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-Part 1 is the Overview |
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-WE begin the AC in 2016. Capitalism has left the world ravaged and destroyed. WE have witnessed the end of communism and proletariat revolution. WE witness the radical whose aim is ivory towered utopia. WE witness the brokenness of the current system. The radical ideology IS DEAD; we must REFORM to survive. |
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-Part 2 is Links |
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-Qualified immunity? That’s capitalist. The Internationalist 15 (Activist group formed in 1998 by Internationalist Group (IG) to combat capitalism. “Killer Cops, White Supremacists: Racist Terror Stalks Black America” http://www.internationalist.org/killercopswstalkblackamerica1507.html) |
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-The entire legal system is based on the recognition that the police are the first line of defense of capital. As shown by the refusal of a grand jury to indict the cops who killed Eric Garner, even in the face of irrefutable evidence, the process is rigged to ensure impunity for the police. In Rise of the Warrior Cop, Post reporter Balko points out that, “Under the qualified immunity from civil lawsuits currently afforded to police under federal law, a police officer can’t be sued for mere negligence – or even for gross negligence that results in a fatality.” But he admits that of his paltry list of reforms, modifying this immunity is the “least likely to be adopted.” This is not some peculiar American or modern invention. Engels in The Origins of the Family notes about even the earliest appearance of the state: “Representatives of a power which estranges them from society, they have to be given prestige by means of special decrees, which invest them with a peculiar sanctity and inviolability.” No amount of protest will convince the ruling class to muzzle their uniformed guard dogs, whom it requires to keep the poor and working people down. What’s needed is militant class struggle on a revolutionary program. The Internationalist Group has called for an end to all drug laws. We call for labor/black/immigrant mobilization against police terror. We have acted to carry this out, with the unprecedented port shutdown to “Stop Police Terror” by Local 10 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in Oakland this past May Day, and the “Labor Against Police Murder” contingent the same day, organized by Class Struggle Workers – Portland. Bringing to bear workers’ power to stop the wheels of commerce could stay the rulers’ hand for a time. At the height of struggle one can also mobilize to get the police and military occupation forces out, as the IG called for in Ferguson last August and again in Baltimore this spring.”10 But such actions can only have a temporary effect. Ultimately, there is no solution to racist police brutality under capitalist rule: it is inherent in the system. Racist vigilantes, from George Zimmerman to Dylann Roof, act as auxiliaries. Whether in the form of slave catchers, KKK nightriders and racist sheriffs under Jim Crow, or mass incarceration combined with paramilitary police forces today, supplemented by massacres, American capitalism has always devised a way to keep its black, Latino and now increasingly immigrant wage slaves in thrall. The killer cops aren’t running amok, in contradiction to their assigned task, they’re doing their job to enforce racist “law and order” which is essential to American capitalism and has been ever since African slaves were brought here in chains. The fact that year after year, from one end of the country to the other, virtually no police are indicted – much less convicted – for killing over 1,000 civilians a year is no accident. |
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-Immunity decreases police accountability – causes social injustice. Carter 15 (Tom, contributor and writer at World Socialist Website. “US Supreme Court expands immunity for killer cops”, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/11/12/pers-n12.html) |
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-So far this year, more than 1,000 people have been killed by the police in America. Almost every day, there are new videos posted online showing police shootings, intrusions into homes and cars, asphyxiations, beatings and taserings. Last week, two police officers in Louisiana opened fire on Jeremy Mardis, a six-year-old autistic boy, and his father Chris Few. The boy’s father had his hands up during the shooting and is currently hospitalized with serious injuries. His son succumbed to the police bullets while still buckled into the front seat of the car. The Supreme Court’s decision reflects the fact that in the face of rising popular anger over police killings, the entire political apparatus—including all of the branches of government—is closing ranks behind the police. This includes the establishment media, which has largely remained silent about Monday’s pro-police Supreme Court decision. The police operate with almost total impunity, confident that no matter what they do, they will have the backing of the state. Two weeks ago, a South Carolina grand jury refused to return an indictment against the officer who was caught on video killing 19-year-old Zachary Hammond. This follows the exoneration of the police who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Eric Garner in New York City and Tamir Rice in Cleveland. The Obama administration’s position regarding the surge of police violence was most clearly and simply articulated by FBI director James Comey in a speech on October 23. “May God protect our cops,” Comey declared. He went on to accuse those who film the police of promoting violent crime. Meanwhile, in virtually every police brutality case that has come before the federal courts, the Obama administration has taken the side of the police. On Monday, the Supreme Court went out of its way to cite approvingly an amicus curiae (friend of court) brief filed by the National Association of Police Organizations (NAPO), which defended Mullenix. With this citation, notwithstanding its ostensible role as a neutral arbiter and guarantor of the Constitution, the Supreme Court sent a clear signal as to which side it is on. During the imposition of de facto martial law in Ferguson last year, NAPO issued statements vociferously defending Michael Brown’s killer, labeling demonstrators as “violent outsiders,” and denouncing “the violent idiots on the street chanting ‘time to kill a cop!’” “Qualified immunity” is a reactionary doctrine invented by judges in the later part of the 20th century to shield public officials from lawsuits. As a practical matter, this doctrine allows judges to toss out civil rights cases without a jury trial if, in the judge’s opinion, the official misconduct in question was not “plainly incompetent” or a “knowing violation of clearly established law.” Over recent decades, the doctrine has been stretched to Kafkaesque proportions to shield police officers from accountability. In the landmark case of Tennessee v. Garner (1985), the Supreme Court held that it violates the Constitution to shoot an “unarmed, nondangerous fleeing suspect,” and required an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury before the police could open fire. But the Supreme Court in its decision on Monday dismissed this language as constituting a “high level of generality” that was not “particular” enough to “clearly establish” any particular constitutional rights. Since cases that are dismissed on the grounds of qualified immunity do not result in decisions on the constitutional issues, this circular pseudo-logic ensures that no rights will ever be “clearly established.” It also ensures that, instead of the democratic procedure of a jury trial, cases involving the police will be decided by judges. |
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-Part 3 is ImpactsPolice brutality is caused by capitalist institutions to protect capital. Peterson 14 (John, author, writer, and contributor to In Defense of Marxism. “To End Racism and Police Brutality, End Capitalism!”. http://www.marxist.com/to-end-racism-and-police-brutality-end-capitalism.htm) |
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-The racism of the police is therefore not merely an ideological construction, the result of “bad people,” “bad will,” or “bad ideas.” Rather, it reflects a deeper objective reality. Social being determines social consciousness. Scarcity leads to a struggle over limited resources. Those who have the bulk of the wealth are in a minority, and must therefore hire a force able and willing to unleash devastating viciousness against the majority in order to “keep them in line.” But sheer violence is not sufficient. Other, far more subtle means must also be employed. The development of a system of skin-color-based discrimination during the rise of capitalism and the revival of chattel slavery became an indispensable weapon in the “divide and rule” arsenal of the capitalists. By getting the exploited and oppressed to fight each other over scraps, attention can be drawn away from the real relations of wealth and power in society. It is the structural racism of the capitalist system that leads to a racist outlook and ideology—not the other way around. There's no question that there is a heavily racist component in the targeting, degree, and frequency of police brutality. Marxists do not reduce this or any other complex social phenomenon “only” and mechanically to class. But in the final analysis, if there were no classes, there would be no need for police, and without police, no police brutality. Only in a society of superabundance, in which there is no scarcity, and therefore nothing life and death to fight over, will people's prejudices begin to melt away. This is why Marxists continually explain that there is no lasting antidote to the venom of racism within the limits of capitalism, which has tailored and compartmentalized this society to benefit the rule of the bourgeoisie. |
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-Failing to interrogate capitalism causes an endless cycle of police brutality. Hedges 15(Chris, regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books. “Corporate Capitalism Is the Foundation of Police Brutality and the Prison State”. http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/07/06/corporate-capitalism-foundation-police-brutality-and-prison-state) |
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-Our national conversation on race and crime is based on a fiction. It is the fiction that the organs of internal security, especially the judiciary and the police, can be adjusted, modernized or professionalized to make possible a post-racial America. We discuss issues of race while ignoring the economic, bureaucratic and political systems of exploitation—all of it legal and built into the ruling apparatus—that are the true engines of racism and white supremacy. No discussion of race is possible without a discussion of capitalism and class. And until that discussion takes place, despite all the proposed reforms to the criminal justice system, the state will continue to murder and imprison poor people of color with impunity. More training, body cameras, community policing, the hiring of more minorities as police officers, a better probation service and more equitable fines will not blunt the indiscriminate use of lethal force or reduce the mass incarceration that destroys the lives of the poor. Our capitalist system callously discards surplus labor, especially poor people of color, employing lethal force and the largest prison system in the world to keep them under control. This is by design. And until this predatory system of capitalism is destroyed, the poor, especially people of color, will continue to be gunned down by police in the streets, as they have for decades, and disproportionately locked in prison cages. “The strength of ‘The New Jim Crow’ by Michelle Alexander is that, by equating mass incarceration with Jim Crow, it makes it rhetorically impossible to defend it,” said Naomi Murakawa, author of “The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America,” when we met recently in Princeton, N.J. “But, on the other hand, there is no ‘new’ Jim Crow, there is just capitalist white supremacy in a state of constant self-preservation.” “We should talk about what we are empowering police to do, not how they are doing it, not whether they are being nice when they carry out arrests,” she said. “Reforms are oriented to making violence appear respectable and courteous. But being arrested once can devastate someone’s life. This is the violence we are not talking about. It does not matter if you are arrested politely. Combating racism is not about combating bad ideas in the head or hateful feelings. This idea is the perfect formula to preserve material distributions in their exact configuration.” |
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-Part 4 is Solvency |
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-Text: The United States ought to limit qualified immunity for police officers. I reserve the right to clarify.Engaging bureaucratic structures like the state through concrete demands is necessary for material change Frank, 12 PhD, History, University of Chicago and Political Analyst (Thomas, “To the Precinct Station,” Baffler, No. 21, http://www.thebaffler.com/articles/to-the-precinct-station)//SY |
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-Measured in terms of words published per political results, on the other hand, OWS may be the most over-described historical event of all time. Nearly every one of these books makes sweeping claims for the movement’s significance, its unprecedented and earth-shattering innovations. Just about everything it does is brilliantly, inventively, mind-blowingly people-empowering. And what do we have to show for it today in our “normal lives”? Not much. President Obama may talk about the “top 1 percent” now, but he is apparently as committed as ever to austerity, to striking a “grand bargain” with the Republicans. Occupy itself is pretty much gone. It was evicted from Zuccotti Park about two months after it began—an utterly predictable outcome for which the group seems to have made inadequate preparation. OWS couldn’t bring itself to come up with a real set of demands until after it got busted, when it finally agreed on a single item.*** With the exception of some residual groups here and there populated by the usual activist types, OWS has today pretty much fizzled out. The media storm that once surrounded it has blown off to other quarters. Pause for a moment and compare this record of accomplishment to that of Occupy’s evil twin, the Tea Party movement, and the larger right-wing revival of which it is a part. Well, under the urging of this trumped-up protest movement, the Republican Party proceeded to win a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives; in the state legislatures of the nation it took some six hundred seats from the Democrats; as of this writing it is still purging Republican senators and congressmen deemed insufficiently conservative and has even succeeded in having one of its own named as the GOP’s vice-presidential candidate. The question that the books under consideration here seek to answer is: What is the magic formula that made OWS so successful? But it’s exactly the wrong question. What we need to be asking about Occupy Wall Street is: Why did this effort fail? How did OWS blow all the promise of its early days? Why do even the most popular efforts of the Left come to be mired in a gluey swamp of academic talk and pointless antihierarchical posturing? The action certainly started with a bang. When the occupation of Zuccotti Park began, in September 2011, the OWS cause was overwhelmingly popular; indeed, as Todd Gitlin points out, hating Wall Street may well have been the most popular left-wing cause since the thirties. Inequality had reached obscene levels, and it was no longer the act of a radical to say so. The bank bailouts of the preceding years had made it obvious that government was captured by organized money. Just about everyone resented Wall Street in those days; just about everyone was happy to see someone finally put our fury in those crooks’ overpaid faces. People flocked to the OWS standard. Cash donations poured in; so did food and books. Celebrities made appearances in Zuccotti, and the media began covering the proceedings with an attentiveness it rarely gives to leftist actions. But these accounts, with a few exceptions here and there, misread that overwhelming approval of Occupy’s cause as an approval of the movement’s mechanics: the camping out in the park, the way food was procured for an army of protesters, the endless search for consensus, the showdowns with the cops, the twinkles. These things, almost every writer separately assumes, are what the Occupy phenomenon was really about. These are the details the public hungers to know. The building of a “community” in Zuccotti Park, for example, is a point of special emphasis. Noam Chomsky’s thoughts epitomize the genre when he tells us that “one of the main achievements” of the movement “has been to create communities, real functioning communities of mutual support, democratic interchange,” et cetera. The reason this is important, he continues, is because Americans “tend to be very isolated and neighborhoods are broken down, community structures have broken down, people are kind of alone.” How building such “communities” helps us to tackle the power of high finance is left unexplained, as is Chomsky’s implication that a city of eight million people, engaged in all the complexities of modern life, should learn how humans are supposed to live together by studying an encampment of college students. The actual sins of Wall Street, by contrast, are much less visible. For example, when you read Occupying Wall Street, the work of a team of writers who participated in the protests, you first hear about the subject of predatory lending when a sympathetic policeman mentions it in the course of a bust. The authors themselves never bring it up. And if you want to know how the people in Zuccotti intended to block the banks’ agenda—how they intended to stop predatory lending, for example—you have truly come to the wrong place. Not because it’s hard to figure out how to stop predatory lending, but because the way the Occupy campaign is depicted in these books, it seems to have had no intention of doing anything except building “communities” in public spaces and inspiring mankind with its noble refusal to have leaders. Unfortunately, though, that’s not enough. Building a democratic movement culture is essential for movements on the left, but it’s also just a starting point. Occupy never evolved beyond it. It did not call for a subtreasury system, like the Populists did. It didn’t lead a strike (a real one, that is), or a sit-in, or a blockade of a recruitment center, or a takeover of the dean’s office. The IWW free-speech fights of a century ago look positively Prussian by comparison. With Occupy, the horizontal culture was everything. “The process is the message,” as the protesters used to say and as most of the books considered here largely concur. The aforementioned camping, the cooking, the general-assembling, the filling of public places: that’s what Occupy was all about. Beyond that there seems to have been virtually no strategy to speak of, no agenda to transmit to the world. Whether or not to have demands, you might recall, was something that Occupy protesters debated hotly among themselves in the days when Occupy actually occupied something. Reading these books a year later, however, that debate seems to have been consensed out of existence. Virtually none of the authors reviewed here will say forthrightly that the failure to generate demands was a tactical mistake. On the contrary: the quasi-official account of the episode (Occupying Wall Street) laughs off demands as a fetish object of literal-minded media types who stupidly crave hierarchy and chains of command. Chris Hedges tells us that demands were something required only by “the elites, and their mouthpieces in the media.” Enlightened people, meanwhile, are supposed to know better; demands imply the legitimacy of the adversary, meaning the U.S. government and its friends, the banks. Launching a protest with no formal demands is thought to be a great accomplishment, a gesture of surpassing democratic virtue. And here we come to the basic contradiction of the campaign. To protest Wall Street in 2011 was to protest, obviously, the outrageous financial misbehavior that gave us the Great Recession; it was to protest the political power of money, which gave us the bailouts; it was to protest the runaway compensation practices that have turned our society’s productive labor into bonuses for the 1 percent. All three of these catastrophes, however, were brought on by deregulation and tax-cutting—by a philosophy of liberation as anarchic in its rhetoric as Occupy was in reality. Check your premises, Rand-fans: it was the bankers’ own uprising against the hated state that wrecked the American way of life. Nor does it require poststructuralism-leading-through-anarchism to understand how to reverse these developments. You do it by rebuilding a powerful and competent regulatory state. You do it by rebuilding the labor movement. You do it with bureaucracy. Occupiers often seemed aware of this. Recall what you heard so frequently from protesters’ lips back in the days of September 2011: Restore the old Glass-Steagall divide between investment and commercial banks, they insisted. Bring back big government! Bring back safety! Bring back boredom! But that’s no way to fire the imagination of the world. So, how do you maintain the carnival while secretly lusting for the CPAs? By indefinitely suspending the obvious next step. By having no demands. Demands would have signaled that humorless, doctrinaire adults were back in charge and that the fun was over. This was an inspired way to play the situation in the beginning, and for a time it was a great success. But it also put a clear expiration date on the protests. As long as demands and the rest of the logocentric requirements were postponed, Occupy could never graduate to the next level. It would remain captive to what Christopher Lasch criticized—way back in 1973—as the “cult of participation,” in which the experience of protesting is what protesting is all about. |
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-Engaging with the state is key to solve police brutality Starr 15(Terrell Jermaine, senior editor at AlterNet. “Why Police Brutality Is So Hard to End—And What It Will Take to Stop It”. http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/why-police-brutality-so-hard-end-and-what-it-will-take-stop-it) |
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-If police brutality were just a matter of a few bad apples, it would be a lot easier to solve. But it isn’t. Protecting bad cops is built into the fabric of police culture, and is a structural issue that has to be corrected with structural solutions. So what, exactly, can reverse this trend of police officers killing unarmed black people and rarely facing the consequences? Marilyn J. Mosby, the Baltimore prosecutor handling the Gray case, is leading by example by bringing charges (including murder and manslaughter) against the officers who are involved in the Gray's arrest. And in New York, Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson’s office charged Officer Peter Liang with manslaughter, police misconduct and other charges after he shot unarmed Akai Gurley in November. Certainly, more prosecutors across the country need to follow their leads. But being DA is often an elected office, and whether or not cops get indicted often seems to depend on who the voters are. But there is more that can be done. Activists and other reformers are demanding that state legislatures pass sweeping laws holding police officers accountable. At least 13 states are reviewing bills that will require officers to wear body cams. This is progress, but it's not nearly enough. An officer who is convicted of killing an innocent person or being abusive should lose his right to work in any law enforcement capacity, as well as his benefits. Jon Burge, an ex-Chicago cop who was imprisoned for lying about torture practices in the city’s jails, is allowed to keep his $54,000-per-year pension. Most reasonable people would agree that bad cops should not be able to keep the benefits of a uniform they violate. Police reform is possible, and in very slow ways, some are seeing a glimmer of hope that it might be coming. But protesters and activists know they have to keep up the pressure. Protests across the country are demanding local and state governments seriously tackle abusive police practices and punish officers who violate the public’s trust. Until that happens, it is likely that more cities beyond Baltimore will see uprisings of their own. |
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-The 1AC’s combination of radical pedagogy and legal pressure is the only way to ensure social change occurs – Civil Rights empirics Prove Reed 15Reed, PhD, 15(Adolph, professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. Summer, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/10/adolph-reed-black-liberation-django-lincoln-selma-glory/) |
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-After decades of frustration with what Selma filmmaker Ava DuVernay calls “white savior” narratives, antiracist progressives appear to have settled on an ideologically more appealing alternative — what we might call the James Brown Theory of Black Liberation. In 1969, after Brown had aligned himself politically with President Richard M. Nixon, he released the paean to black self-help, “I Don’t Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing (Open Up the Door, I’ll Get It Myself).” In the nearly half-century since, especially during the last two decades of neoliberal hegemony, that self-help perspective has become the righteous antiracists’ standard for cultural criticism and political judgment. Typically under the sign of acknowledging and respecting black people’s agency, it has become unacceptable to suggest that black Americans’ advances have depended significantly on anything other than, against all odds, the perseverance and will of black people themselves and a small cast of white allies. But this interpretive approach, which blends the several meanings of self-help, is totally consistent with neoliberal premises that eschew collective action in favor of individual voluntarism and deny the significance of social structures in shaping political opportunities.It masks the important fact that every advance black Americans have made toward equality, full citizenship, and racial justice has been enmeshed with broader struggles to advance egalitarian interests. And so, in the past quarter century of neoliberalism’s rise, the James Brown Theory has entrenched itself as the normative foundation of antiracist cultural criticism. Nowhere is this clearer than in some of the discussions around the 150th anniversary of Emancipation and the crushing of the slave owners’ rebellion. Such ruminations are, after all, typically guided by presentist concerns. For example, the fiftieth and seventy-fifth anniversaries of the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg centered on pageantry of surviving veterans of both armies in service to an overarching message of sectional reconciliation. D. W. Griffith’s scurrilous Birth of a Nation, released fifty years after the Confederate defeat, also carried the message of sectional reconciliation but on explicitly and savagely white supremacist terms. In recent decades those anniversary ruminations have become more likely to consider what the struggle meant for black people, both slave and free, and more likely to center on the relation between successful defeat of the insurrection and the abolition of slavery in the United States, and the larger significance of Emancipation for black Americans. The commentary around two very different 2012 films: Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained and Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln provide a striking example. It concerned the relative merits of each movie’s characterization of the source of Emancipation. Django Unchained was a live-action cartoon in which the entirely fictional story of a rebellious slave is the prop of Tarantino’s homage to the spaghetti westerns of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Whereas the Spielberg production aspires to historically faithful, or at least respectful, examination of Lincoln’s desperate effort to pass the Thirteenth Amendment — which abolished slavery — through Congress before the hostilities ended. That so many critics and commentators nevertheless were inclined to compare these two films indicated that the question of how slavery’s abolition should be narrated had become disconnected from concern with the actual history and politics of the mid-nineteenth century. Rather, the controversy centered on the centrality of black people’s “agency” in the story of Emancipation. That is how juxtaposition of Tarantino’s cartoonish fantasy to a film with historical pretensions like Lincoln could ever seem reasonable. Exploring the story of Emancipation— or the nature of slavery for that matter — was subordinate to an ideological program of racial recognition, validation of the depths and pandemic extent of white racism and celebration of black overcoming. The controversy reduced to whether a film focusing on Lincoln’s role in pushing the Thirteenth Amendment through Congress objectionably overlooked — even denied — the contributions of black slaves to their own “self-emancipation.” In Spielberg’s film, according to the Nation’s Jon Wiener, “old white men make history, and black people thank them for giving them their freedom.” To polish off the comparison, Wiener observes, “In Tarantino’s film, a black gunslinger goes after the white slavemaster with homicidal vengeance.” As Wiener’s bumper sticker analysis makes clear, this debate wasn’t really about how slavery ended in the United States. It was about how it would seem most gratifying now to want slavery to have ended. That very presentist concern underlies the repeated insistence of Lincoln’s critics that Lincoln didn’t free the slaves and that they instead “freed themselves.” But, putting to one side for a moment the issue of historical accuracy, that is a questionable view even by the standard of honoring black Americans’ agency and autonomous action. In a way it’s like what Maoists called “using the red book to defeat the red book.”In the name of lauding black agency in the abstract, the “slaves freed themselves” perspective actually diminishes or disparages the concrete expressions of political agency among the legions of black people, slave and free, who enthusiastically supported and strove to participate in the collective project of dealing a deathblow to the institution. In that light it is interesting to consider Edward Zwick’s 1989 film Glory and how it throws this change into bold relief. Glory — which may be, from the standpoint of egalitarian sensibilities, the greatest film ever made on the “Civil War” — tells the story of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the all-black regiment that famously led an unsuccessful assault on South Carolina’s heavily entrenched Fort Wagner. It was this same fort that defended Charleston, the birthplace of the master class’s insurrection, from seaborne attack. Although Glory depicts the regiment as made up largely of runaway slaves, the Fifty-Fourth was comprised only of free black volunteers and — by official stipulation — commanded by white officers. In addition to the story of the Fifty-Fourth in general, Glory also focuses on the story of Robert Gould Shaw, the young scion of a prominent family of Boston abolitionists who commanded the regiment and died in the attack on Fort Wagner. In fact, Shaw’s character is the central thread running through the film, and Zwick — and Matthew Broderick in the role of Shaw — affectingly show the young officer’s ambivalences, limitations, and growth into an effective regimental commander and resolute advocate for his troops as well as in his convictions of the equal humanity of black people. As he writes in a letter to his mother: “We fight for men and women whose poetry is not yet written but which will presently be as enviable and as renowned as any.” However, the story is not only — or even principally — about Shaw. Glory’s power as a film is that it captures that particular historical moment when the military action to suppress the slaveholders’ insurrection openly condensed as a war to destroy slavery and the crucially important role that black men played in creating that moment and seeing its promise through to fruition. Zwick also uses the war film’s convention of the brothers-in-the-foxhole narrative to good effect in giving the black soldiers individuality, depth, and breadth. All of that background makes even more powerful the James Island battle scene, where the Fifty-Fourth is able to engage the enemy for the first time. It doesn’t take much to imagine what an extraordinary experience that must have been for those men. Yet by the time of the Django–Lincoln controversy, Glory had become for some an instance of the unacceptable denial of full black agency. The director George Lucas quipped while hyping Red Tails — a travesty purporting to honor World War II’s black Tuskegee Airmen — that his abomination was a real hero film, unlike “Glory, where you have a lot of white officers running those guys into cannon fodder.” Over the years, I’ve encountered a number of versions of that sort of objection, generally from Gen-Xers with professional backgrounds. The desire to see the Black Hero — “black agency” — often seems to overwhelm considerations of historical plausibility. But how could a film about the Fifty-Fourth not have white officers? Roger Ebert, while generally praising the film highly in his 1990 review, “didn’t understand why it had to be told so often from the point of view of the Fifty-Fourth’s white commanding officer. Why did we see the black troops through his eyes — instead of seeing him through theirs?” Ebert’s question is reasonable, especially because two years earlier Richard Attenborough’s Cry Freedom determined to tell the story of Stephen Biko (played in the film by Denzel Washington), the Black Consciousness Movement activist killed by South African police while in custody in the aftermath of the Soweto uprising, almost exclusively through the saga of Biko’s white journalist friend (played by Kevin Kline) who was terrorized while attempting to investigate Biko’s murder. Attenborough defended his narrative choice by saying that he wanted to reach and educate a white audience. Then, in the year between Cry Freedom and Glory, Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning depicted a case loosely based on the 1964 murder of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi. However, not only was Parker’s film told through the eyes of FBI agents — who were its heroes — but not a single black actor was considered important enough in the story to warrant being credited in the promotional materials. So it’s understandable that a hair-trigger skepticism might develop about any film about race in which the central characters were white. But it is revealing in this respect that Ebert also loved 1989’s other big release exploring race and “race relations” (a counterproductive, essentializing euphemism for hierarchy) Bruce Beresford’s Driving Miss Daisy. Ebert rhapsodized about that human-interest examination of the bonds of intimacy that could develop between mistress and servant in Jim Crow Atlanta and its transition to the post-segregation era. His enthusiasm for the film was unqualified. Glory, however, is a very different sort of film, and the contrast of Ebert’s concern about representation of black agency in it and his lack of concern with that issue in Miss Daisy may help to illuminate the difference in a way that is especially important for the current moment. When Driving Miss Daisy came out, I was shocked, as I assumed there was only one thing a movie like that could be, but I found it a little difficult to imagine that that film could be so highly touted at the end of the 1980s. So I polled people I knew who had seen it — including several whose views I had trusted up until that point and several who had lived through the Jim Crow era as adults — concerning my skepticism, only to be reassured that it wasn’t that film at all. So I went to see it in the theater, and within the first ten minutes I realized that of course it was that film. There was nothing else it possibly could have been. The master trope of Driving Miss Daisy is the development of a personal relationship between mistress and servant that screens out — though I’m sure the film’s director and advocates would prefer “transcends” — the mundane realities of class and racial hierarchy within which that intimacy was structured. Driving Miss Daisy left such a lingering bad taste in my mouth that I took what was for me the unusual step of going back to the theater within a week or so to see Glory, hoping that the vicarious experience of black men taking up arms against slavery would cleanse my palate. It did that and much more. The punch line of this personal account is not simply that I appreciated Glory as an antidote to Driving Miss Daisy. More than that, it’s something of a cautionary tale about perspectives that reduce political concerns to whether or not the oppressed or the “marginalized” are able to express their agency. Driving Miss Daisy is all about the agency of the two central characters. And that agency is enacted up close and personal, in a world in which there are only personal transactions between individuals and their mutual regard. But we can envisage such a world only to the extent that concern with individual action and relationships blocks from view or overrides the structures of inequality rooted in political economy— whether expressed through racial hierarchies or not — that constrain the sphere of personal interaction. We have no sense whatsoever of driver Hoke’s life outside of his employment in Miss Daisy’s service or of what would have to have been the stark differences in their material circumstances. Even The Help makes a gesture at depicting that contrast. Yet it does so in a way that illustrates the ideological impact of an additional twenty-five years of neoliberal hegemony. Now it is no longer necessary to shy away from displaying the class contradictions. Instead, class becomes just another “identity” to be celebrated as part of a progressive commitment to “diversity.” In The Help the maids live where they live and are poor as a matter of fact. The arc of the narrative bends toward their empowering themselves by finding their individual voices, not improving their material conditions. And at no point does the white ingénue Skeeter — as she forms bonds of friendship, learns the maids’ perspectives and advocates for their voices — ever connect their poverty with her own class’s wealth and power. Thus the film’s happy ending resolves to an equivalence posited between Skeeter’s departing Jackson for New York and the uncertain challenge of seeking her fortune in the publishing industry and the maid Aibileen’s walking off equally cheerfully toward the exciting challenges of an uncertain future given to her by the opportunity of unemployment. The Help is thus an expression of its historical moment. It is no longer necessary to obscure the asymmetries of social and economic power that separate masters and servants, like what was done in Driving Miss Daisy, in order to have a feel-good story. A multiculturalist lameness trivializes recognition of class hierarchy as respect for “difference,” yet another way in which fetishizing agency is at bottom a Thatcherite project. And that takes us back to the political sensibility that underlay the Lincoln versus Django Unchained debates. First of all, the claim that slaves abolished the institution through their self-emancipation — soothing as it may be to those who want history to be like spaghetti westerns — is simply incorrect. In fact, the best predictor of slaves’ efforts to escape from their plantations during the conflict was the proximity of federal troops. Moreover, slaves and free black people alike were emboldened by Lincoln’s election and the national government’s commitment to suppressing the slaveholders’ insurrection. And why wouldn’t they have been? They, like Southern elites, understood that the Republican Party was fundamentally committed to the destruction of slavery. Republicans, largely, did not call for slavery’s immediate abolition, to be sure. But that fact does not undermine the seriousness of the party’s antislavery commitment. While antislavery Whigs and Republicans were convinced that the national government had the authority to prohibit slavery’s expansion, they did not believe that it had constitutional authority to attack slavery where the institution was protected by state law. The one exception to that limitation was military emancipation, and the slaveholders’ insurrection put that option on the table. It is also true that antislavery forces overestimated the ease with which the Border States could be weaned from the institution. None of those limitations, though, justifies the contention that their opposition to slavery was impure and therefore bogus. Finally, we must ask, what is the appeal of this moralistic denunciation of Republican hypocrisies about slavery, and of the assertion that black people single-handedly freed themselves? And to whom does it appeal? How does one see Glory not as a powerful story of black men — slave and free — joining in a much larger collective military project aimed at destroying the institution of slavery and see instead only the travesty of white officers leading them to their death? What approach to political action can follow from the contention that the Thirteenth Amendment was empty window dressing and that black slaves’ emancipation was like James Brown’s backward, Nixonian ideal of self-help? The perspective that shrivels the scope of black political concern to expressing racial “agency” similarly diminishes the significance of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments,the US Supreme Court’s 1944 Smith v. Allwright decision that outlawed the infamous “white primary” (and exponentially increased black voting in the South), the 1954 Brown decision, 1964 Civil Rights law, and 1965 Voting Rights Actas if all were in some twisted way racially inauthentic because acknowledging their significance as moments in the struggle for social justice detracts from the James Brown Theory of Black Liberation. That ideological commitment is what impelled Ava DuVernay to make the seemingly gratuitous move of falsifying Martin Luther King Jr’s relationship with the Johnson administration around the Selma campaign: “I wasn’t interested in making a white savior movie,” she replied to critics, “I was interested in making a movie centered on the people of Selma.” Of course, she doesn’t do the latter either, but her commitment to not “making a white savior movie” also led her to misconstrue the tension between the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Selma, which stemmed precisely from the SNCC activists’ objection that King and his organization maintained secret, backdoor dealings with the Johnson administration. The psychobabbling bromides that elevate recognition and celebration of black agency rest on an ideological perspective that in practical terms rejects effective black political action in favor of expressive display. It is the worldview of an element of the contemporary black professional stratum anchored in the academy, blogosphere, and the world of mass media chat whose standing in public life is bound up with establishing a professional authority in speaking for the race. This is the occupational niche of the so-called black public intellectuals. The torrent of faddish chattering-class blather and trivial debate sparked by Michael Eric Dyson’s recent attack on Cornel West in the New Republic illustrates the utter fatuity of this domain, as if there were any reason to care about a squabble between two freelance Racial Voices with no constituency or links to radical institutions between them. In an illustration of what this game is all about, the Nation, sensing space for competing brands, projected some Alternative Black Voices into this circus of spurious racial representation in a piece entitled “6 Scholars Who Are ‘Reimagining Black Politics.’ ” Twenty years practically to the week before publication of Dyson’s essay, I took stock of what was then the newly confected category of the Black Public Intellectual and noted that the notion’s definitive irony was that its avatars were quite specifically not organically rooted in any dynamic political activity and in fact emerged only after opportunities for real connection to political movements had disappeared. Nor were the “public intellectuals” connected to any particular strain of scholarship or criticism. Rather, their status was no more than a posture and a brand. By the early 2000s, it was possible to see young people entering doctoral programs with their sights on the academy as a venue for pursuing careers as public intellectuals — i.e. among the free-floating racial commentariat. And that was before the explosion of the blogosphere and Twitterverse, which have exponentially increased both avenues for realizing such aspirations and the numbers of people pursuing them. But the politics enacted in those venues is by and large an ersatz politics, and the controversies that sustain them are by and large ephemeral, vacant bullshit — the “feud” between Iggy Azalea and Azealia Banks, whether black people were dissed because Selma wasn’t nominated for/didn’t win enough Oscars, and so on. In the context of this sort of non-stop idiotic bread and circuses — and this may be an apt moment to remind that the blogosphere is open to any fool with a computer and Internet access — it is good to reflect on one of the crucial moments in American history when the linking of social and political forces presented a clear choice between egalitarian and inegalitarian interests, and masses of black people joined with others to strike a consequential blow for social justice and to wipe the scourge of slavery from the United States. No, it wasn’t a final victory over inequality — it didn’t usher in a utopian order, and the greatest promises opened by the triumph were unfulfilled or largely undone. But it was one of the most important victories that egalitarian forces have won, along with those of the twentieth-century labor, civil rights, and women’s movements, and it is worth reflecting on it and the ways it changed the country for the better. That struggle against the slaveholders’ insurrection, along with those latter movements, also underscores the fact that the path to winning the kind of just world to which a left should aspire requires building a politics that seeks, as the old saying goes, to unite the many to defeat the few. Any other focus is either unserious or retrograde. |
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-Part 5 is ROBThe ROB is to vote for the debater that best solves for capitalism – only then can we give voices to those deemed anonymized. Zizek and Daly 04Glyn. 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. |