Cap vs K affs1NC

Capitalism causes inevitable crises, inequality, and dehumanization --- pedagogical spaces are the crucial staging ground for keeping socialism on the horizonMcLaren, Distinguished Fellow Critical Studies @ Chapman U and UCLA urban schooling prof, and Scatamburlo-DAnnibale, associate professor of Communication U Windsor, 4(Peter and Valerie, Class Dismissed? Historical materialism and the politics of difference, Educational Philosophy and Theory Vol. 36, Issue 2, p. 183-199)

For well over two decades we have witnessed the jubilant liberal and conservative pronouncements of the demise of socialism. Concomitantly, history's presumed failure to defang existing capitalist relations has been read by many self-identified radicals as an advertisement for capitalism's inevitability. As a result, the chorus refrain There Is No Alternative, sung by liberals and conservatives, has been buttressed by the symphony of post-Marxist voices recommending that we give socialism a decent burial and move on. Within this context, to speak of the promise of Marx and socialism may appear anachronistic, even nave, especially since the post-al intellectual vanguard has presumably demonstrated the folly of doing so. Yet we stubbornly believe that the chants of T.I.N.A. must be combated for they offer as a fait accompli, something which progressive Leftists should refuse to acceptnamely the triumph of capitalism and its political bedfellow neo-liberalism, which have worked together to naturalize suffering, undermine collective struggle, and obliterate hope. We concur with Amin (1998), who claims that such chants must be defied and revealed as absurd and criminal, and who puts the challenge we face in no uncertain terms: humanity may let itself be led by capitalism's logic to a fate of collective suicide or it may pave the way for an alternative humanist project of global socialism. The grosteque conditions that inspired Marx to pen his original critique of capitalism are present and flourishing. The inequalities of wealth and the gross imbalances of power that exist today are leading to abuses that exceed those encountered in Marx's day (Greider, 1998, p. 39). Global capitalism has paved the way for the obscene concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands and created a world increasingly divided between those who enjoy opulent affluence and those who languish in dehumanizing conditions and economic misery. In every corner of the globe, we are witnessing social disintegration as revealed by a rise in abject poverty and inequality. At the current historical juncture, the combined assets of the 225 richest people is roughly equal to the annual income of the poorest 47 percent of the world's population, while the combined assets of the three richest people exceed the combined GDP of the 48 poorest nations (CCPA, 2002, p. 3). Approximately 2.8 billion peoplealmost half of the world's populationstruggle in desperation to live on less than two dollars a day (McQuaig, 2001, p. 27). As many as 250 million children are wage slaves and there are over a billion workers who are either un- or under-employed. These are the concrete realities of our timerealities that require a vigorous class analysis, an unrelenting critique of capitalism and an oppositional politics capable of confronting what Ahmad (1998, p. 2) refers to as capitalist universality. They are realities that require something more than that which is offered by the prophets of difference and post-Marxists who would have us relegate socialism to the scrapheap of history and mummify Marxism along with Lenin's corpse. Never before has a Marxian analysis of capitalism and class rule been so desperately needed. That is not to say that everything Marx said or anticipated has come true, for that is clearly not the case. Many critiques of Marx focus on his strategy for moving toward socialism, and with ample justification; nonetheless Marx did provide us with fundamental insights into class society that have held true to this day. Marx's enduring relevance lies in his indictment of capitalism which continues to wreak havoc in the lives of most. While capitalism's cheerleaders have attempted to hide its sordid underbelly, Marx's description of capitalism as the sorcerer's dark power is even more apt in light of contemporary historical and economic conditions. Rather than jettisoning Marx, decentering the role of capitalism, and discrediting class analysis, radical educators must continue to engage Marx's oeuvre and extrapolate from it that which is useful pedagogically, theoretically, and, most importantly, politically in light of the challenges that confront us. The urgency which animates Amin's call for a collective socialist vision necessitates, as we have argued, moving beyond the particularism and liberal pluralism that informs the politics of difference. It also requires challenging the questionable assumptions that have come to constitute the core of contemporary radical theory, pedagogy and politics. In terms of effecting change, what is needed is a cogent understanding of the systemic nature of exploitation and oppression based on the precepts of a radical political economy approach (outlined above) and one that incorporates Marx's notion of unity in difference in which people share widely common material interests. Such an understanding extends far beyond the realm of theory, for the manner in which we choose to interpret and explore the social world, the concepts and frameworks we use to express our sociopolitical understandings, are more than just abstract categories. They imply intentions, organizational practices, and political agendas. Identifying class analysis as the basis for our understandings and class struggle as the basis for political transformation implies something quite different than constructing a sense of political agency around issues of race, ethnicity, gender, etc. Contrary to Shakespeare's assertion that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, it should be clear that this is not the case in political matters. Rather, in politics the essence of the flower lies in the name by which it is called (Bannerji, 2000, p. 41). The task for progressives today is to seize the moment and plant the seeds for a political agenda that is grounded in historical possibilities and informed by a vision committed to overcoming exploitative conditions. These seeds, we would argue, must be derived from the tree of radical political economy. For the vast majority of people todaypeople of all racial classifications or identities, all genders and sexual orientationsthe common frame of reference arcing across difference, the concerns and aspirations that are most widely shared are those that are rooted in the common experience of everyday life shaped and constrained by political economy (Reed, 2000, p. xxvii). While post-Marxist advocates of the politics of difference suggest that such a stance is outdated, we would argue that the categories which they have employed to analyze the social are now losing their usefulness, particularly in light of actual contemporary social movements. All over the globe, there are large anti-capitalist movements afoot. In February 2002, chants of Another World Is Possible became the theme of protests in Porto Allegre. It seems that those people struggling in the streets havent read about T.I.N.A., the end of grand narratives of emancipation, or the decentering of capitalism. It seems as though the struggle for basic survival and some semblance of human dignity in the mean streets of the dystopian metropoles doesnt permit much time or opportunity to read the heady proclamations emanating from seminar rooms. As E. P. Thompson (1978, p. 11) once remarked, sometimes experience walks in without knocking at the door, and announces deaths, crises of subsistence, trench warfare, unemployment, inflation, genocide. This, of course, does not mean that socialism will inevitably come about, yet a sense of its nascent promise animates current social movements. Indeed, noted historian Howard Zinn (2000, p. 20) recently pointed out that after years of single-issue organizing (i.e. the politics of difference), the WTO and other anti-corporate capitalist protests signaled a turning point in the history of movements of recent decades, for it was the issue of class that more than anything bound everyone together. History, to paraphrase Thompson (1978, p. 25) doesnt seem to be following Theory's script. Our vision is informed by Marx's historical materialism and his revolutionary socialist humanism, which must not be conflated with liberal humanism. For left politics and pedagogy, a socialist humanist vision remains crucial, whose fundamental features include the creative potential of people to challenge collectively the circumstances that they inherit. This variant of humanism seeks to give expression to the pain, sorrow and degradation of the oppressed, those who labor under the ominous and ghastly cloak of globalized capital. It calls for the transformation of those conditions that have prevented the bulk of humankind from fulfilling its potential. It vests its hope for change in the development of critical consciousness and social agents who make history, although not always in conditions of their choosing. The political goal of socialist humanism is, however, not a resting in difference but rather the emancipation of difference at the level of human mutuality and reciprocity. This would be a step forward for the discovery or creation of our real differences which can only in the end be explored in reciprocal ways (Eagleton, 1996, p. 120). Above all else, the enduring relevance of a radical socialist pedagogy and politics is the centrality it accords to the interrogation of capitalism. We can no longer afford to remain indifferent to the horror and savagery committed by capitalist's barbaric machinations. We need to recognize that capitalist democracy is unrescuably contradictory in its own self-constitution. Capitalism and democracy cannot be translated into one another without profound efforts at manufacturing empty idealism. Committed Leftists must unrelentingly cultivate a democratic socialist vision that refuses to forget the wretched of the earth, the children of the damned and the victims of the culture of silencea task which requires more than abstruse convolutions and striking ironic poses in the agnostic arena of signifying practices. Leftists must illuminate the little shops of horror that lurk beneath globalizations shiny faade; they must challenge the true evils that are manifest in the tentacles of global capitalism's reach. And, more than this, Leftists must search for the cracks in the edifice of globalized capitalism and shine light on those fissures that give birth to alternatives. Socialism today, undoubtedly, runs against the grain of received wisdom, but its vision of a vastly improved and freer arrangement of social relations beckons on the horizon. Its unwritten text is nascent in the present even as it exists among the fragments of history and the shards of distant memories. Its potential remains untapped and its promise needs to be redeemed.

Engaging the state is the only way to break down the crises of capitalismFrank '12 Thomas, brilliant badass, author of What's the Matter with Kansas? and editor of The Baffler "To the Precinct Station: How theory met practice and drove it absolutely crazy" http://www.thebaffler.com/past/to_the_precinct_station

Occupy itself is pretty much gone. It was evicted from Zuccotti Park about two months after it beganan utterly predictable outcome for which the group seems to have made inadequate preparation. OWS couldnt bring itself to come up with a real set of demands until after it got busted, when it finally agreed on a single item. With the exception of some residual groups here and there populated by the usual activist types, OWS has today pretty much fizzled out. The media storm that once surrounded it has blown off to other quarters. Pause for a moment and compare this record of accomplishment to that of Occupys evil twin, the Tea Party movement, and the larger right-wing revival of which it is a part. Well, under the urging of this trumped-up protest movement, the Republican Party proceeded to win a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives; in the state legislatures of the nation it took some six hundred seats from the Democrats; as of this writing it is still purging Republican senators and congressmen deemed insufficiently conservative and has even succeeded in having one of its own named as the GOPs vice-presidential candidate. * * * The question that the books under consideration here seek to answer is: What is the magic formula that made OWS so successful? But its exactly the wrong question. What we need to be asking about Occupy Wall Street is: Why did this effort fail? How did OWS blow all the promise of its early days? Why do even the most popular efforts of the Left come to be mired in a gluey swamp of academic talk and pointless antihierarchical posturing? The action certainly started with a bang. When the occupation of Zuccotti Park began, in September 2011, the OWS cause was overwhelmingly popular; indeed, as Todd Gitlin points out, hating Wall Street may well have been the most popular left-wing cause since the thirties. Inequality had reached obscene levels, and it was no longer the act of a radical to say so. The bank bailouts of the preceding years had made it obvious that government was captured by organized money. Just about everyone resented Wall Street in those days; just about everyone was happy to see someone finally put our fury in those crooks overpaid faces. People flocked to the OWS standard. Cash donations poured in; so did food and books. Celebrities made appearances in Zuccotti, and the media began covering the proceedings with an attentiveness it rarely gives to leftist actions. But these accounts, with a few exceptions here and there, misread that overwhelming approval of Occupys cause as an approval of the movements mechanics: the camping out in the park, the way food was procured for an army of protesters, the endless search for consensus, the showdowns with the cops, the twinkles. These things, almost every writer separately assumes, are what the Occupy phenomenon was really about. These are the details the public hungers to know. The building of a community in Zuccotti Park, for example, is a point of special emphasis. Noam Chomskys thoughts epitomize the genre when he tells us that one of the main achievements of the movement has been to create communities, real functioning communities of mutual support, democratic interchange, et cetera. The reason this is important, he continues, is because Americans tend to be very isolated and neighborhoods are broken down, community structures have broken down, people are kind of alone. How building such communities helps us to tackle the power of high finance is left unexplained, as is Chomskys implication that a city of eight million people, engaged in all the complexities of modern life, should learn how humans are supposed to live together by studying an encampment of college students. The actual sins of Wall Street, by contrast, are much less visible. For example, when you read Occupying Wall Street, the work of a team of writers who participated in the protests, you first hear about the subject of predatory lending when a sympathetic policeman mentions it in the course of a bust. The authors themselves never bring it up. And if you want to know how the people in Zuccotti intended to block the banks agendahow they intended to stop predatory lending, for exampleyou have truly come to the wrong place. Not because its hard to figure out how to stop predatory lending, but because the way the Occupy campaign is depicted in these books, it seems to have had no intention of doing anything except building communities in public spaces and inspiring mankind with its noble refusal to have leaders. Unfortunately, though, thats not enough. Building a democratic movement culture is essential for movements on the left, but its also just a starting point. Occupy never evolved beyond it. It did not call for a subtreasury system, like the Populists did. It didnt lead a strike (a real one, that is), or a sit-in, or a blockade of a recruitment center, or a takeover of the deans office. The IWW free-speech fights of a century ago look positively Prussian by comparison. With Occupy, the horizontal culture was everything. The process is the message, as the protesters used to say and as most of the books considered here largely concur. The aforementioned camping, the cooking, the general-assembling, the filling of public places: thats what Occupy was all about. Beyond that there seems to have been virtually no strategy to speak of, no agenda to transmit to the world. * * * Whether or not to have demands, you might recall, was something that Occupy protesters debated hotly among themselves in the days when Occupy actually occupied something. Reading these books a year later, however, that debate seems to have been consensed out of existence. Virtually none of the authors reviewed here will say forthrightly that the failure to generate demands was a tactical mistake. On the contrary: the quasi-official account of the episode (Occupying Wall Street) laughs off demands as a fetish object of literal-minded media types who stupidly crave hierarchy and chains of command. Chris Hedges tells us that demands were something required only by the elites, and their mouthpieces in the media. Enlightened people, meanwhile, are supposed to know better; demands imply the legitimacy of the adversary, meaning the U.S. government and its friends, the banks. Launching a protest with no formal demands is thought to be a great accomplishment, a gesture of surpassing democratic virtue. And here we come to the basic contradiction of the campaign. To protest Wall Street in 2011 was to protest, obviously, the outrageous financial misbehavior that gave us the Great Recession; it was to protest the political power of money, which gave us the bailouts; it was to protest the runaway compensation practices that have turned our societys productive labor into bonuses for the 1 percent. All three of these catastrophes, however, were brought on by deregulation and tax-cuttingby a philosophy of liberation as anarchic in its rhetoric as Occupy was in reality. Check your premises, Rand-fans: it was the bankers own uprising against the hated state that wrecked the American way of life. Nor does it require poststructuralism-leading-through-anarchism to understand how to reverse these developments. You do it by rebuilding a powerful and competent regulatory state. You do it by rebuilding the labor movement. You do it with bureaucracy. Occupiers often seemed aware of this. Recall what you heard so frequently from protesters lips back in the days of September 2011: Restore the old Glass-Steagall divide between investment and commercial banks, they insisted. Bring back big government! Bring back safety! Bring back boredom! But thats no way to fire the imagination of the world. So, how do you maintain the carnival while secretly lusting for the CPAs? By indefinitely suspending the obvious next step. By having no demands. Demands would have signaled that humorless, doctrinaire adults were back in charge and that the fun was over. This was an inspired way to play the situation in the beginning, and for a time it was a great success. But it also put a clear expiration date on the protests. As long as demands and the rest of the logocentric requirements were postponed, Occupy could never graduate to the next level. It would remain captive to what Christopher Lasch criticizedway back in 1973as the cult of participation, in which the experience of protesting is what protesting is all about.

LinksArtArt has already become commodified, it is a symbol of capitalism and continues the cycleBrown 5 (Richard Harvey Brown, Richard Harvey Brown is professor of sociology at the University of Maryland. 6/2005, Culture, Capitalism, and Democracy in the New America, http://site.ebrary.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/lib/umich//docDetail.action?docID=10170004.)//ky THE CREATION OF ART AS A PRIVILEGED CATEGORY The ambivalence that many people feel toward art as a source of freedom and pleasure or as an enemy of ethics also can be understood as a tension between the conspicuous consumption discussed by Thorstein Veblen and the Protestant ethic described by Max Weber. Veblens () theory of the leisure class seeks to understand why the very bases of human life and the central means and ends of capitalist society that is, labor and wealth ultimately were not regarded as worthy of honor. By contrast, Weber (, ) introduces his study of the Protestant ethic with remarks on music and architecture that he presents as examples of the pervasive rationalism of Western society, notably in the domain of art and not just in business firms and state bureaucracies. The social definition of art as a distinct and universal category of experience was a first step in this long process of transforming aesthetic creations into exchangeable commodities. To be exchanged for cash, art had to be apprehended as independent of its contexts of use and assessed in terms of some nonlocal value. Painting on canvas was a step in this direction since it made the artwork more removable from its initial milieu. In the aesthetic theories of Enlightenment Europe, the value in art that transcended all contexts was beauty, and it remained so during the initial stages of industrialization, until art was later reduced to another universal value money. The postmodern period may be characterized as the latest stage in this transformation. Now beauty, money, art, and even anti-art are all fragmented into interchangeable signs. Indeed, postmodernization has not merely eroded the experience of culture as an integrated unity by confronting each lived unity with many others. More, art itself is no longer seen as a domain of unity, however ideally conceived, but rather as a fragmentation of forms in response to various emerging and changing taste cultures and semiotic orders. In all these transformations, art operates as an ideological construction rather than as any kind of natural category. In its modern usage, to call an object or activity art is to bestow upon it an apparently inherent, quasi-sacred value, while withholding this value from other often similar activities. The term art then functions as a category of distinction that assists in the construction and maintenance of a hierarchy of values and, thence, of persons; the hierarchy, once constructed, can be made to appear natural and inevitable (Bourdieu ; Kelly , ). Although the arts are taken to fall within a broader category of pleasure, they invoke a specific sort of contemplative appreciation that associates contemporary cosmopolitan elites with earlier aristocrats and nobles. Indeed, from this viewpoint, the arts as revered yet pleasurable objects and activities are due as much to the status of their current patrons and their association with leisured, courtly taste as to any intrinsic moral or spiritual properties that they may embody (Bourdieu Earlier generations of Americans, like Europeans, bought paintings for pleasure, status, or commemoration but not for investment. Here Veblens dictum that waste is efficient as a display of wealth is apt, for a century ago art was bought more to lose money than to gain it. Moreover, rich Americans could not get tax writeoffs by giving their collections to museums because there was no personal income tax and few public museums. People applauded extravagant purchases not as shrewd investments, but rather as elitist acts of commercial indifference. The sacralization of cultural objects began in the United States in the with the creation of large, prestigious institutions and the mystification of artistic production. At midcentury John Singleton Copley complained that painters had a social status similar to that of tradesmen (in Hughes but by the end of the century the artist had been separated from his or her publics and mythologized as a crazed demigod or desperado. Similarly, by the outset of the twentieth century the previously commonplace practice of performing Shakespeare along with a farce, a comic dance, and a trained animal act had disappeared, the rowdy audience behavior in public performances had been eliminated (no more crunching peanuts during a concert or hissing inept actors), and newcomers were convinced to value, if not share, the aesthetics of the elite (Griswold , ). The modern conception of the arts was universalized in both time and space so that artifacts from ancient Greece or other cultures could be revered as art (Kelly In the economic and social realms, things were thought to be better because newer, as opposed to the aesthetic realm, where they remained better because older. Thus, American elites continued to validate their economic success by reaffirming the past and its artistic masterpieces, especially Old European Masters. Likewise, movies were not at first considered a highbrow aesthetic form precisely because of the newness of the cinema and its association with technological progress. Even though this particular medium earned the label of seventh art form, the image of Hollywood often connoted vulgarity or navet. Cinema still is more European, connoting art, whereas movies are more American, connoting entertainment.Art is now produced for capital, any form just continues the cycle as it has become commodified into the systemBrown 5 (Richard Harvey Brown, Richard Harvey Brown is professor of sociology at the University of Maryland. 6/2005, Culture, Capitalism, and Democracy in the New America, http://site.ebrary.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/lib/umich//docDetail.action?docID=10170004.)//ky POSTINDUSTRIAL AND POSTMODERN COMMODIFICATIONS OF ART The barrier between artistic and economic values and pursuits began to crumble as the market absorbed more and more areas of life and as capital became increasingly liquid. With mass communication, marketing, and spectacles, capitalistic ventures since the mid-twentieth century have further invaded the cultural realm. The greater volume of cash and credit, the abstraction of things into interchangeable commodities generally, laws permitting art to be used as a tax deduction, and the abstract qualities of modern all favored the swift convergence of one commodity into another and of liquid assets into art. Thus, we have come to think of works of art themselves as investments, assets, or collateral for debt. Further, as the number of executive, professional, and technical workers has grown, along with their discretionary income, the ideology extolling consumption has claimed a larger social territory. Indeed, the blurring of criteria used to distinguish consumption and investment has facilitated the invasion of various art scenes by purely commercial interests. In contrast to the earlier period, when the arts were considered more as a grace note to industrial rhythms or an emotional escape from them, the arts have become another kind of commodity subject to the logic of profit. New taste makers and shapers of desire whether they be curators, media moguls, gallery owners, or theater critics shape culture markets as protean places for the consumption of new lifestyles and identities through the consumption of art. Since the latter decades of the twentieth century, capitalism has become more global and driven by electronic information. As a result, space-time experience has become more compressed and turnover more accelerated. Flexible accumulation, short production runs, and rapid market shifts now characterize art as much as other advanced economic sectors. There is a speedup in the workshops of symbolic production. The transactions involving artworks, their values, and their rates of turnover all have accelerated. Innovations and obsolescence of art are more rapid and their market cycles shorter (Moulin ; Reitlinger ). Even though there have always been cycles in the values assigned to distinct genres, artists, or individual pieces, the time interval separating peaks from nadirs keeps getting shorter, with avant-gardes succeeding one another with blurring speed. As a result, prices reached in art auctions have both soared and dived. As the arts have become another form of accumulation, magazines such as ARTnews compile an investors guide to the art market and issue newsletters that highlight trends in auction prices, tax legislation, and other topics relevant to those who consider cultural capital a subcategory of economic capital. Similarly, Connoisseur magazine featured an investors file that reviewed newly discovered schools, periods, or artists that had good price/equity ratios and upside potentials. The Times/Sotheby art index reports putative statistics on the price movements of art objects from Tibetan bronzes to Italian Bronzinos. Of course, even with information arriving electronically from all over the globe, like most stock market news, these tips are usually obsolete before they reach their readers. The rise of mass media as a dominant cultural factor also affects the commercialization of art and the condition of the artist. In a dialectical fashion, the culture industry thrives on what it fears, and it is nourished by what it excludes free creativity (Gouldner ). The industry seeks to transform an earlier role of the artist or intellectual into that of a contract worker, to turn art and ideas into novelty items or spectacles for sale. As the industry defangs autonomous creators through promises of wealth, the success of works of high culture becomes defined by money. Great books are known as such by becoming best-sellers, masterpiece art shows are called blockbusters, classical movies are supposed to be Oscar winners, and best musical scores are expected to win golden or platinum recordings. Similarly, indigenous or communal traditions are folklorized to become more easily vended (Widmer Peterson ). For example, formerly autochthonous country music is now remade for mass presentations by media stars. As audience reception becomes disconnected from shared conceptions of aesthetic merit or communal traditions, fame based on recognizable achievement is replaced by celebrity based on image recognition. Postmodern artists embrace the very celebrity and commercialization that modernists tended to eschew. Even literary or visual artists perform themselves. They and their works are known for being known, purchased because of their names in a celebrity system that offers a market price and legal brand name protection for personalities, even though it is acknowledged that the fame they enjoy is transient. As high modernism was absorbed as the formal aesthetics of corporate capitalism and the bureaucratic state, postmodernism integrates high and popular culture in the eclectic and short-lived consumerism of the new global economy.

Bataille/Fear of the OceanWhen there is not a distinction between living and nonliving matter, economy is inclusive of both and lifes dynamism makes conscious management impossiblethe perceived uncontrollability of the economy legitimates capitalist development without restrictionAsger Sorenson 2012, Associate Professor of the philosophy of education at Aarhus University in Denmark, On a universal scale: Economy is Batailles general economy in the journal of Philosophy and Social Criticism

In a practical perspective one can consider the natural foundation of society as con- sisting of energy in different forms, some of which make energy accessible to human exploitation. In spite of the theory of relativity and our knowledge of the world as one big ecosystem, in a practical perspective it therefore makes good sense to distinguish between dead and living matter and between matter and energy.120 These distinctions make plain the conflict between on the one side the circulation of money and commod- ities understood mechanically as dead matter and on the other side living organisms that are transformed quantitatively and qualitatively because of the accumulated energy inside living matter. The traditional models of economical thought are clearly hostile to the self-organizing life of nature,121 and this is with good reason. Economy in the ordi- nary sense aims at the optimal management of resources, and management is possible only if one assumes an appropriate degree of standstill and unchangeability; if every- thing moves and emerges by itself, then conscious management is impossible. Batailles theoretical fight to think the unreduced desire and the flow of energy in nature into economy leaves an impression of economy as totally unmanageable and uncontrollable in a practical sense. The anti-authoritarian, theoretical perspective means that the general economy loses its character of political economy and instead transforms itself into a scientistic ontology, the alleged necessity of which contributes to legitimate ideologically a total liberation of desire and consumption, which in turn can legitimate a capitalist development without any restrictions. As mentioned, this was clearly not Batailles intention, but the conceptual logic in this part of his thinking does not leave him much choice. However, in this account of the objective basis for the general econ- omy, as it is presented in the first part of The Accused Share, one does not see many signs of the dialectical thinking, which is the foundation of the other two parts,122 and this ten- sion makes the project as a whole vulnerable to critiques of inconsistency. Actually Bataille himself became aware of the problems with reconciling the wish for political result, which was connected with the account of the objectively given, and the more in-depth reflections concerning the inner subjectively given experiences,123 and he actu- ally ended up declaring the very attempt to create the connection between the subjective experiences of eroticism and sovereignty and what is objectively given by the use of resources as deeply problematic.124 It is thus as political economy that the general economy turns out to have its greatest limitations. The basic problem is that with Batailles extended sense of economy it becomes very difficult to recommend a definite economical strategy at the ordinary polit- ical level. His main concern is the material conflict between the human being and life as such, between the human expression of desire, which liberates energy for loss, and the accumulation of energy on the earth and in nature in general. The human being has in the historical development of civilization developed a still greater consumption of energy, and it is thus not just capitalism, which is self-destructive, but the very human way of being. What Bataille has pointed out at the individual and the historical level is actually an onto- logical problem. The full actualization of the potential of human desire in sovereignty can lead only to emptying out all disposable energy resources on earth, and that will mean the end, if not of life as such, then at least of the human way of living. The complete realization of the human potential of civilization liberates the energy piled up in and on the earth to take up again the interrupted flow, which destines energy to a final loss in the tepidness of the universe.

Their critique ignores the role of money in capitalismthis allows unlimited accumulation of resourcesAsger Sorenson 2012, Associate Professor of the philosophy of education at Aarhus University in Denmark, On a universal scale: Economy is Batailles general economy in the journal of Philosophy and Social Criticism

Batailles anti-authoritarian traits are also expressed in his indifference to money. Throughout the development of the general economy he thus discusses, sometimes in great detail, resources, things and commodities, just as he deals with sacrifices, gifts, labour, trade, growth, saving, accumulation and wealth; but when it comes to money, he just states, quite simply and almost in passing, that money is a form of energy.99 That means, however, that Bataille ignores a basic piece of knowledge gained by the classical political economy, namely that money, as Locke notes, has the special quality that, when recognized as of value, it allows almost unlimited accumulation of wealth. This is not the case with produced goods and not at all with living and thereby perishable resources.100 It is the very social recognition of the value of money that makes it a spe- cific social resource, where the energy precisely is depending on the actual recognition. Batailles disregard of money can therefore be interpreted as a disregard of what is specifically capitalist about modern society, since precisely capital could never come into existence without money in this sense.101 Bataille clearly sees that desire can be directed towards something perishable, just as it can be directed towards something immaterial like value; but apparently he has not noticed the societal mediation, which bestows on money almost magical value, that is, what Marx calls the fetish character of money.102 In the natural scientific energy per- spective of the general economy this is of course a recognition of a fictional resource, but as Locke clearly sees, the acceptance of this fiction is crucial for the development of social inequality as distinct from the naturally given inequality.103 Dead matter is socially recognized as valuable, in the form both of houses, money, jewellery and of con- sumer goods such as washing machines, and social inequality is primarily expressed through the social adaptation, organization and distribution of dead matter. In the general perspective dead matter, however, is not as perishable or explosive as living matter, and there are therefore no urgent practical reasons, nor any ontological necessities with respect to energy, which call upon the one in possession of such an excess to expend it without any retribution. In the perspective of societal economy the accumulation of wealth can be a prob- lem, since it can be a sign of surplus production and lack of purchasing power. This problem Keynesian economics solved politically by a continuous redistribution of the socially recognized dead values, that is, primarily money. It is, however, not the energy movement of life that necessitates this redistribution, but the social misery that makes the exploited masses boil over in rage against the ruling injustice. One can thus experience a social pressure from parts of society despite the exploitation that actually strips them of their natural living energy. Bataille, however, does not distinguish between use-value and exchange-value, he has no specific concept of plus-value and no systematic concept of capital either. Since he does not share the objectively orientated theory of labour-value of the classical political economy of Locke, Smith and Marx, but takes sides with the neoclassical conception of value as subjectively constituted by desire, it becomes difficult for the general economy to criticize economical inequality at the societal level. As mentioned before, accu- mulation is for Bataille not primarily a problem in relation to the societal distribu- tion of economical goods; it is mainly a problem because of the pressure generated by the surplus energy. Bataille is not really interested in the distribution of goods at a societal level, nor in the form of government in a society, and I think it therefore quite fair to characterize the general economy as apolitical in the same sense that liberalism can be considered apolitical.104Batailles criticism is rooted in the critique of the explosion of the capitalist economy in the mid-20th centurycapital-driven consumption if the root cause of catastrophic expenditure of modern society. Yang, 00- (Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, she has held fellowships at the Center for Chinese Studies of the University of Michigan, the Chicago Humanities Institute, University of Chicago, and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Her publications include Gifts, Favors, and Banquets), Mayfair Yang, Putting Global Capitalism in Its Place: Economic Hybridity, Bataille, and Ritual Expenditure, Current Anthropology, Vol. 41, No. 4 (August/October 2000), pp. 477-509 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, accessed at the University of Michigan Library,//{fishnets}The dominant tendency of Western critiques of capitalist economy in the past three decades has been to focus on a sobering picture of the consolidation of Western capitalism, its penetration to the farthest corners of the globe, and its destruction and conversion of local economies. In the world-systems theory of the 1970s and 80s, capitalism is portrayed as quickly and effectively integrating regional and imperial economies into the capitalist world system, and Marxist class analysis is applied to whole nation-states in a scenario of global class struggle between core and semiperiphery and against the exploited periphery (Wallerstein 1979).11 For others, the second half of the 20th century is marked by the rise of multinational corporations which break out of the limitations of the nation-state and directly induct foreign labor forces ranging across the globe (Miyoshi 1993). The thesis of flexible accumulation argues that capitalism has entered a new historical stage since the 1960s, one marked by its deeper penetration in the world and the greater intensification and global integration of production as new technologies of communication and transport produce time-space compression (Harvey 1989). In this new capitalist regime, the global economy achieves a new competitive edge by abandoning hierarchical, capital-intensive bureaucratic enterprises for flexible smaller subcontracting firms. In all this thinking there is a Eurocentric assumption that the Midas touch of capitalism immediately destroys local indigenous economies and cultures or transforms them into a standardized form involving private accumulation, rational-legal principles, individual maximization, and Western cultural domination. Older forms are seen to present no challenge to the all-encompassing and overriding logic of capitalism, whose development is predetermined. Rather than assume that capitalist forces arrive everywhere like conquering victorious armies, I will suggest here that capitalism can be altered, subverted, or appropriated by, made to accommodate to, and even itself absorb preexisting socioeconomic forms.12 Another body of critiques of capitalism emerging in French intellectual circles (Schrift 1997, Botting andWilson 1998) offers a very different approach from the more dominant tradition of political economy which privileges the tropes of labor and production. Inspired by Marcel Mausss (1967) classic work on primitive gift economies and by a Nietzschean challenge to the asceticist ethics and utilitarianism of capitalism, these writers include Georges Bataille (1985, 1989a, 1989b), Jean Baudrillard (1975), Pierre Bourdieu (1977), Marshall Sahlins (1972, 1976), and Pierre Clastres (1987). Instead of taking capitalism as the subject of analysis, these writings seek to mount their critique from outside capitalism, focusing on the radical difference of primitive economies and the way in which primitive gift, sacrificial, ritual, and festival economies present oppositional logics and harbor the potential for alternative social orders. Despite certain shortcomings, these works are more conducive to reconceptualizing capitalism in such a way as to reveal the multiplicity of economies, the tensions between them, and their differential embeddings within the larger social formation. The passage from The Grundrisse with which we began is also cited by Baudrillard in The Mirror of Production (1975:8687), but he does so in order to launch his unique critique of historical materialism. Baudrillard objects to Marxs assumption that the contradictions of labor and ownership in capitalism can be projected back to precapitalist societies such as primitive, archaic, and feudal forms as their structural pivots. Although Marx challenged bourgeois society, his theories did not go far enough to extricate themselves from the productivist and utilitarian ethic of capitalism found in such concepts as subsistence, labor, economic exchange, and relations and means of production. For Baudrillard, this failure to achieve a radical break from capitalist epistemology means that Marxism liberates workers from the bourgeoisie but not from the view that the basic value of their being lies in their labor and productivity. Historical materialism is thus unable to grasp the profound difference between societies based on symbolic circulation and societies based on ownership and exchange of labor and commodities. Notions of labor and production do violence to these societies, where the point of life and the structural order are predicated not on production but on symbolic exchange with humans, spirits, and ancestors. Historical materialism cannot see that these societies possess mechanisms for the collective consumption of the surplus and deliberate antiproduction whenever accumulation threatens the continuity of cycles of reciprocity (p. 143). It fails to recognize that they did not separate economics from other social relations such as kinship, religion, and politics or distinguish between infra- and superstructure. It also perpetuates the Enlightenment invention of Nature as a resource for human production rather than an encompassing symbolic field whose offerings to humans must be compensated through sacrifice.13 Baudrillards emphasis on consumption and the radical difference of precapitalist formations owes much to the earlier work of Georges Bataille. Bataille produced a very different kind of critique of capitalism, one focused not on production but on consumption. He found that in archaic economies production was subordinated to nonproductive destruction (1989a:90). The great motive force of these societies was not the compulsion to produce (which unleashes a process of objectification whereby all forms of life, including humans, become things) but a desire to escape the order of things and to live for the present moment through exuberant consumption in the form of excesses of generosity, display, and sacrifice. The societies of Kwakwakawakw potlatch feasting, Aztec human sacrifice, Islamic militarism, and Tibetan monastic Lamaism all understood the necessity of nonproductive expenditure (Bataille 1989b). They set aside a major proportion of their wealth for expenditures which ensured the wasting and loss of wealth rather than rational accumulation. This destructive consumption allowed them to avoid the deadly hand of utility and to restore some of the lost intimacy of an existence without a separation between sacred and profane. Whereas Weber (1958) looked to religion to explain the origins of the capitalist ethic, Bataille looked to archaic religion for seeds of a subversion of capitalism. If forms of archaic ritual prestation and sacrificial destruction of wealth could be reintegrated into modern economies, capitalism would have built-in mechanisms for social redistribution and for limiting its utilitarian productivism and incessant commodification of nature and culture. Its expansionary tendencies would suffer frequent shutdowns and reversals. Batailles project called for widening the frame of our economic inquiry to what he called a general economy, which accounted not only for such things as production, trade, and finance but also for social consumption, of which ritual and religious sacrifice, feasting, and festival were important components in precapitalist economies. In Batailles approach, religion was not an epiphenomenal derivative of the infrastructures of production but an economic activity in itself. A general economy treats economic wealth and growth as part of the operations of the law of physics governing the global field of energy for all organic phenomena, so that, when any organism accumulates energy in excess of that needed for its subsistence, this energy must be expended and dissipated in some way. What he proposed in his enigmatic and mesmerizing book The Accursed Share was that, in our modern capitalist productivism, we have lost sight of this fundamental law of physics and material existence: that the surplus energy and wealth left over after the basic conditions for subsistence, reproduction, and growth have been satisfied must be expended. If this energy is not destroyed, it will erupt of its own in an uncontrolled explosion such as war. Given the tremendous productive power of modern industrial society and the fact that its productivist ethos has cut off virtually all traditional avenues of ritual and festive expenditures, energy surpluses have been redirected to military expenditures for modern warfare on a scale unknown in traditional societies. Bataille thought that the incessant growth machine that is the post-World War II U.S. economy could be deflected from a catastrophic expenditure on violent warfare only by potlatching the entire national economy. In giving away its excess wealth to poorer nations, as in the Marshall Plan to rebuild war-torn Europe, the United States could engage in a nonmilitary rivalry for prestige and influence with the Soviet Union, that other center of industrial modernitys radical reduction of nonproductive expenditure.14 Thus, Bataille wished to resuscitate an important dimension of the economy, nonproductive expenditure, that has all but disappeared in both capitalist and state socialist modernity. Scholars such as Jean-Joseph Goux (1998) have pointed to a troubling overlap between Batailles views on luxury and sacrificial expenditure and postmodern consumer capitalism. Consumer capitalism is also predicated on massive consumption and waste rather than on the thrift, asceticism, and accumulation against which Ba- taille directed his theory of expenditure. It exhibits potlatch features in the tendency for businesses to give goods away in the hope that supply creates its own demand; it collapses the distinction between luxury and useful goods and between need and desire (Goux 1998). Unlike modernist capitalism, postmodern consumer capitalism is driven by consumption rather than production. Thus, Batailles vision of the ritual destruction of wealth as defying the principles of accumulative and productive capitalism does not address this different phase of consumer capitalism, whose contours have only become clear since his death in 1962. It seems to me that despite their overt similarities, the principles of ritual consumption and those of consumer capitalism are basically incompatible. If Bataille had addressed our consumer society today, he would have said that this sort of consumption is still in the service of production and productive accumulation, since every act of consumption in the world of leisure, entertainment, media, fashion, and home decor merely feeds back into the growth of the economy rather than leading to the finality and loss of truly nonproductive expenditure. Even much of modern warfare is no longer truly destructive but tied into the furthering of military- industrial production. Nor, despite its economic excesses, does our consumer culture today challenge the basic economic logic of rational private accumulation as a self-depleting archaic sacrificial economy does.15 Furthermore, capitalist consumption is very much an individual consumption rather than one involving the whole community or social order.

Batailles solution to capitalism just offloads the system onto other country, forming endless production cycles in other countriesYang 2k (Mayfair Mei-Hui Yang, Ph.D. Anthropology, University of California at Berkeley, October, 2000. http://www.jstor.org.proxy.lib.umich.edu/stable/10.1086/317380.) //kyBaudrillards emphasis on consumption and the radical difference of precapitalist formations owes much to the earlier work of Georges Bataille. Bataille produced a very different kind of critique of capitalism, one focused not on production but on consumption. He found that in archaic economies production was subordinated to nonproductive destruction (1989a:90). The great motive force of these societies was not the compulsion to produce (which unleashes a process of objectification whereby all forms of life, including humans, become things) but a desire to escape the order of things and to live for the present moment through exuberant consumption in the form of excesses of generosity, display, and sacrifice. The societies of Kwakwakawakw potlatch feasting, Aztec human sacrifice, Islamic militarism, and Tibetan monastic Lamaism all understood the necessity of nonproductive expenditure (Bataille 1989b). They set aside a major proportion of their wealth for expenditures which ensured the wasting and loss of wealth rather than rational accumulation. This destructive consumption allowed them to avoid the deadly hand of utility and to restore some of the lost intimacy of an existence without a separation between sacred and profane. Whereas Weber (1958) looked to religion to explain the origins of the capitalist ethic, Bataille looked to archaic religion for seeds of a subversion of capitalism. If forms 13. Baudrillard contests the functional explanation that primitive magic, sacrifice, and religion try to accomplish what labor and forces of production cannot. Rather than our rational reading of sacrifice as producing use values, sacrifice is engagement in reciprocity with the gods for taking the fruits of the earth (1975:8283). of archaic ritual prestation and sacrificial destruction of wealth could be reintegrated into modern economies, capitalism would have built-in mechanisms for social redistribution and for limiting its utilitarian productivism and incessant commodification of nature and culture. Its expansionary tendencies would suffer frequent shutdowns and reversals. Batailles project called for widening the frame of our economic inquiry to what he called a general economy, which accounted not only for such things as production, trade, and finance but also for social consumption, of which ritual and religious sacrifice, feasting, and festival were important components in precapitalist economies. In Batailles approach, religion was not an epiphenomenal derivative of the infrastructures of production but an economic activity in itself. A general economy treats economic wealth and growth as part of the operations of the law of physics governing the global field of energy for all organic phenomena, so that, when any organism accumulates energy in excess of that needed for its subsistence, this energy must be expended and dissipated in some way. What he proposed in his enigmatic and mesmerizing book The Accursed Share was that, in our modern capitalist productivism, we have lost sight of this fundamental law of physics and material existence: that the surplus energy and wealth left over after the basic conditions for subsistence, reproduction, and growth have been satisfied must be expended. If this energy is not destroyed, it will erupt of its own in an uncontrolled explosion such as war. Given the tremendous productive power of modern industrial society and the fact that its productivist ethos has cut off virtually all traditional avenues of ritual and festive expenditures, energy surpluses have been redirected to military expenditures for modern warfare on a scale unknown in traditional societies. Bataille thought that the incessant growth machine that is the post-World War II U.S. economy could be deflected from a catastrophic expenditure on violent warfare only by potlatching the entire national economy. In giving away its excess wealth to poorer nations, as in the Marshall Plan to rebuild war-torn Europe, the United States could engage in a nonmilitary rivalry for prestige and influence with the Soviet Union, that other center of industrial modernitys radical reduction of nonproductive expenditure.14 Thus, Bataille wished to resuscitate an important dimension of the economy, nonproductive expenditure, that has all but disappeared in both capitalist and state socialist modernity. Scholars such as Jean-Joseph Goux (1998) have pointed to a troubling overlap between Batailles views on luxury and sacrificial expenditure and postmodern consumer capitalism. Consumer capitalism is also predicated on massive consumption and waste rather than on the thrift, asceticism, and accumulation against which Bataille directed his theory of expenditure. It exhibits potlatch features in the tendency for businesses to give goods away in the hope that supply creates its own demand; it collapses the distinction between luxury and useful goods and between need and desire (Goux 1998). Unlike modernist capitalism, postmodern consumer capitalism is driven by consumption rather than production. Thus, Batailles vision of the ritual destruction of wealth as defying the principles of accumulative and productive capitalism does not address this different phase of consumer capitalism, whose contours have only become clear since his death in 1962. It seems to me that despite their overt similarities, the principles of ritual consumption and those of consumer capitalism are basically incompatible. If Bataille had addressed our consumer society today, he would have said that this sort of consumption is still in the service of production and productive accumulation, since every act of consumption in the world of leisure, entertainment, media, fashion, and home decor merely feeds back into the growth of the economy rather than leading to the finality and loss of truly nonproductive expenditure. Even much of modern warfare is no longer truly destructive but tied into the furthering of military- industrial production. Nor, despite its economic excesses, does our consumer culture today challenge the basic economic logic of rational private accumulation as a self-depleting archaic sacrificial economy does.15 Furthermore, capitalist consumption is very much an individual consumption rather than one involving the whole community or social order.Batailles method of the general economy only redirects capital to the excess, it produces a new system of capitalism that causes current movements to failHegarty 2k (Paul Hegarty, studied Languages, Economics and Politics at Kingston Polytechnic, Critical Theory at Nottingham, and did a PhD in French and Critical Theory, on Georges Bataille and Jean Baudrillard. 8/2000. http://site.ebrary.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/lib/umich/docDetail.action?docID=10567020.) //kyHeterology persists in Bataille's oeuvre, but takes the guise of the general economy - a system which seeks to account for what is other (heterogeneous) and to 'be other' in the way it is written (compared to social 'science'). The 'notion of the general economy' emerges in its own right in the essay T h e Notion of Expenditure', which draws together the various strands already at work in Bataille's writing - Hegel, Nietzsche, Sade, anthropology. The ideas announced in this essay are more fully developed throughout the three volumes of The Accursed Share, and persist, in a slightly different formulation, in the late texts, such as Eroticism. Whilst Bataille's oeuvre could be categorized as consisting of an array of more or less interchangeable, subtly different terms and notions, this array can be categorized through the notion of general economy, which thus comes to serve as the organizing notion of Bataille's work (this organization could be visualized as a set of clusters, or as the contingent constellations of the 'strange attractors' of chaos theory, rather than the linear structures of genuinely systematic philosophies). The very formulation of something called a 'general economy' suggests an attempt to account for some sort of whole, and also suggests the insufficiency of economics as a free-standing term. In this way, Bataille (from a quasi-Marxist position) challenges the belief held by both capitalism and communism in the primacy of 'the economic', where the economic is the sphere of production, as well as currently being the realm of commodity fetishism. Bataille wishes to criticize a conception of society based on its economics because this categorization is what has led to society being dominated by the economic sphere: in other words, the observation that the economic is the most important is not innocent - it has contributed to the problem it 'describes', as it comes from the same set of presumptions. Bataille argues, via Mauss, that the notion of there being an economic realm that is autonomous is limited to modern, Western, societies, and those brought under their influence, 1 and that to a large extent the economic has no such existence in most societies. Bataille is also echoing Weber, in that he sees capitalism as having removed all vestiges of genuine community and the unifying beliefs of the past (Bataille differs in that, for him, this loss dates from a much earlier period - the start of humanity), as accumulation, and secondarily, profit, have taken over (The Accursed Share, 136; OC VII, 130). As a result of this privileging of the economic, all value is processed in the same way. In fact, even the idea of value is complicit in this. The result is that what is valued is all that fosters accumulation and preservation, or comes from them. Bataille's general economy seeks to get beyond this, to talk of economies of loss, waste, expenditure and, 'above all', excess. More specifically, Bataille is referring to what elsewhere he terms the homogeneous and the heterogeneous. The homogeneous, or the sphere dominated by economics, consists of all that is deemed normal, all that seeks to make society a controllable, controlled phenomenon. In other words, it is the realm of work, religion, utility, (party) politics, laws, taboos, reproductive sex, truth, knowledge. The realm beyond this is that of excess: eroticism, death, festivals, transgression, drunkenness, laughter, the dissolution of truth and knowledge. This realm of excess is the general economy, but the general economy is also the process whereby the homogeneous realm interacts with excessive phenomena. The general economy redefines the economic such that not everything is under 'the economic', but everything is part of one economy among many - this many is the general economy. The fact that the economic in the traditional sense ('restricted economy') and what is, strictly speaking, anti-economic, co-exist in the general economy, also means that they interact. The distinction between the two types of economy is never total, even if it is clear cut. This interaction takes a form not dissimilar to Hegel's dialectical system, but with the intervention of Nietzsche - Bataille's system has no overcoming, just the revelation of nothingness, as excess and waste are not recuperable for self-consciousness. We might attempt to incorporate what is threatening to the norms, sanity, life and so on, but such overcoming is already trapped in a restricted economy, rather than the way out of it. For example, taboo and transgression are absolutely linked, as we need a law for there to be a crime, whilst law is the system that believes it has controlled transgression, but no matter how often it enacts this control, the moment of transgression is still beyond it.The 1ACs idea of the sublime is nothing but a manifestation of capitalism, turning the horrific into something beautiful, affirmation prevents any possible revolutionWoodard 7 (Ben, PhD candidate in Theory and criticism at Western University. Masters in theory and criticism at the European graduate school. A Capitalistic Sublime?, http://naughtthought.wordpress.com/2007/07/29/a-capitalistic-sublime/, hhs-nw)The aforementioned iekian move has a strong Kantian feel in that, as Philip Shaw points out in The Sublime, in Kants Critique of Pure Reason he points out how Copernicus understood the movements of the heavenly bodies by focusing not on the spectacle, the planets themselves, but the spectator. Both strands of thought rely on the notion of the spectator not simply having a subjective or otherwise limited point of view, but that the object observed is fundamentally rife with the concept of perception. Looking specifically at Kants definition of the sublime, one can take note of the formlessness thats imperative in the definition, the way Kants definition swings from materialist to idealist it is an object but at the same time unbound, borderless. Or put another way, as Kant states in his Critique of Judgment, the sublime tests the limits of our imagination The issue I would like to raise here is the possibility of a capitalistic sublime. The issue in regards to the sublimes relation to capitalism hinges on the temporality of the sublime or in other words how long is it expected from the horrifying to become a feeling of the sublime? The other related question is whether capitalism can cause a feeling of the sublime because of its extreme size or whether it functions more in terms of an atomized sublime. In regards to the first point it has been pointed out in the works of anti-capitalists, how there is an odd kind of fearful awe of the machinery of capitalism. While Marxs Victorian novel style details of the factory come immediately to mind, I beleive that Antonio Gramscis writings reveal a more interesting view. In his prison notebook writings, Gramsci seems to have a strange sense of respect for the mind numbing effect of capitalism. One could argue that the mental deadening of the laborer is the slow transformation of the horrible (ones working conditions, lack of benefits, low wage etc) to a postponed sublime (ones eventual wealth or at least the American dream of economic security). On the other hand, and to address the second point, could capitalism function in a more compartmentalized way that seems so small and petty and necessary that its that which deadens us, because it seems beneath us? This leads us back to the problem of narcissism being woven into the concept of the sublime. Lets take a look at a certain Mr West. In particular lyrics to a recent song Cant tell me nothin:The capitalist sublime, if there can be such a thing, seems more like a false opening (more like the Kantian sublime) then a false covering over of a kind of negativity. Or put another way, it seems more of a concern via Proudhon than Marx. The capitalistic zen, the my mind/soul is somewhere else, seems to function through a kind of atomized sublime, the idea that each screw turned gets one closer to the displaced future where the capitalist realists live. Or back to Mr West: He got that ambition, baby look in his eyes, This week hes moppin floors, next week its the fries. So does the sublime have any place in here, in the atomized, bit by bit deadening which we take as a bridge to the capitalist utopia. Whereas the uncanny is an odd return to home, a wishful fear as Freud point out. It seems that while the uncanny fundamentally requires time and the sublime asks for distance, both are rooted in the feminine the sublime in women as das Ding and the uncanny in female genitalia (as it is for some neurotics according to Freud). One could bring up ieks argument here that capitalism serves as the imaginary real of our time, as that which binds the visible possibility of worlds (as he argues in Contingency, Hegemony and Universality - much to the chagrin of Ernesto Laclau) but still something doesnt seem to sit quite right. Also, to follow an idea brought up by Larval Subjects, can bricks of our ontology be deposited into texts, into objects? Following the arguments in Georges Poulets article Criticism and the Interiority of Experience one could argue that ones consciousness is effectively invaded by another in the seemingly benign act of reading. The fashionable death of the author (a la Derrida and his cohorts) may snuff out this line of thinking perhaps a bit too quickly (and I myself am tempted to do following my distrust of phenomenology) and we find ourselves back at the place of strange exchanges of idealism and materialism in Kants work. Does all text itself illicit a kind of view of unboundness that is found along the sublime path? Or to broaden the question and to return to the atomized sublime do all material objects have that sublime glow, that warmth of congealed labor, do we arrive back at the stoop of Marx? The ontological evacuation of the sublime in capitalism seems to not be a sacrificing of the body to alleviate the mind, but the very elevation of the act of evacuation itself which may be the very American aspect of global capitalism at its worst. And if, as iek argues, the entire capitalistic machinery runs on the concept of the drive, how is it possible to break out a context where we are presently dead (or undead) and the impossible is placed in a constantly postponed dream of a lucrative existence. The feeling of the sublime is not so much postponed but the deadening feel of labor is eliminated as we see ourselves eventually living the good life. Our narcissism is not so much one of survival, of ourselves before the welled up ocean, but of our possibility to stop striving endlessly. Philip Shaw ends his text The Sublime in a fairly disconcerting way arguing for a return to the beautiful, that reintroducing desire in the context of the sublime is the only to save ourselves from nihilistic rumination. Following the work of John Milbank (and other Chrisitan figures who see the need to combat postmodern nihilism) Shaw falls in step with a kind of Levinasian reliance on the other that the combination of two incomplete beings can give a kind of completeness, bring us back to beauty. Somewhere Lacan is laughing, desire never brings us quiet, it takes us to an empty house where we see ourselves looking in the window, sadly feeling our wallet.

KatrinaAsserting the response to Katrina was based on race is factually incorrect and reifies class boundaries by focusing on cultural diversity rather than economic equalityMichaels 7 (Walter Benn, Professor of American Literature and Literary Theory at University of Illinois at Chicago, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, 7/24/2007, pg 11)//JL But its the response to Katrina that is most illuminating for our purposes, especially the response from the left, not from the David Brooks right. Lets be honest, Cornel West told an audience at the Paul Robeson Student Center at Rutgers University, we live in one of the bleakest moments in the history of black people in this nation. Look at the Super Dome, he went on to say, its a living hell for black people. Its not a big move from the hull of the slave ship to the living hell of the Super Dome.7 This is what we might call the George Bush doesnt care about black people interpretation of the governments failed response to the catastrophe. But nobody doubts that George Bush cares about Condoleezza Rice, who is very much a black person and who is fond of pointing out that shes been black since birth. And there are, of course, lots of other black peoplelike Clarence Thomas and Thomas Sowell and Janice Rogers Brown and, at least once upon a time, Colin Powellfor whom George Bush almost certainly has warm feelings. But what American liberals want is for our conservatives to be racists. We want the black people George Bush cares about to be some of my best friends are black tokens. We want a fictional George Bush who doesnt care about black people rather than the George Bush weve actually got, one who doesnt care about poor people. Although thats not quite the right way to put it. First because, for all I know, George Bush does care about poor people; at least he cares as much about poor people as anyone else does. What he doesnt care aboutand what Bill Clinton, judging by his eight years in office, didnt much care about, and what John Kerry, judging from his presidential campaign, doesnt much care about and what we on the so- called left, judging by our willingness to accept Kerry as the alternative to Bush, dont care about eitheris taking any steps to get them to stop being poor. We would much rather get rid of racism than get rid of poverty. And we would much rather celebrate cultural diversity than seek to establish economic equality.GenericCategorization based on skin color, gender or sexuality [etc.] benefits the upper class as it decenters the issue of class while dividing up those that are most effected by capitalisms exploitative agenda and pitting them against each otherRosemary Hennessy 1997, Hennessy has written on a range of issues in feminist theory and politics, teaches in the English Department of the University of Albany, SUNY, Review of Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections of the Postsocialist Condition. By Nancy Fraser. New York: Routledge, 1997. HypatiaIt is not news that the U.S. Left has been suffering political paralysis. What is notable, and perhaps hopeful, is that recent assessments are returning to the same telling symptomthe disconnection of cultural politics from political economythat has been the banner of social theory and activism for almost two decades. The major contribution of the essays that comprise Nancy Fraser's Justice Interruptus is their attention to this situation, which she diagnoses as "postsocialism." While the addition of one more "post" to the gathering catalog of postals circulating now is distressing, what the term postsocialism signifies seems right. For Fraser, postsocialism refers to a series of related symptoms of the languishing Left: the absence of any credible vision of an alternative to the present order, the failure to connect a politics of identity to a politics of equality, and, what is really the context for these developments, a resurgence of economic liberalism. Fraser's main concern about the current political landscape is the shift in the grammar of political claims-making from a socialist political imaginary that is primarily concerned with the problem of redistribution of wealth and resources to a politics of identity in which the central problem of justice is cultural recognition (Fraser 1997, 2). Her suggestion for a way out is that neither a politics of redistribution nor a politics of recognition alone is adequate for meaningful social change; rather, both are needed. Eschewing historical explanation of why these two forms of social justice are integrated, Fraser instead offers the more pragmatic thesis that in practice they are always intertwined and reinforce one another dialectically. In a footnote, she reminds us that the "interimbrication" of the two is a leitmotif in all of her work (34, n. 8). Justice Interruptus is based on essays Fraser wrote and published between 1990 and 1996. The chapters treat a wide range of issuesthe family wage; the recasting of the relationship between private and public spheres by particular historical events (the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings is one example); the history of the category of "dependency" as it has affected debates on welfare in the U.S.; and, the critical frameworks of leading feminist theorists (Iris Young, Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Carole Pateman). While the problem of postsocialism's interruption of justice does not shape every chapter, [End Page 126] it is the book's recurring refrain, and Fraser's endorsement of a "bivalent" or "bifocal" vision that encompasses both a politics of recognition and redistribution informs her analysis throughout. For that reason, I will pay special attention to this core argument. The postsocialist condition Fraser diagnoses is both an effect of the hegemony of two decades of neo-liberalism and the legacy of the New Left. Never a coherent organized front, the New Left emerged out of struggles in Europe after World War II to come to terms with the theoretical rigidity and political abuses of an overly economistic, Stalinist marxism and (in the U.S. as well) out of the demands of social subjectswomen, blacks, and eventually lesbians and gay menwhose interests, for many, did not seem to be adequately represented in traditional socialist politics and theory. Debates over how to explain the relationship of culture to political economy, over the adequacy of the base-superstructure model of classical marxism, over the extent to which cultural forms like the media are independent or actually shape economic relations raged in the early phases of the New Left. The consequent theoretical attention to ideology, to the social construction of race, gender, sexualityand more recently to ethnicity and nationalityopened up new and important areas of social life to critical examination, but they often did so at a cost. In tandem with social movements organized around these axes of identity, social theory increasingly came to focus on cultural politics, and gradually attention to the cultural construction of identities was completely dislocated from any connection to political economy. By the mid-eighties the systemic understanding of social life that had characterized the New Left's socialist analysis and vision in the early seventies had been largely abandoned. By the nineties, both in the academy and in community activism, various versions of postmodern identity politics had become the reigning paradigm, often understood in terms of a logic of intersecting oppressions. Fraser's call to reconnect the politics of identity to political economy is an intervention into this vague explanatory frame and its limited preoccupation with culture. But unfortunately she stops short of really grappling, either historically or theoretically, with the Left's abandonment of historical materialism. Consequently, the disavowed specter of marxism haunts her project. Fraser claims that undergirding her diagnostic label of postsocialism is a vision of a full-scale successor project to socialism, an alternative postsocialism that incorporates the best of socialism. The idea of a full-scale successor project to socialism is appealing, but why not simply call it a new socialism? Is the word socialism so tainted and the ideals it stands for so unacceptable now that it has lost all ability to marshal political support? I will elaborate below on how Fraser's reluctance to embrace socialism resonates in her ambivalent stance on class. But even if we accept the premise that the best of socialism needs to be promoted and explained under a new sign, is postsocialism the best alternative? Although she does not explain why she thinks we "are not in a position to [End Page 127] envision a full scale successor project to socialism" (1997, 4) or why she takes a critical stance toward it, the "post" in the postsocialism she promotes is clearly the sign of a critical perspective. This is a standpoint that supports comprehensive, normative thinking and that will lay the conceptual ground for redressing the interruption of distributive and cultural justice. To that end, she promotes a "bivalent" solution to the problematic splitting of the social from the cultural, the economic from the discursive. One reason Fraser may be reluctant to name her vision socialist is that although she bemoans the decentering of class, she finally is not interested in endorsing the class-based analysis that is the signature claim of socialism. While she sees the mobilizing of social movements around various categories of cultural identity to be an unfortunate result of the decentering of class, she does not explain why class is not a viable starting point for social theory, what the relationship is between the concept of political economy that she uses and class, or, for that matter, what the relationship is between the politics of redistribution and class. The frame for her understanding of socioeconomic injustice is "a rough and general" one, loosely referring to exploitation, economic marginalization and deprivation (1977, 13) and informed by a commitment to egalitarianism. One of the consequences of this general model of economic injustice is that her concept of "redistribution" can actually obscure the basis for socioeconomic inequities under capitalism (for example, the fact that the unpaid labor of many is the source of profits for the few). At worst, the concept of redistribution can be taken to imply that social welfare programs rather than fundamental structural changes are the way to remedy economic inequities. Most of all, conceptualizing political economy in terms of distribution forfeits the opportunity to acknowledge that under capitalism there are and historically have always been uneven, complex material connections between the unequal relations of production (another way of understanding class) and the production of identities, knowledges, and culture. That Fraser relinquishes a systemic understanding of social life premised on the human requirement to produce what is needed to survive also points to her ambivalent relationship to socialist feminisma tradition she draws on and was herself part of, but that her postsocialism seems to have disowned. The rich tradition of socialist feminism does connect political economy and cultureand it does so not in a rigid monocausal or reductively economistic way that makes all cultural identities simply determined by class. 1 Certainly, Fraser is alert to the inequity capitalism as a social system has wrought and its damaging effects on people's lives; her references to contemporary neo-liberalism detail the global dimension of this violent social system. But she does not emphasize or explain what it is about late capitalism and neo-liberalism that has provoked the interruption of justice that is her subject. My concern is that Fraser's reluctance to spell out the class character of capitalism's deep [End Page 128]structures finally undermines the adequacy of her conceptual maps to the emancipatory project she espouses. Nonetheless, Fraser's core argument that "the project of transforming the deep structures of both political economy and culture appears to be the one overarching programmatic orientation capable of doing justice to all current struggles" (1997, 32) is a statement worth highlighting and embracing. Despite the ways her analysis might strain against it, this call for attention to deep structures is exactly what has been so absent on the Left. Precisely because it makes this bold proposal, Justice Interruptus is an important and timely book. In the lead chapter, "From Redistribution to Recognition?," Fraser distinguishes two different kinds of claims for justice. Recognition claims understand justice as cultural or symbolic and tend to reinforce group specificity and differentiation (affirmative action programs, to cite one classic example). Redistribution claims understand justice as socioeconomic and aim to abolish the political economic arrangements that underpin group identity as well as the group differentiation they effect (for example, feminist demands to abolish the gendered division of labor). Fraser contends that the two claims for justice can be merely different, or they can interfere with and undermine each other. In treating some of the complex relationships between competing claims for justice, Fraser complicates the "intersecting oppressions" approach to difference and identity that is so pervasive in U.S. feminism presently. She argues that different conceptions of injustice and possible remedies to them can be situated within a four-celled matrix. Groups whose claims of injustice are primarily rooted in cultural misrecognition (lesbians and gay men) are positioned at one end, and groups whose claims of social injustice are primarily rooted in economic injustice are positioned at the other (the exploited working class). As Fraser sees it, lesbians and gay men suffer from injustices that are rooted in cultural misrecognition, and any economic injustice they suffer is attendant on that. Consequently, the solutions to the injustices against them will need to be cultural. Between the two extremes of sexuality and class are bivalent groups whose claims for social justice derive from roots in both economic inequity and cultural misrecognition (groups organized or identified by gender and race). In addition, she outlines two broad categories for remedying injustice that traverse these optionsaffirmative remedies that do not change basic social structures and transformative ones that do. While her heuristic is basically descriptive, Fraser does end by recommending that for all bivalent collectivities transformative economics and a "deconstructive" as opposed to an "identity" cultural politics works best.The aff commodifies alteritytheir guilty rhetoric conceals privilege and precludes actual solvencyChow 93 [Rey Chowcurrently Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature at Duke University, 1995. "Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies". Peer Reviewed. 186.] l.gongWhy are "tactics" useful at this moment? As discussions about "multiculturalism," "interdisciplinarity," "the third world intellectual," and other companion issues develop in the American academy and society today, and as rhetorical claims to political change and difference are being put forth, many deep-rooted, politically reactionary forces return to haunt us. Essentialist notions of culture and history conservative notions of territorial and linguistic propriety, and the "otherness" ensuing from them unattested claims of oppression and victimization that are used merely to guilt-trip and to control sexist and racist reaffirmations of sexual and racial diversities that are made merely in the name of righteousnessall these forces create new "solidarities" whose ideological premises remain unquestioned. These new solidarities are often informed by a strategic attitude which repeats what they seek to overthrow. The weight of old ideologies being reinforced over and over again is immense. We need to remember as intellectuals that the battles we fight are battles of words. Those who argue the oppositional standpoint are not doing anything different from their enemies and are most certainly not directly changing the downtrodden lives of those who seek their survival in metropolitan and nonmetropolitan spaces alike. What academic intellectuals must confront is thus not their "victimization" by society at large (or their victimization in solidarity with the oppressed), but the power, wealth, and privilege that ironically accumulate from their "oppositional" viewpoint, and the widening gap between the professed contents of their words and the upward mobility they gain from such words. (When Foucault said intellectuals need to struggle against becoming the object and instrument of power, he spoke precisely to this kind of situation.) The predicament we face in the West, where intellectual freedom shares a history with economic enterprise, is that "if a professor wishes to denounce aspects of big business, he will be wise to locate in a school whose trustees are big businessmen." 28 Why should we believe in those who continue to speak a language of alterity as lack while their salaries and honoraria keep rising? How do we resist the turning into propriety of oppositional discourses, when the intention of such discourses has been that of displacing and disowning the proper? How do we prevent what begin as tacticsthat which is ''without any base where it could stockpile its winnings" (de Certeau, p. 37)from turning into a solidly fenced off field, in the military no less than in the academic sense?Attempting to take down that system fail, it has already encompassed the movement, the only method is to work within the system through alienation, coalition ultimate feeds into the system Vandenberghe 8 (Frdric Vandenberghe. Professor Vandenberghe graduated in social and political sciences from the Rijksuniversiteit Gent in Belguim in 1998 and received his Masters from the School of High Studies in Social Sciences (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) in Paris in 1989 and a Doctorate in Sociology from same university in 1994. September 18, 2008. Deleuzian capitalism. http://psc.sagepub.com/content/34/8/877.)//ky2 Colonization, commodification and reification From a systemic point of view, the flexible rationalization of the organization that transforms the worker into an actor-networker can best be understood in terms of the generalized introduction of market principles in the organization, with the result that the boundaries between the organization and its environment (markets and other organizations) are eroded and that the relations between the inside and the outside are radically transformed. Decentralization and segmentation of the organization itself, autonomization of its unities and marketization of their internal relations, increased self-organization of the unities and of the sub-unities, introduction of modes of financial calculation and budgetary obligations, translation of programmes into costs and benefits that can be given an accounting value, orientation towards