1NC

OFF
Your decision should answer the resolutional question: Is the enactment of
topical action better than the status quo or a competitive option?
1. Resolved before a colon reflects a legislative forum
AOS 04
(5-12, # 12, Punctuation The Colon and Semicolon, http://usawocc.army.mil/IMI/wg12.htm)
The colon introduces the following: a. A list, but only after "as follows," "the following," or a noun for which
the list is an appositive: Each scout will carry the following: (colon) meals for three days, a survival knife,
and his sleeping bag. The company had four new officers: (colon) Bill Smith, Frank Tucker, Peter Fillmore,
and Oliver Lewis. b. A long quotation (one or more paragraphs): In The Killer Angels Michael Shaara
wrote: (colon) You may find it a different story from the one you learned in school. There have been many
versions of that battle [Gettysburg] and that war [the Civil War]. (The quote continues for two more
paragraphs.) c. A formal quotation or question: The President declared: (colon) "The only thing we have
to fear is fear itself." The question is: (colon) what can we do about it? d. A second independent clause
which explains the first: Potter's motive is clear: (colon) he wants the assignment. e. After the introduction
of a business letter: Dear Sirs: (colon) Dear Madam: (colon) f. The details following an announcement
For sale: (colon) large lakeside cabin with dock g. A formal resolution, after the word "resolved:"
Resolved: (colon) That this council petition the mayor.

2. USFG should means the debate is solely about a policy established by

governmental means
Ericson 03
(Jon M., Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts California Polytechnic U., et al., The Debaters
Guide, Third Edition, p. 4)
The Proposition of Policy: Urging Future Action In policy propositions, each topic contains certain key
elements, although they have slightly different functions from comparable elements of value-oriented
propositions. 1. An agent doing the acting ---The United States in The United States should adopt a
policy of free trade. Like the object of evaluation in a proposition of value, the agent is the subject of the
sentence. 2. The verb shouldthe first part of a verb phrase that urges action. 3. An action verb to follow
should in the should-verb combination. For example, should adopt here means to put a program or
policy into action though governmental means. 4. A specification of directions or a limitation of the
action desired. The phrase free trade, for example, gives direction and limits to the topic, which would, for
example, eliminate consideration of increasing tariffs, discussing diplomatic recognition, or discussing
interstate commerce. Propositions of policy deal with future action. Nothing has yet occurred. The entire
debate is about whether something ought to occur. What you agree to do, then, when you accept the
affirmative side in such a debate is to offer sufficient and compelling reasons for an audience to perform
the future action that you propose.

Unified stasis They explode the number of potential affs removing the
incentive for the neg to conduct in-depth pre-round research which is debates
primary benefit. Externally constrained discussions force creativity, while
preserving avenues for non-traditional forms of evidence.
Debates benefits come from arguing against a well prepared opponent that
preparation is the only way to test the epistemology of the aff, their impact claims
are false until tested
Talisse 5 Professor of Philosophy @ Vandy

(Robert, Philosophy & Social Criticism, Deliberativist responses to activist challenges, 31(4) p. 429-431)
The argument thus far might appear to turn exclusively upon different conceptions of what
reasonableness entails. The deliberativist view I have sketched holds that reasonableness involves
some degree of what we may call epistemic modesty. On this view, the reasonable citizen seeks to
have her beliefs reect the best available reasons, and so she enters into public discourse as a
way of testing her views against the objections and questions of those who disagree; hence she
implicitly holds that her present view is open to reasonable critique and that others who hold
opposing views may be able to offer justications for their views that are at least as strong as her
reasons for her own. Thus any mode of politics that presumes that discourse is extraneous to
questions of justice and justication is unreasonable. The activist sees no reason to accept this.
Reasonableness for the activist consists in the ability to act on reasons that upon due reection
seem adequate to underwrite action; discussion with those who disagree need not be involved.
According to the activist, there are certain cases in which he does in fact know the truth about what
justice requires and in which there is no room for reasoned objection. Under such conditions, the
deliberativists demand for discussion can only obstruct justice; it is therefore irrational. It may
seem that we have reached an impasse. However, there is a further line of criticism that the activist
must face. To the activists view that at least in certain situations he may reasonably decline to
engage with persons he disagrees with (107), the deliberative democrat can raise the phenomenon
that Cass Sunstein has called group polarization (Sunstein, 2003; 2001a: ch. 3; 2001b: ch. 1). To
explain: consider that political activists cannot eschew deliberation altogether; they often engage in
rallies, demonstrations, teach-ins, workshops, and other activities in which they are called to make
public the case for their views. Activists also must engage in deliberation among themselves when
deciding strategy. Political movements must be organized, hence those involved must decide upon
targets, methods, and tactics; they must also decide upon the content of their pamphlets and the
precise messages they most wish to convey to the press. Often the audience in both of these
deliberative contexts will be a self-selected and sympathetic group of like-minded activists. Group
polarization is a well-documented phenomenon that has been found all over the world and in many
diverse tasks; it means that members of a deliberating group predictably move towards a more
extreme point in the direction indicated by the members predeliberation tendencies (Sunstein,
2003: 812). Importantly, in groups that engage in repeated discussions over time, the polarization
is even more pronounced (2003: 86 Hence discussion in a small but devoted activist enclave that
meets regularly to strategize and protest should produce a situation in which individuals hold
positions more extreme than those of any individual member before the series of deliberations
began (ibid.) 17 The fact of group polarization is relevant to our discussion because the activist has
proposed that he may reasonably decline to engage in discussion with those with whom he
disagrees in cases in which the requirements of justice are so clear that he can be condent that
he has the truth. Group polarization suggests that deliberatively confronting those with whom we
disagree is essential even when we have the truth. For even if we have the truth, if we do not
engage opposing views, but instead deliberate only with those with whom we agree, our view will
shift progressively to a more extreme point , and thus we lose the truth . In order to avoid
polarization, deliberation must take place within heterogeneous argument pools (Sunstein, 2003:
93). This of course does not mean that there should be no groups devoted to the achievement of
some common political goal; it rather suggests that engagement with those with whom one
disagrees is essential to the proper pursuit of justice. Insofar as the activist denies this, he is
unreasonable.

Stasis is the internal link to solving the aff debate has the ability to change
peoples attitudes because it forces pre-round internal deliberation on a focused
topic of debate
Goodin and Niemeyer 3 Australian National University
(Robert and Simon, When Does Deliberation Begin? Internal Reflection versus Public Discussion in
Deliberative Democracy Political Studies, Vol 50, p 627-649, WileyInterscience)
What happened in this particular case, as in any particular case, was in some respects peculiar
unto itself. The problem of the Bloomfield Track had been well known and much discussed in the
local community for a long time. Exaggerated claims and counter-claims had become entrenched,

and unreflective public opinion polarized around them. In this circumstance, the effect of the
information phase of deliberative processes was to brush away those highly polarized
attitudes , dispel the myths and symbolic posturing on both sides that had come to dominate the
debate, and liberate people to act upon their attitudes toward the protection of rainforest itself. The
key point, from the perspective of democratic deliberation within, is that that happened in the
earlier stages of deliberation before the formal discussions (deliberations, in the discursive
sense) of the jury process ever began. The simple process of jurors seeing the site for themselves,
focusing their minds on the issues and listening to what experts had to say did virtually all the work
in changing jurors attitudes. Talking among themselves, as a jury, did very little of it. However, the
same might happen in cases very different from this one. Suppose that instead of highly polarized
symbolic attitudes, what we have at the outset is mass ignorance or mass apathy or non-attitudes.
There again, peoples engaging with the issue focusing on it, acquiring information about it,
thinking hard about it would be something that is likely to occur earlier rather than later in the
deliberative process. And more to our point, it is something that is most likely to occur within
individuals themselves or in informal interactions, well in advance of any formal, organized group
discussion. There is much in the large literature on attitudes and the mechanisms by which they
change to support that speculation.31 Consider, for example, the literature on central versus
peripheral routes to the formation of attitudes. Before deliberation, individuals may not have given
the issue much thought or bothered to engage in an extensive process of reflection.32 In such
cases, positions may be arrived at via peripheral routes, taking cognitive shortcuts or arriving at
top of the head conclusions or even simply following the lead of others believed to hold similar
attitudes or values (Lupia, 1994). These shorthand approaches involve the use of available cues
such as expertness or attractiveness (Petty and Cacioppo, 1986) not deliberation in the
internal-reflective sense we have described. Where peripheral shortcuts are employed, there may
be inconsistencies in logic and the formation of positions, based on partial information or
incomplete information processing. In contrast, central routes to the development of attitudes
involve the application of more deliberate effort to the matter at hand, in a way that is more akin to
the internal-reflective deliberative ideal. Importantly for our thesis, there is nothing intrinsic to the
central route that requires group deliberation. Research in this area stresses instead the
importance simply of sufficient impetus for engaging in deliberation, such as when an individual is
stimulated by personal involvement in the issue.33 The same is true of on-line versus memorybased processes of attitude change.34 The suggestion here is that we lead our ordinary lives
largely on autopilot, doing routine things in routine ways without much thought or reflection. When
we come across something new, we update our routines our running beliefs and pro cedures,
attitudes and evaluations accordingly. But having updated, we then drop the impetus for the
update into deep-stored memory. A consequence of this procedure is that, when asked in the
ordinary course of events what we believe or what attitude we take toward something, we easily
retrieve what we think but we cannot so easily retrieve the reasons why . That more fully
reasoned assessment the sort of thing we have been calling internal-reflective deliberation
requires us to call up reasons from stored memory rather than just consulting our running on-line
summary judgments. Crucially for our present discussion, once again, what prompts that shift from
online to more deeply reflective deliberation is not necessarily interpersonal discussion. The
impetus for fixing ones attention on a topic, and retrieving reasons from stored memory, might
come from any of a number sources: group discussion is only one. And again, even in the context
of a group discussion, this shift from online to memory-based processing is likely to occur earlier
rather than later in the process, often before the formal discussion ever begins. All this is simply to
say that, on a great many models and in a great many different sorts of settings, it seems likely that
elements of the pre-discursive process are likely to prove crucial to the shaping and reshaping
of peoples attitudes in a citizens jury-style process. The initial processes of focusing attention
on a topic , providing information about it and inviting people to think hard about it is likely to
provide a strong impetus to internal-reflective deliberation, altering not just the information people
have about the issue but also the way people process that information and hence (perhaps) what
they think about the issue. What happens once people have shifted into this more internal-reflective
mode is, obviously, an open question. Maybe people would then come to an easy consensus, as

they did in their attitudes toward the Daintree rainforest.35 Or maybe people would come to
divergent conclusions; and they then may (or may not) be open to argument and counterargument, with talk actually changing minds. Our claim is not that group discussion will always
matter as little as it did in our citizens jury.36 Our claim is instead merely that the earliest steps in
the jury process the sheer focusing of attention on the issue at hand and acquiring more
information about it, and the internal-reflective deliberation that that prompts will invariably matter
more than deliberative democrats of a more discursive stripe would have us believe. However
much or little difference formal group discussions might make, on any given occasion, the prediscursive phases of the jury process will invariably have a considerable impact on changing the
way jurors approach an issue. From Citizens Juries to Ordinary Mass Politics? In a citizens jury
sort of setting, then, it seems that informal, pre-group deliberation deliberation within will
inevitably do much of the work that deliberative democrats ordinarily want to attribute to the more
formal discursive processes. What are the preconditions for that happening? To what extent, in that
sense, can findings about citizens juries be extended to other larger or less well-ordered
deliberative settings? Even in citizens juries, deliberation will work only if people are attentive,
open and willing to change their minds as appropriate. So, too, in mass politics. In citizens juries
the need to participate (or the anticipation of participating) in formally organized group
discussions might be the prompt that evokes those attributes. But there might be many other
possible prompts that can be found in less formally structured mass-political settings. Here are a
few ways citizens juries (and all cognate micro-deliberative processes)37 might be different from
mass politics, and in which lessons drawn from that experience might not therefore carry over to
ordinary politics: A citizens jury concentrates peoples minds on a single issue. Ordinary politics
involve many issues at once. A citizens jury is often supplied a background briefing that has been
agreed by all stakeholders (Smith and Wales, 2000, p. 58). In ordinary mass politics, there is rarely
any equivalent common ground on which debates are conducted. A citizens jury separates the
process of acquiring information from that of discussing the issues. In ordinary mass politics, those
processes are invariably intertwined. A citizens jury is provided with a set of experts. They can be
questioned, debated or discounted. But there is a strictly limited set of competing experts on the
same subject. In ordinary mass politics, claims and sources of expertise often seem virtually
limitless, allowing for much greater selective perception. Participating in something called a
citizens jury evokes certain very particular norms: norms concerning the impartiality appropriate
to jurors; norms concerning the common good orientation appropriate to people in their capacity
as citizens.38 There is a very different ethos at work in ordinary mass politics, which are typically
driven by flagrantly partisan appeals to sectional interest (or utter disinterest and voter apathy). In
a citizens jury, we think and listen in anticipation of the discussion phase , knowing that we
soon will have to defend our views in a discursive setting where they will be probed
intensively .39 In ordinary mass-political settings, there is no such incentive for paying attention. It
is perfectly true that citizens juries are special in all those ways. But if being special in all those
ways makes for a better more reflective, more deliberative political process, then those are
design features that we ought try to mimic as best we can in ordinary mass politics as well. There
are various ways that that might be done. Briefing books might be prepared by sponsors of
American presidential debates (the League of Women Voters, and such like) in consultation with
the stakeholders involved. Agreed panels of experts might be questioned on prime-time television.
Issues might be sequenced for debate and resolution, to avoid too much competition for peoples
time and attention. Variations on the Ackerman and Fishkin (2002) proposal for a deliberation day
before every election might be generalized, with a day every few months being given over to small
meetings in local schools to discuss public issues. All that is pretty visionary, perhaps. And
(although it is clearly beyond the scope of the present paper to explore them in depth) there are
doubtless many other more-or-less visionary ways of introducing into real-world politics analogues
of the elements that induce citizens jurors to practice democratic deliberation within, even before
the jury discussion gets underway. Here, we have to content ourselves with identifying those
features that need to be replicated in real-world politics in order to achieve that goal and with the
possibility theorem that is established by the fact that (as sketched immediately above) there is at
least one possible way of doing that for each of those key features.

OFF
The affs claims of the symbolic order and language being the cause of
womens exclusion and oppression are inaccurate and masks capitalisms role in
exploitation material conditions shape and maintain the patriarchal ideologies
they criticize this misdiagnosis makes a shift in mass consciousness against
capitalism and patriarchy impossible
*this is highlighted different than the wake DL card

OShea 14
Louise, Marxism and women's liberation [http://marxistleftreview.org/index.php?
option=com_content&view=article&id=103:marxism-and-womens-liberation&catid=44:number-7-summer2014&Itemid=83] Summer //
Difficulties of a period of working class retreat
The decades of defeat that the working class has suffered and its retreat both politically and
organisationally over the last thirty to forty years throughout most of the advanced capitalist world
has shaped political ideas and activism in a profoundly negative way. Amongst those concerned
about womens oppression, it has led to a drift away from class politics, as the working class is less
obviously a force to orient to for those seeking fundamental social change, and towards a more
middle class orientation led by the new layer of women columnists, academics and politicians.
Added to this, the popularity of post-modern ideas over the last few decades, with their
emphasis on fragmented discourse , identity and introspection, has further undermined
any idea that the class struggle , and the left wing politics associated with it, has anything to
offer those questioning oppression. This has brought about a shift in both popular understanding
and public debate. The emphasis has moved away from fighting for womens rights
championed by the Womens Liberation Movement rights at work, equal pay, childcare, control
over our fertility, social service provision towards a focus on issues such as body image and
eating disorders, violence and sexual assault, individual sexist behaviour and language, as well as
the degrading presentation of women in popular culture and the media. It is after all the sexist and
frequently abusive behaviour of individual men towards women which tends to be the most readily
observable form of sexism, and often the most debilitating from the point of view of individual
women. Of course sexist behaviour and other direct expressions of sexism by individuals should
be condemned, and where possible challenged, and efforts made to deepen and extend
understanding and awareness of how sexist behaviour affects womens lives. But it is also
important to recognise that, because both men and women internalise to a greater or lesser
extent, and in turn express, the values and attitudes that accord with their social reality
which is sexist education without real social change can only have a limited effect.
Ultimately, male violence and abuse and the low self-confidence of women with regard to their
relationships and bodies will persist so long as women are structurally unequal, and the
corresponding sexist ideology that makes women perpetually vulnerable to such exploitation and
abuse continues. It will only be possible to effectively convince individuals on a mass scale
not to behave in sexist (or racist or homophobic) ways when there is a change in the social
reality that legitimises such practices. That is why campaigns aimed at improving the general
economic and social position of women are actually a key step towards stamping out offensive and
abusive behaviour towards women. They put women in a better economic position to escape
abusive situations, build their confidence and self-respect, ensure more services are available, and
create more pressure on men to treat women respectfully. Because the issues of violence and
sexism in everyday life can be so personally devastating, because they emphasise the areas of
womens lives in which they are the weakest and with the least power to confront them, a political
emphasis on them tends to lead away from anti-capitalist, working class politics. Furthermore they
tend not to draw those concerned toward an orientation to mass, collective action needed to
seriously challenge womens oppression. More commonly they lead towards identifying men,

and most often working class men, as the key perpetrators of sexism and therefore the main
problem and natural target of any anti-sexist activism or measures. So it matters how these issues
are confronted. Obviously individual men need to be challenged; and everyday sexism should be
made a union issue, emphasising that sexism and abuse of women divides our struggles to fight for
a better world.[32] But as some American feminists have concluded after years of experience in
fighting around the issues of sexual violence, campaigns or political movements that target the
sexist behaviour of individual men and appeal to the state as protector of women against them tend
to undermine such efforts, encourage identification with authority and drag those involved to the
right.[33] The other problem with the increased focus on the personal effects of sexism is that
women are at their weakest and most atomised when they experience or try to confront the
manifestations of sexism in their personal lives. Focusing on these thus tends to reinforce and
encourage identification as victims which, while undeniably reflecting the reality of sexism, does
not help to challenge or change it. Only by fighting back with the aim of changing social
conditions can the reality of oppression and the suffering of the oppressed be fought and
ended. This must involve women and other oppressed groups gaining the confidence and fighting
spirit to defy the patterns of submission that are the effect of that oppression. An identity based on
victimhood, or a political movement that takes this suffering as its starting point, is not an
effective basis for such a struggle. Even amongst those attempting to maintain some
commitment to Marxism against the retreat from class politics over the last couple of decades,
including some socialist feminists, there exists a pronounced lack of confidence that Marxism
provides an effective theoretical and practical guide to liberating the oppressed

The affs absolutist rejection of sameness creates a fractured resistance to

oppression that gets coopted and creates complacency - prioritizing individual
intersectionalties over the shared experience of class exploitation creates
micromovements that at best result in marginal gains for individual groups its
the oldest trick in capitalisms book
Mitchell 13
Eve, I am a woman and a human: a Marxist feminist critique of intersectionality theory
[http://libcom.org/library/i-am-woman-human-marxist-feminist-critique-intersectionality-theory-eve-mitchell]
September 12 //
Identity politics is rooted in a one-sided expression of capitalism, and is therefore not a
revolutionary politics. As noted earlier, identity can be equated with alienated labor; it is a onesided expression of our total potential as human beings. Frantz Fanon discusses something similar
in the conclusion to Black Skin White Masks. He writes, The black man, however sincere, is a
slave to the past. But I am a man, and in this sense the Peloponnesian War is as much mine as the
invention of the compass (200 Philcox Translation, 2008). On the one hand, Fanon points to a
particular, one-sided expression: blackness. On the other hand, he points toward the multi-sides of
a potentially universal human. Fanon is at once both of these things: a black man, and a man (or,
more generally, a human); a particular and a universal. Under capitalism, we are both the alienated
worker and labor itself, except the universal has not been actualized concretely. fanon2 The
identity politics of the 60s and 70s conflates a particular moment, or a determinant point, in the
relations of capitalism with the potential universal. Furthermore, it reproduces the schism between
appearance and essence. Under capitalism there is a contradiction between the particular and the
universal; appearance and essence. We appear to be alienated individuals (a bus driver, a hair
stylist, a woman, etc.), though in essence we are multi-sided individuals capable of many forms of
labor. Identity politics bolsters one side of this contradiction, arguing for collective struggle on the
basis of womanhood, or blackness, or black lesbianhood, etc. To borrow from Fanon, identity
politics states, I am a black man, I am a woman, or I am a black lesbian, etc. This is a key first
step. As he writes in his critical chapter, The Lived Experience of the Black Man: I finally made up
my mind to shout my blackness (101), On the other side of the white world there lies a magical
black culture. Negro sculpture! I began to blush with pride. Was this our salvation? (102), and So
here we have the Negro rehabilitated, standing at the helm, governing the world with his intuition,
rediscovered, reappropriated, in demand, accepted; and its not a Negro, oh, no, but the Negro,
alerting the prolific antennae of the world, standing in the spotlight of the world, spraying the world
with his poetical power, porous to the every breath in the world. I embrace the world! I am the

world! The white man has never understood this magical substitution. The white man wants the
world; he wants it for himself. He discovers he is the predestined master of the world. He enslaves
it. His relationship with the world is one of appropriation. But there are values that can be served
only with my sauce. As a magician I stole from the white man a certain world, lost to him and his
kind. When that happened the white man must have felt an aftershock he was unable to identify,
being unused to such reactions (106-107). For several pages, Fanon argues that black people
must embrace blackness, and struggle on the basis of being black, in order to negate white
supremacists social relations. But to stop there reproduces our one-sided existence and the forms
of appearance of capitalism. Identity politics argues, I am a black man, or I am a woman,
without filling out the other side of the contradiction and I am a human. If the starting
and ending point is one-sided, there is no possibility for abolishing racialized and gendered
social relations. For supporters of identity politics (despite claiming otherwise), womanhood, a
form of appearance within society, is reduced to a natural, static identity. Social relations such as
womanhood, or simply gender, become static objects, or institutions. Society is therefore
organized into individuals, or sociological groups with natural characteristics. Therefore, the only
possibility for struggle under identity politics is based on equal distribution or individualism (I will
discuss this further below). This is a bourgeois ideology in that it replicates the alienated individual
invented and defended by bourgeois theorists and scientists (and materially enforced) since
capitalisms birth. Furthermore, this individualism is characteristic of the current social moment. As
left communist theorist Loren Goldner has theorized, capitalism has been in perpetual crisis for the
last 40 years, which has been absorbed in appearance through neoliberal strategies (among
others). Over time, capital is forced to invest in machines over workers in order to keep up with the
competitive production process. As a result, workers are expelled from the production process. We
can see this most clearly in a place like Detroit, where automation combined with
deindustrialization left hundreds of thousands jobless. The effects of this contradiction of capitalism
is that workers are forced into precarious working situations, jumping from gig to gig in order to
make enough money to reproduce themselves. Goldner refers to this condition as the atomized
individual worker. As Goldner has written elsewhere, this increased individualism leads to a politics
of difference, where women, queers, people of color, etc., have nothing in common with one
another. Intersectionality theorists correctly identified and critiqued this problem with identity
politics. For example, bell hooks, in a polemic against liberal feminist Betty Friedan, writes,
Friedan was a principal shaper of contemporary feminist thought. Significantly, the onedimensional perspective on womens reality presented in her book became a marked feature of the
contemporary feminist movement. Like Friedan before them, white women who dominate feminist
discourse today rarely question whether or not their perspective on womens reality is true to the
lived experiences of women as a collective group. Nor are they aware of the extent to which their
perspectives reflect race and class biases (3). hooks is correct to say that basing an entire
politics on one particular experience, or a set of particular differences, under capitalism is
problematic. However, intersectionality theory replicates this problem by simply adding
particular moments, or determinant points; hooks goes on to argue for race and class inclusion
in a feminist analysis. Similarly, theories of an interlocking matrix of oppressions, simply create a
list of naturalized identities, abstracted from their material and historical context. This methodology
is just as ahistorical and antisocial as Betty Friedans. Again, patriarchy and white supremacy
are not objects or institutions that exist throughout history; they are particular
expressions of our labor, our life-activity, that are conditioned by (and in turn, condition)
our mode of production. In Capital, Marx describes labor as the metabolism between humans
and the external world; patriarchy and white supremacy, as products of our labor, are also the
conditions in which we labor. We are constantly interacting with the world, changing the world and
changing ourselves through our metabolic labor. So patriarchy and white supremacy, like all
social relations of labor, change and transform. Patriarchy under capitalism takes a specific
form that is different from gendered relations under feudalism, or tribalism, etc. There will be
overlap and similarities in how patriarchy is expressed under different modes of production. After
all, the objective conditions of feudalism laid the foundation for early capitalism, which laid the
foundation for industrial capitalism, etc. However, this similarity and overlap does not mean that
particular, patriarchal relations transcend the mode of production. For example, under both

feudalism and capitalism there are gendered relations within a nuclear family, though these
relations took very different forms particular to the mode of production. As Silvia Federici describes,
within the feudal family there was little differentiation between men and women. She writes, since
work on the servile farm was organized on a subsistence basis, the sexual division of labor in it
was less pronounced and less discriminating than the capitalist farm. Women worked in the
fields, in addition to raising children, cooking, washing, spinning, and keeping an herb garden; their
domestic activities were not devalued and did not involve different social relations from those of
men, as they would later, in a money-economy, when housework would cease to be viewed as real
work (25). A historical understanding of patriarchy needs to understand patriarchy from
within a set of social relations based on the form of labor. In other words, we cannot
understand the form of appearance, womanhood, apart from the essence, a universal human. A
Marxist Conception of Feminism. At this point, I should make myself very clear and state that the
limitations of identity politics and intersectionality theory are a product of their time. There was no
revolution in the US in 1968. The advances of Black Power, womens liberation, gay
liberation, and the movements themselves, have been absorbed into capital . Since the
1970s, academia has had a stronghold on theory. A nonexistent class struggle leaves a vacuum of
theoretical production and academic intellectuals have had nothing to draw on except for the
identity politics of the past. A new politics that corresponds to a new form of struggle is
desperately needed ; however, the Marxist method can provide some insight into the
creation of a politics that overcomes the limitations of identity politics. Marx offers a method
that places the particular in conversation with the totality of social relations; the appearance
connected to the essence. Consider his use of the concept of moments. Marx uses this concept
in The German Ideology to describe the development of human history. He describes the
following three moments as the primary social relations, or the basic aspects of human activity:
(1) the production of means to satisfy needs, (2) the development of new needs, and (3)
reproduction of new people and therefore new needs and new means to satisfy new needs. What
is key about this idea is that Marx distinguishes between a moment and a stage. He writes,
These three aspects of social activity are not of course to be taken as three different stages, but
just as three aspects, or, to make it clear to the Germans, three moments, which have existed
simultaneously since the dawn of history and the first men, and which still assert themselves in
history today (48). The particulars of this specific argument are not relevant; what is key is Marxs
use of moments juxtaposed to stages. Marx makes this distinction to distinguish himself from a
kind of determinism that sees the development of history in a static, linear fashion, versus a fluid
and dialectical historical development. Throughout many of Marxs writings, he refers back to this
term, moments, to describe particular social relations in history, or, more precisely, particular
expressions of labor. Moments also helps fill out Marxs idea of fluid modes of production. As
noted earlier, for Marx, there is no pure feudalism or pure capitalism; all relations of production
move and must be understood historically. This concept is useful for understanding our various
alienated existences under capitalism. For example, in the Grundrisse, Marx writes, When we
consider bourgeois society in the long view and as a whole, then the final result of the process of
social production always appears as the society itself, i.e. the human being itself in its social
relations. Everything that has a fixed form, such as a product etc., appears as merely a moment, a
vanishing moment, in this movement. The direct individuals, but individuals in a mutual relationship,
which they equally reproduce and produce anew. The constant process of their own movement, in
which they renew themselves even as they renew the world of wealth they create (712). To be a
woman under capitalism means something very specific; it is even more specific for women
in the US in 2013; it is even more specific for black lesbians in the US in 2013; it is even more
specific for individual women. But, in a universal sense, to be a woman means to produce
and reproduce a set of social relations through our labor, or self-activity. Taking a cue from
Fanon, our method must argue: I am a woman and a human. We must recognize the particular in
conversation with the totality; we must consider a moment, or a single expression of labor, in
relationship to labor itself. It is important to note that identity politics and intersectionality theorists
are not wrong but they are incomplete. Patriarchal and racialized social relations are material,
concrete and real. So are the contradictions between the particular and universal, and the
appearance and essence. The solution must build upon these contradictions and push on them.

Again, borrowing from Fanon, we can say I am a woman and a human, or I am a black person
and a person. The key is to emphasize both sides of the contradiction. Embracing womanhood,
organizing on the basis of blackness, and building a specifically queer politics is an essential
aspect of our liberation. It is the material starting point of struggle. As noted earlier, Frantz Fanon
describes this movement in The Lived Experience of the Black Man chapter of Black Skin, White
Masks. However, at the end of the chapter, Fanon leaves the contradiction unresolved and leaves
us searching for something more, stating, Without a black past, without a black future, it was
impossible for me to live my blackness. Not yet white, no longer completely black, I was damned
(117), and, When I opened my eyes yesterday I saw the sky in total revulsion. I tried to get up but
the eviscerated silence surged toward me with paralyzed wings. Not responsible for my acts, at the
crossroads between Nothingness and infinity, I began to weep (119). Fanon points to the
contradiction between the particular form of appearance (blackness) and the essence, the
universal (humanness). In the conclusion, as noted earlier, Fanon resolves this contradiction,
arguing for further movement toward the universal, the total abolition of race. He writes, In no way
does my basic vocation have to be drawn from the past of peoples of color. In no way do I have to
dedicate myself to reviving a black civilization unjustly ignored. I will not make myself the man of
any past. I do not want to sing the past to the detriment of my present and my future (201). For
Fanon then, and for Marx, the struggle for liberation must include both the particular and the
universal, both the appearance and essence. We must build upon and push on both sides of these
contradictions. Some Practical Consequences. Since identity politics, and therefore
intersectionality theory, are a bourgeois politics, the possibilities for struggle are also bourgeois.
Identity politics reproduces the appearance of an alienated individual under capitalism and
so struggle takes the form of equality among groups at best, or individualized forms of
struggle at worse . On the one hand, abstract sociological groups or individuals struggle for an
equal voice, equal representation, or equal resources. Many have experienced this in
organizing spaces where someone argues that there are not enough women of color,
disabled individuals, trans*folks, etc., present for a campaign to move forward. A contemporary
example of this is the critique of Slut Walk for being too white and therefore a white supremacist or
socially invalid movement. Another example is groups and individuals who argue that all
movements should be completely subordinate to queer people of color leadership, regardless of
how reactionary their politics are. Again, while intersectionality theorists have rightly identified
an objective problem, these divisions and antagonisms within the class must be address
materially through struggle. Simply reducing this struggle to mere quantity, equality of
distribution, or representation, reinforces identity as a static, naturalized category. slutwalk On
the other hand, identity politics can take the form of individualized struggles against
heteropatriarchy, racism, etc., within the class. According to Barbara Smith, a majority of
Combahee River Collectives work was around teaching white women to stop being racist by
holding anti-racism workshops (95). Today, we might see groups whose only form of struggle is to
identify and smash gendered, machismo, male-chauvinist, misogynist, and patriarchal elements
within the left. Another example is Tumblr users constant reminder to check your privilege. Again,
it is important to address and correct these elements; however, contradictions and antagonisms
within the class cannot be overcome in isolation, and individual expressions of patriarchy
are impossible to overcome without a broader struggle for the emancipation of our labor.
We will never free ourselves of machismo within the movement without abolishing gender itself,
and therefore alienated labor itself. A truly revolutionary feminist struggle will collectively take up
issues that put the particular and the form of appearance in conversation with the universal and the
essence. Elsewhere, I have offered the following as examples of areas that would do that work:
Grassroots clinic defense takeovers and/or nonprofit worker committees that build solidarity across
worker-client lines. Neighborhood groups engaged in tenant struggles with the capacity to deal
directly with violence against women in the community. Parent, teacher, and student alliances that
struggle against school closures/privatization and for transforming schools to more accurately
reflect the needs of children and parents, for example on-site childcare, directly democratic
classrooms and districts, smaller class sizes, etc. Sex worker collectives that protect women from
abusive Johns and other community members, and build democratically women- and queer-run
brothels with safe working conditions. Workplace organizations in feminized workplaces like

nonprofits, the service industry, pink collar manufacturing, etc., or worker centers that specialize in
feminized workplaces and take up issues and challenges specific to women. There are many,
many others that I cannot theorize. As noted, we cannot project the forms of struggle and their
corresponding theories without the collective and mass activity of the class, but it is our job as
revolutionaries to provide tools that help overthrow the present state of affairs. To do so, we must
return to Marx and the historical materialist method . We can no longer rely on the ahistorical,
bourgeois theories of the past to clarify the tasks of today. For feminists, this means struggling as
women but also as humans.

Independently, their strategy of feminist language jamming and their push for
debate to claim uncertainty prevents the transition away from capitalism the
focus becomes how do we individually remap our identities to reclaim individual
agency from the harms of the 1AC rather than interrogating the underlying
structures that shape social relations also prioritizes individual survival over
the collective good
*I rehighlighted this to be about Stanfords aff
*replace feminist language jamming with whatever language they use to describe their new discourse
strat

Torrant 14
Julie, It Is Time To Give Up Liberal, Bourgeois Theories, Including New Materialist Feminism, And Take
Up Historical Materialist Feminism For The 21st Century
[http://www.redcritique.org/WinterSpring2014/historicalmaterialistfeminismforthe21stcentury.htm]
Winter/Spring //
Recently, there has been a turn away from textualist and culturalist theory in feminism and the
emergence of "new" materialist feminisms. Represented by the work of Elizabeth Grosz, Rosi
Braidotti, and others, this turn in theory has come in response to the deepening inequalities and
crises of capitalism that are having profound effects on women worldwide material problems
outside the text and not resolvable by a change in cultural values. While it is important to see
that the new materialist feminisms are responses to real problems, it is equally important to
understand how these materialisms are limited by their conceptualization of the material. The new
materialist feminisms are actually disenabling for feminism in that they are forms of
spiritualism which displace critique with strategies of enchanted affective adaptation and
survival and thus dismantle materialist feminism's primary conceptual tool for social transformation.
To avoid merely reproducing sophisticated forms of the survivalism and "prepperism" that
have emerged as individualistic coping responses to economic crisis and austerity, I argue that
feminism needs to return to historical materialism in the tradition of Marx, Engels and Kollontai
to understand social life in terms of its root relations and aid in the struggles to bring about
social transformation. Exemplary of the new materialist feminism is Rosi Braidotti's writing on
"the politics of 'life itself'," a theory which she organizes around the trope of "sustainability."
Sustainability, a concept in ecology for living within natural limits, becomes in these writings a
means of reconceiving the historical social relations of capitalism as if they were the unchangeable,
underlying existential limit-situation of "life itself." The politics of "life itself" and the new materialist
focus on seeking a sustainable feminism within this new, more "realist" approach to material reality,
is a form of feminist theory and politics which is ultimately the already familiar theory and politics of
reparative reading. Why is this significant? As Ellis Hanson suggests in a review of Sedgwick,
"Faced with the depressing realization that people are fragile and the world hostile, a reparative
reading focuses not on the exposure of political outrages that we already know but rather on the
process of reconstructing a sustainable life in their wake" (105). In other words, reparative
analysis begins not with critique of the so-called already known and presumably known to be
unchangeable, but by focusing on how to live within the already-known-to-be hostile world.
Such a theory of the social begins and ends by reducing knowledge to a matter of how to cope,
how to feel, how to exist, etc. within what is taken to be unchangeable. The effect of this focus on
"sustainability" within hostility is that social transformation which requires the production of

knowledge of what needs to be transformed is treated as impossible. Abandoning the

project of transformation, I argue, is a sign of the way dominant "materialist" feminism under the
guise of "new materialism" has increasingly abandoned the project of women's emancipation
from exploitation, and in the interests of capital instead translates austerity measures into a
theoretical discourse of getting by on less. At the core of Braidotti's theory of "sustainable
feminism" and "life politics" is a "new materialist" understanding of "life." For Braidotti, life is made
up of two parts zo and bios. Zo, "life as absolute vitality," is the spiritual and bios is the "bioorganic" body which sets limits on the spiritual life force (210). Braidotti writes: Zo, or life as
absolute vitality, however, is not above negativity, and it can hurt. It is always too much for the
specific slab of enfleshed existence that single subjects actualize. It is a constant challenge for us
to rise to the occasion, to catch the wave of life's intensities and ride it (210). Thus for Braidotti, the
source of social contradictions is the conflict between zo, that is, absolute vitality or spiritual life
force, and our bio-organic bodies. As a result, Braidotti's new materialism bypasses the
ensemble of social relations and historical conditions that produce social contradictions in
capitalism and presents contradictions as transhistorical and existential conditions of life
as such. On this logic, our absolute vitality comes into the world and reaches the limit of the body
and this causes us "pain." But (in this narrative) there is no real way to compensate for pain. This
explanation of pain is an example of bypassing the social. As such it is an accomodationist block to
changing the conditions that produce suffering. In fact, as with all the popular articulations of
"materialism" today, Braidotti's theory is not actually an extension of materialism, but a break from
it. Materialism means determination by the mode of production because it is this materialism that
explains sense experience. Materialism is not the experience that exceeds conceptuality a
Kantian theory of the material that has come to dominate cultural theory, especially as it conceives
of "life." This notion of materialism merely reifies sense experience, it cannot explain it. Braidotti is
Kantian about the material because she sees it as a sublime excess. Life, Braidotti writes, is
experienced as inhuman because it is all too human, obscene because it lives on mindlessly. Are
we not baffled by this scandal, this wonder, this zo, that is to say, by an idea of life that
exuberantly exceeds bios and supremely ignores logos? Are we not in awe of this piece of flesh
called our 'body,' of this aching meat called our 'self' expressing the abject and simultaneously
divine potency of life? (208). According to Braidotti , what exceeds the individual body is zothe
spiritual life force, which we should not understand conceptually (by seeking to explain the
conditions that shape it) but worship. This is a sentimental anti-instrumental call for the reenchantment of life that obscures the way the individual is determined not by what Braidotti calls
"divine potency" but by the social relations of production. And like all anti-instrumental arguments,
Braidoitti's ends up affirming a species of the sublime: a mode of affective non-knowing that resists
rationality. Thus, having rejected the necessity of being able to conceptualize (visible) effects
to their (often invisible) causes, Braidotti proceeds to declare that the effects of living in the ruins
of capitalismespecially disasters like 9/11defy all reason and are impossible to understand,
and she concludes that what is now necessary is not collective praxis to address the
social relations which condition the unequal situations of tragedy, but an individual ethics
of affirmation. She writes: This is the road to an ethics of affirmation, which respects the pain but
suspends the quest for both claims and compensation. The displacement of the "zo"-indexed
reaction reveals the fundamental meaninglessness of the hurt, the injustice, or injury one has
suffered. "Why me?" is the refrain most commonly heard in situations of extreme distress. The
answer is plain: actually, for no reason at all. Why did some go to work in the World Trade Center
on 9/11 while others missed the train? Reason has nothing to do with it. That's precisely the point.
We need to delink pain from the quest for meaning. (213-14) Following her predictable rejection of
concepts and reason, in the guise of a sermon on "selflessness," Braidotti here once again rejects
the abstract in favor of the errant concrete and takes as a presupposition the individual. For it is of
course from the starting point of individuals and their loss that we cannot understand and explain
such historical events as 9/11. From the perspective of the individual, such events are indeed
random and inexplicable, but from a historical perspective they are determined. It was deep global
inequities that provided the conditions of possibility for the 9/11 attacks. To celebrate the individual
perspective and the inability to grasp historical necessity based on that individual perspective is not
only to celebrate ignorance, but to naturalize the limits of workers and how they are thrust into the

position of individuals who must compete on the market for work while leaving it the prerogative of
the owners to organize the totality to the benefit of a few at the expense of the many. Central to
Braidotti's enchanted materialism is her claim that affectivity "is what activates an embodied
subject, empowering him or her to interact with others" (210). However, she writes, "a subject can
think/understand/do/become no more than what he or she can take or sustain within his or her
embodied, spatiotemporal coordinates" (210). Thus, the ethical subject is the one who learns to
endure his or her maximum zo/bios intensity because such endurance leads to "sustainable
transformations" (211), the degree of change an individual can bear. But the consequences of
affirmative ethics are deeply problematic when considered in relation to the material conditions of
working class families, who have been subject to a thirty year stagnation in real wages, even as
worker productivity has sharply increased. In the wake of the more recent 2007 crisis, worker
productivity has sharply increased [1], while wages fell. Alongside of these trends, rates of violence
against women have increased dramatically [2] and suicide is now the 10th leading cause of death
in the US [3]. That the spouses in working class families are increasingly emotionally strained and
often alienated from one another is not a transhistorical effect of their embodied state as it
confronts a "divine" life force in zo, but an effect of their deepening exploitation. To posit their
connection and dis-connection as a transhistorical effect of the confrontation with bios-zo is to dehistoricize their pain and alienation as individuals and as a couple. It is to cut off affect from its
social conditions and then insist on its affirmation. Working more hours is a matter of "making do,"
not existential intensity, and it is this making do under conditions of deepening exploitation
that all working class familiesgay and straight, white and of color, native and international
have been forced to do and which affects women profoundly. As Marx explains in his
analysis of the global development of capitalism The less the skill and exertion of strength implied
in manual labour... the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of men
superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social
validity for the working class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use,
according to their age and sex. (Communist Manifesto 62). This is a particularly important
argument because it explains the way that capitalism increasingly turns women into wage-workers.
Working class women and men form the "great camp" facing capital and it is thus increasing
important to the prospects for revolution that women conceive of themselves as working class. This
is daily confirmed in the era of global capitalism, when women workers make up the increasing
majority of global workers, subject to extremely low wages and are particularly susceptible to the
effects of austerity because they tend to work in and use the public sector more than men. As my
discussion has, thus far, implied, "new materialism" is a ruling class movement in cultural theory in
general and in feminist theory in particular. "New materialism" is aimed not only at ideologically
and pragmatically adjusting exploited workers to the exigencies of capitalism in crisis and
marginalizing struggles for social transformation by representing them as outside the realm of
the "sustainable" (as we see in Braidotti's theory of "new materialism"), but it also serves as a
means to shore up the class privileges of a small ruling class minority of men and women in
capitalism by translating class contradictions into a new metaphysics of freedom.

Capitalism causes inevitable crises, inequality, and dehumanizationthe

alternative is a class-based critique of the systempedagogical 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 selfidentified 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 accept namely 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 postMarxist 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.

CASE
The aff cant subvert dominant discourse/the symbolic order provides no praxis
point and falls into conservatism
Zwagerman 2k
Sean, The (Bio)logical Fallacies of Luce Irigaray [http://summit.sfu.ca/item/13171] //
This Sex Which Is Not One, Luce Irigarays influential collection of essays, is celebrating its
fifteenth anniversary in English translation. And in that time, it has achieved the status of a
classic, defined by Mark Twain as a book which people praise and dont read. The fact that
many students of literary theory may not have actually read Irigaray does not keep them from
responding to the mention of her name with a knowing nod and a reverential murmur of approval.
Even the personlike mewho knows nothing of classical music knows enough to smile and say,
Ah, Mozart, when the composers name is mentioned. It cannot be long before Irigarays name
becomes an awkward adjective, like Derridian or Kafkaesque. The staying power of Irigarays
book suggests that its significance in the field of modern literary theory remainsif you will pardon
the expressionseminal. Luce Irigaray would not pardon the expression, indicative as it is of the
phallocentric thrust of language. This Sex Which Is Not One is often a difficult book to understand
intentionally so, since Irigaray advocates the subversion of the dominant, phallocentric construct
of clear, expository prose. However, the central questions raised in This Sex Which Is Not One are
clear enough, and regardless of whether Irigaray or anyone else succeeds in answering them, the
asking alone has potentially important implications for society at large. This is great praise indeed,
and a compliment which cannot often be bestowed upon the incessant but largely irrelevant output
of the lit. crit. Machine. But sadly the social importance of Irigarays text remains merely
potential, because her battlefield is verbal and theoretical, not actual. Irigaray writes, the
feminine has never been defined except as the inverse, indeed the underside, of the masculine.
So for woman it is not a matter of installing herself within this lack, this negative, even by
denouncing it, nor of reversing the economy of sameness by turning the feminine into the standard
for sexual difference; it is rather a matter of trying to practice that difference. Hence these
questions: what other mode of reading or writing, of interpretation and affirmation, may be mine
inasmuch as I am a woman? (159) [throughout, all italics are Irigarays] To begin to answer her
own question, to begin to imagine what a uniquely feminine discourse might look like, Irigaray
interogates first that which precludes such a discourse: the inescapable, dominant, masculine
discourse within which we all currently operate. Decentering the dominant discourse is a
difficult task, like asking fish to deconstruct the concept of water. In philosophical discourse,
Irigaray finds the defining characteristics of phallocentric language, namely coherence,
consistency, logic, and linearity. Irigaray urges an interpretive rereading of dominant Western
philosophical texts, for it is indeed precisely philosophical discourse that we have to challenge,
and disrupt, . . . inasmuch as it constitutes the discourse on discourse (74). Language in turn is a
tool of power and oppression in our phallocratic society, by which women are reduced to mere
commodities, to be exchanged by men as obliging prop[s] for the enactment of mans fantasies
(25). For a woman, the alternative to submitting to the masculine framework is equally depressing:
A woman may strive to beat the men at their own game, as it were, appropriating the masculine
discourse and its attendant power for herself. But in so doing, a woman has done nothing in
Irigarays eyes toward establishing the otherthe feminineas distinct from the onethe
masculine. She has become merely mans equal, a potential man. For Irigaray, equality between
the sexes does not subvert or even challenge the dominant discourse. At this point I, as a typically
empirical and goal-oriented male, ask, Well, what then can we do to change things? For Irigaray,
however, this question is not particularly interesting, especially if its coming from a man. As David
Richter observes, Those feminists who seek above all a sense of the differences between
femininity and masculinity may find Irigaray a compelling theorist; those more concerned with
pragmatic goalswho prefer to get their share of the things men have traditionally dominated
may find her quietism less useful (1072-3). Irigaray could have turned outward from her thoughts

and put into action the resentment which marks every page of her text. She could have made This
Sex Which Is Not One a work of symbolic action, a book significant outside the academy, a
manifesto for overturning the tables in the female commodity exchange. That such pragmatism is
so thoroughly ignored in the text seems inexcusable, after Irigaray argues that male oppression of
women is so pervasive that it infects not only every action but every utterance. (For those who like
this sort of thing, it was done earlier and with far more intensity, clarity, and humorand with a
powerful desire to actually change societyby Valerie Solonas in her SCUM Manifesto.) But
though Irigaray is also a psychoanalyst, she is primarily an academician. So she turns inward, to
the safe and sophisticated world of ideas, of texts, of interrogating each word, utterance, sentence,
. . . every phoneme, every letter (80), descending into an ever-tighter spiral of deconstruction, until
she winds up staring at her own navel (actually at a place slightly lower than her navel), in the end
having destroyed nothing but strawmen. Which may be just as well, since Irigaray fancies
destroying the discursive mechanism itself (76), casting aside any manipulation of discourse that
would also leave discourse intact. . . . We need to proceed in such a way that linear reading is no
longer possible. . . . There would no longer be either a right side or a wrong side of discourse, or
even of texts (80). Here Irigaray walks down the well-trodden path of theorists before her
who have followed their brilliance down the trail to utter nonsense, self-de(con)structing every
instance in which their writings approach comprehensibility, and subverting every noble attempt
made by a patient reader to take the author seriously. As a metaphor for the non-linear, multiple,
self-contained nature of feminine discourse, Irigaray writes in vivid anatomical detail about female
auto-eroticism. We literary scholars are often accused of mental masturbation; Irigaray seems to
have taken this criticism as her thesis. A woman touches herself in and of herself without any need
for mediation. . . . Woman touches herself all the time, . . . for her genitals are formed of two lips
in continuous contact. Thus, within herself, she is already twobut not divisible into one(s)that
caress each other. . . . Her sexuality, always at least double, goes even further: it is plural. . . .
Woman has sex organs more or less everywhere. . . . This is doubtless why she is said to be
whimsical, incomprehensible, capricious . . . not to mention her language, in which she sets off in
all directions leaving him unable to discern the coherence of any meaning. (26, 28-9) This all
functions as a lead-in to a wise observation about male vs. female discourse, though it is an
observation made elsewhere by others who actually apply it to improving real-world communication
and understanding. Feminine discourse is contradictory, somewhat mad from the standpoint of
reason, inaudible for whoever listens to [it] with ready-made grids. . . . One would have to listen
with another ear, as if hearing an other meaning. . . . For if she says something, it is not, it is
already no longer, identical with what she means. . . . It is useless, then, to trap women in the exact
definition of what they mean, to make them repeat (themselves) so that it will be clear; they are
already elsewhere in that discursive machinery where you expected to surprise them. (29) The
pop-linguist Deborah Tannen, and even John Gray in his horrifically popular Men are from Mars,
Women are from Venus, have observed fundamental differences between male and female
patterns of verbal initiation and response. But unlike Irigaraywho is too busy being brilliant, aloof,
and ironicboth Tannen and Gray offer pragmatic suggestions for listening with another ear.
Irigaray does not go in this direction. Since she believes language is a weapon used by men to
trap women, she has no interest in the notion of successful communication. In fact, her argument
cannot even accommodate the phrase successful communcation as anything but an oxymoron.
But the quotes above and throughout her book reveal what appears to be a paradox: Irigaray
embraces the sexist limitations men have placed upon the female intellect. She has a response to
this criticism, of course: By mimicking the repressive roles of femininity, women may uncover the
mechanisms by which [these roles] exploit them (220). To make matters worse, Irigaray also
seizes in the name of women those stereotypes traditionally leveled against men. In the above
excerpts, for example, she says that women are in a constant state of sexual arousal, which is
doubtless why they speak and act the way they do. Furthermore, she relies heavily upon the
hierarchical discourse and the sexist generalizations she claims to want destroyed. She posits by
necessity masculine oneness, narrowness, and linearity in order to differentiate feminine plurality,
openness, and reflexivity. Though there are many moments of original thought in This Sex Which
Is Not One, there are also plenty of examples like these of Irigaray simply turning the tables in the
human commodity exchange. Irigarays tactics make it clear that behind all the verbal cleverness
and the undeniable intellectual vitality is another wearying example of an angry scholar, feeling

marginalized, trying to get even. One of the favorite strawman fallacies of contemporary theory is
the tactic of positing overly simplified hierarchical oppositionssuch as masculine vs. feminine, or
Derridas favorite: written vs. spoken discourseand then boldly inverting them, as if any intelligent
thinker supprted these simplistic dualities in the first place, or privileged one over the other. This
methodolgy fits hand in glove with the emotion of anger and the motive of revenge: you were once
on top, but now were on top. Its just Stephen Potters one-upmanship, no matter how vehemently
Irigaray calls one and man into question. Another obstacle standing between Irigaray and
relevance is her powerful ability to alienate her audience (although Im probably giving her a run for
her money right now). This comes through most clearly in Chapter 7, entitled Questions. It is not
called Questions and Answers because Irigaray has that annoyingly smug habit, encountered in
deconstructionists and Jehovahs Witnesses, of turning the question back on the questioner, and of
condescending to skeptics as dimwits who just dont get it. According to Irigarays translator,
Catherine Porter, questions are a habitual mode in Irigarays writing, because [they] introduce a
plurality of voices and facilitate the examination of a priori concepts without, however, insisting
upon definitive answers or revisions of the systems of thought that are brought into question (221).
How terribly convenient. What is a woman? asks a student from the Philosophy Department at
the University of Toulouse. Irigaray responds, I believe Ive already answered that there is no way I
would answer that question. The question what is . . . ? is the questionthe metaphysical
questionto which the feminine does not allow itself to submit (122). Isnt that just the sort of
response that makes you wish youd dropped her class while you had the chance? But her
responsessuch as they areare not simply a maddening semantic mannerismor
(wo)mannerism. They are rather an indication of that most phallocentric of failings: intellectual
rigidity. Irigaray attempts to preempt and silence all criticism of her work by saying the following:
As for what is signified by the reactions that a work such as mine may provoke, I think I have just
responded to that: a person who is in a position of mastery does not let go of it easily, does not
even imagine any other position. . . . In other words, the masculine is not prepared to share the
initiative of discourse. (157) In other words, if you disagree with her you are, by definition, part
of the problem. This rhetorical strategy has been used for centuries by a wide variety of
cultural critics, including witch burners, McCarthyites, fundamentalist Christians, and
dictators great and small. Irigarays notion of woman as self-contained and self-satisfying seems
to be a justification for a thoroughly solipsistic theory of discourse and relationships. Instead of
owning what are clearlyto any reader with an ounce of psychological insighther own issues of
anger and resentment toward men, this psychoanalyst-who-should-know-better externalizes her
personal biases as feelings common to all womankind. A womans auto-eroticism is disrupted by a
violent break-in: the brutal separation of the two lips by a violating penis, marking the
disappearance of her own pleasure in sexual relations (24). Any pleasure a woman may find in
heterosexual union is a masochistic prostitution of her body to a desire that is not her own (25). In
the world as Irigaray sees it, a woman is an indifferent, insignificant little receptacle, subject to
their [mens] demands alone (208). The entire last chapterWhen Our Lips Speak Togetheris
divisively framed in terms of ustwo female loversand them: men. But also thrown into the
them category are women who raise families, women who prefer sex to masturbation,
heterosexual women, and women who dare to question Irigaray. A more compassionate and
evolved psychoanalyst, Rollo May, observes that in our era, the most common psychological
defense against confronting and accepting our own emotions is intellectualization, avoiding the
pain of raw emotion by reframing and externalizing it as a rational construct. I think his observation
is extremely important for us as scholars: Who could be more prone to intellectualization than
intellectuals? Youre missing the point, people may argue. Irigaray is being ironic. Indeed she is,
and in fact she has given herself no choice: the linear, logical discourse she so loathes is the
only medium she has for communicating her ideas. Thus by characterizing communication
and even language itself as the enemy, as a trap, Irigaray has thought herself into an intellectual
endgame, joining many of her contemporaries in poststuctural and performativity theories: If
language controls us and not vice versa, then the only way out is through parody, sarcasm, irony.
Much contemporary criticism is an intellectualization of the feeling we all share at some level, the
feeling of being marginalized, of the loss of power and will. To accept such a loss can only result in
feelings of anger and resentment, expressed as cynicism and irony, moods and tones which are

sadlybut not coincidentallypervasive in English departments. For our theories mirror not only
our ideology, but our psychology. Im not against theory, per se; as H. L. Mencken said, A
professor must have theories as a dog must have fleas. But like all intellectualizations, theories
such as Irigarays can only fail us: Such beliefs cannot empower their adherents since the theories
are founded upon an acceptance of disempowerment, and are thus self-defeating. That Irigaray is
so revered is thus yet another indication that too many graduate students are looking to theory
when they should really be looking into therapy. To praise Irigarays insights, as I have tried at
times to do, leaves an unpleasant taste in my mouth, like complimenting Rush Limbaugh on his
success, or a Klansman on his neatly pressed hood. This Sex Which Is Not One perpetuates and
legitimizes the sexism which remains fashionable in academia, and fouls the worthy pursuit of
feminist studies behind which it hides. However appealing Irigarays rallying cry to an assault on
hegemony may seem, her call must be taken for what it is: resentment intellectualized, divisiveness
masquerading as a liberating philosophy.

\ Masculine hierarchies run throughout language any female syntax that

escapes it cannot be understood or extended no solvency
Lieberman, philosophy thesis @ Haverford College, 4/20/2012
(Alyson, Accessing Women through Masculine Discourse: Luce Irigarays Embodied Syntax,
http://thesis.haverford.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/10066/9067/2012LiebermanA_thesis.pdf?
sequence=1)
In looking at the female syntax as a bodily writing Irigaray also brings up the idea of a reader that can
understand feminine expression. The reader supplies the simultaneity, while the written word can provide
proximity. Syntactical proximity can be written into sentences so that the dichotomies that structure our
objects and subjects break down. Irigaray says, every dichotomiz[ation] and at the same time
redoubling break, including the one between enunciation and utterance, has to be disrupted. Nothing is
ever to be posited that is not also reversed and caught up again in the supplemntarity of this reversal,
(TSW, 1985, 80). In this quote, Irigaray tries to turn the womans exclusion from discourse as a subject
into a tool for liberating them. If the female is really never the true subject of her own linguistic use, then
she can potentially act as both the object and subject of speech. Irigaray thinks that this is only possible
through a bodily assertion. . This transcends the meaning of the words by supplying the excluded female
body to the text, an extra-linguistic expression. The female body has not been allowed to function in both
linguistic and material space. An extra-linguistic expression would privilege the excluded body, allowing
for woman to occupy both spaces simultaneously. The female bleeding through onto the page mimes and
may resemble the masculine language, but alters it slightly due to womans exclusion from the
representational structures. This concept of writing is difficult to articulate abstractly and much more
difficult to show concretely because of the nature of the project. Any words that can be used to describe it
would necessarily fall short of a complete picture because the goals of the syntax are outside of
language. Irigaray understands her own trouble in explaining the feminine syntax through language and
offers her text Speculum as a hybrid text of masculine discourse and feminine syntax. I was unable to see
this text as anything bodily.
If this syntax is difficult to articulate and enact, how can it easily be received by a reader? Does there
need to be a subject that is ready to react and properly read the feminine syntax in order for it to express
the body? If that is true, how liberating can a completely incoherent language really be? I think that,
although Irigaray wants to stress the simultaneity of embodied writing, it does not distinctly require a
reader. While the temporal aspect of the work create an eternal link between the reader and the text, it
can also imply a connection of a simultaneous demand for the body. Again, the female body represents
the unique linguistic space of a dissociated subject. When this subject tries to speak about things in the
world, she fails to fully express the distance between herself as the speaker and the object. This is
because the masculine discourse relies on her functioning as the ever present referent in his language
structure. It would follow that any articulation of this kind, if possible, would be incoherent to a non-female
subject. This is an extreme limitation on its potential to deconstruct linguistic paradigms. Irigaray
describes embodied language as a way of jamming the theoretical framework, and tearing down what
was assumed to be equivocally true (TSW, 1986, 78). Although men would be excluded from
understanding this language preliminarily, the new embodied writing would hypothetically create a space
for an unburdened feminine to emerge, and then a common understanding could be broached.

To return to the problem of materiality and the body, let us clarify the remaining issues. Irigaray posits that
only an understanding of the repressed feminine as maintaining a link to unintelligible matter, and
functions outside of conventional linguistic structure, can liberate women. Butler does not constitute an
extra-linguistic space as having any possibly use in liberation. Primarily, she sees such a task as failed
from the start and cannot serve as a uniting, political endeavor. Irigaray relies on accessing inarticulate
matter of the female body as the only move in which to eradicate male domination of subjecthood.
Contrary to this, Butler contends that the only way we can understand our bodies, and/or matter, is
through its linguistic articulations. No matter what type of embodied writing an author did, they would
necessarily be referring back to a linguistic framework that, contains all iterations of the body.
V. Concluding Thoughts:
Luce Irigaray reaches outside the walls of language and grasp at the haunting specter of femininity.
Something unique about the female body has been lost or devalued into nonexistence. Irigarays project
to liberate women from the patriarchy relies on rediscovering this loss. Unfortunately, the patriarchal
domination penetrates every aspect of linguistic and social understanding. Irigaray accepts this to mean
that any liberation the uses language will still entrapped in masculine hierarchies. To get outside of
language Irigaray focuses on the female body. The differences between the male and female body are the
reason for womens oppression. Because of this, Irigaray posits that only through accepting and then
turning these differences in on themselves can we liberate women.

2NC

MARX

2NC ROB
This means alt solvency is irrelevant---neither teams method fixes the
structural harm, but an accurate account of history creates the possibility of
resistance
McLaren, Critical Studies @ Chapman U, urban schooling prof @ UCLA, 1
(Peter, Rage and Hope: The Revolutionary Pedagogy of Peter McLaren an Interview with Peter
McLaren, Currculo sem Fronteiras, v.1, n. 2, p. xlix-lix)
McLaren: Mitja, I like the way that you framed that question. The obviousness of conservative culture is precisely why
it is so hidden from view. Much like those who controlled the paradis articificels of everyday life in the film, The Truman Show. I
am struck each day by the manner in which predatory capitalism anticipates forgetfulness, nourishes social amnesia,

smoothes the pillows of finality, and paves the world with a sense of inevitability and sameness. I am
depressingly impressed by what a formidable opponent it has proven to be, how it fatally denies the full development of
our human capacities, and inures us to the immutability of social life. In other words, it naturalizes us to the
idea that capital is the best of all possible worlds, that it may not be perfect, but it certainly is preferable to socialism and
communism. Many leftists have unwittingly become apologists for capitalist relations of domination because they
are overburdened by the seeming inability of North Americans to imagine a world in which capital did not
reign supreme. To address this situation, I have turned to critical pedagogy. Mitja: You are very much identified with the
field of critical pedagogy. How would you define critical pedagogy? What is your position within this field today? McLaren: As you
know, Mitja, critical pedagogy has been a central

liberatory

current in

education

of the last two decades. Critical pedagogy

has served as a form of struggle within and against the social norms and forces that structure the schooling process. Most
approaches to critical pedagogy are limited to disturbing the foundations upon which bourgeois knowledge is built, placing the term
schooling itself under scrutiny. Questions that arise in critical pedagogy often have to do with the relationship
among schooling and the broader array of publics constructed by the marketplace and brought about by the
secularization and the internationalization of the politics of consumption. In other words, critical pedagogy most often deals
with cultural manifestations of capital, and the norms and formations that are engendered by means of relations of exchange. This is
a good strategy as far as it goes. However, the revolutionary pedagogy that I advocate , that I have built from the roots of

involves the uprooting

of these seeds of naturalization planted through the reification of social relations and the subsumption of
difference to identity by means of the law of value and this means undressing the exploitative, sexist, racist, and
homophobic dimensions of contemporary capitalist society. But it also means more than simply uncovering these
relations, or laying them bare in all of their ideological nakedness. It stipulates and here it is important not to mince
words the total uprooting of class society in all of its disabling manifestations. Revolutionary pedagogy refers to
taking an active part in a total social revolution , one in which acting and knowing are indelibly fused such that the object
of knowledge is irrevocably shaped by the very act of its being contemplated. That is, the very act of contemplation (I need to
emphasize that this act of contemplation is collective and dialogical) shapes and is shaped by the object under
investigation. The knowers are shaped through dialogue by the known. Revolutionary pedagogy attempts to
produce an excess of consciousness over and above our conditional or naturalized consciousness, to create, as it
were, an overflow that outruns the historical conditions that enframe it and that seek to anchor it, so that we
might free our thought and, by extension, our everyday social practices from its rootedness in the very material
conditions that enable thinking and social activity to occur in the first place. In other words, revolutionary pedagogy
Freires and Marxs work and the work of many others, such as the great revolutionary Che Guevara,

teaches us that we need not accommodate ourselves to the permanence of the capitalist law of value. In fact, it reveals to us how
we can begin to think of continuing Marxs struggle for a revolution in permanence. A number of thinkers have helped to unchain the
revolutionary implications of Freires thought in this regard Donaldo Macedo, Henry Giroux, Ira Shor, Peter Mayo, among others. I
have attempted to do this by iterating the protean potential of his work for social revolution and not just the democratizing of
capitalist social relations. So much contemporary work on Freire has inflated its coinage for transforming classroom practices but
devalued its potential for revolutionary social change outside of the classroom in the wider society. Revolutionary pedagogy
requires a dialectical understanding of global capitalist exploitation. Freire is often brought in to illuminate debates
over school reform that are generally structured around the conceit of a dialogue over equality of opportunity, which rarely
go beyond momentous renunciations of corporatism or teeth-rattling denunciations of privatization. But such

debates studiously ignore the key contradictions to which history has given rise those between labor and capital.
Such debates are engineered in the United States to avoid addressing these contradictions. Mitja: What do you
see as the most important challenge in the future for educational researchers? McLaren: The key to see beyond the choir of
invisibilities that envelope us, and to identify how current calls for establishing democracy are little more than
half-way house policies, a smokescreen for neo-liberalism and for making capitalism governable and
regulated a stakeholder capitalism if you will. I do not believe such a capitalism will work, nor am I in favor of market socialism.
We need to chart out a type of positive humanism that can ground a genuine socialist democracy without
market relations, a Marxist humanism that can lead to a transcendence of alienated labor. Following Marx,
Eagleton claims that we are free when, like artists, we produce without the goad of physical necessity ; and it is
this nature which for Marx is the essence of all individuals. Transforming the rituals of schooling can only go so far, since
these rituals are embedded in capitalist social relations and the law of value. There are signs that research in the social sciences
might be going through a sea-shift of transformation. I think we

need to take the focus away from how individual

identities are commodified in postmodern consumer spaces, and put more emphasis on creating
possibilities for a radical reconstitution of society. I like the new public role of Pierre Bourdieu a role that sees him
taking his politics into the streets and factories of France, fighting the structural injustices and economic instabilities
brought about by capitalism and neo-liberalism fighting what, in effect, are nothing short of totalitarian practices that are
facilitating the exploitation of the worlds workers. Bourdieu realizes that we havent exhausted all the alternatives
to capitalism. If that is the case, we need, as researchers, to bring our work to bear on the seeking out of new
social relations around which everyday life can be productively and creatively organized. In my view, this is social
science and politics the way it should be practiced.

2NC AT PERM
Footnoting---locating class alongside identity strips class of its concrete,
socioeconomic nature
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)
In stating this, we need to include an important caveat that differentiates our approach from those invoking the

well-worn
race/class/gender triplet which can sound, to the uninitiated, both radical and vaguely Marxian. It is not.
Race, class and gender, while they invariably intersect and interact, are not co-primary. This triplet
approximates what the philosophers might call a category mistake. On the surface the triplet may be convincingsome
people are oppressed because of their race, others as a result of their gender, yet others because of their classbut this is
grossly misleading for it is not that some individuals manifest certain characteristics known as class
which then results in their oppression; on the contrary, to be a member of a social class just is to be
oppressed and in this regard class is a wholly social category (Eagleton, 1998, p. 289). Furthermore, even though
class is usually invoked as part of the aforementioned and much vaunted triptych, it is usually gutted of its
practical, social dimension or treated solely as a cultural phenomenonas just another form of
difference. In these instances, class is transformed from an economic and, indeed, social category to an
exclusively cultural or discursive one or one in which class merely signifies a subject position. Class is
therefore cut off from the political economy of capitalism and class power severed from exploitation and a
power structure in which those who control collectively produced resources only do so because of the value generated by those
who do not (Hennessy & Ingraham, 1997, p. 2). Such theorizing has had the effect of replacing an historical
materialist class analysis with a cultural analysis of class. As a result, many post-Marxists have also stripped
the idea of class of precisely that element which, for Marx, made it radicalnamely its status as a universal
form of exploitation whose abolition required (and was also central to) the abolition of all manifestations of
oppression (Marx, 1978, p. 60).

With regard to this issue, Kovel (2002) is particularly insightful, for he explicitly addresses an issue which continues to vex the Leftnamely the priority given to different categories of what he calls
dominative splittingthose categories of gender, class, race, ethnic and national exclusion, etc. Kovel argues that we need to ask the question of priority with respect to what? He notes that if we mean priority with respect to time, then the category of gender
would have priority since there are traces of gender oppression in all other forms of oppression. If we were to prioritize in terms of existential significance, Kovel suggests that we would have to depend upon the immediate historical forces that bear down on distinct
groups of peoplehe offers examples of Jews in 1930s Germany who suffered from brutal forms of anti-Semitism and Palestinians today who experience anti-Arab racism under Israeli domination. The question of what has political priority, however, would depend
upon which transformation of relations of oppression are practically more urgent and, while this would certainly depend upon the preceding categories, it would also depend upon the fashion in which all the forces acting in a concrete situation are deployed. As to the

, the priority would have to be given to class since class relations entail the state as an
instrument of enforcement and control, and it is the state that shapes and organizes the splits that appear
in human ecosystems. Thus class is both logically and historically distinct from other forms of exclusion
(hence we should not talk of classism to go along with sexism and racism, and species-ism). This is, first of all, because class
is an essentially man-made category, without root in even a mystified biology. We cannot imagine a human
world without gender distinctionsalthough we can imagine a world without domination by gender. But a
world without class is eminently imaginable indeed, such was the human world for the great majority of our species
time on earth, during all of which considerable fuss was made over gender. Historically, the difference arises because class
signifies one side of a larger figure that includes a state apparatus whose conquests and regulations create
races and shape gender relations. Thus there will be no true resolution of racism so long as class society
stands, inasmuch as a racially oppressed society implies the activities of a class-defending state. Nor can
gender inequality be enacted away so long as class society, with its state, demands the super-exploitation of
women's labor. (Kovel, 2002, pp. 123124) Contrary to what many have claimed, Marxist theory does not relegate
categories of difference to the conceptual mausoleum; rather, it has sought to reanimate these categories by
interrogating how they are refracted through material relations of power and privilege and linked to relations of
question of which split sets into motion all of the others

production. Moreover, it has emphasized and insisted that the wider political and economic system in which they are embedded
needs to be thoroughly understood in all its complexity. Indeed, Marx made clear how constructions of race and ethnicity are
implicated in the circulation process of variable capital. To the extent that gender, race, and ethnicity are all understood as social
constructions rather than as essentialist categories the effect of exploring their insertion into the circulation of variable capital
(including positioning within the internal heterogeneity of collective labor and hence, within the division of labor and the class
system) must be interpreted as a powerful force reconstructing them in distinctly capitalist ways (Harvey, 2000, p. 106). Unlike

contemporary narratives which tend to focus on one or another form of oppression, the irrefragable power of
historical materialism resides in its ability to reveal (1) how forms of oppression based on categories of difference do
not possess relative autonomy from class relations but rather constitute the ways in which oppression is
lived/experienced within a class-based system; and (2) how all forms of social oppression function within an overarching
capitalist system. This framework must be further distinguished from those that invoke the terms classism and/or
class elitism to (ostensibly) foreground the idea that class matters (cf. hooks, 2000) since we agree with Gimenez
(2001, p. 24) that class is not simply another ideology legitimating oppression. Rather, class denotes
exploitative relations between people mediated by their relations to the means of production. To marginalize such a
conceptualization of class is to conflate an individual's objective location in the intersection of structures of
inequality with people's subjective understandings of who they really are based on their experiences.

---OSHEA
Independently that means capitalism is the root and proximate cause of their
impacts and their focus on discourse and the symbolic can only ever exist within
a circumscribed registerEbert 95 (Teresa, PhD, professor at the University of Albany, (Untimely) Critiques for a Red Feminism,
from Post-Ality, Marxism and Postmodernism, edited by Mas'ud Zavarzadeh, Teresa Ebert and Donald
Morton, Maisonneuve Press 1995,
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/ebert.htm)
Theories that approach materialism as a matter of language , as discourse, base their argument on the
assumption that discourse/textuality have an opacity and density of their own , a physicality, which makes
language "mean" not simply by the "intention" of the author and speaker or by her conscious "control" but by its own autonomous
and immanent laws of signification. This understanding of "materialism" is transhistorical: it refers mostly to the
material in the sense that I have already described as inert matter, "medium" or "thingness" and is, in short, a form of
"matterism" rather than materialism. Or as Marx says in his "Theses on Feuerbach," "The chief defect of all hitherto
existing materialism" and we can add poststructuralist materialism to the list "is that the thing,

reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object of contemplation, but not as human
sensuous activity, practice" (The German Ideology I 21). And "human sensuous activity" is above all, for Marx,
labour: the way people "produce their means of subsistence" and thus "indirectly produce their
actual material life" (The German Ideology, 42). It is, then, especially surprising to see a neo-socialist-feminist like Michele
Barrett define materialism in Marxist thought as "the doctrine seeing consciousness as dependent on matter" without realising that

"matter" in Marxism is not inert mass but the praxis of tabor and the contradictions and class conflict.,; in
which it is always involved. Barrett goes on to pose the poststructuralist debate over materialism as one
between "words and things," "matter" and "meaning' ("Words and Things" 202, 201). However, "words and
things," to use her terms, are not finished a-historical entities: they are the product of the social
relations of production. To pose the question the way Barrett does is to erase the dialectical
projector Marxism and to occlude the structure of conflicts in capitalism. Historical materialism is
an explanation of these conflicts. Barrett's misreading is symptomatic of a more serious problem over the issue of
materialism within Marxist and socialist feminism. This is fundamentally the problem of the place of the relations of production in
feminist theory and political practice. It is the question of whether feminist knowledge should give priority to the way people "produce
their means of subsistence" (labour) to the material reality and historical struggles of the relations of production or whether, as
Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell argue, "the confrontation between twentieth-century Marxism and feminist thought requires
nothing less than a paradigm shift ... the 'displacement of the paradigm of production"' (Feminism as Critique 1). This is not simply a
debate among materialist feminists. The "displacement of the paradigm of production" by a majority of
postmodern, Anglo-American neo-socialist feminists has significantly contributed to the occlusion of the
economic and suppression of the problem of exploitation in most other feminist theories and consequently in
contemporary social theory in general. It has produced a ludic or post-al socialist feminism without Marxism, turning it
into a general left-liberalism, and has participated in the ludic substitution of a discursive politics of individual, libidinal
liberation for a revolutionary politics of collective socioeconomic transformation. Why should this displacement matter? The
erasure of Marxism from feminism and (ludic) postmodern knowledges has become so pervasive that
the importance of these issues has been largely suppressed, and the question itself can no longer even be
asked without requiring extensive explanation. It matters because, as Marx and Engels say, "the free development of each is the
condition for the free development of all" (The Communist Manifesto 75), and there can be no "free development" unless the
fundamental needs of each person are met: unless production fulfils needs instead of making profits (Marx, The Gotha Program 10).
Making profits, in short, is the denial of the needs of the many and the legitimisation of the desires of the few. As a revolutionary (not
a post-al) socialist feminist, Nellie Wong argues, Without overthrowing the economic system of capitalism , as
socialists and communists organise to do, we cannot liberate women and everybody else who is also
oppressed. Socialist feminism is our bridge to freedom.... Feminism, the struggle for women's equal rights, is inseparable from
socialism.... (Socialist Feminism, 290). A revolutionary socialist feminism is based on historical materialism.
It insists that the "material" is fundamentally tied to the economic sphere and to the relations of
production, which have a historically necessary connection to all other social/cultural relations.
The "material," in other words, contrary to ludic theory does not simply exist autonomously as a

resisting mass, side by side with autonomous discourse . Materialism, as Engels puts it, means that
"the degree of economic development," in a society forms "the foundation upon which the state
institutions ... the art and even the religious ideas ... have been evolved, and in the light of which
these things must therefore be explained instead of vice versa ('The Funeral of Kari Marx" 39). It is to
repeat what is so violently erased in idealist theory therefore, not "the consciousness of men that determines
their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness" (Marx, A Contribution to
the Critique of Political Economy 21). In short, Marx argues that "the nature of individuals thus depends on the
material conditions determining their production" "both with what they produce and with how
they produce" (The German Ideology 42). For a red feminism this means that issues about the "nature of
individuals" gender, sexuality, pleasure, desire, needs cannot be separated from the conditions
producing individuals: not just the discursive and ideological conditions but most important the material
conditions , the relations of production, which shape discourses and ideologies . Thus the struggle
to end the exploitation and oppression of all women, and in particular of people of colour, lesbians and
gays, within the metropole as well as the periphery, is not simply a matter of discursive or semiotic liberation or a
question of the resisting "matter of the body," but a global social relation: it thus requires the transformation of
the material conditions the relations of production producing these forms of oppression.
Historical materialism thus means the primacy of women's and men's productive practices their labour
processes in the articulation and development of human history and in the construction of their
own subjectivities. As Marx argues in Capital, through labour the subject "acts upon" external nature and
changes it and in this way the labourer simultaneously changes her/his own nature (v. 1, 283). Such a
view of materialism also understands 'reality" to be a historically objective process : reality exists outside
the consciousness of humans ideas do not have an autonomous existence and thus reality is not
merely a matter of desire of the body, or the operation of language (or, on the other hand, of the "thingness" of things). This does not
mean that reality, as we have access to it, as we make sense of it, is not mediated by signifying practices. But the empirical fact
that reality is mediated by language in no way means, as Engels and others have argued, that it is produced by
language. Social relations and practices are, in other words, prior to signification and are objective. The
subjugation of women, then, is an objective historical reality: it is not simply a matter of representation by self-legitimating
discourses. The extraction of surplus labour is an objective social reality in class societies and all social
difference are produced by it, whether directly or through various mediations. Transformative politics
depends on such a view of reality since if there is no objective reality there will be little ground on which to act in
order to change existing social relations. Transformative politics, in other words, does not simply
"redescribe" the existing social world through different discourses as does ludic politics (e.g., see Rorty,
Contingency 44-69), but rather acts to change the "real" social, economic the material conditions of
the relations of production exploiting women and determining our lives.

ROOT CAUSE
evolution of labor methods gave men the control of surplus which gave them
power and created gender labor divisions that are still manifested today i.e.
phallocentrism---you should also prefer our evidence because modern feminist
authors are cognitively biased to write off Marx because hes not cool anymore
Orr 10
Judith, Marxism and feminism today [http://www.isj.org.uk/?id=656] June 24 //
The pioneering work by Fredrich Engels on womens oppression and the family addressed this
question and laid the groundwork for an understanding that still holds today. This anaylsis points to
a materialist explanation for sexist ideas. They are not imbibed with our mothers milk. Instead they
flow from a process of socialisation shaped by the way society is structured, in particular in the role
the family plays. While Power nods towards Marx and Engels theories, most of the new feminist
writing fails to seriously engage with their breakthroughs or examine the validity of their
arguments. Engels insights gave us an understanding of how class divisions did not exist for the
majority of human history and showed the significance of the transition to the first class societies.
He described the changes as the world historic defeat of the female sex. This defeat was
rooted in the development of the monogamous family structure in which women became
responsible for the private reproduction of the next generation and men became dominant
in the sphere of socialised production. This occurred against the background of the transition
from living in small bands of hunters and gatherers to the formation of more settled societies based
on horticulture or agriculture.50 The development of the use of ploughs, irrigation and dams,
depending on the climate and land, all made vast differences to human productivity. These new
techniques had a significant impact on womens role in society: the use of heavy equipment, the
beginning of exchanges of surplus, and contact, some of it hostile, outside the limits of the group.
From a period where womens work had produced at least as much food as mens, and in many
cases more, the areas of work that men undertook became more productive and more central to
survival over time. Those who produced the surplus controlled its use, and this in turn gave some
men power in the group. Child rearing could not so easily be combined with being at the centre of
production and so there developed a division between the ever more private and increasingly
recurring role of reproduction (static horticultural or agricultural societies needed and could sustain
more hands to work the land) played by women and socialised production increasingly performed
by men. Not all men controlled or produced a surplus. Certain circumstances favoured some over
others so the divisions arising also divided men from men. Hierarchies appeared for the first time
and these had implications. If you own something others dont and want to keep hold of it and pass
it on, inheritance becomes important. One way to identify your legitimate heirs is ensuring
monogamy. All these developments had profound implications for the position of women in these
societies. Demonstrating that womens oppression is rooted in how the structure of the
family grew with the rise of class society and was not a feature of previous societies is vital
to our analysis of how to fight. It can be the hardest point to win. It is counterintuitive. It is much
easier to accept that the way we work, live and organise our personal lives is the way it has always
been and that we can only tweak it. For example, Redfern and Aune suggest that men need to be
willing to drop some hours of paid work to take up care for their families, and workplaces need to
adapt to flexible working hours. 51 But all this does is move the burden around and, of course, it is
no answer to women who are single parents. So even for feminists who acknowledge the role
class plays, who accept that capitalism is a problem and who see a role for working class struggle,
the failure to understand the material roots of womens oppression leads to the twin track
approach: one struggle against exploitation, and another against oppression and patriarchy. Today,
however, patriarchy is rarely fully theorised and is more often just used as a description of a
situation where women are discriminated against. In his notes at the end of his classic article
Womens Liberation and Revolutionary Socialism, Chris Harman wrote that his assertion that

revolutionary socialists do not believe womens oppression is something that has always existed
either because of the biological differences between the sexes or because of something inherent in
the male psychecaused more argument among people to whom I showed the first draft of this
article than virtually any other.52 Harman goes through the studies and anthropological data in
detail. He examines the flaws, including the motivation and class background of the (mostly) men
who carried out the earliest anthropological studies. But the undeniable evidence remains that
humans have lived in communities that have been organised in a myriad different ways. There
have been societies in which people did not live in nuclear families, women were not second-class
citizens, gay sex was not deemed abnormal, peoples skin colour was not seen as important and
national boundaries did not exist. There are many examples of societies where womens
oppressionthe systematic discrimination against womenis not a feature. There have been
societies where women have commanded more power than men and others where gender
differences are of little or no importance. The essential point is that women and men have lived in
different ways in the past and so could potentially live in different ways in the future. The family
today Today, although the majority of women are not solely dedicated to giving birth and raising
children, the role of the family still has enormous economic and ideological benefits for the
system: economic because individual families undertake the entire costs of bring up the next
generation; ideological because families are encouraged to see themselves as atomised, selfcontained units where, if you are poor or unemployed, you blame yourself rather than racism in
society, economic crisis or education cuts. The family is also seen by many as a haven from a
brutal world that otherwise treats each of us as a mere cog in the impersonal system. The family
can be the one place where we can expect and receive unconditional love and support. Family life
is eulogised in the media, advertising and popular culture. References to hardworking families
were a constant refrain during the general election from politicians of all the main parties. Marriage
is still portrayed as the ultimate aspiration for women. Despite generations of women being a part
of the workforce, the home is still assumed to be the womans sphere. It is she who must juggle
work, shopping, housework and childcare in order to fulfil societys (and often her own)
expectations of her natural role. This leads to women often accepting low paid or part-time jobs
that fit round school hours and holidays, for example. At all times the state supports and reinforces
this traditional view of gender division, with men also expected to fulfil expectations of being the
provider. The Tories want to offer tax breaks for couples who marry because they are worried by
the trend of people rejecting compliance with the traditional family unit. Women have children later
than ever before. Some choose to remain childless. Since the 1970s there has been a fall in the
proportion of babies born to women aged under 25 in England and Wales, from 47 percent
(369,600 live births) in 1971 to 25 percent (180,700 live births) in 2008.53 While traditional ideas
about the family do not fit the reality of society today, their resilience reflects the fact that the it has
survived as a dominant social structure, despite many profound changes in how we live and work.
It serves an important purpose in maintaining and justifying the status quo. This is the
material bedrock for the ideas about women that permeate society.

1NR

2NC ALT
Collective resistance solves better subordinated classes all are devalued, but
that does not mean that agency is impossible recognizing class as a praxis is
key to effective resistance strategies which well win as a solvency deficit to the
aff also answers the claim that only men create symbols
Kennedy 13 [Sinead Kennedy, Lecturer in NUIM and a leading activist with the SWP, PhD, Marxism
and Feminism in an Age of Neoliberalism Irish Marxist Review, Vol 2, No 7,
2013,http://irishmarxistreview.net/index.php/imr/article/viewFile/79/81]
Sexism affects all women in society, regardless of their class position - just as racism affects people of
colour in all classes and homophobia affects LGBT people of all classes . This is why people with power
and inuence in our society are, overwhelmingly, male, white and straight. But while being wealthy does
not insulate you from sexism in society it does allow you to mitigate some of the most difficult
aspects of oppression. Wealthy women, for example, do not have to worry about childcare in the same way
that working class women do because they can pay someone , often a working class woman, to look after their
children. Individual advancement makes sense for wealthy women but as a strategy for the majority of
women it leads to a dead end. For Marxists class is important not just for understanding oppression
but also for determining a strategy to fight against it by locating where the power lies so we can
destroy it. Marxist-feminist Martha Gimenez comments, while women of all classes share certain
experiences of oppression, women of different classes are also simultaneously locked into an
antagonistic relationship. Thus, as she notes, crucial class differences between women affect important
class and socioeconomic status differences in women's experiences of biological reproduction . . . as well as
differences in the organization of social reproduction: the use of paid domestic workers not only by capitalist women but by
women afuent enough to a fiord them highlights how oppression is not something that only men can infict upon
women. The real advances upper-middleclass professional and business women (those earning six- figure salaries)
have made in the last 30 years presupposes the existence of a servant stratum , drawn from the less
skilled layer of the working class, including a large proportion of women from racial and ethnic minorities ,
often undocumented immigrants.23 Therefore, how do Marxists resolve this apparent contradiction: women of all
classes are oppressed under capitalism, yet class differences also divide women ? The Marxist
analysis of women's oppression is not just another theory of oppression; it advocates a strategy to change it.
Women workers suffer oppression and exploitation but they are part of a powerful force, the
working class. The working class does not bene fit from the oppression of any group; it is only
capitalism that benefits. By oppressing a section of the working class on the basis of sex or race and
dividing workers, capitalism is able to drive down the pay and conditions of all workers . One of the problems
that capitalism has continually had to face has been the tendency of workers to organise collectively to fight back
against their exploitation. The American Marxist Hal Draper argues: To engage in class struggle it is not necessary to `believe in' the
class struggle any more than it is necessary to believe in Newton in order to fall from an airplane. The working class moves toward
class struggle insofar as capitalism fails to satisfy its economic and social needs and aspirations ...There is no evidence that
workers like to struggle any more than anyone else; the evidence is that capitalism compels and accustoms them to do so.24

Therefore one of the strategies that capitalism employs to weaken and defeat workers is to set them
against one another, thereby making them less able to fight back. Conversely it is in the course of
workers' struggles that the practical need for unity helps break down ideas like sexism and racism
that have been used to sow division.

Obviously not everyone will not engage in the same way nor will everyone
experience but there is some certain meditational or causal factor that can be
connected
Priv

Kennedy 13 [Sinead Kennedy, Lecturer in NUIM and a leading activist with the SWP, PhD, Marxism
and Feminism in an Age of Neoliberalism Irish Marxist Review, Vol 2, No 7,
2013,http://irishmarxistreview.net/index.php/imr/article/viewFile/79/81]
A second influential theory for understanding sexism in society is what is sometimes known as privilege theory or
intersectionality. We live in an increasingly unequal society and people experience oppression in a range
of different ways from race, class and sex to gender, nationality and religion. Privilege theory is an attempt to
recognise all the different ways that people are oppressed in our society . One of the most widely known privilege
documents Check your Privilege 101 de fines privilege as `an unearned advantage that a dominant group
has over marginalized groups.' It goes on to argue that `a key aspect of privilege is that, due to its unearned nature, those
who have privilege often do not realize they have it. In other words, they don't see the access and opportunity being a member of a
dominant group a fiords them.' Types of privilege include class, race, education, gender, gender identity, age, body size, ablebodied, life on the outside [of prison], religion and sexuality. The document concludes by asking people to `check their privilege' by
among other things, `acknowledging that privilege exists' and `calling people out about privilege.'16 Intersectionality is a form of
privilege theory that is also concerned with how different oppressions intersect and interact with one another other.
This theory draws in particular on black women activists' criticism of mainstream feminism that while claiming to speak for all women
it often ignores racism. Intersectionality also focuses on the class differences among both oppressed and

supposedly `privileged' groups and can be useful in terms of understanding the relationships between
different forms of oppression. One of the biggest differences between these approaches and the Marxist
approach to oppression is over the question of class. Privilege theory and intersectionality reduce class to
just one of a series of inequalities. Yet for Marxists class is the fundamental relationship that
propels the capitalist system forward. It is also, crucially, the key to overthrowing it . Marxists do not
`overly privilege' class, as they are often accused of doing. Class is central to the Marxist understanding of oppression
not because the working class are the most oppressed group in society, often they are not - but
because the working class has the power to overthrow capitalism and end the oppression and
exploitation for all the oppressed groups .

The affs prioritization of the symbolic is a politics of conservatism only a

materialist method can account for the ways in which material conditions and
class relations create and deploy rhetoric to legitimize capitalism
cloud 2001
[Dana, Prof of Comm at UT Austin, The Affirmative Masquerade, p. online:
http://www.acjournal.org/holdings/vol4/iss3/special/cloud.htm]
At the very least, however, it is clear that poststructuralist discourse theories have left behind some
of historical materialisms most valuable conceptual tools for any theoretical and critical practice
that aims at informing practical, oppositional political activity on behalf of historically exploited and
oppressed groups. As Nancy Hartsock (1983, 1999) and many others have argued (see Ebert
1996; Stabile, 1997; Triece, 2000; Wood, 1999), we need to retain concepts such as standpoint
epistemology (wherein truth standards are not absolute or universal but arise from the scholars
alignment with the perspectives of particular classes and groups) and fundamental, class-based
interests (as opposed to understanding class as just another discursively-produced identity). We
need extra-discursive reality checks on ideological mystification and economic contextualization of
discursive phenomena. Most importantly, critical scholars bear the obligation to explain the origins
and causes of exploitation and oppression in order better to inform the fight against them. In
poststructuralist discourse theory, the "retreat from class" (Wood, 1999) expresses an unwarranted
pessimism about what can be accomplished in late capitalism with regard to understanding and
transforming system and structure at the level of the economy and the state. It substitutes meager
cultural freedoms for macro-level social transformation even as millions of people around the world
feel the global reach of capitalism more deeply than ever before. At the core of the issue is a
debate across the humanities and social sciences with regard to whether we live in a "new
economy," an allegedly postmodern, information-driven historical moment in which, it is argued,
organized mass movements are no longer effective in making material demands of system and
structure (Melucci, 1996). In suggesting that global capitalism has so innovated its strategies that
there is no alternative to its discipline, arguments proclaiming "a new economy" risk inaccuracy,
pessimism, and conservatism (see Cloud, in press). While a thoroughgoing summary is beyond the

scope of this essay, there is a great deal of evidence against claims that capitalism has entered a
new phase of extraordinary innovation, reach, and scope (see Hirst and Thompson, 1999).
Furthermore, both class polarization (see Mishel, Bernstein, and Schmitt, 2001) and the ideological
and management strategies that contain class antagonism (see Cloud, 1998; Parker and
Slaughter, 1994) still resemble their pre-postmodern counterparts. A recent report of the Economic
Policy Institute concludes that in the 1990s, inequality between rich and poor in the U.S. (as well as
around the world) continued to grow, in a context of rising worker productivity, a longer work week
for most ordinary Americans, and continued high poverty rates. Even as the real wage of the
median CEO rose nearly 63 percent from 1989, to 1999, more than one in four U.S. workers lives
at or below the poverty level. Among these workers, women are disproportionately represented, as
are Black and Latino workers. (Notably, unionized workers earn nearly thirty percent more, on
average, than non-unionized workers.) Meanwhile, Disney workers sewing t-shirts and other
merchandise in Haiti earn 28 cents an hour. Disney CEO Michael Eisner made nearly six hundred
million dollars in 1999--451,000 times the wage of the workers under his employ (Roesch, 1999).
According to United Nations and World Bank sources, several trans-national corporations have
assets larger than several countries combined. Sub-Saharan Africa and the Russian Federation
have seen sharp economic decline, while assets of the worlds top three billionaires exceed the
GNP of all of the least-developed countries and their combined population of 600 million people
(Shawki and DAmato, 2000, pp. 7-8). In this context of a real (and clearly bipolar) class divide in
late capitalist society, the postmodern party is a masquerade ball, in which theories claiming to offer
ways toward emancipation and progressive critical practice in fact encourage scholars and/as
activists to abandon any commitment to crafting oppositional political blocs with instrumental and
perhaps revolutionary potential. Instead, on their arguments, we must recognize agency as an
illusion of humanism and settle for playing with our identities in a mood of irony, excess, and
profound skepticism. Marx and Engels critique of the Young Hegelians applies equally well to the
postmodern discursive turn: " They are only fighting against phrases . They forget, however,
that to these phrases they themselves are only opposing other phrases, and that they are in no
way combating the real existing world when they are merely combating the phrases of this world"
(1976/1932, p. 41). Of course, the study of "phrases" is important to the project of materialist
critique in the field of rhetoric. The point, though, is to explain the connections between phrases on
the one hand and economic interests and systems of oppression and exploitation on the other.
Marxist ideology critique, understands that classes, motivated by class interest, produce rhetorics
wittingly and unwittingly, successfully and unsuccessfully. Those rhetorics are strategically adapted
to context and audience. Yet Marxist theory is not nave in its understanding of intention or
individual agency. Challenging individualist humanism, Marxist ideology critics regard people as
"products of circumstances" (and changed people as products of changed circumstances; Marx,
1972b/1888, p. 144). Within this understanding, Marxist ideology critics can describe and evaluate
cultural discourses such as that of racism or sexism as strategic and complex expressions of both
their moment in history and of their class basis. Further, this mode of critique seeks to explain both
why and how social reality is fundamentally, systematically oppressive and exploitative, exploring
not only the surface of discourses but also their often-complex and multi-vocal motivations and
consequences. As Burke (1969/1950) notes, Marxism is both a method of rhetorical criticism and a
rhetorical formation itself (pp. 109-110). There is no pretense of neutrality or assumption of
transcendent position for the critic. Teresa Ebert (1996) summarizes the purpose of materialist
ideology critique:
Materialist critique is a mode of knowing that inquires into what is not said, into
the silences and the suppressed or missing, in order to uncover the concealed operations of power
and the socio-economic relations connecting the myriad details and representations of our lives. It
shows that apparently disconnected zones of culture are in fact materially linked through the highly
differentiated, mediated, and dispersed operation of a systematic logic of exploitation. In sum,
materialist critique disrupts what is to explain how social differences--specifically gender, race,
sexuality, and class--have been systematically produced and continue to operate within regimes of
exploitation, so that we can change them. It is the means for producing transformative knowledges.
(p. 7)

AT ACCESS
You should refuse to tie the fact that women are excluded in debate to a win or a
loss its a fact and obviously important to address, but addressing it through
competitive forums fails the thesis of the case overview is that we need to
negate their embodiment Forcing competition over the claims of the 1ac is
unproductive forces fissures within an otherwise comprehensive movement.
Karlberg 3 - Assistant Professor of Communication at Western Washington University
(Michael, PEACE & CHANGE, v28, n3, July, p. 339-41)
Granted, social activists do "win" occasional battles in these adversarial arenas, but the root
causes of their concerns largely remain unaddressed and the larger "wars" arguably are not
going well. Consider the case of environmental activism. Countless environmental protests,
lobbies, and lawsuits mounted in recent generations throughout the Western world. Many small
victories have been won. Yet environmental degradation continues to accelerate at a rate that far
outpaces the highly circumscribed advances made in these limited battles the most committed
environmentalists acknowledge things are not going well. In addition, adversarial strategies of
social change embody assumptions that have internal consequences for social movements, such
as internal factionalization. For instance, virtually all of the social projects of the "left throughout
the 20th century have suffered from recurrent internal factionalization. The opening decades of the
century were marked by political infighting among vanguard communist revolutionaries. The middle
decades of the century were marked by theoretical disputes among leftist intellectuals. The
century's closing decades have been marked by the fracturing of the a new left** under the
centrifugal pressures of identity politics. Underlying this pattern of infighting and factionalization is
the tendency to interpret differencesof class, race, gender, perspective, or strategyas sources
of antagonism and conflict. In this regard, the political "left" and "right" both define themselves in
terms at a common adversarythe "other"defined by political differences. Not surprisingly,
advocates of both the left and right frequently invoke the need for internal unity in order to prevail
over their adversaries on the other side of the alleged political spectrum. However, because the
terms left and right axe both artificial and reified categories that do not reflect the complexity of
actual social relations, values, or beliefs, there is no way to achieve lasting unity within either camp
because there are no actual boundaries between them. In reality, social relations, values, and
beliefs are infinitely complex and variable. Yet once an adversarial posture is adopted by assuming
that differences are sources at conflict, initial distinctions between the left and the right inevitably
are followed by subsequent distinctions within the left and the right. Once this centrifugal process
is set in motion, it is difficult, if not impossible, to restrain. For all of these reasons, adversarial
strategies have reached a point of diminishing returns even if such strategies were necessary and
viable in the past when human populations were less socially and ecologically interdependent
those conditions no longer exist. Our reproductive and technological success as a species has led
to conditions of unprecedented interdependence, and no group on the planet is isolated any longer.
Under these new conditions, new strategies not only are possible but are essential. Humanity has
become a single interdependent social body. In order to meet the complex social and
environmental challenges now facng us, we must learn to coordinate our collective actions. Yet a
body cannot coordinate its actions as long as its "left" and is "right," or its "north" and its "south," or
its "east" and its "west" are locked in adversarial relationships.

Non-adversarial change is more effective than oppositional appeals to the ballot.

Things like the WDI, hiring more women as coaches, having a forum like we did at
Texas on disability, and creating mentorship programs are more likely to produce
lasting change voting aff does nothing to address the structural reasons
women are excluded

Karlberg 4 - Professor of Communication @ Western Washington University

(Michael, Beyond the Culture of Contest, p. 183-184)
Examples such as these suggest, in turn, an answer to the third question posed above: Arent
adversarial struggles the only means by which real social reform has ever been achieved? These
examples demonstrate that non-adversarial strategies of social reform do exist, and have probably
existed throughout history, but have simply not been recognized as such. The problem is that these
strategies are generally not noticed as strategies of social change. We seldom read about them in
history books because they often lack elements of conventional narrative drama. We seldom hear
about them in the commercial media because they lack the extremism and confrontation needed to
make them newsworthy. Likewise, we do not even read about them in the writings of social
reform-minded scholars because these strategies do not conform to the adversarial models of
social change that many academics have been trained to see. Constructive social reform efforts
that have been carried out quietly by countless people around the world, for many generations,
tend not to register in our accounting of social reform efforts because they are rendered virtually
invisible within the discourses of adversarialism. But adversarial struggles are clearly not the only
means by which social reform has ever been achieved. In fact, a proper accounting might reveal
that, throughout much of history, meaningful social reform has been achieved primarily through
non-adversarial means, while adversarial strategies have absorbed enormous amounts of human
energy and generated significant attention yet yielded few lasting results . Furthermore, if the
analysis in this book is correct, a proper accounting should reveal that while oppositional strategies
have reached a point of diminishing returns, non-adversarial strategies are emerging as the most
effective methods for lasting social change in an age of heightened social and ecological
interdependence. Based on this logic, a sixth and seventh theoretical proposition can he added to
the five that are outlined at the beginning of this chapter: 6. The socially unjust and ecologically
unsustainable nature of the culture of contest has given rise to an internal culture of protest; yet as
a strategy of social change this culture of protest has reached a point of diminishing returns
because it legitimizes and reinforces the codes of aciversarialism that underlie the prevailing
culture of contest. 7. In an age of increasing interdependence, social change can be pursued
more effectively in a non-adversarial manner by withdrawing time and energy from the old
cultural models and investing that time and energy in the construction of new more just and
sustainable models which will serve as a source of attraction to increasing numbers of people as
the old models decline not through war or protest but through attrition.

2NC THEORY LEVEL

There is no masculine/feminine psychological divide phallocentric politics
homogenize difference
Felski 97 [Rita Felski (William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English at the University of Virginia), The
Doxa of Difference, Signs, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Autumn, 1997), pp. 1-21]
Sexual difference: The supreme difference?
As Michele Barrett (1987) points out, the concept of difference is used in various, not always compatible,
ways within feminist theory. Most com- monly, it is used to denote the difference between women and
men, whether this difference is attributed to biological, psychological, or social causes. Second, it is used
to denote the difference between women as shaped by hierarchies of class, race, sexual preference, age,
and so on. This second definition is often used to challenge the claims of the first: the expe- riential
diversity of real women mitigates against any general claims about the nature of female difference. Third,
difference in its Derridean inflection as diffrance has been used by feminist theorists to address the
relational and unstable nature of linguistic meaning and the positioning of the femi- nine as a key site of
such instability. Finally, the concept of sexual difference is deployed by Lacanian feminists to
highlight the "great divide" of mascu- line/feminine as an inescapable if unstable psycholinguistic
relation struc- turing the symbolic order. In this article I consider two influential currents within
contemporary feminist thought: psychoanalytical theories of sexual difference as devel- oped within
feminist philosophy and analyses of cultural and material differences between women within postcolonial
theory. These two ap- proaches exemplify some of the most sophisticated current writing on difference
within feminism. They both proceed from a recognition of the limitations of essentialist notions of female
experience and seek, although in dissimilar ways, to redeem the notion of difference by radicalizing and
extending its claims. They thus provide an ideal starting point from which to explore the ramifications of
concepts of alterity, heterogeneity, and difference within feminist thought. Sexual difference theory first
came to the fore in the United States in the late 1970s as a result of the dissemination of the writings of
the so- called French feminists (Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva). While this work
undoubtedly generated new insights and perspectives in feminist thought, it was also extensively
criticized for its essentialist, idealist, and Eurocentric tendencies
(Jones 1981; Spivak 1987). At the present time, we are witnessing the emergence of what might be called
a "second generation" of sexual difference theorists writing in Europe, Australia, and the United States,
exemplified by such figures as Rosi Braidotti, Drucilla Cornell, and Elizabeth Grosz. For the most part,
these writers are more conscious than their predecessors of the pitfalls involved in theorizing the category
of woman. As a result, they seek to legitimate sexual difference as a foundational category of feminist
thought while simultaneously empty- ing it of any normative or essentialist content. I will consider the
feasibility of such a goal by addressing the philosophical as well as political aspects of recent formulations
of sexual difference. Given that the current visibility and prestige of this writing derives from its perceived
affiliations with "high theory," it is important to address its arguments in these terms and to consider
whether its deployment of poststructuralist ideas is in fact a theoretically cogent one. Rosi Braidotti, for
example, defines the guiding questions of feminist philosophy in the following manner: "Can we
formulate otherness, differ- ence without devaluing it? Can we think of the other not as other-than,
but as a positively other entity?" (1991, 177). Braidotti, like her colleagues, prefers sexual diference to
gender because of the latter's overly sociological connotation that masculine and feminine are externally
imposed roles to be eventually discarded in a putative androgynous future. Sexual difference feminists, by
contrast, stress the structural centrality of sexual division to the formation of human culture,
arguing that the symbolic order is predi- cated on the sovereignty of the phallus and the erasure
of the feminine except as a phantasmic object of male desire. The goal of feminism is thus not to deny
difference -which would merely endorse the logic of phallo- centrism as male-defined sameness--but to
recover the feminine within sexual difference, to generate an autonomous female imaginary beyond

existing stereotypes of woman (Braidotti 1994). The recent work of Drucilla Cornell offers a detailed
elucidation of sex- ual difference theory. Cornell, like Braidotti, acknowledges her affiliation to the work of
Lacan and Derrida, whom she regards as potential allies of feminism in their diagnosis and critique of
phallocentrism. This affiliation renders Cornell suspicious of any reference to female essences or universals. She devotes considerable effort to refuting the arguments of feminist legal theorists Robin West and
Catharine MacKinnon, whose vision of a universal female destiny she explicitly rejects. Yet Cornell, like
other femi- nist philosophers, is also wary of a perceived slippage between women and the feminine in
the writings of Derrida and other male theorists, whereby the feminine becomes a position in language
available to either sex. If the feminine is always already a metaphor, it is one with which actual women
have a particularly urgent connection and affiliation. How, then, can we avoid either essentializing
women or dematerializing them? The solution proposed by Cornell can best be described as a formal
theory of sexual difference; it affirms the importance of the feminine while refusing to give it any
substantive content. Such a strategy seeks to avoid a will to definition and closure deemed to be
quintessentially phallocentric. Rather, the feminine is that which resists definition, which embodies multiplicity and otherness. It is not to be equated with the false femininity of existing gender stereotypes but
embodies a utopian gesturing toward an alternative imaginary beyond the constraints of patriarchal
thought. "Fem- inism" writes Cornell, "demands nothing less than the unleashing of the feminine
imaginary--an imaginary made possible, paradoxically, by the lack of grounding of the feminine in any of
the identifications we know and imagine as Woman" (1995, 147). The value of such a position, according
to Cornell, is that it allows for an affirmation of the feminine without the need for essentialist or naturalist
descriptions of woman (1993, 57). A psycholinguistic model of sexual difference, in its emphasis on
relation rather than essence, can accommo- date rather than exclude the complex variables of race,
class, and culture. Thus, by refusing to give any determinate or normative content to the feminine, the
feminist philosopher hopes to avoid the charge of ethnocen- trism, arguing that such a framework can
include all rather than only some women. Feminine difference exists outside the binary structures of
patriar- chal thought, including, paradoxically, the very distinction between mas- culine and feminine. It is
not part of the already thought, but a principle of opposition to it; the feminine simply is the sign of a
radical heterogene- ity, the privileged marker of difference. I remain troubled , however, by certain
contradictions within this seemingly nonprogrammatic feminist program . Its vision of
autonomous femi- ninity seems incompatible with the poststructuralist paradigm on which
theorists of sexual difference simultaneously rely. Within such a paradigm, there can be no rupture
between an existing male symbolic and a future female imaginary, simply because any recognition
of irreducible otherness necessarily presupposes an existing set of conventions, assumptions,
and traditions against which this singularity can be recognized as other (Gasche 1994, 2). Thus
Braidotti's wish to conceptualize difference not as "other- than" but as "positively other" collides
with the most basic premise of structuralist and poststructuralist thought, the recognition that the sign
has no inherent, positive meaning but exists only through its differential relationship to other
signs. In other words, it is hard to see how a quasi- utopian vision of authentic, self-defined
femininity can be reconciled with a semiotic model that defines meaning as fundamentally
relational, unsta- ble, and impure (were such alterity to exist, it would, of course, constitute pure
identity, the ultimate metaphysics of presence). Thus Cornell's view of feminism is framed for the most
part in absolutist terms; either women seek to articulate a radical otherness beyond the al- ready
thought or we remain forever imprisoned within the iron cage of phallocentrism. This dichotomy follows
inevitably from the Lacanian premises on which she relies (although orthodox Lacanians would undoubtedly regard such a vision of woman-as-alterity as reconfirming rather than transcending
phallocentrism). Yet the Lacanian view of history and culture as fundamentally phallocentric
homogenizes important differences within that history, including the diverse positions and social
practices of women.2 Were all the multitudes of women in history who engaged in cultural activities - the
artists, the revolutionaries, the mothers, the teach- ers-really nothing more than the passive vehicles of
phallocentrism ? If not, then feminism needs a more supple framework for analyzing women's
complex and varied relations to particular axes of power. And if this is indeed the case, as Cornell
frequently implies in her presentation of culture as an exclusively male creation, why should
contemporary feminists be able to free ourselves from the ubiquitous grip of phallocentric

thought when all previous women in history have failed? What epistemological break ren- ders our
position more authentic than theirs?