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+The discourse of free speech in universities instills neoliberal ideologies. Anarchist News 10: Anarchistnews.org, “The university, social death, and the inside joke”, published 18 February 2010, http://anarchistnews.org/content/university-social-death-and-inside-joke |
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+The University is also the perfect focal point for an economy based on simulation. There, we are taught to question everything; this allows for the constant entropy and reabsorption of signs, ideal for living in what Autonomist theorist Franco Berardi calls ‘semiocapitalism’. In Symbolic Exchange and Death, Baudrillard tells us that our new economy "conforms to the global usage we have of the surrounding world of reading and selective decoding - we live less as users than as readers and selectors, reading cells.”39 Yet he adds that “by the same token you are yourself constantly selected and tested by the medium itself.” The subject of the hyperreal economy is increasingly analogous to the student; constantly undergoing evaluation, constantly producing and reproducing value. Berardi explains in his work Precarious Rhapsody that “the worker does not exist any more as a person. He is just the interchangeable producer of microfragments of recombinant semiosis which enters into the continuous flux of the network.”40 A precarious worker may have several jobs in a day. They may be paid by performance, graded like a student might be. Increasingly, a society dependent on affective labor is turning every job interview into an audition, an evaluation not just of the education and experience, but also of the social capital of the candidate. Many in the field of cultural studies have commented on the increasing dependence of corporations on the internet, on social networking sites and viral marketing. Others have talked of participatory management schemes, of the conflation between work and play, or on the growing importance of fan and venture labor. Yet a vital conclusion remains to be drawn, in that all these modulations are analogous to emulating ‘the poverty of student life’. Baudrillard tells us that “the school no longer exists because every strand of social process is shot through with discipline and pedagogical training.” 41Modern capitalist enterprise seeks to reappropriate the University as the new model of the semiotic economy. |
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+The claim that free speech leads to social progress is a neoliberal myth – it distracts direct action and re-entrenches multiple forms of oppression. |
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+Tillett-Saks 13 Andrew Tillett-Saks (Labor organizer and critical activist author for Truth-Out and Counterpunch), Neoliberal Myths, Counterpunch, 11/7/13, http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/11/07/neoliberal-myths/ //LADI |
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+In the wake of the Brown University shout-down of Ray Kelly, champion of the NYPD’s racist stop-and-frisk policy and racial profiling in general, the debate has resurfaced. Rather than talking past the anti-protestors’ arguments, they need to be addressed directly. The prototypical argument in denouncing the protestors is not a defense of Ray Kelly’s racism. It is twofold: First, that a free-flowing discourse on the matter will allow all viewpoints to be weighed and justice to inevitably emerge victorious on its merits. Second, that stopping a bigot from speaking in the name of freedom is self-defeating as it devolves our democratic society into tyranny. The twofold argument against the protestors stems from two central myths of neoliberalism. The argument for free discourse as the enlightened path to justice ignores that direct action protest is primarily responsible for most of the achievements we would consider ‘progress’ historically (think civil rights, workers’ rights, suffrage, etc.), not the free exchange of ideas. The claim that silencing speech in the name of freedom is self-defeating indulges in the myth of the pre-existence of a free society in which freedom of speech must be preciously safeguarded, while ignoring the woeful shortcomings of freedom of speech in our society which must be addressed before there is anything worth protecting. Critics of the protest repeatedly denounced direct action in favor of ideological debate as the path to social justice. “It would have been more effective to take part in a discussion rather than flat out refuse to have him speak,” declared one horrified student to the Brown Daily Herald. Similarly, Brown University President Christina Paxson labeled the protest a detrimental “affront to democratic civil society,” and instead advocated “intellectual rigor, careful analysis, and…respectful dialogue and discussion.” Yet the implication that masterful debate is the engine of social progress could not be more historically unfounded. Only in the fairy tale histories of those interested in discouraging social resistance does ‘respectful dialogue’ play a decisive role in struggles against injustice. The eight-hour workday is not a product of an incisive question-and-answer session with American robber barons. Rather, hundreds of thousands of workers conducted general strikes during the nineteenth century, marched in the face of military gunfire at Haymarket Square in 1886, and occupied scores of factories in the 1930’s before the eight-hour work day became American law. Jim Crow was not defeated with the moral persuasion of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speeches. Rather, hundreds of thousands marched on Washington, suffered through imprisonment by racist Southern law enforcement, and repeatedly staged disruptive protests to win basic civil rights. On a more international scale, Colonialism, that somehow-oft-forgotten tyranny that plagued most of the globe for centuries, did not cease thanks to open academic dialogue. Bloody resistance, from Algeria to Vietnam to Panama to Cuba to Egypt to the Philippines to Cameroon and to many other countries, was the necessary tool that unlocked colonial shackles. Different specific tactics have worked in different contexts, but one aspect remains constant: The free flow of ideas and dialogue, by itself, has rarely been enough to generate social progress. It is not that ideas entirely lack social power, but they have never been sufficient in winning concessions from those in power to the oppressed. Herein lies neoliberal myth number one—that a liberal free-market society will inexorably and inherently march towards greater freedom. To the contrary, direct action has always proved necessary. |
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+Impacts |
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+Prefer the slow violence over big-stick impacts – cap produces suffering unrecognizable by traditional yardsticks of measurement Nixon 11 |
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+(Rob Nixon, a Professor of English at University of Wisconsin at Madison; has a PhD from Columbia University “Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor”, Published 2011, pages 65-67) |
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+Looking back at Chernobyl, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Bhopal, Petryna laments how "many persons who have survived these large-scale technological disasters have been caught in a long-term and vicious bureaucratic cycle in which they carry the burden of proof of their physical damage while experiencing the risk of being delegitimated in legal, welfare, and medical institutional contexts."59 Such people, the illiterate poor above all, are thrust into a labyrinth of self-fashioning as they seek to fit their bodily stories to the story lines that dangle hope of recognition (possibly, though elusively), even recompense. In so doing, the poor face the double challenge of invisibility and amnesia: numerically, they may constitute the majority, but they remain on the margins in terms of visibility and official memory. From an environmental perspective, this marginality is perpetuated, in part, by what Davis terms "the dialectic of ordinary disaster," whereby a calamity is incorporated into history and rendered forgettable and ordinary precisely because the burden of risk falls unequally on the unsheltered poor.60 Such disasters are readily dismissed from memory and policy planning by framing them as accidental, random, and unforeseeable acts of God, without regard for the precautionary measures that might have prevented these catastrophes or have mitigated their effects. At stake here is the role of neoliberal globalization in exacerbating both uneven economic development and the uneven development of official memory. What we witness is a kind of fatal bigotry that operates through the spatializing of time, by off-loading risk onto "backward" communities that are barely visible in the corporate media. Contemporary global politics, then, must be recognized "as a struggle for crude, material dominance, but also (threaded ever closer into that struggle) as a battle for the control over appearances."61 That battle over spectacle becomes especially decisive for public memory—and for the foresight with which public policy can motivate and execute precautionary measures—when it comes to the attritional casualties claimed, as at Bhopal, by the forces of slow violence. We have seen, in recent years, some excellent analytical books about the plight of the international urban underclass by Davis, Jeremy Seabrook, and Jan Breman, among others. However, the kind of visibility such books afford is very different from the visibility offered by a picaresque novel. For even the most eloquent social scientific accounts of the underclass, like social scientific accounts of environmental disaster, veer toward the anonymously collective and the statistical. Such accounts thus tend to be in the same gesture humanizing and dehumanizing, animating and silencing. The dilemma of how to represent the underclass, the infrahombres, stands at the heart of the picaresque tradition. Like GraceLand, Chris Abani's superb picaresque novel about ingenious desperation in a Lagos shanty-town, Animal's People stages a disaggregated irruption of a vivid individual life. Animal, speaking his life story into the Jarnalis's tape recorder, is all charismatic voice: his street-level testimony does not start from the generalized hungers of the wretched of the earth, but from the devouring hunger in an individual belly. If the novel gradually enfolds a wider community— Animal's people—it does so by maintaining at its emotional center Animal, the cracked voiced soloist, who breaks through the gilded imperial veneer of neoliberalism to announce himself in his disreputable vernacular.62 His is the antivoice to the new, ornate, chivalric discourse of neoliberal "free trade" and "development." Through Animal's immersed voice, Sinha is able to return to questions that have powered the picaresque from its beginnings. What does it mean to be reduced to living in subhuman, bestial conditions? What chasms divide and what ties bind the wealthy and the destitute, the human and the animal? What does it mean, in the fused imperial language of temporal and spatial dismissal, to be written off as "backward"?63 In Animal's day-to-day meanderings, the impulse for survival trumps the dream of collective justice. Yet through his somatized foreign burden— and through the intrepid, blighted lives around him—Sinha exhumes from the forces of amnesia not just the memory of a long-ago disaster but the present and future force of that disaster's embodied, ongoing percolations. The infrahombres—those who must eke out an existence amidst such percolations—are, the novel insists, also of this earth. Through his invention of the environmental picaresque, Sinha summons to the imaginative surface of the novel the underclass's underreported lives, redeeming their diverse quirks and hopes and quotidian terrors from what, almost half a millennium ago, Lazaro recognized as "the sepulcher of oblivion."64 |
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+Framing |
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+The Role of the Ballot goes to whoever best proposes an anti-capitalist pedagogy, re-evaluating education tactics is the only way to end the anonymization of workers the capitalist mindset engrains |
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+Zizek and Daly 04 |
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+Glyn. Lecturer in International Studies at the University College Northampton; Slavoj Zizek, world famous philosophy on psychoanalysis and capitalism; Conversations with Žižek. 14-19 |
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+For Žižek it is imperative that we cut through this Gordian knot of postmodern protocol and recognize that our ethico-political responsibility is to confront the constitutive violence of today's global capitalism and its obscene naturalization/anonymization of the millions who are subjugated by it throughout the world. Against the standardized positions of postmodern culture - with all its pieties concerning 'multiculturalist' etiquette - Žižek is arguing for a politics that might be called 'radically incorrect' in the sense that it breaks with these types of positions and focuses instead on the very organizing principles of today's social reality: the principles of global liberal capitalism. This requires some care and subtlety. For too long, Marxism has been bedevilled by an almost fetishistic economism that has tended towards political morbidity. With the likes of Hilferding and Gramsci, and more recently Laclau and Mouffe, crucial theoretical advances have been made that enable the trascendence of all forms of economism. In this new context, however, Žižek argues that the problem that now presents itself is almost that of the opposite fetish. That is to say, the prohibitive anxieties surrounding the taboo of economism can function as a way of not engaging with the economic reality and as a way of implicitly accepting the latter as a basic horizon of existence. In an ironic Freudian-Lacanian twist, the fear of economism can end up reinforcing a de facto economic necessity in respect of contemporary capitalism (i.e. the initial prohibition conjures up the very thing it fears). This is not to endorse any retrograde return to economism. Žižek's point is rather that in rejecting economism we should not lose sight of the systemic power of capital in shaping the lives and destinies of humanity and our very sense of the possible. In particular, we should not overlook Marx's central insight that in order to create a universal global system the forces of capitalism seek to conceal the politico-discursive violence of its construction through a kind of gentrification of that system. What is persistently denied by neo-liberals such as Rorty (1989) and Fukuyama (1992) is that the gentrification of global liberal capitalism is one whose 'universalism' fundamentally reproduces and depends upon a disavowed violence that excludes vast sectors of the world's population. In this way, neo-liberal ideology attempts to naturalize capitalism by presenting its outcomes of winning and losing as if they were simply a matter of chance and sound judgement in a neutral marketplace. Capitalism does indeed create a space for a certain diversity, at least for the central capitalist regions, but it is neither neutral nor ideal and its price in terms of social exclusion is exorbitant. That is to say, the human cost in terms of inherent global poverty and degraded 'life-chances' cannot be calculated within the existing economic rationale and, in consequence, social exclusion remains mystified and nameless (viz. the patronizing reference to the developing world). And Žižek's point is that this mystification is magnified through capitalism's profound capacity to ingest its own excesses and negativity; to redirect (or misdirect) social antagonisms and to absorb them within a culture of differential affirmation. Instead of Bolshevism, the tendency of today is towards a kind of political boutiquism that is readily sustained by postmodern forms of consumerism and lifestyle. |
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+If we do not escape that ontological view that humans are a resource, by failing to rethink our capitalist ontology, we will reach a point of ontological damnation that is worse than extinction. Zimmerman, |
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+(Professor of Philosophy at Tulane), 94 (Michael, Contesting the Earth’s Future, p. 104). |
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+Heidegger asserted that human self-assertion, combined with the eclipse of being, threatens the relation between being and human Dasein. Loss of this relation would be even more dangerous than a nuclear war that might "bring about the complete annihilation of humanity and the destruction of the earth." This controversial claim is comparable to the Christian teaching that it is better to forfeit the world than to lose one's soul by losing one's relation to God. Heidegger apparently thought along these lines: it is possible that after a nuclear war, life might once again emerge, but it is far less likely that there will ever again occur an ontological clearing through which such life could manifest itself. Further, since modernity's one-dimensional disclosure of entities virtually denies them any "being" at all, the loss of humanity's openness for being is already occurring.55 Modernity's background mood is horror in the face of nihilism, which is consistent with the aim of providing material "happiness" for everyone by reducing nature to pure energy.56 The unleashing of vast quantities of energy in nuclear war would be equivalent to modernity's slow-motion destruction of nature: unbounded destruction would equal limitless consumption. If humanity avoided nuclear war only to survive as contented clever animals, Heidegger believed we would exist in a state of ontological damnation: hell on earth, masquerading as material paradise. Deep ecologists might agree that a world of material human comfort purchased at the price of everything wild would not be a world worth living in, for in killing wild nature, people would be as good as dead. But most of them could not agree that the loss of humanity's relation to being would be worse than nuclear omnicide, for it is wrong to suppose that the lives of millions of extinct and unknown species are somehow lessened because they were never "disclosed" by humanity. |
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+ALT |
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+Voting negative refuses the affirmative in favor of Historical Materialist Pedagogy, unconditionally. International inequality is sutured by the unequal circulation of capital. Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary moment. Only starting from the structural antagonisms produced by wage labor can lead to transformative politics. |
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+Ebert ‘9 Teresa, Associate Professor of English, State University of New York at Albany, THE TASK OF CULTURAL CRITIQUE, pp. 92-95 |
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+Unlike these rewritings, which reaffirm in a somewhat new language the system of wage labor with only minor internal reforms, materialist critique aims at ending class rule. It goes beyond description and explains the working of wage labor and the abstract structures that cannot be experienced directly but underwrite it. Materialist critique unpacks the philosophical and theoretical arguments that provide concepts for legitimizing wage labor and marks the textual representations that make it seem a normal part of life. In short, instead of focusing on micropractices (prison, gender, education, war, literature, and so on) in local and regional terms, materialist critique relates these practices to the macrostructures of capitalism and provides the knowledges necessary to put an end to exploitation. At the center of these knowledges is class critique. Pedagogy of critique is a class critique of social relations and the knowledges they produce . Its subject is wage labor, not the body without organs . An exemplary lesson in pedagogy of critique is provided by Marx, who concludes chapter 6 of Capital, " The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power, " by addressing the sphere within which wages are exchanged for labor power and the way this exchange is represented in the legal, philosophical, and representational apparatuses of capitalism as equal . He provides knowledge of the structures of wage labor and the theoretical discourses that sustain it. I have quoted this passage before and will refer to it again and again. Here is the full version: We now know how the value paid by the purchaser to the possessor of this peculiar commodity, labour-power, is determined. The use-value which the former gets in exchange, manifests itself only in the actual usufruct, in the consumption of the labour-power. The money-owner buys everything necessary for this purpose, such as raw material, in the market, and pays for it at its full value . The consumption of labourpower is at one and the same time the production of commodities and of surplus-value. The consumption of labour-power is completed, as is the case of every other commodity, outside the limits of the market or the sphere of circulation. Accompanied by Mr. Moneybags and by the possessor of labour-power, we therefore take leave for a time of this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in view of all men, and follow them both into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there stares us in the face "No admittance except on business . " Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital is produced. We shall at last force the secret of profit making. This sphere that we are deserting, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labour-power, are constrained only by their own free will. They contract as free agents, and the agreement they come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself. The only force that brings them together and puts them in relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interests of each. Each looks to himself only, and no one troubles himself about the rest, and just because they do so, do they all, in accordance with the pre-established harmony of things, or under the auspices of an all-shrewd providence, work together to their mutual advantage, for the common weal and in the interest of all. On leaving this sphere of simple circulation or of exchange of commodities, which furnishes the "Free-trader vulgaris" with his views and ideas, and with the standard by which he judges a society based on capital and wages, we think we can perceive a change in the physiognomy of our dramatis personae. He, who before was the money-owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other, timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but-a hiding. Materialist critique is fundamental to a transformative feminist politics. Through critique the subject develops historical knowledges of the social totality: she acquires, in other words, an understanding of how the existing social institutions (motherhood, child care, love, paternity, taxation, family, . . . and so on ) are part of the social relations of production, how they are located in exploitative relations of difference, and how they can be changed. Materialist critique, in other words, is that knowledge practice that historically situates the conditions of possibility of what empirically exists under capitalist relations of class difference-particularly the division of labor-and, more important, points to what is suppressed by the empirically existing: what could be, instead of what actually is. Critique indicates, in other words, that what exists is not necessarily real or true but only the actuality under wage labor. The role of critique in pedagogy is exactly this: the production of historical know ledges and class consciousness of the social relations, knowledges that mark the transformability of existing social arrangements and the possibility of a different social organization~-~-one that is free from necessity. Quite simply then, the pedagogy of critique is a mode of social knowing that inquires into what is not said, into the silences and the suppressed or the missing, in order to unconceal operations of economic and political power underlying the myriad concrete details and seemingly disparate events and representations of our lives . It shows how apparently disconnected zones of culture are in fact linked by the highly differentiated and dispersed operation of the systematic, abstract logic of the exploitation of the division of labor that informs all the practices of culture and society. It reveals how seemingly unique concrete experiences are in fact the common effect of social relations of production in wage labor capitalism. In sum, materialist critique both disrupts that which represents itself as natural and thus as inevitable and explains how it is materially produced. Critique, in other words, enables us to explain how social differences, specifically gender, race, sexuality, and class, have been systematically produced and continue to operate within regimes of exploitation-namely, the international division of labor in global capitalism-so we can change them. It is the means for producing politically effective and transformative knowledges . The claim of affective pedagogy is that it sets the subject free by making available to her or him the unruly force of pleasure and the unrestrained flows of desire, thereby turning her or him into an oppositional subject who cuts through established representations and codings to find access to a deterritorialized subjectivity. But the radicality of this self, at its most volatile moment, is the radicality of the class politics of the ruling class, a class for whom the question of poverty no longer exists. The only question left for it, as I have already indicated, is the question of liberty as the freedom of desire. Yet this is a liberty acquired at the expense of the poverty of others. The pedagogy of critique engages these issues by situating itself not in the space of the self, not in the space of desire, not in the space of liberation, but in the revolutionary site of collectivity, need, and emancipation. The core of the pedagogy of critique is that education is not simply for enlightening the individual to see through the arbitrariness of signification and the violence of established representations . It recognizes that it is a historical practice and, as such, it is always part of the larger forces of production and relations of production. It understands that all pedagogies are, in one way or the other, aimed at producing an efficient labor force. Unlike the pedagogy of desire, the pedagogy of critique does not simply teach that knowledge is another name for power, nor does it marginalize knowledge as a detour of desire. It acknowledges the fissures in social practices-including its own-but it demonstrates that they are historical and not textual or epistemological. It, therefore, does not retreat into mysticism by declaring the task of teaching to be the teaching of the impossible and, in doing so, legitimate the way things are. Instead, the pedagogy of critique is a worldly teaching of the worldly. |
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+Even if they win our alt doesn’t solve you vote negative – capitalism frames decision making – radically breaking away from the way the status quo produces knowledge is key to solving oppression |
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+De Angelis 3 (Massimo, Dept of Economics at East London, The commoner, http://www.ainfos.ca/03/jan/ainfos00479.html) |
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+Once we acknowledge the existence of the galaxy of alternatives as they emerge from concrete needs and aspirations, we can ground today's new political discourse in the thinking and practice of the actualization and the coordination of alternatives, so as each social node and each individual within it has the power to decide and take control over their lives. It is this actualization and this coordination that rescues existing alternatives from the cloud of their invisibility, because alternatives, as with any human product, are social products, and they need to be recognized and validated socially. Our political projects must push their way through beyond the existing forms of coordination, beyond the visible fist of the state, beyond the invisible hand of competitive markets, and beyond the hard realities of their interconnections that express themselves in today forms of neoliberal governance, promoting cooperation through competition and community through disempowerment. As I will argue, this new political discourse is based on the project of defending and extending the space of commons, at the same time building and strengthening communities through the social fields. |