Verbatim 4.6

Cap K vs K affs --- GHJPP 20141NC

Capitalism causes inevitable crises, inequality, and dehumanization --- pedagogical spaces are the crucial staging ground for keeping socialism on the horizon

McLaren, 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_stationOccupy 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.

LinksKatrinaAsserting 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.History/Wilderson

A focus on historical justice precludes focusing on inequality happening now and perpetuates the capitalist system

Michaels 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 22)//JLAs much as we like being proud of our culture, we also like being proud of our history and being proud of the way our people (whoever we think our people are) have triumphed, or at least survived. And, conversely, we like being outraged by the bad things somebody elses people did to ours, and we like thinking that justice requires they make upor at least apologizefor them. But if the first three chapters give us reasons to be skeptical of the category our people and of the links we can have to people in the past, chapter 4 gives us reasons to doubt the relevance of the past itself. The question it asks is why we should care about the past, and the answer it gives is that we shouldnt, and that our current near obsession with the importance of history is profoundly misplaced. Like the idea of diversity itself, history functions at best as a distraction from present injustices and at worst as a way of perpetuating them. Henry Ford said a long time ago, History is bunk; the purpose of this chapter will be to show that he was right.The 1AC badly misreads historyslavery was not based on racial antagonism but economic exploitation

Alexander 2010 (Michelle, associate professor of law, Ohio State University, Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, former direct of ACLUS Racial Justice Project, J.D., Stanford Law School) The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, The New Press 2010, pages 23-25

The concept of race is a relatively recent development. Only in the past few centuries, owing largely to European imperialism, have the worlds people been classified along racial lines. Here, in America, the idea of race emerged as a means of reconciling chattel slaveryas well as the extermination of American Indianswith ideals of freedom preached by whites in the new colonies. In the early colonial period, when settlements remained relatively small, indentured servitude was the dominant means of securing cheap labor. Under this system, whites and blacks struggled to survive against a common enemy, what historian Lerone Bennett Jr. describes as the big planter apparatus and a social system that legalized terror against black and white bondsmen. Initially, blacks brought to this country were not all enslaved; many were treated as indentured servants. As plantation farming expanded, particular tobacco and cotton farming, demand increased greatly for both labor and land. The demand for land was met by invading and conquering larger and larger swaths of territory. American Indians became a growing impediment to white European progress, and during this period, the images of American Indians promoted in books, newspapers, and magazines became increasingly negative. As sociologists Keith Kilty and Eric Swank have observed, eliminating savages is less of a moral problem than eliminating human beings, and therefore American Indians came to be understood as a lesser raceuncivilized savagesthus providing a justification for the extermination of a native peoples. The growing demand for labor on plantations was met through slavery. American Indians were considered unsuitable as slaves, largely because native tribes were clearly in a position to fight back. The fear of raids by Indian tribes led plantation owners to grasp for an alternative source of free labor. European immigrants were also deemed poor candidates for slavery, not because of their race, but rather because they were in short supply and enslavement would, quite naturally, interfere with voluntary immigration to the new colonies. Plantation owners thus viewed African, who were relatively powerless, as the ideal slaves. The systematic enslavement of Africans, and the rearing of their children under bondage, emerged with all deliberate speedquickened by events such as Bacons Rebellion. Nathaniel Bacon was a white property owner in Jamestown, Virginia, who managed to unite slaves, indentured servants, and poor whites in a revolutionary effort to overthrow the planter elite. Although slaves clearly occupied the lowest position in the social hierarchy and suffered the most under the plantation system, the condition of indentured whites was barely better, and the majority of free whites lived in extreme poverty. As explained by historian Edmund Morgan, in colonies like Virginia, the planter elite, with huge land grants, occupied a vastly superior position to workers of all colors. Southern colonies did not hesitate to invent ways to extend the terms of servitude, and the planter class accumulated uncultivated lands to restrict the options of free workers. The simmering resentment against the planter class created conditions that were ripe for revolt. Varying accounts of Bacons rebellion abound, but the basic facts are these: Bacon developed plans in 1675 to seize Native American lands in order to acquire more property for himself and others and nullify the threat of Indian raids. When the planter elite in Virginia refused to provide militia support for his scheme, Bacon retaliated, leading an attack on the elite, their homes, and their property. He openly condemned the rich for their oppression of the poor and inspired an alliance of white and black bond laborers, as well as slaves, who demanded an end to their servitude. The attempted revolution was ended by force and false promises of amnesty. A number of people who participated in the revolt were hanged. The events in Jamestown were alarming to the planter elite, who were deeply fearful of the multiracial alliance of bond workers and slaves. Word of Bacons Rebellion spread far and wide, and several more uprisings of a similar type followed. In an effort to protect their superior status and economic position, the planters shifted their strategy for maintaining dominance. They abandon their heavy reliance on indentured servants in favor of the importation of more black slaves. Instead of importing English-speaking slaves from the West Indies, who were more likely to be familiar with European language and culture, many more slaves were shipped directly from Africa. These slaves would be far easier to control and far less likely to form alliances with poor whites. Fearful that such measures might not be sufficient to protect their interests, the planter class took an additional precautionary step, a step that would later become known as a racial bribe. Deliberately and strategically, the planter class extended special privileges to poor whites in an effort to drive a wedge between them and black slaves. White settlers were allowed greater access to Native American lands, white servants were allowed to police slaves through slave patrols and militias, and barriers were created so that free labor would not be placed in competition with slave labor. These measures effectively eliminated the risk of future alliances between black slaves and poor whites. Poor whites suddenly had a direct, personal stake in the existence of a race-based system of slavery. Their own plight had not improved by much, but at least they were not slaves. Once the planter elite split the labor force, poor whites responded to the logic of their situation and sought ways to expand their racially privileged position.

Identity

Focusing on identity promotes the idea that class is a cultural issue --- ensures class difference isnt seen as a disadvantage and doesnt get resolvedMichaels 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 22)//JLIndeed, the point of this book as a whole is that the least important thing about usour identityis the thing we have become most committed to talking about, and that this commitment is, especially from the standpoint of a left politics, a profound mistake. What it means is that the political left increasingly committed to the celebration of diversity and the redress of historical grievancehas converted itself into the accomplice rather than the opponent of the right. The old Socialist leader Eugene Debs used to be criticized for being unwilling to interest himself in any social reform that didnt involve the attack on economic inequality. The situation now is almost exactly the opposite; the left today obsessively interests itself in issues that have nothing to do with economic inequality. And, not content with pretending that our real problem is cultural difference rather than economic difference, we have also started to treat economic difference as if it were cultural difference. So now were urged to be more respectful of poor people and to stop thinking of them as victims, since to treat them as victims is condescendingit denies them their agency. And if we can stop thinking of the poor as people who have too little money and start thinking of them instead as people who have too little respect, then its our attitude toward the poor, not their poverty, that becomes the problem to be solved, and we can focus our efforts of reform not on getting rid of classes but on getting rid of what we like to call classism. The trick, in other words, is to stop thinking of poverty as a disadvantage, and once you stop thinking of it as a disadvantage then, of course, you no longer need to worry about getting rid of it. More generally, the trick is to think of inequality as a consequence of our prejudices rather than as a consequence of our social system and thus to turn the project of creating a more egalitarian society into the project of getting people (ourselves and, especially, others) to stop being racist, sexist, classist homophobes. This book is an attack on that trick.Culture

Focusing on cultures reifies notions difference by categorizing behavior to groups of people locking in differenceMichaels 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 43)//JLTwo things make the notion of culture look like an attractive alternative to race. One is that culture is learned rather than inherited (its on the nurture side of nature/nurture); the other is that culture is a looser concept than race; not all black people have to love The Black Album in order for it to be a part of black culture (and some white people can love it too). The problem is that the minute we call black culture black, both these advantages disappear since in order for a sentence like Some white people are really into black culture to make sense, we have to have a definition of white and black people that is completely independent of their culture. Culture cannot replace our concept of race as a biological entity. Learning how to rap doesnt make you a black person; it just makes you a rapper. The problem with culture, then, is that its utterly dependent on race. We can only say what counts as white or black or Jewish culture if we already know who the whites and blacks and Jews are.Race

Race is a myth propped up by capitalists to divert attention from the slavery of the middle class

Posner 14 (Richard, Writer at The Hampton Institute, The Family Tree Revisited: The Mythology of 'Race', 1/22/2014, The Hampton Institute, http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/mythology-of-race.html#.U7_6QoFdUUM)//JLThere are not separate races within the species Homo sapiens. There are only various ethnic groups that present some slight differences in appearance as a result of adaption to the diverse environments in which they developed. All the peoples of Earth are essentially, biologically and genetically the same. We are a single family. The only "race" of people on Earth is the Human Race; one world, one species, one family. Whether you "believe" that family was "created" in the fabled garden of eden or conclude that it evolved on the plains of prehistoric Africa is irrelevant. The existence of any ostensible "races" in the minds of any people, of any nation, in any language, is merely the result of propaganda, memes and disinformation, the mythology of racism, created and perpetuated by a parasitic minority; the pathological ruling class of the dominant culture. The myth of racism is just one more weapon being used in the vain attempt to perpetuate an unsustainable and irredeemable "civilization" that, by its very nature, is irreparably self-destructive. It is a culture that not only consumes non-renewable resources with reckless abandon but devours and destroys renewables, like arable land, potable water, trees and natural food sources at a rate far surpassing that of their recovery. Any culture that depends for its very existence upon such a system cannot endure. Malicious Intent The mythology of racism was created expressly as a justification for the enslavement of specific ethnic groups. The seemingly authoritative but fallacious assignment of a variety of negative traits to the members of any given "race" makes it easier to dehumanize them and thereby rationalize the inhuman abuse they will be subjected to as property. While even today it is still used for that purpose, racism is also employed exhaustively as a "wedge issue," a source of discord, divisiveness and conflict that further enables the processes of oppression and subjugation, which support the perpetuation of civilization. Even modern-language dictionaries seem to perpetuate the myth of racism. Oxford English Dictionary (online) (source) racism noun 1. the belief that there are characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to each race 2. discrimination against or antagonism towards other races - DERIVATIVES racist noun & adjective (emphasis added) The above definition seems to presuppose that there are in fact separate and unique races within the human species. Irrefutably, there are not. The Fact Of The Matter Homo sapiens n. The modern species of humans, the only extant species of the primate family Hominidae All humans now living belong to the subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens. (emphasis added) In genetic terms, there is only one race, said King in a phone interview. "All humans are Africans." - Harvard University Gazette - Cancer researcher, geneticist, and social activist Mary-Claire King (source) "Three fossil skulls from Ethiopia have been revealed as the oldest human remains yet discovered. The 160,000-year-old finds plug an important gap in the fossil record around the time our species first appeared and provides strong new evidence that Homo sapiens originated only in Africa..." (source) "Scientists today announced the discovery of the oldest fossil skeleton of a human ancestor. The find reveals that our forebears underwent a previously unknown stage of evolution more than a million years before Lucy, the iconic early human ancestor specimen that walked the Earth 3.2 million years ago." (source) "Human beings have very low genetic variability. Probably the entire species is descended from a single family that lived about 200,000 years ago." (emphasis added) (source) "Using the latest molecular biology techniques, Templeton has analyzed millions of genetic sequences found in three distinct types of human DNA and concludes that, in the scientific sense, the world is colourblind. That is, it should be. Race is a real cultural, political and economic concept in society, but it is not a biological concept, and that unfortunately is what many people wrongfully consider to be the essence of race in humans -- genetic differences," says Templeton. "Evolutionary history is the key to understanding race, and new molecular biology techniques offer so much on recent evolutionary history. I wanted to bring some objectivity to the topic. This very objective analysis shows the outcome is not even a close call: There's nothing even like a really distinct subdivision of humanity." - Alan R. Templeton, Ph.D., professor of biology in Arts and Sciences at Washington University (source) "Evolution isn't making people in different parts of the world more distinct. There are no human races, just the one species: homo sapiens. Race is one of the most misunderstood terms in modern science, misused by seasoned scientists and laymen alike. Put simply, there are no human races, just the one species: homo sapiens." (source) "In the late 19th century, the 'Science of Race' was established. This was basically a "scientifically determined" list of all the different cultures in the world, listed in order of intelligence. Of course, following the path of historical bigotry, the Northern Europeans were placed at the top, and South Africans (native to the area) were at the bottom. This heinous list was used as justification for the inhumane suppression of slaves originally from the western coast of Africa. It was also used in defense of discrimination against Asians, South Americans, and any number of non Anglo-Saxon peoples. Therefore, the term 'racism' carries the excess baggage of centuries of outright crimes against humanity (i.e. the enslavement of Western and Central Africans for work in the Americas), not to mention xenophobia." (source) "However, "races" as imagined by the public do not actually exist. Any definition of race that we attempt produces more exceptions than sound classifications. No matter what system we use, most people don't fit." - Original (source): The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 17, 1998, Page B4-B5 (source) The mountain of peer-reviewed scientific evidence establishing incontrovertibly that homo sapiens is a single family and is comprised of only one race could fill an encyclopedia, perhaps a small library, dedicated to that subject alone. Nonetheless, there is no sign of abatement in the perpetuation of racism by the dominant culture of civilization. It is still used, albeit a bit more subtly in some places, to perpetrate obscenely vicious crimes against humanity. Ubiquitous Inhumanity Antiracism efforts eliminate the idea of inequality leaving poverty untouched and giving neoliberals free reign to enforce economic inequality

Michaels 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, pgs 74-76)//JLBut antiracism serves another more important and more properly political purpose. As weve seen, the central debates about race in America today are no longer debates between racism and antiracism. Rather, the debate today is between two kinds of antiracism. One, identified with multiculturalism and the left, urges us to respect and preserve the differences between blacks and whites and Native Americans and Jews and whoever. It gives poor people identities and, turning them into black people or Latinos or women, insists on regarding their problems as effects of discrimination and intolerance. The other, identified with the right, regards the respect for racial difference as itself a form of discrimination and insists that the only identity that matters (the one we should be respecting) is American identity. We are just one race here, as Justice Antonin Scalia put it. It is American.25 Where contemporary liberalisms antiracism argues that we can solve our problems by respecting racial difference, contemporary conservatism's antiracism maintains we can solve our problems only by eliminating or ignoring it. The problem with this debate (or, looked at another way, the virtue of this debate) is that, from the standpoint of economic inequality, it doesnt matter which side youre on and it doesnt matter who wins. Either way, economic inequality is absolutely untouched. The dream of a world free of prejudice, the dream of a world where identities (whether American or hyphenated American) are not discriminated against, is as foundational to the right as it is to the left. And this dream is completely compatible with (is, actually, essential to) the dream of a truly free and efficient market. Heres where the concept of neoliberalismthe idea of the free market as the essential mechanism of social justiceis genuinely clarifying. A society free not only of racism but of sexism and of heterosexism is a neoliberal utopia where all the irrelevant grounds for inequality (your identity) have been eliminated and whatever inequalities are left are therefore legitimated. Thus, when it comes to antiracism, the left is more like a police force for, than an alternative to, the right. Its commitment to rooting out the residual prejudices that too many of us no doubt continue to harbor deep inside is a tacit commitment to the efficiency of the market. And its commitment to the idea that the victims of social injustice today are the victims of racism, sexism and heterosexism (the victims of discrimination rather than exploitation, of intolerance rather than oppression, or of oppression in the form of intolerance) is a commitment to the essential justice of the market. The preferred crimes of neoliberalism are always hate crimes; when our favorite victims are the victims of prejudice, we are all neoliberals.An exclusive focus on race makes a focus on economic difference moot regardless of which side theyre on

Michaels 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, pgs 67-68)//JLThe exemplary instance of victimization in modern American political life remains the victim of discrimination. Its the violation of people's rights as citizensthe failure of the liberal state to live up to its liberalismthat we prefer to deplore. The problem in Chesnutt is not that the farm laborers cant afford to ride in the clean comfortable car; its that some people who can afford to (like Dr. Miller) arent allowed to. And Leo Frankthe Jew they lynched in Georgia because of that little factory girlis Roths version of Dr. Miller, a man whose class cant save him from his race. Indeed, part of the attraction of the Leo Frank story may be the way in which it testifies to the triumph of racial prejudice over class privilege, which is to say, the way in which it demonstrates the irrelevance of wealth and (from the standpoint of the racist) turns class warfare into white supremacism while (from the standpoint of the antiracist) turning class warfare into bigotry. If youre a racist, it shows you that racism is the solution; if youre an antiracist, it shows you that racism is the problem. Either way, Tom Watsons anti-Semitism is a kind of gift since it makes over the rational anger of the poor as the irrational anger of the racist and enables everyone to agree that the real issue here is not money but race. So if racism makes economic issues irrelevant by asserting that what really matters is the difference between races, antiracism does exactly the same thing. The difference is just that Chesnutt and Roth condemn what Dixon celebrates. For Roth and Chesnutt, as for Dixon, the fundamental conflicts: are between races; antiracism, just as reliably as racism, turns the hostility between rich and poor into the hostility between black and white, Christian and Jew.Disease

The notion that diseases are associated with specific races is a scientific fallacy and reinforces notions of racism by grouping communities that were geographically distinctMichaels 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 32)//JLThis point is nicely illustrated by recent discoveries about the apparent link between disease and race. For many years, at least in the United States, sickle cell anemia has been a diseaseand, of course, a disease of the bloodcustomarily identified with black people. But it turns out that we cant really distinguish between black people and white people (between black blood and white blood) by invoking a genetic association with sickle cell. For one thing, not all of the people we call black actually have such an association, since it is characteristic among people whose ancestors were at one point centered in parts of West and Central Africa and isnt at all associated with black people whose ancestry is elsewhere in Africa. And, for another, there are people we think of as white (i.e., certain parts of the Greek population) with whom the trait is associated. The unifying factor is apparently descent from people who lived where malaria was a problem since the sickle cell trait is a variant of traits that protect against malaria. Thus, as Adolph Reed pointedly suggests in a country composed largely of white people from the Mediterranean and of black people from southern Africa sickle cell would be thought of as a white disease.6 Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Coleridges poem promotes endless expansion and colonial exploitation by eradicating the consequences of discovery

Levy 4 (Michelle, assistant professor of English at Simon Fraser University, Discovery and the domestic affections in Coleridge and Shelley, 2004, http://web.nsboro.k12.ma.us/algonquin/faculty/englishteachers/coppens/Rimecriticalarticle6.html)//JLIn the fall of 1797, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge was writing "The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere," (1) he found himself reflecting on the influence of his childhood reading, recalling how, from the age of three, he "read incessantly," and, by the age of six, had become obsessed with stories of the unknown, from Robinson Crusoe to the Arabian Nights' Entertainments. (2) This childhood reading was not, however, without its ill effects. By reading the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, he became "haunted by spectres, whenever I was in the dark," causing such "anxious & fearful" behavior that his father, when he "found out the effect, which these books had produced," seized "and burnt them." (3) "The Ancyent Marinere" records the powerful force that tales of the unknown exerted on Coleridge's imagination; he even bestowed his own compulsive habits on his fictional creation, claiming that the Mariner "had told this story ten thousand times since the voyage which was in early youth and fifty years before." (4) In August 1806, Coleridge himself recited the Mariner's tale as another child, eight-year-old Mary Godwin, hid behind a sofa and listened enraptured. (5) The profound influence of Coleridge's poem on Mary Shelley could be seen ten years later, in August 1816, when she, while reading Coleridge's companion piece to "The Ancyent Marinere," "Christabel," began to write her own story of the unknown, Frankenstein. (6) In writing Frankenstein, a novel that replicates "The Ancyent Marinere"'s intricate narrative structure of stories told within stories and incorporates the poem as a formative influence on her characters, Shelley participates in a conversation with Coleridge about the pleasures and the dangers of tales of the unknown. Coleridge's and Shelley's fascination with the unknown reflects a larger cultural obsession of the Romantic period. Across generations and genders, writers of Coleridge's and Shelley's time produced unprecedented quantities of gothic fiction and exotic tales, with stories set in the Middle Ages, the Orient, or, as in "Kubla Khan, or, a Vision in a Dream," both. But while Coleridge and Shelley, like many, were captivated by printed narratives of the unknown, they were vociferously opposed to unregulated and irresponsible venturing into the unknown in the real world. As more than ever before was being learned and written about previously unknown worlds, whether they were found with a telescope or a microscope, on the seven seas or in a laboratory, Coleridge and Shelley, among others, could not help but observe that many of these discoveries inevitably led to conquest and exploitation. By creating a composite voyage alluding to the originary moments in European maritime exploration in "The Ancyent Marinere"--from Ferdinand Magellan's first circumnavigation of the globe in the sixteenth century to Captain James Cook's explorations of the South Pacific and Antarctic regions in the later part of the eighteenth century--Coleridge laid bare the economic motivations for and ethical implications of the Mariner's having been "the first that ever burst / Into that silent Sea" of the Pacific (lines 105-6). (7) Indeed, readers of the poem have long argued that the Mariner's sufferings and guilt cannot be divorced from the expansionist project that culminated, by the end of the eighteenth century, in the slave trade, the plantation system, and imperial culture. (8) Readers of Frankenstein have also observed that Mary Shelley, by reflecting darkly on contemporary maritime exploration and scientific experimentation, lodged a powerful complaint against the twin dangers of imperialism and science. (9) Less attention, however, has been devoted to the ways in which Coleridge and Shelley sought to eradicate, or at least to mitigate, the damage caused by reckless discovery. In this essay, I will argue that both Coleridge and Shelley saw the domestic affections as the primary tool for restraining these excesses. The commonality between "The Ancyent Marinere" and Frankenstein extends beyond their recommendation of the domestic affections to their recognition that the desire for discovery and conquest was profoundly inflamed by printed accounts of discovery and conquest. By liberating the imagination from the constraints of prudence and suffering, narratives of discovery tended to promise excitement and glory without consequences. Both "The Ancyent Marinere" and Frankenstein self-consciously reflect on the power of tales of the unknown, paying particular attention to the way such stories inspire imitation, both in the physical world and on the page. Thus they manifest their awareness that print culture enabled and encouraged British imperialism. Coleridge's poem and Shelley's novel exhibit a tension between their attraction to stories of the unknown and their repulsion by the effects of unbridled exploration. By investing considerable faith in the restraining powers of the domestic affections, Coleridge and Shelley sought, perhaps without complete success, to exploit the enthralling nature of the unknown without encouraging actual projects of discovery.

Walt Whitman

The aff locks in capitalist consumption by promoting purchase and possession

Blake 8 (David Haven, Associate Professor of English at The College of New Jersey, Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity, 2008, Yale University Press, pg. 133)//JLWhitman unwittingly articulates the historical appeal of consumer capitalism. As both an advertisement and a commodity, the celebrated poet becomes a key to public unity. Not only does he invite us to find out individuality through his book, he promises that in the end, our many divisions will be swept into his colossal unifying force. Tuckahoe, congressman, prostitute, fugitive, all have access to the poet of Leaves of Grass. Lauren Berlant has argued that the most politically marginalized groups in the United States have been encouraged to discover their identity, as well as a larger sense of community, through the purchase of commodities. Surely that participation has been meaningful to consumers, but it raises the problem of whether consumption can be a form of political power. Despite Whitmans misgivings about capitalism, Song of Myself participates in a long historical process in which consumption would become a primary means of casually participating in public life. Whitman would have been disappointed with those results and the limited perspectives they have produced. At the same time, we might ask whether the poets insistent publicity threatens to obscure his democratic goals. Once we see in Whitmans poet a nexus of increasingly prevalent cultural forcesnamely, promotion, advertisement and celebritythe bravado of his claims makes startling, if not terrifying, sense. He signals a social transformation that no single person can resist, for his is the power to turn the private individual into a public being. Although he nominally directs his address to the weak and the faltering, he pursues his readers in Song of Myself with hegemonic intensity: I dilate you with tremendous breadth . I buoy you up; Every room of the house do I fill with an armed force. Lovers of me, bafflers of graves: Sleep! I and they keep guard all night; Not doubt, not decrease shall dare to lay finger upon you, I have embraced you, and henceforth possess you to myself, And when you rise in the morning you will find what I tell you is so.Whitmans poetry has been historically used to promote commercial progress and industrial capitalismSewell 4 (Bill, Professor of History at St. Marys University, Reconsidering the Modern in Japanese History: Modernity in the Service of the Prewar Japanese Empire, 2004, Japan Review, http://shinku.nichibun.ac.jp/jpub/pdf/jr/IJ1607.pdf)//JLCoinciding roughly with Japans emergence from seclusion, Walt Whitmans joyous celebration of the modern garnered meaningful praise among late Meiji Japanese literati.2 While Uchimura Kanzo (1861-1930) apparently first introduced Whitman to Japan, a young Natsume Soseki (1867-1916) proclaimed Whitmans happy arrival as that of a great man descending from heaven.4 Japanese fascination with Whitman did not end there.5 While some began translating Whitmans oeuvre,6 others began to write in his style.7 So rapidly did Whitman gain prominence in Japan that Lafcadio Hearn sought to warn Japanese against Whitmans influence.8 It was Whitmans vision of heroic progress that provoked this fascinationboth in substance and in style. On the surface, Whitman, who grew up amid the jubilant tur-moil of a booming New York City, sought to capture the essence of life in a new age by providing it with a new poetic style, one more appropriate for a fresh and exciting era. A deeper consideration reveals that contrasting with antebellum, anti-modern views emanating from the south, Whitman represented important evolutionary transitions apparent in wider society, including the expansion of a commercial and liberal middle class (including its sensibilities), the advent of industrial capitalism, and the triumph of new technologies.9 He noted with special approval the rising significance of the average man.10 Despite occasional misgivings late in life, Whitmans vision of the modern was optimistic and progressive, rendering him for many a veritable prophet of the modern.11

Love Letters

The 1ACs Buddhist approach reifies capitalism by letting technocratic elite outpace the revolution

Zizek 1 (Slavoj, Slovenian Marxist philosopher, psychoanalyst and cultural critic a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, From Western Marxism to Western Buddhism, Spring 2001, Cabinet Magazine, http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/2/western.php)//JL

The ultimate postmodern irony of today is the strange exchange between Europe and Asia: at the very moment when "European" technology and capitalism are triumphing worldwide at the level of the "economic infrastructure, the Judeo-Christian legacy is threatened at the level of "ideological superstructure" in the European space itself by New Age "Asiatic" thought, which, in its different guises ranging from "Western Buddhism" to different "Taos," is establishing itself as the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism.1 Therein resides the highest speculative identity of opposites in today's global civilization: although "Western Buddhism" presents itself as the remedy against the stressful tension of capitalist dynamics, allowing us to uncouple and retain inner peace and Gelassenheit, it actually functions as its perfect ideological supplement. One should mention here the well-known concept of "future shock" that describes how people are no longer psychologically able to cope with the dazzling rhythm of technological development and the social changes that accompany it. Things simply move too fast, and before one can accustom oneself to an invention, it has already been supplanted by a new one, so that one more and more lacks the most elementary "cognitive mapping." The recourse to Taoism or Buddhism offers a way out of this predicament that definitely works better than the desperate escape into old traditions. Instead of trying to cope with the accelerating rhythm of techno-logical progress and social changes, one should rather renounce the very endeavor to retain control over what goes on, rejecting it as the expression of the modern logic of domination. One should, instead, "let oneself go," drift along, while retaining an inner distance and indifference toward the mad dance of accelerated process, a distance based on the insight that all this social and technological upheaval is ultimately just a non-substantial proliferation of semblances that do not really concern the innermost kernel of our being. One is almost tempted to resuscitate the old infamous Marxist clich of religion as the "opium of the people," as the imaginary supplement to terrestrial misery. The "Western Buddhist" meditative stance is arguably the most efficient way for us to fully participate in capitalist dynamics while retaining the appearance of mental sanity. If Max Weber were alive today, he would definitely write a second, supplementary, volume to his Protestant Ethic, entitled The Taoist Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capitalism.2 "Western Buddhism" thus fits perfectly the fetishist mode of ideology in our allegedly "post-ideological" era, as opposed to its traditional symptomal mode in which the ideological lie which structures our perception of reality is threatened by symptoms qua "returns of the repressed," cracks in the fabric of the ideological lie. The fetish is effectively a kind of symptom in reverse. That is to say, the symptom is the exception which disturbs the surface of the false appearance, the point at which the repressed Other Scene erupts, while the fetish is the embodiment of the Lie which enables us to sustain the unbearable truth. Let us take the case of the death of a beloved person. In the case of a symptom, I "repress" this death and try not to think about it, but the repressed trauma returns in the symptom. In the case of a fetish, on the contrary, I "rationally" fully accept this death, and yet I cling to the fetish, to some feature that embodies for me the disavowal of this death. In this sense, a fetish can play a very constructive role in allowing us to cope with the harsh reality. Fetishists are not dreamers lost in their private worlds. They are thorough "realists" capable of accepting the way things effectively are, given that they have their fetish to which they can cling in order to cancel the full impact of reality. In Nevil Shute's melodramatic World War II novel Requiem for a WREN, the heroine survives her lover's death without any visible traumas. She goes on with her life and is even able to talk rationally about her lover's death because she still has the dog that was the lover's favored pet. When, some time after, the dog is accidentally run over by a truck, she collapses and her entire world disintegrates. Satire

Satire fails at breaking down capitalism --- default to our method

Hill et al 2 (Dave, Research Professor in Education at Anglia Ruskin University; Peter McLaren, Distinguished Professor in Critical Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University; Mike Cole, Professor in Education, Cass School of Education and Communities; Glenn Rikowski, Researcher at the University of Birmingham, Marxism Against Postmodernsim in Educational Theory, 2002, http://books.google.com/books?id=bTo2AAAAQBAJ&pg=PA98&lpg=PA98&dq=%22satire%22+%22marxism%22+%22capitalism%22&source=bl&ots=bpV1Xo8HiT&sig=SrqllJ6g3tfOiNgiJ9wJYuVadLU&hl=en&sa=X&ei=6oHaU_WpL-PnygOu9YLADQ&ved=0COsBEOgBMBY#v=onepage&q&f=true)//JLTo extend the parodic activity to social class behavior, we would have to question the extent to which workers and the ruling class mimicking each other would shake the foundations of capitalism and inequality. Surrealism and other art forms performed and continue to perform similar functions, as do, for example, certain alternative comedians. However subversive these may be, they do not provide directions for change. Satirists can mock, can work with counter-hegemonic forces to destabilize. But satire does not organize. Nor does ultra-relativism, where anything goes. In such a scheme of things, anything can be oppressive as well as progressive.

Fear of the oceansThe 1ACs idea of the sublime is nothing but a manifestation of capitalism, turning the horrific into something beautiful, affirmation prevents any possible revolution

Woodard 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.Seaborgs

Haraways ideas reverse the relation of technology and modes of production. This ignores the way technology is deployed in the pursuit of profit

Ebert 95 (Teresa L. Ebert, English Professor at the University at Albany, teaches Critical and Cultural Theory, Marxist Theory, Feminist Critique, Globalization Theory, The Crisis of (Ludic) Socialist Feminism published in Gender Journal, http://search.proques t.com/docview/228211868/fulltext? PROQUEST \\ME)

What kind of politics do socialist feminists need for these postmodern New Times that are not so new? Can the ludic turn away from Marxism provide an effective "new politics" for patriarchal late capitalism? The best way to answer such a question is to critique-ally engage Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto," one of the most influential examples of ludic postmodern socialist feminism. In this manifesto, Haraway attempts to map a new "route for reconstructing socialist-feminist politics" (163) by building "an ironic political myth" to deal with the "rearrangements in world-wide social relations tied to science and technology" (161) -- what she calls the "informatics of domination." In so doing, she rewrites technology as a sociocultural, if not an outright textual/discursive, entity by reunderstanding it as "coding." As she argues, "Communications sciences and modem biologies are constructed by a common move -- the translation of the world into a problem of coding" (164). In other words, Haraway is reversing the relation of technology to the mode of production (capitalism) producing it -- that is, the relation of superstructure and base -- if not severing it altogether. Haraway articulates technology as not only autonomous and self-generating; she represents it as the ground of all other social, cultural, and economic realities. For example, Haraway posits the new economic arrangements, such as the "homework economy" or "the projections for world-wide structural unemployment," as "stemming from the new technologies" (168). Consequently, she erases the very real material conditions of science and technology as capitalist science and technology. She occludes the way technology itself is deployed and developed according to the imperatives of profit, and she erases both the exploitation of labor involved in producing the technology and the uses of technology to further increase the expropriation of labor. Instead, she rewrites material reality as "cyborg semiologies." She argues that "the entire universe of objects that can be known scientifically must be formulated as problems in communications engineering (for the managers) or theories of the text (for those who would resist). Both are cyborg semiologies" (162-63). Thus although Haraway seems, at first, to be quite different from other ludic critics (especially deconstructionists) in her understanding of contemporary social reality, she is in fact subscribing to the same basic logic of the priority of the semiotic and substitutes a semiotic or discursive materialism for historical materialism.

The metaphor of the cyborg obscures class by replacing it with a focus on semiotics

Ebert 95 (Teresa L. Ebert, English Professor at the University at Albany, teaches Critical and Cultural Theory, Marxist Theory, Feminist Critique, Globalization Theory, The Crisis of (Ludic) Socialist Feminism published in Gender Journal, http://search.proques t.com/docview/228211868/abstract?accountid=14667 PROQUEST \\ME)

Elaborating on this ludic logic, [Judith Butler] argues that "the term 'emancipation'" is "exposed as contradictory and untenable" and thus "unrealizable."(16) She thus proposes a "post-teleological," "postfoundationalist" use of the term as "citational" (i.e., as discursive or rhetorical act) "that will mark off the 'playful' use of the category from the serious and foundationalist one." This "playful" (ludic) use of the concept foregrounds the indeterminate and undecidable "play" of its signifiers and "citations" and means that "the writer," according to Butler, "will not know in advance for what purposes or in what direction the term will come to signify."(17) The "serious," "foundationalist" use that she rejects is, of course, Marxism, in which emancipation has a serious, "unplayful" use as a "struggle concept." Emancipation, for historical materialists, is "founded" historically (not ontologically or metaphysically) on the social contradictions of patriarchal-capitalism. Emancipation is not undecidable; rather, it is the specific historical effect of the revolutionary struggle to transform the social relations of production: to change from a society organized around profit and the social divisions of labor and property to one that meets the needs of all people and equally distributes property and social resources without exploiting people's labor. Politics, in the ludic logic, is primarily a cultural politics aimed at semiotic freedom. It seeks to achieve the unrestricted play of differences through the subversion of existing significations (representations). This is what [Drucilla Cornell] (following [Jacques Derrida]) calls the "dream of a new choreography of exual difference" in which we "dance differently with the old distinctions."(18) Whether these political strategies for realizing the unrestricted play of differences are called "resignification" (Butler), "re-metaphorization" (Cornell), or "recoding" ([Donna Haraway]), they are all semiotic practices confined to the superstructure.Haraway's "cyborg politics" is the practice of semiotic recodings, of writing ("recoding") other stories: "feminist cyborg stories have the task of recoding communication and intelligence to subvert command and control" (175). Haraway's celebrated new "route for reconstructing socialist-feminist politics" (163), then, is to substitute a technological and semiotic matterism for a historical materialism as the ground of feminist theory and practice, and in so doing, occlude production and marginalize labor. The similarities between Haraway's "recoding" as a politics of liberation and Judith Butler's "resignification" as a politics of "self-subversion" and "resistance" raise the question of whether there is any difference at all between Haraway's discursive socialist feminism and poststructuralist textual or "performative" feminism?(66)The "cyborg perspective" is basically a bourgeois perspective that obscures the class politics of its own privileged condition by suppressing its relation to the extraction of the surplus labor of others, especially women of color. Haraway's "complaint about socialist/Marxian standpoints is their unintended erasure of polyvocal, unassimilable, radical difference made visible in anti-colonial discourse and practice" (159). But what is this "unassimilable, radical difference"? Is it the difference of "women of color," Haraway's representative cyborg, "Sister Outsider"? If so, does this not risk becoming yet another form of colonialization and Eurocentric essentialization of the "racial other" as the "unassimilable" outsider -- this time in the name of the "other"? The "radical, unassimilable difference" in racist, patriarchal capitalism is not the "postmodernist identity" of women of color but the conditions oppressing them. The "radical, unassimilable difference" is poverty. It is the production of profit and privilege for the few out of the expropriation of the labor of the many (the "others"). Poverty cannot be ended; it cannot be assimilated within bourgeois society, that is, within the existing labor relations of capitalism. Poverty (i.e., need) is the radical, unrepresentable, suppressed "other" to bourgeois pleasure.Their metaphor is incompatible with Marxist though- different views on human nature, the drivers of history, and individualism

Tong 9 (Rosemarie Tong, Director of Center for Professional and Applied Ethics, Distinguished Professor of Health Care Ethics in the Department of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Applied and Professional Ethics at UNC Charlotte, Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction page 97, http://excoradfeminisms.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/feminist_thought_a_more_co mprehensive_intro.pdf \\ME)To appreciate the differences between classical Marxist and contemporary socialist feminism, we need to understand the Marxist concept of human nature. As noted in Chapter 1, liberals believe that several characteristics distinguish human beings from other animals. These characteristics include a set of abilities, such as the capacity for rationality and the use of language; a set of practices, such as religion, art, and science; and a set of attitude and behavior patterns, such as competitiveness and the tendency to put oneself over others. Marxists reject the liberal conception of human nature, claiming instead that what makes us different from other animals is our ability to produce our means of subsistence. We are what we are because of what we dospecifically, what we do to meet our basic needs through productive activities such as fishing, farming, and building. Unlike bees, beavers, and ants, whose activities are governed by instinct and who cannot willfully change themselves, we create ourselves in the process of intentionally transforming and manipulating nature.3 For the liberal, the ideas, thoughts, and values of individuals account for change over time. For the Marxist, material forcesthe production and reproduction of social lifeare the prime movers in history. In laying out a full explanation of how change takes place over time, an explanation usually termed historical materialism, Marx stated, The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.4 In other words, Marx believed a societys total mode of productionthat is, its forces of production (the raw materials, tools, and workers that actually produce goods) plus its relations of production (the ways in which production is organized) generates a superstructure (a layer of legal, political, and social ideas) that in turn reinforces the mode of production. Adding to Marxs point, Richard Schmitt later emphasized that the statement Human beings create themselves is not to be read as Men and women, as individuals, make themselves what they are, but instead as Men and women, through production collectively, create a society that, in turn, shapes them.5 So, for example, people in the United States think in certain ways about liberty, equality, and freedom because their mode of production is capitalist.

The affs view of sexism ignores the role class plays. This inevitably fails because it ignores the difference between proletariat and bourgeois women. Class must come first

Tong 9 (Rosemarie Tong, Director of Center for Professional and Applied Ethics, Distinguished Professor of Health Care Ethics in the Department of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Applied and Professional Ethics at UNC Charlotte, Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction page 106-107, http://excoradfeminisms.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/feminist_thought_a_mor e_comprehensive_intro.pdf \\ME)Affirming the ideas of Marx and Engels, classical Marxist feminists tried to use a class analysis rather than a gender analysis to explain womens oppression. A particularly good example of classical Marxist feminism appeared in Evelyn Reeds Women: Caste, Class, or Oppressed Sex?41 Stressing that the same capitalist economic forces and social relations that brought about the oppression of one class by another, one race by another, and one nation by another42 also brought about the oppression of one sex by another, Reed resisted the view that womens oppression as women is the worst kind of oppression for all women. Although Reed agreed that relative to men, women occupy a subordinate position in a patriarchal or male-dominated society, she did not think that all women were equally oppressed by men or that no women were guilty of oppressing other women. On the contrary, she thought bourgeoisie women were capable of oppressing both proletarian men and women. In a capitalist system, money is most often power. Not found in Reed is any manifesto urging all women to band together to wage a caste war against all men.43 Rather, she encourages oppressed women to join oppressed men in a class war against their common capitalist oppressors, female and male. Reed thought it was misguided to insist that all women, simply by virtue of possessing two X chromosomes, belong to the same class. On the contrary, she maintained that women, like men are a multiclass sex.44 Specifically, proletarian women have little in common with bourgeoisie women, who are the economic, social, and political as well as sexual partners of the bourgeoisie men to whom they are linked. Bourgeoisie women are not united with proletarian women but with bourgeoisie men in defense of private property, profiteering, militarism, racismand the exploitation of other women.45 Clearly, Reed believed that the primary enemy of at least proletarian women is not patriarchy, but first and foremost, capitalism. Optimistic about male-female relations in a postcapitalist society, Reed maintained that [f ]ar from being eternal, womans subjection and the bitter hostility between the sexes are no more than a few thousand years old. They were produced by the drastic social changes which brought the family, private property, and the state into existence.46 With the end of capitalist male-female relationships, both sexes will thrive in a communist society that enables all its members to cooperate with each other in communities of care.

Survival politics

Cultural studies to reaffirm popular culture practices like playing music is profoundly depoliticizing and channels resistance away from the state and cedes the political to the right. Cultural studies is the consolation prize in the game of politicsthe real winners are the right wing elites

Gitlin, 97 (Todd, professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia, The anti-political populism of cultural studies, Dissent, Spring, proquest)

From the late 1960s onward, as I have said, the insurgent energy was to be found in movements that aimed to politicize specific identities-racial minorities, women, gays. If the "collective behavior" school of once-conventional sociology had grouped movements in behalf of justice and democratic rights together with fads and fashions, cultural studies now set out to separate movements from fads, to take seriously the accounts of movement participants themselves, and thereby to restore the dignity of the movementsonly to end up, in the 1980s, linking movements with fads by finding equivalent dignity in both spheres, so that, for example, dressing like Madonna might be upgraded to an act of"resistance" equivalent to demonstrating in behalf of the right to abortion, and watching a talk show on family violence was positioned on the same plane. In this way, cultural studies extended the New Left symbiosis with popular culture. Eventually, the popular culture of marginal groups (punk, reggae, disco, feminist poetry, hip-hop) was promoted to a sort of counterstructure of feeling, and even, at the edges, a surrogate politics-a sphere of thought and sensibility thought to be insulated from the pressures of hegemonic discourse, of instrumental reason, of economic rationality, of class, gender, and sexual subordination. The other move in cultural studies was to claim that culture continued radical politics by other means. The idea was that cultural innovation was daily insinuating itself into the activity of ordinary people. Perhaps the millions had not actually been absorbed into the hegemonic sponge of mainstream popular culture. Perhaps they were freely dissenting. If "the revolution" had receded to the point of invisibility, it would be depressing to contemplate the victory of a hegemonic culture imposed by strong, virtually irresistible media. How much more reassuring to detect "resistance" saturating the pores of everyday life! In this spirit, there emerged a welter of studies purporting to discover not only the "active" participation of audiences in shaping the meaning of popular culture, but the "resistance" of those audiences to hegemonic frames of interpretation in a variety of forms-news broadcasts (Dave Morley, The `Nationwide ' Audience, 1980); romance fiction (Janice Radway, Reading the Romance, 1984); television fiction (Tamar Liebes and Elihu Katz, The Export of Meaning, 1990; Andrea Press, Women Watching Television, 1991); television in general (John Fiske, Television Culture, 1987); and many others. Thus, too, the feminist fascination with the fictions and talk shows of daytime "women's television"-in this view, the dismissal of these shows as "trivial," "banal," "soap opera," and so on, follows from the patriarchal premise that what takes place within the four walls of the home matters less than what takes place in a public sphere established (not coincidentally) for the convenience of men. Observing the immensity of the audiences for Oprah Winfrey and her legions of imitators, many in cultural studies upended the phenomenon by turning the definitions around. The largely female audiences for these shows would no longer be dismissed as distracted voyeurs, but praised as active participants in the exposure and therefore politicizing of crimes like incest, spousal abuse, and sexual molestation. These audiences would no longer be seen simply as confirming their "normality" with a safe, brief, wellbounded, vicarious acquaintanceship with deviance. They could be understood as an avant-garde social movement. Above all, in a word, cultural studies has veered into populism. Against the unabashed elitism of conventional literary and art studies, cultural studies affirms an unabashed populism in which all social activities matter, all can be understood, all contain cues to the social nature of human beings. The object of attention is certified as worthy of such not by being "the best that has been thought and said in the world" but by having been thought and said by or for "the people"-period. The popularity of popular culture is what makes it interesting-and not only as an object of study. It is the populism if not the taste of the analyst that has determined the object of attention in the first place. The sociological judgment that popular culture is important to people blurs into a critical judgment that popular culture must therefore be valuable. To use one of the buzzwords of "theory," there is a "slippage" from analysis to advocacy, defense, upward "positioning." Cultural studies often claims to have overthrown hierarchy, but what it actually does is invert it. What now certifies worthiness is the popularity of the object, not its formal qualities. If the people are on the right side, then what they like is good. This tendency in cultural studies-I think it remains the main line-lacks irony. One purports to stand four-square for the people against capitalism, and comes to echo the logic of capitalism. The consumer sovereignty touted by a capitalist society as the grandest possible means for judging merit finds a reverberation among its ostensible adversaries. Where the market flatters the individual, c