Summary

• Objects (1 modified, 1 added, 0 removed)
  • Caselist.RoundClass[15]
  • Caselist.CitesClass[32]

Details

Caselist.RoundClass[15]

EntryDate

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1		-2016-12-03 19:34:33.14
	1	+2016-12-03 19:34:33.0

Caselist.CitesClass[32]

Cites

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	1	+EXPLANITORY POWER is better than descriptive power – their racialized analysis is rooted in capitalistic false-consciousness that REIFIES racism and IGNORES causality
	2	+Young 6 Robert, Former Associate Professor of English at the University of Alabama. “Putting Materialism Back into Race Theory,” Red Critique, http://www.redcritique.org/WinterSpring2006/puttingmaterialismbackintoracetheory.htm.//MM
	3	+This essay advances a materialist theory of race. In my view, race oppression dialectically intersects with the exploitative logic of advanced capitalism, a regime that deploys race in the interest of surplus accumulation. Thus, race operates at the (economic) base and produces cultural and ideological effects at the superstructure; in turn, these effects—in very historically specific ways—interact with and ideologically justify the operations at the economic base.1 In a sense, then, race encodes the totality of contemporary capitalist social relations, which is why race cuts across a range of seemingly disparate social sites in contemporary U.S. society. For instance, one can mark race difference and its discriminatory effects in such diverse sites as health care, housing/real estate, education, law, the job market, and many other social sites. Unlike many commentators who engage race matters, however, I do not isolate these social sites and view race as a local problem, which would lead to reformist measures along the lines of either legal reform or a cultural-ideological battle to win the hearts and minds of people and thus keep the existing socioeconomic arrangements intact; instead, I foreground the relationality of these sites within the exchange mechanism of multinational capitalism. Consequently, l believe, the eradication of race oppression also requires a totalizing political project: the transformation of existing capitalism-a system that produces difference (the racial/gender division of labor) and accompanying ideological narratives that justify the resulting social inequality. Hence, my project articulates a transformative theory of race-a theory that reclaims revolutionary class politics in the interests of contributing to a postracist society. In other words, the transformation from actually existing capitalism into socialism constitutes the condition of possibility for a postracist society-a society free from racial and all other forms of oppression. By freedom, I do not simply mean a legal or cultural articulation of individual rights, as proposed by bourgeois race theorists. Instead, I theorize freedom as a material effect of emancipated economic forms. I foreground my (materialist) understanding of race as a way to contest contemporary accounts of race, which erase any determinate connection to economics. For instance, humanism and poststructuralism represent two dominant views on race in the contemporary academy. Even though they articulate very different theoretical positions, they produce similar ideological effects: the suppression of economics. They collude in redirecting attention away from the logic of capitalist exploitation and point us to the cultural questions of sameness (humanism) or difference (poststructuralism). In developing my project, I critique the ideological assumptions of some exemplary instances of humanist and poststructuralist accounts of race, especially those accounts that also attempt to displace Marxism, and in doing so I foreground the historically determinate link between race and exploitation. It is this link that forms the core of what I am calling a transformative theory of race. The transformation of race from a sign of exploitation to one of democratic multiculturalism ultimately requires the transformation of capitalism. Within contemporary black humanist discourses, the focus remains on the subject. Hence, diverse intellectual inquiries such as Afrocentricism (Molefi Kete Asante), black feminism (Patricia Hill Collins), and neoconservative culturalism (Shelby Steele) share a philosophical-ideological commitment to the subject. As Asante once put it in a representative formulation, Afrocentricism presents "the African as subject rather than object" ("Multiculturalism" 270). The preoccupation with the subject highlights Asante's rather conservative humanist philosophical position, a position powerfully critiqued by Louis Althusser.2 In reifying the subject, Asante abstracts the (African) subject from history and posits an "essentialized" identity within an "essentialized" historical period that is unproblematically recuperable through an Afrocentric paradigm. Asante takes the essence of the subject for a universal quality, and as Althusser argues, this means that concrete subjects must exist as an absolute given, which implies an empiricism of the subject (For Marx 218). Furthermore, Althusser continues. If the concrete subject is to be a subject, then each must carry the entire essence in himself or herself, and this implies an idealism of the essence (Pbr Marx 228), Thus, Asante's philosophical location provides the basis for the transcendental subject: the always already (self) present black subject, from ancient Egypt to the modern black American. What one needs, quite simply, is an Afrocentric methodology, and this Asante grounds in an idealist metaphysic. As in Eurocentric practices, Asante`s project occludes the historical contradictions constitutive of any social formation and, far from advancing a distinctive Afrocentric epistemology, Asante's humanism puts him squarely within the dominant bourgeois philosophical tradition, and his discourse produces similar effects. Under the guise of the transcendental subject, class divisions within the black community are suppressed, and this, in turn, advances the class interests of the elites, whose interests are silently embedded in the project. As in Eurocentric historical narratives, Afrocentricism reclaims the history of the (African) elites. In this way, Afrocentric discourse is knowledge for middle- and upper-class blacks, since it naturalizes their class privilege; for which other class could afford to see "symbol imperialism" (Asante, Ahofentrif Idea, 56) as the major problem confronting multicultural societies? Bourgeois philosophical assumptions haunt the Afrocentric project and, in the domain of black feminist theory, Patricia Hill Collins provides an instructive example of this intersection. In Black Feminist Thought, Collins posits the "special angle of vision" that black women bring to the knowledge production process (21), and this "unique angle" (22) provides the "standpoint" for Afrocentric feminism, a feminism that she equates with humanism (37). As in the experiential metaphysics of black women's standpoint theory, Collins situates Afrocentric feminist epistemology "in the everyday experiences of African-American women" (207). Consequently, Collins suggests that "concrete experience" constitutes a criterion of meaning (208). But the experiential, the "real," does not equate to the "truth," as Collins implies. Collins rejects the "Eurocentric Masculinist Knowledge Validation Process" for its positivism but, in turn, she offers empiricism as the grounds for validating experience. Hence, the validity of experiential claims is adjudicated by reference to the experience. Not only is her argument circular, but it also undermines one of her key claims. If race, class, gender, and the accompanying ideological apparatuses are interlocking systems of oppression, as Collins suggests, then the experiential is not the site for the "true" but rather the site for the articulation of dominant ideology. On what basis, then, could the experiential provide grounds for a historical understanding of the structures that make experience itself possible as experience? Asante and Collins assume that experience is self-intelligible and, in their discourse, it functions as the limit text of the real. I believe, however, that experience is a highly mediated frame of understanding. Though it is true that a person of color experiences oppression, this experience is not self-explanatory and, therefore, it needs to be situated in relation to other social practices. Experience seems local, but it is, like all cultural and political practices, interrelated to other practices and experiences. Thus, its explanation comes from its "outside." Theory, specifically Marxist theory, provides an explanation of this outside. Experience does not bespeak the real, but rather it is the site of contradictions and, hence, in need of conceptual elaboration to break from cultural common sense, which is a conduit for the dominant ideology. It is this outside that has come under attack by black humanist scholars through the invocation of the black transcendental subject. Indeed, the discourse of the subject operates as an ideological strategy for fetishizing the black experience and, consequently, it positions black subjectivity beyond the reach of Marxism. For example, in The Afrocentric Idea, Asante dismisses Marxism because it is Eurocentric (8); but are the core concepts of Marxism, such as class and mode of production, relevant only for European social formations? Are African and African American social histories/relations unshaped by class structures? Asante assumes that class hierarchies do not structure African or the African American social experiences, and this reveals the class politics of Afrocentricity: It makes class invisible. Asante`s assumption, which erases materialism, enables Asante to offer the idealist formulation that the "word creates reality" (Afroccntric Idea 70). The political translation of such idealism is, not surprisingly, very conservative. Asante directs us away from critiquing capitalist institutions, in a manner similar to the ideological protocol of the Million Man March, and calls for vigilance against symbolic oppression. As Asante tellingly puts it, "symbol imperialism, rather than institutional racism, is the major social problem facing multicultural societies" (Afrocentric Idea 56). In the realm of African American philosophy, Howard McGary Jr. also deploys the discourse of the (black) subject to mark the limits of Marxism. For instance, in a recent interview, McGary offers this humanist rejection of Marxism: "l don't think that the levels of alienation experienced by Black people are rooted primarily in economic relations" (Interview 90). For McGary, black alienation exceeds the logic of Marxist theory and thus McGary's idealist assertion that "the sense of alienation experienced by Black people in the U.S. is also rooted in the whole idea of what it means to be a human being and how that has been understood" (Interview 90). McGary confuses causes and effects and then misreads Marxism as a descriptive modality. Marxism is not as concerned with descriptive accounts, the effects, as it is with explanatory accounts; that is, it is concerned with the cause of social alienation because such an explanatory account acts as a guide for praxis. Social alienation is a historical effect, and its explanation does not reside in the experience itself; therefore, it needs explanation and such an explanation emerges from the transpersonal space of concepts. In theorizing the specificity of black alienation, McGary reveals his contradictory ideological coordinates. First, he argues that black alienation results from cultural "beliefs." Then, he suggests that these cultural "norms" and "practices" develop from slavery and Jim Crow, which are fundamentally economic relations for the historically specific exploitation of black people. If these cultural norms endogenously emerge from the economic systems of slavery and Jim Crow, as McGary correctly suggests, then and contrary to McGary's expressed position, black alienation is very much rooted in economic relations. McGary's desire to place black subjectivity beyond Marxism creates contradictions in his text. McGary asserts that the economic structures of slavery and Jim Crow shape cultural norms. Thus, in a postslavery, post-Jim Crow era, there would still be an economic structure maintaining contemporary oppressive norms-from McGary's logic this must be the case. McGary remains silent, however, on the contemporary economic system structuring black alienation: capitalism. Apparently, it is legitimate to foreground and critique the historical connection between economics and alienation but any inquiry into the present-day connection between economics and alienation is off limits. This other economic structure-capitalism-remains the unsaid in McGary`s discourse, and consequently McGary provides ideological support for capitalism-the exploitative infrastructure that produces and maintains alienation for blacks as well as for all working people. ln a very revealing moment. a moment that confirms my reading of McGary’s procapitalist position, McGary asserts that "it is possible for African-Americans to combat or overcome this form of alienation described by recent writers without overthrowing capitalism" (Ran: 10), Here, in a most lucid way, we see the ideological connection between the superstructure (philosophy) and the base (capitalism). Philosophy provides ideological support for capitalism, and in this instance, we can also see how philosophy carries out class politics at the level of theory (Althusser, Lenin, 18). McGary points out "˜that Black people have been used in ways that white people have not" (Interview 91). McGary's observation may be true, but it does not mean that whites have not also been "used"; yes, whites maybe "used" differently, but they are still "used" because that is the logic of exploitative regimes-people are "used," that is to say, their labor is commodified and exchanged for profit. McGary's interview signals what I call an isolationist view. This view disconnects black alienation from other social relations; hence, it ultimately reifies race and, in doing so, suppresses materialist inquiries into the class logic of race. That is to say that the meaning of race is not to be found within its own internal dynamics but rather in dialectical relation to and as an ideological justification of the exploitative wage-labor economy. This isolationist position finds a fuller, and no less problematic, articulation in Charles W. Mills’s Racial Contract, a text that undermines the possibility for a transracial transformative political project. Mills evinces the ideological assumptions and consequent politics of the isolationist view in a long endnote to chapter 1. Mills privileges race oppression, but, in doing so, he must suppress other forms of oppression, such as gender and class oppression. Mills acknowledges that there are gender and class relations within the white population, but he still privileges race, as if the black community is not similarly divided along gender and class lines, Hence, the ideological necessity for Mills to execute a double move: He must marginalize class difference within the white community and suppress it within the black community. Consequently, Mills removes the possibility of connecting white supremacy, a political-cultural structure, to its underlying economic base. Mills's empiricist framework mystifies our understanding of race. If "white racial solidarity has overridden class and gender solidarity" (138), as Mills proposes, then what is needed is an explanation of this racial formation. If race is the "identity around which whites have usually closed ranks" (Mills 138), then why is this the case? Without an explanation, it seems as if white solidarity reflects some kind of metaphysical alliance. White racial solidarity is a historical articulation that operates to defuse class antagonism within white society, and it is maintained and reproduced through discourses of ideology. The race contract provides whites with an imaginary resolution of actual social contradictions, which are not caused by blacks but by an exploitative economic structure. The race contract enables whites to scapegoat blacks, and such an ideological operation displaces any understanding of the exploitative machinery. Hence, the race contract provides a political cover that ensures the ideological reproduction of the conditions of exploitation, and this reproduction further deepens the social contradictions-the economic position of whites becomes more and more depressed by the very same economic system that they help to ideologically reproduce. Mills points out that the Racial Contract aims at economic exploitation of black people, and this is certainly the case, but it also exploits all working people-a notion suppressed within Mills`s black nationalist problematic, From Mills`s logic,it seems that all whites (materially) benefit from the Racial Contract, but if this is true, then how does he account for the class structure within the white community? His argument rests upon glossing over class divisions within American and European communities, and I believe this signals the theoretical and political limits of his position. The vast majority of white Europeans are workers and therefore subjected to capitalist exploitation through the extraction of surplus value, and this structural relationship operates irrespective of race/ethnicity/gender/sexuality. In other words, neither whiteness nor the Race Contract places whites outside the logic of exploitation. Indeed, the possibility for transracial collective praxis emerges in the contradiction between the (ideological) promise of whiteness and the actual oppressed material conditions of most whites. The class blindness in Mills is surprising because he situates his discourse with- in "the best tradition of oppositional materialist critique" (129), but that tradition foregrounds political economy. Mills undermines his materialism through the silent reinscription of idealism. For example, he argues that "The Racial Contract is an exploitation contract that creates global European economic domination and national white privilege" (31). Indeed, for Mills "the globally-coded distribution of wealth and poverty has been produced by the Racial Contract" (37). The "Racial Contract" does not create global European economic domination, this results from control of capital by the international ruling class, but the RacialContract ideologically legitimates the "color-coded distribution of wealth and poverty." Thus, the race contract effectively naturalizes a racial division of labor, and of course this operation fractures (multiracial) class solidarity. As Cheryl I. Harris insightfully puts it, "It is through the concept of whiteness that class-consciousness among white workers is subordinated and attention is diverted from class oppression" (286), Therefore, if whites organize around race, as Mills asserts, then this is only because of an always already ideological interpellation (to "whiteness") and not a divine (racial) mandate, even though it has the appearance of obviousness. Indeed, the very aim of ideology is to produce cultural obviousnesses; hence the project of materialist analysis involves a critique of ideology and not the reification of common sense. Contrary to Mills, I believe a more effective materialist class analysis foregrounds exploitative social-economic structures and the consequent class struggle between the international ruling class and the international proletariat. My project situates race in relation to the international division of labor. Race emerges historically and within specific political-economic coordinates. These coordinates link the logic of race to the logic of capitalist exploitation. In other words, race is implicated in the historic and ongoing (class) struggle to determine the ratio of surplus value. For me, then, race signals a marking for exploitation, and this economic assignment, in turn, generates an accompanying ideological machinery to justify and increase that exploitation. Any understanding of this economic assignment, which represents a historically objective positionality, has been removed from the contemporary intellectual scene. Race represents not just a cultural or political category, as many critics attest, but it represents a historic apparatus for the production, maintenance, and legitimation of the inequalities of wage labor. As in other modes of social difference, like gender and sexuality, race participates in naturalizing asymmetrical social relations
	4	+
	5	+RECOGNITION POLITICS displace structural politics: The 1AC’s strategy of cultural analysis obscures class antagonism as the motor of social relations
	6	+Reed 2013 Adolph, professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania |“Django Unchained, or, The Help: How “Cultural Politics” Is Worse Than No Politics at All, and Why”, http://nonsite.org/feature/django-unchained-or-the-help-how-cultural-politics-is-worse-than-no-politics-at-all-and-why **we don’t endorse ablest rhetorical choices
	7	+This politics seeps through in the chatter about Django Unchained in particular. Erin Aubry Kaplan, in the Los Angeles Times article in which Tarantino asserts his appeal to youth, remarks that the “most disturbing detail about slavery is the emotional violence and degradation directed at blacks that effectively keeps them at the bottom of the social order, a place they still occupy today.” Writing on the Institute of the Black World blog, one Dr. Kwa David Whitaker, a 1960s-style cultural nationalist, declaims on Django’s testament to the sources of degradation and “unending servitude that has rendered black Americans almost incapable of making sound evaluations of our current situations or the kind of steps we must take to improve our condition.”12 In its blindness to political economy, this notion of black cultural or psychological damage as either a legacy of slavery or of more indirect recent origin—e.g., urban migration, crack epidemic, matriarchy, babies making babies—comports well with the reduction of slavery and Jim Crow to interpersonal dynamics and bad attitudes. It substitutes a “politics of recognition” and a patter of racial uplift for politics and underwrites a conflation of political action and therapy. With respect to the nexus of race and inequality, this discourse supports victim-blaming programs of personal rehabilitation and self-esteem engineering—inspiration—as easily as it does multiculturalist respect for difference, which, by the way, also feeds back to self-esteem engineering and inspiration as nodes within a larger political economy of race relations. Either way, this is a discourse that displaces a politics challenging social structures that reproduce inequality with concern for the feelings and characteristics of individuals and of categories of population statistics reified as singular groups that are equivalent to individuals. This discourse has made it possible (again, but more sanctimoniously this time) to characterize destruction of low-income housing as an uplift strategy for poor people; curtailment of access to public education as “choice”; being cut adrift from essential social wage protections as “empowerment”; and individual material success as socially important role modeling. Neoliberalism’s triumph is affirmed with unselfconscious clarity in the ostensibly leftist defenses of Django Unchained that center on the theme of slaves’ having liberated themselves. Trotskyists, would-be anarchists, and psychobabbling identitarians have their respective sectarian garnishes: Trotskyists see everywhere the bugbear of “bureaucratism” and mystify “self-activity;” anarchists similarly fetishize direct action and voluntarism and oppose large-scale public institutions on principle, and identitarians romanticize essentialist notions of organic, folkish authenticity under constant threat from institutions. However, all are indistinguishable from the nominally libertarian right in their disdain for government and institutionally based political action, which their common reflex is to disparage as inauthentic or corrupt. The previous year’s version of the socially significant film bearing on race (sort of), Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild, which also received startlingly positive responses from nominal progressives,13 marks the reactionary vector onto which those several interpretive strains converge. It lays out an exoticizing narrative of quaint, closer-to-nature primitives living in an area outside the south Louisiana levee system called the Bathtub, who simply don’t want and actively resist the oppressive intrusions—specifically, medical care and hurricane evacuation, though, in fairness, they also mark their superiority by tut-tutting at the presence of oil refineries—of a civilization that is out of touch with their way of life and is destroying nature to boot. The film validates their spiritually rich if economically impoverished culture and their right to it. (Actually, the Bathtub’s material infrastructure seems to derive mainly from scavenging, which should suggest a problem at the core of this bullshit allegory for all except those who imagine dumpster-diving, back-to-nature-in-the-city squatterism as a politics.) Especially given its setting in south Louisiana and the hype touting the authenticity of its New Orleans-based crew and cast, Beasts most immediately evokes a warm and fuzzy rendition of the retrograde post-Katrina line that those odd people down there wouldn’t evacuate because they’re so intensely committed to place. It also brings to mind Leni Riefenstahl’s post-prison photo essays on the Nilotic groups whose beautiful primitiveness she imagined herself capturing for posterity before they vanished under a superior civilization’s advance.14 Beasts of the Southern Wild stands out also as a pure exemplar of the debasement of the notion of a social cause through absorption into the commercial imperative, the next logical step from fun-run or buy-a-tee-shirt activism. The film’s website, has a “get involved” link, a ploy clearly intended to generate an affective identification and to define watching and liking the film as a form of social engagement. There’s nothing to “get involved” with except propagandizing for the film. But the injunction to get involved pumps the idea that going to see a movie, and spending money to do so, is participating in a social movement. (I happened to be on a flight from Hartford, Connecticut, to Chicago with Oprah’s BFF and my local news anchor, Gayle King, on the premiere weekend of Oprah’s film adaptation of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Gayle intimated in a stage whisper to the gaggle of gushing Oprah fans seated around her that it was very important to see the film on opening weekend in order to build the all-important box office count. I hadn’t realized theretofore that making yet more money for Oprah ranks as a social responsibility.) In this device Zeitlin repeats a technique employed by Davis Guggenheim’s Waiting for Superman, the corporate school privatization movement’s Triumph of the Will, speaking of Leni Riefenstahl, and its fictional counterpart Daniel Barnz’s Won’t Back Down, that movement’s Birth of a Nation. It is a minor cause for optimism that, to put it mildly, neither of those abominations came anywhere near its predecessor’s commercial or cultural success. In addition to knee-jerk anti-statism, the objection that the slaves freed themselves, as it shows up in favorable comparison of Django Unchained to Lincoln, stems from a racial pietism that issued from the unholy union of cultural studies and black studies in the university. More than twenty years of “resistance” studies that find again and again, at this point ritualistically, that oppressed people have and express agency have contributed to undermining the idea of politics as a discrete sphere of activity directed toward the outward-looking project of affecting the social order, most effectively through creating, challenging or redefining institutions that anchor collective action with the objective of developing and wielding power. Instead, the notion has been largely evacuated of specific content at all. “Politics” can refer to whatever one wants it to; all that’s required is an act of will in making a claim
	8	+
	9	+REJECT THE 1AC in favor of a historical materialist approach.
	10	+Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary moment. Only starting from the structural antagonisms produced by wage labor can lead to transformative politics.
	11	+Ebert ‘9 Teresa, Associate Professor of English, State University of New York at Albany, THE TASK OF CULTURAL CRITIQUE, pp. 92-95
	12	+Unlike these rewritings, which reaffirm in a somewhat new language the system of wage labor with only minor internal reforms, materialist critique aims a t ending class rule. It goes beyond description and explains the working of wage labor and the abstract structures that cannot be experienced directly but underwrite it. Materialist critique unpacks the philosophical and theoretical arguments that provide concepts for legitimizing wage labor and marks the textual representations that make it seem a normal part of life. In short, instead of focusing on micropractices (prison, gender, education, war, literature, and so on) in local and regional terms, materialist critique relates these practices to the macrostructures of capitalism and provides the knowledges necessary to put an end to exploitation. At the center of these knowledges is class critique. Pedagogy of critique is a class critique of social relations and the knowledges they produce . Its subject is wage labor, not the body without organs . An exemplary lesson in pedagogy of critique is provided by Marx, who concludes chapter 6 of Capital, " The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power, " by addressing the sphere within which wages are exchanged for labor power and the way this exchange is represented in the legal, philosophical, and representational apparatuses of capitalism as equal . He provides knowledge of the structures of wage labor and the theoretical discourses that sustain it. I have quoted this passage before and will refer to it again and again. Here is the full version: We now know how the value paid by the purchaser to the possessor of this peculiar commodity, labour-power, is determined. The use-value which the former gets in exchange, manifests itself only in the actual usufruct, in the consumption of the labour-power. The money-owner buys everything necessary for this purpose, such as raw material, in the market, and pays for it at its full value . The consumption of labourpower is at one and the same time the production of commodities and of surplus-value. The consumption of labour-power is completed, as is the case of every other commodity, outside the limits of the market or the sphere of circulation. Accompanied by Mr. Moneybags and by the possessor of labour-power, we therefore take leave for a time of this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in view of all men, and follow them both into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there stares us in the face "No admittance except on business . " Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital is produced. We shall at last force the secret of profit making. This sphere that we are deserting, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labour-power, are constrained only by their own free will. They contract as free agents, and the agreement they come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself. The only force that brings them together and puts them in relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interests of each. Each looks to himself only, and no one troubles himself about the rest, and just because they do so, do they all, in accordance with the pre-established harmony of things, or under the auspices of an all-shrewd providence, work together to their mutual advantage, for the common weal and in the interest of all. On leaving this sphere of simple circulation or of exchange of commodities, which furnishes the "Free-trader vulgaris" with his views and ideas, and with the standard by which he judges a society based on capital and wages, we think we can perceive a change in the physiognomy of our dramatis personae. He, who before was the money-owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other, timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but-a hiding. Materialist critique is fundamental to a transformative feminist politics. Through critique the subject develops historical knowledges of the social totality: she acquires, in other words, an understanding of how the existing social institutions (motherhood, child care, love, paternity, taxation, family, . . . and so on ) are part of the social relations of production, how they are located in exploitative relations of difference, and how they can be changed. Materialist critique, in other words, is that knowledge practice that historically situates the conditions of possibility of what empirically exists under capitalist relations of class difference-particularly the division of labor-and, more important, points to what is suppressed by the empirically existing: what could be, instead of what actually is. Critique indicates, in other words, that what exists is not necessarily real or true but only the actuality under wage labor. The role of critique in pedagogy is exactly this: the production of historical know ledges and class consciousness of the social relations, knowledges that mark the transformability of existing social arrangements and the possibility of a different social organization~-~-one that is free from necessity. Quite simply then, the pedagogy of critique is a mode of social knowing that inquires into what is not said, into the silences and the suppressed or the missing, in order to unconceal operations of economic and political power underlying the myriad concrete details and seemingly disparate events and representations of our lives . It shows how apparently disconnected zones of culture are in fact linked by the highly differentiated and dispersed operation of the systematic, abstract logic of the exploitation of the division of labor that informs all the practices of culture and society. It reveals how seemingly unique concrete experiences are in fact the common effect of social relations of production in wage labor capitalism. In sum, materialist critique both disrupts that which represents itself as natural and thus as inevitable and explains how it is materially produced. Critique, in other words, enables us to explain how social differences, specifically gender, race, sexuality, and class, have been systematically produced and continue to operate within regimes of exploitation-namely, the international division of labor in global capitalism-so we can change them. It is the means for producing politically effective and transformative knowledges . The claim of affective pedagogy is that it sets the subject free by making available to her or him the unruly force of pleasure and the unrestrained flows of desire, thereby turning her or him into an oppositional subject who cuts through established representations and codings to find access to a deterritorialized subjectivity. But the radicality of this self, at its most volatile moment, is the radicality of the class politics of the ruling class, a class for whom the question of poverty no longer exists. The only question left for it, as I have already indicated, is the question of liberty as the freedom of desire. Yet this is a liberty acquired at the expense of the poverty of others. The pedagogy of critique engages these issues by situating itself not in the space of the self, not in the space of desire, not in the space of liberation, but in the revolutionary site of collectivity, need, and emancipation. The core of the pedagogy of critique is that education is not simply for enlightening the individual to see through the arbitrariness of signification and the violence of established representations . It recognizes that it is a historical practice and, as such, it is always part of the larger forces of production and relations of production. It understands that all pedagogies are, in one way or the other, aimed at producing an efficient labor force. Unlike the pedagogy of desire, the pedagogy of critique does not simply teach that knowledge is another name for power, nor does it marginalize knowledge as a detour of desire. It acknowledges the fissures in social practices-including its own-but it demonstrates that they are historical and not textual or epistemological. It, therefore, does not retreat into mysticism by declaring the task of teaching to be the teaching of the impossible and, in doing so, legitimate the way things are. Instead, the pedagogy of critique is a worldly teaching of the worldly.

EntryDate

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	1	+2016-12-03 19:34:35.522

Judge

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	1	+Arun Sharma

Opponent

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	1	+Earl Warren NO

ParentRound

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	1	+15

Round

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	1	+5

Team

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	1	+Westwood Amodwala Neg

Title

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	1	+1 - K - Cap

Tournament

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	1	+UT