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Alternative Solves – General
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- Only the alternative can solve
- We have an obligation to spread the news that capitalism is unsustainable in order to transition to socialism
- Alternative Solves – Withdrawing
- Only a radical rejection of capitalist practices can solve.
Alternative Solves – GeneralOnly critique can throw off the shackles of capitalismAdam Katz, English Instructor at Onodaga Community College. 2000. Postmodernism and the Politics of “Culture.” Pg. 141. Any discussion of the public intellectual, especially in connection with the various crises framing such discussions (of the humanities, of the Left or leftist intellectuals, of the university, of the public sphere) needs to be grounded in the assumption that only as a result of sustained theoretical struggle—the contention of foundational claims made exoteric—will any genuine critique emerge from the site of theory. Also, it will only be possi¬ble to do anything more than conceal the roots of the aforementioned cri¬sis if such critiques make visible the polemics constitutive of the public sphere and if they do so by siding with the polemic of theory against com¬mon sense. This, of course, requires implicating common sense in the op¬erations of global capitalism through ideology critique. Only in this way, by defending the public “rights” of theory and the theoretical grounds of politics, will it be possible to explain anything, that is, to offer critiques of ideology and expose the structures of violence appearing (anti)politically. Only the alternative can solveEduardo Smith, April 30, 2009, “The Economic Crisis: The Only Response is the Class Struggle,” Internationalism no150, p1 For revolutionaries there is only one solution to the crisis and that is sending capitalism once and of all to dustbin of history. This is the historical task of the world working class. But this will not happen automatically. A social revolution that will leave behind the ‘prehistory' of humanity by overcoming the exploitation of man by man, the divisions of society into classes, the existence of nations.... can only be the product of a conscious and collectively organized effort of the world proletariat. Of course this revolution will not fall out of the sky; it can't only be the result of a prolonged class struggle of which today we are only seeing the beginnings around the world. Faced with relentless attacks workers need to respond by refusing to submit to the logic of capitalism and developing the class struggle to its ultimate conclusion: the overthrow of capitalism. The task is immense, but there is no other way out. We have an obligation to spread the news that capitalism is unsustainable in order to transition to socialismJoel Kovel, Professor of Social Studies at Bard College, 2002, The Enemy of Nature, p. 222-23 If one believes that capital is not only basically unjust but radically unsustainable as well, the prime obligation is to spread the news, just as one should feel obliged to tell the inhabitants of a structurally unsound house doomed to collapse of what awaits them unless they take drastic measures. To continue the analogy, for the critique to matter it needs to be combined with an attack on the false idea that we are, so to speak, trapped in this house, with no hope of fixing it or getting out. The belief that there can be no alternative to capital is ubiquitous and no wonder, given how wonderfully convenient the idea is to the ruling ideology.2 That, however, does not keep it from being nonsense, and a failure of vision and political will. Whether or not the vision of ecosocialism offered here has merit, the notion that there is no other way of organizing an advanced society other than capital does not follow. Nothing lasts for ever, and what is humanly made can theoretically be unmade. Alternative Solves – WithdrawingOnly by withdrawing support for the government as currently constituted, can we solve.Tony Wilsdon, Activist and Freelance Author, September 18, 2005, The Socialist Alternative, Accessed 4/27/09, http://www.socialistalternative.org/literature/katrina/logic.html To achieve this means breaking from giving any support to the two big-business political parties - the Republicans and Democrats. They are both fully implicated in creating the present mess we are in. We need to build a new political party to represent our interests as workers, the poor, and young people, and which points a finger at the real villains, the super-rich and the capitalist system. Freed from control by corporate sponsors, this workers' party could put forward a program that addresses our needs. It would be able to end this system of capitalism, which has been responsible for enriching a tiny group of billionaires at a time of massive need and poverty. We could then create a new democratic socialist society, where the working-class majority would have the power rather than the 1% who are rewarded under this system. Only a radical rejection of capitalist practices can solve.Adam Katz, English Instructor at Onodaga Community College, 2000, Postmodernism and the Politics of “Culture.” P. 127-128. Virno does recognize the danger that a politics predicated upon Exodus, by downgrading the “absolute enmity” implicit in the traditional Marxist assumption that class struggle in its revolutionary form issues in civil war, leads to the assumption that one is “swimming with the current” or is being driven “irresistibly forward” (1996, 203). A politics aimed at the establishment of liberated zones within capitalism under the assumption that the state will wither away without actually being “smashed” leads to the problematic one sees over and over again in postmodern cultural studies: “doing what comes naturally” as radical praxis. To counter this, Virno redefines the “unlimitedly reactive” “enmity” of the “Multitude” in terms of the “right to resistance” (206): What deserve to be defended at all costs are the works of “friendship.” Violence is not geared to visions of some hypothetical tomorrow, but functions to ensure respect and a continued existence for things that were mapped out yesterday. It does not innovate, but acts to prolong things that are already there: the autonomous expressions of “acting-in-concert” that arise out of general intellect, organisms of non-representative democracy, forms of mutual protection and assistance (welfare, in short) that have emerged outside of and against the realm of State Administration. In other words, what we have here is a violence that is conservational (206). The decisiveness of the question of absolute enmity becomes clear if we ask a rather obvious question: What distinguishes autonomous expressions from any privatized space (say, Internet chat rooms) that withdraws from the common in the name of friendships, mutual aid, or, for that matter, networks, gated communities, or whatever? In short, nothing can lead more directly to the death of revolutionary politics than the assumption that the days of absolute enmity are over. Autonomous expressions necessarily lead to the esoteric and the singular as the paths of least resistance. Therefore (as in all Left-Nietzscheanisms), they take as their main enemy the programmatic and the decidable, transforming liberation into a private, simulacral affair, regardless of their denunciations of capitalism. I will return to this issue in the next two chapters, but I want to conclude this discussion by stressing that only theory and action that establish spaces that bring the common out into the open—before an outside (theory and judgment) so as to make visible the concentrated political-economic force of the ruling class—can count as a genuinely “new” politics. 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