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  • Caselist.RoundClass[26]
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Caselist.RoundClass[26]

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Caselist.CitesClass[11]

Cites

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	1	+K
	2	+Three specific links to their 1AC
	3	+A. Historical Amnesia- their historiography totally ignores that class was the central element, historical, of the ascriptive hierarchies that marginalize Asian identity and experience
	4	+B. Intertextuality- their focus on linguistic critique/spoken word reinforces a postmodern strategy of obscuring materiality
	5	+C. Personal experience- individual oppression as a lens occludes class struggle. San Juan Jr.PhD 91
	6	+ (E, Beyond Identity Politics: The Predicament o f the Asian American Writer in Late Capitalism American L ite ra r y H isto ry , Vol. 3, No. 3 (Autumn, 1991), pp. 542-565 )
	7	+With the presumed collapse of the transcendental grounds for universal standards of norms and values, proponents of the postmodern “revolution” in cultural studies in Europe and North America have celebrated differance, marginality, nomadic and decentered identities, indeterminacy, simulacra and the sublime, undecidability, ironic dissemination, textuality, and so forth. A multiplicity of power plays and language games supposedly abounds. The intertextuality of power, desire, and interest begets strategies of positionalities. So take your pick. Instead of the totalizing master narratives of Enlightenment progress, postmodern thinkers valorize the local, the heterogeneous, the contingent and conjunctural. Is it still meaningful to speak of truth? Are we still permitted to address issues of class, gender, and race? What are the implications of this postmodern “transvaluation” of paradigms for literary studies in general and minority/ ethnic writing in particular? One salutary repercussion has been the questioning of the Eurocentric canonical archive by feminists, peoples of color, dissenters inside and outside. The poststructuralist critique of the self-identical Subject (by convention white, bourgeois, patriarchal) has inspired a perspectivalist revision of various disciplinary approaches in history, comparative aesthetics, and others. To cite three inaugural examples: Houston Baker’s text-specific inventory of the black vernacular “blues” tradition presented in Blues, Ideology and Afro-American Literature (1984), Arnold Krupat’s foregrounding of oral tribal allegory in American Indian autobiographies enabled by a “materially situated historicism” in The Voice in the Margin (1989), and Ramon Saldivar’s dialectical assessment of Chicano narrative as an “oppositional articulation” of the gaps and silences in American literary history, a thesis vigor ously argued in Chicano Narrative (1990). Premised on the notion that everything is socio-discursively constructed, these initiatives so far have not been paralleled by Asian American intellectuals. Who indeed will speak for this composite group? One would suspect that the rubric “Asian American,” itself an artificial hypostasis of unstable elements, would preemptively vitiate any unilateral program of systematization. In addition, Asian Americans’ being judged by media and government as a “model minority,” some allegedly whiter than whites (see Themstrom 252; Lee), makes their marginality quite problematic. Perhaps more than other peoples of color, Asian Americans find themselves trapped in a classic postmodern predicament: essentialized by the official pluralism as formerly the “Yellow Peril” and now the “Superminority,” they nevertheless seek to reaffirm their complex internal differences in projects of hybrid and syncretic genealogy. Objectified by state-ordained juridical exclusions (Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos share this historically unique commonality), they pursue particularistic agendas for economic and cultural autonomy. Given these antinomic forces at work, can Asian American writers collectively pursue a “molecular micropolitics” of marginality? What is at stake if a well-known authority on ethnic affairs like Ronald Takaki (whose recent book affords a point of departure for my metacommentary) tries to articulate the identity-in-difference of this fragmented and dispersed ensemble of ethnoP. (see Grigulevich and Kozlov 17-44). How does a postmodern politics of identity refract the innovative yet tradition-bound performances of the Chinese American Maxine Hong Kingston and the Filipino American Carlos Bulosan? Given the crisis of the postmodern politics of identity, can we legitimately propose an oppositional “emergency” strategy of writing whose historic agency is still on trial or, as it were, on reprieve? My inquiry begins with remarks on Asian American history’s textuality as prelude to its possible aesthetic inscription. In composing Strangers from a Different Shore in a period when the planet is beginning to be homogenized by a new pax EuroAmericana, a “New World Order” spawning (as I write) from the Persian Gulf, Takaki has performed for us the unprecedented task of unifying the rich, protean, intractable diversity of Asian lives in the US without erasing the specificities, the ramifying genealogies, the incommensurable repertoire of idiosyncrasies of each constituent group—a postmodern feat of reconciling incommensurables, to say the least. There are of course many discrete chronicles of each Asian community, mostly written by sympathetic Euro-American scholars before Takaki’s work. But what distinguishes Takaki’s account, aside from his empathy with his subject and documentary trustworthiness, is its claim to represent the truth based on the prima facie experiences of individuals. At once we are confronted with the crucial problem plaguing such claims to veracity or authenticity: Can these subalterns represent themselves (to paraphrase Gayatri Spivak) as self-conscious members of a collectivityfor-itself? Or has Takaki mediated the immediacy of naive experience with a theory of representation that privileges the homo economicus as the founding subject of his discourse?1 No one should underestimate Takaki’s achievement here in challenging the tenability of the received dogma (espoused by Nathan Glazer and other neoconservative pundits) that the European immigrant model of successful assimilation applies to peoples of color in the US (see Takaki, “Reflections”). Europe’s Others, hitherto excluded from the canonical tradition, are beginning to speak and present themselves so as to rectify the mystifying re-presentation of themselves. In this light, Takaki is to be credited above all for giving Asian Americans a synoptic view of their deracinated lives by making them (as protagonists who discover their roles and destinies in the process) perform the drama of their diverse singularities. This is stage-managed within the framework of a chronological history of their ordeals in struggling to survive, adapt, and multiply in a hostile habitat, with their accompanying rage and grief and laughter. By a montage of personal testimony—anecdotes, letters, songs, telegrams, eyewitness reports, confessions, album photographs, quotidian fragments, cliches and banalities of everyday life—juxtaposed with statistics, official documents, reprise of punctual events, Takaki skillfully renders a complex drama of Asians enacting and living their own history. We can perhaps find our own lives already anticipated, pantomimed, rounded off, and judged in one of his varied “talk stories”—a case of life imitating the art of history. Granted the book’s “truth-effects,” I enter a caveat. For all its massive accumulation of raw data and plausible images of numerous protagonists and actions spanning more than a century of wars and revolutions, Takaki’s narrative leaves us wondering whether the collective life-trajectory of Asian Americans imitates the European immigrant success story, spiced with quaint “Oriental” twists—which he clearly implies at the end. If so, it is just one thread of the national fabric, no more tormented nor pacified than any other. If not, then this history is unique in some way that escapes the traditional emplotment of previous annals deriving from the master narrative of hu mankind’s continuous material improvement, self-emancipation, and techno-administrative mastery conceived by the philosophes of the European Enlightenment. Either way, there is no reason for Asian Americans to feel excluded from the grand March of Progress. Our puzzlement, however, is not clarified by the book’s concluding chapter, which exposes the myth of the “model minority” in an eloquent argument, assuring us that Asian Americans did not “let the course of their lives be determined completely by the ‘necessity’ of race and class” (473). In the same breath Takaki warns of a resurgent tide of racially motivated attacks against Asian Americans manifested in the media, in campus harassments, in the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin mistaken for a Japanese by unemployed Detroit autoworkers (and, I might add here, in the January 1989 massacre of Vietnamese and Cambodian schoolchildren in Stockton, California, by a man obsessed with hatred for Southeast Asian refugees). During this same period, in contrast, the judicial victory of the Japanese concentration camp internees’ demand for redress and reparations as well as the growing visibility of Asian American artists furnishes convincing proof that what David Harvey calls the post-Fordist post-Keynesian system (173-78) still allows dreams to come true, that is, allows Asian Americans the opportunity in particular “to help America accept and appreciate its diversity.” Calculating the losses and gains, Takaki prudentially opts for a meliorative closure. In retrospect, the telos of Strangers from a Different Shore can be thematized as the Asian immigrants’ almost miraculous struggle for survival and recognition of their desperately won middle-class status. What is sought is the redemption of individual sacrifices by way of conformity to the utilitarian, competitive ethos of a business society. Reversing the dismaying prospect for Asian Americans forecast in an earlier survey, American Racism (1970) by Roger Daniels and Harry Kitano, Takaki offers a balance sheet for general consumption: Asian Americans are no longer victimized by legislation denying them naturalized citizenship and landownership. They have begun to exercise their political voices and have representatives in both houses of Congress as well as in state legislatures and on city councils. They enjoy much of the protection of civil rights laws that outlaw racial discrimination in employment as well as housing and that provide for affirmative action for racial minorities. They have greater freedom than did the earlier immigrants to embrace their own “diversity”—their own cultures as well as their own distinctive physical characteristics, such as their complexion and the shape of their eyes. (473-74) It now becomes clear that despite its encyclopedic scope and archival competence, Takaki’s somewhat premature synthesis is a learned endeavor to deploy a strategy of containment. His rhetoric activates a mode of comic emplotment where all problems are finally resolved through hard work and individual effort, inspired by past memories of clan solidarity and intuitive faith in a gradually improving future. What is this if not a refurbished version of the liberal ideology of a market-centered, pluralist society where all disparities in values and beliefs—nay, even the sharpest contradictions implicating race, class, and gender—can be harmonized within the prevailing structure of power relations? This is not to say that such attempts to empower disenfranchised nationalities are futile or deceptive. But what needs a more than gestural critique is the extent to which such reforms do not eliminate the rationale for the hierarchical, invidious categorizing of people by race (as well as by gender and class) and their subsequent deprivation. Lacking such self-reflection, unable to problematize his theoretical organon, Takaki has superbly accomplished the articulation of the hegemonic doctrine of acquisitive/possessive liberalism as the informing principle of Asian American lives. Whether this is an effect of postmodern tropology or a symptom of “bad faith” investing the logic of elite populism, I am not quite sure. My reservations are shared by other Asian American observers who detect an apologetic agenda in such liberal historiography. At best, Takaki’s text operates an ironic, if not duplicitous, strategy: to counter hegemonic Eurocentrism, which erases the Asian American presence, a positivist-empiricist valorization of “lived experience” is carried out within the master narrative of evolutionary, gradualist progress. The American “Dream of Success” is thereby ultimately vindicated. This is not to suggest that historians like Takaki have suddenly been afflicted with amnesia, forgetting that it is the totalizing state practice of this ideology of market liberalism that underlies, for one, the violent colonial domination of peoples of color and the rape of the land of such decolonizing territories as the Philippines (my country of origin) and Puerto Rico in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War. It is the social practice of an expansive political economy which converts humans to exchangeable commodities (African chattel slavery in the South) and commodified labor power, thus requiring for its industrial take-off a huge supply of free labor—hence the need for European immigrants, especially after the Civil War, and the genocidal suppression of the American Indians. It is the expansion of this social formation that recruited Chinese coolies for railroad construction (the “fathers” poignantly described in Kingston’s China Men) and Japanese and Filipino labor (and Mexican braceros later) for agribusiness in Hawaii and California and for the canneries in Alaska. It is this same hegemonic worldview of free monopoly enterprise, also known as the “civilizing mission” of Eurocentric humanism, that forced the opening of the China market in the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century and the numerous military interventions in China and Indochina up to the Vietnam War and the coming of the “boat people.” Of course it is also the power/knowledge episteme of the modernization process in Kenya, South Korea, Mexico, Indonesia, Egypt, Grenada, and all the neocolonial or peripheral dependencies of the world-system named by Immanuel Wallerstein as “historical capitalism” (13-43; see Amin). It is now generally acknowledged that we cannot understand the situation of Asian Americans in the US today or in the past without a thorough comprehension of the global relations of power, the capitalist world-system that “pushed” populations from the colonies and dependencies and “pulled” them to terrain where a supply of cheap labor was needed. These relations of power broke up families, separating husbands from wives and parents from children; at present they motivate the “warm body export” of cheap labor from Thailand, the Philippines, and elsewhere. They legitimate the unregulated market for brides and hospitality girls, the free trade zones, and other postmodern schemes of capital accumulation in Third World countries. The discourse of the liberal free market underpins these power relations, constructing fluid georacial boundaries to guarantee the supply of cheap labor. Race acquires salience in this world-system when, according to John Rex, “the language of racial difference. . . becomes the means whereby men allocate each other to different social and economic positions. . . . The exploitation of clearly marked groups in a variety of different ways is integral to Capitalism.. . . Ethnic groups unite and act together because they have been subjected to distinct and differentiated types of exploitation” (406-07). The colonization and industrialization of the North American continent epitomize the asymmetrical power relations characteristic of this world-system. The sociocultural formation of global apartheid has been long in the making. Studies like Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History (1982) or Richard Bamet and Ronald Muller’s Global Reach (1974), to mention only the elementary texts, show that the migration of peoples around the world, the displacement of refugees, or the forced expulsion and exile of individuals and whole groups (the Palestinian diaspora is the most flagrant) have occurred not by choice or accident but by the complex interaction of political, economic, and social forces from the period of mercantile capitalism to colonialism, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, continuing into the imperialism of the twentieth century. This genealogy of domination, the self-reproduction of its mechanisms and the sedimentation of its effects, is what is occluded in Takaki’s narrative (see Nakanishi).
	8	+Focusing resistance around difference entrenches neoliberalism since it emphasizes private property and not class struggle. Wilkie 12
	9	+
	10	+Wilkie 12, Assistant Professor of Cultural and Digital Studies – U Wisconsin-La Crosse, (Rob, “Capitalism's Posthuman Empire,” The Red Critique Vol. 14, Fall/Winter). NS from file
	11	+
	12	+There is no broad social movement, no social collectivity, only the ethical acts of one for the other, one in debt to the other. Thus, Wikus (and the viewer) end the film with the hope that the future will be different, simply through the act of individual ethics. This is the limit of the posthumanist theory of "difference." Insofar as it defines otherness, oppression, and exploitation as the effect of an instrumental logic of classification which is endemic to all social relations, it denies that there is any history to the ways in which people live. Instead, transformative theory becomes an "ethical" praxis that, in the words of Agamben, "must face a problem and a particular situation each and every time" (What is An Apparatus? 9). In this way, it becomes impossible to suggest that exploitation and oppression are inherent to capitalism or would be any different under any alternative mode of production. In fact, Hardt and Negri argue precisely this when they declare that "Socialism and capitalism…are both regimes of property that exclude the common" (ix). The consequence is that posthumanism effectively naturalizes capitalism by denying what Marx calls "species-being"—the basis of human freedom in the collectivity of labor—and replacing it instead with what Agamben calls "special being" or that which "without resembling any other…represents all others" (Profanations 59). When Agamben proclaims that, "‘To be special far specie can mean ‘to surprise and astonish’ (in a negative sense) by not fitting into established rules, but the notion that individuals constitute a species and belong together in a homogeneous class tends to be reassuring" (59) he replicates the bourgeois theory of difference which, as Marx writes, is based upon "an individual separated from the community, withdrawn into himself, wholly preoccupied with his private interest and acting in accordance with his private caprice" such that "far from being considered, in the rights of man, as a species-being; on the contrary, species-life itself—society—appears as a system which is external to the individual and as a limitation of his original independence" (On the Jewish Question 43). In other words, the very nature of the division of labor under capitalism causes workers to blame ahistorical notions of "society" and "government" for the contradictions which reside in the economic and, in turn, seek refuge in the "freedom" of individuality which bourgeois society promises. In this way, when Agamben writes that "The transformation of the species into a principle of identity and classification is the original sin of our culture, its most implacable apparatus dispositivo" (60), he reproduces the sense with which people respond to capitalist exploitation by blaming the very idea of "society," rather than the society of exploitation. By taking the question of identity and difference out of the social, Agamben turns exploitation into an existential crisis which can only be resolved by the ethical recognition of difference on its own terms, leaving the contradictions of society intact. This is how the posthumanist theories of identity return to the same structures of representation they claim to oppose because their opposition does not move beyond the economic structures of capitalism. Both the Hegelian theory of "recognition" and the posthuman theory of "singularity" are ultimately theories of the isolated individual, which is an ideological fiction arising alongside capitalism (a la "Robinson Crusoe") as a result of the economic shift toward wage-labor. They consequently substitute for more radical theories of freedom from the market the freedom of the individual in the market, as if rigid structures of social interpretations and not the system of wage-labor were holding the individual back. If we are to truly see the world differently, not just as isolated individuals, but as a united community which uses new technologies for freeing people from the drudgery of wage labor and its corresponding ideologies of racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of oppression, what is necessary is a social transformation that ends the exploitation of labor upon which capitalism is based. Pluralizing identities doesn’t challenge the logic of exploitation, but actually expands it since private property establishes individual responsibility as the very basis of one's "natural" existence by stripping people of any means of survival outside of wage-labor. Thus, retreating into individualism is merely the ideological mask which is placed over the subsumption of all life under the profit motive. However, as Marx writes, regardless of appearances, "the individual is the social being. His life, even if it may not appear in the direct form of a communal life carried out together with others is… an expression and confirmation of social life" (86). Although posthumanism turns the alienation of the worker under capitalism into the very pre-condition of all culture, I argue that it is only by freeing labor from the restrictions of capitalist exploitation that, we can, as Marx writes, end racial oppression and find a "genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man—the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species" (84).
	13	+
	14	+Empirics prove- identity politics shuts down self reflection collapsing social movements. San Juan Jr.PhD 91
	15	+(E, Beyond Identity Politics: The Predicament o f the Asian American Writer in Late Capitalism American L ite ra r y H isto ry , Vol. 3, No. 3 (Autumn, 1991), pp. 542-565 )
	16	+To return to the symposium: aside from inadequate logistics and inexperienced planning, I think the provenance of whatever misrecognitions occurred—the Asian American psyche cannot plead to be exceptional—cannot just be personal or bureaucratic. Causality inheres in the political-symbolic economy of liberal exchange. It inhabits the paradoxical space that syncopates structural constraints and conjunctural opportunities: constraints due to the organizers’ allowing the writers to monopolize the center of attention and the attendant failure to establish an atmosphere of productive conflict by circulating all the texts and distributing occasions for speech in an egalitarian manner. Both failures consequently fostered an attitude of acknowledging differences sublimated in utterly homogenizing repertoires of communication, that is, in commonsense platitudes and pedantic trivia. In the process, novel conjunctural opportunities were missed: for example, my proposal that we distinguish carefully between experience (almost everyone uncritically endorsed the wonderful “chaos” from which writers drew inspiration—a gesture of “bad faith”) and knowledge. “Knowledge,” however, was immediately yoked to “theory” and denounced as dogmatic, mechanical, rigid, and obscurantist. The opportunity for exploring why writers, tuned to a different level of discourse, could not understand the critics’ idiom and theoretical formulations was forfeited. Instead of an ambience of genuine national diversity, due to uneven development of consciousnesses, ironically, a leveling temper supervened in which hierarchy was covertly reinstituted: the writer was established as a prophet/oracle who speaks truth and purveys sacrosanct knowledge. However, because these oracles needed informed readers and intelligent listeners who would confirm their truths, a profound anxiety haunted them. They craved the critics’ attention and approval as though the critics could supply the psychoanalytic cure, thus confirming that they could not find this cure in the mirror images of themselves performing their improvised, minstrel-like roles. And so Narcissus takes revenge in identity politics, which converts dialogue as a pretext for monologue. While the critics in general tried to follow the path of compromise, engaging in a liberal game of balancing negative and positive qualities discerned in their readings, the distinction between knowledge and experience for which I argued (inasmuch as this articulation between the two enables the textualization of identity fought in the battlefields of disciplinary regimes) fell on deaf ears. I argued for the need to posit a wide spectrum of levels of understanding, appreciation, and judgment; for the need to criticize the assumptions of identity politics, which functions as the controlling paradigm in mainstream comparative cultural studies;2 and for the need to guard against anti-intellectualism or a relapse into the banal pragmatic-instrumentalist humanism which preaches that we are all the same, we can all partake of the wealth of the transnational boutiques, and so on. But all these were missed. A “rectification of names” was thus aborted. In fairness, I should say that what the writers testified to was the enigmatic power of poststructuralist critical discourse, which, to some extent under certain conditions, can be mobilized in the service of an oppositional or alternative politics. Such power perhaps bewildered the writers and provoked defensive panic symptoms. Rejecting the imputation of ill will or narrow self-serving intentions, the critics tried to make the texts of the writers (no one, as far as I can recall, alluded to JeanPaul Sartre’s What is Literature? or Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault on the authorship function when the writers began to fondle their own texts like private consumption goods) release a virtue that could communicate with the high cultural productions of the establishment elite, with the discourse of the canonical authors and their foundational critiques. Our project (if I may stress the positive) also aimed to unleash the potential reach of their texts by affording their reading a degree of intelligibility that would challenge and even displace the canonical texts of Euro-American hegemonic culture.3 But, unarguably, the writers’ reflex of self-justification took over and converted the symposium into a theater of naive and pathetic self-congratulation, with disagreements ironed out for the moment, “faces” saved, suspicions deflected—another day swallowed up in the mise-en-abyme of ghetto marginahty and ethnic vainglory. Liberalism and identity politics have conquered again. Unfortunately, the handful of outsiders in the scene may have carried away with them the wrong impression that Asian American writers and intellectuals (compared to the astute African Americans and the resourceful Chicanos) have a long way to go in “the long march through the institutions,” in forging consensus and solidarity through demonstrated respect for their differences. On the other hand, I think the symposium testified to a recalcitrance and intractability ideal for a counterhegemonic drive against the panoptic, reifying thrust of a “New World Order” managed from Washington, DC. Still, the co-optative seductiveness of identity politics cannot be discounted.
	17	+
	18	+Root cause of the case - McLaren et al., 4 – Distinguished Professor, Critical Studies, Chapman University (Peter and Valerie Scatamburlo-D’Annibale, “Class Dismissed? Historical materialism and the politics of ‘difference’,” Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 36, No. 2, April, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu/doi/10.1111/j.1469-5812.2004.00060.x/full)// JJN from file
	19	+For example, E. San Juan (2003) argues that race relations and race conflict are necessarily structured by the larger totality of the political economy of a given society, as well as by modifications in the structure of the world economy. He further notes that the capitalist mode of production has articulated ‘race’ with class in a peculiar way. He too is worth a substantial quotation: While the stagnation of rural life imposed a racial or castelike rigidity to the peasantry, the rapid accumulation of wealth through the ever more intensifying exploitation of labor by capital could not so easily ‘racialize’ the wage-workers of a particular nation, given the alienability of labor-power—unless certain physical or cultural characteristics can be utilized to divide the workers or render one group an outcast or pariah removed from the domain of ‘free labor.’ In the capitalist development of U.S. society, African, Mexican, and Asian bodies—more precisely, their labor power and its reproductive efficacy—were colonized and racialized; hence the idea of ‘internal colonialism’ retains explanatory validity. ‘Race’ is thus constructed out of raw materials furnished by class relations, the history of class conflicts, and the vicissitudes of colonial/capitalist expansion and the building of imperial hegemony. It is dialectically accented and operationalized not just to differentiate the price of wage labor within and outside the territory of the metropolitan power, but also to reproduce relations of domination–subordination invested with an aura of naturality and fatality. The refunctioning of physical or cultural traits as ideological and political signifiers of class identity reifies social relations. Such ‘racial’ markers enter the field of the alienated labor process, concealing the artificial nature of meanings and norms, and essentializing or naturalizing historical traditions and values which are contingent on mutable circumstances. For San Juan, racism and nationalism are modalities in which class struggles articulate themselves at strategic points in history. He argues that racism arose with the creation and expansion of the capitalist world economy. He maintains, rightly in our view, that racial or ethnic group solidarity is given ‘meaning and value in terms of their place within the social organization of production and reproduction of the ideological-political order; ideologies of racism as collective social evaluation of solidarities arise to reinforce structural constraints which preserve the exploited and oppressed position of these “racial” solidarities’. It is remarkable, in our opinion, that so much of contemporary social theory has largely abandoned the problems of labor, capitalist exploitation, and class analysis at a time when capitalism is becoming more universal, more ruthless and more deadly. The metaphor of a contemporary ‘tower of Babel’ seems appropriate here—academics striking radical poses in the seminar rooms while remaining oblivious to the possibility that their seemingly radical discursive maneuvers do nothing to further the struggles ‘against oppression and exploitation which continue to be real, material, and not merely “discursive” problems of the contemporary world’ (Dirlik, 1997, p. 176). Harvey (1998, pp. 29–31) indicts the new academic entrepreneurs, the ‘masters of theory-in-and-for-itself’ whose ‘discourse radicalism’ has deftly side-stepped ‘the enduring conundrums of class struggle’ and who have, against a ‘sobering background of cheapened discourse and opportunistic politics,’ been ‘stripped of their self-advertised radicalism.’ For years, they ‘contested socialism,’ ridiculed Marxists, and promoted ‘their own alternative theories of liberatory politics’ but now they have largely been ‘reduced to the role of supplicants in the most degraded form of pluralist politics imaginable.’ As they pursue the politics of difference, the ‘class war rages unabated’ and they seem ‘either unwilling or unable to focus on the unprecedented economic carnage occurring around the globe.’ Harvey's searing criticism suggests that post-Marxists have been busy fiddling while Rome burns and his comments echo those made by Marx (1978, p. 149) in his critique of the Young Hegelians who were, ‘in spite of their allegedly “world-shattering” statements, the staunchest conservatives.’ Marx lamented that the Young Hegelians were simply fighting ‘phrases’ and that they failed to acknowledge that in offering only counter-phrases, they were in no way ‘combating the real existing world’ but merely combating the phrases of the world. Taking a cue from Marx and substituting ‘phrases’ with ‘discourses’ or ‘resignifications’ we would contend that the practitioners of difference politics who operate within exaggerated culturalist frameworks that privilege the realm of representation as the primary arena of political struggle question some discourses of power while legitimating others. Moreover, because they lack a class perspective, their gestures of radicalism are belied by their own class positions.10 As Ahmad (1997a, p. 104) notes: One may speak of any number of disorientations and even oppressions, but one cultivates all kinds of politeness and indirection about the structure of capitalist class relations in which those oppressions are embedded. To speak of any of that directly and simply is to be ‘vulgar.’ In this climate of Aesopian languages it is absolutely essential to reiterate that most things are a matter of class. That kind of statement is … surprising only in a culture like that of the North American university … But it is precisely in that kind of culture that people need to hear such obvious truths. Ahmad's provocative observations imply that substantive analyses of the carnage wrought by ‘globalized’ class exploitation have, for the most part, been marginalized by the kind of radicalism that has been instituted among the academic Left in North America. He further suggests that while various post-Marxists have invited us to join their euphoric celebrations honoring the decentering of capitalism, the abandonment of class politics, and the decline of metanarratives (particularly those of Marxism and socialism), they have failed to see that the most ‘meta of all metanarratives of the past three centuries, the creeping annexation of the globe for the dominance of capital over laboring humanity has met, during those same decades, with stunning success’ (Ahmad, 1997b, p. 364). As such, Ahmad invites us to ask anew, the proverbial question: What, then, must be done? To this question we offer no simple theoretical, pedagogical or political prescriptions. Yet we would argue that if social change is the aim, progressive educators and theorists must cease displacing class analysis with the politics of difference. Conclusion … we will take our stand against the evils of capitalism, imperialism, and racism with a solidarity derived from a proletarian internationalism born of socialist idealism. —National Office of the Black Panther Party, February 1970 For well over two decades we have witnessed the jubilant liberal and conservative pronouncements of the demise of socialism. Concomitantly, history's presumed failure to defang existing capitalist relations has been read by many self-identified ‘radicals’ as an advertisement for capitalism's inevitability. As a result, the chorus refrain ‘There Is No Alternative’, sung by liberals and conservatives, has been buttressed by the symphony of post-Marxist voices recommending that we give socialism a decent burial and move on. Within this context, to speak of the promise of Marx and socialism may appear anachronistic, even naïve, especially since the post-al intellectual vanguard has presumably demonstrated the folly of doing so. Yet we stubbornly believe that the chants of T.I.N.A. must be combated for they offer as a fait accompli, something which progressive Leftists should refuse to accept—namely the triumph of capitalism and its political bedfellow neo-liberalism, which have worked together to naturalize suffering, undermine collective struggle, and obliterate hope. We concur with Amin (1998), who claims that such chants must be defied and revealed as absurd and criminal, and who puts the challenge we face in no uncertain terms: humanity may let itself be led by capitalism's logic to a fate of collective suicide or it may pave the way for an alternative humanist project of global socialism. The grosteque conditions that inspired Marx to pen his original critique of capitalism are present and flourishing. The inequalities of wealth and the gross imbalances of power that exist today are leading to abuses that exceed those encountered in Marx's day (Greider, 1998, p. 39). Global capitalism has paved the way for the obscene concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands and created a world increasingly divided between those who enjoy opulent affluence and those who languish in dehumanizing conditions and economic misery. In every corner of the globe, we are witnessing social disintegration as revealed by a rise in abject poverty and inequality. At the current historical juncture, the combined assets of the 225 richest people is roughly equal to the annual income of the poorest 47 percent of the world's population, while the combined assets of the three richest people exceed the combined GDP of the 48 poorest nations (CCPA, 2002, p. 3). Approximately 2.8 billion people—almost half of the world's population—struggle in desperation to live on less than two dollars a day (McQuaig, 2001, p. 27). As many as 250 million children are wage slaves and there are over a billion workers who are either un- or under-employed. These are the concrete realities of our time—realities that require a vigorous class analysis, an unrelenting critique of capitalism and an oppositional politics capable of confronting what Ahmad (1998, p. 2) refers to as ‘capitalist universality.’ They are realities that require something more than that which is offered by the prophets of ‘difference’ and post-Marxists who would have us relegate socialism to the scrapheap of history and mummify Marxism along with Lenin's corpse. Never before has a Marxian analysis of capitalism and class rule been so desperately needed. That is not to say that everything Marx said or anticipated has come true, for that is clearly not the case. Many critiques of Marx focus on his strategy for moving toward socialism, and with ample justification; nonetheless Marx did provide us with fundamental insights into class society that have held true to this day. Marx's enduring relevance lies in his indictment of capitalism which continues to wreak havoc in the lives of most. While capitalism's cheerleaders have attempted to hide its sordid underbelly, Marx's description of capitalism as the sorcerer's dark power is even more apt in light of contemporary historical and economic conditions. Rather than jettisoning Marx, decentering the role of capitalism, and discrediting class analysis, radical educators must continue to engage Marx's oeuvre and extrapolate from it that which is useful pedagogically, theoretically, and, most importantly, politically in light of the challenges that confront us.
	20	+
	21	+And indepdently outweighs - neoliberalism causes extinction and massive social inequalities -Farbod 15
	22	+ ( Faramarz Farbod , PhD Candidate @ Rutgers, Prof @ Moravian College, Monthly Review, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2015/farbod020615.html, 6-2)
	23	+Global capitalism is the 800-pound gorilla. The twin ecological and economic crises, militarism, the rise of the surveillance state, and a dysfunctional political system can all be traced to its normal operations. We need a transformative politics from below that can challenge the fundamentals of capitalism instead of today's politics that is content to treat its symptoms. The problems we face are linked to each other and to the way a capitalist society operates. We must make an effort to understand its real character. The fundamental question of our time is whether we can go beyond a system that is ravaging the Earth and secure a future with dignity for life and respect for the planet. What has capitalism done to us lately? The best science tells us that this is a do-or-die moment. We are now in the midst of the 6th mass extinction in the planetary history with 150 to 200 species going extinct every day, a pace 1,000 times greater than the 'natural' extinction rate.1 The Earth has been warming rapidly since the 1970s with the 10 warmest years on record all occurring since 1998.2 The planet has already warmed by 0.85 degree Celsius since the industrial revolution 150 years ago. An increase of 2° Celsius is the limit of what the planet can take before major catastrophic consequences. Limiting global warming to 2°C requires reducing global emissions by 6 per year. However, global carbon emissions from fossil fuels increased by about 1.5 times between 1990 and 2008.3 Capitalism has also led to explosive social inequalities. The global economic landscape is littered with rising concentration of wealth, debt, distress, and immiseration caused by the austerity-pushing elites. Take the US. The richest 20 persons have as much wealth as the bottom 150 million.4 Since 1973, the hourly wages of workers have lagged behind worker productivity rates by more than 800.5 It now takes the average family 47 years to make what a hedge fund manager makes in one hour.6 Just about a quarter of children under the age of 5 live in poverty.7 A majority of public school students are low-income.8 85 of workers feel stress on the job.9 Soon the only thing left of the American Dream will be a culture of hustling to survive. Take the global society. The world's billionaires control $7 trillion, a sum 77 times the debt owed by Greece to the European banks.10 The richest 80 possess more than the combined wealth of the bottom 50 of the global population (3.5 billion people).11 By 2016 the richest 1 will own a greater share of the global wealth than the rest of us combined.12 The top 200 global corporations wield twice the economic power of the bottom 80 of the global population.13 Instead of a global society capitalism is creating a global apartheid. What's the nature of the beast? Firstly, the "egotistical calculation" of commerce wins the day every time. Capital seeks maximum profitability as a matter of first priority. Evermore "accumulation of capital" is the system's bill of health; it is slowdowns or reversals that usher in crises and set off panic. Cancer-like hunger for endless growth is in the system's DNA and is what has set it on a tragic collision course with Nature, a finite category. Secondly, capitalism treats human labor as a cost. It therefore opposes labor capturing a fair share of the total economic value that it creates. Since labor stands for the majority and capital for a tiny minority, it follows that classism and class warfare are built into its DNA, which explains why the "middle class" is shrinking and its gains are never secure. Thirdly, private interests determine massive investments and make key decisions at the point of production guided by maximization of profits. That's why in the US the truck freight replaced the railroad freight, chemicals were used extensively in agriculture, public transport was gutted in favor of private cars, and big cars replaced small ones. What should political action aim for today? The political class has no good ideas about how to address the crises. One may even wonder whether it has a serious understanding of the system, or at least of ways to ameliorate its consequences. The range of solutions offered tends to be of a technical, legislative, or regulatory nature, promising at best temporary management of the deepening crises. The trajectory of the system, at any rate, precludes a return to its post-WWII regulatory phase. It's left to us as a society to think about what the real character of the system is, where we are going, and how we are going to deal with the trajectory of the system ~-~- and act accordingly. The critical task ahead is to build a transformative politics capable of steering the system away from its destructive path. Given the system's DNA, such a politics from below must include efforts to challenge the system's fundamentals, namely, its private mode of decision-making about investments and about what and how to produce. Furthermore, it behooves us to heed the late environmentalist Barry Commoner's insistence on the efficacy of a strategy of prevention over a failed one of control or capture of pollutants. At a lecture in 1991, Commoner remarked: "Environmental pollution is an incurable disease; it can only be prevented"; and he proceeded to refer to "a law," namely: "if you don't put a pollutant in the environment it won't be there." What is nearly certain now is that without democratic control of wealth and social governance of the means of production, we will all be condemned to the labor of Sisyphus. Only we won't have to suffer for all eternity, as the degradation of life-enhancing natural and social systems will soon reach a point of no return.
	24	+
	25	+The alternative is recommitment to class struggle grounded in socialism. McLaren 04
	26	+
	27	+- class at center – tradeoff DA to perm
	28	+- understanding pre re to political organization – can change history
	29	+- Empirically, politics of difference fails – WTO, seattle were successful
	30	+
	31	+Peter Mclaren 4, Education and Urban Schooling Division prof, UCLA—and Valerie Scatamburlo-D'Annibale; University of Windsor, Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 36, No. 2, 2004, www.freireproject.org/articles/node2065/RCGS/class_dismissed-val-peter.10.pdf. NS from file
	32	+
	33	+These are the concrete realities of our time—realities that require a vigorous class analysis, an unrelenting critique of capitalism and an oppositional politics capable of confronting what Ahmad (1998, p. 2) refers to as ‘capitalist universality.’ They are realities that require something more than that which is offered by the prophets of ‘difference’ and post-Marxists who would have us relegate socialism to the scrapheap of history and mummify Marxism along with Lenin's corpse. Never before has a Marxian analysis of capitalism and class rule been so desperately needed. That is not to say that everything Marx said or anticipated has come true, for that is clearly not the case. Many critiques of Marx focus on his strategy for moving toward socialism, and with ample justification; nonetheless Marx did provide us with fundamental insights into class society that have held true to this day. Marx's enduring relevance lies in his indictment of capitalism which continues to wreak havoc in the lives of most. While capitalism's cheerleaders have attempted to hide its sordid underbelly, Marx's description of capitalism as the sorcerer's dark power is even more apt in light of contemporary historical and economic conditions. Rather than jettisoning Marx, decentering the role of capitalism, and discrediting class analysis, radical educators must continue to engage Marx's oeuvre and extrapolate from it that which is useful pedagogically, theoretically, and, most importantly, politically in light of the challenges that confront us. The urgency which animates Amin’s call for a collective socialist vision necessitates, as we have argued, moving beyond the particularism and liberal pluralism that informs the ‘politics of difference.’ It also requires challenging the questionable assumptions that have come to constitute the core of contemporary ‘radical’ theory, pedagogy and politics. In terms of effecting change, what is needed is a cogent understanding of the systemic nature of exploitation and oppression based on the precepts of a radical political economy approach (outlined above) and one that incorporates Marx’s notion of ‘unity in difference’ in which people share widely common material interests. Such an understanding extends far beyond the realm of theory, for the manner in which we choose to interpret and explore the social world, the concepts and frameworks we use to express our sociopolitical understandings, are more than just abstract categories. They imply intentions, organizational practices, and political agendas. Identifying class analysis as the basis for our understandings and class struggle as the basis for political transformation implies something quite different than constructing a sense of political agency around issues of race,

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	1	+2017-03-04 03:49:39.138

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	1	+XX

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	1	+XX

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	1	+26

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	1	+7

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	1	+Harvard Westlake Morganbesser Neg

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	1	+0 - K of Model Minority AC

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	1	+Golden Desert