AT Capitalism K

2AC Marxism K – Core

Permutation – do both
[ ] Theory
If we win a theory of gratuitious violence they can’t go for this position – its
violence without use-value – it’s not premised upon utilitarian calculation like their
[impact card assumes] – libidinal desires for targeting black flesh are a necessary
and sufficient condition for violence – They can’t explain the prior difference that
exists between white and black subjects when they get ON the boat or why white
indentured servants were never thrown overboard.

[ ] Link Turn
The aff accelerates the collapse of cognitive capital in debate – if we win this, then
this position is a double turn with framework – Our new form of research that
programmatically disrupts and limits the workings of humanism, and role as non-
black debaters in opposition to the academy imports toxicity into deliberative
strategies that seek to maximize market based knowledge of criminal justice.

[ ] Link Defense
They have flattened violence by over-extending its signifier to the class realm – it
denies the singularity of anti-blackness that overcodes wealth distinctions – it’s why
Lebron, one of the wealthiest men in America, had his LA mansion vandalized with
the n-word – wealth and class are viscous, permeable signifiers that one can enter
and leave through material possession– blackness is STATIC and bears a
permanent marking for violence at the level of phenotype

[ ] Alternative Turn
They are an mode of being that seeks to create a resilient subject of class
consciousness – this attempts to bounce back from the trauma of capital and
reclaim the very means of production that condition dispossession – that is a notion
of agency that is parasitic upon blackness – a being that is neither subject nor
object in equations of commodity – blackness provides the very coherence of the
semantic field in itself which means the alternative only reshuffles violence into new
signifiers

[ ] Alternative Solvency Deficit

They cannot capture the research portion of the aff – one has to forefront a fidelity
to theories of enslavement that influence the way that we engage with the archive.
Their prescription to a political solution is impact turned by Wilderson’s explanation
that blackness must be theorized as a lens of analysis.
 2AC Marxism K -- Barber
Their grammar of class exploitation, and a communicative
seizing of Marxist paradigms, are based upon an anti-black
ruse of analogy – we control the root cause.
The grammar of class exploitation and alienation which presupposes a mode
of relation and being only possible through direct relations of force waged
against black flesh – locating capital as a matrix of domination commits a
ruse of analogy by highlighting the conflictual violence between human
subjects which crowds out the slave’s grammar of suffering, indexed at the
level of nonbeing

Barber 16 (Daniel Colucciello Barber, researcher at the Humboldt University of

Berlin, PhD from Duke University, 2016, “The Creation of Non-Being,” Rhizomes
Issue 29, footnotes 18 and 20 included in curly braces, modified) gz

This is to name the essential limit of Lazzarato's account as the failure to

[28]
analyze the ways in which the domination of capitalism is constituted by the
domination of anti-blackness . In making this claim, I am following Wilderson's argument that "the
privileged subject of Marxist discourse is a subaltern who is approached by
variable capital—a wage. In other words, Marxism assumes a subaltern structured by
capital, not by white supremacy" (Wilderson 2003: 225). The essential limit of Marxism, he
argues, is its theorization of capitalism in terms of "exploitation (rather than
accumulation and death)" (Wilderson 2003: 234). Marxism thus begins from and stays
within the being of whiteness , a being whose coherence is premised on the
denial of the fact that capital "was kick-started by approaching a particular body (a
Black body) with direct relations of force , not by approaching a White body with
variable capital" (Wilderson 2003: 230).

[29]The position of the worker, in virtue of its raced difference from the position of
the slave, asserts a capacity for analogical relation —even amidst exploitation—
with the exploiter . The exploited and the exploiter, despite their asymmetry,
share a being that is made through the denial of blackness , which is
positioned as the slave; the worker possesses an analogical relation to the
owner that the slave does not . To presume that the slave position can be
analogized with the worker position is thus to attribute the latter's analogical
capacity to the former, which is without analogy . It is to presume an analogy
between what is capable of being analogous with what is not: "the ruse of
analogy" (Wilderson 2010: 37).

[30] This means, as well, that there can be no question of an intersection between
separate but equal spheres of class and anti-black racism , much less of an
account that takes up anti-blackness as a means of proceeding toward a
supposedly essential antagonism of class. Against such accounts, Wilderson remarks
that, within them, "racism is read off the base, as it were, as being derivative of
political economy" (Wilderson 2003: 225). On the contrary, what is essential is anti-
black racism , or the incommensurability between non-being and being :
class division concerns relations between analogizable terms (owner and
worker) that, however conflictual or exploitative, presume a common being , a
being whose making—and being made coherent— is premised on (the denial of) the
real non-being of the slave .

[31] All this is to say that anti-black racial ontology is the condition of possibility
for the Marxist demand —central to Lazzarato's own version of autonomist
Marxism— for being free from exploitation . As Christina Sharpe remarks: " The
legal captivity of Africans and their descendants was central to the
codification of rights and freedoms for those legally constituted as white
and their legally white descendants . That is, freedoms for those people
constituted as white were and are produced through an other's body legally
and otherwise being made to wear unfreedom and to serve as a
placeholder for access to the freedoms that are denied the black subject "
(Sharpe 2010: 15). The being of freedom, or the articulation of a free being – that is, the
very link between being and freedom—is premised upon a denial of blackness,
or non-being . This is the case even (or especially) when freedom is expressed as a
possibility, for such possibility—pertaining only to that which has already emerged
as being— cannot articulate that which this emergence denies . As Saidiya V.
Hartman remarks, the "language of freedom no longer becomes that which rescues
the slave from his or her former condition, but the site of the re-elaboration of
that condition " (Hartman and Wilderson 2003: 185).

Freedom names the modulative, mutational possibilities of being(s) .

[32]
Marxist discourse, however innovative, addresses free beings, or the being of freedom . It
leaves unthought non-being , the reality of which is logically prior to all
being , and thus to all possibilities of being. It is for this reason that Lazzarato's account of
capitalism in terms of debt, while an extremely innovative form of contemporary Marxism, still fails
to articulate the essential antagonism of non-being .[17] When Lazzarato speaks of the
indebted man, of the "we" of debt inheritance, he is speaking of the position that Marxism ascribes to the worker—
Wilderson's
instead of a capital-work relation we have, in Lazzarato, a credit-debt relation.[18] {18. In fact,
analysis and refusal of Marxism's account of the worker holds just as much for
Lazzarato's account of the debtor . To see this, it is enough to cite an instance of Wilderson's
analysis, but in doing so to replace "civil" society with "debt" society, "hegemony" with "communicative control,"
"worker" with "debtor," and "wages" (or "waged") with "debts" (or "indebted"): " [Debt]
society is the
terrain where [communicative control] is produced, contested, mapped . And the
invitation to participate in [communicative control's] gestures of influence,
leadership, and consent is not extended to the Black subject . We live in the
world, but exist outside of [debt] society . This structurally impossible
position is a paradox because the Black subject, the slave, is vital to [debt]
society's political economy : s/he [they] kick-start s capital at its genesis and
rescues it from its over-accumulation crisis at its end— Black death is its
condition of possibility . [Debt] society's subaltern, the [debtor], is coded as
[indebted], and [debts] are White " (Wilderson 2003: 238).} Debt innovatively re-defines
the meaning of work, but it does not change the positionality of the worker ,
which remains as the position of the debtor.[19] His critique proceeds in virtue of a
link—foreclosed by debt—between being and freedom, without ever articulating that the
very possibility of this link is premised on the denial of non-being , on the
making of blackness as that which is without the possibility of being free .
Lazzarato thereby fails to address how the being of the worker, now the
indebted man, is rendered visible by standing out against the background
of (black) flesh .[20] {20. As Spillers writes: "before the 'body' there is the
'flesh, ' that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape
concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography . Even
though the European hegemonies stole bodies—some of them female—out of West African communities in concern
we regard this human and social irreparability as high
with the African 'middleman,'

crimes against the flesh , as the person of African females and African males registered the wounding.
If we think of the 'flesh' as a primary narrative, then we mean its seared, divided,
ripped-apartness, riveted to the ship's hole, fallen, or 'escaped' overboard " (Spillers
1987: 67).}
 2AC Aarons
Identifying Capital as the locus of modern violence only
coheres the existential commons within which non-black
laborers are granted a degree of social access which is bereft of
blackness – the slave is not defined by exploitation and
alienation but rather by accumulation and fungibility which
means Marxist emancipation is framed around a grammar of
suffering that crowds out one of black death
Aarons 16 (Kieran Aarons, PhD candidate in Philosophy at DePaul University, MA
in Theory and Criticism from the University of Western Ontario, 2-29-16, “No Selves
to Abolish: Afro-Pessimism, Anti-Politics, and the End of the World,”
http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/no-selves-to-abolish-afropessimism-
anti-politics-and-end-world, footnote 4 included in curly braces, modified) gz

From a practical or historical point of view, the afropessimist story reaches back to Assata
Shakur, to the Black Liberation Army, even all the way back to the great Nat
Turner, the Dismal Swamp, the Seminole Wars, and so on. But as an explicit body of
theoretical work, it begins really with Historian Orlando Patterson (despite his own liberal proclivities). Patterson
argued in the early 1980’s that, contrary to Marxist assumptions, what historically
defines the slave’s position in society is ultimately not the phenomenon of
forced labour . Although frequent, forced labour occurs only contingently or
incidentally , and not everywhere slaves are found. The slave relation, Patterson
is rather defined by a threefold condition: a) general dishonourment (or
argued,

social death ), b) natal alienation (i.e. the systematic rupture of familial and
genealogical continuities ), c) gratuitous or limitless violence . This threefold
combination gives rise to a being experientially and socially devoid of
relationality : the slave relation is a type of social relation whose product is a
relationless object . [3]

Hartman, following on the work of cultural theorist Hortense Spillers, added

In the late 1990s Saidiya
to Patterson’s criteria an ontological dimension : the slave, she argues, is one who
finds themselves positioned in their very existence, their being-as-such, as a
non-human – a captured, owned, and traded object for another . The
ontological abjection of slave existence is not primarily defined by alienation
and exploitation (a suffering due to the perceived loss of one’s humanity) but by
accumulation and fungibility : the condition of being owned and traded , of
having one’s being reduced to a being-for-the-captor . [4]

{[4] Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, (Oxford, 1997), 7, 21, 26: ‘[T]he
value of blackness
resided in its metaphorical aptitude , whether literally understood as the
fungibility of the commodity or understood as the imaginative surface upon
which the master and the nation came to understand themselves. […] [T]he
fungibility of the commodity makes the captive body an abstract and empty
vessel vulnerable to the projection of others’ feelings, ideas, desires, and
values ; and, as property, the dispossessed body of the enslaved is the surrogate
for the master's body since it guarantees his disembodied universality and
acts as the sign of his power and dominion .’}

Far from disappearing with the 13th amendment, or even in the post-civil rights
period, afropessimists argue that the formal traits of the slave relation were
reproduced and kept alive through the perpetuation of a form of social and civil
death that continues to materially and symbolically locate the Black body
‘outside Humanity’ .

At a symbolic level , these theorists argue that the racial abjection of the slave
was transferred to an ‘epidermalised’ racial construction of Blackness ,
which had the effect of inscribing the social death and relationless
objecthood at the level of appearance itself : the slave relation now marks itself
within the being-as-such of Blackness . Blacks today continue to be
constitutively denied symbolic membership within White civil society (both
culturally and politically), in such a way that no analogical bridge to White culture
exists through which Blacks could conceivably wage a ‘war of position’ or sue
for the sort of junior partner status otherwise accorded to White women, non-
Black people of colour, or ‘dutiful’ immigrants . The symbolic death or exclusion
of Blackness from Humanism means that it is not ‘Whiteness’ or White
supremacy, but ‘Humanity’ as an ontologically anti-Black structure as such,
which stands [remains] in antagonism with Black bodies , since Humanity’s self-
understanding of its own subjecthood as value is coherent only so long as it
is measured against the killable and warehousable objecthood of Black
flesh .
 2AC – Party Bad
Their movement erases the agency of black women
Lynne 18 (Dr. Denise Lynn is an Associate Professor of History at the University
of Southern Indiana. “The Communist Reimagining of Black History” 3/12/18
https://www.aaihs.org/the-communist-reimagining-of-black-history/)

The American Communist Party was aware that history was a powerful tool. It
frequently used history in its propaganda to attract new
members, particularly women and minorities. Party schools across the
country regularly held classes in labor, Black, and women’s
histories. Its newspapers and magazines featured stories on prominent historical figures. Though the
Party’s women’s paper, The Woman Worker–renamed The Woman Today-–regularly featured
stories about prominent women, it almost never discussed Black women

historical figures . After 1949, when Claudia Jones admonished the Party to end its “neglect” of
Black women and recognize their triple oppression, the Party began to spend more time fostering Black women’s

Because the
leadership. Black women’s history became a hallmark of communist publications.

Party desperately sought class unity, these articles did not

often refer to divisions between working-class white
people and minorities. Rebellion against authority, white benevolence, and cross-racial unity
were the most common themes in these articles. The Party’s goal with these histories was to solidify class
solidarity. In a December 1936 issue of The Woman Today, there was a small penciled image of Sojourner Truth
next to an article on Black women in politics. A brief description portrayed Truth as an “antislavery worker and
lecturer” who was renowned for “humor, sarcasm” and quick repartee that often got her out of “difficult situations”
accompanied this image.1 Until The Woman Today discontinued publishing in 1937, this was the only reference to
a Black historical figure. Though there were occasional references to Black women’s history in other communist
publications, Kate Weigand has argued that it only was after Claudia Jones’s article admonishing the Party for its

Articles on
neglect of Black women did the Party give Black women’s history serious treatment.

Black Women’s history began to appear in the Daily

Worker, New Masses, and Masses and Mainstream, and these
articles introduced Party members to Black historical figures. Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman were two figures

who were frequently featured. The articles about them never mentioned race ,
nor did they discuss white supremacy or slavery as an
institution. Instead women’s resistance to authority and Truth’s and Tubman’s work with like-minded
whites was the focus of these articles. The Party sought primarily to inspire and

inform, not to analyze whiteness or confront white

supremacy. Poor whites invested in white supremacy were absent, and this was in service to the Party’s
emphasis on cross-racial unity. In a May 1950 issue of The Worker, an article appeared on Harriet Tubman
authored by Louis Green. Green recounted Tubman’s escape to freedom and her work with the underground
railroad. He linked her to the long tradition of rebellious slaves including Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and Nat
Turner, and he claimed that it was the same spirit of rebellion that influenced Tubman. Tubman’s brothers
thwarted her first attempt to escape, according to Green. But thanks to a local white woman, Tubman was given
two addresses, directions to get to the first. When she arrived at the first home, a white couple helped to shelter
her until they took her to the next station. This benevolence Green claimed was one of many lessons Tubman
learned: some white people were “honest and sincere friends” of slaves.2 Though Green briefly mentioned the

danger of both Black and white people selling out a runaway slave, the Party tried to
convince its members that solidarity was the key to
emancipation . Thus white investment in slavery was not
referred to in Green’s article. Green lauded Tubman’s bravery in emancipating
hundreds of slaves in her many death-defying raids into the South, but it was her work with

whites that became his focus. Green highlighted Tubman’s

work promoting John Brown and his attack and her desire
to join him, though unplanned postponements foiled her work. He noted that Tubman began a “life-long”
friendship with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other abolitionists and suffragists, without any mention of their
notorious racism, including Stanton’s. Green also wrote about Tubman’s Combahee River expedition with her
abolitionist friend James Montgomery and the successful liberation of over 700 slaves. He included an anecdote
about a railroad conductor, whose race he did not mention, who tried forcibly to remove Tubman from a train and
how much that offended Tubman because she fought to end his degradation as much as her own. Green closed
with a note on the memorial to Tubman in Auburn, New York, and her legacy as an honored Black woman in

The Harriet Tubman story has all the trappings of

American history.

the white savior complex with benevolent white people

who helped bring Tubman to freedom and assisted her in resisting the slave
power. It is a narrative that ameliorates white guilt and

ignores the whiteness of the slave power. In 1952 The Worker ran a Black
history week story about Michigan abolitionists. A short biopic that featured Truth offered more insight into her life
than the 1936 article, but with one glaring absence. Like the Tubman article, there was no face, name, or race
associated with the evils of slavery; it was an evil that remained disembodied from white actors. The author
Charlotte Williams emphasized Truth’s dogged resistance to slavery and her forceful personality and presence that
made Truth the “miracle woman” of her day. Williams wrote about Truth’s speaking engagements in which she
“convinced” people that all men should be free. Williams mentioned an “Ohio man” who confronted Truth after a
speech and claimed that he did not think her speech would do any good and he would rather a flea bite him. She
responded that the “Lord willing” she would keep him scratching. Aside from that confrontation, Williams
mentioned no other resistance to the abolitionist’s message.3 Although debates about racial equality frequently
divided both abolitionists and suffragists, Truth operated seemingly without resistance from her fellow anti-slavery
and suffrage comrades. When legal slavery ceased to exist, and Truth realized “her work was done,” she retired.
Other articles on Black and white solidarity in the underground railroad, unified resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act,
and the friendship between Frederick Douglass and John Brown accompanied Williams’s article. These sanitized
histories did little to enlighten readers about Black history. There was no effort to analyze white supremacy, white
investment in whiteness, and the violent and concerted efforts made by rich and poor whites alike to uphold

What both narratives have in common is a

slavery and white supremacy.

problematic reflection on Black history. Williams and Green

had the same goal: to convince their readers that racial
solidarity was essential for class unity . Accomplishing this
falseness meant telling a tale of two women who were
heroes but ignoring that their resistance to white power
was what made them courageous. The nameless and
faceless slave institution in these stories does not reflect opposition to white power and
indeed does not demonstrate the investment of whites in slavery despite class status. Class unity

was meant to usurp any racial divisions, and the celebratory history that
appeared in the Party’s papers made that argument. The Party preached class unity and the sublimation of other
identities, even after Jones’s remarkable article. Throughout the post-emancipation era, an inability to reckon with
America’s racial past and recognize the appeal of whiteness over class solidarity for the white working-class has

the real lessons from these histories are

plagued the American Left. Perhaps

that until liberals and the Left genuinely confront their

“neglect” of Black women and race, real substantive
progress remains out of reach .
Party = Racism!
Ervin 16 Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin is an American writer, activist, and black
anarchist. He is a former member of the Black Panther Party and Concerned
Citizens for Justice, The Progressive Plantation: racism inside white radical social
change groups http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2017/01/04/book-review-
vulnerability-in-resistance-edited-by-judith-butler-zeynep-gambetti-and-leticia-
sabsay/

There is this illusion among white radicals and progressives generally that if they
declare themselves to be some sort of radical activist, this proves that they and
white
their movements cannot possibly be racist, but as we have discussed,
racism works inside all social movements, even those who
make the claim that they are opposed to or exist to fight
racism. Part of the problem is that they believe that if they do not
personally take any harmful action against a Black or non-
white person, and maybe even give them a few privileges
out of their bag of white privileges, that this proves that they must
be excused from the standard definitions of a racist. Only problem is that there are
not any standard definitions, no template, or other method to know if one is a racist
A white
other than what they do, and sometimes even that is not enough.
radical, like a white person generally have middle class
privileges in a white racist society, and it does not matter
about their personal beliefs. The white Left is brilliant at
self-deception, and pointing at the right-wing as the
racists we must crush is certainly one of them, but they also
neglect to point the finger at themselves. They are also a force helping
to oppress peoples of color, and keep them disempowered
for the white masters on high to continue their rule. Their control over
social change movements, their access to capital, the middle class lifestyle afforded
them, and the mystique and social power of whiteness puts them in a favored
position vis-a-vis poor people, who generally have nothing. So, just their very
existence as white people means they profit from oppression, even if they don't
White social
make racist pronouncements or join the KKK or Tea Party.
change movements have always had a love-hate
relationship with the rest of white society, but with the rise of the
non-profit organizattons in 1970’s, they became the keeper of the flame and the
agent of the liberal wing of capitalism. After laws on corporate giving to non-profit
social action movements were changed, a large wing of the primarily-white Left
changed their political orientation to pacifism and Left civil rights activism. This was
actually a subversion of existing social movements from the Left, to finish
destroying autonomous Black/POC movements, and allow these new nonprofit
radical social change movements to take their place. Of course. everyone realized
their role was to co-opt ,
they were selling out to capitalism and racism.
and make unnecessary, autonomous local political
movements and deliver their bones to the capitalist
bosses. In that sense they worked, hand-in-glove with government repression
programs COINTELPRO, who was doing the real killing and subversion of groupslike
the Black Panther Party.These white radical social justice groups
always have had access to more capital than any of the
autonomous movements of colur, and so they can use that
to challenge, co-opt and crush autonomous movements of
color. Internally, they carry out a purely white radical agenda, although they
sometimes hire POC “faces” to trick the public, even
communities of color that they are both tolerant, and are their anti-racist allies.
they make sure that white people really
Inside these groups,
control things, and that the POC are just window dressing. They mislead
would-be radical movements into the most tame, white
middle class activism possible. They do not actually oppose
government officials, except in the most limited “safe”,
fashion possible to obtain the passage of regulations or
passive reforms. They do not advocate or believe in revolutionary organizing,
and do not “break the law”, except in permitted instances using nonviolent protest
actions. They actually keep the capitalists in power. I am not the
first author to say this, Two books: “Pacifism as Pathology” by Ward Churchill and
“How Nonviolence Protects the Government” by Peter Gelderloos, very forcefully
made the case. I am saying it as a person of color who has
directly suffered at the hands of such groups, and know
first-hand that pacifism is a retrograde force , and will lead us to
defeatism ultimately.