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- Only total rejection can solve.
- Complete rejection of the affirmative is necessary for anti-capitalism to be successful.
- AT: Capitalism Inevitable
- Capitalism isn’t inevitable – our alternative can make miracles happen
- AT: Gibson Graham
- Gibson-Graham is wrong - this approach forecloses Marxist politics
AT: PermutationPermutation fails – too rooted in scienceChris McMillan, PhD student at Massey, 11-12-2008, “In Defence of the Hungry,” http://sewersociety.blogspot.com/ Sach’s blindness is part of a larger trend, the scientific hegemony of global problem solving. Science itself has a role to play in both the reduction of poverty and in managing environment change, but it does not consider the structuration of its own understanding. This has led to a situation where the status of global politics is considered as either moral or scientific, never human. Both social theory and politics are foreclosed from the debate – with the result that not only do we not look outside of current understanding for solutions, but human behaviour is implicitly considered to be fundamentally malleable. However, as Terry Eagleton has asserted, mountains has proved much easier to move that the structures of social life. Only total rejection can solve.Working Class Freedom, May 21, 2008, Accessed 4/29/09, http://www.workingclassfreedom.com/index.php?display=cgd.vs.activism The socialist analysis of society shows that capitalism itself is the underlying cause of most of the problems which the social activists want to solve. The social activists attack the symptoms but ignore the cause. Social activists work to reform capitalism, socialists work to eliminate capitalism: the cause of the problems. If people eliminate the cause of the problems, the problems will not keep cropping up. Instead of trying to fix the symptoms, year in and year out, over and over again, forever, people can eliminate the cause, once. Then we can all get on with living our lives in a world where solutions actually solve problems, instead of just covering up symptoms. This approach can be emotionally difficult. It may even mean that someone dies today, who might have been saved by social activism. A simple analogy to explain the socialist perspective: If a pipe bursts and the water is rising on the floor, one can start bailing the water out while it continues to flow in, or one can turn the water off, and then start bailing. It may take a while to find the tap, and some valuables might be destroyed while searching, but unless the water is turned off, the water will continue to rise and bailing is rather pointless. Complete rejection of the affirmative is necessary for anti-capitalism to be successful.Slavoj Zizek, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies in Ljubljana, 2004, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, p. 83-84 There is a will to accomplish the ‘leap of faith’ and step outside the global circuit at work here, a will which was expressed in an extreme and terrifying manner in a well-known incident from the Vietnam War: after the US Army occupied a local village, their doctors vaccinated the children on the left arm in order to demonstrate their humanitarian care; when, the day after, the village was retaken by the Vietcong, they cut off the left arms of all the vaccinated children. .. . Although it is difficult to sustain as a literal model to follow, this complete rejection of the enemy precisely in its caring ‘humanitarian’ aspect, no matter what the cost, has to be endorsed in its basic intention. In a similar way, when Sendero Luminoso took over a village, they did not focus on killing the soldiers or policemen stationed there, but more on the UN or US agricultural consultants or health workers trying to help the local peasants after lecturing them for hours, and then forcing them to confess their complicity with imperialism pub¬licly, they shot them. Brutal as this procedure was, it was rooted in an acute insight: they, not the police or the army, were the true danger, the enemy at its most perfidious, since they were ‘lying in the guise of truth’ — the more they were ‘innocent’ (they ‘really’ tried to help the peasants), the more they served as a tool of the USA. It is only such a blow against the enemy at [their]his best, at the point where the enemy ‘indeed helps us’, that displays true revolutionary autonomy and ‘sovereignty (to use this term in its Bataillean sense). If one adopts the attitude of ‘let us take from the enemy what is good, and reject or even fight against what is bad’, one is already caught in the liberal trap of ‘humanitarian aid’. AT: Capitalism InevitableCapitalism isn’t inevitable – multiple warrants disprove your wishful thinkingJoel Kovel, Professor of Social Studies at Bard College, 2002, The Enemy of Nature, p. 115-16 What is the root of capital’s wanton ecodestructivity? One way of seeing this is in terms of an economy geared to run on the basis of unceasing accumulation. Thus each unit of capital must, as the saying goes, ‘grow or die’, and each capitalist must constantly search to expand markets and profits or lose his position in the hierarchy. Under such a regime the eco nomic dimension consumes all else, nature is continually devalued in the search for profit along an expanding frontier, and the ecological crisis follows inevitably. This reasoning is, I believe, valid, and necessary for grasping how capital becomes the efficient cause of the crisis. But it is incomplete, and fails to clear up the mystery of what capital is, and consequently what is to be done about it. For example, it is a commonly held opinion that capitalism is an innate and therefore inevitable outcome for the human species. If this is the case, then the necessary path of human evolution travels from the Olduvai Gorge to the New York Stock Exchange, and to think of a world beyond capital is mere baying at the moon. It only takes a brief reflection to demolish the received understanding. Capital is certainly a potentiality for human nature, but, despite all the efforts of ideologues to argue for its natural inevitability, no more than this. For if capital were natural, why has it only occupied the last 500 years of a record that goes back for hundreds of thousands? More to the point, why did it have to be imposed through violence wherever it set down its rule? And most importantly, why does it have to be continually maintained through violence, and continuously re-imposed on each generation through an enormous apparatus of indoctrination? Why not just let children be the way they want to be and trust that they will turn into capitalists and workers for capitalists — the way we let baby chicks be, knowing that they will reliably grow into chickens if provided with food, water and shelter? Those who believe that capital is innate should also be willing to do without police, or the industries of culture, and if they are not, then their arguments are hypocritical. But this only sharpens the questions of what capital is, why the path to it was chosen, and why people would submit to an economy and think so much of wealth in the first place? These are highly practical concerns. It is widely recognized, for example, that habits of consumption in the in dustrial societies will have to be drastically altered if a sustainable world is to be achieved. This means, however that the very pattern of human needs will have to be changed, which means in turn that the basic way in which we inhabit nature will have to be changed. We know that capital forcibly indoctrinates people to resist these changes, but only a poor and superficial analysis would stop here and say nothing further about how this works and how it came about. Capital’s efficient causation of the ecological crisis establishes it as the enemy of nature. But the roots of the enmity still await exploration. Capitalism isn’t inevitable – our alternative can make miracles happenDaly, Lecturer of International Studies @ University College of Northampton, 2004 (Glyn, “Slavoj Zizek: Risking the Impossible,” Lacan.com, http://www.lacan.com/zizek-primer.htm, Kel) Zizek's thought is concerned crucially to reactivate the dimension of the miraculous in political endeavour. For Zizek the miracle is that which coincides with trauma in the sense that it involves a fundamental moment of symbolic disintegration (2001b: 86). This is the mark of the act: a basic rupture in the weave of reality that opens up new possibilities and creates the space for a reconfiguration of reality itself. Like the miracle, the act is ultimately unsustainable - it cannot be reduced to, or incorporated directly within, the symbolic order. Yet it is through the act that we touch (and are touched by) the Real in such a way that the bonds of our symbolic universe are broken and that an alternative construction is enabled; reality is transformed in a Real sense. The Real is not simply a force of negation against which we are helpless. In contrast to standard criticisms, what psychoanalysis demonstrates is that we are not victims of either unconscious motives or an infrastructural logic of the Real. If reality is a constitutive distortion then the ultimate lesson of psychoanalysis is that we are responsible for its reproduction. Miracles can and do happen. We are capable of Real acts that give reality a new texture and direction; acts that reflect this gap in the order of Being, this abyss of freedom. If Freud - in his theory of the unconscious - affirms an essential autonomization of the signifier, then what Zizek emphasises is an essential autonomization of the act: a basic capacity to break out of existing structures/cycles of signification. Far from being constrained by the notion of impossibility, Zizek's perspective is sustained and energised by the ontological potential for achieving the "impossible" through Real intervention. In this sense, Zizek's conception of the Real may be said to constitute both an inherent limit and an inherent opening/beginning: the radically negative dimension that is the condition of creatio ex nihilo and the political itself. AT: Gibson GrahamGibson-Graham is inapplicable because they misunderstand class analysisRene Francisco Poitevin, Writer for the Socialist Review, 2001, “The end of anti-capitalism as we knew it: Reflections on postmodern Marxism.” http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3952/is_200101/ai_n8932891 One of the problems with trying to make the case for postmodern Marxism is that in order to get rid of Marxism and declare its tradition obsolete, you have to distort its legacy by constructing a straw man. This straw man-reading of Marx is predicated upon the double maneuver of collapsing Marxist history into Stalinism, on the one hand, and reducing Marxist theory to "essentialism," "totality," and "teleology," on the other. As J.K. Gibson-Graham themselves acknowledge, without any regrets, "Indeed, as many of our critics sometimes charge, we have constructed a [straw person] 'straw man.'"21 What is left out of their quasi-humorous dismissal of Marxism is the complicity of such a [straw person] straw man in the long history of red-baiting and anti-Marxist repression in this country and around the world. Also left out is the rich Marxist scholarship that was addressing their concerns long before there was a postmodern Marxist school. The fact is that postmodern Marxist's "contributions" are not as original nor as profound as they might have us believe. For example, what about the bulk of the Western Marxist tradition since the Frankfurt School? Has it not been predicated on a rejection of the economic reductionism embedded in the passage from the Preface to the Introduction to A Critique of Political Economy in which the (in)famous base/superstructure metaphor of society gets set in stone as the "official" definition of historical materialism? Or what about Horkheimer and Adorno's relentless critique of instrumental rationality? Marxism, in spite of what the postmodern Marxists want us to believe, has long been making the case for the centrality of culture and its irreducibility to economic laws, as anybody who has read Walter Benjamin or Antonio Gramsci can certify. Furthermore, postcolonial Marxism and critical theory have also been theorizing at more concrete levels of analyses the irreducibility of subjectivity to class.22 And despite the postmodern Marxist excitement when talking about class as a relational process, in fact it is impossible to tell that they are not the first ones to talk about class as a relational process, lots of Marxists before the Amherst School have been theorizing and clarifying the relational mechanisms embedded in class politics.23 Postmodern Marxism also ignores Lefebvre's urban Marxist contribution: his emphasis on the importance of experience and the everyday in accounting for social processes.24 And Marxist feminist contributions on the intersection of agency and gender with race, class, and sexuality are conveniently erased from J.K. Gibson-Graham's reduction of Marxism to a straw man.25 The fact is that when one looks at Marxism not as a distorted [straw person]"straw man" but on its own terms, taking into account its richness and complexity, Marxist theory starts to appear all of a sudden less "totalizing," "essentializing," and "reductionist" and instead as more rich in possibilities and more enabling. Gibson-Graham is wrong - this approach forecloses Marxist politicsRene Francisco Poitevin, Writer for the Socialist Review. 2001. “The end of anti-capitalism as we knew it: Reflections on postmodern Marxism.” http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3952/is_200101/ai_n8932891 And it is Marxist legitimacy that the postmodern Marxists lack and desperately seek. The Amherst School's strategy has been to lock on to Althusser's "overdetermination" and claim it as their own as a way to argue for the legitimacy of postmodern epistemologies as an acceptable part of the Marxist canon. In this way postmodern Marxists get to have their cake and eat it too. They get to reject and condemn notions of capitalism as a macro-system that is inherently exploitative -- while remaining Marxists at the same time. Thus, statements like "overdetermination enables us to read the causality that is capitalism as coexisting with an infinity of other determinants, none of which can be said to be less or more significant"11 together with sentences like "We are not arguing for the abandonment of such terms as 'working class,' but for an approach to their use that does not know in advance what they mean" get to pass for legitimate Marxist positions.12 How claims such as these, where we can neither explain capitalism nor tell what we mean by "working class," can pass for Marxist theory today, all in the name of Althusser, is beyond my comprehension. The Amherst School's sleight of hand is made possible in part because Althusser actually never fully developed his concept of overdetermination beyond some rather cryptic comments.13 But fortunately for the Amherst School, this is where post-structuralist theory can come to the rescue, making it possible for Althusserian thought to become more clear. Take for example J.K. Gibson-Graham's approach, when they say that "Althusser's overdetermination can be understood as signaling the irreducible specificity of every determination... the openness and incompleteness of every identity; the ultimate unfixity of every identity ...."14 People familiar with Derrida's work will recognize immediately that what Gibson-Graham have done is attribute to Althusser what is in fact Derrida's definition of the "sign," which for him is one of the fundamental building blocks of language. What this seemingly innocent trick by the Amherst School does is to effectively transform Althusser's "overdetermination" into a problem of language and discourse - and therefore into a post-structuralist agenda.15 This kind of post-structuralist-wolves-dressed-up-in-Marxist-clothes trick, so entrenched within the postmodern Marxist tradition, needs to be rejected and denounced. To substitute Derrida for Althusser might be a clever trick that allows postmodern Marxism to sound legitimate, but it is certainly not Althusserian Marxism. Directory: file -> fetch fetch -> 11 th Lit Semester 1 Final Study Guide!!! fetch -> Industrial Revolution Inventors fetch -> Analysis for Galveston Hurricane of 1900 fetch -> The Illuminators (Team 2) 1900 Galveston Hurricane Cycle a team Assignment fetch -> Team csi-utb ruth Reyes Jose Ferrer fetch -> Galveston Hurricane of 1900 Cycle a-teacher as a Problem Solver fetch -> Is Climate Change Starting a New Dust Bowl? 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