NC Turn – Desire Ballot / Big Other

2NC Turn – Desire Ballot / Big Other

Extend the Cho and Lewis evidence from the 1NC - The aff’s pedagogy fails because they view the ballot as essential to the realization of their project. Their desire for the judge’s approval via the ballot is a passionate attachment to the very system of power and domination that they are attempting to resist. This internalization of power prevents critical educators from elevating to the level of a shift in consciousness – opposition will simply be co-opted and by power. Only the alternative can solve because a proper act disrupts the fundamental fantasy itself, restructuring the field of possibilities which can allow us to break free from the restraints of capital.

The system of capital creates an ethical dilemma: ethics will never be political if we don’t insist on risking the impossible - i.e. a successful revolution against capitalism which RESISTS THE DESIRE for the power that resides in the big other – the negative radically restructures the ethico-political imagination to include the possibility of successful actions against domination

For Zizek, a confrontation with the obscenities of abundance capitalism also requires a transformation of the ethico-political imagination. It is no longer a question of developing ethical guidelines within the existing political framework (the various institutional and corporate ‘ethical committees’) but of developing a politicization of ethics; an ethics of the Real.8 The starting point here is an insistence on the unconditional autonomy of the subject; of accepting that as human beings we are ultimately responsible for our actions and being-in-the-world up to and including the constructions of the capitalist system itself. Far from simple norm-breaking or refining / reinforcing existing social protocol, an ethics of the Real tends to emerge through norm-breaking and in finding new directions that, by definition, involve traumatic changes: i.e. the Real in genuine ethical challenge. An ethics of the Real does not simply defer to the impossible (or infinite Otherness) as an unsurpassable horizon that already marks every act as a failure, incomplete and so on. Rather, such an ethics is one that fully accepts contingency but which is nonetheless prepared to risk the impossible in the sense of breaking out of standardized positions. We might say that it is an ethics which is not only politically motivated but which also draws its strength from the political itself. For Zizek an ethics of the Real (or Real ethics) means that we cannot rely on any form of symbolic Other that would endorse our (in)decisions and (in)actions: for example, the ‘neutral’ financial data of the stockmarkets; the expert knowledge of Beck’s ‘new modernity’ scientists, the economic and military councils of the New World Order; the various (formal and informal) tribunals of political correctness; or any of the mysterious laws of God, nature or the market. What Zizek affirms is a radical culture of ethical identification for the left in which the alternative forms of militancy must first of all be militant with themselves. That is to say, they must be militant in the fundamental ethical sense of not relying on any external/higher authority and in the development of a political imagination that, like Zizek’s own thought, exhorts us to risk the impossible.

Reject the aff and their permutation – any degree of acceptance of the Big Other colonizes the entirety of the aff’s gesture

Zizek 7 [Slavoj, Senior Researcher at the University of Ljublijana, Slovenia and Prof. of Philosophy and Sociology @ European Grad Institute, How to Read Lacan, Ch. 2 Empty Gestures and Performatives, 2007]

There are, however, many features of the "big Other" which get lost in this simplified notion. For Lacan, the reality of human beings is constituted by three mutually entangled levels: the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real. This triad can be nicely illustrated by the game of chess. The rules one has to follow in order to play it are its symbolic dimension: from the purely formal symbolic standpoint, "knight" is defined only by the moves this figure can make. This level is clearly different from the imaginary one, namely the way different pieces are shaped and characterized by their names (king, queen, knight), and it is easy to envision a game with the same rules, but with a different imaginary, in which this figure would be called "messenger" or "runner" or whatever. Finally, real is the entire complex set of contingent circumstances which affect the course of the game: the intelligence of the players, the unpredictable intrusions that may disconcert one of the players or directly cut the game short The big Other operates at a symbolic level. What, then, is this symbolic order composed of? When we speak (or listen, for hat matter), we never merely interact with others; our speech activity is grounded on our accepting of and relying on a complex network of rules and other kinds of presuppositions. First, there are the grammatical rules I have to master blindly and spontaneously: if I were to bear in mind all the time these rules, my speech would come to a halt. Then there is the background of participating in the same life-world which enables me and my partner in conversation to understand each other. The rules that I follow are marked by a deep split: there are rules (and meanings) that I follow blindly, out of custom, but of which, upon reflection, I can become at least partially aware (such as common grammatical rules), and there are rules that I follow, meanings that haunt me, unbeknownst to me (such as unconscious prohibitions). Then there are rules and meanings I am aware of, but have to act on the outside as if I am not aware of them - dirty or obscene innuendos which one passes over in silence in order to maintain the proper appearances. This symbolic space acts like a standard against which I can measure myself. This is why the big Other can be personified or reified in a single agent: "God" who watches over me from beyond and over all real individuals or the Cause which addresses me (Freedom, Communism, Nation) and for which I am ready to give my life. While talking, I am never merely a "small other" (individual) interacting with other "small others," the big Other always has to be there.

Cap Links – Identity

The incorporation of identity into politics is not resistance – rather it strengthens the symbolic fiction of the political by keeping up appearances

Zizek 99 [Slavoj, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies, Ljubljana, Slovenia, The Ticklish Subject, pgs. 195-96, 1999]

The distinction between appearance and the postmodern notion of simulacrum as no longer clearly distinguishable from the Real is crucial here.27 The political as the domain of appearance (opposed to the social reality of class and other distinctions, that is, of society as the articulated social body) has nothing in common with the postmodern notion that we are entering the era of universalized simulacra in which reality itself becomes indistinguishable from its simulated double. The nostalgic long­ing for the authentic experience of being lost in the deluge of simulacra (detectable in Virilio), as well as the postmodern assertion of the Brave New World of universalized simulacra as the sign that we are finally getting rid of the metaphysical obsession with authentic Being (detectable in Vattimo), both miss the distinction between simulacrum and appear­ance: what gets lost in today's 'plague of simulations' is not the firm, true, non-simulated Real, but appearance itself. To put it in Lacanian terms: simulacrum is imaginary (illusion), while appearance is symbolic (fiction); when the specific dimension of symbolic appearance starts to disintegrate, the Imaginary and the Real become more and more indistinguishable. The key to today's universe of simulacra, in which the Real is less and less distinguishable from its imaginary simulation, lies in the retreat of ‘symbolic efficiency'. In sociopolitical terms, this domain of appearance (of symbolic fiction) is none other than that of politics as distinct from the social body subdivided into parts. There is 'appearance' in so far as a part not included in the Whole of the Social Body (or included/ excluded in a way against which it protests) symbolizes its position as that of a Wrong, claiming, against other parts, that it stands for the universality of egaliberte here we are dealing with appearance in contrast to the 'reality' of the structured social body. The old conservative motto of 'keeping up appearances' thus takes a new twist today: it no longer stands for the 'wisdom' according- to which it is better not to disturb the rules of social etiquette too much, since social chaos might ensue. Today, the effort to 'keep up appearances' stands, rather, for the effort to maintain the properly political space against the onslaught of the postmodern all-embracing social body with its multitude of particular identities.28

Cap Links - Race

Race and economy are inseparable. A politics of racial affirmation that centers on discursive and symbolic racism fetishizes identity and reifies structural oppression. We must intervene on the level of the material and systemic to challenge the exploitative structure of racialized capitalism

Young 6 [Robert, “Putting Materialism back into Race Theory:
Toward a Transformative Theory of Race” http://redcritique.org/WinterSpring2006/puttingmaterialismbackintoracetheory.htm]
Indeed, the discourse of the subject operates as an ideological strategy for fetishizing the black experience and, consequently, it positions black subjectivity beyond the reach of Marxism. For example, in the Afrocentric Idea, Asante dismisses Marxism because it is Eurocentric (8), but are the core concepts of Marxism, such as class and mode of production, only relevant for European social formations? Are African and African-American social histories/relations unshaped by class structures? Asante assumes that class hierarchies do not structure African or the African-American social experiences, and this reveals the class politics of Afrocentricity: it makes class invisible. Asante's assumption, which erases materialism, enables him to offer the idealist formulation that the "word creates reality" (70). The political translation of such idealism is not surprisingly very conservative. Asante directs us away from critiquing capitalist institutions, in a manner similar to the ideological protocol of the Million Man March, and calls for vigilance against symbolic oppression. As Asante tellingly puts it, "symbol imperialism, rather than institutional racism, is the major social problem facing multicultural societies" (56). In the realm of African-American philosophy, Howard McGary Jr. also deploys the discourse of the (black) subject to mark the limits of Marxism. For instance, in a recent interview, McGary offers this humanist rejection of Marxism: "I don't think that the levels of alienation experienced by Black people are rooted primarily in economic relations" (Interview 90). For McGary, black alienation exceeds the logic of Marxist theory and thus McGary's idealist assertion that "the sense of alienation experienced by Black people in the US is also rooted in the whole idea of what it means to be a human being and how that has been understood" (Interview 90). McGary confuses causes and effects and then misreads Marxism as a descriptive modality. Marxism is not concerned as much with descriptive accounts, the effects, as much as it is with explanatory accounts. That is, it is concerned with the cause of social alienation because such an explanatory account acts as a guide for praxis. Social alienation is an historical effect and its explanation does not reside in the experience itself; therefore, it needs explanation and such an explanation emerges from the transpersonal space of concepts. In theorizing the specificity of black alienation, McGary reveals his contradictory ideological coordinates. First, he argues that black alienation results from cultural "beliefs".  Then, he suggests that these cultural "norms" and "practices" develop from slavery and Jim Crow, which are fundamentally economic relations for the historically specific exploitation of black people. If these cultural norms endogenously emerge from the economic systems of slavery and Jim Crow, as McGary correctly suggests, then and contrary to McGary's expressed position, black alienation is very much rooted in economic relations. McGary's desire to place black subjectivity beyond Marxism creates contradictions in his text. McGary asserts that the economic structures of slavery and Jim Crow shape cultural norms. Thus in a post-slavery, post-Jim Crow era, there would still be an economic structure maintaining contemporary oppressive norms—from McGary's logic this must be the case. However, McGary remains silent on the contemporary economic system structuring black alienation: capitalism. Apparently, it is legitimate to foreground and critique the historical connection between economics and alienation but any inquiry into the present day connection between economics and alienation is off limits. This other economic structure—capitalism—remains the unsaid in McGary's discourse, and consequently he provides ideological support for capitalism—the exploitative infrastructure which produces and maintains alienation for blacks as well as for all working people. In a very revealing moment, a moment that confirms my reading of McGary's pro-capitalist position, he asserts that "it is possible for African-Americans to combat or overcome this form of alienation described by recent writers without overthrowing capitalism" (20). Here, in a most lucid way, we see the ideological connection between the superstructure (philosophy) and the base (capitalism). Philosophy provides ideological support for capitalism, and, in this instance, we can also see how philosophy carries out class politics at the level of theory (Althusser Lenin 18). McGary points out "that Black people have been used in ways that white people have not" (91). His observation may be true, but it does not mean that whites have not also been "used"; yes, whites may be "used" differently, but they are still "used" because that is the logic of exploitative regimes—people are "used", that is to say, their labor is commodified and exchanged for profit. McGary's interview signals what I call an "isolationist" view. This view disconnects black alienation from other social relations; hence, it ultimately reifies race, and, in doing so, suppresses materialist inquiries into the class logic of race. That is to say, the meaning of race is not to be found within its own internal dynamics but rather in dialectical relation to and as an ideological justification of the exploitative wage-labor economy. This isolationist position finds a fuller and, no less problematic, articulation in Charles W. Mills' The Racial Contract, a text which undermines the possibility for a transracial transformative political project. Mills evinces the ideological assumptions and consequent politics of the isolationist view in a long endnote to chapter 1. Mills privileges race oppression, but, in doing so, he must suppress other forms of oppression, such as gender and class. Mills acknowledges that there are gender and class relations within the white population, but he still privileges race, as if the black community is not similarly divided along gender and class lines. Hence, the ideological necessity for Mills to execute a double move: he must marginalize class difference within the white community and suppress it within the black community. Consequently, Mills removes the possibility of connecting white supremacy, a political-cultural structure, to its underlying economic base.

Cap Links - Blackness

And, Blackness will be commodified, which destroys the potential for authentic solidarity and the momentum of revolution against capital

Gasper 10 (Matthew Gasper, Critical Consciousness, “Identity Commodification and Negation” April 19 2010 http://matthewgasper.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/59/)

The commodification of individual and group identities isuseful for the maintenance of social and capitalist structures. When an identity is commodified, it loses what makes it unique and desirable. Ironically, the materialization of identity has a devaluing affect that can strip identity of its authenticity, turning it into another product that can be acquired. In bell hooks’ view, this is true for black identity: “Commodification of blackness strips away that component of cultural genealogy that links living memory and history in ways that subvert and undermine the status quo.” For hooks, this removes any sense of unity through the negation of historical context. When the identity of blackness is commodified, individuals that are not authentically affiliated with blackness are able to buy that identity, which degrades the unifying affect group solidarity can have. Shared interest is no longer the cohesion for groups, but rather an assumption that membership in an identity can bolster individualism, adding to one’s uniqueness. This process of commodification is a double-edged sword; in addition to devaluing group identity, it causes members that have the appearance of any identity to suddenly value that identity. hooks helps to clarify this aspect:¶ “Ironically, white consumer demand for the commodification of blackness has led more assimilated non-black-identified black folks who have class privilege to engage themselves with interpreting and reinventing the blackness they once repudiated.”¶ Black identity, as it becomes more valued by mainstream society, also becomes more valuable to those that can use it to their advantage. When being part of a group is materialistically advantageous, anyone that can assimilate that identity will. Creating profit from identity becomes a business that is easy to maintain because all it requires is continued reproduction of that perceived identity. If rap music is perceived as contributing to black identity, then rap music can be packaged with that identity and sold as such, making black identity easily accessible. hooks sums up:¶ “I would add that the contemporary commodification of blackness has become a dynamic part of that system of cultural oppression. Opportunistic longings for fame, wealth, and power now lead many black critical thinkers, writers, academics, and/or intellectuals to participate in the production and marketing of black culture in ways that are complicit with the existing oppressive-exploitative structure. That complicity begins with the equation of black capitalism with black self-determination.”¶ Anything seen as “black” is marketed as social capital to create economic capital. The complexity of identity is destroyed for profit. In addition, capitalist structures need to commodify potential dissenting voices so radical ideas cannot be disseminated across any group that has potential to create revolutionary solidarity. Assimilating identities that could challenge existing structures helps keep social/economic change from aggressively pursuing any radical vision. Commodification makes identity unauthentic, and subsequently mainstream. Anything that can be bought and sold cannot be critical of a system which allows for these identity transactions. Materialistic transformation of identity is effective in creating profit while silencing countercultural identities that challenge the status quo.¶
Blackness is and will be commodified, providing a cloak under which anti-blackness can be justified and concealed – the depoliticization of the economy thus turns the affirmative’s attempts at transformation

bell hooks 2005

(Media Education Foundation Transcript, 2005, “bell hooks: culturual criticism & transformation” http://www.mediaed.org/assets/products/402/transcript_402.pdf)

I believe that American culture is obsessed with transgression. And to¶ the degree that blackness remains a primary sign of transgression, one could talk about American culture and mainstream culture as being obsessed with blackness, but it is blackness primarily in a commodified form that can then be possessed, owned, controlled, and shaped by the consumer and not with an engagement in black culture that might require one to be a participant and therefore to be in some way transformed by what you are consuming as opposed to being merely a buyer. Anecdotally that to me¶ is the difference between a young white male from the suburb who’s consuming black music in the form of rap and who’s wearing the same kind of clothes as other, you¶ know, hip hop musicians but then in fact when he encounters a young black male on the streets feels the same racialized fear and demonizes that person as any white person who’s had no contact with that music, so that there's no correlation often between the¶ consumption of the commodity that is blackness and the culture from which that¶ commodity comes, or that provides the resource base and that's no different again from¶ us thinking of Third World countries.¶ There's a way in which white culture is perceived as too Wonder Bread right now, not¶ edgy enough, not dangerous enough. Let's get some of those endangered species¶ people to be exotic for us and it's really simply, I think, a more upscale version of¶ primitivism, resurging. When blackness is the sign of transgression that is most desired it allow whiteness to remain static, to remain conservative, and it's conservative thrust to go unnoticed. So as we're having a mounting Fascism in the United States that is¶ perpetuated increasingly by liberal young, moneyed, liberal, white people, if they are¶ wearing black clothes or listening to black music, they can be perceived as¶ transgressive, as radical, when in fact, once again, we see a separation between¶ material aspirations and cultural and social interests. So that at any point in time they¶ can drop their interest in blackness and do whatever they need to do to reinforce their¶ class interests, the interest of white supremacy, the interest of capitalism and¶ imperialism and I think that this is frightening because it's so deep and profound. It really¶ suggests the way in which fantasy will I think, more and more mediate Fascism as it has¶ always done in the past. Pretend that you're going somewhere that you're not really¶ going and you can stay in place and be ready to serve the state when the state calls¶ you because you really haven't left home. And I think that's a lot of what's happening.

Cap Links – Intersectionality

Intersectionality as a lens is dangerous because its plurality disables an analysis which positions capitalism as a constitutive force for other forms of oppression

Mclaren and Farhmandpur, 2005. (Peter, PhD, prof of education at UCLA, and Ramin, PhD, prof of educational policy at Portland State. Teaching Against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism: A Critical Pedagogy. Page 176. SPP)

We believe not that class struggle is outmoded but rather that it constitutes one of the crucial missing dimensions of contemporary educational criticism (McLaren 1998b). We are rejecting neo-Weberian concept of class based on consumption-based patterns, status, and occupational hierarchies that tell us little about the relationship between social classes. Along with British Marxist educators Dave Hill and Mike Cole, we reject technicist redudions of class into "fractions" or segments that hide or disguise common interests such as common consciousness among these groups comprising the working class in opposition to the exploiting capitalist class (Hill and Cole 2001).

We feel it is important for the educational researcher to recognize both the political and the pedagogical import of the dilemma put forward by Ellen Meiksins Wood (1994): "Once you replace the concept of capitalism with an undifferentiated plurality of sexual identities and special oppressions, socialism as the antithesis to capitalism loses all meaning" (29). Here the critical educational researcher challenges the relativism of the gender-race-class grid of reflexive positionality by recognizing that class antagonism or struggle is not simply one in a series of social antagonisms but rather constitutes the part of this series that sustains the horizon of the series itself. In other words, class struggle is the specific antagonism that assigns rank to and modifies the particularities of the other antagonisms in the series ( Zizek 1999).

Cap Links – Counter-Hegemonic Discourses

Privileging counter-hegemonic discourses as a method of deconstruction is flawed – it simply replaces the system of domination it wishes to replace via the reification of capital

Mclaren and Farhmandpur, 2005. (Peter, PhD, prof of education at UCLA, and Ramin, PhD, prof of educational policy at Portland State. Teaching Against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism: A Critical Pedagogy. Page 109-110. SPP)

Polycentric social and political spaces can be created by deconstructing the center/periphery and dominant/marginalized dichotomies that underwrite many critical approaches to social reform. The idea is not to move marginalized voices from the periphery to the center since behind this move marginalized voices are no more "authentic" than dominant voices and are vulnerable to reinscription into the "centrist" ideologies of the neoliberal capitalist state; And while the view of marginalized groups is fundamental in providing the initial counterstatement to the dominant ideology, it is not necessarily less distorted than the view of those who occupy the center. Yet a political commitment to social change and equality gives marginalized groups more political urgency and saliency. Flores and McPhail (1997) explain thusly:

By simply replacing "dominant" voices with "marginalized" voices, critics can perpetuate notions of identity that presume an essential authenticity, subscribe to monolithic notions of race, gender, or ethnicity, or privilege a particular position with "the community." These voices can become as constraining and as counterproductive as those they are intended to replace, often even excluding people within those communities whose voices are ostensibly represented, but who are not being heard. Such voices can also shut down any move toward empathic dialogue. We therefore cannot assume that the marginalized voice is the liberatory voice. (115)

What is required in order to move toward an emancipatory and transformative framework is a critical consciousness accompanied by critical self-reflexivity (McLaren 1997). Self-reflexivity is a process that identifies the source of oppression, both from the outside and from within, through participation in a dialectical critique of one's own positionality in the larger totalizing system of oppression and the silencing of others. Again it is worth quoting Flores and McPhail (1997) in detail:

Cap Impact – Racism

Even if it is not the root cause of racism, Capital creates the conditions for racist domination to continue: the logic of the market will subsume any identity-based struggle and turn it into profit and exploitation. The invisible hands of the market will applaud the affirmative for failing to disrupt its mode of domination

San Juan 3 [E., Fulbright Lecturer @ Univ. of Leuven, Belgium, “Marxism and the Race/Class Problematic: A Re-Articulation,”2003, http://clogic.eserver.org/2003/sanjuan.html. SPP]

It seems obvious that racism cannot be dissolved by instances of status mobility when socio-historical circumstances change gradually or are transformed by unforeseen interventions. The black bourgeoisie continues to be harassed and stigmatized by liberal or multiculturalist practices of racism, not because they drive Porsches or conspicuously flaunt all the indices of wealth. Class exploitation cannot replace or stand for racism because it is the condition of possibility for it. It is what enables the racializing of selected markers, whether physiological or cultural, to maintain, deepen and reinforce alienation, mystifying reality by modes of commodification, fetishism, and reification characterizing the routine of quotidian life. Race and class are dialectically conjoined in the reproduction of capitalist relations of exploitation and domination. well as the principle of self-determination for oppressed or "submerged" nations espoused by Lenin, exemplify dialectical attempts to historicize the collective agency for socialist transformation. Within the framework of the global division of labor between metropolitan center and colonized periphery, a Marxist program of national liberation is meant to take into account the extraction of surplus value from colonized peoples through unequal exchange as well as through direct colonial exploitation in "Free Trade Zones," illegal traffic in prostitution, mail-order brides, and contractual domestics (at present, the Philippines provides the bulk of the latter, about ten million persons and growing). National oppression has a concrete reality not entirely reducible to class exploitation but incomprehensible apart from it; that is, it cannot be adequately understood without the domination of the racialized peoples in the dependent formations by the colonizing/imperialist power, with the imperial nation-state acting as the exploiting class, as it were (see San Juan 1998; 2002). 32. Racism arose with the creation and expansion of the capitalist world economy (Wolf 1982; Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991). Solidarities conceived as racial or ethnic groups acquire meaning and value in terms of their place within the social organization of production and reproduction of the ideological-political order; ideologies of racism as collective social evaluation of solidarities arise to reinforce structural constraints which preserve the exploited and oppressed position of these "racial" solidarities. Such patterns of economic and political segmentation mutate in response to the impact of changing economic and political relationships (Geshwender and Levine 1994). Overall, there is no denying the fact that national-liberation movements and indigenous groups fighting for sovereignty, together with heterogeneous alliances and coalitions, cannot be fully understood without a critical analysis of the production of surplus value and its expropriation by the propertied class--that is, capital accumulation. As John Rex noted, different ethnic groups are placed in relations of cooperation, symbiosis or conflict by the fact that as groups they have different economic and political functions.Within this changing class order of [colonial societies], the language of racial difference frequently becomes the means whereby men allocate each other to different social and economic positions. What the type of analysis used here suggests is that the exploitation of clearly marked groups in a variety of different ways is integral to capitalism and that ethnic groups unite and act together because they have been subjected to distinct and differentiated types of exploitation. Race relations and racial conflict are necessarily structured by political and economic factors of a more generalized sort (1983, 403-05, 407). Hence race relations and race conflict are necessarily structured by the larger totality of the political economy of a given society, as well as by modifications in the structure of the world economy. Corporate profit-making via class exploitation on an international/globalized scale, at bottom, still remains the logic of the world system of finance capitalism based on historically changing structures and retooled practices of domination and subordination.

Cap Impact – Whiteness / Slavery

Whiteness emerged as an identity category in order to sustain the plantation via granting white indentured servants special privileges

Mclaren and Farhmandpur, 2005 (Peter, PhD, prof of education at UCLA, and Ramin, PhD, prof of educational policy at Portland State. Teaching Against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism: A Critical Pedagogy. Page 139-140. SPP)

In order to fracture intraclass consciousness between European indentured servants and African slaves, the plantocracy offered the indentured servants a place in the corporate infrastructure of the plantocracy where they were given the role of policing the behavior of the Africans. This also included the right to citizenship and a "white" identity. The theologian Thandeka (1999) identifies this as a form of “white classism.”' Offering white identity to indentured Europeans allowed them to identify "racially" with the plantation owners. In addition, it manufactured a class illusion by having poor whites identify with the class interests of plantation owners without enjoying any of their economic privileges. Eventually, white racism allowed poor whites to blame Africans for their economic hardships while harmonizing the class conflict between plantation owners and poor whites. While the African slaves were fully aware that they were victims of white racism, poor Europeans failed to recognize that they were the victims of white classism.

By granting racial/corporate membership to the European bond laborer who had the responsibility of preventing rebellion against the dominant center, the corporate state that emerged out of the plantocracy was able to survive and flourish. Poor white laborers were offered membership in the corporate plantocracy in order to control the subalterned nonwhite labor force. Whites were thus given a double role: as workers and as white people. White laborers were given membership at the center of the corporate plantation structure while still serving as a marginalized labor force. By using whiteness as a means of guaranteeing allegiance, the plantocracy secured its hegemony through white solidarity and the integration of labor relations (wage labor, prison labor, and so on) into the white confraternal society, or what Martinot (2000) calls the "overarching white social machine" (50). Whiteness or white solidarity became an "administrative apparatus" of the slave/class economy that served as a "matrix of social cohesion" that located whites "in a structural relation to each other" (52).

Whiteness is a symptom of capitalist social relations – the construction of racial categories such as black and white emerged historically out of the perceived necessity to accumulate capital

Mclaren and Farhmandpur, 2005 (Peter, PhD, prof of education at UCLA, and Ramin, PhD, prof of educational policy at Portland State. Teaching Against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism: A Critical Pedagogy. Page 105-106. SPP)

The concept of whiteness was introduced in modern history beginning with the Spanish conquest of the "New World" in the early sixteenth century and later reinforced with the practice of slavery in the United States. We need to remember that racial concepts are historically embedded in the specificity of social relations of capitalist production, a point Schiller (1997) articulates clearly, stating that "the construction of race is the product of particular relations of domination in particular places, periods of time, and social locations" (449). Complementing Schiller's position, Winant (1997) suggests that "like any other complex beliefs and practices, whiteness is imbedded in a highly articulated social structure and system of signification; rather than trying to repudiate it, we shall have to rearticulate it" (48). However, the question still remains: how can a racial category be rearticulated?

We believe that the rearticulation of the concept of whiteness can be attained only by its eradication (McLaren 1997), which itself can occur only if accompanied coterminously by the transformation of those capitalist social relations on which the concept is premised (McLaren 1997). This is because the social construction of whiteness is always articulated from a position of privilege and power in relation to marginalized ethnic groups. Schiller (1997) asserts that the abolition of the concept of race is a necessary first step toward the eradication of racism(s): Race is a construction that is lived, structuring society and the daily experiences, possibilities, perceptions, and identity of each individual; it is not about people socially defined as black or of color. To the extent that race structures society, all people are "raced,” and there is no blackness without the construction and experiences

of whiteness, no Indian without a white man, no mulatto without a system of deciding who is truly white. (449)

Following Theodore W. Allen (1994, 1997), Jonathan Scott (1998), and McLaren and Munoz (2000), we support the claim that whiteness is, first and foremost, a "sociogenic" (having to do with social forces and relations) rather than a "phylogenic" (having to do with phenotype or skin color) phenomenon and is fundamentally linked to the practice of Anglo-European and U.S. colonialism. For instance, in colonial Virginia, roughly between 1676 and 1705, there existed no distinction in status between “black” and “white” bond laborers. Whiteness was a status position introduced by the seventeenth-century Anglo-American and U.S. ruling class – largely the oligarchy of owners of large coonial plantations – who for purely political and economic purposes endowed indentured Europeans (at the time de facto slave) with civil and social privileges that greatly exceeded those of their fellow African bondsmen.

Historical Materialism Alt > Intersectionality

The aff’s basis in postmodern notions of identity is mutually exclusive with a historical materialist framework. Only the alternative’s framework prevents reification and can orient itself towards universal social justice

Mclaren and Farhmandpur, 2005 (Peter, PhD, prof of education at UCLA, and Ramin, PhD, prof of educational policy at Portland State. Teaching Against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism: A Critical Pedagogy. Page 86-87. SPP)

The treatment of class as yet another arbitrary floating signifier among race, class, and identity, and the taboo usage of concepts such as "base" and "superstructure" has led postmodernists to expunge the notions of capitalist exploitation and imperialism from their lexicon and replace them with more politically benign discourses of "difference" and "identity politics." Even self-proclaimed progressive postmodernists fare no better in articulating a persuasive critique of capitalism. Roslyn Wallach Balogh and Leonard Mell (1994) remark that "the best that this tradition can offer is a rearrangement of the existing distribution of power-ideally, some kind of vague hope for egalitarianism or radical democracy" (85). Because postmodern politics has failed to develop a sustained critique of class inequalities, racism, sexism, and economic inequality are thus framed superficially within fragmented discourses articulated around the holy trinity of race, class, and gender. Bologh and Mell culminate their argument with the assertion that "if postmodernism wants to confront colonization and the production of otherness, it must confront capital. If it wants to deconstruct universal categories, it might begin with the categories of political economy-as did Marx. Those are the most universal categories in which power resides" (86}. lt follows that we need to critically examine and rearticulate from a Marxist perspective the dynamic mechanisms that allow capitalist social relations of exploitation to persist.

Developing and envisioning an anticapitalist pedagogy requires a common yet open-ended historical materialist framework of equality and social justice. The meaning of equality and justice are not predetermined, nor do they float freely in some effervescent semiotic ether; rather, they are embedded within the specificity of social, economic, and political relations. In fact, historical specificity of the concept of equality denies neither its universal quality nor its objective significance. Rather, it is a standard by which we are able to judge political arguments or social practices, and it is a measure by which we can objectively gauge historical and social progress (Malik 1996).

The antiessentialism and antiuniversalism of conservative postmodernism considers race, class, and gender to be indeterminate and relatively unstable identities by which we represent ourselves. However, race, class, and gender are not merely fashionable costumes we wear in our daily social relations but constitute historically grounded social practices within the material relations of production. As Ahmad ( 1998) explains at length, “There is the idea of discreteness of identities, cultural, ethnic, or national; a kind of remorseless differentiatialism, whereby I am not permitted the claim that I may understand your identity but I am supposed to simply respect whatever you say are the requirements of your identity. In this ideology, any number of people celebrate hardened boundaries between self and other, denounce, what they understand as the "universalism" of the enlightenment, rationalism, and so on, while also fully participating in the globalization of consumption patterns and the packaging of identities as so many exhibits. At the same time and often from the same people, we also have the propagation of the idea of infinite hybridity, migrancy, choice of alternate or multiple identities, as if new selves could be fashioned in the instant out of any clay that one could lay one's hand on, and as if cultures had no real historical density and identities could be simply made up, sui generis out of the global traffic and malleability of elements. taken from all over the world. (103) In sum, we need to fashion identities that partake of a universal commitment to social equality. This also means that an ethics of social justice must more clearly underwrite the current work being done in identity politics.

AT: Perm – Sequencing

Overcoming capitalist relations of production is a prerequisite to struggles against other forms of oppression

Mclaren and Farhmandpur, 2005 (Peter, PhD, prof of education at UCLA, and Ramin, PhD, prof of educational policy at Portland State. Teaching Against Global Capitalism and the New Imperialism: A Critical Pedagogy. Page 175. SPP)

What Boris Kagarlitsky (2000) calls a "strategic hierarchy of goals" grounded in the' overthrow of the social hierarchy of capitalist society is a measure that we take seriously. We acknowledge that political struggle for race, class, gender, and sexual equality is a tightly interwoven struggle. But we understand class politics as the engine of our struggle for proletarian hegemony. As Robert McChesney (1996) asserts,

Radicals are opposed to all forms of oppression and it is ludicrous to debate which of sexism, racism, "classism,” or homophobia is most terrible, as if we were in some zero-sum game. Socialists have traditionally emphasized class-and continue to do so today-because the engine of a capitalist society is profit maximization-- and class struggle. Moreover, it is only through class politics that human liberation can truly be reached. (4-5)

In acknowledging this, we do not follow postmodernists in calling for an equivalence among various struggles. Rather, we call for a strategic integration of different yet equally important struggles. Recognizing that the legacy of racism and sexism is far from over (in fact, in many ways it is intensifying), we offer possible ways in which race and gender antagonisms can be addressed and overcome within the larger project of class struggle. As Adolph Reed Jr. (2000) maintains, "Recent debates that juxtapose identity politics or cultural politics to class politics are miscast. Cultural politics and identity politics are class politics" (xxii). The ways in which the contradiction between capital and labor is lived at the level of everyday life are almost certainly racialized and gendered. The modalities in which class exploitation are lived have specific consequences related to race, sexuality, age, and religion, and these must be placed at center stage in the struggle against oppression. We want to make clear that we are not subordinating race, ethnic, and gender struggles to class struggle. We simply are saying that without overcoming capitalist relations of production, other struggles will have little chance of succeeding. Yet to make such an assertion is to identify a structured silence within many postmodernized versions of critical pedagogy: the disappearance of class struggle.

Capitalism > Intersectionality

The gender and social structures in Capitalism need to be evaluated before Intersectionality

Eve Mitchell December 2, 2013 “I am a Woman and a Human: A Marxist-Feminist Critique of Intersectionality Theory”
In order to understand “identity” and “intersectionality theory,” we must have an understanding of the movement of capital (meaning the total social relations of production in this current mode of production) that led to their development in the 1960s and 1970s in the US. More specifically, since “intersectionality theory” primarily developed in response to second wave feminism, we must look at how gender relations under capitalism developed. In the movement from feudalism to capitalism, the gendered division of labor, and therefore gender relations within the class began to take a new form that corresponded to the needs of capital. Some of these new relations included the following: (1) The development of the wage. The wage is the capitalist form of coercion. As Maria Mies explains in her book, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, the wage replaced serf and slave ownership as the method to coerce alienated labor (meaning labor that the worker does for someone else). Under capitalism, those who produce (workers) do not own the means of production, so they must go to work for those who own the means of production (capitalists). Workers must therefore sell the only thing they own, their ability to labor, or their labor power, to the capitalist. This is key because workers are not paid for their sensuous living labor, the act of producing, but the ability to labor. The labor-labor power split gives rise to the appearance of an equal exchange of value; it appears as though the worker is paid for the amount of value she produces but in essence she is paid only for her ability to labor for a given period of time.
Furthermore, the working day itself is split into two parts: necessary labor time and surplus labor time. Necessary labor time is the time it takes the worker (on average) to produce enough value to buy all the commodities he needs to reproduce himself (everything from his dinner to his iPhone). Surplus labor time is the time the worker works beyond the necessary labor time. Since the going rate for labor power (again, our capacity to labor – not our actual living labor) is the value of all the commodities the worker needs to reproduce herself, surplus labor is value that goes straight into the capitalist’s pocket. For example, let’s say I work in a Furby factory. I get paid $10 a day to work 10 hours, I produce 10 Furbies a day, and a Furby is worth $10 each. The capitalist is only paying me for my ability to work 1 hour each day to produce enough value to reproduce myself (1 Furby = 1 hour’s labor = $10). So my necessary labor time is 1 hour, and the surplus labor time I give to the capitalist is 9 hours (10-1). The wage obscures this fact. Recall that under capitalism, it appears as though we are paid the equivalent value of what we produce. But, in essence, we are paid only for our necessary labor time, or the minimum amount we need to reproduce ourselves. This was different under feudalism when it was very clear how much time humans spent working for themselves, and how much time they spent working for someone else. For example, a serf might spend five hours a week tilling the land to produce food for the feudal lord, and the rest of her time was her own. The development of the wage is key because it enforced a gendered division of labor. (2) A separation of production and reproduction. Along with commodity production came a separation between production and reproduction. To be clear, “reproduction” does not solely refer to baby making. It also includes meeting the many various needs we have under capitalism, from cooking food and cleaning the home, to listening to a partner vent about their shitty day and holding their hand, to caring for the young, sick, elderly and disabled members of society. As capitalism developed, generally speaking, productive (value-producing) labor corresponded to the wage, and reproductive labor was unwaged (or extremely low waged), since in appearance it produced no surplus value for the capitalist. This separation, characterized by the wage, took on a specific gendered form under capitalism. Women were largely excluded from productive sphere and therefore did not receive a wage for the reproductive work they did. This gave men a certain amount of power over women, and created antagonisms within the class based on a gendered division of labor. Silvia Federici, in Caliban and the Witch, calls this the “patriarchy of the wage” (97-100). (3) The contradictory development of the nuclear family. With the development of capitalism and large-scale industry, the content of the nuclear family took a contradictory turn. On the one hand, as pointed out by theorists such as Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa in “The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community,” the nuclear family was strengthened by the gendered division of labor characterized by the wage. Women and children were excluded from the wage and relegated to reproductive work; men received a wage and were relegated to productive work. This meant that men needed women and children to reproduce them, and women and children needed men to bring in a wage to reproduce the family as a whole (of course this wage was sometimes supplemented by a woman’s low wage earnings as a domestic or other paid reproductive worker). And so on the one hand, the development of capitalism strengthened the nuclear family. On the other hand; however, capitalist relations also undermined the nuclear family. As James and Dalla Costa point out, the gendered division of labor is “rooted in the framework of capitalist society itself: women at home and men in the factories and office, separated from the other the whole day … Capital, while it elevates heterosexuality to a religion, at the same time in practice makes it impossible for men and women to be in touch with each other, physically or emotionally — it undermines heterosexuality as a sexual, economic, and social discipline” (James, Sex, Race and Class, 56). (4) The development of “identity” and alienation. John D’Emilio runs with this concept of the contradictory development of the nuclear family, arguing that “gay identity” (and we can infer “female identity”) as a category developed through this contradictory movement of the nuclear family. He argues for a distinction between gay behavior and gay identity, stating. “There was, quite simply, no ‘social space’ in the colonial system of production that allowed men and women to be gay. Survival was structured around participation in the nuclear family. There were certain homosexual acts — sodomy among men, ‘lewdness’ among women — in which individuals engaged, but family was so pervasive that colonial society lacked even the category of homosexual or lesbian to describe a person … By the second half of the nineteenth century, this situation was noticeably changing as the capitalist system of free labor took hold. Only when individuals began to make their living through wage labor, instead of parts of an interdependent family unit, was it possible for homosexual desire to coalesce into a personal identity — an identity based on the ability to remain outside the heterosexual family and to construct a personal life based on the attraction to one’s own sex” (“Capitalism and the Gay Identity,” 104-105). D’Emilio’s understanding of “identity” is key for understanding identity politics and intersectionality theory; however, I would slightly change his framework. In distinguishing between “behavior,” and “identity,” D’Emilio is touching on what could be broadened out to the Marxist categories, “labor” and “alienation.” I digress in order to fill out this idea. For Marx, labor is an abstract category that defines human history. In his early texts, Marx refers to labor as self- or life-activity. In “Estranged Labour,” Marx writes, “For in the first place labour, life-activity, productive life itself, appears to man merely as a means of satisfying a need — the need to maintain the physical existence. Yet the productive life is the life of the species. It is life-engendering life. The whole character of a species — its species character — is contained in the character of its life activity; and free conscious activity is man’s species character. Life itself appears only as a means to life” (76). Life-activity, or labor, is an abstraction that transcends a specific form, or a specific mode of production (capitalism, feudalism, tribalism, etc.). However, labor can only be understood within the context of these forms; it is through these forms, the social organization of our labor, that humans engage in the ever-expanding process of satisfying our needs, introducing new needs, and developing new ways of fulfilling our needs. Labor encompasses everything from our jobs under capitalism to tilling the land under feudalism, to creating art and poetry, to having sex and raising children. Through labor and its many expressions, or forms, we engage with the world around us, changing the world and changing ourselves in the process. Under capitalism, there is a separation between our labor and our conscious will. When Marx says “Life itself appears only as a means to life,” he is pointing toward this contradiction. As noted above, under capitalism, labor is divorced from the means of production so we must work for those who own the means of production. We engage in the same form of labor all day every day, and we receive a wage for this activity in order to exchange to meet our needs. We produce value in order to exchange for the use-values we need to survive. So what appears under capitalism as a mere means to satisfy our needs (work), is in essence the activity of life itself (labor). Because of this schism between our labor and our conscious will, our labor under capitalism is alienated, meaning it is not used for our own enrichment, instead, we give it away to the capitalist. Our multi-sided labor becomes one-sided; our labor is reduced to work. In “The German Ideology,” Marx writes, “as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood” (53). We are not fully enriched human beings, engaging in all forms of labor we wish to engage in, we are relegated into one form of labor in order to exchange to meet our needs. We are call center workers, hair stylists, nurses, teachers, etc. This one-sidedness, as the precondition for meeting our needs, is unique to the capitalist mode of production. In applying Marx’s categories to D’Emilio’s explanation of homosexuality, we could say that homosexual behaviors are an expression of labor, or self-activity, and homosexual identity is a one-sided, alienated form of labor unique to capitalism. It distinguishes the difference between a person who consciously engages in homosexual acts, and one who is defined by one form of labor: a homosexual. Women and people of color experience something similar in the development of capital; a shift from engaging in certain types of labor to engaging in feminized, or racially relegated forms of labor. To put it another way, under capitalism, we are forced into a box: we are a bus driver, or a hair stylist, or a woman. These different forms of labor, or different expressions of our life-activity (the way in which we interact with the world around us) limit our ability to be multi-sided human beings.

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