1nc r1

1
A. Interpretation -- the affirmative should have to instrumentally defend the
institutional implementation of a topical plan.
B. Violation – the aff doesn’t defend a plan.
C. Best for fairness.
1. Plan focus is the only predictable way of affirming the resolution.
Philosophical and theoretical concerns certainly play into the ways that policies
are made, but the resolution only calls for us to defend and/or question
political-institutional implementations of these kinds of concerns.
2. Plan focus is the only way to ensure a fair division of ground. The affirmative
has the advantage of trying to solve the most heinous problems of the status
quo—without plan focus, debates devolve into whether or not things like
racism, sexism, classism, or homophobia are good or bad. While problems are
often less contestable, solutions to these problems are—we can debate about
whether or not a particular proposal will fix or worsen these problems and
proffer our own solutions.
D. Best for education:
1. Their infatuation to theoretical purity makes political and institutional
engagement impossible. Political engagement is always cast against the theoretical
purity of abstract philosophizing. This also turns their argument because, despite
their radical aspirations, critique smuggles metaphysical distinctions between thinking
and acting, purity and impurity, and truth and falsity into the judge’s decisionmaking
calculus.
Yar 2k (Majid, Ph.D in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University, “Arendt's Heideggerianism:
Contours of a `Postmetaphysical' Political Theory?,” Cultural Values, Volume 4, Issue 1, January,
Academic Search Complete)

Similarly, we must consider the consequences that this 'ontological substitution' for the essence of the political has for politics, in terms of what
is practically excluded by this rethinking. If
the presently available menu of political engagements and projects (be
they market or social liberalism, social democracy, communitarianism, Marxism, etc.) are only so many moments of the techno-
social completion of an underlying metaphysics, then the fear of 'metaphysical contamination' inhibits
any return to recognisable political practices and sincere engagement with the political exigencies of the
day. This is what Nancy Fraser has called the problem of 'dirty hands', the suspension of engagement
with the existing content of political agendas because of their identification as being in thrall to the
violence of metaphysics. Unable to engage in politics as it is, one either [a] sublimates the desire for
politics by retreating to an interrogation of the political with respect to its essence (Fraser, 1984, p. 144), or [b]
on this basis, seeks 'to breach the inscription of a wholly other politics'. The former suspends politics
indefinitely, while the latter implies a new politics, which , on the basis of its reconceived understanding of the political,
apparently excludes much of what recognizably belongs to politics today . This latter difficulty is well known from
Arendt's case, whose barring of issues of social and economic justice and welfare from the political domain
are well known. To offer two examples: [1] in her commentary on the U.S. civil rights movement in the 1950s, she argued that the
politically salient factor which needed challenging was only racial legislation and the formal exclusion of African-Americans from the political
sphere, not discrimination, social deprivation and disadvantage, etc.(Arendt, 1959, pp. 45-56); [2] Arendt's pronounceraent at a conference in
1972 (put under question by Albrecht Wellmer regarding her distinction of the 'political' and the 'social'), that housing and homelessness were
not political issues, that they were external to the political as the sphere of the actualisation of freedom as disclosure; the political is about
human self-disclosure in speech and deed, not about the distribution of goods, which belongs to the social realm as an extension of the oikos.
[20] The point here is not that Arendt and others are in any sense unconcerned or indifferent about such sufferings,
deprivations and
inequalities. Rather, it is that such disputes and agendas are identified as belonging to the socio-technical
sphere of administration, calculation, instrumentality, the logic of means and ends, subject-object
manipulation by a will which turns the world to its purposes, the conceptual rendering of beings in
terms of abstract and levelling categories and classes, and so on; they are thereby part and parcel of the
metaphysical-technological understanding of Being , which effaces the unique and singular appearance
and disclosure of beings, and thereby illegitimate candidates for consideration under the renewed,
ontological-existential formulation of the political. To reconceive the political in terms of a departure
from its former incarnation as metaphysical politics, means that the revised terms of a properly political
discourse cannot accommodate the prosaic yet urgent questions we might typically identify under the
rubric of 'policy'. Questions of social and economic justice are made homeless, exiled from the political
sphere of disputation and demand in which they were formerly voiced . Indeed, it might be observed that the
postmetaphysical formulation of the political is devoid of any content other than the freedom which
defines it; it is freedom to appear, to disclose, but not the freedom to do something in particular, in that
utilising freedom for achieving some end or other implies a collapse back into will, instrumentality,
teleocracy, poeisis, etc. By defining freedom qua disclosedness as the essence of freedom and the sole
end of the political, this position skirts dangerously close to advocating politique pour la politique,
divesting politics of any other practical and normative ends in the process .[21]

2. The political is value to life—it is how originally solipsistic lives become

incarnate and real to themselves.
Arendt 1958 [Hannah, The Human Condition, pp. 196-199]
The original, prephilosophic Greek remedy for this frailty had been the foundation of the polis. The polis ,
as it grew out of and remained rooted in the Greek pre-polis experience and estimate of what makes it
worthwhile for men to live together (syzen), namely, the "sharing of words and deeds," 26 had a twofold
function. First, it was intended to enable men to do permanently, albeit under certain restrictions, what
otherwise had been possible only as an extraordinary and infrequent enterprise for which they had to leave their
households. The polis was supposed to multiply the occasions to win "immortal fame," that is, to multiply
the chances for everybody to distinguish himself, to show in deed and word who he was in his unique
distinctness. One, if not the chief, reason for the incredible development of gift and genius in Athens, as well as for the hardly less
surprising swift decline of the city-state, was precisely that from beginning to end its foremost aim was to make the extraordinary an ordinary
occurrence of everyday life. The
second function of the polls, again closely connected with the hazards of action
as experienced before its coming into being, was to offer a remedy for the futility of action and speech ;
for the chances that a deed deserving fame would not be forgotten, that it actually would become
"immortal," were not very good. Homer was not only a shining example of the poet's political function, and therefore the "educator
of all Hellas"; the very fact that so great an enterprise as the Trojan War could have been forgotten without a poet to immortalize it several
hundred years later offered only too good an example of what could happen to human greatness if it had nothing but poets to rely on for its
permanence. We are not concerned here with the historical causes for the rise of the Greek city-state; what the Greeks themselves thought of
it and its ralson d'etre, they have made unmistakably clear. The
polis-—if we trust the famous words of Pericles in the Funeral Oration—
gives a guaranty that those who forced every sea and land to become the scene of their daring will not
remain without witness and will need neither Homer nor anyone else who knows how to turn words to praise them; without
assistance from others, those who acted will be able to establish together the everlasting remembrance of their good and bad deeds, to inspire
admiration in the present and in future ages.27 In other words, men's life together in the form of the polis seemed to
assure that the most futile of human activities, action and speech, and the least tangible and most
ephemeral of man-made "products," the deeds and stories which are their outcome, would become
imperishable. The organization of the polis, physically secured by the wall around the city and physiognomically guaranteed by
its laws—lest the succeeding generations change its identity beyond recognition is a kind of organized remembrance . It assures
the mortal actor that his passing existence and fleeting greatness will never lack the reality that comes from being seen, being heard, and,
generally, appearing before an audience of fellow men, who outside the polis could attend only the short duration of the performance and
therefore needed Homer and "others of his craft" in order to be presented to those who were not there. According
to this self-
interpretation, the political realm rises directly out of acting together, the "sharing of words and deeds."
Thus action not only has the most intimate relationship to the public part of the world common to us all,
but is the one activity which constitutes it. It is as though the wall of the polis and the boundaries of the
law were drawn around an already existing public space which, however, without such stabilizing
protection could not endure, could not survive the moment of action and speech itself . N

MARKED

\ot historically, of course, but speaking metaphorically and theoretically , it is as though the men who returned from
the Trojan War had wished to make permanent the space of action which had arisen from their deeds and sufferings, to prevent its perishing
with their dispersal and return to their isolated homesteads. The
polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its
physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and
its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be .
"Wherever you go, you will be a polis": these famous words became not merely the watchword of Greek colonization, they expressed the
conviction that action
and speech create a space between the participants which can find its proper location
almost any time and anywhere. It is the space of appearance in the widest sense of the word, namely,
the space where I appear to others as others appear to me , where men exist not merely like other living
or inanimate things but make their appearance explicitly . This space does not always exist, and although
all men are capable of deed and word, most of them—like the slave, the foreigner, and the barbarian in
antiquity, like the laborer or craftsman prior to the modern age, the jobholder or businessman in our
world—do not live in it. No man, moreover, can live in it all the time. To be deprived of it means to be
deprived of reality, which, humanly and politically speaking, is the same as appearance. To men the
reality of the world is guaranteed by the presence of others, by its appearing to all; "for what appears to
all, this we call Being,"28 and whatever lacks this appearance comes and passes away like a dream,
intimately and exclusively our own but without reality .29
 3. No solvency for their critique without institutional focus. We must try to
change policy in order to change the world—the concentration of power in the hands
of political elites is inevitable, so we must work within that system to check
oppression and violence.
Themba-Nixon 2k [Makani, Executive Director of the Praxis Project, Colorlines 3.2, pg. 12]

The flourish and passion with which she made the distinction said everything. Policy is for wonks, sell-
out politicians, and ivory-tower eggheads. Organizing is what real, grassroots people do. Common as it
may be, this distinction doesn't bear out in the real world. Policy is more than law . It is any written
agreement (formal or informal) that specifies how an institution, governing body, or community will
address shared problems or attain shared goals . It spells out the terms and the consequences of these agreements and is the
codification of the body's values-as represented by those present in the policymaking process. Given who's usually present, most
policies reflect the political agenda of powerful elites. Yet, policy can be a force for change-especially
when we bring our base and community organizing into the process . In essence, policies are the
codification of power relationships and resource allocation . Policies are the rules of the world we live in.
Changing the world means changing the rules . So, if organizing is about changing the rules and building power, how can
organizing be separated from policies? Can we really speak truth to power, fight the right, stop corporate abuses,
or win racial justice without contesting the rules and the rulers, the policies and the policymakers? The
answer is no-and double no for people of color. Today, racism subtly dominates nearly every aspect of policymaking. From ballot propositions
to city funding priorities, policy is increasingly about the control, de-funding, and disfranchisement of communities of color. What Do We Stand
For? Take the public conversation about welfare reform, for example. Most of us know it isn't really about putting people to work. The right's
message was framed around racial stereotypes of lazy, cheating "welfare queens" whose poverty was "cultural." But the new welfare policy
was about moving billions of dollars in individual cash payments and direct services from welfare recipients to other, more powerful, social
actors. Many of us were too busy to tune into the welfare policy drama in Washington, only to find it washed up right on our doorsteps. Our
members are suffering from workfare policies, new regulations, and cutoffs. Families who were barely getting by under the old rules are being
pushed over the edge by the new policies. Policy
doesn't get more relevant than this. And so we got involved in
policy-as defense. Yet we have to do more than block their punches. We have to start the fight with
initiatives of our own. Those who do are finding offense a bit more fun than defense alone. Living wage ordinances, youth development
initiatives, even gun control and alcohol and tobacco policies are finding their way onto the public agenda, thanks to focused community
organizing that leverages power for community-driven initiatives. - Over 600 local policies have been passed to regulate the tobacco industry.
Local coalitions have taken the lead by writing ordinances that address local problems and organizing broad support for them. - Nearly 100 gun
control and violence prevention policies have been enacted since 1991. - Milwaukee, Boston, and Oakland are among the cities that have
passed living wage ordinances: local laws that guarantee higher than minimum wages for workers, usually set as the minimum needed to keep
a family of four above poverty. These are just a few of the examples that demonstrate how organizing for local policy advocacy has made
inroads in areas where positive national policy had been stalled by conservatives. Increasingly, the local policy arena is where the action is and
where activists are finding success. Of course, corporate interests-which are usually the target of these policies-are gearing up in defense.
Tactics include front groups, economic pressure, stand for takes place in the shaping of demands. Bygetting into the policy arena in
a proactive manner, we can take our demands to the next level. Our demands can become law, with real
consequences if the agreement is broken . After all the organizing, press work, and effort, a group should leave a decisionmaker
with more than a handshake and his or her word. Of course, this work requires a certain amount of interaction with
"the suits," as well as struggles with the bureaucracy, the technical language, and the all-too-common
resistance by decisionmakers. Still, if it's worth demanding, it's worth having in writing-whether as law,
regulation, or internal policy. From ballot initiatives on rent control to laws requiring worker protections, organizers are leveraging
their power into written policies that are making a real difference in their communities. Of course, policy work is just one tool in
our organizing arsenal, but it is a tool we simply can't afford to ignore . Making policy work an integral part of
organizing will require a certain amount of retrofitting. We will need to develop the capacity to translate our information, data, and experience
into stories that are designed to affect the public conversation. Perhaps most important, we will need to move beyond
fighting problems and on to framing solutions that bring us closer to our vision of how things should be .
And then we must be committed to making it so.
 2
The aff’s replacement of stable knowledge and material resistance with
representational nonsense is a neoliberal tactic that renders a coherent struggle
against capital impossible.
McLaren, Distinguished Fellow – Critical Studies @ Chapman U and UCLA urban schooling prof, and
Scatamburlo-D’Annibale, associate professor of Communication – U Windsor, ‘4 [1](Peter and Valerie,
“Class Dismissed? Historical materialism and the politics of ‘difference’,” Educational Philosophy and
Theory Vol. 36, Issue 2, p. 183-199)

Eager to take a wide detour around political economy, post-Marxists tend to assume that the principal
political points of departure in the current ‘postmodern’ world must necessarily be ‘cultural.’ As such, most, but
not all post-Marxists have gravitated towards a politics of ‘difference’ which is largely premised on uncovering
relations of power that reside in the arrangement and deployment of subjectivity in cultural and ideological
practices (cf. Jordan & Weedon, 1995). Advocates of ‘difference’ politics therefore posit their ideas as bold steps forward in advancing
the interests of those historically marginalized by ‘dominant’ social and cultural narratives. There is no doubt
that post-Marxism has advanced our knowledge of the hidden trajectories of power within the processes of representation and that it remains
useful in adumbrating the formation of subjectivity and its expressive dimensions as well as complementing our understandings of the
relationships between ‘difference,’ language, and cultural configurations. However, post-Marxists
have been woefully remiss
in addressing the constitution of class formations and the machinations of capitalist social organization.
In some instances, capitalism and class relations have been thoroughly ‘otherized;’ in others, class is
summoned only as part of the triumvirate of ‘race, class, and gender’ in which class is reduced to merely
another form of ‘difference.’ Enamored with the ‘cultural’ and seemingly blind to the ‘economic,’ the rhetorical
excesses of post-Marxists have also prevented them from considering the stark reality of contemporary class
conditions under global capitalism. As we hope to show, the radical displacement of class analysis in contemporary
theoretical narratives and the concomitant decentering of capitalism , the anointing of ‘difference’ as a primary explanatory
construct, and the ‘culturalization’ of politics, have had detrimental effects on ‘left’ theory and practice.
Reconceptualizing ‘Difference’ The manner in which ‘difference’ has been taken up within ‘post-al’ frameworks has tended to stress
its cultural dimensions while marginalizing and, in some cases, completely ignoring the economic and material
dimensions of difference. This posturing has been quite evident in many ‘post-al’ theories of ‘race’ and in the realm of
‘ludic’1 cultural studies that have valorized an account of difference—particularly ‘racial difference’—in almost exclusively
‘superstructuralist’ terms (Sahay, 1998). But this treatment of ‘difference’ and claims about ‘the “relative
autonomy” of “race”’ have been ‘enabled by a reduction and distortion of Marxian class analysis’ which ‘involves
equating class analysis with some version of economic determinism.’ The key move in this distorting gesture depends on the ‘view that the
economic is the base, the cultural/political/ideological the superstructure.’ It is then ‘relatively easy to show that the (presumably non-political)
economic base does not cause the political/cultural/ideological superstructure, that the latter is/are not epiphenomenal but relatively
autonomous or autonomous causal categories’ (Meyerson, 2000, p. 2). In such formulations the ‘cultural’ is treated as a separate
and autonomous sphere, severed from its embeddedness within sociopolitical and economic arrangements. As a result, many of these
‘culturalist’ narratives have produced autonomist and reified conceptualizations of difference which ‘far from
enabling those subjects most marginalized by racial difference’ have, in effect, reduced ‘difference to a question of
knowledge/power relations’ that can presumably be ‘dealt with (negotiated) on a discursive level without a
fundamental change in the relations of production’ (Sahay, 1998). At this juncture, it is necessary to point out that
arguing that ‘culture’ is generally conditioned/shaped by material forces does not reinscribe the simplistic and
presumably ‘ deterministic’ base/superstructure metaphor which has plagued some strands of Marxist theory. Rather, we invoke
Marx's own writings from both the Grundrisse and Capital in which he contends that there is a consolidating logic in the
relations of production that permeates society in the complex variety of its ‘empirical’ reality. This
emphasizes Marx's understanding of capitalism and capital as a ‘social’ relation—one which stresses the
interpenetration of these categories, the realities which they reflect, and one which therefore offers a unified and
dialectical analysis of history, ideology, culture, politics, economics and society (see also Marx, 1972, 1976, 1977).2
Foregrounding the limitations of ‘difference’ and ‘representational’ politics does not suggest a disavowal of the
importance of cultural and/or discursive arena(s) as sites of contestation and struggle. We readily acknowledge the significance of
contemporary theorizations that have sought to valorize precisely those forms of ‘difference’ that have historically been
denigrated. This has undoubtedly been an important development since they have enabled subordinated groups
to reconstruct their own histories and give voice to their individual and collective identities. However , they
have also tended to redefine politics as a signifying activity generally confined to the realm of ‘representation’ while
displacing a politics grounded in the mobilization of forces against the material sources of political and economic
marginalization. In their rush to avoid the ‘capital’ sin of ‘economism,’ many post-Marxists (who often ignore their own
class privilege) have fallen prey to an ahistorical form of culturalism which holds, among other things, that cultural
struggles external to class organizing provide the cutting edge of emancipatory politics.3 In many respects, this
posturing, has yielded an ‘intellectual pseudopolitics’ that has served to empower ‘the theorist while
explicitly disempowering’ real citizens (Turner, 1994, p. 410). We do not discount concerns over representation;
rather our point is that progressive educators and theorists should not be straightjacketed by struggles
that fail to move beyond the politics of difference and representation in the cultural realm. While space limitations prevent
us from elaborating this point, we contend that culturalist arguments are deeply problematic both in terms of their penchant
for de-emphasizing the totalizing (yes totalizing!) power and function of capital and for their attempts to employ culture
as a construct that would diminish the centrality of class. In a proper historical materialist account, ‘culture’ is not the ‘other’ of class
but, rather, constitutes part of a more comprehensive theorization of class rule in different contexts.4 ‘Post-al’ theorizations of
‘difference’ circumvent and undermine any systematic knowledge of the material dimensions of
difference and tend to segregate questions of ‘difference’ from class formation and capitalist social relations. We
therefore believe that it is necessary to (re)conceptualize ‘difference’ by drawing upon Marx's materialist and
historical formulations. ‘Difference’ needs to be understood as the product of social contradictions and in relation to
political and economic organization. We need to acknowledge that ‘otherness’ and/or difference is not something that passively
happens, but, rather, is actively produced. In other words, since systems of differences almost always involve relations of domination and
oppression, we must concern ourselves with the economies of relations of difference that exist in specific contexts. Drawing upon the Marxist
concept of mediation enables us to unsettle our categorical approaches to both class and difference, for it was Marx himself who warned
against creating false dichotomies in the situation of our politics—that it was absurd to ‘choose between consciousness and the world,
subjectivity and social organization, personal or collective will and historical or structural determination.’ In a similar vein, it
is equally
absurd to see ‘difference as a historical form of consciousness unconnected to class formation ,
development of capital and class politics’ (Bannerji, 1995, p. 30). Bannerji points to the need to historicize ‘difference’ in
relation to the history and social organization of capital and class (inclusive of imperialist and colonialist legacies).
Apprehending the meaning and function of difference in this manner necessarily highlights the importance of exploring (1) the institutional and
structural aspects of difference; (2) the meanings that get attached to categories of difference; and (3) how differences are produced out of,
and lived within specific historical formations.5
Postcolonialism's focus on cultural representations excludes Marxist analysis by
denying the existence of material origins to issues, ensuring that the plan only
retrenches colonial domination
Sahay, Marxist scholar, 02
[Amrohini, September 2002, The Red Critique, “Edward Said's (Class) "Politics",
http://redcritique.org/SeptOct02/printversions/edwardsaidsclasspoliticsprint.htm, accessed 7-18-13,
GSK]

Over the years, especially since the publication of his book, Orientalism, in 1978, Edward Said has
insisted that the most effective way to understand the world is by cultural analysis. Even though the
general public usually associates him with "politics", he is, in any meaningful sense of the word, not only
not political but clearly opposed to politics and political analysis. Culture has been the key to
understanding and solving problems. In fact, culture has acquired the status of a secular sacred in his
writing. The privileging of culture is, of course, the hallmark of the writings of liberal intellectuals in the
West—from Arnold to Gramsci, to Trilling, ...and to Said. A few years ago in an interview in Z Magazine,
Said went so far as to basically condemn as irresponsible those teachers of the humanities who used the
"literary" (the canonic text of culture for Said) to draw political conclusions from it. As he said at the
time, "I don't advocate and I'm very much against, the teaching of literature as a form of politics… I don't
think the classroom should become a place to advocate political ideas. I've never taught political ideas in
a classroom. I believe that what I'm there to teach is the interpretation and reading of literary texts" (Z
Magazine, July/August, 1993).

The emphasis on "culture" has done two things for Said: it has made his writing pretty much harmless to
the establishment and made him into a valuable commodity for the U.S. academy, which bids for his
services on a yearly basis. It has, however, trivialized the issues that he deals with —trivialized them by
reducing their dense class content to a subtle cultural layeredness and thus worked towards diverting
the reader from unpacking the layers of the cultural web and obscured their class content .

Said's writings on the Palestinian and Israeli "conflict", are exemplary of this use of culture to divert
attention from the ongoing class struggle in the contemporary situation. Take for example, Said's April
essay in Z Magazine, "Thinking ahead: After Survival, what Happens?" (April, 2002). The essay, in spite of
its seemingly political orientation, is focused on reading the situation in Palestine in terms of the moral
"values" of the two sides. On these terms, it is Sharon's "homicidal instincts" and his "single-minded
negation and hate" and not the class interests of Israeli capitalism in preserving Palestine as a cheap
labor pool and secure market for Israeli big business that is at issue in the colonial occupation and recent
military aggressions. And Palestine should, in turn, be defended not as part of the historical struggles of
the oppressed and exploited of the world against their oppressors and exploiters but because it is "one
of the great moral causes of our time".

This is, to be clear, part of Said's larger view: that it is not the "exploitation" of "labor" and the struggles
against it that make history, but "culture": the zone of "values", "ideas" and "representations". Thus,
according to Said, Israel's "success" in its colonial occupation of Palestine is only secondarily due to its
overwhelming use of its military power (funded by U.S. imperialism which needs Israel to protect its own
class interests in the Middle East) to quell the class revolts of the Palestinians and maintain its colonial
occupation of Palestine. Rather, according to him, "What has enabled Israel to do what it has been doing
to the Palestinians for the past 54 years is the result of a carefully and scientifically planned campaign to
validate Israeli actions and, simultaneously, devalue and efface Palestinian actions". In this perspective,
what "has enabled Israel to deal with [the Palestinians] with impunity" is "the immense diffusionary,
insistent, and repetitive power of the images broadcast by CNN, for example" which represent all
Palestinians as "terrorists" and Israel as merely acting in "self-defence". Thus what is "politically"
necessary to defend Palestine, according to Said, is to "tell the Palestinian story" in order to "provide
context and understanding" and "a moral and narrative presence with positive, rather than merely
negative, value". The outcome of this view is of course to shift the focus onto (cultural)
"representations" and thus displace any serious discussion of the class interests determining colonialism
and the kind of struggle that is needed to combat it. It is to posit the world as an effect of "ideas" and
thus cancel the possibility of any historical and materialist inquiry into the foundations of the social
relations which in fact explain all practices (including the political economy of "representations").

Far from offering any effective political analysis of the causes of the Palestine-Israel struggle, Said's
"postcolonial" discourse—in its blindness to class—is itself symptomatic of the class violence of
imperialism which is currently being unleashed upon the workers of the world, including Palestinian
workers. The ultimate symptom of this class blindness is when Said says, "To hear our spokesmen, as
well as other Arabs, throwing themselves on its [America's] mercy, cursing it in one breath, asking for its
help in another, all in miserably inadequate fractured English, shows such a state of primitive
incompetence as to make one cry". But as Saeed Urrehman asks: don't "the material circumstances of
the dominance of English need to be foregrounded before we can demand that Palestinians speak
'correct' English" (from discussion on postcolonial@lists.village.virginia.edu Monday, 8 April, 2002)?
These "material circumstances" of "correct" English are the class circumstances of capitalism which have
not only made "English" the privileged language of transnational big business under the global
hegemony of U.S. imperialism but is what divides postcolonial intellectuals such as Said—educated at
the elite institutions of the metropole—from those without access to the lingua franca of the global
elites. In condemning the Palestinian spokesmen and other Arabs for their "miserably inadequate
fractured English", Said thus in fact defends the very class system that is ruthlessly crushing the people
of Palestine and echoes the class violence of imperialism in a cultural idiom. In doing so he does what he
has always done: deploy "culture" to cover over the contradictions of class.

The colonialism that created presence was structured by capitalism

Maurice Smiley 9, "Abstract: Root Cause of Colonialism", December 11,
mauricesmiley.blogspot.com/2009/12/there-is-little-doubt-that-colonialism.html

There is little doubt that colonialism has changed the face of the planet and continues to affect
postcolonial societies in a number of different ways. Fusing of cultures, religion, economics, and
language are but of few of the results of postcolonialism. Some societies have adapted markedly well
while others have fallen into abject poverty, civil war, social unrest, and in extreme cases extinction.
Regardless of the outcomes, this essay examines the texts we have read throughout the semester in an
effort to determine the underlying reason ,or the "why", for colonialism in the first place . The answer
is undoubtedly capitalism .¶ In examining colonial Europe, the common thread found in examining the
question of why colonialism happened can be seen clearly in Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness",
Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart", and V.S. Naipaul's "The Mimic Men". These novels show how the
Europeans used various pretexts for rationalizing the colonization of other countries, in order to pave
the way for private enterprise to make money.¶ Looking into more recent history, Ha Jin's story, "After
Cowboy Chicken Came to Town" shows how America, a postcolonial society itself, uses capitalism as a
means of spreading culture and values to other countries. Future evidence of capitalism's role in
colonialism can be examined in the Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age". In "The Diamond Age", we
see a future "globalized" world that is controlled by tribes instead of countries. In examining the
relationship between the tribes and globalization, we see evidence that the most successful tribes are
really technology corporations who's citizens are members of the corporate culture. ¶ Pundits may argue
that there were other reasons for colonialism, such as religion , and that capitalism played a secondary
role. Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies", Diamond provides
evidence through historical facts that the driving force behind colonialism was completely based on
capitalism . Further evidence can be found in Juan Gonzalez's "Harvest Empire" where he explores the
history behind Spanish colonialism and provides compelling evidence that colonialism is rooted in
capitalism.

Their focus is misplaced – coloniality occurs between elites, not nations—at best, the
United States leads the interventionary phase of capital
Robinson 7 (Professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, William, 2007,
“Beyond the Theory of Imperialism: Global Capitalism and the Transnational State” Societies Without
Borders, 2 (2007) 5-26 p. 18-23, RSR)
There are vital functions that the national state performs for transnational capital, among them, sets of local economic policies aimed at
achieving macroeconomic equilibrium, the provision of property laws, infrastructure, and of course, social control and ideological reproduction.
However, national states are ill equipped to organize a supranational unification of macroeconomic
policies, create a unified field for transnational capital to operate, impose transnational trade regimes, supranational “transparency,” and so
forth. The construction of a supranational legal and regulator system for the global economy in recent
years has been the task of sets of transnational institutions whose policy prescriptions and actions have
been synchronized with those of neo-liberal national state that have been captured by local
transnationally-oriented forces. A transnational institutional structure has played an increasingly salient role in coordinating global
capitalism and imposing capitalist domination beyond national borders. Clearly the IMF, by imposing a structural adjustment program that
opens up a given country to the penetration of transnational capital, the subordination of local labor, and the extraction of wealth by
transnational capitalists, is operating as a state institution to facilitate the exploitation of local labor by global capital. “ New
imperialism”
dogma reduces these IMF practices to instruments of “US” imperialism. 30 Yet I know of no single IMF
structural adjustment program that creates conditions in the intervened country that favors “US” capital
in any special way, rather than opening up the intervened country, its labor and resources, to capitalists from any corner of the world. US
foreign policy is exercised behind the backs of the public by state managers as proximate policymakers and politicized corporate elites that
constitute the ruling class in the formal sense of the term. Nevertheless, state
policymaking is also a process in which
different factions and institutions that make up the state apparatus have influence over varied quotas of
decision-making at given moments. Tactical and strategic differences as well as personal and institutional rivalries are played out
at the level of proximate policymaking in disputes for control over policy. This diffusion of foreign policy making power within an elite and levels
of (relative) autonomy among proximate policymakers can make moments of transition and redefinition appear highly contradictory and can
confuse observers, especially when these observers that take public discourse at face value or assume that social actors are not inl uenced by
ideologies that may be in contradiction with interests and underlying intent. The Crisis of Global Capitalism and the US State “US”
imperialism refers to the use by transnational elites of the US state apparatus to continue to attempt to
expand, defend and stabilize the global capitalist system. We face an empire of global capital, as I have argued elsewhere,
31 headquartered, for evident historical reasons, in Washington. The questions for global elites are: In what ways, under what particular
conditions, arrangements, and strategies should US state power be wielded? How can particular sets of US state managers be responsive and
held accountable to global elites who are fractious in their actions, dispersed around the world, and operating through numerous supranational
institutional settings, each with distinct histories and particular trajectories? We
are witness to new forms of global capitalist
domination, whereby intervention is intended to create conditions favorable to the penetration of
transnational capital and the renewed integration of the intervened region into the global system . US
intervention facilitates a shift in power from locally and regionally-oriented elites to new groups more
favorable to the transnational project. The result of US military conquest is not the creation of exclusive
zones for “US” exploitation, as was the result of the Spanish conquest of Latin America, the British of South Africa and India, the
Dutch of Indonesia, and so forth, in earlier moments of the world capitalist system. The enhanced class power of capital brought about by these
changes is felt around the world. We see not a reenactment of this old imperialism but the colonization and recolonization of the vanquished
for the new global capitalism and its agents. The underlying class relation between the TCC and the US national state needs to be understood in
these terms. In sum, the US state has attempted to play a leadership role on behalf of transnational capitalist
interests. That it is increasingly unable to do so points not to heightened national rivalry but to the impossibility of the task at hand given a
spiraling crisis of global capitalism. This crisis involves three interrelated dimensions. First is a crisis of social polarization. The system cannot
meet the needs of a majority of humanity, or even assure minimal social reproduction. Second is a structural crisis of overaccumulation. The
system cannot expand because the marginalization of a significant portion of humanity from direct productive participation, the downward
pressure on wages and popular consumption worldwide, and the polarization of income, has reduced the ability of the world market to absorb
world output. The problem of surplus absorption makes state-driven military spending and the growth of military-industrial complexes an
outlet for surplus and gives the current global order a built-in war drive. Third is a crisis of legitimacy and authority. The legitimacy of the
system has increasingly been called into question by millions, perhaps even billions, of people around the world, and is facing expanded
counter-hegemonic challenges. This multidimensional crisis of global capitalism has generated intense discrepancies and disarray within the
globalist ruling bloc. The opposition of France, Germany and other countries to the Iraq invasion indicated sharp tactical and strategic
differences over how to respond to crisis, shore up the system, and keep it expanding .
The political coherence of ruling groups
always frays when faced with structural and/or legitimacy crises as different groups push distinct
strategies and tactics or turn to the more immediate pursuit of sectoral interests . Faced with the increasingly dim
prospects of constructing a viable transnational hegemony, in the Gramscian sense of a stable system of consensual domination, the
transnational bourgeoisie has not collapsed back into the nation-state . Global elites have, instead, mustered up
fragmented and at times incoherent responses involving heightened military coercion, the search for a post-Washington consensus, and
acrimonious internal disputes. The more politically astute among global elites have clamored in recent years to promote a “post-Washington
consensus” project of reform – a so-called “globalization with a human face” – in the interests of saving the system itself. 32 But there were
other from within and outside of the bloc that called for more radical responses. Neo-liberalism
“peacefully” forced open new
areas for global capital in the 1980s and the 1990s. This was often accomplished through economic
coercion alone, made possible by the structural power of the global economy over individual countries.
But this structural power became less effective in the face of the three-pronged crisis mentioned above. Opportunities for both intensive and
extensive expansion have been drying up as privatizations ran their course, the “socialist” countries became integrated, the consumption of
high-income sectors worldwide reached ceilings, spending through private credit expansion could not be sustained, and so on. The space for
“peaceful” expansion, both intensive and extensive, has become ever more restricted. Military aggression becomes an instrument for prying
open new sectors and regions, for the forcible restructuring of space in order to further accumulation. The
train of neo-liberalism
became latched on to military intervention and the threat of coercive sanctions as a locomotive for
pulling the moribund Washington consensus forward . The “war on terrorism” provides a seemingly endless military outlet
for surplus capital, generates a colossal deficit that justifies the ever-deeper dismantling of the Keynesian welfare state and locks neo-liberal
austerity in place, and legitimates the creation of a police state to repress political dissent in the name of security. In the post 9/11 period the
military dimension appears to exercise an over-determining influence in the reconfiguration of global politics. The Bush White House militarized
social and economic contradictions, launching a permanent war mobilization to try to stabilize the system through direct coercion. Is this
evidence for a new US bid for empire? We need to move beyond a conjunctural focus on the Bush regime to grasp the current moment and the
US role in it. In this sense, interventionism
and militarized globalization is less a campaign for US hegemony
than a contradictory political response to the crisis of global capitalism – to economic stagnation,
legitimation problems, and the rise of counterhegemonic forces . Despite the rhetoric of neo-liberalism, the US state is
undertaking an almost unprecedented role in creating profit-making opportunities for transnational capital and pushing forward an
accumulation process that let to its own devices (the “free market”) would likely ground to a halt. A Pentagon budget of nearly $500 billion in
2003, an invasion and occupation of Iraq with a price tag of over $300 billion by 2006 and a proposed multi billion dollar space program that
would rest on a marriage of NASA, the military, and an array of private corporate interests must be seen in this light. Some have seen the $300
billion invested by the US state in the first three years of its Iraq invasion and occupation as evidence that the US intervention benei ts “US
capital” to the detriment of other national – e.g., “EU” – capitals. However, Bechtel, the Carlyle Group, and Halliburton are themselves
transnational capital conglomerates. 33 It is true that military, oil, and engineering/construction companies, many of them headquartered in
the United States, have managed to secure their particular sectoral interests through brazen instrumentalization of the US state under the Bush
presidency. However, these companies are themselves transnational and their interests are those not of “US capital” in rivalry with other
countries but of particular transnational clusters in the global economy. The “creative destruction” of war (and natural and humanitarian
disasters) generates new cycles of accumulation through “reconstruction.” And the military-energy-engineering-construction complex
constitutes one of those sectors of global capital that most benefits from such “creative destruction.” Transnational capitalists are themselves
aware of the role of the US state in opening up new possibilities for unloading of surplus and created new investment opportunities. “We’re
looking for places to invest around the world,” explained one former executive of a Dutch-based oil exploration and engineering company, and
then “you know, along comes Iraq.” 34 The $300 billion invested by the US state in war and “reconstruction” in Iraq between 2003 and 2006
went to a vast array of investors and sub contractors that spanned the globe. 35 Kuwaiti Trading and Contracting, Alargan Trading of Kuwait,
Gulf Catering and Saudi Trading and Construction Company were just some of the Middle East-based companies that shared in the bonanza,
along with companies and investor groups as far away as South Africa, Bosnia, the Philippines, and India. The
picture that emerges is
one in which the US state mobilizes the resources to feed a vast transnational network of profit making
that passes through countless layers of outsourcing, subcontracting, alliances and collaborative
relations, benefiting transnationally-oriented capitalists from many parts of the globe. The US state is
the pivotal gear in a TNS machinery dedicated to reproducing global capitalism.

Capitalism causes inevitable crises, inequality, and dehumanization—the alternative is

a class-based critique of the system—pedagogical spaces are the crucial staging
ground for keeping socialism on the horizon
McLaren, Distinguished Fellow – Critical Studies @ Chapman U and UCLA urban schooling prof, and
Scatamburlo-D’Annibale, associate professor of Communication – U Windsor, ‘4 [2](Peter and Valerie,
“Class Dismissed? Historical materialism and the politics of ‘difference’,” Educational Philosophy and
Theory Vol. 36, Issue 2, p. 183-199)
For well over two decades we have witnessed the jubilant liberal and conservative pronouncements of the demise of socialism. Concomitantly,
history's presumed failure to defang existing capitalist relations has been read by many self-identified ‘radicals’ as
an advertisement for capitalism's inevitability. As a result, the chorus refrain ‘There Is No Alternative’, sung by
liberals and conservatives, has been buttressed by the symphony of post-Marxist voices recommending that we
give socialism a decent burial and move on. Within this context, to speak of the promise of Marx and socialism may appear
anachronistic, even naïve, 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 people—almost half of the
world's population—struggle
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 time—realities 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 today—people of all ‘racial classifications or identities, all genders and
sexual orientations’—the common frame of reference arcing across ‘difference’, the ‘concerns and aspirations that are
most widely shared are those that are rooted in the common experience of everyday life shaped and constrained by
political economy’ (Reed, 2000, p. xxvii). While post-Marxist advocates of the politics of ‘difference’ suggest that
such a stance is outdated, we would argue that the categories which they have employed to analyze ‘the social’
are now losing their usefulness, particularly in light of actual contemporary ‘social movements.’ All over the globe, there
are large anti-capitalist movements afoot. In February 2002, chants of ‘Another World Is Possible’ became the theme of protests in
Porto Allegre. It seems that those people struggling in the streets haven’t 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 doesn’t 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) doesn’t 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 silence—a 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 ‘globalization’s’ shiny
façade; 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.

Historical materialist understanding of the way that consciousness is shaped by social

reality is key to negate the ideology of ambivalence and contradiction embraced by
postmodernism. This is a prerequisite to transforming capitalist social relations and
solving the aff because the reality of class conflict is the methodological dynamo of
our times.
Gonzalez 2004 [Marcial, “Historical Materialism and Chicana/o Cultural Studies,” Science & Society
68.2]
I shall draw this essay to a close by proposing a historical materialist criticism for the study of Chicana/o literature. But to attempt
comprehensive description of historical materialism in these short pages would be futile. I shall therefore briefly discuss six issues re- lated to
historical materialism that will serve as a starting point for better understanding the method I am proposing.First , historical
materialism attempts to understand the dialecti- cal relation between the particularities of existence
and the larger social frameworks that give them meaning . R. Saldivar, for example, puts this dialectical
procedure in motion when he reads Chicana /o narratives not as the transparent replication of events,
but as texts that imagine the "ways in which historical men and women live out their lives as class
subjects," a project that involves "attaining a true knowledge of society as a whole" (R. Saldivar, 1990, 6). Dialectical criticism
enables a comprehension of "society as a whole" through the "abstraction from specific real conditions ,
followed by systematic analysis, and then by successive reapproximations to the real, all made necessary because everyday
experience catches only the delusive ap- pearance of things " (89). Second , as a dialectical system
historical materialism comes into conflict with postmodernist theory. As Steven Best and Douglas Kellner point out,
postmodernism not only promotes a skeptical view of his- tory and subjectivity, it "aggressively rejects
dialectics" (Best and Kellner, 1991, 222) . They offer a lucid analysis of the tension between dialectics and postmodernism, arguing that
dialectics "attempts to describe how concrete particulars are constituted by more general and abstract
social forces, undertaking an analysis of particulars to illuminate these broader social forces [but]
postmodern theory re- jects dialectics in principle . . . and thus is unable to conceptualize the dialectic of
totalization and fragmentation" (223). Deleuze aptly encapsulates the postmodernist attitude toward dialectics when he declares:
"What I detested more than anything else was Hegelianism and the Dialectic" (Deleuze, 1977, 112). Without an understanding of

the relation between universal processes and their local manifes- tations, postmodernism ends up
producing a fetish of social fragmen- tation by privileging concepts such as "schizophrenia" to
describe the ideal postmodern (non)-subject. Third , historical materialism affords avenues for
understanding the complex categories of identity based on race, ethnicity, sexuality and gender, not as
autonomous formations but as interconnected processes within the larger dynamics of social relations .
This is what Stuart Hall has in mind when he characterizes the category of race as "the modality in which
class is lived" (Hall, 1996, 55). Hall theo- rizes the thorny relation between these categories, recognizing the particularity and relative
autonomy of race without jettisoning the causal character of class relations. From a similar perspective, Teresa Ebert argues "for a revolutionary
understanding and engagement with historical materialism for feminism in postmodernity," and she does so "at a time when feminism, for the
most part, has lost the revo- lutionary knowledges of historical materialism so necessary to under- stand the exploitative relations of labor and
production and to trans- form them" (Ebert, 1996, xi). In adopting a theoretical model and argumentative approach similar to Ebert's, I
would characterize my own method as an engagement with historical materialism for U. S. ethnic
literary studies generally, and for Chicana/o literary studies in particular, and I propose this method at a
time when literary and cultural studies in race and ethnicity "for the most part, [have] lost the
revolutionary knowledges of historical materialism," succumbing instead to the epistemological and
political limitations of method- ologies emerging from what Best and Kellner call "the postmodern turn."
Fourth , the categories and concepts of historical materialism are not pre-established truths set in stone.
To argue that dialectical criti- cism represents an absolute truth would amount to a contradiction in
terms since such an argument would tend to reify the methodologi- cal approach. In a much cited
passage, Georg Lukács argues, "or- thodox Marxism . . . does not imply the uncritical acceptance of the
results of Marx's investigations. It is not the 'belief ' in this or that thesis, nor the exegesis of a 'sacred'
book. ... It refers exclusively to method" (Lukács, 1971, 1). Similarly, Peter Knapp and Alan Spector explain,
"dialectics is a way of looking at reality, not as a complex of ready-made 'things' but as a set of
processes. The dialectical approach examines the ways that everything changes . A dialectical approach asks . . .
How do [these changes] connect to the rest of the world? This concern with change and interrelation implies that dialectical analyses are
usually historical" (Knapp and Spector, 1991, 264). Ad- ditionally, Alfred Sohn-Rethel argues that historical materialism should not be
considered a "world view" or an empirical science about how the world operates; nor should it be assumed that historical ma- terialism
possesses a predetermined set of laws requiring only that an astute practitioner impose those laws from the outside on the object of study
Fifth , the goal of Marxism is not to correct faulty ideas but to negate them - to
(Sohn-Rethel, 1978, 189-204).
critique them, to transform them qualitatively. As Ebert argues, for instance, "ludic" postmodernism must be
"critiqued" not simply because its theories about society and culture are faulty (even if they are in fact faulty),
but because they function as ideol- ogy that correlates to real social contradictions . For a theory to be
faulty implies that it can be corrected. The Marxist critique of post- modernism does not serve as an
analytical corrective, but as an en- gagement that leads to a démystification of real contradictions . In a
similar vein, Sohn-Rethel explains that the superiority of historical materialism over other methods of
interpretation does not rest in the claim that it is capable of arriving at better or more correct analyses.
The difference between Marxism and other methods cannot be mea- sured on a quantitative scale ,
where the various methods measure up as more or less correct . Finally (in an effort to synthesize the five points just
outlined) , historical materialism should be considered a "methodological pos- tulate " (Sohn-Rethel, 1978, 189-204)
that makes truth-claims about social existence , but only after a thorough critique of the concepts and
ideas associated with that existence. As a "methodological pos- tulate," historical materialism stands
opposed to unmediated reflec- tion theory, which can be considered a pseudo-materialist approach
based on the premise that, because social existence determines con- sciousness, consciousness logically
must reflect social existence. His- torical materialism agrees that social existence determines conscious-
ness, but it holds that consciousness does not "reflect" social existence transparently . On the contrary,
consciousness necessarily mystifies the social world because it functions not independently from social
real- ity, as in unmediated reflection theory, but as an integral part of re- ality. In the same way that
Marx showed how "capital is not a thing, but a social relation established by the instrumentality of
things" (Marx, 1974, 766), Sohn-Rethel argues that the intellect is not "pure thought," but rather an
abstraction of universal social relations, es- tablished concretely by the instrumentality of cognition.
Further, the abstractions that take place in both commodity exchange and cogni- tion operate, at one
level, to conceal social relations and, on another, as a "social synthesis" to maintain cohesion and
stability within the mode of production out of which they emerge. Thus, for Sohn-Rethel, although
existence produces "necessarily false consciousness," it is only through a critical study of this con-
sciousness that the historical materialist arrives at a greater knowl- edge of social existence , as if
attempting to solve a mystery entirely with clues that are intentionally designed to lead the investigator
down a false trail. But even if the clues are false, the truth may be approxi- mated from the formal logic and content of the distortions
them- selves. "Roughly," Sohn-Rethel argues, "the Marxist approach to his- torical reality can be understood as answering the question: what
must the existential reality of society be like to necessitate such and such a form of consciousness?" (197). He adds: Thus,
methodologically the subject-matter of Marx's critique is not the his- torical reality of this or that form of
social existence but, in the first instance, a particular mode of consciousness - namely, that of political
economy; it is thoughts, not things. It is the concepts of "value," "capital," "profit," "rent," etc., as he
found them defined and discussed in the writings of economists. He does not deal directly with realities,
does not elaborate concepts of his own which, as "correct" ones, he would oppose to the "false" ones of
the economists. His approach is characteristically different . It is an approach to reality, but by way of the "critique" of the
historically given consciousness. (Sohn-Rethel, 1978, 195.) Following Sohn-Rethel's argument, a historical materialist critique of postmodernism
and its influences on Chicana/o cultural studies should not be understood as a critique of social existence as such - even if the goal is to arrive at
a better understanding of social exis- tence in order to develop more effective strategies for changing so- ciety. A Marxist critique of
postmodernism should be viewed rather as a critique of ideas and theories that emerge from a particular his- torical reality, which we can now
hypothesize as a politically unstable, economically chaotic, contradiction-ridden capitalist mode of pro- duction that must increasingly give the
appearance of being stable in order to maintain cohesion - or, when the deception of instabil- ity no longer remains feasible, must make the
instability and chaos appear natural and perhaps even progressive, as in the case of post- modernist thought. Historical
materialism,
then, does not begin with the premise that it possesses a more truthful account of social reality than
does postmodernism; it claims only that the critique of the lat- ter by the former initiates a dialectical
process through which social contradictions and other previously concealed truths about social
existence become evident. In this essay I have argued that Chicana/o writers and critics hold much
interest in explaining ideological ambivalence in both creative and critical works. Postmodernism,
however, hinders rather than helps in these efforts because it celebrates the appearances and ef- fects
of fragmentation, rather than engaging in a critique of its causes - or rather than theorizing a viable
response to alienation. From a Marxist perspective, ideological ambivalence reflects the symptoms of
reification resulting from the individualizing and divisive needs of a capitalist mode of production . Thus,
the ambivalence of Chicana/o literature represents real social contradictions, mediated in the com- plex
nexus of author, reader, text and history . From this perspective, postmodernism's celebration of
fragmentation coupled with its vicious attacks against the concept of totality reproduces its own reified
con- dition. Despite this apparent paradox, Chicana/o cultural criticism nonetheless has turned in the
direction of the postmodern. Post- modernist theory might be considered one of the most popular
forms of "ideology critique" on the cultural studies market today, but to my mind postmodernism has
become the ideology, not the critique .
 3
Interpretation: The kritik needs a written text to their advocacy.
Reasons to Prefer:
Predictability: pinning the aff to a stable advocacy is key to predictable debate. No
ground is usable without predictability.
Moving Target: Aff needs an alt text so they can’t change their alt to avoid arguments.
The impact is time and strategy skew, which alter the nature of the entire debate.
Justifies new args.
Voter for fairness and education
 4
There is no excuse for the use of gendered language to refer to us as “you guys”. We
are not guys and referring to us as such denies my position in the partnership as one
that is subsumed by gender position. This has implications that come prior to the
particular consequences of the specific advocacies of either team. When you look
around at debate tournaments and see that there are often more male debaters in
view, or why there are fewer womyn in out rounds at national tournaments or why
more broadly aggressive womyn speakers are often labeled as being “bitchy” where
their male partner can simply be assertive.. These things are not based outside of
language and taking a stance against this language is important…

When they essentializes my position with Abigail they are practicing the exact
epistemological violence they attempts to criticszie – their method CLEARLY doesn’t
matter if they doesn’t practice it.

Debate is an activity that makes the presumption– you called me a guy – you practice
the same EXCLUSIVE STRATEGIES THAT YOU CRITICISZE
Alcoff 92 [Linda, Prof of Philosophy, “The Problem of Speaking for Others,” Cultural Critique 20, p.12-3]
A plethora of sources have argued in this century that the neutrality of the theorizer can no longer, can never again, be sustained, even for a moment. Critical theory,
discourses of em- powerment, psychoanalytic theory, post-structuralism, feminist, and anticolonialist theories have all concurred on this point. Who is speaking to
whom turns out to be as important for meaning and truth as what is said; in fact what is said turns out to change ac- cording to who is speaking and who is listening.
Following Foucault, I will call these "rituals
of speaking" to identify discursive practices of speaking or writing that
involve not only the text or utterance but their position within a social space including the persons
involved in, acting upon, and/or affected by the words. Two elements within these rituals will deserve our
attention: the positionality or location of the speaker and the discursive context. We can take the latter to refer to the
connections and relations of involvement between the utterance/text and other utterances and texts as well as the material practices in the relevant environment, which
should not be confused with an environment spatially adja- cent to the particular discursive event. Rituals
of speaking are constitutive of
meaning, the meaning of the words spoken as well as the meaning of the event. This claim requires us to
shift the ontology of meaning from its location in a text or utterance to a larger space, a space that
includes the text or utterance but that also includes the discursive context . And an important implication of this claim is that
meaning must be understood as plural and shifting, since a single text can en-gender diverse meanings given diverse contexts.
Not only what is emphasized, noticed, and how it is understood will be affected by the location of both
speaker and hearer, but the truth-value or epistemic status will also be affected. For example, in many
situations when a woman speaks the presumption is against her ; when a man speaks he is usually taken
seriously (unless he talks "the dumb way," as Andy Warhol accused Bruce Springsteen of doing, or, in other words, if he is from an oppressed group). When
writers from oppressed races and na- tionalities have insisted that all writing is political the claim has been dismissed as foolish, or grounded in ressentiment, or it is
simply ignored; when prestigious European philosophers say that all writing is political it is taken up as a new and original "truth" (Judith Wilson calls this "the
intellectual equivalent of the 'cover record.'")9 The
rituals of speaking that involve the location of speaker and listeners
affect whether a claim is taken as a true, well-reasoned, compelling argument , or a significant idea. Thus,
how what is said gets heard depends on who says it, and who says it will affect the style and language in
which it is stated, which will in turn affect its perceived significance (for specific hearers). The discursive style in which some
European post-structuralists have made the claim that all writing is political marks it as important and likely to be true for a certain (powerful) milieu; whereas the
style in which African-American writers made the same claim marked their speech as dismissable in the eyes of the same milieu.
Changing language is a pre-requisite to shaping gender equality—phrases like “you
guys” reinforce patriarchal system.

Kleinman 07 (Sherryl Kleinman, Professor in Department of Sociology at the University of North

Carolina, “Why Sexist Language Matters.” March 12, 2007. http://www.alternet.org/story/48856/.)

Gendered words and phrases like "you guys" may seem small compared to issues like violence against wo men, but
changing our language is an easy way to begin overcoming gender inequality. For years I've been up inches of space
in the newsletter of a rape crisis center? Because male-based generics are another indicator -- and more importantly,
a reinforcer -- of a system in which "man" in the abstract and men in the flesh are privileged over women. Some say
that language merely reflects reality and so we should ignore our words and work on changing the unequal gender
arrangements that are reflected in our language. Well, yes, in part. Link—noun, pronoun.

Your ballot functions within the social order of debate pedagogy and should not
endorse an advocacy that is presented with gendered language- Your ballot sends a
message- they are here to win, like everyone else- debates are often used, and even
privileged- by the inclusion of gendered language- your ballot is important not only for
the consequences of that language, but to also send a message.
 case
Specifically targeted demands against institutions have been empirically successful.
Even though some native successes have been reversed, every victory has been
consistent, and only the aff’s politics can entrench changes that allow for native
survival in the present
NoiseCat 16 (Julian Brave NoiseCat is an enrolled member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq'escen in British
Columbia and a graduate of Columbia University and the University of Oxford. “The Indigenous
Revolution.” Jacobin. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/11/standing-rock-dakota-access-pipeline-
obama/ JM
Many Americans, Canadians, Australians, and New Zealanders believe that indigenous people are long gone and defeated. Inheritors of the
imperial myth of “Manifest Destiny,” they presume the colonizers’ victory was inevitable and even predetermined. This racist myth has led
empires and states to underestimate indigenous power. Global histories of indigenous resistance, survival, and resurgence tell another story.
On these Oceti Sakowin plains in 1876, a cocksure General Custer rushed into the Battle of the Little Bighorn only to be soundly defeated by
allied Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho forces. Dalrymple appears poised to repeat Custer’s mistake. Countless indigenous communities, nations,
and confederacies from the Americas to Australasia, and South Africa to Siberia, including Aboriginal Australians, Apache, Arapaho, Cherokee,
Cheyenne, Chukchi, Comanche, Cree, Creek, Diné, Hawaiian, Haudenosaunee, Kiowa, Maori, Modoc, Nez Perce, Pueblo, Salish, Sauk, Seminole,
Shawnee, Tasmans, Tlingit, Ute, Xhosa, Yakima, Zulu, and others have resisted imperial powers and industrial states and prevailed. Before
defeating Custer, the Oceti Sakowin had a long history of settler handling. In 1862, the Dakota pushed thousands of settlers off the Minnesota
frontier. Six years later, the Lakota defeated the United States Army in Red Cloud’s War. Retribution followed many indigenous victories. In
California, entire communities were hunted like animals. After taking dozens of Dakota men as prisoners of war following the uprising of 1862,
Abraham Lincoln signed an order to execute thirty-eight of them — the largest mass execution in American history. Later in 1890, the United
States Army gunned down three hundred Lakota at Wounded Knee. This history continues to devastate. Indigenous people remain the poorest
of the poor and the most likely to be killed by law enforcement. Four of the fifteen most impoverished counties in the United States include
Lakota reservations in South Dakota. The two poorest, Oglala Lakota and Todd County, lie entirely within the Pine Ridge and Rosebud
reservations, where half of all residents live in poverty. In Ziebach County, which includes parts of the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River
reservations, 45 percent of the population lives at or below the poverty line. Elsewhere in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New
Zealand, indigenous people are among the poorest, most oppressed, and least visible. They are overrepresented in prisons and
these
underrepresented in universities. Their economic realities are bleak. Their pain is intergenerational. In short, colonialism endures. Yet
same communities are uniquely positioned to resist unjust systems and force them to retreat . We must hold
these two seemingly contradictory realities of devastation and resilience in our minds at the same time. The
Fourth World lives in devastation. The Fourth World is unconquered and on the rise. Since the 1970s,
indigenous people in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have danced impressive victories. They have
compelled states to forego assimilationist policies like the involuntary removal of indigenous children to
abusive residential schools and the relocation of indigenous workers to cities. Overtly coercive policies have
been slowly and steadily replaced with policies that recognize indigenous rights to land, jurisdiction,
and sovereignty. Gains are limited, but they are still gains. At certain times over the past thirty years, indigenous
claims have prevented corporations from exploiting natural resources. In New Zealand in the 1980s, Maori claims
under the Treaty of Waitangi stopped a state drive to privatize fisheries and hydroelectric power. In Canada and Australia, from the 1990s to
the present, aboriginal claims have increased risk for prospective investors in extractive industries. But the dance with the state can be perilous.
In recent decades, some indigenous groups mistook neoliberals who denounced “big government” for allies. They accepted land claims
settlements, treaty agreements, and business deals that enabled states to slash social services for the most vulnerable while restructuring
indigenous communities as junior corporate partners in the global economy. As Trump prepares to take power in the US and
Brexit changes the economic calculus in Britain and across the world, it is clear that the dance with the state is entering a
new age. The New Colonialism The new age has precedents. Any Howard Zinn reader knows that the United States is built on stolen land
with stolen labor. However, this is an observation too imprecise to help us understand and predict the trajectory of a global political economy
steered and shaped by the likes of Trump and Nigel Farage. If you squint hard enough, Jack Dalrymple might look like a young George Custer,
but that does not make him so. To
prevail, indigenous people and the Left must fully understand the precise
ways that emerging systems will dispossess indigenous communities . In the nineteenth century, the United States
Army incarcerated indigenous people on reservations, claimed land for homesteaders, protected prospectors, and cleared the way for railroad
barons. In the 1960s, a different set of historical, political, and economic forces erected the Lake Oahe Dam on the Missouri River, flooding two
hundred thousand acres of the Standing Rock reservation to provide power to suburban homeowners. Today , the drive for independence from
OPEC sees a solution in hydraulic fracturing technology.
North American oil fields and infrastructure are funded by a
financial system that encourages speculation, drives massive inequality, and fails to account for costs
associated with human and environmental risks — passing these very real risks and consequences on to
communities, workers, and indigenous nations. Inherently unaccountable capitalists are paid big money for being even more
unaccountable, and indigenous dispossession continues on new frontiers. Preliminary post-election forecasts indicate that Trump’s victory and
Brexit will redirect capital back toward the American West and the British Commonwealth. In particular, Trump — a DAPL investor
himself — will expedite completion of DAPL and similar projects . He will push to reopen and complete the Keystone XL
Pipeline. If he keeps his campaign promises, he will support infrastructure projects and extractive industries, including coal and fracking, in
indigenous homelands across the American hinterlands. At the same time, a conservative Supreme Court, an Interior Department
led by Sarah Palin or oil baron Lucas Forrest, and a Justice Department led by Jeff Sessions means limited but hard-won
Native rights
will be rolled back. If this gang of reactionary appointees can’t figure out how to dismantle complex legal precedents, they can just cut
funding to essential services like housing, schools, and health care that are already woefully underfunded, putting tribes in a stranglehold of
austerity. Native resistance will be policed by Orwellian surveillance systems finely tuned by the Obama administration. Militarized law
enforcement will find reinforcements in the booming private security and prison industries. Surveillance, state law enforcement, and private
security will drive mass arrests, as we’re seeing at Standing Rock. Law enforcement will have more power than ever to quash protesters and
silence dissent. In the former British Wests of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, where the right-wing populist revolution has yet to take hold
in the same way, suppression of indigenous resistance may be less visibly coercive — perhaps with the exception of skyrocketing policing,
incarceration, and deaths-in-custody of indigenous people, particularly Aboriginal Australians (the “most imprisoned people in the world”).
Politicians in the Commonwealth will look to roll back or restructure indigenous rights won over the last three decades in ways that are
favorable to capital. Governments, like Justin Trudeau’s Liberals in Canada, are already abandoning campaign promises to indigenous people,
opting instead to grab land and resources (as seen in the ham-fisted effort to force through the Site C Dam against indigenous opposition).
Trudeau’s minister of natural resources has already stated that Canada will no longer ask First Nations for consent before going forward with
lucrative natural resource projects like Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain Expansion project and Enbridge’s Northern Gateway pipelines. In
Australia, the government is steamrolling the Wangan and Jagalingou peoples’ Native Title claims in order to move forward with the massive
Carmichael Coalmine in Queensland. With the Commonwealth clamoring to cash in on opportunities created by Brexit, new free trade deals
with the United Kingdom will be struck, resuscitating and rebuilding the capital networks of the former British Empire, previously weakened by
globalization and the European Single Market. The Tory dream of a revived Anglosphere, long derided as fanciful, nostalgic, and bad business by
Liberals, may even emerge as a legitimate principle and framework of international relations and trade. It will compete with increasingly
powerful Chinese and Indian capital throughout the Commonwealth, as already witnessed in the Canadian tar sands, Australian coalmines, and
New Zealand real estate and dairy. Combined with the rise of China and India, this will bring new waves of exploitive capital into indigenous
homelands, along with increased policing and the dismantling of indigenous rights. Renewed colonial and capitalist pressure on indigenous
people means that the Fourth World’s adversarial relationship with the state will become more central to the struggle to transform political and
economic systems for all. If the history of the indigenous dance with the state is any indication, the Fourth World will suffer tremendously while
at the same time standing athwart the forces of capitalism and exploitation. The Left must stand with the Fourth World in our collective
struggle. The Fourth World and a Fourth Way On November 14, the Army Corps of Engineers temporarily halted
DAPL’s progress, stating that “the history of the Great Sioux Nation’s dispossessions of lands” and the United States’ “government-to-
government” relationship with indigenous nations demanded that the route of the proposed pipeline be reassessed. The Army told Energy
Transfer Partners (ETP), the company building DAPL, that construction beneath the Missouri River required explicit approval, and asked the
Standing Rock Sioux to negotiate conditions for the pipeline to cross tribal territory. Faced with a momentary victory for Standing Rock, Kelcy
Warren, Dallas billionaire and CEO of ETP, denounced the decision as “motivated purely by politics at the expense of a company that has done
nothing but play by the rules.” Warren was right. Had
it not been for thousands of people mobilizing behind an
indigenous-led coalition, DAPL would have been business as usual . ETP would have desecrated the graves of
Standing Rock ancestors unimpeded. Workers, lured by relatively high wages, would have taken on toxic and insecure work. The tribe’s hunting
and fishing grounds would have been jeopardized, and if the pipeline leaked, Standing Rock and its downstream communities would have been
poisoned. Environmental degradation and runaway climate change would have pressed ahead unabated. Carbon dependency would have
become even more deeply engrained in our political economy. Eventually, ETP and their investors would have cashed out, and future
generations would have been robbed. And all of this still will happen if President Obama doesn’t heed the water protectors and instead sides
with ETP. ETP spent $1.2 million over the last five years paying politicians to legislate in its favor. Warren personally donated $103,000 to the
Trump campaign. But when
indigenous people organized, turning to direct action and the law to pressure
government systems, they wrested power from ETP’s hands. DAPL is just one chapter in
elected officials and
a much longer story of indigenous resistance to, and victories against, pipelines across North America. In 2015, the
Obama administration nixed the Keystone XL Pipeline, yielding to pressure from the Cowboy Indian Alliance. In Minnesota, Enbridge shelved
plans for the Sandpiper pipeline, after encountering tribal opposition. The Unist’ot’en camp in northern British Columbia has held out against
numerous proposed pipelines through their territory, building a space where indigenous sovereignty stands tall on lands defined by industry as
an “energy corridor.” The American and Canadian oil industries are more vulnerable than we realize . Fracked oil from
the Bakken and Tar Sands is expensive to extract and refine. Meanwhile, OPEC is pumping at breakneck speed, driving down global oil prices.
Oil infrastructure is costly, not only for indigenous people, workers, and the environment, but for investors too. Canadian oil producers have
sold crude at a loss. The North Dakota and Tar Sands oil booms have busted. Indigenous opposition to pipelines through their
territories has made investors uneasy. ETP was concerned that their $3.7 billion pipeline would be cancelled. Just this week, Warren
used another one of his companies, Sunoco, to buy ETP for $20 billion in order to cut his losses. The move will lower profits for shareholders of
ETP in order to protect profits for Energy Transfer Equities (ETE), the DAPL umbrella company in which Warren owns more than 10 percent of
shares. Simply put, in the face of massive opposition, the Dallas billionaire reshuffled his companies at shareholders’ expense in order to
safeguard and grow his own vast fortune. The show of force against indigenous protesters, however brutal, is an act of desperation to protect
his infinitely deep pockets. If DAPL is not moving oil by the New Year, shipping contractors can cancel their transportation agreements.
Warren’s time is running out. Standing Rock, on the other hand, is the future. Populism is killing the “Third Way” politics advocated by Bill
Clinton, Tony Blair, and their equivalents around the world. This is the Fourth Way. The Fourth Way will harness the power and strategic
location of indigenous people, exploiting pressure points beyond the workplace to oppose and transform unjust, unequal, and undemocratic
systems. Movements working to reshape infrastructure, environmental policy, financial systems,
policing, and work will be of particular importance to indigenous people. Fossil fuel divestment and the “Keep It in
the Ground” movement can weaken and even undermine companies seeking to exploit fossil fuels on indigenous lands. Regulations that
dismantle financial instruments and policies that profit from natural resource speculation could divert
and damage returns on capital flows. The abolition of mass incarceration would loosen the death grip of prisons and police on
indigenous communities. Unions can turn individual workers into collective forces of resistance, helping drive up costs for developers and
protect laborers from unsafe working conditions. Long-term efforts to reimagine work through full automation and a universal basic income
could prevent laborers from having to seek such dangerous work in the first place. As Standing Rock has shown, indigenous nations
that use their unique standing to advocate for viable alternatives to unjust systems will gain
supporters. Our traditional territories encompass the rivers, mountains, and forests that capital exploits with abandon. Our resistance — to
the pipelines, bulldozers, and mines that cut through our lands and communities — has greater potential than yet realized. Ours is a powerful
voice envisioning a more harmonious and sustainable relationship with the natural world rooted in the resurgence of indigenous sovereignty.
As long as indigenous people continue to make this argument, we are positioned to win policies, court
decisions, and international agreements that protect and enlarge our sovereignty and jurisdiction. As our
jurisdiction and sovereignty grow, we will have more power to stop, reroute, and transform carbon-based, capitalist, and colonial
infrastructure. When the Justice Department halted construction of DAPL in October, they also said they would begin looking into Free Prior
Informed Consent legislation. This is a minimal first step, and we must hold them to it. Longstanding
alliances with progressive
parties and politicians are key to our success. In the United States, Native people have worked with Democratic
elected officials like Bernie Sanders and Raúl Grijalva to advance bills like the Save Oak Flat Act, which aimed to
stop an international mining conglomerate from exploiting an Apache sacred site in Arizona . In Canada,
First Nations have supported the New Democratic Party. In New Zealand, the Maori Rātana religious and political movement has an alliance
with the Labour Party that stretches back to the 1930s. Some indigenous leaders, such as outspoken Aboriginal Australian leader Pat Dodson, a
Labour senator for Western Australia, have won prominent positions in these parties. This does not mean, of course, that we should pay
deference to elected officials. In 2014, Obama became one of the first sitting presidents to visit an Indian reservation when he travelled to
Standing Rock. His visit was historically symbolic and emotionally important, but if Obama fails to stop DAPL, indigenous people should
renounce him. Politicians are helpful when they change policies and outcomes. We cannot and should not settle for symbolic victories. If there
is to be an enduring indigenous-left coalition,
the Left must support indigenous demands for land, jurisdiction, and
sovereignty. At their core, these demands undermine the imperial cut-and-paste model of the nation-state, stretching from Hobbes to the
present, which insists that there is room for just one sovereign entity in the state apparatus. Thomas Piketty’s call for a global wealth tax implies
an international governance structure to levy such a tax. He pushes us to think beyond the state. Similarly, indigenous demands for lands,
jurisdiction, and sovereignty imply that we must think beneath it. As the Fourth World continues to push states to recognize our inherent,
constitutional, and treaty rights as sovereign nations, the Left cannot remain neutral. To remain neutral is to perpetuate a long history of
colonization. To remain neutral is to lose a valuable, organized, and powerful ally. Struggle Without End On November 15, more than 1,500
protesters gathered in Foley Square in Manhattan. With songs and chants of “Water is life,” we expressed our solidarity with Standing Rock,
and sent a strong message to Obama and the Army Corps of Engineers, whose offices lie just across the street: rescind DAPL. We were just a
fraction of the thousands who came together in cities across the country that day. Marching into the street, a few dozen of us locked arms, sat
down and stopped traffic in an act of civil disobedience. We refused to move. We became the bodies blocking the behemoth. Police corralled
us. An automated announcement warned us that we faced imminent arrest if we refused to move. The machine blared louder and louder: “you
are unlawfully in the roadway and blocking vehicular traffic . . .” We responded with even louder chants and songs to drown out the machine.
The officers tightened their ranks and arrested us one by one. In jail, I was surprised to learn that I was just one of two indigenous arrestees.
The radical potential of July’s canoe journey had spread farther and wider than anything we’d imagined just a few months earlier. We can still
stop the Dakota Access pipeline. The police may turn water cannons on us, assault and maim us, and lock us up, but we own the momentum.
And even if we fail to defeat this pipeline, we will have prevailed in many battles along the way, and we can still win the long war. As
we
seek a way forward amid an ascendant right, the Fourth World has opened up a new window of
political possibility. The Left must stand with them and start stitching their successful formula for resistance and transformation
together with movements for economic, racial, environmental, gender, and sexual justice into a winning coalition.

Their totalizing binary theorization of colonialism is descriptively false – AND applying

it as a reason to refuse policy advocacy reifies settler logics
--reification = conflating deliberately oversimplified theory with the incomprehensibly complex reality it
describes, an analytical error which, in a socially constructed system, produces that theory as reality
through circulating its representation

--also sometimes referred to as “bad faith” because if you believe something will never work, then you
won’t try, which is the only way almost never becomes never

Svirsky 16 (Marcelo Svirsky, senior lecturer, International Studies in the School of Humanities and
Social Inquiry, and Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts, University of Wollongong, Ph.D., M.A.
Political Science, University of Haifa, B.A. Physics, Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, “Resistance is
a structure not an event,” Settler Colonial Studies, 7(1), 2016, DOI 10.1080/2201473X.2016.1141462,
p.4-7)KMM
Wolfe’s position on the issue of resistance, I suspect, encompasses more preoccupations than how to respond to the white appropriation of indigenous discourses.
According to Wolfe, ‘Indigenous resistance has been a constant feature of the entire settler-colonial era’, and therefore, ‘in generating its own resistance, settler-
colonial power also contains it’.23 Wolfe
conceives resistance, it seems, in a Newtonian fashion, as a necessarily reactive
force that is always responding to the constraints of power and is thus quickly re-appropriated. In
adopting this conception, we risk conceiving no outside to settler colonial power. Thus, oppression and
domination in all their forms and shapes are given explanatory monopoly replicating their
omnipresence in the shaping and managing of life. Yet, importantly, since Wolfe does not place an
emphasis on the study of resistance, this position prompted a lively debate on the ways the strategies of
resistance and survival of those subjected to settler colonial domination should be investigated. The
implications this scholarly debate has for our understanding of reality in settler societies, and for
potentially transformative political work, can hardly be overstated. As Macoun and Strakosch note, the critique of
Wolfe’s paradigm centres on its ‘failure to take resistance seriously or to see subjects as sites of
freedom and innovation’.24 And as they add: ‘By emphasizing continuities in colonial relationships between
the past and the present, SCT [settler colonial theory] can depict colonization as structurally inevitable,
and can be deployed in ways that re-inscribe settler colonialism’.25 This line of critique is not new and in fact joins the
scholarship that preceded Wolfe’s publications. In this regard, Wolfe construed works such as Henry Reynolds’s The Other Side of the Frontier (1981) as his
theoretical-other, since, as Altenbernd and Young explain, Reynolds ‘decisively recast the Australian frontier as a site of settler conquest and indigenous resistance’,
and in so doing ‘transformed the content and conclusions of Australian frontier historiography by recuperating the suppressed history of the violence that
subtended settlement, and the indigenous agency expressed through various forms of resistance’.26 This critique is not unprecedented. Replying to Wolfe’s 1994
article, Francesca Merlan
stated that his position ‘seems to offer no prospect of a place and a future for
indigenous peoples ‘within the modern order’, except perhaps a completely oppositional one, defined
in terms of a binary logic of radical difference, Aborigine versus Other’, adding that in ‘centering the notion of a
continuous “logic” of settler-colonialism, and regarding this as a “structure not an event”, Wolfe
succumbs to the appealing closure of all structuralisms, and constitutes this logic as impervious to
agency and event’.27 Looking into the dimension of settler subjecthood, Elizabeth Povinelli claimed that identifying ‘one’s
procedure if not oneself as thoroughly other to an invasion logic, in no way comparable to or implicated
in that invasion’, troubles the identity binary Wolfe flagged as essential to his project .28 In a recent edited book Lisa
Ford and Tim Rowse bring together a collection of essays committed to analyses
centred on contingency and complexity rather
than on ‘notions that settler states were ever total institutions and that settler colonialism is a
structure bent inexorably on dispossession, subordination, erasure or extinction’ .29 The list does not end here. In the
last two years, Settler Colonial Studies has published two special issues dedicated to transformative political work. In 2013 Tate A. LeFevre edited a special issue
titled Difference, Representation, Resistance, highlighting – in LeFevre words – ‘a
peculiar paradox: the eliminatory logics of
settler colonialism are also generative. As the state settles, it produces the materials and possibilities
of its own unsettlement’.30 A second special issue, edited by myself, tackles Wolfe’s paradigm from another perspective, that of
‘collaborative struggles’ – those arrangements whereby indigenous agency lead settlers and
cooperatively find ways to transcend settler formations.31 These concerns in regards the role of resistance and of the anticolonial
struggle in settler colonial theory have a particular relevance for the study of Palestine, perhaps epitomised in Veracini’s poignant question, ‘what can settler
colonial studies offer to an interpretation of the conflict in Israel–Palestine?’32 Until recent years, analyses of Palestine have placed the focus majorly on the Zionist
structures of domination, a trend that is still been adopted by the younger generations of scholars.33 Yet, as Ilan Pappé recently explained, as useful as the settler-
colonial paradigm is, it is nonetheless insufficient to take account of settler constructions such as Israel-Palestine in a comprehensive fashion. For him, while the
paradigm ‘challenge effectively the official Israeli, and mainstream scholarly approach […] it is unsatisfactory [because it] applies historical case studies with a known
closure to an ongoing reality’.34 On the one hand, a rigid analysis of the history of the Zionist incursion since the late nineteenth century that excludes the study of
Palestinian and other forms of struggle and survival would severely distort our empirical understanding of indigenous and settler subjectivities. On the other hand, it
would be no less empirically erroneous, and also ethically obscene, to maintain that in Palestine the destructive logics of Zionist settlerism have surrendered to
more toned-down axioms. That neither of these understandings should subdue the other is a strategy in the present study. But the reason for bringing these two
perceptions together is motivated by a concern to recuperate not just a sense of urgency about the still oppositional and thus oppressive character of settler
realties, nor indigenous agency per se, but a sensibility towards political work that reorients settler colonial studies to better communicate with the specificities of
historical and ongoing anticolonial struggles. Structure, power, forces In what seems to be an attempt to soften Wolfe’s methodological position, Veracini explains
that if‘there is a plot in the “historiography of elimination” and more generally in settler-colonial studies
it is that while the structure attempts to eliminate Indigenous peoples it fails to do so’. The ‘structure
cannot be reduced to its intention’.35 That is to say, Wolfe’s logic of elimination should not be equated with elimination itself. As Veracini
explains: Far from equating settler colonialism with elimination, Wolfe’s ‘structure’ refers to a continuing relationship of inequality between Indigenous and settler
collectives. Beside ‘structure’ and ‘event’, it seems important to note that Wolfe refers to a logic of
elimination, not to elimination itself. After all, were Indigenous elimination to become an accomplished
and irretrievable fact, settler colonialism would lose its logic .36 Though the key for Wolfe is to shed light on the mechanisms of
elimination, Veracini takes Wolfe’s position that ‘we should not view the logic of elimination as solely a drive to

exterminate Native human beings’, and suggests that we should focus on what the structure actualising the
logic fails to accomplish.37 The difference between the two highlights the incompleteness of the settler
project. If settler colonialism is not a fait accompli but an incomplete project invested in a continuing
structuration of life actualising the logic of elimination , then we may expect the settler colonial
paradigm to take seriously phenomena of struggle, resistance and confrontation, and hence to align
itself with the idea of power not just as coercion or repression but as a complex multiplicity. This is simply
because the incompleteness of elimination must be explained, and it cannot be explained just in terms
of the oppressor’s self-error or strategic deferment . The methodological imperative that derives then,
is to trace the forces that cause the settler structure to fail and remain incomplete – forces that work
either by compelling retreat in specific policy areas, or because of the ineffectiveness of the settler
structure in territorialising its logic and imposing its discourse, codifications, and meanings in all areas of
life. As Macoun and Strakosch note, ‘[e]xposing the settler colonial project as fundamentally incomplete – and unable to be completed in the face of Indigenous
resistance – has the potential to be a profoundly liberating and destabilizing move’.38 This is because this move leads research to deal with liberatory forces. Some
Palestinian scholars have taken the analysis of the Israeli settler state in this direction. Recently, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian draws on Wolfe’s logic of elimination
but not without combining her analysis of surveillance and fear with an account of practices of resistance.39 Similarly, Mazin Qumsiyeh notes that the brutal
removal of villagers during Ottoman and later the British and, finally, Israeli rule over the past thirteen decades would have proceeded much faster and certainly
would have resulted in a far more homogeneous Jewish state had it not been for Palestinian resistance.40 Explaining
strategic and tactical
changes in the continuing implementation of elimination only by means of the subject’s determination
to eliminate appears as an act of theoretical cannibalism. The vicissitudes of elimination are the
vicissitudes of the struggle, of resistance; or , as Veracini recently put it: the ‘settler colonial present is also an
indigenous one’.41 Settler stability, in other words, needs to be explained not just by way of the discourse
of settler inscription but by taking seriously Veracini’s insistence that the settler colonial situation is
best described in terms of a ‘permanent movement’ .42 Movement here needs to be conceived as a
constantly changing composition of forces – those which seek to eliminate indigenous life together with
those that either cause some of these attempts to fail, or that institute forms of life contiguous to
settlerism – in both cases compelling settler colonialism to rework itself . The benefit of adopting the
perspective of a field of forces lies, in the words of James Williams, in its questioning of ‘the evolution of things in
order to sense how they have become what they are and how they may become something other ’. This
analytical sensibility, as he rightly adds, ‘sets things in movement above the secure foundation of an
unchanging given’, enabling a view of political life which emphasises the variations occurring within a
social order – though always in the making – claiming to be established.43 This logical development and contribution to
the settler colonial paradigm is inspired mainly by the works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. However, the objections to their works among some scholars of
settler colonialism, warrant a more extended response.

Reject their totalizing, all or nothing approach to politics---it locks in the status quo
through an apocalyptic fatalism regarding the prospects for tangible change---
accepting minor victories is necessary to catalyze total transformation
Jonathan Smucker 14, spent most of the past two decades organizing within grassroots social justice
movements and organizations in the United States, PhD candidate at the Department of Sociology at
University of California, Berkeley, “The danger of fetishizing revolution,”
wagingnonviolence.org/feature/danger-fetishizing-revolution/
What do contact with extraterrestrials, the return of Jesus Christ, apocalypse, and revolution all have in common? In a sense, they are all
imagined redemptions — epic reset buttons for humanity. Onto these we can pin our heartbreaks and frustrations with the world as it is, with
all its suffering, mire and messy details. Any of these redemptive apocalypses can serve as the X that solves the daunting problem of our sense
of impotency. This messianic X — this unknown and imaginary seismic intervention — might help us to hold onto a kind of hope despite
overwhelming evidence of a hopeless reality. Somehow, someday, something will occur that stops the madness, and we will be able to begin
anew.¶ We need hope — in life and also in political mobilization . Hope is an essential ingredient in scaling up collective
action beyond the limited pool of martyrs, saints and counter-cultural usual suspects. Organizing large-scale collective power requires
something of an art of raising popular hopes and expectations. A long-term vision of a radically transformed world can be an important
grounding for such hope. And isn’t such radical transformation precisely the idea of social and political revolution? Isn’t it a bit unfair to include
revolution as an item on the same list as the Biblical end of days? ¶ Perhaps it is a bit unfair. It depends on whether we mean revolution as
horizon or revolution as apocalypse. Do we imagine a revolutionary restructuring of power relations in society as
an all-or-nothing totalizing moment or as an aspirational horizon, something to always be moving
towards? If the former, then what incentive do we have to study the details of the terrain where we are
presently situated? Why would we bother to strategize about overcoming the particular obstacles that
block our way today, if we believe that the accumulation of all obstacles will ultimately add up to a
grand crisis that will somehow magically usher in a new era? Believing that things will “have to get worse before they get
better,” we may become disinterested in — perhaps even sabotaging of — efforts to improve real-life conditions in
the here and now. After all, why put a band-aid on a gaping wound? Why prolong the life of an
oppressive system? With such logic we can excuse ourselves from the trouble of getting to know our
political terrain. It is, after all, the very mess we hope to avoid.¶ If, on the other hand, we imagine revolutionary
change as a horizon toward which we orient ourselves, such a vision may be of use, so long as it grounds
us in a political struggle in the here and now.¶ Still, let us further interrogate our attachment to the word revolution — even
as a horizon. Many of my friends like to think of themselves and their efforts as revolutionary. I am tempted to fancy myself a revolutionary too
— it sounds sexy enough — but what does this label really mean today? In the present context in the United States, the words revolution and
revolutionary have been mostly emptied of their contents. Their meanings are more than slightly ambiguous. Proponents of revolution range
from radical Leftists to libertarians and members of the Tea Party. What
does advocating for revolution mean then? Is it not
merely a more extreme and totalizing way of advocating for “change”? The question begs itself: What
kind of change? And revolution for what?¶ Answering these questions will provide us with our political
content. Revolution is not itself the content , but (among) the means we might possibly use to deliver the content. If we are to
articulate a horizon to guide our day-to-day political struggle, shouldn’t that horizon be the content of a social vision, rather than scenes from
the battles we must fight along the way?¶ Even as a means, revolution is vague and less than instructive. Today in the context
of the U.S. Left, the
label revolutionary serves largely as a reference to inspirational historical moments — and contemporary
moments in other countries — and as
a signifier of belonging, or “getting it,” within radical subcultures, more
than it suggests an instructive path or framework for social, economic and political change in our
context. When we say “revolution” today — if we mean something beyond an empty signifier of subcultural belonging — we are
mostly, vaguely, referring to the overthrow of governments in specific historical circumstances. Social
justice-directed revolutions have overthrown monarchies, feudal systems and colonial governments, but the “revolutionary” forces that have
overthrown democratic elected governmentsin the past century — however much we may critique how democratic they actually are — have by
and large been right-wing reactionary forces, usually through military coups. ¶ On the other hand, one could tweak the definition of revolution
to make it fit the context of advanced capitalist democracies; one could argue that revolution is about overthrowing the current order.
Presently, we are subject to an oppressive capitalist order, and we are working to overthrow that regime. I am fine with the signifying label
revolutionary being attributed to me if it is with this intended meaning. But still, what is the point of the label? What is the value added? What
does it do for us, besides earning us cool pointsin our little “revolutionary” social clubs? What does it accomplish politically? ¶ What am I getting
at here? Why does this matter? It matters because, as an ambiguous signifier of belonging within political groups, the word revolutionary can
privilege certain tactics and approaches over others. As a signifying label, revolutionary is meant to distinguish a change agent within a broader
field of change agents — to marginally differentiate oneself and one’s group within a broader alignment of groups working for social justice-
directed change — perhaps even more than it is meant to distinguish us from all-out defenders of the status quo. As such, the posed opposite
of revolutionary is less the status quo or an elite power than it is a reform approach to change. In extreme form, this tendency lumps
“reformists” together with the status quo and its defenders into one big impenetrable monolith that we “revolutionaries” are unequivocally
against. It sets up a false dichotomy of revolution versus reform — a framework that may sometimes hold merit or useful warnings, but that
can be paralyzing without further contextualization, clarification and nuance.¶ Where revolution
serves as an ambiguous
signifier of belonging to radical subcultures , group members may be inclined to do things, to say things, even to wear things
that seem “revolutionary,” and to distance themselves from whatever reeks of “reformism,” often including the efforts
and organizations of key social blocs that any serious “revolutionary” project must ultimately include in
its political alignment. It is true that, in today’s landscape, such efforts and organizations tend to have
limited goals and to win compromised victories , if they win at all. Dismissing such reform efforts as a
general principle, however, does not somehow make one a revolutionary. It is, rather, a sign of purism,
fatalism and apocalyptic thinking — and often of an abstract “politics” that emerges from a
disconnected social position of relative privilege. This amounts to revolution as apocalypse; what is needed is a cataclysmic,
nevermind catastrophic, reset. Any improvement in the situations of real people is dismissed , perhaps even
denounced, as prolonging the life of “the system.”¶ Of course, not everyone who uses the word revolution is guilty of all or any
of the above. After all, it is mostly an empty signifier. Advertisers love to brand the shit they’re selling as “revolutionary” too. The point here is
that there can be harm in framing our social, economic and political change efforts in the United States today in a term whose applicability is
historically contingent — at least if we lack an analysis of this contingency. The word revolution conjures the idea of overthrowing a
government, and as such is descriptive of a particular model and moment of transformation that mostly applies to the radical overhaul of
particular kinds of governments in particular historical contexts, namely feudalism, monarchies, dictatorships and colonial governments. As
such, our attachment to the abstract idea of revolution might be something like holding a hammer and perceiving every problem one
encounters as a nail.¶ Moreover, even in historical revolutionary contexts, revolution has never been a panacea. Problems and injustices still
have to be struggled against. “The revolution” is a moment, certainly an important one, but in an ongoing political struggle with no end point.
Most of the moments in that struggle are far less spectacular than the moment of dramatic upheaval. In The Cultural Contradictions of
Capitalism, sociologist Daniel Bell describes how “the real problems arise the ‘day after the revolution,’ when the mundane world again
intrudes upon consciousness.” Bell argues that “Our fascination with the apocalypse blinds us to the mundane : the
relations of exchange, economic and social; the character of work and occupations; the nature of family life; and the traditional modes of
conduct which regulate everyday life.” Social
change is “much slower, and the processes more complex than the
dramaturgic mode of the apocalyptic vision , religious or revolutionary, would have us believe.Ӧ If we project a
totalizing imaginary-future moment onto our own situation, we may also fixate on present-day moments
that seem to carry the essence of our ideas about such an imagined “revolution.” We may elevate
ritualistic signifiers of revolutionary zeal above winning real -world victories and above the patient
construction of social bases of collective power that could win bigger, more systemic — we might even
say revolutionary — changes.¶ Revolution as apocalypse or as a totalizing moment is highly related to utopianism. The practical
implications of the two concepts are equivalent. With both orientations a post-revolutionary, utopian vision of the future can become the
distorted lens through which to view the messy present. Nothing
in present society, including stepping-stone victories,
can measure up to utopian standards. It is as if the revolutionary or utopian “dreamer” is afraid of
contaminating the purity of his or her vision with the grit of real life. In reality, the seeds of society’s “redemption” —
the fits and starts of social justice struggles — are always manifest in the fabric of what already exists in society. The job of effective change
agents is to identify and encourage these fits and starts; to awaken and empower the “better angels” that we find in our histories and our
contemporary cultures; to claim and contest both history and culture, rather than try to build from scratch in the ashes of an imaginary-future
apocalypse.¶ This is not at all to suggest that we give up on big structural changes — even including
ultimately ending capitalism. To the extent that “revolutionary” means “big structural changes” I am all
for being revolutionary. The problem here is not the radicalness of our end goal; the problem is all-or-
nothing apocalyptic thinking about political change in the meantime . If the structures of society were to
collapse tomorrow, why would society reconstruct itself in a way that substantially differs from its
present structure? A revolutionary social justice movement will not magically ascend in the wake of
catastrophe.¶ A movement gains strength by organizing over time, by showing more and more people that it can succeed. By
winning small victories, it begins to overcome popular resignation, awakening hope in people that it is
possible to fight for something and win — that collective action “gets the goods.” If a movement is incapable of
winning even small things, why should anyone believe it capable of winning a revolution — of accelerating
“from zero to sixty” in a mere moment? Most people are not going to join our movement because they want to
ride with us into the apocalypse; they join when they have enough reason to believe that the movement
can act effectively as a vehicle to bring about changes that matter to them . It’s on us to show that this is indeed
possible.