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... ... @@ -1,39 +1,0 @@ 1 -I affirm and value morality because ought implies a moral obligation. 2 - 3 -Notions of normativity and laws constantly shift through time. All decisions are made with the knowledge that time may change them. Martin Hagglund writes. 4 -Martin Hagglund. The Necessity of Discrimination Disjoining Derrida and Levinas. Project Muse. Diacritics 34.1:40-71. 5 -“Once again, it is... has been prescribed.” 6 - 7 -Every ethical decision inevitably excludes other perspectives and is haunted by those “specters.” Hagglund 2 8 - 9 - “In effect, every attempt... thus not be a struggle for peace, but only for what I will call “lesser violence.” END QUOTE 10 - 11 -The deconstructive concept of ethics is the only way to recognize these excluded beings and create meaningful political or ethical change. It is precisely because justice can open to interpretation, that it can be changed to always be better. Hagglund 3 12 - 13 -“Hence, Derrida argues that the ... is more or less discriminating and open to new attacks or conflicting demands.” 14 - 15 -Thus, the standard is embracing transformative justice. 16 - 17 -I contend protecting a right to free speech allows for a justice to come. 18 - 19 -Asserting you are right without defending your opinion makes dialogue impossible. It creates an us-them dichotomy which makes practical solutions inaccessible. Foucault: Foucault, Michel French post-structuralist. “Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations.” In Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984. Ed. Paul Rabinow. 1 Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. The New Press. 1998. 20 - 21 -The polemicist, on ...surrenders or disappears. 22 - 23 -Empirically true- collegiate trends against microaggressions deter meaningful engagement and make violent outburst inevitable. Lukianoff and Haidt Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt (Greg Lukainoff is president and CEO of Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Jonathan Haidt is the Thomas Cooley professor of ethical leadership at NYU Stern. “The Coddling of the American Mind” The Atlantic. 9/15. 24 - 25 -Burns defines magnification ... people the benefit of the doubt? 26 - 27 -Only engaging in the public sphere allows for change- we need to learn the tools needed to engage others so we can manage to persuade them of our issues and opinions. If people don’t know why they’re problematic, then calling them problematic does nothing but emblazon them to do whatever they need. Foucault 2: : Foucault, Michel French post-structuralist. “Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations.” In Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984. Ed. Paul Rabinow. 1 Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. The New Press. 1998. 28 -It is a question, ... to form a community of action. 29 - 30 -Causes spillover to the real world- outside of college is the real world- we need skills to deal with other people- creating an isolated space does nothing. Trump election proves uniqueness for my side- if we don’t actually convince people our issues matter nothing will ever change for the better. Lukianoff and Haidt 2Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt (Greg Lukainoff is president and CEO of Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Jonathan Haidt is the Thomas Cooley professor of ethical leadership at NYU Stern. “The Coddling of the American Mind” The Atlantic. 9/15. 31 - 32 -Attempts to shield students ... diverse faculty—would further serve that goal. 33 - 34 -And we need to engage in institutions- withdrawal reifies oppression and causes no change- this means the 1AC is key. Mouffe Chantal, Professor of Political Theory at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster, “The Importance of Engaging the State,” What is Radical Politics Today? October 2009, pgs. 233-237 35 -In both Hardt and Negri, ...in my view, is how we should conceive the nature of radical politics. 36 - 37 -Empirically true- and controls the internal link to any oppression arguments- maintaining regimes of truth allows oppressive dictates to take control- only discourse allows individuals to challenge norms. Dungey 2k1 (Nicholas, Ph.D. from the University of California, lecturer in Political Science @ University of California, “(Re)Turning Derrida to Heidegger: Being-with-Others as Primordial Politics”, Polity, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Spring, 2001), pp. 455-477, Palgrave Macmillan Journals Stable, 38 - 39 -The desire for communal identity ... barbed wire, security zones, racial ghettos, and laws that are designed to separate and isolate. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,56 +1,0 @@ 1 -=1AC Deleuzian Graffiti= 2 - 3 - 4 -https://www.fastcocreate.com/1682808/coldplay-tastefully-rocks-comic-book-fans-faces-off-with-mylo-xyloto 5 -. 6 -We begin with a story set in a Mark Osborne's "Silencia", a world without color ruled by Major Minus, a cruel dictator who controls the population through media and propaganda. Using an army of grey "silencers", his is aim is to take color off the streets, contorting society into believing only evil can come through expression and difference. The story follows Mylo, a soldier in an army tasked to hunt and track down "sparkers", people who have the power to project light and embed the ashen streets with color and vibrance. He encounters Xyloto, the sparker most wanted by Major Minus and his dark regime. Deciding not to capture him out of curiosity, Mylo discovers his own sparker abilities and is compelled to leave the police force. Feeling alone for all of his life, he now finds solace through the imprinting of luminous graffiti on the walls otherwise destined to be colorless. Along with Xyloto he joins the Sparker movement and discovers meaning and value in fighting against an oppressive regime. With each stroke of light, he falls in love with himself and his creation. The graffiti becomes more than art, it represents peace; a chance at a new future. It represents freedom. The government struggles to hold back his masterpieces. 7 - 8 -Although his present is bleak, dead, and without hope, every luminous imprint brings new colors into the world. With each handstroke, a dream of revolution is painted. 9 - 10 - 11 -====With each passing day, the story of Mylo Xyloto seems less like a comic-book fiction and more and more like an ominous prophesy. Militarized police, profit warfare, government tracking and the silencing of whistleblowers constitute the lived experience of an incapacitated population. The Orwellian state depicted in the story bursts from the graphic novel and becomes a gloomy foreshadowing of a future reality. Havens 15' 12 -Ali Havens 13 -"17 Ways The Government Exceeds Orwell's Fears About Big Brother" December 31, 2015 14 -Ali Havens was weekly co-host for the ... private facilities as of December 2010 37: percent by which number of prisoners in private facilities increased between 2002 and 2009 217,690: Total federal inmate population as of May 2012, according to the Bureau of Prisons ~~read more~~ The government has forgotten this… Read more at http://libertyupward.com/ways-the-us-government-equals-or-exceeds-george-orwells-fears-about-big-brother/~~#7hvUoX4jsgmTc0dj.99==== 15 - 16 - 17 -====In this world of constant surveillance, we can't stay visibly active. The government is watching our every move, conceding the right to revolt to the technocratic elite marks the end of freedom, in this world, we need secret forms political agency that provide new subcultures with avenues of resistance 18 -**Tsianos explains Deleuze and Guattari ** 19 -Vassilis, teaches sociology at the University of Hamburg, Germany, Dimitris Papadopoulos teaches social theory at Cardiff University, Niamh Stephenson teaches social science at the University of New South Wales. "Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century" Pluto Press 20 -In this sense imperceptible ... becomes the vital force for imperceptible politics.==== 21 - 22 - 23 -====In educational spaces that allow for new, radical ideas and their contestation, resistance through key — the role of the judge is to be a critical intellectual and endorse the debater whose praxis best challenges power structures. 24 -Rabinow explains Foucault ==== 25 -Rabinow, Paul, "Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 202" University of Chicago Press Hence, we must return again, one last time, to the problem of the analyst. ... mechanisms are hidden. 26 - 27 -1) That outweighs- ethical subjects are constructed by structures of power that demarcate recognition. Without breaking down structures- obligations can't be imposed because they are based in normalized desires that have no basis. This means my framing is a pre-requisite to ethics. 28 - 29 - 30 -====As the world steps further toward authoritarian control, subaltern populations find themselves alone, demoralized and suffering. In the face of this misery, graffiti culture cultivates close bonds and connections forged through mutual suffering and love of art. These spaces become key survival strategies for minority voices. 31 -Halsey and Young 32 -Mark Halsey and Alison Young "'Our desires are ungovernable' Writing Graffiti in Urban Space" University of Melbourne, Australia Mark Halsey teaches in the Department of Criminology, University of Melbourne, and is an adjunct senior lecturer, School of Law, Flinders University of South Australia.. Mark is the author of Deleuze and Environmental Damage (published by Ashgate) and his work has appeared in such journals as Punishment and Society, British Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Alison Young teaches in the Department of Criminology, University of Melbourne. She is the author of Femininity in Dissent (1990), Imagining Crime (1996) and Judging the Image (2005) and has published numerous articles on the intersections of law, crime and culture. She is currently working on a book examining cinematic images of violence and justice. Her research on graffiti was funded by a Discovery Grant from the Australian Research Council. The research has more recently been extended to examine stencil artists and street artists, and graffiti writers' narratives of cultural belonging. 33 - 34 -Reasons for writing For ...security dogs and possible injury. 35 - 36 - 37 -====We affirm the political methodology of the Graffeteur 38 - 39 -Thus the Advocacy: Public Colleges and Universities in the United States ought not restrict constitutionally protected free speech performed through tagging spaces with graffiti. 40 - 41 -==== 42 - 43 - 44 -====This form of expression ceases to be physical, and begins to register on an spiritual plane. Mapping the way that the body, the paint, the surface and the atmosphere interact reveals unique characteristics about this new form of counter-cartography. Tagging is no longer a spray-paint adventure, it is an affective transformation that turns the body into a vessel of urban resistance and allows becoming. 45 -Halsey, Massumi and Young 46 -Mark Halsey and Alison Young "'Our desires are ungovernable' Writing Graffiti in Urban Space" University of Melbourne, Australia Mark Halsey teaches in the Department of Criminology, University of Melbourne, and is an adjunct senior lecturer, School of Law, Flinders University of South Australia.. Mark is the author of Deleuze and Environmental Damage (published by Ashgate) and his work has appeared in such journals as Punishment and Society, British Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Alison Young teaches in the Department of Criminology, University of Melbourne. She is the author of Femininity in Dissent (1990), Imagining Crime (1996) and Judging the Image (2005) and has published numerous articles on the intersections of law, crime and culture. She is currently working on a book examining cinematic images of violence and justice. Her research on graffiti was funded by a Discovery Grant from the Australian Research Council. The research has more recently been extended to examine stencil artists and street artists, and graffiti writers' narratives of cultural belonging. ==== 47 -Image, sign, affect: writing the corporeal Graffiti ... by writers themselves. 48 - 49 - 50 -====The 1AC is a method of "nomadic grammatology", speech that exists in an affective dimension un-diagnosable to external power structures but coherent communication to the hidden subaltern. We give minoritarian voices a way to articulate themselves without revealing them to state writ large 51 -Fieni 52 -David Fieni "What A Wall Wants, Or How Graffiti Thinks Nomad Grammatology In The French Banlieue" '13 David Fieni teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. He has also published on Jean Genet, Ernest Renan, and Algerian women writers. He is currently editing a special issue of Expressions maghrébines on the work of Abdelkébir Khatibi, and an issue of The Journal of Postcolonial Writ-ing , entitled "The Global Checkpoint. 53 -The populist rage that Sarkozy ... at the moment of inscription or viewing. 54 -The 1AC allows us to activate our agency through the creation of subaltern spaces of 55 -AND 56 -and define the grafitiscape within the context of the archaeograph (Figure 105) - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,64 +1,0 @@ 1 -1AC Kalinka 2 -A spectre is haunting the resolution 3 - 4 -The resolution is just a new iteration of the same question posed by the authoritarian regime: Do we arbitrarily allow certain methods of speech to be forcibly restricted, setting us on the path to neoliberal control, OR do we stand idle to the proliferation of racist voices and cede public discourse to the white hegemonic order; Both options are infected in the will of the technocratic elite 5 -The 1AC is the 3rd option: Use the resolution as an opportunity to rethink our positionality as subjects in relation to the war machine of capitalism 6 -ICC 15' 7 -"Charlie Hebdo and "Freedom of Speech" in Capitalism", International Communist Current, January 8, 2015 http://en.internationalism.org/forum/1056/jamal/11786/charlie-hebdo-freedom-speech-capitalism 8 -The ICC was founded in January 1975 by different political groups which had arisen in the wake of the historic revival of the working class at the end of the 1960s. 9 - 10 -As a left communist just wanted to say a few things...There's a lot of debate around these shootings regarding the "freedom of speech" of the cartoonists. Everyone is in agreement that - sure - these guys have the "right" to draw whatever they want. At a certain level this makes sense. But like everything else in capitalist society there are class implications of all these things, and surprise, surprise, they are the only things being left out of the popular discourse on the Charlie Hebdo murders right now. All the terms I've just written that one normally glosses over - freedom, rights, etc. - these are all privileges handed down by the bourgeoisie to everyone else. So when we talk about "freedom of speech" in capitalist society, we're just talking about the privilege to talk about things the ruling class is cool with us talking about. This "right" disappears very quickly in many situations, which is why I call it a privilege. So how to deal with this? I think as communists we have to reject the notion of "free speech" entirely. Not all speech is free. Some speech is meant to be oppressive and we should oppose it. This is the framework for saying, "fuck no nazis dont deserve the right to march freely in the streets", and also "yes people can draw whatever they want" as long as it isn't repressive to others. Yes, what is repressive and isn't will always be a matter of controversy, but I would hope that in an internationalist society without cut throat imperialist and class tensions that these issues could be solved with intelligent discussion and words instead of bullets.==== 11 - 12 -Welcome to Orientation 13 - 14 -Understanding capitalism requires that we undergo an assessment of how it has co-opted our ideas, dreams, desires, the very way we assign value and evaluate ethics. Life, death and even reality itself has been altered by the commodification of labor. Join me in dawning a pair of critical ideological lenses in search of a third option in the face of the resolution's double-binding authoritarianism. This is how capitalism operates, making our choices seem binary and limited. The time has come to traverse this fantasy. 15 -Zizek 16 -Bracketed for Gendered Language 17 -Slavoj Zizek, researcher at the institute of sociology at the University of Ljubljana, The Plague of Fantasies, 1997. Preface xi-xiii EM, fackin orange juice, ideology and sho on and sho on *sniff*, Slavoj Zizek: fucking badass, legendary commieboy, holy comrade l33t 18 -In caring for his own household, the city of Bucharest, Ceaujescu made a 19 -AND 20 -is - we are 'naturally' in ideology, our natural sight is ideological. 21 - 22 -Quantitative methods of studying oppression limit our analysis to myopic modes of understanding exploitation; only qualitative analysis of the resolution allows us to enact new methods of deconstruction, allowing us to light to embers of revolution. Rather than widespread communication, we need focused micropolitical projects that activate our agency. 23 -Packer 11' 24 -http://www.mathcs.duq.edu/~~packer/Packer20book_intro.pdf 25 -Packer M. J. (2011). "The Science of Qualitative Research" Cambridge University Press. Martin Packer is a developmental psychologist who works within the theoretical framework of cultural psychology, conducting research with an interpretive logic of inquiry. 26 -But participation in the practices of a form of life can lead not to understanding 27 -AND 28 -. This is the excitement, and the importance, of qualitative research. 29 - 30 -This necessitates understanding how capitalism has corrupted our method of learning, acting and speaking in the world; this means that all other epistemological framing mechanisms collapse to mine. Absent breaking free of labor hypnotism, any attempts to formulate knowledge become tainted. 31 -Deleuze and Guattari 72': 32 -Deleuze, Gilles. Guattari, Felix, "Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia." 1972. Gilles Deleuze was a French philosopher who, from the early 1960s until his death, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art, Felix Guattari was a schizoanalyst who specialized in understanding human identity, they were both fucking badass and this card is dope as hell. 33 -Capital is indeed the body without organs of the capitalist, or rather of the capitalist being. But as such, it is not only the fluid and petrified substance of money, for it will give to the sterility of money the form whereby money produces money. It produces surplus value, just as the body without organs reproduce itself, puts forth shoots, and branches out to the farthest corners of the universe. It makes the machine responsible for producing a relative surplus value, while embodying itself in the machine as fixed capital. Machines and agents cling so closely to capital that their very functioning appears to be matriculated by it. Everything seems objectively to be produced by capital as quasi cause. As Marx observes, in the beginning capitalists are necessarily conscious of the opposition between capital and labor, and of the use of capital as a means of extorting surplus labor. But a perverted, bewitched world quickly comes into being, as capital increasingly plays the role of a recording surface that falls back on (se rabat sur) all of production. (Furnishing or realizing surplus value is what establishes recording rights.) "With the development of relative surplus-value in the actual specifically capitalist mode of production, whereby the productive powers of social labour are developed, these productive powers and the social interrelations of labor in the direct labor-process seem transferred from labor to capital. Capital thus becomes a very mystic being since all of labor's social productive forces appear~s~ to be due to capital, rather than labour as such, and seem to issue from the womb of capital itself." What is specifically capitalist here is the role of money and the use of capital as a full body to constitute the recording or inscribing surface. But some kind of full body, that of the earth or the despot, a recording surface, an apparent objective movement, a fetishistic, perverted, bewitched world are characteristic of all types of society as a constant of social reproduction. The body without organs now falls back on (se rabat sur) desiring-production, attracts it, and appropriates it for its own. The organ-machines now cling to the body without organs as though it were a fencer's padded jacket, or as though these organ-machines were medals pinned onto the jersey of a wrestler who makes them jingle as he starts toward his opponent. An attraction-machine now takes the place, or may take the place, of a repulsion-machine: a miraculating-machine succeeding the paranoiac machine. ==== 34 - 35 -Vote Affirmative to endorse Micropolitical Marxism as a method of traversing the capitalist fantasy embodied by the resolutional question of free speech restrictions on college campuses. The 1AC is a method of un-congealing that attempts to resolve the antagonistic spectere which haunts the resolution, questions of free speech, praxis on college campuses, and ultimately our positionality as workers within the system of labor value. 36 -Tumino '1 37 -http://redcritique.org/spring2001/whatisorthodoxmarxism.htm jss 38 -Stephen Tumino, professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, "What is Orthodox Marxism and Why it Matters Now More Than Ever Before," Red Critique, Spring 2001, http://redcritique.org/spring2001/whatisorthodoxmarxism.htm jss 39 -Any effective political theory will have to do at least two things: it will have to offer an integrated understanding of social practices and, based on such an interrelated knowledge, offer a guideline for praxis. My main argument here is that among all contesting social theories now, only Orthodox Marxism has been able to produce~d~ an integrated knowledge of the existing social totality and provide~d~ lines of praxis that will lead to building a society free from necessity. But first I must clarify what I mean by Orthodox Marxism. Like all other modes and forms of political theory, the very theoretical identity of Orthodox Marxism is itself contested—not just from non-and anti-Marxists who question the very "real" (by which they mean the "practical" as under free-market criteria) existence of any kind of Marxism now but, perhaps more tellingly, from within the Marxist tradition itself. I will, therefore, first say what I regard to be the distinguishing marks of Orthodox Marxism and then outline a short polemical map of contestation over Orthodox Marxism within the Marxist theories now. I will end by arguing for its effectivity in bringing about a new society based not on human rights but on freedom from necessity. I will argue that to know contemporary society—and to be able to act on such knowledge—one has to first of all know what makes the existing social totality. I will argue that the dominant social totality is based on inequality—not just inequality of power but inequality of economic access (which then determines access to health care, education, housing, diet, transportation, . . . ). This systematic inequality cannot be explained by gender, race, sexuality, disability, ethnicity, or nationality. These are all secondary contradictions and are all determined by the fundamental contradiction of capitalism which is inscribed in the relation of capital and labor. All modes of Marxism now explain social inequalities primarily on the basis of these secondary contradictions and in doing so—and this is my main argument—legitimate capitalism. Why? Because such arguments authorize capitalism without gender, race, discrimination and thus accept economic inequality as an integral part of human societies. They accept a sunny capitalism—a capitalism beyond capitalism. Such a society, based on cultural equality but economic inequality, has always been the not-so-hidden agenda of the bourgeois left—whether it has been called "new left," "postmarxism," or "radical democracy." This is, by the way, the main reason for its popularity in the culture industry—from the academy (Jameson, Harvey, Haraway, Butler,. . . ) to daily politics (Michael Harrington, Ralph Nader, Jesse Jackson,. . . ) to. . . . For all, capitalism is here to stay and the best that can be done is to make its cruelties more tolerable, more humane. This humanization (not eradication) of capitalism is the sole goal of ALL contemporary lefts (marxism, feminism, anti-racism, queeries, . . . ). Such an understanding of social inequality is based on the fundamental understanding that the source of wealth is human knowledge and not human labor. That is, wealth is produced by the human mind and is thus free from the actual objective conditions that shape~s~ the historical relations of labor and capital. Only Orthodox Marxism recognizes the historicity of labor and its primacy as the source of all human wealth. In this paper I argue that any emancipatory theory has to be founded on recognition of the priority of Marx's labor theory of value and not repeat the technological determinism of corporate theory ("knowledge work") that masquerades as social theory. Finally, it is only Orthodox Marxism that recognizes the inevitability and also the necessity of communism—the necessity, that is, of a society in which "from each according to their ability to each according to their needs" (Marx) is the rule. 40 - 41 -Only through engaging in micropolitical methods of knowledge proliferation can we truly make productive social advances within academic spaces. Micropolitical spaces are the starting ground through which we can question the way that our subjectivities have been co-opted, and start to uproot oppressive ideology. 42 -Empirics prove the 1AC- 43 -Environmentalism, Feminism, Civil Rights and Communism all started out as epistemic movements that centered on micropolitical knowledge creation. 44 -Bullis and Houde in '99: 45 -Lincoln Bullis, Professor of Comunications at Southwestern College, and Connie Houde, Associate Professor of Communications at the University of Utah, "Ecofeminist Pedagogy: An Exploratory Case", Ethics and the Environment, Volume 4, Number 2, 1999, pp. 143-174 (Article) 46 -A position of differential and tactical subjectivity questions hegemonic discourses within text-audience interactions 47 -AND 48 -now to describing how this philosophy was, and may be, enacted. 49 - 50 -The Role of the Ballot is to endorse the debater who best activates micropolitical agency as an avenue of resisting the capitalist war machine. 51 -Micropolitical strategies are the only way we as students can productively change society. Policy reform can never expect to solve for systemic grievances unless we invigorate the political with innovative methodologies. The election of a white supremacist proves that jerking off to the magic of policy fiat doesn't do jack shit until we re-conceptualize our orientation to power structures. Only the 1AC's microstrategic method can revive the graveyard of democracy. 52 -Giroux in '12:==== 53 -Henry A. Giroux, Global TV Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, "Beyond the Politics of the Big Lie: The Education Deficit and the New Authoritarianism", 19 June 2012 54 -The democratic deficit is not, as many commentators have argued, reducible to the 55 -AND 56 -making education central to organized politics and the quest for a radical democracy. 57 - 58 -The AFF doesn't suddenly implement a bloody anti-capitalist revolution nor does it defend some kind of magical, idealized, post-fiat advocacy where everyone just sporadically abandons the state. Rather, the 1AC is a method of interjecting new methods of analysis and intellectualism into academic spheres, be it college campuses, discursive opportunities or the debate space. 59 -We allow the proliferation of Marxist pedagogy to liberate the proletariat from capital hypnotism and we embrace whatever erupts from this newfound class consciousness. 60 -Slaughter 61 -https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/slaughte.htm 62 -Cliff Slaughter "Marxism and the Class Struggle", 1975 Slaughter was born 1928 and was a British socialist activist and writer. His best-known works are Coal is our life and Marxism, Ideology and Literature; Index Books published his "Not without a storm: towards a communist manifesto for the age of globalisation in 2006" . publ. by New Park Publications. ==== 63 - 64 -Marxism is not a 'sociology'. It only appears to be so, because, from the point of view of every other particular section of the intellectual division of labour-philosophy, economics, history, history of ideas, etc.-Marxism goes beyond their defined subject-matter, insisting that the real content of each of them is to be found in the contradictory totality of social economic relations from which flow the forms of activity and thought to which the separate disciplines address themselves. Political economy, for example, is 'negated' by Marxism, in the Hegelian sense. Marx's treatment of political economy takes to their limit the contradictory developments of classical political economy. To do this requires the explanation of political economy's concepts and their real content as the 'alienated' consciousness of the development of bourgeois society itself. Thus we find in the Critique of Political Economy and in Capitalitself a negation of political economy, which is demonstrated as being an adequate reflection of the sphere of exchange values and their behaviour. But this sphere is shown to be the real world of appearances or illusions as necessarily created by a historically limited social order, capitalism. Marx's rejection of bourgeois philosophy is a similar materialist critique. His analysis of political and historical thought and their material sources was the third element of the synthesis achieved by Marx. Why then do we say that Marxism only appears to be a sociology? Because sociology originated and developed, not as the dialectical negation, the overcoming of the contradictions, of each of the alienated spheres of thought, but as their definition anew in relation to some supposedly more 'general' science of the 'the social as such' (Durkheim's 'le social en soi' and 'social facts' constitute the acme of this approach). Comte, first to use the term 'sociology', invented the word in order to indicate: '. . . under one single heading that integral part of natural philosophy which concerns itself with the positive study of the totality of fundamental laws proper to social phenomena.' Instead of the dynamic synthesis constituted by Marx's negation of the separated and alienated fields of philosophy, political economy and history (class struggle), we have the static and uncritical synthesis of Comte, to be followed by a century of sterile debate in sociology about 'metaphysics or empiricism', 'generalisation or specialised monographs', 'system or action'. Instead of the consistent materialism made possible by Marx's historical or dialectical approach, we have the pseudo-scientific reliance on 'experience', which in Comte's case ended in the purest mysticism, since his 'spiritual' experience was granted just as much validity as any other. Bourgeois sociology in the 20th century is tied, philosophically and methodologically, to the pragmatism of the ruling class. Sociology continues to oscillate between idealism and mechanical materialism: 'social facts as things' on the one hand, freedom of the individual on the other; the classical dichotomy of bourgeois ideology. Instead of social analysis in terms of the contradictory development and struggle of opposites in each specific, historically limited, socioeconomic formation, we have in sociology the search for general principles or sociological laws which transcend specific historical stages. Talcott Parsons' rejection of Marxism, on the grounds that it is a series of 'genetic' explanations, sums up this functionalist barrenness. These aspects of the split in social theory between Marxism and sociology since the second quarter of the last century are of course inseparably linked with the fact that, as against Marx and Marxism's concern with capitalist society, Comte is the father (though he himself is only the bastard son of Saint-Simon in this and many other respects) of the sociologists' insistence that they are concerned with 'industrial' or 'modern' society. This is only a 'sociological' version of the political economists' recognition of the 'natural' character of the laws of capitalist economy, which they could not accept as only the laws of a definite and historically limited socio-economic formation. When Marx insisted on the 'social' dimension of all spheres of activity and thought, it was with a dual emphasis: first, to grasp each sphere as only one 'moment' of a contradictory social whole; second, to put an end to the alienation resulting from exploitation, to give a new life to each activity by making it the conscious activity of the associated producers in a classless society; for this, theory must unite with and develop in unity with the proletarian revolution. Sociology, by contrast, accepts and describes the alienation and even dignifies it by presenting it systematically as the 'differentiation and integration of roles' and the 'structuring of orientations'. A Marxist analysis of sociology would demonstrate in what way these supposedly 'general' social phenomena and mechanisms are but an ideological reflection of the surface of capitalist society itself. The revolutionary political orientation of Marxist social theory, as contrasted with the professed 'value-freedom' of sociology, is fundamental to Marxism. And the perennial pleas for separating Marx's politics from his sociological 'insights' are as absurdity misplaced as the similar attempts to cleanse Marx's social theories of philosophy. Marxism is then the dialectical negation of the highest developments in bourgeois thought, and through this of the reality from which that thought flows and of which it forms a necessary part. It is this conception which lies behind Lenin's famous dictum: The workers can acquire political consciousness only from without, i.e., only outside of the economic struggle, outside of the sphere of relations between workers and employers. The sphere from which alone it is possible to obtain this knowledge is the sphere of relationships between all classes and the state and the government-the sphere of the interrelations between all classes. (Lenin, What is to be Done?) Here Lenin expresses politically (i.e. in conflict with political opponents who based themselves on the supposed 'spontaneous' development of socialist consciousness from the experience of the working class) the implications for working-class consciousness of the discoveries of Marx. Scientific thought (in the philosophy of Hegel) had arrived at the point where it must accept the conclusion that it could advance further only by grasping activity its real place in the struggle to end the conditions of its own alienated character; this was only possible, Marx said, by grasping the nature of the working class as the agent of the necessary revolutionary change. The working class itself, however, could arrive at the necessary consciousness and thereby the unity necessary for social revolution only by understanding the full historical implications of its role in production and its capacity for abolishing class society. Besides the conclusion that the economic structure is 'basic', and that the class struggle of the proletariat is an objective necessity creating the conditions for socialist revolution, there was necessary the whole theory of historical materialism, the understanding of social development as a unified process, with revolutionary consciousness seizing hold of the meaning of the contradictions at the base of society in order to overthrow it. This body of theory could not come from the working class but only 'from the outside, from bourgeois intellectuals'. From that point on, the development of Marxism takes definite forms in relation to the struggle of the working class, its internal political conflicts, strategy, tactics and organisation, nationally and internationally. While Marx and Engels themselves made great contributions in this field, it has of course been most enriched in the twentieth century, above all by the work of Lenin and Trotsky. Marx and Engels began their communist political careers with a series of thoroughgoing polemics against other schools of socialism (e.g., in The Comnunist Manifesto). Immediately after the 1848 revolutions they combated the impatience and what amounted to rejection of theory by those who wanted to continue an insurrectionist struggle in unfavourable conditions. They never ceased to participate in and advise the labour movement in every country with which they could establish contact. They insisted - for example, in correspondence with Russian and North American socialists - on a very close and detailed attention to the specific conditions of the history, economy and working-class movement of each particular country. But they always were vigilant against eclecticism and attempts to put aside the theoretical conquests they had made. Writing to Bebel and other leaders of the German Social-Democratic Party in 1879, Marx and Engels returned to a theme which had concerned them as long ago as 1848: the role of bourgeois intellectuals in the revolutionary movement. Then, in the Manifesto, they had written: ' . . . a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class . . . in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists.' Now, in 1879, they make a very different emphasis, and one which shows that Lenin was not inconsistent when he combined his insistence on the decisive importance of intellectuals in the development of revolutionary theory with an implacable struggle against every manifestation of revisionism and intellectual light-mindedness with theory. Marx and Engels go out of their way to warn Bebel and the party leaders that bourgeois and petty-bourgeois intellectuals joining the movement must show that they are willing to learn from the party its theory of scientific socialism in the first place. If this is not done, then they inevitably bring with them elements of the now decaying and disintegrating German bourgeois culture and philosophy. (In other words, what could be gained from bourgeois development before 1848 was the opposite of what flowed from it in 1789.) Lenin stressed that the fight against revisionism (so called after the celebrated controversy in the German Social Democracy over Bernstein's criticisms of Marx in the 1890s) was a recurring and inevitable one. He explained that not only individual thinkers in the working class or the revolutionary Marxist party were affected by particular aspects of bourgeois ideology, but that the development of capitalism constantly modified the relations between the proletariat and the middle classes, the latter carrying into the former their ideas, the ideas of capitalism. Revisionism in the labour movement reflected these class pressures. The nearer a revolutionary situation, the more these ideological differences would be expressed in political and organisational differences. Hence the vital importance in a pre-revolutionary period of consciously combating revisionism. This theoretical fight is the anticipation of all the problems and divisions which the working class will have to overcome in its actual struggle for power. The problem of proletarian class-consciousness is often discussed in a very abstract and general manner, instead of through the analysis of the actual historical process by which the Marxist movement and the working-class movement have developed. These are not two distinct processes: the conscious building of revolutionary parties is the highest form of the process by which the proletariat becomes a class 'for itself'. In the proper place, there is needed a critical analysis of all those writings on the working class and its consciousness which rely on concepts lie 'affluence', 'prosperity', 'embourgeoisement', 'social mobility', and so on; and this analysis would have to deal with all the superficially very different and 'radical' approaches of writers like Marcuse. For the Marxist, such an analysis is of interest as an insight into the ideology of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, reflecting their own historical situation and its changes, but it would at the same time be important in relation to the development of Marxism itself, because it bears directly on the most characteristic 'revision' of Marxism in our epoch: the rejection of the revolutionary role of the working class and of the need for revolutionary parties. Class, for Marx, is rooted in social relations of production, and cannot be referred in the first place to relations of distribution and consumption or their ideological reflections. In considering the class consciousness of the proletariat, Marxists are therefore not concerned with the ideas of individual workers about their position in society (no matter how many examples are collected and classified) so much as with the following series of categories: relations of production (sale of labour-power, exploitation); conflict of workers and employers on this basis (economic struggles, trade unions, elementary political battles for economic ends); conflict at the level of class (economic struggles which merge into the conflict between classes, which is organised through the political parties and the struggle for state power); the theoretical and practical struggle to build revolutionary parties of the working class, in conflict with non-revolutionary and counter-revolutionary tendencies in the class and their reflection inside the revolutionary party. Thus, for example, a worker in the motor car industry will move through his elemental experience to an understanding of the gap between his own standard of life, income and conditions of work, on the one hand, and the mass of wealth to whose production he contributes, on the other. He will recognise an identity of interest, on this basis, with other wage-workers. 'Combinations' or trade unions are the adequate expression of this level of consciousness. To this 'trade union consciousness' may correspond other ideological, critical views on various aspects of capitalist society: for example, such consciousness can easily co-exist with that view which lays all the stress on differences or similarities in patterns of consumption; thus, elementary socialistic propaganda of the moralising type, and modern pessimistic speculation about the workers' consciousness being dulled by the abundance of consumer goods, are types of consciousness which do not penetrate to the basis of class differences and class struggle and therefore cannot facilitate the development of political consciousness. More 'sophisticated' socialist views of class-consciousness often refer to a process of more or less spontaneous political maturing through a series of economic struggles which take on greater and greater magnitude, finally posing demands which the system cannot meet. Here again the same basic error, from the Marxist standpoint, is made. In all such approaches, the class and its consciousness are seen in terms of a pre-Marxist theory of knowledge and of history. Those who put forward these ideas are unable to escape from a conception in which the separate individuals in the class move from their own working and other everyday experience to a higher level of consciousness, in this case political consciousness. In point of fast an individual worker does not arrive through his own experience at a scientific consciousness of the actual relationships at work, let alone the political relationships. It u only when a worker comes into contact with the products, in political programme and action, of Marxist theory in politics - i.e., with the outcome of theoretical works produced in the first place by non-proletarian - that he can conceive of even his own working experience in terms which go beyond those of the prevailing bourgeois ideology. These works take the essence of the experience of the proletariat as well as all developments in economy, politics, science, the arts, etc. Only a historical view of the working class and of the theory of Marxism, in their mutual interrelations, can produce a theory of class consciousness. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Marx and Engels, working on various fields of learning, as well as analysing the experience of the struggle of the working class to that date, elaborated their theory of socialism. The theory is henceforth the essential component of the process by which the working class becomes a class 'for itself'. As a theory, it had first to penetrate beneath the day-to-day phenomenal form of capitalist society to the social relations of production. It demonstrated that production under capitalism continues, and society develops, not through any conscious plan, but through the drive to produce surplus value, consequent upon the reduction of labour-power to a commodity, to units of 'abstract labour'. This is the essence of the worker's exploitation, rather than the fact, say, that he does not own the cars he produces. What he produces is essentially surplus value, the augmentation of that same capital which oppresses him. From these basic relationships, Marx demonstrated the reality of the history of capitalism, the way in which private ownership came to a revolutionary clash with the further development of the forces of production. For a political or socialist consciousness of the struggle against the capitalist class, there is necessary the understanding of this historical tendency of the capitalist system. This means not just an abstract knowledge of the theory of historical materialism, but the concrete analysis of, and active engagement in, the development of the class struggle in all its forms and at all levels, in the period of capitalism's historical decline. It was" Lenin's major special contribution to Marxism to elaborate this theory of leadership and the revolutionary party, first of all in What is to be Done? and One Step Forward, Two Steps Back. But the whole of Lenin's work is an expression of this central concern. Later, Trotsky devoted a series of books and articles to the defence and development of the ideas worked out by Lenin (cf. particularly his In Defence of Marxism and Lessons of October). Gramsci also worked on important aspects of the relationship between Marxist theory and class consciousness, and developed further the critique of notions of spontaneity. We have seen that even though the mass of workers experience capitalist exploitation, it is necessary for a struggle to take place between their existing consciousness, on the one hand, and Marxism on the other. This struggle is conducted, as part of the struggle of material forces, by the revolutionary Marxist party. The socialist revolution, like every social revolution, occupies an entire epoch. Its outcome is decided by a series of battles in every country, requiring ~requires~ the developed strategy and tactics of revolutionary parties and a revolutionary international whose whole outlook and experience is guided by the theoretical foundations laid by Marx. Through the socialist revolution, men will enter 'the realm of freedom', says Marx. Consciousness will then not be the distorted ideology of oppressive social relations, resulting from the product's domination over the producer, but will be the expression of the scientifically-orientated will of the collective producers, of 'socialised humanity'. 'The free development of each will be the condition of the free development of all.' Already the struggle of the working class against capitalism raises this fundamental question of the relation between subject and object, thus bringing Marx to say that philosophy can realize itself only through the proletariat. Capitalism poses the question in generalised from for the whole class in its relation to the rest of society, and thus demands nothing less than a revolutionary solution: '... the labour employed on the products appears here as the value of those products, au a material quality possessed by them.' (Marx, 'Critique of the Gotha Programme'). This 'reification', the value-form, in which a social relation between men in their most fundamental activity is transformed into a 'thing' standing outside and against men, is specific to the way in which the capitalist system continues the enslavement of man by man. This 'topsy-turvy world' becomes in sociology a world of 'social facts', of 'roles', faithfully recorded as the necessary framework of experience. Just as the working class in its struggle must reject this split between subject and object as a threat to its very humanity, so must Marxist theory penetrate beneath it and point the way to its internal contradictions and historical fate. The real relation between the working class and its product is obscured in the first place by the fact that the labour appears to have been paid for in wages, and that there the matter ends. Marx says that this illusion of wages as the proper reward for labour is the key to all the ideology of capitalism (Capital, Vol . I, p. 550). Marx exploded this illusion in theory, and thus opened the path for its being exploded in practice. That path leads from trade union consciousness (a fair day's pay for a fair day's work!) to socialist consciousness. Working-class consciousness is then, for Marxists, the comprehending in struggle of the process through which the proletariat develops from its identity as formed by capitalism (the mass of exploited wage-labourers, the class 'in itself') to the working class organised as a revolutionary force for the taking of power and the building of socialism (the class 'for itself'). This process must be grasped dialectically, i.e., as a conflict of opposites, a real conflict between the class as it is and as the Marxist movement fights for it to be, on the basis of analysing the objective developments in society. It is the failure to recognise and to begin from this conflict which restricts, for example, the work of Lukacs in his History and Class Consciousness (1923-1924). Lukacs cannot get beyond the concept of 'adjudged' or 'adequate' consciousness, which is abstracted by the investigator according to his scientific estimation of the needs of the class historically. This remains at the level of the type of concepts developed by bourgeois sociology (particularly Max Weber), and fails to reach the level of dialectical materialism, at the centre of which is the unity of theory and practice as a contradictory process. Lukacs' own subsequent capitulation to Stalinism, whatever other causes it had, was rooted in this static and essentially idealist conception of class consciousness, imported from neo-Kantian philosophy. It helped him in a very crude way to accept and become an apologist for Stalinist orthodoxy in the communist movement. Lukacs asserted that the central concept of dialectics is 'totality'; and here again he shows the inadequacy of his outlook for a theory of class consciousness. For Marx, the struggle, the unity and the interpenetration of opposites is the essence of dialectics, and this dialectic is materialist, so that for Marxists the notion of totality must have a meaning different from that presented by Lukacs. 'The unity of the world consists in its materiality,' wrote Engels. It is characteristic of Lukacs' agnosticism on the question of the objective nature of the external world (in History and Class Consciousness) that he must take 'totality' and the proletariat's grasp of this totality as an abstraction. Only a view of the 'unity' or 'totality' of the objective world of nature and society which sees this unity as arising continuously from a changing conflict of material opposites can form the basis of 'revolutionary practice', the sine qua non of Marx's theory of knowledge. Henri Lefebvre (in his The Sociology of Marx, 1968, and elsewhere) has criticised Lukacs for his stress on 'totality' and has argued that 'the conflict of opposites' is in fact the core of dialectics. However, in Lefebvre's work this correct criticism remains purely abstract, and leads him eventually to Utopianism. He starts from the concept of a struggle of opposites, but leaves it at the level of the very general concepts of praxis and alienation. These terms, taken from Marx's early work, enable Lefebvre to make often penetrating exposés of capitalist culture, but they remain altogether too abstract for a revolutionary theory of class consciousness. The theory remains purely critical, aloof from practice, i.e., from the activity of the class and the fight for a working-class leadership on a Marxist basis. Lefebvre criticises, for example, Lucien Goldmann, because the latter, developing the work of Lukacs, over-emphasises the phenomenon of 'reification' so much that his argument amounts to a virtual acceptance, rather than a criticism, of the forms of objectivity imposed on consciousness by capitalist society. But this criticism is inadequate, and needs in the end to be turned against Lefebvre himself. Goldmann in the period between 1957 and his death in 1973, expressed complete scepticism about the revolutionary role of the working class under modern capitalism. He did so on the grounds that, besides certain economic and political changes in the capitalist system, such as the part played by state intervention in the economy, the ability of capitalism to supply an ever-increasing amount of consumer goods had eroded working class consciousness. This suggests immediately that Goldmann's original reasons for accepting the revolutionary character of the proletariat were unsound, from the Marxist standpoint (see his articles in Les Temps Modernes for 1957 and 1958, reprinted in Recherches Dialectiques, Paris, 1959). Goldmann conceives of ideas and ideologies as mental translations of economic and social patterns, rather than as the outcome of the struggles of the class at all levels of social reality (see chapter VI above), and this has provided an avenue for him to accept the fashionable 'structuralist' school of idealism in France. The actual contradictory process of the struggle for revolutionary consciousness, the conflicts between theory and practice, between party and class and, concretely, the struggle of tendencies within the labour movement and within the revolutionary party, and the class bases of these struggles-all these are almost completely lacking in any of the often interesting commentaries of these writers, whose works appeal so much to those who look for some pure or 'restored' Marxism, rediscovered by removing all the results of a century and more of bitter struggle as the theory has taken on flesh and blood. The 'young Marx' is the usual gospel of this faith. It would be in the spirit of Marx himself to aim for a Marxism which is rich and concrete, and at the same time warlike, having worked over and 'negated' all the contradictory developments in the proletarian revolution, and above all in the communist movement itself. For the various 'schools' of Marxism in France and their faint echoes outside, the issue is indeed presented much more concretely than they would like: to really develop the Marxist method and concepts for the analysis of modern capitalist society and of the USSR, it is necessary to start from a conscious reintegration with the whole actual past struggle for Marxism against the social democrats and then the Stalinists and revisionists who distorted it. That means an identification with the continuity of the fight for Marxism of Lenin and Trotsky, and in particular against the Stalinist domination of working-class politics and of 'Marxism' in France. In the most fundamental theoretical terms, Lefebvre has missed out what was potentially correct in Lukacs' insistence on 'totality': the struggle of opposites in society must be taken as first and foremost a class conflict, at the level of the social whole. To analyse, and to start in all social analyses from this, requires of course a concentration on the specific contradictions of capitalism and of the development of the working class and its revolutionary consciousness within capitalism. Marx himself developed his ideas from the general notions of praxis and alienation of humanity in his early works to the specific analysis of the historically developing social relations of capitalism, out of which grew all the 'praxis' and 'alienation' of modern man. By returning to the early Marx for the key to capitalist society today, Lefebvre opens the door to a reformist and Utopian critique of culture, instead of a consistent and revolutionary theory and practice, in conflict with the Stalinist distortion of Marxism in every field. His works Critique de la Vie Quotidienne (Vol II, 1960, Editions de L'Arche) and Introduction a la Modernite (Editions de Minuit, 1962) reveal this tendency very clearly: a searching for a 'poetic' quality in particular aspects of life, a contrast between creative and repetitive actions which is made a more general and important distinction than the specific historical contradictions of capitalism and the tasks of revolutionary transformation which they pose to the working class and to Marxists. Our argument here does not simplify the question of class consciousness. On the contrary, it opens up a prospect which cannot be settled purely by words. Theory must become conscious of its real relationship with its subject-matter, and consciously guide the revolutionary struggle to transform it. This is the essence of dialectical materialism in Marx's work. For the working class to become a class 'for itself' requires not simply the absorption of the experience of capitalist society, but the critical struggle against this experience by a party armed with the whole theory of Marxism. Party and class are two interpenetrating opposites at one level (the class 'for itself' and the class 'in itself'). These two poles at the same time constitute a whole (the working class) which itself is one pole as against its opposite (the capitalist class) in another contradictory whole (capitalist society). Society confronts nature as its 'opposite'. The working class must realize itself, against capitalism, subsuming all the historical gains for humanity made by capitalism at the same time as overthrowing it. This it can do only when the outlook, strategy and tactics of a Marxist party predominate in the actions of the class as a class, in revolutionary struggles. A similar process is necessary within the party: only if it can study, unify and transform through struggle all the experiences of the class can its theory be saved from one-sidedness, dogma and idealism. Within the Marxist party, once again we have a struggle of opposites, a struggle for the development of Marxist theory and its application to the struggles of the proletariat, in constant struggle against every mode of adaptation to the existing position of the working class, its disunity, fragmentation, etc., those aspects of its situation which predispose it towards acceptance of its oppression. Then theory itself must also be considered as a struggle of opposites. We have seen that at every level, each pole of a unity of opposites contains a recapitulation of the total opposition within itself (e.g. the party has both its own essence and its opposite within it and not only as an external opposite, etc.). Marxist theory develops by proving the 'concreteness' of its abstractions against the apparent concreteness (really abstractness, because abstracted from the changing forces which produce them) of uncritically accepted empirical reality. It does this through a struggle to change that reality, capitalism, by placing itself politically in a relation of political consciousness, leadership, with the working class. That means the struggle to build revolutionary parties able to lead the working class to power. Marxism is this struggle: it is not a sociology or an abstract theoretical system of any kind. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,0 +1,42 @@ 1 +I affirm and value morality because ought implies a moral obligation. 2 + 3 +Notions of normativity and laws constantly shift through time. All decisions are made with the knowledge that time may change them. Martin Hagglund writes. 4 +Martin Hagglund. The Necessity of Discrimination Disjoining Derrida and Levinas. Project Muse. Diacritics 34.1:40-71. 5 +“Once again, it is... has been prescribed.” 6 + 7 +Every ethical decision inevitably excludes other perspectives and is haunted by those “specters.” Hagglund 2 8 + 9 + “In effect, every attempt... thus not be a struggle for peace, but only for what I will call “lesser violence.” END QUOTE 10 + 11 +The deconstructive concept of ethics is the only way to recognize these excluded beings and create meaningful political or ethical change. It is precisely because justice can open to interpretation, that it can be changed to always be better. Hagglund 3 12 + 13 +“Hence, Derrida argues that the ... is more or less discriminating and open to new attacks or conflicting demands.” 14 + 15 +Thus, the standard is embracing transformative justice. 16 + 17 +I contend protecting a right to free speech allows for a justice to come. 18 + 19 +Asserting you are right without defending your opinion makes dialogue impossible. It creates an us-them dichotomy which makes practical solutions inaccessible. Foucault: Foucault, Michel ~French post-structuralist~. “Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations.” In Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984. Ed. Paul Rabinow. 1 Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. The New Press. 1998. 20 + 21 +The polemicist, on ...surrenders or disappears. 22 + 23 + 24 +Empirically true- collegiate trends against microaggressions deter meaningful engagement and make violent outburst inevitable. Lukianoff and Haidt Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt (Greg Lukainoff is president and CEO of Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Jonathan Haidt is the Thomas Cooley professor of ethical leadership at NYU Stern. “The Coddling of the American Mind” The Atlantic. 9/15. 25 + 26 + 27 +Burns defines magnification ... people the benefit of the doubt? 28 + 29 +Only engaging in the public sphere allows for change- we need to learn the tools needed to engage others so we can manage to persuade them of our issues and opinions. If people don’t know why they’re problematic, then calling them problematic does nothing but emblazon them to do whatever they need. Foucault 2: : Foucault, Michel ~French post-structuralist~. “Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations.” In Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984. Ed. Paul Rabinow. 1 Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. The New Press. 1998. 30 +It is a question, ... to form a community of action. 31 + 32 +Causes spillover to the real world- outside of college is the real world- we need skills to deal with other people- creating an isolated space does nothing. Trump election proves uniqueness for my side- if we don’t actually convince people our issues matter nothing will ever change for the better. Lukianoff and Haidt 2Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt (Greg Lukainoff is president and CEO of Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Jonathan Haidt is the Thomas Cooley professor of ethical leadership at NYU Stern. “The Coddling of the American Mind” The Atlantic. 9/15. 33 + 34 + 35 +Attempts to shield students ... diverse faculty—would further serve that goal. 36 + 37 +And we need to engage in institutions- withdrawal reifies oppression and causes no change- this means the 1AC is key. Mouffe Chantal, Professor of Political Theory at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster, “The Importance of Engaging the State,” What is Radical Politics Today? October 2009, pgs. 233-237 38 +In both Hardt and Negri, ...in my view, is how we should conceive the nature of radical politics. 39 + 40 +Empirically true- and controls the internal link to any oppression arguments- maintaining regimes of truth allows oppressive dictates to take control- only discourse allows individuals to challenge norms. Dungey 2k1 (Nicholas, Ph.D. from the University of California, lecturer in Political Science @ University of California, “(Re)Turning Derrida to Heidegger: Being-with-Others as Primordial Politics”, Polity, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Spring, 2001), pp. 455-477, Palgrave Macmillan Journals Stable, 41 + 42 +The desire for communal identity ... barbed wire, security zones, racial ghettos, and laws that are designed to separate and isolate. - EntryDate
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... ... @@ -1,0 +1,79 @@ 1 +=1AC Kalinka= 2 + 3 + 4 +===A spectre is haunting the resolution=== 5 + 6 + 7 +====The resolution is just a new iteration of the same question posed by the authoritarian regime: Do we arbitrarily allow certain methods of speech to be forcibly restricted, setting us on the path to neoliberal control, OR do we stand idle to the proliferation of racist voices and cede public discourse to the white hegemonic order; Both options are infected in the will of the technocratic elite 8 + 9 +The 1AC is the 3rd option: Use the resolution as an opportunity to rethink our positionality as subjects in relation to the war machine of capitalism 10 +ICC 15' 11 +"Charlie Hebdo and "Freedom of Speech" in Capitalism", International Communist Current, January 8, 2015 http://en.internationalism.org/forum/1056/jamal/11786/charlie-hebdo-freedom-speech-capitalism 12 +The ICC was founded in January 1975 by different political groups which had arisen in the wake of the historic revival of the working class at the end of the 1960s. 13 + 14 +As a left communist just wanted to say a few things...There's a lot of debate around these shootings regarding the "freedom of speech" of the cartoonists. Everyone is in agreement that - sure - these guys have the "right" to draw whatever they want. At a certain level this makes sense. But like everything else in capitalist society there are class implications of all these things, and surprise, surprise, they are the only things being left out of the popular discourse on the Charlie Hebdo murders right now. All the terms I've just written that one normally glosses over - freedom, rights, etc. - these are all privileges handed down by the bourgeoisie to everyone else. So when we talk about "freedom of speech" in capitalist society, we're just talking about the privilege to talk about things the ruling class is cool with us talking about. This "right" disappears very quickly in many situations, which is why I call it a privilege. So how to deal with this? I think as communists we have to reject the notion of "free speech" entirely. Not all speech is free. Some speech is meant to be oppressive and we should oppose it. This is the framework for saying, "fuck no nazis dont deserve the right to march freely in the streets", and also "yes people can draw whatever they want" as long as it isn't repressive to others. Yes, what is repressive and isn't will always be a matter of controversy, but I would hope that in an internationalist society without cut throat imperialist and class tensions that these issues could be solved with intelligent discussion and words instead of bullets.==== 15 + 16 + 17 +===Welcome to Orientation=== 18 + 19 + 20 +====Understanding capitalism requires that we undergo an assessment of how it has co-opted our ideas, dreams, desires, the very way we assign value and evaluate ethics. Life, death and even reality itself has been altered by the commodification of labor. Join me in dawning a pair of critical ideological lenses in search of a third option in the face of the resolution's double-binding authoritarianism. This is how capitalism operates, making our choices seem binary and limited. The time has come to traverse this fantasy. ==== 21 +Zizek 22 +Bracketed for Gendered Language 23 +Slavoj Zizek, researcher at the institute of sociology at the University of Ljubljana, The Plague of Fantasies, 1997. Preface xi-xiii EM, fackin orange juice, ideology and sho on and sho on *sniff*, Slavoj Zizek: fucking badass, legendary commieboy, holy comrade l33t 24 +In caring for his own household, the city of Bucharest, Ceaujescu made a 25 +AND 26 +is - we are 'naturally' in ideology, our natural sight is ideological. 27 + 28 + 29 +====Quantitative methods of studying oppression limit our analysis to myopic modes of understanding exploitation; only qualitative analysis of the resolution allows us to enact new methods of deconstruction, allowing us to light to embers of revolution. Rather than widespread communication, we need focused micropolitical projects that activate our agency.==== 30 +Packer 11' 31 +http://www.mathcs.duq.edu/~~packer/Packer20book_intro.pdf 32 +Packer M. J. (2011). "The Science of Qualitative Research" Cambridge University Press. Martin Packer is a developmental psychologist who works within the theoretical framework of cultural psychology, conducting research with an interpretive logic of inquiry. 33 +But participation in the practices of a form of life can lead not to understanding 34 +AND 35 +. This is the excitement, and the importance, of qualitative research. 36 + 37 + 38 +====This necessitates understanding how capitalism has corrupted our method of learning, acting and speaking in the world; this means that all other epistemological framing mechanisms collapse to mine. Absent breaking free of labor hypnotism, any attempts to formulate knowledge become tainted. 39 +Deleuze and Guattari 72': 40 +Deleuze, Gilles. Guattari, Felix, "Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia." 1972. Gilles Deleuze was a French philosopher who, from the early 1960s until his death, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art, Felix Guattari was a schizoanalyst who specialized in understanding human identity, they were both fucking badass and this card is dope as hell. 41 + 42 +Capital is indeed the body without organs of the capitalist, or rather of the capitalist being. But as such, it is not only the fluid and petrified substance of money, for it will give to the sterility of money the form whereby money produces money. It produces surplus value, just as the body without organs reproduce itself, puts forth shoots, and branches out to the farthest corners of the universe. It makes the machine responsible for producing a relative surplus value, while embodying itself in the machine as fixed capital. Machines and agents cling so closely to capital that their very functioning appears to be matriculated by it. Everything seems objectively to be produced by capital as quasi cause. As Marx observes, in the beginning capitalists are necessarily conscious of the opposition between capital and labor, and of the use of capital as a means of extorting surplus labor. But a perverted, bewitched world quickly comes into being, as capital increasingly plays the role of a recording surface that falls back on (se rabat sur) all of production. (Furnishing or realizing surplus value is what establishes recording rights.) "With the development of relative surplus-value in the actual specifically capitalist mode of production, whereby the productive powers of social labour are developed, these productive powers and the social interrelations of labor in the direct labor-process seem transferred from labor to capital. Capital thus becomes a very mystic being since all of labor's social productive forces appear~~s~~ to be due to capital, rather than labour as such, and seem to issue from the womb of capital itself." What is specifically capitalist here is the role of money and the use of capital as a full body to constitute the recording or inscribing surface. But some kind of full body, that of the earth or the despot, a recording surface, an apparent objective movement, a fetishistic, perverted, bewitched world are characteristic of all types of society as a constant of social reproduction. The body without organs now falls back on (se rabat sur) desiring-production, attracts it, and appropriates it for its own. The organ-machines now cling to the body without organs as though it were a fencer's padded jacket, or as though these organ-machines were medals pinned onto the jersey of a wrestler who makes them jingle as he starts toward his opponent. An attraction-machine now takes the place, or may take the place, of a repulsion-machine: a miraculating-machine succeeding the paranoiac machine. ==== 43 + 44 + 45 +====Vote Affirmative to endorse Micropolitical Marxism as a method of traversing the capitalist fantasy embodied by the resolutional question of free speech restrictions on college campuses. The 1AC is a method of un-congealing that attempts to resolve the antagonistic spectere which haunts the resolution, questions of free speech, praxis on college campuses, and ultimately our positionality as workers within the system of labor value. 46 +Tumino '1 47 +http://redcritique.org/spring2001/whatisorthodoxmarxism.htm jss 48 +Stephen Tumino, professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, "What is Orthodox Marxism and Why it Matters Now More Than Ever Before," Red Critique, Spring 2001, http://redcritique.org/spring2001/whatisorthodoxmarxism.htm jss==== 49 +Any effective political theory will have to do at least two things: it will have to offer an integrated understanding of social practices and, based on such an interrelated knowledge, offer a guideline for praxis. My main argument here is that among all contesting social theories now, only Orthodox Marxism has been able to produce~~d~~ an integrated knowledge of the existing social totality and provide~~d~~ lines of praxis that will lead to building a society free from necessity. But first I must clarify what I mean by Orthodox Marxism. Like all other modes and forms of political theory, the very theoretical identity of Orthodox Marxism is itself contested—not just from non-and anti-Marxists who question the very "real" (by which they mean the "practical" as under free-market criteria) existence of any kind of Marxism now but, perhaps more tellingly, from within the Marxist tradition itself. I will, therefore, first say what I regard to be the distinguishing marks of Orthodox Marxism and then outline a short polemical map of contestation over Orthodox Marxism within the Marxist theories now. I will end by arguing for its effectivity in bringing about a new society based not on human rights but on freedom from necessity. I will argue that to know contemporary society—and to be able to act on such knowledge—one has to first of all know what makes the existing social totality. I will argue that the dominant social totality is based on inequality—not just inequality of power but inequality of economic access (which then determines access to health care, education, housing, diet, transportation, . . . ). This systematic inequality cannot be explained by gender, race, sexuality, disability, ethnicity, or nationality. These are all secondary contradictions and are all determined by the fundamental contradiction of capitalism which is inscribed in the relation of capital and labor. All modes of Marxism now explain social inequalities primarily on the basis of these secondary contradictions and in doing so—and this is my main argument—legitimate capitalism. Why? Because such arguments authorize capitalism without gender, race, discrimination and thus accept economic inequality as an integral part of human societies. They accept a sunny capitalism—a capitalism beyond capitalism. Such a society, based on cultural equality but economic inequality, has always been the not-so-hidden agenda of the bourgeois left—whether it has been called "new left," "postmarxism," or "radical democracy." This is, by the way, the main reason for its popularity in the culture industry—from the academy (Jameson, Harvey, Haraway, Butler,. . . ) to daily politics (Michael Harrington, Ralph Nader, Jesse Jackson,. . . ) to. . . . For all, capitalism is here to stay and the best that can be done is to make its cruelties more tolerable, more humane. This humanization (not eradication) of capitalism is the sole goal of ALL contemporary lefts (marxism, feminism, anti-racism, queeries, . . . ). Such an understanding of social inequality is based on the fundamental understanding that the source of wealth is human knowledge and not human labor. That is, wealth is produced by the human mind and is thus free from the actual objective conditions that shape~~s~~ the historical relations of labor and capital. Only Orthodox Marxism recognizes the historicity of labor and its primacy as the source of all human wealth. In this paper I argue that any emancipatory theory has to be founded on recognition of the priority of Marx's labor theory of value and not repeat the technological determinism of corporate theory ("knowledge work") that masquerades as social theory. Finally, it is only Orthodox Marxism that recognizes the inevitability and also the necessity of communism—the necessity, that is, of a society in which "from each according to their ability to each according to their needs" (Marx) is the rule. 50 + 51 + 52 +====Only through engaging in micropolitical methods of knowledge proliferation can we truly make productive social advances within academic spaces. Micropolitical spaces are the starting ground through which we can question the way that our subjectivities have been co-opted, and start to uproot oppressive ideology. 53 +Empirics prove the 1AC- 54 +Environmentalism, Feminism, Civil Rights and Communism all started out as epistemic movements that centered on micropolitical knowledge creation.==== 55 +Bullis and Houde in '99: 56 +Lincoln Bullis, Professor of Comunications at Southwestern College, and Connie Houde, Associate Professor of Communications at the University of Utah, "Ecofeminist Pedagogy: An Exploratory Case", Ethics and the Environment, Volume 4, Number 2, 1999, pp. 143-174 (Article) 57 +A position of differential and tactical subjectivity questions hegemonic discourses within text-audience interactions 58 +AND 59 +now to describing how this philosophy was, and may be, enacted. 60 + 61 + 62 +====The Role of the Ballot is to endorse the debater who best activates micropolitical agency as an avenue of resisting the capitalist war machine. 63 + 64 +Micropolitical strategies are the only way we as students can productively change society. Policy reform can never expect to solve for systemic grievances unless we invigorate the political with innovative methodologies. The election of a white supremacist proves that jerking off to the magic of policy fiat doesn't do jack shit until we re-conceptualize our orientation to power structures. Only the 1AC's microstrategic method can revive the graveyard of democracy. 65 +Giroux in '12:==== 66 +**Henry A. Giroux, Global TV Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, "Beyond the Politics of the Big Lie: The Education Deficit and the New Authoritarianism", 19 June 2012** 67 +The democratic deficit is not, as many commentators have argued, reducible to the 68 +AND 69 +making education central to organized politics and the quest for a radical democracy. 70 + 71 + 72 +====The AFF doesn't suddenly implement a bloody anti-capitalist revolution nor does it defend some kind of magical, idealized, post-fiat advocacy where everyone just sporadically abandons the state. Rather, the 1AC is a method of interjecting new methods of analysis and intellectualism into academic spheres, be it college campuses, discursive opportunities or the debate space. 73 + 74 +We allow the proliferation of Marxist pedagogy to liberate the proletariat from capital hypnotism and we embrace whatever erupts from this newfound class consciousness. 75 +Slaughter 76 +https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/slaughte.htm 77 +Cliff Slaughter "Marxism and the Class Struggle", 1975 Slaughter was born 1928 and was a British socialist activist and writer. His best-known works are Coal is our life and Marxism, Ideology and Literature; Index Books published his "Not without a storm: towards a communist manifesto for the age of globalisation in 2006" . publ. by New Park Publications. ==== 78 + 79 +Marxism is not a 'sociology'. It only appears to be so, because, from the point of view of every other particular section of the intellectual division of labour-philosophy, economics, history, history of ideas, etc.-Marxism goes beyond their defined subject-matter, insisting that the real content of each of them is to be found in the contradictory totality of social economic relations from which flow the forms of activity and thought to which the separate disciplines address themselves. Political economy, for example, is 'negated' by Marxism, in the Hegelian sense. Marx's treatment of political economy takes to their limit the contradictory developments of classical political economy. To do this requires the explanation of political economy's concepts and their real content as the 'alienated' consciousness of the development of bourgeois society itself. Thus we find in the Critique of Political Economy and in Capitalitself a negation of political economy, which is demonstrated as being an adequate reflection of the sphere of exchange values and their behaviour. But this sphere is shown to be the real world of appearances or illusions as necessarily created by a historically limited social order, capitalism. Marx's rejection of bourgeois philosophy is a similar materialist critique. His analysis of political and historical thought and their material sources was the third element of the synthesis achieved by Marx. Why then do we say that Marxism only appears to be a sociology? Because sociology originated and developed, not as the dialectical negation, the overcoming of the contradictions, of each of the alienated spheres of thought, but as their definition anew in relation to some supposedly more 'general' science of the 'the social as such' (Durkheim's 'le social en soi' and 'social facts' constitute the acme of this approach). Comte, first to use the term 'sociology', invented the word in order to indicate: '. . . under one single heading that integral part of natural philosophy which concerns itself with the positive study of the totality of fundamental laws proper to social phenomena.' Instead of the dynamic synthesis constituted by Marx's negation of the separated and alienated fields of philosophy, political economy and history (class struggle), we have the static and uncritical synthesis of Comte, to be followed by a century of sterile debate in sociology about 'metaphysics or empiricism', 'generalisation or specialised monographs', 'system or action'. Instead of the consistent materialism made possible by Marx's historical or dialectical approach, we have the pseudo-scientific reliance on 'experience', which in Comte's case ended in the purest mysticism, since his 'spiritual' experience was granted just as much validity as any other. Bourgeois sociology in the 20th century is tied, philosophically and methodologically, to the pragmatism of the ruling class. Sociology continues to oscillate between idealism and mechanical materialism: 'social facts as things' on the one hand, freedom of the individual on the other; the classical dichotomy of bourgeois ideology. Instead of social analysis in terms of the contradictory development and struggle of opposites in each specific, historically limited, socioeconomic formation, we have in sociology the search for general principles or sociological laws which transcend specific historical stages. Talcott Parsons' rejection of Marxism, on the grounds that it is a series of 'genetic' explanations, sums up this functionalist barrenness. These aspects of the split in social theory between Marxism and sociology since the second quarter of the last century are of course inseparably linked with the fact that, as against Marx and Marxism's concern with capitalist society, Comte is the father (though he himself is only the bastard son of Saint-Simon in this and many other respects) of the sociologists' insistence that they are concerned with 'industrial' or 'modern' society. This is only a 'sociological' version of the political economists' recognition of the 'natural' character of the laws of capitalist economy, which they could not accept as only the laws of a definite and historically limited socio-economic formation. When Marx insisted on the 'social' dimension of all spheres of activity and thought, it was with a dual emphasis: first, to grasp each sphere as only one 'moment' of a contradictory social whole; second, to put an end to the alienation resulting from exploitation, to give a new life to each activity by making it the conscious activity of the associated producers in a classless society; for this, theory must unite with and develop in unity with the proletarian revolution. Sociology, by contrast, accepts and describes the alienation and even dignifies it by presenting it systematically as the 'differentiation and integration of roles' and the 'structuring of orientations'. A Marxist analysis of sociology would demonstrate in what way these supposedly 'general' social phenomena and mechanisms are but an ideological reflection of the surface of capitalist society itself. The revolutionary political orientation of Marxist social theory, as contrasted with the professed 'value-freedom' of sociology, is fundamental to Marxism. And the perennial pleas for separating Marx's politics from his sociological 'insights' are as absurdity misplaced as the similar attempts to cleanse Marx's social theories of philosophy. Marxism is then the dialectical negation of the highest developments in bourgeois thought, and through this of the reality from which that thought flows and of which it forms a necessary part. It is this conception which lies behind Lenin's famous dictum: The workers can acquire political consciousness only from without, i.e., only outside of the economic struggle, outside of the sphere of relations between workers and employers. The sphere from which alone it is possible to obtain this knowledge is the sphere of relationships between all classes and the state and the government-the sphere of the interrelations between all classes. (Lenin, What is to be Done?) Here Lenin expresses politically (i.e. in conflict with political opponents who based themselves on the supposed 'spontaneous' development of socialist consciousness from the experience of the working class) the implications for working-class consciousness of the discoveries of Marx. Scientific thought (in the philosophy of Hegel) had arrived at the point where it must accept the conclusion that it could advance further only by grasping activity its real place in the struggle to end the conditions of its own alienated character; this was only possible, Marx said, by grasping the nature of the working class as the agent of the necessary revolutionary change. The working class itself, however, could arrive at the necessary consciousness and thereby the unity necessary for social revolution only by understanding the full historical implications of its role in production and its capacity for abolishing class society. Besides the conclusion that the economic structure is 'basic', and that the class struggle of the proletariat is an objective necessity creating the conditions for socialist revolution, there was necessary the whole theory of historical materialism, the understanding of social development as a unified process, with revolutionary consciousness seizing hold of the meaning of the contradictions at the base of society in order to overthrow it. This body of theory could not come from the working class but only 'from the outside, from bourgeois intellectuals'. From that point on, the development of Marxism takes definite forms in relation to the struggle of the working class, its internal political conflicts, strategy, tactics and organisation, nationally and internationally. While Marx and Engels themselves made great contributions in this field, it has of course been most enriched in the twentieth century, above all by the work of Lenin and Trotsky. Marx and Engels began their communist political careers with a series of thoroughgoing polemics against other schools of socialism (e.g., in The Comnunist Manifesto). Immediately after the 1848 revolutions they combated the impatience and what amounted to rejection of theory by those who wanted to continue an insurrectionist struggle in unfavourable conditions. They never ceased to participate in and advise the labour movement in every country with which they could establish contact. They insisted - for example, in correspondence with Russian and North American socialists - on a very close and detailed attention to the specific conditions of the history, economy and working-class movement of each particular country. But they always were vigilant against eclecticism and attempts to put aside the theoretical conquests they had made. Writing to Bebel and other leaders of the German Social-Democratic Party in 1879, Marx and Engels returned to a theme which had concerned them as long ago as 1848: the role of bourgeois intellectuals in the revolutionary movement. Then, in the Manifesto, they had written: ' . . . a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class . . . in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists.' Now, in 1879, they make a very different emphasis, and one which shows that Lenin was not inconsistent when he combined his insistence on the decisive importance of intellectuals in the development of revolutionary theory with an implacable struggle against every manifestation of revisionism and intellectual light-mindedness with theory. Marx and Engels go out of their way to warn Bebel and the party leaders that bourgeois and petty-bourgeois intellectuals joining the movement must show that they are willing to learn from the party its theory of scientific socialism in the first place. If this is not done, then they inevitably bring with them elements of the now decaying and disintegrating German bourgeois culture and philosophy. (In other words, what could be gained from bourgeois development before 1848 was the opposite of what flowed from it in 1789.) Lenin stressed that the fight against revisionism (so called after the celebrated controversy in the German Social Democracy over Bernstein's criticisms of Marx in the 1890s) was a recurring and inevitable one. He explained that not only individual thinkers in the working class or the revolutionary Marxist party were affected by particular aspects of bourgeois ideology, but that the development of capitalism constantly modified the relations between the proletariat and the middle classes, the latter carrying into the former their ideas, the ideas of capitalism. Revisionism in the labour movement reflected these class pressures. The nearer a revolutionary situation, the more these ideological differences would be expressed in political and organisational differences. Hence the vital importance in a pre-revolutionary period of consciously combating revisionism. This theoretical fight is the anticipation of all the problems and divisions which the working class will have to overcome in its actual struggle for power. The problem of proletarian class-consciousness is often discussed in a very abstract and general manner, instead of through the analysis of the actual historical process by which the Marxist movement and the working-class movement have developed. These are not two distinct processes: the conscious building of revolutionary parties is the highest form of the process by which the proletariat becomes a class 'for itself'. In the proper place, there is needed a critical analysis of all those writings on the working class and its consciousness which rely on concepts lie 'affluence', 'prosperity', 'embourgeoisement', 'social mobility', and so on; and this analysis would have to deal with all the superficially very different and 'radical' approaches of writers like Marcuse. For the Marxist, such an analysis is of interest as an insight into the ideology of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, reflecting their own historical situation and its changes, but it would at the same time be important in relation to the development of Marxism itself, because it bears directly on the most characteristic 'revision' of Marxism in our epoch: the rejection of the revolutionary role of the working class and of the need for revolutionary parties. Class, for Marx, is rooted in social relations of production, and cannot be referred in the first place to relations of distribution and consumption or their ideological reflections. In considering the class consciousness of the proletariat, Marxists are therefore not concerned with the ideas of individual workers about their position in society (no matter how many examples are collected and classified) so much as with the following series of categories: relations of production (sale of labour-power, exploitation); conflict of workers and employers on this basis (economic struggles, trade unions, elementary political battles for economic ends); conflict at the level of class (economic struggles which merge into the conflict between classes, which is organised through the political parties and the struggle for state power); the theoretical and practical struggle to build revolutionary parties of the working class, in conflict with non-revolutionary and counter-revolutionary tendencies in the class and their reflection inside the revolutionary party. Thus, for example, a worker in the motor car industry will move through his elemental experience to an understanding of the gap between his own standard of life, income and conditions of work, on the one hand, and the mass of wealth to whose production he contributes, on the other. He will recognise an identity of interest, on this basis, with other wage-workers. 'Combinations' or trade unions are the adequate expression of this level of consciousness. To this 'trade union consciousness' may correspond other ideological, critical views on various aspects of capitalist society: for example, such consciousness can easily co-exist with that view which lays all the stress on differences or similarities in patterns of consumption; thus, elementary socialistic propaganda of the moralising type, and modern pessimistic speculation about the workers' consciousness being dulled by the abundance of consumer goods, are types of consciousness which do not penetrate to the basis of class differences and class struggle and therefore cannot facilitate the development of political consciousness. More 'sophisticated' socialist views of class-consciousness often refer to a process of more or less spontaneous political maturing through a series of economic struggles which take on greater and greater magnitude, finally posing demands which the system cannot meet. Here again the same basic error, from the Marxist standpoint, is made. In all such approaches, the class and its consciousness are seen in terms of a pre-Marxist theory of knowledge and of history. Those who put forward these ideas are unable to escape from a conception in which the separate individuals in the class move from their own working and other everyday experience to a higher level of consciousness, in this case political consciousness. In point of fast an individual worker does not arrive through his own experience at a scientific consciousness of the actual relationships at work, let alone the political relationships. It u only when a worker comes into contact with the products, in political programme and action, of Marxist theory in politics - i.e., with the outcome of theoretical works produced in the first place by non-proletarian - that he can conceive of even his own working experience in terms which go beyond those of the prevailing bourgeois ideology. These works take the essence of the experience of the proletariat as well as all developments in economy, politics, science, the arts, etc. Only a historical view of the working class and of the theory of Marxism, in their mutual interrelations, can produce a theory of class consciousness. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Marx and Engels, working on various fields of learning, as well as analysing the experience of the struggle of the working class to that date, elaborated their theory of socialism. The theory is henceforth the essential component of the process by which the working class becomes a class 'for itself'. As a theory, it had first to penetrate beneath the day-to-day phenomenal form of capitalist society to the social relations of production. It demonstrated that production under capitalism continues, and society develops, not through any conscious plan, but through the drive to produce surplus value, consequent upon the reduction of labour-power to a commodity, to units of 'abstract labour'. This is the essence of the worker's exploitation, rather than the fact, say, that he does not own the cars he produces. What he produces is essentially surplus value, the augmentation of that same capital which oppresses him. From these basic relationships, Marx demonstrated the reality of the history of capitalism, the way in which private ownership came to a revolutionary clash with the further development of the forces of production. For a political or socialist consciousness of the struggle against the capitalist class, there is necessary the understanding of this historical tendency of the capitalist system. This means not just an abstract knowledge of the theory of historical materialism, but the concrete analysis of, and active engagement in, the development of the class struggle in all its forms and at all levels, in the period of capitalism's historical decline. It was" Lenin's major special contribution to Marxism to elaborate this theory of leadership and the revolutionary party, first of all in What is to be Done? and One Step Forward, Two Steps Back. But the whole of Lenin's work is an expression of this central concern. Later, Trotsky devoted a series of books and articles to the defence and development of the ideas worked out by Lenin (cf. particularly his In Defence of Marxism and Lessons of October). Gramsci also worked on important aspects of the relationship between Marxist theory and class consciousness, and developed further the critique of notions of spontaneity. We have seen that even though the mass of workers experience capitalist exploitation, it is necessary for a struggle to take place between their existing consciousness, on the one hand, and Marxism on the other. This struggle is conducted, as part of the struggle of material forces, by the revolutionary Marxist party. The socialist revolution, like every social revolution, occupies an entire epoch. Its outcome is decided by a series of battles in every country, requiring ~~requires~~ the developed strategy and tactics of revolutionary parties and a revolutionary international whose whole outlook and experience is guided by the theoretical foundations laid by Marx. Through the socialist revolution, men will enter 'the realm of freedom', says Marx. Consciousness will then not be the distorted ideology of oppressive social relations, resulting from the product's domination over the producer, but will be the expression of the scientifically-orientated will of the collective producers, of 'socialised humanity'. 'The free development of each will be the condition of the free development of all.' Already the struggle of the working class against capitalism raises this fundamental question of the relation between subject and object, thus bringing Marx to say that philosophy can realize itself only through the proletariat. Capitalism poses the question in generalised from for the whole class in its relation to the rest of society, and thus demands nothing less than a revolutionary solution: '... the labour employed on the products appears here as the value of those products, au a material quality possessed by them.' (Marx, 'Critique of the Gotha Programme'). This 'reification', the value-form, in which a social relation between men in their most fundamental activity is transformed into a 'thing' standing outside and against men, is specific to the way in which the capitalist system continues the enslavement of man by man. This 'topsy-turvy world' becomes in sociology a world of 'social facts', of 'roles', faithfully recorded as the necessary framework of experience. Just as the working class in its struggle must reject this split between subject and object as a threat to its very humanity, so must Marxist theory penetrate beneath it and point the way to its internal contradictions and historical fate. The real relation between the working class and its product is obscured in the first place by the fact that the labour appears to have been paid for in wages, and that there the matter ends. Marx says that this illusion of wages as the proper reward for labour is the key to all the ideology of capitalism (Capital, Vol . I, p. 550). Marx exploded this illusion in theory, and thus opened the path for its being exploded in practice. That path leads from trade union consciousness (a fair day's pay for a fair day's work!) to socialist consciousness. Working-class consciousness is then, for Marxists, the comprehending in struggle of the process through which the proletariat develops from its identity as formed by capitalism (the mass of exploited wage-labourers, the class 'in itself') to the working class organised as a revolutionary force for the taking of power and the building of socialism (the class 'for itself'). This process must be grasped dialectically, i.e., as a conflict of opposites, a real conflict between the class as it is and as the Marxist movement fights for it to be, on the basis of analysing the objective developments in society. It is the failure to recognise and to begin from this conflict which restricts, for example, the work of Lukacs in his History and Class Consciousness (1923-1924). Lukacs cannot get beyond the concept of 'adjudged' or 'adequate' consciousness, which is abstracted by the investigator according to his scientific estimation of the needs of the class historically. This remains at the level of the type of concepts developed by bourgeois sociology (particularly Max Weber), and fails to reach the level of dialectical materialism, at the centre of which is the unity of theory and practice as a contradictory process. Lukacs' own subsequent capitulation to Stalinism, whatever other causes it had, was rooted in this static and essentially idealist conception of class consciousness, imported from neo-Kantian philosophy. It helped him in a very crude way to accept and become an apologist for Stalinist orthodoxy in the communist movement. Lukacs asserted that the central concept of dialectics is 'totality'; and here again he shows the inadequacy of his outlook for a theory of class consciousness. For Marx, the struggle, the unity and the interpenetration of opposites is the essence of dialectics, and this dialectic is materialist, so that for Marxists the notion of totality must have a meaning different from that presented by Lukacs. 'The unity of the world consists in its materiality,' wrote Engels. It is characteristic of Lukacs' agnosticism on the question of the objective nature of the external world (in History and Class Consciousness) that he must take 'totality' and the proletariat's grasp of this totality as an abstraction. Only a view of the 'unity' or 'totality' of the objective world of nature and society which sees this unity as arising continuously from a changing conflict of material opposites can form the basis of 'revolutionary practice', the sine qua non of Marx's theory of knowledge. Henri Lefebvre (in his The Sociology of Marx, 1968, and elsewhere) has criticised Lukacs for his stress on 'totality' and has argued that 'the conflict of opposites' is in fact the core of dialectics. However, in Lefebvre's work this correct criticism remains purely abstract, and leads him eventually to Utopianism. He starts from the concept of a struggle of opposites, but leaves it at the level of the very general concepts of praxis and alienation. These terms, taken from Marx's early work, enable Lefebvre to make often penetrating exposés of capitalist culture, but they remain altogether too abstract for a revolutionary theory of class consciousness. The theory remains purely critical, aloof from practice, i.e., from the activity of the class and the fight for a working-class leadership on a Marxist basis. Lefebvre criticises, for example, Lucien Goldmann, because the latter, developing the work of Lukacs, over-emphasises the phenomenon of 'reification' so much that his argument amounts to a virtual acceptance, rather than a criticism, of the forms of objectivity imposed on consciousness by capitalist society. But this criticism is inadequate, and needs in the end to be turned against Lefebvre himself. Goldmann in the period between 1957 and his death in 1973, expressed complete scepticism about the revolutionary role of the working class under modern capitalism. He did so on the grounds that, besides certain economic and political changes in the capitalist system, such as the part played by state intervention in the economy, the ability of capitalism to supply an ever-increasing amount of consumer goods had eroded working class consciousness. This suggests immediately that Goldmann's original reasons for accepting the revolutionary character of the proletariat were unsound, from the Marxist standpoint (see his articles in Les Temps Modernes for 1957 and 1958, reprinted in Recherches Dialectiques, Paris, 1959). Goldmann conceives of ideas and ideologies as mental translations of economic and social patterns, rather than as the outcome of the struggles of the class at all levels of social reality (see chapter VI above), and this has provided an avenue for him to accept the fashionable 'structuralist' school of idealism in France. The actual contradictory process of the struggle for revolutionary consciousness, the conflicts between theory and practice, between party and class and, concretely, the struggle of tendencies within the labour movement and within the revolutionary party, and the class bases of these struggles-all these are almost completely lacking in any of the often interesting commentaries of these writers, whose works appeal so much to those who look for some pure or 'restored' Marxism, rediscovered by removing all the results of a century and more of bitter struggle as the theory has taken on flesh and blood. The 'young Marx' is the usual gospel of this faith. It would be in the spirit of Marx himself to aim for a Marxism which is rich and concrete, and at the same time warlike, having worked over and 'negated' all the contradictory developments in the proletarian revolution, and above all in the communist movement itself. For the various 'schools' of Marxism in France and their faint echoes outside, the issue is indeed presented much more concretely than they would like: to really develop the Marxist method and concepts for the analysis of modern capitalist society and of the USSR, it is necessary to start from a conscious reintegration with the whole actual past struggle for Marxism against the social democrats and then the Stalinists and revisionists who distorted it. That means an identification with the continuity of the fight for Marxism of Lenin and Trotsky, and in particular against the Stalinist domination of working-class politics and of 'Marxism' in France. In the most fundamental theoretical terms, Lefebvre has missed out what was potentially correct in Lukacs' insistence on 'totality': the struggle of opposites in society must be taken as first and foremost a class conflict, at the level of the social whole. To analyse, and to start in all social analyses from this, requires of course a concentration on the specific contradictions of capitalism and of the development of the working class and its revolutionary consciousness within capitalism. Marx himself developed his ideas from the general notions of praxis and alienation of humanity in his early works to the specific analysis of the historically developing social relations of capitalism, out of which grew all the 'praxis' and 'alienation' of modern man. By returning to the early Marx for the key to capitalist society today, Lefebvre opens the door to a reformist and Utopian critique of culture, instead of a consistent and revolutionary theory and practice, in conflict with the Stalinist distortion of Marxism in every field. His works Critique de la Vie Quotidienne (Vol II, 1960, Editions de L'Arche) and Introduction a la Modernite (Editions de Minuit, 1962) reveal this tendency very clearly: a searching for a 'poetic' quality in particular aspects of life, a contrast between creative and repetitive actions which is made a more general and important distinction than the specific historical contradictions of capitalism and the tasks of revolutionary transformation which they pose to the working class and to Marxists. Our argument here does not simplify the question of class consciousness. On the contrary, it opens up a prospect which cannot be settled purely by words. Theory must become conscious of its real relationship with its subject-matter, and consciously guide the revolutionary struggle to transform it. This is the essence of dialectical materialism in Marx's work. For the working class to become a class 'for itself' requires not simply the absorption of the experience of capitalist society, but the critical struggle against this experience by a party armed with the whole theory of Marxism. Party and class are two interpenetrating opposites at one level (the class 'for itself' and the class 'in itself'). These two poles at the same time constitute a whole (the working class) which itself is one pole as against its opposite (the capitalist class) in another contradictory whole (capitalist society). Society confronts nature as its 'opposite'. The working class must realize itself, against capitalism, subsuming all the historical gains for humanity made by capitalism at the same time as overthrowing it. This it can do only when the outlook, strategy and tactics of a Marxist party predominate in the actions of the class as a class, in revolutionary struggles. A similar process is necessary within the party: only if it can study, unify and transform through struggle all the experiences of the class can its theory be saved from one-sidedness, dogma and idealism. Within the Marxist party, once again we have a struggle of opposites, a struggle for the development of Marxist theory and its application to the struggles of the proletariat, in constant struggle against every mode of adaptation to the existing position of the working class, its disunity, fragmentation, etc., those aspects of its situation which predispose it towards acceptance of its oppression. Then theory itself must also be considered as a struggle of opposites. We have seen that at every level, each pole of a unity of opposites contains a recapitulation of the total opposition within itself (e.g. the party has both its own essence and its opposite within it and not only as an external opposite, etc.). Marxist theory develops by proving the 'concreteness' of its abstractions against the apparent concreteness (really abstractness, because abstracted from the changing forces which produce them) of uncritically accepted empirical reality. It does this through a struggle to change that reality, capitalism, by placing itself politically in a relation of political consciousness, leadership, with the working class. That means the struggle to build revolutionary parties able to lead the working class to power. Marxism is this struggle: it is not a sociology or an abstract theoretical system of any kind. - EntryDate
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