Summary

• Objects (1 modified, 1 added, 0 removed)
  • Caselist.RoundClass[15]
  • Caselist.CitesClass[29]

Details

Caselist.RoundClass[15]

EntryDate

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1		-2017-01-28 15:00:22.90
	1	+2017-01-28 15:00:22.0

Caselist.CitesClass[29]

Cites

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	1	+ROB
	2	+The Counter-Role of the ballot is to endorse the best political strategy for resisting capitalism in the university–the judge has a unique obligation to act as a critical educator and shift focus of the debate towards resolving capitalism
	3	+McClaren 5 Peter, Professor at the Graduate School of Education at UCLA, Teaching against global capitalism and the new imperialism: a critical pedagogy, pg. 6-11, 2005)
	4	+As U.S. imperialism sinks its claws deeper into the rich oil fields of the Middle East, foreign policy pundits in the White House brandish the bragging rights of belonging to the one and only uncontested imperial power of the twenty-first century. In the wake of the recent invasion, occupation, and brutish colonization of Iraq, not to mention Afghanistan and Haiti, there has been an unforgiving yet understandable reluctance on the part of some educators in graduate schools of education and teacher education programs to engage in political and ideological debates over the current social, political, and economic crisis of capitalism (which Marxists claim are dangerously moving us closer to a fatal collision course with capitalism's own internal contradictions). Fewer still have seen fit to inquire into and oppose the baleful erosion of human rights that have been pro- vided by the Constitution. They have justified their inaction in the name of fight- ing a permanent war on terrorism. Under the false pretense of research "objectivity" and "neutrality" many educators are reluctant to take a public stance, let alone rally against the blood-soaked ambitions of the American empire. Protected by the ivory towers of academia, educators routinely resort to a discourse of objectivity and neutrality as a tactic to avoid facing the political and ideological nature of their work (hooks 2004). In some cases, the discourse of neutrality and objectivity allows educators to distance themselves from the larger set of social and political contradictions and antagonisms that are generated by capitalist social relations of production. It also enables them to reduce the risks of having their fellow colleagues criticize them for lacking collegiality. Of course, for tenured professors who sport $120 Tommy Bahama's T-shirls and are waiting for their retirement benefits to kick in, there is little to worry about. But for a number of untenured Marxist educators, who have opened up a new front in university classrooms by teaching against global capitalism and the new imperialism, it has become increasingly dangerous to problematize let alone unmask the relationship between imperialism and education. Within the academy in general, there exists too little genuine discussion or debate over the globalization of poverty, the exploitation of labor in Third World countries, or the Wal-Martization of the American workforce in the domestic frontiers. Given that most universities are now under corporate board-style management, this comes as little surprise. That a significant amount of scholarship churned out of graduate schools of education across the United States continues to operate from within the parameters drawn by capitalist social relations of production is simply restating a truism that holds for most of the academy. But what disturbs us is that this situation equally holds true for much of today's radical and progressive scholarship, which has largely failed to offer a lucid and incisive criticism of capitalism. This is because naming let alone questioning the social, political, cultural, and economic arrangements under capitalism constitutes a form of political intervention and activism that for many educators is simply too risky. Instead, many engage in a form of "soft-radicalism" that scantly scratches the surface of the mechanisms of the dominant ideology. Here, protests reverberate like distant eructations from the bar stools of the local pub. Other colleagues may hide their class and race privileges in an obscure political and ideological dis- course and language that leaves little room for actually addressing the material needs of those in our society who permanently live on the margins and the periphery. Often times, educators divorce political and ideological questions from pedagogical questions and reduce pedagogy to a congerie of prescribed methods and techniques that sacrifice theory and reflection at the altar of the high priests and prophets of practice. Here we are referring to those self- proclaimed practitioners who advocate concrete applications of teaching and learning over theory and self-reflection. We do not deny the importance of practice. In fact, we believe that theory must serve practice, and vice versa, for questions raised in practice must be answered by theory, which underscores the dialectical relationship between theory and practice. However, the theoretical and the practical dimensions of pedagogy can never be reduced to each another. This is because they exist in dialectical tension. In the absence of a theoretical understanding of the world, or a conceptual framework where we can reflect upon our experiences, or a discourse that enables us to examine our positionalities, or an opportunity to explore and rethink the ways in which we interact and relate to the world, practical tools and applications of pedagogy work only to reproduce and maintain capitalist social relations of production. In many instances, teacher education programs have failed to engage students in dialogues about class exploitation and oppression. Oftentimes, class power is sanitized and its powerful effect on the life chances of working-class students is denuded or made invisible. As Paul Lauter (1998) has cogently expressed: Class... remains that unaddressed member of that now-famous trio "race, gender, class." Over the last two decades, there has been far more widespread acknowledgment of and open discussion of race and gender in the classroom, while class has generally remained the silenced subject. In fact, in classrooms, people have seemed afraid to talk about class. They often don't know how to acknowledge economic difference and economic privilege—with their entourage of conflicting social and cultural forms. Regrettably, many progressive teacher education programs too often divorce the causes of cultural, racial, and gender oppression from class oppression. As a result, the struggle for social justice oftentimes is reduced to a truncated and dogmatically fatalist strategy of attrition that fails, in the main, to challenge and expose the mechanisms responsible for reproducing capitalist hegemony. In fact, such programs serve as a recipe for inaction. Educators in our view need to shoulder the courage to question and to problematize the intensification of class antagonisms, the reproduction of the sexual division of labor, and the stubborn persistence of institutional racism that nourishes the ever-decaying roots of capitalism in its latest metabolic stage, namely, the new imperialism. As educators, we need to take the moral and ethical responsibility to question why the United States, as the wealthiest nation on the planet, continues to have the highest child poverty rate among Western industrialized countries. We need to question why 34.6 million Americans are living in poverty. We need to question why 43.6 million Amer- icans are lacking any access to health insurance. And why is the combined in- come of the three wealthiest individuals on the planet equal to the combined national income of the poorest forty-nine countries? A historical comparison by Mathew Fox may shed some light on the issues. Fox (2004) notes that "in the 1960s, the overall income of the richest 20 percent of the world's population was thirty times that of the poorest 20 percent. Today, it is 224 times larger! In the 1960s, the richest 20 percent held 70 percent of the world's revenues; in 1999 it was 85 percent"(42). Those of us who teach in graduate schools of education, and whose work is informed and guided by the principles of critical pedagogy, feel a sense of urgency in drawing attention to the growing class inequalities. Take for example, access to higher education, which now more than ever is beyond the reach of working-class high school graduates. In a recent issue of BusinessWeek, Jessi Hempel (2004) notes that in a study of the country's top 146 colleges and universities, only 3 percent of the student body came from families in the bottom quarter of wage earners. A more disturbing trend is the growing number of entering freshman who are from families earning $100,000 or more. Hemple writes that in the nation's top forty-two state universities, the number of entering fresh- man in this category jumped from 32 percent to 40 percent in less than five years. unions. Finally, critical pedagogy needs to be a creative process by integrating elements of popular culture (i.e., drama, music, oral history, narratives) as educational tools that can successfully raise the level of political conscious- ness of students and teachers. In our view, critical pedagogy must be animated by a passionate and critical-minded optimism. In the chapters that follow, we attempt to expand on this approach to pedagogy as a means of challenging current social relations of production and incarnations of imperialism worldwide.
	5	+That outweighs—capitalism is the root cause of gendered and racialized oppression and makes mass violence and extermination inevitable
	6	+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
	7	+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 laborprocess, 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 “worldshattering” 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.

EntryDate

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	1	+2017-01-28 15:00:23.651

Judge

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	1	+Nadia Hussein

Opponent

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	1	+Kinkaid JY

ParentRound

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	1	+15

Round

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	1	+3

Team

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	1	+Lexington Weiler Neg

Title

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	1	+1- CAP ROB

Tournament

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	1	+Emory