R6 NEG V. USC OS
T
1NC TOPICALITY
Should means future tense – not past tense
American Heritage 2k
Usage Note: Like the rules governing the use of shall and will on which they are based, the traditional
rules governing the use of should and would are largely ignored in modern American practice. Either
should or would can now be used in the first person to express conditional futurity: If I had known that,
I would (or somewhat more formally, should) have answered differently. But in the second and third persons only would is used: If
he had known that, he would (not should) have answered differently. Would cannot always be substituted for should, however.
Should is used in all three persons in a conditional clause: if I (or you or he) should decide to go. Should is also used in all
three persons to express duty or obligation (the equivalent of ought to): I (or you or he) should go. On the other hand,
would is used to express volition or promise: I agreed that I would do it. Either would or should is possible as an auxiliary with like,
be inclined, be glad, prefer, and related verbs: I would (or should) like to call your attention to an oversight. Here would was
acceptable on all levels to a large majority of the Usage Panel in an earlier survey and is more common in American usage than
should. ·Should have is sometimes incorrectly written should of by writers who have mistaken the source of the spoken contraction
should've. See Usage Note at if. See Usage Note at rather. See Usage Note at shall.
Legalize means remove civil and criminal sanctions
Mikos, 9 - Professor of Law, Vanderbilt University Law School (Robert, “On the Limits of
Supremacy: Medical Marijuana and the States' Overlooked Power to Legalize Federal Crime” 62
Vand. L. Rev. 1419, Hein Online)
2. By legalize, I mean the government permits some private conduct to occur free of legal
sanctions, both civil and criminal. It means something more than decriminalize, which
merely removes the threat of criminal sanctions. States can legalize conduct by repealing
existing sanctions or by failing to enact sanctioning legislation in the first instance. In either
case, the legal status of state law is the same, though the former method of legalization may have
more practical impact than the latter, for reasons discussed in Part IV.B. I thank Bill Funk for
bringing the distinction to my attention.
Marijuana isn’t opium
MTA 37—Marihuana Tax Act
(“THE MARIHUANA TAX ACT OF 1937”, http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/hemp/taxact/mjtaxact.htm, dml)
“The term "marihuana" means all parts of the plant Cannabis sativa L., whether growing or not; the
seeds thereof; the resin extracted from any part of such plant; and every compound, manufacture, salt,
derivative, mixture, or preparation of such plant, its seeds, or resin- but shall not include the
mature stalks of such plant, fiber produced from such stalks, oil or cake made from the seeds of such
plant, any other compound, manufacture, salt, derivative, mixture, or preparation of such mature stalks (except the
resin extracted therefrom), fiber, oil, or cake, or the sterilized seed of such plant which is incapable of germination.”
“Topic relevance” isn't enough—only a precise and limited rez creates deliberation
on a point of mutual difference
Steinberg & Freeley 8 *Austin J. Freeley is a Boston based attorney who focuses on criminal,
personal injury and civil rights law, AND **David L. Steinberg , Lecturer of Communication
Studies @ U Miami, Argumentation and Debate: Critical Thinking for Reasoned Decision
Making pp45Debate is a means of settling differences, so there must be a difference of opinion or a conflict of
interest before there can be a debate. If everyone is in agreement on a tact or value or policy, there is no need for
debate: the matter can be settled by unanimous consent. Thus, for example, it would be pointless to
attempt to debate "Resolved: That two plus two equals four," because there is simply no controversy about
this statement. (Controversy
is an essential prerequisite of debate. Where there is no clash of ideas,
is no debate. In addition, debate cannot produce
effective decisions without clear identification of a question or questions to be answered. For
example, general argument may occur about the broad topic of illegal immigration. How many
illegal immigrants are in the United States? What is the impact of illegal immigration and immigrants on our economy?
What is their impact on our communities? Do they commit crimes? Do they take jobs from American workers? Do they pay
taxes? Do they require social services? Is it a problem that some do not speak English? Is it the responsibility of
employers to discourage illegal immigration by not hiring undocumented workers? Should they have the
opportunity- to gain citizenship? Docs illegal immigration pose a security threat to our country? Do illegal immigrants do
work that American workers are unwilling to do? Are their rights as workers and as human beings at risk due to
proposals, interests, or expressed positions on issues, there
their status? Are they abused by employers, law enforcement, housing, and businesses? I low are their families impacted by their
status? What is the moral and philosophical obligation of a nation state to maintain its borders? Should we build a wall on
the Mexican border, establish a national identification can!, or enforce existing laws against employers? Should we invite
immigrants to become U.S. citizens? Surely you can think of many more concerns to be addressed by a
conversation about the topic area of illegal immigration. Participation in this "debate" is likely to
be emotional and intense. However, it is not likely to be productive or useful without focus on a
particular question and identification of a line demarcating sides in the controversy. To be
discussed and resolved effectively, controversies must be stated clearly. Vague understanding results
in unfocused deliberation and poor decisions, frustration, and emotional distress, as evidenced by the
failure of the United States Congress to make progress on the immigration debate during the
summer of 2007.
Someone disturbed by the problem of the growing underclass of poorly educated, socially
disenfranchised youths might observe, "Public schools are doing a terrible job! They are overcrowded,
and many teachers are poorly qualified in their subject areas. Even the best teachers can do little more than struggle to maintain
order in their classrooms." That same concerned citizen, facing a complex range of issues, might arrive at an unhelpful decision,
such as "We ought to do something about this" or. worse. "It's too complicated a problem to deal with." Groups of concerned
citizens worried about the state of public education could join together to express their
frustrations, anger, disillusionment, and emotions regarding the schools, but without a focus for their
discussions, they could easily agree about the sorry state of education without finding points of
clarity or potential solutions. A gripe session would follow. But if a precise question is posed—
such as "What can be done to improve public education?"—then a more profitable area of discussion is opened
up simply by placing a focus on the search for a concrete solution step. One or more judgments
can be phrased in the form of debate propositions, motions for parliamentary debate, or bills for
legislative assemblies. The statements "Resolved: That the federal government should implement a program of charter
schools in at-risk communities" and "Resolved: That the state of Florida should adopt a school voucher program" more clearly
identify specific ways of dealing with educational problems in a manageable form, suitable for debate. They provide specific
policies to be investigated and aid discussants in identifying points of difference.
To have a productive debate, which facilitates effective decision making by directing and placing
limits on the decision to be made, the basis for argument should be clearly defined. If we merely talk
about "homelessness" or "abortion" or "crime'* or "global warming" we are likely to have an
interesting discussion but not to establish profitable basis for argument. For example, the statement
"Resolved: That the pen is mightier than the sword" is debatable, yet fails to provide much basis
for clear argumentation. If we take this statement to mean that the written word is more effective than physical force for
some purposes, we can identify a problem area: the comparative effectiveness of writing or physical force for a specific purpose.
Although we now have a general subject, we have not yet stated a problem. It is still too broad, too loosely
worded to promote well-organized argument. What
sort of writing are we concerned with—poems, novels,
government documents, website development, advertising, or what? What does "effectiveness" mean in this context?
What kind of physical force is being compared—fists, dueling swords, bazookas, nuclear weapons, or what? A more specific question
might be. "Would a mutual defense treaty or a visit by our fleet be more effective in assuring Liurania of our support in a certain
crisis?" The basis for argument could be phrased in a debate proposition such as "Resolved: That the
United States should enter into a mutual defense treatv with Laurania." Negative advocates
might oppose this proposition by arguing that fleet maneuvers would be a better solution. This is not to
say that debates should completely avoid creative interpretation of the controversy by advocates, or that
good debates cannot occur over competing interpretations of the controversy; in fact, these sorts
of debates may be very engaging. The point is that debate is best facilitated by the guidance
provided by focus on a particular point of difference, which will be outlined in the
following discussion.
B. Vote neg—
1. Prep and clash—post facto topic change alters balance of prep, which
structurally favors the aff because they speak last and use perms—key to engage a
prepared adversary.
2. Limits—specific topics are key to reasonable expectations for 2Ns—open
subjects create incentives for avoidance—that overstretches the negative and turns
participation.
It’s a prior question—otherwise there's nothing to require disagreement
Adolf G. Gundersen, Associate Professor of Political Science, Texas A&M, 2000
POLITICAL THEORY AND PARTISAN POLITICS, 2000, p. 104-5. (DRGNS/E625)
Indirect political engagement is perhaps the single most important element of the strategy I am recommending here. It is also the
most emblematic, as it results from a fusion of confrontation and separation. But what kind of political engagement might
conceivably qualify as being both confrontational and separated from actual political decision-making? There is only one type, so far
as I can see, and that is deliberation. Political deliberation is by definition a form of engagement with the collectivity of which one is
a member. This is all the more true when two or more citizens deliberate together. Yet deliberation is also a form of
political action that precedes the actual taking and implementation of decisions. It is thus
simultaneously connected and disconnected, confrontational and separate. It is, in other words,
a form of indirect political engagement. This conclusion, namely, that we ought to call upon
deliberation to counter partisanship and thus clear the way for deliberation, looks rather
circular at first glance. And, semantically at least, it certainly is. Yet this ought not to concern us
very much. Politics, after all, is not a matter of avoiding semantic inconveniences, but of doing
the right thing and getting desirable results. In political theory, therefore, the real concern is
always whether a circular argument translates into a self-defeating prescription. And here that is
plainly not the case, for what I am suggesting is that deliberation can diminish partisanship, which will in turn
contribute to conditions amenable to continued or extended deliberation. That "deliberation promotes deliberation" is surely a
circular claim, but it is just as surely an accurate description of the real world of lived politics, as observers as far back as Thucydides
have documented. It may well be that deliberation rests on certain preconditions. I am not arguing that there is no
such thing as a deliberative "first cause." Indeed, it seems obvious to me both that deliberators
require something
to deliberate about and that deliberation presumes certain institutional structures
and shared values. Clearly something must get the deliberative ball rolling and, to keep it rolling,
the cultural terrain must be free of deep chasms and sinkholes. Nevertheless, however extensive
and demanding deliberation's preconditions might be, we ought not to lose sight of the fact that,
once begun, deliberation tends to be self-sustaining. Just as partisanship begets partisanship,
deliberation begets deliberation. If that is so, the question of limiting partisanship and
stimulating deliberation are to an important extent the same question.
Topical fairness requirements are key to effective dialogue—monopolizing strategy
and prep makes the discussion one-sided and subverts any meaningful neg role
Galloway 7 – professor of communications at Samford University (Ryan, “Dinner And
Conversation At The Argumentative Table: Reconceptualizing Debate As An Argumentative
Dialogue”, Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, Vol. 28 (2007), ebsco)
Debate as a dialogue sets an argumentative table, where all parties receive a relatively fair opportunity to voice their position.
Anything that fails to allow participants to have their position articulated denies one side of the argumentative table a fair hearing.
The affirmative side is set by the topic and fairness requirements. While affirmative teams have recently
resisted affirming the topic, in fact, the topic selection process is rigorous, taking the relative ground of each topic as its central point
of departure.¶ Setting the affirmative reciprocally sets the negative. The negative crafts approaches to the topic
consistent with affirmative demands. The negative crafts disadvantages, counter-plans, and critical arguments premised on the
arguments that the topic allows for the affirmative team. According to fairness norms, each side sits at a relatively balanced
argumentative table.¶ When one side takes more than its share, competitive equity suffers. However, it also
undermines the respect due to the other involved in the dialogue. When one side excludes the
other, it fundamentally denies the personhood of the other participant (Ehninger, 1970, p. 110). A
pedagogy of debate as dialogue takes this respect as a fundamental component. A desire to be
fair is a fundamental condition of a dialogue that takes the form of a demand for equality of voice. Far
from being a banal request for links to a disadvantage, fairness is a demand for respect, a
demand to be heard, a demand that a voice backed by literally months upon months of
preparation, research, and critical thinking not be silenced.¶ Affirmative cases that suspend
basic fairness norms operate to exclude particular negative strategies. Unprepared, one side
comes to the argumentative table unable to meaningfully participate in a dialogue. They are
unable to “understand what ‘went on…’” and are left to the whims of time and power (Farrell, 1985,
p. 114). Hugh Duncan furthers this line of reasoning:¶ Opponents not only tolerate but honor and respect each
other because in doing so they enhance their own chances of thinking better and reaching sound
decisions. Opposition is necessary because it sharpens thought in action. We assume that argument, discussion, and talk, among
free an informed people who subordinate decisions of any kind, because it is only through such discussion that we
reach agreement which binds us to a common cause…If we are to be equal…relationships among
equals must find expression in many formal and informal institutions (Duncan, 1993, p. 196-197).¶
Debate compensates for the exigencies of the world by offering a framework that
maintains equality for the sake of the conversation (Farrell, 1985, p. 114).¶ For example, an
affirmative case on the 2007-2008 college topic might defend neither state nor international action in the Middle
East, and yet claim to be germane to the topic in some way. The case essentially denies the
arguments that state action is oppressive or that actions in the international arena are philosophically
or pragmatically suspect. Instead of allowing for the dialogue to be modified by the interchange
of the affirmative case and the negative response, the affirmative subverts any meaningful
role to the negative team, preventing them from offering effective “counter-word” and
undermining the value of a meaningful exchange of speech acts. Germaneness and other
substitutes for topical action do not accrue the dialogical benefits of topical advocacy.
Game spaces like debate require balanced ground to prevent one side from create
de facto monologue—prerequisite to mutual education
Hanghoj 2008 – PhD, assistant professor, School of Education, University of Aarhus, also
affiliated with the Danish Research Centre on Education and Advanced Media Materials, located
at the Institute of Literature, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Southern Denmark
(Thorkild,
http://static.sdu.dk/mediafiles/Files/Information_til/Studerende_ved_SDU/Din_uddannelse/
phd_hum/afhandlinger/2009/ThorkilHanghoej.pdf)
Debate games are often based on pre-designed scenarios that include descriptions of issues to be debated, educational
goals, game goals, roles, rules, time frames etc. In this way, debate games differ from textbooks and everyday
classroom instruction as debate scenarios allow teachers and students to actively imagine,
interact and communicate within a domain-specific game space. However, instead of mystifying debate games as a
“magic circle” (Huizinga, 1950), I will try to overcome the epistemological dichotomy between “gaming” and “teaching” that tends to dominate
discussions of educational games. In short, educational gaming is a form of teaching. As mentioned, education and games
represent two different semiotic domains that both embody the three faces of knowledge: assertions, modes of representation and social forms of
organisation (Gee, 2003; Barth, 2002; cf. chapter 2). In order to understand the interplay between these different domains and their interrelated
knowledge forms, I will draw attention to a central assumption in Bakhtin’s dialogical philosophy. According to Bakhtin, all
forms of
communication and culture are subject to centripetal and centrifugal forces (Bakhtin, 1981). A
centripetal force is the drive to impose one version of the truth, while a centrifugal force involves
a range of possible truths and interpretations. This means that any form of expression involves a duality of centripetal and
centrifugal forces: “Every concrete utterance of a speaking subject serves as a point where centrifugal as well as centripetal forces are brought to bear”
(Bakhtin, 1981: 272). If we take teaching as an example, it is always affected by centripetal and centrifugal forces in the on-going negotiation of “truths”
between teachers and students. In the words of Bakhtin: “Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born
between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction” (Bakhtin, 1984a: 110). Similarly, the
dialogical
space of debate games also embodies centrifugal and centripetal forces. Thus, the election
scenario of The Power Game involves centripetal elements that are mainly determined by the
rules and outcomes of the game, i.e. the election is based on a limited time frame and a fixed voting procedure. Similarly, the
open-ended goals, roles and resources represent centrifugal elements and create virtually
endless possibilities for researching, preparing, presenting, debating and evaluating a variety of key political issues.
Consequently, the actual process of enacting a game scenario involves a complex negotiation
between these centrifugal/centripetal forces that are inextricably linked with the teachers and students’ game activities. In this way, the
enactment of The Power Game is a form of teaching that combines different pedagogical practices (i.e. group work, web quests, student presentations)
and learning resources (i.e. websites, handouts, spoken language) within the interpretive frame of the election scenario. Obviously, tensions may arise if
there is too much divergence between educational goals and game goals. This means that game
facilitation requires a balance
between focusing too narrowly on the rules or “facts” of a game (centripetal orientation) and a focusing too broadly
on the contingent possibilities and interpretations of the game scenario (centrifugal orientation). For Bakhtin,
the duality of centripetal/centrifugal forces often manifests itself as a dynamic between “monological” and
“dialogical” forms of discourse. Bakhtin illustrates this point with the monological discourse of the
Socrates/Plato dialogues in which the teacher never learns anything new from the students,
despite Socrates’ ideological claims to the contrary (Bakhtin, 1984a). Thus, discourse becomes
monologised when “someone who knows and possesses the truth instructs someone who is ignorant
of it and in error”, where “a thought is either affirmed or repudiated” by the authority of the teacher (Bakhtin, 1984a: 81). In contrast to this,
dialogical pedagogy fosters inclusive learning environments that are able to expand upon students’ existing knowledge and collaborative construction of
“truths” (Dysthe, 1996). At this point, I should clarify that Bakhtin’s term “ dialogic”
is both a descriptive term (all utterances
are per definition dialogic as they address other utterances as parts of a chain of communication) and a normative term as
dialogue is an ideal to be worked for against the forces of “monologism” (Lillis, 2003: 197-8). In this project, I
am mainly interested in describing the dialogical space of debate games. At the same time, I agree with Wegerif that “one
of the goals of
education, perhaps the most important goal, should be dialogue as an end in itself ” (Wegerif, 2006: 61).
LIMITS OUTWEIGH
Limits – the alternative is unreasonable expectations – the topic is already big
enough, with five areas, and an infinite amount of permutations and affirmatives –
Harris slays their offense
Harris 13 (Scott Harris is an Associate Specialist & Debate Coach at the University of
Kentucky, and Ph.D, Northwestern University. “Scott Harris Writes a Long Ballot for the NDT
Finals, Emporia vs. Northwestern, "This Ballot”, 4/6/13,
http://globaldebateblog.blogspot.com/)
I understand that there has been some criticism of Northwestern’s strategy in this debate round. This criticism
is premised
on the idea that they ran framework instead of engaging Emporia’s argument about home and the Wiz.
I think this criticism is unfair. Northwestern’s framework argument did engage Emporia’s argument. Emporia said
that you should vote for the team that performatively and methodologically made debate a home. Northwestern’s argument
directly clashed with that contention. My problem in this debate was with aspects of the
execution of the argument rather than with the strategy itself. It has always made me angry in debates when people have treated
topicality as if it were a less important argument than other arguments in debate. Topicality is a real argument. It is a
researched strategy. It is an argument that challenges many affirmatives. The fact that other
arguments could be run in a debate or are run in a debate does not make topicality somehow a less
important argument. In reality, for many of you that go on to law school you will spend much of your life
running topicality arguments because you will find that words in the law matter. The rest of us
will experience the ways that word choices matter in contracts, in leases, in writing laws and in many aspects of
our lives. Kansas ran an affirmative a few years ago about how the location of a comma in a law led a
couple of districts to misinterpret the law into allowing individuals to be incarcerated in jail for two
days without having any formal charges filed against them. For those individuals the location of the comma in the law
had major consequences. Debates about words are not insignificant. Debates about what kinds of arguments we
should or should not be making in debates are not insignificant either. The limits debate is an argument that
has real pragmatic consequences. I found myself earlier this year judging Harvard’s eco-pedagogy aff and thought to
myself—I could stay up tonight and put a strategy together on eco-pedagogy, but then I thought to
myself—why should I have to? Yes, I could put together a strategy against any random argument
somebody makes employing an energy metaphor but the reality is there are only so many nights
to stay up all night researching. I would like to actually spend time playing catch with my children occasionally or maybe
even read a book or go to a movie or spend some time with my wife. A world where there are an infinite number of
affirmatives is a world where the demand to have a specific strategy and not run framework is a world that says
this community doesn’t care whether its participants have a life or do well in school or spend time
with their families. I know there is a new call abounding for interpreting this NDT as a mandate for broader more diverse topics. The
reality is that will create more work to prepare for the teams that choose to debate the topic but will have little to no effect on the
teams that refuse to debate the topic. Broader topics that do not require positive government action or are bidirectional will not
make teams that won’t debate the topic choose to debate the topic. I think that is a con job. I am not opposed to broader
topics necessarily. I tend to like the way high school topics are written more than the way college topics are
written. I just think people who take the meaning of the outcome of this NDT as proof that we need to make
it so people get to talk about anything they want to talk about without having to debate against topicality or
framework arguments are interested in constructing a world that might make debate an unending nightmare
and not a very good home in which to live. Limits, to me, are a real impact because I feel their impact in my everyday existence.
CREATIVITY TURN
Innovation
Intrator, 10 [David President of The Creative Organization, October 21, “Thinking Inside the
Box,” http://www.trainingmag.com/article/thinking-inside-box
One of the most pernicious myths about creativity, one that seriously inhibits creative
thinking and innovation, is the belief that one needs to “think outside the box.” As someone
who has worked for decades as a professional creative, nothing could be further from the truth . This a is view
shared by the vast majority of creatives, expressed famously by the modernist designer Charles Eames when he wrote,
“Design depends largely upon constraints.” The myth of thinking outside the box stems from
a fundamental misconception of what creativity is, and what it’s not. In the popular
imagination, creativity is something weird and wacky. The creative process is magical, or divinely inspired. But, in
fact, creativity is not about divine inspiration or magic. It’s about problem-solving, and by definition a
problem is a constraint, a limit, a box. One of the best illustrations of this is the work of photographers. They create
by excluding the great mass what’s before them, choosing a small frame in which to work.
Within that tiny frame, literally a box, they uncover relationships and establish priorities. What makes creative problem-solving uniquely challenging is
that you, as the creator, are the one defining the problem. You’re the one choosing the frame. And you alone determine what’s an effective solution. This
can be quite demanding, both intellectually and emotionally. Intellectually,
you are required to establish limits,
set priorities, and cull patterns and relationships from a great deal of material, much of it fragmentary. More often than not, this is the
material you generated during brainstorming sessions. At the end of these sessions, you’re usually left with a big mess of ideas, half-ideas, vague
notions, and the like. Now, chances are you’ve had a great time making your mess. You might have gone off-site, enjoyed a “brainstorming camp,”
played a number of warm-up games. You feel artistic and empowered. But to
be truly creative, you have to clean up your
mess, organizing those fragments into something real, something useful, something that actually works. That’s the hard
part. It takes a lot of energy, time, and willpower to make sense of the mess you’ve just generated. It also can be emotionally difficult. You’ll
need to throw out many ideas you originally thought were great, ideas you’ve become attached to,
because they simply don’t fit into the rules you’re creating as you build your box.
EXCLUSION TURN
No link—our argument is a set of contestable guidelines for competitions. Only a
standard like the resolution is limited enough to enable prep AND creativity
Armstrong 2K – Paul B. Armstrong, Professor of English and Dean of the College of Arts and
Sciences at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Winter 2000, “The Politics of Play:
The Social Implications of Iser's Aesthetic Theory,” New Literary History, Vol. 31, No. 1, p. 211223
*aleatory = depending on luck, i.e. the throw of a die
Such a play-space also opposes the notion that the only alternative to the coerciveness of
consensus must be to advocate the sublime powers of rule-breaking.8 Iser shares Lyotard’s concern that to privilege
harmony and agreement in a world of heterogeneous language games is to limit their play and to inhibit semantic innovation and the
creation of new games. Lyotard’s endorsement of the “sublime”—the pursuit of the “unpresentable” by rebelling
against restrictions, defying norms, and smashing the limits of existing paradigms—is undermined by
contradictions, however, which Iser’s explication of play recognizes and addresses. The paradox of the unpresentable, as
Lyotard acknowledges, is that it can only be manifested through a game of representation. The sublime is,
consequently, in Iser’s sense, an instance of doubling. If violating norms creates new games, this crossing of
boundaries depends on and carries in its wake the conventions and structures it oversteps. The
sublime may be uncompromising, asocial, and unwilling to be bound by limits, but its pursuit of what is not contained
in any order or system makes it dependent on the forms it opposes. ¶ The radical presumption of the
sublime is not only terroristic in refusing to recognize the claims of other games whose rules it
declines to limit itself by. It is also naive and self-destructive in its impossible imagining that it can
do without the others it opposes. As a structure of doubling, the sublime pursuit of the unpresentable requires a playspace that includes other, less radical games with which it can interact. Such conditions of exchange would be
provided by the nonconsensual reciprocity of Iserian play. ¶ Iser’s notion of play offers a way of conceptualizing
power which acknowledges the necessity and force of disciplinary constraints without seeing them as
unequivocally coercive and determining. The contradictory combination of restriction and openness in how play
deploys power is evident in Iser’s analysis of “regulatory” and “aleatory” rules. Even the regulatory rules, which set
down the conditions participants submit to in order to play a game, “permit a certain range of
combinations while also establishing a code of possible play. . . . Since these rules limit the text game without
producing it, they are regulatory but not prescriptive. They do no more than set the aleatory in motion, and the aleatory rule
differs from the regulatory in that it has no code of its own” (FI 273). Submitting to the discipline of regulatory
restrictions is both constraining and enabling because it makes possible certain kinds of
interaction that the rules cannot completely predict or prescribe in advance. Hence the existence of
aleatory rules that are not codified as part of the game itself but are the variable customs, procedures, and
practices for playing it. Expert facility with aleatory rules marks the difference, for example, between
someone who just knows the rules of a game and another who really knows how to play it.
Aleatory rules are more flexible and openended and more susceptible to variation than regulatory rules, but they too
are characterized by a contradictory combination of constraint and possibility, limitation and
unpredictability, discipline and spontaneity.
AT: VIEW FROM NOWHERE
We’re not the view from nowhere—the dichotomy they’re drawing makes them
equally suspect—because it claims a privileged insight on reality
DISCH ‘93 (Lisa J.; Professor of Political Theory – University of Minnesota, “More Truth Than
Fact: Storytelling as Critical Understanding in the Writings of Hannah Arendt,” Political Theory
21:4, November)
What Hannah Arendt called “my old fashioned storytelling”7 is at once the most elusive and the most provocative aspect of her
political philosophy. The apologies she sometimes made for it are well known, but few scholars have attempted to discern from these
“scattered remarks” as statement of epistemology or method.8 Though Arendt alluded to its importance throughout her writings in
comments like the one that prefaces this essay, this offhandedness left an important question about storytelling unanswered: how
can thought that is “bound” to experience as its only “guidepost” possibly be critical? I discern an answer to this question in Arendt’s
conception of storytelling, which implicitly redefines conventional understandings of objectivity and impartiality. Arendt failed to
explain what she herself termed a “rather unusual approach”9 to political theory because she considered methodological discussions
to be self-indulgent and irrelevant to real political problems.10 This reticence did her a disservice because by failing to explain how
storytelling creates a vantage point that is both critical and experiential she left herself open to charges of subjectivism.11 As Richard
Bernstein has argued, however, what makes Hannah Arendt distinctive is that she is neither a subjectivist nor a foundationalist but,
rather, attempts to move “beyond objectivism and relativism.”12 I argue that Arendt’s apologies for her storytelling were
disingenuous; she regarded it not as an anachronistic or nostalgic way of thinking but as an innovative approach to critical
understanding. Arendt’s storytelling proposes an alternative to the model of impartiality defined as
detached reasoning. In Arendt’s terms, impartiality involves telling oneself the story of an event or
situation form the plurality of perspectives that constitute it as a public phenomenon. This
critical vantage point, not from outside but from within a plurality of contesting standpoints, is
what I term “situated impartiality.” Situated impartial knowledge is neither objective disinterested
nor explicitly identified with a single particularistic interest. Consequently, its validity does not
turn on what Donna Haraway calls the “god trick,” the claim to an omnipotent, disembodied vision that is
capable of “seeing everything from nowhere.”13 But neither does it turn on a claim to insight
premised on the experience of subjugation, which purportedly gives oppressed peoples a
privileged understanding of structures of domination and exonerates them of using power to
oppress. The two versions of standpoint claims – the privileged claim to disembodied vision and
the embodied claim to “antiprivilege” from oppression – are equally suspect because they are
simply antithetical. Both define knowledge positionally, in terms of proximity to power; they
differ only in that they assign the privilege of “objective” understanding to opposite poles of the
knowledge/power axis. Haraway argues that standpoint claims are insufficient as critical theory
because they ignore the complex of social relations that mediate the connection between
knowledge and power. She counters that any claim to knowledge, whether advanced by the oppressed
or their oppressors, is partial. No one can justifiably lay claim to abstract truth, Haraway argues, but
only to “embodied objectivity,” which she argues “means quite simply situated knowledges.”14 There is a
connection between Arendt’s defense of storytelling and Haraway’s project, in that both define theory as a critical enterprise whose
purpose is not to defend abstract principles or objective facts but to tell provocative stories that invite contestation form rival
perspectives.15
K
1NC K
The 1AC aims to compensate for the totality of modern capitalism by affirming
bricolage. Viewed in historical context, this method of resistance is just another
gesture toward transgression and alterity for its own sake. You can agree with the
goals of their praxis but vote neg to recognize that this is neither radical nor
intrinsically political.
Eagleton, Distinguished Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University, Professor of Cultural Theory at the National
University of Ireland and Distinguished Visiting Professor of English Literature at The University of Notre Dame, 1997 (Terry,
Where do Postmodernists Come from? in In defense of history)
Imagine a radical movement that had suffered an emphatic defeat. So emphatic, in fact, that it
seemed unlikely to resurface for the length of a lifetime, if at all. As time wore on, the beliefs of this movement might begin to seem less
false or ineffectual than simply irrelevant. For its opponents, it would be less a matter of hotly contesting these doctrines than of contemplating them
with something of the mild antiquarian interest one might have previously reserved for Ptolemaic cosmology or the scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas.
Radicals might come to find themselves less overwhelmed or out-argued than simply washed
up, speaking a language so quaintly out of tune with their era that, as with the language of Platonism or courtly love, nobody even bothered any longer
to ask whether it was true. What would be the likely response of the left to such a dire condition? Many, no
doubt, would drift either cynically or sincerely to the right, regretting their earlier views as infantile idealism. Others might keep the faith purely out of
habit, anxiety, or nostalgia, clinging to an imaginary identity and risking the neurosis that that may bring. A small clutch of left triumphalists, incurably
hopeful, would no doubt carry on detecting the stirrings of the revolution in the faintest flicker of militancy. In others, the radical impulse would
persist, but would be forced to migrate elsewhere. One can imagine that the
ruling assumption of this period would be that
the system was, at least for the moment, unbreachable; and a great many of the left’s
conclusions could be seen to flow from this glum supposition. One might expect, for example, that
there would be an upsurge of interest in the margins and crevices of the system—in those ambiguous,
indeterminate places where its power seemed less secure. If the system could not be breached, one might at least look
to those forces which might momentarily transgress , subvert, or give it the slip. There would be, one
might predict, much celebration of the marginal—but this would be partly making a virtue out of necessity, since
the left would itself have been rudely displaced from the mainstream, and might thus come, conveniently enough, to suspect all talk of centrality as
suspect. At its crudest, this
cult of marginality would come down to a simpleminded assumption that
minorities were positive and majorities oppressive. .Just how minorities like fascist groups, Ulst 6 Unionists, or the
international bourgeoisie fitted into this picture would not be entirely clear. Nor is it obvious how such a position could cope with a previously marginal
movement—the ANC, for example—becoming p0]jtj cally dominant, given its formalist prejudice that dominance was undesirable as such. The
historical basis for this way of thinking would be the fact that political movements that were at
once mass, central, and creative were by and large no longer in business. Indeed, the idea of a
movement that was at once central and subversive would now appear something of a contradiction
in terms. It would therefore seem natural to demonize the mass dominant, and consensual, and
romanticize whatever happened to deviate from them. It would be, above all, the attitude of
those younger dissidents who had nothing much, politically speaking, to
remember, who had no actual memory or experience of mass radical politics, but a
good deal of experience of drearily oppressive majorities. If the system really did seem to have canceled
all opposition to itself, then it would not be hard to generalize from this to the vaguely anarchistic belief that system is oppressive as such. Since there
were almost no examples of attractive political systems around, the claim would seem distinctly plausible. The
only genuine criticism
could be one launched from outside the system altogether; and one would expect, therefore, a
certain fetishizing of “otherness” in such a period. There would be enormous interest in anything that seemed alien,
deviant, exotic, unincorporable, all the way from aard- varks to Alpha Centauri, a passion for whatever gave us a tantalizing glimpse of something
beyond the logic of the system altogether. But
this romantic ultra-leftism would coexist, curiously enough, with a
brittle pessimism—for the fact is that if the system is all-powerful, then there can be by
definition nothing beyond it, any more than there can be anything beyond the infinite curvature of cosmic space. If there were
something outside the system, then it would be entirely unknowable and thus incapable of saving us; but if we could draw it into the orbit of the system,
so that it could gain some effective foothold there, its otherness would be instantly contaminated and its subversive power would thus dwindle to
nothing. Whatever
negates the system in theory would thus be logically incapable of doing so in
practice. Anything we can understand can by definition not be radical, since it must be within itself; but anything which escapes the system could be
heard by thC ^no more than a mysterious murmur. llS ,S.| thinking has abandoned the whole notion of a system which is nally contradictory—which has
that installed at its heart which can '!lter tially undo it. Instead, it thinks in the rigid oppositions of “inside” and «°u tside ” where to be on the inside is to
be complicit and to be on the outside •°to be impotent. The
typical style of thought of such a period, then, might be
described as libertarian pessimism—libertarian, because one would not have given up on the dream of something quite other than
what we have; pessimism, because one would be much too bleakly conscious of the omnipotence of law and
power to believe that such a dream could ever be realized. If one still believed in subversion, but not in the existence of
any flesh-and-blood agents of it, then it might be possible to imagine that the system in some way subverted itself, deconstructed its own logic, which
would then allow you to combine a certain radicalism with a certain skepticism. If the system is everywhere, then it would seem, like the Almighty
himself, to be visible at no particular point; and it would therefore become possible to believe, paradoxically enough, that whatever was out there was
not in fact a system at all. It is only a short step from claiming that the system is too complex to be represented to declaring that it does not exist. In the
period we are imagining, then, some
would no doubt be found clamoring against what they saw as the
tyranny of a real social totality, whereas others would be busy deconstructing the whole idea of
totality and claiming that it existed only in our minds. It would not be hard to see this as, at least in
part, a compensation in theory for the fact that the social totality was proving difficult to crack in
practice. If no very ambitious form of political action seems for the moment possible, if so-called
micropolitics seem the order of the day, it is always tempting to convert this necessity
into a virtue—to console oneself with the thought that one’s political limitations have a kind of
objective ground in reality, in the fact that social “totality” is in any case just an illusion.
(“Metaphysical” illusion makes your position sound rather more imposing.) It does not matter if
there is no political agent at hand to transform the whole, because there is in fact no whole to be transformed. It
is as though, having mislaid the breadknife, one declares the loaf to be already sliced. But totality might also seem something of
an illusion because there would be no very obvious political agent for whom society might
present itself as a totality. There are those who need to grasp how it stands with them in order to be free, and who find that they can do
this only by grasping something of the overall structure with which their own immediate situation intersects. Local and universal are not, here, simple
opposites or theoretical options, as they might be for those intellectuals who prefer to think big and those more modest academics who like to keep it
concrete But if some of those traditional political agents are in trouble, then so will be the concept of social totality, since it is those agents’ need of it
that gives it its force. Grasping a complex totality involves some rigorous analysis; so it is not surprising that such strenuously systematic thought
should be out of fash- x ion, dismissed as phallic, scientistic, or what have you, in the sort of period Cf J we are imagining. When
there is
nothing in particular in it for you to find out how you stand—if you are a professor in Ithaca or
Irvine , for example— you can afford to be ambiguous, elusive, deliciously indeterminate. You
are also quite likely, in such circumstances, to wax idealist—though in some suitably newfangled rather
than tediously old-fashioned sense. For one primary way in which we know the world is, of course, through practice; and if any very
ambitious practice is denied us, it will not be long before we catch ourselves wondering whether there is anything out there at all. One would expect,
then, that in such an era a belief in reality as something that resists us (“History is what hurts,” as Fredric Jameson has put it) will give way to a belief in
the “constructed” nature of the world. This, in turn, would no doubt go
hand in hand with a full-blooded
“culturalism” which underestimated what men and women had in common as material human
creatures, and suspected all talk of nature as an insidious mystification. It would tend not to realize that such culturalism is just as reductive as,
say, econo- mism or biologism. Cognitive and realist accounts of human consciousness would yield ground to various kinds of pragmatism and
Everything would
become an interpretation, including that statement itself. And what would also gradually
implode, along with reasonably certain knowledge, would be the idea of a human subject “centered” and
unified enough to take significant action. For such significant action would now seem in
short supply; and the result, once more, would be to make a virtue out of necessity by singing the
praises of the diffuse, decentered, schizoid human subject—a subject who might well not be “together” enough
to topple a bottle off a wall, let alone bring down the state, but who could nevertheless be
presented as hair-raisingly avant-garde in trast to the smugly centered subjects of an older, more classical
phase c0 pitalism. To put it another way: the subject as producer (coherent, disciplined, self-determining) would have yielded
ground to the subject as consumer (mobile, ephemeral, constituted by insatiable desire). If the “left” orthodoxies of such a period
were pragmatist, relativist, pluralistic, deconstructive, then one might well see such thought-forms as dangerously radical. For does not
capitalism need sure foundations, stable identities, absolute authority, metaphysical certainties,
in order to survive? And wouldn’t the kind of thought we are imagining put the skids under all
this? The answer, feebly enough, is both yes and no. It is true that capitalism, so far anyway, has felt the need to underpin
relativism, partly because there didn’t any longer seem much politically at stake in knowing how it stood with you.
its authority with unimpeachable moral foundations. Look, for example, at the remarkable tenacity of religious belief in North America. On the other
hand, look at the British, who are a notably godless bunch. No British politician could cause anything other than acute embarrassment by invoking the
Supreme Being in public, and the British talk much less about metaphysical abstractions like Britain than those in the United States do about
something called the United States. It
is not clear, in other words, exactly how much metaphysical talk the
advanced capitalist system really requires; and it is certainly true that its relentlessly secularizing, rationalizing operations
threaten to undercut its own metaphysical claims. It is clear, however, that without pragmatism and plurality the system
could not survive at all. Difference, “hybridity,” heterogeneity, restless mobility are native to the
capitalist mode of production, and thus by no means inherently radical phenomena. So if these
ways of thinking put the skids under the system at one level, they reproduce its logic at another.
If an oppressive system seems to regulate everything, then one will naturally look around for
some enclave of which this is less true—some place where a degree of freedom or randomness or
pleasure still precariously survives. Perhaps you might call this desire, or discourse, or the body,
or the unconscious. One might predict in this period a quickening of interest in psychoanalysis—
for psychoanalysis is not only the thinking person’s sensationalism, blending intellectual rigor with the most lurid
materials, but it exudes a general exciting air of radicalism without being particularly
so politically. If the more abstract questions of state, mode of production, and civil
society seem for the moment too hard to resolve, then one might shift one’s
political attention to something more intimate and immediate, more living and
fleshly, like the body . Conference papers entitled “Putting the Anus Back into Coriolanus” would attract eager crowds who had never
heard of the bourgeoisie but who knew all about buggery. This state of affairs would no doubt be particularly marked in those societies which in any
case lacked strong socialist traditions; indeed, one could imagine much of the style of thought in question, for all its suspiciousness of the universal, as
no more than a spurious universalizing of such specific political conditions. Such
a concern with bodiliness and sexuality would
represent, one imagines, an enormous political deepening and enrichment, at the same time as it would signify a thoroughgoing
displacement. And no doubt just the same could be said if one were to witness an increasing
obsession with language and culture—topics where the intellectual is in any case more likely to
feel at home than in the realm of material production. One might expect that some, true to the pessimism
of the period, would stress how discourses are policed, regulated, heavy with power, while others would
proclaim in more libertarian spirit how the thrills and spills of the signifier can give the slip to the system. Either way, one would no doubt
witness an immense linguistic inflation, as what appeared no longer conceivable in political
reality was still just about possible in the areas of discourse or signs or textuality. The freedom of
text or language would come to compensate for the unfreedom of the system as a whole. There
would still be a kind of utopian vision, but its name now would be increasingly poetry. And it
would even be possible to imagine, in an “extremist” variant of this style of thought, that the future was here and now—that utopia had already arrived
in the shape of the pleasurable intensities, multiple selfhoods, and exhilarating exchanges of the marketplace and the shopping mall. History
would then most certainly have come to an end—an end already implicit in the blocking of
radical political action. For if no such collective action seemed generally possible, then history
would indeed appear as random and directionless, and to claim that there was no longer any
“grand narrative” would be, among other things, a way of saying that we no longer knew how
to construct one effectively in these conditions. For this kind of thought, history would have ended because freedom
would finally have been achieved; for Marxism, the achievement of freedom would be the beginning of history and the end of all we have known to date:
those boring prehisto- rical grand narratives which are really just the same old recycled story of scarcity, suffering, and struggle. (17-22)
Stereotypes of Asians are social technologies deployed to stabilize labor relations—
the stigmas they describe are just an extension of underlying ideologies of
ascriptive differences. Our Marxist analysis is key to demystify the role of identity
within class conflict—voting aff just makes neoliberalism more efficient by
embracing difference as such.
Reed 2013 – professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in
race and American politics. He has taught at Yale, Northwestern and the New School for Social
Research. An expert on racial and economic inequality, he is a founding member of the Labor
Party and a frequent contributor to The Nation (Adolph, New Labor Forum 22.1, “Marx, Race,
and Neoliberalism”)
A Marxist perspective can be most helpful for understanding race and racism insofar as it
perceives capitalism dialectically, as a social totality that includes modes of production, relations of production, and the
pragmatically evolving ensemble of institutions and ideologies that lubricate and propel its
reproduction. From this perspective, Marxism’s most important contribution to making sense of
race and racism in the United States may be demystification. A historical materialist perspective should
stress that “race”—which includes “racism,” as one is unthinkable without the other—is a historically specific
ideology that emerged, took shape, and has evolved as a constitutive element within a definite set of social relations
anchored to a particular system of production.
Race is a taxonomy of ascriptive difference, that is, an ideology that constructs populations as groups and
sorts them into hierarchies of capacity, civic worth, and desert based on “natural” or essential characteristics
attributed to them. Ideologies of ascriptive difference help to stabilize a social order by
legitimizing its hierarchies of wealth, power, and privilege, including its social division of labor,
as the natural order of things.1 Ascriptive ideologies are just-so stories with the potential to become self-fulfilling
prophecies. They emerge from self-interested common sense as folk knowledge: they are “known” to
be true unreflectively because they seem to comport with the evidence of quotidian experience. They
are likely to become generally assumed as self-evident truth, and imposed as such by law and custom, when
they converge with and reinforce the interests of powerful strata in the society.
Race and gender are the most familiar ascriptive hierarchies in the contemporary United States.
Ironically, that is so in part because egalitarian forces have been successful in the last half-century in
challenging them and their legal and material foundations. Inequalities based directly on claims of race and gender difference
are now negatively sanctioned as discrimination by law and prevailing cultural norms. Of course, patterns of inequality
persist in which disadvantage is distributed asymmetrically along racial and gender lines, but practically no one—even
among apologists for those patterned inequalities— openly admits to espousing racism or sexism.
It is telling in this regard that Glenn Beck stretches to appropriate Martin Luther King, Jr., and
denounces Barack Obama as racist, and that Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Ann Coulter accuse
Democrats of sexism. Indeed, just as race has been and continues to be unthinkable without racism,
today it is also unthinkable without antiracism.
Crucially, the significance of race and gender, and their content as ideologies of essential difference have changed markedly over
time in relation to changing political and economic conditions. Regarding race in particular, classificatory schemes have
varied substantially, as have the narratives elaborating them. That is, which populations count
as races, the criteria determining them, and the stakes attached to counting as one, or as one or
another at any given time, have been much more fluid matters than our discussions of the notion
would suggest.
And that is as it must be because race, like all ideologies of ascriptive hierarchy, is fundamentally
pragmatic. After all, these belief systems emerge as legitimations of concrete patterns of social
relations in particular contexts.
Race emerged historically along with the institution of slavery in the New World. A rich scholarship examines
its emergence, perhaps most signally with respect to North America in Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom and
Kathleen Brown’s Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs. Both focus on the simultaneous sharpening of distinctions
between slavery and indentured servitude, and the institutional establishment of black and white, or African and English, as distinct,
mutually exclusive status categories over the course of the seventeenth century in colonial Virginia.2 Race and racism took shape as
an ideology and material reality during the following century initially in the context of the contest between free-and slave-labor
systems and the related class struggle that eventually produced the modern notion of free labor as the absolute control of a worker
over her or his person.3
After defeat of the Confederate insurrection led to slavery’s abolition, race as white supremacy evolved in the
South as an element in the struggle over what freedom was to mean and how it would be
harmonized with the plantocracy’s desired labor system and the social order required to maintain it. That struggle
culminated in the planter-dominated ruling class’s victory, which was consolidated in racialized
disfranchisement and imposition of the codified white supremacist regime of racial segregation.
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the West Coast fights over importation of Chinese labor and
Japanese immigration also condensed around racialist ideologies. Railroad operators and other
importers of Chinese labor imagined that Chinese workers’ distinctive racial characteristics made
them more tractable and capable of living on less than white Americans; opponents argued that those very racial
characteristics would degrade American labor and that Chinese were racially “unassimilable.” Postbellum southern planters
imported Chinese to the Mississippi Delta to compete with black sharecroppers out of the same
racialist presumptions of greater tractability, as did later importers of Sicilian labor to the sugarcane and
cotton fields.
Large-scale industrial production in the latenineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, of course, depended on mass
labor immigration mainly from the eastern and southern fringes of Europe. The innovations of race science—
that is, of racialist folk ideology transformed into an academic profession—promised to assist employers’ needs for rational labor force management
and were present in the foundation of the fields of industrial relations and industrial psychology. Hugo Münsterberg, a founding luminary of industrial
psychology, included “race psychological diagnosis” as an element in assessment of employees’ capabilities, although he stressed that racial or national
temperaments are averages and that there is considerable individual variation within groups. He argued that assessment, therefore, should be leavened
with consideration of individuals’ characteristics and that the influence of “group psychology” would be significant only if the employment not of a
single person, but of a large number, is in question, as it is most probable that the average character will show itself in a sufficient degree as soon as
many members of the group are involved.4
As scholarship on race science and its kissing cousin, eugenics, has shown, research that sets out to find
evidence of racial difference will find it, whether or not it exists. Thus, race science produced increasingly
refined taxonomies of racial groups—up to as many as sixty-three “basic” races. The apparent specificity of race theorists’ just-so
stories about differential racial capacities provided rationales for immigration restriction, sterilization, segregation, and other
regimes of inequality. It also held out the promise of assisting employers in assigning workers to jobs
for which they were racially suited. John Bodnar and his coauthors reproduce a Racial Adaptability Chart used by a Pittsburgh
company in the 1920s that maps thirty-six different racial groups’ capacities for twenty-two distinct jobs, eight different atmospheric
conditions, jobs requiring speed or precision, and day or night shift work. For example, Letts were supposedly fair with pick and
shovel, and concrete and wheelbarrow, bad as hod carriers, cleaners and caretakers, and boilermaker’s helpers; good as coal passers
and blacksmiths as well as at jobs requiring speed or precision; and good in cool and dry, smoky or dusty conditions; fair in oily or
dirty processes; and good on both day and night shifts.5
Of course, all this was bogus, nothing more than narrow upper-class prejudices parading about
as science. It was convincing only if one shared the folk narratives of essential hierarchy that the research assumed from the
outset. But the race theories did not have to be true to be effective. They had only to be used as if they were
true to produce the material effects that gave the ideology an authenticating verisimilitude. Poles became steel workers in
Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Buffalo, Chicago, and Gary not for any natural aptitude or affinity but because employers
and labor recruiters sorted them into work in steel mills.
Even the New Deal embedded premises of racial and gender hierarchy in its most fundamental policy
initiatives. The longer-term implications of the two-tiered system of social benefits thus created
persist to the present day. This extensive history illustrates that, as Marxist theorist Harry Chang observed in the
1970s, racial formation has always been an aspect of class formation, as a “social condition of
production.” Race has been a constitutive element in a capitalist social dynamic in which “social
types (instead of persons) figure as basic units of economic and political management.”6 Chang
perceptively analogized race to what Marx described as the fetish character of money. Marx, he
noted, described money as “the officiating object (or subject as an object) in the reification of a relation called value” and
as a “function-turned-into-an-object.” Race is similarly a function—a relation of hierarchy rooted
in the capitalist division of labor—turned into an object.7 “Money seeks gold to objectify itself—
gold does not cry out to be money.” Similarly, “the cutting edge of racial determinations of
persons is a social ‘imposition’ on nature,” which on its own yields no such categories.8
Research that sets out to find evidence of racial difference will find it, whether or not it exists. Although discussing race
specifically, Chang also puts his finger on the central characteristic of ideologies of ascriptive
hierarchy in general: In practice, the political economic raison d’etre of racial categories lies in
the ironclad social validity that is possible if relations are objectified as the intrinsic quality of
“racial features.” Blacks as the absence of the minimum guarantee of bourgeois rights (against enslavement and bondage)
presupposes Whites as a guarantee of immunity from such social degradation.9
This formulation applies equally to populations stigmatized as feebleminded, natural-born
criminals, “white trash,” poverty cultures, the underclass, crack babies, superpredators, and
other narratives of ascriptive hierarchy. Each such narrative is a species of the genus of
ideologies that legitimize capitalist social relations by naturalizing them. The characteristic
linking the species of this genus of ascriptive ideologies is that they are populations living, if not exactly outside
“the minimum guarantee of bourgeois rights,” at least beneath the customary floor of social worth and regard. In
practice, the latter devolves toward the former.
Chang’s perspective may help us see more clearly how ascriptive ideologies function. It certainly is
no surprise that
dominant classes operate among themselves within a common sense that understands their
dominance unproblematically, as decreed by the nature of things. At moments when their dominance
faces challenges, those narratives may be articulated more assertively and for broader dissemination.
This logic, for example, underlay the antebellum shift, in the face of mounting antislavery
agitation, from pragmatic defenses of slavery as a necessary evil—a stance that presumed a ruling class
speaking among itself alone—to essentialist arguments, putatively transcending class interests, namely,
that slavery was a positive good. It also may be seen in the explosion of racialist ideology in its various forms, including
eugenics, in justifying imperialist expansionism and consolidating the defeat of populism and working-class insurgency in the years
overlapping the turn of the twentieth century. That same dynamic was at work displacing the language of class and political economy
by culture and culturology in the postwar liberalism that consolidated the defeat of CIO radicalism. Later, racial essentialism helped
reify the struggles against southern segregation, racial discrimination, inequality, and poverty during the 1960s by separating
discussions of injustice from capitalism’s logic of reproduction. Poverty was reinvented as a cultural dilemma, and “white racism”
singled out as the root of racial inequality.
In this way, Chang’s perspective can be helpful in sorting out several important limitations in
discussions of race and class characteristic of today’s left. It can also help to make sense of the striking
convergence between the relative success of identitarian understandings of social justice and the steady, intensifying advance of
neoliberalism. It suggests a kinship where many on the left assume an enmity. The rise of neoliberalism in particular
suggests a serious problem with arguments that represent race and class as dichotomous or
alternative frameworks of political critique and action, as well as those arguments that posit the
dichotomy while attempting to reconcile its elements with formalistic gestures, for example, the
common “race and class” construction.
This sort of historical materialist perspective throws into relief a fundamental limitation of the
“whiteness” notion that has been fashionable within the academic left for roughly two decades: it reifies whiteness
as a transhistorical social category. In effect, it treats “whiteness”— and therefore “race”—as existing
prior to and above social context.10 Both who qualifies as white and the significance of being white
have altered over time. Moreover, whiteness discourse functions as a kind of moralistic exposé
rather than a basis for strategic politics; this is clear in that the program signally articulated in its name has been
simply to raise a demand to “abolish whiteness,” that is, to call on whites to renounce their racial
privilege. In fact, its fixation on demonstrating the depth of whites’ embrace of what was known to an
earlier generation’s version of this argument as “white skin privilege” and the inclination to slide into teleological accounts in which groups or
individuals “approach” or “pursue” whiteness erases the real historical dynamics and contradictions of American racial
history.
The whiteness discourse overlaps other arguments that presume racism to be a sui generis form of
injustice. Despite seeming provocative, these arguments do not go beyond the premises of the racial liberalism from which they
commonly purport to dissent. They differ only in rhetorical flourish, not content. Formulations that invoke
metaphors of disease or original sin reify racism by disconnecting it from the discrete historical circumstances and social structures
in which it is embedded, and treating it as an autonomous force. Disconnection from political economy is also a
crucial feature of postwar liberalism’s construction of racial inequality as prejudice or intolerance.
Racism becomes an independent variable in a moralistic argument that is idealist intellectually
and ultimately defeatist politically.
This tendency to see racism as sui generis also generates a resistance to precision in analysis. It is fueled by a tendency to inflate the
language of racism to the edge of its reasonable conceptual limits, if not beyond. Ideological commitment to
shoehorning into the rubric of racism all manner of inequalities that may appear statistically as
racial disparities has yielded two related interpretive pathologies. One is a constantly expanding
panoply of neologisms—“ institutional racism,” “systemic racism,” “structural racism,” “color-blind racism,”
“post-racial racism,” etc.— intended to graft more complex social dynamics onto a simplistic and
frequently psychologically inflected racism/anti-racism political ontology. Indeed, these efforts bring to mind [Thomas S.]
Kuhn’s account of attempts to accommodate mounting anomalies to salvage an interpretive paradigm in danger of crumbling under
a crisis of authority.11
A second essentialist sleight-of-hand advances claims for the primacy of race/racism as an explanation of inequalities in
the present by invoking analogies to regimes of explicitly racial subordination in the past . In these
arguments, analogy stands in for evidence and explanation of the contemporary centrality of
racism. Michelle Alexander’s widely read and cited book, The New Jim Crow, is only the most prominent expression of this tendency; even she has
to acknowledge that the analogy fails because the historical circumstances are so radically different.12 Rigorous pursuit of equality of opportunity
exclusively within the terms of capitalist class relations has been fully legitimized under the rubric of “diversity.”
From the historical materialist standpoint, the view of racial inequality as a sui generis injustice and dichotomous formulations of
the relation of race and class as systems of hierarchy in the United States are not only miscast but also fundamentally
counterproductive. It is particularly important at this moment to recognize that the familiar taxonomy of racial
difference is but one historically specific instance of a genus of ideologies of ascriptive hierarchy
that stabilize capitalist social reproduction. I have argued previously that entirely new race-like
taxonomies could come to displace the familiar ones. For instance, the “underclass” could become
even more race-like as a distinctive, essentialized population, by our current folk norms, multiracial in
composition, albeit most likely including in perceptibly greater frequencies people who would be classified
as black and Latino “racially,” though as small enough pluralities to preclude assimilating the
group ideologically as a simple proxy for nonwhite inferiors.13
This possibility looms larger now. Struggles for racial and gender equality have largely divested race and gender of
their common sense verisimilitude as bases for essential difference. Moreover, versions of racial and gender equality are now also
incorporated into the normative and programmatic structure of “left” neoliberalism. Rigorous pursuit of equality of opportunity
exclusively within the terms of given patterns of capitalist class relations—which is after all the ideal of racial
liberalism—has been fully legitimized within the rubric of “diversity.” That ideal is realized through gaining rough parity in
distribution of social goods and bads among designated population categories. As Walter Benn Michaels has argued powerfully,
according to that ideal, the society would be just if 1 percent of the population controlled 90 percent of the
resources, provided that blacks and other nonwhites, women, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and
transgender (LGBT) people were represented among the 1 percent in roughly similar proportion
as their incidence in the general population.14
Given the triumph of racial liberalism, it is entirely possible that new
discourses of ascriptive difference might
take shape that fit the folk common sense of our time and its cultural norms and sensibilities. Indeed, the explosive
resurgence in recent years of academically legitimated determinist discourses—all of which simply rehearse the standard idealist
tropes and circular garbage in/garbage out faux scientific narratives—reinforce that concern. The undergirding premises of
intellectual programs like evolutionary psychology, behavioral economics, genes and politics, and neurocriminology are strikingly
like straight-line extrapolations from Victorian race science— although for the most part, though not entirely, scholars operating in
those areas are scrupulous, or at least fastidious, in not implicating the familiar racial taxonomies in their deterministic sophistries.
Some scholars imagine that “epigenetics”—a view that focuses on the interplay of genes and environment in producing organisms
and genotypes—avoids determinism by providing causal explanations that are not purely biological. Recent research purporting to
find epigenetic explanations for socioeconomic inequality already foreshadows a possible framework for determinist “underclass”
narratives that avoid the taints associated with biological justifications of inequality and references to currently recognized racial
categories.15 Ironically, some enthusiasts for this epigenetic patter expressly liken it to Lamarckian evolutionary theory, which
stressed the heritability of characteristics acquired after birth, as though this were insulation against determinism. As historian of
anthropology George Stocking, Jr., and others have shown, Lamarckian race theory was no less determinist than its Darwinian
alternative, which posited strictly biological determinism. As Stocking notes, Lamarckians’ dependence on a “vague sociobiological
indeterminism” made it all the more difficult to challenge their circular race theories.16 In any event, narrow approaches that reduce
ascriptive ideology to reified notions of race/racism are not at all up to the challenge posed by this new determinist turn.
Finally, the adamant commitment to a racefirst perspective on inequalities that show up as statistical disparities has a material
foundation. The victories of the civil rights movement carried with them a more benign and
unavoidable political imperative. Legal remedies can be sought for injustices understood as
discrimination on the basis of race, gender, or other familiar categories of invidious ascription; no such
recourse exists for injustices generated through capitalism’s logic of production and
reproduction without mediation through one of those ascriptive categories. As I have argued elsewhere, this
makes identifying “racism” a technical requirement for pursuing certain grievances, not the basis of an overall strategy for pursuit of
racial justice, or, as I believe is a clearer left formulation, racial equality as an essential component of a program of social justice.17
Yet, for those who insist that racial reductionism is more than a pragmatic accommodation to
the necessities of pursuing legal or administrative grievances, something more is at play. A historical
materialist perspective can be helpful for identifying the glue that binds that commitment to a
race-first political discourse and practice.
All politics in capitalist society is class, or at least a class-inflected, politics. That is also true of the
political perspective that condenses in programs such as reparations, antiracism, and insistence on the sui
generis character of racial injustice. I submit that those tendencies come together around a politics
that is “entirely consistent with the neoliberal redefinition of equality and democracy along disparitarian
lines.” That politics reflects the social position of those positioned to benefit from the view that the
market is, or can be, a just, effective, or even acceptable, system for rewarding talent and virtue and punishing their
opposites and that, therefore, removal of “artificial” impediments to functioning like race and
gender will make it even more efficient and just.18
This is the politics of actual or would-be race relations administrators, and it is completely embedded within
American capitalism and its structures of elite brokerage. It is fundamentally antagonistic to working-class
politics, notwithstanding left identitarians’ gestural claims to the contrary.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
The politics of symbolism only insulate the 1ac from critical scrutiny and prevent
collective struggle
Chandler 7 – Researcher @ Centre for the Study of Democracy, Chandler. 2007. Centre for the
Study of Democracy, Westminster, Area, Vol. 39, No. 1, p. 118-119
This disjunction between the human/ethical/global causes of post-territorial
political activism and the capacity to 'make
claims immediately abstract and metaphysical – there is
no specific demand or programme or attempt to build a collective project. This is the politics of
symbolism. The rise of symbolic activism is highlighted in the increasingly popular framework of 'raising awareness'– here
there is no longer even a formal connection between ethical activity and intended outcomes
(Pupavac 2006). Raising awareness about issues has replaced even the pretense of taking responsibility for
engaging with the world – the act is ethical in-itself. Probably the most high profile example of awareness raising
a difference' is what makes these individuated
is the shift from Live Aid, which at least attempted to measure its consequences in fund-raising terms, to Live 8 whose goal was
solely that of raising an 'awareness of poverty'. The struggle for 'awareness' makes it clear that the focus of symbolic
politics is the individual and their desire to elaborate upon their identity – to make us aware of their
'awareness', rather than to engage us in an instrumental project of changing or engaging with the outside
world. It would appear that in freeing politics from the constraints of territorial political community
there is a danger that political activity is freed from any constraints of social mediation(see further,
Chandler 2004a). Without being forced to test and hone our arguments, or even to clearly articulate
them, we can rest on the radical 'incommunicability' of our personal identities and claims – you
are 'either with us or against us'; engaging with those who disagree is no longer possible or even desirable. It is this lack
of desire to engage which most distinguishes the unmediated activism of post-territorial political actors from
the old politics of territorial communities, founded on struggles of collective interests (Chandler
2004b). The clearest example is old representational politics – this forced engagement in order to win the votes of people necessary
for political parties to assume political power. Individuals with a belief in a collective programme knocked on strangers' doors and
were willing to engage with them, not on the basis of personal feelings but on what they understood were their potential shared
interests. Few people would engage in this type of campaigning today; engaging with people who do not share our views, in an
attempt to change their minds, is increasingly anathema and most people would rather share their individual vulnerabilities or
express their identities in protest than attempt to argue with a peer. This paper is not intended to be a nostalgic
paean to the old world of collective subjects and national interests or a call for a revival of
territorial state-based politics or even to reject global aspirations: quite the reverse. Today,
politics has been 'freed' from the constraints of territorial political community – governments
without coherent policy programmes do not face the constraints of failure or the constraints of
the electorate in any meaningful way; activists, without any collective opposition to relate to, are
free to choose their causes and ethical identities; protest, from Al Qaeda, to anti-war
demonstrations, to the riots in France, is inchoate and atomized. When attempts are made to formally
organize opposition, the ephemeral and incoherent character of protest is immediately apparent.
Instead, the ballot should prioritize class struggle—fixation on representational
politics weakens resistance against the impersonal roots of violence
Valerie Scatamburlo-D’Annibale PhD, Prof University of Windsor AND Peter McLaren PhD, Prof University
of California, Los Angeles The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of “Race” and “Difference Cultural Studies ↔ Critical
Methodologies, Volume 3 Number 2, 2003 148-175
It is remarkable, in our opinion, that so much of contemporary
social theory has largely abandoned the problems
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 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) has indicted the new academic entrepreneurs, the “masters of theory-inand-for-itself ” whose “discourse radicalism” has deftly sidestepped “the enduring conundrums
of labor and class
of class struggle” and who have, against a “sobering background of cheapened discourse and
opportunistic politics,” been “stripped of their self-advertised radicalism” (pp. 29-31). 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” (pp. 30-31). 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” (pp. 30-31). Harvey’s
searing criticism suggests that post-Marxists have been busy fiddling while Rome burns, and his comments
echo those made byMarx (1978) in his critique of the Young Hegelians who were, “in spite of their allegedly ‘world-shattering’
statements, the staunchest conservatives” (p. 149). Marx lamented that the Young Hegelians were simply fighting “phrases” and that
they failed to acknowledge that in offering only counterphrases, 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 ludic 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.16 In
their anathema towards totalization and in their penchant for thematizing culture with a particularizing
impulse that domiciles class in the hinterland of a divertissement, they reinscribe racial
formations within the prevailing logic of capitalist social relations. Moreover, because they
generally lack a class perspective, their gestures of radicalism are belied by their own class
positions. We agree with Reed (2000) who contended that cultural politics are class politics insofar as they
are “manifestations within the political economy of academic life and the left-liberal public
sphere” of the “petit bourgeois, brokerage politics of interest-group pluralism” (p. xxii). Regardless
of the “radical-sounding patina” that such theorizing attempts to lay over this “all-too-familiar worldview and practice”
(p. xxii), the paralysis and inconsequentiality of postal, culturalist discourses in the face of
globalized capitalism are patently clear. As Ahmad (1997b) has contended, 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 . (p. 104) Ahmad’s
provocative observations imply that substantive analyses of “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 has further suggested that although various post-Marxists have invited us to
join their euphoric celebrations honoring the decentering of capitalism and the abandonment of class
politics in favor of a post-al tomorrow filled with the proliferation of more and more forms of difference, such formulations
will never be able to challenge let alone overturn “capitalist universality” (Ahmad, 1998, p. 22). Indeed,
such gestures often result in a pragmatic fetishization of particularity and difference that
precludes systemic critique, a serious analysis of capitalism, and coherent action. As such, Ahmad
invited us to ask anew, the proverbial question, What then, must be done? To this question, we offer no simple theoretical
or political prescriptions. Yet we would argue that if social change is the aim, as it has traditionally been for the “Left,”
progressive educators and intellectuals must cease in displacing class analysis with the politics
of difference, they must resuscitate a sustained and unrelenting interrogation of capitalism in its
globalized forms, and they must overcome the corrosive skepticism of those narratives that have
rendered visions of social transformation hopelessly impractical or obsolete.
K OUTWEIGHS
The ballot is a choice between unrelenting critique of capitalist ideology and
collective suicide. Foregrounding collective humanist alternatives is key—politics
of pure difference isn’t a survival strategy, it’s fatalism
Valerie Scatamburlo-D’Annibale PhD, Prof University of Windsor AND Peter McLaren PhD, Prof
University of California, Los Angeles The Strategic Centrality of Class in the Politics of “Race” and “Difference Cultural Studies ↔
Critical Methodologies, Volume 3 Number 2, 2003 148-175
We will take our stand against the evils [of capitalism, imperialism, and racism] with a solidarity derived from a proletarian internationalism born of
socialist idealism. (National Office of the Black Panther Party, 1995, p. 220) For well more than two
decades, we have witnessed
the jubilant liberal and conservative pronouncements of the demise of socialism.
Concomitantly, history’s presumed failure to defang existing capitalist relations has been read
by many self-identified “radicals” as an advertisement for capitalism’s inevitability. As a result, the
chorus refrain of TINA sung by liberals and conservatives has been buttressed by the symphony of post-Marxist voices recommending that we give
socialism a decent burial and move on. Within this context, to speak of the promise of Marx and socialism may appear anachronistic, even naive,
especially because the post-al intellectual vanguard has presumably demonstrated the folly of doing so. Yet we defiantly believe that the
chants
of TINA must be combated for they offer as a fait accompli something that progressive leftists
should refuse to countenance—namely the triumph of globalized capitalism and its political bedfellow,
neoliberalism, which have worked together to naturalize suffering and obliterate hope. The grotesque
conditions that inspired Marx to pen his original critiques of capitalism are present and flourishing. In fact,
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). These are the circumstances of our
times—circumstances that require an unrelenting critique of capitalism and an
oppositional politics capable of confronting capitalist universality. These are realities
that require something more than the liberal pluralism of difference politics, something more than the cries
of post-Marxists who would have us relegate socialism to the rag-and-bone shop of historical memory and mummify Marxism along with Lenin’s
corpse.We concur with Amin (1998) who claimed that the
politics of historical inevitability sewn into the neoliberal
undergarments of TINA supporters must be defied and revealed as absurd and criminal and who put the
challenge we face in no uncertain terms: Humanity may let itself be led by capitalism’s logic to a fate
of collective suicide, or it may pave the way for an alternative humanist project of
global socialism. The urgency that animates Amin’s clarion call for a collective socialist vision necessitates challenging the questionable
assumptions that have come to constitute the core of “radical” theory and practice. In terms of effecting change, what is needed is a
cogent understanding of the systemic nature of exploitation and oppression based on the
precepts of a radical critique of political economy. Seldom before has a Marxian analysis of capitalism and class rule been
so desperately needed. That is not to say that everything Marx anticipated has come true, for that is clearly not the case.Nonetheless,Marx’s enduring
relevance lies in his indictment of capitalism that continues to wreak havoc in the lives of most global citizens. Rather
than jettisoning
Marx, leftists must continue to engage his oeuvre and extrapolate from it that which is useful
pedagogically, theoretically, and, most important, politically in light of the challenges that confront us in defeating
capitalism and instituting a socialist alternative. The task for progressive intellectuals is to seize the moment and plant the seeds for
a political agenda that is grounded in an array of historical possibilities, is informed by a vision
committed to overcoming exploitative conditions, and incorporates Marx’s notion of “unity in
difference” in which people share widely common class and material interests. Such an understanding
extends far beyond the realm of theory, for the manner in which we choose to interpret and explore the social world
and the concepts and frameworks we use to express our sociopolitical understandings represents more than just
a Faustian infatuation with abstract categories. They imply intentions, organizational
practices, and political agendas. Identifying class analysis as the basis for our understandings
and class struggle as the basis for political transformation implies something quite different
than constructing a sense of political agency around issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and so
forth. Contrary to “Shakespeare’s assertion that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” it should be clear that this is not the case in political
matters. Rather, in politics “the essence of the flower lies in the name by which it is called” (Bannerji, 2000, p. 41). For the vast majority of
people today—people of all “racial classifications or identities, all genders and sexual orientations,” the common frame of
reference arcing across “difference,”—the “concerns and aspirations that are most widely shared are those that are rooted in
the common experience of everyday life shaped and constrained by political economy” (Reed, 2000, p.
xxvii).Does this mean that race should be reduced solely to a question of class or that we should
ignore racism and center our efforts on class struggle? No. We acknowledge, along with Marable (2001), that socialist
movements have been held in suspicion or rejected outright by the Black community because of
“the manifestation of racism by white workers, labor unions, and white ‘progressives’ ” (p. 204). Furthermore,
“white democratic socialists still seldom respect or even comprehend the African American’s
legitimate claim to unique national identity, culture, and tradition of struggle” (p. 204). Here, we support the
perspective of C. L. R. James who wrote, The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to
think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely
incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental. (as cited in Marable, 2001, p. 205)
Although post-Marxist advocates of the politics of difference suggest that the project of class struggle is
outdated, we would argue that the categories they have typically employed are now losing their usefulness, particularly in light of actual
social conditions and movements. “The day-to-day realities of corporate hegemony” are increasingly
suggesting “promising possibilities for a shift beyond the difficulties” of identity and difference politics, for
the “experience of multiple oppressions no longer requires multiple theories of oppression
because corporations multiply oppress” (Starr, 2000, pp. 166-167). The current anticorporate globalization
movements have redefined “enemies in ways that do not depend on identity as the basis of
understanding and allies in ways that do not depend on a subtle and fragile ‘politics of
difference.’ . . . What is at stake is political economic” (Starr, 2000, pp. 166-167). As such, notions of
difference and identity “may no longer be the most important organizing principle for social
movements”; rather, they “speak with clarity about the enemy,” that is, neoliberal,
globalized corporate capitalism (Starr, 2000, pp. 166-167). The mantra “another world is possible” has become the animating theme
of recent global protests. It appears that those people struggling against tear gas, police batons, and rubber
bullets in the streets of Seattle, Genoa, Prague, and Quebec City have not read about TINA, the end of grand
narratives of emancipation, or the decentering of capitalism. It seems as though the struggle for basic survival and
some semblance of human dignity in the mean streets of the dystopian metropolis does not permit much time or opportunity to read the heady
proclamations emanating from the post-al academy. As E. P. Thompson (1978) once remarked, sometimes “experience walks in without knocking at the
door, and announces deaths, crises of subsistence, trench warfare, unemployment, inflation, genocide” (p. 11). History, to paraphrase Thompson
(p. 25),
does not seem to be following theory’s script. This, of course, does not mean that socialism will
inevitably come about; yet a sense of its burgeoning promise permeates contemporary protest
movements (Zinn, 2000). Committed Left intellectuals must work to cultivate a democratic socialist
vision that refuses to forget the “wretched of the earth,” the children of the damned, and the victims of the culture of
silence—a task that requires more than abstruse convolutions and striking ironic poses in the
agnostic arena of signifying practices. Socialism in the United States remains a theory of social and
economic justice rooted in a ruthless critique of capitalism and exploitation. It must be made
into a living reality opposed to liberal democracy, which only serves to facilitate the
reproduction of capital. In advancing this struggle, we advocate the building of a multiracial, genderbalanced, and anti-imperialist social movement dedicated to opposing racism, capitalism (both in
private property and state property forms), sexism, heterosexism, hierarchies based on social class, as well as
other forms of oppression. Whatever the misunderstandings or confusion surrounding the
notion of socialism—largely bound up with a mistaken identification ofMarxism with its opposite, Stalinism—the democratic and
internationalist principles of socialism need to be reinvigorated among those serious about
resisting the domination of capital and social relations that create inequality and oppression.
Socialism today, undoubtedly, runs against the grain of received wisdom, but its vision of a
vastly improved and freer arrangement of social relations beckons on the horizon. Its unwritten
text is nascent in the present even as it exists among the fragments of history and the shards of
distant memories. Its promise needs to be redeemed.
AT: RACIAL REDUCTIONISM
Wrong
Taylor 11 [Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, on the editorial board of the International Socialist Review and a doctoral student in
African American Studies at Northwestern University; “Race, class and Marxism,” SocialistWorker.org,
http://socialistworker.org/2011/01/04/race-class-and-marxism]
Marxists believe that the potential for that kind of unity is dependant on battles and struggles against racism today. Without a commitment by revolutionary organizations in the here and now to the fight against
racism, working-class unity will never be achieved and the revolutionary potential of the working class will never be realized. Yet despite all the evidence of this commitment to fighting racism over many decades,
Marxism has been maligned as, at best, "blind" to combating racism and, at worst, "incapable" of it.
For example, in an article published last summer, popular commentator and self-described "anti-racist" Tim Wise summarized the critique
of "left activists" that he later defines as Marxists. He writes: [L]eft activists often marginalize people of color by operating from a framework of extreme
class reductionism, which holds that the "real" issue is class, not race, that "the only color that matters is green," and that issues like racism are mere "identity politics," which should take a backseat to promoting
class-based universalism and programs to help working people. This reductionism, by ignoring the way that even middle class and affluent people of color face racism and color-based discrimination (and by
presuming that low-income folks of color and low-income whites are equally oppressed, despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary) reinforces white denial, privileges white perspectivism and dismisses the lived
reality of people of color. Even more, as we'll see, it ignores perhaps the most important political lesson regarding the interplay of race and class: namely, that the biggest reason why there is so little working-class
consciousness and unity in the Untied States (and thus, why class-based programs to uplift all in need are so much weaker here than in the rest of the industrialized world), is precisely because of racism and the
way that white racism has been deliberately inculcated among white working folks. Only by confronting that directly (rather than sidestepping it as class reductionists seek to do) can we ever hope to build crossracial, class based coalitions. In other words, for the policies favored by the class reductionist to work--be they social democrats or Marxists--or even to come into being, racism and white supremacy must be
Wise accuses Marxism of: "extreme class reductionism," meaning that Marxists
allegedly think that class is more important than race; reducing struggles against racism to
"mere identity politics"; and requiring that struggles against racism should "take a back seat" to
struggles over economic issues. Wise also accuses so-called "left activists" of reinforcing "white denial" and
"dismiss[ing] the lived reality of people of color"--which, of course, presumes Left activists and
Marxists to all be white. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - What do Marxists actually say? Marxists argue that capitalism
is a system that is based on the exploitation of the many by the few. Because it is a system based
on gross inequality, it requires various tools to divide the majority--racism and all
oppressions under capitalism serve this purpose. Moreover, oppression is used to justify and "explain" unequal relationships in society that enrich the
minority that live off the majority's labor. Thus, racism developed initially to explain and justify the enslavement of
Africans--because they were less than human and undeserving of liberty and freedom. Everyone accepts the idea that the oppression of slaves was rooted in
the class relations of exploitation under that system. Fewer recognize that under capitalism, wage
slavery is the pivot around which all other inequalities and oppressions turn. Capitalism
challenged directly. Here,
used racism to justify plunder, conquest and slavery, but as Karl Marx pointed out, it also used racism to divide and rule--to pit one section of the working class against another and thereby blunt class
To claim, as Marxists do, that racism is a product of capitalism is not to deny or diminish its
importance or impact in American society. It is simply to explain its origins and the reasons for its perpetuation.
consciousness.
Many on the left today talk about class as if it is one of many oppressions, often describing it as "classism." What people are really referring to as "classism" is elitism or snobbery, and not the fundamental
it is popular today to talk about various oppressions, including class, as
intersecting. While it is true that oppressions can reinforce and compound each other, they are
born out of the material relations shaped by capitalism and the economic exploitation that is at
the heart of capitalist society. In other words, it is the material and economic structure of society that gave rise to a range of ideas and ideologies to justify, explain and help
perpetuate that order. In the United States, racism is the most important of those ideologies. Despite the widespread beliefs to the contrary of his critics, Karl Marx himself was well aware
of the centrality of race under capitalism. While Marx did not write extensively on the question of slavery and its racial impact in societies specifically, he did
write about the way in which European capitalism emerged because of its pilfering, rape and destruction, famously writing: The discovery of gold and silver in
America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of
the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of Black skins, signalized the rosy
dawn of the era of capitalist production. He also recognized the extent to which slavery was central to the world economy. He wrote: Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of
organization of society under capitalism. Moreover,
bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that has given the colonies their value; it is the colonies that have
created world trade, and it is world trade that is the pre-condition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance. Without slavery North America, the most progressive of
countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe out North America from the map of the world, and you will have anarchy--the complete decay of modern commerce and civilization. Cause slavery
to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations. Thus slavery, because it is an economic category, has always existed among the institutions of the peoples. Modern nations have been able only
to disguise slavery in their own countries, but they have imposed it without disguise upon the New World. Thus, there is a fundamental understanding of the centrality of slave labor in the national and
international economy. But what about race? Despite the dearth of Marx's own writing on race in particular, one might look at Marx's correspondence and deliberations on the American Civil War to draw
conclusions as to whether Marx was as dogmatically focused on purely economic issues as his critics make him out be. One must raise the question: If Marx was reductionist, how is his unabashed support and
If Marx was truly an economic reductionist, he might have surmised
that slavery and capitalism were incompatible, and simply waited for slavery to whither away.
involvement in abolitionist struggles in England explained?
W.E.B. Du Bois in his Marxist tome Black Reconstruction, quotes at length a letter penned by Marx as the head of the International Workingmen's Association, written to Abraham Lincoln in 1864 in the midst of
the Civil War: The contest for the territories which opened the epoch, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the immigrant or be prostituted by the tramp of
the slaver driver? When an oligarchy of 300,000 slave holders dared to inscribe for the first time in the annals of the world "Slavery" on the banner of armed revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century
ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first declaration of the rights of man was issued...when on the very spots counter-revolution...maintained "slavery to be a beneficial
institution"...and cynically proclaimed property in man 'the cornerstone of the new edifice'...then the working classes of Europe understood at once...that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a
general holy war of property against labor... They consider it an earnest sign of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through
Not only was Marx personally opposed to slavery
and actively organized against it, but he theorized that slavery and the resultant race
discrimination that flowed from it were not just problems for the slaves themselves, but for white workers who were constantly under the
the matchless struggles for the rescue of the enchained race and the Reconstruction of a social order.
threat of losing work to slave labor. This did not mean white workers were necessarily sympathetic to the cause of the slaves--most of them were not. But Marx was not addressing the issue of consciousness, but
objective factors when he wrote in Capital, "In the United States of America, every independent movement of the workers was paralyzed as long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labor cannot
Moreover, Marx understood the dynamics of racism in a modern sense as well--as a
means by which workers who had common, objective interests with each other could also become mortal
enemies because of subjective, but nevertheless real, racist and nationalist ideas. Looking at the tensions between Irish and English workers, with a nod
emancipate itself in the white skin where in the Black it is branded."
toward the American situation between Black and white workers, Marx wrote: Every industrial and commercial center in England possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and
Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he feels himself a member of the ruling nation and so turns
himself into a tool of the aristocrats and capitalists of his country against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social and national prejudices against the Irish worker.
His attitude is much the same as that of the "poor whites" to the "niggers" in the former slave states of the USA. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker at once
This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in
It is the secret by which
the capitalist maintains its power. And that class is fully aware of it. Out of this quote, one can see a Marxist theory of how racism operated in contemporary society, after
slavery was ended. Marx was highlighting three things: first, that capitalism promotes economic competition between workers; second, that
the ruling class uses racist ideology to divide workers against each other; and finally, that when one group of
workers suffer oppression, it negatively impacts the entire class.
the accomplice and stupid tool of the English rule in Ireland.
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.
HORIZONTALISM BAD
Bricolage—we are impact turning their method, their Paradis evidence says “There
is great power "behind the curtain" that can be leveraged by those of us who are
typically "disenfranchised." Their attempt to claim “debate space” as a site for
organic, horizontalist politics sells out radical change to the private sphere of
individual performance.
Marcus 2012 – associate book editor at Dissent Magazine (Fall, David, “The Horizontalists”,
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-horizontalists)
There is a much-recycled and certainly apocryphal tale told of an ethnographer traveling in
India. Journeying up and down the Ganges Delta, he encounters a fisherman who claims to
know the source of all truth. “The world,” the fisherman explains, “rests upon the back of an
elephant.”
“But what does the elephant stand on?” the ethnographer asks.
“A turtle.”
“And the turtle?”
“Another turtle.”
“And it?”
“Ah, friend,” smiles the fisherman, “it is turtles all the way down.”
As with most well-circulated apocrypha, it is a parable that lacks a clear provenance, but has a
clear moral: that despite our ever-dialectical minds, we will never get to the bottom of things;
that, in fact, there is nothing at the bottom of things. What we define as society is nothing
more than a set of locally constructed practices and norms, and what we define as history is
nothing more than the passage of one set to the next. Although we might “find the picture of our
universe as an infinite tower of tortoises rather ridiculous,” as one reteller admitted, it only
raises the question, “Why do we think we know better?”
Since the early 1970s we have wondered—with increasing anxiety—why and if we know better.
Social scientists, literary critics, philosophers, and jurists have all begun to turn from their
particular disciplines to the more general question of interpretation. There has been an
increasing uneasiness with universal categories of thought; a whispered suspicion and
then a commonly held belief that the sum—societies, histories, identities—never amounts to
more than its parts. New analytical frameworks have begun to emerge, sensitive to both the
pluralities and localities of life. “What we need,” as Clifford Geertz argued, “are not enormous
ideas” but “ways of thinking that are responsive to particularities, to individualities, oddities,
discontinuities, contrasts, and singularities.”
This growing anxiety over the precision of our interpretive powers has translated into a variety
of political as well as epistemological concerns. Many have become uneasy with universal
concepts of justice and equality. Simultaneous to—and in part because of—the ascendance of
human rights, freedom has increasingly become understood as an individual entitlement instead
of a collective possibility. The once prevalent conviction that a handful of centripetal values
could bind society together has transformed into a deeply skeptical attitude toward general
statements of value. If it is, indeed, turtles all the way down, then decisions can take place only
on a local scale and on a horizontal plane. There is no overarching platform from which to
legislate; only a “local knowledge.” As Michael Walzer argued in a 1985 lecture on social
criticism, “We have to start from where we are,” we can only ask, “what is the right thing for us
to do?”
This shift in scale has had a significant impact on the Left over the past twenty to thirty years.
Socialism, once the “name of our desire,” has all but disappeared; new desires have emerged in
its place: situationism, autonomism, localism, communitarianism, environmentalism, antiglobalism. Often spatial in metaphor, they have been more concerned with where and how
politics happen rather than at what pace and to what end. Often local in theory and in practice,
they have come to represent a shift in scale: from the large to the small, from the vertical to the
horizontal, and from—what Geertz has called—the “thin” to the “thick.”
Class, race, and gender—those classic left themes—are, to be sure, still potent categories. But
they have often been imagined as spectrums rather than binaries, varying shades rather than
static lines of solidarity. Instead of society, there is now talk of communities and actor networks;
instead of radical schemes to rework economic and political institutions,
there is an emphasis on localized campaigns and everyday practices. The
critique of capitalism—once heavily informed by intricate historical and social theories—has
narrowed. The “ruthless criticism of all,” as Karl Marx once put it, has turned away from
exploitative world systems to the pathologies of an over-regulated life. As post-Marxists Ernesto
Laclau and Chantal Mouffe declared in 1985,
Left-wing thought today stands at a crossroads. The “evident truths” of the past—the classical
forms of analysis and political calculation, the nature of the forces in conflict, the very meaning
of the Left’s struggles and objectives—have been seriously challenged….From Budapest to
Prague and the Polish coup d’état, from Kabul to the sequels of Communist victory in Vietnam
and Cambodia, a question-mark has fallen more and more heavily over the whole way of
conceiving both socialism and the roads that should lead to it.
In many ways, the Left has just been keeping up with the times. Over the last quarter-century,
there has been a general fracturing of our social and economic relations, a “multiplication of,”
what one sociologist has called, “partial societies—grouped by age, sex, ethnicity, and
proximity.” This has not necessarily been a bad thing. Even as the old Left—the vertical Left—
frequently bemoaned the growing differentiation and individuation, these new categories did, in
fact, open the door for marginalized voices and communities. They created a space for more
diversity, tolerance, and inclusion. They signaled a turn toward the language of recognition: a
politics more sensitive to difference. But this turn was also not without its disadvantages. Gone
was the Left’s hope for an emerging class consciousness, a movement of the “people” seeking
greater realms of freedom. Instead of challenging the top-down structures of late capitalism,
radicals now aspired to create—what post-Marxists were frequently calling—“spaces of
freedom.” If one of the explicit targets of the global justice movement of the late 1990s was the
exploitative trade policies of the World Trade Organization, then its underlying critique was the
alienating patterns of its bureaucracy: the erosion of spaces for self-determination and
expression. The crisis of globalization was that it stripped individuals of their rights to
participate, to act as free agents in a society that was increasingly becoming shaped by a set of
global institutions. What most troubled leftists over the past three or four decades was not the
increasingly unequal distribution of goods and services in capitalist societies but the
increasingly unequal distribution of power. As one frequently sighted placard from the 1999
Seattle protests read, “No globalization without participation!”
Occupy Wall Street has come to represent the latest turn in this movement toward local and
more horizontal spaces of freedom. Occupation was, itself, a matter of recovering local space: a
way to repoliticize the square. And in a moment characterized by foreclosure, it was also
symbolically, and sometimes literally, an attempt to reclaim lost homes and abandoned
properties. But there was also a deeper notion of space at work. Occupy Wall Street sought out
not only new political spaces but also new ways to relate to them. By resisting the top-down
management of representative democracy as well as the bottom-up ideals of labor movements,
Occupiers hoped to create a new politics in which decisions moved neither up nor down but
horizontally. While embracing the new reach of globalization—linking arms and webcams with
their encamped comrades in Madrid, Tel Aviv, Cairo, and Santiago—they were also rejecting its
patterns of consolidation, its limits on personal freedom, its vertical and bureaucratic structures
of decision-making.
Time was also to be transformed. The general assemblies and general strikes were efforts to
reconstruct, and make more autonomous, our experience of time as well as space. Seeking to
escape from the Taylorist demands of productivity, the assemblies insisted that decision-making
was an endless process. Who we are, what we do, what we want to be are categories of flexibility,
and consensus is as much about repairing this sense of open-endedness as it is about agreeing
on a particular set of demands. Life is a mystery, as one pop star fashionista has insisted, and
Occupiers wanted to keep it that way. Likewise, general strikes were imagined as ways in which
workers could take back time—regain those parts of life that had become routinized by work.
Rather than attempts to achieve large-scale reforms, general strikes were improvisations,
escapes from the daily calculations of production that demonstrated that we can still be happy,
creative, even productive individuals without jobs. As one unfurled banner along New York’s
Broadway read during this spring’s May Day protests, “Why work? Be happy.”
In many ways, the Occupy movement was a rebellion against the institutionalized nature of
twenty-first century capitalism and democracy. Equally skeptical of corporate monopolies as it
was of the technocratic tendencies of the state, it was ultimately an insurgency against control,
against the ways in which organized power and capital deprived the individual of the time and
space needed to control his or her life. Just as the vertically inclined leftists of the twentieth
century leveraged the public corporation—the welfare state—against the increasingly powerful
number of private ones, so too were Occupy and, more generally, the horizontalist Left to
embrace the age of the market: at the center of their politics was the anthropological “man” in
both his forms—homo faber and homo ludens—who was capable of negotiating his interests
outside the state. For this reason, the movement did not fit neatly into right or left, conservative
or liberal, revolutionary or reformist categories. On the one hand, it was sympathetic to the most
classic of left aspirations: to dismantle governing hierarchies. On the other, its language was
imbued with a strident individualism: a politics of anti-institutionalism and personal freedom
that has most often been affiliated with the Right.
Seeking an alternative to the bureaucratic tendencies of capitalism and socialism, Occupiers
were to frequently invoke the image of autonomy: of a world in which social and economic
relations exist outside the institutions of the state. Their aspiration was a society
based on organic, decentralized circuits of exchange and
deliberation—on voluntary associations, on local debate, on loose
networks of affinity groups.
If political and economic life had become abstracted in the age of globalization and
financialization, then Occupy activists wanted to re-politicize our everyday choices. As David
Graeber, one of Occupy’s chief theoretical architects, explained two days after Zuccotti Park was
occupied, “The idea is essentially that “the system is not going to save us,” so “we’re going to
have to save ourselves.”
Borrowing from the anarchist tradition, Graeber has called this work “direct action”: the
practice of circumventing, even on occasion subverting, hierarchies through practical projects.
Instead of attempting “to pressure the government to institute reforms” or “seize state power,”
direct actions seek to “build a new society in the shell of the old.” By creating spaces in which
individuals take control over their lives, it is a strategy of acting and thinking “as if one is already
free.” Marina Sitrin, another prominent Occupier, has offered another name for this politics—
“horizontalism”: “the use of direct democracy, the striving for consensus” and “processes in
which everyone is heard and new relationships are created.” It is a politics that not only refuses
institutionalization but also imagines a new subjectivity from which one can project the future
into the present.
Direct action and horizontal democracy are new names, of course, for old ideas. They descend—
most directly—from the ideas and tactics of the global justice movement of the 1990s and
2000s. Direct Action Network was founded in 1999 to help coordinate the anti-WTO protests in
Seattle; horizontalidad, as it was called in Argentina, emerged as a way for often unemployed
workers to organize during the financial crisis of 2001. Both emerged out of the theories and
practices of a movement that was learning as it went along. The ad hoc working groups, the allnight bull sessions, the daylong actions, the decentralized planning were all as much by
necessity as they were by design. They were not necessarily intended at first. But what emerged
out of anti-globalization was a new vision of globalization. Local and horizontal in practice,
direct action and democracy were to become catchphrases for a movement that was attempting
to resist the often autocratic tendencies of a fast-globalizing capitalism.
But direct action and horizontal democracy also tap into a longer, if often neglected, tradition on
the left: the anarchism, syndicalism, and autonomist Marxism that stretch from Peter
Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, and Rosa Luxemburg to C.L.R. James, Cornelius Castoriadis, and
Antonio Negri. If revolutionary socialism was a theory about ideal possibilities, then anarchism
and autonomism often focused on the revolutionary practices themselves. The way in which the
revolution was organized was the primary act of revolution. Autonomy, as the Greco-French
Castoriadis told Le Monde in 1977, demands not only “the elimination of dominant groups and
of the institutions embodying and orchestrating that domination” but also new modes of what
he calls “self-management and organization.”
With direct action and horizontal democracy, the Occupy movement not only developed a set of
new tactics but also a governing ideology, a theory of time and space that runs counter to many
of the practices of earlier leftist movements. Unlike revolutionary socialism or evolutionary
social democracy—Marx’s Esau and Jacob—Occupiers conceived of time as more cyclical than
developmental, its understanding of space more local and horizontal than structural and
vertical. The revolution was to come but only through everyday acts. It was to occur only
through—what Castoriadis obliquely referred to as—“the self-institution of society.”
The seemingly spontaneous movement that emerged after the first general assemblies in
Zuccotti Park was not, then, sui generis but an elaboration of a much larger turn by the Left. As
occupations spread across the country and as activists begin to exchange organizational tactics,
it was easy to forget that what was happening was, in fact, a part of a much larger shift in the
scale and plane of Western politics: a turn toward more local and horizontal patterns of life, a
growing skepticism toward the institutions of the state, and an increasing desire to seek out
greater realms of personal freedom. And although its hibernation over the summer has,
perhaps, marked the end of the Occupy movement, OWS has also come to represent an
important—and perhaps more lasting—break. In both its ideas and tactics, it has given us a new
set of desires—autonomy, radical democracy, direct action—that look well beyond the
ideological and tactical tropes of socialism. Its occupations and general assemblies, its flash
mobs and street performances, its loose network of activists all suggest a bold new set of
possibilities for the Left: a horizontalist ethos that believes that revolution will begin by
transforming our everyday lives.
It can be argued that horizontalism is, in many ways, a product of the growing
disaggregation and individuation of Western society; that it is a kind of
free-market leftism: a politics jury-rigged out of the very culture
it hopes to resist.
For not only does it emphasize the agency of the individual, but it draws
one of its central inspirations from a neoclassical image: that of the selfmanaging society—the polity that functions best when the state is absent
from everyday decisions.
But one can also find in its anti-institutionalism an attempt to speak in today’s language for
yesterday’s goals. If we must live in a society that neither trusts nor feels compelled by
collectivist visions, then horizontalism offers us a leftism that attempts to be, at once, both
individualist and egalitarian, anti-institutional and democratic, open to the possibilities of selfmanagement and yet also concerned with the casualties born out of an age that has let capital
manage itself for far too long. Horizontalism has absorbed the crisis of knowledge—what we
often call “postmodernism”—and the crisis of collectivism—what we often call “neoliberalism.”
But instead of seeking to return to some golden age before our current moment of fracture, it
seeks—for better and worse—to find a way to make leftist politics conform to our current age of
anti-foundationalism and institutionalism. As Graeber argued in the prescriptive last pages of
his anthropological epic, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, “Capitalism has transformed the world in
many ways that are clearly irreversible” and we therefore need to give up “the false choice
between state and market that [has] so monopolized political ideology for the last centuries that
it made it difficult to argue about anything else.” We need, in other words, to stop thinking like
leftists.
But herein lies the problem. Not all possible forms of human existence and
social interaction, no matter how removed they are from the institutions of
power and capital, are good forms of social organization. Although it is easy to
look enthusiastically to those societies—ancient or modern, Western or non-Western—that exist
beyond the structures of the state, they, too, have their own patterns of hierarchy, their own
embittered lines of inequality and injustice. More important, to select one form of social
organization over the other is always an act of exclusion. Instituting
and then protecting a particular way of life will always require a normative
commitment in which not every value system is respected—in which, in
other words, there is a moral hierarchy.
More problematically, by working outside structures of power one may circumvent coercive
systems but one does not necessarily subvert them. Localizing politics—stripping it of its
larger institutional ambitions—has, to be sure, its advantages. But without a larger structural
vision, it does not go far enough. “Bubbles of freedom,” as Graeber calls them, may create
a larger variety of non-institutional life. But they will always neglect other crucial avenues of
freedom: in particular, those social and economic rights that can only be protected from the top
down. In this way, the anti-institutionalism of horizontalism comes
dangerously close to that of the libertarian Right. The turn to previous eras
of social organization, the desire to locate and confine politics to a
particular regional space, the deep skepticism toward all forms of
institutional life not only mirror the aspirations of libertarianism but help
cloak those hierarchies spawned from non-institutional forms of power and
capital.
This is a particularly pointed irony for a political ideology that claims to be opposed to the many
injustices of a non-institutional market—in particular, its unregulated financial schemes.
Perhaps this is an irony deeply woven into the theoretical quilt of autonomy: a vision that, as a
result of its anti-institutionalism, is drawn to all sites of individual liberation—even those that
are to be found in the marketplace. As Graeber concludes in Debt, “Markets, when allowed to
drift entirely free from their violent origins, invariably begin to grow into something different,
into networks of honor, trust, and mutual connectedness,” whereas “the maintenance of systems
of coercion constantly do the opposite: turn the products of human cooperation, creativity,
devotion, love and trust back into numbers once again.”
In many ways, this is the result of a set of political ideas that have lost touch with their origins.
The desire for autonomy was born out of the socialist—if not also often the Marxist—tradition
and there was always a guarded sympathy for the structures needed to oppose organized
systems of capital and power. Large-scale institutions were, for thinkers such as Castoriadis,
Negri, and C.L.R. James, still essential if every cook was truly to govern. To only “try to create
‘spaces of freedom’ ‘alongside’ of the State” meant, as Castoriadis was to argue later in his life, to
back “down from the problem of politics.” In fact, this was, he believed, the failure of 1968: “the
inability to set up new, different institutions” and recognize that “there is no such thing as a
society without institutions.”
This is—and will be—a problem for the horizontalist Left as it moves forward. As a leftism readymade for an age in which all sides of the political spectrum are arrayed against the regulatory
state, it is always in danger of becoming absorbed into the very ideological
apparatus it seeks to dismantle. For it aspires to a decentralized and
organic politics that, in both principle and practice, shares a lot in common
with its central target. Both it and the “free market” are anti-institutional.
And the latter will remain so without larger vertical measures. Structures, not only everyday
practices, need to be reformed. The revolution cannot happen only on the ground; it must also
happen from above. A direct democracy still needs its indirect structures, individual freedoms
still need to be measured by their collective consequences, and notions of social and economic
equality still need to stand next to the desire for greater political participation. Deregulation is
another regulatory regime, and to replace it requires new regulations: institutions that will limit
the excesses of the market. As Castoriadis insisted in the years after 1968, the Left’s task is not
only to abolish old institutions but to discover “new kinds of relationship between society and its
institutions.”
Horizontalism has come to serve as an important break from the static strategies and categories
of analysis that have slowed an aging and vertically inclined Left. OWS was to represent its
fullest expression yet, though it has a much longer back story and still—one hopes—a promising
future. But horizontalists such as Graeber and Sitrin will struggle to establish spaces of freedom
if they cannot formulate a larger vision for a society. Their vision is not—as several on the
vertical left have suggested—too utopian but not utopian enough: in seeking out local
spaces of freedom, they have confined their ambitions; they have, in fact,
come, at times, to mirror the very ideology they hope to resist. In his famous
retelling of the turtle parable, Clifford Geertz warned that in “the search of all-too-deep-lying
turtles,” we have to be careful to not “lose touch with the hard surfaces of life—with the political,
economic, stratificatory realities within which men are everywhere contained.” This is an everpresent temptation, and one that, in our age of ever more stratification, we must resist.