Summary

• Objects (1 modified, 1 added, 0 removed)
  • Caselist.RoundClass[32]
  • Caselist.CitesClass[30]

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Caselist.RoundClass[32]

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Caselist.CitesClass[30]

Cites

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	1	+Expenditure as a strategy can't cope with the changing face of capitalism- it sanitizes neoliberalism
	2	+GOUX , PhD, 90
	3	+(JEAN-JOSEPH, Laurence H. Favrot Professor Emeritus of French Studies @ Rice Yale French Studies, No. 78, On Bataille (1990), pp. 206-224)
	4	+Everything suggests that Bataille was unable to articulate the my- stical tension toward sovereign self-consciousness "without form and mode," "pure expenditure" (224) with a utopia of social life that would make it possible, nor to explain in a developed capitalist soci- ety the consumption of the surplus beyond its reinvestment in pro- duction. Now it is quite clear that today's capitalism has come a long way from the Calvinist ethic that presided at its beginning. The val- ues of thrift, sobriety and asceticism no longer have the place that they held when Balzac could caricature the dominant bourgeois men- tality with the characters of pere Grandet or the usurer Gobseck. It is doubtful that the spirit of capitalism, which according to Weber is expressed with an almost classical purity in Benjamin Franklin's principles ("he who kills a five shilling coin assassinates all that it could have produced: entire stacks of sterling pounds") cited by Bataille, 163, could today be considered the spirit of the times. Un- doubtedly, the pace at which all residual sacred elements inherited from feudalism are eliminated has quickened. But hasn't contempo- rary society undergone a transformation of the ethic of consumption, desire, and pleasure that renders the classical (Weberian) analyses of the spirit of capitalism (to which Bataille subscribes) inadequate? If the great opposition between the sacred and the profane no longer structures social life, if communal, sacrificial, and glorious expendi- ture has been replaced by private expenditure, it is no less true that advanced capitalism seems to exceed the principle of restricted econ- omy and utility that presided at its beginning. No society has "wasted" as much as contemporary capitalism. What is the form of this waste, of this excess? These questions strike directly at the historical situation and philosophical signification of Bataille's thought. Is it not clear that his passion for the "notion of expenditure,"-which, beginning in 1933, is the matrix of all his economic reflections to come-emerge precisely at a turning point in the history of capitalism, in the 1920s and 1930s, which also saw the appearance of Lukacs and Heidegger?2 Can we not perceive within the principles of secularization and re- stricted economics that were the strength of early capitalism an inter- nal conflict that undermines them, and puts capitalism in contradic- tion with itself ? (209-210)
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	6	+The critique is ivory tower elitism – only the rich and powerful can afford to expend without reserve.
	7	+Wolin, PhD, 04
	8	+(Richard, Left Fascism: Georges Bataille and the German Ideology in The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism )
	9	+One could raise an analogous criticism of Bataille's treatment of potlatch—the public, demonstrative destruction of wealth—as well end page 170 as gift-giving. In truth, only those who possess great wealth can afford to destroy it. Consequently, the option to engage in potlatch does not exist for society's lower classes. 56 Like sacrifice, potlatch is implicated in the reproduction of social hierarchy. Such acts reinforce the status and prestige of those who destroy their wealth. In nearly every case, the practitioners of potlatch belong to the upper strata of society. Those who are forced to passively endure the potlatch are in effect humiliated. Through such acts, their lowly social rank is reaffirmed.(170-1)
	10	+
	11	+Post-date on Bataille matters-capitalism has shifted and outflanked his expenditure theory
	12	+Yang Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara , 00
	13	+(Mayfair Mei‐hui Putting Global Capitalism in Its Place Economic Hybridity, Bataille, and Ritual Expenditure1 Current Anthropology Vol. 41, No. 4, August/October )
	14	+Scholars such as Jean‐Joseph Goux (1998) have pointed to a troubling overlap between Bataille’s views on luxury and sacrificial expenditure and postmodern consumer capitalism. Consumer capitalism is also predicated on massive consumption and waste rather than on the thrift, asceticism, and accumulation against which Bataille directed his theory of expenditure. It exhibits potlatch features in the tendency for businesses to give goods away in the hope that “supply creates its own demand”; it collapses the distinction between luxury and useful goods and between need and desire (Goux 1998). Unlike modernist capitalism, postmodern consumer capitalism is driven by consumption rather than production. Thus, Bataille’s vision of the ritual destruction of wealth as defying the principles of accumulative and productive capitalism does not address this different phase of consumer capitalism, whose contours have only become clear since his death in 1962.
	15	+
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	17	+This isn't a random missed prediction- Bataille's failure to anticipate hedonistic capitalism invalidates his entire sociology
	18	+GOUX , PhD, 90
	19	+(JEAN-JOSEPH, Laurence H. Favrot Professor Emeritus of French Studies @ Rice Yale French Studies, No. 78, On Bataille (1990), pp. 206-224)
	20	+Along with this "postbourgeois" capitalism that at once contra- dicts Bataille's sociological interpretation and confirms his on- tological vision, explode the sociocultural contradictions of cap- italism. Daniel Bell has convincingly shown that with the develop- ment of mass consumption and mass credit (which he situates in the 1930s) the puritan ideology of early capitalism entered into contra- diction with an increasingly hedonist mode of consumption favored by capitalism. The entrepreneur's need to revive seduction, to re- spond to competition with promises of evermore complex pleasures, inscribes him in a consumerist ideology directly at odds with the "bourgeois" virtues of sobriety, thrift, and hard work that had assured the development of production. In this way, the strict moral confines necessary for production enter into contradiction with the ethical liberation (even moral license) necessary to consumption.8 Bataille does not seem to have foreseen this conflict born of abundance and the extraordinary sophistication of production. The Weberian image of capitalism that he maintains, the slightly obsolete conviction that Franklin's precepts of economy and sobriety represent capitalism's morals in its pure state, seem to indicate that Bataille did not imagine the paradoxical situation of postindustrial capitalism where only the appeal to compete infinitely in unproductive consumption (through comfort, luxury, technical refinement, the superfluous) allows for the development of production. (218-9)
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	24	+The impact is extinction—short term reforms aimed at stabilizing the system only cause harder landing
	25	+Robinson 14—professor of sociology, global and international studies, and Latin American studies, at the University of California-Santa Barbara
	26	+(William, “Global Capitalism: Crisis of Humanity and the Specter of 21st Century Fascism”, The World Financial Review, May-June 2014, dml)
	27	+
	28	+The system-wide crisis we face is not a repeat of earlier such episodes such as that of the the 1930s or the 1970s precisely because capitalism is fundamentally different in the 21st century. Globalisation constitutes a qualitatively new epoch in the ongoing and open-ended evolution of world capitalism, marked by a number of qualitative shifts in the capitalist system and by novel articulations of social power. I highlight four aspects unique to this epoch.1
	29	+First is the rise of truly transnational capital and a new global production and financial system into which all nations and much of humanity has been integrated, either directly or indirectly. We have gone from a world economy, in which countries and regions were linked to each other via trade and financial flows in an integrated international market, to a global economy, in which nations are linked to each more organically through the transnationalisation of the production process, of finance, and of the circuits of capital accumulation. No single nation-state can remain insulated from the global economy or prevent the penetration of the social, political, and cultural superstructure of global capitalism. Second is the rise of a Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC), a class group that has drawn in contingents from most countries around the world, North and South, and has attempted to position itself as a global ruling class. This TCC is the hegemonic fraction of capital on a world scale. Third is the rise of Transnational State (TNS) apparatuses. The TNS is constituted as a loose network made up of trans-, and supranational organisations together with national states. It functions to organise the conditions for transnational accumulation. The TCC attempts to organise and institutionally exercise its class power through TNS apparatuses. Fourth are novel relations of inequality, domination and exploitation in global society, including an increasing importance of transnational social and class inequalities relative to North-South inequalities.
	30	+Cyclical, Structural, and Systemic Crises
	31	+Most commentators on the contemporary crisis refer to the “Great Recession” of 2008 and its aftermath. Yet the causal origins of global crisis are to be found in over-accumulation and also in contradictions of state power, or in what Marxists call the internal contradictions of the capitalist system. Moreover, because the system is now global, crisis in any one place tends to represent crisis for the system as a whole. The system cannot expand because the marginalisation of a significant portion of humanity from direct productive participation, the downward pressure on wages and popular consumption worldwide, and the polarisation of income, has reduced the ability of the world market to absorb world output. At the same time, given the particular configuration of social and class forces and the correlation of these forces worldwide, national states are hard-pressed to regulate transnational circuits of accumulation and offset the explosive contradictions built into the system.
	32	+Is this crisis cyclical, structural, or systemic? Cyclical crises are recurrent to capitalism about once every 10 years and involve recessions that act as self-correcting mechanisms without any major restructuring of the system. The recessions of the early 1980s, the early 1990s, and of 2001 were cyclical crises. In contrast, the 2008 crisis signaled the slide into a structural crisis. Structural crises reflect deeper contradictions that can only be resolved by a major restructuring of the system. The structural crisis of the 1970s was resolved through capitalist globalisation. Prior to that, the structural crisis of the 1930s was resolved through the creation of a new model of redistributive capitalism, and prior to that the structural crisis of the 1870s resulted in the development of corporate capitalism. A systemic crisis involves the replacement of a system by an entirely new system or by an outright collapse. A structural crisis opens up the possibility for a systemic crisis. But if it actually snowballs into a systemic crisis – in this case, if it gives way either to capitalism being superseded or to a breakdown of global civilisation – is not predetermined and depends entirely on the response of social and political forces to the crisis and on historical contingencies that are not easy to forecast. This is an historic moment of extreme uncertainty, in which collective responses from distinct social and class forces to the crisis are in great flux.
	33	+Hence my concept of global crisis is broader than financial. There are multiple and mutually constitutive dimensions – economic, social, political, cultural, ideological and ecological, not to mention the existential crisis of our consciousness, values and very being. There is a crisis of social polarisation, that is, of social reproduction. The system cannot meet the needs or assure the survival of millions of people, perhaps a majority of humanity. There are crises of state legitimacy and political authority, or of hegemony and domination. National states face spiraling crises of legitimacy as they fail to meet the social grievances of local working and popular classes experiencing downward mobility, unemployment, heightened insecurity and greater hardships. The legitimacy of the system has increasingly been called into question by millions, perhaps even billions, of people around the world, and is facing expanded counter-hegemonic challenges. Global elites have been unable counter this erosion of the system’s authority in the face of worldwide pressures for a global moral economy. And a canopy that envelops all these dimensions is a crisis of sustainability rooted in an ecological holocaust that has already begun, expressed in climate change and the impending collapse of centralised agricultural systems in several regions of the world, among other indicators. By a crisis of humanity I mean a crisis that is approaching systemic proportions, threatening the ability of billions of people to survive, and raising the specter of a collapse of world civilisation and degeneration into a new “Dark Ages.”2
	34	+This crisis of humanity shares a number of aspects with earlier structural crises but there are also several features unique to the present:
	35	+1. The system is fast reaching the ecological limits of its reproduction. Global capitalism now couples human and natural history in such a way as to threaten to bring about what would be the sixth mass extinction in the known history of life on earth.3 This mass extinction would be caused not by a natural catastrophe such as a meteor impact or by evolutionary changes such as the end of an ice age but by purposive human activity. According to leading environmental scientists there are nine “planetary boundaries” crucial to maintaining an earth system environment in which humans can exist, four of which are experiencing at this time the onset of irreversible environmental degradation and three of which (climate change, the nitrogen cycle, and biodiversity loss) are at “tipping points,” meaning that these processes have already crossed their planetary boundaries.
	36	+2. The magnitude of the means of violence and social control is unprecedented, as is the concentration of the means of global communication and symbolic production and circulation in the hands of a very few powerful groups. Computerised wars, drones, bunker-buster bombs, star wars, and so forth, have changed the face of warfare. Warfare has become normalised and sanitised for those not directly at the receiving end of armed aggression. At the same time we have arrived at the panoptical surveillance society and the age of thought control by those who control global flows of communication, images and symbolic production. The world of Edward Snowden is the world of George Orwell; 1984 has arrived;
	37	+3. Capitalism is reaching apparent limits to its extensive expansion. There are no longer any new territories of significance that can be integrated into world capitalism, de-ruralisation is now well advanced, and the commodification of the countryside and of preand non-capitalist spaces has intensified, that is, converted in hot-house fashion into spaces of capital, so that intensive expansion is reaching depths never before seen. Capitalism must continually expand or collapse. How or where will it now expand?
	38	+4. There is the rise of a vast surplus population inhabiting a “planet of slums,”4 alienated from the productive economy, thrown into the margins, and subject to sophisticated systems of social control and to destruction to a mortal cycle of dispossession-exploitation-exclusion. This includes prison-industrial and immigrant-detention complexes, omnipresent policing, militarised gentrification, and so on;
	39	+5. There is a disjuncture between a globalising economy and a nation-state based system of political authority. Transnational state apparatuses are incipient and have not been able to play the role of what social scientists refer to as a “hegemon,” or a leading nation-state that has enough power and authority to organise and stabilise the system. The spread of weapons of mass destruction and the unprecedented militarisation of social life and conflict across the globe makes it hard to imagine that the system can come under any stable political authority that assures its reproduction.
	40	+Global Police State
	41	+How have social and political forces worldwide responded to crisis? The crisis has resulted in a rapid political polarisation in global society. Both right and left-wing forces are ascendant. Three responses seem to be in dispute.
	42	+One is what we could call “reformism from above.” This elite reformism is aimed at stabilising the system, at saving the system from itself and from more radical responses from below. Nonetheless, in the years following the 2008 collapse of the global financial system it seems these reformers are unable (or unwilling) to prevail over the power of transnational financial capital. A second response is popular, grassroots and leftist resistance from below. As social and political conflict escalates around the world there appears to be a mounting global revolt. While such resistance appears insurgent in the wake of 2008 it is spread very unevenly across countries and regions and facing many problems and challenges.
	43	+Yet another response is that I term 21st century fascism.5 The ultra-right is an insurgent force in many countries. In broad strokes, this project seeks to fuse reactionary political power with transnational capital and to organise a mass base among historically privileged sectors of the global working class – such as white workers in the North and middle layers in the South – that are now experiencing heightened insecurity and the specter of downward mobility. It involves militarism, extreme masculinisation, homophobia, racism and racist mobilisations, including the search for scapegoats, such as immigrant workers and, in the West, Muslims. Twenty-first century fascism evokes mystifying ideologies, often involving race/culture supremacy and xenophobia, embracing an idealised and mythical past. Neo-fascist culture normalises and glamorises warfare and social violence, indeed, generates a fascination with domination that is portrayed even as heroic.
	44	+The need for dominant groups around the world to secure widespread, organised mass social control of the world’s surplus population and rebellious forces from below gives a powerful impulse to projects of 21st century fascism. Simply put, the immense structural inequalities of the global political economy cannot easily be contained through consensual mechanisms of social control. We have been witnessing transitions from social welfare to social control states around the world. We have entered a period of great upheavals, momentous changes and uncertainties. The only viable solution to the crisis of global capitalism is a massive redistribution of wealth and power downward towards the poor majority of humanity along the lines of a 21st century democratic socialism, in which humanity is no longer at war with itself and with nature.
	45	+
	46	+Vote neg to express political dissent beyond the grasp of globalization’s regulatory framework—the act of criticism is what makes democracy effective. This fits within his framework of critical educator
	47	+Roland Bleiker 2, professor of international relations at the University of Queensland, Politics After Seattle: Dilemmas of the Anti-Globalisation Movement, conflits.revues.org/1057
	48	+
	49	+46 While engendering a series of problematic processes, globalisation has also increased the possibility to engage political issues. Before the advent of speed, for instance, a protest event was a mostly local issue. But the presence of global media networks has fundamentally changed the dynamics and terrains of dissent. Political activism no longer takes place solely in the streets of Prague, Seoul or Asuncion. The Battle for Seattle, for instance, was above all a media spectacle, a battle for the hearts and minds of global television audiences. Political activism, wherever it occurs and whatever form it takes, has become intrinsically linked with the non-spatial logic of speed. It has turned into a significant transnational phenomena.¶ 47With the exploration of new terrains of dissent, global activists also face a series of political dilemmas. This essay has addressed two of them : the tension between violent and nonviolent means of resistance, and the issue of unequal representation, the question of who can speak for whom. Rather than suggesting that these issues can be understood and solved by applying a pre-existing body of universal norms and principles, the essay has drawn attention to the open-ended and contingent nature of the puzzles in question. Protest acts against the key multilateral institutions of the world economy will continue, and so will debates about the nature of globalisation and the methods of interfering with its governance. Keeping these debates alive, and seeking to include as many voices, perspectives and constituencies as possible, is a first step towards something that may one day resemble globalisation with a human face.¶ 48But making global governance more humane, more transparent and more democratic is no easy task. Principles of transparency and democracy have historically been confined to the territorial boundaries of the sovereign nation state. Within these boundaries there is the possibility for order and the rule of law. But the space beyond is seen as threatening and anarchical - that is, lacking a central regulatory institution. The standard realist response to these perceptions is well know : protect sovereignty, order and civility at the domestic level by promoting policies that maximise the state's military capacity and, so it is assumed, its security.68 It is questionable to what extent realist policies remain adequate - and ethical for that matter - at a time when process of globalisation have lead to a fundamental transformation of political dynamics.¶ 49The Battle for Seattle, and the media spectacle that issued form it, may well demonstrate that the struggle for power takes place in a realm that lacks a central regulatory institution. But realist interpretations make the mistake of embarking on a fatalistic interpretation of this political realm, constituting conflict as an inevitable element of the system's structure. It may be more adequate - and certainly more productive - to characterise the international system in the age of globalisation and transnational dynamics not as anarchical, but as rhizomatic. For Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari a rhizome is a multiplicity that has no coherent and bounded whole, no beginning or end, only a middle from where it expands and overspills. Any point of the rhizome is connected to any other. It has no fixed points to anchor thought, only lines, magnitudes, dimensions, plateaus, and they are always in motion.69 How, then, is one to reach a moral position in a world of webs, multitudes and multiplicities ? Are the lines, dimensions and plateaus of the rhizome so randomly arranged that we are no longer able to generate the kind of stable knowledge that is necessary to advance critique and, indeed, dissent ? Is the very notion of political foundations still possible at a time when social consciousness gushes out of five-second sound-bites and the corresponding hyperreal images that flicker over our television screens ? Are there alternatives to realist approaches that protect domestic order by warding off everything that threatens it from the outside ? Answers to such questions do, of course, not come easy. And they may not be uniform either. But an adequate response will need to engage in one way or another with the search for political engagements beyond the territorial boundaries of the nation state.¶ 50 An extension of democratic principles into the more ambiguous international realm is as essential as it is difficult. It will need to be based on a commitment to democracy that goes beyond the establishment of legal and institutional procedures. William Connolly has pointed in the right direction when arguing for a democratic ethos. The key to such cultural democratisation, he believes, "is that it embodies a productive ambiguity at its very centre, always resisting attempts to allow one side or the other to achieve final victory."70 Such a model is, of course, the antithesis of prevailing realist wisdom, and perhaps of modern attitudes in general, which seek to achieve security and democracy through the establishment of order and the repression of all ambiguity.71¶ 51Rather than posing a threat to human security, the rhizomatic dimension of the international system may well be a crucial element in the attempt to establish a democratic ethos that can keep up with the pace of globalisation. Some aspects of democratic participation can never be institutionalised. Any political system, no matter how just and refined, rests on a structure of exclusion. It has to separate right from wrong, good from evil, moral from immoral. This separation is both inevitable and desirable. But to remain legitimate the respective political foundations need to be submitted to periodic scrutiny. They require constant readjustments in order to remain adequate and fair. It is in the struggle for fairness, in the attempt to question established norms and procedures, that global protest movements, problematic as they are at times, make an indispensable contribution to democratic politics.¶ 52 The political significance of protest movments is located precisely in the fact that they cannot be controlled by a central regulatory force or an institutional framework. They open up possibilities for social change that are absent within the context of the established legal and political system.72 The various movements themselves are, of course, far from unproblematic. The violent nature of recent actions against neo-liberal governance may well point towards the need for greater political awareness among activists. But such awareness can neither be imposed by legal norms or political procedures. It needs to emerge from the struggle over values that takes place in civil society. The fact that this struggle is ongoing does not detract from the positive potential that is hidden in the movement's rhizomatic nature. These elements embody the very ideal of productive ambiguity that may well be essential for the long-term survival of democracy.
	50	+
	51	+Giroux votes neg
	52	+Giroux 13—Professor, English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University, Ontario
	53	+(Henry, “Radical Democracy Against Cultures of Violence”, http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/20669-radical-democracy-against-cultures-of-violence, dml)
	54	+
	55	+Casino capitalism's paranoiac and increasingly repressive institutional and ideological apparatuses live in fear of dissent, critical rationality and the possibility of collective struggles moved by the desire for justice and a radical democracy. This is precisely where questions about education and resistance connect to broader debates about producing critical agents capable of acting as engaged and responsible citizens in a substantive democracy. Education matters not simply as a space where students can learn to read texts critically or cite the latest fashionable theorists but where they are taught to actually think critically and connect what they learn to the belief that democracy is desirable, possible and has to be defended and constantly renewed. And it is precisely this struggle over ideologies, modes of governance, and social relations that necessitates that educators, workers, young people, intellectuals, artists, journalists and others make clear that any attempt to develop a radical notion of democracy must be inextricably tied to a defense of those institutions where critical thinking, informed dialogue and the resurrection of critical agency become possible. It must also be seen as a site of constant struggle.
	56	+As Chantal Mouffe argues: "Democracy is something uncertain and improbable and must never be taken for granted. It is an always fragile conquest that needs to be defended as well as deepened. There is no threshold of democracy that, once reached, will guarantee its continued existence."17 In the current historical moment, democracy is not in peril because it has been taken for granted, but because under the various regimes of neoliberalism it is viewed as an excess, a burden, a pathology and a potential threat to the corporate and financial elite. Democracy harbors a political antibody to the concentration of power that now abhors its ideals and discourse of equality, justice, and freedom - made evident in the various revolts and insurrections among young people, workers, and others taking place all over the globe.
	57	+Given the current crisis, educators, artists, intellectuals, youth and workers need a new political and pedagogical language for addressing the changing contexts and issues facing a world in which capital draws upon an unprecedented, ruthless appropriation of resources - financial, cultural, political, economic, scientific, military and technological -to exercise powerful and diverse forms of control. Theorists such as Stanley Aronowitz, Angela Davis, Michael Albert, Michael Yates, Richard Wolff, Bill McKibben, Dorothy Roberts, Michelle Alexander and Michael Lerner have made invaluable contributions toward rethinking the role of labor, abolishing the prison-industrial complex, decoupling capitalism from the war machine, abolishing the world-wide gap between the rich and the poor, addressing ecological sustainability, championing women's rights and the need for a new Marshall Plan. All of these theorists share a recognition that democracy is under siege all over the globe by the forces of neoliberalism and that it is time to reclaim its most noble and promising ideals and practices. All of them have suggested a need to reclaim democracy as a radical rather than liberal ideology, mode of governance, and set of policies. C. Douglas Lummis is right in arguing that "Democracy was once a word of the people, a critical word, a revolutionary word. It has been stolen by those who would rule over the people, to add legitimacy to their rule. It is time to take it back."18
	58	+If educators and others are to counter global capitalism's increased efforts to eviscerate democracy as a result of separating the traditional sphere of politics from the now transnational reach of power, it is crucial for them and other cultural workers to develop a political language and educational approaches that reject a collapse of the distinction between market liberties and civil liberties, a market economy and a market society. This suggests developing public spheres capable of constructing forms of moral and political agency willing to challenge neoliberalism and other antidemocratic traditions, including the increasing criminalization of social problems such as homelessness, while resurrecting a radical democratic project that provides the basis for imagining a life beyond the dream-world of capitalism.
	59	+Once again, under such circumstances, education becomes more than a business, an obsession with accountability schemes, measurable utility, authoritarian governing structures, a crude empiricism for defining what counts as research, and a site for simply delineating students as consumers and training them for the workforce. At stake here is the need to recognize and assert the power of schooling, public pedagogy, and the educational influence of the alternative public spheres. Such educational forces are crucial to produce the formative cultures capable of producing the subjectivities, identities, dispositions and capacities necessary to both challenge the various threats being mobilized against the very idea of justice and democracy while also fighting for those ideals, values and policies that offer alternative modes of identity, social relations and politics. More specifically, any viable vision of radical democracy must acknowledge that the foundation for a radical democracy is rooted not merely in economics but in the realm of beliefs, without which there is neither a discourse of critique nor a sense of utopian possibility.
	60	+One starting point for addressing the necessity of a radical democracy might be an international movement for the defense of public goods, especially higher education. As such, higher education would be reclaimed and defended as a democratic public sphere and public good rather than a privilege or private right. Such an education should be financed by public funds, committed to pedagogy as the practice of freedom, governed in a democratic fashion, defined as a center of critique, and dedicated to teaching students how to write, learn important skills and think critically. It should also immerse students in those archives of knowledge that enable the full development of the capacities essential to be thoughtfully engaged and socially responsible citizens of the world.
	61	+A radical democracy implies a politics, consciousness and ethical commitment that takes seriously a level of shared beliefs, a respect for the commons, and practices that allow the fullest application of the principles of equality, freedom, justice and popular control.19 Radical democracy is not strictly about matters of process, representation, political, and personal rights. It is also about the development of a radical consciousness along with an investment in economic and social rights -b those social and economic provisions that enable people to be free from the deprivations of hunger, shelter, unemployment, and inadequate health care, among others. The very idea of a radical democracy is impossible without the existence of a radical imagination and public vision in which it becomes possible to envision conditions in which people participate in and shape all levels of power and decision making. That is, as Stanley Aronowitz puts it, "in which decisions are lodged with those directly affected by them, a realignment of economy and the polity entailing the reintegration of various aspects of life with smaller regional economic and social units."20
	62	+In this instance, radical democracy both registers the need for a critical consciousness as the precondition for people to exercise power in all spheres of life in which power shapes the economic, political and social conditions of their everyday lives and accentuates the need to provide a "critique of centralized power of every sort - charismatic, bureaucratic, class, military, corporate, party, union and technocratic."21 Power and politics in this instance, are about more than economics; they are also about and constitutive of how ideas, hegemony, and those cultural apparatuses engaged in forms of public pedagogy shape desires, needs, values, identities and modes of agency.22 At the same time, it must be recognized that political democracy cannot exist without economic democracy.
	63	+A radical democracy is also grounded in a revolutionizing logic in which the conditions for its fulfillment are always under question and indeed have no final or complete end point. Hence, a radical democracy must be viewed as "stubbornly incomplete and the human condition underdetermined."23 Jean-Luc Nancy is right in arguing that a radical democracy is a space of endless determinations,24 which suggests the need to allow differences to emerge peacefully as a central element of critical exchange, dialogue and thoughtfulness. At stake here is the need to adjudicate conflict thoughtfully without violence and to respond to the myriad forms of "powerlessness that affect citizens of all class and social strata."25 Radical democracy must resist all closure while at the same time arguing for those principles and institutions "in which the democratic ideals of equality, freedom and popular control are allowed their most complete sway and fullest application."26 In defense of such a position, Jacques Derrida points out convincingly that radical democracy is a "democracy to come - because it is the only name for a political regime which declares its historicity and its imperfectability."27 For Derrida, it is "something that has never existed in a satisfactory way and remains to come.28 Democracy is a politics and mode of governance that must always put itself at issue, calling into question the consequences of its regulative principles, while repeatedly assessing the reality of existing institutions against the need for more justice, freedom and equality. This is not a call for endless purification, which can only lead to violence,29 but the call for a society in which democracy becomes synonymous with power for and by the people so as to expand the parameters of justice, dignity and compassion for all people.

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	1	+2016-10-18 20:20:13.682

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	1	+Panel

Opponent

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	1	+Montgomery WP

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	1	+32

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	1	+Harvard Westlake Engel Neg

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	1	+1 - K - Bataille Bad

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	1	+St Marks