Cap Against Race Affs—UMich 2013
Links
L: General
Using race as an analytic category blurs real power structures and prevents change—
Marxist analysis does not ignore it but explains it on a deeper and more effective level
Scatamburlo-D’Annibale and McLaren 04 (Valerie and Peter, associate professor in the Department of
Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor and Professor in the Division of Urban Schooling, the Graduate School of
Education and Information Studies at UCLA, “Class Dismissed? Historical materialism and the politics of ‘difference’”, Educational Philosophy
and Theory 36:2, April 2004, Wiley)//AS
A radical political economy framework is crucial since various ‘culturalist’ perspectives seem to
diminish the role of political economy and class forces in shaping the edifice of ‘the social’—including the
shifting constellations and meanings of ‘difference.’ Furthermore, none of the ‘differences’ valorized in culturalist
narratives alone, and certainly not ‘race’ by itself can explain the massive transformation of the
structure of capitalism in recent years. We agree with Meyerson (2000) that ‘race’ is not an adequate explanatory
category on its own and that the use of ‘race’ as a descriptive or analytical category has serious
consequences for the way in which social life is presumed to be constituted and organized. The
category of ‘race’—the conceptual framework that the oppressed often employ to interpret their experiences of inequality ‘often
clouds the concrete reality of class, and blurs the actual structure of power and privilege.’ In this regard,
‘race’ is all too often a ‘barrier to understanding the central role of class in shaping personal and
collective outcomes within a capitalist society’ (Marable, 1995, pp. 8, 226). In many ways, the use of ‘race’ has
become an analytical trap precisely when it has been employed in antiseptic isolation from the messy
terrain of historical and material relations. This, of course, does not imply that we ignore racism and racial
oppression; rather, an analytical shift from ‘race’ to a plural conceptualization of ‘racisms’ and their
historical articulations is necessary (cf. McLaren & Torres, 1999). However, it is important to note that ‘race’ doesn’t
explain racism and forms of racial oppression. Those relations are best understood within the context
of class rule, as Bannerji, Kovel, Marable and Meyerson imply—but that compels us to forge a conceptual shift in theorizing, which entails
(among other things) moving beyond the ideology of ‘difference’ and ‘race’ as the dominant prisms for understanding exploitation and
oppression. We are aware of some potential implications for white Marxist criticalists to unwittingly support racist practices in their criticisms
of ‘race-first’ positions articulated in the social sciences. In those instances, white criticalists wrongly go on ‘high alert’ in placing theorists of
color under special surveillance for downplaying an analysis of capitalism and class. These activities on the part of white criticalists must be
condemned, as must be efforts to stress class analysis primarily as a means of creating a white vanguard position in the struggle against
capitalism. Our
position is one that attempts to link practices of racial oppression to the central, totalizing
dynamics of capitalist society in order to resist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy more fully .7 We
have argued that it is virtually impossible to conceptualize class without attending to the forms and contents of difference, but we insist that
this does not imply that class struggle is now outdated by the politics of difference. As Jameson (1998, p. 136) notes, we are now in the midst of
returning to the ‘most fundamental form of class struggle’ in light of current global conditions. Today's climate suggests that class struggle
is ‘not yet a thing of the past’ and that those who seek to undermine its centrality are not only
‘morally callous’ and ‘seriously out of touch with reality’ but also largely blind to the ‘needs of the
large mass of people who are barely surviving capital's newly-honed mechanisms of globalized greed’
(Harvey, 1998, pp. 7–9). In our view, a more comprehensive and politically useful understanding of the
contemporary historical juncture necessitates foregrounding class analysis and the primacy of the
working class as the fundamental agent of change.8 This does not render as ‘secondary’ the concerns of those marginalized
by race, ethnicity, etc. as is routinely charged by post-Marxists. It is often assumed that foregrounding capitalist social
relations necessarily undermines the importance of attending to ‘difference’ and/or trivializes
struggles against racism, etc., in favor of an abstractly defined class-based politics typically identified as ‘white.’ Yet, such
formulations rest on a bizarre but generally unspoken logic that assumes that racial and ethnic
‘minorities’ are only conjuncturally related to the working class. This stance is patently absurd since the
concept of the ‘working class’ is undoubtedly comprised of men and women of different races,
ethnicities, etc. (Mitter, 1997). A good deal of post-Marxist critique is subtly racist (not to mention
essentialist) insofar as it implies that ‘people of color’ could not possibly be concerned with issues
beyond those related to their ‘racial’ or ‘ethnic’‘difference.’ This posits ‘people of color’ as single-minded, onedimensional caricatures and assumes that their working lives are less crucial to their self-understanding (and survival) than is the case with their
‘white male’ counterparts.9 It
also ignores ‘the fact that class is an ineradicable dimension of everybody's
lives’ (Gimenez, 2001, p. 2) and that social oppression is much more than tangentially linked to class
background and the exploitative relations of production. On this topic, Meyerson (2000) is worth quoting at length:
“Marxism properly interpreted emphasizes the primacy of class in a number of senses. One of course is the primacy of the working class as a
revolutionary agent—a primacy which does not render women and people of color ‘secondary.’ This view assumes that ‘working class’ means
white—this division between a white working class and all the others, whose identity (along with a corresponding social theory to explain that
identity) is thereby viewed as either primarily one of gender and race or hybrid …[T]he primacy of class means … that building a multiracial,
multi-gendered international working-class organization or organizations should be the goal of any revolutionary movement so that the
primacy of class puts the fight against racism and sexism at the center. The intelligibility of this position is rooted in the explanatory primacy of
class analysis for understanding the structural determinants of race, gender, and class oppression. Oppression is multiple and intersecting but
its causes are not.” The cohesiveness of this position suggests that forms of exploitation and oppression are related internally to the extent that
they are located in the same totality—one which is currently defined by capitalist class rule. Capitalism is an overarching totality that is,
unfortunately, becoming increasingly invisible in post-Marxist ‘discursive’ narratives that valorize ‘difference’ as a primary explanatory
construct.
Their aff legitimizes current social relations and is used by the elites to exacerbate commodification of
the working class
Tumino 1[Stephen, Prof English at Pitt, ““What is Orthodox Marxism and Why it Matters Now More than
Ever”, Red Critique, p. online,
http://redcritique.org/spring2001/printversions/whatisorthodoxmarxismprint.htm SGarg]
Two"Orthodox" Marxism has become the latest cover by which the bourgeois left authenticates its
credentials and proceeds to legitimate the economics of the ruling class and its anti-proletarian
politics.Take Paul Smith, for example. In Orthodox Marxism class is the central issue. (I put aside here
that in his writings, on subjectivity for example, Smith has already gotten rid of the "central" by a
deconstructive logic). What Smith does with class is a rather interesting test of how OrthodoxMarxism is
being used to legitimate the class interests of the owners. Smith reworks class and turns it into a useless
Habermasian communicative act. He writes that "classes are what are formed in struggle, not something
that exists prior to struggle" (Millennial Dreams 60). To say it again: the old ideological textualization of
the "new left" is not working any more (just look at the resistance against globalization), so the ruling
class is now reworking the "old left" to defend itself. Against the Orthodox Marxist theory of class, Smith
evacuates class of an objective basis in the extraction of surplus labor in production, and makes it the
effect of local conflicts.In short, Smith reverses the Orthodox Marxist position that, "It is not the
consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that
determines their consciousness" (Marx, Contribution, 21), and turns it into a neomarxist view that what
matters is their consciousness. In this he in fact shares a great deal with conservative theories that make
"values" (the subjective) as what matters in social life and not economic access.Zizek provides another
example of the flexodox parody of Marxism today. Capitalism in Orthodox Marxism is explained as an
historical mode of production based on the privatization of the means of subsistence in the hands of a
few, i.e., the systemic exploitation of labor by capital.Capitalism is the world-historic regime of unpaid
surplus-labor. In Zizek's writings, capitalism is not based on exploitation in production (surplus-labor),
but on struggles over consumption ("surplus-enjoyment"). The Orthodox Marxist concepts that lay bare
the exploitative production relations in order to change them are thus replaced with a "psycho-marxist"
pastiche of consumption in his writings, a revisionist move that has proven immensely successful in the
bourgeois cultural criticism.Zizek, however, has taken to representing this displacement of labor
(production) with desire (consumption) as "strictly correlative" to the concept of "revolutionary praxis"
found in the texts of Orthodox Marxism(e.g., "Repeating Lenin"). Revolutionary practice is always
informed by class consciousness and transformative cultural critique has always aimed at producing
class consciousness by laying bare the false consciousness that ruling ideology institutes in the everyday.
Transformativecultural critique,in other words, is always a linking of consciousness to production
practices from which a knowledge of social totality emerges. Zizek, however, long ago abandoned
Orthodox Marxist ideology critique as an epistemologically naïve theory of "ideology" because it could
not account for the persistence of "desire" beyond critique (the "enlightened false-consciousness" of
The Sublime Object of Ideology, Mapping Ideology,. . . ).His more recent "return to the centrality of the
Marxist critique" is, as a result, a purely tropic voluntarism of the kind he endlessly celebrates in his
diffusionist readings of culture as desire-al moments when social norms are violated and personal
emotions spontaneously experienced as absolutely compulsory (as "drive"). His concept of revolutionary
Marxist praxis consists of re-describing it as an "excessive" lifestyle choice (analogous to pedophilia and
other culturally marginalized practices, The Ticklish Subject 381-8). On this reading,Marxism is the only
metaphorical displacement of "desire" into "surplus-pleasure" that makes imperative the "direct
socialization of the productive process" (Ticklish Subject 350)and that thus causes the subjects
committed to it to experience a Symbolic death at the hands of the neoliberal culture industry. It is this
"affirmative" reversal of the right-wing anti-Marxist narrative that makes Zizek's writings so highly
praised in the bourgeois "high-theory" market—where it is read as "subtle" and an example of "deep
thinking" because it confirms a transcendental position considered above politics by making all politics
ideological.If everything is ideology then there can be no fundamental social change only formal
repetition and reversal of values(Nietzsche). Zizek's pastiche of psycho-marxism thus consists in
presenting what is only theoretically possible for the capitalist—those few who have already met, in
excess, their material needs through the exploitation of the labor of the other and who can therefore
afford to elaborate fantasies of desire—as a universal form of agency freely available to
everyone.Psycho-marxism does what bourgeois ideology has always done—maintain the bourgeois
hegemony over social production by commodifying, through an aesthetic relay, the contradictions of the
wages system. What bourgeois ideology does above all is deny that the mode of social production has
an historic agency of its own independent of the subject. Zizek's "return" to "orthodox" Marxism erases
its materialist theory of desire—that "our wants and their satisfaction have their origin in society"
(Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital, 33) and do not stand in "excess" of it. In fact, he says exactly the
opposite andturns the need for Orthodox Marxist theory now into a phantom desire of individuals: he
makes "class struggle" an effect of a "totalitarian" desire to polarize the social between "us" and
"them"(using the "friend/enemy" binary found in the writings of the Nazi Carl Schmitt, Ticklish Subject
226).What is basic only to Orthodox Marxist theory, however, which is what enables it to produce class
consciousness through a critique of ideology, is its materialist prioritization of "need" over "desire." Only
Orthodox Marxism recognizes that although capitalism is compelled to continually expand the needs of
workers because of the profit motive it at the same time cannot satisfy these needs because of its logic
of profit. "Desire" is always an effect of class relations, of the gap between the material level and
historical potential of the forces of production and the social actuality of un-met needs.In spite of their
formal "criticality," the writings of Zizek, Spivak, Smith, Hennessy and other theorists of designer
socialisms produce concepts that legitimate the existing social relations. The notion of class in their
work, for example, is the one that now is commonly deployed in the bourgeois newspapers. In their
reporting on what has become known as the "Battle of Seattle," and in the coverage of the rising tide of
protest against the financial institutions of U.S. monopoly capital which are pillaging the nations of the
South, the bourgeois media represents the emergent class struggles as a matter of an alternative
"lifestyle choice" (e.g., the Los Angeles Times, "Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Catch Our Anti-Corporate Puppet
Show!"). On this diffusional narrative,"class" is nothing more than an opportunity for surplus-pleasure
"outside" the market for those who have voluntarily "discarded" the normal pleasures of U.S. culture. It
is the same "lifestyle" politics that in the flexodox marxism of AntonioNegri is made an autonomous
zone of "immaterial labor" which he locates as the "real communism" that makes existing society postcapitalist already so that revolution is not necessary (Empire).What is at the core of both the flexodox
marxism and the popular culture of class as "lifestyle" is a de-politicization of the concepts of
OrthodoxMarxism which neutralizes them as indexes of social inequality and reduces them to merely
descriptive categories which take what is for what ought to be.Take the writings of Pierre Bourdieu for
example. Bourdieu turns Marx's dialectical concepts of "class" and "capital" which lay bare the social
totality, into floating "categories" and reflexive "classifications" that can be formally applied to any
social practice because they have been cut off from their connection to the objective global relations of
production. Bourdieu, in short, legitimates the pattern of class as "lifestyle" in the bourgeois media by
his view that "class" is an outcome of struggles over "symbolic capital" in any "field."I leave aside here
that his diffusion of the logic of capital into "cultural capital," "educational capital" and the like is itself
part of a depoliticization of the relation between capital and labor and thus a blurring of class
antagonism. What Bourdieu's "field" theory of class struggle does is segregate the struggles into so
many autonomous zones lacking in systemic determination by the historic structure of property so that
everyone is considered to be equally in possession of "capital" (ownership is rhetorically democratized)
making socialist revolution unnecessary. What the reduction of "class" and "capital" to the self-evidency
of local cultural differences cannot explain is the systemic primacy of the production of surplus-value in
unpaid-labor, the basic condition of the global majority which determines that their needs are not being
met and compels them into collective class struggles.
The aff fails and gets co-opted – only a collective revolutionary social theory will solve exploitation
Tumino 1[Stephen, Prof English at Pitt, ““What is Orthodox Marxism and Why it Matters Now More than
Ever”, Red Critique, p. online,
http://redcritique.org/spring2001/printversions/whatisorthodoxmarxismprint.htm SGarg]
Without totalizing knowledge of exploitation—which is why such dialectical concepts as "capital" form
the basis of Orthodox Marxist class theory—exploitation cannot be abolished. The cultural idealism of
the de-politicized voiding of Marxist concepts fits right in with the "volunteer-ism" of the neoliberals and
"compassionate" conservatives that they use to justify their massive privatization programs.Considering
class struggle politics as a matter of cultural struggles over symbolic status is identical to the strategy of
considering the dismantling of social welfare as an opportunity for "local" agency freed from coercive
state power, i.e., the bedrock of the "non-governmental" activism and "community" building of the
bourgeois reformists.When President select Bush seeks to mobilize what he calls the "armies of
compassion" against the "Washington insiders" and return "power" to the "people" it is the old cultural
studies logic that all politics is "people vs. power bloc," a warmed over popular frontism that makes
politics a matter of building de-politicized cross-class coalitions for bourgeois right, utopic models of a
post-political social order without class struggle possessing equality of representation that excludes the
revolutionary vanguard.As Marx and Engels said of the "bourgeois socialists" of their day, such utopian
measures "at. . . best, lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work, of bourgeois government"
(Manifesto of the Communist Party, Selected Works, 59). Zizek's "affirmation" of revolutionary Marxism
as a "totalitarian" desire that polarizes the cultural "lifeworld" between "friends" and "enemies" is
another relay of "class-as-an-after-effect of 'struggle'" of the networked left. What the parody does is
make class struggle a rhetorical "invention" of Marx(ists) analogous to the bourgeois "rights" politics of
the transnational coalitional regime of exploitation ruling today, and erases the need for a global theory
of social change. Orthodox Marxism cuts through the closed atmosphere of the "friends" of the
networked left and their embrace of a voluntarist "compassionate" millenarianism with acritique from
outside so to expose the global collective need for a revolutionary social theory and red cultural studies
to end exploitation for all.
Capitalism has appropriated the term “racist” and used it to justify its own ends—
their use only aids expansion of capital
Mitchell 93 (Katharyne, Professor of Geography at the University of Washington, “MULTICULTURALISM, OR THE UNITED COLORS OF
CAPITALISM?”, Antipode 25:4, 1993, JSTOR)//AS
This is an old story. But there is a twist that introduces a new dimensionto this pervasive development conflict. When
Goldberg
accusedRankin of inhibiting international capitalism, he accused him of beinga racist at the same
time.This new strategy, involving the politicalmanipulation of the meanings of race and racism, has
had profoundrepercussions for political and economic alliances, consciousness formation,and urbanization in Vancouver. Although
the dislocating effectsof rapid capitalist development present a familiar theme, the importanceof contemporary
international relations with wealthy Pacific Rim players,particularly those operating out of Hong Kong, introduces a
crucialsubtext; identification of major international capitalists such as Li Kashingand Victor Li brings
”race” into the equation, and control overrace construction and the meanings of race and racism has
thus becomean extremely desirable and highly contested prize. Capitalists and politiciansseeking to attract Hong
Kong Chinese investment target “localists” as racist, and endeavor to present themselves and the city as
nonracist.Their willingness to attract foreign capital, to advertise the cityas “open for business” is deliberately
conflated with a willingness toengage with Chinese immigrants and businesspeople in the spirit
ofracial harmony.
Antiracism is a justification coopted by global capital to facilitate its expansion
Mitchell 93 (Katharyne, Professor of Geography at the University of Washington, “MULTICULTURALISM, OR THE UNITED COLORS OF
CAPITALISM?”, Antipode 25:4, 1993, JSTOR)//AS
One of the stakes in this strategy of ideological production and control has been the liberal doctrine of
multiculturalism. Multiculturalism, which was heralded as Canada’s answer to the flawed and tired American melting
pot metaphor, appeared to many as the only possible solution for a diverse society with an indigenous
population, two European colonizers, and a burgeoning community of non-European immigrants. Upholding citizens’ equal
rights under law, yet respecting individuals’ fundamental differences stemming from diverse cultural and “racial” backgrounds,
the tenet of multiculturalism seemed to be the perfect solution for Canada’s disparate and often ornery population. In this
paper I examine how this hopeful, shining concept has been politically appropriated by individuals and
institutions to facilitate international investment and capitalist development in Vancouver. The city’s
increasing integration into the global economy in the 1980s intensified many of the experiences of capitalism for urban
residents and led to new forms of capitalist ventures and to new types of resistance to these ventures. Incipient relationships
between Canadian and Chinese capitalists have thus required a reworking of social as well as economic understandings for the
ventures to succeed. As economic activities are socially embedded practices influenced and gradually
transformed by local social contacts and contexts, the personal interactions between people can have
major repercussions for business activity and capital flow. Gereffi and Hamilton (1990:37) have noted, “regulatory
institutions, such as those created by the state, provide a prescriptive environment in which people fashion their involvement
in economic activities. People, however, respond not only to an institutional environment, but also to each other .” Racism,
particularly against the Chinese, has been a long-standing problem in British Columbia, which has only been
addressed in a vociferous manner in Vancouver in the past decade. As racism hinders the social
networks necessary for the integration of international capitalisms, it has been targeted for
eradication.Multiculturalism has become linked with the attempt to smooth racial friction and reduce
resistance to the recent changes in the urban environment and experiences of daily life in Vancouver. In this
sense, the attempt to shape multiculturalism can be seen as an attempt to gain hegemonic control over
concepts of race and nation in order to further expedite Vancouver’s integration into the international
networks of global capitalism.
The aff fails to solve the root cause of racism – modern racism is a construct of capitalism which
creates a new “American dream” constructed around color blindness – this simply seeks to attract
others and facilitate the expansion of capitalism
Koshy, Ph.D. @ UCLA Associate Professor of Asian American Studies, English @ University of Illinois
Urbana-Champaign, 1
[Susan, “Morphing Race into Ethnicity: Asian Americans and Critical Transformations of Whiteness”,
Boundary 2 , Vol. 28.1, pg 193-94, Duke University Press, Project Muse]//SGarg
How do these factors reflect and shape the new politics of race in the post–civil rights era? At the turn of
the century, conflicts between white labor and capital were temporarily resolved through the
disenfranchisement and exclusion of Asian labor.79 Thus the emergence of class consciousness was
preempted by fostering a race-based nationalism.80 In the present, the emergence of class
consciousness is preempted by fostering an ethnicitybased nationalism. In the updated version of the
American Dream, underwritten by corporate and popular multiculturalism, ethnically diverse subjects
aspire to success in a system that purports to reward the capitalist virtues of hard work, striving, and
self-sufficiency in all alike. Whiteness dissembles race privilege as fitness-within-capitalism and recruits
highly skilled middle-class and wealthy new immigrants to endorse this narrative of American color-blind
equality. Within the new multiculturalism, ‘‘white’’ serves only as a modifier of ethnicity, and,
simultaneously, nonwhite capitalcompatible ethnicities are promised incorporation into the American
Dream. Populist, anti-immigration discourses of the costs of immigrants notwithstanding, skillpreference and investor immigration categories provide access to a global pool of talent whose training
and education are subsidized by other governments but whose success can showcase U.S.
multiculturalism and equal opportunity. Asian immigrants serve a pivotal role in this narrative, both as
representatives of Pacific Rim economic success and as symbols of Asian political underdevelopment
(authoritarianism, ethnic con- flict, repression). The continuing demand for American citizenship shows
that the United States is still ‘‘the happiest place on earth’’ and that new Asian immigrants can be
represented as value-added Americans. Thus global narratives of development have begun to
rearticulate racial hierarchies in the United States. Identity politics, once a powerful ground for
oppositional formations, will now have to reckon with the ways in which the new discourse of ethnicity
in a transnational context obscures the operations of race and class.
Their analysis of racial oppression doesn’t take capitalist views into account – this furthers oppression
and produces new models that serve to exacerbate oppression in the capitalist society
Koshy, Ph.D. @ UCLA Associate Professor of Asian American Studies, English @ University of Illinois
Urbana-Champaign, 1
[Susan, “Morphing Race into Ethnicity: Asian Americans and Critical Transformations of Whiteness”,
Boundary 2 , Vol. 28.1, pg 163-64, Duke University Press, Project Muse]//SGarg
A materialist analysis that occludes class stratification within racial formation not only leaves
unchallenged the power of class-inflected invocations of ethnic and racial solidarity but impedes the
development of strategies that can address the cross-hatching of class, race, and ethnicity in the post–
civil rights era.16 In her discussion of the contemporary context, Lowe focuses primarily on the exploitation of immigrant Asian women
laborers in the United States, while leaving untheorized the ways in which the dramatic growth of some Asian economies, the increase and
mobility of Asian capital across national boundaries, and the entry of Asians into the technicalmanagerial class has created a situation where
Asian America is a site of both resistance and exploitation. This is particularly problematic because the
exploitation of Asian
sweatshop workers, restaurant workers, and migrant workers by small and large Asian capital often
deploys the discourse of ethnic and family loyalty to enforce discipline and extract compliance. In
addition, the postindustrial forms of historic abuses such as slavery have assumed gigantic dimensions in the transnational era and flourish within
closed national and diasporic networks that are difficult to penetrate. Pino Arlacchi, the director of the United Nations Office for Drug Control
and Crime Prevention, pointed to human trafficking (sexual slavery, forced labor, human smuggling) as the largest criminal market in the world,
involving approximately two hundred million people worldwide, of whom some thirty million women and children have been trafficked within
and from Southeast Asia alone for sex and sweatshop labor. According to Arlacchi, Chinese migrants destined for Britain and North America
‘‘disappear into neighborhoods and businesses run by other Asians,’’ and the Chinese networks, in particular, are nearly impenetrable because
‘‘the Chinese work very much inside closed communities.’’ 17The
scale of the new forms of human exploitation and the
movement of peoples within networks like these require models of ethnic and racial identity
formation that can extend beyond the equation of minoritization with resistance. Aihwa Ong
characterizes as ‘‘flexible citizenship’’ the practices of some overseas Chinese who have been adroit at
acquiring citizenship in England and North America as investors in order to avoid political instability
and optimize capital accumulation, and she points out that these strategies have, in turn, reconfigured the forms of patriarchal
power within ethnic formations.18 Thus the ‘‘outsideness’’ of some minorities to the nation has come to acquire
very different connotations from the earlier era of exclusion and labor exploitation, and the challenge
of post– civil rights politics is to produce models of minoritization and agency that do not obscure the
operations of race and class in the new global economy.
Concepts of race are used by capital to divide the working class
Retman 08 (Sonnet H. Associate Professor of African American Studies and Adjunct Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and English
at the University of Washington, “Black No More: George Schuyler and Racial Capitalism”, PMLA [ Journal of the Modern Language Association]
123:5, http://www.mlajournals.org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/doi/pdf/10.1632/pmla.2008.123.5.1448)//AS
By way of conclusion, I
return to Max’s cynical strategy for subduing the exploited working class: “these
people have been raised on the Negro problem, they’re used to it, they’re trained to react to it. Why
should I rack my brain to hunt up something else when I can use a dodge that’s always delivered the
goods?” (106). This provocation might be brought to bear on the scholarship of the Harlem Renaissance that situates race outside capital
instead of understanding it as constitutive of capital. Critics consistently suggest that “Schuyler prefers to base his political and social theories
on economic class rather than on race, so that even when the two are virtually inseparable, he generally chooses to ignore the connection”
(Rayson 103). As I have argued, we see in Schuyler’s work not a precedence of class over race or vice versa but a dialectical logic akin to Stuart
Hall’s contention that “race is . . . the modality in which class is ‘lived’” (341). Even when
workers all share the same
complexion, thereby eliminating a construction of racial difference according to phenotype, Max is able to divide his
working-class employees along racial lines by reproducing blackness as an invisible threat. Schuyler may
adopt a fantasy of racial standardization as his central plot device, but in the end his novel underscores our inability to
exclude race from a capitalist matrix. Instead of supplanting race as a category, Black No More shows
that technology augments its commercial viability, its fungible quality in the marketplace. In other words, if new
technologies enable new forms of black agency in the market, they are inexorably tied to processes of
commodification and hegemony. Indeed, in the fiction of Schuyler and other writers of the Harlem Renaissance we see an
engaged exploration of the interplay of race and the marketplace.15 This literature emerges at a particular juncture
of racial capitalism, when jim crow segregation encourages the growth of niche and crossover markets that
capitalize on racial difference, just as Fordist technologies of mass production usher in the promise of a democracy of consumers.
Limning the depths of these seemingly incongruous conditions, Schuyler takes up the violent manufacture of race in its
more hyperbolic forms—passing and blackface— to subvert basic epistemological assumptions about
race. He also demonstrates the ease with which race is transformed into a commodity—a transaction
dependent, in part, on its visual, performative, and discursive constructions. In so doing, Schuyler participates
in a central conversation about the African American encounter with the shifting racial coordinates of consumer culture in the interwar period.
His work illuminates an alternative genealogy of the Harlem Renaissance, one that centers literature that explicitly examines class and the
vagaries of race as commodity, one that sheds light on our contemporary negotiations with mass-mediated identity. With
“the
globalization of capital” and the “entrenchment of consumerism,” Schuyler’s nuanced attention to
the circulation of race in commodity form is prescient (Gilroy, Against Race 7). Dr. Crookman’s first successful
experiment on the Senegalese man in Germany forecasts the global channels through which such racial procedures and products are bought
and sold today. The purchasable whiteness of Black-No-More portends, for example, the ever-popular dramatic spectacle of identity
prosthesis on display in FX’s 2006 reality television show Black. White. about two “families trading races” (Ryan), a narrative of passing
facilitated by blackface and whiteface. The ironic turn in the novel toward “dusky skin” and the sale of “skin stains” (178) predicts what the
cultural theorist Ralina Joseph describes as the particular “post-race” marketability of the racially ambiguous models featured on the CW’s
America’s Next Top Model, the competitive reality television show hosted and created by the African American supermodel Tyra Banks.16
Though both shows are conveyed globally through the newest digital technologies, these entertainments are clearly of a piece with theatrical
forms of popular culture dating back to the nineteenth century. Perhaps it is not altogether surprising, then, that Schuyler’s satire foretells the
power of these narratives even as we enter the twenty-first century
The idea of racism weakens workers ability fight capitalism
Reich 81 (Michael Reich is Professor of Political Economy at U. C. Berkeley “The Economics of Racism”
1981 http://tomweston.net/ReichRacism.pdf researched: 7-21)
How is the historical persistence of racism in the United States to be explained? The most prominent analysis of discrimination among
economists was formulated in 1957 by Gary Becker in his book, The Economics of Discrimination. 6 Racism, according to Becker, is
fundamentally a problem of tastes and attitudes. Whites are defined to have a "taste for discrimination" if they are willing to forfeit income in
order to be associated with other whites instead of blacks. Since white employers and employees prefer not to associate with blacks, they
require a monetary compensation for the psychic cost of such association. In Becker's principal model, white employers have a taste for
discrimination; marginal productivity analysis is invoked to show that white employers lose while white workers gain (in monetary terms) from
discrimination against blacks. Becker
does not try to explain the source of white tastes for discrimination. For
him, these attitudes are determined outside of the economic system. (Racism could presumably be ended simply by
changing these attitudes, perhaps by appeal to whites on moral grounds.) According to Becker's analysis, employers would find the ending of
racism to be in their economic self-interest, but white workers would not. The persistence of racism is thus implicitly laid at the door of white
workers. Becker suggests that long-run market forces will lead to the end of discrimination anyway: less discriminatory employers, with no
"psychic costs" to enter in their accounts, will be able to operate at lower costs by hiring equivalent black workers at lower wages, thus bidding
up the black wage rate and/or driving the more discriminatory employers out of business.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 American Empire was founded on the racist extermination of American Indians, was
financed in large part by profits from slavery, and was extended by a string of interventions, beginning with the Mexican War of the
1840s, which have been at least partly justified by white supremacist ideology. Today, by transferring white resentment
toward blacks and away from capitalism, racism continues to serve the needs of the capitalist system.
Although individual employers might gain by refusing to dis criminate and hiring more blacks, thus raising the black wage rate, it is not true that
the capitalist 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 approaches to the analysis of racism. The first suggests that capitalists lose and white workers gain from racism. The second
predicts the opposite—capitalists gain while workers lose. The first says that racist "tastes for discrimination" are formed independently of the
economic system; the second argues that racism
interacts symbiotically with capitalistic economic institutions.
L: Political Movement
Black political movements are products of a capitalist system making resistance less
threatening by fragmenting it—the aff prevents successful overthrow
Reed 79 (Adolph L., professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, “Black Particularity Reconsidered”, Telos 1979: 39,
3/20/79, University of Michigan Libraries)//AS
The development
of black activism from spontaneous protest through mass mobilization to system
support indicated the arrival of a new era of domination based on domesticating negativity by
organizing spaces in which it could be legitimately expressed. Rather than suppressing opposition, the
social system now creates its own. The proliferation of government generated reference groups in addition
to ethnic ones (the old, the young, battered wives, the handicapped, veterans, retarded and gifted children, etc.)49 andtheappearance
of legions of "watchdog" agencies, reveal the extent to which the system manufactures and markets
its own illusory opposition. What makes the "age of artificial negativity" possible is the overwhelming success
of the process of massification undertaken since the Depression and in response to it. Universal
fragmentation of consciousness, with the corollary decline in the ability to think critically and the regimentation of an alienated
everyday life50 set the stage for new forms of domination built in the very texture of organization. In mass
society, organized activity on a large scale requires hierarchization. Along with hierarchy, however, the social
management logic also comes into being to (1) protect existing privileges by delivering realizable, if
inconsequential, payoffs and (2) to legitimate the administrative rationality as a valid and efficient
model. To the extent that the organization strives to ground itself on the mass it is already integrated into the system of domination. The
shibboleths whch comprise its specific platform make little difference. What is important is that the organization
reproduces the manipulative hierarchy and values typical of contemporary capitalism.
L: Academics
Black academia has been coopted by capitalist forces and subjugated to prevent
resistance—focus on race continues this
Reed 79 (Adolph L., professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, “Black Particularity Reconsidered”, Telos 1979: 39,
3/20/79, University of Michigan Libraries)//AS
Finally, Prof. Williams does" lay out," as the parlance goes, an interest- ing view of some of the options which might be available if selfmanagement were on the agenda of a politically autonomous black community. However, since we
are nowhere near autonomy
and since after almost a decade of black community development activity we have only
inconsequential results (and no sign of improvement forthcoming),those carefully elaborated options really have
little significance. What is signifi- cant is that Prof. Williams reflects those characteristics of current black social
thought discussed early in this comment. For all the fanfare he is commited to the type of social order which he
seems to protest against. So long as each enterprise is internally democratic, he has no problem. For all the novelty, we come
right back to where we have been since the English peasants were driven off the land and African
peasants stolen to the plantations. Our author proposes only a little procedural self-management for window-dressing. I am
reminded of the quoted passage which began these remarks and of the avuncular esteem held by black "nation-builders" for the American
bourgeoisie which is apparently, but perhaps often unconsciously, the model for the "development" which those builders would have in store
for us. Fortunately, they are too late and too inept to implement the model. Regrettably, however, black
academics and other
social theorists, whose social function should be clarification of the ambiguities and illu- sions propagated by
those ideologists of the reigning order, have failed miserably. We become epigones to the mainstream currents in
social science ideology to hustling black ideologues and to any other bourgeois stimulus available. We allow ourselves to
be led into tangential or impro- perly stated argumentslike school-busing, affirmative action, and the
like. We never bother to reflect on the social implications of our work, and instead of clarification we seek more
after acceptability and vogue. La- mentably, of the mass of recent attempts by black liberal intellectuals at social theory
we can make the same observation that Marx made of the work of the last major British liberal, John Stuart Mill: "On
the level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the imbecile flatness of the present bourgeoisie is
to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects. ''13
L: Rap
Rap and the surrounding culture have been irrevocably corrupted by white capital—
their resistance only furthers the oppressive capitalist project
Comissiong No Date (Simon, educator, community activist, author, public speaker and the host of the Your World News radio
program, “Corporate Hip Hop, White Supremacy and Capitalism”, Mystic Politics, http://mysticpolitics.com/corporate-hip-hop-whitesupremacy-capitalism/)
Huge media corporations literally bought up Hip Hop in the early to mid-1990s, imposing “cookie
cutter themes of senseless violence, excessive materialism, and misogyny.” Progressive voices in rap
were silenced. The clear message was, “the minute you dare try to step outside of the ‘box’ and attack their power structure, you will be
omitted.” “I won’t believe the hype I understand the Media dictates The mind and rotates The way you think And syncopates slow pace… Brains
Can’t maintain A certain Insipid inane crass rain. Insane lame Traditions All praise fame Positions Want to be a star. Drive a big car. Live
bourgeois…And won’t know who you are. Lost in the source And praising the dollar” – Kool Moe Dee (1989) It
is undeniable that hip
hop culture is one of the most powerful marketing tools America has seen in quite sometime. Had hip hop
been around during the earlier part of the 20th century the unscrupulous public relations pioneer, Edward Bernays, would have probably also
used it to promote the smoking of Viceroy Cigarettes to women.
Various aspects of hip hop culture, mainly rap music,
generate billions of dollars. However, who is generating this wealth, where is it going and at what cost?
“Their unfettered corporate feeding frenzy was similar to that of the European conquest of lands
inhabited by people of color.” Hip hop culture (rapping, djing, graffiti art, and breaking, etc.) was
unequivocally created by youth of color in the Bronx during the early 1970s. Even though the origins of hip hop
are entrenched in black and Latino communities throughout New York City it is currently pimped/used by large white owned
corporations (media, record labels, etc.) to create astronomical bottom lines, reinforce capitalistic ideals, and
adversely mass program black and brown youth. Hip hop has been co-opted, from the black
community, by the white corporate establishment in much the same manner as was rock-n-roll
(originally called rhythm and blues). Everyone from Allan Freed to Pat Boone cashed in on the original works of black artists, many of whom
died penniless. However, where the corporate establishment left off when it came to thievery of rock-n-roll they picked up with hip hop.
Once white corporations recognized the multi-billion dollar earning potential of rap music, the mass
commercialization of hip hop began. They bought out everything from record labels to urban radio
stations. Their unfettered corporate feeding frenzy was similar to that of the European conquest of
lands inhabited by people of color. RAP (rhythm and poetry) music has provided corporate radio stations
and record labels, alike, with gigantic revenues almost beyond their wildest capitalistic wet dreams.
The corporate takeover and commoditization of hip hop began to grow exponentially in the early to mid 1990s. The more money they made the
less diversified rap music became on the radio and television airwaves. Balance on the mainstream airwaves rapidly became a thing of the past.
Before corporate usurpation of rap music record labels, and subsequently airwaves, the fledging
genre (RAP) was the embodiment of resistance for many. During the late 1980s and early 1990s rap music provided
many black and Latino youth, including myself, with countless hours of culturally edifying and politically oriented music. If I was not learning
how to “Fight the Power” I was proudly sporting my leather African medallion and rocking the map of Alkebulan (Africa) shaved in the back of
my head.
L: Afro-Optimism
Rhetoric of racial optimism and progress masks the neoliberal project and prevents
true political progress
Reed 08 (Adolph L., professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, “Obama No”, The Progressive, May 2008,
http://www.progressive.org/mag_reed0508)
He's a vacuous opportunist.I’ve never been an Obama supporter. I’ve known him since the very beginning of his political career, which was his
campaign for the seat in my state senate district in Chicago. He struck me then as a vacuous opportunist, a good performer with an ear for how
to make white liberals like him. I argued at the time that his
fundamental political center of gravity,beneath an empty
rhetoric of hope and change and new directions, is neoliberal. His political repertoire has always included the
repugnant stratagem of using connection with black audiences in exactly the same way Bill Clinton did—i.e.,
getting props both for emoting with the black crowd and talking through them to affirm a victimblaming “tough love” message that focuses on alleged behavioral pathologies in poor black communities. Because he’s able
to claim racial insider standing, he actually goes beyond Clinton and rehearses the scurrilous and ridiculous sort of
narrative Bill Cosby has made infamous. It may be instructive to look at the outfit where he did his “community
organizing,” the invocation of which makes so many lefties go weak in the knees. My understanding of the group, Developing Communities
Project, at the time was that it was simply a church-based social service agency. What he pushed as his main political
credential then, to an audience generally familiar with that organization, was his role in a youth-oriented voter
registration drive. The Obama campaign has even put out a misleading bio of Michelle Obama, representing her as having grown up in
poverty on the South Side, when, in fact, her parents were city workers, and her father was a Daley machine precinct captain. This fabrication,
along with those embroideries of the candidate’s own biography, may be standard fare, the typical log cabin narrative. However, in Obama’s
case, the license taken not only underscores Obama’s more complex relationship to insider politics in Daley’s Chicago; it also underscores how
much this campaign depends on selling an image rather than substance. There is also something disturbingly
ritualistic and superficial in the Obama camp’s young minions’ enthusiasm. Paul Krugman noted months ago that the Obamistas display a
cultish quality in the sense that they treat others’ criticism or failure to support their icon as a character flaw or sin. The
campaign even
has a stock conversion narrative, which has been recycled in print by such normally clear-headed columnists as Barbara Ehrenreich
and Katha Pollitt: the middle-aged white woman’s report of not having paid much attention to Obama early on, but having been won over by
the enthusiasm and energy of their adolescent or twenty-something daughters. (A colleague recently reported having heard this narrative from
a friend, citing the latter’s conversion at the hands of her eighteen year old. I observed that three short years ago the daughter was likely acting
the same way about Britney Spears.) Princeton Professor Sean Wilentz, a Clinton supporter, noted that the Obama campaign advisers have
tried to have it both ways on the race question. On the one hand, they
present their candidate as a figure who
transcends racial divisions and “brings us together”; on the other hand, they exhort us that we should
support his candidacy because of the opportunity to “make history” (presumably by nominating and maybe electing
a black candidate). Increasingly, Obama supporters have been disposed to cry foul and charge racism at nearly
any criticism of him, in steadily more extravagant rhetoric.
L: Black Uniqueness
The concept of black uniqueness is a capitalist construct to sell products and crush
resistance to its hegemony
Reed 79 (Adolph L., professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, “Black Particularity Reconsidered”, Telos 1979: 39,
3/20/79, University of Michigan Libraries)//AS
It was in the ideological sphere as well that the third major protest, that against massification of the
black community, was resolved. Although authentic Afro-American particularity had been undermined by the standardizing
imperatives of mass capitalism, the black nationalist reaction paved the way for the constitution of an artificial
particularity.44 Residual idiomatic and physical traits, bereft of any distinctive content, were injected
with racial stereotypes and the ordinary petit bourgeois Weltanschauung to create the pretext for an
apparently unique black existence. A thoroughly ideological construction of black uniqueness — which was
projected universally in the mass market as black culture — fulfilled at least three major functions. First, as
a marketing device it facilitated the huckstering of innumerable commodities designed to enhance,
embellish, or glorify "blackness".45 Second, artificial black particularity provided the basis for the myth of
genuine black community and consequently legitimated the organization of the black population into an
administrative unit — and, therefore, the black elite's claims to primacy. Finally, the otherness-without
negativity provided by the ideologized blackness can be seen as a potential antidote to the new
contradictions generated by monopoly capitalism's bureaucratic rationality. By constituting an independently
given sector of society responsive to administrative controls, the well-managed but recalcitrant black community justifies the existence of the
administrative apparatus and legitimates existing forms of social integration. In one sense, the decade and a half of black activism was a
phenomenon vastly more significant than black activists appreciated while in another sense it was far less significant than has been claimed.46
As an emancipatory project for the Afro-American population, the "movement" — especially after the
abolishment of segregation — had little impact beyond strengthening the existing elite strata. Yet, as part
of a program of advanced capitalist reconstruction, black activism contributed to thawing the Cold War and outlined a model to replace it.
L: Multiculturalism/Diversity
Capital hides behind discourse of racial harmony to extend its reach
Mitchell 93 (Katharyne, Professor of Geography at the University of Washington, “MULTICULTURALISM, OR THE UNITED COLORS OF
CAPITALISM?”, Antipode 25:4, 1993, JSTOR)//AS
In Political Power and Social Classes Poulantzas (1973217) describes
how the dominant discourse of bourgeois
ideology presents itself as innocent of power, often through the concealment of political interests
behind the objective facade of science. In the production and promotion of multiculturalism in Canada,
the particular configurations of power remain similarly concealed, but in this case, behind the facade of
national identity and racial harmony. The struggle over ideological formation, such as the language and meaning
of race and nation, resonates as an effort to shape a dominant discourse for specific ends; the internal complexity
of the endeavor should not obfuscate the fact that it is a struggle with particular material goals and rewards. The
manipulation of ”united colors” as an increasingly common form of hegemony building in late
capitalism is arguable to the extent that the control of tensions surrounding rapid and increasingly international
spatial integration must be secured for the ongoing expansion of capitalism. The manner in which these tensions
are controlled, however, remains historically and spatially specific.
Diversity emphasis essentializes minorities and prevents solving true barriers of class
Leong 13 (Nancy, Assistant Professor of Civil Rights ,Constitutional Law, and Criminal Procedure at the University of Denver, “Racial
Capitalism”, Harvard Law Review 126:8, June 2013, Infotrac)//AS
The emphasis on diversity -- both as a way of justifying race-conscious affirmative action programs and in society more broadly -has been the subject of critique by commentators of all political persuasions. On the right, diversity is the subject
of widespread ridicule and indignation. (86) Justice Thomas, concurring in part in Grutter v. Bollinger, slightingly referred to diversity as "more a
fashionable catchphrase than ... a useful term," and to a school's interest in diversity as an "aesthetic" desire to "have a certain appearance,
from the shape of the desks and tables in its classrooms to the color of the students sitting at them." (87) Popular pundit Ann Coulter claims:
"Never in recorded history has diversity been anything but a problem. ... 'Diversity' is a difficulty to be overcome, not an advantage to be
sought." (88) This
disparagement of diversity represents a backlash against its pervasiveness . From the
left, the diversity rationale also has been criticized since its inception. (89) Derrick Bell argues that the diversity
rationale "enables courts and policymakers to avoid addressing directly the barriers of race and class
that adversely affect so many applicants" and "serves to give undeserved legitimacy to the heavy reliance on grades and test
scores that privilege well-todo, mainly white applicants." (90) From a more individualistic perspective, Richard Ford critiques the diversity
rationale on the grounds that it
essentializes minorities by ascribing certain characteristics to them and
requiring racial minorities to "perform" stereotyped versions of their identities in order to justify their
presence within institutions. (91) Like Bell, he argues that the focus on diversity detracts from more compelling
rationales for affirmative action, such as corrective or distributive justice. (92)
L: Identity Politics/Historical Analogies
Capital coopts identity politics and uses it to fracture the opposition that could
ultimately overcome all oppression—focus on race perpetuates this
Reed 79 (Adolph L., professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, “Black Particularity Reconsidered”, Telos 1979: 39,
3/20/79, University of Michigan Libraries)//AS
Over forty years ago Benjamin pointed out that "mass
reproduction is aided especially by the reproduction of
masses."lThis statement captures the central cultural dynamic of a "late" capitalism. The triumph of
the commodity form over every sphere of social existence has been made possible by a profound
homogenization of work, play, aspirations and self-definition among subject populations — a condition
Marcuse has characterized as one-dimensionality.2 Ironically, while U.S. radicals in the late 1960s fantasized about a "new man" in the
abstract, capital was in the process of concretely putting the finishing touches on its new
individual.Beneath the current black-female-student-chicano-homosexual-old-young-handicapped, etc.,
etc., ad nauseum, "struggles" lies a simple truth: there is no coherent opposition to the present
administrative apparatus. Certainly, repression contributed significantly to the extermination of opposition and there is a long record
of systematic corporate and state terror, from the Palmer Raids to the FBI campaign against the Black Panthers. Likewise, cooptation of
individuals and programs has blunted opposition to bourgeois hegemony throughout this century, and cooptative mechanisms
have
become inextricable parts of strategies of containment. However, repression and cooptation can never fully explain the
failure of opposition, and an exclusive focus on such external factors diverts attention from possible sources of failure within the opposition,
thus paving the way for the reproduction of the pattern of failure. The
opposition must investigate its own complicity.
reflexiveness was difficult because of the intensity of activism. When sharply drawn
political issues demanded unambiguous responses, reflection on unintended consequences seemed treasonous. A decade later, coming to
terms with what happened during that period is blocked by nostalgic glorification of fallen heroes and
by a surrender which Gross describes as the "ironic frame-of-mind".3 Irony and nostalgia are two sides of the coin of
resignation, the product of a cynical inwardness that makes retrospective critique seem tiresome or uncomfortable.4 At any rate, things
have not moved in an emancipatory direction despite all claims that the protest of the 1960s has
extended equalitarian democracy. In general, opportunities to determine one's destiny are no greater now than before and, more
importantly, the critique of life-as-it-is disappeared as a practical activity; i.e., an ethical and political
commitment to emancipation seems no longer legitimate, reasonable or valid. The amnestic principle, which imprisons
the social past, also subverts any hope, which ends up seeking refuge in the predominant forms of alienation. This is also true in the
black community. Black opposition has dissolved into celebration and wish fulfillment. Today's political
During the 1960s theoretical
criticism within the black community — both Marxist-Leninist and nationalist — lacks a base and is unlikely to attract substantial
constituencies.
This complete collapse of political opposition among blacks, however, is anomalous. From the
1956 Montgomery bus boycott to the 1972 African Liberation Day demonstration, there was almost
constant political motion among blacks. Since the early 1970s there has been a thorough pacification; or
these antagonisms have been so depoliticized that they can surface only in alienated forms. Moreover, few attempts have been
made to explain the atrophy of opposition within the black community.5 Theoretical reflexiveness is as rare behind Dubois'
veil as on the other sidelThis critical failing is especially regrettable because black radical protests and the
system's adjustments to them have served as catalysts in universalizing one-dimensionality and in
moving into a new era of monopoly capitalism. In this new era, which Piccone has called the age of "artificial negativity,"
traditional forms of opposition have been made obsolete by a new pattern of social management.6 Now, the social order legitimates
itself by integrating potentially antagonistic forces into a logic of centralized administration. Once
integrated, these forces regulate domination and prevent disruptive excess. Furthermore, when these internal regulatory mechanisms do not
exist, the system must create them. To the extent that the black community has been pivotal in this new mode of administered domination,
reconstruction of the trajectory of the 1960s' black activism can throw light on the current situation
and the paradoxes it generates.
The project of black advancement pacifies those already economically elite and
ignores the poor—your authors have been coopted
Reed 79 (Adolph L., professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, “Black Particularity Reconsidered”, Telos 1979: 39,
3/20/79, University of Michigan Libraries)//AS
By now the
reasons for the demise of black opposition in the U.S. should be clear. The opposition's
sources were formulated in terms of the predominant ideology and thereby formulated in terms of the predominant
ideology and thereby readily integrated as an affirmation of the reality of the system as a whole. The
movement "failed" because it "succeeded," and its success can be measured by its impact on the
administration of the social system. The protest against racial discrimination in employment and education was answered by the
middle 1970s by state-sponsored democratization of access to management and other "professional" occupations. Clear, quantifiable racial
discrimination remained a pressing public issue only for those whose livelihood depended on finding continuous instances of racial
discrimination. 41 Still, equalization
of access should not be interpreted simply as a concession: it also
rationalized recruitment of intermediate management personnel. In one sense the affirmative action
effort can be viewed as a publicly subsidized state and corporate talent search. Similarly, the protest
against external administration of black life was met by an expansion in the scope of the black
political-administrative apparatus. Through federal funding requirements of community representation,
reapportionment of electoral jurisdictions, support for voter "education" and growth of the social welfare
bureaucracy, the black elite was provided with broadened occupational opportunities and with offical
responsibility for administration of the black population. The rise of black officialdom in the latter 1970s
signals the realization of the reconstructed elite's social program and the consolidation of its
hegemony over black life. No longer do preachers, funeral directors and occasional politicos vie for the right to rationalize an
externally generated agenda to the black community. Now, black officials and professional political activists represent, interact among, and
legitimate themselves before an attentive public of black functionaries in public andprivate sectors of the social management apparatus.42
Even the ideological reproduction of the^ elite is assured: not only mass-market journalists, but black
academicians as well (through black "scholarly" publications, research institutes and professional organizations) almost
invariably sing the praises of the newly empowered elite.43
L: Individual Identity
Individual identity is inadequate to overcome racism and the capital system that
sustains it
Koepke 07 (Deanna Jacobsen, PhD candidate in Human and Organizational. Development at Fielding Graduate University, “RACE, CLASS,
POVERTY, AND CAPITALISM”, Race, Gender and Class 14:3-4, 2007, ProQuest)//AS
Most of the "-isms" that we encounter are socially constructed categories of group identity that are
located within a social system (Andersen & Collins, 2007). Their populations can change from time to time, but the categories are
necessary to promote the idea of the "other" (Madrid, 2007). The "other" is needed because, as Max Weber wrote,
power is relative. If everyone has it, then no one has it (Semau, 2001). The wealthy elite use the power
they wield through democracy and capitalism to gain more of the valuable resources available (Beeghley, 2000)
and then do whatever it takes to keep those resources and stay in power (Marable, 2000). Marable (2000) wrote
that capitalism is fraud. It promotes the idea that everyone has a fair and equal chance to succeed, that hard
work is all it takes, and that justice is inherent. In fact, most of the advantages and rewards available to people are
shaped by race, class, and gender (Rothman, 2005). These include the distribution of earnings and wealth, social prestige, political
power, educational opportunities, and justice. Our society is socially stratified with those at the top commanding
the respect of all the others. Historically, the United States has perpetuated the ideology of individualism.
There are plenty of opportunities, so those who work hard will be fairly compensated. The idea that individuals were responsible for their own
fates came from the Protestant Reformation. Wealth was seen as a sign of divine grace because God would never allow an immoral person to
prosper. Conversely, failure was seen as a personal flaw. Unfortunately, it remains
that the true results of hard work
are unequal across class and race (Shapiro, 2007). The social structure sets the range of opportunities available to any one person
(Beeghley, 2000). It is true that to a certain extent, individual differences and efforts play a part in the success of an individual. However,
there are structural patterns of inequality that go beyond the individual (Sernau, 2001).
Capitalism depends on disunity – exposing our differences prevents unified
capitalist upheaval
Bohmer 98 – Ph.D Economics @ U of Massachusetts, B.S. Economics and Math, teaches
political economy @ Evergreen State College (Peter, “Marxist Theory of Racism and Racial
Inequality”, 12/20/98, http://academic.evergreen.edu/b/bohmerp/marxracism.htm, RSpec)
Much of the social analysis that focuses on the injustices and inequalities in U.S. society has been
influenced by the ideas of Karl Marx and the Marxist tradition. Central to Marxism is the
understanding that capitalism is an economic system with two major classes. The capitalist class owns
and controls the means of production, capital, and continually tries to increase its profits. The working class, which is the large
majority of the population, sell their labor power, their capacity to work, in return for a wage. Profits come largely from paying
employees less than the value they add to production. Marx called this exploitation. Conflict between capitalists and workers is
inherent in a capitalist system. Workers try to raise their wages and improve their working conditions. Employers try to
limit wages and increase the amount of work done per hour. The employer has the upper hand because
workers fear losing their job and the unemployment that awaits them. Exploitation, in the Marxist sense, can only be
ended by the working class overthrowing capitalism. Workers can, however, improve their economic situation
by forming unions and other organizations. The more disunity among workers, the weaker their ability to
effectively challenge the employer. This insight is central to the Marxist analysis of racism, which focuses on attempts
by capitalists to divide black and white workers. If white workers identify primarily as whites,
rather than as workers, they will not act in their common class interests with black workers. The
way to end racial oppression and class exploitation is an interracial and united working class.
Racial divisions make capitalist upheaval impossible
Bohmer 98 – Ph.D Economics @ U of Massachusetts, B.S. Economics and Math, teaches
political economy @ Evergreen State College (Peter, “Marxist Theory of Racism and Racial
Inequality”, 12/20/98, http://academic.evergreen.edu/b/bohmerp/marxracism.htm, RSpec)
Racist ideology, promoted by the elites, is accepted in varying degrees by most white workers. This
‘false consciousness’ of white workers decreases the ability of workers to unite across racial lines
and struggle as a unified group for better wages, benefits and conditions. Racism makes it easier
for employers to play off one group against the other, reduce the average wage, and maximizes
employer control and profits. Paying lower wages to black workers exacerbates racial divisions.
(2)
L: Narratives
Experience without grounding in the context of capital is suspect and fails to produce
change—Marxist analysis is essential
Gimenez 01 (Martha E. , retired Professor of Sociology at the University of Colorado at Boulder, “Marxism, and Class, Gender, and Race:
Rethinking the Trilogy”, Race, Gender, and Class 8:2, April 2001, ProQuest)//AS
I agree with the importance of learning from the experience of all groups, especially those who have been
silenced by oppression and exclusion and by the effects of ideologies that mystify their actual conditions of existence. To
learn how people describe their understanding of their lives is very illuminating , for "ideas are the conscious
expression -- real or illusory -- of (our) actual relations and activities" (Marx, 1994:111), because "social existence determines consciousness"
(Marx, 1994: 211). Given
that our existence is shaped by the capitalist mode of production, experience, to
be fully understood in its broader social and political implications, has to be situated in the context of the capitalist
forces and relations that produce it. Experience in itself, however, is suspect because, dialectically, it is a
unity of opposites; it is, at the same time, unique, personal, insightful and revealing and, at the same time,
thoroughly social, partial, mystifying, itself the product of historical forces about which individuals may
know little or nothing about (for a critical assessment of experience as a source of knowledge see Sherry Gorelick, "Contradictions of
feminist methodology," in Chow, Wilkinson, and Baca Zinn, 1996; applicable to the role of experience in contemporary RGC and feminist
research is Jacoby's critique of the 1960s politics of subjectivity: Jacoby, 1973:37-49). Given
the emancipatory goals of the RGC
perspective, it is through the analytical tools of Marxist theory that it can move forward, beyond the impasse
revealed by the constant reiteration of variations on the "interlocking" metaphor. This would require, however, a) a rethinking
and modification of the postulated relationships between race, class and gender, and b) a
reconsideration of the notion that, because everyone is located at the intersection of these structures,
all social relations and interactions are "raced," "classed," and "gendered." In the RGC perspective, race,
gender and class are presented as equivalent systems of oppression with extremely negative
consequences for the oppressed. It is also asserted that the theorization of the connections between these systems require "a
working hypothesis of equivalency" (Collins, 1997:74). Whether or not it is possible to view class as just another
system of oppression depends on the theoretical framework within class is defined. If defined within the
traditional sociology of stratification perspective, in terms of a gradation perspective, class refers simply to strata or population aggregates
ranked on the basis of standard SES indicators (income, occupation, and education) (for an excellent discussion of the difference between
gradational and relational concepts of class, see Ossowski, 1963). Class in this non-relational, descriptive sense has no claims to being more
fundamental than gender or racial oppression; it simply refers to the set of individual attributes that place individuals within an aggregate or
strata arbitrarily defined by the researcher (i.e., depending on their data and research purposes, anywhere from three or four to twelve
"classes" can be identified).
Accounts of experience are situated within social sites—they cannot be productive
without a Marxist analysis
Young 06 (Robert, Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature. At New York University, “Putting Materialism back into
Race Theory: Toward a Transformative Theory of Race”, The Red Critique 11, Winter/Spring 2006,
http://www.redcritique.org/WinterSpring2006/puttingmaterialismbackintoracetheory.htm)//AS
Asante and Collins assume that experience is self-intelligible and in their discourse it functions as the
limit text of the real. However, I believe experience is a highly mediated frame of understanding. Though
it is true that a person of color experiences oppression, this experience is not self-explanatory and, therefore,
it needs to be situated in relation to other social practices. Experience seems local but it is, like all
cultural and political practices, interrelated to other practices and experiences. Thus its explanation come from
its "outside". Theory, specifically Marxist theory, provides an explanation of this outside by reading the
meaning of all experiences as determined by the economic realities of class. While Asante's and Collins'
humanism reads the experience of race as a site of "self-presence", the history of race in the United States—from slavery to Jim
Crow to Katrina—is written in the fundamental difference of class. In other words, experience does not speak
the real, but rather it is the site of contradictions and, hence, in need of conceptual elaboration to
break from cultural common sense, a conduit for dominant ideology. It is this outside that has come under attack by black
(humanist) scholars through the invocation of the black (transcendental) subject. Indeed, the discourse of the subject operates as
an ideological strategy for fetishizing the black experience and, consequently, it positions black
subjectivity beyond the reach of Marxism. For example, in the Afrocentric Idea, Asante dismisses Marxism
because it is Eurocentric (8), but are the core concepts of Marxism, such as class and mode of
production, only relevant for European social formations? Are African and African-American social histories/relations
unshaped by class structures? Asante assumes that class hierarchies do not structure African or the AfricanAmerican social experiences, and this reveals the class politics of Afrocentricity: it makes class
invisible. Asante's assumption, which erases materialism, enables him to offer the idealist formulation that the "word creates reality" (70).
The political translation of such idealism is not surprisingly very conservative. Asante directs us away from critiquing capitalist institutions, in a
manner similar to the ideological protocol of the Million Man March, and calls for vigilance against symbolic oppression. As Asante tellingly puts
it, "symbol imperialism, rather than institutional racism, is the major social problem facing multicultural societies" (56).
Their narrative focus prevents actual discussion - this turn case and proves that they turn effective
dialogue into a lecture devoid of making any change
Subotnik, J.D. (Juris Doctor) @ Columbia University School of Law, 98
(Dan, “What’s Wrong with Critical Race Theory?: Reopening the Case for Middle Class Values” Touro
Law, 1/1/1998, bit.ly/18wTRCk)//SGarg
 CRT – Critical Race Theory
 CRAT – Advocate of Critical Race Theory
If CRATs have the tools to see the world holistically, their missionshould be clear.They must endeavor to
break down categories, Williamssays, and she works to "reveal[ ] the [subtle] .intersubjectivity of
legalconstructions, that forces the reader both to participate in the construction of meaning and be
conscious of that process."'62This will be hardwork, acknowledges Williams, but there is a rewardpersonalliberation:[B]oundary crossing, from safe circle into wilderness[,] ... [i]s the willingness to spoil a
good party andbreak an encompassing circle ....The transition is dizzyingly intense, a reminder of what it
is to be alive.It isa sinful pleasure, this willing trangression of a line,which takes one into a new
awareness, a secret, lonelyand tabooed world-to survive the transgression is terrifying and addictive ....
63What a heady prospect for the stereotypically repressed academic!Regina Austin64 offers academics
even wilder pleasures. She writes: I grew up thinking that "Sapphire" was merely a character on Amos 'n'
Andy, a figment of a white man's racist/sexist comic imagination.... Sapphire is the sort of person you
look at and wonder how she can possibly standherself. All she does is complain. Why doesn't that
woman shut up?65After pondering whether blacks should renounce or embrace her,Austin concludes
that "the time has come for us to get truly hysterical, totake on the role of 'professional Sapphires' in a
forthright way . . . totestify on her own behalf, in writing, complete with footnotes. '66What precisely
should CRT's mission be?"[O]ur jurisprudenceshould create enough static to interfere with the
transmission of the dominant ideology and jam the messages that reduce our indignation, limitour
activism, misdirect our energies, and otherwise make us the(re)producers of our own
subordination.'67Given this rhetoric of victimization, could CRT develop free fromstultifying selfrighteousness? 68 And when that rhetoric is combinedwith that of transgression, provocation and
transcendence-especially inthe absence of fully-elaborated critiques to provide discipline69-would it be
surprising if CRT attracted those who are champing to shuck thecoils of traditional scholarly rigor and
self-restraint?70 Indeed, couldCRT avoid evolving into How Dost Thou Offend Me:, Let Me Count
theWays?71B. AND THE CONSEQUENCES Having traced a major strand in the development of CRT, we
turn now to the strands' effect on the relationships of CRATs with each other and with outsiders. As the
foregoing material suggests,the centralCRTmessage is not simply that minorities are being treated
unfairly, or even that individuals out there are in pain- assertions for which there are data to serve as
grist for the academic mill -but that the minority scholar himself or herself hurts and hurts badly.An
important problem that concerns the very definition of the scholarly enterprise now comes into
focus.What can an academic trained to [*694] question and to doubt n72possibly say to Patricia
Williams when effectively she announces, "I hurt bad"?n73"No, you don't hurt"? "You shouldn't
hurt"?"Other people hurt too"?Or, most dangerously - and perhaps most tellingly - "What do you expect
when you keep shooting yourself in the foot?" If the majority were perceived as having the well- being
of minority groups in mind, these responses might be acceptable, even welcomed. And theymight lead
to real conversation. But, writes Williams, the failure by those "cushioned within the invisible privileges
of race and power... to incorporate a sense of precarious connection as a part of ourlives is... ultimately
obliterating." n74 "Precarious." "Obliterating." These words will clearly invite responses only from fools
and sociopaths; they will, by effectively precluding objection, disconcert and disunite others. "I hurt," in
academic discourse, has three broad though interrelated effects. First, it demands priority from the
reader's conscience. It is for this reason that law review editors, waiving usual standards, have privileged
a long trail of undisciplined - even sillyn75- destructive and, above all, self-destructive arti
[*695]cles.n76Second, by emphasizing the emotional bond between those who hurt in a similar way, "I
hurt" discourages fellow sufferers from abstracting themselves from their pain in order to gain
perspective on their condition. n77 [*696]Last, as we have seen, it precludes the possibility of open and
structured conversation with others. n78 [*697]It is because of this conversation-stopping effectof what
they insensitively call "first-person agony stories"that Farber and Sherry deplore their use."The norms of
academic civility hamper readers from challenging the accuracy of the researcher's account; it would be
rather difficult, for example, to criticize a law review article by questioning the author's emotional
stability or veracity." n79 Perhaps, a better practice would be to put the scholar's experience on the
table, along with other relevant material, but to subject that experience to the same level of scrutiny.
Ifthrough the foregoing rhetorical strategies CRATs succeeded in limiting academic debate, why do they
not have greater influence on public policy?Discouraging white legal scholars from entering the national
conversation about race, n80 I suggest,has generated a kind of cynicism in white audiences which, in
turn, has had precisely the reverse effectof that ostensiblydesiredby CRATs.It drives the American public
to the right and ensures that anything CRT offers is reflexively rejected.In the absence of scholarly work
by white males in the area of race, of course, it is difficult to be sure what reasons they would give for
not having rallied behind CRT. Two things, however, are certain. First,the kinds of issuesraised by
Williamsare too important in their implications[*698]forAmericanlifeto be confined to communities of
color.If the lives of minorities are heavily constrained, if not fully defined, by the thoughts and actions of
the majority elements in society,it would seem to be of great importance that white thinkers and doers
participate in open discourse to bring about change. Second, given the lack of engagement of CRT by the
community of legal scholars as a whole, the discourse that should be taking place at the highest
scholarly levels has, by default, been displaced to faculty offices and, more generally, the streets and the
airwaves.
L: Institutionalized Racism
Their forced attempts to rid institutionalized racism serves to exacerbate dominant control over
education
Subotnik, J.D. (Juris Doctor) @ Columbia University School of Law, 98
(Dan, “What’s Wrong with Critical Race Theory?: Reopening the Case for Middle Class Values” Touro
Law, 1/1/1998, pg 713-15, bit.ly/18wTRCk)//SGarg
 CRT – Critical Race Theory
 CRAT – Advocate of Critical Race Theory
If Berkeley High is not the model for advancing the psychological and educational well-being of our
students-all our students-what is? Part of the answer is surely that schools must find a gentler way of
promoting inclusion. That such a middle path exists should be incontrovertible. Another way is
suggested by Art Yee's immigrant uncle.152 Art, an Asian-American at Berkeley High who seems
destined for academic success, is attending a family feast with his (unnamed) uncle. 153 The uncle is
pointing to the fat choy. "Actually it's seaweed.., but this is a good omen ... [s]o everybody [eat] fat choy;
that means make lots, lots of money.' 154 Pointing to the dried fish, he explains that it means long
life.155 Art Yee's uncle then turns philosophical as the issue shifts to whether the high school should
create an Asian-American studies program. 156 I don't think high school.., should specially set aside a
department [to] study just... Asians. We would rather have the kids learn more ... general knowledge,
like, basic mathematics, basic English, how [to] compose a good English ... paragraph. A culture is [to]
pass from generation to generation. [B]asically, culture is directly [best] related in a small family unit
instead of. . . in school.157 If whites have attempted to assert control over the schools, they have,
according to Williams, been no less eager to control immigration.158 She laments that the rich are
gaining entrance to the United States while "the Statue of Liberty's great motto [is being] retired just
when the homeless, huddled masses of the world are mostly brown and black... ."159 The observation
requires a range of responses. First, the rich only receive an immigration preference when they invest a
substantial sum in an American business and create jobs for those same huddled masses that Williams
seeks to protect.160 Second, while the door to white immigration was open for most of our history,
access to America has been substantially restricted for the last seventy years.161 Third, if the brown and
black masses are the least likely to assimilate-indeed are the most likely to insist that the emphasis be
on how mass culture can accommodate outsiders rather than on how they can best assimilate into mass
society16 2 -what policy should Williams expect? By definition a national culture is a majority culture.
And so the question arises, does a majority have a right to protect the national culture? The answer
seems apparent. 1 63 Last, and most important, the fact of the matter is that all the handwringing
notwithstanding, in each of the last ten years the number of immigrants into this country has exceeded
the number in each of the previous seventy and a large number of these have been brown and black
(and, for that matter, yellow).164 Many of them have achieved a measure of social and economic
success that is stunning. They have done so precisely because, given the opportunity to assimilate, they
have willingly distanced themselves from their old cultures to some extent to devote their energies to
the new one. 165 How can one say they are wrong? These considerations seem to apply to blacks in
America as well. According to Jennifer Hochschild, a professor of political science at Princeton, 20
percent of employed blacks worked as managers in 1990, up from 5 percent in 1950.166 Identical
numbers describe the increase in black employment rates in clerical and sales positions. 167 Thus,
Hochschild concludes, up to 40 percent of black workers can now be counted as middle class. 168 This
extraordinary transformation cannot have taken place without some assimilation. Does the black middle
class consider its birthright sold, as Williams implies? 169 Would members of this class happily send
their teenagers to Berkeley High for a different kind of education than they had? Williams offers no
data. No one would dispute that far greater social and economic gains would have been registered in
the absence of the still widespread racism that wears down black body and spirit. And surely no
reasonable person will deny that this problem still requires the wholehearted attention of the nation.
But what follows from this? Does the authentic lifestyle require that blacks withdraw from mass culture
like the Amish or the Hasidim?
L: Ideology
The aff critique of ideology is used by the bourgeoisie to further hegemonic capitalism – the alt fails
Tumino 1[Stephen, Prof English at Pitt, ““What is Orthodox Marxism and Why it Matters Now More than
Ever”, Red Critique, p. online,
http://redcritique.org/spring2001/printversions/whatisorthodoxmarxismprint.htm SGarg]
Zizek provides another example of the flexodox parody of Marxism today. Capitalismin Orthodox
Marxismis explained as an historical mode of productionbased on the privatization of the means of
subsistence in the hands of a few, i.e., the systemic exploitation of labor by capital.Capitalism is the
world-historic regime of unpaid surplus-labor. In Zizek's writings, capitalism is not based on exploitation
in production (surplus-labor), but on struggles over consumption ("surplus-enjoyment"). The
OrthodoxMarxist concepts that lay bare the exploitative production relations in order to change
themarethusreplaced with a "psycho-marxist" pastiche of consumption in his writings, a revisionist
move that has proven immensely successful in the bourgeois cultural criticism. Zizek, however, has
taken to representing this displacement of labor (production) with desire (consumption) as "strictly
correlative" to the concept of "revolutionary praxis" found in the texts of Orthodox Marxism (e.g.,
"Repeating Lenin"). Revolutionary practice is always informed by class consciousness and transformative
cultural critique has always aimed at producing class consciousness by laying bare the false
consciousness that ruling ideology institutes in the everyday.Transformative cultural critique, in other
words, is always a linking of consciousness to production practices from which a knowledge of social
totality emerges. Zizek, however, long agoabandoned Orthodox Marxist ideology critique as an
epistemologically naïve theory of "ideology" because it could not account for the persistence of "desire"
beyond critique(the "enlightened false-consciousness" of The Sublime Object of Ideology, Mapping
Ideology,. . . ). His more recent "return to the centrality of the Marxist critique" is, as a result, a purely
tropic voluntarism of the kind he endlessly celebrates in his diffusionist readings of culture as desire-al
moments when social norms are violated and personal emotions spontaneously experienced as
absolutely compulsory (as "drive"). His concept ofrevolutionary Marxist praxis consists of re-describing it
as an "excessive" lifestyle choice(analogous to pedophilia and other culturally marginalized practices,
The Ticklish Subject 381-8). On this reading, Marxism is the only metaphorical displacement of "desire"
into "surplus-pleasure" that makes imperative the "direct socialization of the productive process"
(Ticklish Subject 350) and that thus causes the subjects committed to it to experience a Symbolic death
at the hands of the neoliberal culture industry. It isthis "affirmative" reversal of the right-wing antiMarxist narrative that makes Zizek's writings so highly praised in the bourgeois "high-theory" market—
where it is read as "subtle" and an example of "deep thinking" because it confirms a transcendental
position considered above politics by making all politics ideological. If everything is ideology thenthere
can be no fundamental social change only formal repetition and reversal of values (Nietzsche). Zizek's
pastiche of psycho-marxism thus consists in presenting what is only theoretically possible for the
capitalist—those few who have already met, in excess, their material needs through the exploitation of
the labor of the other and who can therefore afford to elaborate fantasies of desire—as a universal form
of agency freely available to everyone.Psycho-marxism does what bourgeois ideology has always done—
maintain the bourgeois hegemony over social production by commodifying, through an aesthetic relay,
the contradictions of the wages system. What bourgeois ideology does above all is deny that the mode
of social production has an historic agency of its own independent of the subject. Zizek's "return" to
"orthodox" Marxism erases its materialist theory of desire—that "our wants and their satisfaction have
their origin in society" (Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital, 33) anddo not stand in "excess" of it. In fact, he
says exactly the opposite and turns the need for Orthodox Marxist theory now into a phantom desire of
individuals: he makes "class struggle" an effect of a "totalitarian" desire to polarize the social between
"us" and "them" (using the "friend/enemy" binary found in the writings of the Nazi Carl Schmitt, Ticklish
Subject 226).
L: Discussion
A simple discussion of race blocks any possibility of making any change – it simply functions to
entrench the hegemony of the hegemonically dominant capitalist system
Subotnik, J.D. (Juris Doctor) @ Columbia University School of Law, 98
(Dan, “What’s Wrong with Critical Race Theory?: Reopening the Case for Middle Class Values” Touro
Law, 1/1/1998, pg 698-701, bit.ly/18wTRCk)//SGarg
 CRT – Critical Race Theory
 CRAT – Advocate of Critical Race Theory
Since such a situation cannot be salutary, we need what Williams has so substantially contributed to,
and what she has called, that "longoverdue national dialogue about race, gender.., and all the other
divisive issues that block the full possibility of American community. 81 Williams recognizes, as many
others surely will, that such discourse will be painful. But "we must get beyond the stage of halting
conversations filled with the superficialities of hurt feelings. ' 2 In sum, what is needed is to crack the
"hermetic bravado celebrating victimization and stylized marginalization" 83 that leads to the virtual
hegemony on the discussion of race relations that the academic community has ceded to CRATs. No
matter how raw sensibilities might understandably be after centuries of slavery and racism, a position
must be staked out that allows for a rejoinder to a Derrick Bell when he says self-mutilating things like
"while slavery is over, a racist society continues to exert dominion over black men and their maleness in
ways more subtle but hardly less castrating .... ,,84 Locating that position is precisely what is attempted
here. CRT encompasses the works of a great many authors. Accordingly, I quote as many sources as my
reading and space permit. At the same time, in the interests of a more consistent and thematic
exposition, I focus particularly on the oeuvre of two notable CRATs, Patricia Williams and Regina
Austin.85 Why Professor Williams? Most importantly because she is, according to Cornel West, "a
towering public intellectual of our time [who] articulates a synoptic vision, synthetic analysis, and moral
courage with great power."86 And why The Rooster's Egg in particular? Harvard Professor Sacvan
Bercovitch calls it "a stunning achievement... a prophetic testament.... It bears much the same relation
to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s which The Souls of Black Folk does to the era of
Reconstruction. ... It deserves national attention. '87 To be sure, these accolades appear on the book
jacket and must be construed in that light. But even when subjected to the ordinary discount, they
suggest that wrestling with Williams can offer great spiritual, as well as intellectual, rewards. Regina
Austin's prominence, meanwhile, is evidenced by her recent appointment to the William A. Schnader
chair at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and her central role in a major controversy at the
Harvard Law School.88 Towards the end of The Rooster's Egg, Williams recounts a story first told by
black New York Times columnist Brent Staples, then a student at the University of Chicago.89 Staples
liked to take walks at night near the lake on the south side of the city. He realized early on that these
strolls, which gave him much pleasure, were terrifying to the whites he would encounter. Being basically
a man of peace, he was much distressed. He tried first to be "innocuous" in his gait. Then he began
whistling Vivaldi so people would hear him coming and take him for the student he was. All this,
however, came at a price2828 Then I changed .... The man and the woman walking toward me were
laughing and talking but clammed up when they saw me... I veered toward them and aimed myself so
that they'd have to part to avoid walking into me. The man stiffened, threw back his head and assumed
the stare: eyes ahead, mouth open. I suppressed the urge to scream into his face. Instead, I glided
between them, my shoulder nearly brushing his. A few steps beyond them I stopped and howled with
laughter. I came to call this game "Scatter the Pigeons." 90 Williams laments, "The gentle journalist who
stands on a streetcorner and howls. . . . What upside-down craziness, this paradoxical logic of having to
debase oneself in order to retrieve one's sanity ... "9, And yet, we may ask, how far should our hearts go
out to Williams, who articulates such anguish, and to the extent they are at one with her, to her fellow
CRATs? For in describing their lives as one extended I hurt, CRATs, as has been suggested, disconcert and
disjoin their alleged vic- timizers. 92 And so, is it not conceivable that at this very moment in a
convention hall somewhere, Williams and her friends are doubled over, convulsed with laughter,
delighting in their own versions of "Scatter the Pigeons"? 93
The affirmative’s discourse of race reduces it to a color and denies the link between racism and
oppression in the dominant capitalist system
Koshy, Ph.D. @ UCLA Associate Professor of Asian American Studies, English @ University of Illinois
Urbana-Champaign, 1
[Susan, “Morphing Race into Ethnicity: Asian Americans and Critical Transformations of Whiteness”,
Boundary 2 , Vol. 28.1, pg 187-88, Duke University Press, Project Muse]//SGarg
Conservative discourses were early to identify the distinctiveness of Asian Americans and solicit their
political affiliations on key social issues that threatened white dominance. Neoconservative discourse
achieved hegemony in the eighties and nineties, operating through a ‘‘bad-faith antiracism’’62 that
sought to maintain white advantages through a denial of racial difference. Within this discourse, the
putative economic success of Asian Americans is used to affirm the existence of a color-blind system,
which in turn negated the use of race as a category for remedial action. These arguments were given
authenticity and voice by minorities themselves, among them Indian-born Dinesh D’Souza (Illiberal
Education, The End of Racism), who were commissioned to promote these social truths. The redefinition
of race has also been extended to legal discourse and public policy with devastating effect. Harris
observes: Thus, at the very historical moment that race is infused with a perspective that reshapes it,
through race-conscious remediation, into a potential weapon against subordination, official rules
articulated in law deny that race matters. Simultaneously, the law upholds race as immutable and
biological. . . . To define race reductively as simply color, and therefore meaningless, however, is as
subordinating as defining race to be scientifically determinative of inherent deficiency. The old definition
creates a false linkage between race and inferiority; the new definition denies the real linkage between
race and oppression under systematic white supremacy.63 Neoconservative discourse has been
particularly effective in recruiting new immigrants and middle-class minorities. In particular, the myth of
the model minority,64 which has been appropriated by this discourse, singles out Asian Americans,
interpellating them as whites-to-be: ‘‘The neoconservative approach to these groups thus sought to
identify them as aspiring whites— much as Italians, Greeks, and Jews had been categorized a century
earlier —and simultaneously to exempt them from the logic of affirmative action.’’6 The abandonment
of race as an explanatory category has been accompanied by a renewed emphasis on ethnicity. I will
examine the discursive dominance of ethnicity paradigms in articulations of identity and Americanness
to locate the position of Asian Americans in the production of this shift and to highlight the dependence
of rearticulations of whiteness on Asian Americanness. I will look at two aspects of the emergence of
ethnic identity: the resurgence of white ethnicity since the 1950s, and the revitalization of nonwhite
ethnic identity with the influx of immigrants after 1965 and the rise of a multiculturalism that affirms
ethnic differentiation rather than assimilation.
Discussions of critical race theory fail to produce an outline of a substitute culture – prefer the
specificity of the world of the alternative
Subotnik, J.D. (Juris Doctor) @ Columbia University School of Law, 1998
(Dan, “What’s Wrong with Critical Race Theory?: Reopening the Case for Middle Class Values” Touro
Law, 1/1/1998, pg 707-09, bit.ly/18wTRCk)//SGarg
 CRAT – Advocate of Critical Race Theory
As for the public schools, one can hardly conceive of a more reactionary message. Over the last fifty
years social and economic development in the South has been nothing short of miraculous. And that
growth is hard to imagine without the changes in public education that have taken place. Shall the
nation head back in the direction of the rod and the one-room schoolhouse out of empty
sentimentalism and the terror of a No. 2 pencil? 123 Who can doubt that black culture today lacks the
autonomy and vitality it had before the age of mass communications and the advent of a national and
subsequently global economy? 124 The problem is that Peller's work and that of other CRATS fails to
provide even an outline for a substitute culture. What standards of performance would Peller adopt?
What subjects would be taught in the schools and how would students of different backgrounds be
taught to engage one another? 125 Without answers to such questions, must we not, at least
tentatively, incline towards skepticism? Patricia Williams puts the issue of mainstream pressure on black
culture into a broader perspective. For her the problem is the steamroller of middle-class values. Middle
class, she writes, means variously, and contradictorily, "thrifty, greedy, smug, conventional,
commonplace, respectable, hard-working, and shallow." 126 While not without redeeming aspects-a
subject we will come to' 27 -this group of features, which according to Williams seems especially
characteristic of the "amalgamated" white middle class,128 has led to a general "demand for conformity
to what keeps being called the 'larger' American way, a coerced rather than willing assimilation .... "129
Middle-class values impose "high cost: . . . some 'successfully assimilated' ethnics have become so only
by ... burying forever languages, customs and cultures." 130 What is the solution to the problem?
Williams elaborates: [If we are] to be anything more than a loose society of mercenaries-of suppliers
and demanders, of vendors and consumers-then we must recognize that other forms of group culture
and identity exist. We must respect the dynamic power of these groups and cherish their contributions
to our civil lives, rather than pretend they do not exist as a way of avoiding arguments about their
accommodation. And in our law we must be on guard against either privileging a supposedly neutral
"mass" culture that is in fact highly specific and historically contingent or legitimating a supposedly
neutral ethic of individualism that is really a corporate group identity, radically constraining any sense of
individual- ity, and silently advancing the claims of that group identity. 31 For Williams and Peller, then,
it will be hard to find authentic blacks or other minorities until American culture is thoroughly
decentralized. 132
Discussing race only reinforces it – turns the case – voting affirmative does
nothing to eliminate race
Omi and Winant 93 (Michael and Howard, “On the Theoretical Status of the Concept of
Race”, PDF, *Michael Omi Ph.D, M.A. both @ UC Santa Cruz and in sociology, Associate
Professor in Ethnic Studies Department @ UC Berkeley, *Howard Winant, professor of
sociology @ UC Berkeley, 1993, http://www.neiu.edu/~circill/f107bp1.pdf, RSpec)
Fields simply skips from emancipation to the present where disparages opponents of “racism” for unwittingly
perpetuating it. In denunciatory terms she concludes by arguing for the concept’s abolition: Nothing handed down
from the past could keep race alive if we did not constantly reinvent and re-ritualize it to fit our
own terrain. If race lives on today, it can do so only because we continue to create and re-create
it in our social life, continue to verify it, and thus continue to need a social vocabulary that will
allow us to make sense, not of what our ancestors did then, but of what we choose to do now. (p.
118) Fields is unclear about how “we” should jettison the ideological construct of race, and one can well understand why. By her own
logic, racial ideologies cannot be abolished by acts of will. One can only marvel at the ease with
she distinguishes the bad old slavery days of the past from the present, when we
anachronistically cling, as if for no reason, to the illusion that races retains any meaning. WE
which
foolishly “throw up our hands” and acquiesce in race-thinking, rather than…doing what? Denying the racially demarcated divisions
in society? Training ourselves to be “color-blind?”
L: Black/White Binary
A focus on the black-white binary prevents addressing the new capitalism which has changed modern
racism
Koshy, Ph.D. @ UCLA Associate Professor of Asian American Studies, English @ University of Illinois
Urbana-Champaign, 1
[Susan, “Morphing Race into Ethnicity: Asian Americans and Critical Transformations of Whiteness”,
Boundary 2 , Vol. 28.1, pg 151-56, Duke University Press, Project Muse]//SGarg
Whiteness studies has focused primarily on the historical emergence of liminal European groups (the
Irish and southern and eastern Europeans) as whites over the last century and a half and on the
mutually constitutive nature of whiteness and blackness in the construction of American national
identity. Central to the project of whiteness studies in both areas has been the effort to reveal the status
of whiteness as an unmarked marker and to expose its historical contingency as a racial category.1
Other minority groups have figured only tangentially in the historiography and sociology of whiteness,
thereby entrenching the black-white binary as the defining paradigm of racial formation in the United
States. This essay focuses on how Asian Americans produced, and were in turn produced by, whiteness
frameworks of the U.S. legal system. In doing so, it opens up a new area of investigation in whiteness
studies and critiques the reliance on a black-white model of race relations, which has obscured the
complex reconfigurations of racial politics over the last century. Furthermore, the theoretical
simplifications of the black-white binary have impeded the articulation of strategies adequate to
confronting the significant racial and class-based realignments of the post–civil rights era. These recent
shifts have enabled the reconstitution of white privilege as color-blind meritocracy through the consent
of new immigrant groups and model minorities, and have legitimized the retrenchment of civil rights
gains in the name of the new global economy. The rearticulation of whiteness in the era of global
capitalism highlights another important paradigmatic constraint within whiteness studies, namely, the
reliance on the analytic framework of the nation-state for understanding the shifting meanings of
whiteness. But the erosion of civil rights gains cannot be fully understood apart from the emergence of a
global economy under U.S. geopolitical supremacy in the 1970s, a connection that seems to have been
largely overlooked so far. Studies of whiteness that are limited to a nation-state model are unable to
address the ways in which global capital has used, modified, and infiltrated racial meanings in the
contemporary context. No materialist analysis of racial formation can afford to ignore the implications
of the transatlantic and transpacific integration of capital circuits during what Marxist critics have
identified as the fourth epochal stage of capitalism, in the progression from mercantile to industrial to
monopoly to global capitalism. Asian Americans (of whom approximately 65 percent are foreign-born)
have been a crucial conduit for and a site of the reconfiguration of racial identities. By offering a
Foucauldian analysis of the productivity of whiteness in shaping the meanings of Asian American
identities and in creating stratifications within the Asian American grouping and across minority groups,
I hope to foreground the need for developing conceptions of agency that account for complicity and
resistance within this intermediary racial group. e legacy of the civil rights and antiracist coalitions of the
1960s, which were founded on the convergence of working-class and nonwhite identities, developed
models of minoritization that foregrounded racial oppression, resistance, and oppositional
consciousness. Based on an implicit construct of parallel minoritization rather than stratified
minoritization, the racial politics of the sixties challenged white supremacy by positing the opposition
between white and nonwhite positionality and strategically deferred theorizing the relationship
between racial minorities outside this framework. However, our continued dependence on this once
powerful and transformative model of the minority has hampered our ability to recognize and engage
the breakdown of the coalitional rationality that grounded the strategic alliances of people of color in
the 1960s: This breakdown is dramatically evident in some of the most politically charged and definitive
contemporary issues, such as immigration, affirmative action, welfare reform, and the recent Elián
González case. As the immediate beneficiaries of the disbanding of affirmative action programs, whites
and a segment of Asian Americans were unified in opposition to Hispanics and blacks on this issue;
antiimmigration legislation brought together Asian Americans and Hispanics on one side and whites and
blacks on the other; and the Elián González case joined whites, blacks, and non-Cuban Hispanics against
Cuban Americans. The divergent interests among minorities around such issues have been eagerly
seized by conservatives, whose lexicon has furnished the terms for interpreting and containing the
meanings and direction of these realignments. Changed demographics, class stratifications, new
immigration, and a global economy have produced the rearticulation of whiteness as color blindness,
thereby enabling opportunistic alliances between whites and different minority groups as circumstances
warrant. This new discourse of race projects a simulacrum of inclusiveness even as it advances a political culture of market individualism that has legitimized the gutting of social services to disadvantaged
minorities in the name of the necessities of the global economy.
The alt is key – it changes race at its roots – this solves for all instances of racial inequalities, not just
the Black-White Binary
Koshy, Ph.D. @ UCLA Associate Professor of Asian American Studies, English @ University of Illinois
Urbana-Champaign, 1
[Susan, “Morphing Race into Ethnicity: Asian Americans and Critical Transformations of Whiteness”,
Boundary 2 , Vol. 28.1, pg 156-58, Duke University Press, Project Muse]//SGarg
I begin by focusing on the state institution that most actively delineated and codified the racial identity
of Asian Americans and situated its meanings within the framework of the existing national binary of
black and white—the law. In particular, I analyze how the naturalization claims of early Asian immigrants
at the turn of the century, which were articulated as bids for citizenship as whites, were a function of
the racial provisions of naturalization law rather than, as sometimes construed, a voluntarist act of
selfidentification. Nevertheless, the terms of the naturalization law created the field within which and
the direction in which the desire for national belonging would be impelled. The focus of this section is on
the productivity of the discourse of white citizenship in engendering Asian immigrants as cultural aliens,
establishing a taxonomy of various Asian identities in terms of their relative distance from whiteness,
prompting competitive self-differentiation among Asian groups, and adumbrating hierarchical
distinctions between Asians and blacks in terms of their fitness for citizenship. The second section
focuses on the way in which the Chinese community in Mississippi, initially categorized with blacks at
the base of the racial hierarchy and connected to them through working and sexual relationships,
maneuvered their way to the privileges of whiteness by severing and reconstructing their relationships
with blacks at the bidding of the white elite of the region. These transformations took place as the
Chinese community in Mississippi was itself transformed from a sojourner to a family-oriented settler
community, thus raising the stakes for access to white privileges of good schooling, housing, and social
mobility.2 Moreover, the mobility of the Chinese Mississippians was achieved despite their legal
classification as ‘‘colored’’ and during a time when Jim Crow laws were strictly enforced against blacks in
the South. I examine this community because the demarcations between black and white were most
entrenched in the South and the prospects of racial mobility seemingly most limited. Therefore, the
negotiations with blackness and whiteness were most unambiguous. Furthermore, I wish to highlight
that despite their status as noncitizens, their small numbers and growing economic strength allowed for
their gradual positioning as middlemen minorities in the racial hierarchy and their eventual entry into
symbolic whiteness. The first and second sections highlight the dynamic nature of whiteness, the
continuous contestation of its boundaries, and the consequences of the renegotiation of Asian American
and white boundaries on the status and mobility of blacks. As Michael Omi explains, ‘‘Any change in the
system of racial meanings will affect all groups. Challenging the dominant racial ideology inherently
involves not only reconceptualizing one’s own racial identity, but a reformulation of the meaning of
race in general.’’3 While the civil rights and antiracist discourses of the 1960s reconceived the meanings
of whiteness and blackness in such a way as to enable the categorization of other racial minorities as
‘‘people of color,’’ sharing a common history of oppression and marginalization, by contrast, a decade
earlier, the racial mobility of Chinese Mississippians was predicated on the continued subjection of
blacks at the base of the racial hierarchy. Finally, in the third section, I examine the active efforts of one
particular Asian American group, South Asian Americans, to renegotiate their classification by a federal
agency, the Census Bureau. In 1970, for the first and only time in the history of their appearance on the
census, South Asians were counted as whites by the state.4 This change was made in the aftermath of
civil rights legislation extending protections and benefits to underrepresented racial minorities. The
effort to seek official classification as Asian Americans in the 1980 census was led by Asian Indian
organizations, but it generated deep divisions among the new immigrants in this group about the costs
and benefits of seeking minority status as nonwhites and abandoning categorization as whites. I analyze
this instance to identify the shifting meanings of whiteness institutionalized by the state apparatus and
to foreground the ad hoc nature of the construction of a rationale for classi fication as white.
L: Performativity/Discourse
Performative politics and discourse focus ignore commodification of difference and
privilege the capitalist elite
Young 06 (Robert, Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature. At New York University, “Putting Materialism back into
Race Theory: Toward a Transformative Theory of Race”, The Red Critique 11, Winter/Spring 2006,
http://www.redcritique.org/WinterSpring2006/puttingmaterialismbackintoracetheory.htm)//AS
Indeed, Bhabha
re-understands the political not as an ideological practice aimed at social
transformation—the project of transformative race theory. Instead, he theorizes "politics as a performativity" (15).
But what is the social effect of this understanding of politics? Toward what end might this notion point us? It seems as if
the political now calls for (cosmopolitan) witnesses to the always already permanent slippage of
signification and this (formal) process of repetition and reinscription outlines a space for "other forms of
enunciation" (254). But will these "other forms of enunciation" naturally articulate resistance to the dominant
political and ideological interests? For Bhabha, of course, we "need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus
on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences" (1). However, cultural
differences, in
themselves, do not necessarily mean opposition. Indeed, at the moment, cultural difference represents one
of the latest zones for commodification and, in this regard, it ideologically legitimates capitalism. Bhabha
homogenizes (cultural) difference and, consequently, he covers over ideological struggles within the
space of cultural difference. In short, this other historical site is not the site for pure difference, which naturally resists the
hegemonic; for it, too, is the site for political contestation. Bhabha's formalism makes it seem as if ambivalence
essentially inheres in discourse. Ambivalence results from opposed political interests that inflect discourses and so the
ambivalence registers social conflict. In Marxism and the Philosophy and Language, Vološinov offers this materialist understanding of the sign:
“Class does not coincide with the sign community, i.e. with the community which is the totality of users of the same set of signs for ideological
communication. Thus various different classes will use one and the same language. As a result, differently oriented accents intersect in every
ideological sign. Sign becomes an arena of class struggle. (22)” The
very concept—ideology—that could delineate the
political character and therefore class interests involved in structuring the content of discourses,
Bhabha excludes from his discourse. In the end, Bhabha's discourse advocates what amounts to
discursive freedom and he substitutes this for material freedom. Like Gilroy, Bhabha's discursive freedom
takes place within the existing system. In contrast to Bhabha, Marx theorizes the material presupposition of freedom. In
theGerman Ideology, Marx argues that "people cannot be liberated as long as they are unable to obtain food and drink, housing and clothing in
adequate quality and quantity" (61). Thus for Marx "[l]iberation" is an historical and not a mental act" (61). In
suppressing the issue
of need, Bhabha's text reveals his own class interests. The studied preoccupation with "ambivalence" reflects a class
privilege, and it speaks to the crisis for (postcolonial) subjects torn between national affiliation and their privileged (and objective) class position
within the international division of labor. The ambivalence is a symptom of social antagonism, but in Bhabha's hands, it becomes a
transhistorical code for erasing the trace of class.
L: Discourse
<note: this card also answers the perm well>
Politics of discourse and difference do nothing with regard to real oppression and
detract from useful Marxist analysis
Scatamburlo-D’Annibale and McLaren 04 (Valerie and Peter, associate professor in the Department of
Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor and Professor in the Division of Urban Schooling, the Graduate School of
Education and Information Studies at UCLA, “Class Dismissed? Historical materialism and the politics of ‘difference’”, Educational Philosophy
and Theory 36:2, April 2004, Wiley)//AS
It is remarkable, in our opinion, that so much of contemporary social theory has largely abandoned the
problems of labor, capitalist exploitation, and class analysis at a time when capitalism is becoming
more universal, more ruthless and more deadly. The metaphor of a contemporary ‘tower of Babel’
seems appropriate here—academics striking radical poses in the seminar rooms while remaining oblivious to
the possibility that their seemingly radical discursive maneuvers do nothing to further the struggles
‘against oppression and exploitation which continue to be real, material, and not merely “discursive”
problems of the contemporary world’ (Dirlik, 1997, p. 176).Harvey (1998, pp. 29–31) indicts the new academic entrepreneurs, the
‘masters of theory-in-and-for-itself’ whose ‘discourse radicalism’ has deftly side-stepped ‘the enduring
conundrums of class struggle’ and who have, against a ‘sobering background of cheapened discourse
and opportunistic politics,’ been ‘stripped of their self-advertised radicalism.’ For years, they ‘contested
socialism,’ ridiculed Marxists, and promoted ‘their own alternative theories of liberatory politics’ but now they have largely been ‘reduced to
the role of supplicants in the most degraded form of pluralist politics imaginable.’ As
they pursue the politics of difference,
the ‘class war rages unabated’ and they seem ‘either unwilling or unable to focus on the
unprecedented economic carnage occurring around the globe.’ Harvey's searing criticism suggests that postMarxists have been busy fiddling while Rome burns and his comments echo those made byMarx (1978, p. 149) in his
critique of the Young Hegelians who were, ‘in spite of their allegedly “world-shattering” statements, the staunchest conservatives.’ Marx
lamented that the Young
Hegelians were simply fighting ‘phrases’ and that they failed to acknowledge that
in offering only counter-phrases, they were in no way ‘combating the real existing world’ but merely
combating the phrases of the world. Taking a cue from Marx and substituting ‘phrases’ with ‘discourses’ or ‘resignifications’ we
would contend that the practitioners of difference politics who operate within exaggerated culturalist
frameworks that privilege the realm of representation as the primary arena of political struggle question some
discourses of power while legitimating others. Moreover, because they lack a class perspective, their
gestures of radicalism are belied by their own class positions.10 As Ahmad (1997a, p. 104) notes: One may speak of any
number of disorientations and even oppressions, but one cultivates all kinds of politeness and indirection about the structure of capitalist class
relations in which those oppressions are embedded. To speak of any of that directly and simply is to be ‘vulgar.’ In this climate of Aesopian
languages it is absolutely essential to reiterate that most things are a matter of class . That kind of statement is …
surprising only in a culture like that of the North American university … But it is precisely in that kind of culture that people need to hear such
obvious truths. Ahmad's provocative observations imply that substantive
analyses of the carnage wrought by
‘globalized’ class exploitation have, for the most part, been marginalized by the kind of radicalism that
has been instituted among the academic Left in North America. He further suggests that while various postMarxists have invited us to join their euphoric celebrations honoring the decentering of capitalism,
the abandonment of class politics, and the decline of metanarratives (particularly those of Marxism and socialism), they have
failed to see that the most ‘meta of all metanarratives of the past three centuries, the creeping annexation of
the globe for the dominance of capital over laboring humanity has met, during those same decades,
with stunning success’ (Ahmad, 1997b, p. 364). As such, Ahmad invites us to ask anew, the proverbial question: What, then, must be
done? To this question we offer no simple theoretical, pedagogical or political prescriptions. Yet we would argue that if social change is
the aim, progressive educators and theorists must cease displacing class analysis with the politics of
difference.
Race discourse allows race to be taken out of the Marx framing
Young 06(Robert Young- British postcolonial theorist, cultural critic, and historian “Putting Materialism
back into Race Theory: Toward a Transformative Theory of Race”
http://www.redcritique.org/WinterSpring2006/puttingmaterialismbackintoracetheory.htm
Indeed,
the discourse of the subject operates as an ideological strategy for fetishizing the black
experience and, consequently, it positions black subjectivity beyond the reach of Marxism. For example, in
the Afrocentric Idea, Asante dismisses Marxism because it is Eurocentric (8), but are the core concepts of Marxism, such as class and mode of
production, only relevant for European social formations? Are African and African-American social histories/relations unshaped by class
structures? Asante
assumes that class hierarchies do not structure African or the African-American social
experiences, and this reveals the class politics of Afrocentricity: it makes class invisible. Asante's assumption,
which erases materialism, enables him to offer the idealist formulation that the "word creates reality" (70). The political translation of such
idealism is not surprisingly very conservative. Asante directs us away from critiquing capitalist institutions, in a manner similar to the ideological
protocol of the Million Man March, and calls for vigilance against symbolic oppression. As Asante tellingly puts it, "symbol imperialism, rather
than institutional racism, is the major social problem facing multicultural societies" (56).
L: Neopragmatism/Humanism
Neopragmatist analysis of race is flawed—ahistoricity prevents it from being
effective—class as a frame of reference is essential
San Juan 05 (Epifanio, Filipino American literary academic, mentor, cultural reviewer, civic intellectual, activist, writer, essayist “From
Race to Class Struggle: Marxism and Critical Race Theory”, Nature, Society and Thought 18:3, 2005,
http://homepages.spa.umn.edu/~marquit/nst183a.pdf#page=5)//AS
Goldberg has
obsessively pursued a Foucauldean/neopragmatist genealogy of racist discourse and practices, rejecting
structuralist conceptualizations as well as the standard approach that reduced racism to an
epiphenomenon of economics or politics in which “racism is mostly conceived as ideological, a set of rationalizations for sustaining
exploitative economic practices and exclusionary political relations” (1993, 93). Goldberg thus dismisses as narrow and
restrictive Robert Miles’s theory of racialization (1989)—the construction of differentiated social collectivities by the way human
biological characteristics are signifi ed. For Goldberg, exclusion by virtue of imputed somatic characteristics
acquires a privileged position in the analysis of social relations, overshadowing the fact of class
exploitation. In so doing, Goldberg and other ludic neopragmatists lapse into a species of nominalism
that equates class with stratification, not recognized as constituting a “real totality, ” but “as an aggregate of
individuals, who are differentiated from one another in terms of various kinds of social and psychological criteria” (Giddens 1973, 76).
Nominalists (like Goldberg) refuse to recognize class as a relational process in historical reality. Limited to a
concern with atomistic facts rather than with a world of intelligible necessity, sociologists of ethnicity likewise
confine themselves to heterogeneous experiential data removed from any larger sociohistorical
process within which they acquire intelligibility. Instead of historical-materialist principles, techniques
of psychologistic and functional instrumentalism are deployed to connect discrete phenomena and validate the
normality and consistency of the status quo. This applies to the functionalism of neo-Weberians, hermeneutic and
interpretive humanists, and various neo-Marxists who reject the historical-materialist principles of
critique, totality, and the dialectical approach to elucidating the dynamics of multifarious contradictions in society.
Let me cite here the prolific revisionary work of David Theo Goldberg. In his Racist Culture (1993) and subsequent texts.
L: Afrocentrism/Black Humanism
Afrocentric discourse is bourgeois and dangerous—ignores historicity and privileges
the elite within the capitalist system
Young 06 (Robert, Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature. At New York University, “Putting Materialism back into
Race Theory: Toward a Transformative Theory of Race”, The Red Critique 11, Winter/Spring 2006,
http://www.redcritique.org/WinterSpring2006/puttingmaterialismbackintoracetheory.htm)//AS
Within contemporary Black humanist discourses the focus remains on the subject. Hence, diverse intellectual
inquiries such as Afrocentricism (Molefi Kete Asante), Black feminism (Patricia Hill Collins), and neo-conservative culturalism
(Shelby Steele), share a philosophical-ideological commitment to the subject. What is ultimately at stake in
this commitment is, I argue, a class matter. The philosophico-cultural move—as Asante once put it in a representative
formulation, Afrocentricism presents "the African as subject rather than object" ("Multiculturalism" 270)—is in fact
part of the positing of a Black "essence" that can form the basis for a cross-class alliance between
black workers and black business, between, that is, exploited and exploiters. The logic of this act of cultural
translation of the economic is powerfully foregrounded in Asante's writings. The preoccupation with the subject highlights Asante's rather
conservative humanist philosophical position, a position powerfully critiqued by Louis Althusser [2]. In
reifying the subject, Asante
abstracts the (African) subject from history and posits an "essentialized" identity within an
"essentialized" historical period that is unproblematically recuperable through an Afrocentric
paradigm. Asante takes the essence of the subject for a universal quality and, as Althusser argues, this means that concrete
subjects must exist as an absolute given, which implies an empiricism of the subject (228). Furthermore,
Althusser continues, if the concrete subject is to be a subject, then each must carry the entire essence in him/herself, and this implies an
idealism of the essence (228). Thus, Asante's philosophical location provides the basis for the transcendental subject: the always already (self)
present black subject, from ancient Egypt to the modern black American. What one needs, quite simply, is an Afrocentric methodology, and this
Asante grounds in an idealist metaphysic. Similar to Eurocentric practices, Asante's
project occludes the historical
contradictions constitutive of any social formation and so far from advancing a distinctive Afrocentric
epistemology, Asante's humanism puts him squarely within the dominant bourgeois philosophical
tradition and his discourse produces similar effects. Under the guise of the transcendental subject, the class divisions
within the black community are suppressed and this, in turn, advances the class interests of the elites,
whose interests are silently imbedded in the project. Similar to Eurocentric historical narratives, Afrocentricism
reclaims the history of the (African) elites. In this way, Afrocentric discourse is knowledge for middle
and upper class blacks, as it naturalizes their class privilege; for which other class could afford to see "symbol
imperialism" (Asante 56) as the major problem confronting multicultural societies? Bourgeois philosophical assumptions
haunt the Afrocentric project and, in the domain of black feminist theory, Patricia Hill Collins provides an instructive example of this
intersection. In Black Feminist Thought, Collins posits the "special angle of vision" that black women bring to knowledge production process
(21), and this "unique angle" (22) provides the "standpoint" for Afrocentric feminism, a feminism that she equates with humanism (37).
Similar to the experiential metaphysics of Black women's standpoint theory, Collins also situates
Afrocentric feminist epistemology "in the everyday experiences of African-American women" (207).
Consequently, Collins suggests that "concrete experience" constitutes a criterion of meaning (208).
L: Postmodernism
Postmodern theorists expand bourgeois Western ideology and cannot contribute to
critique of capitalist systems
McLaren and Farahmandpur 03 (Peter and Ramin, Professor in the Division of Urban Schooling, the Graduate School of
Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles and Professor of Education at Portland State University, “Breaking
Signifying Chains: A Marxist Position on Postmodernism”, Marxism Against Postmodernism in Educational Theory, Lexington Books, March
2003, http://books.google.com/books/about/Marxism_Against_Postmodernism_in_Educati.html?id=nK_UST5ng6gC)//AS
This chapter attempts to address some fundamental problems with postmodern theory, as it currently
informs the field of educational research' Our position is that postmodern theory has overwhelmingly debauched the
field of Leftist criticism. However, we have not undertaken an analysis of specific postmodern educationalists (this being achieved by
many of the other chapters in this book). Rather, we set forth counterpositions to claims put forth in the literature by postmodern theorists.
We give a positive appraisal of postmodern theory in certain instances where we feel it has contributed to the field of Leftist critique. In the
main, however, our
position remains unwaveringly critical. This is largely a result of our contention that
postmodern theorists advocate an expansion of existing bourgeois forms of democratic social life into
wider arenas of society, by means of a reformist politics in the tradition of Western liberalism. Such a
politics views culture as partially independent of the state. Such a move only makes sense, however,
within a larger politics of anticapitalist struggle. Yet postmodernists fail to challenge existing social
relations of production and the larger social totality of capitalist social relations. As a result, their
work has very little to contribute to the uprooting of the contradictions between capital and labor.
Postmodern theory in unable to offer a transformatory vision and pushes radical
resistance to capital to the center
McLaren and Farahmandpur 03 (Peter and Ramin, Professor in the Division of Urban Schooling, the Graduate School of
Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles and Professor of Education at Portland State University, “Breaking
Signifying Chains: A Marxist Position on Postmodernism”, Marxism Against Postmodernism in Educational Theory, Lexington Books, March
2003, http://books.google.com/books/about/Marxism_Against_Postmodernism_in_Educati.html?id=nK_UST5ng6gC)//AS
Mocked as a "˜modernist' form of outmoded phallomilitary and "˜totalizing' demagoguery, Marxism
is now relegated to history`s cabinet of lost revolutionary dreams where it is abandoned to those romantic images of
guerrillas of the Sierra Maestra. While elegiac hymns to Che Guevara still abound in the courtyards of the diminishing Left, this should not
detract from the fact that, when read sharply against Guevarian challenges to imperialism and Marxist
challenges to social relations of production and global regimes of capitalist exploitation,
postmodernist theory frequently collapses into a form of toothless liberalism and airbrushed
insurgency. While to its considerable credit, postmodern theory-especially through the insights of its pantheon of progenitors such as
Nietzsche, Toynbee, Heidegger, C. Wright Mills, Horkheimer, and Adomo-has troubled the primary status of the colonizer, peeled back the
horizon of culture to reveal the trace marks of the antipodal, broken the semiotic gridlock of reigning binarisms, prevented the authoritative
closure that serves to reenlist alterity into the ranks of Western imperialism, and revealed how temporal structures of dislocation constitute
rather than describe our geographies of identity, it has often reconfirmed as much as contested capitalist relations of exploitation. Although
it is important to follow postmodemists in introducing subaltern readers of texts, such texts need to
be acknowledged as speaking through the ventriloquism of Westem epistemologies linked to
imperialist and capitalist social relations. Progressive educators need to ask: how does the semiotic warfare of
the postmodern or postcolonial critic reinscribe, repropose, and recohere capitalist social relations of
production through decentering and rerouting cultural representations? This is a central question that
postmodemists routinely sidestep and to do so at this current historical conjuncture of titanic
capitalist forces is, to say the least, perilous. As the dust finally settles we are troubled by the fact that much of what is
called postmodern education is freighted with insoluble contradictions that unwittingly push radical
critique toward the center. As Dave Hill writes, postrnodernism's tunnel vision and myopic limitations have
particular consequences when it comes to, first, the theoretical de-constructive analysis and assessment
of developments within state policy, and, second, an inability to agree on and define a re-constructive
socially and economically transformatory vision of the future. A third consequence is its inability to
draw up and develop a politically and effective project and detailed program to work toward and actualize that social and
economic vision, and a fourth, to define, or secure a politically effective agreement on a political strategy-to suggest how to get there. A fifth
consequence is an inability to define what effective and solidaristic role radical educators might play
in that political strategy. As far as l am aware, no postmodernist theorist, of any theoretical bent, has gone beyond deconstruction
into constructing a coherent program for reconstruction. This is precluded by a postmodern theoretical orientation."•
Postmodernists like to pretend they’re radical while in reality they decimate actual
revolutionary politics—prevents a fight against capital
McLaren and Farahmandpur 03 (Peter and Ramin, Professor in the Division of Urban Schooling, the Graduate School of
Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles and Professor of Education at Portland State University, “Breaking
Signifying Chains: A Marxist Position on Postmodernism”, Marxism Against Postmodernism in Educational Theory, Lexington Books, March
2003, http://books.google.com/books/about/Marxism_Against_Postmodernism_in_Educati.html?id=nK_UST5ng6gC)//AS
Capitalism and democracy share a forced intimacy: their marriage has been arranged so that the families of the global ruling class can
consolidate their power and set limits on how and what questions concerning equality and emancipation can be raised and in what contexts.
The preservation of capital remains entombed within postmodernism's own ineffable logic and
"conceals the true contradictions of advanced capitalist societies."• This remains the case even though
some postmodernists like to imbibe the miasmically iconoclastic aura of Marx without , we might add,
necessarily engaging in radical (let alone revolutionary) politics. As postmodernists look amusingly at
what Charlie Bensch and Joe Lockard call "the widely successful repackaging of The Communist ManWsto as a
pricey fetish object for the upwardly mobile,"• they can play out their cathartic fantasies of the
guerrillero/a while continuing to trash the politics that underlies revolutionary praxis ."• ln many instances,
postmodernists have dismissed Marxism as a form of ideological Neanderthalism , or a crusted-over
antediluvian memory, and have tried to disabuse progressive educators and other cultural workers of the
notion that there are practical and workable alternatives to capitalism worth considering. In their less generous
moments, they recycle Marxist theory as contemporary farce. We don't want to deny the crimes against humanity
committed by regimes claiming to be Marxist, to ignore the problems associated with Eastern and European Communist
parties in their unregenerate Stalinist aspects, or to defend Marxism's recidivistic retreat into bureaucratic authoritarianism, dogmatism, and
economic determinism. Nor do we wish to defend what Eagleton calls "the long tragedy of class-society,"•
corporate governance, the ill-gotten gains of financial profiteers and speculators, and the history of imperialism and international terrorism
committed by Western "democracies"• 32 On
the other hand, we don't believe that Marxism should be dismissed
because it appears to have reached its apex in the decades before the collapse of the Soviet Union and
Russia's new gangster capitalism, red bourgeoisie, and forms of primitive accumulation. We admit that Marxist theory may be out
of fashion (in the United States at least) but it still has a full tank of conceptual fuel for the kind of analysis
urgently needed at this point in the history of capitalism. In fact, in the light of current debates about
the globalization of capital, there is a renewed interest in and reappraisal of Marx's work among social
scientists. As Peter Hudis puts it: Some may find such talk of Marx a bit odd, given the abject failure of the communist regimes that claimed to
rule in his name. Yet as Marx scholars have long pointed out, the communist
regimes had little in common with Marx's
actual ideas. Marx opposed centralized state control of the economy (he called those who advocated it "crude and unthinking
communists"•); he passionately defended freedom of the press (he made his debut as a radical joumalist espousing it); and he ridiculed the
notion that a small "vanguard"• of revolutionaries could successfully restructure society without the democratic consent of its citizens. lf
anything, the
collapse of communism seems to have spurred new interest in Marx, since it makes his
predictions concerning the global reach of capitalism seem even more timely.3
Postmodern dissent reifies capital structures and prevents emancipatory politics
McLaren and Farahmandpur 00 (Peter and Ramin, Professor in the Division of Urban Schooling, the Graduate School of
Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles and Professor of Education at Portland State University, “Reconsidering
Marx in Post-Marxist Times: A Requiem for Postmodernism?”, Educational Researcher 29:3, April 2000, JSTOR)//AS
Despite its successes, postmodern
dissent is symptomatic of the structural contradictions and problematic
assumptions within postmodern theory itself. By too often displacing critique to a field of serial
negation without fully grasping its prefigurative or emancipatory potential, postmodern criticism
frequently traps intelligibility and meaning internally, that is, inside the texts of culture. In revealing the
inconsistencies, aporias, and contradictions within the text of culture, postmodernism often fails to
connect the significance of these contradictions, inconsistencies, and equivocations by comprehending their
necessity. As a consequence, it often blunts an understanding of contemporary society and unwittingly
agitates for a reenactment of the fate of society that constitutes the object of its critique. This line of
fracture is emblematic of the problem that has plagued the postmodern Left over the last several decades. At this moment we are compelled
to ask: Is
the practice of ignoring these contradictions and inconsistencies of culture structurally
advantageous to capitalist relations of exploitation? Do such contradictions left conspicuously unaddressed merely-or
mainly-provide ballast to reigning hegemons and the international division of labor? Postmodernists appear loathe to raise
such questions yet continue unrepentantly to dismiss an analysis of the so-called economic "base" in
favor of the cultural "superstructure." While postmodernists encourage an examination of the
cultural discourses of capitalism as open-ended sites of desire, Marxists, by contrast, treat discourses
not as sanctuaries of difference barricaded against the forces of history but as always an
interpretation naturalized by the libidinal circuits of desire wired into the culture of commerce and
historically and socially produced within the crucible of class antagonisms. Marxist criticism uncoils the political economy of
texts by remapping and rethinking systems of signification in relation to the material and historical
practices that produce them (McLaren, 2000), thus valorizing the "structural endurance of histories" over
the "contingent moment" (Ahmad, 1995, p. 15). In doing so it examines not the present's lack of coincidence with itself, or its lack of
self-identity, but rather its ability to surpass its own limitations. The shift towards a postmodernism2 layered with a
thin veneer of cultural Marxism, scaffolded by identity politics and postsocialist ideology, sprayed by
aerosol terms such as "difference" and "indeterminacy," and dipped in the gurgling foam of jacuzzi
socialism and window-dressing democracy, has witnessed the categories of cultural domination and oppression
replace those of class exploitation and imperialism as capitalism's reigning antagonisms. At the same time, a
politics of representaAPRIL 2000 27 This content downloaded from 141.213.236.110 on Fri, 26 Jul 2013 15:42:30 PM All use subject to JSTOR
Terms and Conditionstion has deftly outflanked the issue of socioeconomic redistribution (Fraser, 1997). The
postmodernist and
postsocialist assumption that culture has suddenly found ways of winning independence from
economic forces and that somehow the new globalized capitalism has decapitated culture from the body
of class exploitation by constructing new desires and remaking old ones in ways that are currently unmappable and unfactorable within the
has not only contributed to the crisis of Western Marxism, but has
effectively secured a long-term monopoly for capitalist market ideology. Gospelized and accorded a sacerdotal
status in the temple of the new postsocialist Left, postmodern theory has failed to provide an effective
counterstrategy to the spread of neoliberal ideology that currently holds educational policy and
practice in its thrall. In fact, it has provided neoliberalism with the political stability it needs to reproduce its most troublesome
theoretical optics of political economy
determinations.
Postmodernists’ project cannot effect meaningful change and plays into the hands of
structures that maintain capitalistic exploitation
Cole 03 (Mike, senior lecturer in education, University of Brighton, “Might It Be in the Practice that It Fails to Succeed? A Marxist Critique
of Claims for Postmodernism and Poststructuralism as Forces for Social Change and Social Justice”, British Journal of Sociology of Education
24:4, September 2003, JSTOR)//AS
Whereas for
Marxists the possibility of postmodernism leading to social change is a non sequitur , for
Atkinson postmodernism is 'an inevitable agent for change' in that: it challenges the educator, the researcher, the
social activist or the politician not only to deconstruct the certainties around which they might see as standing in need of change, but also to
This sounds fine, but what do these
constituencies actually do to effect meaningful societal change once their views have been
challenged? What is constructed after the deconstruc- tion process? Atkinson provides no answer. Nor
deconstruct their own certainties as to why they hold this view. (2002, p. 75)
does Patti Lather (nor, as we shall see, does Judith Baxter). This
is because neither postmodernism nor
poststructuralism is capable of providing an answer (Hill, 2001, 2003; Rikowski, 2002, pp. 20-25). Decon-
struction 'seeks
to do justice to all positions ... by giving them the chance to be justified, to speak originarily for themselves and be chosen rather that enforced'
(Zavarzadeh, 2002, p. 8). Indeed, for Derrida (1990), 'deconstruction is justice' (cited in Zavarzadeh, 2002, p. 8; emphasis added). Thus, once
the deconstruction process has started, justice is already apparent and there is no discernible
direction in which to head. In declaring on the first page of the Preface of her book Getting Smart:
Feminist Research and Pedagogy With/In the Postmodern, her 'longtime interest in how to turn
critical thought into emancipatory action' (Lather, 1991, p. xv), Lather is, in fact, wasting her time. After more
than 200 pages of text, in which indications are made of the need for emancipatory research praxis, in which proclamations are made
of how the goals of research should be to understand the maldistribution of power and resources in society, with a view to societal change,
we are left wondering how all this is to come about. Postmodernism cannot provide strategies to
achieve a different social order and hence, in buttressing capitalist exploitation, it is essentially
reactionary. This is precisely what Marxists (and others) mean by the assertion that postmodernism serves to disempower
the oppressed [7] According to Atkinson, postmodernism 'does not have, and could not have, a "single" project for social justice' (2002,
p. 75). Socialism then, if not social change, is thus ruled out in a stroke [8]. Atkinson then rehearses the familiar
postmodern position on multiple projects (2002, p. 75). Despite Atkinson's claims that postmodernism views 'the local as the product of the
global and vice versa' and that postmodernism should not be interpreted as limiting its scope of enquiry to the local (2002, p. 81), since
postmodernism rejects grand meta- narratives and since it rejects universal struggle, it can by
definition concentrate only on the local. Localised struggle can, of course, be liberating for individuals
and certain selected small groups, but postmodernism cannot set out any viable mass strategy or
programme for an emancipated future. The importance of local as well as national and international
struggle is recognised by Marxists, but the postmodern rejection of mass struggle ultimately plays
into the hands of those whose interests lie in the maintenance of national and global systems of
exploitation and oppression. Furthermore, 'as regards aims, the concern with autonomy, in terms of organisation', postmodernism
comprises 'a tendency towards network forms, and, in terms of mentality, a tendency towards self-limitation' (Pieterse, 1992). While
networking can aid in the promotion of solidarity, and in mass petitions, for example (Atkinson, 2001), it
cannot replace mass
action, in the sense, for example, of a general or major strike; or a significant demonstration or uprising that forces social change. Indeed,
the postmodern depiction of mass action as totalitarian negates/renders illicit such action. Allied to its
localism is postmodernism's non-dualism (Lather, 1991). This does have the advantage of recognising the struggles of groups oppressed on
grounds in addition to or other than those of class. However, non-dualism prevents the recognition of a major duality in capitalist societies,
that of social class (Cole & Hill, 1995, pp. 166-168, 2002; McLaren & Farahmandpur, 1999; Sanders et al., 1999: Hill et al., 2002b). This has, I
Marxism, on the other hand, allows
a future both to be envisioned and worked towards. This vision can and has been extended beyond
the 'brotherhood of man' concept of early socialists, to include the complex subjectivities of all
(subjectivities which the postmodernists are so keen to bring centre stage). Socialism can and should be conceived of as a
project where subjective identities, such as gender, 'race', disability, non-exploitative sexual
preference and age all have high importance in the struggle for genuine equality (Cole & Hill, 1999a, p. 42).
believe, profoundly reactionary implications, in that it negates the notion of class struggle.
L: Language/Discourse/Identity Politics
Postmodern fetishization of [language/discourse/identity politics/culture] as sites of
emancipation are dangerously antiproductive and inhibit resistance to capital
McLaren and Farahmandpur 00 (Peter and Ramin, Professor in the Division of Urban Schooling, the Graduate School of
Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles and Professor of Education at Portland State University, “Reconsidering
Marx in Post-Marxist Times: A Requiem for Postmodernism?”, Educational Researcher 29:3, April 2000, JSTOR)//AS
Following tectonic shifts in the geo- political landscapes of the 1980s and 1990s, postmodern
social and political theory-with
its preening emphasis on language, culture, and identity-has become the de rigeur conceptual attire
among social scientists attempting to make sense of contemporary social life within late capitalism. Mining the terrain of
identity politics, consumer fetishism, and privatopia has become a central academic activity and is
now considered theoretical-chic. In contrast, Marxism has been mummified along with Lenin's corpse,
and its scholarly exercise has been likened to tampering with historical relics. The joint ambition of uncovering the hidden
ideologies secreted within Western representations of the "other" and refashioning the antifoundational self, has
disposed postmodern theo- rists to dampen their euphoria sur- rounding social transformation at the
level of relations of production and to heighten their regard for reforming and decentering dominant
discourses and institutional practices at the level of cultural transactions. According to Sam J. Noumoff (1999),
postmodern politics attempts (a) to separate culture from ideology, (b) to employ culture as a
construct that diminishes the central- ity of class, (c) to insert a neoliberal po- litical system of intelligibility and pol- icy
agenda, (d) to perpetuate the belief in the ultimate futility of the socialist project, and (e) to promote an
assort- ment of "post" concepts-such as post- structuralism, post-modernism, post- history, postideology-as a way of limiting the theoretical direction of in- quiry and preempting socialist challenges to new objective realities brought about by the globalization of capital. Hilary Wainwright (1994) rightly
as- serts that much of what passes as post- modern politics not only lacks a co- herent social and political vision
with which to actively challenge the Radical Right, it also endorses a number of the Right's main tenets in
progressive and radical discourses. She writes that postmodernism does not "provide ad- equate tools to answer the radical
right ... the tools of postmodernism pro- duce only a more volatile version of the radical right....
Postmodernism cuts the connection between human inten- tion and social outcome" (p. 100). Postmodern theory's stress on
mi- cropolitics transforms what are essen- tially social struggles into discursive struggles that
overvalue economies of desire at the expense of political econ- omy and a philosophy of praxis. Many
postmodernists refute the idea that any particular social group or class is capa- ble of transforming the existing social relations of production
under capital- ism. At the same time, however, they
fail to lay the conceptual foundations for building necessary
political alli- ances among oppressed and marginal- ized social groups. Ehrenberg under- scores this vividly: It
will not do to claim that knowl- edge is local, "identity" and "differ- ence" are the key categories in
mod- ern social life, human relations are constituted by language and "dis- course," "culture" is the
site of strug- gle, and no single agent of human lib- eration can even be theorized. The inexorable
concentration and central- ization of capital stand in eloquent opposition to the claim that fragmen- tation and discontinuity have eliminated all possibilities for collective action toward a common end which can cut across the multiple, shifting and self-defined "identities" that
make up the social world (1998, p. 43). While postmodern
politics tends to focus on particular forms of oppression, the irrefragable power of Marxist theory resides in its ability to reveal how all forms of social
oppression under capitalism are mutually inter- connected (Ebert, 1996; Henessey, 1993; McLaren & Farahmandpur,
1999; Wood, 1996). While both Marxism and post- modernism address the "interlocking triumvirate" of race, class, and gender, Marxist
theory attempts to reveal how all of these forms of oppression are linked to private ownership of the
means of production and the extraction of surplus labor.
L: Asian Race Aff
The aff’s focus on ridding racism against Asian American serves to exacerbate the oppression of
capitalism – the alt is a prerequisite – only by addressing the issues of capitalism and class
stratification can we engage racism as a whole
Koshy, Ph.D. @ UCLA Associate Professor of Asian American Studies, English @ University of Illinois
Urbana-Champaign, 1
[Susan, “Morphing Race into Ethnicity: Asian Americans and Critical Transformations of Whiteness”,
Boundary 2 , Vol. 28.1, pg 191-93, Duke University Press, Project Muse]//SGarg
Virulent political rhetoric and widespread anti-immigrant sentiment has resulted (most of the public is
not watching when the hysteria periodically whipped up by media and politicians dies down) not in
significant curtailment of immigration but in the prioritizing and expansion of skilled worker categories
that offer quick, low-cost solutions to corporate demands for labor. On 3 October 2000, Congress passed
a bill increasing the cap from 115,000 to 195,000 for H1-B visas for specialized workers, such as
computer programmers, over the next three years.72 The change in immigration laws, by expanding
skilled-worker categories and establishing new cate- gories of investment-based citizenship, has resulted
in a significant number of incoming middle- and upper-class Asian immigrants.73 Their class status often
insulates them from the harshest effects of the experiences from which the antiracist discourses of the
civil rights movement derive, and their educational (generally in the sciences) and career paths often
bypass the arenas where the politics of race is engaged in a sustained way. This is not to suggest that
middle-class Asian Americans are no longer subject to racism or discrimination, nor is it to ignore the
existence of a segment of the Asian American population itself (illegal immigrants, refugee groups,
sweatshop workers) that remains trapped in poverty. Signifi cant economic disparities exist across the
various Asian American national groups, and underemployment remains a persistent problem. Indeed,
without foregrounding the effects of class stratification and differential minoritization, we will be
unable to engage the problem of Asian Americans as the agents of exploitation and its victims,
especially in instances where invocations of ethnic and national loyalties form the conduits for
coercion and control. Furthermore, scholars of transnationalism and globalization have pointed to the
emergence of a transnational capitalist class in the global triad of Europe, North America, and East Asia,
which is now rapidly integrating the South within its circuits. As William I. Robinson and Jerry Harris
observe, ‘‘Transnationalization of the capital circuit implies as well the transnationalization of the agents
of capital. As national circuits of capital become transnationally integrated, these new transnational
circuits become the sites of class formation worldwide.’’74 The rapid growth of East and some
Southeast Asian economies, the dramatic increase in foreign direct investment into and from these
countries, and the intensified transnationalization and externalization of many Asian economies as a
result of the structural adjustments following the 1997 financial crisis require that we move away from
an implicit model of chromatic capitalism, in which oppressors are white and their victims are nonwhite.
Since the 1990s, the value of the transnationality index for the top fifty transnational corporations
(TNCs) from developing countries has been increasing steadily, and they have built up their foreign
assets almost seven times faster than the world’s top one hundred TNCs between 1993 and 1996.75 Of
the top twenty five TNCs from developing countries, more than 55 percent are headquartered in East
Asian countries (China, Hong Kong, Republic of Korea, Taiwan);76 Japan is ranked with developing
countries and has four out of the top twenty-five TNCs.77 The transpacific and transatlantic integration
of capital circuits in this era requires us to rethink concepts of agency and minoritization, because global
capitalism has been characterized by its ability to use and deploy multiculturalism and cultural
difference. In the present context, the agency of Asian Americans is imbricated in differentiated
relationships to domination in the uneven terrain of transnationalism and requires a theorization of
Asian American agency in complicity and in resistance. We cannot assume that ‘‘outsideness’’ to the
nation is inherently subversive when it can be defined very differently in the ‘‘guerilla transnationalism’’
of flexible citizenship adopted as a business strategy by an Asian American capitalist78 and in the
working conditions of an undocumented Asian American restaurant worker.
L: Non-Black Race Affs
<Read against a Race Aff that isn’t about Black White Binary – also, this card would probably function
better on case>
The aff focus on one particular group justifies a continued “Otherization” of the black population and
also trades off with making any real progress
Koshy, Ph.D. @ UCLA Associate Professor of Asian American Studies, English @ University of Illinois
Urbana-Champaign, 1
[Susan, “Morphing Race into Ethnicity: Asian Americans and Critical Transformations of Whiteness”,
Boundary 2 , Vol. 28.1, pg 173-75, Duke University Press, Project Muse]//SGarg
Negotiating the Black-White Binary: The Racial Strategies of the Chinese Mississippians Some of my
white friends call me a Delta lotus. I’m a Delta Southerner, but still a lotus and not a magnolia. I guess I
can never be one because when I look in the mirror I don’t have lily-white skin. But it sure ain’t black,
either. It’s a God-awful in-between shade of destiny. Just ’cause I’m not white in the Delta doesn’t mean
I can’t be white somewhere else . . . , or maybe I can even be Chinese in another place, but not in the
Delta. —Chinese Mississippian student, quoted in Lotus among the Magnolias Transformations in the
status of most Asian Americans would await incremental changes in immigration and naturalization
legislation from the 1940s onward, until all racial prerequisites to naturalization were dropped in 1952
and Asian immigration was placed on an equal footing with European immigration in 1965. But although
judicial decree decisively closed off access to citizenship through naturalization, in certain instances, the
racial ambiguity of Asian Americans within an entrenched black-white binary was deployed to lay claim
to other privileges of whiteness and to circumvent their legal classification as ‘‘colored’’ people. This
section examines the challenge posed to the meanings of whiteness by the Chinese community in
Mississippi, first through the legal system, in petitioning for access to white public schools, and, when
that proved unsuccessful, through the adoption of the cultural norms of the white Southern elite. The
analysis focuses on the forms and terms under which the remarkable racial mobility of the Chinese
community in Mississippi was negotiated at a time when Jim Crow laws were strictly enforced against
blacks in the South. Their attainment of honorary white status highlights the importance of the
institutions of civil society (the church, schools, clubs) in modifying the racial meanings written into law
and reveals the multiple sites at which racial formation takes place. The lower numbers of Chinese in the
South as compared to the West Coast, their relative economic strength, their role in mediating the
threat represented by a free black population, and their strategic mimicry of white cultural norms
opened up access to symbolic whiteness. But such mobility was based on their endorsement of the
black-white racial divide that preceded their arrival in the South. While the Chinese Mississippians
earned a social status as honorary whites that was not achieved by other Chinese communities across
the country, this historical instance highlights the crucial role of blacks in effecting the boundary
demarcations between intermediary groups and whites, and foregrounds the necessity of recognizing
the dialectical relationship between blackness, whiteness, and Asianness. The case of the Chinese
Mississippians illustrates the power of whiteness to induce identification from nonwhites and the
position of blacks as the definitional ‘‘other’’ against whom ideologies of whiteness are produced and
sustained. ned. The structural position of the Chinese in Delta society is vividly re flected in the
circumstances surrounding, and the unforeseen legacy of, a legal challenge that reached the Bolivar
District Court in Mississippi in 1924. Gong Lum, a Chinese Mississippian merchant, appealed the school
district’s decision to debar his daughter Martha from attending the white public school in Rosedale.
Gong Lum’s lawyers initially appealed her case on the grounds that ‘‘she is not a member of the colored
race nor is she of mixed blood, but that she is pure Chinese’’ and by arguing that there was no separate
school maintained in the district for the education of children of Chinese descent.42 In this instance, the
claim to white privilege is based on a nega- tive definition: Since she was not colored or of mixed race,
she was white. The weakness of this argument is that it is potentially reversible. Indeed, its potential
reversibility presaged what was to come. The trial court ruled in her favor, but the school district
appealed to the Mississippi Supreme Court, which overturned the decision offering the reverse negative
definition: Since the Chinese were not white, they were to be considered with all other nonwhites under
the heading ‘‘colored races.’’43 When Gong Lum appealed to the United States Supreme Court, his
lawyers abandoned the argument that the Chinese were not ‘‘colored.’’ Instead, they adopted another
strategy: Affirming the practice of segregation because ‘‘such intercourse with African-Americans is
objectionable . . . in many instances...repulsive and impossible,’’ they invoked the Equal Protection
Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to argue that it was discriminatory to deny the Chinese the
opportunity to practice the same forms of segregation as whites. They argued that whites, as the ‘‘lawmaking race,’’ had created separate schools to protect themselves from mixing with Negroes: ‘‘If there is
danger in the association, it is a danger from which one person is entitled to protection just the same as
another. . . . The white race creates for itself a privilege that it denies to other races; exposes the
children of other races to risks and dangers to which it would not expose its own children. This is
discrimination.’’44 The appeal was rejected by the Supreme Court. However, the trajectory of the case
reveals that the further the case moved from the control of the local white elite who had extended to
the Chinese many of the privileges of whiteness, the less amenable the courts were to accepting the
argument that the Chinese were not ‘‘colored.’’
Alt
Alt: Generic
The alternative situates racism within the process of capitalist society—the aff’s
analysis only reifies racism and commodifies human life
San Juan 05 (Epifanio, Filipino American literary academic, mentor, cultural reviewer, civic intellectual, activist, writer, essayist “From
Race to Class Struggle: Marxism and Critical Race Theory”, Nature, Society and Thought 18:3, 2005,
http://homepages.spa.umn.edu/~marquit/nst183a.pdf#page=5)//AS
Following the lead of Anderson and others, I would
reaffirm the need to situate racism in late-capitalist society
within the process of class rule and labor exploitation to grasp the dynamics of racial exclusion and
subordination. Beyond the mode of production, the antagonistic relations between the capitalist class and the
working class are articulated with the state and its complex bureaucratic and juridical mechanisms, multiplying
cultural and political differentiations that affect the attitudes, sentiments, and actual behavior of
groups. A critique of ideologies of racism and sexism operating in the arena of class antagonism becomes
crucial in the effort to dismantle their efficacy. Moreover, as Bensaid observes in Marx for Our Times (2002), “the
relationship between social structure and political struggle is mediated by the relations of dependence and domination between nations at the
Viewed historically, the
phenomenon of migrant labor, in particular Filipina domestics in North America and elsewhere, demonstrates how racial
and gender characteristics become functional and discursively valorized when they are inserted into
the dialectic of abstract and concrete labor, of use value and exchange value, in the production of
commodities—in this case, domestic labor as a commodity. Contrary to any attempts to legitimate the use of the
underpaid services of women of color from the South, the racializing and gendering discourse of
global capitalism can only be adequately grasped as the mode through which extraction of surplus
value, wage differentiation, and control and representation of bodies are all negotiated. A study of racist practices and
institutions, divorced from the underlying determinant structure of capital accumulation and class rule
allowing such practices and institutions to exercise their naturalizing force, can only perpetuate an abstract
metaphysics of race and a discourse of power that would reinforce the continuing reification or
commodification of human relations in everyday life. We cannot multiply static determinations in an atomistic manner
and at the same time acquire the intelligible totality of knowledge that we need for formulating strategies of radical social transformation. A
first step in this project of renewing critical race theory is simple: begin with the concept of class as an
antagonistic relation between labor and capital, and then proceed to analyze how the determinant of
“race” is played out historically in the class conflicted structure of capitalism and its
political/ideological processes of class rule.
international level.” Linear functionalism yields to the dialectical analysis of concrete mediations.
The alternative is to reject critical theory and embrace transformative pedagogy based in class
analysis to avoid the preservation of the bourgeoisie
Zavarzadeh 3 - retired professor of English at Syracuse University (Mas'ud, “The Pedagogy of Totality” Journal of Advanced Composition
Theory 2003 JAC Online)
Pedagogy is most effective when its lessons are situated in the conceptual analysis of objective social
totality and grounded in historical materialist critique. Totalization is essential to transformative pedagogy because it is
through totalization that the student-the future worker-is enabled to "see society from the center, as a
coherent whole" and therefore "act in such a way as to change reality" (Lukacs, History 69). Changing reality in a sustained
way, requires knowing it historically and objectively-that is, conceptually as a totality in structure-and not simply
reacting to it as a galaxy of signifiers (as textualists have done), as the working of power in networks of
discourses (Foucault), or as a spontaneous reality that is available to us in its full immediacy (as activists
have done with eclecticism and sentimentality). Pedagogy, in other words, is always partisan, and the only
question is whose side (in the great class struggles) it takes and why: "Who does not know that talk about this or that
institution being non-partisan is generally nothing but the humbug of the ruling classes, who want to gloss over the fact that existing
institutions are already imbued, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, with a very definite political spirit?" (Lenin, "Tasks"). Criticism
of
totality as a closural space that excludes difference" and thus leads to totalitarianism is based on an
antimaterialist reading of difference as "contingency" (Rorty 3-69); as "hybridity" (Bhabha); as "differance"-the play of "traces" in
the differing and deferral of the sign (Derrida, "Differance"); or the performativity of identity (Butler, Bodies). These and other
versions of difference in contemporary pedagogy are based on cultural heterogeneities that deflect the
difference that makes all the differences: the social division of labor under capitalism. The pedagogy of
totality writes the foundational difference of class (which explains all these differences) back into teaching and
foregrounds it not as aleatory signs (which is the epistemology of all these differences) but as a historical necessity for capital, which divides
people with rigid clarity in the regime of wage labor (Marx and Engels, Manifesto 40-60). Social
totality, as I have suggested, is a
totality with a materialist (class) difference. It is resistance against the ferocity of "contingency,"
"performativity," "hybridity," and "differance"-all of which have rewritten the world in cynicism, in
pathos, and ironically but always in the interest of the transnational bourgeoisie. Objective knowledge
of the world and thus of the social totality is not a product of individual consciousness (Popper) or the
outcome of codes of the "culture of science" (Kuhn). Nor is it simply a semiotic effect (Latour). Objective knowledge of the
world is a knowledge that is produced as people collectively produce their material life: The fact is, therefore,
that definite individuals who are productively active in a definite way enter into these definite social and political relations .... The social
structure and the state are continually evolving out of the life-process of definite individuals, however, of these individuals, not as they may
appear in their own or other people's imagination, but as they actually are, i. e. as they act, produce materially, and hence as they work under
definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of their will. (Marx and Engels, German 35-36) The
focus of
transformative pedagogy is on these material relations of difference that are the basis of all social
relations and practices. Without teaching these grounding material relations that condition all
knowledges-from Nanosciences to Anthropology-pedagogy becomes the art of mystification in the interest of the
class that benefits from keeping these foundational relations and therefore the causes of social
inequalities in the dark (especially by using an epistemological argument against the foundational). Since the production of
material life involves acting on the object of labor by the means of labor, relations of production are
primarily relations to the means and object of labor-they are relations to the means of production. Social
relations of production indicate who controls the means of production, which is another way of saying they are relations of property
(class). Social life, itself, takes opposing forms depending on whether the means of production are owned collectively by the producers or
privately by individuals who appropriate the products of the producers. Pedagogy acts within these relations and, therefore,
must situate its teaching within them and also self-reflexively include the conditions of its own
production in its lessons. Under wage labor, the "appearance" of the relations of production differs from their "essence," since their
appearance in the market is an inversion of what they actually are at the point of production. The inequality at the point of productionbetween those who have to sell their labor power for their subsistence and those who purchase it for profit-is characterized in the market as
equality and freedom, and the exchange of wages for labor power is inverted and represented as a fair trade (Marx, Capita/I, 280). The task
of a pedagogy of totality is not to mistake the "appearance" for the "essence" and to foreground the material
difference: "All science would be superfluous if the form of appearance of things directly coincided with
their essence" (3, 956). Transformative teaching is the science of the material difference. It points out to the student why in daily life,
ideology sutures difference in order to persuade the subject of labor that the appearance is the essence and to textualize the "essence" as a
species of "appearance." Transformative
pedagogy breaks through this false consciousness with a conceptual
analysis that produces knowledge of the essence through a class critique of appearance.
Experience-based pedagogy has been co-opted by the bourgeoisie and obscures class-based
oppression
Zavarzadeh 3 - retired professor of English at Syracuse University (Mas'ud, “The Pedagogy of Totality” Journal of Advanced Composition
Theory 2003 JAC Online)
The ideological value of the concept of "experience" in de-conceptualizing pedagogy will perhaps become
more clear in examining the way bourgeois radical pedagogues, such as Giroux, deploy experience as an
instance of spontaneity to eviscerate class as an explanatory concept by which the social relations of property are critiqued. In
his Impure Acts a book devoted to marginalizing explanatory concepts and popularizing "hybrids" and that, in effect,
justifies political opportunism in pedagogy-Giroux repeats the claims of such other cultural
phenomenologists as Stuart Hall, Judith Butler, and Robin Kelley that "class" is "lived through race" (28). Class, in other
words, is an affect. He represents this affective view of class as epistemological resistance against class which, he claims, is a universal category
that takes the "difference" of race out of class. As I have already argued, epistemology
is used in mainstream pedagogy as a
cover for a reactionary class politics that does several things, as Giroux demonstrates. First, it segregates the
"black" proletariat from the "white" proletariat and isolates both from other "racial" proletariats. In doing
so, Giroux's pedagogy carries out the political agenda of capital-to pit one segment of the proletariat
against the other and to tum the unity of the working class into contesting (race) "differences." Second, it
rewrites the system of wage labor itself into a hybrid. Giroux's experience-ism obscures the systematicity
of wage labor and argues that there is no capitalism operating with a single logic of exploitation. Instead,
there are many, aleatory, ad hoc, local arrangements between employees and employers depending on the color of the worker not the laws of
motion of capital. Third, it
converts capitalism from an economic system based on the "exploitation" of
humans by humans (wage labor)- through the ownership of the means of production-into an institution of cultural
"oppression" based on "power." Fourth, since class is lived through race, it is not an objective fact (the relation
of the worker to ownership ofthe means of production) but a subjective experience. The experience of ("living") class
through race, like all experiences, is contingent, aleatory, and indeterminate. Class (lived through the experience
of race) is thus reconstituted as contingent-an accident not a necessity of wage labor. Fifth, since capitalism is
not a system but a series of ad hoc arrangements of exchange with various workers of diverse colors, it does not
produce an objective binary class system but only cultural differences. One cannot, therefore, obtain
objective knowledge of capitalism. There are, in short, no laws of motion of capital; there are only "experiences" of work
influenced by one's color. Consequently, to say-as I have said-that capitalism is a regime of exploitation is simply a totalitarian closure. We
cannot know what capitalism is because, according to Giroux's logic, it is fraught with differences (of race) not the singularity of "surplus labor."
In Giroux's pedagogy, there is no capitalism ("totality"), only cultural effects of capitals without
capitalism ("differences"). Giroux represents his gutting of class as a radical and groundbreaking notion
that will lead to liberation of the oppressed. However, he never completes the logic of his argument
because in the end it will deground his position and turn it into epistemological nonsense and political
pantomime. If class is a universal category that obliterates the difference of race, there is (on the basis of such a
claim) no reason not to say that race is also a universal category because it obliterates the difference of
sexuality (and other differences), which is, by the same logic, itself a universal category since it obliterates the difference of age (and other
differences), which is itself a universal category because it obliterates the difference of (dis )ability (and other differences), which is itself a
universal category because it obliterates the difference of class (and other differences). In
short, the social, in Giroux's pedagogy
is a circle of oppressions, none of whose components can explain any structural relations; each simply
absorbs the other ("class is actually lived through race," paraphrasing Giroux) and thus points back to itself as a local knowledge of the
affective, difference, and contingency. Class explains race; it does not absorb it as an experience (see Butler, "Merely"),
nor does it reduce it to the contingencies of ethnicities (Hall, "New") or urban performativities (Kelley, Yo '). To put it differently, since in
this pluralism of oppressions each element cancels out the explanatory capacity of all others, the
existing social relations are reaffirmed in a pragmatic balancing of differences. Nothing changes, everything
is resignified. The classroom of experience reduces all concepts (which it marks as "grand narratives") to affects ("little stories") and, instead of
explaining the social in order to change it, only "interprets" it as a profusion of differences. Teaching becomes an affirmation of the singular-asis; its lessons "save the honor of the name" (see Lyotard, Postmodern 82). Giroux's
program is a mimesis of the logic of the
ruling ideology: as in all pedagogies of affect, it redescribes the relation of the subject of knowledge with the world but leaves the world
itself intact by reifying the signs of "difference" (see Rorty, Contingency 53, 73). The subject, as I will discuss later in my analysis of Cary
Nelson's radical pedagogy, feels differently about itself in a world that remains what it was. Giroux is putting
forth a class-cleansing pedagogy: he erases class from teaching in the name of epistemology ("totalization").
But as I have already argued, epistemology is not an issue for Giroux; it is an alibi for hollowing out from class its
economic explanatory power. Epistemology in bourgeois pedagogy is class politics represented as
"theory"-whose aim is to tum class into a cultural aleatory experience. In Giroux's phenomenological experientialism,
lived experience is an excuse for advancing the cause of capital in a populist logic (respect for the ineluctable
"experience" of the student) so that the student, the future worker, is trained as one who understands the
world only through the sense-able-his own "unique" experience as black, white, or brown; man or
woman; gay or straight-but never as a proletariat: a person who, regardless of race, sexuality, gender, age, or (dis
)ability has to sell his or her labor power to capital in order to obtain subsistence wages in exchange.
Experience, in Giroux's pedagogy, becomes a self-protecting "inside" that resists world-historical
knowledge as an intrusion from "outside"; it thus valorizes ignorance as a mark of the authenticity and
sovereignty of the subject-as independence and free choice.
Alt: Revolution
The alternative is to embrace a radical strategy of revolution—only after the demise of
capital can we solve racism
San Juan 05 (Epifanio, Filipino American literary academic, mentor, cultural reviewer, civic intellectual, activist, writer, essayist “From
Race to Class Struggle: Marxism and Critical Race Theory”, Nature, Society and Thought 18:3, 2005,
http://homepages.spa.umn.edu/~marquit/nst183a.pdf#page=5)//AS
Nevertheless, without
framing all these within the total picture of the crisis of capital and its globalized
understanding the continued domination of labor
by capital globally, we cannot effectively counteract the racism that underwrites the relation of
domination and subordination among nationalities, ethnic communities, and gender groups. The critique of an emergent
authoritarian state and questionable policies sanctioned by the USA Patriot Act is urgently necessary.
In doing so, naming the system and understanding its operations would be useful in discovering precisely
that element of self-activity, of agency, that has supposedly been erased in totalizing metanarratives such as the
restructuring from the late seventies up to the present, and without
“New World Order,” the “New American Century” that will end ideology and history, and in revolutionary projects of achieving racial justice
and equality. As the familiar quotation goes, we do make history—but not under circumstances of our choosing. So the question is, as always,
“What alternatives do we have to carry out which goals at what time and place?” The
goal of a classless communist society
and strategies to attain it envisage the demise of racist ideology and practice in their current forms.
But progressive forces around the world are not agreed about this. For example, the World Conference
against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance–NGO Forum held in Durban, South Africa, from 31 August to
7 September, 2001 publicized the global problem of racism but was unable to formulate a consensus on how to solve it.
Its fi nal declaration highlighted the historic origin of racism in the slave trade, colonialism, and genocide, and it raised the possibility of
Because of its composition and the
pervasive climate of reaction, the Forum could not endorse a radical approach that would focus on
the elimination of the exploitation of labor (labor power as commodity) as a necessary fi rst step. Given its limits, it could
not espouse a need for a thoroughgoing change of the material basis of social production and
reparations for its victims, but did not offer a concrete program of action (see Mann 2002).
reproduction—the latter involving the hegemonic rule of the propertied bloc in each society profi ting from the unequal division of labor and
the unequal distribution of social wealth—on which the institutional practices of racism (apartheid, discrimination, genocide) thrive. “Race is
the modality in which class is lived,” as Stuart Hall remarks concerning post- 1945 Britain (Solomos 1986, 103). Without
political
power in the hands of the democratic-popular masses under the leadership of the working class, the
ideological machinery (laws, customs, religion, state bureaucracy) that legitimizes class domination, with its
attendant racist practices, cannot be changed. What is required is a revolutionary process that
mobilizes a broad constituency based on substantive equality and social justice as an essential part of
the agenda to dissolve class structures. Any change in the ideas, beliefs, and norms would produce
changes in the economic, political, and social institutions, which would in turn promote wideranging
changes in social relations among all groups and sectors
The alternative reclaims revolutionary class politics to endorse a transformation of
capitalism that solves racism
Young 06 (Robert, Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature. At New York University, “Putting Materialism back into
Race Theory: Toward a Transformative Theory of Race”, The Red Critique 11, Winter/Spring 2006,
http://www.redcritique.org/WinterSpring2006/puttingmaterialismbackintoracetheory.htm)//AS
This essay advances a materialist theory of race. In my view, race
oppression dialectically intersects with the
exploitative logic of advanced capitalism, a regime which deploys race in the interest of surplus
accumulation. Thus, race operates at the (economic) base and therefore produces cultural and
ideological effects at the superstructure; in turn, these effects—in very historically specific way—interact with and ideologically
justify the operations at the economic base [1]. In a sense then, race encodes the totality of contemporary capitalist
social relations, which is why race cuts across a range of seemingly disparate social sites in contemporary US
society. For instance, one can mark race difference and its discriminatory effects in such diverse sites as health care, housing/real estate,
education, law, job market, and many other social sites. However, unlike many commentators who engage race matters, I
do not isolate
these social sites and view race as a local problem, which would lead to reformist measures along the
lines of either legal reform or a cultural-ideological battle to win the hearts and minds of people and thus keep
the existing socio-economic arrangements intact; instead, I foreground the relationality of these sites
within the exchange mechanism of multinational capitalism. Consequently, I believe, the eradication of race
oppression also requires a totalizing political project: the transformation of existing capitalism —a system
which produces difference (the racial/gender division of labor) and accompanying ideological narratives that justify the resulting social
inequality. Hence, my
project articulates a transformative theory of race—a theory that reclaims
revolutionary class politics in the interests of contributing toward a post-racist society. In other words, the
transformation from actually existing capitalism into socialism constitutes the condition of possibility for a post-racist society—a society free
from racial and all other forms of oppression. By freedom, I
do not simply mean a legal or cultural articulation of
individual rights as proposed by bourgeois race theorists. Instead, I theorize freedom as a material effect
of emancipated economic forms. I foreground my (materialist) understanding of race as a way to contest contemporary accounts
of race, which erase any determinate connection to economics. For instance, humanism and poststructuralism represent two dominant views
on race in the contemporary academy. Even though they articulate very different theoretical positions, they produce similar ideological effects:
the suppression of economics. They
collude in redirecting attention away from the logic of capitalist
exploitation and point us to the cultural questions of sameness (humanism) or difference
(poststructuralism). In developing my project, I critique the ideological assumptions of some exemplary
instances of humanist and poststructuralist accounts of race, especially those accounts that also attempt to displace
Marxism, and, in doing so, I foreground the historically determinate link between race and exploitation. It is this
link that forms the core of what I am calling a transformative theory of race. The transformation of race from a sign of
exploitation to one of democratic multiculturalism, ultimately, requires the transformation of
capitalism.
Postmodernist critiques of Marxism are false—a revolution against capital is necessary
now more than ever
McLaren and Farahmandpur 03 (Peter and Ramin, Professor in the Division of Urban Schooling, the Graduate School of
Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles and Professor of Education at Portland State University, “Breaking
Signifying Chains: A Marxist Position on Postmodernism”, Marxism Against Postmodernism in Educational Theory, Lexington Books, March
2003, http://books.google.com/books/about/Marxism_Against_Postmodernism_in_Educati.html?id=nK_UST5ng6gC)//AS
Regardless of where we position ourselves at the crossroads of history, our location is always precarious and risky. Though
we are
tempted always to look beyond the agony of the present moment into the sublime abyss of the
unknown, we cannot avoid encountering the violent clash between labor and capital. We are at a
peculiar juncture in human history that tantalizes us with the promise of redemption and liberation
while delivering on its threat of corruption and despair. We are suspended precariously between the
revolution and counter revolution, which Rosa Luxemburg so forcefully referred to as a choice between socialism and barbarism.
We face the future much like the observers of The Ambassadors, a masterpiece painted by Hans Holbein the Younger in 1533 that now hangs in
London's British Museum. Below the figures of two ambassadors is a large skull that appears drastically out of proportion when viewed headon. The distortion corrects itself, however, when viewed at a sharp angle from below the bottom right hand side of the painting. The painting
was meant to be viewed from below, possibly as one walked up the stairs to one's bedroom to pray before sleeping. Presumably, the observer
would be reminded of one's mortality. The lesson for us voyagers in the new millennium is that we
need to position ourselves
from below, from the perspective of the suffering masses, in order to see what is happening in the
capitalist world system, and how mortality is something the masses confront on a daily basis , and not
because they can aftbrd to commission a painting, much less own a house in which to hang it. Marx's description of capitalism as
the sorcerer's dark power that has become uncontrollable is even more apt today than it was in
Marx's time, despite the fact that Marxism has been relegated by the postmodemists to the Icarian
Status of failed aspiration. No other individual has been able to analyze the Frankensteinian dimensions of capital accumulation with
the same intensity and foresight as Marx, who wrote, "If money _ . . "˜comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,' capital
comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt."•2 Never
before has a Marxian analysis of
capitalism been so desperately needed than at this particular juncture in history, especially in view of
the global push toward finance and speculative capital. It is becoming increasingly clearer that the quality of life
in capitalist nations such as the United States is implicated in the absence of freedom in less
developed countries. Global carpetbaggers and "˜bankerist Overworlders' profiteering from human suffering, and bargain basement
capitalists with a vision of transforming the environment into Planet Mall, are bent upon reaping short-term profits at the expense of ecological
health and human dignity and drawing ever more of existence within their expanding domain, cannibalizing life as a whole. On the soil of our
former Cold War opponent, a clique of wealthy Russian oligarchs now follow the Westem path to redemption, pillaging existing state propertythe refmeries, steel mills, smelters, pipelines, mineral deposits and factories' The state picks up the bill, while the former proletariats surf the
black market for rent money. The World Bank calls it "tough love."•
Alt: Politics
Black intellectualism has been coopted by the elite—creating political and economic
opportunity is the only way to solve
Reed 71 (Adolph L., professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, “Marxism and Nationalism in Latin America”, Social
Theory and Practice 1:4, Fall 1971, JSTOR)//AS
In obeisance to the spirit of Mills my own biases, which are definitely and actively with both the Black Nationalist position and the Marxian
analytical method, must be made clear. Such biases are inevitable, and any attempt to deny them can be only charlatan- ry, no matter what
Robert Dahl and Talcott Parsons might argue. Black intellectuals,
students and academics cannot afford to be
sucked in by the elitist, systems-maintenance ideology of professional Social Scientism. Subscription to
the mythology flowing from notions of "science qua science"• can only be silly coming from men and
women who are allowed no control over the institutions which define their humanity and determine
their destiny, who can at any time be shot clown on the streets or herded into concen- tration camps. They cannot evaluate the racist,
imperialistic war in Vietnam only in terms of its functionality as abstract foreign policy when they and their families provide the cannon fodder,
and they cannot prattle about minimization of social conflict be cause for them and for all Afro-Americans that simply means the continuation
and refinement of our colonization. On the contrary, black
intellectuals and academics have a responsibility to them
selves and to their people to use whatever skills they may possess first and always in accordance with
the dictates of the libera- tion struggle. Within the purview of this responsibility, social science must be seen as
demonstrating functionality in no way other than as a tool to be used in the light to decolonize
millions of Afroamericans. its value-direction must come from a desire to seize, develop, and create
political, economic, cultural and social institutions relevant to black experience and black necessities ,
and to construct a theoretical grounding for the activist groups and individuals operating in Afroamerica (which entails for the intellec- tuals the
development of an Afroamerican praxis). Only
in this way will the Afroamer- ican radical movement develop a
truly com- prehensive and revolutionary ideology, and in no other way will the internal contradictions which debilitate that movement be resolved. This essay is hoped to be a small step toward a synthesis which only the
intellectuals can complete.
Privileged groups must take initiative in combatting racism—a multiracial
anticapitalist uprising is the only way to solve
Crass 2000 (Chris, organizer and writer working to build powerful working class-based, feminist, multiracial movements for collective
liberation, “Beyond the Whiteness – Global Capitalism and White Supremacy: thoughts on movement building and anti-racist organizing”,
http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/books/collectiveliberation/beyond.html)//AS
The other major aspect of ‘how can we get more people of color to join our group’ is the idea that
anti-racist consciousness develops through osmosis – i.e. that if white people sit in the same room as people of color, we
will begin to understand how white supremacy operates and therefore we won’t really need to talk about it. We need to be clear that
multiracial doesn’t automatically mean anti-racist. The US military is multiracial in composition, but clearly
serves the interests of imperialism and white supremacy. Similarly, an anti-racist group of whites can
work to end white supremacy. What we are envisioning is a consciously anti-racist and multiracial
movement against global capitalism. It is absolutely true that white people learn about racism through interactions and
relationships with people of color. But in terms of how we plan to do this work in activism, our goal cannot be to bring in people
of color and expect that they will school us. Organizers of color have enough work already. In our pursuit to get educated, we
need to go to more events and actions organized by people of color and show support, listen and
learn. We need to read the amazing writers that are out there. We can pay attention to how the system works (when we
are in jail, in court, in classrooms, at work and on the street). We can build relationships and learn from each other. But, just as men
cannot expect women to educate them about sexism and heteros cannot expect queers to give them
the homophobia 101 class whenever it is deemed appropriate, white people have a responsibility to
work on racism together and not just wait until a person of color brings it up. Here’s an example of this kind of
dynamic. Men in Food Not Bombs (the group I’ve worked with) would often talk about sexism in terms of how can we get more women taking
on more responsibility and create equal power. The conversations would sometimes turn to questions like, How can we check our behavior that
is preventing women from taking on responsibility? And, What kind of internal culture do we have and how does it privilege men and keep
women down? These conversations about what men should do were very useful – as men should worry less about what women are and aren’t
doing and think more about what they as men are and aren’t doing. The women in the group are just as capable, just as responsible, just as
intelligent, once men stop occupying all of the space and learn to share power. Men worrying less about appeasing women and more about
ending sexism is what must happen. This is
how we need to think about racism. Too often I hear white activists
talk about why more people of color aren’t in the group – as opposed to whether or not we really
have an understanding of how deeply racism impacts the issues we’re working on and whether or not there
are organizations and activists of color already working on these issues so that we can form working relationships.
Alt: Analysis
Analyzing race in terms of capital is essential—it operates in society via valuation
Leong 13 (Nancy, Assistant Professor of Civil Rights ,Constitutional Law, and Criminal Procedure at the University of Denver, “Racial
Capitalism”, Harvard Law Review 126:8, June 2013, Infotrac)//AS
More importantly, however, the characteristics
associated with both traditional and contemporary understandings of property do
not capture some of the implications of the way that nonwhiteness is currently assigned value. Therefore, a more useful lens for
understanding the value assigned to nonwhiteness is that of capital. (108) Capital has been theorized in many forms.
One of the most influential theories is Karl Marx's critique, rooted in political economy, of the relationship
between private property, accumulated wealth, and exploitative social relations. (109) Subsequent theorists
have posited other kinds of capital. Theodore Schultz introduced the notion of human capital -- the value added to a
laborer when the laborer acquires education, skills, training, knowledge, or other attributes that improve her usefulness in the process of
producing and exchanging goods. (110) Pierre Bourdieu later distinguished
among several forms of capital, including
economic capital, cultural capital, social capital, and symbolic capital . (111) Catherine Hakim has developed the idea
of erotic capital as a mechanism for furthering both social and economic interests through sexual attractiveness. (112) In many contexts, then,
scholars have found the lens of capital a useful way of examining particular phenomena. In the analysis I develop in this Article, existing
theories of capital serve as heuristics for understanding the way that race is valued and the way that
racial value is exchanged. There are undeniable differences between economic and racial markets, and so I do not claim that the
analogy to any given theory of capital is a perfect explanation for the dynamics of racial value. But as a means to understand how race is valued
-- and in particular how nonwhiteness is valued -- the various theories of capital provide useful frameworks for thinking about both that process
of valuation and about how racial identity consequently functions in markets, economic and otherwise. Theories
of capital thus
clarify several aspects of the valuation of nonwhiteness. For example, conceptions of social capital further
illustrate the reasons thatnonwhiteness has value to white people and predominantly white
institutions. Relatedly, social capital provides an understanding of the way that racial value is transferred through interaction and
affiliation. These ideas then provide the basis for understanding the process of exploitation and profit that Marxian theories of capital
illuminate. That is, the
question is not simply who "possesses" racial identity, but also who reaps value
from it, and conceiving of nonwhiteness as capital helps to illustrate this process of exploitation and
profit. The Marxian capital framework likewise highlights the dynamism of the value assigned to racial
identity -- that is, how the value of racial identity fluctuates depending on the situation. The Marxian capital
framework also allows for a more transparent examination of who, precisely, derives value from nonwhiteness. And perhaps most importantly,
the framework exposes the imbalance in power that frames the valuation of nonwhiteness.
The alternative is to embrace a critical reflexive Marxist theory—key to resisting
systems of global oppression—the aff’s postmodernism is dangerous and ineffective
McLaren and Farahmandpur 00 (Peter and Ramin, Professor in the Division of Urban Schooling, the Graduate School of
Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles and Professor of Education at Portland State University, “Reconsidering
Marx in Post-Marxist Times: A Requiem for Postmodernism?”, Educational Researcher 29:3, April 2000, JSTOR)//AS
Our purpose here has not been to establish, evidentially, instance by in- stance, or in toto, the dilemmas, pit- falls,
and shortcomings of postmodern theory, but rather to sound a rather basic caution with respect to its potential for mounting an effective counter- hegemonic project against global capi- talism and its discontents. In
doing so we raise the following questions echoed by the epigones of the mod- ernist project: Does returning to Marx reveal the
ultimate sources of the pa- triarchal and colonizing venture of the West's master narratives? Will reembracing Marxism somehow summon a new coherent identity for the patriar- chal West? Is Marxism a quixotically romantic quest for
liberation that can only serve as a stimulant for the pas- sion of the Western master narrative? Can Marxist writings today be any- thing more
The position we take on the issues raised by these questions is
unambigu- ous. We believe that Marxist analysis should serve as an axiomatic tool for contesting
current social relations linked to the globalization of capital and the neoliberal education policies
that follow in its wake. Educational re- searchers ignore Marxist analyses of globalization and the
than a dirge on the death of the communist dream?
quotidian poetics of the everyday at
their peril. At the
same time, we admit that Marxist
the- ory constitutes a social system of
must continually be examined for its
underlying assumptions. We believe that a critical reflexive Marxist theory-- undergirded by the categorical
impera- tive of striving to overthrow all social conditions in which human beings are exploited and
oppressed-can prove foundational in the development of current educational research traditions as well as
pedagogies of liberation.
analy- sis that inscribes subjects and is seeped in the dross of everyday life. As such, it
Alt: Inclusivity
The alternative asks you to view the debate through a Marxist analysis of race,
gender, and class—only by including all these perspectives can we solve oppression
Belkhir 01, (Jean Ait, founded the American Sociological Association Section on Race, Gender and Class, Professor of Sociology at the
University of New Orleans, “Marxism Without Apologies: Integrating Race, Gender, Class; A Working Class Approach”, Race, Gender, and Class
8:2, April 2001, ProQuest)//AS
Bringing racism, sexism and classism to an end requires the elimination of classism, racism and sexism
on all social levels including changing the macro-level structures of capitalism so that power and
decision-making are shared in a way that prevents exploitation based on class, race, or gender and allows for political
as well as economic democracy. On a personal level freeing ourselves from classism, racism and sexism requires
reversing the conditioning process through healing the emotional wounds of race, gender and class
oppression, reclaiming our past and present class, race and gender experiences, and sorting out how
classism, racism and sexism presently and in the past prevents us from being ourselves , from shaping our
own identities, and from having the kinds of relationships we want with all people. Our goal is to create a society that is free
of racism, and classism and that is democratic, equitable, and humane. The anti-racism/sexism/classism movement is a powerful
social movement. However, the movement faces enormous challenges in the future. Among the most
urgent, is the need to develop a more inclusive, culturally sensitive, broad-based political agenda that will
appeal to those who suffer the most from racism, sexism and classism: the multi-racial, multicultural, working-class women and
men in this global economic system, who are still left out of the race, gender and class political and social
agenda. We seek to build a broad, unifying theory and movement playing at the center of the Marxist
analysis of capitalism the voices of those people who have been so insulted, betrayed, brutalized,
maltreated, mythified, deified, silenced, exploited, numbed, and dulled not only by the organic intellectuals who
are in service to the dominant society, but also by those organic intellectuals who claim to be in service to and in affinity with oppressed people
everywhere.
Alt: Reconceptualization
<note: this is useful against affs that talk about “the debate space” or “inclusivity”>
The alternative is to reconceptualize difference in terms of historical materialism—
understanding the situation of oppression relative to capital is essential—the aff’s
identity politics precludes this
Scatamburlo-D’Annibale and McLaren 04 (Valerie and Peter, associate professor in the Department of
Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor and Professor in the Division of Urban Schooling, the Graduate School of
Education and Information Studies at UCLA, “Class Dismissed? Historical materialism and the politics of ‘difference’”, Educational Philosophy
and Theory 36:2, April 2004, Wiley)//AS
‘Post-al’ theorizations of ‘difference’ circumvent and undermine any systematic knowledge of the
material dimensions of difference and tend to segregate questions of ‘difference’ from class formation and
capitalist social relations. We therefore believe that it is necessary to (re)conceptualize ‘difference’ by
drawing upon Marx's materialist and historical formulations. ‘Difference’ needs to be understood as
the product of social contradictions and in relation to political and economic organization. We need to
acknowledge that ‘otherness’ and/or difference is not something that passively happens, but, rather, is
actively produced. In other words, since systems of differences almost always involve relations of domination and oppression, we must
concern ourselves with the economies of relations of difference that exist in specific contexts. Drawing upon the Marxist concept
of mediation enables us to unsettle our categorical approaches to both class and difference, for it was
Marx himself who warned against creating false dichotomies in the situation of our politics—that it was absurd to ‘choose between
consciousness and the world, subjectivity and social organization, personal or collective will and historical or structural determination.’ In a
similar vein, it
is equally absurd to see ‘difference as a historical form of consciousness unconnected to
class formation, development of capital and class politics’ (Bannerji, 1995, p. 30). Bannerji points to the need
to historicize ‘difference’ in relation to the history and social organization of capital and class (inclusive of
imperialist and colonialist legacies). Apprehending the meaning and function of difference in this manner necessarily highlights the importance
of exploring (1) the institutional and structural aspects of difference; (2) the meanings that get attached to categories of difference; and (3) how
differences are produced out of, and lived within specific historical formations.5 Moreover, it presents a challenge to those theorizations
that work to consolidate ‘identitarian’ understandings of difference based exclusively on questions of
cultural or racial hegemony. In such approaches, the answer to oppression often amounts to creating
greater cultural space for the formerly excluded to have their voices heard (represented). In this regard, much
of what is called the ‘politics of difference’ is little more than a demand for inclusion into the club of
representation —a posture which reinscribes a neo-liberal pluralist stance rooted in the ideology of free-market
capitalism. In short, the political sphere is modeled on the marketplace and freedom amounts to the liberty of all vendors to display their
‘different’ cultural goods. What advocates of this approach fail to address is that the forces of diversity and
difference are allowed to flourish provided that they remain within the prevailing forms of capitalist
social arrangements. The neo-pluralism of difference politics (including those based on ‘race’) cannot
adequately pose a substantive challenge to the productive system of capitalism that is able to accommodate a
vast pluralism of ideas and cultural practices, and cannot capture the ways in which various manifestations of oppression are intimately
connected to the central dynamics of capitalist exploitation. An
historical materialist approach understands that
categories of ‘difference’ are social/political constructs that are often encoded in dominant ideological
formations and that they often play a role in ‘moral’ and ‘legal’ state-mediated forms of ruling. It also acknowledges the ‘material’ force of
ideologies—particularly racist ideologies—that assign separate cultural and/or biological essences to different segments of the population
which, in turn, serve to reinforce and rationalize existing relations of power. But more than this,
an historical materialist
understanding foregrounds the manner in which ‘difference’ is central to the exploitative
production/reproduction dialectic of capital, its labor organization and processes, and in the way
labor is valued and renumerated.
Alt: Psychoanalysis
The alternative is to embrace the memory of what capital has done to the black
body—this genealogy is key to stopping destructive progress
Farley 12 (Anthony Paul, James Campbell Matthews Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence at Albany Law School, “CRITICAL RACE
THEORY AND MARXISM: TEMPORAL POWER”, Columbia Journal of Race and Law 1:3, University of Michigan Libraries)//AS
There is no such thing as race unless there is first an act of mass murder that attaches the mark of race
to capital. That is the sin of capital; capital requires mass murder and it makes race out of that mass murder.
The race born of this is always divided in two, one race with an abundance and the other race with a
lack. The latter race, the one with the lack, is forced by force of arms to silently suffer or to work for a legal
equality that must, as a matter of maintaining what appears in the form of race, the very sign under which they gather, appear to be the
order of the universe, be denied in ever more clever ways. Striving for equality within the boundaries authorized by the very
system that has attached race to lack, the race with the lack succeeds only in forgetting: The patient cannot remember the
whole of what is repressed in him, and what he cannot remember may be precisely the essential part of it . . . He is obliged to repeat the
repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of . . . remembering it as something belonging to the past. These reproductions,
which emerge with an unwished for exactitude, always have as their subject some portion of infantile sexual life . . . that are invariably acted
Psychoanalysis, the talking cure, has as its
object of study—its queer contents—the unspeakable event. The unspeakable event, in other words, is what we talk about
when we talk about psychoanalysis. That is why psychoanalysis, to the extent it operates as a cure, has always to
do with “other words,” words other than what we meant to say. The cure for the individual may be the cure for the
group. The talking cure proceeds by freeing the analysand’s speech from the usual constraints of propriety and relevance. Once free to
roam the enclosure of the analytic space, the analysand’s speech sometimes returns to its source. When
out in the sphere of the transference, of the patient’s relation to the physician.33
the analysand’s speech returns it does so in the shape of whatever it was the analysand had previously not allowed herself or himself to know.
Thoughts and feelings from one moment in time are transferred onto the person of the analyst. The
transferred thoughts and
feelings, transferred to the person of the analyst, may show the analysand, by not fitting, just how much work she or
he has done to make those feelings appear to fit. The theatre of transference ‘shows’ the analysand a way out of her or his
temporal tangle. There is a temporal power that is exercised within time. There is also a temporal power that is said to be eternal, and
exercised outside of time. This Essay concerns neither the power that is exercised within time, nor the power that is said to be exercised
outside of time. Temporal
power, as that term is used herein, is the power that is exercised over time
itself. This is an essay about temporal power. Time is created. Time can also be destroyed. If modernity is the
“drawing of a line,” then color and time are not parallel, they are self-same, the one is also the other
one. Trauma is another word for destroyed time. So is repetition. The repetitions are another mode by which we destroy
time. We live the horizonless trauma and experience constant repetition of unremembered experience as the passage of time. But it is not
the passage of time, it is only repetition. Modern progress is a line of destroyed time, a line drawn in sand that
has already slipped away. Modern time is not time; it is destroyed time, spectacular time. Modern progress
is not progress at all. Life moves on. But progress does not move. Modern progress does not progress. Modern progress
can only repeat, endlessly, and repetition, however endless it may be, is not life, it is a line, a timeline,
every segment of which is as identical to the rest. It does not have to be this way: This earth divided We will
make whole So it can be A common treasury for all.34 Memory is a first step to making this earth whole. And this is
what is to be remembered about the genealogies of property represented by “the bill of sale”: By theft
and murder They took the land Now everywhere the walls Rise up at their command.35
Alt: Orthodox Marxism
Thus the alternative is one of Orthodox Marxism – the time is now and it’s the only prerequisite for
our emancipation from social inequality
Tumino 1[Stephen, Prof English at Pitt, ““What is Orthodox Marxism and Why it Matters Now More than
Ever”, Red Critique, p. online,
http://redcritique.org/spring2001/printversions/whatisorthodoxmarxismprint.htm SGarg]
It is only Orthodox Marxism that explains socialism as an historical inevitability that is tied to the
development of social production itself and its requirements.Orthodox Marxism makes socialism
scientific because it explains how in the capitalist system, based on the private consumption of laborpower (competition), the objective tendency is to reduce the amount of time labor spends in
reproducing itself (necessary labor) while expanding the amount of time labor is engaged in producing
surplus-value (surplus-labor) for the capitalist through the introduction of machinery into the production
process by the capitalists themselves to lower their own labor costs. Because of the competitive drive
for profits under capitalismit is historically inevitable that a point is reached when the technical
mastery—the amount of time socially necessary on average to meet the needs of society through the
processing of natural resources—is such that the conditions of the workers worsen relative to the
owners and becomes an unbearable global social contradiction in the midst of the ever greater mass of
wealth produced.It is therefore just as inevitable that at such a moment it obviously makes more sense
to socialize production and meet the needs of all to avoid the explosive social conflicts perpetually
generated by private property than to maintain the system at the risk of total social collapse on a world
scale. "Socialism or barbarism" (Luxemburg) is the inevitable choice faced by humanity because of
capitalism.Either maintain private property and the exploitation of labor in production, in which case
more and more social resources will go into policing the growingly desperate surplus-population
generated by the technical efficiency of social production, or socialize production and inaugurate a
society whose founding principle is "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs"
(Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program, Selected Works, 325) and "in which the free development of each
is the condition for the free development of all" (Manifesto of the Communist Party, Selected Works,
53).The time has come to state it clearly so that even the flexodox opportunists may grasp it: Orthodox
Marxism is not a free-floating "language-game" or "meta-narrative" for arbitrarily constructing local
utopian communities or spectral activist inversions of ideology meant to seduce "desire" and "mobilize"
(glorify) subjectivity—it is an absolute prerequisite for our emancipation from exploitation and a new
society freed from necessity! Orthodox Marxism is the only global theory of social change.Only
Orthodox Marxism has explained why under the system of wage-labor and capital communism is not
"an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself" but "the real movement which abolishes the present
state of things" (The German Ideology 57) because of its objective explanation of and ceaseless
commitment to "the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of
the immense majority" (Manifesto of the Communist Party, Selected Works, 45)to end social inequality
forever.
Policy Solves Race
Racism is a creation of policy and can only be destroyed by engaging with the state
Coates 13 (Ta-nehesi, senior editor at The Atlantic,“Good People, Racist People”, The Atlantic, 3/8/13,
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/03/good-people-racist-people/273843/)//AS
The "I'm not racist even though I'm doing something actually racist right now" rationale is linked to
the notion of racism as something worthy of societal condemnation. That is a good thing. As Sugrue
identifies in his book, you see a post-World-War-II consensus forming in the 1950s that racial discrimination
actually is wrong. Along with that (perhaps in the 60s) comes the idea that racism is something that "low-class" white people do. It's not
a system of laws and policies, so much as the ideology of Cletus the slack-jawed yokel. But Arnold Hirsch and Beryl Satter's work
shows the University of Chicago quietly and privately pursuing a racist strategy of "urban renewal"
while publicly claiming otherwise. None of this is new. It's akin to proto-Confederates loudly and
lustily defending slavery, daring the North to war before 1865, and then afterward claiming that the war really
wasn't about slavery. The point is to save face. Last night I had the luxury of sitting and talking with the brilliant historian
Barbara Fields. One point she makes that very few Americans understand is that racism is a creation.You read Edmund
Morgan's workand actually see racism being inscribed in the law and the country changing as a result . If
we accept that racism is a creation, then we must then accept that it can be destroyed. And if we accept
that it can be destroyed, we must then accept that it can be destroyed by us and that it likely must be
destroyed by methods kin to creation. Racism was created by policy. It will likely only be ultimately
destroyed by policy. That is hard to take. If Forrest Whitaker sticks out in that deli for reasons of individual mortal sin, we can castigate
the guy who frisked him and move on. But if he -- and others like him -- stick out for reasons of policy, for decisions that we, as a state, have
made, then we have a problem. Then we
have to do something beyond being nice to each other.
Racism is not inherent—it is a policy creation that can be dismantled by policy
Bouie 13 (Jamelle, staff writer at The American Prospect, “Making (and Dismantling) Racism”, The American Prospect, 3/11/13,
http://prospect.org/article/making-and-dismantling-racism)//AS
Over at The Atlantic, Ta-NehisiCoates
has been exploring the intersection of race and public policy, with a focus
on white supremacy as a driving force in political decisions at all levels of government. This has led him to
two conclusions: First, that anti-black racism as we understand it is a creation of explicit policy choices—the
decision to exclude, marginalize, and stigmatize Africans and their descendants has as much to do with racial
prejudice as does any intrinsic tribalism. And second, that it's possible to dismantle this prejudice using
public policy. Here is Coates in his own words: Last night I had the luxury of sitting and talking with the brilliant historian Barbara Fields.
One point she makes that very few Americans understand is that racism is a creation. You read Edmund Morgan’s work and actually see racism
being inscribed in the law and the country changing as a result. If we accept that racism is a creation, then we must then accept that it can be
destroyed. And if we accept that it can be destroyed, we must then accept that it can be destroyed by us and that it likely must be destroyed by
methods kin to creation. Racism was created by policy. It will likely only be ultimately destroyed by policy. Over at his blog, Andrew Sullivan
offers a reply: I don’t believe the law created racism any more than it can create lust or greed or envy
or hatred. It can encourage or mitigate these profound aspects of human psychology – it can create racist structures as in the Jim Crow
South or Greater Israel. But it can no more end these things that it can create them. A complementary strategy is finding ways for the targets of
such hatred to become inured to them, to let the slurs sting less until they sting not at all. Not easy. But a more manageable goal than TNC’s
utopianism. I can appreciate the
point Sullivan is making, but I'm not sure it's relevant to Coates' argument . It is
if you define racism as an overly aggressive form of
group loyalty—basically just prejudice—then Sullivan is right to throw water on the idea that the law can
"create racism any more than it can create lust or greed or envy or hatred." But Coates is making a more precise
claim: That there's nothing natural about the black/white divide that has defined American history. White
Europeans had contact with black Africans well before the trans-Atlantic slave tradewithout the
emergence of an anti-black racism. It took particular choices made by particular people—in this case,
absolutely true that "Group loyalty is deep in our DNA," as Sullivan writes. And
plantation owners in colonial Virginia—to make black skin a stigma, to make the "one drop rule" a defining feature
of American life for more than a hundred years. By enslaving African indentured servants and allowing their white counterparts
a chance for upward mobility, colonial landowners began the process that would make white supremacy the
ideology of America. The position of slavery generated a stigma that then justified continued
enslavement—blacks are lowly, therefore we must keep them as slaves. Slavery (and later, Jim Crow) wasn't built to reflect
racism as much as it was built in tandem with it. And later policy, in the late 19th and 20th centuries, further
entrenched white supremacist attitudes. Block black people from owning homes, and they're forced to
reside in crowded slums. Onlookers then use the reality of slums to deny homeownership to blacks, under the view that they're unfit
for suburbs. In other words, create a prohibition preventing a marginalized group from engaging in socially sanctioned behavior—owning a
home, getting married—and then blame them for the adverse consequences. Indeed, in arguing for gay marriage and responding to
conservative critics, Sullivan has taken note of this exact dynamic. Here he is twelve years ago, in a column for The New Republicthat builds on
earlier ideas: Gay men--not because they're gay but because they are men in an all-male subculture--are almost certainly more sexually active
with more partners than most straight men. (Straight men would be far more promiscuous, I think, if they could get away with it the way gay
guys can.) Many gay men value this sexual freedom more than the stresses and strains of monogamous marriage (and I don't blame them). But
this is not true of all gay men. Many actually yearn for social stability, for anchors for their relationships, for the family support and financial
security that come with marriage. To deny this is surely to engage in the "soft bigotry of low expectations." They may be a minority at the
moment. But with legal marriage, their numbers would surely grow. And they would function as emblems in gay culture of a sexual life linked to
stability and love. [Emphasis added] What else is this but a variation on Coates' core argument, that society
can create stigmas by
using law to force particular kinds of behavior? Insofar as gay men were viewed as unusually
promiscuous, it almost certainly had something to do with the fact that society refused to recognize
their humanity and sanction their relationships. The absence of any institution to mediate love and desire encouraged
behavior that led this same culture to say "these people are too degenerate to participate in this institution." If the prohibition
against gay marriage helped create an anti-gay stigma, then lifting it—as we've seen over the last
decade—has helped destroy it. There's no reason racism can't work the same way.
Racism is not the product of individual evil but societal-level norms reinforced through
economics
Coates 13 (Ta-nehesi, senior editor at The Atlantic, “The Good, Racist People”, The New York Times, 3/6/13,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/07/opinion/coates-the-good-racist-people.html?src=me&ref=general&_r=0)
The idea that racism lives in the heart of particularly evil individuals, as opposed to the heart of a
democratic society, is reinforcing to anyone who might, from time to time, find their tongue sprinting ahead
of their discretion. We can forgive Whitaker’s assailant. Much harder to forgive is all that makes Whitaker stand
out in the first place. New York is a city, like most in America, that bears the scars of redlining, blockbusting and urban renewal. The
ghost of those policies haunts us in a wealth gap between blacks and whites that has actually gotten
worse over the past 20 years. But much worse, it haunts black people with a kind of invisible violence that
is given tell only when the victim happens to be an Oscar winner. The promise of America is that those
who play by the rules, who observe the norms of the “middle class,” will be treated as such. But this injunction is only
half-enforced when it comes to black people, in large part because we were never meant to be part of the
American story. Forest Whitaker fits that bill, and he was addressed as such. I am trying to imagine a white president
forced to show his papers at a national news conference, and coming up blank. I am trying to a imagine a
prominent white Harvard professor arrested for breaking into his own home, and coming up with nothing. I am trying to see Sean
Penn or Nicolas Cage being frisked at an upscale deli, and I find myself laughing in the dark. It is worth
considering the messaging here. It says to black kids: “Don’t leave home. They don’t want you around.” It is
messaging propagated by moral people.
Alt Solvency
Using the political to dismantle capitalism solves racist policy and prevents the Right
from demolishing positive government forces
Reed 08 (Adolph L., professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania “Race and the New Deal Coalition”, The Nation,
3/20/08, http://www.thenation.com/article/race-and-new-deal-coalition#axzz2ZcPH3kri)//AS
That so much of recent liberal and left discussion of the New Deal has been charged by the
imperatives of current political debates has given it an unfortunate either/or quality. In reality, the New
Deal was both racially discriminatory and a boon to many black Americans. Blacks benefited relatively
less than whites from many social policy initiatives. Worse, postwar urban renewal--one of the main conduits of federal resources to the
local level--actively intensified racial disadvantage as blacks and Puerto Ricans were displaced for federally supported redevelopment at a rate
more than 500 percent greater than their share of the national population. But
benefiting relatively less does not mean not
benefiting. The Social Security exclusions were overturned, and black people did participate in the WPA, Federal Writers' Project, CCC and
other classic New Deal initiatives, as well as federal income relief. Moreover, the National Labor Relations Act facilitated the Congress of
Industrial Organizations' efforts, from which blacks also benefited substantially. Black
Americans' emergence as a significant
constituency in the Democratic electoral coalition helped to alter the party's center of gravity and was
one of the factors--as was black presence in the union movement--contributing to the success of the postwar civil
rights insurgency. One lesson to take from reflecting on the New Deal is that political institutions and the politics
rooted in them can have significant and far-reaching consequences.The right understands this well.
When Newt Gingrich and his protofascist comrades took over Congress in 1994, they sneeringly boasted
that they intended to take the federal government back to the 1920s. This was not only because they were bent on
eliminating redistributive social programs. They also wanted to extirpate from the culture the idea that
government can be an active force for making most people's lives better. By crippling public institutions, they
leave us without any rudder or focus for an effective politics. We need to remember that in the lived
experience of younger Americans today, public power and government capacity have been only dismissed
and disparaged. Both Democratic presidential candidates qualify their embrace of federal activism and temporize with fealty to market
forces and calls to personal responsibility. Therefore, the nostalgic identification that those of us who are older or who grew up in left, union or
Democratic activist households feel for the New Deal era will not transfer well to others. I've seen this with my own students. To those young
people who encounter the era, unions may have been necessary then; federal intervention and regulation may have been appropriate then.
We can use the New Deal as part of a discussion about what government can do and how its actions
can change the playing field in progressive ways. What we need most of all, though, is to articulate a
politics steeped in a vision like that of the industrial democracy that fed the social movements that
pushed the New Deal to be as much as it was.
The only way to solve for racism is to unite workers and attack the conditions that allow for the
perpetuation of capitalism and racism
Selfa, Senior Research Scientist in the Education and Child Development department at National
Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, 2003
(Lance, “Slavery and the Origins of Racism”, International Socialist Review, Issue 26,
http://www.isreview.org/issues/26/roots_of_racism.shtml)//SGarg
What does this discussion mean for us today? First,racism is not part of some unchanging human
nature. It was literally invented. And soit can be torn down. Second, despite the overwhelming
ideological hold of white supremacy, people always resisted it—from the slaves themselves to white
anti-racists. Understanding racism in this way informs the strategy that we use to combat racism.
Antiracist education is essential, but it is not enough. Because it treats racism only as a question of “bad
ideas” it does not address the underlying material conditions that give rise to the acceptance of racism
among large sections of workers.32›Thoroughly undermining the hold of racism on large sections of
workers requires three conditions:first, a broader class fightback that unites workers across racial lines;
second, attacking the conditions(bad jobs, housing, education, etc.) that give rise to the appeal of racism
among large sections of workers; and third, the conscious intervention of antiracists to oppose racism in
all its manifestations and to win support for interracial class solidarity. The hold of racism breaks down
when the class struggle against the bosses forces workers to seek solidarity across racial lines.Socialists
believe that such class unity is possible because white workers have an objective interest in fighting
racism. Theðinfluence of racism on white workers is a question of their consciousness, not a question of
some material bribe from the system they receive. Struggle creates conditions by which racism can be
challenged and defeated.Racism and capitalism have been intertwined since the beginning of capitalism.
You can’t have capitalism without racism. Therefore, the final triumph over racism will only come when
we abolish the source of racism—capitalism—and build a new socialist society.
Marxism provides a concrete mechanism for social change and emancipation—their
postmodern project cannot
Cole 03 (Mike, senior lecturer in education, University of Brighton, “Might It Be in the Practice that It Fails to Succeed? A Marxist Critique
of Claims for Postmodernism and Poststructuralism as Forces for Social Change and Social Justice”, British Journal of Sociology of Education
24:4, September 2003, JSTOR)//AS
Atkinson's main argument seems to be that the strength of postmodernism is that it 'comes as
something of a shock' (2002, p. 78) [10] and reveals subtexts and textual silences. Well, so does Marxism on both
counts. The difference is that with the former, after our shock, there is not much else to do, except at the
local level. One of the great strengths of Marxism is that allows us to move beyond appearances, and to
look beneath the surface and to move forward. It allows us to transgress Derrida's 'ordeal of the
undecidable', Lather's 'praxis of not being so sure', and Jones' and Baxter's 'paralysis of practice'. Marx's Labour Theory of
Value (LTV), for example, explains most concisely why capitalism is objectively a system of
exploitation, whether the exploited realise it or not, or indeed whether they believe it to be an issue of importance for
them or not. The LTV also provides a solution to this exploitation. It thus provides dialectical praxis-the
authentic union of theory and practice. According to the LTV, the interests of capitalists and workers are diametrically
opposed, since a benefit to the former (profits) is a cost to the latter (Hickey, 2002, p. 168). Marx argued that workers' labour is
embodied in goods that they produce. The finished products are appropriated (taken away) by the
capitalists and eventually sold at a profit. However, the worker is paid only a fraction of the value
he/she creates in productive labour; the wage does not represent the total value he/she creates. We
appear to be paid for every single second we work. However, underneath this appearance, this fetishism, the working day (like under serfdom)
is split in two: into socially necessary labour (and the wage represents this) and surplus labour, labour that is not reflected in the wage. This
is the basis of surplus value, out of which comes the capitalist's profit.
While the value of the raw materials and of
the depreciating machinery is simply passed on to the commodity in production, labour power is a peculiar, indeed unique, commodity, in that
it creates new value. 'The magical quality of labour-power's ... value for ... capital is therefore critical' (Rikowski, 2001, p. 11). '[L]abour-power
creates more value (profit) in its consumption than it possesses itself, and than it costs' (Marx, 1966, p. 351). Unlike, for example, the value of
a given commodity, which can only be realised in the market as itself, labour creates a new value, a value greater than itself, a value that
previously did not exist. It
is for this reason that labour power is so important for the capitalist, in the quest
for capital accumulation. It is in the interest of the capitalist or capitalists (nowadays, capitalists may, of course, consist of a number
of shareholders, for example, rather than outright owners of businesses) to maximise profits, and this entails (in order to create the greatest
amount of new value) keeping workers' wages as low as is 'acceptable' in any given country or historical period, without provoking effective
strikes or other forms of resistance. Therefore, the capitalist mode of production is, in essence, a system of exploitation of one class (the
Whereas class conflict is endemic to the capitalist system, and
ineradicable and perpetual within the capitalist system, it does not always or even typically take the
form of open conflict or expressed hostility (Hickey, 2002, p. 168). Fortunately for the working class,
however, capitalism is prone to cyclical instability and subject to periodic political and economic
crises. At these moments, the possibility exists for socialist revolution. Revolution can only come
working class) by another (the capitalist class)
about when the working class, in addition to being a 'class-in-itself (an objective fact because of the shared
exploitation inherent as a result of the LTV) becomes 'a class-for-itself (Marx, 1976b). By this, Marx meant a class with a
subjective awareness of its social class position; that is, a class with 'class consciousness' including its
awareness of its exploitation and its transcendence of 'false consciousness'.
Capitalism sets the limits for sociopolitical change—dismantling it is key to meaningful
change
Young 06 (Robert, Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature. At New York University, “Putting Materialism back into
Race Theory: Toward a Transformative Theory of Race”, The Red Critique 11, Winter/Spring 2006,
http://www.redcritique.org/WinterSpring2006/puttingmaterialismbackintoracetheory.htm)//AS
In one of the few recent texts to explore the centrality of class, bell hooks' Where We Stand, we are,
once again, still left with a reaffirmation of capitalism. For instance, hooks argues for changes within capitalism: "I identify
with democratic socialism, with a vision of participatory economics within capitalism that aims to challenge and change class hierarchy" (156).
Capitalism produces class hierarchy and, therefore, as long as capitalism remains, class hierarchy and
antagonism will remain. Hence, the solution requires a transformation of class society. However, hooks
mystifies capitalism as a transhistorical system and thus she can assert that the "poor may be with us
always" (129). Under this view, politics becomes a matter of "bearing witness" to the crimes of
capitalism, but rather than struggle for its replacement, hooks call for strategies of "self-actualization"
and redistributing resources to the poor. She calls for the very same thing—collectivity—that capitalism cannot provide because social
resources are privatized under capitalism.
Consequently, Hooks' program for "self-esteem" is an attempt to put a
human face on capitalism. Whether one considers the recent work by African-American humanists, or
discourse theorists, or even left-liberal intellectuals, these various groups—despite their intellectual differences—form a
ruling coalition and one thing is clear: capitalism set the limit for political change, as there is no alternative to
the rule of capital. In contrast to much of contemporary race theory, a transformative theory of race highlights the political economy of race in
the interests of an emancipatory political project. Wahneema Lubiano once wrote that "the
idea of race and the operation of
racism are the best friends that the economic and political elite have in the United States" (vii). Race
mystifies the structure of exploitation and masks the severe inequalities within global capitalism. I am
afraid that, at this point, many contemporary race theorists, in their systematic erasure of materialism, have
become close (ideological) allies with the economic and political elites, who deny even the existence of classes. A
transformative race theory pulls back into focus the struggle against exploitation and sets a new social
priority "in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all"
(Marx 31).
Neoliberalism uses anti-racist discourse to distract from the fact that economics are
the root cause of oppression and suffering—New Orleans proves
Reed 06 (Adolph L., professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, “Undone by Neoliberalism”, The Nation, 9/18/06)//AS
The neoliberal worldview, which the late Daniel Singer, among others, memorialized as TINA—There Is No Alter
native to market logic—has become the default position of common sense. Its smug moral standard is drawn from an
idealized world in which equivalent individuals make choices in line with an abstract market rationality. Its viciousness seeped
through even during the phase of mass-mediated compassion for the human suffering in New Orleans.
The litany of victim-blaming questions frequently enough arose: Why didn’t they evacuate? Why would
they choose to live below sea level? Why should we be expected to pay for their choices? Those questions no doubt
had a racial edge regarding New Orleans, but it is useful to re call that Joseph Allbaugh, Michael Brown’s
predecessor as FEMA director, denigrated FEMA as a huge “entitlement program” when he took over
and promptly stonewalled rural white, heavily Republican Missourians with the same kind of
accusatory language during the severe flooding of the Mississippi River in 2001. A critique that focuses just on race
misses how the deeper structures of neoliberal practice and ideology underlie the travesty in New
Orleans, as well as in the other devastated areas of the Gulf Coast. (Adjacent to the Lower Ninth Ward, St. Bernard launched as an
emergency health clinic and relief center days after Katrina by Malik Rahim, a former Black Panther. Under the slogan “Solidarity, Not Charity,”
Common Ground soon became a beacon for Seattle-generation activists, and has since proliferated new outposts and projects across the city,
from house-gutting to “bio-remediation” of soil toxins and the opening of a Women’s Center. The success and high profile of Common
Ground—which has brought some 10,000 volunteers through its crash-course program in mutual aid that includes a radical history of New
Orleans and a workshop in “Dismantling Racism”—have overshadowed other impressive youth efforts in the region, such as a spring-break
drive that brought more than a thousand students from historically black colleges into community projects. This is their Freedom Summer, and
those making the pilgrimage can’t help but be changed by the experience. They’ve been cast into a scattered but epic battle between the Gulf’s
dispossessed—relegated to lives in tents, trailers and exile—and a gathering storm of privateers and power brokers whose ambitions can only
sharpen the divide between those who have and those who are clearly holding on to very little. Which, in the eyes of New Orleans lawyeractivist Bill Quig ley, prepares them perfectly for the struggles they face back home. “In New Orleans it’s so condensed and easy to see, but
these same forces of destroying our public housing, destroying public healthcare, destroying public education—those things are happening in
every community across this country,” Quigley says. “What
is happening in New Orleans is coming to your
community.”■ September 18, 2006 The Nation. 27 Parish, nearly 90 percent white, working class and reliably Re
- publican, was virtually wiped off the face of the earth. Most of the parish’s housing was destroyed. No hospitals or
public libraries have reopened, and only 20 percent of its schools are operating.) The “chocolate city” quip for which Mayor Ray Nagin became
notorious nationally was an instance of his scuffling to reassure angry black New Orleanians that he did not endorse the widely touted models
of a smaller, whiter city that seemed to follow from his administration’s utterances and practices. And
it is revealing of the depth
and persistence of many whites’ racial double standards that the Mayor’s affirmation of the goal of
retaining a black majority provoked a national and local firestorm of denunciation as narrow and
racist, but the many calls for remaking New Orleans as a white-majority city, to which he was ultimately
responding, generated no such reaction. But as it turned out, even though the most politically articulate and militant demands
stressed the rights of renters [see Chris Kromm, page 22], Nagin’s main policy concession to the protest against the rebuilding proposals was to
extend greater latitude to “homeowners.” Thus, in what was supposed to be a victory for popular interests against developers, renters were
left out of the equation entirely and established as non-stakeholders. The irony is that blacks were disproportionately renters, and renters were
a
preponderance, of black homeowners are not affluent, and securing greater civic voice for
homeowners democratized the process, if only by slowing down the development juggernaut a bit. Nevertheless, the
concession at the same time inscribed property ownership as the condition for entry into the arena of
interest groups with effective civic voice.Treating property ownership as the sine qua non for policy consideration didn’t raise
disproportionately black. And roughly 90 percent of rental units destroyed were low-income affordable. Many, no doubt
any eyebrows locally or nationally, except among the ranks of those who were left out. Neither the black Mayor nor the majority-black City
Council has shown initiative in taking into account, much less defending, the interests of poor New Orleanians. The
city’s evacuation
plans notoriously failed to anticipate adequately poor people’s circumstances and needs. Landlords began
evicting tenants without a hint of due process as soon as water receded and rumors spread of possibilities for extracting exorbitant rents from
construction workers. The state officially prohibited evictions before October 25, but that prohibition was academic for the tens of thousands of
people dispersed in shelters around the region and nation. And even that minimal right was flagrantly ignored with impunity. New Orleans City
Council president Oliver Thomas
complained in February that government programs and agencies had
“pampered” poor people and proclaimed that they should not be encouraged to return. As he put it, “We
don’t need soap opera watchers right now.” At least one other black councilmember expressed support of his view,
as did the New Orleans Housing Authority receiver .This all attests to the triumph of neoliberalism as both ideology
and policy regime, and that triumph is seamlessly compatible with the discourse of racial politics . Black
property owners, after all, are stakeholders as well as whites. Demonizing government to cut public spending and regulation, plundering the
public treasury through privatization and rationalizing both through the myth of magical market efficiency all underlie what happened to New
Orleans. The storm exposed the consequences of neoliberalism’s lies and mystifications , in a single locale and
all at once. The levees on the 17th Street and London Avenue canals, it turns out, failed because they were inadequately constructed. In the
words of the Independent Levee Investigation Team, “safety was exchanged for efficiency and reduced costs.” This was largely the result of
federal underfunding, partly the result of the Army Corps of Engineers’ skimping, partly state and local officials’ temporizing and lack of
government oversight or, in neoliberal parlance, cutting government red tape. The breach of the Industrial Canal, and much of the flooding of
St. Bernard Parish, resulted from storm surge that pushed up the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a boondoggle channel dug four decades ago as
corporate welfare that was obsolete almost from its opening.
Whiteness is valued in terms of economics—removing economic value systems
prevents racial hierarchies
Bhattacharya 12 (Shilpi, “THE DESIRE FOR WHITENESS: CAN LAW AND ECONOMICS EXPLAIN IT?”, Columbia Journal of Race and Law
2:1, 2012, http://cjrl.columbia.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/The-Desire-for-Whiteness.pdf)//AS
Cheryl Harris
describes whiteness as a kind of property, evidenced, for instance, by the attempts of blacks
with light skin color to “pass” as white. As she explains it, blacks attempted to pass as white because possessing
whiteness meant enjoying various privileges that were exclusively associated with being white .10
Colonization and the slave trade led to the legal construction of blacks as chattel. The exploitation of
black slaves contributed to the construction of whiteness as property because, at that time, whiteness
represented mastership.11 Therefore, being white was valued in a manner similar to the value associated
with the possession of property. In America, the law played a significant role in creating and sustaining the idea of whiteness as
property by recognizing the differential rights and privileges of whites.12 Similarly, whiteness was valued in colonial India because whites had
In what
way do we value whiteness and how do we measure its value to us? 14 Is the value given by individuals to
whiteness a factor of the racial identity of that individual? Studies have shown that skin tone has a substantial impact on the
way a person is treated in society and affects one’s chances for successful employment and marriage.15 In many societies,
skin color is directly associated with social status, and those who are dark-skinned are economically
and socially disadvantaged.16 In America, lighter-skinned blacks are reported to face much lower
incidences of discrimination than darker-skinned blacks, not only from whites but also from other blacks.17 The literature shows
privileges that native Indians did not.13 In short, whiteness had value. It was exclusively possessed and, therefore, it was desired.
similar effects for darker- skinned persons of other racial categories as well, such as Asians and Latinos.18 In China, there is a
common saying that “white skin can cover 1,000 uglinesses.”19
Racism cannot be uncoupled from capitalism—removing socioeconomic gaps solves
racism
Retman 08 (Sonnet H. Associate Professor of African American Studies and Adjunct Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and English
at the University of Washington, “Black No More: George Schuyler and Racial Capitalism”, PMLA [ Journal of the Modern Language Association]
123:5, http://www.mlajournals.org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/doi/pdf/10.1632/pmla.2008.123.5.1448)//AS
Black No More is a narrative of passing, part of a genre that subverts basic epistemological assumptions about race and identity. Passing
unmasks the juridical, economic, and social structures of race. In particular, it reveals the function of
whiteness as a kind of property. The path-breaking scholarship of the critical race theorist Cheryl Harris contends that
“the concept of whiteness—established by centuries of custom and codified by law—may be understood as a
property interest” (1728). She illustrates the extent to which race cannot be uncoupled from the
workings of capitalism. The cultural theorist Valerie Smith offers the important caveat that while racial
passing is traditionally coded as a desire to be white, the impetus for passing is often the increased
social and economic opportunities that accompany whiteness (“Reading”). If passing centers on the transfer of
racial property—usually the seizure of whiteness and its privileges— Fordist technologies of mass production and their
ancillary modernist twin, primitivism, give rise to a particular imaginary around the manufacture and exchange
of race as commodity. Put differently, Fordism instigates new market possibilities for the trade of racial
property in commodity form. Thus, in much New Negro fiction that focuses on passing or primitivism, race is often produced and
inscribed through purchasable objects, techniques, and procedures—a kind of “identity prosthesis” that alters the consumer’s body
(Nakamura). To amplify this corporeal dimension, the pass is always predicated on some kind of trespass, a fact that underscores the inherent
mobility involved in the transaction—specifically, the passer’s reliance on bodily performance in the production of visual narratives of identity.
Hence, the performance theorist Amy Robinson suggests that “the apparatus of the pass” should be viewed as a “spectatorial transaction”
rather than one that is ontological (721, 726). Not
only does passing manufacture whiteness through nonbiological
means, it also reveals the ideological foundations of biological race.
Race is used in modernity for economic identification—removing economic status
from consideration makes the concept of race useless
Gans 05 (Herbert J., merican sociologist who has taught at Columbia University between 1971 and 2007, “Race as Class”, Contexts 4:4,
November 2005, University of Michigan Libraries)//AS
In fact, the skin
colors and facial features commonly used to define race are selected precisely because,
resemble the country’s class-and-status hierarchy. Thus, whites are on top of
the socioeconomic pecking order as they are on top of the racial one, while variously shaded
nonwhites are below them in socioeconomic position (class) and prestige (status). The darkest people are for
the most part at the bottom of the class-status hierarchy. This is no accident, and Americans have therefore
always used race as a marker or indicator of both class and status. Sometimes they also use it to
enforce class position, to keep some people “in their place.” Indeed, these uses are a major reason for its
persistence. Of course, race functions as more than a class marker, and the correlation between race and the socioeconomic pecking order
is far from statistically perfect: All races can be found at every level of that order. Still, the race-class correlation is strong
enough to utilize race for the general ranking of others. It also becomes more useful for ranking darkskinned people as white poverty declines so much that whiteness becomes equivalent to being middle
or upper class. The relation between race and class is unmistakable. For example, the l998–2000 median household income of nonwhen arranged hierarchically, they
Hispanic whites was $45,500; of Hispanics (currently seen by many as a race) as well as Native Americans, $32,000; and of African Americans,
$29,000. The poverty rates for these same groups were 7.8 percent among whites, 23.1 among Hispanics, 23.9 among blacks, and 25.9 among
Native Americans. (Asians’ median income was $52,600—which does much to explain why we see them as a model minority.)
Focus on Cap Solves Root of Racism
A focus on capitalism is key to solving the root cause of racism
a) Racism is grounded in capitalism - the slave trade was a purely economic
trade - it dictated the flow of commodities including food, metals and people.
This was done for profit for personal gain - they were grounded in the profit
motive mindset. In the colonial US, white people were used for labor but the
seemingly racist transition to the use of African slaves was for purely economic
reasons
b) Capitalism comes first - the alt is a prerequisite to getting rid of racism elites in their evil, profit driven ways will continue to exploit their workers in a
“racial” way if they can make perceived benefits from it. The only way to fix this
problem is to ensure an ethical world with true equality - without getting rid of
capitalism, the case fails
Racism is not inherent—it is a policy creation that can be dismantled by policy
Bouie 13 (Jamelle, staff writer at The American Prospect, “Making (and Dismantling) Racism”, The American Prospect,
3/11/13, http://prospect.org/article/making-and-dismantling-racism)//AS
Over at The Atlantic, Ta-NehisiCoates has been exploring the intersection of race and public policy,
with a focus on white supremacy as a driving force in political decisions at all levels of
government. This has led him to two conclusions: First, that anti-black racism as we understand it is a
creation of explicit policy choices—the decision to exclude, marginalize, and stigmatize
Africans and their descendants has as much to do with racial prejudice as does any intrinsic
tribalism. And second, that it's possible to dismantle this prejudice using public policy. Here is
Coates in his own words: Last night I had the luxury of sitting and talking with the brilliant historian Barbara Fields. One
point she makes that very few Americans understand is that racism is a creation. You read Edmund Morgan’s work and
actually see racism being inscribed in the law and the country changing as a result. If we accept that racism is a creation,
then we must then accept that it can be destroyed. And if we accept that it can be destroyed, we must then accept that it can
be destroyed by us and that it likely must be destroyed by methods kin to creation. Racism was created by policy. It will likely
only be ultimately destroyed by policy. Over at his blog, Andrew Sullivan offers a reply: I don’t believe the law
created racism any more than it can create lust or greed or envy or hatred. It can encourage or
mitigate these profound aspects of human psychology – it can create racist structures as in the Jim Crow South or Greater
Israel. But it can no more end these things that it can create them. A complementary strategy is finding ways for the targets
of such hatred to become inured to them, to let the slurs sting less until they sting not at all. Not easy. But a more
manageable goal than TNC’s utopianism. I can appreciate the point Sullivan is making, but I'm not sure it's
relevant to Coates' argument. It is absolutely true that "Group loyalty is deep in our DNA," as Sullivan writes.
And if you define racism as an overly aggressive form of group loyalty—basically just prejudice—then
Sullivan is right to throw water on the idea that the law can "create racism any more than it can
create lust or greed or envy or hatred." But Coates is making a more precise claim: That there's nothing
natural about the black/white divide that has defined American history. White Europeans had
contact with black Africans well before the trans-Atlantic slave tradewithout the emergence
of an anti-black racism. It took particular choices made by particular people—in this case,
plantation owners in colonial Virginia—to make black skin a stigma, to make the "one drop rule" a
defining feature of American life for more than a hundred years. By enslaving African indentured servants and
allowing their white counterparts a chance for upward mobility, colonial landowners began the process that
would make white supremacy the ideology of America. The position of slavery generated a
stigma that then justified continued enslavement—blacks are lowly, therefore we must keep them as slaves.
Slavery (and later, Jim Crow) wasn't built to reflect racism as much as it was built in tandem with
it. And later policy, in the late 19th and 20th centuries, further entrenched white supremacist attitudes.
Block black people from owning homes, and they're forced to reside in crowded slums.
Onlookers then use the reality of slums to deny homeownership to blacks, under the view that they're unfit for suburbs. In
other words, create a prohibition preventing a marginalized group from engaging in socially sanctioned behavior—owning a
home, getting married—and then blame them for the adverse consequences. Indeed, in arguing for gay marriage and
responding to conservative critics, Sullivan has taken note of this exact dynamic. Here he is twelve years ago, in a column for
The New Republicthat builds on earlier ideas: Gay men--not because they're gay but because they are men in an all-male
subculture--are almost certainly more sexually active with more partners than most straight men. (Straight men would be far
more promiscuous, I think, if they could get away with it the way gay guys can.) Many gay men value this sexual freedom
more than the stresses and strains of monogamous marriage (and I don't blame them). But this is not true of all gay men.
Many actually yearn for social stability, for anchors for their relationships, for the family support and financial security that
come with marriage. To deny this is surely to engage in the "soft bigotry of low expectations." They may be a minority at the
moment. But with legal marriage, their numbers would surely grow. And they would function as emblems in gay culture of a
sexual life linked to stability and love. [Emphasis added] What else is this but a variation on Coates' core argument, that
society can create stigmas by using law to force particular kinds of behavior? Insofar as gay
men were viewed as unusually promiscuous, it almost certainly had something to do with
the fact that society refused to recognize their humanity and sanction their relationships. The
absence of any institution to mediate love and desire encouraged behavior that led this same culture to say "these people are
too degenerate to participate in this institution." If the prohibition against gay marriage helped create an
anti-gay stigma, then lifting it—as we've seen over the last decade—has helped destroy it.
There's no reason racism can't work the same way.
Analyzing race in terms of capital is essential—it operates in society via
valuation
Leong 13 (Nancy, Assistant Professor of Civil Rights ,Constitutional Law, and Criminal Procedure at the University of
Denver, “Racial Capitalism”, Harvard Law Review 126:8, June 2013, Infotrac)//AS
More importantly, however, the characteristics associated with both traditional and contemporary
understandings of property do not capture some of the implications of the way that nonwhiteness is currently assigned
value. Therefore, a
more useful lens for understanding the value assigned to nonwhiteness is that
of capital. (108) Capital has been theorized in many forms. One of the most influential theories is Karl
Marx's critique, rooted in political economy, of the relationship between private property,
accumulated wealth, and exploitative social relations. (109) Subsequent theorists have posited other kinds
of capital. Theodore Schultz introduced the notion of human capital -- the value added to a laborer when
the laborer acquires education, skills, training, knowledge, or other attributes that improve her usefulness in the process of
producing and exchanging goods. (110) Pierre Bourdieu later distinguished among several forms of capital,
including economic capital, cultural capital, social capital, and symbolic capital. (111) Catherine
Hakim has developed the idea of erotic capital as a mechanism for furthering both social and economic interests through
sexual attractiveness. (112) In many contexts, then, scholars have found the lens of capital a useful way of examining
particular phenomena. In the analysis I develop in this Article, existing theories of capital serve as heuristics
for understanding the way that race is valued and the way that racial value is exchanged.
There are undeniable differences between economic and racial markets, and so I do not claim that the analogy to any given
theory of capital is a perfect explanation for the dynamics of racial value. But as a means to understand how race is valued -and in particular how nonwhiteness is valued -- the various theories of capital provide useful frameworks for thinking about
both that process of valuation and about how racial identity consequently functions in markets, economic and otherwise.
Theories of capital thus clarify several aspects of the valuation of nonwhiteness. For example,
conceptions of social capital further illustrate the reasons thatnonwhiteness has value to
white people and predominantly white institutions. Relatedly, social capital provides an understanding of
the way that racial value is transferred through interaction and affiliation. These ideas then provide the basis for
understanding the process of exploitation and profit that Marxian theories of capital illuminate. That is, the question
is
not simply who "possesses" racial identity, but also who reaps value from it, and conceiving
of nonwhiteness as capital helps to illustrate this process of exploitation and profit. The
Marxian capital framework likewise highlights the dynamism of the value assigned to racial
identity -- that is, how the value of racial identity fluctuates depending on the situation. The
Marxian capital framework also allows for a more transparent examination of who, precisely, derives value from
nonwhiteness. And perhaps most importantly, the framework exposes the imbalance in power that
frames the valuation of nonwhiteness.
Focus on Race Does Not Solve Capitalism
Focusing on race does not solve for capitalism
1)It fails - if we continue to focus on race, we cannot unite together against
capitalism. A focus on race means a focus on our differences and not our
similarities. The aff fails to create an effective social movement and actual
change. The alt precludes aff solvency
2) Defeating capitalism requires us to unite- In order to defeat capitalism we
all need to be united as one to work against capitalism. The whole is greater
than the sum of its parts, in order to be successful in defeating the inequalities
of capitalism including race, the social movement created by the alt comes first
Racism is a creation of policy and can only be destroyed by engaging with the
state
Coates 13 (Ta-nehesi, senior editor at The Atlantic,“Good People, Racist People”, The Atlantic, 3/8/13,
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/03/good-people-racist-people/273843/)//AS
The "I'm not racist even though I'm doing something actually racist right now" rationale is
linked to the notion of racism as something worthy of societal condemnation. That is a good
thing. As Sugrue identifies in his book, you see a post-World-War-II consensus forming in the 1950s that
racial discrimination actually is wrong. Along with that (perhaps in the 60s) comes the idea that racism is
something that "low-class" white people do. It's not a system of laws and policies, so much as the ideology of Cletus the slackjawed yokel. But Arnold Hirsch and Beryl Satter's work shows the University of Chicago quietly and
privately pursuing a racist strategy of "urban renewal" while publicly claiming
otherwise. None of this is new. It's akin to proto-Confederates loudly and lustily defending
slavery, daring the North to war before 1865, and then afterward claiming that the war really wasn't
about slavery. The point is to save face. Last night I had the luxury of sitting and talking with the brilliant
historian Barbara Fields. One point she makes that very few Americans understand is that racism is a
creation.You read Edmund Morgan's workand actually see racism being inscribed in the law and the
country changing as a result. If we accept that racism is a creation, then we must then
accept that it can be destroyed. And if we accept that it can be destroyed, we must then accept
that it can be destroyed by us and that it likely must be destroyed by methods kin to creation.
Racism was created by policy. It will likely only be ultimately destroyed by policy. That is hard to
take. If Forrest Whitaker sticks out in that deli for reasons of individual mortal sin, we can castigate the guy who frisked him
and move on. But if he -- and others like him -- stick out for reasons of policy, for decisions that we, as a state, have made,
then we have a problem. Then we have to do something beyond being nice to each other.
Racism is not the product of individual evil but societal-level norms reinforced
through economics
Coates 13 (Ta-nehesi, senior editor at The Atlantic, “The Good, Racist People”, The New York Times, 3/6/13,
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/07/opinion/coates-the-good-racist-people.html?src=me&ref=general&_r=0)
The idea that racism lives in the heart of particularly evil individuals, as opposed to the
heart of a democratic society, is reinforcing to anyone who might, from time to time, find their
tongue sprinting ahead of their discretion. We can forgive Whitaker’s assailant. Much harder to
forgive is all that makes Whitaker stand out in the first place. New York is a city, like most in America,
that bears the scars of redlining, blockbusting and urban renewal. The ghost of those policies haunts us in a
wealth gap between blacks and whites that has actually gotten worse over the past 20 years. But
much worse, it haunts black people with a kind of invisible violence that is given tell only when
the victim happens to be an Oscar winner. The promise of America is that those who play by the
rules, who observe the norms of the “middle class,” will be treated as such. But this injunction is only halfenforced when it comes to black people, in large part because we were never meant to be part of
the American story. Forest Whitaker fits that bill, and he was addressed as such. I am trying to imagine a
white president forced to show his papers at a national news conference, and coming up
blank. I am trying to a imagine a prominent white Harvard professor arrested for breaking into his own home, and coming
up with nothing. I am trying to see Sean Penn or Nicolas Cage being frisked at an upscale deli,
and I find myself laughing in the dark. It is worth considering the messaging here. It says to black kids:
“Don’t leave home. They don’t want you around.” It is messaging propagated by moral
people.
Impact
Root Cause
Racism is perpetuated by right-wing capitalist policy that cuts social aid—Katrina
proves
Reed 05 (Adolph L., professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, “The Real Divide”, The Progressive, November 2005,
http://progressive.org/mag_reed1105)
Everyone who reads The Progressive will know that the
horror that has occurred in New Orleans was entirely
preventable. For years, the New Orleans Times-Picayune annually had punctuated the hurricane season’s
arrival with detailed articles warning that the levee system needed shoring up and quite possibly would not survive a
category 4 or strong category 3 storm. As many readers know, similar articles in major newspapers and magazines around the country at one
time or another had reported on the city’s precarious situation and described how much of it could be inundated in case of a storm-induced
levee breach. Many will know also that in 2001 the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
listed a major hurricane in
New Orleans as one of the three most likely disasters in the United States. Most readers, therefore, will also know that
when George W. Bush offered as an explanation for his continuing inaction nearly three days after the city began
filling with water that no one could have anticipated that the levee would break, he was a lying sack of shit.
But he was worse than that. He was an active agent in bringing this catastrophe about. Most Progressive
readers will know already that the Bush Administration last year slashed funding for the levee project, in part to feed the war on Iraq. The cuts
brought work on the project nearly to a standstill. The city of New Orleans, the state of Louisiana, even the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had all
emphasized the imminent danger. Their entreaties fell on deaf ears; in fact, the Administration scuttled a Corps of Engineers study of how to
protect the city. And this is not even to consider how Bush’s wetlands policy made New Orleans more vulnerable by speeding erosion. Bush
finally proclaimed that he takes responsibility. Well, Mable and Salvatore Mangano, operators of St. Rita’s nursing home in St. Bernard Parish,
were indicted for negligent homicide because thirty-four people died in their facility after the Manganos failed to evacuate them. Bush also
should be indicted. Self-important nincompoop Michael Brown, the abominable former FEMA director and failed horse show lawyer, should be
in the dock with him, as should Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security secretary. They should spend the rest of their lives in jail. Of course,
that won’t happen. That’s not the way things work in the United States. Bush, after all, was already a mass murderer in Iraq, to the tune of
perhaps 100,000 Iraqi civilians and more than 1,900 American soldiers. But it’s considered over the top or politically irresponsible to say so
plainly. In any official investigation of Katrina, impeachment for Bush and criminal trials for him, Brown, and Chertoff will never surface as a
consideration. The investigation will no doubt focus in flamboyant meticulousness on who knew what when. There
will be much back
and forth about which agency or branch of government was responsible for which actions or
inactions.The federal government’s unconscionable delay in response will be explained as an unfortunate
circumstance, a concatenation of mistakes and miscommunications, and perhaps some incompetence. Maybe Brown will become a
symbolic fall guy. Not that he’ll do any time, as he probably will follow his predecessor at FEMA and former college buddy Joseph Allbaugh into
a lucrative lobbying/consulting career. I
seriously doubt there will be any consideration of the role that the Bush
Administration’s systematic hostility to government’s functions played in bringing about this
catastrophe in the first place. That’s largely because Democratic liberals for the last twenty-five years have aided
and abetted the right in shrinking and privatizing public functions. As Paul Krugman noted in The New York Times and
Michael Parenti pointed out in Z, the travesty in New Orleans is the expression of the right’s essential contempt
for any public institutions, for the idea of the public. Going back to Reagan, they’ve exhibited a thug’s
approach to government. Remember how Reagan opened up the Department of Housing and Urban Development to wanton and
rapacious plunder by cronies? They’ve made a regular practice of appointing agency and department heads who were on record as enemies of
the departments and their functions, with a mandate to gut them. Parking utterly unqualified hacks and cronies in five of the eight senior-most
posts in FEMA shows how flagrant and unmitigated their contempt for public responsibility actually is. The fact that Bush, Brown, and Chertoff
sat on their hands for three days after word that the levee had burst was probably not the result of active malice. Their basic view of the world
prevents them from recognizing the people who were imperiled on the Gulf Coast as forms of life equivalent to their own. Bush said as much
when he could notice only Trent Lott’s fine old house as a casualty of the storm and reassured us all that he’d be sitting on Lott’s great porch
again soon, when the only image of New Orleans he could muster was a nostalgic, loutish frat boy’s. And they
genuinely do not
believe that government can or should play an active role in protecting the general public in any way,
other than by funding the police or invading another country. The Democrats’ critique of the Bush Administration will
be wonkish and abstruse. They will cast as a problem of inadequate management what is fundamentally the product of a combined
commitment to vicious, reactionary ideologies and plunder. They will give us at best a replay of their lame attempt at health care reform, which
from the outset defined single-payer—the only adequate option, and the only one with any support—as “off the table,” primarily because of
their commitments to the insurance industry and fear of seeming too different from the Republicans.
It is through economic situations that racism is perpetuated—dismantling capitalism
solves
Koepke 07 (Deanna Jacobsen, PhD candidate in Human and Organizational. Development at Fielding Graduate University, “RACE, CLASS,
POVERTY, AND CAPITALISM”, Race, Gender and Class 14:3-4, 2007, ProQuest)//AS
While discrimination is not always a problem, a lack of reserve resources is. William Julius Wilson wrote that
class is actually a bigger determining factor for life chances than race is (Conley, 1999). As mentioned previously,
there is little hope of overcoming poverty when there is little or no income, no reserve savings to cover
emergencies, unmanageable levels of debt, and no "fun" money with which one can escape the daily burdens, even if only for a little while
(Marable, 2000). There
is definitely a lack of security felt since that is frequently supported by the amount of money one has
will not usually lend money for mortgages in neighborhoods where
more than fifty percent of the units are rentals, as many poor and Black ones are (Conley, 1999; Williams,
2001). However, if one is able to purchase a house, it may be worth less because of the neighborhoods in which it is
located, as determined by the market and society. Home ownership is one of the simplest ways to build personal
wealth, so this is yet another way people are prevented from doing so. Additionally, Blacks have shorter life
upon which to rely (Taylor, 2007). Banks
expectancies, so they are likely to earn less over a lifetime than Whites and have less opportunity to save wealth and pass it on to their children
(Conley, 1999). The same can be said for people living in poverty. Education
is another area where race and class
intersect. Although the dominant group gives lip service to the idea that education is the ticket out of poverty, the truth is that a less
educated labor force is easier to manipulate so they can stay in power (Freire, 1970; Sernau, 2001). Victims of
racism and classism may even question why they should bother getting an education at all when they
can expect to be discriminated against and only hold menial jobs (Council of Economic Adisors, 1965a). Myrdal wrote of what he
called cumulative causation (Sernau, 2001), and it affects people of color and people living in poverty equally. The poor are subjected to
inadequate school funding and then blamed by society for not valuing education. They are placed in substandard public housing in bad
neighborhoods and then are criticized for not keeping up the property. They are denied job opportunities and then are shunned for not valuing
hard work. They are denied the resources that would allow them to improve themselves and are then denigrated for not doing so. The truth is
that privilege equals choices. Options for people of color and the poor are reduced, and the ones available to
them subject them to scrutiny, ridicule, and penalties and deprivation (Frye, 2007). Actions are shaped by circumstances and the circumstances
that the poor and people of color live with are lacking in opportunity. There is no voice for them in our democracy, and there is little or no
hope. They do not have the ability to control their own lives (Beeghley, 2000). Within that context, nearly all social
services programs sanction behavior change (Piven, 2001) rather than celebrating diversity and the resourcefulness employed by people of
color and those living in poverty. Rather
than feeling they have a purpose in life, they are merely taking what
they can get to survive (West, 1993).
Race is a construction borne of economics—change in the definition of whiteness
proves
Gans 05 (Herbert J., merican sociologist who has taught at Columbia University between 1971 and 2007, “Race as Class”, Contexts 4:4,
November 2005, University of Michigan Libraries)//AS
Race became a marker of class and status almost with the first settling of the United States. The country’s
initial holders of cultural and political power were mostly WASPs (with a smattering of Dutch and Spanish in some parts of
what later became the United States). They thus automatically assumed that their kind of whiteness marked the
top of the class hierarchy. The bottom was assigned to the most powerless, who at first were Native
Americans and slaves. However, even before the former had been virtually eradicated or pushed to the country’s edges, the skin color
and related facial features of the majority of colonial America’s slaves had become the markers for the lowest class in the colonies. Although
dislike and fear of the dark are as old as the hills and found all over the world, the
distinction between black and white skin
became important in America only with slavery and was actually established only some decades after
the first importation of black slaves. Originally, slave owners justified their enslavement of black
Africans by their being heathens, not by their skin color. In fact, early Southern plantation owners could
have relied on white indentured servants to pick tobacco and cotton or purchased the white slaves that were available then,
including the Slavs from whom the term slave is derived. They also had access to enslaved Native Americans. Blacks,
however, were cheaper, more plentiful, more easily controlled, and physically more able to survive
the intense heat and brutal working conditions of Southern plantations. After slavery ended, blacks became farm laborers and
sharecroppers, de facto indentured servants, really, and thus they remained at the bottom of the class hierarchy. When the pace of
industrialization quickened, the country needed new sources of cheap labor. Northern industrialists, unable
andunwilling to recruit southern African Americans, brought in very poor European immigrants, mostly peasants. Because
these people were near the bottom of the class hierarchy, they were considered nonwhite and classified into races.
Irish and Italian newcomers were sometimes even described as black (Italians as “guineas”), and the eastern and
southern European immigrants were deemed “swarthy.” However, because skin color is socially
constructed, it can also be reconstructed. Thus, when the descendants of the European immigrants
began to move up economically and socially, their skins apparently began to look lighter to the whites
who had come to America before them. When enough of these descendents became visibly middle class, their skin was
seen as fully white. The biological skin color of the second and third generations had not changed, but it was
socially blanched or whitened. The process probably began in earnest just before the Great Depression and resumed after World
War II. As the cultural and other differences of the original European immigrants disappeared, their descendants became known as white
ethnics..
Slavery was not initially associated with Africans – capitalist economics, not
racism, perpetuated slavery
Drescher 97 – Ph.D @ U of Wisconsin-Madison, Professor of History and Sociology @ U of
Pittsburgh (Seymour, Slavery & Abolition, 18:3, pages 212-213, “Slavery and capitalism after
fifty years”, 1997, RSpec)
Perhaps the best point of departure is the collective volume that emerged from the fortieth anniversary conference on Capitalism
and Slavery, held at Bellagio, Italy, and was published in 1987. The editors, Barbara L. Solow and Stanley L. Engerirían, divided the
non-biographical contributions into three parts, corresponding to three major hypotheses on the relationship between economic
development and slavery in the British empire. We may appropriately test the first hypothesis most briefly. Williams only briefly
broached the subject and his assessment has not been of major historiographical interest in the subsequent literature. Williams took
the position that economic factors rather than racism occupied pride of place in the
switch to African labour in the plantation Americas, that slavery 'was not bom of racism' but rather
slavery led to racism. Although some recent interpretations make racial preferences and
inhibitions central to the choice of African labour, Williams's order of priorities, if not his either-or approach, is
supported by a survey of hundreds of articles. They show virtual unanimity on the primacy of
economics in accounting for the turn toward slave labour. Non-economic factors, such as race or religion,
entered into the development of New World slavery only as a limiting parameter. Such factors affected the historical sequence by
which entire human groups (Christians, Jews, Muslim North Africans, Native Americans) were excluded from liability to
enslavement in the Atlantic system. Since Williams published his book, the main change in the historiographical context of origins is
an increase in the number and variety of actors brought into the process. That broader context complicates the role of any
exclusively 'African' racial component of the slave trade. From the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries,
slavery, even the English colonial varieties, was hardly synonymous with Africans.
Nor were Africans synonymous with slaves. In the African sector of the Atlantic system
Europeans were forced to regard Africans (and Afro-Europeans) as autonomous and even locally
dominant participants in the slave trade. They were often dominant militarily and were certainly
dominant in terms of their massive presence and limited vulnerability to local diseases. Even in the
Americas, Africans did not arrive only as captives and deracinated slaves.
Capitalism creates the parameters for the continued expansion of racism
Selfa, Senior Research Scientist in the Education and Child Development department at National
Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, 2003
(Lance, “Slavery and the Origins of Racism”, International Socialist Review, Issue 26,
http://www.isreview.org/issues/26/roots_of_racism.shtml)//SGarg
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.29 In his famous passage on the
antagonism between English and Irish workers in Britain in the end of the 19th century,Marx outlined
the main sources of racism under modem capitalism. By its nature, capitalism fosters competition
between workers. Bosses take advantage of this in two ways: first, to deliberately stoke divisions
between workers; second, to appeal to racist ideology. Capitalism forces workers to compete for jobs,
for affordable housing, for admittance to schools, for credit, etc. When capitalism restructures, it
replaces workers with machines and higher-paid workers with lower-paid workers. Throughout the late
19th and early 20th centuries, U.S. bosses used the surplus of cheap labor immigration provided to
substitute unskilled workers for skilled (generally white, native workers), “triggering a nativist reaction
among craft workers.”30 Today,restructuring in U.S. industry makes many U.S. workers open to
nationalist appeals to “protect their jobs” against low-wage competition from Mexico.Bosses seek to
leverage this competition to their advantage. “Keep a variety of laborers, that is different nationalities,
and thus prevent any concerted action in case of strikes, for there are few, if any, cases of Laps, Chinese,
and Portuguese entering into a strike as a unit,” advised Hawaiian plantation managers in the early
1900s.31Here was a fairly stark example of the bosses’ conscious use of racism to divide the workforce.
Today, bosses continue to do the same, as when they hire nonwhite strikebreakers against a strike of
predominantly white workers.And politicians never stand above playing “the race card” if it suits
them.Racism serves the bosses’ interests and bosses foster racism consciously, but these points do not
explain why workers can accept racist explanations for their conditions. The competition between
workers that is an inherent feature of capitalism can be played out as competition (or perceived
competition) between workers of different racial groups.Because it seems to correspond with some
aspect of reality, racism thus can become part of white workers’ “common sense.” This last point is
important because it explains the persistence of racist ideas. Because racism is woven right into the
fabric of capitalism, new forms of racism arose with changes in capitalism.As the U.S. economy
expanded and underpinned U.S. imperial expansion, imperialist racism—which asserted that the U.S.
had a right to dominate other peoples, such as Mexicans and Filipinos—developed. As the U.S. economy
grew and sucked in millions of immigrant laborers, anti-immigrant racism developed. But these are both
different forms of thesame ideology—of white supremacy and division of the world into “superior” and
“inferior” races—that had their origins in slavery.
Racism originated as an economic tool for separation and profit
Shapira 10 (HarelShapira, PhD from Columbia University, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York
University, “Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands”, Contemporary Sociology 39:1, January 2010,
Sage)//AS
Concentrating on the middle of the nineteenth century to the New Deal era, Benton-Cohen
explores why some “borderline
Americans”—a term she uses to refer to resident noncitizens with a “tenuous claim on whiteness”—became
“white Americans,” while others did not.Why, she asks, did Eastern and Southern Europeans, one
group of “borderline Americans” become white, while Mexicans did not? Borderline Americans can be read as
another chapter in America’s history of racial formation, as told by Noel Ignatiev in How the Irish Became White. What we are presented with
here is an effort to explain how the Mexicans became brown. Benton-Cohen’s contribution is to show that the conflict between “Mexicans” and
“Americans,” which today seems to be timeless and inevitable, was a contingent outcome, motivated in large part by the penetration of
industrial capitalism into southern Arizona. This conflict has a curious history containing moments of cooperation and not conflict. Unlike the
dominant narratives which examine the social construction of race, Benton-Cohen takes us to the local level and focuses attention not on state
actors (although she does not overlook them) but on corporate managers. She helps us to understand that capitalism
did not
eliminate racial difference, rather it constituted it. The labor process does not suspend difference but
rather articulates it. Class conflict is racial conflict, and racial conflict is class conflict. The chapters outline the
historical transformation of a once undefined line between “Mexican” and “white American” into a sharp border. The first four chapters of the
book offer the most compelling reads, providing engaging portraits of four different communities in Cochise County. In the first two chapters,
Benton-Cohen takes us to Tres Alamos and Tombstone, and exposes us to places where relations between
Mexicans and white Americans were characterized, for the most part, by harmony, equal legal protection,
and sense of membership in the same community. In Tres Alamos and Tombstone, Mexicans and whites inhabited a “shared world”
characterized by a “hybrid borderlands culture of the 1880’s, when Mexican-Anglo intermarriages and business partnerships still flourished.”
Benton-Cohen argues that race, at least the racial antagonism between Mexicans and whites, was not a central organizing feature of these
communities. In this “shared world,” it was not Mexicans who were the “others”, but a range of groups such as Apaches, Chinese immigrants,
and Cowboys—each “other” representing a common enemy for the Mexicans and white Americans. She attributes the prevailing “ecumenical”
view of whiteness in these two communities to their agricultural-based economies and the fact that most of the Mexicans residing there were
members of the landholding elite. In
contrast, the mining town of Bisbee and its suburb, Warren, the subjects of the next two
more palatable, as a dual-wage system saw Mexicans
chapters, tell a different story. In these communities, race was
receiving lower pay, and residential segregation restricted the cosmopolitan interactions which characterized Tres Alamos and
Tombstone. As with the previous two communities, Benton-Cohen claims that the status of race in these towns is a
consequence of economic and class conditions.Unlike Tres Alamos and Tombstone, Bisbee was
dominated by a mining economy and laboring population. This case is picked up in the remainder of the book, where
Benton-Cohen explores how the divide between “Mexicans” and “whites,” indeed the presence of a racial
discourse, is connected to the penetration of industrialized capitalism. As the mining boom took hold, corporations
redeveloped the geographic and social ecology of Cochise County. Bisbee expanded and race entered into once unknown places such as Tres
Alamos and Tombstone. Along with these corporations, homesteaders from other parts of America moved in, and brought with them
understandings of racial difference that were foreign to Cochise County. The “white labor movement” as she names it, gained a strong
influence over Arizona politics, and elected officials who saw Mexicans as racial “others.” Over time, the four communities began to resemble
each other, as an Anglo/Hispanic color line became a prominent feature of them all.
Race cannot be understood absent an analysis of capital—racism is simply a means of
maintaining an economic order
San Juan Jr. 03 (Epifanio , Filipino American literary academic, mentor, cultural reviewer, civic intellectual, activist, writer, essayist,
“Marxism and the Race/Class Problematic: A Re-Articulation”, Cultural Logic, http://clogic.eserver.org/2003/sanjuan.html)//AS
Racism and nationalism are thus modalities in which class struggles articulate themselves at strategic points
in history. No doubt social conflicts in recent times have involved not only classes but also national,
ethnic, and religious groups, as well as feminist, ecological, antinuclear social movements (Bottomore 1983). The concept of
"internal colonialism" (popular in the seventies) that subjugates national minorities, as well as the principle of self-determination for oppressed
or "submerged" nations espoused by Lenin, exemplify dialectical attempts to historicize the collective agency for socialist transformation.
Within the framework of the global division of labor between metropolitan center and colonized periphery, a
Marxist program of
national liberation is meant to take into account the extraction of surplus value from colonized
peoples through unequal exchange as well as through direct colonial exploitation in "Free Trade
Zones," illegal traffic in prostitution, mail-order brides, and contractual domestics (at present, the Philippines
provides the bulk of the latter, about ten million persons and growing). National oppression has a concrete reality not
entirely reducible to class exploitation but incomprehensible apart from it; that is, it cannot be
adequately understood without the domination of the racialized peoples in the dependent formations by the
colonizing/imperialist power, with the imperial nation-state acting as the exploiting class, as it were (see San Juan 1998; 2002). 32. Racism
arose with the creation and expansion of the capitalist world economy (Wolf 1982; Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991).
Solidarities conceived as racial or ethnic groups acquire meaning and value in terms of their place within the social organization of production
and reproduction of the ideological-political order; ideologies of racism as collective social evaluation of solidarities arise to reinforce structural
constraints which preserve the exploited and oppressed position of these "racial" solidarities. Such
patterns of economic and
political segmentation mutate in response to the impact of changing economic and political
relationships (Geshwender and Levine 1994). Overall, there is no denying the fact that national-liberation
movements and indigenous groups fighting for sovereignty, together with heterogeneous alliances and coalitions,
cannot be fully understood without a critical analysis of the production of surplus value and its
expropriation by the propertied class--that is, capital accumulation. As John Rex noted, different ethnic groups are
placed in relations of cooperation, symbiosis or conflict by the fact that as groups they have different economic and political
functions.Within
this changing class order of [colonial societies], the language of racial difference
frequently becomes the means whereby men allocate each other to different social and economic
positions. What the type of analysis used here suggests is that the exploitation of clearly marked groups in a variety of
different ways is integral to capitalism and that ethnic groups unite and act together because they have been subjected to
distinct and differentiated types of exploitation. Race
relations and racial conflict are necessarily structured by
political and economic factors of a more generalized sort (1983, 403-05, 407). Hence race relations and race conflict are necessarily
structured by the larger totality of the political economy of a given society, as well as by modifications in the structure of the world economy.
Corporate profit-making via class exploitation on an international/globalized scale, at bottom, still remains the logic
of the world system of finance capitalism based on historically changing structures and retooled
practices of domination and subordination.
Race is a social construction borne of capitalism
Bannerji 05 (Himani, Professor of Sociology at York University, “Building from Marx: Reflections on Class and Race”, Social Justice 32:4,
2005)//AS
If we consider "race" to be a connotative, expressionist cluster of social rela? tions in the terrain of certain
historical and economic relations, and class to be an ensemble of property-oriented social relations with
signifying practices, it is easy to see how they are formatively implicated. From this standpoint, one could say
that modern "race" is a social culture of colonialist and imperialist capitalism . "Race," therefore, is a
collection of discourses of colonialism and slavery, but firmly rooted in capitalism in its different
aspects through time. As it stands, "race" cannot be disarticulated from "class" any more than milk can be
separated from coffee once they are mixed, or the body divorced from consciousness in a living person. This inseparability,
this formative or figurative relation, is as true for the process of extraction of surplus value in capitalism as it is a commonsense practice at the
level of social life. Economic
participation, the value of labor, social and political participation and
entitlement, and cultural marginalization or inclusion are all part of this overall social formation
Class and race are mutually constitutive—capital created the concept of race for its
own ends
Brodkin 2000 (Karen, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of California Los Angeles, “998 AES Keynote Address":
Global Capitalism: What's Race Got to Do with It?”, American Ethnologist 27:2, May 2000, WILEY)//AS
In the remainder of this article, I will
use the United States as an illustrative caseto develop further my argument
that capitalism is causally and systemically linked to the construction of race and racism . I will show that
relations to the means of capital- ist production in the United States have been organized in ways that are
consistent with nationalist constructions of national subjects and internal aliens. The central theoretical point I
wish to advance is that race in the United States has historically been a key relationship to the means of
capitalist production, and gender construc- tions are what has made race corporeal, material, and visible. In Marxist thought, re- lations
to the means of production are class relations. To argue that race is a relation- ship to the means of production is
not to reduce race to class. Rather, it is to complicate each term, to argue that race and class are
mutually constitutive, two facets of thesame process that apply to both the structure of productive relationships and people's
consciousnesses or identities. It is in such socially structured identities that the nation- alist and capitalist projects connect. Current
interest in identities-especially the conventional threesome of race, class, and gender-has addressed the cultural content
of identities for actors, as well as for the national hegemonic structures that make them meaningful for people to in- terpret, enact, and
embrace. I think it is
fair to say that they are dialectical: State pol- icy, law, and popular discourse make
race and gender matter for one's life chances; people embrace these categories because they matter,
but they do not inhabit them in the ways hegemonic institutions and discourses construct them; popular enactments in turn
reshape hegemonic practices. Class is often the Cinderella in analyses of this threesome with respect to national projects. That is, it is treated as
a "lifestyle choice of you and your family," as Lillian Robinson (1995:8) puts it when criticizing scholars who treat class as if it were a set of
cultural choices that are unrelated to economic structures. But
one could also challenge the lack of attention to
economics in analyses of race in the same way that Robinson does for class. True, the state, nationalism, and civic
discourse have gotten a lot of play on the structural side of race. But the organi- zation of production and the racial division of labor, though
well described, are poorly theorized. Thinking
theoretically about the ways that race and ethnicity work as a
relationship to the means of capitalist production in the United States can help us understand how
global capitalism might feed nationalism even as it seems to erode states.
The concept of race did not exist before capital—racial divisions are created and
maintained to sustain the labor force
Brodkin 2000 (Karen, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of California Los Angeles, “998 AES Keynote Address":
Global Capitalism: What's Race Got to Do with It?”, American Ethnologist 27:2, May 2000, WILEY)//AS
Soon after the reopening of immigration in 1965, a Federal Interagency Commit- tee was formed to
create for the Bureau of the Census a classification of race and eth- nicity reflective of the nation's new immigration and
attentive to the progress of af- firmative action. The result was the now-familiar four racial groups: American
Indian/Alaskan Native, Asian/Pacific Islander, black, and white. The committee de- cided that the fifth group, Hispanic, was an ethnic group but
not a race. The govern- mentese term Hispanic emphasizes the Euro-origins of Spanish speakers from many nations. These "Hispanics" are not
exactly white, which they were in the 1960 cen- sus. Rather they are modified, not-quite whites, as in Hispanic whites (Wright 1994: 50-51). In
sum, although race was
initially invented to justify a brutal regime of slave la- bor that was profitable
to Southern planters, race making has become a key process by which the United States continues to
organize and understand labor and national belonging.Africans, Europeans, Mexicans, and Asians each
came to be treated as members of less civilized, less moral, less self-restrained races only when they were
recruited to be the core of the U.S. capitalist labor force. Such race making depended andcontinues to rest
upon occupational and residential segregation (Massey and Denton 1993). Race making in turn facilitated the
degradation of work itself, its or- ganization as "unskilled," intensely driven, mass-production work. Race making is class
making, just as much as class making is race making. They are two views of the same thing.
Racism was the most convenient way for capital to divide and oppress the masses—
only undoing capitalism solves racism
GLW 10 (Green Left Weekly, “Why capitalism needs racism”, GLW Iss. 823, 1/24/10, http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/43086)//AS
The capitalist social pyramid is black at the base and white at the top. In South Africa, until apartheid was formally
abolished in 1994, this pyramid was legally sanctioned. Elsewhere, while slavery and segregation have been outlawed,
the richest people are still the whitest and the poorest are the blackest.Racism suits capitalism
because it's an important way of justifying economic discrimination. It's no accident that wherever
you find racism, someone seems to be making money from it. Racist ideas help capitalism get away with superexploiting racial and ethnic minorities, and all non-white people. "Those Arabs" or "Those Asians", we're told, "are used to doing dirty, hard
work, and they'll be glad to get a job at all." Or when
unemployment is on the rise, it's always handy to blame
ethnic group is being demonised at the time, for taking jobs away from "real" Australians.
And when governments in the rich countries impose welfare funding or wage cuts on working people,
they always start by targeting the most vulnerable groups — non-Anglo migrants or indigenous people. International
students are often the first to cop attacks on higher education. Racism fosters the idea that the massive underdevelopment and deprivation faced by the people of the Third World is "their fault".This leads to
acceptance of the idea that, while rich countries should give some aid orloans, it should be tied to the recipient
government agreeing to terms favourable to the donor countries, including huge interest charges. Without
racist and nationalist ideas prevalent in the populations of imperialist countries, people would be less likely to accept
as "natural" or "inevitable" the huge inequalities between the First and Third Worldsor endorse wars
on Third World peoples who resist imperialist domination. In other words, racism is a way for the capitalist
class to divide ordinary people from each other, within and between countries: divide and rule.
"Asians", or whichever
Capitalism is the root cause of racial division – race is a tool to divide the working class and preserve
capitalism
Hill 9, teaches at Middlesex University and is Visiting Professor of Critical Education Policy and Equality Studies at the University of Limerick,
Ireland (Dave, “Culturalist and Materialist Explanations of Class and "Race"”, Cultural Logic 2009 http://clogic.eserver.org/2009/Hill.pdf)
The capitalist system – with a tiny minority of people owning the means of production – oppresses and
exploits the working class. This, indeed, constitutes the essence of capitalism: the extraction of surplus value – and profit – from
workers by capitalist employers. These capitalists may be white, black, men, women, (high caste) Brahmin,
or(“untouchable”) Dalit. In India as well as in Britain, there are millionaire men, women, Brahmin, and Dalit capitalists – and politicians.
Marxist analysis also suggests that class conflict, which is an essential feature of capitalist society, will result in an
overthrow of capitalism given the right circumstances. There has been considerable debate, historically,
in different countries over whether this can, or will, be achieved either by revolutionary force or by
evolutionary measures and steps for example through the evolutionary, reformist measures of social democracy). Important examples
of such debate- between protagonists of revolutionary socialism and those of evolutionary socialism/social democracy are the late nineteenth
century debates in Germany over “Revisionism” associated with the revisionist Eduard Bernstein (e.g., in 1899, his The Prerequisites for
Socialism and the Tasks of Social Democracy – see Tudor and Tudor, 1988) on the one hand, and on the other hand, , orthodox revolutionary
Marxist critics of revisionism such as Rosa Luxemburg (for example, in Reform and Revolution, in 1899/1900. Today such debates are carried on
between revolutionary socialists/ Marxists such as the various Trotskyite groups, parties and internationals on the one hand, and social
democratic parties and internationals on the other. As for where the former communist parties stood, a historical transition was made in the
1970s and 1980s by various communist parties and leaders when they foreswore revolution and adopted gradualist social democracy. 3 These
arguments and conflicts take place within many leftist revolutions. Today, for example, in Venezuela, Trotskyites argue for a revolutionary
rupture with capitalism, while others urge caution, an accommodation with capitalism and capitalists. (See Gonzalez, 2007; ISG, 2007; Esteban
et al, 2008; Fuentes, 2009.) And Trotskyite, revolutionary, anti-capitalist groups and parties have persistent major problems working within
larger left formations, united fronts and popular fronts. Thus PSOL at first joined the PT government in Brazil but left in 2004 in protest
at(Brazilian President) Lula’s neoliberal pro-capitalist policies, and in 2007 Sinistra Critica pulled out of the broader left Rifondazione Comunista.
There is considerable current debate within the Trostskyite movement and internationals over the incompatibility of socialist revolution with
social democratic broader parties. (See, for example, Bensaid, 2009.) 4 Historically,
and indeed in current times, it is, of
course the armed/police forces of the capitalist state that shoot first – and where the local capitalist state is not
powerful enough in the balance of class forces in any particular site, then in come the United States cavalry, acting on behalf of transnational
capital and its national capital – on behalf of the international capitalist system itself. (See, for example, Brosio, 1994.) And yet there
are
denials, by postmodernists and other theorists of complexity and hybridity and postmodernists and post-ists of various stripes, that
we no longer live in a period of metanarratives, such as mass capitalism, social class, working class, 7 or,
indeed, “woman” or “black.” 5 For many theorists since the 1980s, history is at an end, the class war is
over, and we all exalt in the infinite complexity and hybridity of subjective individualist consumerism . It is
interesting, and rarely remarked upon, that arguments about “the death of class” are not advanced regarding the
capitalist class. Despite their horizontal and vertical cleavages (Dumenil and Levy, 2004), they appear to know very well who
they are. Nobody is denying capitalist class consciousness. Opposition to the rule of capital and its policies
(either its wider policies, or specific policy) is weakened when the working class is divided, by “race,” caste, religion,
tribe, or by other factors. When I say “divided,” I am using it here as an active verb, to mean that the
capitalist class divides the working class, for example by its ideological state apparatuses- its media, its
formally or informally segregated school systems. This is “divide and rule.” Examples of schooling systems perpetuating such
divisions are in apartheid South Africa, Arab-Jew segregated schooling in Israel, Protestant-Catholic
religiously segregated Northern Ireland, and parts of the USA – in particular its inner cities, and, indeed, parts of Britain,
where, in some inner-city working-class schools, more than 90 percent of the pupils are from minority ethnic
groups. 6 In many of the cities of the USA and Britain the ethnic division is localized. But such segregation and
division is overwhelmingly a class stratification. It is rarely the millionaire and capitalist minorities who
live in the ghetto, or poor minorities or whites who live in “millionaires row.”
Statistics flow neg – class is the most important factor in educational accomplishment
Hill 9, teaches at Middlesex University and is Visiting Professor of Critical Education Policy and Equality Studies at the University of Limerick,
Ireland (Dave, “Culturalist and Materialist Explanations of Class and "Race"”, Cultural Logic 2009 http://clogic.eserver.org/2009/Hill.pdf ***CRT
is Critical Race Theory)
Gillborn (2008) is right about underachievement by Blacks (Black Caribbean and Black African school students) in England and Wales. However,
to repeat the points made above in relation to Dehal’s data and analysis, most of this underachievement
is related to class
location –Black Caribbeans are, with Bangladeshis, Pakistanis and Traveller/Roma, the most heavily working class of
any ethnic group. When class location – as measured by those claiming and in receipt of Free School Meal (FSM) – is accounted,
the all minority ethnic groups other than Gypsy Roma/travellers perform better than whites. Regarding more privileged
groups in society, Strand (2008b) points out that (at age 16) “White British pupils from high SEC” (Socio-Economic Class)
“homes are one of the highest attaining ethnic groups, while White British pupils living in disadvantaged
circumstances are the lowest attaining group” (p. 2). Gillborn (e.g., pp. 54-56), too, draws attention to this, showing that with
regard to non-FSM students (for example at age 16 in their national GCSE assessments) that white students perform better than (most) other
ethnic groups. To repeat, and, as shown by the final Dehal table above, the
poor white working class (as measured by FSM), being in
less well than the working class of nearly all other ethnic groups. Most
BME groups do better than whites, once allowance has been made/controlled for class location as
measured by FSM. It seems that Gillborn’s own statistics (in Gillborn and Mirza, 2000) and other empirical data I present or refer to in this
paper (see also Independent Working Class Association, 2005) lend compelling support to a Marxist critique of “race”
salience theories in general (such as, currently, Critical Race Theory) offered, for example, by Cole, Maisuria, Miles and Sivanandan,
and the Institute of Race Relations that he founded, in Britain, 15 and in the USA by the Red Critique journal, for example, Young, 2006. In his
work on Critical Race Theory, Gillborn in most cases ignores and in other cases belittles the class
dimension, a class dimension that, ironically, his own statistics of 2000 (Gillborn and Mirza, 2000) draw attention to. Gillborn (in his chapter
receipt of free school meals, performs
3, 2008, p. 45) does refer to the relative importance of and intersections between, inequalities based on “race,” class, and gender. He does, as
have I, following Strand and Dehal (Dehal, 2006; Strand, 2007, 2008a, b) above, note that “economic background is not equally important for all
students.” On p. 46 he criticises an “exclusive focus on class.” On p. 69 Gillborn notes that “the data certainly confirms that social class
background is associated with gross inequalities of achievement at the extremes of the class spectrum.” He repeats: “However, class does not
appear to be equally significant for all groups.” He then adds, importantly for his argument (i.e., an argument that seeks to avoid concentrating
on data concerning the poorest strata in society), “the growing emphasis on FSM students projects a view of failing Whites that ignores 5 out of
6 students who do not receive FSM.” But contemporary
and recent Marxist work, including my own work, does not
have an exclusive focus on class. As this article, and an accompanying article (Hill, 2009), I hope, makes clear, we adhere to a
notion of “raced” and gendered class, in which some (but not all) minority ethnic groups are racialised or
xeno-racialised (explained below) and suffer a “race penalty” in, for example, teacher labelling and expectation, treatment by
agencies of the state, such as the police, housing, judiciary, health services and in employment. Gillborn gives specific recognition
to the analysis that social classis “raced” and gendered (e.g., p. 46), but gives relatively little – in fact very
substantially less – explicit (other than implicit)recognition that “race” is classed (and gendered). While his work is
not silent on social class disadvantage and social class based oppression, his treatment of social class analysis is dismissive
and his treatment of social class underachievement in education and society, extraordinarily subdued. In Hill(2009), Race and Class in Britain: a
Critique of the 15 statistical basis for Critical Race Theory in Britain: and some political implications, I also critique what I regard and analyse as
the misuse of statistics in arguments put forward by some Critical Race Theorists in Britain showing that “Race” “trumps” Class in terms of
underachievement at 16+ exams in England and Wales. 16 Accepting the urgent need for anti-racist awareness, policy and activism – from the
classroom to the street 17 – I welcome the anti-racism that CRT promulgates and analyses while criticising its over-emphasis on “white
supremacy” and its statistical misrepresentations.
Emphasis on culture over materialism is flawed
Zavarzadeh 3 - retired professor of English at Syracuse University (Mas'ud, “The Pedagogy of Totality” Journal of Advanced Composition
Theory 2003 JAC Online ***“the event” Zavarzadeh refers to is 9/11)
Underlining his pedagogy is, in other words, a
view of history as an expansionism of "power" (see Hardt and Negri) and as
conflicts of "ideologies" (see Fukuyama). It is based on the notion that "discourse" and "ideas" shape the world
since, ultimately, history itself is the discursive journey of the Soul toward a cultural and spiritual resolution of material contradictions. This
theory mystifies history by displacing "class" (labor) with "ideas" and "discourse," and it consequently
produces world history as a "clash of civilizations" that rewrites the world in the interest of the
Euroamerican capitalism (see Huntington). According to the clash theory (which is the most popular interpretive axis of 9/
11), people do what they do because of their "culture" not because they exploit the labor of others (and live
in comfort), or because their labor is exploited by others (and therefore they live in abject poverty). The event, in other words,
is an instance of the clash of civilizations: culture ("values," "language," "religion," the "affective") did it. "They" hate "our" way of life ("Their
'values' clash with our 'values"'). Since
"values" are transhistorical, the clash is spiritual, not material. But culture,
didn't do it. Contrary to contemporary dogma (see Hall, "Centrality"), culture is not autonomous; it is the bearer of
economic interests. Cultural values are, to be clear, inversive: they are a spiritualization of material interests.
Culture cannot solve the contradictions that develop at the point of production; it merely suspends
them. Material contradictions can be solved only materially-namely, by the class struggles that would end the global
regime of wage labor. The event is an unfolding of a material contradiction not a clash of civilizations. If teaching the event does not at least
raise the possibility of a class understanding of it, the teaching is not pedagogy; it is ideology (as I outline it later in this essay). To be more
precise, the
CIA fought the Soviets (and then the Taliban) because U.S. capitalism needs to turn
Afghanistan into a "new silk road." The conquest of Afghanistan, in other words, was planned long before the event, and its goal
was neither liberation of the Afghani people nor what the CIA calls "democratization." It was simply
aimed at turning the country into a huge pipeline station. In his testimony before the "House Committee on International
Relations Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific" on February 12, 1998 (three years before "9/11"), John J. Maresca, the Vice President for
International Relations of Uno cal Corporation, stated that The
Caspian region contains tremendous untapped
hydrocarbon reserves, much of them located in the Caspian Sea basin itself. Proven natural gas reserves within Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan,
Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan equal more than 236 trillion cubic feet. The region's total oil reserves may reach more than 60 billion barrels of
oil-enough to service Europe's oil needs for 11 years. Some estimates are as high as 200 billion barrels. In 1995, the region was producing only
870,000 barrels per day (44 million tons per year [Mtly]). (Monthly Review, Dec. 2001) The
problem for U. S. capital was how to
get the energy to the market. The safest and most profitable way to get the energy to the West was, Maresca testified, by building
"A commercial corridor, a 'new' Silk Road" through Afghanistan. Developing "cost-effective, profitable and efficient export routes for Central
Asia," according to Maresca, is the point of converging "U.S. commercial interests and U.S. foreign policy": Afghanistan
had to be
liberated to build the new silk road not because of a "clash of civilizations." A pedagogy that brings up
the event in the classroom has a responsibility at least to raise these issues: to limit "knowledge" to
"background information" and then substitute CIA stories for conceptual analysis of material causes is
not curing ignorance but legitimating it. Attributing the causes of the event to culture, therefore, is to
obscure the world class relations and the fact that their "hatred" is not the effect of an immanent evil in their
religion or language or values but the brutal exploitation of capital that has tom apart "their" way of life
to build new silk roads all over "their" world. The silk road always and ultimately leads to "events." To blame other cultures,
as Berube does when he refers to "searing images of cheering Palestinian children," is to let capitalism off the hook. It is a
practice that produces a "false consciousness" in students so that they make sense of the world through
spiritualistic "values" that marginalize the actual struggles over the surplus labor of the "other"- which is
what makes their own life comfortable. This is not curing ignorance; it is the corporate pedagogy of a flag-waving nationalism.
Capitalism is the root cause of race and racism – their methods dismiss class as a factor in oppression
Brodkin 98 – professor emeritus Department of Anthropology at UCLA, Ph.D. from the University of Michigan (“Global Capitalism: What's
Race Got to Do with It?” American Ethnologist published May 2000 JStor)
Such nationalistic and
xenophobic movements are broadly enmeshed in the na- tionalist project of
subject making. The idea that national subjects and colonial sub- jects have been historically constructed
as races (or ethnicities, languages, or reli- gions), classes, and styles of manhood and womanhood is well
established (e.g., Kerber et al. 1995; Ong 1996; Stoler 1989; Tamanoi 1998; Williams 1996). There has been a historic
isomorphism (or overdetermination or fit) between the ways states construct national subjects and the ways
capital organizes production and its labor forces on the basis of gender, race, and ethnicity (recent analyses
include Fikes 1998 and Medina 1998). Although nation and capitalism are separate projects, each de- pends on
and shapes the other. In the remainder of this article, I will use the United States as an illustrative case to develop further my argument
that capitalism is causally and systemically linked to the construction of race and racism. I will show that
relations to the means of capital- ist production in the United States have been organized in ways that
are consistent with nationalist constructions of national subjects and internal aliens. The central theoretical
point I wish to advance is that race in the United States has historically been a key relationship to the means of
capitalist production, and gender construc- tions are what has made race corporeal, material, and visible. In Marxist thought, relations to the means of production are class relations. To argue that race is a relation- ship to the means
of production is not to reduce race to class. Rather, it is to complicate each term, to argue that race and
class are mutually constitutive, two facets of the 239 same process that apply to both the structure of productive relationships and
people's consciousnesses or identities. It is in such socially structured identities that the nation- alist and capitalist
projects connect. Current interest in identities-especially the conventional threesome of race, class, and gender-has
addressed the cultural content of identities for actors, as well as for the national hegemonic structures that make them
meaningful for people to in- terpret, enact, and embrace. I think it is fair to say that they are dialectical: State pol- icy,
law, and popular discourse make race and gender matter for one's life chances; people embrace these categories
because they matter, but they do not inhabit them in the ways hegemonic institutions and discourses
construct them; popular enactments in turn reshape hegemonic practices. Class is often the Cinderella in analyses of this threesome
with respect to national projects. That is, it is treated as a "lifestyle choice of you and your family," as Lillian Robinson
(1995:8) puts it when criticizing scholars who treat class as if it were a set of cultural choices that are unrelated to economic structures. But
one could also challenge the lack of attention to economics in analyses of race in the same way that Robinson
does for class. True, the state, nationalism, and civic discourse have gotten a lot of play on the structural side
of race. But the organi- zation of production and the racial division of labor, though well described, are
poorly theorized. Thinking theoretically about the ways that race and ethnicity work as a relationship to
the means of capitalist production in the United States can help us understand how global capitalism
might feed nationalism even as it seems to erode states.
Anti-blackness is a tool of capital to prevent union power – empirically proven
Bonacich 76 - Professor of Sociology and Ethnic Studies at University of California Riverside, Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard (Edna,
“Advanced Capitalism and Black/White Relations in the United States: A Split Labor Market Interpretation” American Sociological Review Feb.
1976 JStor)
The substitution of black labor for white was, in part, accompanied by the process, described earlier, of division
of skills into simpler, assembly line tasks. Black migrants were largely unskilled while the union
movement's strength lay in controlling access to training in complex skills. A way of cracking the unions'
power was to break down the skills and substitute unskilled labor. Black labor was not the only source of substitution, but
it was an important and growing element. Returning to Figure I, the efforts to develop the black labor force
aroused the ire of white labor (4) which felt a threat to their efforts to improve their lot. The antagonism
towards black workers was not simply race prejudice but a fear that blacks, because of their weakness in the labor
market, could be used by capital as a tool to weaken or destroy their organizations or take away their jobs. As Spero and
Harris (l966:l28) state: "The use of Negroes for strike breaking has . . . led the white trade unionist to regard the black workers as an enemy of
the labor movement." White
workers reacted by trying to exclude black workers or to keep them restricted to certain
workers came on the
industrial scene unfamiliar, for the most part, with the aspirations of organized labor. 1'hey were not an easy element
to organize to start out with, but whatever potential for organization was pre- sent was discouraged by white
union antipathy and exclusion (5). Union policies frequently meant that black workers had no alternative but to turn
to strike-breaking as the only means of entering white-dominated lines of work. Sometimes even strike-breaking did not secure longterm employment as white workers roared back, anxious to see them dis- missed. Interaction 5 was mutually reinforcing. Blacks
distrusted the unions because they discriminated, and the unions discriminated because blacks didn't
support them. The circle of antagonism was difficult to break out of. Even if the unions opened their doors, as was not uncommon, black
jobs. (See Bonacich, I972, for a more thorough discussion of the reasoning behind these reactions.) Black
workers were apt to view the action as self-sewing, to protect the unions from scabbing by blacks. It would take more than non-discrimination
to end the dis- trust, and many white unionists were not willing even to take the first step of lowering the barriers to membership? The
policies of the employer fed the division between black and white workers (6). Employer paternalism led
black workers to feel they had more to gain by allying with capital than with white labor. Besides, behind it
lay a veiled threat: blacks would be hired and given preference over white workers so long as they
remained out of the unions. Interaction 6 helped sustain interaction 5. Foster (l920:2 I ) vividly makes this point: They know little of
the race problem in industry who declare that it can be settled merely by the unions opening their doors to the Negroes. It is much more
complex than that, and will require the best thought that conscientious whites and blacks can give to it. The Negro has the more difficult part to
solve in resisting the insidious efforts of unscrupulous white employers and misguided intellectuals of his own race to make a professional
strike-breaker of him, The antagonism of the labor movement to black workers weakened still further the latter's position in the labor market
(7). White
labor severely restricted the alternatives of black labor by maintaining control over important
lines of work. The perpetuation of the black labor force in a weak position kept_ them as a target group
for capital's efforts to undermine the union movement. Finally, to close the "system," the efforts by capital to utilize black
labor to their detriment added to the militance of white workers (8). Strikes were sometimes called over this very issue, which could unite
white workers in a common grievance (Tuttle, 1970a: 107-8).
Racism is rooted in capitalism
Cole 07( Mike Cole is research professor in education and equality at Bishop Grosseteste University
College Lincoln. His latest book, Marxism and Educational Theory : Origins and Issues, is published by
Routledge- The Heart of the Higher Education Debate- “'Racism' is about more than colour” November
23 2007 http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/311222.article Researched: 7-20-13)
The problem with standard critical race theory is the narrowness of its remit, says Mike Cole. One of the main
tenets of critical race theory is that "white supremacy" is the norm in societies rather than merely the province of
the racist right (the other major tenet is primacy of "race" over class). There are a number of significant problems with this use of the term
"white supremacy". The first is that it homogenises all white people together in positions of power and privilege. Writing about the US, critical
race theorist Charles Mills acknowledges that not "all whites are better off than all non-whites, but ... as a statistical generalisation, the
objective life chances of whites are significantly better". While this is, of course, true, we
should not lose sight of the life
chances of millions of working-class white people.To take poverty as one example, in the US, while it is the case that
the number of black people living below the poverty line is some three times that of whites, this still
leaves more than 16 million "white but not Hispanic" people living in poverty there. In the UK, there are similar
indicators of a society underpinned by rampant colour-coded racism, with black people twice as poor as whites, and those
of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin more than three times as poor as whites. Once again, however, this still leaves
some 12 million poor white people in the UK. That such statistics are indicative of racism, however, is beyond doubt, and to interpret them it is
useful to employ the concept of "racialisation". Given that there is widespread agreement among geneticists and social scientists that
"race" is a meaningless concept, racialisation describes the process by which people are falsely
categorised into distinct "races". Statistics such as these are indicative of racialised capitalism rather
than white supremacy. A second problem with "white supremacy" is that it is inherently unable to explain noncolour-coded racism. In the UK, for example, this form of racism has been and is directed at the Irish and at
gypsy/traveller communities. There is also a well-documented history of anti-Semitism, too. It is also important to underline the fact
that Islamophobia is not necessarily triggered by skin colour. It is often sparked by one or more (perceived) symbols of the Muslim faith. Finally,
a new form of non- colour-coded racism has manifested itself recently in the UK. This has all the hallmarks of
traditional racism, but it is directed towards newly arrived groups of people. It has been described by A. Sivanandan,
director of the Institute of Race Relations, as "xeno-racism". It appears that there are some similarities in the xenoracialisation of Eastern European migrant workers and the racialisation of Asian and black workers in the
immediate postwar period, a point I address in my latest book. "White supremacy" is counterproductive as a
political unifier and rallying point against racism. John Preston concluded an article in The Times Higher advocating critical
race theory ("All shades of a wide white world", October 19) by citing the US journal Race Traitor , which seeks the "abolition of the racial
category 'white'". Elsewhere, Preston has argued "the
abolition of whiteness is ... not just an optional extra in terms
of defeating capitalism (nor something which will be necessarily abolished post-capitalism) but
fundamental to the Marxist educational project as praxis". Indeed, for Preston, "the abolition of capitalism and
whiteness seem to be fundamentally connected in the current historical circumstances of Western
capitalist development".From my Marxist perspective, coupling the "abolition of whiteness" to the "abolition of
capitalism" is a worrying development that, if it gained ground in Marxist theory, would most certainly
further undermine the Marxist project.I am not questioning the sincerity of the protagonists of "the abolition of whiteness", nor
suggesting in any way that they are anti-white people but merely questioning its extreme vulnerability to misunderstanding. Anti-racists have
made some progress in the UK at least in making anti- racism a mainstream rallying point, and this is reflected, in part, in legislation. Even if it
were a good idea, the
chances of making "the abolition of whiteness" a successful political unifier and rallying
point against racism are virtually non-existent.The usage of "white supremacy" should be restricted to
its everyday meaning. To describe and analyse contemporary racism we need a wide- ranging and fluid conception of racism. Only then
can we fully understand its multiple manifestations and work towards its eradication.
Capitalism is the root cause of slavery and racism
Crawford 5 – Graduate student @ Queen’s U studying race theory and critical whiteness
(“Henry Winant. “The New Politics of Race: Globalism, Difference, Justice.”, Canadian Journal
of Sociology Online, March-April 2005, Henry Winnant is a professor of sociology @ UC
Berkeley, RSpec)
The second section of Winant’s book is dedicated to comparative racial studies. This section
discusses at length the historical transition from “racial domination” to “racial hegemony,” and
does so through connecting the Atlantic slave trade system to capitalism and
abolitionism to democracy. Racism has been essential to the development of
modernity as well as a global capitalist system. Winant argues that it was not racism that
created slavery, but slavery that created racism, and that slavery became racialized as a practical
way to meet labour demands at the time (p. 84). He extends the argument of slavery as creator to
the establishment of capitalism, and suggests that through resistance to slavery, modern forms
of democracy and culture were made possible. Thus, the Atlantic slave trade is argued by Winant
to represent “the first truly multinational capitalist enterprise ,” in the same way that abolitionism comes to
be represented as “the first multinational social movement” (p. 88). As such, Winant argues that abolitionism was an effort to “fulfill
the political promise of democracy” as well as an extension of “the cultural logic of enlightenment” (p. 87). Abolitionism seemed to
render notions of democracy and equality, despite the fact that such notions were not fully materialized, and several emancipatory
tasks remain. Democracy is conceptualized as the opposite of slavery, and as such, race and racism are viewed as
intricate components of the development of modern forms of democracy. Winant draws several
concrete linkages between the Atlantic slave trade and the racialized divide between the global
North and the global South. This is perhaps one of the book’s greatest strengths, insofar as it reminds the reader that, as
Winant writes, “the pattern of northern racialized rule has continued unbroken” (p. 88). Furthermore, that what exists now is
“global apartheid,” and this is evidenced in the massive exploitation and endemic indebtedness of the global South as well as in the
global distribution of resources.
Race is rooted in capitalism- they are suppressed by economics
Young 06 (Robert Young- British postcolonial theorist, cultural critic, and historian “Putting Materialism
back into Race Theory: Toward a Transformative Theory of Race”
http://www.redcritique.org/WinterSpring2006/puttingmaterialismbackintoracetheory.htm)
This essay advances a materialist theory of race. In my view, race oppression
dialectically intersects with the exploitative
logic of advanced capitalism, a regime which deploys race in the interest of surplus accumulation. Thus, race operates at the
(economic) base and therefore produces cultural and ideological effects at the superstructure; in turn,
these effects—in very historically specific way—interact with and ideologically justify the operations at
the economic base [1]. In a sense then, race encodes the totality of contemporary capitalist social relations,
which is why race cuts across a range of seemingly disparate social sites in contemporary US society. For
instance, one can mark race difference and its discriminatory effects in such diverse sites as health care,
housing/real estate, education, law, job market, and many other social sites. However, unlike many commentators who engage
race matters, I do not isolate these social sites and view race as a local problem, which would lead to reformist
measures along the lines of either legal reform or a cultural-ideological battle to win the hearts and minds of people and thus keep the existing
socio-economic arrangements intact; instead, I
foreground the relationality of these sites within the exchange
mechanism of multinational capitalism. Consequently, I believe, the eradication of race oppression also
requires a totalizing political project: the transformation of existing capitalism—a system which
produces difference (the racial/gender division of labor) and accompanying ideological narratives that justify the
resulting social inequality. Hence, my project articulates a transformative theory of race—a theory that reclaims revolutionary class
politics in the interests of contributing toward a post-racist society. In other words, the transformation from actually existing
capitalism into socialism constitutes the condition of possibility for a post-racist society—a society free
from racial and all other forms of oppression. By freedom, I do not simply mean a legal or cultural articulation of individual
rights as proposed by bourgeois race theorists. Instead, I theorize freedom as a material effect of emancipated
economic forms. I foreground my (materialist) understanding of race as a way to contest contemporary accounts of race, which erase any
determinate connection to economics. For instance, humanism and poststructuralism represent two dominant views
on race in the contemporary academy. Even though they articulate very different theoretical positions, they produce similar
ideological effects: the suppression of economics. They collude in redirecting attention away from the logic
of capitalist exploitation and point us to the cultural questions of sameness (humanism) or difference
(poststructuralism). In developing my project, I critique the ideological assumptions of some exemplary instances of
humanist and poststructuralist accounts of race, especially those accounts that also attempt to displace Marxism, and, in
doing so, I foreground the historically determinate link between race and exploitation. It is this link that forms the core of what I am calling
a transformative theory of race. The transformation of race from a sign of exploitation to one of
democratic multiculturalism, ultimately, requires the transformation of capitalism. Within contemporary
Black humanist discourses the focus remains on the subject. Hence, diverse intellectual inquiries such as Afrocentricism
(Molefi Kete Asante), Black feminism (Patricia Hill Collins), and neo-conservative culturalism (Shelby Steele), share a philosophical-ideological
commitment to the subject. What is ultimately at stake in this commitment is, I argue, a class matter. The philosophicocultural move—as Asante once put it in a representative formulation, Afrocentricism presents "the African as subject rather than object"
("Multiculturalism" 270)—is in fact part of the positing of a Black "essence" that can form the basis for a cross-class alliance between black
workers and black business, between, that is, exploited and exploiters.
People are not desriminated against solely based on color- social practices contribute to their
oppression
Young 06 (Robert Young- British postcolonial theorist, cultural critic, and historian “Putting Materialism
back into Race Theory: Toward a Transformative Theory of Race”
http://www.redcritique.org/WinterSpring2006/puttingmaterialismbackintoracetheory.htm
However, the experiential, the "real",
does not adequate the "truth", as Collins implies. Collins rejects the "Eurocentric
Masculinist Knowlege Validation Process" for its positivism but, in turn, she offers empiricism as the grounds for validating
experience. Hence, the validity of experiential claims is adjudicated by reference to the experience. Not only is her argument
circular, but it also undermines one of her key claims. If race, class, gender, and the accompanying
ideological apparatuses are interlocking systems of oppression, as Collins suggest, then the experiential
is not the site for the "true" but rather the site for the articulation of dominant ideology. On what basis
then, could the experiential provide grounds for an historical understanding of the structures that make
experience itself possible as experience? Asante and Collins assume that experience is self-intelligible and in their discourse it
functions as the limit text of the real. However, I believe experience is a highly mediated frame of understanding.
Though it is true that a person of color experiences oppression, this experience is not self-explanatory and,
therefore, it needs to be situated in relation to other social practices. Experience seems local but it is, like all
cultural and political practices, interrelated to other practices and experiences. Thus its explanation come from its "outside".
Theory, specifically Marxist theory, provides an explanation of this outside by reading the meaning of all
experiences as determined by the economic realities of class. While Asante's and Collins' humanism reads
the experience of race as a site of "self-presence", the history of race in the United States—from slavery to Jim
Crow to Katrina—is written in the fundamental difference of class. In other words, experience does not speak the real, but
rather it is the site of contradictions and, hence, in need of conceptual elaboration to break from cultural common sense, a conduit for
dominant ideology. It is this outside that has come under attack by black (humanist) scholars through the invocation of the black
(transcendental) subject.
Capitalism has allowed for federal manipulation by the private sector that resulted
in slavery
Blackmon 01 - an American writer, journalist and a Pulitzer Prize winner in 2009 for his book, Slavery by Another Name:
The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. (Douglas, “From Alabama's Past, Capitalism Teamed
With Racism to Create Cruel Partnership”, The Wall Street Journal, 7/16/01,
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB995228253461746936.html) //JA
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — On March 30, 1908, Green Cottenham was arrested by the Shelby County, Ala., sheriff and charged with
vagrancy. After three days in the county jail, the 22-year-old African-American was sentenced to an unspecified term of hard labor.
The next day, he was handed over to a unit of U.S. Steel Corp. and put to work with hundreds of other convicts in the notorious Pratt
Mines complex on the outskirts of Birmingham. Four months later, he was still at the coal mines when tuberculosis killed him.¶
Born two decades after the end of slavery in America, Green Cottenham died a slave in all but name. The facts are dutifully entered
in the handwritten registry of prisoners in Shelby County and in other state and local government records.¶ In
the early
decades of the 20th century, tens of thousands of convicts — most of them, like Mr. Cottenham,
indigent black men — were snared in a largely forgotten justice system rooted in racism and
nurtured by economic expedience. Until nearly 1930, decades after most other Southern states had abolished similar
programs, Alabama was providing convicts to businesses hungry for hands to work infarm fields, lumber
camps, railroad construction gangs and, especially in later years, mines. For state and local officials, the incentive was
money; many years, convict leasing was one of Alabama’s largest sources of funding.¶ ‘Assault With a Stick’¶ Most of the
convicts were charged with minor offenses or violations of "Black Code" statutes passed to reassert white control in
the aftermath of the Civil War. Mr. Cottenham was one of more than 40 Shelby County men shipped to the Pratt Mines in the winter
of 1908, nearly half of them serving time for jumping a freight train, according to the Shelby County jail log. George Roberson was
sent on a conviction for "assault with a stick," the log says. Lou William was in for adultery. John Jones for gambling.¶ Subjected
to squalid living conditions, poor medical treatment, scant food and frequent floggings,
thousands died. Entries on a typical page from a 1918 state report on causes of death among leased convicts include: "Killed by
Convict, Asphyxia from Explosion, Tuberculosis, Burned by Gas Explosion, Pneumonia, Shot by Foreman, Gangrenous Appendicitis,
Paralysis." Mr. Cottenham was one of dozens of convicts who died at the Pratt Mines complex in 1908.¶ This form of government
and corporate forced labor ended in 1928 and slipped into the murk of history, discussed little outside the circles of sociologists and
penal historians. But the story of Alabama’s trade in human labor endures in minute detail in tens of thousands of pages of
government records stored in archives, record rooms and courthouses across the state.¶ These documents chronicle another chapter
in the history of corporate involvement in racial abuses of the last century. A $4.5 billion fund set up by German corporations, after
lawsuits and intense diplomatic pressure from the U.S. and others, began making payments last month to the victims of Nazi slavelabor programs during the 1930s and 1940s. Japanese manufacturers have come under criticism for their alleged use of forced labor
during the same period. Swiss banks agreed in 1998 to a $1.25 billion settlement of claims related to the seizure of Jewish assets
during the Holocaust.¶ Traditions of Segregation¶ In the U.S., many companies — real-estate agents that helped maintain rigid
housing segregation, insurers and other financial-services companies that red-lined minority areas as off-limits, employers of all
stripes that discriminated in hiring — helped maintain traditions of segregation for a century after the end of the Civil War. But in
the U.S., recurrent calls for reparations to the descendants of pre-Civil War slaves have made little headway. And there has been
scant debate over compensating victims of 20th century racial abuses involving businesses.¶ The biggest user of forced labor in
Alabama at the turn of the century was Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co., the U.S. Steel unit that owned the mine where Mr.
Cottenham died. Dozens ofother companies used convicts, too, many of them now defunct or absorbed into larger
businesses. Executives at some of the corporate descendants say they shouldn’t be asked to bear responsibility for the actions of
executives long dead or the practices of businesses acquired decades ago.¶ U.S. Steel says it can find no evidence to
suggest that the company ever abused or caused the deaths of convicts in Alabama. U.S. Steel spokesman
Thomas R. Ferrall says that concerns voiced about convict leasing by Elbert H. Gary, the company’s chairman at the time, helped set
the stage for "knocking the props out from under" the system. "We think U.S. Steel proper was a positive player in this history … was
a force for good," Mr. Ferrall says.¶ The company’s early presence in Alabama is still evident a few miles from downtown
Birmingham. There, on a hillside overgrown with brush, hundreds of sunken graves litter the ground in haphazard rows. A few plots
bear stones. No other sign or path marks the place. Only a muddy scar in the earth — the recently filled-in mouth of a spent coal
mine — suggests that this is the cemetery of the Pratt Mines complex.¶ "The convicts were buried out there," says Willie Clark, an
82-year-old retired coal miner. He grew up in a house that overlooked the cemetery and the sprawling mine operation that once
surrounded it. "I heard my daddy talking about how they would beat the convicts with pick handles. If they
didn’t like them, they would kill them."¶ He and other older people living in the ramshackle "Pratt City" neighborhood
surrounding the old mining site still call the graveyard the "U.S. Steel cemetery." There are no records of those buried on the hillside.
Mr. Cottenham could be among them.¶ When Mr. Cottenham died in 1908, U.S. Steel was still new to convict leasing. But by then,
the system was decades old and a well-oiled machine.¶ After the Civil War, most Southern states set up similar penal systems,
involving tens of thousands of African-Americans. In those years, the Southern economy was in ruins. State officials had few
resources, and county governments had even fewer. Leasing prisoners to private individuals or
companies provided revenue and eliminated the need to build prisons. Forcing convicts to work as part of
their punishment was entirely legal; the 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, adopted in 1865, outlaws involuntary servitude —
except for "duly convicted" prisoners.¶ Convict leasing in other states never reached the scale of Alabama’s program. By the turn of
the century, most states had ended the practice or soon would because of opposition on humanitarian grounds and from organized
labor. Convict leasing also wasn’t well-suited to the still largely agrarian economies of most Southern states. But in Alabama,
industrialization was generating a ravenous appetite for the state’s coal and iron ore. Production was booming, and unions were
attempting to organize free miners. Convicts provided an ideal captive work force: cheap, usually docile, unable to organize and
available when free laborers went on strike.¶ Under the convict-leasing system, government officials agreed with a company such as
Tennessee Coal to provide a specific number of prisoners for labor. State officials signed contracts to supply companies with large
blocks of men — often hundreds at a time — who had committed felonies. Companies entered into separate deals with county
sheriffs to obtain thousands more prisoners who had been convicted of misdemeanors. Of the 67 counties in Alabama, 51 actively
leased their convicts, according to one contemporary newspaper report. The companies built their own prisons, fed
and clothed the convicts, and supplied guards as they saw fit.In Barbour County, in the cotton country of southern Alabama,
nearly 700 men were leased between June 1891 and November 1903, most for $6 a month, according to the leatherbound Convict
Record still kept in the courthouse basement. Most were sent to mines operated by Tennessee Coal or Sloss-Sheffield Steel & Iron
Co., another major industrial presence in Birmingham.¶ Sheriffs, deputies andsome court officials derived most
of their compensation from feescharged to convicts for each step in their own arrest, conviction and shipment to a
private company. That gave sheriffs an incentive to arrest and obtain convictions ofas many people as
possible. They also had an incentiveto feed the prisoners as little as possible, since they could pocket the
differencebetween what the state paid them and what they spent to maintain the convicts while in their custody. Some convicts
had enough money to pay the fees themselves and gain their freedom; the many who didn’t were instead put to work. Company lease
payments for the convicts’ time at hard labor then were used to cover the fees.
Root Cause (Wilderson)
Race is a construction of capitalism—differences can be overcome after dismantling
capitalism
Mullings 05 (Leith, Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York, “Interrogating Racism: Toward an Antiracist
Anthropology”, Annual Review of Anthropology 34, 2005, University of Michigan Libraries)//AS
There is consensus that modern
racism emerged in the context of European expansion. In fact, Wade (1997) suggests
that the physical differences that are cues for contemporary racial distinctions may be seen as social
constructions built of phenotypic variations, which correspond to the “geographic encounters of Europeans in
their colonial histories” (p. 15). One interesting theme is the mutability and historical contingency of the meaning of these perceptions
and distinctions and how they are organized. English, French, and Dutch travelers portrayed Pacific Islanders
differently at various points in time depending on prevailing global and regional agendas . Gailey (1996)
notes that their willingness to reduce judgment to skin color was associated with the rise of capitalist
slavery in West Africa and settlement colonization elsewhere. Hence, the skin color of Pacific Islanders is depicted as
markedly darker over 35 years as colonialism develops (Gailey 1996). Similarly, Daniel (1996) describes a
gradual process of “aryanization” of the Sinhala people during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as they
appropriated Western racial categories in the context of colonialism and the spread of scientific
racism. In the recent massacres in Sri Lanka, conflicts were at times framed in the discourse of race. Along with enslavement,
conquest, and colonialism, modern racism is frequently intertwined with both early and later stages
of nation building and the drive for national consolidation. Although the variety of racism developed in the West had the greatest
impact on the rest of the world, racial systems are simultaneously national and international projects. Racial projects as they appear in different
parts of the world are constructed, in part, from tools and symbols already existing within local cultural repertoires as well as from new
encounters and conflicts. As
states make race, they do so from beliefs, symbols, practices, and conflicts,
transmitted from the past yet interpreted in new ways.
Using race to explain history is inaccurate and dangerous—slavery existed before
capital but racism did not
Fields 90 (Barbara Jane, professor of American history at Columbia University, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of
America”, New Left Review 181, May/June 1990, JSTOR)//AS
Nothing so well illustrates that impossibility as the conviction among otherwise sensible scholars that race
‘explains’ historical phenomena; specifically, that it explains why people of African descent have been set
apart for treatment different from that accorded to others.12 But race is just the name assigned to the
phenomenon, which it no more explains than judicial review ‘explains’ why the United States Supreme Court can declare acts of
Congress unconstitutional, or than Civil War ‘explains’ why Americans fought each other between 1861 and
1865.13 Only if race is defined as innate and natural prejudice of colour does its invocation as a historical explanation do more than repeat
the question by way of answer. And there an insurmountable problem arises: since race is not genetically programmed,
racial prejudice cannot be genetically programmed either but, like race itself, must arise historically .
The most sophisticated of those who invoke race as a historical explanation—for example, George Fredrickson and Winthrop Jordan—recognize
the difficulty. The preferred solution is to suppose that, having arisen historically, race then ceases to be a historical phenomenon and becomes
instead an external motor of history; according to the fatuous but widely repeated formula, it ‘takes on a life of its own’.14 In other words, once
historically acquired, race becomes hereditary. The shopworn metaphor thus offers camouflage for a latter-day version of Lamarckism. Race
is not an element of human biology (like breathing oxygen or reproducing sexually); nor is it even an idea (like the speed of light
or the value of _) that can be plausibly imagined to live an eternal life of its own. Race is not an idea but an ideology.
It came into existence at a discernible historical moment for rationally understandable historical
reasons and is subject to change for similar reasons. The revolutionary bicentennials that Americans have celebrated with such unction— of
independence in 1976 and of the Constitution in 1989—can as well serve as the bicentennial of racial ideology, since the birthdays are not far
apart. During the revolutionary era, people who favoured slavery and people who opposed it collaborated in identifying the racial incapacity of
Afro-Americans as the explanation for enslavement.15 American racial ideology is as original an invention of the Founders as is the United
States itself. Those holding liberty to be inalienable and holding Afro-Americans as slaves were bound to end by holding race to be a selfevident truth. Thus we ought to begin by restoring to race—that is, the American version of race—its proper history. As
convenient a place as any to begin a brief summary of that history, along with that of plantation society in British North America, is in
seventeenth-century Virginia. Virginia foundered during its early years and survived only through the good will and, when the colonists had
exhausted that, the extorted tribute of the indigenous Indians. But during the second decade of the seventeenth century, Virginia
discovered its vocation: the growing of tobacco. The first boom in what would eventually become the United States took
place during the 1620s, and it rested primarily on the backs of English indentured servants , not African slaves.
Not until late in the century, after the boom had passed, did landowners begin buying slaves in large numbers,
first from the West Indies and, after 1680, from Africa itself.16 During the high years of the boom it was the ‘free-born’ Englishman who
became, as one historian put it, ‘a machine to make tobacco for somebody else’.17 Indentured servants served longer terms in Virginia than
their English counterparts and enjoyed less dignity and less protection in law and custom. They could be bought and sold like livestock,
kidnapped, stolen, put up as stakes in card games, and awarded—even before their arrival in America—to the victors in lawsuits. Greedy
magnates (if the term is not redundant) stinted the servants’ food and cheated them out of their freedom dues, and often out of their freedom
itself, when they had served their time. Servants were beaten, maimed, and even killed with impunity. For expressing opinions unfavourable to
the governor and the governing council, one man had both his arms broken and his tongue bored through with an awl, while another lost his
ear and had to submit to a second seven-year term of servitude— to a member of the council that had judged his case.18 Whatever truths may
have appeared self-evident in those days, neither an inalienable right to life and liberty nor the founding of government on the consent of the
governed was among them. Virginia
was a profit-seeking venture, and no one stood to make a profit growing
tobacco by democratic methods. Only those who could force large numbers of people to work tobacco for them stood to get rich
during the tobacco boom. Neither white skin nor English nationality protected servants from the grossest
forms of brutality and exploitation. The only degradation they were spared was perpetual
enslavement along with their issue in perpetuity, the fate that eventually befell the descendants of
Africans.
I: Commodification
Capital creates blacks as nothing more than property to be sold and abused
Farley 12 (Anthony Paul, James Campbell Matthews Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence at Albany Law School, “CRITICAL RACE
THEORY AND MARXISM: TEMPORAL POWER”, Columbia Journal of Race and Law 1:3, University of Michigan Libraries)//AS
The New World was not new before the killing. The blacks were not black before the killing. The colonized
were not colonized before the killing. The murders constitute and mark a new species. The production of race is
the production of a race that is to have and another race, subordinate to the first, that is to have not. The
abundance belonging to the One and the lack that is the chief property of the Other are conjoined twins, born of the same unspeakable event.
The black can trace its origin only as far back as a bill of sale. James Baldwin, speaking in London, was clear on this
point: I tried to explain that if I was originally from [an African point of origin] I couldn’t find out where it was because my entry into America
was a bill of sale. And that stops you from going any further. At some point I became Baldwin’s Nigger.30 But is the same for the white? The
bill of sale is the official screen memory of the mass murder that is the origin of capital. The bill of sale is the
alpha and omega of law. The bill of sale is a death certificate, ours. The bill of sale is the recording angel assigned to the
children of slaves and children of slavemasters. The legality of that bill of sale is what keeps the chains, the genealogies of property that bind
now to then, and all of us to the repetitions, together. Law is the work of screening the original accumulation from consciousness. The
bill
of sale, a paper that somehow connects a person to a property, is an atomic proposition of law. To see
the connection between a person and a property as legal requires us to see that connection, the legal connection, as something other than
“pain and terror.”31 This is so even
though the connection is in fact nothing other than pain and terror,
nothing but the why of the mass murders that gave rise to the first capital, nothing more than talon and tooth,
and nothing other than a matter for the Furies. The bill of sale is part of a system. The bill of sale, its system,
designates haves and have-nots. Those who have, have. Those who have not, have not. Like law and right, having and not having
are inherited. The original sin of property—the original accumulation—thus repeats itself in our progeny.
What does the slave inherit upon legal emancipation? The slave inherits nothing . The ex-slave, now a laborer,
enters the marketplace with nothing. Having nothing, the ex-slave has nothing by way of bargaining power. The move from chattel
slavery to wage slavery is therefore not a move at all. Legal emancipation is not progress . The wage system
is not progress. The movement from status to contract is not progress. All of this is only slavery repeated as wage-slavery.
We are still within the time of the spectacle, the time of slavery, the time of the undiscovered
country. Slavery to contract is the non-progress of white-over-black to white-over-black. White over black is slavery, slavery
is death, death only, and that continually. The slave, having nothing of her own, finding herself in the world that regards her
labor-power as a commodity among other commodities, is compelled to go to the marketplace to sell her skin, her skin is what her labor power
is wrapped in.
Because the slave has nothing by way of bargaining power, the slave can expect nothing
from the marketplace, as Marx observed, “but a hiding.”32
Capitalism commodifies racial identity—degrades individuals and justifies slavery—
only dismantling capitalism solves
Leong 13 (Nancy, Assistant Professor of Civil Rights ,Constitutional Law, and Criminal Procedure at the University of Denver, “Racial
Capitalism”, Harvard Law Review 126:8, June 2013, Infotrac)//AS
Racial capitalism -- the process of deriving social and economic value from the racial identity of another
person -- is a longstanding, common, and deeply problematic practice. This Article is the first to identify racial
capitalism as a systemic phenomenon and to undertake a close examination of its causes and consequences. The Article focuses on instances of
racial capitalism in which white
individuals and predominantly white institutions use nonwhite people to
acquire social and economic value. Affirmative action doctrines and policies provide much of the impetus
for this form of racial capitalism. These doctrines and policies have fueled an intense legal and social
preoccupation with the notion of diversity, which encourages white individuals and predominantly white
institutions to engage in racial capitalism by deriving value from nonwhite racial identity . Racial capitalism
has serious negative consequences both for individuals and for society as a whole. The process of racial capitalism relies
upon and reinforces commodification of racial identity, thereby degrading that identity by reducing it to
another thing to be bought and sold.Commodification can also foster racial resentment by causing nonwhite
people to feel used or exploited by white people. And the superficial process of assigning value to nonwhiteness within
a system of racial capitalism displaces measures that would lead to meaningful social reform . In an ideal society, racial
capitalism would not occur. Given the imperfections of our current society, however, this Article proposes a pragmatic
approach to dismantling racial capitalism, one that recognizes that progress must occur incrementally. Such an approach
would require a transition period of limited commodification during which we would discourage racial capitalism. Moreover, we would ensure
that any transaction involving racial value is structured to discourage future racial capitalism. I briefly survey some of the various legal
mechanisms that can be deployed to discourage racial capitalism through limited commodification. Ultimately, this
approach will
allow progress toward a society in which we successfully recognize and respect racial identity without
engaging in racial capitalism.
I: Genocide (Prisons)
Capitalism exacts modern genocide on Black Americans and other marginalized groups
via the prison-industrial complex
Smith and Hattery 08 (Earl and Angela J., professors of sociology at Wake Forest University, “INCARCERATION: A TOOL FOR
RACIAL SEGREGATION AND LABOR EXPLOITATION”, Race, Gender, and class 15:1-2, 2008, ProQuest)//AS
As powerful an analytical tool as this framework is, one
of the shortcomings of the use of the race, class and gender paradigm by
other scholars is the tendency to focus on the individual level rather than the structural level . In other
words, often the analysis focuses on the race, class, and gender of individual actors and how these status locations shape experiences. We
focus our analysis on the structural level and the ways in which different systems of domination are
mutually reinforcing: patriarchy is woven with racism (or race supremacy) both of which are woven with
capitalism. For example, we are not focused on the social class or race of individual inmates, but instead examine the ways in
which capitalism and the system of racial domination collude to exploit the labor of male and female
inmates thus increasing profits for shareholders while simultaneously reducing competition for scarce jobs in
an increasingly tenuous domestic labor market.Of particular importance to the argument here is a focused examination on
capitalism as a core organizing structure of the raced and gendered PIC [Prison Industrial Complex].
Wright's work on exploitation (1997), though not developed with the express purpose of explicating the processes in prisons offers
an important framework for understanding the role of capitalism in the PIC. Pointing out, as others do, that
prisons are nothing more than catchments for the undesirables in our society (Chang &Thompkins, 2002; Chasin,
2004:234-239), Wright (1997:153).extends the argument and links it directly to the "needs" of capitalist economic system:In the case of labor
power, a person
can cease to have economic value in capitalism if it cannot be deployed productively.
This is the essential condition of people in the 'underclass'...above all [they lack] the necessary means to acquire the
skills needed to make their labor power saleable. As a result they are not consistently exploited...the underclass consists of human
beings who are largely expendable from the point of view of the logic of capitalism. Like Native
Americans who became a landless underclass in the nineteenth century, repression rather than incorporation
is the central mode of social control directed toward them. Capitalism does not need the labor power
of unemployed inner city youth. The material interests of the wealthy and privileged segments of American society would be
better served if these people simply disappeared. However, unlike in the nineteenth century, the moral and political forces are
such that direct genocide is no longer a viable strategy. The alternative, then, is to build prisons and
cordon off the zones of cities in which the underclass lives.According to Wright, prisons can be seen as a
modem day substitution for genocide , a strategy for removing unwanted, unnecessary, un-useful
members of a capitalist society. Incarceration provides a mechanism whereby the privileged can segregate or
cordon-off these unwanted members of society, thus increasing the efficiency of the capitalist economy
and its insatiable desire for expansion, without the moral burden of genocide. It is easy to see how prisons accomplish this goal:
they remove individuals from society and they permanently (in many states) disenfranchise them from the political realm (Uggen&Manza,
2002). Prisoners and ex-convicts become virtual non-citizens, unable to challenge the economic, social or political power
structures. And, the very fact of cordoning off some individuals means that the goods and riches of society are accessible only to those citizens
who are not cordoned-off. As Baca Zinn and Thornton Dill (2005) note, every system of oppression has as its reflection a system of privilege.
That which cordons some off, cordons others in. Put another way, along with any accumulation of disadvantage comes an accumulated
advantage for someone else (Zinn& Dill, 2005). For example, Whites,
especially White men, implicitly or explicitly,
benefit from the sending of hundreds of thousands of African American men to prisons; specifically, high
levels of incarceration effectively remove African American men from the competitive labor force and
upon release they are disenfranchised in the political system (Uggen&Manza, 2002) and permanently unemployable
(Pager, 2003).
Capital developed the prison system as modern slavery to remove the “unproductive”
and “undesirable” from society
Smith and Hattery 08 (Earl and Angela J., professors of sociology at Wake Forest University, “INCARCERATION: A TOOL FOR
RACIAL SEGREGATION AND LABOR EXPLOITATION”, Race, Gender, and class 15:1-2, 2008, ProQuest)//AS
Many scholars exploring
the question of the purpose of the criminal justice system have underscored
the role that the economy plays in incarceration (Chang &Thompkins, 2002; Parenti, 1999; Western, 2006). For a
variety of reasons-including the history of chattel slavery and intensive agriculture-this relationship is
particularly profound in the southern region of the US (Sellin cited in Hartnett n.d.). Prison labor became a more
significant part of modern capitalism during Reconstruction because the Civil War... left the U.S.
economically devastated, and deprived capitalism of its lucrative slave labor. One of the responses to these
crises was to build more prisons and then to lease the labor of prisoners, many of whom were ex-slaves, to labor-hungry capitalists. An
examination of the economy of the Mississippi Delta region, where one of the largest and quintessential examples of penal agriculture-The
Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, or simply "Parchman"-explicates this relationship.Oshinsky( 1997) argues convincingly that
Parchman was established to ease the transition for Mississippi Whites between the end of slavery
and the development of sharecropping. In this setting Parchman served two main functions: social control
and forced labor. Whites who feared the demise of their social order were pacified by the role that Parchman could play as a mechanism
of social control over "Negroes" who might otherwise run about uncontrolled and destroy not only property but also the southern way of life.
Wright's argument underscores the point;
just as Whites in the post-bellum South were worried about "Negroes"
running amok, Wright carefully articulates the role that prisons and urban ghettos play in modern day America by
housing unwanted, unruly, violent, drug users and thus removing them from nearby White, middle
class neighborhoods and from public life. Second, planters had serious labor concerns in an economy dominated by labor
dense crops such as cotton and rice. Very shortly after Parchman was established-and it is important to note that it was developed out of a
plantation-the convict leasing system was implemented. This system allowed Parchman to lease out the labor of convicts to local planters.
Oshinsky (1997) provides clear evidence for this relationship between incarceration and exploitable
labor by noting that the inmate population fluctuated along with the labor needs of local planters; the
police would conduct "sweeps" and make arrests-specifically targeting African American men-just
prior to planting, cutting, and harvest, thus creating the labor pool necessary for the convict leasesystem and
the continuation of the plantation economy (Browne, n.d.). In 1865, the 13th Amendment officially abolished slavery for all people except lhose
convicted of a crime and opened the door for mass criminalization. Prisons
were built in the South as part of the backlash
to Black Reconstruction and as a mechanism to re-enslave Black workers. In the late 19th-cenrury South, an
extensive prison system was developed in the interest of maintaining the racial and economic relationship of slavery. When slavery was legally
abolished, a new set of laws called the Black Codes emerged to criminalize legal activity for African Americans. Through the enforcement of
these laws, acts such as standing in one area of town or walking at night, for example, became the criminal acts of "loitering" or "breaking
curfew," for which African Americans were imprisoned. As
a result of Black Codes, the percentage of African
Americans in prison grew exponentially, surpassing whites for the first time. The relationship among
race, the economy, and incarceration is complex and deeply rooted in the peculiarities of US history:
namely the wedding of slavery, the plantation economy, and capitalism. For 250 years the system of chattel slavery
provided the most exploitable form of labor (Williams, 1944; Wright, 1997). Regardless of individuals' moral perspectives on
slavery, it was an incredibly efficient tool of capitalism that had it disappeared completely would have devastated the
social-political economy of the entire southern region of the US. And, though northerners don't like to believe this, would have had a negative
impact on the regional and national economy as well. Thus, this
morally repugnant system was quickly replaced by the
system of Jim Crow segregation which, according to Wacquant (2001:98), was important in sustaining two key
aspects of the plantation slave economy: labor extraction and social segregation. Though the Jim Crow system of
segregation endured chinks for many, many years, its symbolic, if not real, demise occurs in a series of legislative and judicial decisions
beginning with Brown v. Board (1954) and perhaps ending with the Civil Rights Act of 1965. Curiously, though perhaps not serendipitously,
another set of legislative and judicial decisions, beginning in the administration of Richard Nixon and continuing until
today, result in the racial transformation of prisons (Wacquant, 2001:96). Since 1989 and for the first time in national
history, African Americans make up a majority of those entering prison each year . Indeed, in four short
decades, the ethnic composition of the U.S. inmate population has reversed, turning over from 70
percent white at mid-century to nearly 70 percent black and Latino today, although ethnic patterns of criminal activity
have not fundamentally changed during that period. Wacquant argues that the current system of incarceration has
developed to sustain the goals of slavery and Jim Crow segregation: labor extraction and social segregation
(Wacquant, 2001:99). By employing Wright's theory of cordoning off we extend not only Wacquant's argument but also Chang and Thompkins'.
As Wright notes, we can't
enslave people anymore or commit genocide, so the system of ghettos and
incarceration provide the mechanism for eliminating the unexploitablewho are, by definition, threats
to capitalism. This cordoning off serves as both a removal from social life, as noted by Wacquant, and ultimately,
through reconceptualizing inmates as "exploitable" creates a pool of extractable labor.
Modern capitalism’s inexhaustible profit drive is embodied in the prison system—
causes civic death for huge numbers of Black Americans
Smith and Hattery 08 (Earl and Angela J., professors of sociology at Wake Forest University, “INCARCERATION: A TOOL FOR
RACIAL SEGREGATION AND LABOR EXPLOITATION”, Race, Gender, and class 15:1-2, 2008, ProQuest)//AS
The goal of this paper was to advance and extend the work of scholars writing about the prison industrial complex by incorporating the work of
neoMarxist Erik Olin Wright into the discussion. Specifically, we synthesized the work of Wright (1997) and Wacquant (2001) in order to
demonstrate that mass
incarceration is in the best interest of capitalism. Specifically it removes unwanted
competition from the "free labor" market and reconstitutes this unexploitable labor as exploitable in
order to facilitate the extraction of surplus value of inmates by both state prisons and multi-national corporations.
Furthermore, we suggest that mass incarceration is a "permanent" solution to the labor-work crunch
experienced by working class White men because a felony results in both disenfranchisement
(Uggen&Manza, 2002) and long-term unemployability (Pager, 2003). Just as bondage imposed "social death" on
imported African captives and their descendants, mass incarceration induces civic death for those it
ensnares. (Wacquant, 2001:119) We contend that the changes in the drug laws provide the judicial mechanism or justification for
incarcerating such a significant portion of the inmate population. Yet, the changes in the drug laws mask a more insidious and complex goal: the
removal of men (and to a lesser degree women) from the "free market" labor pool and the relocation of these individuals to a "captive" labor
pool that is highly exploitable by capitalists.3 One clear illustration of this link arose in our
examination of the membership of
the board of directors of the largest private prison corporation, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). We
identified at least one member of the board of directors with ties to the government-specifically serving a tenure as a staff
member of the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control-a committee clearly linked to the development
of drug laws and policies. And, we identified several
members who served as CEO of the types of manufacturing
companies that frequently contract with prisons for inmate labor. These links across government,
business, and the prison industry are similar to the kinds of links President Eisenhower identified
when he coined the term "Military Industrial Complex."4 This makes it difficult to believe that prisons
are designed for the pure motive of rehabilitating citizens as opposed to making profits. Like the military industrial
complex, once the relationships are established a pre-determined set of actions are set into place, all built around the need to maintain the
relationships among the government, big business, and the system of incarceration. Indeed, much as the military-industrial complex fueled the
economic juggernaut of the Reagan/Bush era's redistribution of wealth and resources, so now
we are witnessing the production
of a correctional-industrial complex in which society's already limited resources and funds are
redistributed away from social justice-based forms of spending in favor of imprisonment...the Bureau of
Justice Statistics reports that state spending on prison construction increased 612% between 1979 and 1990. California is a particularly cogent
example.." Its budget for fiscal year 1996/97, for the first time ever, appropriated more money for prisons (9.9% of the budget, up from 2% in
1980) than for the University of California and California State University systems combined (9.5% of the budget, down from 12.6% in 1980).
Put more simply, since 1980 California has slashed educational spending by roughly 25%, while raising prison spending by roughly 500%.
(Hartnett, n.d.) Added to this is the fact that prisons in the US are filled with African American men. Thus, to use the language of Wright (1997),
the PIC can be understood as a tool whose consequences-both intended and unintended-effectively cordon-off
African Americans much as they were cordoned-off during slavery and Jim Crow segregation and
exploit their labor for individual and "class" gain. Effectively prisoners have been identified and
reconstituted as the latest, greatest captive group whose labor can be exploited. And, while inmates may see
small benefits associated with the opportunities for work, as the inmates at Twin Rivers Correctional Facility so eloquently articulate, the PIC is
a complex system that is not about rehabilitating inmates but is about making money for a host of national and multinational corporations. Just
as the U.S. became the richest nation on earth by its extensive 250-year reliance on exploiting slave labor, today one of the ways U.S.
based
corporations secure their place as the richest companies in the world is by exploiting vulnerable,
mostly African American male, prison labor.
I: Social Death
The project of neoliberalism corrupts positive social movements’ discourse and uses it
to exacerbate violence—causes social death for marginalized groups
Ferguson and Hong 12 (Roderick A. and Grace Kyungwon, professor of American Studies, Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies,
and African American & African Studies at the University of Minnesota and Associate Professor of Women's Studies at the University of
California at Los Angeles respectively, “The Sexual and Racial Contradictions of Neoliberalism”, Journal of Homosexuality 59:7, 2012, Taylor and
Francis)//AS
To begin with, we follow Duggan (2003), who argues that neoliberalism
denotes the distortion of the social
movements of the 1960s, exploiting the language of social justice forged within these movements to call for the
upward, rather than downward, redistribution of resources. Similarly, Hong (2011) argues, “In the contemporary
[neoliberal] moment, certain aspects of 1960s and 1970s social movements have been mobilized for the aims of power and rendered
legitimate, albeit in contingent and constantly vulnerable ways” (p. 263). As Hong implies, conferring
legitimacy has arisen as
one of the strategies of neoliberal mobilization. As Ferguson (2012) observes in The Re-Order of Things: The University and
Its Pedgagogies of Minority Difference, affirmation of previously degraded forms of subjectivity became a part of
the apparatus of power. He describes the emergence of a new “political entity and object of love, a new article called minority
culture” (p. 111). Yet, this was not an example of power receding, but of its redeployment: “the arrival of
this new object did not usher in a season of unbridled liberation but provided the building blocks for a
new way to regulate” (p. 111). In Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism, Melamed (2011)
contextualizes this shift by observing that, in the period after World War II, White supremacy began to lose the explanatory and legitimating
force it had previously had, and that White liberalism became the dominant state rhetoric. Liberal
anti-racism at various points
in the post-War period legitimated U.S. global ascendancy and countered charges of U.S. racism in the
context of the Cold War, rationalized de-industrialization and the dismantling of the welfare state through notions
of individual achievement and responsibility, and advanced the notion of freedom as free trade and free markets. As
such, White liberalism’s statesponsored anti-racism in actuality erased and exacerbated racial violence,
dispossession, exploitation, and impoverishment, and in so doing, facilitated racial capital as much
as—or, perhaps more accurately, in even more brutal and efficient a manner as—White supremacy did in an earlier era. As
such, neoliberalism’s projects of upward redistribution and legitimacy have been underwritten by
formations of violence and social death, formations that disproportionately impact devalued
communities minoritized by race, class, gender, and sexuality.
I: Oppression
Neoliberal policies oppress the black population and manipulate public sentiment,
perpetuating racist ideology
Roberts and Mahtani 10 (David J. and Minelle, PhD in Geography at the University of Toronto and Associate Professor of
Geography and Planning at The University of Toronto, “Neoliberalizing Race, Racing Neoliberalism: Placing “Race” in Neoliberal Discourses”,
Antipode 42:2, March 2010, Wiley Online)//AS
Neoliberalism has a long history in geographical thought. For this paper, we limit much of our analysis of neoliberalism to the work that has
directly examined the concept in relation to race. Geographers have focused on the impacts that neoliberalization has had on institutions and
governmental policies (see Peck and Tickell 2002, Cope 2001, Theodore 2007). New
scholarship has begun to map the
impacts of neoliberal policy reforms in terms of their racially differentiated impacts. Nik Theodore’s
work, Closed Borders, Open Markets: Immigrant Day Laborers’ Struggle for Economic Rights, in its analyzing of the impacts of neoliberal policy
reforms on the lives of day laborers provides an interesting example of this new direction. Theodore’s work
provides a compelling look at how neoliberal policy reforms can have significantly racialized impacts .
As Theodore explains, “In the name of greater labor market flexibility, the neoliberal regulatory project has sought to
dismantle or seriously weaken labor market insurance programs and job-protection legislation, and
undermine trade unionism and worker collective action.” (2007: 252-253). The result has been the
emergence of an informal economy of day laborers, who are largely comprised of ’illegal immigrants’, and due to their
precarious legal position bear the brunt of such social change as their access to legal recourses in regards to unfair
employment practices are circumscribed. Day labors, as a notably racialized group, provide a compelling
example of the ways in which neoliberal policy reforms disparately impact certain racialized
populations. Theodore is not alone in mapping eruptions of racism that occur as a result of neoliberalization. David Wilson’s book, Cities
and Race: America’s New Black Ghetto (2006) also examines the connection between race and neoliberalism. Wilson explores in
impacts of neoliberal policy reform on the entrenchment and expansion of the racialized ghetto within the
American rust belt. He introduces readers to a cast of characters, such as ‘Welfare Queens’, ‘welfarehustling men’, and ‘black youth gangbangers’ that Ronald Reagan used to capitalize upon the fears of the
country and direct them at the ghetto. In each of these terms, race, specifically blackness, coupled with antimarket behaviors become intertwined in the construction of the antithesis of the ideal neoliberal
citizen in the black ghetto resident. In his analysis, race is mobilized to show that racialized subjectivities are
essential in justifying certain impacts of neoliberalization that are experienced disproportionately
within racialized communities. However, Cities and Race fails to provide a precise examination of how these black ghettos are
connected to a wider racialized system within U.S. (or Western) society. In fact, at several points in the book, Wilson quotes the language used
to describe the ghetto that is highly evocative of the history of racism, such as “the inner city as primitive engulfers of societal resources,”
(2006:62) contrasting this with other ‘spaces of civility’ within the city (2006:60), but he never fully unpacks the use of this language to explain
how it historically connects global tropes to the dehumanizing history of race.
Neoliberalism uses the discourse of merit to mask racism and oppression of minorities
Roberts and Mahtani 10 (David J. and Minelle, PhD in Geography at the University of Toronto and Associate Professor of
Geography and Planning at The University of Toronto, “Neoliberalizing Race, Racing Neoliberalism: Placing “Race” in Neoliberal Discourses”,
Antipode 42:2, March 2010, Wiley Online)//AS
Neoliberalism in Canada has effectively reshaped the ideal conception of the relationship between the
citizen and the society (and the corresponding obligations that each has to the other). As Dana-Ain Davis explains in Narrating the
Mute: Racializing and Racism in a Neoliberal Moment: “Neoliberal practices pull into its orbit a market of ideas about a lot of things including
the family, gender, and racial ideology. It
is, as Lisa Duggan (2003) notes, “saturated with race” (xvi) using capitalism to hide
racial (and other) inequalities by relocating racially coded economic disadvantage and reassigning
identity-based biases to the private and personal spheres. (Davis 2007: 349)” Specifically, it has meant the establishment
of a market orientation to this relationship. Ideally, within a neoliberal theorization of society, the success of the
individual is directly related to the work output of that individual. Under this ideal, modalities of
difference, such as race, no longer predetermine one’s success as each individual is evaluated solely in terms of his or
her economic contribution to society. What
becomes clear, however, with an examination of the discourses of
neoliberalism in the contemporary Canadian context, is that this ideal relationship is obviously not ideal for
everyone – certainly not for immigrants. Herein lies the double-edged sword of neoliberalism. Constituting the
immigrant as not-quite Canadian allows for the continued disconnect between their ability to play the
neoliberal game and the rewards that they receive for successful play. This can be seen through policies that
continue to disregard foreign degrees or other credentials that is at the heart of the deskilling process, for example. Yet, as immigrants
are racialized within the economy of Canada, claims of racism under neoliberalism are fundamentally ruled as
outside of the way in which society – especially Canadian society - is structured. Davis, again, provides a useful articulation
of this process: “Under neoliberal racism the relevance of the raced subject, racial identity and racism is subsumed under the auspices of
meritocracy. For in
a neoliberal society, individuals are supposedly freed from identity and operate under the
limiting assumptions that hard work will be rewarded if the game is played according to the rules. Consequently, any impediments
to success are attributed to personal flaws. This attribution affirms notions of neutrality and silences
claims of racializing and racism. (Davis 2007: 350)” As a consequence, neoliberalism effectively masks racism
through its value-laden moral project: camouflaging practices anchored in an apparent meritocracy,
making possible a utopic vision of society that is non-racialized. David Theo Goldberg’s articulation of racist culture is
particularly useful in understanding how race is both evoked and suppressed under neoliberal discourse. Goldberg’s project in Racist Culture:
Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning is to “map the overlapping terrains of racialized expression, their means and modes of discursive
articulation, and the exclusions they license with the view to contending and countering them.” (Goldberg 1993: 9) His central thesis is that
modern racist culture is marked, fundamentally, by its refusal to acknowledge the role that racism
plays in everyday structures of society and how these structures work to fundamentally disguise and, simultaneously, reify the
power of racism within society. He intricately describes the ways liberalism sanctions racist institutions and reproduces racial knowledge with
every outwardly progressive gesture, which works to normalize racism as just an aspect of life.
I: Genocide
Capitalism devalues black labor and legitimizes genocide
Bonacich 76 (Edna, Professor of Sociology and Ethnic Studies at University of California Riverside, “Advanced Capitalism and
Black/White Race Relations in the United States: A Split Labor Market Interpretation”, American Sociological Review 41:1, February 1976,
JSTOR)//AS
The rise in relative unemployment among blacks raises a question regarding the role of race in
advanced capitalism. While black slav- ery and share-cropping were of unambiguous benefit to the owners of land and capital, the
gains from high unemployment in one seg- ment of the population are less evident. Two approaches to this question can be distin- guished in
the literature. One
sees a continued advantage to the employer in keeping blacks as a marginal
workforce, useful for dealing with economic fluctuations and helping to divide and weaken the working class (e.g.,
Baron, 1971:34; Gordon, 1972:53-81; Reich, 1972; Tabb, 1970:26-7). The other, exempli- fied by Willhelm (1971), asserts that the technology of advanced capitalism has lessened the need for unskilled labor, which was the primary role
played by blacks in the past. Blacks have become useless to the economy and to the capitalist class
and, combining this fact with persistent racism, may even face gen- ocide. (It should be noted that some authors, e.g., Baran and
Sweezy, 1966:263-8; Bailey, 1973, hold both of these apparently contra- dictory positions simultaneously.)
The endless march of capitalism inflicts modern genocide on the black population—
relegating them to ghettos and removing them from view
Wilhelm and Powell 93 (Sidney M. and Edwin H., assistant professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Buffalo
and associate professor of sociology at the State University of New York respectively, “Who Needs the Negro?”, Conquering Books 1993,
University of Michigan Libraries)//AS
The Negro movement is merely the advance turbulence of a general tempest. At the moment that the Negro
passes a major milestone in his struggle for full citizenship our society shifts from an industrial to an automated economy. He is like the
breathless runner in the nightmare who, no matter how he strains, can only see his goal recede farther in the distance. Even if he won his
demands for civil rights he could not keep up with the spreading effects of the introduction of total machine production. The "Negro Problem"
therefore is not only one of civil rights but is also one Trans-action of economic and human rights: How
are we to re-arrange our
social life in response to the rapid alterations in economic production? On the face of it the idea of a "Negro
Revolution" is absurd. The Negro is not challenging basic American values. He wants to join the white man's system, not upset it; he wants to
come into the house, not bomb it. Rather than being engaged in a revolution to overthrow an oppressive system, the Negro
is being
disengaged by the system. The Ne gro flees the South-one region to another. He abandons the
country for the city. And the white's response? He flees the Negro, abandoning the city to him . The usual
explanation is that the Negro leaves his rural birthplace because the city needs his labor, especially after the cutting off of European
immigration. But if this is so, why is the Negro's unemployment rate in urban centers so high? Basically, 20,000,000 Negroes are unwanted.
Our values inhibit genocide-so we discard them by establishing new forms of "Indian reservations"
called "Negro ghettos." We even make them somewhat economically self-sufficient through an
"Indian hand-out." One out of every four Negroes in Chicago, for example, receives some form of public welfare assistance. Is it an
exaggeration to suggest that the deteriorated city has now become the junk heap upon which the
economically worthless are thrown? Urban renewal is often offered as a remedy, a medication which can help
check the spreading blight of slum neighborhoods and slum lives. But what in fact has urban renewal brought about?
Isn't the Negro simply being shuttled around turned over to the onward rush of economic interests as
the Indian was? Reservation lands were once thought worthless-so they were given to the Indian;
when this turned out to be wrong economically, they were taken away again. So with Negro slums as
they become less profitable than middleclass urban renewal. The Negroes--and the slums -are being moved from one
part of the city to another, while their old neighborhoods are converted into bulldozer wastelands ("Hiroshima flats" as one famous project has
been nicknamed) until more prosperous tenants finally arrive. Presumably the bulldozers can then move to the "new" Negro neighborhoods, by
then probably sufficiently blighted to require a new urban renewal project. One writer comments: "Planners
endeavor to improve
city life by property improvement: to upgrade property values rather than human values ." "Urban
Renewal" becomes "Negro Removal."
I: Forgetting
Capital is in the process of rendering the black population invisible because it no
longer has a use for them
Wilhelm and Powell 93 (Sidney M. and Edwin H., assistant professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Buffalo
and associate professor of sociology at the State University of New York respectively, “Who Needs the Negro?”, Conquering Books 1993,
University of Michigan Libraries)//AS
A discontented, restless generation of American Negroes, anxious to abandon a history of enslavement for equal participation in our society,
has abruptly ended centuries of seeming lethargy. But is their.demand for "Freedom NOW" a genuine Negro revolt? Is there actually a civil
rights struggle? Is the fundamental conflict between black and white? The
tendency to look upon the racial crisis as a
struggle for equality between Negro and white is too narrow in scope. The crisis is caused not so much by the
transition from slavery to equality as by a change from an economics of exploitation to an economics
of uselessness. With the onset of automation the Negro is moving out of his historical state of oppression into uselessness. Increasingly,
he is not so much economically exploited as he is irrelevant. And the Negro's economic anxiety is an
anxiety that will spread to others in our society as automation proceeds. The tremendous historical
change for the Negro is taking place in these terms: he is not needed. He is not so much oppressed as
unwanted; not so much unwanted as unnecessary; not so much abused as ignored. The dominant whites no
longer need to exploit him. 1f he disappeared tomorrow he would hardly be missed. As automation proceeds, it is easier
and easier to disregard him.
I: Poverty
Ongoing capitalism perpetuates a wealth gap that condemns billions to lives of
poverty, starvation, and wage slavery—Marxist critiques is more essential now than
ever
Scatamburlo-D’Annibale and McLaren 04 (Valerie and Peter, associate professor in the Department of
Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor and Professor in the Division of Urban Schooling, the Graduate School of
Education and Information Studies at UCLA, “Class Dismissed? Historical materialism and the politics of ‘difference’”, Educational Philosophy
and Theory 36:2, April 2004, Wiley)//AS
The grosteque
conditions that inspired Marx to pen his original critique of capitalism are present and
flourishing. The inequalities of wealth and the gross imbalances of power that exist today are leading to
abuses that exceed those encountered in Marx's day (Greider, 1998, p. 39). Global capitalism has paved the
way for the obscene concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands and created a world increasingly divided
between those who enjoy opulent affluence and those who languish in dehumanizing conditions and economic misery. In every corner
of the globe, we are witnessing social disintegration as revealed by a rise in abject poverty and
inequality. At the current historical juncture, the combined assets of the 225 richest people is roughly equal to
the annual income of the poorest 47 percent of the world's population, while the combined assets of
the three richest people exceed the combined GDP of the 48 poorest nations (CCPA, 2002, p. 3). Approximately
2.8 billion people—almost half of the world's population—struggle in desperation to live on less than two
dollars a day (McQuaig, 2001, p. 27). As many as 250 million children are wage slaves and there are over a billion
workers who are either un- or under-employed. These are the concrete realities of our time—realities that require a
vigorous class analysis, an unrelenting critique of capitalism and an oppositional politics capable of
confronting what Ahmad (1998, p. 2) refers to as ‘capitalist universality.’ They are realities that require something more
than that which is offered by the prophets of ‘difference’ and post-Marxists who would have us relegate
socialism to the scrapheap of history and mummify Marxism along with Lenin's corpse. Never before has a Marxian analysis of
capitalism and class rule been so desperately needed. That is not to say that everything Marx said or anticipated has
come true, for that is clearly not the case. Many critiques of Marx focus on his strategy for moving toward socialism, and with ample
justification; nonetheless Marx did provide us with fundamental insights into class society that have held true to this day. Marx's enduring
relevance lies in his indictment of capitalism which continues to wreak havoc in the lives of most. While capitalism's cheerleaders have
attempted to hide its sordid underbelly, Marx's description of capitalism as the sorcerer's dark power is even more apt in light of contemporary
historical and economic conditions. Rather
than jettisoning Marx, decentering the role of capitalism, and
discrediting class analysis, radical educators must continue to engage Marx's oeuvre and extrapolate
from it that which is useful pedagogically, theoretically, and, most importantly, politically in light of
the challenges that confront us.
I: Laundry List
Capital leaves behind nothing but slavery, racism, genocide, war, and despair—
postmodernists ignore this march toward extinction
McLaren and Farahmandpur 00 (Peter and Ramin, Professor in the Division of Urban Schooling, the Graduate School of
Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles and Professor of Education at Portland State University, “Reconsidering
Marx in Post-Marxist Times: A Requiem for Postmodernism?”, Educational Researcher 29:3, April 2000, JSTOR)//AS
As we cross the mine-sown threshold of a new millennium we can hear the earth groaning behind us.
The portal through which the human race has dragged itself over the last few centuries is ominously decorated
with the blood-soaked trophies of capital: slavery, racism, sexism, homophobia, starvation, genocide,
imperialist conquest, war, disease, unemployment, alienation, and despair. These historical "souvenirs" tacked
above our heads as we pass through the entrance to another thousand years should reveal to current generations that the Lords of
Commerce-the
newly ordained saviors of civilization-are nothing more than paper saints, contemporary
Lords of the Flies. We've seen their likes before. Unfortunately we still mistake the disease
(capitalism) for the cure (democracy). Such persistent misrecognition, mutatis mutandis, brings to the fore a world-historical
dilemma: Will we continue to interpret our defeats as victories, to reaffirm our conditioned reflexes, or
will we finally see the writing on the wall? Marx's description of capitalism as the sorcerer's dark power that has now
become uncontrollable is even more apt today than it was in Marx's time, despite the fact that Marxism has been
relegated by the postmodernists to the Icarian status of failed aspirations. No other individual has been able to
analyze the Frankensteinian dimensions of capital accumulation with the same intensity and foresight as Marx, who wrote: "If money ...
'comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,' capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and
Never before has a Marxian analysis of capitalism been so desperately needed than at
this particular juncture in history, especially since the global push towards finance and speculative
capital. It is becoming increasingly clearer that the quality of life in capitalist nations such as the United States is implicated in the absence
of freedom in less developed countries. Global carpetbaggers profiteering on human suffering and bargain
basement capitalists with a vision of transforming the environment into Planet Mall are bent upon
reaping short-term profits at the expense of ecological health and human dignity and drawing ever
more of existence within their expanding domain, cannibalizing life as a whole.
dirt" (1959, p. 760).
Capitalism perpetuates enormous wealth gaps, ecological degradation, abject poverty,
and sex slavery
Cole 03 (Mike, senior lecturer in education, University of Brighton, “Might It Be in the Practice that It Fails to Succeed? A Marxist Critique
of Claims for Postmodernism and Poststructuralism as Forces for Social Change and Social Justice”, British Journal of Sociology of Education
24:4, September 2003, JSTOR)//AS
I would like to begin with a few recent and current facts about the state of globalised capitalism in
the US, the UK and the 'developing world'. As far as the US is concerned, during the 1980s the top 10% of families increased
their average family income by 16%, the top 5% increased it by 23%, and the top 1% increased it by 50%. At the same time, the bottom 80% all
lost something, with the bottom 10% of families losing 15% of their incomes (George, 2000, cited in McLaren & Pinkney-Pastrana, 2001, p.
208). The poverty rate rose from 11.3% in 2000 to 11.7% in 2001, while the number of poor increased also by 1.3 million to 32.9 million (US
In the UK, the latest figures show that the wealthiest 1% own 23% of wealth, while the wealthiest 50% own 94% of
wealth (Social Trends, 2002, p. 102). This means that the poorest half of the population own only 6% of all wealth (Hill
Census Bureau, 2002).
& Cole, 2001, p. 139). With respect to income, in Britain, the bottom one-fifth of people earn less than 10% of disposable income and the top
fifth earn over 40% (Social Trends, 2002, p. 97). Over one in five children in Britain do not have a holiday away from home once a year because
their parents cannot afford it (Social Trends, 2002, p. 87). As far as the 'developing world' is concerned, poverty
in Africa and Latin
America for two decades has increased, both in absolute and relative terms. Nearly one-half of the
world's population are living on less than $2 a day and one-fifth live on just $1 a day (World Development Movement,
2001). The turning over of vast tracts of land to grow one crop for multinationals often results in
ecological degradation, with those having to migrate to the towns living in slum conditions and
working excessive hours in unstable jobs (Harman, 2000). There are about 100 million abused and hungry
'street kids' in the world's major cities; slavery is re-emerging, and some 2 million girls from the age of 5 to
15 are drawn into the global prostitution market (Mojab, 2001, p. 118). It was estimated that over 12 million
children under 5 years old would die from poverty-related illness in 2001 (World Development Movement, 2001).
Approximately, 100 million human beings do not have adequate shelter and 830 million people are not
'food secure' (i.e. hungry) (Mojab, 2001, p. 118). It has been estimated that, if current trends persist, in the whole of
Latin America apart from Chile and Colombia, poverty will continue to grow in the next 10 years, at the rate of two
more poor people per minute (Heredia, cited in McLaren, 2000, p. 39).
2NC Blocks
Cap v. Race Neg Blocks
AT: Economics Prove
1. You don’t understand economics—slave trade was driven by the triangular
trade where Europe sent cheap guns and manufactures goods to Africa in
exchange for slaves—it was where slaves were the cheapest and most
convenient for trade
2. Race is a construction borne of economics—change in the definition of
whiteness proves
Gans 05 (Herbert J., merican sociologist who has taught at Columbia University between 1971 and 2007, “Race as Class”, Contexts 4:4,
November 2005, University of Michigan Libraries)//AS
Race became a marker of class and status almost with the first settling of the United States. The country’s
initial holders of cultural and political power were mostly WASPs (with a smattering of Dutch and Spanish in some parts of
what later became the United States). They thus automatically assumed that their kind of whiteness marked the
top of the class hierarchy. The bottom was assigned to the most powerless, who at first were Native
Americans and slaves. However, even before the former had been virtually eradicated or pushed to the country’s edges, the skin color
and related facial features of the majority of colonial America’s slaves had become the markers for the lowest class in the colonies. Although
dislike and fear of the dark are as old as the hills and found all over the world, the
distinction between black and white skin
became important in America only with slavery and was actually established only some decades after
the first importation of black slaves. Originally, slave owners justified their enslavement of black
Africans by their being heathens, not by their skin color. In fact, early Southern plantation owners could
have relied on white indentured servants to pick tobacco and cotton or purchased the white slaves that were available then,
including the Slavs from whom the term slave is derived. They also had access to enslaved Native Americans. Blacks,
however, were cheaper, more plentiful, more easily controlled, and physically more able to survive
the intense heat and brutal working conditions of Southern plantations. After slavery ended, blacks became farm laborers and
sharecroppers, de facto indentured servants, really, and thus they remained at the bottom of the class hierarchy. When the pace of
industrialization quickened, the country needed new sources of cheap labor. Northern industrialists, unable
andunwilling to recruit southern African Americans, brought in very poor European immigrants, mostly peasants. Because
these people were near the bottom of the class hierarchy, they were considered nonwhite and classified into races.
Irish and Italian newcomers were sometimes even described as black (Italians as “guineas”), and the eastern and
southern European immigrants were deemed “swarthy.” However, because skin color is socially
constructed, it can also be reconstructed. Thus, when the descendants of the European immigrants
began to move up economically and socially, their skins apparently began to look lighter to the whites
who had come to America before them. When enough of these descendents became visibly middle class, their skin was
seen as fully white. The biological skin color of the second and third generations had not changed, but it was
socially blanched or whitened. The process probably began in earnest just before the Great Depression and resumed after World
War II. As the cultural and other differences of the original European immigrants disappeared, their descendants became known as white
ethnics..
3. Slavery was not initially associated with Africans – capitalist economics, not
racism, perpetuated slavery
Drescher 97 – Ph.D @ U of Wisconsin-Madison, Professor of History and Sociology @ U of
Pittsburgh (Seymour, Slavery & Abolition, 18:3, pages 212-213, “Slavery and capitalism after
fifty years”, 1997, RSpec)
Perhaps the best point of departure is the collective volume that emerged from the fortieth anniversary conference on Capitalism
and Slavery, held at Bellagio, Italy, and was published in 1987. The editors, Barbara L. Solow and Stanley L. Engerirían, divided the
non-biographical contributions into three parts, corresponding to three major hypotheses on the relationship between economic
development and slavery in the British empire. We may appropriately test the first hypothesis most briefly. Williams only briefly
broached the subject and his assessment has not been of major historiographical interest in the subsequent literature. Williams took
the position that economic factors rather than racism occupied pride of place in the
switch to African labour in the plantation Americas, that slavery 'was not bom of racism' but rather
slavery led to racism. Although some recent interpretations make racial preferences and
inhibitions central to the choice of African labour, Williams's order of priorities, if not his either-or approach, is
supported by a survey of hundreds of articles. They show virtual unanimity on the primacy of
economics in accounting for the turn toward slave labour. Non-economic factors, such as race or religion,
entered into the development of New World slavery only as a limiting parameter. Such factors affected the historical sequence by
which entire human groups (Christians, Jews, Muslim North Africans, Native Americans) were excluded from liability to
enslavement in the Atlantic system. Since Williams published his book, the main change in the historiographical context of origins is
an increase in the number and variety of actors brought into the process. That broader context complicates the role of any
exclusively 'African' racial component of the slave trade. From the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries,
slavery, even the English colonial varieties, was hardly synonymous with Africans.
Nor were Africans synonymous with slaves. In the African sector of the Atlantic system
Europeans were forced to regard Africans (and Afro-Europeans) as autonomous and even locally
dominant participants in the slave trade. They were often dominant militarily and were certainly
dominant in terms of their massive presence and limited vulnerability to local diseases. Even in the
Americas, Africans did not arrive only as captives and deracinated slaves.
4. The concept of race did not exist before capital—racial divisions are created
and maintained to sustain the labor force
Brodkin 2000 (Karen, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of California Los Angeles, “998 AES Keynote Address":
Global Capitalism: What's Race Got to Do with It?”, American Ethnologist 27:2, May 2000, WILEY)//AS
Soon after the reopening of immigration in 1965, a Federal Interagency Commit- tee was formed to
create for the Bureau of the Census a classification of race and eth- nicity reflective of the nation's new immigration and
attentive to the progress of af- firmative action. The result was the now-familiar four racial groups: American
Indian/Alaskan Native, Asian/Pacific Islander, black, and white. The committee de- cided that the fifth group, Hispanic, was an ethnic group but
not a race. The govern- mentese term Hispanic emphasizes the Euro-origins of Spanish speakers from many nations. These "Hispanics" are not
exactly white, which they were in the 1960 cen- sus. Rather they are modified, not-quite whites, as in Hispanic whites (Wright 1994: 50-51). In
sum, although race was
initially invented to justify a brutal regime of slave la- bor that was profitable
to Southern planters, race making has become a key process by which the United States continues to
organize and understand labor and national belonging.Africans, Europeans, Mexicans, and Asians each
came to be treated as members of less civilized, less moral, less self-restrained races only when they were
recruited to be the core of the U.S. capitalist labor force. Such race making depended andcontinues to rest
upon occupational and residential segregation (Massey and Denton 1993). Race making in turn facilitated the
degradation of work itself, its or- ganization as "unskilled," intensely driven, mass-production work. Race making is class
making, just as much as class making is race making. They are two views of the same thing.
AT: Racism came before Cap
1. Empirically false—racism did not exist as a concept before slavery and even for
about a century after—it was developed as a rationale for economic slavery
2. Even if racism existed before traditional Marxism it was always economically
motivated—to justify accumulating people as property or demonize those who
weren’t economically useful
3. Slavery was not initially associated with Africans – capitalist economics, not
racism, perpetuated slavery
Drescher 97 – Ph.D @ U of Wisconsin-Madison, Professor of History and Sociology @
U of Pittsburgh (Seymour, Slavery & Abolition, 18:3, pages 212-213, “Slavery and
capitalism after fifty years”, 1997, RSpec)
Perhaps the best point of departure is the collective volume that emerged from the fortieth anniversary conference on
Capitalism and Slavery, held at Bellagio, Italy, and was published in 1987. The editors, Barbara L. Solow and Stanley L.
Engerirían, divided the non-biographical contributions into three parts, corresponding to three major hypotheses on the
relationship between economic development and slavery in the British empire. We may appropriately test the first
hypothesis most briefly. Williams only briefly broached the subject and his assessment has not been of major
historiographical interest in the subsequent literature. Williams took the position that economic factors
rather than racism occupied pride of place in the switch to African labour in
the plantation Americas, that slavery 'was not bom of racism' but rather slavery led to racism.
Although some recent interpretations make racial preferences and inhibitions central to
the choice of African labour, Williams's order of priorities, if not his either-or approach, is supported by a
survey of hundreds of articles. They show virtual unanimity on the primacy of economics
in accounting for the turn toward slave labour. Non-economic factors, such as race or religion, entered
into the development of New World slavery only as a limiting parameter. Such factors affected the historical sequence by
which entire human groups (Christians, Jews, Muslim North Africans, Native Americans) were excluded from liability to
enslavement in the Atlantic system. Since Williams published his book, the main change in the historiographical context
of origins is an increase in the number and variety of actors brought into the process. That broader context complicates the
role of any exclusively 'African' racial component of the slave trade. From the fifteenth to the eighteenth
centuries, slavery, even the English colonial varieties, was hardly
synonymous with Africans. Nor were Africans synonymous with slaves. In the
African sector of the Atlantic system Europeans were forced to regard Africans (and
Afro-Europeans) as autonomous and even locally dominant participants in the slave
trade. They were often dominant militarily and were certainly dominant in terms of their
massive presence and limited vulnerability to local diseases. Even in the Americas, Africans did not
arrive only as captives and deracinated slaves.
4. Racism originated as an economic tool for separation and profit
Shapira 10 (HarelShapira, PhD from Columbia University, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York
University, “Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands”, Contemporary Sociology 39:1, January 2010,
Sage)//AS
Concentrating on the middle of the nineteenth century to the New Deal era, Benton-Cohen
explores why some “borderline
Americans”—a term she uses to refer to resident noncitizens with a “tenuous claim on whiteness”—became
“white Americans,” while others did not.Why, she asks, did Eastern and Southern Europeans, one
group of “borderline Americans” become white, while Mexicans did not? Borderline Americans can be read as
another chapter in America’s history of racial formation, as told by Noel Ignatiev in How the Irish Became White. What we are presented with
here is an effort to explain how the Mexicans became brown. Benton-Cohen’s contribution is to show that the conflict between “Mexicans” and
“Americans,” which today seems to be timeless and inevitable, was a contingent outcome, motivated in large part by the penetration of
industrial capitalism into southern Arizona. This conflict has a curious history containing moments of cooperation and not conflict. Unlike the
dominant narratives which examine the social construction of race, Benton-Cohen takes us to the local level and focuses attention not on state
actors (although she does not overlook them) but on corporate managers. She helps us to understand that capitalism
did not
eliminate racial difference, rather it constituted it. The labor process does not suspend difference but
rather articulates it. Class conflict is racial conflict, and racial conflict is class conflict. The chapters outline the
historical transformation of a once undefined line between “Mexican” and “white American” into a sharp border. The first four chapters of the
book offer the most compelling reads, providing engaging portraits of four different communities in Cochise County. In the first two chapters,
Benton-Cohen takes us to Tres Alamos and Tombstone, and exposes us to places where relations between
Mexicans and white Americans were characterized, for the most part, by harmony, equal legal protection,
and sense of membership in the same community. In Tres Alamos and Tombstone, Mexicans and whites inhabited a “shared world”
characterized by a “hybrid borderlands culture of the 1880’s, when Mexican-Anglo intermarriages and business partnerships still flourished.”
Benton-Cohen argues that race, at least the racial antagonism between Mexicans and whites, was not a central organizing feature of these
communities. In this “shared world,” it was not Mexicans who were the “others”, but a range of groups such as Apaches, Chinese immigrants,
and Cowboys—each “other” representing a common enemy for the Mexicans and white Americans. She attributes the prevailing “ecumenical”
view of whiteness in these two communities to their agricultural-based economies and the fact that most of the Mexicans residing there were
members of the landholding elite. In
contrast, the mining town of Bisbee and its suburb, Warren, the subjects of the next two
chapters, tell a different story. In these communities, race was more palatable, as a dual-wage system saw Mexicans
receiving lower pay, and residential segregation restricted the cosmopolitan interactions which characterized Tres Alamos and
Tombstone. As with the previous two communities, Benton-Cohen claims that the status of race in these towns is a
consequence of economic and class conditions.Unlike Tres Alamos and Tombstone, Bisbee was
dominated by a mining economy and laboring population. This case is picked up in the remainder of the book, where
Benton-Cohen explores how the divide between “Mexicans” and “whites,” indeed the presence of a racial
discourse, is connected to the penetration of industrialized capitalism. As the mining boom took hold, corporations
redeveloped the geographic and social ecology of Cochise County. Bisbee expanded and race entered into once unknown places such as Tres
Alamos and Tombstone. Along with these corporations, homesteaders from other parts of America moved in, and brought with them
understandings of racial difference that were foreign to Cochise County. The “white labor movement” as she names it, gained a strong
influence over Arizona politics, and elected officials who saw Mexicans as racial “others.” Over time, the four communities began to resemble
each other, as an Anglo/Hispanic color line became a prominent feature of them all.
5. Class and race are mutually constitutive—capital created the concept of race
for its own ends
Brodkin 2000 (Karen, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of California Los Angeles, “998 AES Keynote Address":
Global Capitalism: What's Race Got to Do with It?”, American Ethnologist 27:2, May 2000, WILEY)//AS
In the remainder of this article, I will
use the United States as an illustrative caseto develop further my argument
that capitalism is causally and systemically linked to the construction of race and racism . I will show that
relations to the means of capital- ist production in the United States have been organized in ways that are
consistent with nationalist constructions of national subjects and internal aliens. The central theoretical point I
wish to advance is that race in the United States has historically been a key relationship to the means of
capitalist production, and gender construc- tions are what has made race corporeal, material, and visible. In Marxist thought, re- lations
to the means of production are class relations. To argue that race is a relation- ship to the means of production is
not to reduce race to class. Rather, it is to complicate each term, to argue that race and class are
mutually constitutive, two facets of thesame process that apply to both the structure of productive relationships and people's
consciousnesses or identities. It is in such socially structured identities that the nation- alist and capitalist projects connect. Current
interest in identities-especially the conventional threesome of race, class, and gender-has addressed the cultural content
of identities for actors, as well as for the national hegemonic structures that make them meaningful for people to in- terpret, enact, and
embrace. I think it is
fair to say that they are dialectical: State pol- icy, law, and popular discourse make
race and gender matter for one's life chances; people embrace these categories because they matter,
but they do not inhabit them in the ways hegemonic institutions and discourses construct them; popular enactments in turn
reshape hegemonic practices. Class is often the Cinderella in analyses of this threesome with respect to national projects. That is, it is treated as
a "lifestyle choice of you and your family," as Lillian Robinson (1995:8) puts it when criticizing scholars who treat class as if it were a set of
cultural choices that are unrelated to economic structures. But
one could also challenge the lack of attention to
economics in analyses of race in the same way that Robinson does for class. True, the state, nationalism, and civic
discourse have gotten a lot of play on the structural side of race. But the organi- zation of production and the racial division of labor, though
well described, are poorly theorized. Thinking
theoretically about the ways that race and ethnicity work as a
relationship to the means of capitalist production in the United States can help us understand how
global capitalism might feed nationalism even as it seems to erode states.
AT: Class is an excuse
1. Class is not an excuse—rest of the debate proves black scholars agree that
racism is perpetuated through capitalism—it’s not just a white focus
2. We’re not avoiding race—we are engaging the subject and want to solve race,
we just think there’s a better way to do it
3. Marxist theory does not reduce other forms of oppression but explains them—
experiential politics alone are suspect and fail to create real change
Scatamburlo-D’Annibale and McLaren 04 (Valerie and Peter, associate professor in the Department of
Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor and Professor in the Division of Urban Schooling, the Graduate School of
Education and Information Studies at UCLA, “Class Dismissed? Historical materialism and the politics of ‘difference’”, Educational Philosophy
and Theory 36:2, April 2004, Wiley)//AS
Contrary to what many have claimed, Marxist
theory does not relegate categories of ‘difference’ to the
conceptual mausoleum; rather, it has sought to reanimate these categories by interrogating how they
are refracted through material relations of power and privilege and linked to relations of production. Moreover, it has
emphasized and insisted that the wider political and economic system in which they are embedded needs
to be thoroughly understood in all its complexity. Indeed, Marx made clear how constructions of race and
ethnicity ‘are implicated in the circulation process of variable capital.’ To the extent that ‘gender, race, and
ethnicity are all understood as social constructions rather than as essentialist categories’ the effect of exploring their insertion into the
‘circulation of variable capital (including positioning within the internal heterogeneity of collective labor and hence, within the division of labor
and the class system)’ must be interpreted as a ‘powerful force reconstructing them in distinctly capitalist ways’ (Harvey, 2000, p. 106).
Unlike contemporary narratives which tend to focus on one or another form of oppression, the
irrefragable power of historical materialism resides in its ability to reveal (1) how forms of oppression
based on categories of difference do not possess relative autonomy from class relations but rather
constitute the ways in which oppression is lived/experienced within a class-based system; and (2) how all
forms of social oppression function within an overarching capitalist system. This framework must be further distinguished from those that
invoke the terms ‘classism’ and/or ‘class elitism’ to (ostensibly) foreground the idea that ‘class matters’ (cf. hooks, 2000) since we agree with
Gimenez (2001, p. 24) that ‘class is not simply another ideology legitimating oppression.’ Rather, class denotes ‘exploitative relations between
people mediated by their relations to the means of production.’ To
marginalize such a conceptualization of class is to
conflate an individual's objective location in the intersection of structures of inequality with people's
subjective understandings of who they really are based on their ‘experiences.’ Another caveat. In making such a
claim, we are not renouncing the concept of experience. On the contrary, we believe it is imperative to retain
the category of lived experience as a reference point in light of misguided post-Marxist critiques which imply that all forms
of Marxian class analysis are dismissive of subjectivity. We are not, however, advocating the uncritical fetishization of
‘experience’ that tends to assume that experience somehow guarantees the authenticity of
knowledge and which often treats experience as self-explanatory, transparent, and solely individual.
Rather, we advance a framework that seeks to make connections between seemingly isolated situations
and/or particular experiences by exploring how they are constituted in, and circumscribed by, broader
historical and social circumstances. Experiential understandings, in and of themselves, are suspect
because, dialectically, they constitute a unity of opposites—they are at once unique, specific, and personal, but also
thoroughly partial, social, and the products of historical forces about which individuals may know little or nothing (Gimenez, 2001). In this
sense, a rich description of immediate experience in terms of consciousness of a particular form of oppression (racial or otherwise) can be an
appropriate and indispensable point of departure. Such
an understanding, however, can easily become an isolated
‘difference’ prison unless it transcends the immediate perceived point of oppression, confronts the social
system in which it is rooted, and expands into a complex and multifaceted analysis (of forms of social mediation) that is capable of mapping out
the general organization of social relations. That,
however, requires a broad class-based approach.
4. Class analysis doesn’t neglect race but explains it—class defines social
interaction
San Juan 05 (Epifanio, Filipino American literary academic, mentor, cultural reviewer, civic intellectual, activist, writer, essayist “From
Race to Class Struggle: Marxism and Critical Race Theory”, Nature, Society and Thought 18:3, 2005,
http://homepages.spa.umn.edu/~marquit/nst183a.pdf#page=5)//AS
Our key heuristic axiom is this: the extraction of surplus labor always involves conflict and struggle. In
this process of class conflict, identities are articulated with group formation, and race, gender, and
ethnicity enter into the totality of contradictions that define a specific conjuncture, in particular the
contradictions between the social relations dominated by private property and the productive forces. Reformulated, this proposition
translates into a principle of causality: the organization of work influences the way in which race and
gender are mediated within the hegemony of a social bloc. Class consciousness as a “state of social cohesion” (Braverman 1974, 29)
involves layers that have varying duration and intensities expressed in popular and mass culture. A historical-materialist
understanding of race relations and racism embedded in the process of class formation and class
struggles, in the labor process and cultural expression, distinguishes the research projects of cultural studies
scholars like Michael Denning, Peter McLaren, Paul Buhle, Gregory Meyerson, and Teresa Ebert. Given this emphasis on class
struggle and class formation, on the totality of social relations that define the position of interacting
collectivities in society, materialist critique locates the ground of institutional racism and racially based
inequality in the capitalist division of labor—primarily between the seller of labor-power as prime commodity and the
employer who maximizes surplus value (unpaid labor) from the workers. What will maximize accumulation of profi t and
also maintain the condition for such stable and efficient maximization? The answer to this question
would explain the ideology and practice of racial segregation, subordination, exclusion, and
variegated tactics of violence. This is not to reduce race to class, but rather to assign import or intelligible
meaning to the way in which racialization (the valorization of somatic or “natural” properties) operates. While social
subjects indeed serve as sites of variegated differences—that is, individuals undergo multiple inscriptions and occupy
shifting positionalities on the level of everyday experience—the patterns of their actions or “forms of life” are not
permanently indeterminate or undecidable when analyzed from the perspective of the totality of
production relations. The capitalist labor process and its conditions overdetermine the location of groups whose ethnic, racial, gender,
and other characteristics acquire value within that context. I think this is the sense in which Barbara Jeanne Fields argues for a materialist
reading of slavery in U.S. history: “A majority of historians think of slavery as primarily a system of race relations—as though the chief business
of slavery were the production of white supremacy rather than the production of cotton, sugar, rice and tobacco” (1990, 99). This one-sided,
indeed mechanistic, explanation needs to be corrected with the observation that the production of cotton, etc. reproduces in itself the whole
complex of social and political relations of that fi eld—in fact, production of commodities for exchange and profi t would not be possible if the
reproduction of class relations did not accompany it. Which came first, the actual exploitation or its rationalization, is a trick question posed by
disingenuous ideologues whose vulgar materialism can easily consort with the hallucinatory narcotics of superstition and the fetishism of
goods and spectacles (Guillaumin 1995). Culture,
ideology, politics, and economics are all inextricably
intertwined; but their “law of motion” can be clarifi ed through the mediation of a historicalmaterialist optic.
AT: Essentialism Bad
1. If we win the root cause debate we’re not ignoring race, just addressing it at a
deeper level
2. Race focus is just as essentializing—ignores class and gender oppression
3. Class analysis doesn’t neglect race but explains it—class defines social
interaction
San Juan 05 (Epifanio, Filipino American literary academic, mentor, cultural reviewer, civic intellectual, activist, writer, essayist “From
Race to Class Struggle: Marxism and Critical Race Theory”, Nature, Society and Thought 18:3, 2005,
http://homepages.spa.umn.edu/~marquit/nst183a.pdf#page=5)//AS
Our key heuristic axiom is this: the extraction of surplus labor always involves conflict and struggle. In
this process of class conflict, identities are articulated with group formation, and race, gender, and
ethnicity enter into the totality of contradictions that define a specific conjuncture, in particular the
contradictions between the social relations dominated by private property and the productive forces. Reformulated, this proposition
translates into a principle of causality: the organization of work influences the way in which race and
gender are mediated within the hegemony of a social bloc. Class consciousness as a “state of social cohesion” (Braverman 1974, 29)
involves layers that have varying duration and intensities expressed in popular and mass culture. A historical-materialist
understanding of race relations and racism embedded in the process of class formation and class
struggles, in the labor process and cultural expression, distinguishes the research projects of cultural studies
scholars like Michael Denning, Peter McLaren, Paul Buhle, Gregory Meyerson, and Teresa Ebert. Given this emphasis on class
struggle and class formation, on the totality of social relations that define the position of interacting
collectivities in society, materialist critique locates the ground of institutional racism and racially based
inequality in the capitalist division of labor—primarily between the seller of labor-power as prime commodity and the
employer who maximizes surplus value (unpaid labor) from the workers. What will maximize accumulation of profi t and
also maintain the condition for such stable and efficient maximization? The answer to this question
would explain the ideology and practice of racial segregation, subordination, exclusion, and
variegated tactics of violence. This is not to reduce race to class, but rather to assign import or intelligible
meaning to the way in which racialization (the valorization of somatic or “natural” properties) operates. While social
subjects indeed serve as sites of variegated differences—that is, individuals undergo multiple inscriptions and occupy
shifting positionalities on the level of everyday experience—the patterns of their actions or “forms of life” are not
permanently indeterminate or undecidable when analyzed from the perspective of the totality of
production relations. The capitalist labor process and its conditions overdetermine the location of groups whose ethnic, racial, gender,
and other characteristics acquire value within that context. I think this is the sense in which Barbara Jeanne Fields argues for a materialist
reading of slavery in U.S. history: “A majority of historians think of slavery as primarily a system of race relations—as though the chief business
of slavery were the production of white supremacy rather than the production of cotton, sugar, rice and tobacco” (1990, 99). This one-sided,
indeed mechanistic, explanation needs to be corrected with the observation that the production of cotton, etc. reproduces in itself the whole
complex of social and political relations of that fi eld—in fact, production of commodities for exchange and profi t would not be possible if the
reproduction of class relations did not accompany it. Which came first, the actual exploitation or its rationalization, is a trick question posed by
disingenuous ideologues whose vulgar materialism can easily consort with the hallucinatory narcotics of superstition and the fetishism of
goods and spectacles (Guillaumin 1995). Culture,
ideology, politics, and economics are all inextricably
intertwined; but their “law of motion” can be clarifi ed through the mediation of a historicalmaterialist optic.
4. “Post-Marxist” politics of identity enriches the bourgeois academics and hurts
leftist politics as a whole—orthodox Marxism is essential to understanding
modern oppression
Scatamburlo-D’Annibale and McLaren 04 (Valerie and Peter, associate professor in the Department of
Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor and Professor in the Division of Urban Schooling, the Graduate School of
Education and Information Studies at UCLA, “Class Dismissed? Historical materialism and the politics of ‘difference’”, Educational Philosophy
and Theory 36:2, April 2004, Wiley)//AS
Perhaps one of the most
taken-for-granted features of contemporary social theory is the ritual and
increasingly generic critique of Marxism in terms of its alleged failure to address forms of oppression
other than that of ‘class.’ Marxism is considered to be theoretically bankrupt and intellectually passé, and class analysis is often
savagely lampooned as a rusty weapon wielded clumsily by those mind-locked in the jejune factories of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries.
When Marxist class analysis has not been distorted or equated with some crude version of
‘economic determinism,’ it has been attacked for diverting attention away from the categories of
‘difference’—including ‘race’ (Gimenez, 2001). To overcome the presumed inadequacies of Marxism, an
entire discursive apparatus, sometimes called ‘post-Marxism’, has arisen to fill the void. Serving as academic
pallbearers at the funeral of the old bearded devil, post-Marxists (who often go by other names such as postmodernists, radical
multiculturalists, etc.) have tried to entomb Marx's legacy while simultaneously benefiting from it. Yet, the crypt designed for Marx, reverential
in its grand austerity, has never quite been able to contain his impact on history.
For someone presumably dead, Marx has a
way of escaping from his final resting place and reappearing with an uncanny regularity in the world
of ideas. His ghost, as Greider (1998) notes, ‘hovers over the global landscape’ as he continues to shape our
understandings of the current crises of capitalism that haunt the living present. Regardless of Marx's enduring relevance
and even though much of post-Marxism is actually an outlandish ‘caricature’ of Marx and the entire Marxist tradition, it
has eaten through the Left ‘like a cancer’ and has ‘established itself as the new common sense’ (Johnson,
2002, p. 129). What has been produced is a discourse eminently more digestible to the academic ‘Left’
whose steady embourgeoisement appears to be altering the political palate of career social theorists .
Eager to take a wide detour around political economy, post-Marxists tend to assume that the principal political points of departure in the
current ‘postmodern’ world must necessarily be ‘cultural.’ As such, most, but not all post-Marxists
have gravitated towards a
politics of ‘difference’ which is largely premised on uncovering relations of power that reside in the
arrangement and deployment of subjectivity in cultural and ideological practices (cf. Jordan & Weedon, 1995). Advocates of
‘difference’ politics therefore posit their ideas as bold steps forward in advancing the interests of those historically marginalized by ‘dominant’
social and cultural narratives. There is no doubt that post-Marxism has advanced our knowledge of the hidden trajectories of power within the
processes of representation and that it remains useful in adumbrating the formation of subjectivity and its expressive dimensions as well as
complementing our understandings of the relationships between ‘difference,’ language, and cultural configurations. However, post-
Marxists have been woefully remiss in addressing the constitution of class formations and the machinations
of capitalist social organization. In some instances, capitalism and class relations have been thoroughly
‘otherized;’ in others, class is summoned only as part of the triumvirate of ‘race, class, and gender’ in
which class is reduced to merely another form of ‘difference.’ Enamored with the ‘cultural’ and seemingly blind to the
‘economic,’ the rhetorical excesses of post-Marxists have also prevented them from considering the
stark reality of contemporary class conditions under global capitalism. As we hope to show, the radical
displacement of class analysis in contemporary theoretical narratives and the concomitant decentering of capitalism, the anointing
of ‘difference’ as a primary explanatory construct, and the ‘culturalization’ of politics, have had detrimental effects on ‘left’
theory and practice.
5. Integrating class on the same level as race guts class analysis of its meaning and
political power—prioritizing Marxian analysis is essential to dismantle
capitalism and racism
Scatamburlo-D’Annibale and McLaren 04 (Valerie and Peter, associate professor in the Department of
Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor and Professor in the Division of Urban Schooling, the Graduate School of
Education and Information Studies at UCLA, “Class Dismissed? Historical materialism and the politics of ‘difference’”, Educational Philosophy
and Theory 36:2, April 2004, Wiley)//AS
In stating this, we
need to include an important caveat that differentiates our approach from those
invoking the well-worn race/class/gender triplet which can sound, to the uninitiated, both radical and vaguely Marxian. It is
not. Race, class and gender, while they invariably intersect and interact, are not co-primary. This
‘triplet’ approximates what the ‘philosophers might call a category mistake.’ On the surface the triplet
may be convincing—some people are oppressed because of their race, others as a result of their gender, yet others because of their
class—but this ‘is grossly misleading’ for it is not that ‘some individuals manifest certain characteristics
known as “class” which then results in their oppression; on the contrary, to be a member of a social
class just is to be oppressed’ and in this regard class is ‘a wholly social category’ (Eagleton, 1998, p. 289).
Furthermore, even though ‘class’ is usually invoked as part of the aforementioned and much vaunted triptych,
it is usually gutted of its practical, social dimension or treated solely as a cultural phenomenon—as just another form of
‘difference.’ In these instances, class is transformed from an economic and, indeed, social category to an exclusively
cultural or discursive one or one in which class merely signifies a ‘subject position.’ Class is therefore cut off from the
political economy of capitalism and class power severed from exploitation and a power structure ‘in which those
who control collectively produced resources only do so because of the value generated by those who do not’ (Hennessy & Ingraham, 1997, p.
2). Such
theorizing has had the effect of replacing an historical materialist class analysis with a cultural
analysis of class. As a result, many post-Marxists have also stripped the idea of class of precisely that
element which, for Marx, made it radical—namely its status as a universal form of exploitation whose
abolition required (and was also central to) the abolition of all manifestations of oppression (Marx, 1978, p. 60). With
regard to this issue, Kovel (2002) is particularly insightful, for he explicitly addresses an issue which continues to vex the Left—namely the
priority given to different categories of what he calls ‘dominative splitting’—those categories of ‘gender, class, race, ethnic and national
exclusion,’ etc. Kovel argues that we need to ask the question of priority with respect to what? He notes that if we mean priority with respect to
time, then the category of gender would have priority since there are traces of gender oppression in all other forms of oppression. If we were
to prioritize in terms of existential significance, Kovel suggests that we would have to depend upon the immediate historical forces that bear
down on distinct groups of people—he offers examples of Jews in 1930s Germany who suffered from brutal forms of anti-Semitism and
Palestinians today who experience anti-Arab racism under Israeli domination. The question of what has political priority, however, would
depend upon which transformation of relations of oppression are practically more urgent and, while this would certainly depend upon the
preceding categories, it would also depend upon the fashion in which all the forces acting in a concrete situation are deployed. As to the
question of which split sets into motion all of the others, the priority would have to be given to class since class
relations entail the
state as an instrument of enforcement and control, and it is the state that shapes and organizes the
splits that appear in human ecosystems. Thus class is both logically and historically distinct from other
forms of exclusion (hence we should not talk of ‘classism’ to go along with ‘sexism’ and ‘racism,’ and ‘species-ism’). This is, first of all,
because class is an essentially man-made category, without root in even a mystified biology. We
cannot imagine a human world without gender distinctions—although we can imagine a world
without domination by gender. But a world without class is eminently imaginable—indeed, such was the
human world for the great majority of our species’ time on earth, during all of which considerable fuss was made over gender. Historically, the
difference arises because ‘class’ signifies one side of a larger figure that includes a state apparatus
whose conquests and regulations create races and shape gender relations. Thus there will be no true
resolution of racism so long as class society stands, inasmuch as a racially oppressed society implies the activities of a classdefending state. Nor can gender inequality be enacted away so long as class society, with its state, demands the super-exploitation of women's
labor. (Kovel, 2002, pp. 123–124)
AT: Cap Can’t Explain all racism
1. Even if rich black people experience racism it’s a vestige of capitalism—
capitalism wants us to expect black people to always be poor so that racism is a
result of capitalist expectations being subverted
2. Cap can explain all racism—race as a concept did not exist before it was
economically useful for slave traders—their argument is historically disproven
3. Race was created to sustain slavery, not vice versa—it’s an undoable social
construction
Fields 90 (Barbara Jane, professor of American history at Columbia University, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of
America”, New Left Review 181, May/June 1990, JSTOR)//AS
Racial ideology supplied the means of explaining slavery to people whose terrain was a republic
founded on radical doctrines of liberty and natural rights; and, more important, a republic in which those doctrines
seemed to represent accurately the world in which all but a minority lived. Only when the denial of liberty became an
anomaly apparent even to the least observant and reflective members of Euro- American society did ideology
systematically explain the anomaly. But slavery got along for a hundred years after its establishment
without race as its ideological rationale. The reason is simple. Race explained why some people could
rightly be denied what others took for granted: namely, liberty, supposedly a self-evident gift of nature’s God. But
there was nothing to explain until most people could, in fact, take liberty for granted—as the indentured
servants and disfranchised freedmen of colonial America could not. Nor was there anything calling for a radical
explanation where everyone in society stood in a relation of inherited subordination to someone else:
servant to master, serf to nobleman, vassal to overlord, overlord to king, king to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. It was not AfroAmericans, furthermore, who needed a racial explanation; it was not they who invented themselves
as a race. Euro- Americans resolved the contradiction between slavery and liberty by defining Afro-Americans as a race; Afro-Americans
resolved the contradiction more straightforwardly by calling for the abolition of slavery. From the era of the American, French and Haitian
revolutions on, they claimed liberty as theirs by natural right.38 They
did not originate the large nineteenth-century
literature purporting to prove their biological inferiority, nor, by and large, did they accept it. Vocabulary
can be very deceptive. Both Afro- and Euro-Americans used the words that today denote race, but
they did not understand those words the same way. Afro-Americans understood the reason for their enslavement to be, as
Frederick Douglass put it, ‘not color, but crime’.39 Afro-Americans invented themselves, not as a race, but as a
nation. They were not troubled, as modern scholars often are, by the use of racial vocabulary to express their sense of nationality. AfroAmerican soldiers who petitioned on behalf of ‘These poor nation of colour’ and ‘we Poore Nation of a Colered rast [race]’ saw nothing
incongruous about the language.40
4. It is through economic situations that racism is perpetuated—dismantling
capitalism solves
Koepke 07 (Deanna Jacobsen, PhD candidate in Human and Organizational. Development at Fielding Graduate University, “RACE, CLASS,
POVERTY, AND CAPITALISM”, Race, Gender and Class 14:3-4, 2007, ProQuest)//AS
While discrimination is not always a problem, a lack of reserve resources is. William Julius Wilson wrote that
class is actually a bigger determining factor for life chances than race is (Conley, 1999). As mentioned previously,
there is little hope of overcoming poverty when there is little or no income, no reserve savings to cover
emergencies, unmanageable levels of debt, and no "fun" money with which one can escape the daily burdens, even if only for a little while
(Marable, 2000). There
is definitely a lack of security felt since that is frequently supported by the amount of money one has
will not usually lend money for mortgages in neighborhoods where
more than fifty percent of the units are rentals, as many poor and Black ones are (Conley, 1999; Williams,
2001). However, if one is able to purchase a house, it may be worth less because of the neighborhoods in which it is
located, as determined by the market and society. Home ownership is one of the simplest ways to build personal
wealth, so this is yet another way people are prevented from doing so. Additionally, Blacks have shorter life
upon which to rely (Taylor, 2007). Banks
expectancies, so they are likely to earn less over a lifetime than Whites and have less opportunity to save wealth and pass it on to their children
(Conley, 1999). The same can be said for people living in poverty. Education
is another area where race and class
intersect. Although the dominant group gives lip service to the idea that education is the ticket out of poverty, the truth is that a less
educated labor force is easier to manipulate so they can stay in power (Freire, 1970; Sernau, 2001). Victims of
racism and classism may even question why they should bother getting an education at all when they
can expect to be discriminated against and only hold menial jobs (Council of Economic Adisors, 1965a). Myrdal wrote of what he
called cumulative causation (Sernau, 2001), and it affects people of color and people living in poverty equally. The poor are subjected to
inadequate school funding and then blamed by society for not valuing education. They are placed in substandard public housing in bad
neighborhoods and then are criticized for not keeping up the property. They are denied job opportunities and then are shunned for not valuing
hard work. They are denied the resources that would allow them to improve themselves and are then denigrated for not doing so. The truth is
that privilege equals choices. Options for people of color and the poor are reduced, and the ones available to
them subject them to scrutiny, ridicule, and penalties and deprivation (Frye, 2007). Actions are shaped by circumstances and the circumstances
that the poor and people of color live with are lacking in opportunity. There is no voice for them in our democracy, and there is little or no
hope. They do not have the ability to control their own lives (Beeghley, 2000). Within that context, nearly all social
services programs sanction behavior change (Piven, 2001) rather than celebrating diversity and the resourcefulness employed by people of
color and those living in poverty. Rather
than feeling they have a purpose in life, they are merely taking what
they can get to survive (West, 1993).
5. Class and race are mutually constitutive—capital created the concept of race
for its own ends
Brodkin 2000 (Karen, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of California Los Angeles, “998 AES Keynote Address":
Global Capitalism: What's Race Got to Do with It?”, American Ethnologist 27:2, May 2000, WILEY)//AS
In the remainder of this article, I will
use the United States as an illustrative caseto develop further my argument
that capitalism is causally and systemically linked to the construction of race and racism . I will show that
relations to the means of capital- ist production in the United States have been organized in ways that are
consistent with nationalist constructions of national subjects and internal aliens. The central theoretical point I
wish to advance is that race in the United States has historically been a key relationship to the means of
capitalist production, and gender construc- tions are what has made race corporeal, material, and visible. In Marxist thought, re- lations
to the means of production are class relations. To argue that race is a relation- ship to the means of production is
not to reduce race to class. Rather, it is to complicate each term, to argue that race and class are
mutually constitutive, two facets of thesame process that apply to both the structure of productive relationships and people's
consciousnesses or identities. It is in such socially structured identities that the nation- alist and capitalist projects connect. Current
interest in identities-especially the conventional threesome of race, class, and gender-has addressed the cultural content
of identities for actors, as well as for the national hegemonic structures that make them meaningful for people to in- terpret, enact, and
embrace. I think it is
fair to say that they are dialectical: State pol- icy, law, and popular discourse make
race and gender matter for one's life chances; people embrace these categories because they matter,
but they do not inhabit them in the ways hegemonic institutions and discourses construct them; popular enactments in turn
reshape hegemonic practices. Class is often the Cinderella in analyses of this threesome with respect to national projects. That is, it is treated as
a "lifestyle choice of you and your family," as Lillian Robinson (1995:8) puts it when criticizing scholars who treat class as if it were a set of
cultural choices that are unrelated to economic structures. But
one could also challenge the lack of attention to
economics in analyses of race in the same way that Robinson does for class. True, the state, nationalism, and civic
discourse have gotten a lot of play on the structural side of race. But the organi- zation of production and the racial division of labor, though
well described, are poorly theorized. Thinking
theoretically about the ways that race and ethnicity work as a
relationship to the means of capitalist production in the United States can help us understand how
global capitalism might feed nationalism even as it seems to erode states.
AT:
AT: You’re Racist
Marxism doesn’t ignore race but interprets it through an essential class perspective
Gimenez 01 (Martha E. , retired Professor of Sociology at the University of Colorado at Boulder, “Marxism, and Class, Gender, and Race:
Rethinking the Trilogy”, Race, Gender, and Class 8:2, April 2001, ProQuest)//AS
I am aware, however, that most sociologists do not take Marxism seriously and that theorists of gender and racial
oppression have been, on the whole, hostile to Marxism's alleged reductionisms. More importantly, this is a country where class is
not part of the common sense understanding of the world and remains conspicuously absent from the vocabulary of
politicians and most mass media pundits. This is why, despite the U.S. history of labor struggles, today people are more likely
to understand their social and economic grievances in gender, racial and ethnic terms, rather than in
class terms, despite the fact that class is an ineradicable dimension of everybody's lives . I am not
arguing that racial and gender based grievances are less important nor that they are a form of "false consciousness;"
in the present historical conjuncture in the U.S. it has become increasingly difficult, exceptions notwithstanding, to articulate class grievances
separately from gender and racial/ethnic grievances. The ideological and political struggles against "class reductionism" have succeeded too
well, as Kandal (1995) pointed out, resulting in what amounts to gender and race/ethnic reductionisms. This
situation does not
indicate the demise of class as a fundamental determinant of peoples' lives, but that the relationship
between structural changes, class formations and political consciousness is more complex than what
simplistic versions of Marxism would suggest. It is an important principle of historical materialism that it is necessary to differentiate between
material or objective processes of economic change and the ideological (e.g., legal, political, philosophical, etc.) ways in which people become
conscious of these processes of transformations and conflicts and fight them out (Marx, [1859]1970:21). This is why I welcomed the emergence
of the RGC perspective because, I thought, it would contribute to raise awareness about the reality and the importance of class and the extent
to which neither racial nor gender oppression can be understood in isolation from the realities of class exploitation. My expectations, however,
were misplaced: the location of class in the RGC trilogy, at the end, replicates its relative significance within this approach; class is "the weak
link in the chain" (Kandal, 1995:143). But
altering the place of class in the trilogy would not matter, for the RGC
perspective erases the qualitative differences between class and other sources of inequality and
oppression, an erasure grounded in its essentially atheoretical nature.
AT: Perm
The perm flattens class’s importance in power relations and equalizes it with race—
prevents productive analysis
Gimenez 01 (Martha E. , retired Professor of Sociology at the University of Colorado at Boulder, “Marxism, and Class, Gender, and Race:
Rethinking the Trilogy”, Race, Gender, and Class 8:2, April 2001, ProQuest)//AS
Nevertheless, I
want to argue against the notion that class should be considered equivalent to gender and
race. I find the grounds for my argument not only on the crucial role class struggles play in processes
of epochal change but also in the very assumptions of RGC studies and the ethnomethodological insights put forth by
West and Fenstermaker (1994). The assumption of the simultaneity of experience (i.e., all interactions are raced, classed,
gendered) together with the ambiguity inherent in the interactions themselves, so that while one person might think he
or she is "doing gender," another might interpret those "doings" in terms of "doing class," highlight the basic issue that Collins
accurately identifies when she argues that ethnomethodology ignores power relations. Power relations underlie
all processes of social interaction and this is why social facts are constraining upon people. But the pervasiveness of
power ought not to obfuscate the fact that some power relations are more important and
consequential than others. For example, the power that physical attractiveness might confer a woman in
her interactions with her less attractive female supervisor or employer does not match the economic power of
the latter over the former. In my view, the flattening or erasure of the qualitative difference between class,
race and gender in the RGC perspective is the foundation for the recognition that it is important to deal with
"basic relations of domination and subordination" which now appear disembodied, outside class
relations. In the effort to reject "class reductionism," by postulating the equivalence between class and other forms of oppression, the
RGC perspective both negates the fundamental importance of class but it is forced to acknowledge its
importance by postulating some other "basic" structures of domination. Class relations -- whether we are
referring to the relations between capitalist and wage workers, or to the relations between workers (salaried and waged) and their managers
and supervisors, those who are placed in "contradictory class locations," (Wright, 1978) -- are of
paramount importance, for most
survival is determined by them. Those in dominant class positions do exert power over their employees and
subordinates and a crucial way in which that power is used is through their choosing the identity they impute their workers. Whatever
identity workers might claim or "do," employers can, in turn, disregard their claims and "read" their
"doings" differently as "raced" or "gendered" or both, rather than as "classed," thus downplaying their class location and
the class nature of their grievances. To argue, then, that class is fundamental is not to "reduce" gender or racial
oppression to class, but to acknowledge that the underlying basic and "nameless" power at the root
of what happens in social interactions grounded in "intersectionality" is class power .
people's economic
Individualized politics of race prevent recognition and resistance to global capital
oppression
San Juan 05 (Epifanio, Filipino American literary academic, mentor, cultural reviewer, civic intellectual, activist, writer, essayist “From
Race to Class Struggle: Marxism and Critical Race Theory”, Nature, Society and Thought 18:3, 2005,
http://homepages.spa.umn.edu/~marquit/nst183a.pdf#page=5)//AS
One observer points out that in contrast, the
historical materialist analysis of “whiteness” carried out by Alexander
Saxton inscribed the ideological within the process of class politics, mass culture, and historical
background (Hartman 2004). Arising as a rationalization of the slave trade and the theft of land from nonwhites, white supremacy
evolved as a theory/practice designed to legitimize the rule of dominant groups in fluctuating class
coalitions, modified and readjusted according to the complex process of reconfiguring hegemony (moral and intellectual leadership of a
historic bloc, in Gramsci’s construal). Thus, it is the totality of capitalist production relations—not an essentializing
ingredient such as economic position alone—that explains why the ideological synthesis of white supremacy
functioned as a key element in the bourgeoisie’s strategic construction of hegemony through the
calculated syncopation or calibration
of the relations among the state, the institutions of civil society, and
the practices of everyday life (see also Meyerson 1997). When the economic and political (base and superstructure)
are separated or fragmented into discursive local effects, the result is an incoherent amalgam of
incommensurable categories that cannot provide an explanatory critique to connect various seemingly
independent social practices and institutions to one another and to the global economic situation (Meyerson 2003). If we
want to transform the oppressive system based on the skewed social division of labor and the unequal distribution of social
wealth, we need a historical knowledge of social totality that would afford opportunities for organized
mass intervention.
The perm intersects race and class without complexity or deep analysis—exemplified
by a casual “do both”—prevents effective social justice
Bannerji 05 (Himani, Professor of Sociology at York University, “Building from Marx: Reflections on Class and Race”, Social Justice 32:4,
2005)//AS
For democracy to be more than a mere form consisting of political rituals that only serve to entrench
the rule of capital and sprinkle holy water on existing social inequalities, it must have a popular and
actually participatory content. That content should be social and cultural demands concentrated in social movements and orga?
nizations that work through political processes aimed at popular entitlement at all levels. Such politics needs a social
understanding that conceives social formations as a set of complex, contradictory, and inclusive
phenomena of social interactions. A simple arithmetical exercise of adding or intersecting "race," gender,
and class in a stratificatory mode would not do. Neither can it posit "race" as a cultural phenomenon and
gender and class as social and economic. It must overcome the segmentation of the overall social into such elementary aspects
of its composi? tion. For example, a trade union cannot properly be said to be an organization for class struggle if it only thinks of class in
economic terms, without broadening the concept of class to include "race" and gender in its intrinsic formative definition. Furthermore, it
must make its understanding actionable on this socially composite ground of class.4 Outside the trade unions, which are explicitly "class"
organizations, the usual practice in current social justice movements is to adopt "coalition"
politics that do not discriminate
against platforms on which these organizations have been put together.5 Such coalitionist activism is a tactical matter that
reflects the same pluralist aggregative logic of social understanding. Class-based organizations come
together with those that are not because of a shared interest in certain issues. In "new social
movements," issues of class and capital would be considered unnecessary, if at all.6 So popular demands
based on gender, "race," sexuality, identity, and so on must primarily be formulated in cultural terms,
outside of class and capital. In this political framework, "antiracism" becomes more a question of
multiculturalism and ethnicity, as the socially relational aspects of racialization embedded in the former is converted into a
cultural demand. The sharp, recent decline in work on "race" that combines hegemonic/cultural commonsense with the workings of class and
state is thus not surprising.7 The
turn to postmodernism, away from Marxism and class analysis, has resulted
in increasing valorization of cultural norms and forms, and made theories of discourse into vehicles
for "radical" politics. If once positivist Marxists compelled us to deal with economism and class reductionism, now our battle is with
"cultural reductionism." Neither of these readings of social ontology allows us to do justice to politics for
social justice. Our theoretical journey must begin somewhere else to reach another destination.
AT: Race-First FW
Your focus to narrow the discussion to solely race and failure to discuss capitalism inflates every other
sources of exploitation, including race discussions - this turns the case
Brown, Ph.D. in Political Philosophy from Princeton, Professor of Political Theory & Philosophy @ UC
Berkeley, 1993
[Wendy, “Wounded Attachments,” Political Theory, Vol. 21.3, August 1993, pp. 393-395, JSTOR]//SGarg
In addition to the formations of identity that may be the complex effects of disciplinary and liberal
modalities of power, I want to suggest one other historical strand relevanto the production of politicized
identity, this one hewn more specifically to recent developments in political culture. Although sanguine
to varying degrees about the phenomenon they are describing, many on the European and North
American Left have argued that identity politics emerges from the demise of class politics consequent to
post-Fordism or pursuant to May 1968. Without adjudicating the precise relationship between the
breakup of class politics and the proliferation of other sites of political identification, I want to refigure
this claim by suggesting that what we have come to call identity politics is partly dependent on the
demise of a critique of capitalism and of bourgeois cultural and economic values. In a reading that links
the new identity claims to a certain relegitimation of capitalism, identity politics concerned with race,
sexuality, and gender will appear not as a supplement to class politics, not as an expansion of Left
categories of oppression and emancipation, not as an enriching complexification of pro- gressive
formulations of power and persons-all of which they also are-but as tethered to a formulation of justice
which, ironically, reinscribes a bour- geois ideal as its measure. If it is this ideal that signifies educational
and vocational opportunity, upward mobility, relative protection against arbitrary violence, and reward
in proportion to effort, and if it is this ideal against which many of the exclusions and privations of
people of color, gays and lesbians, and women are articulated, then the political purchase of
contemporary American identity politics would seem to be achieved in part through a certain discursive
renaturalization of capitalism that can be said to have marked progressive discourse since the
1970s.What this suggests is that identity politics may be partly configured by a peculiarly shaped and
peculiarly disguised 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. If
there is one class that is politically articulated in late modem U.S. life, it is that which gives itself the
name of the "middle class." This is the "class" that represents the normalization rather than the
politicization of capitalism, the denial of capitalism's power effects in ordering social life, the representation of the ideal of capitalism to provide the good life for all. Poised between the rich and the poor,
feeling itself to be protected from the encroachments of neither, the phantasmatic middle class signifies
the natural and the good between the decadent or the corrupt, on the one side, and the aberrant or the
decaying, on the other. Middle class identity is a conservative identity in the sense that it semiotically
recurs to a phantasmatic past, an idyllic and uncorrupted historical moment (implicitly located around
1955) when life was good-housing was affordable, men supported families on single in- comes, and
drugs were confined to urban ghettos. But it is not a reactionary identity in the sense of reacting to an
insurgent politicized identity from below. Rather, it embodies the ideal to which nonclass identities refer
for proof of their exclusion or injury: homosexuals who lack the protection of marriage, guarantees of
child custody or job security, and freedom from harassment; single women who are strained and
impoverished by trying to raise children and hold paid jobs simultaneously; people of color disproportionately affected by unemployment, punishing urban housing costs, inade- quate health care programs,
and disproportionately subjected to unwarranted harassment and violence, figured as criminals, ignored
by cab drivers. The point is not that these privations are trivial but that without recourse to a white
masculine middle class ideal, politicized identities would forfeit a good deal of their claims to injury and
exclusion, their claims to the political signifi- cance of their difference. If they thus require this ideal for
the potency and poignancy of their political claims, we might ask to what extent a critique of capitalism
is foreclosed by the current configuration of oppositional politics and not simply by the "loss of the
socialist alternative" or the ostensible "triumph of liberalism" in the global order. To what extent do
identity politics require a standard internal to existing society against which to pitch their claims, a
standard that not only preserves capitalism from critique but sustains the invisibility and
inarticulateness of class, not accidentally, but endemically? Could we have stumbled on one reason why
class is invariably named but rarely theorized or developed in the multiculturalist mantra, "race, class,
gender, sexuality
AT: Reductionist
We’re not reductionist—analyzing race through an economic view doesn’t preclude
the existence of race
Marxist theory does not reduce other forms of oppression but explains them—
experiential politics alone are suspect and fail to create real change
Scatamburlo-D’Annibale and McLaren 04 (Valerie and Peter, associate professor in the Department of
Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor and Professor in the Division of Urban Schooling, the Graduate School of
Education and Information Studies at UCLA, “Class Dismissed? Historical materialism and the politics of ‘difference’”, Educational Philosophy
and Theory 36:2, April 2004, Wiley)//AS
Contrary to what many have claimed, Marxist
theory does not relegate categories of ‘difference’ to the
conceptual mausoleum; rather, it has sought to reanimate these categories by interrogating how they
are refracted through material relations of power and privilege and linked to relations of production. Moreover, it has
emphasized and insisted that the wider political and economic system in which they are embedded needs
to be thoroughly understood in all its complexity. Indeed, Marx made clear how constructions of race and
ethnicity ‘are implicated in the circulation process of variable capital.’ To the extent that ‘gender, race, and
ethnicity are all understood as social constructions rather than as essentialist categories’ the effect of exploring their insertion into the
‘circulation of variable capital (including positioning within the internal heterogeneity of collective labor and hence, within the division of labor
and the class system)’ must be interpreted as a ‘powerful force reconstructing them in distinctly capitalist ways’ (Harvey, 2000, p. 106).
Unlike contemporary narratives which tend to focus on one or another form of oppression, the
irrefragable power of historical materialism resides in its ability to reveal (1) how forms of oppression
based on categories of difference do not possess relative autonomy from class relations but rather
constitute the ways in which oppression is lived/experienced within a class-based system; and (2) how all
forms of social oppression function within an overarching capitalist system. This framework must be further distinguished from those that
invoke the terms ‘classism’ and/or ‘class elitism’ to (ostensibly) foreground the idea that ‘class matters’ (cf. hooks, 2000) since we agree with
Gimenez (2001, p. 24) that ‘class is not simply another ideology legitimating oppression.’ Rather, class denotes ‘exploitative relations between
people mediated by their relations to the means of production.’ To
marginalize such a conceptualization of class is to
conflate an individual's objective location in the intersection of structures of inequality with people's
subjective understandings of who they really are based on their ‘experiences.’ Another caveat. In making such a
claim, we are not renouncing the concept of experience. On the contrary, we believe it is imperative to retain
the category of lived experience as a reference point in light of misguided post-Marxist critiques which imply that all forms
of Marxian class analysis are dismissive of subjectivity. We are not, however, advocating the uncritical fetishization of
‘experience’ that tends to assume that experience somehow guarantees the authenticity of
knowledge and which often treats experience as self-explanatory, transparent, and solely individual.
Rather, we advance a framework that seeks to make connections between seemingly isolated situations
and/or particular experiences by exploring how they are constituted in, and circumscribed by, broader
historical and social circumstances. Experiential understandings, in and of themselves, are suspect
because, dialectically, they constitute a unity of opposites—they are at once unique, specific, and personal, but also
thoroughly partial, social, and the products of historical forces about which individuals may know little or nothing (Gimenez, 2001). In this
sense, a rich description of immediate experience in terms of consciousness of a particular form of oppression (racial or otherwise) can be an
appropriate and indispensable point of departure. Such
an understanding, however, can easily become an isolated
‘difference’ prison unless it transcends the immediate perceived point of oppression, confronts the social
system in which it is rooted, and expands into a complex and multifaceted analysis (of forms of social mediation) that is capable of mapping out
the general organization of social relations. That,
however, requires a broad class-based approach.
Marxist analysis does not reduce or marginalize racial and gender oppression—
economic and political critique of capitalism is the only way to solve the multiplicity of
oppression
Meyerson 01 (Gregory, Associate Professor of English at North Carolina A&T University, “Rethinking Black Marxism: ¶ Reflections on
Cedric Robinson and Others”, Cultural Logic 3:2, Spring 2000, http://clogic.eserver.org/3-1&2/meyerson.html)//AS
The "relative autonomy" of "race" has been enabled by a reduction and distortion of class analysis. The
essence of the reduction and distortion involves equating class analysis with some version of economic determinism. The key move in the
critique of economic determinist Marxism depends upon the view that the economic is the base, the cultural/political/ideological the
superstructure. It is then relatively easy to show that the (presumably non-political) economic base does not cause the
political/cultural/ideological superstructure, that the latter is/are not epiphenomenal but relatively autonomous or autonomous causal
categories in their own right--though such causal pluralism often results in the deconstruction of the category of cause. It might be said, at least
with regard to the "class struggle in theory," that most critics of Marxism zero in on the perceived conceptual inadequacies of base and
superstructure. So I'd like to state my position on this at some length before turning to Robinson.¶ 4. Marxism
properly interpreted
emphasizes the primacy of class in a number of senses. One, of course, is the primacy of the working
class as a revolutionary agent--a primacy which does not, as often thought, render women and people of
color "secondary." Such an equation of white male and working class, as well as a corresponding division between a "white" male
working class identity and all the others, whose identity is thereby viewed as either primarily one of gender and race or hybrid, is a view this
essay contests all along the way. The
primacy of class means that building a multiracial, multi-gendered
international working-class organization or organizations should be the goal of any revolutionary
movement: the primacy of class puts the fight against racism and sexism at the center . The intelligibility of
this position is rooted in the explanatory primacy of class analysis for understanding the structural determinants of race, gender and class
oppression. Oppression
is multiple and intersecting but its causes are not.¶ 5. As I will show, the incorrect
understanding of the primacy of class does carry with it for critics of historical materialism both the
devaluation of "race" and "gender" as explanatory categories and their devaluation as real people, women and people of color.
So when the charge is made against Marxism that it makes race and gender secondary, there is always
the sense that race and gender are being treated at once as analytical categories and citizens--with
the implication that Marxism in theory is the corollary of a deprivation of rights in practice. On this view,
race, gender, class are co-primary, interacting, intersecting and, to reiterate the confusion I see between the triad as analytical category and
person, in dialogue.¶ 6.
In my view, and this is surely controversial, but it also puts Marxism on its strongest footing, the primacy of
class means not only that class is the primary determinant of oppression and exploitation but the only
structural determinant. "Race" and gender (this essay focuses on racism but has implications for gender) are not structural
determinants. There is racist and sexist ideology. And there is a racial and gendered division of labor, whose severity and function vary
depending on where one works in the capitalist global economy. Both ideology and the division of labor are understood here to be functional
for class rule--facilitating profit making and social control.
Class rule is itself a form of class struggle. This latter point is
crucial. Class rule is never automatic or easy, and there is constant resistance, both to class rule itself
and its symptoms. This essay thus strongly rejects that part of the Althusserian thesis on social reproduction that explains class rule as a
function of interpellation.3¶ 7. So class does not mean the economic in contradistinction to the political or the
material in contradistinction to the mental. And class struggle should itself not be seen as a reflex of the primacy of the
productive forces over the social relations of production--in this scenario, the working class is not really struggling to emancipate itself but to
emancipate "the productive forces." Such a view also legitimates nationalism as a stepping stone to internationalism--insofar as nationalism
(through, say, import-substitution) helps develop capitalism enough so that it becomes ripe for the next stage. Finally, class does not mean
"objective," defined in turn as "impersonal forces." All agents must face the constraints of a given mode of production--capitalists must obey
capital's laws of motion. They must be motivated to maximize profit in order to survive, though the strongest profit making motives in the
world cannot prevent the destruction of capital, which is a property of the system. In this sense, the mode of production is objective, not
reducible to the wills of individual agents. But processes
of class rule always involve subjects (embodied to be sure)
who do make choices about how to rule and how to resist.¶ 8. The primacy of class means that "the
economic" and "the political" are inseparable--we must not divide them into the economic base
(equated with "class" and "impersonal forces," the two in turn synonymous with "structure") and the political superstructure (just
about everything else from law and custom to the agency of ruling and resisting subjects), separate realms that "mutually determine one
another." As I've argued elsewhere and will argue below,
when you split the economic and the political and then
recombine them, you do not have dialectics but an incoherent amalgam of incommensurable
categories, or, in E. P. Thompson's words, "barren oscillation."4 Finally, class does not mean capitalism. The tacit equation of the two
facilitates the mistaken view, central to Robinson et al., that pre-capitalist sexism and racism pose insoluble problems for Marxism.
Anti-reductionist analyses are trapped in tautology and can never explain the root of
racism
Young 06 (Robert, Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature. At New York University, “Putting Materialism back into
Race Theory: Toward a Transformative Theory of Race”, The Red Critique 11, Winter/Spring 2006,
http://www.redcritique.org/WinterSpring2006/puttingmaterialismbackintoracetheory.htm)//AS
The logic of autonomy moves away from transcendental subject, but it gives way to reification of
discourse. For instance, Goldberg theorizes race and class as autonomous "fields of discourse" ("Racist
Discourse" 87). After de-totalizing the social, Goldberg introduces a very problematic split between racism, which deals
with the issue of "exclusion", and class theory, which deals with the issue of "exploitation" (97). Goldberg's text raises an important
question concerning the relationship between exclusion and exploitation. However, he is unable to provide an effective
response because of his commitment to a non-reductive analysis of race and this leaves him without an
historical explanation of the constitution of (racist) discourse. Goldberg examines racist discourse "in own terms", but
he has very difficult time accounting for the "persuasiveness" of racist discourse. In its own terms, racist
discourse is very compelling for racists, but this begs the questions: why is racist discourse so persuasive in the first place?
Why does the social formation make available such a subject position? This is an urgent question because of the
nature of Goldberg's project, which attempts to identify "racists on the basis of the kinds of beliefs they hold" (87). The identification of racists
based on their beliefs does not explain the origin of such beliefs in the first place. Thus, the question remains: why do racists hold such (racist)
beliefs? For
Goldberg, it appears that racists hold racist beliefs because of Racist discourse! Goldberg can
not offer an explanation of these beliefs because this would take him outside of the formal grammar
of racist discourse. In Goldberg, the obsession with autonomy engenders a reification of discourse and the political implications of this
are quite revealing. For Goldberg, discourse—not class struggle—becomes the motor of history: "it is in virtue of
racist discourse and not merely rationalized by it that such forced manipulations of individual subjects and whole populations could have been
affected" (95). He continues: "[i]nstruments of exclusion—legal, cultural, political, or economic—are forged by subjects as they mould criteria
for establishing racial otherness" (95). Racial alterity makes sense not on its own terms but in relation to "instruments of exclusion". However,
to move beyond Goldberg, I suggest
that these instruments, in turn, must be related to existing property
relationships. In short, the logic of alterity justifies and hence assists in the maintenance of class
generated social inequality. The preoccupation with "autonomy" and "racial discourse formation" makes it seem as if social life is a
matter of "contingency". This view blocks our understanding of the one constant feature of daily life under capitalism: exploitation. Under
capitalism, exploitation is a not a discursive contingency but a structural articulation, and this
structure of exploitation underpins (post)modern social life.
Absent economic analysis racial politics are ahistorical—class focus is key
Leonardo 04 (Zeus, Professor of Education at UC Berkeley, “The Unhappy Marriage between Marxism and Race Critique: political
economy and the production of racialized knowledge”, Policy Futures in Education 2:3-4, 2004,
http://www.wwwords.co.uk/pdf/validate.asp?j=pfie&vol=2&issue=3&year=2004&article=4_Leonardo_PFIE_2_3-4_web)//AS
Without a critical language of identity politics, policy educators cannot answer convincingly the
question of: ‘Who will fill the empty places of the economy?’ With it, they can expose the contradictions in the ‘beyond
identity politics’ thesis, which is dependent on the concept of identity in its reassertion of the Euro-white, patriarchal imagination.
However, without economic principles, educators also forsake an apprehension of history that maps
the genealogy of the race concept. It is not uncommon that students of education project race into the
past and equate it with the descriptor ‘group’ rather than a particular way of constructing group
membership. For that matter, the Greeks of antiquity, the Trojans of Troy, and the Mesopotamians each constitute a race, much like
today’s African-Americans or the African diaspora. There is enough consensus between social scientists about the periodization of race to
A progressive union between Marxist concepts
and race analysis allows critical teachers to explain that race is a relatively recent phenomenon,
traceable to the beginnings of European colonization and capitalist expansion. As a concept, race is
coextensive with the process of world- making. Edward Said (1979) has explicated the process of orientalism, or how the
disprove this common-sense belief (see Goldberg, 1990; Mills, 1997, 2003).
Occident constructed the idea of the Orient (or Near East) through discursive strategies in order to define,
control, and manipulate it. This does not mean that the Orient did not exist in a material sense, but
that it was spatially demarcated and then written into a particular relationship with the West through
scholarship and industries invested with economic resources. Cedric Robinson (1983) has mobilized a parallel œuvre in
what Robin Kelley (1983), in the foreword to Black Marxism, characterizes as a version of black orientalism, or how Europe constructed the
idea of the black Mediterranean. In this sense, race is a process of co-creation – it creates an external group at the same time as it defines its
creator.
Critics of reductionism fail to see that class is the determining factor in modern
oppression—it’s the most important for explaining racial and other oppression
Mann and Grimes 01 (Susan Archer and Michael D., Professors of Sociology at the University of New Orleans and Louisiana State
University respectively, “Common and Contested Ground: Marxism and Race, Gender & Class Analysis”, Race, Gender, and Class 8:2, April 2001,
ProQuest)//AS
Of all of the articles in this special issue, [Martha Gimenez]'s "Marxism and Class, Gender, and Race: Rethinking the Trilogy" best represents
a Neo-Marxist position in that it takes
the strongest position in support of Marxism and against RGC analyses.
Gimenez defends Marxism against its ostensible neglect of race and gender and points to a number of
limitations of RGC analyses. As we noted above, she criticizes RGC analysts for conflating objective social
locations and subjective identities and for moving to a gradational, individual-level analysis of
oppression that undermines relational or social structural analysis. Gimenez is also quite clear that she views
class as the most fundamental form of oppression and is unapologetic about hierarchicalizing
oppressions in this manner. For Gimenez, the call for race, gender and class analysis has become simply a
descriptive "mantra" devoid of explanatory power. She argues that the "nameless power" underlying
all raced, gendered, and classed interactions is none other than class power
Accusations of reductionism mask the fact that identity-based approaches fail—they
ignore reproduction of social norms and reify difference
Mann and Grimes 01 (Susan Archer and Michael D., Professors of Sociology at the University of New Orleans and Louisiana State
University respectively, “Common and Contested Ground: Marxism and Race, Gender & Class Analysis”, Race, Gender, and Class 8:2, April 2001,
ProQuest)//AS
Perhaps the major difference between Marxism and RGC analyses concerns the issue of hierarchicalizing oppressions or of viewing one form of
oppression as more fundamental than others. In particular, RGC
analysts accuse Marxists of treating racial and gender
oppressions as either less important than or as simply derivative of class oppression. Feminist writers like
Heidi Hartmann likened this problem to an "unhappy marriage of Marxism and feminism"- a union where Marxism's "sex-blind" categories
subsumed feminism - much as the doctrine of coverture enabled husbands to subsume wives' rights in marriage (Hartmann, 1981). Similarly,
both Marx's own historical writings on slavery in the United States (1937), as well as more recent treatments of race and class by Marxists, like
Eric Olin Wright (1997), have been accused of simply reducing racial inequality to class inequality. In contrast, a hallmark of RGC analyses is
their focus on simultaneous, multiple, and interlocking oppressions (Lengermann & Neibrugge-Brantley, 2000:338). Barbara Smith captures this
distinguishing feature of RGC analyses when she discusses intersectionality theory - a perspective initially pioneered by Black feminist writers
that is recognized today as one of the more clearly articulated theories of race, class and gender: The concept of the simultaneity of
oppressions is still the crux of a Black feminist understanding of political reality and, I believe, one of the most significant ideological
contributions of Black feminist thought (Smith, 1983:xxxii, our emphasis). As the pioneers of intersectionality theory have argued, the
simultaneity of oppressions means that different forms of oppression cannot be torn apart from their interactive or multiple impacts on
people's lives and experiences. These multiple oppressions are not simply additive in theory (King, 1993; Brewer, 1999) nor can they be singled
out in research methodologies, like multivariate regression analysis (Brod, 1999). As Derek Price's article in this special issue argues, these
simultaneous oppressions form an integral or interwoven whole that so transforms the theoretical and methodological approaches used to
understand oppression that it represents a "radical break" with traditional ways of knowing. To address this simultaneity of oppressions, one
strand of RGC analysis embraces an identity politics that envisions a "matrix of oppressions" where every individual has both a
"race/gender/class specific identity" and a unique position of penalty and privilege, such that individuals can simultaneously "be oppressed and
oppressors" (Collins, 1993:28). Proponents of this type of analysis also tend to elevate the importance of direct experience or "socially lived
knowledge" (hooks, 1994). Such recognition of the value of socially lived knowledge has been lauded for providing an important critique of
expert knowledge and dominant discourses, since it highlights how everyone can be a knowledge producer. It also includes a politically
progressive, consciousness-raising component that can empower oppressed people to view themselves both as valuable players and as active
agents in social change (Agger, 1998:70). However
as, Martha Gimenez argues in this special issue, this move to
embrace identity politics wrongly conflates objective locations in the intersection of structures of
oppression with identities. She writes:...structural location "does not necessarily entail awareness of
being or the automatic development of identities corresponding to those locations." By ignoring this
analytical distinction, such RGC analyses are open to a number of criticisms Marxists might raise. On the one
hand, this conflation of objective location and subjective identities ignores the problem of false
consciousness or how social relations of oppression are often concealed from the individuals that
reproduce them. The very distinctions Marx made between a "class in itself" and a "class for itself" are
indicative of this recognition, as is his understanding of the importance of theory for revealing hidden structures of oppression
(1844/1962). On the other hand, this conflation also ignores how the costs of oppression can limit people's
ability to expand their awareness of the social world. For example, the fact that American slaves were
prohibited from learning to read and write exemplifies such costs and limitations. Such a blindness to
hidden structures of oppression and to barriers to social awareness is a shortcoming of those RGC analyses that embrace
identity politics, privilege socially-lived knowledge, and/or privilege the knowledge of the oppressed.
Other writers have highlighted further dangers entailed in embracing identity politics. While identity politics
initially arose as a critique of essentialist collective categories, like women, that ignored differences by race and class, ironically identity
politics serves to reify rather than redefine difference. That is, identities - even oppositional identities fix identity whether in a new or an old location. They, therefore, by definition, set themselves in opposition to an "other"
and in doing so are exclusive. Thus rather than protecting difference, they simply demean other forms of difference (Phelan, 1989; Hekman,
2000). While postmodernists have been most critical of such reified identities, preferring instead more fluid and open notions of identity
(Butler, 1990; Seidman, 1994), Marxist critics
have also been critical of this reification as exemplified by Alain
Touraine's critique of identity politics as a new form of regressive tribalism (1998:131-132).
Defence of Marxism/AT: Perm
Critical race theory is unable to understand social power relations—Marxist analysis
alone can solve
San Juan 05 (Epifanio, Filipino American literary academic, mentor, cultural reviewer, civic intellectual, activist, writer, essayist “From
Race to Class Struggle: Marxism and Critical Race Theory”, Nature, Society and Thought 18:3, 2005,
http://homepages.spa.umn.edu/~marquit/nst183a.pdf#page=5)//AS
The advent of critical race theory marked a rediscovery of the primacy of the social relations of production and the division of labor in late
modern industrial society. A historicizing perspective was applied by Derrick Bell and elaborated by, among others, Charles Mills in his theory
of the United States as a “racial polity.” However, a tendency
to juxtapose “class” as a classifying category with
“race” and “gender” in an intersectional framework has disabled the Marxian concept of class relation
as a structural determinant. This has led to the reduction of the relational dynamic of class to an
economistic factor of identity, even though critical race theory attacks capitalist relations of production and its legal ideology as
the ground for racist practices and institutions. The intersectionality approach (where race, class, and gender function as equally
salient variables) so fashionable today substitutes a static nominalism for concrete class analysis . It displacesa
Marxian with a Weberian organon of knowledge. As Gregory Meyerson notes, the “explanatory primacy of class
analysis” is a theoretical requisite for understanding the structural determinants of race, gender, and
class oppression (2003). Class as an antagonistic relation is, from a historical-materialist viewpoint, the only structural
determinant of ideologies and practices sanctioning racial and gender oppression in capitalist society .
Nonetheless, it was exhilarating to read classic texts in both CRT anthologies of Richard Delgado (1995) and Kimberle Crenshaw et al. (1995),
such as Cheryl Harris’s “Whiteness as Property,” Delgado’s “Legal Storytelling,” and Derrick Bell’s “Property Rights in Whiteness.” Not being a
legal scholar, I cannot gauge how effective the impact of CRT has been in changing legislation, court procedures, and prison and police
behavior, nor how CRT has altered academic practice in law schools. Bell has been exemplary in linking class exploitation and racial
discrimination. Racism
indeed cannot be understood outside or separate from the social division of labor
in the capitalist mode of production and its concomitant reproduction of unequal relations. This is a
central insight that has motivated many CRT practitioners. But, as Alan Freeman has noted, the “dilemma of liberal reform”
springs from CRT’s inability, or refusal, to reject—not just question, expose, or demystify—the premises or
presuppositions of the system. Freeman adds that the various strategies Bell and others have deployed
simply preserve “the myths of liberal reform.” He concludes: “Yet it is one thing to call for, and show the need for, the
historicization of civil rights law, and quite another to write the history. The task of unmasking, of exposing presuppositions, of delegitimizing,
is easier than that of offering a concrete historical account to replace what is exposed as inadequate” (1995, 462). Could it be that for
all its
power as a rigorous critical analytic of U.S. jurisprudence and mainstream legal theory and practice,
CRT has fatally confi ned itself to this reformist task? With its derivation from legal realism (Jerome Frank) and critical
legal studies (Roberto Unger), it seems that CRT’s adherence to the notions of formal justice, which translates into “another style of class
domination” (1984, 136) based on the rule of law, leads to acceptance of the fact of substantive inequality. To
eliminate the effects
of systemic domination and subordination, racial justice and gender parity may not be suffi cient. As
Daniel Bensaid remarks, Theories of justice and the critique of political economy are irreconcilable . Conceived as
the protection of the private sphere, liberal politics seals the holy alliance between the nightwatchman state and the market of opinions in
which individual interests are supposed to be harmonized. Marx’s
Capital establishes the impossibility of allocating
the collective productivity of social labour individually. Whereas the theory of justice rests on the atomism of contractual
procedures, and on the formalist fi ction of mutual agreement (whereby individuals become partners in a cooperative adventure for their
mutual advantage), social relations of exploitation are irreducible to intersubjective relations. (2002, 158) On the
other hand, one commentator ascribes to CRT the allegedly Marxist doctrine of “radical contingency” and then faults it for its belief that the
experience of the racially oppressed affords valid knowledge of society. CRT’s
loss of political neutrality and perspectival
objectivity could prevent it from engaging the dominant discourses as well as compromise its
revolutionary aspirations (Belliotti 1995). Given the historical stages of its emergence, CRT’s eclectic nonconformity and pluralist
constructionism may be the source of its strength and also its weakness in promoting radical institutional changes. One may hypothesize that
a reassessment of CRT’s condition of possibility may disclose ways of renewing its emancipatory potential.
Class analysis doesn’t neglect race but explains it—class defines social interaction
San Juan 05 (Epifanio, Filipino American literary academic, mentor, cultural reviewer, civic intellectual, activist, writer, essayist “From
Race to Class Struggle: Marxism and Critical Race Theory”, Nature, Society and Thought 18:3, 2005,
http://homepages.spa.umn.edu/~marquit/nst183a.pdf#page=5)//AS
Our key heuristic axiom is this: the extraction of surplus labor always involves conflict and struggle. In
this process of class conflict, identities are articulated with group formation, and race, gender, and
ethnicity enter into the totality of contradictions that define a specific conjuncture, in particular the
contradictions between the social relations dominated by private property and the productive forces. Reformulated, this proposition
translates into a principle of causality: the organization of work influences the way in which race and
gender are mediated within the hegemony of a social bloc. Class consciousness as a “state of social cohesion” (Braverman 1974, 29)
involves layers that have varying duration and intensities expressed in popular and mass culture. A historical-materialist
understanding of race relations and racism embedded in the process of class formation and class
struggles, in the labor process and cultural expression, distinguishes the research projects of cultural studies
scholars like Michael Denning, Peter McLaren, Paul Buhle, Gregory Meyerson, and Teresa Ebert. Given this emphasis on class
struggle and class formation, on the totality of social relations that define the position of interacting
collectivities in society, materialist critique locates the ground of institutional racism and racially based
inequality in the capitalist division of labor—primarily between the seller of labor-power as prime commodity and the
employer who maximizes surplus value (unpaid labor) from the workers. What will maximize accumulation of profi t and
also maintain the condition for such stable and efficient maximization? The answer to this question
would explain the ideology and practice of racial segregation, subordination, exclusion, and
variegated tactics of violence. This is not to reduce race to class, but rather to assign import or intelligible
meaning to the way in which racialization (the valorization of somatic or “natural” properties) operates. While social
subjects indeed serve as sites of variegated differences—that is, individuals undergo multiple inscriptions and occupy
shifting positionalities on the level of everyday experience—the patterns of their actions or “forms of life” are not
permanently indeterminate or undecidable when analyzed from the perspective of the totality of
production relations. The capitalist labor process and its conditions overdetermine the location of groups whose ethnic, racial, gender,
and other characteristics acquire value within that context. I think this is the sense in which Barbara Jeanne Fields argues for a materialist
reading of slavery in U.S. history: “A majority of historians think of slavery as primarily a system of race relations—as though the chief business
of slavery were the production of white supremacy rather than the production of cotton, sugar, rice and tobacco” (1990, 99). This one-sided,
indeed mechanistic, explanation needs to be corrected with the observation that the production of cotton, etc. reproduces in itself the whole
complex of social and political relations of that fi eld—in fact, production of commodities for exchange and profi t would not be possible if the
reproduction of class relations did not accompany it. Which came first, the actual exploitation or its rationalization, is a trick question posed by
disingenuous ideologues whose vulgar materialism can easily consort with the hallucinatory narcotics of superstition and the fetishism of
goods and spectacles (Guillaumin 1995). Culture,
ideology, politics, and economics are all inextricably
intertwined; but their “law of motion” can be clarifi ed through the mediation of a historicalmaterialist optic.
“Post-Marxist” politics of identity enriches the bourgeois academics and hurts leftist
politics as a whole—orthodox Marxism is essential to understanding modern
oppression
Scatamburlo-D’Annibale and McLaren 04 (Valerie and Peter, associate professor in the Department of
Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor and Professor in the Division of Urban Schooling, the Graduate School of
Education and Information Studies at UCLA, “Class Dismissed? Historical materialism and the politics of ‘difference’”, Educational Philosophy
and Theory 36:2, April 2004, Wiley)//AS
Perhaps one of the most
taken-for-granted features of contemporary social theory is the ritual and
increasingly generic critique of Marxism in terms of its alleged failure to address forms of oppression
other than that of ‘class.’ Marxism is considered to be theoretically bankrupt and intellectually passé, and class analysis is often
savagely lampooned as a rusty weapon wielded clumsily by those mind-locked in the jejune factories of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries.
When Marxist class analysis has not been distorted or equated with some crude version of
‘economic determinism,’ it has been attacked for diverting attention away from the categories of
‘difference’—including ‘race’ (Gimenez, 2001). To overcome the presumed inadequacies of Marxism, an
entire discursive apparatus, sometimes called ‘post-Marxism’, has arisen to fill the void. Serving as academic
pallbearers at the funeral of the old bearded devil, post-Marxists (who often go by other names such as postmodernists, radical
multiculturalists, etc.) have tried to entomb Marx's legacy while simultaneously benefiting from it. Yet, the crypt designed for Marx, reverential
in its grand austerity, has never quite been able to contain his impact on history.
For someone presumably dead, Marx has a
way of escaping from his final resting place and reappearing with an uncanny regularity in the world
of ideas. His ghost, as Greider (1998) notes, ‘hovers over the global landscape’ as he continues to shape our
understandings of the current crises of capitalism that haunt the living present. Regardless of Marx's enduring relevance
and even though much of post-Marxism is actually an outlandish ‘caricature’ of Marx and the entire Marxist tradition, it
has eaten through the Left ‘like a cancer’ and has ‘established itself as the new common sense’ (Johnson,
2002, p. 129). What has been produced is a discourse eminently more digestible to the academic ‘Left’
whose steady embourgeoisement appears to be altering the political palate of career social theorists .
Eager to take a wide detour around political economy, post-Marxists tend to assume that the principal political points of departure in the
current ‘postmodern’ world must necessarily be ‘cultural.’ As such, most, but not all post-Marxists
have gravitated towards a
politics of ‘difference’ which is largely premised on uncovering relations of power that reside in the
arrangement and deployment of subjectivity in cultural and ideological practices (cf. Jordan & Weedon, 1995). Advocates of
‘difference’ politics therefore posit their ideas as bold steps forward in advancing the interests of those historically marginalized by ‘dominant’
social and cultural narratives. There is no doubt that post-Marxism has advanced our knowledge of the hidden trajectories of power within the
processes of representation and that it remains useful in adumbrating the formation of subjectivity and its expressive dimensions as well as
complementing our understandings of the relationships between ‘difference,’ language, and cultural configurations. However, post-
Marxists have been woefully remiss in addressing the constitution of class formations and the machinations
of capitalist social organization. In some instances, capitalism and class relations have been thoroughly
‘otherized;’ in others, class is summoned only as part of the triumvirate of ‘race, class, and gender’ in
which class is reduced to merely another form of ‘difference.’ Enamored with the ‘cultural’ and seemingly blind to the
‘economic,’ the rhetorical excesses of post-Marxists have also prevented them from considering the
stark reality of contemporary class conditions under global capitalism. As we hope to show, the radical
displacement of class analysis in contemporary theoretical narratives and the concomitant decentering of capitalism, the anointing
of ‘difference’ as a primary explanatory construct, and the ‘culturalization’ of politics, have had detrimental effects on ‘left’
theory and practice.
Analyzing race in terms of discourse is ineffective pseudopolitics that disempowers
real change—only orthodox Marxist analysis solves
Scatamburlo-D’Annibale and McLaren 04 (Valerie and Peter, associate professor in the Department of
Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor and Professor in the Division of Urban Schooling, the Graduate School of
Education and Information Studies at UCLA, “Class Dismissed? Historical materialism and the politics of ‘difference’”, Educational Philosophy
and Theory 36:2, April 2004, Wiley)//AS
The manner in which ‘difference’ has been taken up within ‘post-al’ frameworks has tended to stress
its cultural dimensions while marginalizing and, in some cases, completely ignoring the economic and material
dimensions of difference. This posturing has been quite evident in many ‘post-al’ theories of ‘race’ and
in the realm of ‘ludic’1 cultural studies that have valorized an account of difference—particularly ‘racial difference’—in almost exclusively
‘superstructuralist’ terms (Sahay, 1998). But this treatment
of ‘difference’ and claims about ‘the “relative
autonomy” of “race”’ have been ‘enabled by a reduction and distortion of Marxian class analysis’ which
‘involves equating class analysis with some version of economic determinism.’ The key move in this distorting gesture
depends on the ‘view that the economic is the base, the cultural/political/ideological the
superstructure.’ It is then ‘relatively easy to show that the (presumably non-political) economic base does not cause the
political/cultural/ideological superstructure, that the latter is/are not epiphenomenal but relatively autonomous or autonomous causal
categories’ (Meyerson, 2000, p. 2). In such
formulations the ‘cultural’ is treated as a separate and autonomous
sphere, severed from its embeddedness within sociopolitical and economic arrangements. As a result,
many of these ‘culturalist’ narratives have produced autonomist and reified conceptualizations of
difference which ‘far from enabling those subjects most marginalized by racial difference’ have, in
effect, reduced ‘difference to a question of knowledge/power relations’ that can presumably be ‘dealt
with (negotiated) on a discursive level without a fundamental change in the relations of production’
(Sahay, 1998). At this juncture, it is necessary to point out that arguing that ‘culture’ is generally conditioned/shaped by material forces does
not reinscribe the simplistic and presumably ‘deterministic’ base/superstructure metaphor which has plagued some strands of Marxist theory.
Rather, we invoke
Marx's own writings from both the Grundrisse and Capital in which he contends that
there is a consolidating logic in the relations of production that permeates society in the complex
variety of its ‘empirical’ reality. This emphasizes Marx's understanding of capitalism and capital as a ‘social’ relation—one which
stresses the interpenetration of these categories, the realities which they reflect, and one which therefore offers a unified and dialectical
analysis of history, ideology, culture, politics, economics and society (see alsoMarx, 1972, 1976, 1977).2 Foregrounding
the
limitations of ‘difference’ and ‘representational’ politics does not suggest a disavowal of the
importance of cultural and/or discursive arena(s) as sites of contestation and struggle. We readily acknowledge
the significance of contemporary theorizations that have sought to valorize precisely those forms of ‘difference’ that have historically been
denigrated. This has undoubtedly been an important development since they have enabled subordinated groups to reconstruct their own
histories and give voice to their individual and collective identities. However,
they have also tended to redefine politics as
a signifying activity generally confined to the realm of ‘representation’ while displacing a politics
grounded in the mobilization of forces against the material sources of political and economic
marginalization. In their rush to avoid the ‘capital’ sin of ‘economism,’ many post-Marxists (who often
ignore their own class privilege) have fallen prey to an ahistorical form of culturalism which holds , among other
things, that cultural struggles external to class organizing provide the cutting edge of emancipatory
politics.3 In many respects, this posturing, has yielded an ‘intellectual pseudopolitics’ that has served to
empower ‘the theorist while explicitly disempowering’ real citizens (Turner, 1994, p. 410). We do not discount
concerns over representation; rather our point is that progressive educators and theorists should not be
straightjacketed by struggles that fail to move beyond the politics of difference and representation in
the cultural realm. While space limitations prevent us from elaborating this point, we contend that culturalist arguments are deeply
problematic both in terms of their penchant for de-emphasizing the totalizing (yes totalizing!) power and function of capital and for their
attempts to employ culture as a construct that would diminish the centrality of class. In a proper historical materialist account, ‘culture’ is not
the ‘other’ of class but, rather, constitutes part of a more comprehensive theorization of class rule in different contexts.4
Integrating class on the same level as race guts class analysis of its meaning and
political power—prioritizing Marxian analysis is essential to dismantle capitalism and
racism
Scatamburlo-D’Annibale and McLaren 04 (Valerie and Peter, associate professor in the Department of
Communication, Media and Film at the University of Windsor and Professor in the Division of Urban Schooling, the Graduate School of
Education and Information Studies at UCLA, “Class Dismissed? Historical materialism and the politics of ‘difference’”, Educational Philosophy
and Theory 36:2, April 2004, Wiley)//AS
In stating this, we
need to include an important caveat that differentiates our approach from those
invoking the well-worn race/class/gender triplet which can sound, to the uninitiated, both radical and vaguely Marxian. It is
not. Race, class and gender, while they invariably intersect and interact, are not co-primary. This
‘triplet’ approximates what the ‘philosophers might call a category mistake.’ On the surface the triplet
may be convincing—some people are oppressed because of their race, others as a result of their gender, yet others because of their
class—but this ‘is grossly misleading’ for it is not that ‘some individuals manifest certain characteristics
known as “class” which then results in their oppression; on the contrary, to be a member of a social
class just is to be oppressed’ and in this regard class is ‘a wholly social category’ (Eagleton, 1998, p. 289).
Furthermore, even though ‘class’ is usually invoked as part of the aforementioned and much vaunted triptych,
it is usually gutted of its practical, social dimension or treated solely as a cultural phenomenon—as just another form of
‘difference.’ In these instances, class is transformed from an economic and, indeed, social category to an exclusively
cultural or discursive one or one in which class merely signifies a ‘subject position.’ Class is therefore cut off from the
political economy of capitalism and class power severed from exploitation and a power structure ‘in which those
who control collectively produced resources only do so because of the value generated by those who do not’ (Hennessy & Ingraham, 1997, p.
2). Such
theorizing has had the effect of replacing an historical materialist class analysis with a cultural
analysis of class. As a result, many post-Marxists have also stripped the idea of class of precisely that
element which, for Marx, made it radical—namely its status as a universal form of exploitation whose
abolition required (and was also central to) the abolition of all manifestations of oppression (Marx, 1978, p. 60). With
regard to this issue, Kovel (2002) is particularly insightful, for he explicitly addresses an issue which continues to vex the Left—namely the
priority given to different categories of what he calls ‘dominative splitting’—those categories of ‘gender, class, race, ethnic and national
exclusion,’ etc. Kovel argues that we need to ask the question of priority with respect to what? He notes that if we mean priority with respect to
time, then the category of gender would have priority since there are traces of gender oppression in all other forms of oppression. If we were
to prioritize in terms of existential significance, Kovel suggests that we would have to depend upon the immediate historical forces that bear
down on distinct groups of people—he offers examples of Jews in 1930s Germany who suffered from brutal forms of anti-Semitism and
Palestinians today who experience anti-Arab racism under Israeli domination. The question of what has political priority, however, would
depend upon which transformation of relations of oppression are practically more urgent and, while this would certainly depend upon the
preceding categories, it would also depend upon the fashion in which all the forces acting in a concrete situation are deployed. As to the
question of which split sets into motion all of the others, the priority would have to be given to class since class
relations entail the
state as an instrument of enforcement and control, and it is the state that shapes and organizes the
splits that appear in human ecosystems. Thus class is both logically and historically distinct from other
forms of exclusion (hence we should not talk of ‘classism’ to go along with ‘sexism’ and ‘racism,’ and ‘species-ism’). This is, first of all,
because class is an essentially man-made category, without root in even a mystified biology. We
cannot imagine a human world without gender distinctions—although we can imagine a world
without domination by gender. But a world without class is eminently imaginable—indeed, such was the
human world for the great majority of our species’ time on earth, during all of which considerable fuss was made over gender. Historically, the
difference arises because ‘class’ signifies one side of a larger figure that includes a state apparatus
whose conquests and regulations create races and shape gender relations. Thus there will be no true
resolution of racism so long as class society stands, inasmuch as a racially oppressed society implies the activities of a classdefending state. Nor can gender inequality be enacted away so long as class society, with its state, demands the super-exploitation of women's
labor. (Kovel, 2002, pp. 123–124)
A broad analytic approach is key – evaluating both class and race enables greater analysis and
interdisciplinary study – their evidence ignores the intersections between structures of oppression
Hill 9, teaches at Middlesex University and is Visiting Professor of Critical Education Policy and Equality Studies at the University of Limerick,
Ireland (Dave, “Culturalist and Materialist Explanations of Class and "Race"”, Cultural Logic 2009 http://clogic.eserver.org/2009/Hill.pdf)
I need to state that this
is a panoptic paper that attempts to bring together, to link, empirical and theoretical
data and conceptual analyses across a number of areas: These are: firstly, culturalist and materialist issues
and analyses of “race,” caste, and class oppression, particularly in Britain, the USA and India; secondly, South Asian,
other Black and Minority Ethnic groups(BME) and White working-class labour market and educational
experience in Britain; thirdly, Marxist, revisionist socialist, and social democratic educational and political
analysis; and, finally, neoliberal and neoconservative policy and its impacts. In particular, this chapter attempts to compare
BME oppression and exploitation in the UK and, tangentially, in the USA, with caste oppression and exploitation in India and also as it manifests
itself in Britain. Both are examined
through a materialist, class perspective: a Marxist analysis. Panoptic
approaches can have value: a bringing together, an interrelating, of different aspects and areas of analysis,
enabling, potentially, wider social theorizing. They potentially enable a wider understanding, or facilitate a wider
evaluation of an overarching theory, such as Marxism, as it analyzes a variety of linked issues. In this paper, the issues above are linked in terms
of Marxist analysis of capitalism, class oppression, and the implications of such analysis for the politics of resistance. A
hazard with
panoptic papers is that they can be dense, heavily referenced and footnoted. But this is to enable pursuit of
further study/reading across a number of fields. In addition, a key strength of the panoptic approach is that
it is multidisciplinary, enabling analysis, synthesis and evaluation across a number of disciplines.
AT: Personal Narrative/ “Insiders Only”
<this isn’t strictly for cap but could be useful on case>
“Insider-only” identity politics regresses to an infinitely segmented society that
accomplishes nothing
Merton 72 (Robert, former University Professor at Columbia University (since deceased), “Insiders and Outsiders: A Chapter in the
Sociology of Knowledge”, American Journal of Sociology 78:1, July 1972, JSTOR)//AS
In contrast to this de facto form of Insiderism, an explicitly doctrinal form has in recent years been put
forward most clearly and emphatically by some black intellectuals. In its strong version, the argument holds
that, as a matter of social epistemology, only black historians can truly under- stand black history,
only black ethnologists can understand black culture, only black sociologists can understand the
social life of blacks, and so on. In the weaker form of the doctrine, some practical concessions are made. With regard to programs
of Black Studies, for example, it is proposed that some white professors of the relevant subjects might be brought in since there are not yet
enough black scholars to staff all the proliferating programs of study. But as Nathan Hare, the founding publisher of the Black Scholar, stated
several years ago, this is only on temporary and conditional sufferance: "Any white professors involved in the program would have to be black
in spirit in order to last. The same is true for 'Negro' professors."6 Apart from this kind of limited concession, the
Insider doctrine
maintains that there is a body of black history, black psychology, black ethnology, and black sociology
which can be significantly advanced only by black scholars and social scientists. In its fundamental character,
this represents a major claim in the sociology of knowledge that implies the balkanization of social science, with separate baronies kept
exclusively in the hands of Insiders bearing their credentials in the shape of one or another ascribed status. Generaliz-
ing the
specific claim, it would appear to follow that if only black scholars can understand blacks, then only
white scholars can understand whites. Generalizing further from race to nation, it would then appear,
for example, that only French scholars can understand French society and, of course, that only
Americans, not their external critics, can truly understand Amer- ican society. Once the basic principle
is adopted, the list of Insider claims to a monopoly of knowledge becomes indefinitely expansible to
all manner of social formations based on ascribed (and, by extension, on some achieved) statuses. It would thus seem to follow
that only women can understand women-and men, men. On the same principle, youth alone iscapable of understanding youth just as,
presumably, only the middle aged are able to understand their age peers.7 Furthermore, as we
shift to the hybrid cases of
ascribed and acquired statuses in varying mix, on the Insider principle, proletarians alone can
understand proletarians and presumably capitalists, capitalists; only Catholics, Catholics; Jews, Jews,
and to halt the inventory of socially atomized claims to knowledge with a limiting case that on its face would seem to have some merit, it
would then plainly follow that only sociologists are able to understand their fellow sociologists.8 In all these applications, the
doctrine
of extreme Insiderism represents a new credentialism.9 This is the credentialism of ascribed status, in
which understanding
becomes accessible only to the fortunate few or many who are to the manner born. In this respect, it contrasts with the creden- tialism of
achieved status that is characteristic of meritocratic systems.10 Extreme Insiderism moves toward a doctrine of group methodological
solipsism.1" In
this form of solipsism, each group must in the end have a monopoly of knowledge about
itself just as according to the doctrine ofindividual methodological solipsism each individual has
absolute privacy of knowledge about him- or her-self. The Insider doctrine can be put in the vernacular with no great
loss in meaning: you have to be one in order to understand one. In somewhat less idiomatic language, the doctrine holds that one has
monopolistic or privileged access to knowledge, or is wholly excluded from it, by virtue of one's group membership or social position. For
some, the notion appears in the form of a question-begging pun: Insider as Insighter, one endowed with special insight into matters
necessarily obscure to others, thus possessed of penetrating discernment. Once adopted, the pun provides a specious solution but the serious
In- sider doctrine has its own rationale.
Insider-only doctrine leads to extreme ethnocentrism and total dismissal of any other
viewpoint
Merton 72 (Robert, former University Professor at Columbia University (since deceased), “Insiders and Outsiders: A Chapter in the
Sociology of Knowledge”, American Journal of Sociology 78:1, July 1972, JSTOR)//AS
Clearly, the
social epistemological doctrine of the Insider links up with what Sumner (1907, p. 13) long ago defined as
ethnocentrism: "the tech- nical name for [the] view of things in which one's own group is the center
of everything, and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it." Sumner then goes on to include as a
component of ethnocentrism, rather than as a frequent correlate of it (thus robbing his idea of some of its potential analytical power), the
belief that one's group is superior to all cognate groups: "each group nourishes its own pride and vanity, boasts itself
superior, exalts its own divinities, and looks with contempt on out- siders" (p. 13). For although the practice of seeing one's own group as the
center of things is empirically correlated with a belief in its superiority, centrality and superiority need to be kept analytically distinct in order
Supplementing the abundance of
historical and ethnological evidence of the empirical tendency for belief in one's group or collectivity
as superior to all cognate groups or collectivities-whether nation, class, race, region, or organizationis a recent batch of studies of what Theodore Caplow (1964, pp. 213-16) has called the aggrandizement effect: the
distortion upward of the prestige of an organization by its members. Caplow ex- amined 33 different kinds of
to deal with patterns of alienation from one's membership group and contempt for it.13
organizations-ranging from dance studios to Protestant and Catholic churches, from skid row missions to big banks, and from advertising
agencies to university departments-and found that members overestimated the prestige of their organization some "eight times as often as
they underestimated it" (when compared with judgments by Outsiders). More in point for us, while members tended to disagree with
Outsiders about the standing of their own organization, they tended to agree with them about the prestige of the other organizations in the
sameset. These findings can be taken as something of a sociological parable. In these matters at least, the
judgments of "Insiders"
are best trusted when they assess groups other than their own; that is, when members of groups
judge as Outsiders rather than as Insiders. Findings of this sort do not testify, of course, that ethnocentrism and its frequent
spiritual correlate, xenophobia, fear and hatred of the alien, are incorrigible. They do, however, remind us of the widespread
tendency to glorify the ingroup, sometimes to that degree in which it qualifies as chauvinism : the
extreme, blind, and often bellicose extolling of one's group, status, or collectivity. We need not abandon
"chauvinism" as a concept useful to us here merely because it has lately become adopted as a vogue word, blunted in meaning through
indiscriminate use as a rhetorical weapon in intergroup conflict. Nor need we continue to confine the scope of the concept, as it was in its
origins and later by Lasswell (1937, p. 361) in his short, incisive discussion of it, to the special case of the state or nation. The concept can be
usefully, not tendentiously, extended to desig- nate the extreme glorification of any social formation
AT: Universalizing
We can use universalism productively—their arguments about subjectivity are
historically disproven
McLaren and Farahmandpur 00 (Peter and Ramin, Professor in the Division of Urban Schooling, the Graduate School of
Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles and Professor of Education at Portland State University, “Reconsidering
Marx in Post-Marxist Times: A Requiem for Postmodernism?”, Educational Researcher 29:3, April 2000, JSTOR)//AS
It is a cardinal position in postmod- ernism to place under suspicion master narratives, universalism,
and objectiv- ity on the grounds that they are partic- ular epistemological and moral dis- courses
camouflaged under the guise of universal discourses. Enlightenment ideals come under fire as well
since they putatively aim at creating homoge- nous discourses which are based on scientific progress associated
with Eu- ropean economic, social, and political dominance (Thompson, 1997). Post- modernists additionally dismiss the
Enlightenment's claim and appeal to universalism by associating it with Eu- ropean imperialism and
colonialism which, in their view, aided the Span- ish, Portuguese, and British conquest of the "New World." However, history
demonstrates that prior empires did not rely on specific universal discourses similar to the
Enlightenment ideas to justify their atrocities, genocide, and territorial conquest. On the contrary, Enlightenment thinkers frequently stressed the significance of other cultures' moral and ethical
commitments by compar- ing and contrasting them to their own European origins. According to Willie
Thompson: The Spanish conquistadors did not require the Enlightenment to commit genocide upon the populations of the Caribbean, Mexico
and Peru and subject the remnant to slavery, nor Genghis Khan to do similar things in Central Asia during the earlier pe- riod. These
were committed by cultures with no pretensions to uni- versalism (unless Christianity is to be
acts
regarded as such, in
which case the root of all evil has to be sought a lot further back). (1997, p. 219)
Racial, gender and sexual divisions can be overcome through a struggle against capital – only way to
overcome all forms of oppression
Sears and Mooers 95 – teaches at Ryerson University in Toronto; ** Professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration
at Ryerson University, PhD in Social and Political Thought from York University (Alan and Colin “The Politics of Hegemony: Democracy, Class,
and Social Movements” November 1 1995 Transformation: Marxist Boundary Work in Theory, Economics, Politics and Culture)
Perhaps the
strongest argument used against the Marxist conception of totality today is that reduces a
diversity of experiences to a unitary system and subordinates a range of struggles to a single dynamic. Churchill (199) wrote, for
example, that Marxism could not hope to relate to native struggles without a rich appreciation of native
perspectives: "Only through learning the specifics of the local struggle can one hope to 'fit it into the broader picture' without intellectually
forcing it, a priori, into the constraints of preconception and stereotype." Lenin himself would have endorsed this statement, arguing the need
for detailed knowledge of the concrete situation. However, opponents of Marxism
use the argument for detailed local
knowledge as the basis for a rejection of Marxism tout court. Any attempt to "fit it into the broader
picture" is likely to be accused of "forcing it." It is common sense among many on the left that Marxism
is a "male-stream," "eurocentric" (and undoubtedly straight) theory (see for example Burstyn 81 and Churchill200).
This kind of reasoning is used to disqualify Marxism in advance as an answer to pressing social questions. The
alternative to Marxism is generally some variant of multiple systems theory linked to the politics of
alliance and the abandonment of any conception of totality. If Marxism is to be a credible alternative it must be able to
show the possibility and efficacy of an inclusive class politics. Lebowitz (1992) provides an important theoretical starting point for this kind of
politics with his critique of the "one-sidedness of capital." Marx's Capital presented the dynamics of capitalism and class struggle from the
perspective of capital only. The other side of the capital relation, namely the working class, was held constant in Capital to permit an
elaboration of the laws of development of capitalism (31-4). This, Lebowitz argues, must be
complemented with an account of
"class struggle from the side of the wage-laborer" to give an inclusive picture of class conflict (56). Looked at
from this perspective, workers encounter capital as a barrier to meeting the rich and diverse needs that they develop in particular historical
circumstances. These include not only a wage required to secure the goods that workers need or want, but also the time required for the selfreproduction of the worker. More than this, such
a perspective must encompass the myriad of conditions required
for social life itself and the realization of the full creative potential of the worker as an individual (see 567,96-1 00). This broader conception of class struggle, which encompasses the rich world of workers' needs
provides the basis for an inclusive politics capable of embracing issues around gender, race/ethnicity,
sexuality, and other special needs. Creese (193-4) pointed out the need to overcome the inadequacy of dealing w1th issues such as
gender and race as "add-ons" to class analysis: Ethnic/racial and gender relations of power and domination are
embedded within capitalist practices. The class relations that are thereby generated are not gender and ethnically/racially neutral
form; rather, classes are gendered and racialized (Creese 193). An inclusive conception of class struggle allows us to
understand classes as gendered, racialized and sexualized while connecting the diverse needs and
capacities of workers to a common struggle. Lebowitz (123) argues that workers approach capital "already divided by (among
aspects) sex, gender, race and nationality." This division is fostered due to "the inherent tendency m cap1tal1tself to foster competition among
workers .... " . These
divisions need not be unbridgeable. The demands of lesbians and gay men, people of
color, women, people with physical or mental special needs and others are class demands against
capital and its dominance over society. HIV infected people, for example, may require a more flexible working day due to the
need for rest, or ways to meet their needs and wants without engaging in wage labor if unable to work (see Sears and Adam 1992). Women
may have particular needs in the configuration of wage and domestic labor (see Vogel 1990 and Luxton 1987). These issues may or may not
manifest themselves directly in the workplace. That is not the central point. Class
struggles include more than struggles
around wages or conflicts in individual workplaces. Rather than directed against particular capitalists, they are
struggles against the power of capital as a whole. And, insofar as they are directed against capital's
position as the owner of the products of social labor, they have the potential of unifying (rather than
maintaining the separation of) all those who have nothing to sell but their labor power (Lebowitz 147). This
unity has an objective basis: it is founded on the fact that forms of exploitation and oppression are
related internally to the extent that they are located in the same totality-one which is defined and governed by
capitalist social relations. Each of these struggles has the potential of strengthening the others. Conversely, the
failure to connect these struggles weakens each of them. This is precisely what Marx (118) referred to when he wrote "A
people that subjugates another people forges its own chains." The myth of the "white male working
class" presents class struggle as one in which a gain for some workers means a loss for others. This is based
on a static picture of a relatively constant wage packet which gets divided between sections of the class on the basis of power and privilege.
Thus, the "white male working class" is presented as the beneficiary of lower wages paid women, people of color and immigrants. By this logic,
gains for women, people of color and immigrants are necessarily losses for white men (e.g. Coote and Campbell 247). The overall
size of
the wage packet, the length of the working day, the comprehensiveness of social programs and indeed
the amount of direct management control is not fixed, but varies with the strength and tactics of each side in the class
struggle. Workers who attempt to defend relative privileges through exclusionary and sectional strategies
weaken their own position. The failure, for example, to campaign vigorously against racist privilege in the American South not only
weakened the position of southern workers but indeed that of the whole American labor movement. The downward pressure of a nonunionized low wage sector historically divided by racism is one of the tools American employers have used in their anti-union offensive in the
recent past (see Davis). This
does not mean that workers will automatically recognize their broader class
interests or that sectionalism will be easily overcome. This requires a political struggle. However, there is an objective basis for
building solidarity. It is when workers enter into struggle that the opportunities are greatest for the subjective
recognition of this objective basis (see Lebowitz 163). McCaskell (249) showed just one example of these possibilities when he
described the development of a general strike in an area of the Basque country following the shooting of a transvestite by the Spanish National
Police: the industrial suburb closed down in a general strike protesting the killing. Sexual liberation was a focus of discussion in dozens of
workplaces. Two thousand people marched through San Sebastian under the banners of EHGAM [the Basque gay liberation front) .... This was a
mobilization on a class basis which connected national liberation and sexual politics. This kind of political generalization is not inevitable in
large-scale workers struggles; politics are required to make these links. There is, however, a very real basis for such generalization. Indeed, this
should not be surprising. At the level of daily experience, there is an obviousness to the connections between different aspects of exploitation
and oppression. The
divisions between gender, class and race don't exist at the level of the
everyday/everynight world of people's actual lives; to be black, a woman and working class are not
three different and distinctive experiences. (D. Smith 54) We would argue that these are not separate experiences precisely
because they are grounded in a single social totality. There is a connection within this totality between for example economic
crisis and the rise of the racist right (see } I I Sivanandan v-vi). The relations within this totality have a specifically capitalist
character even where they are not directly economic (see Wood). This is the basis for an inclusive class
politics. Albert has attacked this inclusive conception of class struggle, which he labels as "Marxist monism" (44). The absurdity of this view
that women and blacks, for instance, can only be critical social agents as representatives of some class, and that hey cannot be agents of history
simply by virtue of their position as women oppressed by gender relations and blacks oppressed by racist community relations fortunately has
struck more than a few activists. This is a caricature. The
argument is not that class is the only subject position in
society, but that it is a unique one in the process of emancipation. There are two reasons for this uniqueness. First, as
Marx (58) argued, the working class is a class with "radical chains" which to free itself must break the all the
chains which bind society. Secondly, the working class is the only force which can break through the limits of the
capitalist totality to forge a new society (see Lukacs 28).
Their criticism of class struggle as exclusive is flawed – the working class can be defined to include
anyone who sells wage labor
Sears and Mooers 95 – teaches at Ryerson University in Toronto; ** Professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration
at Ryerson University, PhD in Social and Political Thought from York University (Alan and Colin “The Politics of Hegemony: Democracy, Class,
and Social Movements” November 1 1995 Transformation: Marxist Boundary Work in Theory, Economics, Politics and Culture)
Movementist critics
often present Marxism as a partial and inadequate theory of emancipation, concerned
with the freedom of only one relatively privileged stratum in society, the "white male working class." This view is
based on the claim that Marxism is fundamentally reductionist, subordinating all aspects of social life to economic class
relations and political class struggle. This criticism is grounded in a view of class politics that can be labeled an
"exclusive conception of class." While this exclusive conception of class is certainly present in some
versions of Marxist theory, the most powerful versions are those grounded in an inclusive conception of
class. The exclusive conception of class criticized by movementist critics of Marxism has two aspects. First, the working
class is narrowly defined in empirical terms to include only certain forms of industrial labor which are still
largely male. Not only are working-class women largely forgotten (an error corrected by marxist feminists, and then
frequently re-forgotten by male marxists and socialists), but the whole conceptualization and understanding of the
proletariat is male ... (Hearn 76) Secondly, the purview of class politics is narrowly confined to economistic
issues in the workplace. Thus, class struggle is reduced to the efforts of a small segment of the population to improve their immediate
economic conditions. Epstein (60) argues that one reason many on the left are uncomfortable with class politics is that "'the working class'
conjures up organized labor and the white men who are its largest constituency."4 This
exclusive conception of class has its roots in
specific versions of Marxist theory. It is based first on a concept of productive labor, which as Lebowitz (1 00) points out "has
been the subject of endless (and singularly unproductive) discussion among Marxists." This concept is rooted in Marx (152-7), who
distinguished between productive labor which created surplus-value for capital and unproductive labor which who did not. A working class
comprised only of those engaged in productive labor would exclude all those who do not directly produce surplus value. If
we accept
productive labor as defining the working class, then only wage-laborers in extractive, manufacturing,
and freight industries would form the proletariat. On such a view, the working class would be narrowed down to its
nineteenth century stereotype of male manual workers (Callinicos 19). Such influential writers as Althusser (171) and Poulantzas took this
narrow view of the working class, excluding for example state employees. Even Epstein (60), who is critical of this narrow conception of class,
sees it as perhaps the only tenable Marxist position. Expanding this definition to include the vast majority of the population leaves one without
a clear definition of working-class boundaries. It also involves losing some of the power of traditional class analysis, which claimed a
revolutionary role for the working class on the basis of its relationship to surplus value. The
exclusive conception of class
combines this narrow conception of class boundaries with an economistic understanding of class
struggles. The domain of class struggles is reduced to the narrow question of wages paid to productive laborers. The
result is a view of class politics which excludes women laboring in the household, the unemployed,
people working on the margins of the economy, and workers in certain sectors (such as the state and social
services) which include a high proportion of women workers. The working class is then seen as a privileged core,
distinguished from a periphery or underclass which is more exploited and more vulnerable. (see Sivanandan 8,17,24; Atkinson and Gregory).
This view of the working class has achieved particular currency in the postfordist argument that the contemporary workforce has been
reshaped by the requirements of "flexible specialization." The working class is depicted as a shrinking core of well paid full-time workers being
forced to learn new and varied skills and an adaptable and participatory work style, while a growing low-paid portion of the labor force
(including disproportionate numbers of women and people of color) become "flexible" in the sense that they are employed on a part-time or
temporary basis at the convenience of employers. This exclusive conception of the working class is often marshaled as part of a critique of
unions which are depicted as bargaining to defend white male privilege against the claims of a more exploited and oppressed periphery
comprised largely of women, people of color and immigrants. The traditional priorities of union bargaining-focusing on the wage and on the
maintenance of differentials-have not helped lift women out of low paid ghettos, or to alleviate their domestic responsibilities. On the contrary,
the process we know as "free collective bargaining" is primarily a defense of the interests of male workers (Coote and Campbell 166). Lebowitz
(1 03) argues persuasively that this exclusive conception of the working class does not flow from the logic of Marxism, but rather from the logic
of capitalism. It is, after all, capital that would define "productive" labor as that which produces surplus-value and it is capital that tries to limit
the purview of legitimate class politics to narrow collective bargaining issues. A
Marxism rooted in this narrow conception of
class will "not only be found wanting by feminists and others but it also cannot challenge capital" (Lebowitz 1 03). Critics who attack
Marxism as a theory of the "white male working class" are responding to this narrow definition of class developed within Marxist theory. Their
strategy has generally been to supplement a narrow vision of class politics with separate perspectives covering gender, race/ethnicity and/or
sexuality. There
is, however, another alternative and that is to develop a broader, inclusive conception of
social class. An inclusive conception must begin with a broader definition of the boundaries of class. Wright (49), for example, argues that
there is no basis for excluding unproductive workers from the working class. both productive and
unproductive workers are exploited; both have unpaid labor extorted from them .... In both cases, the capitalist will try to keep
the wage bill as low as possible; in both cases the capitalist will try to increase the productivity by getting workers to work harder; in both cases,
workers will be dispossessed of control over the labor process. Therefore, the
boundaries of the working class can be drawn
widely to encompass productive and unproductive, full-time and part-time, employed and unemployed.
It includes all those who are dependent on the sale of labor-power (whether or not they directly produce surplus value or
are employed at a g1ven moment) and who do not own or control their workplace.6 The point of production
constitutes the single greatest source of power for those dependent on the sale of labor-power, but neither
limits class membership to those employed at a given moment nor class politics to narrow workplace concerns. Resnick and Wolff usefully
distinguish between fundamental classes, those which directly produce surplus value for capital, and subsumed classes, those who are
employed as wage-laborers but whose labor does not directly contribute to surplus value (such as state employees). In this way, they
are
able to point to the central place of surplus production to capitalism without losing s1ght of the fact that
subsumed workers are still part of the working class. In th1s regard, subsumed workers such as state employees
have as much potential to engage in class struggle as industrial workers.7
Analysis of culture must include analysis of class
LeBlanc 95 – professor of history at La Roche College in Pennsylvania, historian of working class and revolutionary politics, Ph.D. from the
University of Pittsburgh (Paul “Culture, Identity, Class Struggle” 1995 Transformation: Marxist Boundary Work in Theory, Economics, Politics
and Culture)
Common themes in post-Marxist discourse involve a tendency to turn from class struggles to culture
critiques, questioning the centrality of class while privileging identities relating to race, gender and
sexuality, and exchanging the goal of socialism for that of "radical democracy," sometimes with a greenish hue. It is an Hegelian
commonplace that there is generally some element of (overextended) truth in an erroneous analysis. So it seems to me that not all elements of
the post-Marxists' challenge are without interest, that in fact some of their notions can be engaged/incorporated/transformed/superseded in
an historical materialist critique. What follows constitutes a practical critique of much post-Marxist discourse: it is a
non-polemical effort to put forward-in relatively clear language-an analysis which touches on themes that relate both to the post-Marxist
debate and to practical problems of the class struggle and socialist political work today. Two The concept of "culture" is an essential tool for
those who want to apply the historical materialist approach of Marx and Engels to the question of how class consciousness develops among
those of us who are part of the working class, that is, those of us who make our living through the sale of labor power, as opposed to making a
living through the ownership of businesses. Before
discussing culture, we need to look more closely at this working
class and its consciousness. The working class, as defined here, constitutes a majority of the people in U.S. society, but a majority
of those who are, in this sense, working class, do not automatically or necessarily have a sense of
themselves as being part of something called the working class. They don't necessarily believe that they can best
improve their conditions by joining with other workers in a struggle against the big businessmen, the capitalists, who own and run our
economy. They
don't automatically or necessarily see themselves as having common interests with
working-class people of other countries (or even of working-class people of our own country who have
different racial or ethnic backgrounds, different occupations and income levels, different sexual identities and orientations, and
so on). And they don't automatically conclude that they can and should, as a class, take political power in
order to transform our society in a way that gives them control of our economic life. These beliefs-(1) that there
is something called the working class to which we belong, (2) that our interests are necessarily counterposed to the interests of the capitalists,
against whom we must struggle, (3) that we should identify with and have solidarity with a// members of our class, and (4) that the working
class should struggle for political power in order to bring about the socialist transformation of society these beliefs are traditionally seen by
Marxists (in this case Lenin) as constituting the class-consciousness of the proletariat, of the working class (LeBlanc 21-26). People who
are born into the working class are not born with these ideas. Nor do we get our ideas simply from raw
experience. In our families, among our friends, in school, and in the larger society, we are taught certain beliefs, values,
moral codes, ways of understanding things, and forms of behavior. These constitute a framework that
helps us make some kind of sense of the world around us, affecting the way we process our experience, and therefore
shaping our consciousness. This, according to culture theorists, is what is meant by the theoretical concept
known as culture. This conception of culture involves: the social habits and learned behavior shaping our lives and consciousness; our
beliefs and values and ways of understanding reality; the various activities and institutions which help to transmit these habits, beliefs and
values; and the intellectual, technological, artistic and other products of human creation. Included in this, of course, is the realm of art,
literature, film, television, music, etc. which is sometimes more narrowly given the label of "culture."1 Marxists
insist that culture
cannot be adequately understood unless we see it dialectically-composed of complex and contradictory
elements, dynamic and evolving, which not only shapes people but also is shaped by them as they seek to
adjust to and transform the realities of which they are part. Here it may be helpful to emphasize the central importance
(in contrast to some "post-Marxist" theorists) of materialism and economics in this way of seeing
culture. Obviously, if I do not physically exist, I cannot engage in any form of activity, cultural or otherwise;
a pre-requisite of my ex1stence is the intake of nourishment. Marx and Engels noted, in The German Ideology, that "by
producing food, man indirectly produces his material life itself." They elaborate: The way in which man produces his
food depends first of all on the nature of the means of subsistence that he finds and has to reproduce. This mode of product1on must not be
viewed simply as reproduction of the physical existence of individuals. Rather it is a definite form of their activity, a definite way of expressing
their life, a definite mode of life. As
individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides
with what they produce, with what they produce, and how they produce (Marx, 409). The way we each make a
living, taken together, adds up to our way of life; the activities and relationships which we enter into for the purpose of securing our
subsistence is what is meant by an economy. As Marx put it in The Poverty of Philosophy, economic
categories are only the
theoretical expressions, the abstractions, of social relations of production" (Marx, 480). The concepts of
culture, society and economy overlap here. Marx sees economics "anthropologically"-which means that
culture is necessarily permeated with the economic realities from which it is inseparable. Of course, not all
economies are the same. As historical materialists, Marxists insist that culture must also be comprehended, in capitalist
society, as something in which we find reflected the actual, divided class experiences and conflicts existing
under capitalism: To the extent that we speak of a so-called national culture in one or another capitalist country, the dominant influence in that
culture is enjoyed by the dominant social class: the cap1talists, who own and control the economy, and this control shapes the so-called "way
of life" of the society. But there are also elements of popular culture, attitudes, practices, values and viewpoints arising from the other classes,
especially the working class, which are different from and sometimes in conflict with the dominant cultural orientation of the capitalist class.
This broad working-class culture-sometimes influenced by the dominant bourgeois-national culture, sometimes drawing on deeper preindustrial or pre-capitalist traditions, sometimes powerfully asserting itself through social struggles against the capitalists-has been the basis for
a distinctive radical-democratic and socialist sub-culture arising in various capitalist countries of the past century and a half, including in the
United States. Three There is, then, the larger culture of capitalist society, in which, under normal circumstances, ethical orientations, ideology,
values and social habits consistent with capitalism tend to predominate. But also within this larger culture there is a different cultural
orientation which reflects the life-experience of those who are part of the working class-life-experience which is refracted and interpreted, to
be sure, through the ideological orientation (ways of seeing things and understanding reality) into which one has been socialized. In fact,
there is a considerable amount of cultural variation within this working class, given the ethnic and racial
differences, as well as occupation and income differences, differences in gender and sexual orientation,
and so on. There is, nonetheless, a fundamental cultural divide between bourgeois and proletarian social
layers. From television-if we compare the more or less proletarian way of life depicted on "Roseanne" with the more or less bourgeois way of
life depicted on "L.A. Law," then we get some sense of the broad cultural difference of class being suggested. There should be no
mystery about the source of this cultural divide. Those who are part of the working class share an
intimate knowledge of having no way to make a living except by selling their own labor power, finding
someone willing to hire them, and being under the economic domination of a boss who tries to convert that labor power into as much actual
labor as possible. It
involves a sense of common cause (despite petty aggravations) with one's workmates, a desire to
exercise at least some common control over one's work situation, and a shared resentment over the "boss-ism" of
management and the owners. It involves a feeling (shaped by one's economic situation) that you earn every penny that you make, and in many
cases a vivid sense that your labor enriches others. There
is a shared understanding with millions of others that those
on top will always have many more advantages, privileges, tax breaks, perks, resources, opportunities,
etc., and that the majority of us-looked down upon and taken for granted-pay for that. All of this necessarily and
profoundly impacts on one's entire world-view and way of life.
AT: Link Turn
Antiracist movements cannot undo capitalism on their own—they fail to see the
multiplicity of its oppression—focus on race is detrimental
McLaren and Farahmandpur 00 (Peter and Ramin, Professor in the Division of Urban Schooling, the Graduate School of
Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles and Professor of Education at Portland State University, “Reconsidering
Marx in Post-Marxist Times: A Requiem for Postmodernism?”, Educational Researcher 29:3, April 2000, JSTOR)//AS
capitalism is not necessarily endan- gered by the ethnic, racial, gender, or
sexual identities of the social groups that it seeks to exploit. Capitalism can survive antiracist and
antisexist prac- tices because it is a social system based on economic exploitation and the own- ership of
private property3 (Wood, 1996). Of course, antiracist and femi- nist struggles can help bring capitalism down, but they are
necessary and not sufficient struggles. We believe that in its failure to recognize capitalism as a
fundamental determinant of social oppression, and in its focus on racism, sexism, and homophobia delinked
from their attachment to White patriarchal epistemologies, the law of value, and the international division of labor,
identity politics falls prey to a facile form of culturalism. In our opinion, certain contexts arise in which identity
politics tends to ham- per and weaken working-class strug- gles. In some instances, for example, by blaming
only Whites for the oppression of Blacks, men for the oppression of women, and heterosexuality for
the op- pression of gays and lesbians, identity politics fails to situate White racializ- ing and racist
practices, as well as pa- triarchal and heteronormative prac- tices, as conjunctional practices within the wider context
of capitalist relations of exploitation.
We would also like to point out that
AT: McGary
McGary supports capitalism and ignores it’s effects on race
Young 06(Robert Young- British postcolonial theorist, cultural critic, and historian “Putting Materialism
back into Race Theory: Toward a Transformative Theory of Race”
http://www.redcritique.org/WinterSpring2006/puttingmaterialismbackintoracetheory.htm
In the realm of African-American philosophy, Howard
McGary Jr. also deploys the discourse of the (black) subject to
mark the limits of Marxism. For instance, in a recent interview, McGary offers this humanist rejection of Marxism: "I don't think that
the levels of alienation experienced by Black people are rooted primarily in economic relations" (Interview 90). For McGary, black alienation
exceeds the logic of Marxist theory and thus McGary's idealist assertion that "the sense of alienation experienced by Black people in the US is
also rooted in the whole idea of what it means to be a human being and how that has been understood" (Interview 90). McGary
confuses
causes and effects and then misreads Marxism as a descriptive modality. Marxism is not concerned as
much with descriptive accounts, the effects, as much as it is with explanatory accounts. That is, it is
concerned with the cause of social alienation because such an explanatory account acts as a guide for
praxis. Social alienation is an historical effect and its explanation does not reside in the experience itself; therefore, it needs explanation and
such an explanation emerges from the transpersonal space of concepts. In theorizing the specificity of black alienation, McGary reveals his
contradictory ideological coordinates. First, he argues that black alienation results from cultural "beliefs". Then, he suggests that these cultural
"norms" and "practices" develop from slavery and Jim Crow, which are fundamentally economic relations for the historically specific
exploitation of black people. If these cultural norms endogenously emerge from the economic systems of slavery and Jim Crow, as McGary
correctly suggests, then and contrary to McGary's expressed position, black alienation is very much rooted in economic relations. McGary's
desire to place black subjectivity beyond Marxism creates contradictions in his text. McGary asserts that the
economic structures of slavery and Jim Crow shape cultural norms. Thus in a post-slavery, post-Jim Crow era, there would still be an economic
structure maintaining contemporary oppressive norms—from McGary's logic this must be the case. However, McGary
remains silent
on the contemporary economic system structuring black alienation: capitalism. Apparently, it is legitimate to
foreground and critique the historical connection between economics and alienation but any inquiry into the present day connection between
economics and alienation is off limits. This other economic structure—capitalism—remains the
unsaid in McGary's
discourse, and consequently he provides ideological support for capitalism—the exploitative
infrastructure which produces and maintains alienation for blacks as well as for all working people. In a
very revealing moment, a moment that confirms my reading of McGary's pro-capitalist position, he asserts that "it is possible for AfricanAmericans to combat or overcome this form of alienation described by recent writers without overthrowing capitalism" (20). Here, in a most
lucid way, we see the ideological connection between the superstructure (philosophy) and the base (capitalism). Philosophy
provides
ideological support for capitalism, and, in this instance, we can also see how philosophy carries out class
politics at the level of theory (Althusser Lenin 18). McGary points out "that Black people have been used in ways that white people
have not" (91). His observation may be true, but it does not mean that whites have not also been "used"; yes, whites may be "used" differently,
but they are still "used" because that is the logic of exploitative regimes—people are "used", that is to say, their labor is commodified and
exchanged for profit. McGary's interview signals what I call an "isolationist" view.
This view disconnects black alienation from
other social relations; hence, it ultimately reifies race, and, in doing so, suppresses materialist inquiries
into the class logic of race. That is to say, the meaning of race is not to be found within its own internal
dynamics but rather in dialectical relation to and as an ideological justification of the exploitative wagelabor economy.
AT: Mills
Mills puts race discrimination before any other form of discrimination- this exploits the working class
Young 06(Robert Young- British postcolonial theorist, cultural critic, and historian “Putting Materialism
back into Race Theory: Toward a Transformative Theory of Race”
http://www.redcritique.org/WinterSpring2006/puttingmaterialismbackintoracetheory.htm
This isolationist position finds a fuller and, no less problematic, articulation in Charles W. Mills' The Racial Contract, a text which undermines
the possibility for a transracial transformative political project. Mills evinces the ideological assumptions and consequent politics of the
isolationist view in a long endnote to chapter 1. Mills privileges race oppression, but, in doing so, he must suppress other forms of oppression,
such as gender and class. Mills
acknowledges that there are gender and class relations within the white
population, but he still privileges race, as if the black community is not similarly divided along gender
and class lines. Hence, the ideological necessity for Mills to execute a double move: he must marginalize
class difference within the white community and suppress it within the black community. Consequently,
Mills removes the possibility of connecting white supremacy, a political-cultural structure, to its
underlying economic base. Mills empiricist framework mystifies our understanding of race. If "white racial
solidarity has overridden class and gender solidarity" (138), as he proposes, then what is needed is an explanation of this racial formation. If
race is the "identity around which whites have usually closed ranks" (138), then why is the case? Without an explanation, it seems as if white
solidarity reflects some kind of metaphysical alliance. White racial solidarity is an historical articulation that operates to defuse class
antagonism within white society, and it is maintained and reproduced through discourses of ideology. The
race contract provides
whites with an imaginary resolution of actual social contradictions, which are not caused by blacks, but
by an exploitative economic structure. The race contract enables whites to scapegoat blacks and such an ideological operation
displaces any understanding of the exploitative machinery. Hence, the race contract provides a political cover which
ensures the ideological reproduction of the conditions of exploitation, and this reproduction further
deepens the social contradictions—the economic position of whites becomes more and more depressed
by the very same economic system that they help to ideologically reproduce. Mills points out that the Racial
Contract aims at economic exploitation of black people, and this is certainly the case, but it also exploits all
working people—a notion suppressed within Mills' black nationalist problematic. From Mills' logic, it seems that
all whites (materially) benefit from the Racial Contract, but, if this true, then how does he account for the class structure within the white
community? His
argument rests upon glossing over class divisions within American and European
communities, and I believe this signals the theoretical and political limits of his position. The vast majority of
white/Europeans are workers and therefore are subjected to capitalist exploitation through the extraction of
surplus value, and this structural relationship operates irrespective of race/ethnicity/gender/sexuality. In
other words, neither whiteness nor the race contract places whites outside the logic of exploitation. Indeed, the possibility for transracial
collective praxis emerges in the contradiction between the (ideological) promise of whiteness and the actual oppressed material conditions of
most whites. The class blindness in Mills is surprising because he situates
his discourse within "the best tradition of
oppositional materialist critique" (129), but that tradition foregrounds political economy. Mills undermines
his materialism through the silent reinscription of idealism. For example, he argues that "[t]he Racial Contract is an
exploitation contract that creates global European economic domination and national white privilege" (31). Indeed for Mills, "the globallycoded distribution of wealth and poverty has been produced by the Racial Contract" (37). However, the "Racial Contract" does not create global
European economic domination—this results from control of capital by the international ruling class—but it ideologically legitimates the "colorcoded distribution of wealth and poverty". Thus
the race contract effectively naturalizes a racial division of labor,
and, of course, this operation fractures (multi-racial) class solidarity.
AT Race First
The affirmative’s root cause of inequality is incorrect – methodology first solves capitalism
Tumino 1[Stephen, Prof English at Pitt, ““What is Orthodox Marxism and Why it Matters Now More than
Ever”, Red Critique, p. online,
http://redcritique.org/spring2001/printversions/whatisorthodoxmarxismprint.htm SGarg]
Any effective political theory will haveto do at leasttwo things: it will have to offer anintegrated
understanding of social practices and, based on such an interrelated knowledge, offer a guideline for
praxis. My main argument here is that among all contesting social theories now,
onlyOrthodoxMarxismhas been able to produce an integrated knowledge of the existing social totality
and provide lines of praxis that will lead to building a society free from necessity. But first I must clarify
what I mean by Orthodox Marxism. Like all other modes and forms of political theory, the very
theoretical identity of Orthodox Marxism is itself contested—not just from non-and anti-Marxists who
question the very "real" (by which they mean the "practical" as under free-market criteria) existence of
any kind of Marxism now but, perhaps more tellingly, from within the Marxist tradition itself. I will,
therefore, first say what I regard to be the distinguishing marks of Orthodox Marxism and then outline a
short polemical map of contestation over Orthodox Marxism within the Marxist theories now. I will end
by arguing for its effectivity in bringing about anew society basednot on human rights but onfreedom
from necessity.I will argue that to knowcontemporary society—and to be able to act on such
knowledge—one has to first of all know whatmakes the existing social totality. I will argue that
thedominant social totality is based on inequality—not just inequality of power but inequalityof
economic access(which then determines access to health care, education, housing, diet, transportation,
. . . ). Thissystematic inequality cannot be explained by gender, race, sexuality, disability, ethnicity, or
nationality. These are all secondary contradictions and are all determined by the fundamental
contradiction of capitalism which is inscribed in the relation of capital and labor.All modes
ofMarxismnowexplain social inequalitiesprimarilyon the basis of thesesecondary contradictions and in
doing so—and this is my main argument—legitimate capitalism. Why? Because such arguments
authorize capitalism without gender, race, discrimination and thus accept economic inequality as an
integral part of human societies. They accept a sunny capitalism—a capitalismbeyond capitalism. Such a
society, based on cultural equality but economic inequality, has always been the not-so-hidden agenda
of the bourgeois left—whether it has been called "new left," "postmarxism," or "radical democracy."
This is, by the way, the main reason for its popularity in the culture industry—from the academy
(Jameson, Harvey, Haraway, Butler,. . . ) to daily politics (Michael Harrington, Ralph Nader, Jesse
Jackson,. . . ) to. . . . For all, capitalism is here to stay and the best that can be done is to make its
cruelties more tolerable, more humane.This humanization(not eradication)of capitalism is the sole goal
of ALL contemporary lefts (marxism, feminism, anti-racism, queeries, . . . ). Such anunderstanding of
social inequality is based on the fundamental understanding that thesource of wealth is human
knowledge and not human labor. That is,wealth is produced by the human mind and is thus free from
the actual objective conditionsthat shape the historical relations of labor and capital. Only
OrthodoxMarxism recognizes the historicity of labor and its primacy as the source of all human wealth.
In this paper I argue that any emancipatory theory has to be founded on recognition of the priority of
Marx's labor theory of value and not repeat the technological determinism of corporate theory
("knowledge work") that masquerades as social theory.Finally, it isonlyOrthodoxMarxismthatrecognizes
the inevitability and also the necessity of communism—the necessity, that is, of a society in which "from
each according to their ability to each according to their needs" (Marx) is the rule.
AT Cap Sustainable/Good
Capitalism may be good in the short term but leads to unfettered exploitation and is unsustainable
Tumino 1[Stephen, Prof English at Pitt, ““What is Orthodox Marxism and Why it Matters Now More than
Ever”, Red Critique, p. online,
http://redcritique.org/spring2001/printversions/whatisorthodoxmarxismprint.htm SGarg]
Capitalism is, according to Hennessy's soap-operatic leftism, something that one should always keep in
mind butnot seriously consider overthrowing. She is too cynical to take even her own views seriously:
"This means thateliminating the social structures of exploitation that capitalism absolutely requires and
so violently enacts at the expense of human needs must be on the political agenda, at the every least as
the horizon that sets the terms for imagining change" (232). Capitalist exploitation is a heuristic
considerationnot a revolutionary imperative. Beyond the theatrical moves of the bourgeois left,
however, Orthodox Marxism is emerging as the only understanding of the new global formations that
lead to transformative praxis. Orthodox Marxism has become impossible to ignore because the
objective possibility oftransforming the regime of wage-labor into a system in which the priority is not
profit but meeting the needs of all is confronted as a daily actuality. The flexodox left turns the
emergent class struggles into self-enclosed struggles for symbolic power so to represent class hegemony
in the relations of production as capable of being changed through cross-class "coalitions" when in fact
exploitation is everywhere in the world maintained by such coalitions which are loosing their legitimacy
and breaking apart under the weight of their own contradictions precisely because the class divide is
growing under their rule and beyond their borders. Orthodox Marxism demonstrates thatthe productive
forces of capitalism have reached tremendous levels and have the ability to feed, clothe, and house the
world many times over but are fettered by capitalism's existing social relations: its fundamental drive to
privately consume the social resources of collective labor. That the left today has, in dramatic fashion,
been forced to return (if only rhetorically) to Orthodox Marxism marks the fact that the struggle to
transform capitalism has reached a stage of development that necessitates a systemic theoretical basis
for revolutionary praxis.The hegemonic left now wants to incorporate Orthodox Marxism into its
dogmatic coalitional logic as a discourse which depends for its identity on "class" as "real": which is a
code for the "lived experience" or the transcendental ineffable politics (Lacan) of class as an outside
inferred from the inside (the side of subjective "values") and as such held to be unavailable for positive
knowing. Which is another way of saying thatclass is a matter of "persuasion" and "seduction" rather
than production. What the resulting flexodox marxism cannot explain therefore is that classis not a
matter of what this or that proletarian or even the proletariat as a whole pictures as its goal. It is a
matter ofwhat the proletariat is in actuality and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be
compelled to do(Marx-Engels Reader 135).Orthodox Marxism does not consist of raising "class" as a
dogmatic banner of the "real," but inthe critique of false consciousness that divides the workers by
occulting their collective interest by shifting the focus from their position in social production, their
material antagonism with the capitalist class. "Class as real" (a spectral agency) cannot explain, and
therefore cannot engage in, the material process through which capitalism, by its very own laws of
motion, produces its own "gravedigger" in the global proletariat. What the flexodox return to and
hollowing out of the concepts of Orthodox Marxism proves, among other things, is that "the ideas of the
ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas" (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology 67) and history
progresses despite this ideological hegemony through the agency of labor. In short—"The history of all
hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."
AT: Racism = Human Nature
Racism is not part of human nature, it’s a relatively new concet – Racism is a product of slavery which
is a product of capitalism
Selfa, Senior Research Scientist in the Education and Child Development department at National
Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, 2003
(Lance, “Slavery and the Origins of Racism”, International Socialist Review, Issue 26,
http://www.isreview.org/issues/26/roots_of_racism.shtml)//SGarg
IT IS commonly assumed that racism is as old as human society itself. As long as human beings have
been around, the argument goes, they have always hated or feared people of a different nation or skin
color. In other words, racism is just part of human nature. Representative John L. Dawson, a member of
Congress after the Civil War, insisted that racial prejudice was “implanted by Providence for wise
purposes.” Senator James Doolittle of Wisconsin, a contemporary of Dawson’s, claimed thatan “instinct
of our nature” impelled us to sort people into racial categories and to recognize the natural supremacy
of whites when compared to people with darker skins.1 More than a century later, Richard Herrnstein
and Charles Murray produced The Bell Curve, an 800-page statistics-laden tome that purported to prove
innate racial differences in intelligence.Today’s racists might don the mantel of science to justify their
prejudices, but they are no less crude or mistaken then their 19th century forebears. If racism is part of
human nature, then socialists have a real challenge on their hands. If racism is hard-wired into human
biology, then we should despair of workers ever overcoming the divisions between them to fight for a
socialist society free of racial inequality.Fortunately, racism isn’t part of human nature. The best
evidence for this assertion is the fact that racism has not always existed. Racism is a particular form of
oppression. It stems from discrimination against a group of people based on the idea that some
inherited characteristic, such as skin color, makes them inferior to their oppressors. Yetthe concepts of
“race” and “racism” are modern inventions. They arose and became part of the dominant ideology of
society in the context of the African slave trade at the dawn of capitalism in the 1500s and 1600s.
Although it is a commonplace for academics and opponents of socialism to claim that Karl Marx ignored
racism, Marx in fact described the processes that created modern racism. His explanation of the rise of
capitalism placed the African slave trade, the European extermination of indigenous people in the
Americas, and colonialism at its heart. In Capital, Marx writes: The discovery of gold and silver in
America, the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of the
continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a
preserve for the commercial hunting of black skins are all things that characterize the dawn of the era of
capitalist production.2 Marx connected his explanation of the role of the slave trade in the rise of
capitalism to the social relations that produced racism against Africans. In Wage Labor and Capital,
written twelve years before the American Civil War, he explains: What is a Negro slave? A man of the
black race. The one explanation is as good as the other.A Negro is a Negro. He only becomes a slave in
certain relations. A cotton spinning jenny is a machine for spinning cotton. It only becomes capital in
certain relations. Torn away from these conditions, it is as little capital as gold by itself is money, or as
sugar is the price of sugar.3 In this passage, Marx shows no prejudice to Blacks(“a man of the black
race,” “a Negro is a Negro”), but he mocks society’s equation of “Black” and “slave” (“one explanation is
as good as another”).He shows how the economic and social relations of emerging capitalism thrust
Blacks into slavery(“he only becomes a slave in certain relations”),which produce the dominant ideology
that equates being African with being a slave. These fragments of Marx’s writing give us a good start in
understanding the Marxist explanation of the origins of racism. As the Trinidadian historian of slavery
Eric Williams put it: “Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery.”4
And, one should add,the consequence of modern slavery at the dawn of capitalism. While slavery
existed as an economic system for thousands of years before the conquest of America, racism as we
understand it today did not exist.
AT: Slaves in Ancient Times
There was slavery in Ancient times but not based on race – in fact – the majority of slaves were
“white”
Selfa, Senior Research Scientist in the Education and Child Development department at National
Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, 2003
(Lance, “Slavery and the Origins of Racism”, International Socialist Review, Issue 26,
http://www.isreview.org/issues/26/roots_of_racism.shtml)//SGarg
The classical empires of Greece and Rome were based on slave labor. But ancient slavery was not
viewed in racial terms. Slaves were most often captives in wars or conquered peoples.If we understand
white people as originating in what is today Europe, then most slaves in ancient Greece and Rome were
white. Roman law made slaves the property of their owners, while maintaining a “formal lack of interest
in the slave’s ethnic or racial provenance.” Over the years, slave manumission produced a mixed
population of slave and free in Roman-ruled areas in which all came to be seen as “Romans.”5 The
Greeks drew a sharper line between Greeks and “barbarians,” those subject to slavery. Again, this was
not viewed in racial or ethnic terms, as the socialist historian of the Haitian Revolution, C.L.R. James,
explained: [H]istorically it is pretty well proved now that the ancient Greeks and Romans knew nothing
about race. They had another standard—civilized and barbarian—and you could have white skin and be
a barbarian and you could be black and civilized.6 More importantly, encounters in the ancient world
between the Mediterranean world and black Africans did not produce an upsurge of racism against
Africans. In Before Color Prejudice, Howard University classics professor Frank Snowden documented
innumerable accounts of interaction between the Greco-Roman and Egyptian civilizations and the Kush,
Nubian, and Ethiopian kingdoms of Africa. He found substantial evidence of integration of black Africans
in the occupational hierarchies of the ancient Mediterranean empires and Black-white
intermarriage.Black and mixed race gods appeared in Mediterranean art, and at least one Roman
emperor, Septimius Severus, was an African. Snowden concluded: There is little doubt that many blacks
were physically assimilated into the predominantly white population of the Mediterranean world, in
which there were no institutional barriers or social pressures against black-white unions. In antiquity,
then, black-white sexual relations were never the cause of great emotional crisesÖ.The ancient pattern,
similar in some respects to the Mahgrebian and the Latin American attitude toward racial mixture,
probably contributed to the absence of a pronounced color prejudice in antiquity.7 Between the 10th
and 16th centuries, the chief source of slaves in Western Europe was Eastern Europe. In fact, the word
“slave” comes from the word “Slav,” the people of Eastern Europe.In the Middle Ages, most people sold
into slavery in Europe came from Eastern Europe, the Slavic countries. In Eastern Europe, Russia stood
out as the major area where slaveholders and slaves were of the same ethnicity. Of course, by modernday racial descriptions the Slavs and Russian slaves were white.8 This outline doesn’t mean to suggest a
“pre-capitalist” Golden Age of racial tolerance, least of all in the slave societies of antiquity. Empires
viewed themselves as centers of the universe and looked on foreigners as inferiors. Ancient Greece and
Rome fought wars of conquest against peoples they presumed to be less advanced. Religious scholars
interpreted the Hebrew Bible’s “curse of Ham” from the story of Noah to condemn Africans to slavery.
Cultural and religious associations of the color white with light and angels and the color black with
darkness and evil persisted. But none of these cultural or ideological factors explain the rise of New
World slavery or the “modern” notions of racism that developed from it.
AT: Black Slaves
American “slaves” used to be white – the shift to black slaves was purely economical
Selfa, Senior Research Scientist in the Education and Child Development department at National
Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, 2003
(Lance, “Slavery and the Origins of Racism”, International Socialist Review, Issue 26,
http://www.isreview.org/issues/26/roots_of_racism.shtml)//SGarg
Notwithstanding the horrible conditions African slaves endured, it is important to underscore thatwhen
European powers began carving up the New World between them, African slaves were not part of their
calculations. When we think of slavery today, we think of it primarily from the point of view of its
relationship to racism. Butplanters in the 17th and 18th centuries looked at it primarily as a means to
produce profits for them. Slavery was a method of organizing labor to produce sugar, tobacco, and
cotton. It was not, first and foremost, a system for producing white supremacy.How did slavery in the
U.S. (and the rest of the New World) become the breeding ground for racism? For much of the first
century of colonization in what became the United States,the majority of slaves and other “unfree
laborers” were white. The term “unfree” draws the distinction between slavery and servitude and “free
wage labor” that is the norm in capitalism.One of the historic gains of capitalism for workers is that
workers are “free” to sell their ability to labor to whatever employer will give them the best deal. Of
course, this kind of freedom is limited at best. Unless they are independently wealthy, workers aren’t
free to decide not to work. They’re free to work or starve. Once they do work, they can quit one
employer and go to work for another. Butthe hallmark of systems like slavery and indentured servitude
was that slaves or servants were “bound over” to a particular employer for a period of time or for life in
the case of slaves.The decision to work for another master wasn’t the slave’s or the servant’s. It was the
master’s, who could sell slaves for money or other commodities like livestock, lumber, or machinery.The
North American colonies started predominantly as private business enterprises in the early 1600s.
Unlike the Spanish, whose conquests of Mexico and Peru in the 1500s produced fabulous gold and silver
riches for Spain, settlers in places like the colonies that became Maryland, Rhode Island, and Virginia
made money through agriculture. In addition to sheer survival,the settlers’ chief aim was to obtain a
labor force that could produce the large amounts of indigo, tobacco, sugar, and other crops that would
be sold back to England.From 1607, when Jamestown was founded in Virginia to about 1685,the primary
source of agricultural labor in English North America came from white indentured servants.The colonists
first attempted to press the indigenous population into labor. But the Indians refused to be become
servants to the English. Indians resisted being forced to work, and they escaped into the surrounding
area, which, after all, they knew far better than the English. One after another, the English colonies
turned to a policy of driving out the Indians. They then turned to white servants. Indentured servants
were predominantly young white men—usually English or Irish—who were required to work for a
planter master for some fixed term of four to seven years. They received room and board on the
plantation but no pay. Andthey could not quit and work for another planter.They had to serve their
term, after which they might be able to acquire some land and to start a farm for themselves. They
became servants in several ways. Some were prisoners, convicted of petty crimes in Britain, or convicted
of being troublemakers in Britain’s first colony, Ireland. Many were kidnapped off the streets of
Liverpool or Manchester and put on ships to the New World. Some voluntarily became servants, hoping
to start farms after they fulfilled their obligations to their masters.15 For most of the 1600s, the planters
tried to get by with a predominantly white, but multiracial workforce. But as the 17th century wore on,
colonial leaders became increasingly frustrated with white servant labor. For one thing, they faced the
problem of constantly having to recruit labor as servants’ terms expired. Second, after servants finished
their contracts and decided to set up their farms, they could become competitors to their former
masters. And finally, the planters didn’t like the servants’ “insolence.” The midñ1600s were a time of
revolution in England, when ideas of individual freedom were challenging the old hierarchies based on
royalty.The colonial planters tended to be royalists, but their servants tended to assert their “rights as
Englishmen” to better food, clothing, and time off.Most laborers in the colonies supported the servants.
As the century progressed, the costs of servant labor increased. Planters started to petition the colonial
boards and assemblies to allow the large-scale importation of African slaves.Black slaves worked on
plantations in small numbers throughout the 1600s. But until the end of the 1600s, it cost planters more
to buy slaves than to buy white servants. Blacks lived in the colonies in a variety of statuses—some were
free, some were slaves, some were servants. The law in Virginia didn’t establish the condition of
lifetime, perpetual slavery or even recognize African servants as a group different from white servants
until 1661. Blacks could serve on juries, own property, and exercise other rights. Northampton County,
Virginia, recognized interracial marriages and, in one case, assigned a free Black couple to act as foster
parents for an abandoned white child. There were even a few examples of Black freemen who owned
white servants. Free Blacks in North Carolina had voting rights.16 In the 1600s, the Chesapeake society
of eastern Virginia had a multiracial character: There is persuasive evidence dating from the 1620s
through the 1680s that there were those of European descent in the Chesapeake who were prepared to
identify and cooperate with people of African descent. These affinities were forged in the world of
plantation work. On many plantations Europeans and West Africans labored side by side in the tobacco
fields, performing exactly the same types and amounts of work; they lived and ate together in shared
housing; they socialized together; and sometimes they slept together.17 A white servants’ ditty of the
time said, “We and the Negroes both alike did fare/Of work and food we had equal share.” The planters’
economic calculations played a part in the colonies’ decision to move towards full-scale slave labor. By
the end of the 17th century, the price of white indentured servants outstripped the price of African
slaves. A planter could buy an African slave for life for the same price that he could purchase a white
servant for ten years. As Eric Williams explained: 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.Ö[The planter] would have gone to the moon, if necessary, for labor. Africa was nearer than the
moon, nearer too than the more populous countries of India and China. But their turn would soon
come.18 Planters’ fear of a multiracial uprising also pushed them towards racial slavery. Because a rigid
racial division of labor didn’t exist in the 17th century colonies, many conspiracies involving Black slaves,
servants, and white indentured servants were hatched and foiled.We know about them today because
of court proceedings that punished the runaways after their capture. As historians T.H. Breen and
Stephen Innes point out, “These casesÖreveal only extreme actions, desperate attempts to escape, but
for every group of runaways who came before the courts there were doubtless many more poor whites
and blacks who cooperated in smaller, less daring ways on the plantation.”19
Misc
Race = Institutionalized
Your attempts to fix racism fail to produce real change– racism is institutionalized in various levels of
capitalist modes of eduacation
Subotnik, J.D. (Juris Doctor) @ Columbia University School of Law, 98
(Dan, “What’s Wrong with Critical Race Theory?: Reopening the Case for Middle Class Values” Touro
Law, 1/1/1998, pg 709-712, bit.ly/18wTRCk)//SGarg
 CRT – Critical Race Theory
 CRAT – Advocate of Critical Race Theory
We shall come back to the question of language. In the meantime, if we are to evaluate the message of
multiculturalism in Peller's and Williams's work, we must look to our schools, for the schools have taken
the message most closely to heart. In the name of inclusion, over the past ten years textbooks have
been purged, demasculinized, and reconstructed. A wide array of new authors now grace reading lists.
Ethnic holidays of all kinds are celebrated in the classroom. A more diverse group of teachers and
administrators populate our urban schools than ever before. But what do schools have to show for their
efforts? Have comfort levels and test scores for minorities gone up? 136 A recent video of life at
Berkeley High School provides an instructive answer. Filmed during the 1993-94 school year, School
Colors137 tells a story about one of the first high schools to voluntarily integrate, a school that today is
38 percent white, 35 percent African American, 11 percent Asian-Pacific Islander, 9 percent Hispanic,
and 7 percent mixed race, a school that has an Afro-American Studies department that sponsors fifteen
courses ranging from black economics to Swahili.'38 One cannot be sure of the extent to which the film
accurately represents the school, or to which the school represents urban America, but to the extent
that these are representative, School Colors gives its viewers pause about Williams's and Peller's
prescriptions. Here are some vignettes from the video. A Hispanic student says it is an insult to be called
an American. A black teacher tells his AfricanAmerican students that "America denotes the nation you
live in... but the African part is your essence." 139 A Chinese-American boy is labeled "whitewashed"
because he has white friends. A Hispanic girl breaks down when she is accused of betraying her group by
dating a white boy. A white boy describes himself as "White, real white" and goes on to say he "likes to
promote whiteness." 140 A Hispanic boy complains of the Greek statue overlooking the campus, while
the narrator explains that owing to concerns about ethnocentrism, "Toga Day" is now "Ethnicity
Day."141 These sentiments, as could be expected, are reflected in Berkeley High geography. A student,
pointing, says, "This is Africa."'142 "That's Europe. I don't care to go over there. I stay here, maybe [at
the] snack bar, something like that, but, that's about it."' 143 "Berkeley High is like the real world," says
another. "And the real world is totally segregated. No such thing as integration when it comes to
America. We all want to be with our own kind and that's the way humans are."'144 "I mean you come
here and it's nothing in the middle; it's just black, white, Asian,” says a white girl. "[lt's really hard."'145
It is not surprising that several students complained about being attacked by members of other groups.
To be sure, inter-ethnic harmony is not necessarily the highest social value. So we turn to the academic
side; how are the kids doing? The answer is not reassuring. Eighty-five percent of the advanced
placement kids, we learn, are white and Asian, while 85 percent of those in the lowest levels are black
and Hispanic; in fact, the D and F rate for the latter groups is three times higher than for the former.14 6
This is not the place to discuss grading-or tracking. Our subject is what pursuing an authentic lifestyle
might actually mean for young blacks-and for the rest of our community. Consider that in America today
only a tiny fraction of our Ph.D.s in physics, astronomy, and mathematics are black. 147 If, as a result,
science comes to be seen as a white thing, what will induce our brightest black students to enter these
professions? 148 It is not only that to stay competitive we Americans need all the highly trained
scientists we can get, but, to be brutally realistic, if minorities are not represented in the highestprestige, highest-visibility occupations, what will counter the destructive conclusion that their absence
stems not from lack of desire but from lack of ability? In short, can this country afford a definition of
authenticity that amounts to a reification of the racial status quo? A drive for authenticity will come at
no smaller cost in the humanities. Here is what Judge, a young black student at Berkeley High, has to say
to Tiaye, who has just argued for the importance of knowing and using standard grammar: "Elijah
Mohammed, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Huey Newton-they didn't speak what you wanna call
functioning grammar-they, they function in this world. You ain't gotta speak the cracker language to live
in a cracker world." 149 The accuracy of the premise aside, is this a conclusion that our students should
be drawing in school? Is Judge on his way to Columbia Law School? Would even Williams want him as
her student? Black economist Glenn Loury has drawn what seems to be the logical conclusion. "Anything
that either incites other Americans to look upon inner-city blacks as different from themselves, or
suggests to the inner city blacks that their future is in any place other than the mainstream, is a
dangerous thing." 150 Once again, it is not clear whether Berkeley High is representative of the
American urban high school. But even without further data one has to wonder whether life at Berkeley
High as depicted in School Colors is not the natural consequence of the fear of cultural annihilation so
promiscuously spread by CRATs.151
Cede the Political
Postmodern identity politics re-entrench oppression by justifying the policies of the right
Hill 9, teaches at Middlesex University and is Visiting Professor of Critical Education Policy and Equality Studies at the University of Limerick,
Ireland (Dave, “Culturalist and Materialist Explanations of Class and "Race"”, Cultural Logic 2009 http://clogic.eserver.org/2009/Hill.pdf ***CRT
is Critical Race Theory)
Young (2006) notes that “in terms of race, an Althusserian account is presented in Stuart Hall’s, 1980 article, “Race, Articulation, and Societies
Structured in Dominance”: by the 1990s, Hall shifts to a semiotic notion of race, and sees race as a “floating signifier.” In many ways, Hall’s
intellectual trajectory on race mirrors the larger shift from the “material” to the “semiotic” in social theory. (from Young, 2006) In a similar
critique of Hall’s “New Times” analysis, I also trace the Stuart Hall’s (and other post-Marxist and postmodernist) progression from materialist
analyses to semiotic/culturalist analyses) (Hill, 2001, 2005a). So does Jenny Bourne, in her discussion of the rise of cultural studies, the “Hokum
of New Times,” and her critique of Hall over his post-Marxist position on “race,” “identity,” and difference. She writes, The
politics of
identity and difference were now being clearly used to justify the break with class politics and, indeed, with
the concept of Left politics altogether. (idem) The “personal is the political” also helped to shift the center of gravity
of struggle from the community and society to the individual. “What has to be done?” was replaced by
“who am I?” as the blacks, feminists and gays, previously part of the pressure groups in Left parties or in social movements campaigning for
rights, turned to Identity Politics. Articulating one’s identity changed from being a path to political action to being
the political action itself. (2002:200) Bourne, continues, Sivanandan critiques postmodernism not so much in terms of the inward
looking self-referencing type of debate, beloved of academics, as in terms of the danger it spells to anti-racist practice. First, he takes issue
with those intellectuals who, at a time when racism against the black working class is getting worse,
“have retreated into culturalism and ethnicity or, worse, fled into discourse and deconstruction and
representation – as though to interpret the world is more important than to change it, as though changing the
interpretation is all we could do to change the world.” And in an acerbic aside Sivanandan adds: “Marxists interpret the world in order to
change it, postmodernists change the interpretation” (cited in Bourne, 2002, p. 203). Class is absolutely central to Marxist ontology and
epistemology. Ultimately, it is economically induced and it conditions and permeates all social reality in capitalist systems. Marxists
therefore critique
postmodern and post-structural arguments that class is, or ever can be, “constructed
extra-economically,” or equally that it can be “deconstructed politically” – an epistemic position which
has underwritten in the previous two decades numerous so-called “death of class” theories, arguably the
most significant of which are Laclau & Mouffe (1985) and Laclau (1996). I am not arguing against the complexities of
subjective identities. People have Different subjectivities. Some individual coalminers in Britain were gay, black,
Betty Page or Madonna fetishists, heavily influenced by Biggles or Punk, their male gym teacher or their female
History teacher, by Robert Tressell or by Daily Porn masturbation, by Radical Socialists or by Fascist
ideology. But the coal mining industry has virtually ceased to exist in Britain, and the police occupation of mining
villages such as Orgreave during the Great Coalminers’ Strike (in Britain) of 1984-85 and the privatisation of British Coal and virtual wiping
out of the coal mining industry was motivated by class warfare of the ruling capitalist fraction. It was
class warfare from above. Whatever individuals in mining families like to do in bed, their dreams, and in their transmutation of
television images, they suffered because of their particular class fraction position – they were miners – and historically
the political shock troops of the British manual working class. Postmodernism’s rejection of metanarratives can be seen
as symptomatic of the theoretical inability to construct a mass solidaristic oppositional transformatory
political project, and that it is based on the refusal to recognise the validity or existence of solidaristic social class. More importantly, this
general theoretical shortcoming is politically disabling because the effect of eschewing mass solidaristic
policy is, in effect, supporting a reactionary status quo. Both as an analysis and as a vision, post-modernism has its dangers
– but more so as a vision. It fragments and denies economic, social, political, and cultural relations. In particular, it
rejects the solidaristic metanarratives of neo-Marxism and socialism. It thereby serves to disempower the oppressed and to
uphold the hegemonic Radical Right in their privileging of individualism and in their stress on patterns
and relations of consumption as opposed to relations of production. Postmodernism analysis, in effect if not
in intention, justifies ideologically the current Radical Right economic, political, and educational project.
Critical pedagogy hides systems of class oppression behind concepts of individualism
Zavarzadeh 3 - retired professor of English at Syracuse University (Mas'ud, “The Pedagogy of Totality” Journal of Advanced Composition
Theory 2003 JAC Online ***“the event” Zavarzadeh refers to is 9/11)
These pedagogues
theorize desire, the affective, trauma, feelings, and experience, which are all effects of
class relations, as spontaneous reality and deploy them in teaching to outlaw lessons in conceptual
analysis of the social totality-which is aimed at producing class consciousness in the student (the future
worker). The classroom is then constituted as the scene of desire where the student is interpellated as the subject of his or her affects which,
in their assumed inimitability, ascribe to him an imaginary, matchless individuality. The un-said exceptionality of affect in the
classroom of desire becomes an ideological alibi for the negation of collectivity grounded in objective
class interests, and the student is taught to "wage a war on totality" by activating "the differences," and in
"the honor of the name" identify with himself as an unsurpassable singularity that exceeds all representations (Lyotard, Postmodern 82). The
pedagogy of totality is the negation of the negation. Berube's stories of a political CIA are narratives of capitalist desire aimed at fragmenting
the internationalism of class connectedness among working people by dehistoricizing and localizing affects (suffering of the same and cheering
of the other). However, the event has a history and, as an objective materiality, cannot be understood without placing it in the world-historical
class struggles. But
in the classroom of "enlightened false consciousness" constituted by desire, class has no
place. Any explanations of the event as a moment in the unfolding of international class struggles, as a moment in which "two great classes"
(the rich and the poor) are finally "directly facing each other," is suspended in silence (Marx and Engels, Manifesto 41). To put class back
into teaching of the event is to move beyond dissipating history through "trauma" and anecdotes of affect
and thus to put an end to the teaching of savviness, which masquerades as a curing of ignorance. The
task of the pedagogy of totality is to teach the abstract relations that structure the concrete material
reality and not be distracted by the details of appearance because "abstractions reflect nature more deeply, truly and completely" and bring
the student closer to grasping social totality: "the relations of production in their totality" (Marx, Wage Labour 29), which is constituted by class
antagonism, and therefore its unity is a "unity of opposites" (Lenin, "On" 358). The
hostility to conceptual analysis and
particularly to class critique in contemporary pedagogy goes well beyond the teach-ins on the event. It is the
fundamental dogma of "radical" bourgeois pedagogy. Henry Giroux, for example, wipes out class from pedagogy on the
grounds that class is part of what he calls "totalizing" politics (Impure 25-26). To be so totally opposed to totalizing is, of
course, itself a totalization. But totalizing in opposing totalization does not seem to bother Giroux and other anti-totalizing
pedagogues because the issue, ultimately, is really not epistemological ("totalizing") but economic ( class). In contemporary
pedagogy, "totalizing" is an epistemological cover for the class cleansing of pedagogy. The pedagogy of
affect is always and ultimately a ruse for pragmatism, which is, as the writings of Richard Rorty demonstrate, an
apologetics for what actually "is"-the dominant system of wage labor (see Achieving). Pragmatism deploys
the affective to naturalize the existing social relations of property by teaching affect as the only site in which the
"hopes and aspirations" of the subject of learning can be fulfilled (Brooks): a site in which class is "dead" (Pakluski and Waters), and desire is
sovereign (Gallop, "Teacher's"). Sovereignty, however,
is not the sovereignty of the individual of affect but of
consumption, which is eroticized to interpellate him or her as the individual of affect. "Ideologically, we see the
same contradiction in the fact that the bourgeoisie endowed the individual with an unprecedented importance, but at the same time that same
individuality was annihilated by the economic conditions to which it was subjected, by the reification created by commodity production"
(Lukacs, History 62).
Reification Turn
Turn: talking about race as an immutable or special category reifies racism—it’s
oppression with a different name
Fields 90 (Barbara Jane, professor of American history at Columbia University, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of
America”, New Left Review 181, May/June 1990, JSTOR)//AS
Those who create and re-create race today are not just the mob that killed a young Afro-American
man on a street in Brooklyn or the people who join the Klan and the White Order. They are also those
academic writers whose invocation of self propelling ‘attitudes’ and tragic flaws assigns Africans and
their descendants to a special category, placing them in a world exclusively theirs and outside history— a form of
intellectual apartheid no less ugly or oppressive, despite its righteous (not to say self-righteous) trappings,
than that practised by the bio- and theo-racists; and for which the victims, like slaves of old, are expected to be grateful. They are
the academic ‘liberals’ and ‘progressives’ in whose version of race the neutral shibboleths difference
and diversity replace words like slavery, injustice, oppression and exploitation, diverting attention
from the anything-but-neutral history these words denote. They are also the Supreme Court and spokesmen for
affirmative action, unable to promote or even define justice except by enhancing the authority and prestige of race; which they will
continue to do forever so long as the most radical goal of the political opposition remains the
reallocation of unemployment, poverty and injustice rather than their abolition. The creators and re-creators of
race include as well a young woman who chuckled appreciatively when her four-year-old boy, upon being asked whether a young friend whose
exploit he was recounting was black, answered: ‘No; he’s brown.’ The young woman’s benevolent laughter was for the innocence of youth, too
soon corrupted. But for all its benevolence, her laughter hastened the corruption whose inevitability she laments, for it taught the little boy
that his empirical description was cute but inappropriate. It enacted for him, in a way that hand-me-down stereotypes never could, the truth
that physical description follows race, not the other way around. Of
just such small, innocuous and constantly repeated
rituals, often undertaken with the best of motives, is race reborn every day. Evil may result as well
from good as from ill intentions. That is the fallibility and tragedy of human history—or, to use a different vocabulary, its dialectic.
Nothing handed down from the past could keep race alive if we did not constantly reinvent and reritualize it to fit our own terrain. If race lives on today, it can do so only because we continue to create
and re-create it in our social life, continue to verify it, and thus continue to need a social vocabulary that will allow us to make
sense, not of what our ancestors did then, but of what we ourselves choose to do now.*
Lack of Marxist understanding of race reifies racism—ignores other forms of
oppression and the true way racism operates in society
Young 06 (Robert, Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature. At New York University, “Putting Materialism back into
Race Theory: Toward a Transformative Theory of Race”, The Red Critique 11, Winter/Spring 2006,
http://www.redcritique.org/WinterSpring2006/puttingmaterialismbackintoracetheory.htm)//AS
McGary's desire to place black subjectivity beyond Marxism creates contradictions in his text. McGary asserts that
the economic structures of slavery and Jim Crow shape cultural norms. Thus in a post-slavery, post-Jim Crow era, there would still be an
economic structure maintaining contemporary oppressive norms—from McGary's logic this must be the case. However, McGary
remains
silent on the contemporary economic system structuring black alienation: capitalism. Apparently, it is
legitimate to foreground and critique the historical connection between economics and alienation but any inquiry into the present day
connection between economics and alienation is off limits. This other economic structure—capitalism—remains the unsaid in McGary's
discourse, and consequently
he provides ideological support for capitalism—the exploitative
infrastructure which produces and maintains alienation for blacks as well as for all working people. In a very
revealing moment, a moment that confirms my reading of McGary's pro-capitalist position, he asserts that "it is possible for African-Americans
to combat or overcome this form of alienation described by recent writers without overthrowing capitalism" (20). Here, in a most lucid way, we
see the ideological connection between the superstructure (philosophy) and the base (capitalism). Philosophy provides ideological support for
capitalism, and, in this instance, we can also see how philosophy carries out class politics at the level of theory (Althusser Lenin 18). McGary
points out "that Black people have been used in ways that white people have not" (91). His
observation may be true, but it does not mean that whites have not also been "used"; yes, whites
may be "used" differently, but they are still "used" because that is the logic of exploitative regimes —
people are "used", that is to say, their labor is commodified and exchanged for profit. McGary's interview signals what I call an
"isolationist" view. This view disconnects black alienation from other social relations; hence, it
ultimately reifies race, and, in doing so, suppresses materialist inquiries into the class logic of race . That
is to say, the meaning of race is not to be found within its own internal dynamics but rather in dialectical
relation to and as an ideological justification of the exploitative wage-labor economy. This isolationist
position finds a fuller and, no less problematic, articulation in Charles W. Mills' The Racial Contract, a text which undermines the possibility for a
transracial transformative political project. Mills evinces the ideological assumptions and consequent politics of the isolationist view in a long
endnote to chapter 1. Mills privileges
race oppression, but, in doing so, he must suppress other forms of
oppression, such as gender and class. Mills acknowledges that there are gender and class relations within the white population,
but he still privileges race, as if the black community is not similarly divided along gender and class lines. Hence, the ideological necessity for
Mills to execute a double move: he
must marginalize class difference within the white community and suppress
it within the black community. Consequently, Mills removes the possibility of connecting white
supremacy, a political-cultural structure, to its underlying economic base.
No Absolute Race
Race was created to sustain slavery, not vice versa—it’s an undoable social
construction
Fields 90 (Barbara Jane, professor of American history at Columbia University, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of
America”, New Left Review 181, May/June 1990, JSTOR)//AS
Racial ideology supplied the means of explaining slavery to people whose terrain was a republic
founded on radical doctrines of liberty and natural rights; and, more important, a republic in which those doctrines
seemed to represent accurately the world in which all but a minority lived. Only when the denial of liberty became an
anomaly apparent even to the least observant and reflective members of Euro- American society did ideology
systematically explain the anomaly. But slavery got along for a hundred years after its establishment
without race as its ideological rationale. The reason is simple. Race explained why some people could
rightly be denied what others took for granted: namely, liberty, supposedly a self-evident gift of nature’s God. But
there was nothing to explain until most people could, in fact, take liberty for granted—as the indentured
servants and disfranchised freedmen of colonial America could not. Nor was there anything calling for a radical
explanation where everyone in society stood in a relation of inherited subordination to someone else:
servant to master, serf to nobleman, vassal to overlord, overlord to king, king to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. It was not AfroAmericans, furthermore, who needed a racial explanation; it was not they who invented themselves
as a race. Euro- Americans resolved the contradiction between slavery and liberty by defining Afro-Americans as a race; Afro-Americans
resolved the contradiction more straightforwardly by calling for the abolition of slavery. From the era of the American, French and Haitian
revolutions on, they claimed liberty as theirs by natural right.38 They
did not originate the large nineteenth-century
literature purporting to prove their biological inferiority, nor, by and large, did they accept it. Vocabulary
can be very deceptive. Both Afro- and Euro-Americans used the words that today denote race, but
they did not understand those words the same way. Afro-Americans understood the reason for their enslavement to be, as
Frederick Douglass put it, ‘not color, but crime’.39 Afro-Americans invented themselves, not as a race, but as a
nation. They were not troubled, as modern scholars often are, by the use of racial vocabulary to express their sense of nationality. AfroAmerican soldiers who petitioned on behalf of ‘These poor nation of colour’ and ‘we Poore Nation of a Colered rast [race]’ saw nothing
incongruous about the language.40
Misc. AT:Wilderson
Ideas of unbridgeable difference are essentializing and racist themselves
Mullings 05 (Leith, Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York, “Interrogating Racism: Toward an Antiracist
Anthropology”, Annual Review of Anthropology 34, 2005, University of Michigan Libraries)//AS
Although overt racism has diminished in many countries, racial inequality continues and has in some
instances worsened. Perhaps the most significant new feature isthe transformation of practices and ideologies of
racism to a configuration that flourishes without official support of legal and civic institution s. Struggling to
interpret these complex new forms of racism, scholars have bestowed such appelations as “laissez-faire racism” (Bobo 2004, p15); postracism
(Winant 2001); racism in consequence rather than by formal institution (Bowser 1995b); “unmarked racisms” (Harrison 2000, p. 52); neoracism
or cultural racism (Balibar 1991); and cultural fundamentalism (Stolcke 1995). Observers agree that often
coexisting with flagrant
forms of racism and genocide, “unmarked racisms” have been the trend in the colonial metropoles and former
white settler societies. For example, Cowlishaw (2000) describes the postracial view that emerged in the 1970s as part of the modern
repositioning of the Australian state, where the trend has been to expunge or conceal references to
aborigines as a race,mystifying historically constructed differences and thereby obscuring the reasons
for contemporary inequality—and the need for restitution.6 In South Africa, where the rationale for apartheid was a
racialized cultural essentialism, the society remains deeply stratified by race. The rhetoric of multiculturalism and colorblindness (Sharp 2001, Erasmus 2005) is employed to suggest that the playing field is now level, facilitating the
widespread opposition by whites to affirmative action, redistribution, and other forms of compensatory justice (Fletcher
2000). In Europe, observers have described a “new racism” that does not rely on notions of biological
inferiority but rather appropriates the concept of culture and the “right to be different” to undergird a
neoracism that essentializes culturaldifferences as unbridgeable . There has been some difference of opinion about
whether this is a new formulation of racism (e.g., Balibar 1991); a reversion to pre–eighteenth century scientific racism in which cultural
differences were seen as unbridgeable (Fredrickson 2002); or as Stolcke (1995) contends, a cultural fundamentalism based in notions of
citizenship and distinct from traditional racism, which is grounded in biology.
Assuming that white/black interactions are necessarily negative is a fallacy that
prevents any change in ideology or politics
Fields 90 (Barbara Jane, professor of American history at Columbia University, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of
America”, New Left Review 181, May/June 1990, JSTOR)//AS
Perhaps most intellectually debilitating of all is a third assumption: namely, that any situation involving
people of European descent and people of African descent automatically falls under the heading ‘race
relations’. Argument by definition and tautology thereby replaces argument by analysis in anything to do
with people of African descent. Probably a majority of American historians think of slavery in the United States as primarily a
system of race relations—as though the chief business of slavery were the production of white supremacy rather than the production of cotton,
sugar, rice and tobacco. One
historian has gone so far as to call slavery ‘the ultimate segregator’.7 He does
not ask why Europeans seeking the ‘ultimate’ method of segregating Africans would go to the trouble
and expense of transporting them across the ocean for that purpose, when they could have achieved
the same end so much more simply by leaving the Africans in Africa. No one dreams of analysing the
struggle of the English against the Irish as a problem in race relations, even though the rationale that the
English developed for suppressing the ‘barbarous’ Irish later served nearly word for word as a rationale for suppressing
Africans and indigenous American Indians.8 Nor does anyone dream of analysing serfdom in Russia as primarily a problem of
race relations, even though the Russian nobility invented fictions of their innate, natural superiority over the serfs as preposterous as any
devised by American racists.9 Loose
thinking on these matters leads to careless language, which in turn
promotes misinformation. A widely used textbook of American history, written by very distinguished historians, summarizes the
three-fifths clause of the United States Constitution (article 1, section 2) thus: ‘For both direct taxes and representation, five blacks were to be
counted as equivalent to three whites.’10 The three-fifths clause does not distinguish between blacks and whites—not even, using more polite
terms, between black and white people. (Indeed, the terms black and white—or, for that matter, Negro and Caucasian—do not appear
anywhere in the Constitution, as is not surprising in a legal document in which slang of that kind would be hopelessly imprecise.) The threefifths
clause distinguishes between free Persons—who might be of European or African descent—and other Persons, a euphemism for slaves. The
issue at stake was whether slaveowning citizens would hold an advantage over non-slaveowning citizens; more precisely, whether slaves would
be counted in total population for the purpose of apportioning representation in Congress—an advantage for slaveholders in states with large
numbers of slaves—and of assessing responsibility for direct taxes—a disadvantage. The Constitution answered by saying yes, but at a ratio of
three-fifths, rather than the five-fifths that slaveholders would have preferred for representation or the zero-fifths they would have preferred
for taxation. When
wellmeaning people affirm, for rhetorical effect, that the Constitution declared AfroAmericans to be only three-fifths human, they commit an error for which American historians
themselves must accept the blame. When virtually the whole of a society, including supposedly thoughtful,
educated, intelligent persons, commits itself to belief in propositions that collapse into absurdity upon the
slightest examination, the reason is not hallucination or delusion or even simple hypocrisy; rather, it is ideology. And
ideology is impossible for anyone to analyse rationally who remains trapped on its terrain. 11 That is
why race still proves so hard for historians to deal with historically, rather than in terms of metaphysics, religion or
socio- (that is, pseudo-) biology.
Race Focus Bad
Focus on race is a convenient political device that assuages liberal’s egos while
ingoring the true problem—the aff’s insistence on race as the defining factor only
makes the situation worse
Reed 05 (Adolph L., professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, “The Real Divide”, The Progressive, November 2005,
http://progressive.org/mag_reed1105)
And neither
wing of the labor movement—original recipe or extra crispy—has come near probing at the roots of
the catastrophe in New Orleans in the last two decades of bipartisan neoliberal policy. While both admirably mobilized
humanitarian aid, the AFL-CIO’s initial statement was pro forma and tepid in its criticism of the Bush administration. Change to Win’s was smallminded and opportunistic; it called on everyone to contribute to the Red Cross and Salvation Army and demanded that the rebuilding effort not
suspend worker protections. This is especially sad because the labor movement is the one vehicle we have for reaching and crafting the broad
base of working people who must be the foundation of any political movement that can hope to turn this tide. And it’s failing miserably. Race
in this context becomes
a cheap and safely predictable alternative to pressing a substantive critique of the
sources of this horror in New Orleans and its likely outcomes. Granted, the images projected from the Superdome, the
convention center, overpasses, and rooftops seemed to cry out a stark statement of racial inequality. But that’s partly because in the
contemporary U.S., race is the most familiar language of inequality or injustice. It’s what we see partly
because it’s what we’re accustomed to seeing, what we look for. As I argued in The Nation, class—as income,
wealth, and access to material resources, including a safety net of social connections—was certainly a
better predictor than race of who evacuated the city before the hurricane, who was able to survive the
storm itself, who was warehoused in the Superdome or convention center or stuck without food and water on the
parched overpasses, who is marooned in shelters in Houston or elsewhere, and whose interests will be factored into the
reconstruction of the city, who will be able to return. New Orleans is a predominantly black city, and it
is a largely poor city. The black population is disproportionately poor, and the poor population is
disproportionately black. It is not surprising that those who were stranded and forgotten, probably those
who died, were conspicuously black and poor. None of that, however, means that race—or even racism —is
adequate as an explanation of those patterns of inequality. And race is especially useless as a basis on
which to craft a politics that can effectively pursue social justice. Before the “yes, buts” begin, I am not
claiming that systemic inequalities in the United States are not significantly racialized. The evidence of
racial disparities is far too great for any sane or honest person to deny, and they largely emerge from a history of discrimination
and racial injustice. Nor am I saying that we should overlook that fact in the interest of some idealized nonracial or post-racial politics. Let me
be blunter than I’ve ever been in print about what I am saying: As a political strategy, exposing racism is
wrongheaded and at best an utter waste of time. It is the political equivalent of an appendix: a useless
vestige of an earlier evolutionary moment that’s usually innocuous but can flare up and become
harmful. There are two reasons for this judgment. One is that the language of race and racism is too imprecise to
describe effectively even how patterns of injustice and inequality are racialized in a post-Jim Crow world.
“Racism” can cover everything from individual prejudice and bigotry, unself-conscious perception of
racial stereotypes, concerted group action to exclude or subordinate, or the results of ostensibly
neutral market forces.It can be a one-word description and explanation of patterns of unequal distribution
of income and wealth, services and opportunities, police brutality, a stockbroker’s inability to get a cab,
neighborhood dislocation and gentrification, poverty, unfair criticism of black or Latino athletes, or
being denied admission to a boutique. Because the category is so porous, it doesn’t really explain
anything. Indeed, it is an alternative to explanation. Exposing racism apparently makes those who do it
feel good about themselves. Doing so is cathartic, though safely so, in the same way that proclaiming one’s
patriotism is in other circles. It is a summary, concluding judgment rather than a preliminary to a concrete argument. It doesn’t allow for
politically significant distinctions; in fact, as a strategy, exposing racism requires subordinating the
discrete features of a political situation to the overarching goal of asserting the persistence and power
of racism as an abstraction. This leads to the second reason for my harsh judgment. Many liberals gravitate to the
language of racism not simply because it makes them feel righteous but also because it doesn’t carry
any political warrant beyond exhorting people not to be racist. In fact, it often is exactly the opposite of
a call to action. Such formulations as “racism is our national disease” or similar pieties imply that racism is a natural condition. Further, it
implies that most whites inevitably and immutably oppose blacks and therefore can’t be expected to
align with them around common political goals. This view dovetails nicely with Democrats’ contention that the
only way to win elections is to reject a social justice agenda that is stigmatized by association with
blacks and appeal to an upper-income white constituency concerned exclusively with issues like abortion rights and the deficit. Upper-status
liberals are more likely to have relatively secure, rewarding jobs, access to health care, adequate housing, and prospects for providing for the
kids’ education, and are much less likely to be in danger of seeing their nineteen-year-old go off to Iraq. They tend, therefore, to have a higher
threshold of tolerance for political compromises in the name of electing this year’s sorry pro-corporate Democrat. Acknowledging
racism—and, of course, being pro-choice—is one of the few ways many of them can distinguish themselves from
their Republican co-workers and relatives. As the appendix analogy suggests, insistence on understanding inequality
in racial terms is a vestige of an earlier political style. The race line persists partly out of habit and partly because it
connects with the material interests of those who would be race relations technicians. In this sense, race is not an alternative to
class. The tendency to insist on the primacy of race itself stems from a class perspective. For roughly a
generation it seemed reasonable to expect that defining inequalities in racial terms would provoke some,
albeit inadequate, remedial response from the federal government. But that’s no longer the case; nor has it been
for quite some time. That approach presumed a federal government that was concerned at least not to
appear racially unjust. Such a government no longer exists.A key marker of the right’s victory in
national politics is that the discussion of race now largely serves as a way to reinforce a message to
whites that the public sector is there merely to help some combination of black, poor, and
loser.Liberals have legitimized this perspective through their own racial bad faith. For many whites, the
discussion of race also reinforces the idea that cutting public spending is justifiably aimed at weaning a lazy black underclass off the dole or—in
the supposedly benign, liberal Democratic version—teaching them “personal responsibility.” New
Orleans is instructive. The right
has a built-in counter to the racism charge by mobilizing all the scurrilous racial stereotypes that it has
propagated to justify attacks on social protection and government responsibility all along. Only those who already
are inclined to believe that racism is the source of inequality accept that charge. For others, nasty victimblaming narratives abound to explain away obvious racial disparities. What we must do, to pursue justice for displaced, impoverished
New Orleanians as well as for the society as a whole, is to emphasize that their plight is a more extreme, condensed
version of the precarious position of millions of Americans today, as more and more lose health care,
bankruptcy protection, secure employment, afford¬able housing, civil liberties, and access to
education. And their plight will be the future of many, many more people in this country once the bipartisan neoliberal consensus reduces
government to a tool of corporations and the investor class alone.
Focus on race is a neoliberal mask for expoloitation of the masses—it divides the poor
black from the elite regardless of race and prevents successful movements against
capitalism
Reed 05 (Adolph L.,professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, “Class-ifying the Hurricane”, The Nation, 10/3/05,
http://www.thenation.com/article/class-ifying-hurricane#axzz2ZcPH3kri)//AS
What will be lost is the central point that the destruction was not an "act of God." Nor was it simply the
product of incompetence, lack of empathy or cronyism. Those exist in abundance, to be sure, but they are symptoms, not ultimate causes.
What happened in New Orleans is the culmination of twenty-five years of disparagement of any idea
of public responsibility; of a concerted effort--led by the right but as part of a bipartisan consensus--to reduce government's functions
to enhancing plunder by corporations and the wealthy and punishing everyone else, undermining any notion of social solidarity. I know that
some progressives believe this incident will mark a turning point in American politics. Perhaps, especially if gas prices continue to rise. I suspect,
however, that this belief is only another version of the cargo cult that has pervaded the American left in different ways for a century: the wish
for some magical intervention or technical fix that will substitute for organizing a broad popular base around a clearly articulated, alternative
vision that responds to most people's pressing concerns. The greater likelihood is that within
a month Democratic liberals will
have smothered the political moment just as they've smothered every other opportunity we've had
since Ronald Reagan's election. True, Nancy Pelosi and others finally began to bark at the Bush Administration's persisting homicidal negligence.
But my hunch is that, as with Iran/contra, the theft of the 2000 election and the torrent of obvious lies that justified the war on Iraq, liberals'
fear of seeming irresponsibly combative and their commitment to the primacy of corporate and investor-class interests will lead them to aid
and abet the short-circuiting of whatever transformative potential this moment has.
This will also obscure the deeper reality
that lies beneath the manifest racial disparities in vulnerability, treatment and outcome. The abstract,
moralizing patter about how and whether "race matters" or "the role of race" is appealing partly because it
doesn't confront the roots of the bipartisan neoliberal policy regime. It's certainly true that George W. Bush and his
minions are indifferent to, or contemptuous of, black Americans in general. They're contemptuous of anyone who is not part of the ruling class.
Although Bush and his pals are no doubt small-minded bigots in many ways, the racial dimension stands
out so strikingly in part because race is now the most familiar--and apparently for many progressives
the most powerful--language of social justice. For roughly a generation it seemed reasonable to expect that defining
inequalities in racial terms would provoke some remedial response from the federal government. But for quite some time race's
force in national politics has been as a vehicle for reassuring whites that "public" equals some
combination of "black," "poor" and "loser"; that cutting public spending is aimed at weaning a lazy
black underclass off the dole or--in the supposedly benign, liberal Democratic version--teaching blacks "personal responsibility." To
paraphrase historian Barbara Fields, race is a language through which American capitalism's class contradictions
are commonly expressed. Class will almost certainly turn out to be a better predictor than race of who
was able to evacuate, who drowned, who was left to fester in the Superdome or on overpasses, who is
stuck in shelters in Houston or Baton Rouge, or who is randomly dispersed to the four winds. I'm certain that class is also a better
predictor than race of whose emotional attachments to place will be factored into plans for
reconstructing the city. Of course, in a case of devastation so vast as this, class position provides imperfect insulation. All my very
well connected, petit-bourgeois family in New Orleans are now spread across Mississippi and south Louisiana with no hint of
when they will return home or what they'll have to return to. Some may have lost their homes and all their belongings. But most
of them evacuated before the storm. No one died or was in grave danger of dying; no one was left on an overpass,
in the Superdome or at the convention center. They were fortunate but hardly unique among the city's black
population, and class had everything to do with the terms of their survival. Natural disasters can
magnify existing patterns of inequality. The people who were swept aside or simply overlooked in this
catastrophe were the same ones who were already swept aside in a model of urban revitalization
that, in New Orleans as everywhere else, is predicated on their removal. Their presence is treated as an eyesore, a
retardant of property values, proof by definition that the spaces they occupy are underutilized. And it's not simply because they're
black. They embody another, more specific category, the equivalent of what used to be known, in the heyday of racial
taxonomy, as a "sub-race." They are a population against which others--blacks as well as whites--measure
their own civic worth. Those who were the greatest victims of the disaster were invisible in preparation and response, just as they
were the largely invisible, low-wage props supporting the tourism industry's mythos of New Orleans as the city of constant carnival. They
enter public discussion only as a problem to be rectified or contained, never as subjects of political
action with their own voices and needs. White elites fret about how best to move them out of the
way; black elites ventriloquize them and smooth their removal.Race is too blunt an analytical tool
even when inequality is expressed in glaring racial disparities. Its meanings are too vague. We can see already that the
charges of racial insensitivity and neglect threaten to divert the focus of the Katrina outrage to a secondary debate about how Bush feels about
blacks and whether the sources of the travesty visited upon poor New Orleanians were "color blind" or racist. Beyond that, a
racial
critique can lead nowhere except to demands for black participation in decision-making around
reconstruction. But which black people? What plans?Reconstruction on what terms? I've seen too many black- and Latinoled municipal governments and housing authorities fuel real estate speculation with tax giveaways and zoning variances, rationalizing massive
displacement of poor and other working-class people with sleight-of-hand about mixed-income occupancy and appeals to the sanctity of
market forces. The
only hope we have for turning back the tide of this thuggish Administration's commitment to destroy
liesin finding ways to build a broad movement of the
vast majority of us who are not part of the investor class. We have to be clear that what happened in New
Orleans is an extreme and criminally tragic coming home to roost of the con that cutting public
spending makes for a better society. It is a shocking foretaste of a future that many more of us will experience less dramatically,
every bit of social protection that's been won in the past century
often quietly as individuals, as we lose pensions, union protection, access to healthcare and public education, Social Security, bankruptcy and
tort protection, and as we are called upon to feed an endless war machine.
A focus on one racial group fails to address racial interactions to other racial groups – Asian racial
movements prove
Koshy, Ph.D. @ UCLA Associate Professor of Asian American Studies, English @ University of Illinois
Urbana-Champaign, 1
[Susan, “Morphing Race into Ethnicity: Asian Americans and Critical Transformations of Whiteness”,
Boundary 2 , Vol. 28.1, pg 159-62, Duke University Press, Project Muse]//SGarg
While one of the most crucial challenges to white privilege and the corresponding construction of a
collective subjectivity as ‘‘Asian Americans’’ was launched by the Asian American movement in the wake
of the postwar black movement and in conjunction with the antiwar movement, my essay focuses on
these less examined transformations of whiteness by Asian Americans, which were initiated by various
Asian American groups and constitute acts of self-representation formulated as an address to the state
or a white elite. Unlike the Asian American movement, these moments of racial reconstruction were
initiated by various Asian Americans groups themselves and did not emerge in a political space opened
up by another racial minority. Nor did they seek to engender multiracial coalitions. My purpose in
examining these instances is precisely to highlight the dangers of a racial politics that leaves untheorized
the relationship between an intermediary racial group and other marginalized groups in the racial
hierarchy. The political transformations and identities produced by the Asian American movement in the
1970s represent a critical historical transition that informs this analysis, but focusing on these other
specific pre- and postmovement articulations of racial meanings by Asian Americans illuminates the
dynamics of racial realignment in the post–civil rights era, which has witnessed the breakdown of the
coalitional rationality that drove the Asian American and antiracist struggles of the earlier era. The
analysis of these cases leads into the final section of the essay, which examines the relationship
between the discursive reconstruction of whiteness in the post–civil rights era and the changing
meanings of Asian American and black identities in an era of globalization marked by the dramatic
growth of Asian economies and the reconstitution of the Asian American constituency through new
immigration. The difficulty of articulating the dialectics of Asian American racial formation in the
contemporary context is evident in the lack of scholarship on the subject; in what Omi and Dana Takagi
characterize as the political embarrassment among left and progressive critics, in identifying the position
of Asian Americans on such issues as affirmative action; and in the lacunae in even such a major,
dialectical analysis as Lisa Lowe’s Immigrant Acts in theorizing class stratifications among Asian
Americans and formulating interminority relations.6 Since dialectical analysis requires that ‘‘however
limited the immediate object of interest, investigating its potential requires that we project the
evolution of the complex and integrated whole to which it belongs,’’7 an account such as Lowe’s, which
analyzes Asian American emergence without incorporating the mutually constitutive relations of blacks
and Asian Americans, is impeded in its attempt to historicize and systematize the complex conditions of
their emergence as a group. A theorization of the racial structure, rather than a selective focus on
white–Asian American relations, is an analytic precondition for projecting the group’s potential for
further development, even as the projection of this potential forms the crux of the ‘‘anticipativeindicative’’ mode of dialectical critique.8 Immigrant Acts is considered an important and comprehensive
study of the role of Asian Americans in constituting American national identity and warrants more
detailed discussion because of the academic currency of the resistant Asian American subject it
constructs. Certainly, Lowe’s work has opened up valuable new perspectives on how American national
identity has been constituted by Asian American immigration, particularly in her analysis of the pre-1965
period of immigration. However, her interest in re- covering a subversive Asian American political
subject constricts and simplifies the understanding of agency that grounds her study of Asian American
racialization. The organizing metaphor of Lowe’s genealogical study is the spatial one of Asian
Americans’ contradictory position inside/outside the nation: ‘‘ ‘Immigrant acts,’ then, attempts to name
the contradictions of Asian immigration, which at different moments in the last century and a half of
Asian entry into the United States have placed Asians ‘within’ the U.S. nation-state, its workplaces, and
its markets, yet linguistically, culturally, and racially marked Asians as ‘foreign’ and ‘outside’ the national
polity.’’9 By examining minoritization and racialization primarily through their conflicted relationship to
citizenship, this approach is limited by its framework from engaging the implications or salience of racial
hierarchies in which Asian Americans came to assume an intermediary position, despite their
‘‘outsideness’’ to the nation. This conceptual constraint generates readings that, in the end, undermine
Lowe’s political project of establishing the materialist basis for projecting the potential for cross-racial
coalitions. For instance, Lowe reads Monique Thuy-Dung Truong’s ‘‘Kelly’’ 10 as an allegory of crossracial
coalition building. Truong’s autobiographical piece struggles to locate its Vietnamese American narrator
in the black-white divide of her first American home in Boiling Spring, North Carolina, in 1975. ‘‘Kelly’’
deals with the ‘‘solidarity of misfits’’ created through the short-lived friendship of a fat white girl and the
Vietnamese American narrator, and through the narrator’s separate friendship with Michelle, a girl with
a ‘‘brown face’’ (who is possibly either ‘‘white trash’’ or of mixed race).11 The narrator is acutely aware
of her position in the racial hierarchy above Michelle and the black girls, despite her own
marginalization within the white community: ‘‘You said only black people lived in trailer homes. I said I
wasn’t black as if your mamma and poppa would have let me into their house if they thought I was.’’
12The narrative stresses the tenuousness of her former friendship with Kelly, the impossibility of its
continuation in the present, and her childhood friend’s oblivion to the narrator’s unspoken fears and
longings. But Lowe’s interpretation of this piece underplays the tensions and conflicts of this fraught
racial stratifi cation and constructs from it a celebratory account of cross-racial coalitions between a
Vietnamese American girl and two white girls. Lowe extrapolates from a narrative about the stifling
social constraints on some racial crossings and the unsustainability of others the following political
allegory of exclusion and resistance: ‘‘The story ultimately allegorizes a network of alliance across lines
of race, class, and gender, a network that is . . . the basis of contesting the historically differentiated but
intersecting determinations of racist colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism.13 The narrator makes it
clear that the black girls inhabit a social world completely removed from hers and that she herself never
manages to cross this racial boundary. But what, one wants to ask, happened to the black girls within
Lowe’s celebratory political allegory? Do they have to disappear in order to bring it into existence? Does
a narrative of resistant Asian American subjectivity in relation to whiteness that elides or obscures its
ineluctable relationship to blackness allow us to adequately theorize either the impediments to the
emergence of cross-racial coalitions or the prospects for it? My interest is not in producing a different
reading from Lowe’s but in locating the weaknesses of theoretical paradigms grounded in an
inside/outside binary and of dialectical analyses of Asian American racialization that erase, absorb, or
subsume black racialization in a framework of parallel minoritization.
A focus on one racial group elevates them on capital’s social hierarchy making social mobility harder
for other groups – Asian Americans prove. The only solution is to get rid of racism at its root
Koshy, Ph.D. @ UCLA Associate Professor of Asian American Studies, English @ University of Illinois
Urbana-Champaign, 1
[Susan, “Morphing Race into Ethnicity: Asian Americans and Critical Transformations of Whiteness”,
Boundary 2 , Vol. 28.1, pg 189-91, Duke University Press, Project Muse]//SGarg
Since European American ethnicity has achieved dominance as the paradigm of Americanness, it
represents a very powerful solicitation to incoming immigrant groups who are caught in the process of
recasting their identities and negotiating the terms of their Americanization. It offers a mythology of the
American Dream that allows for their ethnicization rather than their racialization and ties the comforting
vision of a continuity with the past (through ethnicity) to a promising future (through class mobility).
Furthermore, the ethos of liberal pluralism that underwrites U.S. versions of multiculturalism
encourages the maintenance of ethnic identity. So do the transnational networks between immigrants
and their homelands supported by email, faxes, videophones, electronic capital, and discount airfares.
These transnational networks are further strengthened by new waves of incoming immigrants, who
revitalize the cultures of existing ethnic groups. Especially among Asians Americans, there has been a
powerful resurgence of ethnicity because of continuing immigration. Douglas Massey predicts that since
the post-1965 regime of immigration is quite distinct from patterns of early twentieth-century
immigration, the assimilation of post-1965 immigrants is unlikely to follow the pattern of the
assimilation of white ethnics. He stresses two factors. Firstly, the older European immigration, which
peaked between 1901 and 1930, was followed by a hiatus in European immigration, from 1931 to 1970,
which allowed the slow social processes that aid assimilation to take effect. Secondly, it was
accompanied by a period of economic expansion, which made possible the economic and social mobility
that was a necessary prerequisite to the absorption of peripheral white ethnic groups. According to
Massey, neither of these conditions now exists to support the assimilation of Asian and Latin American
immigrants; rather, the slowness with which assimilatory processes presently take effect contrasts
sharply to the rapidity of changes brought about by the continuous It is important to keep in mind that
Asian Americanness has acquired a very different inflection over the last decade because of the
increasing economic strength of Asia and the greater interconnectedness with and dependency of the
United States on Asia. While on the one hand, the economic competitiveness of many Asian nations has
generated negative stereotypes, on the other hand, it is conceivable that given the corporate interest in
Asia, the increase in tourism, and the proliferation of academic and cultural networks, Asian American
ethnicity (facility with languages, mores, social networks) will increasingly serve as a form of cultural
capital. Small wonder, then, that Disney recently launched its first animated version of a Chinese legend,
Mulan, or that the ad for the film features the boy band 98° and Stevie Wonder urging a beautiful young
Chinese woman to be ‘‘True to Your Heart,’’ while she moves through a store fingering various Chinese
artifacts.173 While the morphing of race into ethnicity is possible for intermediary racial groups and can
function to open up an avenue to social mobility and affiliation with whiteness, this transformation is
less possible for blacks. Moreover, as a result of the increasing abandonment of race in public discourse
and public policy, we may see a discursive shift by which the political concerns of blacks are invalidated
or suppressed by being relegated to the domain of race discourse and rendered, by that very move,
obsolete. By contrast, the new ethnicities identified with the new needs of the global economy will
accrue greater cultural capital, and their achievements will be used as an argument to roll back civil
rights initiatives and as evidence that the racial problems of the 1960s have been resolved. In a
compelling illustration of this trend, a recent New YorkTimes article describes how the Chinese
American politician Gary Locke won the race for governor of Washington state by offering his immigrant
story of hardship and struggle to the voters, while his black opponent for the Democratic nomination,
Norm Rice, opted to suppress race in his campaign because it was too risky a strategy for a black
politician to adopt. Speaking of Locke’s appeal to voters, his wife, Mona Lee Locke, observes, ‘‘People
come up to Gary all the time and tell him what a role model he is, that they hope he runs for higher
office. Even Republicans. And it’s because of his race that they look up to him. They see in him the
American Dream come true.’’ In a state poised on the Pacific Rim and closely integrated with Asia
through proliferating circuits of capital and communications, Locke’s ethnicity connotes much of what
Washingtonians see as the globalizing future of their state, its adherence to color-blind principles of
prosperity and its affirmation of the American Dream. It is no contradiction that Locke won in a state
where a ballot measure to remove af firmative action in hiring was successful, since both his and the
ballot’s success are signs of the reconfiguration of racial politics in the post–civil rights era. However,
these reconfigurations have very different implications for a black politician such as Norm Rice and his
Asian American opponent. Rice remarks of his run for governor, ‘‘I think that if people have a choice
between an African-American and an Asian-American, they will probably choose the latter.... Whether
people want to admit it or not, there is a hierarchy of race.’’ When the reporter poses the question of a
racial hierarchy to Locke, his response is puzzlement: ‘‘Racial hierarchy? You know, I’ve never really
thought about it.’’71
binary kritik
1nc binary k
The discourse of the affirmative focuses solely on the black white paradigm – this
causes otherization of all other oppressed races
Alcoff 3 – Professor of Philosophy @ Hunter College, Ph.D philosophy @ Brown, M.A. and B.A.
both in philosophy @ Georgia State U (Linda Martin, “Latino/As, Asian Americans, and the
Black-White Binary”, 2003, JSTOR, RSpec)
The discourse of social justice in regard to issues involving race has been dominated in the U.S. by what
many theorists name the "black/white paradigm," which operates to govern racial classifications and
racial politics in the U.S., most clearly in the formulation of civil rights law but also in more informal arenas of
discussion. Juan Perea defines this paradigm as the conception that race in America consists,
either exclusively or primarily, of only two constituent racial groups, the Black and White ... In
addition, the paradigm dictates that all other racial identities and groups in the United States are
best understood through the Black/White binary paradigm.5 He argues that this paradigm operates
even in recent anti-racist theory such as that produced by Andrew Hacker, Cornel West, and Toni Morrison, though it is
even clearer in works by liberals such as Nathan Glazer. Openly espousing this view, Mary Francis Berry, former chair
of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, has stated that the U.S. is comprised of "three nations, one
Black, one White, and one in which people strive to be something other than Black to avoid the
sting of White Supremacy."6 To understand race in this way is to assume that racial discrimination operates exclusively
through anti-black racism. Others can be affected by racism, on this view, but the dominance of the
black/white paradigm works to interpret all other effects as "collateral damage" ultimately
caused by the same phenomena, in both economic and psychological terms, in which the given other,
whether Latino/a, Asian American, or something else, is placed in the category of "black" or
"close to black." In other words, there is basically one form of racism, and one continuum of
racial identity, along which all groups will be placed. The black/white paradigm can be understood either
descriptively or prescriptively (or both): as making a descriptive claim about the fundamental nature of racializations and racisms in
the U.S., or as prescribing how race shall operate and thus enforcing the applicability of the black/white paradigm.
The alternative is to reject the 1AC to create a binary of all races – this is key to
solving racism at the political level and solving inevitable white domination
Alcoff 3 – Professor of Philosophy @ Hunter College, Ph.D philosophy @ Brown, M.A. and B.A.
both in philosophy @ Georgia State U (Linda Martin, “Latino/As, Asian Americans, and the
Black-White Binary”, 2003, JSTOR, RSpec)
Thus, thinking of race in terms only of black and white produces a sense of inevitability to white
domination which is not empirically supportable. I believe this issue of imagery is very significant.
Whites must come to realize that maintaining white dominance for much longer is simply not a viability,
short of fascism, or significantly expanding the fascist treatments that many communities already experience. By
maintaining the black/white binary we only persist in falsely representing the
realities of race in the U.S.; by opening up the binary to rainbow images and the
like we can more accurately and thus helpfully present the growing and future
conditions within which political action and contestations will occur. This is in everyone's
interests. For this reason, the increasingly high profile of Asian Americans, Native Americans, and
Latino/as is all to the good. It may also someday lead away from the imagery of oppositionality,
or mutually exclusive interests, which the very terms black and white have long conveyed, and
move toward an imagery of pluralism (which has some of its own problems, I realize, but which can more readily
recognize the diverse ways in which alliances and differences can occur).
xt: alternative
Incorporating all groups into our conception of racism is the only way to solve
Alcoff 3 – Professor of Philosophy @ Hunter College, Ph.D philosophy @ Brown, M.A. and B.A.
both in philosophy @ Georgia State U (Linda Martin, “Latino/As, Asian Americans, and the
Black-White Binary”, 2003, JSTOR, RSpec)
My basic thesis, then, is simply that we need an expanded analysis of racism and an attentiveness to the
specificities of various forms it can take in regard to different groups, rather than continuing to
accept the idea that it operates in basically one way, with one axis, that is differentially
distributed among various groups. Whether my own analysis of some of these specificities is right in all respects, it may
still be the case that this basic thesis is correct.
You must reject the inadequacy of the 1AC to fully address racial realities – the
affirmative’s approach excludes other races
Alcoff 3 – Professor of Philosophy @ Hunter College, Ph.D philosophy @ Brown, M.A. and B.A.
both in philosophy @ Georgia State U (Linda Martin, “Latino/As, Asian Americans, and the
Black-White Binary”, 2003, JSTOR, RSpec)
Several Latino/a and Asian American theorists, such as Elaine Kim, Gary Okihiro, Elizabeth Martinez, Juan Perea,
Frank Wu, Dana Takagi, and community activists such as Bong Hwan Kim have argued that the black/white
paradigm is not adequate, certainly not sufficient, to explain racial realities in the U.S. They
have thus contested its claim to descriptive adequacy, and argued that the hegemony of the
black/white paradigm in racial thinking has had many deleterious effects for Latino/as and
Asian Americans.8 In this paper, I will summarize and discuss what I consider the strongest of these arguments and then
develop two further arguments. It is important to stress that the black/white paradigm does have some descriptive reach, as I shall
discuss, even though it is inadequate when taken as the whole story of racism. Asian Americans and
Latino/as are often categorized and treated in ways that reflect the fact that they have been
positioned as either "near black" or "near white," but this is not nearly adequate to
understanding their ideological representation or political treatment in the U.S. One might also argue
that, although the black/white paradigm is not descriptively adequate to the complexity and
plurality of racialized identities, it yet operates with prescriptive force to organize these complexities into its bipolar
schema. Critics, however, have contested both the claim of descriptive adequacy as well as prescriptive efficacy. That is, the
paradigm does not operate with effective hegemony as a prescriptive force. I believe these arguments
will show that continuing to theorize race in the U.S. as operating exclusively through the
black/white paradigm is actually disadvantageous for all people of color in the U.S., and in many
respects for whites as well (or at least for white union households and the white poor).
turns the aff
The black white binary reinforces racial oppression and the current power
structure – turns the aff
Alcoff 3 – Professor of Philosophy @ Hunter College, Ph.D philosophy @ Brown, M.A. and B.A.
both in philosophy @ Georgia State U (Linda Martin, “Latino/As, Asian Americans, and the
Black-White Binary”, 2003, JSTOR, RSpec)
3) By eliminating specificities within the large "black" or nonwhite group, the black/white binary
has undercut the possibility of developing appropriate and effective legal and political solutions
for the variable forms that racial oppression can take. A broad movement for civil rights does
not require that we ignore the specific circumstances of different racial or ethnic identities, nor
does it mandate that only the similarities can figure into the formulation of protective
legislation. I will discuss an example of this problem, one that concerns the application of affirmative action in higher education,
at the end of this essay. 4) Another major disadvantage of eliminating specificities within the large
"black" or nonwhite group is that one cannot then either understand or address the real
conflicts and differences within this amalgam of peoples. The black/white paradigm proposes to
understand all conflicts between communities of color through anti-black racism, when the
reality is often more complex. 5) For all these reasons, the black/white paradigm seriously undermines
the possibility of achieving coalitions. Without being a conspiracy theorist, it is obvious that keeping
us in conflict with each other and not in coalition is in the interests of the current
power structure . 6) The black/white binary and the constant invocation of all race discourses
and conflicts as between blacks and whites has produced an imaginary of race in this country in
which a very large white majority confronts a relatively small black minority, which has the
effect of reinforcing the sense of inevitability to white domination.
Forcing individual ethnicities into the black or white group reinforces the black
white paradigm – turns the case
Alcoff 3 – Professor of Philosophy @ Hunter College, Ph.D philosophy @ Brown, M.A. and B.A.
both in philosophy @ Georgia State U (Linda Martin, “Latino/As, Asian Americans, and the
Black-White Binary”, 2003, JSTOR, RSpec)
Contrary to what one might imagine, it has not always or even generally been to the advantage of Asian
Americans and Latino/as to be classified as white.12 An illustration of this is found in another important
legal case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954, just two weeks before they issued the decision in Brown
vs. Board of Education. The case of Hernandez vs. Texas involved a Mexican American man convicted
of murder by an all white jury and sentenced to life imprisonment.13 His lawyer appealed the
conviction by arguing that the absence of Mexicans on the jury was discriminatory, making
reference to the famous Scottsboro case in which the U.S. Supreme Court overturned (after
many years) the conviction of nine African American men on the grounds of an absence of
African Americans from the jury. But in the Hernandez case, the Supreme Court of the State of
Texas ruled that Mexicans were white people of Spanish descent, and therefore that there was
no discrimination in the all-white make-up of the jury. Forty years later, Hernandez's lawyer, James DeAnda,
recounted how he made his argument appealing this ruling: Right there in the Jackson County Courthouse, where no Hispanic had
served on any kind of a jury in living memory because Mexicans were white and so it was okay to bring them before all-white juries,
they had two men's rooms. One had a nice sign mat just said MEN on it. The other had a sign on it that said COLORED MEN and
below that was a hand scrawled sign that said HOMBRES AQUI [men here]. In that jury pool, Mexicans may have been
white, but when it came to nature’s functions, they were not.14 In fact, in Texas not only were Mexicans subject
to Jim Crow in public facilities from restaurants to bathrooms, they were also excluded from business and community groups, and
children of Mexican descent were required to attend a segregated school for the first four grades, whether they spoke fluent English
or not. Thus, when they were classified as nonwhite, Latino/as were overtly denied certain civil rights; when they were classified as
white, the de facto denial of their civil rights could not be appealed. Although the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Supreme Court
of the State of Texas decision in the Hernandez case, its final decision indicated a perplexity regarding Mexican American identity.
The U.S. Supreme Court did not want to classify Mexicans as black, nor did they want to alter the legal classification of Mexicans as
white; since these were the only racial terms they thought were available, they ended up explaining the discrimination Mexicans
faced as based on "other differ ences," left undefined. Thus, oddly, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld that there was racial
discrimination against Mexicans, but denied that Mexicans constituted a race.15 One clear lesson to be learned from this legal
history is that race
is a construction that is variable enough to be stretched opportunistically as the
need arises to maintain and expand discrimination. The fact that Latino/as and Asians had to be
put into either one of two categories - black and white - has not been of benefit to them.
Nonetheless, one might take these legal cases to indicate that discrimination against African
Americans was the paradigm case which U.S. courts stretched when they could to justify
discrimination against other nonwhites, and thus to provide support for the black/white
paradigm of race.