Summary

• Objects (1 modified, 1 added, 0 removed)
  • Caselist.CitesClass[26]
  • Caselist.CitesClass[27]

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Caselist.CitesClass[26]

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1		-2016-09-16 17:29:07.699
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Caselist.CitesClass[27]

Cites

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	1	+In its affirmation of fluidity and difference in identity, the project of postmodern politics has been outflanked by the capitalist machine, which affirms the very notions of fluidity that the 1AC unwittingly endorses
	2	+Hardt and Negri 01 Michael Hardt (American literary theorist and political philosopher) and Antonio Negri (Ph.D., is an Italian Marxist sociologist, scholar, revolutionary philosopher and teacher). “Empire.” 2001. Harvard University Press AJ
	3	+Many of the concepts dear to postmodernists and postcolonialists find a perfect correspondence in the current ideology of corporate capital and the world market. The ideology of the world market has always been the anti-foundational and anti-essentialist discourse par excellence. Circulation, mobility, diversity, and mixture are its very conditions of possibility. Trade brings differences together and the more the merrier! Differences (of commodities, populations, cultures, and so forth) seem to multiply infinitely in the world market, which attacks nothing more violently than fixed boundaries: it overwhelms any binary division with its infinite multiplicities. As the world market today is realized ever more completely, it tends to deconstruct the boundaries of the nation-state. In a previous period, nation-states were the primary actors in the modern imperialist organization of global production and exchange, but to the world market they appear increasingly as mere obstacles. Robert Reich, former U.S. secretary of labor, is in an excellent position to recognize and celebrate the overcoming of national boundaries in the world market. He contends that "as almost every factor of production—money, technology, factories, and equipment— moves effortlessly across borders, the very idea of a national econ- omy is becoming meaningless." In the future "there will be no national products or technologies, no national corporations, no na- tional industries. There will no longer be national economies, as least as we have come to understand that concept."18 With the decline of national boundaries, the world market is liberated from the kind of binary divisions that nation-states had imposed, and in this new free space a myriad of differences appears. These differences of course do not play freely across a smooth global space, but rather are regimented in global networks of power consisting of highly differentiated and mobile structures. Arjun Appadurai captures the new quality of these structures with the analogy of landscapes, or better, seascapes: in the contemporary world he sees finanscapes, technoscapes, ethnoscapes, and so forth.19 The suffix "-scape" allows us on the one hand to point to the fluidity and irregularity of these various fields and on the other to indicate formal commonalities among such diverse domains as finance, culture, commodities, and demography. The world market establishes a real politics of dif- ference. The various -scapes of the world market provide capital with potentials on a scale previously unimaginable. It should be no sur- prise, then, that postmodernist thinking and its central concepts have flourished in the various fields of practice and theory proper to capital, such as marketing, management organization, and the organization of production. Postmodernism is indeed the logic by which global capital operates. Marketing has perhaps the clearest relation to postmodernist theories, and one could even say that the capitalist marketing strategies have long been postmodernist, avant la lettre. On the one hand, marketing practices and consumer con- sumption are prime terrain for developing postmodernist thinking: certain postmodernist theorists, for example, see perpetual shopping and the consumption of commodities and commodified images as the paradigmatic and defining activities of postmodern experience, our collective journeys through hyperreality.20 On the other hand, postmodernist thinking—with its emphasis on concepts such as difference and multiplicity, its celebration of fetishism and simulacra, its continual fascination with the new and with fashion—is an excellent description of the ideal capitalist schemes of commodity consumption and thus provides an opportunity to perfect marketing strategies. As a marketing theorist says, there are clear "parallels between contemporary market practices and the precepts of post- modernism."21 Marketing itself is a practice based on differences, and the more differences that are given, the more marketing strategies can develop. Ever more hybrid and differentiated populations present a proliferating number of "target markets" that can each be addressed by specific marketing strategies—one for gay Latino males between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two, another for Chinese-American teenage girls, and so forth. Postmodern marketing recognizes the difference of each commodity and each segment of the population, fashioning its strategies accordingly.22 Every difference is an oppor- tunity. Postmodern marketing practices represent the consumption cycle of contemporary capital, its external face, but we are even more interested in the postmodernist tendencies within the cycle of capitalist production. In the productive sphere, postmodernist thinking has perhaps had the largest direct impact in the field of management and organization theory. Authors in this field argue that large and complex modern organizations, with their rigid boundaries and homogeneous units, are not adequate for doing business in the postmodern world. "The postmodern organization," one theorist writes, "has certain distinctive features—notably, an emphasis on small-to-moderate size and complexity and adoption of flexible structures and modes of interinstitutional cooperation to meet turbulent organizational and environmental conditions."23 Postmodern organizations are thus imagined either as located on the boundaries between different systems and cultures or as internally hybrid. What is essential for postmodern management is that organi- zations be mobile, flexible, and able to deal with difference. Here postmodernist theories pave the way for the transformation of the internal structures of capitalist organizations. The "culture" within these organizations has also adopted the precepts of postmodernist thinking. The great transnational corporations that straddle national boundaries and link the global system are themselves internally much more diverse and fluid cultur- ally than the parochial modern corporations of previous years. The contemporary gurus of corporate culture who are employed by management as consultants and strategy planners preach the effi- ciency and profitability of diversity and multiculturalism within corporations.24 When one looks closely at U.S. corporate ideology (and, to a lesser but still significant extent, at U.S. corporate practice), it is clear that corporations do not operate simply by excluding the gendered and/or racialized Other. In fact, the old modernist forms of racist and sexist theory are the explicit enemies of this new corporate culture. The corporations seek to include difference within their realm and thus aim to maximize creativity, free play, and diversity in the corporate workplace. People of all different races, sexes, and sexual orientations should potentially be included in the corporation; the daily routine of the workplace should be rejuvenated with unexpected changes and an atmosphere of fun. Break down the old boundaries and let one hundred flowers bloom! The task of the boss, subsequently, is to organize these energies and differences in the interests of profit. This project is aptly called "diversity management." In this light, the corporations appear not only "progressive" but also "postmodernist," as leaders in a very real politics of difference. The production processes of capital have also taken forms that echo postmodernist projects. We will have ample opportunity to analyze (particularly in Section 3.4) how production has come to be organized in flexible and hybrid networks. This is, in our view, the most important respect in which the contemporary transforms- tions of capital and the world market constitute a real process of postmodernization. We certainly agree with those contemporary theorists, such as David Harvey and Fredric Jameson, who see postmodernity as a new phase of capitalist accumulation and commodification that accompanies the contemporary realization of the world market.26 The global politics of difference established by the world market is defined not by free play and equality, but by the imposition of new hierarchies, or really by a constant process of hierarchization. Postmodernist and postcolonialist theories (and fundamentalisms in a very different way) are really sentinels that signal this passage in course, and in this regard are indispensable.
	4	+The left’s abandonment of affirmative visions for making society better, in favor of carving out individual identities, plays into neoliberal conceptions of social justice—perpetuating the idea that individual action is somehow more “authentic” than institutional action—turns the case.
	5	+Reed 13 – professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in race and American politics. He has taught at Yale, Northwestern and the New School for Social Research. An expert on racial and economic inequality, he is a founding member of the Labor Party and a frequent contributor to The Nation (2/25, Adolph, Nonsite, “Django Unchained, or, The Help: How “Cultural Politics” Is Worse Than No Politics at All, and Why”, http://nonsite.org/feature/django-unchained-or-the-help-how-cultural-politics-is-worse-than-no-politics-at-all-and-why)
	6	+In addition to knee-jerk anti-statism, the objection that the slaves freed themselves, as it shows up in favorable comparison of Django Unchained to Lincoln, stems from a racial pietism that issued from the unholy union of cultural studies and black studies in the university. More than twenty years of “resistance” studies that find again and again, at this point ritualistically, that oppressed people have and express agency have contributed to undermining the idea of politics as a discrete sphere of activity directed toward the outward-looking project of affecting the social order, most effectively through creating, challenging or redefining institutions that anchor collective action with the objective of developing and wielding power. Instead, the notion has been largely evacuated of specific content at all. “Politics” can refer to whatever one wants it to; all that’s required is an act of will in making a claim. The fact that there has been no serious left presence with any political capacity in this country for at least a generation has exacerbated this problem. In the absence of dynamic movements that cohere around affirmative visions for making the society better, on the order of, say, Franklin Roosevelt’s 1944 “Second Bill of Rights,” and that organize and agitate around programs instrumental to pursuit of such visions, what remains is the fossil record of past movements—the still photo legacies of their public events, postures, and outcomes. Over time, the idea that a “left” is defined by commitment to a vision of social transformation and substantive program for realizing it has receded from cultural memory. Being on the left has become instead a posture, an identity, utterly disconnected from any specific practical commitments. Thus star Maggie Gyllenhaal and director Daniel Barnz defended themselves against complaints about their complicity in the hideously anti-union propaganda film Won’t Back Down by adducing their identities as progressives. Gyllenhaal insisted that the movie couldn’t be anti-union because “There’s no world in which I would ever, EVER make an anti-union movie. My parents are left of Trotsky.”15 Barnz took a similar tack: “I’m a liberal Democrat, very pro-union, a member of two unions. I marched with my union a couple of years ago when we were on strike.”16 And Kathryn Bigelow similarly has countered criticism that her Zero Dark Thirty justifies torture and American militarism more broadly by invoking her identity as “a lifelong pacifist.”17 Being a progressive is now more a matter of how one thinks about oneself than what one stands for or does in the world. The best that can be said for that perspective is that it registers acquiescence in defeat. It amounts to an effort to salvage an idea of a left by reformulating it as a sensibility within neoliberalism rather than a challenge to it. Gyllenhaal, Barnz, and Bigelow exemplify the power of ideology as a mechanism that harmonizes the principles one likes to believe one holds with what advances one’s material interests; they also attest to the fact that the transmutation of leftism into pure self-image exponentially increases the potential power of that function of ideology. Upton Sinclair’s quip—“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”—takes on all the more force when applied not merely to actions or interpretations of an external world but to devoutly savored self-perception as well. That left political imagination now operates unself-consciously within the practical ontology of neoliberalism is also the most important lesson to be drawn from progressives’ discussion of Django Unchained and, especially, the move to compare it with Lincoln. Jon Wiener, writing in The Nation, renders the following comparisons: “In Spielberg’s film, the leading black female character is a humble seamstress in the White House whose eyes fill with tears of gratitude when Congress votes to abolish slavery. In Tarantino’s film, the leading female character (Kerry Washington) is a defiant slave who has been branded on the face as a punishment for running away, and is forced—by Leonardo DiCaprio—to work as a prostitute. In Spielberg’s film, old white men make history, and black people thank them for giving them their freedom. In Tarantino’s, a black gunslinger goes after the white slavemaster with homicidal vengeance.”18 Never mind that, for what it’s worth, Kerry Washington’s character, as she actually appears in the film, is mainly a cipher, a simpering damsel in distress more reminiscent of Fay Wray in the original King Kong than heroines of the blaxploitation era’s eponymous vehicles Coffy or Foxy Brown. More problematically, Wiener’s juxtapositions reproduce the elevation of private, voluntarist action as a politics—somehow more truly true or authentic, or at least more appealing emotionally—over the machinations of government and institutional actors. That is a default presumption of the identitarian/culturalist left and is also a cornerstone of neoliberalism’s practical ontology. In an essay on Lincoln published a month earlier, Wiener identifies as the central failing of the film its dedication “to the proposition that Lincoln freed the slaves” and concludes, after considerable meandering and nit-picking ambivalence that brings the term pettifoggery to mind, “slavery died as a result of the actions of former slaves.”19 This either/or construct is both historically false and wrong-headed, and it is especially surprising that a professional historian like Wiener embraces it. The claim that slaves’ actions were responsible for the death of slavery is not only inaccurate; it is a pointless and counterproductive misrepresentation. What purpose is served by denying the significance of the four years of war and actions of the national government of the United States in ending slavery? Besides, it was indeed the Thirteenth Amendment that abolished slavery. Slaves’ mass departure from plantations was self-emancipation, by definition. Their doing so weakened the southern economy and undermined the secessionists’ capacity to fight, and the related infusion of black troops into the Union army provided a tremendous lift both on the battlefield and for northern morale. How does noting that proximity of Union troops greatly emboldened that self-emancipation diminish the import of their actions? But it was nonetheless the Thirteenth Amendment that finally outlawed slavery once and for all in the United States and provided a legal basis for preempting efforts to reinstate it in effect. Moreover, for all the debate concerning Lincoln’s motives, the sincerity of his commitment to emancipation, and his personal views of blacks, and notwithstanding its technical limits with respect to enforceability, the Emancipation Proclamation emboldened black people, slave and free, and encouraged all slavery’s opponents. And, as Wiener notes himself, the proclamation tied the war explicitly to the elimination of slavery as a system. Firefly, or The Road to Serfdom So why is a tale about a manumitted slave/homicidal black gunslinger more palatable to a contemporary leftoid sensibility than either a similarly cartoonish one about black maids and their white employers or one that thematizes Lincoln’s effort to push the Thirteenth Amendment through the House of Representatives? The answer is, to quote the saccharine 1970s ballad, “Feelings, nothing more than feelings.” Wiener’s juxtapositions reflect the political common sense that gives pride of place to demonstrations of respect for the “voices” of the oppressed and recognition of their suffering, agency, and accomplishments. That common sense informs the proposition that providing inspiration has social or political significance. But it equally shapes the generic human-interest “message” of films like The Help that represent injustice as an issue of human relations—the alchemy that promises to reconcile social justice and capitalist class power as a win/win for everyone by means of attitude adjustments and deepened mutual understanding. That common sense underwrites the tendency to reduce the past to a storehouse of encouraging post-it messages for the present. It must, because the presumption that the crucial stakes of political action concern recognition and respect for the oppressed’s voices is a presentist view, and mining the past to reinforce it requires anachronism. The large struggles against slavery and Jim Crow were directed toward altering structured patterns of social relations anchored in law and state power, but stories of that sort are incompatible with both global marketing imperatives and the ideological predilections of neoliberalism and its identitarian loyal opposition. One can only shudder at the prospect of how Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film, The Battle of Algiers, or Costa-Gavras’s State of Siege (1972) would be remade today. (Guy Ritchie’s and Madonna’s execrable 2002 remake of Lina Wertmüller’s 1974 film Swept Away may provide a clue; their abomination completely erases the original film’s complex class and political content and replaces it with a banal—aka “universal”—story of an encounter between an older woman and a younger man, while at the same time meticulously, almost eerily, reproducing, scene by scene, the visual structure of Wertmüller’s film.) Particularly as those messages strive for “universality” as well as inspiration, their least common denominator tends toward the generic story of individual triumph over adversity. But the imagery of the individual overcoming odds to achieve fame, success, or recognition also maps onto the fantasy of limitless upward mobility for enterprising and persistent individuals who persevere and remain true to their dreams. As such, it is neoliberalism’s version of an ideal of social justice, legitimizing both success and failure as products of individual character. When combined with a multiculturalist rhetoric of “difference” that reifies as autonomous cultures—in effect racializes—what are actually contingent modes of life reproduced by structural inequalities, this fantasy crowds inequality as a metric of injustice out of the picture entirely. This accounts for the popularity of reactionary dreck like Beasts of the Southern Wild among people who should know better. The denizens of the Bathtub actively, even militantly, choose their poverty and cherish it and should be respected and appreciated for doing so. But no one ever supposed that Leni Riefenstahl was on the left. The tale type of individual overcoming has become a script into which the great social struggles of the last century and a half have commonly been reformulated to fit the requirements of a wan, gestural multiculturalism. Those movements have been condensed into the personae of Great Men and Great Women—Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, George Washington Carver, Martin Luther King, Jr., Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer and others—who seem to have changed the society apparently by virtue of manifesting their own greatness. The different jacket photos adorning the 1982 and 1999 editions of Doug McAdam’s well known sociological study of the civil rights movement, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970, exemplify the shift. The first edition’s cover was a photo of an anonymous group of marching protesters; the second edition featured the (staged) photo—made iconic by its use in an Apple advertising campaign—of a dignified Rosa Parks sitting alone on the front seat of a bus looking pensively out the window.20 Ironically, the scholarly turn away from organizations and institutional processes to valorize instead the local and everyday dimensions of those movements may have exacerbated this tendency by encouraging a focus on previously unrecognized individual figures and celebrating their lives and “contributions.” Rather than challenging the presumption that consequential social change is made by the will of extraordinary individuals, however, this scholarship in effect validates it by inflating the currency of Greatness so much that it can be found any and everywhere. Giving props to the unrecognized or underappreciated has become a feature particularly of that scholarship that defines scholarly production as a terrain of political action in itself and aspires to the function of the “public intellectual.” A perusal of the rosters of African American History Month and Martin Luther King, Jr. Day speakers at any random sample of colleges and universities attests to how closely this scholar/activist turn harmonizes with the reductionist individualism of prosperity religion and the varieties of latter-day mind cure through which much of the professional-managerial stratum of all races, genders, and sexual orientations, narrates its understandings of the world.
	7	+The impact is biopolitical Empire - the new biopolitical machine that invades every space by destroying the nationalist boundaries of Modernity. The key condition of the Empire is absolute control, the complete consumption of life
	8	+Hardt and Negri 01 Michael Hardt (American literary theorist and political philosopher) and Antonio Negri (Ph.D., is an Italian Marxist sociologist, scholar, revolutionary philosopher and teacher). “Empire.” 2001. Harvard University Press AJ
	9	+Many contemporary theorists are reluctant to recognize the global- ization of capitalist production and its world market as a fundamen- tally new situation and a significant historical shift. The theorists associated with the world-systems perspective, for example, argue that from its inception, capitalism has always functioned as a world economy, and therefore those who clamor about the novelty of its 13 globalization today have only misunderstood its history. it is important to emphasize both capitalism's continuous foundational relationship to (or at least a tendency toward) the world market and capitalism's expanding cycles of power. We believe that this shift makes perfectly clear and possible today the capitalist project to bring together economic power and political power, to realize, in other words, a properly capitalist order. In constitutional terms, the processes of globalization are no longer merely a fact but also a source of juridical definitions that tends to project a single supranational figure of political power. Other theorists are reluctant to recognize a major shift in global power relations because they see that the dominant capitalist nation-states have continued to exercise imperialist domination over the other nations and regions of the globe. From this perspective, the contemporary tendencies toward Empire would represent not a fundamentally new phenomenon but simply a perfecting of imperi- 14 alism. Without underestimating these real and important lines of continuity, however, we think it is important to note that what used to be conflict or competition among several imperialist powers has in important respects been replaced by the idea of a single power that overdetermines them all, structures them in a unitary way, and treats them under one common notion of right that is decidedly postcolonial and postimperialist. This is really the point of departure for our study of Empire: a new notion of right, or rather, a new inscription of authority and a new design of the production of norms and legal instruments of coercion that guarantee contracts and resolve conflicts. We should point out here that we accord special attention to the juridical figures of the constitution of Empire at the beginning of our study not out of any specialized disciplinary interest—as if right or law in itself, as an agent of regulation, were capable of representing the social world in its totality—but rather because they provide a good index of the processes of imperial constitution. New juridical figures reveal a first view of the tendency toward the centralized and unitary regulation of both the world market and global power relations, with all the difficulties presented by such a project. Juridical transformations effectively point toward changes in the material constitution of world power and order. The transition we are witnessing today from traditional international law, which was defined by contracts and treaties, to the definition and constitu- tion of a new sovereign, supranational world power (and thus to an imperial notion of right), however incomplete, gives us a framework in which to read the totalizing social processes of Empire. In effect, the juridical transformation functions as a symptom of the modifications of the material biopolitical constitution of our societies. These changes regard not only international law and inter- national relations but also the internal power relations of each country. While studying and critiquing the new forms of interna- tional and supranational law, then, we will at the same time be pushed to the heart of the political theory of Empire, where the problem of supranational sovereignty, its source of legitimacy, and its exercise bring into focus political, cultural, and finally ontologi- cal problems.
	10	+The alternative is to embrace the multitude through class analysis, recognizing the ever-present being and material existence of the poor. Only class analysis can resolve identity
	11	+Hardt and Negri 01 Michael Hardt (American literary theorist and political philosopher) and Antonio Negri (Ph.D., is an Italian Marxist sociologist, scholar, revolutionary philosopher and teacher). “Empire.” 2001. Harvard University Press AJ
	12	+In each and every historical period a social subject that is ever-present and everywhere the same is identified, often negatively but nonetheless urgently, around a common living form. This form is not that of the powerful and the rich: they are merely partial and localized figures, quantitate signatae. The only non-localizable ^common name" of pure difference in all eras is that of the poor. The poor is destitute, excluded, repressed, exploited—and yet living! It is the common denominator of life, the foundation of the multitude. It is strange, but also illuminating, that postmodernist authors seldom adopt this figure in their theorizing. It is strange because the poor is in a certain respect an eternal postmodern figure: the figure of a transversal, omnipresent, different, mobile subject; the testament to the irrepressible aleatory character of existence. This common name, the poor, is also the foundation of every possibility of humanity. As Niccolo Machiavelli pointed out, in the ureturn to begin- nings" that characterizes the revolutionary phase of the religions and ideolo- gies of modernity, the poor is almost always seen to have a prophetic capacity: not only is the poor in the world, but the poor itself is the very possibility of the world. Only the poor lives radically the actual and present being, in destitution and suffering, and thus only the poor has the ability to renew being. The divinity of the multitude of the poor does not point to any transcendence. On the contrary, here and only here in this world, in the existence of the poor, is the field of immanence presented, confirmed, consoli- dated, and opened. The poor is god on earth. Today there is not even the illusion of a transcendent God. The poor has dissolved that image and recuperated its power. Long ago modernity was inaugurated with Rabelais's laugh, with the realistic supremacy of the belly of the poor, with a poetics that expresses all that there is in destitute humanity "from the belt on down." hater, through the processes of primitive accumulation, the proletariat emerged as a collective subject that could express itself in materiality and immanence, a multitude of poor that not only prophesied but produced, and that thus opened possibilities that were not virtual but concrete. Finally today, in the biopolitical regimes of production and in the processes ofpostmodernization, the poor is a subjugated, exploited figure, but nonetheless a figure of production. This is where the novelty lies. Everywhere today, at the basis of the concept and the common name of the poor, there is a relationship of production. Why are the postmodernists unable to read this passage? They tell us that a regime of transversal linguistic relations of production has entered into the unified and abstract universe of value. But who is the subject that produces "transversally," who gives a creative meaning to language—who if not the poor, who are subjugated and desiring, impoverished and powerful, always more powerful? Here, within this reign of global production, the poor is distinguished no longer only by its prophetic capacity but also by its indispensable presence in the production of a common wealth, always more exploited and always more closely indexed to the wages of rule. The poor itself is power. There is World Poverty, but there is above all World Possibility, and only the poor is capable of this. Vogelfrei, "bird free," is the term Marx used to describe the proletar- iat, which at the beginning of modernity in the processes of primitive accumulation was freed twice over: in the first place, it was freed from being the property of the master (that is, freed from servitude); and in the second place, it was "freed" from the means of production, separated from the soil, with nothing to sell but its own labor power. In this sense, the proletariat was forced to become the pure possibility of wealth. The dominant stream of the Marxist tradition, however, has always hated the poor, precisely for their being "free as birds," for being immune to the discipline of the factory and the discipline necessary for the construction of socialism. Consider how, when in the early 1950s Vittorio De Ska and Cesare Zavattini set the poor to fly away on broomsticks at the end of their beautiful film Miracle in Milan, they were so violently denounced for utopianism by the spokesmen of socialist realism. The Vogelfrei is an angel or an intractable demon. And here, after so many attempts to transform the poor into proletarians and proletarians into a liberation army (the idea of army weighed heavily on that of liberation), once again in postmodernity emerges in the blinding light of clear day the multitude, the common name of the poor. It comes out fully in the open because in postmodernity the subjugated has absorbed the exploited. In other words, the poor, ever)' poor person, the multitude of poor people, have eaten up and digested the multitude of proletarians. By that fact itself the poor have become productive. Even the prostituted body, the destitute person, the hunger of the multitude—all forms of the poor have become productive. And the poor have therefore become ever more important: the life of the poor invests the planet and envelops it with its desire for creativity and freedom. The poor is the condition of every production. The story goes that at the root of the postmodernist sensibility and the construction of the concept of postmodernism are those French socialist philosophers who in their youth celebrated factory discipline and the shining horizons of real socialism, but who became repentant after the crisis of1968 and gave up, proclaiming the futility of the pretense of communism to reappropriate social wealth. Today these same philosophers cynically decon- struct, banalize, and laugh at every social struggle that contests the universal triumph of exchange value. The media and the culture of the media tell us that those philosophers are the ones who recognized this new era of the world, but that is not true. The discovery of postmodernity consisted in the reproposition of the poor at the center of the political and productive terrain. What was really prophetic was the poor, bird-free laugh of Charlie Chaplin when, free from any Utopian illusions and above all from any discipline of liberation, he interpreted the "modern times} of poverty, but at the same time linked the name of the poor to that of life, a liberated life and a liberated productivity.

EntryDate

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	1	+2016-09-16 17:29:08.122

Judge

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	1	+Fakorede, Paramo

Opponent

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	1	+Montgomery WP

ParentRound

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	1	+10

Round

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	1	+5

Team

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	1	+La Canada Zhao Neg

Title

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	1	+1 Empire K

Tournament

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	1	+Greenhill RR