as the economic
developments of this week have already shown, as the war drive proceeds. The US has produced Franklin, Washington,
Jefferson and Lincoln, as well as extraordinary working class and socialist leaders. Its immense contradictions are perhaps
exemplified by the figure of Jefferson, the slave-owner who wrote one of the greatest and most sincere hymns to human
freedom. Raven continues, resorting to the terminology of Postmodernist drivel: “When America speaks from its heart, it
retreats into a language that none but its true-born citizens can begin to understand. At the root of this is an overwhelming
need to control meaning. America can’t let the world speak for itself. It was taken unawares last Tuesday and part of the
trauma of that event was the shock of being forced to listen to a message that it hadn’t had time to translate. The
subsequent roar of anger was, amongst other things, the sound of the US struggling to regain the right to control its own
narrative.” If Raven is speaking of George W. Bush and other servants of American imperial interests, then the first
sentence has no meaning. Such people clearly don’t speak from the heart on this or any other occasion; they are in the
business of lying and deceiving. But pardon us for pointing out that, in fact, when “America,” in the form of its greatest
political and cultural representatives, has spoken “from its heart,” millions around the world have listened and
understood, beginning in the aftermath of July 4, 1776. The most advanced British workers certainly paid attention to the
issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. One could mention the appeals to the international working
class on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti and numerous other examples. And such instances, we hazard to predict, will occur
in the future too. One might add that the finest products of American culture have also attracted and moved masses of
people around the world, from Poe and Whitman, Melville and Hawthorne, in the 19th century, to Dreiser, Fitzgerald,
Richard Wright and others in the 20th. Nor should one entirely forget the influence of American music, popular and
otherwise. A few people, one imagines, have heard it speaking from the heart. This to say nothing of contributions with
international implications in film, painting, sculpture, dance and architecture. Raven apparently counts upon her readers
being so consumed by subjective venom and their own self-importance that they overlook obvious historical and
cultural realities. It has always been an essential task of socialists in the US to awaken the positive and generous instincts
that are so deeply embedded in the American population. There are, after all, two Americas, the America of Bush, Clinton
and the other scoundrels, and another America, of its working people. Revolutionary internationalists have continuously
insisted on this. James P. Cannon, the leader of the American Trotskyists, devoted a speech to this theme in July 1948. Of
the “Two Americas” he observed: “One is the America of the imperialists—of the little clique of capitalists, landlords, and
militarists who are threatening and terrifying the world. This is the America the people of the world hate and fear. There is
the other America—the America of the workers and farmers and the ‘little people.’ They constitute the great majority of the
people. They do the work of the country. They revere its old democratic traditions—its old record of friendship for the
people of other lands, in their struggles against Kings and Despots—its generous asylum once freely granted to the
oppressed.” The struggle against the policies and designs of the American government requires, in the first instance, the
exposure of the latter’s claim that it is the true voice and representative of the people. Socialists are obliged to explain that
the US ruling elite is carrying out anti-democratic and rapacious policies, with inevitably tragic consequences, in the
pursuit of which it falsely invokes the name of the American people. All this of course is a closed book to the smug middle
class philistine and snob, satisfied to make use of words and phrases that come most easily to hand. Raven’s variety of
anti-Americanism is no more original than it is insightful. It is available cheaply and in large quantities in middle class
circles in Britain, France, Germany and, for that matter, in the United States. It is available, so to speak, “on tap.” Such an
outlook has the virtue of appearing oppositional, while not committing its adherent to any course of political action that
might cause inconvenience. It is a form of pseudo-socialism, the phony “anti-imperialism” of cynics and fools.
Agamben
The 1AC perpetuates neoliberalism
Gambetti 11 (Zeynep, Arendt and Foucault On Market Logic: Security, Violence, and Superfluousness,
https://www.academia.edu/532833/Arendt_and_Foucault_on_market_logic_security_violence_and_s
uperfluousness, 4/15/11)
The central thesis of Giorgio Agamben’s political philosophy, as expressed in Homo Sacer , is that “the politicization of bare life as such […] constitutes the decisive event of modernity” (Agamben,
1998, 4). Drawing among others upon Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the totalitarian concentration camp and Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of biopolitical power, Agamben seeks to remedy a
lacuna that he detects in both: that of the exact relation between the camp and biopower. To this end, he turns to otherthinkers, notably Carl Schmitt, from whom he borrows the theory of
As
such Agamben hopes to “bring the political out of its concealment and, at
the same time, return thought to its practical calling” (5). As challenging and
meaningful such an enterprise may be, it nevertheless falls short of
accomplishing its avowed goal. Agamben obscures the relation between
violence and the market fundamentalism of neoliberalism, a matter of much
concern foranyone heeding the practical calling of thought. The
overpoliticization of bare life in Homo Sacer in turn conceals the complex
and intricate relationship between the economic and the political. The problem with
sovereignty. This allows Agamben to reframe the question of biopower in such a way that it reveals the hidden ground of politics and finds its paradigmatic example in the camp. 1
Agamben’s analysis has to do with the ontological status of “politics”. Organicism pervades the whole of Homo Sacer . The language of “incorporation” discloses what remains explicit in Agamben’s
political metaphysics:politics is conceived as an ordered body, a whole, an identity and a determination. The outside of this body is not negativity as such but another body, a biological one. The
identity-thinking that this construal is grounded upon (Norris, 2000, 42-43) cannot have an outside, since antagonism is built into it: the political is political because it is not barelife, or rather, the
political defines itself at the same time as it defines what it is not, barelife. Politics is reduced to a dichotomous system of relating that comprises a project, a nomos , which can never be stabilized
once and for all. It does not come as a surprise, then, that Agamben should use Aristotle’s teleological construal of politics as the tending towards the “good life” as an argument upon which to
ground his metaphysics of the exclusion of bare life from the political (Agamben, 1998, 7). The only exception that can be imagined in his universe is indistinction, not aufhebung . Since politics is a
self-reflexive form-giving, it exhausts itself in pure positivity, the negation of the negation is a 1 Agamben also draws upon Benjamin, Heidegger, Nancy and Bataille, but the focus of this paper is
exclusively on Arendt and Foucault. 3 moment that never comes. The sovereign exception, “the figure in which singularity is represented as such, which is to say, insofar as it is unrepresentable”
(Agamben, 1998,24), is what Agamben paradoxically tends to represent throughout his analysis, beginning with the figure of homo sacer , passing through the Müselmann , and ending with Karen
Quinlan. Thus, as Andrew Norris strikingly underlines, Agamben’s decision to erect the camp into the exemplary norm that characterizes the modern is itself an act of sovereignty that “puts him in
the position of deciding upon the camp victims one more time, thereby repeating the gesture of the ss [ sic ] in precisely the way he says we mustavoid” (Norris, 2005, 278). As such, he is unable to
conceptualize singularity, but only antagonism in the sense Laclau and Mouffe use it (1985, 122-127). The trouble is that by conflating politics with sovereign form-giving and, subsequently,
sovereignty with every distinction that may exist in the humanly constructed world (language, body, life, form, fact, right, law, exception, example,decision), Agamben has indeed already rendered
indistinct any distinction to be made between politics and other phenomena. The circle is squared with the concept of biopolitics, since Agamben’s account of sovereignty is already biopolitical – it
hinges upon a conception of the political that defines itself in relation to life, only if to exclude it. Thus, what appears to be “the politicization of life” in the modern era cannot be grasped in
Agamben’s perspective since life is construed as always-already defined by apolitical decision. As such, the difference between the Greek polis and the modernnation-state, the nation-state and
Empire is effaced. As a matter of fact, there is a huge inconsistency in Homo Sacer that reveals itself as soon as we move into the third part of the book on biopolitics. The indistinction between zoe
and bios is to have been caused by a crisis in sovereignty such that the whole earth is now functioning on the basis of states of exception. Yet, the capacity to decide upon states of exception is still
construed as a sign of sovereignty – there seems to be no crisis, after all. In fact, while it seems that the only difference between classical politics and biopolitics is the expansion of domains of
sovereign decision, the latter already comprises the most fundamental activities of human existence such as speech since time immemorial. The metaphysical account of sovereignty makes it
impossible to grasp what is at stake in biopolitics proper, i.e. in specifically modern politics in such a way as to make sense of the Agambenian rendition of biopolitics as the destabilization of the
It may well be that sovereignty has been
dissolved in such a way as to dissolve along with it any criteria for judging
whether a situation is an exception or not.
otherwise stable border between life and death (Agamben, 1998, 122).
Surveillance cannot end without capitalism ending
Smith 14 (R.C., writer and researcher in the fields of philosophy and Frankfurt School critical theory, with special
interest in an interdisciplinary course of study that ranges widely between (although not limited to) psychology,
existential-phenomenology, epistemology, anthropology, history, economics, education, and systems theory.,Power
Capital &The Rise of the Mass Surveillance State: on the absence of democracy, ethics, disenchantment, & critical theory
http://www.heathwoodpress.com/power-capital-the-rise-of-the-mass-surveillance-state-on-the-absence-of-democracyethics-disenchantment-critical-theory/, 4/24/14)
While the question of the legitimacy of the security state and the existence of mass surveillance programmes is of
paramount importance, what is perhaps a more fundamental line of questioning has to do with discerning the social and
ethical criteria in which the existence of mass surveillance can be seen as directly set against genuinely emancipatory,
egalitarian social-political ambitions. Moreover, in the advance of social movements that
challenge the rise of the mass surveillance state, it is not only crucial to be
able to distinguish the fundamental ethical criteria or critical categories
which may offer guidance in particular moments of search for a more
wholesome critique of society, not for the benefit of the reproduction of the
coordinates of present society, but to challenge and transform that social
reality into a ‘correct version’.[24] In an age defined by the eclipse of reason[25], “to be able to
distinguish genuinely emancipatory, egalitarian political movements from their mere semblance in order to offer these
support”, this is, in general, crucial to recognising political movements, social phenomena, institutional and state forces
“for what they are before – in the deep confusion of quickly-changing events – these manage to install themselves in
positions of unassailable power.”[26] In other words, for critical theory, it is essential to insist that, along with addressing
a particular social issue, one needs to identify the greater socio-historical processes and developments which surround the
development of that particular issue.[27] “Furthermore, to understand and explain social phenomena, one needs to
contextualize one’s topic of inquiry within a comprehensive theoretical framework for social analysis and critique in order
to avoid illegitimate abstraction which would, for instance, analyze political or cultural phenomena apart from its
constitution in socio-economic processes”.[28] That is why in order to begin understanding the very
existence of mass surveillance programmes initiated by the state, we must
first consider how the dynamics of capital play such a constitutive role in
social life[29] and then, from here, look into how these programmes, how
such phenomena, are positioned within modern capitalism. To better explain this
approach, let us considering the following. We can summarise very generally that the vicissitudes of development in terms
of the rise of the mass surveillance state are directly enmeshed or caught up in the forces of modernity. As I commented
previously in a discussion on the NSA: from an Adornian perspective we can say that “there is a ‘grain of insanity’ in the
very existence of such social phenomena [i.e., mass surveillance technology and programmes], and this ‘grain of insanity’
resides not only in the very nature and impetus of the (ideological) systems and organisations that support the NSA and its
operation, but also in the very historical process of their justification.”[30] The basic thesis here is simple (and not at all
an uncommon one): that the ethical predicament posed by the revelation of the existence of mass surveillance is not in and
of itself solely a matter of the absence or crisis of democracy, which is symptomatic but which ‘liberal’ commentators tend
limit themselves to. Indeed, the problem of the mass surveillance state is related to the fact “that democracy today, as a
concept and as a thing, has less to do with the actual content of “democracy” as an egalitarian system of political-economic
values than it does with the neglect of this content for its (mere) form” and how the concept of democracy today is
therefore “the mere distillate remaining after the actual content (Equality, Egalitarianism, Justice, Rights, etc.) has been
boiled away”[31]. But the ethical predicament we face also has to do with the
greater (historical) disenchantment of society, of the distillation of ethical
concepts, overlapped and converged with the domination of instrumental
reason (i.e., positivism, scienticism, technicism) and the intensification of
bureaucratic rationality in the context of the historic genesis of the
institutional structures of capitalism.[32] In late-capitalist society, with its
intense economic (capital) expansion, these aspects of modernity converge
and form the definitions of reason and rationality[33] – i.e., what is
qualified on behalf of the ideology of a “rationally administered world”[34]
– and the result is the disenchantment of the world which drains from
human experience sources of meaning and significance that anchor ethical
practice.[35] To put it differently, Elliot Sperber has a nice way of describing how “society (especially one holding
itself out as a just society) has an actual duty of care to supply [conditions necessary for human flourishing] directly. If one
accepts the argument that a society has such a duty of care, a society’s failure to supply such conditions amounts to a
breach of this duty, and to a forfeiture of its legitimacy”.[36] We have to see the problem of the NSA
and the rise of the mass surveillance state as a systemic problem, one which
coincides and indeed exists directly in relation with the list of injustices that
already define the scope of a society that has failed to satisfy its duty of care.
Commodify Your Dissent Links
Neoliberalism sees your dissent, your radical movement, and
figures out a way to sell it to a niche market.
Frank, 1997 – prof of American History at Univ of Chicago [Thomas The Business of Culture in the new Gilded Age
Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from The Baffler ed. By Frank and Weiland; “Why Johnny Can’t Dissent”; Pages 31-32)
CAPITALISM IS CHANGING, obviously and drastically. From the moneyed pages of the Wall Street journal to TV commercials for
airlines and photocopiers we hear every day about the new order’s globe spanning, cyber-accumulating ways. But our notion
about what’s wrong with American life and how the figures responsible are to be confronted haven't changed much in
thirty years. Call it, for convenience, the “countercultural idea.” It holds that the paramount ailment of our society is
conformity, a malady that has variously been described as over-organization, bureaucracy, homogeneity, hierarchy,
logocentrism, technocracy, the Combine, the Apollonian. We all know what it is and what it does. It transforms humanity into
“organization man,” into “the man in the gray flannel suit.” It is “Moloch whose mind is pure machinery, ”the “incomprehensible prison”
that consumes “brains and imagination.” It is artifice, starched shirts, tailfins, carefully mowed lawns, and always, always, the
consciousness of impending nuclear destruction. It is a stiff, militaristic order that seeks to suppress instinct, to forbid sex and pleasure, to
deny basic human impulses and individuality, to enforce through a rigid uniformity a meaningless plastic consumerism. As this half of the
countercultural idea originated during the 1990s, it is appropriate that the evils of conformity are most conveniently summarized with
images of 1950s suburban correctness. You know, that land of sedate music, sexual repression, deference to authority, Red Scares, and
smiling white people standing politely in line to go to church. Constantly appearing as a symbol of arch backwardness in advertising and
movies, it is an image we find easy to evoke. The ways in which this system are to be resisted are equally Well understood and
agreed-upon. The Establishment demands homogeneity; we revolt by embracing diverse, individual lifestyles. It demands
self-denial and rigid adherence to convention; we revolt through immediate gratification, instinct uninhibited, and
liberation of the libido and the appetites. Few have put it more bluntly than jerry Rubin did in 1970: “America says: Don’t! The hippies
say: Do lt!" The countercultural idea is hostile to any law and every establishment. “Whenever we see a rule, we must break it,”
Rubin continued. “Only by breaking rules do we discover who we are. ”Above all rebellion consists of a sort of Nietzschean
antinomianism, an automatic questioning of rules, a rejection of whatever social prescriptions we 've happened to inherit.
Just Do It is the whole of the law. But one hardly has to go to a poetry reading to see the countercultural idea acted out. Its
frenzied ecstasies have long since become an official aesthetic of consumer society, a monotheme of mass as well as
adversarial culture. Turn on the TV and there it is instantly: the unending drama of consumer unbound and in search of an everheightened good time, the inescapable rock 'n' roll soundtrack, dreadlocks and ponytails bounding into Taco Bells, a drunken, swingingcamera epiphany of tennis shoes, outlaw soda pops, and mind-bending dandruff shampoos. Corporate America, it turns out, no
longer speaks in the voice of oppressive order that it did when Ginsberg moaned in 1956 that Time magazine was “always telling me
about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody 's serious but me.” Nobody wants you to think
they’re serious today, least of all Time Warner. On the contrary: the Culture Trust is now our leader in the Ginsbergian search
for kicks upon kicks. Corporate America is not an oppressor but a sponsor of fun, provider of lifestyle accouterments,
facilitator of carnival, our slang-speaking partner in the quest for that ever-more apocalyptic orgasm. The countercultural idea has
become capitalist orthodoxy, its hunger for transgression upon transgression now perfectly suited to an economic-cultural
regime that runs on ever-faster cyclings of the new; its taste for self-fulfillment and its intolerance f1or the confines of tradition now
permitting vast latitude in consuming practices and lifestyle experimentation. Consumerism is no longer about “conformity” but
about “difference.” Advertising teaches us not in the ways of puritanical self-denial (a bizarre notion on the face of it), but in orgiastic,
never-ending self'-fulfillment. It counsels not rigid adherence to the tastes of the herd but vigilant and constantly updated
individualism. We consume not to fit in, but to prove, on the surface at least, that we are rock 'n' roll rebels, each one of us
as rule-breaking and hierarchy-defying as our heroes of the 60s, who now pitch cars, shoes, and beer. This imperative of endless
difference is today the genius at the heart of American capitalism, an eternal fleeing from “sameness” that satiates our
thirst for the New with such achievements of civilization as the infinite brands of identical cola, the myriad colors and irrepressible
variety of the cigarette rack at 7-Eleven. As existential rebellion has become a more or less official style of Information Age
capitalism, so has the countercultural notion of a static, repressive Establishment grown hopelessly obsolete. However the
basic impulses of the countercultural idea may have disturbed a nation lost in Cold War darkness, they are today in fundamental agreement
with the basic tenets of Information Age business theory. So close are they, in fact, that it has become difficult to understand the
countercultural idea as anything more than the self justifying ideology of the new bourgeoisie that has arisen since the 1960s,
the cultural means by which this group has proven itself ever so much better skilled than its slow-moving, security-minded
forebears at adapting to the accelerated, always-changing consumerism of today. The anointed cultural opponents of
capitalism are now capitalism’s ideologues. The two come together in perfect synchronization in a figure like Camille Paglia, whose
ravings are grounded in the absolutely noncontroversial ideas of the golden sixties. According to Paglia, American business is still exactly
what it was believed to have been in that beloved decade, that is, “puritanical and desensualized.” Its great opponents are, of course,
liberated figures like “the beatniks,” Bob Dylan, and the Beatles. Culture is, quite simply, a binary battle between the repressive
Apollonian order of capitalism and the Dionysian impulses of the counterculture. Rebellion makes no sense without
repression; we must remain forever convinced of capitalism's fundamental hostility to pleasure in order to consume
capitalism’s rebel products as avidly as we do. It comes as little surprise when, after criticizing the “Apollonian capitalist machine” (in
her book, Kamp.: 6' Tramps), Paglia applauds American mass culture (in Utne Reader), the preeminent product of that “capitalist
machine,” as a “third great eruption” of a Dionysian “paganism.” For her, as for most other designated dissidents, there is no contradiction
between replaying the standard critique of capitalist conformity and repressiveness and then endorsing its rebel products—for Paglia the car
culture and Madonna—as the obvious solution: the Culture Trust offers both Establishment and Resistance in one convenient package. The
only question that remains is why Paglia has not yet landed an endorsement contract from a soda pop or automobile manufacturer.
Feminism
Co-opts movements
Capitalism co-opts feminist movements
Fraser professor of philosophy and politics at the New School for Social Research in New York 13
[ Nancy Fraser, “How feminism became capitalism's handmaiden - and how to reclaim it”, TheGuardian,
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/14/feminism-capitalist-handmaiden-neoliberal MSteph]
As a feminist, I've always assumed that by fighting to emancipate women I was building a better world – more egalitarian, just and free. But
our
critique of sexism is now supplying the justification
for new forms of inequality and exploitation. In a cruel twist of
fate, I fear that the movement for women's liberation has
become entangled in a dangerous liaison with
neoliberal efforts to build a free-market society. That would
lately I've begun to worry that ideals pioneered by feminists are serving quite different ends. I worry, specifically, that
explain how it came to pass that feminist ideas that once formed part of a radical worldview are increasingly expressed in individualist
Where feminists once criticised a society that
promoted careerism, they now advise women to
"lean in". A movement that once prioritised social
solidarity now celebrates female entrepreneurs. A
perspective that once valorised "care" and
interdependence now encourages individual
advancement and meritocracy. What lies behind this shift is a sea-change in the
character of capitalism. The state-managed capitalism of the
postwar era has given way to a new form of
capitalism – "disorganised", globalising, neoliberal.
Second-wave feminism emerged as a critique of the
first but has become the handmaiden of the second.
terms.
With the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that the movement for women's liberation pointed simultaneously to two different possible
futures. In a first scenario, it prefigured a world in which gender emancipation went hand in hand with participatory democracy and social
solidarity; in a second, it promised a new form of liberalism, able to grant women as well as men the goods of individual autonomy,
increased choice, and meritocratic advancement. Second-wave feminism was in this sense ambivalent. Compatible with either of two
different visions of society, it was susceptible to two different historical elaborations. As I see it, feminism's ambivalence has been resolved
in recent years in favour of the second, liberal-individualist scenario – but not because we were passive victims of neoliberal seductions. On
the contrary, we ourselves contributed three important ideas to this development.
One contribution was our critique of the "family
wage": the ideal of a male breadwinner-female
homemaker family that was central to stateorganised capitalism. Feminist criticism of that
ideal now serves to legitimate "flexible capitalism".
After all, this form of capitalism relies heavily on
women's waged labour, especially low-waged work
in service and manufacturing, performed not only
by young single women but also by married women
and women with children; not by only racialised
women, but by women of virtually all nationalities
and ethnicities. As women have poured into labour markets around the globe, stateorganised capitalism's ideal of the family wage is
being replaced by the newer, more modern norm –
apparently sanctioned by feminism – of the twoearner family.
Never mind that the reality that underlies the new ideal is
depressed wage levels, decreased job security,
declining living standards, a steep rise in the
number of hours worked for wages per household,
exacerbation of the double shift – now often a triple or quadruple shift – and a rise in poverty,
increasingly concentrated in female-headed households. Neoliberalism turns a sow's
ear into a silk purse by elaborating a narrative of
female empowerment. Invoking the feminist
critique of the family wage to justify exploitation, it
harnesses the dream of women's emancipation to
the engine of capital accumulation.
Feminism has also made a second contribution to the neoliberal ethos. In the era of state-organised capitalism, we rightly criticised a
constricted political vision that was so intently focused on class inequality that it could not see such "non-economic" injustices as domestic
Rejecting "economism" and
politicising "the personal", feminists broadened the
political agenda to challenge status hierarchies
premised on cultural constructions of gender
difference. The result should have been to expand the struggle for justice to encompass both culture and economics.
But the actual result was a one-sided focus on
"gender identity" at the expense of bread and butter
issues. Worse still, the feminist turn to identity
politics dovetailed all too neatly with a rising
neoliberalism that wanted nothing more than to
repress all memory of social equality. In effect, we absolutised the critique of
violence, sexual assault and reproductive oppression.
cultural sexism at precisely the moment when circumstances required redoubled attention to the critique of political economyFinally,
feminism contributed a third idea to neoliberalism:
the critique of welfare-state paternalism. Undeniably
progressive in the era of state-organised capitalism,
that critique has since converged with
neoliberalism's war on "the nanny state" and its
more recent cynical embrace of NGOs. A telling
example is "microcredit", the programme of small
bank loans to poor women in the global south. Cast
as an empowering, bottom-up alternative to the topdown, bureaucratic red tape of state projects,
microcredit is touted as the feminist antidote for
women's poverty and subjection. What has been missed, however, is a disturbing
coincidence: microcredit has burgeoned just as states have
abandoned macro-structural efforts to fight poverty,
efforts that small-scale lending cannot possibly
replace. In this case too, then, a feminist idea has been recuperated by neoliberalism. A perspective
aimed originally at democratising state power in
order to empower citizens is now used to legitimise
marketisation and state retrenchment. In all these
cases, feminism's ambivalence has been resolved in
favour of (neo)liberal individualism. But the other, solidaristic scenario
may still be alive. The current crisis affords the chance to pick up its thread once more, reconnecting the dream of
women's liberation with the vision of a solidary society. To that end, feminists need to break off our dangerous liaison with
neoliberalism and reclaim our three "contributions" for our own ends. First, we might break the spurious link between our
critique of the family wage and flexible capitalism by militating for a form of life that de-centres waged work and valorises
unwaged activities, including – but not only – carework. Second, we might disrupt the passage from our critique of
economism to identity politics by integrating the struggle to transform a status order premised on masculinist cultural
values with the struggle for economic justice. Finally, we might sever the bogus bond between our critique of bureaucracy
and free-market fundamentalism by reclaiming the mantle of participatory democracy as a means of strengthening the
public powers needed to constrain capital for the sake of justice.
Immigration
Links
Their attempt to open more immigration into the US just props
up the capitalist system
Castles and Kosack, prof. sociology at university of Sydney, 14
(Stephen and Godula, Ethnicity and Globalization: From Migrant Worker to Transnational Citizen, pg 3
Castles, Stephen, and Godula Kosack. "The Function of Labour Migration in Western European Capitalism." Ethnicity and
Globalization: From Migrant Worker to Transnational Citizen Ethnicity and Globalization: From Migrant Worker to
Transnational Citizen (2000): 27-45. 2014. Web. 25 July 2015.)
The domination of the working masses by a small capitalist ruling class has never been based on violence alone.
Capitalist rule is based on a range of mechanisms, some objective products of the economic
process, others subjective phenomena arising through manipulation of attitudes. Two
such mechanisms, which
the industrial reserve
army, which belongs to the first category, and the labour aristocracy, which belongs to the second.
received considerable attention from the founders of scientific socialism, are
These two mechanisms are closely related, as are the objective and subjective factors which give rise to them. Engels
pointed out that ‘English manufacture must have, at all times save the brief periods of highest prosperity, an unemployed
reserve army of workers, in order to produce the masses of goods required by the market in the liveliest months.’1 Marx
showed that the industrial reserve army or surplus working population is not only the necessary product of capital
accumulation and the associated increase in labour productivity, but at the same time ‘the lever of capitalist
accumulation’, ‘a condition of existence of the capitalist mode of production’.2 Only by bringing ever more
workers into the production process can the capitalist accumulate capital,
which is the precondition for extending production and applying new
techniques. These new techniques throw out of work the very men whose labour allowed their application. They
are set free to provide a labour reserve which is available to be thrown into
other sectors as the interests of the capitalist require. ‘The whole form of the movement of
modern industry depends, therefore, upon the constant transformation of a part of the labouring population into
unemployed or half-employed hands.’3 The pressure of the industrial reserve army forces those workers who are
employed to accept long hours and poor conditions. Above all: ‘Taking them as a whole, the general movements of wages
are exclusively regulated by the expansion and contraction of the industrial reserve army.’4 If employment grows and the
reserve army contracts, workers are in a better position to demand higher wages. When this happens, profits and capital
accumulation diminish, investment falls and men are thrown out of work, leading to a growth of the reserve army and a
fall in wages. This is the basis of the capitalist economic cycle. Marx mentions the possibility of the workers seeing through
the seemingly natural law of relative over-population, and undermining its effectiveness through trade-union activity
directed towards co-operation between the employed and the unemployed.5 The labour aristocracy is also described by
Engels and Marx. By conceding privileges to certain well-organized sectors of labour, above all to craftsmen
(who by virtue of their training could not be readily replaced by members of the industrial reserve army), the
capitalists were able to undermine class consciousness and secure an
opportunist nonrevolutionary leadership for these sectors.6 Special advantages, sometimes taking the
form of symbols of higher status (different clothing, salary instead of wages, etc) rather than higher material rewards, were
also conferred upon foremen and non-manual workers, with the aim of distinguishing them from other workers and
causing them to identify their interests with those of the capitalists. Engels pointed out that the privileges given to some
British workers were possible because of the vast profits made by the capitalists through domination of the world market
and imperialist exploitation of labour in other countries.7 Lenin emphasized the effects of imperialism on class
consciousness: ‘Imperialism . . . makes it economically possible to bribe the upper strata of the proletariat, and thereby
fosters, gives shape to, and strengthens opportunism.’8 ‘. . . A section of the proletariat allows itself to be led by men
bought by, or at least paid by, the bourgeoisie’, and the result is a 1 Engels, ‘The Condition of the Working Class in
England’, in Marx and Engels, On Britain, Moscow 1962, p. 119. 2 Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Moscow 1961, p. 632. 3 Ibid., p.
633. 4 Ibid., p. 637. 5 Ibid., p. 640. 6 Engels, Preface to the English edition of ‘The Condition of the Working Class in
England’, op. cit., p. 28. 7 Engels, ‘The English Elections’, in On Britain, op. cit., p. 505. 8 Lenin, Imperialism—the highest
Stage of Capitalism, Moscow 1966, pp. 96–7. 4 split among the workers and ‘temporary decay in the working-class
movement’.9 The industrial reserve army and the labour aristocracy have not lost their importance as mechanisms of
domination in the current phase of organized monopoly capitalism. However, the way in which they function has
undergone important changes. In particular the maintenance of an industrial reserve army within the developed capitalist
countries of West Europe has become increasingly difficult. With the growth of the labour movement after the First World
War, economic crises and unemployment began to lead to political tensions which threatened the existence of the
capitalist system. Capitalism responded by setting up fascist régimes in the areas where it was most threatened, in order to
suppress social conflict through violence. The failure of this strategy, culminating in the defeat of fascism in 1945, was
accompanied by the reinforcement of the non-capitalist bloc in East Europe and by a further strengthening of the labour
movement in West Europe. In order to survive, the capitalist system had to aim for continuous expansion and full
employment at any price. But full employment strikes at a basic principle of the capitalist economy: the use of the
industrial reserve army to keep wages down and profits up. A substitute for the traditional form of reserve army had to be
found, for without it capitalist accumulation is impossible. Moreover, despite Keynsian economics, it is not possible
completely to avoid the cyclical development of the capitalist economy.
It was therefore necessary to
find a way of cushioning the effects of crises, so as to hinder the development of dangerous
social tensions. reserve army, which can be imported into the developed countries
as the interests of the capitalist class dictate. In addition to this economic function, the
employment of immigrant workers has an important socio-political function for capitalism: by creating a split between
immigrant and indigenous workers along national and racial lines and offering better conditions and status to indigenous
workers, it is possible to give large sections of the working class the consciousness of a labour aristocracy. The
employment of immigrant workers in the capitalist production process is
not a new phenomenon. The Irish played a vital part in British
industrialization. Not only did they provide a special form of labour for
heavy work of a temporary nature on railways, canals and roads;12 their
competition also forced down wages and conditions for other workers.
Engels described Irish immigration as a ‘cause of abasement to which the
English worker is exposed, a cause permanently active in forcing the whole
class downwards’.13 Marx described the antagonism between British and Irish workers, artificially created by
the mass media of the ruling class, as ‘the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite their
organization’.14 As industrialization got under way in France, Germany and Switzerland in the latter half of the 19th
century, these countries too brought in foreign labour: from Poland, Italy and Spain. There were 800,000 foreign workers
in the German Reich in 1907. More than a third of the Ruhr miners were Poles. Switzerland had half a million foreigners
in 1910—15 per cent of her total population. French heavy industry was highly dependent on immigrant labour right up to
the Second World War. According to Lenin, one of the special features of imperialism was ‘the decline in emigration from
imperialist countries and the increase in immigration into these countries from the more backward countries where lower
wages are paid’.15 This was a main cause of the division of the working class. The fascist form of capitalism also developed
its own specific form of exploiting immigrant workers: the use of forced labour. No less then 71 - 2 million deportees from
occupied countries and prisoners of war were working in Germany by 1944, replacing the men recruited for the army.
About a quarter of German munitions production was carried out by foreign labour.16 Compared with early patt
Celebration of racial ideology props up capitalism
Castles and Kosack, prof. sociology at university of Sydney, 14
(Stephen and Godula, Ethnicity and Globalization: From Migrant Worker to Transnational Citizen, pg 3
Castles, Stephen, and Godula Kosack. "The Function of Labour Migration in Western European Capitalism." Ethnicity and
Globalization: From Migrant Worker to Transnational Citizen Ethnicity and Globalization: From Migrant Worker to
Transnational Citizen (2000): 27-45. 2014. Web. 25 July 2015)
Workers often adopt racialism as a defence mechanism against a real or
apparent threat to their conditions. It is an incorrect response to a real problem. By
preventing working-class unity, racialism assists the capitalists in their
strategy of ‘divide and rule’. The function of racialism in the capitalist
system is often obscured by the fact that racialist campaigns usually have
petty-bourgeois leadership and direct their slogans against the big
industrialists. The Schwarzenbach Initiative in Switzerland—which called
for the deportation of a large proportion of the immigrant population—is an
example,50 as are Enoch Powell’s campaigns for repatriation. Such demands are
opposed by the dominant sections of the ruling class. The reason is clear: a complete acceptance of racialism would
prevent the use of immigrants as an industrial reserve army. But despite this, racialist campaigns
serve the interests of the ruling class: they increase tension between
indigenous and immigrant workers and weaken the labour movement. The large
workingclass following gained by Powell in his racialist campaigns demonstrates how dangerous they are. Paradoxically,
their value for capitalism lies in their very failure to achieve their declared aims.
But now is key; the market has found ways to overcome
inhibiting barriers
Castles and Kosack, prof. sociology at university of Sydney, 14
(Stephen and Godula, Ethnicity and Globalization: From Migrant Worker to Transnational Citizen, pg 3
Castles, Stephen, and Godula Kosack. "The Function of Labour Migration in Western European Capitalism." Ethnicity and
Globalization: From Migrant Worker to Transnational Citizen Ethnicity and Globalization: From Migrant Worker to
Transnational Citizen (2000): 27-45. 2014. Web. 25 July 2015.)
Compared with early patterns, immigration of workers to contemporary West Europe has two new features.
The first
is its character as a permanent part of the economic structure.
Previously, immigrant labour was used more or less temporarily when the domestic
industrial reserve army was inadequate for some special reason, like war or unusually fast expansion; since
1945, however, large numbers of immigrant workers have taken up key
positions in the productive process, so that even in the case of recession their labour cannot be
dispensed with. The second is its importance as the basis of the modern industrial reserve army. Other
groups which might conceivably fulfil the same function—nonworking women, the
disabled and the chronic sick, members of the lumpenproletariat whose conditions prevent them from working,17 have
already been integrated into the production process to the extent to which
this is profitable for the capitalist system. The use of further reserves of this type would require
costly social measures (e.g. adequate kindergartens). The main traditional form of the industrial reserve army —men
thrown out of work by rationalization and cyclical crises—is hardly available today, for reasons already mentioned. Thus
immigration is of key importance for the capitalist system.
Turns Case
Turns Case: Xenophobic exclusion caused by ICE is just a
product of bureaucratic Capitalism
Flynn, J.D. Yale university, 15
(Flynn, Matthew. "Limits on Immigration Detention." The Liberty of Non-Citizens : Indefinite Detention in
Commonwealth Countries (2014): n. pag. Globaldetentionproject.org. 11 June 2015. Web. 24 July 2015.)
Although it remains very much a contested issue, many observers have concluded that deterrence
policies and tactics employed by wealthy, advanced capitalist states of the West will not over the
long term curtail efforts by migrants and asylum seekers to make perilous journeys across
international borders in search of safe havens and better living conditions (Sampson 2015). According to
the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (Edwards 2011:1), for example, “there is no empirical evidence that the prospect
of being detained deters irregular migration, or discourages persons from seeking asylum.” Further, government policies
and international aid programs appear unable to stem today’s “age of migration” (Castles, Haas, and Miller 2013). Recent
estimates show international migrant stocks rising from 154 million in 1990 to
231 million in 2013 as total migrant flows have more than doubled from an average of 2 million per year
between 1990 and 2000 to about 4.6 million annually the following decade (OECD-UNDESA 2013). A person’s
decision to migrate is driven less by the migration policies of destination countries than by deeper
push factors such as social change, political disruption, and concerns over
personal security (Castles 2003). In addition, there is some evidence to indicate that when certain states
employ so-called alternatives to detention (or rather, employ polices that fall short of detention), fewer than one in ten
asylum seekers and deportation-based detainees who have been released from custody actually disappear (Edwards 2011).
Nevertheless, the lack of evidence concerning the efficacy of detention and other
deterrence policies and the existence of cheaper non-custodial measures to
prevent absconding has not reduced expenditures on immigration control in
most major immigration destination countries. In fact, governments continue
to commit ever-larger budgets to this. For example, between 2007 and 2013 the European Union
slated four billion euros, or 60 percent of its total Home Affairs budget, to immigration control measures, despite regional
economic austerity. This amount does not comprise the additional funding spent by individual member states. Spain, for
example, increased its migration control budget to one billion euros between 2006 and 2009 (Andersson 2014:37). The
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had an operating budget
of $2.9 billion for detention and deportation in fiscal year 2009 alone
(Immigration and Customs Enforcement 2009). The amount the U.S.
federal government spends strictly on detention more than doubled
between 2005 and 2010, and peaked at US$2 billion in 2012 (see Figure One). Due to
increased spending, the capacity for holding non-citizens in administrative detention has jumped exponentially. In the
U.S., there were 7,500 beds in 1995, a figure that increased to more than 30,000 by 2009 (Immigration and Customs
Enforcement 2009). In 2009, ICE reported that 378,582 people were placed in
custody or supervision, with daily averages of 30,000 non-citizens located in 300 facilities and an additional
19,000 in alternative detention programs. While similar data has thus far not been made available for the entire European
Union, according to one estimate, as of 2012 there were 473 detention centres located throughout Europe and bordering
countries as of 2012, an increase from 324 in 2000 (Migreurop n.d.). This rapid increase in immigration detention
funding and capacity is a puzzle. Why have states opted for this course of action despite the
fact that there is little or no evidence demonstrating its long-term efficacy or cost effectiveness? Who are the actors
involved in the management of these people and what are their interests? What does immigration detention tell us about
the role of complex organizations who view human bodies as “raw material” (Welch 2002)? I argue that post-structuralist
accounts of immigration detention obscure more than they illuminate and depoliticize more
than address problems associated with detention. Instead, I argue that the central
issue concerns the operations and role of complex organizations in modern
society, employing in particular the perspective of “bureaucratic capitalism”
developed by Gideon Sjoberg (1999). Such an 0 100,000 200,000 300,000 400,000 500,000 600,000 $0.00 $0.50
$1.00 $1.50 $2.00 $2.50 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 Detained Population Cost of Detention
in Billions 5 approach can help provide an actor-focused perspective with respect to organizational arrangements geared
towards revenue generation. In contrast to post-structuralist accounts, Sjoberg’s meso-level analysis better elucidates the
contemporary manifestation of global capitalism to analyse immigrant detention as an industry instead of just a
metaphor. In effect, warehousing human bodies for financial gain becomes the central problematic.
Capitalism causes their exclusion impacts; this turns case
Castles and Kosack, prof. sociology at university of Sydney, 14
(Castles, Stephen, and Godula Kosack. "The Function of Labour Migration in Western European Capitalism." Ethnicity
and Globalization: From Migrant Worker to Transnational Citizen Ethnicity and Globalization: From Migrant Worker
to Transnational Citizen (2000): 27-45. 2014. Web. 25 July 2015)
The division of the working class within the production process is
duplicated by a division in other spheres of society. The poor living conditions of
immigrants have attracted too much liberal indignation and welfare zeal to need much description here.
Immigrants get the worst types of housing: in Britain slums and run-down lodging houses, in
France bidonvilles (shanty-towns) and overcrowded hotels, in Germany and Switzerland camps of wooden huts belonging
to the employers and attics in the cities. It is rare for immigrants to get council houses. Immigrants are
discriminated against by many landlords, so that those who do specialize in housing them can
charge extortionate rents for inadequate facilities. In Germany and France, official programmes have been established to
provide hostel accommodation for single immigrant workers. These hostels do provide somewhat better material
increase the segregation of immigrant workers from
the rest of the working class, deny them any private life, and above all put
them under the control of the employers 24 hours a day.39 In Germany the employers
conditions. On the other hand they
have repeatedly attempted to use control over immigrants’ accommodation to force them to act as strike-breakers.
Language and vocational training courses for immigrant workers are generally provided only when it is absolutely
necessary for the production process, as in mines for example. Immigrant children are also at a
disadvantage: they tend to live in run-down overcrowded areas where school
facilities are poorest. No adequate measures are taken to deal with their special educational problems (e.g. language
difficulties), so that their educational performance is usually below-average. As a result
of their bad working and living conditions, immigrants have serious health problems. For instance they
have
much higher tuberculosis rates than the rest of the population virtually everywhere.40 As there are
health controls at the borders, it is clear that such illnesses have been contracted in West Europe rather than being
brought in by the immigrants. The inferior work-situation and living conditions of
immigrants have caused some bourgeois sociologists to define them as a
‘lumpen- 39 ‘So far as we are concerned, hostel and works represent parts of a single whole. The hostels belong to the
mines, so the foreign workers are in our charge from start to finish’, stated a representative of the German mining
employers proudly. Magnet Bundesrepublik, Informationstagung der Bundesvereinigung Deutscher Arbeitgeberverbände,
Bonn 1966, p. 81. 40 A group of French doctors found that the TB rate for black Africans in the Paris suburb of Montreuil
was 156 times greater than that of the rest of the local population. R. D. Nicoladze, C. Rendu, G. Millet, ‘Coupable d’être
malades’, Droit et Liberté, No. 280, March 1969, p. 8. For further examples see Immigrant Workers and Class Structure in
Western Europe, op. cit., Ch.VIII. 13 proletariat’ or a ‘marginal group’. This is clearly incorrect. A group which makes up
10, 20 or 30 per cent of the industrial labour force cannot be regarded as marginal to society. Others speak of a ‘new
proletariat’ or a ‘sub-proletariat’. Such terms are also wrong. The first implies that the indigenous workers have ceased to
be proletarians and have been replaced by the immigrants in this social position. The second postulates that immigrant
workers have a different relationship to the means of production than that traditionally characteristic of the proletariat.
In reality both indigenous and immigrant workers share the same relationship to the means of
production: they
are excluded from ownership or control; they are forced to sell
their labour power in order to survive; they work under the direction and in
the interests of others. In the sphere of consumption both categories of workers are subject to the laws of the
commodity market, where the supply and price of goods is determined not by their use value but by their profitability for
capitalists; both are victims of landlords, retail monopolists and similar bloodsuckers and manipulators of the
consumption-terror. These are the characteristics typical of the proletariat ever since the industrial revolution, and on this
basis immigrant and indigenous workers must be regarded as members of the same class: the proletariat. But it is a
divided class: the marginal privileges conceded to indigenous workers and the particularly intensive exploitation of
immigrants combine to create a barrier between the two groups, which appear as distinct strata within the class. The
division is deepened by certain legal, political and psychological factors, which will be discussed below. Upon
arrival in West Europe, immigrants from under-developed areas have little
basic education or vocational training, and are usually ignorant of the
language. They know nothing of prevailing market conditions or prices. In
capitalist society, these characteristics are sufficient to ensure that
immigrants get poor jobs and social conditions.
Micropolitical responses ignore the larger context of the prison
industrial complex and this is the root cause of their impacts
(Matthew, Global detentionproject.org, pg 7-8)
In economic sociology, the central
problematic of contemporary
immigration detention regimes is not the inexorable impulse of sovereignty
to demonstrate its power through inclusive exclusion. Rather, it begins with the premise
that complex organizations are a fact of life in modern society. For good or bad, they play a central
role in social reproduction through the management, production, and
distribution of goods, resources, and other necessities. Complex
organizations reflect the underlying social structure and distribution of
power in society, including class relations and social status, as well as
embody specific cultural attributes such as values and norms (Portes 2006). Critically
examining the role and nature of organizations in modern life provides insights into ways in which they either promote or
abuse human rights in concrete situations. The conceptual framework developed by sociologist Gideon Sjoberg,
specifically his work on “bureaucratic capitalism,” provides a useful blueprint for analysing the growth and operations of
immigration detention regimes. Sjoberg (1999) emphasizes the role of complex organizations in shaping modern
capitalism and considers how these entities can be morally accountable. He combines the elite-based theories of power of
Domhoff, Mann, and Mills with actor-oriented perspectives of Mead and Dewey. For Sjoberg, organizations are not
reducible to the individuals that comprise them nor can the actions of individuals within an organizational field be
adequately understood without considering the various rules and constraints in place: “Once we recognize the role of
human agents within organizational settings, two strategic patterns can be identified. First, organizational structures
cannot exist without 9 human agents; yet organizations are not reducible to human agency. The normative
order, as well as the economic and political resources of organizations, has a reality apart from any
particular set of human agents. Second, if we take account of human agents in shaping organization
arrangements, we discover that the end product (or the ‘official reality’) can be constructed
by somewhat different sets of activities” (Sjoberg 1999:29).. Sjoberg’s approach provides a
conceptual framework that is empirically driven while retaining a critical stance that is neither deterministic nor
teleological. Modern day capitalism cannot be understood without considering the role formal organizations play in the
creation and distribution of resources that result in on-going social inequalities. “We must seek to understand the
processes by which bureaucratic structures come to support and sustain privilege, as well as the processes by which social
triage is produced,” writes Sjoberg (1999:32). In post-structuralist accounts, class inequalities typically do not become a
central issue because state power is seen as focusing on whole groups of people irrespective of their class position. But
in reality, while there are certainly exceptions, people from upper and
middle classes rarely find themselves in immigration detention. In contrast,
Sjoberg (1999:32) emphasizes that people “who attain privilege do so by
relying upon corporatestate organizations, and they sustain their privileges through a complex
set of organizational rules (reinforced by police power).” He therefore critiques post-moderns for their inherent relativism
and diffuse notions of power that make challenging “contemporary organizational domination well-nigh impossible”
(Sjoberg 1999:25). Contemporary prison systems demonstrate social triage , i.e. harm
for some to the benefit of others, which results more from human creativity
than as a functional necessity of state. “The prison-industrial complex in the
United States serves two functions. It sweeps the ‘unwanted’ (especially members of racial and ethnic
minorities) off the streets, and it provides a stable market for producers of a rather
wide range of goods and services,” contends Sjoberg (1999:33). There appears to be a distinct class
bias to how immigration detention regimes are organized and targeted. One drawback in Sjoberg’s schema is the
inadequate development of why certain racial and ethnic minorities intersect with class to constitute the “unwanted.” For
example, he notes the growing documentation surrounding race, gender, ethnicity, and lifestyle but considers that these
developments, while affecting the cosmetic make-up of organizations, do not confront the growth of centralized
bureaucratic power. This gap in Sjoberg’s work reveals a strength in post-structuralist, as well as post-colonial accounts,
which draw our attention to discursive creations of “the other” as a key problematic. With this caveat, we
can consider how bureaucratic capitalism, especially in relation to
“unwanted” groups, links class-based dynamics to forms of ethnonationalist tendencies. In other words, we can see the increased use of immigration detention centres as a
means to profit from the active creation of vulnerable groups as exploitable commodities. By appending critical
constructions of “the other” to Sjoberg’s economic sociology we can analyse the growth and operations of detention
centres in terms of bureaucratic capitalism in a variety of contexts. In doing so, we can highlight the tendencies that lead
to human rights abuses and consider alternative organizational arrangements. Specifically, our analysis of the immigrant
detention industry will adapt the framework developed by Sjoberg (1999) for analysing organizations. These include the
following dimensions: the corporate-state nexus; human agency; the rationalization process; hierarchy, blameability, and
responsibility; and secrecy systems. 10 The Corporate-State Nexus The focus on complex organizations as the drivers of
modern capitalism helps highlight the increasingly blurred lines between the state and corporate sectors. “In effect, in
most highly industrialized orders we find hybrid organizations that are a mix of the public and the private” (Sjoberg
1999:26). While in some countries the role of the private sector is greater than others, there are clear connections between
the two. Still, the central problematic is the comprehensive nature of these arrangements, which is particularly evident in
contemporary efforts to manage and control international migration, as reflected in the proliferation of phrases like the
“migration industry” (Gammeltoft-Hansen and Sørensen 2012; Hernández-León 2008), the “illegality industry”
(Andersson 2014), the “xénophobie business” (Rodier 2012), and the “immigration industrial complex” (Fernandes 2011).
For Andersson (2014:15), this industry, which is ultimately responsible for the management of people, “allows for the
consideration of a dispersed “value chain,” or the distinct domains in which migrant illegality is processed, ‘packaged,’
presented, and ultimately rendered profitable.” Hernandez-Leon (2008:154) defines the “migration industry” as “the
ensemble of entrepreneurs who, motivated by the pursuit of financial gain, provide a variety of services facilitating human
mobility across international borders.” For her part, Fernandes (2011:23) helps focus attention on the control aspects of
this industry, focusing particularly on the United States, where she characterizes the “immigration industrial complex” as
being comprised of “big business interests that have always driven immigration policy [to increase their participation] in
the enforcement of immigration law through lucrative federal contracts.”
No Plan/Discourse Focus Links
Fixation on academic discourse and resistance comes at the
expense of a political agenda
Poitevin, PhD , 2001
(Rene Francisco, “The end of anti-capitalism as we knew it: Reflections on postmodern Marxism”, TheSocialist Review 8.3/4 (2001): 137-156)
I want to seize this special issue on anti-capitalism to talk about the ways in which the U.S. Left thinks and talks about "capitalism." More specifically, I want to
look at the ways in which the U.S. Left itself has undermined its own capacity for anti-capitalist organizing by increasingly being
unable to articulate a political agenda that can go beyond liberal reform. This assessment of left politics comes out of a specific
political and theoretical context. A Latino from a poor working-class background, I came to voice politically and
intellectually during the late 1980s and early 1990s, while attending college at an elite university. During that time I willingly embraced and
inhabited the identity politics/urban direct action/new social movements paradigm -- from abortion clinic defenses, to organizing against
police brutality, to defending affirmative action. I was able to immerse myself in the writings of Marx and Lenin, and further discovered their enduring influence
through the lenses of Foucault, Gramsci, and Spivak. To realize early in my education that someone in my subject and class position
had little chance of getting a good college education, much less of pursuing an academic career, had a strong politicizing
effect on me. The awareness of that material contradiction and how it relates to the world outside of the university
evolved into a burning desire to formulate a new Marxism that could incorporate the best of what previous Lefts had
offered, with the best ideas contributed by a new generation of radicals. I felt then, and I still do, that in order to expose and denounce and
supersede a regime that was profoundly unjust, Marxism had to be part of the solution. I ended the 1990s, however,
profoundly dissatisfied with both the theory and the practice of what constitutes "the Left" in this country. When I look around and
see what passes for radical politics today, I see a Left so acquiescent and timid in its demands that one has to wonder what
is left of the Left. And the theory and action that claims recognition as critical, or oppositional, is not only more dogmatically anti-Marxist
than ever, it is also masquerading itself as socialist discourse. What I see is a U.S. Left political practice - vehement in rhetoric and tone -more invested in pursuing a reformist intra- middle class liberal agenda , all in the name of "going beyond Marx," than with
the well-being of the majority of people in this country. This is a Left that insists on downplaying institutional and structural
inequality, the asymmetric distribution of social and economic power, in favor of issues concerning language , cultural
representation, procedural democracy , access to elite employment, and environmental degradation as a quality-of-life issue. So my
critique of actually existing U.S. Lefts comes out of my own need for intellectual and political self-clarification, but more importantly, it is a way to look
forward to what must be done.
Oppression - Generic
Root cause
Capitalism is the root cause of oppression
Myers , writer for the Direct Action for Socialism, 9 (Allen Myers, “Why Capitalism needs oppression”, Direct Action for socialism,
http://directaction.org.au/issue15/why_capitalism_needs_oppression )//MSteph
Capitalism is a system based on exploitation. For Marxists, this has a precise scientific meaning.
Capitalists take for themselves the monetary values created by or belonging
to other people — usually workers, but also small farmers and, to varying degrees,
small shop owners and nominally independent tradespeople. This value is what
their capital consists of. But exploitation does not exhaust the harmful effects that
capitalism has on the rest of the world. Capitalist society also invents many
forms of oppression, as well as perpetuating many inherited from earlier
forms of social organisation. Oppression is the systematic imposition of
inferior conditions of life on particular groups of people. Members of an
oppressed group may be discriminated against economically, socially
and/or politically. Sometimes oppression has an economic impact; in some way,
it increases the capitalists’ ability to exploit. An obvious example is
discrimination against women or against a national or racial minority. The
victims of such discrimination often receive lower wages than other
workers, so this oppression adds directly to capitalists’ profits. Capitalists
gain a slightly more indirect economic benefit from militarism and war. Two
world wars in the 20th century occurred primarily because the capitalists of the major imperialist
countries were competing for colonies and semi-colonies, to monopolise the
profits from them. Today capitalists are risking making the planet
uninhabitable for much of the human race because behaving differently
might reduce their profits. Capitalism also maintains oppressions in which profits are at most a very
secondary consideration. The economic benefits that capitalists seek from war and militarism are less significant than
their political role. The military forces maintained by imperialist countries like Australia are an ever present threat to the
peoples of the underdeveloped countries: “Step too far out of line, don’t do as you’re told, and you’ll have a fight on your
hands (in which we hold all the weapons)”. These forces are also the ultimate guarantee of
capitalists’ power in their own country: that is, they are intended for use
against their own working people if they get too far “out of line”. Capitalists
have to maintain a variety of oppressions because they are a very small
minority in any society. If the exploited majority were to act together to put an end to exploitation, they
could very easily overcome the capitalists. For this reason, the capitalists have a very strong vested interest in preventing
the exploited majority from getting used to the idea of working together — on almost anything.
Oppression has a political function for capitalism if it sets one section of the
exploited against another section. Male union members who think that a woman’s “real” place is at
home won’t build a strong union. Parents who are concerned about their children going to school with immigrant children
won’t be raising demands on the government to provide better education for everyone. People who think that a
Socialism is about human liberation: from exploitation, and from all forms of oppression. There is a parody view —
sometimes held by some socialists — that socialists therefore believe that victims of oppression should put off the struggle
for their own liberation until “after the revolution”, at which point the new socialist government will put everything right.
Such an attitude misses the essential point: we will never escape capitalism without uniting
in action the great majority of the working people, who are now mostly disunited and often
at loggerheads with each other because of discrimination and oppression.
So fighting for socialism necessarily means fighting to help the oppressed overcome their oppression now, not in some
distant future. This is the meaning of “solidarity”: “We are with you because your future is also our future”. Anything else
allows the capitalists to continue keeping us divided and unable to consistently confront our real enemy: them.
Race
Hip Hop Link
The aff’s use of hip-hop isn’t revolutionary. Their conception
that hip-hop is transformative is just another way to obscure
class struggles.
Darder, and Torress 04 [Antonia Darder, Prof of education policy studies at U of Illinois, and
Rodolfo Torress, Associate prof of latino studies at UC Irvine, After Race: Racism after multiculturalism, p. 101-4 //liam]
The process of signification is at work in the emphasis that critical race theory places on “experiential knowledge”
(Delgado 1995; Ladson BilIhSgs 1999). Robin Barnes (1990) notes that “Critical race theorists... iisirgrate their
experiential knowledge, drawn from a shared history as ‘OJer’ with their ongoing struggles to transform a world
deteriorating under the albatross of racial hegemony” (1864—65). In concert with this privileging of experience,
critical race theory employs narratives and storytelling as a central method
of inquiry to “analyze the myths, presuppositions, and received wisdoms
that make up the common culture about race and that invariably render
blacks and other minorities one-down” (Delgado 1995, xiv). The results of this storytelling method
are theorized and then utilized to draw conclusions meant to impact public policy and institutional practices. The
narrative and storytelling method employed by critical race theo rists sought to critique essentialist narratives in law,
education, and the social sciences. In place of a systematic analysis of class and capitalist
relations, critical race theory constructs “race”-centered responses to Eu
rocentrism and white privilege. Delgado Bernal (2002) affirms the valid. icy of this position, arguing
that Western modernism is a network or grid of broad assumptions and be liefs that are deeply embedded in the way
dominant Western culture constructs the nature of the world and one’s experiences in it. In the United States, the center
of this grid is a Eurocentric epistemological per spective based on White privilege. (111) The narrative method based on
this perspective “has become especially successful among groups committed to making the voice of the voiceless heard in
the public arena” (Viotti da Costa 2001, 21). However, despite an eagerness to include the
participation of historically excluded populations, scholars who embrace
the poetics of the narrative approach often “fail to challenge the underlying
socioeconomic, political and cultural structures that have excluded these
groups to begin with and have sus tained the illusion of choice” (Watts 1991, 652).
Thus, the narrative and storytelling approach can render the scholarship antidialectical by creat ing a false dichotomy
between objectivity and subjectivity, “forgetting that one is implied in the other, [while ignoring] a basic dialectical prm
ciple: that men and women make history, but not under the conditions of their own choosing” (Viotti da Costa 2001, 20).
We agree that “cultural resources and funds of knowledge such as myths, folk tales, dichos, consejos, kitchen
talk, [and] autobiographical stories” (Delgado Bernal 2002, 120) employed by critical race theory canilluminate particular
concrete manifestations of racism. However, we contend that they can also prove problematic in
positing a broader un derstanding of the fundamental macrosocial
dynamics which shape the conditions that give rise to the “microaggressions” (Solórzano 1998) of racism in the first place. In an incisive critique of the narrative
approach, Emilia Viottj da Costa (2001) argues, The new paths it opened for an investigation of the process of construc
tion and articulation of multiple and often contradictory identities (eth nic, class, gender, nationality and so on), often led
to the total neglect of the concept of class as an interpretive category. . . . What started as . . . a critique of Marxism, has
frequently led to a complete subjectivism, to the denial of the possibility of knowledge and sometimes even to the
questioning of the boundaries between history and fiction, fact and fancy.” (19) Robin Kelley, in his book Yo’ Mama’s
DisFUNKtional (1997), offers the following illuminating and sobering commentary regarding the limits of personal
experience and storytelling: I am not claiming absolute authority or authenticity for having lived there. On the contrary, it
is because I did not know what happened to our world, to my neighbors, my elders, my peers, our streets, buildings, parks,
our health, that I chose not to write a memoir. Indeed, if I relied on memory alone I would invariably have more to say
about devouring Good and Pleneys or melting crayons on the radiator than about eco nomic restructuring, the
disappearance of jobs, and the dismantling of the welfare state. (4—5) Hence, we believe the use of critical
race theory in education and the social sciences in general, despite authors’
intentions, can unwittingly serve purposes that are fundamentally
conservative or mainstream at best. Three additional but related concerns with the
storytelling narrative method are also at issue here. One is the tendency to romanticize the
ex perience of marginalized groups, privileging the narratives and
discourses of “people of coloi” solely based on their experience of
oppression, as if a people’s entire politics can be determined solely by their
in dividual location in history. The second is the tendency to dichotomize and
“overhomogenize” both “white” people and “people of color” with respect to
questions of voice and political representation (Viotti da Costa 2iO1). And the third,
anticipated by C. L. R. James in 1943, is the in inevitable “exaggerations excesses and
ideological trends for which the only possible name is chauvinism” (McLemee
1996, 86). Unfortunately, these tendencies, whether academic or political, can result in
unintended essentialism and superficiality in our theorizing of broader
social in equalities, as well as the solutions derived from such theories. Yet,
truth be told, prescribed views of humanity are seldom the reality, whatever be their source. Human beings who share
phenotypical traits seldom respond to the world within the Constraints of essentialszed ex pectations and perceptions.
Hence, any notion of “racial” solidarity “must run up against the hard facts of political economy ... and enormous class
disparities” within racialized Communities (Gates 1997, 36). This is why Gilroy (2000) warns against “short-cut solidarity”
attitudes that assume that a person’s political allegiance can be determined by his or her “race” or that a “shared history”
will guarantee an emancipatory woridview. For this reason, we argue that such declarations, though
they may sound reasonable, commonsensical, or even promising as literary
contributions, have little utility in explaining “how and why power is
constituted, reproduced and transformed” (Viotti da Costa 2001, 22).
Link of Omission
Failure to discuss capitalism artificially inflates other sources of
exploitation- turns the case
Brown 93 (Wendy Brown, “Wounded Attachments,” Political Theory, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Aug., 1993), pp. 390-410)
What this suggests is that identity
politics may be partly configured by a peculiarly shaped
form of resentment-class resent- ment without class consciousness or class
analysis. This resentment is displaced onto discourses of injustice other than
class but, like all resent- ments, retains the real or imagined holdings of its
reviled subject-in this case, bourgeois male privileges-as objects of desire.
From this perspective, it would appear that the articulation of politicized identities through
race, gender, and sexuality require, rather than incidentally produce, a
relatively limited identification through class. They necessarily rather than incidentally
abjure a critique of class power and class norms precisely because the injuries suffered
by these identities are measured by bourgeois norms of social acceptance,
legal protection, relative material comfort, and social indepen- dence. The problem is that when not
only economic stratification but other injuries to body and psyche enacted by
capitalism (alienation, commodifica- tion, exploitation, displacement,
disintegration of sustaining, albeit contra- dictory, social forms such as families and neighborhoods) are
discursively normalized and thus depoliticized, other markers of social
difference may come to bear an inordinate weight. Absent an articulation of
capitalism in the political discourse of identity, the marked identity bears all
the weight of the sufferings produced by capitalism in addition to that
bound to the explicitly politicized marking.
and peculiarly disguised
Root cause
Tangible Practices Links
Capitalism is the root cause of surveillance of the black body
Haiphong, an activist and case manager in the Greater Boston area, 14
[Danny Haiphong, “ Death, US Capitalism and Black Panter Party Founder Hey Newton’s Theory of Suicide”,
http://www.globalresearch.ca/death-us-capitalism-and-black-panther-party-founder-huey-newtons-theory-ofsuicide/5378154, MSTEPH]
“Class and race oppression brings death by many means. “The person or movement
partaking in revolutionary suicide has chosen to confront death by fighting for movement partaking in revolutionary
suicide has chosen to confront death by fighting for liberation.” Death is central to the US capitalist
system, especially in the form of state-sponsored murder. Without the
murderous invasions, coups, and mercenary wars conducted by the US
capitalist state and its allied countries, the entire system of finance
speculation and profit accumulation would come undone. Mass
murder is ”collateral damage” for securing markets, resources,
geopolitical hegemony, and thus profit, for the capitalist class. This form of death
is overlooked and understudied despite its centrality to the historical development of the United States. The
US project itself would not of been possible without murder in the name of
capitalism. The Euro-colonization of the Western hemisphere
required the murder of indigenous peoples, and subsequently, the
enslavement of Black Africans. Following the establishment of the US government, a rapid period of
industrialization produced a powerful capitalist class. This capitalist class was special, for its
entire existence depended not upon a transition from a feudal economic base, but rather from the
stolen labor and wealth of enslaved Africans and slaughtered indigenous
peoples. US colonialism continued into Mexico, Latin America, and western
North America, displacing and eliminating native peoples to establish an
industrial capitalist empire. The Civil War and the two World Wars that followed were indicative of the
capitalist system’s tendency to monopolize after bloody wars of competition for colonial possessions. When the US
emerged as the capitalist super-power after the World Wars ravaged the
European capitalist system, the stage was set for the transition from
industrial capitalism to finance capitalism. Since 1945, millions more have perished from US
imperial incursions on sovereignty in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Asia on behalf of Wall Street and its
international organizations: the World Bank, IMF, and World Trade Organization Of course, a complete analysis of the
murderous nature of US capitalism honors the resistance of its victims. However many hundreds of millions, maybe
billions, of people have been forced into premature death, it is critical we remember and learn from past and present
freedom fighters. Whether examining the resistance of slave rebellions in colonized North America or the socialist
revolutions in China, Cuba, and Vietnam, the US ruling class has never experienced a day without a fight from workers,
peasants, and nations exploited by the capitalist system. The study and practice of resistance has the profound effect of
transforming our collective consciousness toward all aspects of humanity, including death. “Mass murder is ‘collateral
damage’ for securing markets, resources, geopolitical hegemony, and thus profit, for the capitalist class.” Huey Newton,
one of the founding leaders of the Oakland Black Panther Party (BPP), brought death and revolutionary activity together
in his analysis of suicide. The BPP organized to unite the Black community against
the forces that oppressed them in the United States and the world.
Huey Newton’s
theory of suicide was informed by his experience as a historically enslaved and exploited subject of Black America, as well
as the US government’s response to Black resistance. As the Panthers organized self-defense
initiatives and grassroots “survival” programs, the US government worked
in collusion with local police departments to destroy the Party. The FBI’s
COINTEPRO infiltrated every chapter of the BPP, murdering or imprisoning
much of its leadership. To this day, Black Panther members like Mumia Abu Jamal remain in prison while
the Black population outside the walls experiences murder every 28 hours by some form of law enforcement. This is the
context in which Newton produced a theory of suicide that redefined the experience of death for the purposes of
revolutionary change. Newton’s examination brought him to analyze two forms of suicide: reactionary suicide and
revolutionary suicide. Reactionary suicide is most commonly known as the act of killing oneself. The indignities
of US capitalism produce severe internal strife. Racism and patriarchy
exacerbates class exploitation and tears apart communities.
Reactionary suicide peaks during capitalist economic crises and imperialist wars, where economic conditions and trauma
are most severe. Huey Newton understood that Black America was a dispossessed community whose wealth, culture,
and history were stolen as a result of racist and capitalist exploitation. This
historical condition increased the tendency of reactionary suicide in the
Black community. Thus, Newton and the BPP leadership organized with the intent of empowering the Black
community through collective work. Each concrete medical clinic, free breakfast program, and Panther school were
organized to move community to confront the racist, capitalist power structure and embrace revolutionary socialism and
communalism. The BPP concluded that only confidence, discipline, and concrete political education could build a
powerful movement against the forces that cause reactionary suicide. “The FBI’s COINTEPRO
infiltrated every chapter of the BPP, murdering or imprisoning much of its
leadership.” Revolutionary suicide, in contrast, develops out of the
recognition that one is a “doomed man” after making the conscious choice to participate in the
struggle for self-determination and freedom. Newton’s theory of revolutionary suicide placed the utmost importance not
on death itself, but how it occurs. US government repression killed many Black Panther Party members in an attempt to
weaken the growing spirit of resistance in the Black community. Newton’s theory of revolutionary suicide connected
suicide and death to the fight for a dignified, collective humanity. The person or movement partaking in revolutionary
suicide has chosen to confront death by fighting for liberation. Those who commit revolutionary suicide live on through
the concrete fight for freedom, self-determination, socialism and Black Power. In other words, a revolutionary can be
killed, but not the revolution Huey Newton’s work on suicide was produced in a period of time where revolutionary
upheaval was at a high point in the US. Today, we must find a way to apply theories of suicide and pre-mature death in a
way that fights the forces that cause them. The potential of being brutally murdered by US
imperialism while we struggle to meet our individual and collective needs
creates the perfect conditions for reactionary suicide. The US ruling class
exploits feelings of purposelessness, depression, and confusion to
manufacture consent to their rule. Death and suicide are two of the most
uncomfortable, yet inevitable, consequences of US capitalism. However, as Huey
Newton teaches us, to confront the meaning of our mortality in the face of a powerful enemy can give us positive direction
in the fight to free ourselves from the chains of this system.
Racism originated with the slave trade- a product of capitalism
Taylor , writer for the socialist worker, 2k
[Alex Taylor,, “The roots of Racism” , http: socialistworker.org/2002-2/431/431_08_Racism.shtml
MSteph]
FOR MANY people coming to radical politics--Blacks and whites alike--hatred of racism and a desire to get rid of it is a huge motivating
factor. This is in contrast to some of the common assumptions about where racism comes from. The first is that racism is part of human
nature--that it's always existed and always will. The second is the liberal idea of racism--that it comes from people's bad ideas, and that if we
could change these ideas, we could get rid of it. Both assumptions are wrong. Racism
isn't just an ideology but
is an institution. And its origins don't lie in bad ideas or in human nature. Rather, racism originated with
capitalism and the slave trade. As the Marxist writer CLR James put it, "The conception of
dividing people by race begins with the slave trade. This thing was so
shocking, so opposed to all the conceptions of society which religion and
philosophers had…that the only justification by which humanity could face
it was to divide people into races and decide that the Africans were an
inferior race." History proves this point. Prior to the advent of capitalism,
racism as a systematic form of oppression did not exist. For example,
ancient Greek and Roman societies had no concept of race or racial
oppression. These weren't liberated societies. They were built on the backs of slaves. And
these societies created an ideology to justify slavery. As the Greek philosopher Aristotle put it in
his book Politics, "Some men are by nature free, and others slaves, and that for these latter, slavery is both expedient and right." However,
because slavery in ancient Greece and Rome was not racially based, these societies had no corresponding ideology of racial inferiority or
oppression. In fact, Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Early Christian societies had a favorable image of Blacks and of African societies.
Septemus Severenus, an emperor of Rome, was African and almost certainly Black. "The ancients did accept the
institution of slavery as a fact of life; they made ethnocentric judgments of other societies; they had narcissistic canons of
physical beauty," writes Howard University professor Frank Snowden in his book Before Color Prejudice. "Yet nothing
comparable to the virulent color prejudice of modern time existed in the ancient world. This is the view of most scholars
who have examined the evidence." RACISM ORIGINATED with the modern slave trade.
Just as the slaveholders of ancient Greece and Rome created an ideology that their barbaric slave system was "natural," so
did the modern slave-owning class. There was one important difference. As historian Eric Williams writes in his book
Capitalism and Slavery, "Slavery was not born of racism; rather, racism was the
consequence of slavery."Again, history bears this out. If racism had existed prior to the slave trade, then
Africans would have been the first group of people to be enslaved. But, in the early years of colonial America, slavery was
not racially based. Initially, the colonists attempted to enslave Native Americans. They also imported thousands of white
indentured servants. White servants were treated like slaves. They were bought, sold, put up as stakes in card games and
raped, beaten and killed with impunity. Not only was servitude a multiracial institution in the early years of colonial
America, there was also a surprising degree of equality between Blacks and whites. For example, in 17th century Virginia,
Blacks were able to file lawsuits, testify in court against whites, bear arms and own property, including servants and
slaves. In other words, 17th century Blacks in Virginia had more rights than Blacks in the Jim Crow South during the 20th
century. Colonial records from 17th century Virginia reveal that one African slave named Frances Payne bought his
freedom by earning enough money to buy three white servants to replace him. Such events prove the point that
institutional racism did not exist in the early years of slavery--but was
.
created later OVER TIME, the slaveholding class gradually came to the
conclusion that racism was in its interest and that it must be deeply
embedded in all of society's institutions. There were several reasons for this conclusion. First,
indentured servitude was no longer sufficient to meet the demand for labor as industry developed in Britain and put new
demands on the colonial economy. Also, by the middle of the 17th century, African slaves began to live longer than five to
seven years--the standard period for indentured servitude. Put in the cold terms of economic
reality, slavery became more profitable than indentured servitude. Finally,
Africans, whose children could also be enslaved, were more easily segregated and oppressed than servants or Native
Americans.
As Williams summarized this process: "Here then, is the origin of Negro slavery. The reason was economic, not racial; it had to do not with
the color of the laborer, but the cheapness of the labor…This was not a theory, it was a practical conclusion deduced from the personal
experience of the planter. He would have gone to the moon, if necessary, for labor. Africa was nearer than the moon." BUT THE most
important reason that the planter class created a racially based slave system was not economic, but political--the age-old strategy of divide
. The "slaveocracy" was a tiny, extremely wealthy minority surrounded
by thousands of people whom it had enslaved, exploited or conquered. Its greatest
and rule
fear was that slaves and servants would unite against it--and this fear was legitimate. For example, Bacon's Rebellion of 1676 began as a
protest against Virginia's policy against native Americans, but turned into an armed multiracial rebellion against the ruling elite. An army of
several hundred farmers, servants and slaves demanding freedom and the lifting of taxes sacked Jamestown and forced the governor of
Virginia to flee. One thousand soldiers were sent from England to put it down. The rebel army held out for eight months before it was
defeated. Bacon's Rebellion was a turning point. It made clear to the planters that for their class to survive, they would have to divide the
people that they ruled--on the basis of race. Abolitionist and ex-slave Frederick Douglass put it this way: "The slaveholders…by encouraging
the enmity of the poor, laboring white man against the Blacks, succeeded in making the said white man almost as much a slave as the Black
himself…Both are plundered, and by the same plunderers." Or, as Douglass also said, "They divided both to conquer each." Over time,
the institution of racism became firmly established--both as a means of
legitimizing slavery, but also as a means of dividing poor people against one
other. While the Civil War smashed the planters' slave system, it did not end
the institution of racism. The reason for this is that racism had further uses
for capitalism. Similar to the slave societies of antiquity and of the early U.S., under capitalism
today, a small, wealthy minority exploits and oppresses the immense
majority of people. Racism is the main division among workers today, and it
provides a convenient scapegoat for problems created by the system. But
ordinary people--regardless of their race--don't benefit from racism. It's no coincidence that the historical periods in
which workers as a whole have made the greatest gains--such as the 1930s and the 1960s--have coincided with great
battles against racism. Capitalism created racism and can't function without it. The
way to end racism once and for all is to win a socialist society--in which the
first priority is abolishing all traces of exploitation and racism.
Capitalism is the root cause of modern racism- police brutality
proves
Peterson, writer for the Marxist, 14
[John Peterson, 2014, “To End Racism and Police Brutality, End Capitalism!” ,
http://www.marxist.com/to-end-racism-and-police-brutality-end-capitalism.htm MSteph]
The response has been spontaneous, global, and organic, with tens of thousands of people from virtually every ethnic and cultural background participating in everything from silent “die-ins” to school walk-outs; from mass vigils to winding
marches through city centers; from the occupation of highways and major intersections to individuals passionately yelling “black lives matter!” in busy public spaces.Everyone from the homeless, to recent immigrants, construction workers,
nurses, as well as entire faculties of medical and law students have organized and mobilized around this question. Even NBA and NFL players and other celebrities have expressed their solidarity. Many protesters have also connected these
killings with the state’s brutality and collusion with drug cartels in Mexico, with protests in solidarity with Ferguson and Ayotzinapa overlapping in the last few weeks. With the advent of social media, videos of police shootings and abuse are now
widely available and the lie that the police are here to “serve and protect” has been exposed. Mainstream media coverage has, predictably, shifted from a somewhat more honest portrayal of the initial facts and public response, to a sensationalized
focus on the most violent handfuls of window-smashing anarchists and police provocateurs. But there is far more to this movement than letting off steam and damaging a few cop cars. What we are witnessing is the early beginnings of a tide
change in awareness of the real class interests and balance of forces in American society. In the past, the KKK was a big force in the US, with points of support from the small-town South to the White House. It not only terrorized racial and ethnic
minorities and their defenders, but regularly held mass, pro-racist rallies. Even just a few years ago, racial tensions tended to degenerate into polarized, elemental “race riots,” with looting and fighting between blacks, Latinos, Asians, and others.
The response to this latest contemptible travesty of so-called bourgeois justice has been something altogether different. It represents the emergence of a new wave of united working class and youth action and solidarity, albeit at an embryonic,
individual, and uncoordinated level. Reflecting the ever-greater integration and concentration of the economy, changing demographics, and increased access to culture and media, attitudes towards race have shifted dramatically over the last few
years. Not only has a black president been elected, but it will be far more difficult for the ruling class to crassly play “the race card” and set the working class scrapping at each other’s throats in the future. Without a clear lead given by the labor
leaders on this or any other issue of vital importance to the working class, necessity has expressed itself through accident and made its way to the surface through this channel. The indignation over the unremitting racism and abuse has tapped
into a deep reserve of frustration. Millions of Americans, and particularly the youth, have long felt impotent in the face of social and economic powers seemingly be yond their control. Tens of thousands of people who were previously “apathetic”
or “apolitical” have now been explosively awakened to political consciousness. Illusions in the impartiality of the US justice system or in an allegedly “post-racial” America have been burst. While the movement has no real leadership or clear
demands, and is limited mostly to raw anti-racist solidarity and anger against police brutality, it nonetheless marks a qualitative change. Along with events such as the uprising in Wisconsin and Occupy, it is yet another important nodal point in
the transformation of Americans’ consciousness. More and more people are drawing the conclusion that the problems we face have deep roots that cannot merely be ignored or willed away. The United Sta tes has a long and sordid history of
racism and state brutality. From the differential treatment of black and white rebels after Bacon’s rebellion in 1676, to the hanging, flaying, beheading, and quartering of Nat Turner following his failed slave uprising in 1831; from the police dogs
set on peaceful marchers in Birmingham in 1963, to the police bombing of MOVE activists in Philadelphia in 1985; from the 1991 videotaped beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles, to the cold-blooded murder in 1999 of unarmed immigrant
Amadou Diallo, shot 19 times by the NYPD; the bloody thread of repression and horror can be traced back for centuries and continues on a daily basis.According to the FBI’s own figures, there are over 400 “justifiable homicides” each year
involving the police killing citizens. As these figures depend on self-reporting by the police departments themselves, the number of deaths and incidents of police violence while suspects are in custody is likely much higher. The Wall Street
Journal recently investigated officer-involved deaths at 105 of the nation's 110 largest police departments, and found that federal data failed to include or mislabeled hundreds of fatal police encounters. USC criminologist Geoff Alpert has pointed
out that around 98.9% of excessive force allegations are ultimately ruled as justified. Even the US Department of Justice, a key component of the state apparatus, has concluded that police departments in Albuquerque and Cleveland “engage in a
Although legalized discrimination and
segregation were formally ended through mass struggles in the past,
crushing racial disparity continues in practice. It can be seen in poverty
levels, access to health care, housing, and education, incidence of heart
disease, diabetes, and overall quality of life and expectancy. But it is perhaps most
outrageous when it comes to the use of police violence. White officers kill
black suspects twice a week in the United States—an average of 96 times a year. According to ProPublica,
pattern or practice of use of excessive force, including deadly force, in violation of the Fourth Amendment.”
young black males are 21 times as likely to be shot by police than their white counterparts. “The 1,217 deadly police shootings from 2010 to 2012 captured in the
federal data show that blacks, age 15 to 19, were killed at a rate of 31.17 per million, while just 1.47 per million white males in that age range died at the hands of
police.” In Ferguson, 92% of all people arrested in 2013 were black, although the overall population is 65% black.
Little wonder that whites are twice as likely as blacks to say they have confidence that their local police will treat blacks
and whites equally (74% vs. 37%). Latinos, who are also victims of discrimination and racial profiling, had a similar view,
with just 45% confident in the lack of bias of their local police. It would seem that the relationship between race or
ethnicity and police violence is incontrovertible.
However, as with any multifaceted phenomenon, it is not quite so straightforward. A 2003 study found that the use of
police violence can chiefly be tied to whether or not a neighborhood is “economically distressed.” I.e., the higher
the poverty, the higher the crime, the higher the rate of police violence, no
matter what racial demographic predominates in a particular area. As
institutional discrimination means blacks and Latinos are generally more
concentrated in poorer areas, a cycle of crime, racism, and police brutality
is perpetuated. The racism of the police is therefore not merely an ideological construction, the result of “bad
people,” “bad will,” or “bad ideas.” Rather, it reflects a deeper objective reality. Social being determines social
. Scarcity leads to a struggle over limited resources. Those who
have the bulk of the wealth are in a minority, and must therefore hire a force
able and willing to unleash devastating viciousness against the majority in
order to “keep them in line.” But sheer violence is not sufficient. Other, far more subtle means must also
be employed. The development of a system of skin-color-based discrimination
during the rise of capitalism and the revival of chattel slavery became an
indispensable weapon in the “divide and rule” arsenal of the capitalists. By
consciousness
getting the exploited and oppressed to fight each other over scraps, attention can be drawn away from the real relations of
. It is the structural racism of the capitalist system that
leads to a racist outlook and ideology—not the other way around. There's no
wealth and power in society
question that there is a heavily racist component in the targeting, degree, and frequency of police brutality. Marxists do
not reduce this or any other complex social phenomenon “only” and mechanically to class. But in the final analysis, if
there were no classes, there would be no need for police, and without police,
no police brutality. Only in a society of superabundance, in which there is no scarcity, and therefore nothing
life and death to fight over, will people's prejudices begin to melt away. This is why Marxists continually explain that there
is no lasting antidote to the venom of racism within the limits of capitalism, which has tailored and compartmentalized
this society to benefit the rule of the bourgeoisie. This does not mean that we must passively wait for socialism before we
combat racism and police brutality. On the contrary! It is precisely during the process of the
socialist revolution, which will combine political and economic struggles
against the bosses, as well as against racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and all
forms of discrimination and oppression, that the necessary class unity to
win will be forged. Only through common struggle against our common oppressors will the majority of workers
fully understand that we have much in common with each other, and nothing in common with the bosses.Only united and
militant working class struggle can fight and defeat the might of the bosses. Many of the Black Panthers, along with Martin
Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, were drawing the same conclusion. Before he was murdered in cold blood by the Chicago
Police Department and the FBI, Fred Hampton summed it up as follows: “We got to face some facts. That the masses are
poor, that the masses belong to what you call the lower class, and when I talk about the masses, I'm talking about the
white masses, I'm talking about the black masses, and the brown masses, and the yellow masses, too. We've got to face the
fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don't fight
racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say you don't fight capitalism with no black capitalism;
you fight capitalism with socialism.” Given its position in society—organizing millions of workers in key industries within
its ranks—the labor movement must be at the forefront of this struggle. Unfortunately, that’s not the case today. The
current labor leaders’ policy of class collaboration leads them to pay only tepid lip service to this decisive question, when
what is required is mass mobilization of the union rank and file on the streets, large-scale unionization drives, massive
educational campaigns to root out racism in the workers’ organizations, strikes, general strikes, and the creation of a mass
party of labor to fight the bosses politically. Nonetheless, even these token appeals for unity are a step forward from the
past, when many unions were on the front lines of enforcing Jim Crow on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. We should
also not lose sight of the fact that the increased militarization of the police is an expression of the weakness, not the
strength of the bourgeois state. They must resort to naked, raw force and intimidation, as the economic carrots they
dangled before the workers for decades after World War II are no longer available. The scandalous decisions not to indict
the police involved in murdering Mike Brown and Eric Garner have brought people out on the streets in a way we haven't
seen in the US quite some time. For many people
, the realization that there is persistent racial,
gender and other forms of discrimination, and that this is a systemic
component of capitalism, is an important first step towards arriving at a more fully developed class
consciousness. Political awakening around these issues is in many ways the "outer shell of an immature Bolshevism," to
paraphrase Trotsky's characterization of the nationalism of the workers of the oppressed national minorities in tsarist
Russia (versus the nationalism of the bourgeois and petty bourgeois). The recent wave of multiracial protests and
solidarity clearly marks another turning point in the polarization of US society—polarization, above all, along class lines—
and not racial lines, as was more the case in decades past. But contrary to what many well-meaning activists believe, in
their impatient desperation to "do something,” the main task of the Marxists is not to "build the movement." The
worldwide outpouring of protest is ample proof that when conditions are ripe, movements will emerge as a result of the
inner contradictions and dynamics of the system itself. But as Sam Adams once said—and he knew a thing or two about
revolution—“our business is not to make events, but to wisely improve them.” So while the US Marxists have participated
in dozens of these protests, spoken at several, and even organized a handful, our primary task at the present time is to
"patiently explain" and to connect with those seeking an explanation and longer-term perspective for how we can
collectively change the system once and for all. Without serious organization and a clear set of demands linked to the
broader issues facing the working class and youth—such as jobs, higher wages, indebtedness, healthcare, and education—
the movement will inevitably tend to dissipate. However, all of these problems will remain, which will only generate more
and even larger movements in the future. Accepting that this poison can never be eliminated within the limits of this
system is actually quite a big step to take, and not one most people take lightly. For if you follow your convictions to their
logical conclusion, it means taking action to actually do something about it. As the saying goes, "if you aren't part of the
solution, you're part of the problem." It is the task of the Marxists to help people draw these revolutionary conclusions.
Experience shows that it is often only after a movement ebbs that we can enter into serious dialogue with the most farsighted and self-sacrificing individuals, those who have gone through or keenly observed the experience, but are left
wanting something more substantial. It will not be linear or automatic, but by participating in this and similar movements
in the months and years ahead, we will win many new comrades to the banner of revolutionary Marxism, socialism, and
the IMT.
Marketplace Values Links
The inherent values of neoliberalism place the market over
racial issues and negate them. Antiracism efforts must be rooted
in an indict of capitalism.
Giroux 3 (Henry A. Giroux, Giroux received his Doctorate from Carnegie-Mellon in 1977. He then became professor
of education at Boston University from 1977 to 1983. In 1983 he became professor of education and renowned scholar in
residence at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio where he also served as Director at the Center for Education and Cultural
Studies. He moved to Penn State University where he took up the Waterbury Chair Professorship at Penn State University
from 1992 to May 2004. He also served as the Director of the Waterbury Forum in Education and Cultural Studies. He
moved to McMaster University in May 2004, where he currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in
the Public Interest. Spectacles of Race and Pedagogies of Denial: Anti- Black Racist Pedagogy Under the Reign of
Neoliberalism, Communication Education, 52:3-4, 191-211, 2003, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0363452032000156190 ) ZB
Within this emerging neoliberal ethic, success is attributed to thriftiness
and entrepreneurial genius, while those who do not succeed are viewed as
either failures or utterly expendable. Neoliberalism’s attachment to
individualism, markets, and antistatism ranks human needs as less
important than property rights and subordinates “the art of politics ... to the
science of economics” (Lapham, 2001, p. 8). Racial justice in the age of market-based
freedoms and financially driven values loses its ethical imperative to a
neoliberalism that embraces commercial rather than civic values, private rather
than pubic interests, and financial incentives rather than ethical concerns.
Neoliberalism negates racism as an ethical issue and democratic values as a
basis for citizen-based action. Of course, neoliberalism takes many forms as it moves across the globe. In
the United States, it has achieved a surprising degree of success but is increasingly being resisted by labor unions,
students, and environmentalists. Major protests against economic policies promoted by the World Bank, International
Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization have taken place in Seattle, Prague, New York, Montreal, Genoa, and
other cities around the world. In the United States, a rising generation of students is protesting against trade agreements
like GATT and NAFTA as well as sweatshop labor practices at home and abroad and the corporatization of public and
higher education. Unfortunately, antiracist theorists have not said enough about
either the link between the new racism and neoliberalism, on the one hand, or the rise
of a race-based carceral state on the other. Neither the rise of the new racism nor
any viable politics of an antiracist movement can be understood outside of
the power and grip of neoliberalism in the United States. Hence, at the risk of
oversimplification, I want to be a bit more specific about neoliberalism’s central assumptions and how it frames some of
the more prominent emerging racial discourses and practices.¶
The neoliberal ideals that laziness, mediocrity, and private
suffering are inhibiting progress in race relations have infected
racial discourse.
Giroux 3 (Henry A. Giroux, Giroux received his Doctorate from Carnegie-Mellon in 1977. He then became professor
of education at Boston University from 1977 to 1983. In 1983 he became professor of education and renowned scholar in
residence at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio where he also served as Director at the Center for Education and Cultural
Studies. He moved to Penn State University where he took up the Waterbury Chair Professorship at Penn State University
from 1992 to May 2004. He also served as the Director of the Waterbury Forum in Education and Cultural Studies. He
moved to McMaster University in May 2004, where he currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in
the Public Interest. Spectacles of Race and Pedagogies of Denial: Anti- Black Racist Pedagogy Under the Reign of
Neoliberalism, Communication Education, 52:3-4, 191-211, 2003, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0363452032000156190 ) ZB
Black public intellectuals such as Shelby Steele and John McWhorter garner
national attention persuading the American people that the subject and object of
racism have been reversed. For Steele, racism has nothing to do with soaring Black unemployment,
failing and segregated schools for Black children, a criminal justice system that resembles the old plantation system of the
South, or police brutality that takes its toll largely on Blacks in urban cities such as Cincinnati and New York. On the
contrary, according to Steele, racism has produced White guilt, a burden that
White people have to carry as part of the legacy of the civil rights movement.
To remove this burden, Blacks now have to free themselves from their victim
status and act responsibly by proving to Whites that their suffering is unnecessary (see,
for instance, Steele, 2002). Blacks can remove this burden through the spirit of
principled entrepreneurialism—allowing themselves to be judged on the
basis of hard work, individual effort, a secure family life, decent values, and
property ownership (this position is fully developed in Steele, 1990). It gets worse. John
McWhorter (2003), largely relying on anecdotes from his own limited experience in the
academy argues that higher education is filled with African American students
who are either mediocre or simply lazy, victims of affirmative action
programs that coddle them because of their race while allowing them to
“dumb down” rather than work as competitively as their White classmates.
The lesson here is that the color line now benefits Blacks not Whites and that in the
end, for McWhorter, diversity, not bigotry, is the enemy of a quality education
and functions largely to “condemn black students to mediocrity.”¶ Within
this discourse, there is a glimmer of a new kind of racial reference, one that
can only imagine public issues as private concerns. This is a racism that refuses
to “translate private sufferings into public issues” (Bauman, 2001, p. 205), a racism
that works hard to remove issues of power and equity from broader social
concerns. Ultimately, it imagines human agency as simply a matter of
individualized choices, the only obstacle to effective citizenship and agency
being the lack of principled self-help and moral responsibility. In what follows, I
want to examine briefly the changing nature of the new racism by analyzing how some of its central assumptions evade
notions of race, racial justice, equity, and democracy altogether. In doing so, I analyze some elements of the new racism,
particularly the discourse of color blindness and neoliberal racism. I then want to address how the racism of denial and
neoliberal racism were recently on prominent display in the controversial Trent Lott affair. I will conclude by offering
some suggestions about how the new racism, particularly its neoliberal version, can be addressed as both pedagogical and
political issues.¶
The marketplace values perpetuated by the capitalism create the
evasive and ignorant discourses that dominate discussions of
race.
Giroux 3 (Henry A. Giroux, Giroux received his Doctorate from Carnegie-Mellon in 1977. He then became professor
of education at Boston University from 1977 to 1983. In 1983 he became professor of education and renowned scholar in
residence at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio where he also served as Director at the Center for Education and Cultural
Studies. He moved to Penn State University where he took up the Waterbury Chair Professorship at Penn State University
from 1992 to May 2004. He also served as the Director of the Waterbury Forum in Education and Cultural Studies. He
moved to McMaster University in May 2004, where he currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in
the Public Interest. Spectacles of Race and Pedagogies of Denial: Anti- Black Racist Pedagogy Under the Reign of
Neoliberalism, Communication Education, 52:3-4, 191-211, 2003, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0363452032000156190 ) ZB
Representations of race and difference are everywhere in American society, and yet
racism as both a symbol and condition of American life is either ignored or relegated
to an utterly privatized discourse, typified in references to individual
prejudices, or psychological dispositions such as expressions of “hate.” As
politics becomes more racialized, the discourse about race becomes more privatized. While the realities of
race permeate public life, they are engaged less as discourses and sites
where differences are produced within iniquitous relations of power than as either
unobjectionable cultural signifiers or desirable commodities. The public
morality of the marketplace works its magic in widening the gap between
political control and economic power while simultaneously reducing political
agency to the act of consuming. One result is a growing cynicism and
powerlessness among the general population as the political impotence of public
institutions is reinforced through the disparaging of any reference to ethics,
equity, justice, or any other normative referent that prioritizes democratic values
over market considerations. Similarly, as corporate power undermines all
notions of the public good and increasingly privatizes public space, it
obliterates those public spheres where criticism might emerge that
acknowledges the tensions wrought by a pervasive racism that “functions as one of the
deep, abiding currents in everyday life, in both the simplest and the most
complex interactions of whites and blacks” (Geiger, 1997, p. 27). Indifference and
cynicism breed contempt and resentment as racial hierarchies now collapse into
power-evasive strategies such as blaming minorities of class and color for
not working hard enough, or exercising individual initiative, or practicing
reverse racism. Marketplace ideologies now work to erase the social from
the language of public life so as to reduce all racial problems to private
issues such as individual character.¶
Racism = Capitalist Tool
Racism is a tool used by Capitalism to justify inequality.
Reich, Professor of Political Economy at U.C. Berkeley, 74 [Michael Reich, “the
Economics of Racism”, pg 5,
http://www.africanafrican.com/folder15/alot%20more%20of%20african%20%26%20african%20american%20history18/
teachers%20manual/ReichRacism.pdf //MSteph)
However, a full assessment
of the im- portance of racism for capitalism would proba- bly conclude that the primary significance of racism is not
strictly economic. The simple economics of racism does not explain why many workers seem to be so vehemently rac- ist,
when racism is not in their economic self- interest. In non-economic ways, racism
helps to legitimize
inequality, alienation, and power- lessness—legitimization that is
necessary for the stability of the capitalist system as a whole. For example,
many whites believe that welfare payments to blacks are a far more important factor in their taxes than is military
spending. Through racism, poor whites come to believe that their poverty is
caused by blacks who are willing to take away their jobs, and at lower wages,
thus concealing the fact that a substantial amount of income inequality is
inevitable in a capitalist society. Racism thus transfers the locus of whites' resentment towards blacks
and away from capitalism. Racism also provides some psycho-logical benefits to poor and working-class whites. For
example, the opportunity to participate in another's oppression compensates for one's own misery. There is a parallel here
to the subjugation of women in the family: after a day of alienating labor, the tired husband can compensate by oppressing
his wife. Further- more, not being at the bottom of the heap is some solace for an unsatisfying life; this argument was
successfully used by the Southern oligarchy against poor whites allied with blacks in the interracial Populist movement of
the late nineteenth century. Thus, racism is likely to take firm root in a society that
breeds an individualistic and competitive ethos. In general, blacks provide a
convenient and visible scapegoat for problems that actually derive from the
institutions of capitalism. As long as building a real alternative to capitalism
does not seem feasible to most whites, we can expect that identifiable and
vulnerable scapegoats will prove functional to the status quo. These non-economic
factors thus neatly dovetail with the economic aspects of racism discussed earlier in their mutual service to the
perpetuation of capitalism.
Slavery Link
They misread slavery. Saying that we should begin only at
slavery omits its relation to class. Absent an accurate
understanding of historical process, they cannot hope to redress
the harms of past injustice.
Darder, and Torress 04 (Antonia, Prof of education policy studies at U of Illinois, and Rodolfo,
Associate prof of latino studies at UC Irvine, After Race: Racism after multiculturalism, p.6-8)
Although today “race” is generally linked to phenotypic characteris tics, there is a strong consensus among evolutionary
biologists and ge netic anthropologists that “biologically identifiable human races do not exist; Homo sapiens constitute a
single species, and have been so since their evolution in Africa and throughout their migration around the world” (Lee,
Mountain, and Koenig 2001, 39). This perspective is simi lar to that which existed prior to the eighteenth century, when
the notion that there were distinct populations whose differences were grounded in biology did not exist. For the Greeks,
for example, the term “barbarian” was tied to how civilized a people were considered to be (generally based on language
rather than genetics). So how did all this begin? George Fredrickson (2002), writing on the history of
racism, identifies the
anticipatory moment of modern racism with the
“treatment of Jew ish converts to Christianity in fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury Spain. Conversos were identified and discriminated against because of the belief held by
Christians that the impurity of their blood made them incapable of
experiencing a true conversion” (31). Fredrickson argues that the racism inherent in the
quasi-religious, Spanish doctrine of limpeza de sangre, referring to purity of blood, set the stage for
the spread of racism to the New World: To the extent that it was enforced represented the
stigmatization of an entire ethnic group on the basis of deficiencies that allegedly could not be eradicated by conversion or
assimilation. Inherited social status was nothing new; the concept of “noble blood” had long meant that the off spring of
certain families were born with a claim to high status. But when the status of large numbers of people was depressed
purely and simply because of their derivation from a denigrated ethnos, a line had been crossed that gave “race” a new and
more comprehensive significance. (33) Hence, religious notions, steeped in an ideology of
“race,” played a significant role in the exportation of racism into the
Americas, wheiie domination by the superior “race” was perceived as “inevitable and de sirable, because it was
thought to lead to human progress” (Castles 1996, 21). The emergence of “race” as ideology can also be traced to the rise of
nationalism. Efforts by nation-states to extend or deny rights of citizenship
contingent on “race” or “ethnicity” were not uncommon, even within so-called
democratic republics. Here, national mythology about those with “the biological unfitness for full citizenship”
(Fredrickson 2002, 68) served to sanction exclusionary practices, despite the fact that all people shared “the historical
process of migration and intermingling” (Castles 1996, 21). Herein is contained the logic behind what Valle and Torres
(2000) term “the policing of race,” a condition that results in official policies and practices by the nation-state designed to
exclude or curtail the rights of racialized populations. In Germany, the Nazi regime took the logic of
“race” to its pinnacle, rendering Jewish and Gypsy pop ulations a threat to
the state, thus rationalizing and justifying their demise. This example
disrupts the notion that racism occurs only within the context of black-white
relations. Instead, Castles (1996) argues that economic exploitation has always been
central to the emergence of racism. Whether it incorporated slavery or indentured servitude,
racial ized systems of labor were perpetrated in Europe against inunigrants,
in cluding Irish, Jewish, and Polish workers, as well as against indigenous
populations around the world. In the midst of the “scientific” penchant of the eighteenth century,
Carolus Linneaus developed one of the first topologies to actually cate gorize human beings into four distinct subspecies:
americanus, asiaticus, africanus, and europeaeus. Linneaus’s classification, allegedly neutral and scientific, included not
only physical features but also behavioral charac teristics, hierarchically arranged in accordance with the prevailing social
values and the political-economic interests of the times. The predictable result is the current ideological configuration of
“race”. used to both ex plain and control social behavior. Etienne Balibar’s (2003) work on racism is useful in
understanding the ideological justifications that historically have accompanied the exclu sion and domination of racialized
populations—a phenomenon heavily fueled by the tensions of internal migration in the Current era of global ization.
[R]acism describes in an abstract idealizing manner “types of human ity,” and. . . makes extensive use of classifications
which allow all indi viduals and groups to imagine answers for the most immediate existen tial questions, such as
imposition of identities and the permanence of vi olence between nations, ethnic or religious communities. (3) Balibar also
points to the impact of “symbolic projections and media tions” (in particula; stereotypes and prejudices linked to divinehuman ity or bestial-animality) in the construction of racialized formations. “Racial” classification
becomes associated with a distinction between the “properly human” and its
imaginary (animal-like) “other.” Such projec tions and mediations, Balibar argues, are
inscribed with modernity’s ex pansionist rationality—a quasi-humanist conception
that suggests that differences and inequalities are the result of unequal
access and social ex clusion from cultural, political, or intellectual life but
also implies that these differences and inequalities represent normal
patterns, given the level of “humanity” or “animality” attributed to
particular populations. James Baldwin in “A Talk to Teachers” (1988) links this
phenomenon of racialization to the political economy and its impact on
African Ameri cans.The point of all this is that Black men were brought here as a
source of cheap labor. They were indispensable to the economy. In order to
justify the fact that men were treated as though they were animals, the white re
public had to brain wash itself into believing that they were indeed ani mals and deserved to be treated like animals. (7)
Lee, Mountain, and Koenig (2001) note, “the taxonomy of race has al ways been and
continues to be primarily political” (43). Since politics and economics actually constitute one sphere,
it is more precise to say that the ideology of “race” continues to be primarily about political economy. Thus,
historians of “race” and racism argue that the idea of immutable,
biologically determined “races” is a direct outcome of exploration and
colonialism, which furnished the “scientific” justification for the eco nomic
exploitation, slavery, and even genocide of those groups perceived as
subhuman.
Turns case
Turns case- solving Capitalism is a prerequisite to any effective
movement against racism - a product of capitalism
Taylor, Assistant Professor Center for African American Studies at Princeton University,
11
[Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who also got her PhD from the Department of African American
Studies at Northwestern “Race, class and Marxism”, socialistworker.org,
http://socialistworker.org/2011/01/04/race-class-and-marxism // MSteph]
FOR REVOLUTIONARY Marxists, there
is an inextricable link between racism and
capitalism. Capitalism is dependant on racism as both a source of
profiteering, but more importantly as a means to divide and rule. Racism is
necessary to drive a wedge between workers who otherwise have everything
in common and every reason to ally and organize together, but who are
,
perpetually driven apart to the benefit of the ruling class. Thus any serious
discussion about Black liberation has to take up not only a critique of
capitalism, but also a credible strategy for ending it. For Marxists, that strategy hinges on the
revolutionary potential of a unified, multiracial and multi-ethnic working-class upheaval against capitalism. Marxists believe that the
potential for that kind of unity is dependant on battles and struggles against racism today. Without a commitment by revolutionary
organizations in the here and now to the fight against racism, working-class unity will never be achieved and the revolutionary potential of
the working class will never be realized. Yet despite all the evidence of this commitment to fighting racism over many decades, Marxism has
been maligned as, at best, "blind" to combating racism and, at worst, "incapable" of it. For example, in an article published last summer,
popular commentator and self-described "anti-racist" Tim Wise summarized the critique of "left activists" that he later defines as Marxists.
He writes:
the "real" issue
is class, not race, that "the only color that matters is green," and that issues like racism are mere "identity politics," which should take a backseat
[L]eft activists often marginalize people of color by operating from a framework of extreme class reductionism, which holds that
to promoting class-based universalism and programs to help working people. This reductionism, by ignoring the way that even middle class and affluent people of
color face racism and color-based discrimination (and by presuming that low-income folks of color and low-income whites are equally oppressed, despite a wealth
of evidence to the contrary) reinforces white denial, privileges white perspectivism and dismisses the lived reality of people of color. Even more, as we'll see, it
the biggest reason why
there is so little working-class consciousness and unity in the Untied States
(and thus, why class-based programs to uplift all in need are so much weaker here than in the rest of the industrialized world), is precisely
because of racism and the way that white racism has been deliberately
inculcated among white working folks. Only by confronting that directly (rather
than sidestepping it as class reductionists seek to do) can we ever hope to build cross-racial, class based
coalitions. In other words, for the policies favored by the class reductionist to work--be they social democrats or Marxists--or even to come into being,
ignores perhaps the most important political lesson regarding the interplay of race and class: namely, that
racism and white supremacy must be challenged directly. Here, Wise accuses Marxism of: "extreme class reductionism," meaning that Marxists allegedly think that
class is more important than race; reducing struggles against racism to "mere identity politics"; and requiring that struggles against racism should "take a back
seat" to struggles over economic issues. Wise also accuses so-called "left activists" of reinforcing "white denial" and "dismiss[ing] the lived reality of people of
Marxists argue that capitalism is a
system that is based on the exploitation of the many by the few. Because it is a system based
on gross inequality, it requires various tools to divide the majority--racism and all
oppressions under capitalism serve this purpose. Moreover, oppression is used to
justify and "explain" unequal relationships in society that enrich the
minority that live off the majority's labor. Thus, racism developed initially to
explain and justify the enslavement of Africans--because they were less than human and undeserving of
color"--which, of course, presumes Left activists and Marxists to all be white.
liberty and freedom
. Everyone accepts the idea that the oppression of slaves was
rooted in the class relations of exploitation under that system. Fewer
recognize that under capitalism, wage slavery is the pivot around which all
other inequalities and oppressions turn. Capitalism used racism to justify
plunder, conquest and slavery, but as Karl Marx pointed out, it also used
racism to divide and rule--to pit one section of the working class against
another and thereby blunt class consciousness. To claim, as Marxists do, that racism is a
product of capitalism is not to deny or diminish its importance or impact in American society. It is simply to explain its origins and the
reasons for its perpetuation. Many on the left today talk about class as if it is one of many oppressions, often describing it as "classism." What people are really
referring to as "classism" is elitism or snobbery, and not the fundamental organization of society under capitalism. Moreover, it is popular today to talk about
oppressions can reinforce and compound
each other, they are born out of the material relations shaped by capitalism
and the economic exploitation that is at the heart of capitalist society . In other
words, it is the material and economic structure of society that gave rise to a
range of ideas and ideologies to justify, explain and help perpetuate that
order. In the United States, racism is the most important of those ideologies.
various oppressions, including class, as intersecting. While it is true that
Despite the widespread beliefs to the contrary of his critics, Karl Marx himself was well aware of the centrality of race
under capitalism. While Marx did not write extensively on the question of slavery and its racial impact in societies
specifically, he did write about the way in which European capitalism emerged because of its pilfering, rape and
destruction, famously writing: The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment
in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa
into a warren for the commercial hunting of Black skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. He
also recognized the extent to which slavery was central to the world economy. He wrote: Direct slavery is just as much the
pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no
modern industry. It is slavery that has given the colonies their value; it is the colonies that have created world trade, and it
is world trade that is the pre-condition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest
importance. Without slavery North America, the most progressive of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal
country. Wipe out North America from the map of the world, and you will have anarchy--the complete decay of modern
commerce and civilization. Cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations. Thus
slavery, because it is an economic category, has always existed among the institutions of the peoples. Modern nations have
been able only to disguise slavery in their own countries, but they have imposed it without disguise upon the New World.
Thus, there is a fundamental understanding of the centrality of slave labor in the national and international economy. But
what about race?
Despite the dearth of Marx's own writing on race in particular, one might look at Marx's correspondence and deliberations
on the American Civil War to draw conclusions as to whether Marx was as dogmatically focused on purely economic issues
as his critics make him out be. One must raise the question: If Marx was reductionist, how is his unabashed support and
involvement in abolitionist struggles in England explained? If Marx was truly an economic reductionist, he might have
surmised that slavery and capitalism were incompatible, and simply waited for slavery to whither away. W.E.B. Du Bois in
his Marxist tome Black Reconstruction, quotes at length a letter penned by Marx as the head of the International
Workingmen's Association, written to Abraham Lincoln in 1864 in the midst of the Civil War:
The contest for the territories which opened the epoch, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts
should be wedded to the labor of the immigrant or be prostituted by the tramp of the slaver driver? When an oligarchy of
300,000 slave holders dared to inscribe for the first time in the annals of the world "Slavery" on the banner of armed
revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up,
whence the first declaration of the rights of man was issued...when on the very spots counter-revolution...maintained
"slavery to be a beneficial institution"...and cynically proclaimed property in man 'the cornerstone of the new
edifice'...then the working classes of Europe understood at once...that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin
for a general holy war of property against labor... They consider it an earnest sign of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot
of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggles for
the rescue of the enchained race and the Reconstruction of a social order. Not only was Marx personally opposed to
slavery and actively organized against it, but he theorized that slavery and the resultant race discrimination that flowed
from it were not just problems for the slaves themselves, but for white workers who were constantly under the threat of
losing work to slave labor. This did not mean white workers were necessarily sympathetic to the cause of the slaves--most
of them were not. But Marx was not addressing the issue of consciousness, but objective factors when he wrote in Capital,
"In the United States of America, every independent movement of the workers was paralyzed as long as slavery disfigured
a part of the Republic. Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the Black it is branded." Moreover, Marx
understood the dynamics of racism in a modern sense as well--as a means by which workers who
had common, objective interests with each other could also become mortal
enemies because of subjective, but nevertheless real, racist and nationalist
ideas. Looking at the tensions between Irish and English workers, with a nod toward the American situation between Black and white workers, Marx
wrote: Every industrial and commercial center in England possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians.
The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he feels himself a member of the
ruling nation and so turns himself into a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists of his country against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He
cherishes religious, social and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude is much the same as that of the "poor whites" to the "niggers" in the former
slave states of the USA. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker at once the accomplice and stupid tool of the
English rule in Ireland. This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short by all the means at the disposal
of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organization. It is the secret by which the capitalist
maintains its power. And that class is fully aware of it. Out of this quote, one can see a Marxist theory of how racism operated in contemporary society, after slavery
first, that capitalism promotes economic competition
between workers; second, that the ruling class uses racist ideology to divide
workers against each other; and finally, that when one group of workers
suffer oppression, it negatively impacts the entire class. These questions get to the heart of
was ended. Marx was highlighting three things:
Marxism and really begin to address whether Marxism subsumes political questions to economic ones. Here's how Marx described the issue of ideas themselves:
The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the
material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the material intercourse of men appear at this
stage as the direct efflux of their material behavior...Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas,
etc....Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life
process. This does not mean that humans are only automatons with no thought, creativity, ideas or agency, and that life is
a linear and determined existence. Human action or inaction constantly impacts and changes the environment and the
world around us. But human activity is shaped by the material world. Racism is ideological, but it has tangible
implications in the real world. Stating that racism is ideological does not somehow, then, render it less important, but
distinguishes the difference between a question of material conditions and consciousness.
It is undeniable that some in the socialist and Marxist traditions--primarily in the 19th and early 20th century--assumed
that because African Americans were overrepresented as workers, simply focusing on the class struggle would by itself
liberate Black workers and the poor from their oppression. But Marxist theory on the "Black question" has certainly
evolved since then. Marxism should not be conceived of as an unchanging dogma. It
is a guide to social revolution and political action, and has been built upon
by successive generations of Marxists. But theory doesn't precede material and social conditions--
it flows from them. In the mid-1920s, when hundreds of thousands of African Americans made their way to the urban
North, socialists and communists were forced to theorize how they would relate to Black workers on a mass scale-something that had never been an issue before. Black revolutionary Claude McKay reported as a delegate to the
Communist International in 1922: In associating with the comrades of America, I have found demonstrations of prejudice
on the various occasions when the white and black comrades had to get together, and this is the greatest obstacle that the
Communists of America have got to overcome--the fact that they first have got to emancipate themselves from the ideas
they entertained toward Negroes before they can be able to reach the Negroes with any kind of radical propaganda. The
Russian revolutionary Lenin directly intervened in the American Communist Party (CP) and directed it to immediately
begin political agitation among African Americans. Thus, the founding convention of the Communist Party in 1919 stated
merely that the "racial oppression of the Negro is simply the expression of his economic bondage and oppression, each
intensifying the other." By 1921, after Lenin's involvement on the question, the stated approach of the CP had shifted, with
its program stating: The Negro workers in American are exploited and oppressed more ruthlessly than any other group.
The history of the Southern Negro is the history of a reign of terror--of persecution, rape and murder...Because of the antiNegro policies of organized labor, the Negro has despaired of aid from this source, and he has either been driven into the
camp of labor's enemies, or has been compelled to develop purely racial organizations which seek purely racial aims. The
Workers Party will support the Negroes in their struggle for Liberation, and will help them in their fight for economic,
political and social equality...Its task will be to destroy altogether the barrier of race prejudice that has been used to keep
apart the Black and white workers, and bind them into a solid union of revolutionary forces for the overthrow of our
common enemy.
By the early 1940s, thousands of Blacks had joined the Communist Party. The politics of communism became the
dominant political framework for most of the nonwhite world as hundreds of millions of people of color across the globe
were inspired by the writings of Lenin on the rights of oppressed nations to fight for their own freedom. Lenin wrote:
The proletariat must struggle against the enforced retention of oppressed
nations within the bounds of the given state...The proletariat must demand
freedom of political separation for the colonies and nations oppressed by
"their own" nation. Otherwise, the internationalism of the proletariat would be nothing but empty words;
neither confidence nor class solidarity would be possible between the workers of the oppressed and the oppressor
nations... On the other hand, the socialists of the oppressed nation must, in particular, defend and implement the full and
unconditional unity, including organizational unity, of the workers of the oppressed nation and those of the oppressor
nation. Without this it is impossible to defend the independent policy of the proletariat and their class solidarity with the
proletariat of other countries. So it is an odd charge that Marxism is incapable of comprehending the racialized nature of
capitalism, while simultaneously becoming the politics that led the vast majority of non-white national liberation
movements in the 20th century. The critique of Marxism also minimizes the extent to which Black revolutionaries and the
Black struggle itself shaped and impacted the trajectory of Marxist thought. Thus, C.L.R. James, the Black revolutionary
from the Caribbean and collaborator with Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, advanced Marxist theory when he wrote-presciently in 1948, years before the emergence of the civil rights movement in the U.S. South: We say, number one, that
the Negro struggle, the independent Negro struggle, has a vitality and a validity of its own; that it has deep historic roots in
the past of America and in present struggles; it has an organic political perspective, along which it is traveling, to one
degree or another, and everything shows that at the present time it is traveling with great speed and vigor. We say, number
two, that this independent Negro movement is able to intervene with terrific force upon the general social and political life
of the nation, despite the fact that it is waged under the banner of democratic rights and is not led necessarily either by the
organized labor movement or the Marxist party. We say, number three, and this is the most important, that it is able to
exercise a powerful influence upon the revolutionary proletariat, that it has got a great contribution to make to the
development of the proletariat in the United States, and that it is in itself a constituent part of the struggle for socialism. In
this way we challenge directly any attempt to subordinate or to push to the rear the social and political significance of the
independent Negro struggle for democratic rights. That is our position. It was the position of Lenin 30 years ago. It was
the position of Trotsky which he fought for during many years. It has been concretized by the general class struggle in the
United States, and the tremendous struggles of the Negro people. Much of the controversy about Marxism and race is over
whether Marxist theory appropriately comprehends the centrality of race in U.S. society and beyond. But what is really at
the heart of the debate is the view of revolutionary Marxists that: one, white workers do not have a privileged status in this
country; two, white workers can gain revolutionary consciousness; and three, therefore a multiracial and united working-
class revolution is possible. Marxists
start with the premise that all workers under
capitalism are oppressed, but some workers face further oppression
because of additional discrimination like racism, sexism, homophobia, antiimmigrant ideas, religious oppression, etc. Thus, in the United States, white workers are
oppressed, but not to the same degree as non-white workers. Oppression is not just an ideological tool to divide groups of
workers, but has real material consequences as well. Because of racism, for example, the median household income for
white families as of 2006 was over $50,000 a year. For Blacks, it was just under $32,000. By every measure of the quality
of life in the U.S., whites are on the top and Blacks are on the bottom.
Marxists do not deny that these differences exist, nor do we deny that oppression means the lives of some workers are
actually worse than others. For Marxists, the question is the cause of the differences. Are the disparities the result of white
workers benefiting directly from the oppression of Black workers? That is, do white workers make more on average
because Black workers make less? To accept this explanation means to ignore the biggest beneficiary in the disparity in
. That employers are able to use racism to justify paying
Black workers less brings the wages of all workers down--the employers
enjoy the difference.
wages--employers and bosses
This is not to deny that white workers receive some advantages in U.S. society because they are white in a racist society. If they did not get some advantage--and with it, the
illusion that the system works for them--then racism would not be effective in dividing Black and white workers.
The distinctions and differences among workers function to create a distorted view of reality that turns the traits attributed to the oppressed into a kind of "common sense," which in turn deepens those divisions. African Americans are poorer,
have worse housing, go to worse schools, have a shorter life span and generally live in worse conditions, which helps to perpetuate the image in the minds of white workers that African Americans are inferior. But the problem with so-called
"common sense" is that it is based on surface appearances and information, and does not reach deeper to give a systemic explanation for the disparities that exist in society. Instead, it creates what Frederick Engels was the first to call "false
consciousness." False consciousness is simply ruling-class ideology that is used to explain away or cover up material reality. The point is that white workers, to the extent that they accept white supremacy, contribute to capitalism's ability to
exploit them more effectively. The purely "psychological" advantage obscures the very real material deficit that racist oppression helps reinforce. Du Bois explained how "false consciousness" worked in the South and why a labor movement never
developed there in the aftermath of slavery: The race element was emphasized in order that property holders could get the support of the majority of white laborers and make it more possible to exploit Negro labor. But th e race philosophy came
as a new and terrible thing to make labor unity or labor class-consciousness impossible. So long as the Southern white laborers could be induced to prefer poverty to equality with the Negro, just so long was a labor movement in the South made
impossible. For Du Bois, racism wasn't metaphysical, nor did it exist autonomously from class. Its development is a result of one class' efforts to keep power away from another. Du Bois did come up with a famous formulation of poor whites
gaining a "psychological wage"--as opposed to a material wage--from racism. But the psychological wage was to make the white worker feel superior because he wasn't Black, even though he would have nothing material to show for it. This leads
to the question: If it isn't in the interest of white workers to be racist, then why do they accept racist ideas? But the same question could be asked of any group of workers. Why do men accept sexist ideas? Why do Black workers accept racist antiimmigrant ideas? Why do many Black Caribbean and African immigrant workers think that Black Americans are lazy? Why do American workers of all races accept many racist ideas about Arabs and Muslims? If most people agree that it would
be in the interest of any group of workers to be more united than divided, then why do workers accept reactionary ideas? There are two primary reasons. The first is competition. Capitalism operates under the laws of false scarcity, which simply
means that we are all told there isn't enough to go around, so we must compete with each other for housing, education, jobs and anything else valued in society. While the scarcity is false, the competition is real, and workers fighting over these
items to better themselves or their families are often willing to believe the worst about other workers to justify why they should have something and others should not. The other reason is, as Marx wrote in the German Ideology, that the ruling
ideas of any society are the ideas of the ruling class. We live in a racist society, and therefore people hold racist ideas. The more important question is whether or not those ideas can change. The consciousness of workers is both fluid and
contradictory because of the clash between the "ruling ideas" in society and people's lived experience. So, for example, while the media inundates people with constant images of Blacks as criminals or on welfare, people's experience with Blacks at
work completely contradicts the stereotype. The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci explained the phenomenon of mixed consciousness this way: The active man-in-the-mass has a practical activity but has no clear theoretical consciousness of his
practical activity which nonetheless involves understanding the world in so far as it transforms it. His theoretical consciousness can...be historically in opposition to his activity. One might almost say that he has two theoretical consciousnesses
(or one contradictory consciousness): one which is implicit in his activity and which in reality unites him with all fellow workers in the practical transformation of the real world; and one superficially explicit or verbal, which he has inherited from
the past and uncritically absorbed. The person is strangely composite: it contains Stone Age elements and principles of a more advanced science, prejudices all past phases of history at the local level and intuitions of a future philosophy which will
be that of a human race united the world over. Whether or not a group of workers has reactionary, mixed or even revolutionary consciousness does not change their objective and real function as exploited and oppressed labor. The question of
consciousness affects whether or not workers are in a position to fundamentally alter that function through collective action. Just because white workers, to take a specific example, may at different times fully accept reactionary ideas about
African Americans does not change the objective fact that the majority of the poor in the U.S. are white, the majority of people without health insurance are white an d the majority of the homeless are white. While Blacks and Latinos are
disproportionately affected by the economic reality of the U.S. today, in a country that is more than 65 percent white, it is a reality they share with the majority of white workers.This shared reality shows the potential for a united struggle to better
the conditions of all workers. But by the same token, losing the battle against racism undermines the overall project of working-class revolution. As Du Bois explained in Black Reconstruction about the defeat of the post-Civil War Reconstruction
policies that briefly put the power of the federal government behind equal rights for the freed slaves: The political success of the doctrine of racial separation, which overthrew Reconstruction by uniting the planter and the poor white, was far
exceeded by its astonishing economic results. The theory of laboring class unity rests upon the assumption that laborers, despite internal jealousies, will unite because of their opposition to exploitation by the capitalists. According to this, even
after a part of the poor white laboring class became identified with the planters, and eventually displaced them, their interests would be diametrically opposed to those of the mass of white labor, and of course to those of the black laborers. This
would throw white and black labor into one class, and precipitate a united fight for higher wage and better working conditions. Most persons do not realize how far this failed to work in the South, and it failed to work because the theory of race
was supplemented by a carefully planned and slowly evolved method, which drove such a wedge between the white and black workers that there probably are not today in the world two groups of workers with practically identical inter ests who
Today, the need for a revolutionary
alternative to the failures of capitalism has never been greater. The election of
hate and fear each other so deeply and persistently and who are kept so far apart that neither sees anything of common interest.
Barack Obama came 40 years after the passage of the 1968 Civil Rights Act, the last piece of civil rights legislation from the
civil rights era of the 1960s. Despite the enormous shift in racial attitudes symbolized by the election of a Black president
in a country built in large part on the enslavement of Black people, the condition of the vast majority
of African Americans today is perilous. For almost two years, Black unemployment has fluctuated
between 15 and 17 percent. Almost 20 percent of African Americans under the age of 65 are without health insurance
compared to 15 percent for the rest of the population. According to the Center for Responsible Lending, a home owned by
an African American or Latino family is 76 percent more likely to be foreclosed upon than a white-owned home. The
wipeout of home ownership among African Americans threatens to widen even more the gap in median family net worth.
In 2007, the average white family had a net worth of more than $171,000 compared to less than $29,000 for African
American and Latino families. More than 25 percent of Blacks and Latinos languish below the official poverty line, and
more than a third of Black and Latino children live in poverty. The distressing numbers that
document the full impact of racism and discrimination in the United States
have no end. But while conditions across Black America threaten to wipe out the economic gains made possible by
the civil rights movement, millions of white workers are meeting their Black brothers and sisters on the way down. Tens of
millions of white workers are stuck in long-term joblessness, without health insurance and waiting for their homes to be
foreclosed upon. Thus, the question of Black, Latino and white unity is not abstract or academic, but must be a concrete
discussion about how to collectively go forward.
For most of the 20th century, legal racism both North and South created a tension-filled cross-class alliance in the African
American community that was focused on freedom and equal treatment. The legislative fruition of that in the form of legal
civil rights removed the barriers to advance for a small section of Black America. To be sure, the "Black middle class" is
tenuous, fragile and, for many, a paycheck or two away from oblivion, but a more stable and ambitious Black elite most
definitely exists, and their objectives and aspirations are anathema to the future of the mass of Black people. No serious
Marxist organization demands that Black and Latino workers put their struggles on the backburner while some mythical
class struggle is waged beforehand. This impossible formulation rests on the ridiculous notion that the working class is
white and male, and thus incapable of taking up issues of race, class and gender. In fact, the American working class is
female, immigrant, Black and white. Immigrant issues, gender issues and anti-racism are working-class issues and to miss
this is to be operating with a completely anachronistic idea of the working class. Genuine Marxist organizations
understand that the only way of achieving unity in the working class over time is to fight for unity today and every day.
Workers will never unite to fight for state power if they cannot unite to fight for workplace demands today. If white
workers are not won to anti-racism today, they will never unite with Black workers for a revolution tomorrow. If Black
workers are not won to being against anti-immigrant racism today, they will never unite with Latino workers for a
revolution tomorrow. This is why Lenin said that a revolutionary party based on Marxism must be a "tribune of the
oppressed," willing to fight against the oppression of any group of people, regardless of the class of those affected. And this
is why, despite the anti-Marxist slurs from academics and even some who consider themselves part of the left, the idea
that Marxism has been on the outside of the struggle against racism in the U.S. and around the world defies history and
the legacy of Black revolutionaries who understood Marxism as a strategy for emancipation and liberation. The challenge
today is to make revolutionary Marxism, once again, a part of the discussion of how to end the social catastrophe that is
unfolding in Black communities across the United States.
Racism was caused and is now perpetuated by the Capitalist
system – turns case
Reich, Professor of Political Economy at U. C. Berkeley, 74 (Michael Reich, “the Economics
of Racism”, pg 2-3,
http://www.africanafrican.com/folder15/alot%20more%20of%20african%20%26%20african%2
0american%20history18/teachers%20manual/ReichRacism.pdf MSteph)
The approach to racism argued here is entirely different. Racism
is viewed as rooted in the
economic system and not in "exogenously determined" attitudes. Historically, the Ameri-
can Empire was founded on the racist extermi- nation of American
Indians, was financed in large part by profits from slavery, and was ex- tended
by a string of interventions, beginning with the Mexican War of the 1840s, which have been at least partly justified by
white su- premacist ideology. Today, by transferring white resentment toward blacks and away from capitalism,
racism continues to serve the needs of the capitalist system. Although indi-
vidual employers might gain by refusing to dis- criminate and hiring more blacks, thus raising the black wage rate, it is not
true that the capi- talist class as a whole would benefit if racism were eliminated and labor were more efficiently allocated
without regard to skin color. We will show below that the divisiveness of racism weakens workers' strength when
bargaining with employers; the economic consequences of racism are not only lower incomes for blacks but also higher
incomes for the capitalist class and lower incomes for white workers. Although capitalists may not have conspired
consciously to create racism, and although capitalists may not be its principal perpetuators, never-the-less racism
docs support the continued viability of the American capitalist system.
We have, then, two alternative ap- proaches to the analysis of racism. The first suggests that capitalists lose and white
work- ers gain from racism. The second predicts the opposite—capitalists
gain while workers
lose. The first says that racist "tastes for discrimina- tion" are formed independently of the economic system; the
second argues that racism inter- acts symbiotically with capitalistic economic institutions. The
very
persistence of racism in the United States lends support to the second approach. So do repeated instances of employ- ers using blacks as strikebreakers, as in the massive steel strike of 1919,
and employer- instigated exacerbation of racial antagonisms during that strike and many others. However, the particular
virulence of racism among many blue- and white-collar workers and their fami- lies seems to refute our approach and
support Becker. Which of the two models better ex- plains reality? We have already mentioned that our approach predicts
that capitalists gain and workers lose from racism, whereas the con- ventional Beckerian approach predicts pre- cisely the
opposite. In the latter approach ra- cism has an equalizing effect on the white in- come distribution, whereas in the former
ra- cism has a disequalizing effect. The statistical relationship between the extent of racism and
the degree of inequality among whites provides a simple yet clear test of the two approaches. This section describes that
test and its results.
Capitalism and racism have been intertwined from the
beginning--which is why confronting racism requires
confronting capitalism first
Gasper, professor of philosophy at Notre Dame de Namur University, 15
[Phil Gasper, “Capitalism, racism, and the 1Percent”, the socialist worker,
http://socialistworker.org/2015/03/31/capitalism-racism-and-the-1-percent //MSteph]
RACISM HAS been an ugly and persistent feature of the United States since the country was founded. Today,
despite the important victories of the 1960s civil rights movement and other
struggles, racial disparities are in many respects getting worse. In mid-March, the
National Urban League released its annual State of Black America report, which found "little accountability for law
enforcement responsible for killing unarmed Black men, teenagers and children; a continual assault on voting rights;
[and] widening economic inequality gaps," among other major problems. As the report notes: Sixty years after the
landmark ruling in Brown v. Board of Education ended segregation in America's public schools, separate and unequal is
still a pervasive reality. While de jure, or legal, segregation has been abolished, de facto, or the actual practice of
segregation, is greater now than it was 40 years ago. Black and Brown students are less likely to share classrooms with
white students. We also see separate and unequal levels of expectations and resources in our schools that continue to
break down along economic, and thus largely color, lines. Using government data on income and wealth, unemployment,
poverty and other factors, the report calculates a Black Equality Index of only 72.2 percent--meaning that "Blacks
experience less than three-fourths the quality of life experienced by white Americans," according to the report. The
Hispanic Equality Index is only a little higher, at 77.7 percent. RACISM IS a moral obscenity, but
how can we fight it? That depends on how we understand the problem.
Racism is often thought to be a consequence of ignorance and lack of
understanding--something that can be overcome by education and reforms
that leave the basic nature of the system we live in untouched. But while the
racist attitudes of individuals are one symptom of a racist society, this view
gives no explanation of where racist ideas come from in the first place. Since the
1930s, there has been a seemingly endless series of government commissions set up to investigate racism--often following
major urban rebellions. But all the policy recommendations of such groups--such as improved police training and more
Black officers--have not eliminated racism. More Black cops have done nothing to stop racist police violence. Because of
these failures, it's possible to be pessimistic and conclude that racism is a permanent feature of society. But while
the roots of racism run deep, it is not natural, and it can be ended. If we
want to understand where racism comes from and formulate a strategy to
defeat it, we have to view it in the context of the class divisions that separate
our society. In capitalist societies, a small ruling class controls the wealth
produced by the rest of us. Racism is the most important tool used by the top
1 Percent to keep workers divided and thus protect their power. That's why
socialists put such a strong emphasis on fighting racism. Unless racial
divisions are overcome, it will be impossible to organize a movement that
can radically transform society and build a democratic, socialist alternative.
It's common to think that racism must have always existed, but this isn't true. Nothing like the systematic racial
oppression of modern slavery, for instance, existed in ancient Greece or Rome, where slavery existed, yet it was possible
for people of different ethnic and racial groups to attain high social position. In fact, the concept of race
itself was unknown until the age of European exploration and colonialism,
beginning in the late 15th century. The term isn't in the Bible, nor the histories written by the ancient
Greek writer Herodotus, nor the writings of Marco Polo.
Modern racism emerged hand in hand with the early development of
capitalism in Western Europe in the 16th century and was used to justify two
pillars of the new economic system: Imperialism, meaning the colonization
of much of the rest of the world by the most powerful nations; and slavery. In
North America, racism was used as the justification for genocide against Native
Americans and the enslavement of Africans for plantation labor. It was also
consciously used as a method of dividing Blacks and poor whites. As the people's
historian Howard Zinn wrote: [I]n spite of special subordination of Blacks in the Americas in the 17th century, there is
evidence that where whites and Blacks found themselves with common problems, common work, a common enemy in
their master, they behaved to one another as equals...Black and white worked together, fraternized together. The very fact
that laws had to be passed after a while to forbid such relations indicates the strength of that tendency. Starting
with Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, there were significant uprisings in the
American colonies, with poor whites and Black slaves often joining forces to
fight against their common masters. Ruling classes responded by passing
slave codes to discipline Blacks, while offering privileges to poor whites.
According to the historian Theodore Allen, this amounted to "the invention
of the white race." After an exhaustive survey of 17th century records, Allen reported: "I have found no instance
of the official use of the word 'white' as a token of social status before its appearance in a Virginia law passed in 1691."
Soon after this point, however, the Virginia Assembly proclaimed that all white men were superior to Blacks and passed a
law requiring masters to provide white servants whose indenture time was up with money, supplies and land.
RACISM ALLOWED the ruling class to divide and conquer the mass of the
population. In the words of Frederick Douglass, "They divided both to conquer
each." That is why racism survived the abolition of slavery with the Civil
War. In the 1870s, racism was used to subvert alliances between poor whites and former slaves and to undermine the
basic democratic rights granted to African Americans during the post-Civil War Reconstruction era overseen by the
federal government. In the 1890s, it was used again to defeat the Populist movement, which in the South threatened to
. As capitalism has developed and drawn
workers from all corners of the globe to the main metropolitan centers, the
rulers of the system have tried to keep workers divided along racial, ethnic
unite poor whites and Blacks against the ruling class
and national grounds.
In the early 20th century, racial quotas were instituted in many Northern industries.
As the employment manager at one steel foundry explained: "It isn't good to have all of one nationality; they will gang up
on you...We have Negroes and Mexicans in a sort of competition with each other." In adopting racial quotas and
deliberately inciting racial antagonisms, employers were following the examples set in Southern coal mining, iron and
steel, and other industries.
Employers often used "divide and rule" tactics of this kind to defeat strikes. The 1919 steel strike, for example, which
involved more than 360,000 workers throughout the entire industry, was defeated in large part because the employers
imported more than 30,000 Black strikebreakers to keep the plants operating. Racism has clearly been used to benefit
capitalists, but some people argue that it is also in the interest of white workers, since in general they receive higher wages
and other advantages compared to Blacks. Citing the work of the Black historian Lerone Bennett, Jr., Theodore Allen
rejected this conclusion:
, racial slavery and white supremacy in this country was a ruling-class
response to a problem of labor solidarity. Second, a system of racial
privileges for white workers was deliberately instituted in order to define
and establish the "white race" as a social control formation. Third, the consequence
First
was not only ruinous to the interests of the Afro-American workers but was also "disastrous"...for the white worker. The
Berkeley economist Michael Reich published an extensive study of this question in the 1980s. He found that "where
racism is greater, income inequality among whites is also greater," and that "most of the inequality among whites
generated by racism [is] associated with increased income for the richest 1 percent of white families." Reich also found
that "increases in...racism...had an insignificant effect on the share received by the poorest whites and resulted in a
decrease in the income share of the whites in the middle-income brackets." This remained true even when data from the
South was ignored. THERE ARE two reasons why racism operates against the interests of the working class as a whole,
. First, competition among workers over wages and working
conditions drives down the standards for all workers. The standards for
specially oppressed sectors of the working class drive down living standards
for all workers. As the pre-eminent African American social theorist and
historian W.E.B. Du Bois noted: "So long as white labor must compete with
Black labor, it must approximate Black labor conditions--long hours, small
including white workers
wages." Second, racial antagonisms inhibit union growth and labor
militancy,
as well as political unity between Blacks and whites. Where racism is worst, unionization rates are
lowest, average wages for white workers are lowest, and profit rates go up. To quote the words of Karl Marx from the 19th
century, "Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded." Ruling-class politicians are
adept at manipulating racial stereotypes to push through policies that benefit the 1 Percent at the expense of the rest of the
population. Law professor Ian Haney-López examined how this played out in the U.S. over the past 40 years in his recent
book Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class. He
summarized his findings in an interview last year: [O]ne of the central dynamics in American politics since the civil rights
era has been the use of cultural provocations--primary among them race, but not exclusively...to try and advance a
conservative agenda that favors tax cuts for the rich and that favors a deregulation of big industry.
In that context, Democrats had to decide how to respond. And when the Democrats responded, they responded not by
contesting that politics, but instead by embracing it. And this is part of the story of dog-whistle politics. Republicans shift
right and the Democrats have tracked rightward, following them.
RACISM HAS deep roots. But despite this, its grip can be broken,
particularly at times of heightened class struggle, when working-class
people see their interests most clearly. The organizing drives of the Congress of Industrial
Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s provide one important example. The CIO hired Black organizers, built a strong working
coalition with the NAACP and worked actively to educate racist white workers. "Black and white, unite and fight" became
one of its most important slogans.
In contrast to the American Federation of Labor at the time, the CIO prohibited constitutional exclusion clauses or the
segregation of Blacks into separate locals, and worked to include Black workers on an equal basis. With this policy, it was
able to overcome initial Black skepticism about the labor movement, which had accumulated as a result of decades of
discrimination by white unions. The CIO succeeded in organizing hundreds of thousands of Black and white workers in
mass production industries and the number of Black union members increased from 56,000 in 1930 to 1.25 million by
1945. In each industry that the CIO organized, union bargaining committees negotiated contracts in which the biggest
wage increases went to unskilled workers. Large numbers of Black workers--concentrated in unskilled occupations as a
consequence of the legacy of racism--were thus among the main beneficiaries of these efforts. These policies were no
accident--they were a result of the active role of Communists, socialists and other radicals in the unions. As one labor
historian puts it: "The CIO was to no small degree given birth by Communists, and largely as a result of red anti-racism,
the CIO stood up for Black workers and their communities." Tragically, these policies were not continued after the 1940s.
This was partly due to the weaknesses of the Communist Party's broader politics, and partly to the sharp shift to the right
in U.S. society during the late 1940s and 1950s. This drove leftists out of the unions and ushered in decades of tame
business unionism, which betrayed the interests of Black and white workers alike. Today, we are seeing the
reemergence of a multiracial movement challenging horrific levels of police
violence and mass incarceration. There is a new opportunity to build the
kinds of organization that can lead a fight against the material conditions
Racism and capitalism are
intertwined. To fight one, we have to organize to fight both.
and inequality that gives rise to racism.
Impact Turns
Policing
Capitalism perpetuates policing and racism to maximize profitonly reclaiming the state from capitalism can end this cycle and
lead to reform
El Kilombo Intergalactico 07 (Collective in Durham NC that interviewed Subcomandante
Insurgente Marcos “BEYOND RESISTANCE: EVERYTHING,”libcom.org/files/beyondresistance.pdf //MGD)
The war with no front has two faces. The first is destruction. Any coherent
logic and practice that allows for the organization of life outside of capital,
anything that allows us to identify ourselves as existing independent of capital, must be destroyed or, what may
be the same thing, reduced to the quantifiable exchangeability of the world market. Cultures, languages,
histories, memories, ideas, and dreams all must undergo this process. In this
regard, struggles for control over the production and subordination of racialized and gendered
identities becomes a central battlefield. All the colors of the people of the
earth face off with the insipid color of money. For the capitalist market, the
ultimate goal is to make the entire world a desert of indifference populated
only by equally indifferent and exchangeable consumers and producers. As a direct consequence,
the “Empire of Money” has turned much of its attention to destroying the
material basis for the existence of the nation-state, as it was through this institution that for
the last century humanity was able to, even if only marginally, keep the forces of money at
bay. The second face is reorganization. Once the “Empire of Money” has sufficiently
weakened the nation-state, it then reinvigorates this same institution for its
own ends through the introduction of schemes intended to benefit the structure of the market itself, specifically the
advent of privatization as government policy. This allows for the increasing intervention of the state with the end
of minimizing its redistributive or social capacity and using it as a mechanism for the insistent imposition
of the market. This imposition is so expansive that literally everything becomes a business opportunity, a site for
speculation, or a marketable moment. What was previously a site for community strength
(i.e. a mural)
is today simply a wall for corporate advertisement; what was previously
knowledge passed down to be shared socially is today the site for the latest pharmaceutical patent; what
yesterday was free and abundant today is bottled and sold. Without any
social safety net and bombarded with images of an ever-present enemy, the
logic of policing extends to that figure previously known as “the citizen” of
the former nation-state. This figure is today reconstituted as an atomistic self-policing
subject, “a competitor” who enters (i.e. misses) all encounters believing that “the other,” that which is not me,
exists only to defeat me, or be defeated by me. A total war indeed. Today there is simply no quiet corner to rest
and catch one’s breath.
Racism
Capitalism is the root cause of racism
Cole 9 (Mike Cole, Bishop Grosseteste University College Lincoln, UK, “Critical Race Theory comes to the UK : A
Marxist response”, Ethnicities 2009 9: 246)
While, for Marxists, it is certainly the case that there has been a continuity
of racism for hundreds of years, the concept of ‘white supremacy’ does not
in itself explain this continuity, since it does not need to connect to modes of
production and developments in capitalism. It is true that Mills (1997) provides a wide-ranging
discussion of the history of economic exploitation, and that Preston (2007) argues that CRT needs to be considered
alongside Marxism. However, unlike Marxism, there is no a priori need to connect
with capitalist modes of production. Thus Gillborn (e.g. 2005, 2006a) is able
to make the case for CRT and ‘white supremacy’ without providing a
discussion of the relationship of racism to capitalism. For me, the Marxist concept of
racialization5 is most useful in articulating racism to modes of production, and I have developed these links at length
elsewhere (e.g. Cole, 2004a, 2004b). Manning Marable (2004) has used the concept of racialization to connect to modes
of production in the US. He has described the current era in the US as ‘The New Racial Domain’ (NRD). This New
Racial Domain, he argues, is ‘different from other earlier forms of racial
domination, such as slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and ghettoization, or
strict residential segregation, in several critical respects’. These early forms
of racialization, he goes on, were based primarily, if not exclusively, in the
political economy of US capitalism. ‘Meaningful social reforms such as the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were debated
almost entirely within the context of America’s expanding, domestic
economy, and a background of Keynesian, welfare state public policies.’ The
political economy of the New Racial Domain, on the other hand, is driven
and largely determined by the forces of transnational capitalism, and the
public policies of state neoliberalism, which rests on an unholy trinity, or
deadly triad, of structural barriers to a decent life. These oppressive
structures are mass unemployment, mass incarceration and mass
disfranchisement, with each factor directly feeding and accelerating the
others, ‘creating an ever-widening circle of social disadvantage, poverty, and
civil death, touching the lives of tens of millions of US people’. For Marable, adopting
a Marxist perspective, ‘The process begins at the point of production. For decades, US corporations
have been outsourcing millions of better-paying jobs outside the
country.The class warfare against unions has led to a steep decline in the
percentage of US workers.’ As Marable concludes: Within whole US urban
neighborhoods losing virtually their entire economic manufacturing and
industrial employment, and with neoliberal social policies in place cutting
job training programs, welfare, and public housing, millions of Americans
now exist in conditions that exceed the devastation of the Great Depression
of the 1930s. In 2004, in New York’s Central Harlem community, 50 percent
of all black male adults were currently unemployed. When one considers
that this figure does not count those black males who are in the military, or
inside prisons, it’s truly amazing and depressing. Moreover, the new jobs
being generated for the most part lack the health benefits, pensions, and
wages that manufacturing and industrial employment once offered.
Makes state worse
Flaws in the state can be traced by to capitalism- rejecting it is an
a priori concern
El Kilombo Intergalactico 07 (Collective in Durham NC that interviewed Subcomandante
Insurgente Marcos “BEYOND RESISTANCE: EVERYTHING,”libcom.org/files/beyondresistance.pdf)
First, States: the State in the Empire of Money, as mentioned above, is reorganized.
now the
It is
“downsized” state where any semblance of collective welfare is eliminated
with the logic of individual safety, with the most repressive
apparatuses of the State, the police and the Army, unleashed to enforce this
logic. This state is in no way smaller in the daily lives of its subjects; rather, it is guaranteed that the power of this
and replaced
institution (collective spending) is directed purely toward new armaments and the increasing presence of the police in
daily life. Second, Armies: the Army in previous eras was assumed to exist for the protection of a national population from
foreign invasion. Today, in the structural absence of such a threat, the army is redirected to respond
with violence to manage (and yet never solve) a series of never-ending local conflicts
(Atenco, Oaxaca, New Orleans) that potentially threaten the overall stability of international
markets. In other words, as the EZLN points out, these armies can no longer be considered
“national” in any meaningful sense; they are instead various precinct divisions of
a global police force under the direction of the “Empire of Money.” Third, Politics: the
politics of the politicians (i.e. the actions of the legislative, executive, and judiciary branches) has
been completely eliminated as a site for public deliberation, or for the construction of
the previously existing 4 nation-state. The politics of the politicians has been redirected
and its new function is that of the implementation and administration of the local influence of
transnational corporations. What was previously national politics has been replaced
with what the EZLN refers to as “megapolitics”—the readjustment of local policy to global financial
interests. Thus the sites that once actually mediated among local actors are now additionally charged with the
mission of creating the image that such mediation continues to take place. It is best to be careful then and not believe that
the politicians and their parties (be they right wing or “progressive”) are of no use; rather, it is important to note that
today their very purpose is the outright simulation of social dialogue (that is, they are of no use TO US!).
Global Destruction
Modern leftist struggles only serve to regulate the worst
excesses of capitalism without challenging its global destruction
Zizek 4 (Slavoj, Prof of Sociology at the Institute for Sociology at Ljubljana Univ, Conversations With Zizek, pg 1489)
My position is almost classical Marxist in the sense that I would insist that anti-capitalist
struggle is not
simply one among other political struggles for greater equality, cultural
recognition, anti-sexism and so on. I believe in the central structuring role
of the anti-capitalist struggle. And I don’t think that my position is as crazy or
idiosyncratic as it appeared maybe a couple a years ago. It is not only the so-called
Seattle Movement; there are many other signals that demonstrate—how shall I put it?—
capitalism is becoming a problem again; that the honeymoon of
globalization, which lasted through the 1990s, is coming to an end. It’s in this context that we can also
understand the incredible successes of Negri and Hardt’s Empire, which points out that people are again perceiving
capitalism as a problem. It is no longer the old story that the ideological battles are
over and that capitalism has won. Capitalism is once more a problem. This would be
my starting point. And I am not thinking of anti-capitalist struggle just in
terms of consumerist movements. This is not enough. We need to do more
than simply organize a multitude of sites of resistance against capitalism.
There is a basic necessity to translate this resistance into a more global project—otherwise we will
merely be creating regulatory instances that control on the worst excesses of
capitalism. GD: This also appears to be at the base of your dispute with Ernesto Laclau – in J. Butler (et al.)
Contingency, Hegemony, and Universality – where you seem to be arguing that the existing political struggles are already
caught up in a certain liberal capitalist ethos and that the contemporary logiics of hegemony are already hegemonized;
already configured within the capital processes themselves…SJ: Yes, I agree with your formulation that
hegemony itself is hegemonized. In what sense? I think that the idea that
today we no longer have a central struggle but a multitude of struggles is a
fake one, because we shouldn’t forget that the group for this multitude of
struggles was created by modern global capitalism. This doesn’t devaluate
these struggles: I am not saying they are not real struggles. I am saying that the
passage from old-fashioned class struggle to all these post-modern struggles
of ecological, cultural, sexual etc. struggles is one that is opened up by global
capitalism. The ground of these struggles is global capitalism.
Revolt without
Revolution/Clean Hands Links
Thier apolitical 1AC is an attempt at revolt without revolution
Zizek, professor of sociology at the institute at ljubjana university , 2011
(Slavoj, http://www.lrb.co.uk/2011/08/19/slavoj-zizek/shoplifters-of-the-world-unite)
But one should also avoid the temptation of the narcissism of the lost cause: it’s
too easy to admire the sublime beauty of
uprisings doomed to fail. Today’s left faces the problem of ‘determinate negation’: what new order should replace the old
one after the uprising, when the sublime enthusiasm of the first moment is over? In this context, the manifesto of the Spanish indignados,
issued after their demonstrations in May, is revealing. The first thing that meets the eye is the pointedly apolitical tone : ‘Some of us
consider ourselves progressive, others conservative. Some of us are believers, some not. Some of us have clearly defined ideologies, others are
apolitical, but we are all concerned and angry about the political, economic and social outlook that we see around us: corruption
among politicians, businessmen, bankers, leaving us helpless, without a voice.’ They make their protest on behalf of the ‘inalienable truths that we should abide by
in our society: the right to housing, employment, culture, health, education, political participation, free personal development and consumer rights for a healthy
and happy life.’ Rejecting violence, they call for an ‘ethical revolution. Instead of placing money above human beings, we shall put it back to our
service. We
are people, not products. I am not a product of what I buy, why I buy and who I buy from.’ Who will be the agents of this revolution? The
indignados dismiss the entire political class , right and left, as corrupt and controlled by a lust for power , yet the
manifesto nevertheless consists of a series of demands addressed at – whom? Not the people themselves: the indignados do not (yet)
claim that no one else will do it for them, that they themselves have to be the change they want to see. And this is the fatal weakness of recent
protests : they express an authentic rage which is not able to transform itself into a positive programme of
sociopolitical change. They express a spirit of revolt without revolution . The situation in Greece looks more promising, probably
owing to the recent tradition of progressive self-organisation (which disappeared in Spain after the fall of the Franco regime). But even in Greece, the protest
movement displays the limits of self-organisation: protesters sustain a space of egalitarian freedom with no central authority to regulate it, a public space where all
are allotted the same amount of time to speak and so on. When the protesters started to debate what to do next, how to move beyond
mere protest, the majority consensus was that what was needed was not a new party or a direct attempt to take state
power, but a movement whose aim is to exert pressure on political parties. This is clearly not enough to impose a
reorganisation of social life. To do that, one needs a strong body able to reach quick decisions and to implement them with
all necessary harshness.
Belief in alternatives to the overthrow of capital- of new ways of
being "political" are a revolt without revolution - a comforting
dream that helps us swallow the capitalist nightmare
Zizek, professor of sociology at the institute at ljubjana university, 2003
[Slavoj, Virtue and Terror]
Nowhere is the dictum 'every history is a history of the present' more true than in the case of the French Revolution: its
historiographical reception always closely mirrored the twists and turns of political struggles. The identifying mark of all
kinds of conservatives is its flat rejection: the French Revolution was a catastrophe from its very beginning, the product of the godless modern mind; it
is to be interpreted as God's punishment for the humanity's wicked ways, so its traces should be undone as thoroughly as possible. The typical liberal attitude
is a differentiated one: its formula is '1789 without 1793'. In short, what the sensitive liberals want is a decaffeinated
revolution, a revolution which doesn't smell of revolution. Francois Furet and others thus try to. 'deprive the French Revolution of its status as
the founding event of modern democracy, relegating it to a historical anomaly: there was a historical necessity to assert the modern principles of personal freedom,
etc., but, as the English example demonstrates, the same could have been much more effectively achieved in a more peaceful way . . . Radicals are, on the contrary,
possessed
by what Alain Badiou called the 'passion of the Real': if you say A - equality, human rights and freedoms - you
should not shirk from its consequences but muster the courage to say B - the terror needed to really defend and assert
the A.1 However, it is all too easy to say that today's Left should simply continue along this path. Something, some kind of historical cut, effectively took place in
1990: everyone, today's 'radical Left' included, is somehow ashamed of the Jacobin legacy of revolutionary terror with its
state-centralized character, so that the commonly accepted motto is that the Left, if it is to regain political effectiveness,
should thoroughly reinvent itself, finally abandoning the so-called Jacobin paradigm'. In our post-modern era of 'emergent properties', the chaotic
interaction of multiple subjectivities, free interaction rather than centralized hierarchy, the multitude of opinions instead of one Truth, the Jacobin dictatorship is
fundamentally 'not to our taste' (the term 'taste' should be given all its historical weight, as the name for a basic ideological disposition). Can one imagine
something more foreign to our universe of the freedom of opinions, of market competition, of nomadic pluralist interaction,
etc., than Robespierre's politics of Truth (with a capital T, of course), whose proclaimed goal is `to return the destiny of liberty into the hands of the truth'? Such
a Truth can only be enforced in a terrorist manner: If the mainspring of popular government in peacetime is virtue, the
mainspring of popular government in revolution is both virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is disastrous; terror,
without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a specific
principle as a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our homeland's most pressing needs.2 Robespierre's line of argumentation reaches its
climax in the paradoxical identification of the opposites: revolutionary terror `sublates' the opposition don between punishment and
clemency - the just and severe punishment of the enemies is the highest form of clemency, so that, in it, rigour and charity
coincide: To punish the oppressors of humanity: that is clemency; to forgive -them is barbarity. The rigour of tyrants has that rigour
as its sole principle: that of the republican government is based on beneficence.3 What, then, should those who remain faithful to the legacy of
the radio Left do with all this? Two things, at least. First, the terrorist past has to accepted as ours, even - or precisely because
- it is critically rejected. T only alternative to the half-hearted defensive position of feeling guilty front of our liberal or Rightist critics is: we have to do
the critical j, better than our opponents. This, however, is not the entire story: o should also not allow our opponents to determine the field and topic
the struggle. What this means is that the ruthless self-critique should hand in hand with a fearless admission of what, to paraphrase Mar judgement
on Hegel's dialectics, one is tempted to call the 'ratio] kernel' of the Jacobin Terror: Materialist dialectics assumes, without particular joy, that,
till now, no political subject was able to arrive at the eternity of the truth it was deploying without moments of terror . Since,
as Saint-Just asked: `What do those who want neither Virtue nor Terror want?' His answer is well-known: they want corruption - another name for the subject's
defeat.4 Or, as Saint-Just put it succinctly: 'That which produces the gem good is always terrible.'5 These words should not be
interpreted a warning against the temptation to impose violently the general gc onto a society, but, on the contrary, as a
bitter truth to be fully endorsed.
Satire
The affirmative's "satire" reinforces violent neoliberalism—the
desire to maintain a safe, cynical distance from ideology is a
form of vaccination—it makes dominant cultural messages more
acceptable by diminishing the revolutionary potential of dissent.
The 1AC isn't a radical like Che Guevara, its a 29.99 Che Guevara
T-shirt
Adam Corner is a research associate in psychology at Cardiff University. 11-21-13 http://aeon.co/magazine/livingtogether/how-advertising-turned-anti-consumerism-into-a-secret-weapon/
In 1796, the English physician Edward Jenner injected an eight-year-old boy in Gloucestershire with cowpox. Reasoning
that absorbing a small amount of the virus would protect the child from a full-strength attack of smallpox in the future,
Jenner’s bold experiment founded the practice of vaccination. Two hundred years later, the marketing industry has
cottoned on to Jenner’s insight: a little bit of a disease can be a very useful thing. If you’re one of the more than 7 million
people who have watched the global fast-food chain Chipotle’s latest advertisement, you’ll have experienced this sleight of
hand for yourself. The animated short film — accompanied by a smartphone game — depicts a haunting parody of
corporate agribusiness: cartoon chickens inflated by robotic antibiotic arms, scarecrow workers displaced by ruthless
automata. Chipotle’s logo appears only at the very end of the three-minute trailer; it is otherwise branding-free. The
motivation for this big-budget exposé? ‘We’re trying to educate people about where their food comes from,’ Mark
Crumpacker, chief marketing officer at Chipotle, told USA Today, but ‘millennials are sceptical of brands that perpetuate
themselves’. Never mind that Chipotle itself — with more than 1,500 outlets across the US, and an annual turnover of
$278 million — is hardly treading lightly on the world’s agricultural system. The real story is that the
company is using a dose of anti-Big Food sentiment to inoculate the viewer against not buying any more
of its burritos. Chipotle are very happy to sell the idea that they’re on our side if it helps to keep the millennials happy. If
it’s advertising we don’t like, then it’s advertising we won’t get. In the UK, the telecommunications giant Orange creates
cinema ads which are spoof scenes from well-known feature films, doctoring the scripts to include gratuitous references to
cell phones. One popular instalment features the actor Jack Black recreating a scene from Gulliver’s Travels (2010), in
which Gulliver is captured by the tiny Lilliputians and lashed to the ground with ropes. As the product placements for
Orange become increasingly blatant, Black realises he has been tricked into acting in a cellphone ad, breaks character and
begins a speech about how he won’t be duped by Orange. ‘Don’t let a mobile phone ruin your film’ runs the slogan. It’s
annoying, but they know this. And they know that you know that they know. And ... well you get the gist. These ads want to
be our friends — to empathise with us against the tyranny of the corporate world they inhabit. Just when we thought we’d
cottoned on to subliminal advertising, personalised sidebars on web pages, advertorials and infomercials, products started
echoing our contempt for them. ‘Shut up!’ we shout at the TV, and the TV gets behind the sofa and shouts along with us. It
seems almost quaint, now that popular culture is riddled with knowing, self-referential nods to itself, but the aim of
advertising used to be straightforward: to associate a product in a literal and direct way with positive images of a desirable,
aspirational life. How we chortle at those rosy-cheeked families that dominated commercials in the post-war era.
Nowadays, we adopt the slogans and imagery as ironic home decor — wartime advertisements for coffee adorn our kitchen
walls; retro Brylcreem posters are pinned above the bathroom door. But our reappropriation of artefacts from a previous
era of consumerism sends a powerful message: we wouldn’t be swayed by such naked pitches today. The iconic VW 'Think
small' campaign. The iconic VW 'Think small' campaign. Genre-subverting ads started to emerge as early as 1959, when
the Volkswagen Beetle’s US ‘Think Small’ campaign began poking fun at the German car’s size and idiosyncratic design. In
stark contrast to traditional US car adverts, whose brightly coloured depictions of gargantuan front ends left the viewer in
no doubt that bigger was better, the Beetle posters left most of the page blank, a tiny image of the car itself tucked away in
a corner. These designs spoke to a generation that was becoming aware of how the media and advertising industries
worked. The American journalist Vance Packard had blown the whistle on the tricks of the advertising trade in The
Hidden Persuaders (1957), and younger consumers increasingly saw themselves as savvy. Selling to this demographic
required not overeager direct pitches, but insouciant ‘cool’, laced with irony. Ads for sports drinks bemoan the abundance
of minutely differentiated sports drinks on the market, and beers yearn for the day when a beer was just a beer In
subsequent decades, self-aware adverts became the norm, and advertising began to satirise the very concept
of itself. In 1996, Sprite launched a successful campaign with the slogan ‘Image is nothing. Thirst is everything. Obey
your thirst’. In 2010, Kotex sent up the bizarre conventions of 1980s tampon adverts (happy, dancing women, jars of blue
liquid being spilt) by flashing up the question ‘Why are Tampon adverts so ridiculous?’ before displaying its latest range of
sanitary products. ‘Companies try to convince you that they are part of your family,’ says Tim Kasser, professor of
psychology and an expert on consumer culture at Knox College in Illinois. ‘They want to create a sense of connection or
even intimacy between the viewer and the advertiser. An ad that says: “Yes, I know you know that I’m an ad, and I know
that you know that I’m annoying you” is a statement of empathy, and thus a statement of connection. And as any
salesperson will tell you, connection is key to the sales.’ This technique of cultivating empathy through shared
cynicism has taken off over the past decade. Today, ads for sports drinks bemoan the abundance of minutely
differentiated sports drinks on the market, and beers yearn for the day when a beer was just a beer. The Swedish brewery
Kopparberg has done more than any other company to promote the idea that cider can come in many delicious fruity
flavours, so if anyone is to blame for the difficulty in buying plain old apple cider, it is Kopparberg. Yet their most recent
invention is ‘Naked’ apple cider. As the company’s UK managing director Davin Nugent told The Morning Advertiser:
Innovation through fruit is not enough. The bigger picture is apple cider and we’re opening the back gate into the category.
The apple taste in cider has been lost and become bland… we’re on to something exciting. Corporate advertising is the
ultimate shape-shifter; the perpetual tease. No sooner had the virulently anti-capitalist ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement
begun than the American rapper Jay Z’s clothing label created and marketed an ‘Occupy All Streets’ spin-off T-shirt. But
as citizen cynicism has advanced, the space in which advertising can operate without tripping on its own rhetoric has
become ever more restricted, and ever more bizarre. Feeling jaded and cynical about samey scripts in ads? Commercials
such as 2012’s Old Milwaukee Super Bowl spoof, in which Will Ferrell’s formulaic endorsement gets cut off mid-sentence,
might still speak to you. Getting a vicarious thrill from viral videos? Ads can mimic that excitement, with carefully
coordinated campaigns to capture the grassroots feel, such as the ‘amateur footage’ of a man hacking the video screens in
Times Square, New York, in fact promoting the film Limitless (2011). Cynical about the lack of spontaneity in advertising
messages? ‘Real-time’ news-led marketing can make even the most hackneyed of products seem cutting-edge — although
American Apparel’s attempt in October last year to launch the #SandySale off the back of the worst Hurricane to hit New
York in living memory was not the blast they had hoped for. The ambiguous, semi-disguised adverts of today
would appear to be the commercials we deserve: self-cynical sales pitches for a jaded generation At the
same time, Magazine content, musical and theatrical entertainment and, in particular, online media are often entirely
integrated with the commercial messages that bankrolled them. This probably wouldn’t have been possible if advertisers
had not made the strategic move from the blatant salesmanship of yore to the subtler, more oblique arts of modern
industry. As consumers cottoned on to the tricks of the trade, ads have stayed one step ahead. There have, of course, been
attempts to kick back. An entire lexicon has flourished around the idea of subverting the advertising industry — from acts
of ‘brandalism’, which distort or undermine corporate iconography, to ‘culture jamming’ (satirical analyses of the business
world). Adbusters, the long-running Canadian magazine, has dedicated itself to exposing and challenging the the
corporate world generally, not just advertising. But a 2011 report for the Public Interest Research Centre about the cultural
impact of commercial messages argued that: The public debate about advertising — such as it exists — has also been
curiously unfocused and sporadic. Civil society organisations have almost always used the products advertised as their
point of departure — attacking the advertising of a harmful product like tobacco, or alcohol, for instance — rather than
developing a deeper critical appraisal of advertising in the round. So what would a deeper look tell us? Perhaps it is that
the ‘cynical distance’ inherent in knowing, self-immolating, empathetic adverts not only perpetuates
brands, but is at the foundation of advertising itself. By ‘factoring in’ dissent, the ad neutralises it in
advance, like the stock market inoculating itself against future shocks by including their likelihood in
share prices. The advertising industry anticipates and then absorbs its own opposition, like a politician cracking jokes at
his own expense to disarm a hostile media. And the industry’s seemingly endless capacity to perpetuate itself
matters. Marketing is not simply a mirror of our prevailing aspirations. It systematically promotes and presents a
specific cluster of values that undermine pro-social and pro-environmental attitudes and behaviour. In other words, the
more that we’re encouraged to obsess about the latest phone upgrade, the less likely we are to concern ourselves with
society’s more pressing problems. That’s a reason to want to keep a careful tab on advertising’s elusive and ephemeral
forms. Encouragingly, there is some evidence that young people are quietly developing their own defence mechanisms —
the ‘click-through’ rate for online advertising has plummeted from a heady 78 per cent for the world’s first banner ad in
1994 to a meagre 0.05 per cent for Facebook ads in 2011. The Beetle adverts at the tail end of the 1950s picked up on the
growing media smarts of the post-war generation, and Sprite’s ironic critique of image-led branding could almost have
been lifted from the arguments of the 1990s anti-globalisation movement. The ambiguous, semi-disguised adverts of today
would then appear to be the commercials we deserve: self-cynical sales pitches for a jaded generation. Instead of
questioning the economic mechanisms that lead to the homogenisation of town centres, we shop and drink coffee in
commercial spaces disguised in the stylishly-frayed aesthetics of the counter-culture. Satire has long been
acknowledged as a paradoxical crutch for a society’s existing power structures: we laugh at political
jibes, and that same laughter displaces the desire for change. As such as Chipotle's — which express our
concerns about the failings of globalisation in a safe space before packing them away — are surely an equivalent safety
valve for any subversive rumblings. We all like to think that we’re above the dark art of advertising; that we are
immune to its persuasive powers. But the reality is that, though we might have been immunised, it is not against ads:
it is against dissent.
Satire is not a form of effective resistance
Contu, phD, 08 (Alessia, Warwick Business School, “Decaf Resistance On
Misbehavior, Cynicism, and Desire in Liberal Workplaces,” Management
Communication Quarterly, vol. 21 no. 3 364-379)
What seems to be taking hold in the organization theory discourse of
resistance, if articulated through different theoretical nuances (which brings together discursive analysts as well as
more traditional work sociologists), is an injunction to investigate the hidden transcripts,
the offstage discourse— the unofficial speeches and gestures and practices (Scott, 1990). These can tell us a different story
from the whole encompassing and somewhat disappointing quietness (as seen from the position of critical researchers of
the Leftist kind) of the official consent or obedience. Such a mode of resistance, in the crevices and in the
underlife of capitalist organized production, has
many different forms. The lists in Mumby (2005) and
Collinson (2003), for example, are similar and include studies that have discussed resistance as parody, irony,
satire, and cynicism. In what sense do these practices still count as
antagonistic forms that intervene in the struggle for subverting and
changing power relations? My argument is that such transgressions (humor,
skepticism, etc.) are inherent transgressions of the liberal capitalist relations in
which they are observed. As such, they are the way the ideology sustaining such
relations performs its efficacy. The mutual embrace between power and
resistance is deadly. It is also deadly to propose the care of self as the path that liberates “us” from the iron
laws of disciplinary mechanisms. These transgressive acts that we call “resistance” are
akin to a decaf resistance, which changes very little. It is resistance without
the risk of really changing our ways of life or the subjects who live it. My
conclusion is not simply that real acts of resistance are impossible. Instead, the conclusion addresses the
deadlock between our studies of resistance and how a real act of resistance
attains the impossible. My aim is to stimulate our thinking about the
paradoxes and impossibilities of resistance and, specifically, our actions
associated with understanding and organizing resistance in relation to the
wider social order where we, business school academics, maintain a
privileged position. The invitation is to reflect on cynicism, the cost of
resistance, and death. It suggests that resistance, as a real act that suspends the constellation
of power relations, has a cost that cannot be accounted for. It involves an ethics, which Zizek,
following Lacan, called the “Ethics of the Real.” This opens up the possibility of tackling resistance and its relation to
antagonism when “there is not such a thing as class struggle.”
Satire is not an effective form of resistance – it is a resistance
without a cost that fails to produce change
Contu, phD, 08 (Alessia, Warwick Business School, “Decaf Resistance On
Misbehavior, Cynicism, and Desire in Liberal Workplaces,” Management
Communication Quarterly, vol. 21 no. 3 364-379)
Many studies on resistance and control give us stories of organizational
humor, parody, skepticism, and piss taking. They seem to indicate carnivalesque and often
obscene examples of (mis)behavior in the undergrowth of organized life. However, these carnivalesque
forms of resistance often do not constitute a threat to dominant order in the
workplace. They end up being, as is often noticed with surprise, the support of the very
order that such actions transgress (Collinson, 1992). What is important to observe
is that these transgressive actions in liberal workplaces (call centers, automobile
factories, insurance companies, etc.) do not seriously challenge the economic
reproduction of both producers and consumers. These actions are even less
of a challenge to the liberal democratic logic where the “I” is constituted as
the liberal free subject who has, among other things, the right to disagree.
The real trick is, of course, that “I,” on the whole, still “do” whatever “it” she or he disagrees with. This is regardless of how
bothered, bewitched, or bewildered he or she may be. In other words, as Zizek (1994) suggests, far from undermining the
rule of Law its transgression in fact serves as its ultimate support. So it is not only that the
transgression relies on, presupposes, the Law it transgresses; rather the
reverse case is much more pertinent: law itself relies on its inherent
transgression, so that when we suspend this transgression, the Law itself
disintegrates. (p. 77) Acts of irony, skepticism, and cynicism are not beyond the
dominating logic that states/legislates, that codifies the reality at hand (the
Law). Resistance qua transgression is not due to some more or less problematic human nature. For example, some would
argue resistance springs from the rationality of humans (cognitive limitations, personal aberrations, and idiosyncrasies).
Others would suggest that resistance arises from the immanent freedom of a recalcitrant will. Rather, such
transgressions are the conditions of possibility of the Law itself (the codified,
ordered reality we recognize as such). Such acts are better understood as the inherent
transgression of the order that is the ultimate support of the official
discourse (Zizek, 1997, p. 18). The reason for this is that the public Law1 itself is incomplete. It has a not-all
character that needs to be supplemented by a clandestine, unwritten support. As Zizek (2005) suggested, “far from being a
kind of secondary weakness, a sign of Power’s imperfection, this splitting is necessary for its exercise” (p. 287). Of course,
such splitting always relies also on presupposing “us” as split subjects. Proponents of “mis-behaviour” (Ackroyd &
Thompson, 1999) see this split in the recognition that the subject is, at once, labor and an autonomous being. In the
discursive, poststructuralist, feminist approach, the subject itself is already constituted as a space of multiple,
inconsistent, and ambiguous “subject positions” (see, e.g., Collinson, 2003). This split is what can help us explain what
organization theorists know very well—that when workers take the Law too seriously, suspending the transgression, such
as in overidentification—it is effectively possible to perform a subversion of the system. Examples of open
workplace antagonism show the devastating effects that working following
stringently the rule can have. One of the examples Zizek (1994) gave is based
on one of Adorno’s considerations in Minima Moralia, of a woman who is
subordinated to her husband. In an unseen-by-him gesture, she shows a hitch and a transgression to
that subordination. While they are leaving a party and she is dutifully helping him with his coat, she exchanges
patronizing glances behind his back with fellow guests, which deliver the message, “Poor weakling, let him think he is the
Master.” The same gesture is what we see in much of these modes of interstitial and subterranean resistance, which
Mumby (2005) captured in the Malaysian proverb, “When the great lord passes the wise peasant bows deeply and silently
farts” (see also Scott, 1990). As Zizek(1994) put it, what is not to be missed is that this
spectre of woman’s power [one can add of peasants farting or workers
parody, piss taking, skepticism, etc.] structurally depends on male
domination [in our case on the liberal capitalist constellation]: it remains its
shadowy double, its retroactive effect, and as such is its inherent moment. (p.
56) With a slight shift of the view, skepticism, parody, and so forth appear to pose no threat to the system that supports
them and makes them possible in the first instance (and most important, vice versa). Our insistence on treating them as
“resistance” (as a signifier that traces an ineluctable antagonism that is more than “behaving badly”) is important and
symptomatic. At best, it indicates our inability or unwillingness to thematize the paradox in which our study of resistance
sits. At worst, it affirms our implications in it as “jesters” (Lacan, 1992; Zizek, 1997). It is not enough to state
that there is a dualistic, ambiguous, and contradictory dynamic between
resistance and control, so that sometimes certain acts are emblematic of a
transgression to the order and sometimes they are not. These acts we
specifically study (in rich Western business organizations) are always inscribed in today’s
socioeconomic constellation and inherently guarantee, rather than disturb
or disrupt, such a way of life. But what exactly does that mean? It means that
it does not disturb but rather supports the fantasy of ourselves as liberal,
free, and self-relating human beings to whom multiple choices are open and
all can be accommodated. This amounts to what, in the vernacular, could be expressed as “having our cake
and eating it too.” By maintaining that these are acts of resistance (marked by something more, as we have seen, than
misbehavior) is giving us a decaf resistance. Decaf, because it threatens and hurts nobody.
It
is resistance without a cost. A Real2 act of resistance is exactly an act of the impossible. This is because it
cannot be accounted for and presupposed in and by the Law and its obscene undergrowth; as such, it is an impossible act.
This impossibility is what is foreclosed from our own very discourse on
resistance in organization theory. We, of course, consume a lot of this decaf
resistance. It maintains our (as in our academic personae) subtle illusion,
that yes, the “workplace”3 (including our own) is not a silent place. I shall
return to the decaf resistance and silence in the conclusions. For the moment, I turn
more closely to an aspect that has enjoyed much attention lately in the organization theory discourse on resistance—
cynicism. This enables me to expand on the discussion of the split introduced earlier.
Subject Creation Links
The aff’s focus on becoming forever suspends political
engagement in favor of New Age self-therapy---accepting some
axioms of commonality are necessary to achieve emancipation
Chamsy Ojeili 3, Senior Lecturer School of Social and Cultural Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, Postmodernism, the Return to Ethics, and the Crisis of Socialist Values,
www.democracynature.org/vol8/ojeili_ethics.htm#_edn9
Notably, anarchists have often been charged with this failing by Marxian thinkers.[157] Anarchism does include those suspicious of the demands of association,
those who fear the tyranny of the majority and who emphasise instead the uniqueness and liberty of the individual. Here, the freedom of the creative individual,
unhindered by the limitations of sociality, is essential. This second strand shows clearly the influence of liberal ideas. It is also, in its bohemian and nihilistic
incarnation, a child to the malevolent trio of De Sade, Stirner, Nietzsche, that is, those who reject coercive community mores and who recoil from herdish,
conformist pressures. The free individual must create his or her own guiding set of values, exploring the hitherto untapped and perhaps darker aspects of him or
herself through an art which chaffs against the standards of beauty and taste of the ordinary mortal. Given that freedom cannot endure limitations and that all idols
have been driven from the world and the mind, for these revolutionaries, “all is permitted”.[158] This emphasis on individual sovereignty is clear in Godwin and
Stirner,[159] but also in Goldman’s suspicion of collective life, in her elevation of the role of heroic individuals in history, and in the work of situationist Raoul
Vaneigem.[160]¶ This accent within non-orthodox socialism has been much criticised. For instance, Murray Bookchin has contrasted “social” with “lifestyle”
consider, here,
the consequences, in the case of Emma Goldman, of the substitution of collective
revolutionary change for boheme and for an intellectualist contempt for the masses.
Goldman turned more and more to purely self-expressive activity and increasingly appealed to
intellectuals and middle class audiences, who felt amused and flattered by her individualism and exotic iconoclasm.[162] This egoistic and
anarchism, rejecting the elevation the self-rule of the individual in the latter to the highest goal of anarchist thinking.[161] One might
personalistic turn ignores the essential social anarchist aspiration to freedom,
the commitment to an end to domination in society , the comprehension of the social premises of the
individualist urge itself, and the necessity of moving beyond a purely negative conception of liberty to a thicker, positive conception of freedom.[163] Perhaps, as
the recent individualist and neo-situationist concern
with subjectivity, expression, and desire is all too much like middle class
Bookchin has rather trenchantly asserted,
narcissism and the self-centred therapeutics of New Age culture.
Perhaps also, as Barrot
has said, the kind of revolutionary life advocated by Vaneigem cannot be lived.[164] Further, total freedom for any one individual necessarily means diminished
freedom for others. As La Banquise argue, “Repression and sublimation prevent people from sliding into a refusal of otherness”.[165] For socialists, freedom must
The whole thrust of libertarian politics is towards a
collective project that reconstructs those freedom-limiting structures of
economy, power, and ideology.[166] It seems unlikely that such ambitions could be achieved by those motivated solely by a
Sadean ambition to seek satisfaction of their own improperly understood desires. ¶ On this question, Castoriadis is again useful – accenting
autonomy as a property of the collective and of each individual within
society, and rejecting the opposition between community and humanity, between
the “inner man [sic] and the public man [sic]”.[167] Castoriadis ridiculed abstract individualism: “We
are not ‘individuals’, freely floating above society and history, who are capable of
be an ineradicably social as well as an individual matter.
deciding sovereignly
and in the absolute about what we shall do, about how we shall do it, and about the meaning our doing will have once
it is done … Above all, qua individuals, we choose neither the questions to which we will have to respond nor the terms in which they will be posed, nor, especially,
Rejecting the contemporary tendency to posit others as
limitations on our freedom, Castoriadis argued that others were in fact premises of
liberty, “possibilities of action”, and “sources of facilitation”.[169] Freedom is the
most vital object of politics, and this freedom – always a process and never an
achieved state – is equated with the “effective, humanly feasible, lucid and
reflective positing of the rules of individual and collective activity”.[170] An
the ultimate meaning of our response, once given”.[168]
autonomous society – one without alienation – explicitly and democratically creates and recreates the institutions of its own world,
formulating and reformulating its own rules, rather than simply accepting them as given from above and outside. The resulting institutions,
Castoriadis hoped, would facilitate high levels of responsibility and activity among all people in respect of all questions about society.[171]¶ Castoriadis’
notion of social transformation holds to the goals of integrated human communities, the unification of people’s lives and culture, and the collective domination of
committed to the free deployment of the person’s
creative forces. Just as Castoriadis enthused over the capacity of human collectivities for immense works of creativity and responsibility,[173] so
people over their own lives.[172] He was also
he insisted on the radical creativity of the individual and the importance of individual freedom. Congruent with the notion of social autonomy, Castoriadis posited
the autonomous individual as, most essentially, one who legislates for and thus regulates him or herself.[174] Turning to psychoanalysis, he designated this
autonomy as the emergence of a more balanced and productive relationship between the ego and the unconscious. For Castoriadis,
these goals
were not guaranteed by anything outside of the collective activity of people
towards such goals , and he insisted that individual autonomy could only
arise “under heavily instituted conditions … through the instauration of a
regime that is genuinely … democratic ”.[175] Such an outcome could not be
solved in theory but only by a re-awakening of politics. Only in the clash of
opinions – dependent on a restructured social formation – not determined
in advance by naturalistic or religious postulates, could a true ethics emerge.[176] This, I believe, is the highpoint of
Conclusion ¶ I have argued that socialist orthodoxy has been eclipsed as a programme
for the good life. On the one hand, it devolves into a project of pragmatic expediency bereft of a political and ethical
dimension, where statist administration submerges both individual freedom and democratic decision-making. On the
other hand, as social democracy the orthodox tradition coalesces into a variety of more or less straightforward liberalism.
Liberalism tends to overstate the conception of humans as choosers, under-theorising and under-valuing the necessity of
political community and the social dimension of individuality and the necessity of a positive conception of freedom. The
communitarian critique, however, too readily diminishes the freedoms of the individual, subordinating people entirely to
the horizons of community life and reducing politics to something like a “general will”. ¶ Possessed of both liberal and
communitarian features, post-modernism has been skeptical about the idea of a unitary human essence. It has jettisoned
the notion of humans as unencumbered choosers, and it has underscored the constructedness of all our values. In so
doing, post-modernism signals a renewed interest in ethics, in questions of responsibility,
libertarian thinking about ethics and politics.
evaluation, and difference, within contemporary social thinking. Post-modernism offers a valuable critique of the
tendency of socialist orthodoxy to bury the socialist insight as to the sociality and historicity of values.
Nevertheless, advancing as it does on orthodox socialism, post-modernism’s radical constructivism and
its horror
at the disasters of confident and unreflective modernity can issue in an ironic
hesitancy, indicated in particular by an uncritical emphasis on pluralism and
incommensurability that threatens to forever suspend evaluation .[177] One
signal of this is the cautious and depoliticised obsession with Otherness and the
subject as victim of the return to ethics.[178] Further, post-modernism all too often
withdraws from universals and emancipation towards particularist – either
individualist or community-based – answers to questions of justice and the content of the
valuable life. In contrast, those seeking a radical, inclusive democracy must remain
engaged and universalist in orientation . ¶ A number of libertarians have not hesitated in
committing themselves, most importantly, to the emancipation of humanity without exception.[179] In
fact, politics and ethics seem unthinkable without such universalistic
aspirations . Post-modernists themselves have often had to submit to this truth,
smuggling into their analyses universally-binding ethico-political
principles and attempting to theorise the potential linkages between
progressive political struggles. However, such linkages do not amount to a
coherent anti-systemic movement that addresses the power of state and
capital . In contrast, the universalist commitments of the ethics of emancipation
held to by many libertarians accents
both freedom and equality , and the establishment
of a true political community , against the dominations and distortions of state
and capital. Against the contemporary obsession with ethics, which is so often
sloganistic, depoliticised , defensive, privatised, and trivial, we should, with Castoriadis,
accent politics as primary and as the condition of proper ethical
engagement. I have argued that, in line with Castoriadis’ strictures, such a political community and the aspiration
to truly ethical and political deliberation, can only be attained when socialists free themselves from belief in the possibility
of extra social guarantees “other than the free play of passions and needs”,[180] and from the expectation of an end to
tensions and dilemmas around questions of social ordering. On these terms, libertarian goals are not – contra liberal
strictures – the negation of aspirations for freedom and democracy but are rather a collective pressing of these aspirations
to the very far limits of popular sovereignty. It is for this reason that the stubborn durability of these goals may, against all
expectations, be an auspicious sign for libertarian utopianism.
Queerness
Root Cause
Capitalism is the root cause of queer oppression
Crunch 11 (Queers and Capitalism Part One: The Dialectics of Moving Towards A Larger Social Acceptance,
https://ordoesitexplode.wordpress.com/2011/06/10/queers-and-capitalism-part-one-the-dialectics-of-moving-towardsa-larger-social-acceptance/, June 10, 2011)
For me, a struggle against homophobia must mean one that addresses capitalism. I see my oppression as a Black, gay male
as one whose roots are intrinsically linked with the beast of capitalism. In order for the power structure to maintain
itself it needs to suppress certain parts of the population. Does this mean that we will never see wealthy gays? No, San
Francisco is proof of that. However, it does mean that the majority of queer and trans folk,
especially those of color, can
bet that they will never be apart of the ruling class. The
very nature of the society cannot allow for that. Queer folk, being a one of the more
vulnerable parts of the population, find themselves subordinated into lower levels of the
working class through homophobia or excluded entirely as seen in the case of trans folk.
This strengthens the elite and their machinery because the horizontal
violence (homophobia) maintains a division of labor and permanent caste
position. We also see the building of a surplus army of labor (the unemployed) to be used against working people
who may feel the need to challenge their abuse at the hands of the elite. Workers who seek to withhold their labor (strikes)
until better conditions arise are quickly met with the leagues of unemployed folk who will scab (break the picket and
replace the strikers) and that makes sense in a society where there is no space for the entirety of the population to work for
a decent wage. Also, just as in the case of race, socialized gender is a one of the pillars of
capitalism. In using patriarchy as one of it’s stepping stones, capitalism has created the
conditions under which it’s demise cannot come without attacking the
gendered division of labor, homophobia, etc . . . This means that our ascension into the utter
fabulousness of liberation means that gender, and capitalism must be destroyed because the
destruction of such a poisonous ideology (patriarchy) would mean the crumbling
of walls built between working people. The system needs us isolated into paranoid fractions.
Capitalism is the root cause of queer oppression
Copland 15 (Simon, Australian freelance writer, specialising in sex, culture and politics, Sex and
society (4), Capitalism and Gay Oppression, http://leftflank.org/2015/06/19/sex-and-society-4-capitalism-gay-oppression/,
6/19/15)
How has this translated during the rise of industrial capitalism? Just as industrialised capitalism had the potential to
break the bonds of the patriarchy, John D’Emilio notes it also had the capacity to lead to greater freedoms for gays and
lesbians. As noted in previous blogs capitalism weakened the foundation of family life as it brought people away from rural
family life into more autonomous lives in the city. This is why Engels predicted capitalism would lead to the end of the
proletarian family. This breakdown of the traditional family also allowed for greater autonomy for gays and lesbians. Yet,
with this came a problem. While industrial capitalism opened the potential for the breakdown in the family unit,
capitalists required families to stay together more than ever — primarily so
they could reproduce the next lot of workers. This remains a fundamental contradiction of
capitalism. Stonewall This contradiction created a very unique situation for gays and lesbians. In The History of Sexuality
Michel Foucault argues there have been two significant changes in the way our society approaches sexuality. First sex and
our sexual desires shifted from something we simply do into something that reveals a fundamental truth about who we
are, and second, with this, we have developed an obligation to see out that truth and express it. As Jesi Egan argues,
“within this framework, sex isn’t just something you do. Instead, the kind of sex you have (or want to have) becomes a
symptom of something else: your sexuality.” As industrialised capitalism developed sex shifted from something you just
did, to something that formed a core part of your identity. In doing so our capitalist society was able to
identify and target people who connected to this identity. It’s worth noting that this is an
interesting, and largely positive step forward in society. Industrial capitalism allowed for the development of
individuality that was not possible in previous social organisations. Despite attempts to oppress this
individuality, as occurred with those with “divergent sexualities” this is largely a
positive step forward. Foucault argues the creation of sexual identities was matched with a scientific approach to
sexualities — what he calls Scientia Sexualis. The identification of different sexualities
allowed for these sexualities to be “controlled” and “cured”. This is how
anti-gay sentiment manifested in the modern capitalist state. Capitalism
created the very foundations of the homosexual identity, but also required that identity to be squashed
so it did not mess with the norm of the nuclear family, which the state
promoted because the breakdown of family structures caused by capitalism
threatened wider social breakdown. Hence a process of scientific
identification and treatment — treatment designed to bring those with
deviant identities back into the fold.
Capitalism negatively affects queers
Kirsch 06 (Max, PhD, Queer Theory Late Capitalism and Internalized
Homophobia,
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/6517971_Queer_Theory_Late_Capitalism_and_Intern
alized_Homophobia, February 2006)
What the history
of advertising shows is that you can appeal to the queer
community without condoning its behavior. While the human need for
community enhances the drive for conformity, the realization of the
generalized non-acceptance and “otherness” of queerness fuels arguments
for difference as an expression of resistance while, at the same time, it extols the
desire to “normalize” and consume, evoking courses of action that often
result in the buying of uniforms rather than the celebrating of difference.
Communities, both geographic and spatial, have historically acted as agents of resistance to exogenous forces that would
transform their role as centers of daily physical and emotional maintenance for individuals, kinship units and groups.
The aim of the capitalist engagement of the social realm, then, is the creation
of the ego-centered individual and the destruction of communities as places
of mutual support and resistance. In more recent times, transnational corporations have responded to
the ability of communities to resist outside domination by actively fighting their influence on social life, and indeed, their
very existence. In the face of conflict, they have moved their production to other areas where communities and unions are
less organized. In the 1970s, the mass movement of factories around the world to areas where communities did not exist
forced wage-seekers to travel to the worksite. The movement of corporations offshore serves to provide, at least initially,
resistance-free factories. These are calculated strategies to counter incipient organization. This separation of
worker from both product and community affects every aspect of daily living
and emotional life. But there is resistance to attempts to destroy solidarity on the part of global forces.
Geographic communities can even act as barricades against the attempt to enforce hegemony. Emotional
communities, whether they be produced by similarities based on sex,
gender, race, or class, serve as centers of identification, spaces where
individuals realize that there are others like themselves and which provide a
counter to the alienation caused by rejection and discrimination. Communities can
thus provide alternatives to the goals of capitalist production. Jameson has proposed that the concept of
alienation in late capitalism has been replaced with fragmentation (1991, p.14).
Fragmentation highlights the increased separation of people from one
another and from place that is now occurring. It is located in a generalized and growing lack of
cultural affect that distinguishes our present period from our past. Which is not to say, in Jameson’s words, that “the
cultural products of the postmodern era are utterly devoid of feeling, but rather that such feelings–which it may be better
and more accurate, following J.F. Lyotard, to call ‘intensities,”–are particularly free flowing and impersonal” (1991, p. 16).
Here, many postmodernists and poststructuralists argue, is the disappearance of the individual as subject. Yet what is
really completed with this disappearance is the objectification of the
individual as alone and incomparable. As the idea of difference becomes embedded in culture it
also becomes more abstract:
Queerness/Queer Theory = Capitalist
Queerness feeds capitalism
Crunch 11 (Queers and Capitalism Part One: The Dialectics of Moving Towards A Larger Social Acceptance,
https://ordoesitexplode.wordpress.com/2011/06/10/queers-and-capitalism-part-one-the-dialectics-of-moving-towardsa-larger-social-acceptance/, June 10, 2011)
It is in the best interest of capitalism to bring queers into the fold (through a very narrow,
white supremacist, patriarchal view of course) the
potential to expand capital through an
exploitation of queer images and culture is vast. At the same time this gay
assimilation dulls the blade of radical queer politics. Because capitalism’s
veil of justice and equality is kept in place through the façade of acceptance
and limitless upward mobility, embodied in the emerging queer ruling class,
it becomes harder for queer militants to argue for the necessity of a
revolution against capitalism itself. Reform to the system is popular when
the connection between class oppression and patriarchy isn’t clear. If I believe
that patriarchy is something completely separate from the otherwise redeemable capitalist world order then it makes no
sense to seize the means of production as apart of liberation because my conceived liberation is tied to
the eradication of an ideology within certain people and not connected to a
material struggle against the bourgeoisie (the top 10% of people who own everything) to end
the totality of oppression. Radical queers, in this historical moment, find themselves
struggling to articulate the need for a queer struggle that includes a radical
class analysis and positive program that reflects such. We must also win people away
from bourgeois delusions like equality under capitalism.
Queer theory aligns itself with capitalist ideas
Kirsch 06 (Max, PhD, Queer Theory Late Capitalism and Internalized
Homophobia,
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/6517971_Queer_Theory_Late_Capitalism_and_Intern
alized_Homophobia, February 2006)
This mirroring
of late capitalism in queer theory has unforeseen
consequences for the individual in society and has hindered its practioners
from engaging important ways of envisioning collective action. Queer theory
promotes the “self” of the individual as an alternative to wider social interaction,
disassembling the social ties that bind. Recognizing that oppression and violence, symbolic and
physical, are part of the daily reality for those of us who do not correspond to dominant standards is compromised by
queer theory’s rejection of the category of identity, and indeed, categories as a whole. The stance that it is limiting to pose
categories of behavior and belief, even if those constructs are fluid and changing, puts the individual subject in the
position of internalizing thoughts and feelings without the benefit of peer feedback. Too, this aspect of
marginality can itself become an identity: if one recognizes and embraces
the fact that one is marginalized, there is no need to seek support or to
engage social action. It declares that the only way to prevent being
overwhelmed by power is to “disclaim” (Butler, 1993, p. 308). But to simply
disclaim creates isolation, and, as I will maintain, reinforces internalized
homophobia.