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  • Caselist.RoundClass[7]
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1		-2016-12-17 18:46:03.402
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	1	+The claim that free speech leads to democratic debate and social progress is a neoliberal myth – the AFF’s faith in the free exchange of ideas displaces a focus on direct action and re-entrenches multiple forms of oppression.
	2	+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
	3	+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 suasion 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.
	4	+The AFF’s assumption of a property right to free speech assumes an overly idealistic notion of society that ignores economic barriers and is a product of the neoliberal myth that individuality should be protected at all costs.
	5	+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
	6	+Yet there are many critics of the protestors who do not claim Ray Kelly’s policies can be defeated with sharp debate. Instead, they argue that any protest in the name of freedom which blocks the speech of another is self-defeating, causing more damage to a free society by ‘silencing’ another than any potential positive effect of the protest. The protestors, the argument goes, tack society back to totalitarian days of censorship rather than forward to greater freedom. The protestors, however well intentioned, have pedantically thwarted our cherished liberal democracy by imposing their will on others. The premise of this argument is neoliberal myth number two—that we live in a society with ‘freedom of speech’ so great it must be protected at all costs. This premise stems from an extremely limited conception of ‘freedom of speech’. Free speech should not be considered the mere ability to speak freely and inconsequentially in a vacuum, but rather the ability to have one’s voice heard equally. Due to the nature of private media and campaign finance in American society, this ability is woefully lopsided as political and economic barriers abound. Those with money easily have their voices heard through media and politics, those without have no such freedom. There is a certain irony (and garish privilege) of upper-class Ivy Leaguers proclaiming the sanctity of a freedom of speech so contingent upon wealth and political power. There is an even greater irony that the fight for true freedom of speech, if history is any indicator, must entail more direct action against defenders of the status quo such as Ray Kelly. To denounce such action out of indulgence in the neoliberal myth of a sacrosanct, already existing, freedom of speech is to condemn the millions in this country with no meaningful voice to eternal silence. Every few years, an advocate of oppression is shouted down. Every few years, the protestors are denounced. They are asked to trust open, ‘civil’ dialogue to stop oppression, despite a historical record of struggle and progress that speaks overwhelmingly to the contrary. They are asked to restrain their protest for freedom so to protect American freedom of speech, despite the undeniable fact that our private media and post-Citizens United political system hear only dollars, not the voices of the masses. Some will claim that both sides have the same goal, freedom, but merely differ on tactics. Yet the historical record is too clear and the growing dysfunctions in our democracy too gross to take any such claims as sincere. In a few years, when protestors shout down another oppressive conservative, we will be forced to lucidly choose which side we are on: The oppressors or the protestors. The status quo or progress.
	7	+The AFF’s notion of the marketplace of ideas is neoliberal rhetoric designed to strengthen corporate power.
	8	+Whatler 13 Stuart Whatley, Speak for Yourself: A Meditation on the Marketplace of Ideas, Los Angeles Review of Books, 10/4/13, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/speak-for-yourself-a-meditation-on-the-marketplace-of-ideas/#! //LADI
	9	+The very notion of a “marketplace of ideas” tracks exactly with neoliberalism’s rising star. This can be seen through Nexis searches of the term, as well as through Google’s n-gram book search between 1800 and 2008. Since first breaking into common usage with a couple dozen mentions in the 1970s, its appearances have increased exponentially decade by decade in books, newspapers, journals, and similar forms of media to the point that it is now published hundreds of times every year. Though use of the phrase actually declined very slightly in books between 2000 and 2008 (not to any degree of significance), it increased in news media year by year over the same course of time — especially between 2008 and 2012. While public policy can be altered and reversed from one administration or congress to another, the fideistic embrace of market vocabulary across political divides indicates that it has become more deeply embedded — instead of being the subject of political debate, it designates the coordinates of what is debatable as politics. It did not take until the 1970s for the “marketplace of ideas” to develop, but it did take that long for it to really become prevalent. Before then it had mainly been the subject of legal opinions, notably in Oliver Wendell Holmes’s 1919 Abrams v. United States dissent. The law scholar Ronald Collins points out that Holmes used the metaphor, if not the exact phrase, when he wrote, “The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas — that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” For his part, Holmes was influenced by John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, which in turn drew from John Milton’s Areopagitica, which asked, “Who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?” With Holmes as the more direct line of inspiration, the actual words would come to form decades later in other free speech and free press court opinions, including United States v. Rumely (1953) and Lamont v. Postmaster General (1965). In the latter, Justice William Brennan opined that, “The dissemination of ideas can accomplish nothing if otherwise willing addressees are not free to receive and consider them. It would be a barren marketplace of ideas that had only sellers and no buyers.” Back to the early 1970s: big business was a beleaguered beast, feeling the need to counter the popular social movements of the previous decade, and found it prudent to press-gang the “marketplace of ideas” into its service. After a series of crises in capitalism — stagflation, the collapse of Bretton Woods, the 1973 Oil Shock — the solution eventually proffered was even more capitalism. Which is to say, the failure of postwar Keynesian fiscal and monetary policies to turn the economy around led in time to a loss of faith in their effectiveness and to the ouster of leftward-leaning leaders Jimmy Carter and James Callahan. When the recessionary waves did eventually subside, the timing allowed for Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to dance on their predecessors’ political graves, accredit their own success to market fundamentalism, and move forward full bore with its implementation through tax cuts and financial deregulation. As Reagan later declared on the New York Stock Exchange floor, “We’re going to turn the bull loose.” And so, the “marketplace of ideas” began to appear for the first time in the mainstream press — most notably in reports quoting corporate public relations professionals in defense of their respective industries. To take one early example, in a July 1975 U.S. News and World Report interview titled “Why Business Has a Black Eye,” Alexander B. Trowbridge, president of a corporate advocacy organization called the Conference Board, addressed questions about the lugubrious public favorability of big business: We businessmen have to get out individually into this marketplace of ideas. We have to be far more involved in our communities. We have to be in closer touch with the groups of people with whom we have close contact — our employees, out stockholders, the community leaders in places where we have our plants and offices, and our customers and suppliers. We need to do a better job not only in supporting them with better products, but in explaining the workings of our business system and what makes it all tick. A March 1976 Newsweek article by Michael Ruby and Gretchen Browne titled “Oil: The Mobil Manner” followed, reporting on a full-page advertisement taken out by Mobil in response to a critical NBC News documentary about gasoline prices. According to Mobil’s vice president of public affairs, Herbert Schmertz, “The ad was an effort to participate in the market-place of ideas” (Schmertz’s line would be quoted again two years later in a Harvard Business Review story by Louis Banks, titled “Taking on the Hostile Media”). Such participation, the reporters note, had become a trend of late. And it would only continue, to the point where even Jimmy Carter invoked the metaphor in an unwittingly ironic 1977 statement, declaring Voice of America independent from State Department propagandizing: The agency must not operate in a covert, manipulative or propagandistic way … Under this administration, Voice of America will be solely responsible for the content of its news broadcasts — for there is no more valued coin than candor in the international marketplace of ideas. While it’s unclear how much of this was a consciously cooperative effort on the part of business and pro-market advocates, it was, regardless, in keeping with the corporate PR strategy of the time — what sociologists David Miller and William Dinan have labeled the “third wave of corporate political activism.” That wave rode from the late 1960s through the 1970s, and saw vast and rapid expansion in corporate lobbying, the founding of numerous business-funded think tanks (including the Heritage Foundation, an early influence on the Reagan presidential platform), and increased media involvement on the part of businesses across the board. According to Miller and Dinan, a collective corporate strategy was effectively launched in a private August 1971 memo from corporate lawyer (and later Supreme Court justice) Lewis F. Powell Jr. to US Chamber of Commerce Education Committee chairman Eugene B. Sydnor Jr., in which Powell wrote: “It is time for American business — which has demonstrated the greatest capacity in all history to produce and to influence consumer decisions — to apply its great talents vigorously to the preservation of the system itself.”
	10	+Impact is extinction – neoliberalism destabilizes neurological functioning, dissolves ethical models and creates an endless cycle of environmental crisis creation
	11	+Bone 12 (John, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Scotland, the Deregulation Ethic and the Conscience of Capitalism: How the Neoliberal ‘Free Market’ Model Undermines Rationality and Moral Conduct, Globalizations, October 2012, Vol. 9, No. 5, pp. 651–665)//mm
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	13	+First, as Durkheim observed, the ability to act with relative impunity is both individually as well as socially corrosive (Durkheim, 1925, 1960, 1965). Compounding this situation, the mutual social estrangement that occurs with increasing social polarisation diminishes the extent to which actors on both sides of the divide identify with each other as, raising the potential for stereotyping, distrust, prejudice and stigma (Aronson, 1995; Bone, 2010; Goffman, 1963). This process can evidently produce a situation where an exclusive elite begin to view the masses as ‘other’ which, in turn, leads to demonization and reduced empathy, legitimating a hardening of attitudes to the plight of those negatively affected by the actions of the powerful, a situation that has arguably been much at play during the neoliberal era. Once more, as has been identified throughout our history, psycho-social estrangement and the concomitant negative stereotyping and prejudice that it cultivates, further enhances the capacity for un-empathic and amoral conduct, with potentially fateful outcomes, particularly where this can occur with few constraints. It may even be the case, as has been argued, that social arrangements and values such as those prevalent in contemporary capitalism not only disinhibit anti-social behaviours but actually undermine an otherwise natural predisposition towards pro-social and empathic conduct (Olson, 2005). Conclusion As above, the much promulgated notion that deregulated economies promote freedom, wealth and the greater good can be regarded as a touchstone of late twentieth and early twenty-first century capitalist societies, as was the case a century before. Thus, the notion of competitive, rational and deregulated markets, operating by the rational laws and governed by the ‘invisible hand’, are once more presented as being the best vehicle providing economic efficiency and the wider public good, with any restraint merely operating to the detriment of the latter. From this standpoint, the brief intervening period of managed capitalism, or ‘embedded liberalism’, appears as a minor detour, as opposed to the sea change that it was once assumed to represent within major developed Western societies (Harvey, 2005; Ruggie, 1982). It has been extensively argued, however, that the return to the economics of the past has revived capitalism’s worst irrationalities and instabilities, culminating in the credit crisis, as well as its capacity to generate profound inequities (Krugman, 2009). This paper asserts that, in their contribution to the above, the deregulatory features of neoliberal capitalism imply more than mere structural adjustments to economic organisation, but might also be understood as impacting upon the aspects of individual neurological functioning that are correlated with inhibiting anti-social self gratifying behaviour. Thus, without a deeply neurologically ‘engrained’ set of formal and informal rules, together with a concomitant commitment to their adherence, the habituated emotional ‘stop’ signs that routinely inhibit socially and economically destructive conduct dissolve, as firm injunctions become pliable obstacles to be ‘negotiated’ or simply ignored. Overall, by undermining or even eradicating the regulatory walls that guide individual conscience—and, in turn, socially and economically rational and responsible conduct—licentiousness, self interest and short term expediency flourish, raising the potential for further ‘irrational’ destabilization of society and economy and the generation of continuing crises. In this way deregulation, of itself, compounds the deleterious effects of the value system that drives it. From this perspective, the ‘spirit’ of contemporary neoliberal capitalism and its organisational ‘form’ appears as almost the inverse of the rational, measured and moral credo that Weber once imagined (1930).
	14	+Thus the alternative is an ethic of social flesh. That foregrounds embodied interdependence, substituting an ecological view of relationships for the aff’s commodity thinking – only the alternative can produce ethical institutional decisionmaking
	15	+Beasley and Bacchi 7
	16	+(Chris, Prof. of Politics @ University of Adelaide, Carol, Prof. Emeritus @ University of Adelaide, “Envisaging a new politics for an ethical future: Beyond trust, care and generosity ~-~- towards an ethic of `social flesh'”, Feminist Theory, 2007 8: 279)
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	18	+The political vocabulary of social flesh has significant implications for democratic visions. Because it conceptualizes citizens as socially embodied – as interconnected mutually reliant flesh – in a more thoroughgoing sense than the languages of trust, care, responsibility and generosity, it resists accounts of political change as making transactions between the ‘less fortunate’ and ‘more privileged’, more trusting, more caring, more responsible or more generous. Social flesh is political metaphor in which fleshly sociality is profoundly levelling. As a result, it challenges meliorist reforms that aim to protect the ‘vulnerable’ from the worst effects of social inequality, including the current distribution of wealth. A political ethic of embodied intersubjectivity requires us to consider fleshly interconnection as the basis of a democratic sociality, demanding a rather more far-reaching reassessment of national and international institutional arrangements than political vocabularies that rest upon extending altruism. Relatedly, it provides a new basis for thinking about the sorts of institutional arrangements necessary to acknowledge social fleshly existence, opening up ‘the scope of what counts as relevant’ (Shildrick, 2001: 238). For example, it allows a challenge to current conceptualizations that construct attention to the ‘private sphere’ as compensatory rather than as necessary (Beasley and Bacchi, 2000: 350). We intend to pursue the relationship between social flesh and democratic governance in future papers. Conclusion In this paper we focus on various vocabularies of social interconnection intended to offer a challenge to the ethos of atomistic individualism associated with neo-liberalism and develop a new ethical ideal called ‘social flesh’. Despite significant differences in the several vocabularies canvassed in this paper, we note that most of the trust and care writers conceive the social reform of atomistic individualism they claim to address in terms of a presumed moral or ethical deficiency within the disposition of individuals. Hence, they reinstate the conception of the independent active self in certain ways. Moreover, there is a disturbing commonality within all these accounts: an ongoing conception of asymmetrical power relations between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’, ‘carers’ and ‘cared for’, ‘altruistic’ and ‘needy’. While widely used terms like trust and care clearly remain vocabularies around which social debate may be mobilized, and hence are not to be dismissed (see Pocock, 2006), we suggest that there are important reasons for questioning their limits and their claims to offer progressive alternative understandings of social life. In this setting, we offer the concept of social flesh as a way forward in rethinking the complex nature of the interaction between subjectivity, embodiment, intimacy, social institutions and social interconnection. Social flesh generalizes the insight that trusting/caring/ altruistic practices already take place on an ongoing basis to insist that the broad, complex sustenance of life that characterizes embodied subjectivity and intersubjective existence be acknowledged. As an ethico-political starting point, ‘social flesh’ highlights human embodied interdependence. By drawing attention to shared embodied reliance, mutual reliance, of people across the globe on social space, infrastructure and resources, it offers a decided challenge to neo-liberal conceptions of the autonomous self and removes the social distance and always already given distinction between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’. There is no sense here of ‘givers’ and ‘receivers’; rather we are all recognized as receivers of socially generated goods and services. Social flesh also marks our diversity, challenging the privileging of normative over ‘other’ bodies. Finally, because social flesh necessarily inhabits a specific geographical space, environmentalist efforts to preserve that space take on increased salience (Macken, 2004: 25). By these means, the grounds are created for defending a politics beyond assisting the ‘less fortunate’. Social flesh, therefore, refuses the residues of ‘noblesse oblige’ that still appear to linger in emphasis upon vulnerability and altruism within the apparently reformist ethical ideals of trust/respect, care, responsibility and even generosity. In so doing it puts into question the social privilege that produces inequitable vulnerability and the associated need for ‘altruism’. Vital debates about appropriate distribution of social goods, environmental politics, professional and institutional power and democratic processes are reopened.
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	20	+Neolib-Framework
	21	+Role of the ballot is to foreground a particular political vocabulary – how society is framed and understand gives debaters’ skill development a particular trajectory and meaning – the alternative is crucial to inserting the pedagogical energy of the debate into a broader circuit of anti-neoliberal public spaces and commons
	22	+Giroux 13
	23	+(Henry Giroux, currently holds the Global TV Network Chair Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship at Ryerson University, “Hope in the Age of Looming Authoritarianism,” 02 December 2013, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/20307-hope-in-the-age-of-looming-authoritarianism#_edn2)
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	25	+We live at a time in which the crisis of politics is inextricably connected to the crisis of ideas, education and agency. What must be remembered is that any viable politics or political culture can emerge only out of a determined effort to provide the economic conditions, public spaces, pedagogical practices and social relations in which individuals have the time, motivation and knowledge to engage in acts of translation that reject the privatization of the public sphere, the lure of ethno-racial or religious purity, the emptying of democratic traditions, the crumbling of the language of commonality, and the decoupling of critical education from the unfinished demands of a global democracy.¶ Young people, artists, intellectuals, educators and workers in the United States and globally are increasingly addressing what it means politically and pedagogically to confront the impoverishment of public discourse, the collapse of democratic values and commitments, the erosion of its public spheres and the widely promoted modes of citizenship that have more to do with forgetting than with critical learning. Collectively, they provide varied suggestions for rescuing modes of critical agency and social grievances that have been abandoned or orphaned to the dictates of global neoliberalism, a punishing state and a systemic militarization of public life. In opposition to the attacks on democratic institutions, values and modes of governance, activists all over the globe are offering an incisive language of analysis, a renewed sense of political commitment, different democratic visions and a politics of possibility.¶ Political exhaustion and impoverished intellectual visions are fed by the widely popular assumption that there are no alternatives to the present state of affairs. Within the increasing corporatization of everyday life, market values trump ethical considerations enabling the economically privileged and financial elite to retreat into the safe, privatized enclaves of family, religion and consumption. Those without the luxury of such choices pay a terrible price in the form of material suffering and the emotional hardship and political disempowerment that are its constant companions. Even those who live in the relative comfort of the middle classes must struggle with a poverty of time in an era in which the majority must work more than they ever have to make ends meet. Moreover, in the face of the 2008 economic crisis caused by gangster financial service institutions such as J.P. Morgan, Bank of America, Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Barclay and Merrill Lynch, among others, the middle class is dissolving into the jaws of a death-machine that has robbed them of their homes, health care, jobs and dignity.¶ The ruling elites have taken flight from any sense of social and ethical responsibility and their willing and active repression of conscience has opened the door to new forms of authoritarianism in which the arrogance of corporate power finds its underside in a hatred of all others that threaten its power. Some contemporary theorists suggest that politics as a site of contestation, critical exchange and engagement is in a state of terminal arrest or has simply come to an end. However, too little attention is paid to what it means to think through how the struggle over democracy is inextricably linked to creating and sustaining public spheres where individuals can be engaged as political agents equipped with the skills, capacities and knowledge they need not only as autonomous political agents but also to believe that such struggles are worth taking up. The growth of cynicism in American society may say less about the reputed apathy of the populace than about the bankruptcy of the old political languages and the need for a new language and vision for clarifying intellectual, ethical, economic and political projects, especially as they work to reframe questions of agency, ethics and meaning for a substantive democracy.¶ In opposition to the attacks on critical thought, engaged citizenship, the discourse of hope and the erosion of "the public character of spaces, relations, and institutions,"xx young people, workers, intellectuals, artists and environmentalists are once again taking seriously Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's insistence "to hang on to intellectual and real freedom" and to ensure that thinking does not become "immune to the suggestion of the status quo,"xxi thus losing its "secure hold on possibility."xxii Increasingly, young people and others concerned about a substantive democracy are taking political stands; they are becoming more willing to cross boundaries, join questions of understanding and power, and bring into being with passion and conscience new ways of engaging with the world. In doing so, this diverse group of activists, intellectuals and concerned global citizens is intervening in the world on several registers.¶ Such groups, while in their infancy, are determined to unmask society's most pernicious myths, restage power in productive ways, rescue the promise of social agency from those places where it has been denied, and further the ethical and political imperative to provide an accurate historical account of the racial state and racial power. More and more, youths and others marginalized by race and class are refusing the dominant scripts of official authority and the limitations they impose upon individual and social agency. Progressives and oppositional groups are rethinking what it would mean to engage spaces of neglect and human suffering such as schools, shelters, food banks, union halls and other sites of potential resistance as starting points from which to build unfamiliar, potential worlds of hope, learning and struggle. In the process of thinking seriously about structures of power, state formation, race, sexuality, technology, class and pedagogy, these new modes of resistance never substitute moral indignation for the hard work of contributing to critical education and enabling people to expand the horizons of their own sense of agency and collectively challenge structures of power.¶ From Québec and Athens to Paris and New York City, these emerging collective movements bristle with a deeply rooted refusal to serve up well-worn and obvious truths, reinforce existing relations of power or bid retreat to an official rendering of common sense that promotes "a corrosive and demoralizing silence."xxiii What emerges in these distinct but politically allied voices is a pedagogy of disruption, critique, recovery and possibility, one that recognizes that viable politics cannot exist without will and awareness, and that critical education motivates and provides a crucial foundation for understanding and intervening in the world. Freedom in this discourse means learning how to think critically and act courageously - refusing to substitute empowering forms of education for mind-deadening training and numbing methods of memorizing data and test taking.¶ Collectively these emerging movements of resistance are developing an understanding of politics that demands not only a new language but also necessitates a broader vision, sense of organization and robust strategies that are critical and visionary. This commitment translates into a pedagogy and politics capable of illuminating the anti-democratic forces and sites that threaten human life; at the same time, its visionary nature cracks open the present to reveal new horizons, different futures and the promise of a global democracy. And yet, under the reign of casino capitalism, racist xenophobic nationalisms and other anti-democratic forces, notions of citizenship are increasingly privatized, commodified or subject to various religious and ideological fundamentalisms that feed a sense of powerlessness and disengagement from democratic struggles, if not politics itself. The culture of cruelty is alive and well as casino capitalism presents misfortune as a weakness and the logic of the market instructs individuals to rely on their own wits if they fall on hard times, especially because the state has washed its hands of any responsibility for the fate of its citizens. Hope is in the air, but it is crucial to recognize that the creeping authoritarianism descending upon the United States will not give up power easily, if at all. Consequently, an impatient patience proceeds slowly and persistently offers the formative culture necessary for feeding a radical imagination waiting to manifest itself concretely in a new vision, social movement and fierce urgency of struggle.
	26	+this question of the ballot is an incalculable ethical directive - Every argument they make is dependent on this flawed symbolic order that precludes effective analysis because capitalism subsumes truth claims.
	27	+Zizek and Daly ‘4
	28	+(Slavoj Zizek, Senior Researcher, Institute for Social Studies, Ljubljana, and Glyn Daly, Lecturer and Instructor, Political Theory and Thought, Northampton University, 2004, Conversations With Zizek, p. 14-19)
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	30	+This is not to endorse any retrograde return to economism. Zizek'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 Zizek'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. Against this Zizek argues for a new universalism whose primary ethical directive is to confront the fact that our forms of social existence are is founded on exclusion on a global scale. While it is perfectly true that universalism can never become Universal (it will always require a hegemonic-particular embodiment in order to have any meaning), what is novel about Zizek's universalism is that it would not attempt to conceal this fact or to reduce the status of the abject Other to that of a 'glitch' in an otherwise sound matrix. Risking the impossible / The response of the left to global capitalism cannot be one of retreat into the nation-state or into organicist forms of ‘community’ and popular identities that currently abound in Europe and elsewhere. For Zizek it is, rather, a question of working with the very excesses that, in a Lacanian sense, are in capitalism more than capitalism. It is a question, therefore, of transcending the provincial ‘universalism’ of capitalism. To illustrate the point, Zizek draws attention to the category of ‘intellectual property’ and the increasingly absurd attempts to establish restrictive dominion over technological advances – genetic codes, DNA structures, digital communications, pharmaceutical breakthroughs, computer programs and so on – that either affect us all and/or to which there is a sense of common human entitlement. Indeed, the modern conjuncture of capitalism is more and more characterized by a prohibitive culture: the widespread repression of those forms of research and development that have real emancipatory potential beyond exclusive profiteering; the restriction of information that has direct consequences for the future of humanity; the fundamental denial that social equality could be sustained by the abundance generated by capitalism. Capitalism typically endeavors to constrain the very dimensions of the universal that are enabled by it and simultaneously to resist all those developments that disclose its specificity-artificiality as merely one possible mode of being. / The left, therefore, must seek to subvert these ungovernable excesses in the direction of a political (and politicizing) universalism; or what Balibar would call egaliberte. This means that the left should demand more globalization not less. Where neo-liberals speak the language of freedom – either in terms of individual liberty or the free movement of goods and capital – the left should use this language to combat today’s racist obsessions with ‘economic refugees’, ‘immigrants’ and so on, and insist that freedoms are meaningless without the social resources to participate in those freedoms. Where there is talk of universal rights, the left must affirm a responsibility to the universal; one that emphasizes real human solidarity and does not lose sight of the abject within differential discourses. Reversing the well-known environmentalists’ slogan, we might say that the left has to involve itself in thinking locally and acting globally. That is to say, it should attend to the specificity of today’s political identities within the context of their global (capitalist) conditions of possibilities precisely in order to challenge those conditions. / Yet here I would venture that, despite clearly stated differences (Butler et al., 2000), the political perspective of Zizek is not necessarily opposed to that of Laclau and Mouffe and that a combined approach is fully possible. While Zizek is right to stress the susceptibility of today’s ‘alternative’ forms of hegemonic engagement to deradicalization within a postmodern-p.c. imaginary – a kind of hegemonization of the very terrain (the politico-cultural conditions of possibility) that produces and predisposes the contemporary logics of hegemony – it is equally true to say that the type of political challenge that Zizek has in mind is one that can only advance through the type of hegemonic subversion that Laclau and Mouffe have consistently stressed in their work. The very possibility of a political universalism is one that depends on a certain hegemonic breaking out of the existing conventions/grammar of hegemonic engagement. / It is along these lines that Zizek affirms the need for a more radical intervention in the political imagination. The modern (Machiavellian) view of politics is usually presented in terms of a basic tension between (potentially) unlimited demands/appetites and limited resources; a view which is implicit in the predominant ‘risk society’ perspective where the central (almost Habermasian) concern is with more and better scientific information. The political truth of today’s world, however, is rather the opposite of this view. That is to say, the demands of the official left (especially the various incarnations of the Third Way left) tend to articulate extremely modest demands in the face of a virtually unlimited capitalism that is more than capable of providing every person on this planet with a civilized standard of living. For Zizek, a confrontation with the obscenities of abundance capitalism also requires a transformation of the ethico-political imagination. It is no longer a question of developing ethical guidelines within the existing political framework (the various institutional and corporate ‘ethical committees’) but of developing a politicization of ethics; an ethics of the Real. The starting point here is an insistence on the unconditional autonomy of the subject; of accepting that as human beings we are ultimately responsible for our actions and being-in-the-world up to and including the construction of the capitalist system itself. Far from simple norm-making or refining/reinforcing existing social protocol, an ethics of the Real tends to emerge through norm-breaking and in finding new directions that, by definition, involve traumatic changes: i.e. the Real in genuine ethical challenge. An ethics of the Real does not simply defer to the impossible (or infinite Otherness) as an unsurpassable horizon that already marks every act as a failure, incomplete and so on. Rather, such an ethics is one that fully accepts contingency but which is nonetheless prepared to risk the impossible in the sense of breaking out of standardized positions. We might say that it is an ethics which is not only politically motivated but which also draws its strength from the political itself. / For Zizek an ethics of the Real (or Real ethics) means that we cannot rely on any form of symbolic Other that would endorse our (in)decisions and (in)actions: for example, the ‘neutral’ financial data of the stockmarkets; the expert knowledge of Beck’s ‘new modernity’ scientists; the economic and military councils of the New World Order; the various (formal and informal) tribunals of political correctness; or any of the mysterious laws of God, nature or the market. What Zizek affirms is a radical culture of ethical identification for the left in which the alternative forms of militancy must first of all be militant with themselves. That is to say, they must be militant in the fundamental ethical sense of not relying on any external/higher authority and in the development of a political imagination that, like Zizek’s own thought, exhorts us to risk the impossible.

EntryDate

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	1	+2016-12-17 18:48:44.658

Judge

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	1	+Karen Qi

Opponent

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	1	+Lynbrook NA

ParentRound

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	1	+8

Round

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	1	+1

Team

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	1	+Polytechnic Liu Neg

Title

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	1	+Jan-Feb neolib

Tournament

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	1	+college prep