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Caselist.CitesClass[40]

Cites

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1		-The 1AC focus on identity politics is a spectacle that entices viewers to listen but not act. This creates a ruse of solvency that exacerbates capitalism and turns the case.
2		-Reed 15. Adolph Reed; Black professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in race and American politics; “Adolph Reed: Identity Politics Is Neoliberalism”; 29 JUNE 2015; http://bennorton.com/adolph-reed-identity-politics-is-neoliberalism/ // YS 11.23.15 **BRACKETS IN ORIGINAL**
3		-Political scientist and race theorist Adolph Reed has long maintained that identity politics is a form of neoliberalism. In a June article, he explains: Identity politics is not an alternative to class politics; it is a class politics, the politics of the left-wing of neoliberalism. It is the expression and active agency of a political order and moral economy in which capitalist market forces are treated as unassailable nature. An integral element of that moral economy is displacement of the critique of the invidious outcomes produced by capitalist class power onto equally naturalized categories of ascriptive identity that sort us into groups supposedly defined by what we essentially are rather than what we do. As I have argued, following Walter Michaels and others, within that moral economy a society in which 1 of the population controlled 90 of the resources could be just, provided that roughly 12 of the 1 were black, 12 were Latino, 50 were women, and whatever the appropriate proportions were LGBT people. It would be tough to imagine a normative ideal that expresses more unambiguously the social position of people who consider themselves candidates for inclusion in, or at least significant staff positions in service to, the ruling class. Reed has been arguing this point for years. In his 2009 essay “The Limits of Anti-Racism,” Reed condemns identity politics for, despite its putative good intentions, disguising objectively right-wing, neoliberal ideology with superficially “progressive” rhetorical window dressing. Reed’s criticisms of “antiracism” can been taken to be criticisms of identity politics more generally (emphasis mine). Antiracism is a favorite concept on the American left these days. Of course, all good sorts want to be against racism, but what does the word mean exactly? The contemporary discourse of “antiracism” and identity politics overall is focused much more on taxonomy than politics. It emphasizes the name by which we should call some strains of inequality—whether they should be broadly recognized as evidence of “racism”— over specifying the mechanisms that produce them or even the steps that can be taken to combat them. And, no, neither “overcoming racism” nor “rejecting whiteness” qualifies as such a step any more than does waiting for the “revolution” or urging God’s heavenly intervention. If organizing a rally against racism seems at present to be a more substantive political act than attending a prayer vigil for world peace, that’s only because contemporary antiracist activists understand themselves to be employing the same tactics and pursuing the same ends as their predecessors in the period of high insurgency in the struggle against racial segregation.
4		-Capitalism perpetuates all other forms of oppression – we control the direction of their impacts.
5		-Bennett 12. Sara Bennett. Socialist Review is a monthly magazine covering current events, theory and history, books and arts reviews from a revolutionary socialist perspective. It is the sister publication of Socialist Worker. , May 2012, "Marxism and oppression," Socialist Review, http://socialistreview.org.uk/369/marxism-and-oppression //RS
6		-Marx recognised that oppression, far from being a natural and thus a permanent feature of human society, is a historical invention. True, the oppression of certain groups of people in society existed before capitalism. For example, Marx's collaborator Engels traced the origins of women's oppression to the formation of the family with the rise of class society. Despite the many changes to the family over the centuries, it persists to this day because it plays a crucial role in the continuation of the system, by bearing the brunt of the cost for caring for present and past generations of workers and the rearing of the next - all at our own expense. So, despite the fact that the majority of women in this country who can work do work, their role in the family means they still accept lower wages and fewer career opportunities. Other forms of oppression have arisen with the emergence of capitalism. So racism was created to justify the slave trade and imperialism and is perpetuated by the need to keep workers divided. Towards the end of the 19th century a new sexual identity, the "homosexual", was invented and portrayed as a threat to society and the maintenance of the family. What is common to all forms of oppression, however, is that they have a material basis and arise from the structures and dynamics of class society. Oppression serves to reinforce the interests of capitalism. But while Marx understood that some forms of oppression existed before capitalism, he also grasped the way the nature of oppression under capitalism was different to what had gone before. Under feudalism or slavery the mass of the population were either slaves, the property of masters, or serfs tied to particular pieces of land and bound to a lord. Such societies were rigidly hierarchical and were based on the idea that everyone had their "rightful place". Notions of freedom for those other than the rulers in society were rare and subordination in society was widely accepted. When new societies emerge so too do new ideas. The bourgeois revolutions that overthrew feudalism and paved the way for capitalism did so under the banner of "liberty, equality and fraternity", as the French Revolution put it. This was a huge step forward for humanity compared to previous societies. Under capitalism production takes the form of creating commodities to be sold in the market. Everything becomes a commodity, including our ability to labour. Workers are no longer tied to individual lords and masters. The new ideas of individual freedom and equality under capitalism reflect this new way of organising production. But in reality freedom for the vast majority of the human race is simply this ability to sell their labour power to one or another capitalist (provided, of course, that there is sufficient demand). Capitalism holds out the promise of liberation, but then denies it to the majority of society. Capitalist production increasingly comes to depend on the mass cooperation of workers, but as capitalism brings workers together so too it divides them from each other. Workers are forced to continually compete against each other - for jobs, overtime, housing, even access to decent healthcare provision. Oppression helps to create and reinforce divisions between workers. For example, the mass media and mainstream government encourage us to see immigrant workers as inferior to native-born workers. While it may be acceptable for immigrants to participate in our workforce when there are plenty of jobs, as soon as jobs become more scarce, immigrants are portrayed as less deserving of work, and therefore a threat. Alienation These divisions are underpinned by the alienation of workers under capitalism from control over their labour. This results in a sense of powerlessness, especially when workers do not fight back collectively. In this situation, some workers may gain a feeling of empowerment by looking down on others and feeling superior. So a white person may look down on a black person or a man on a woman. And it is not just non-oppressed groups who feel superior to oppressed groups - it cuts across oppressed groups too. For example, a "second-generation immigrant" can feel superior to a recently arrived immigrant, or a gay man can feel superior to a disabled person. As a result, some people argue that sections of workers have an interest in sustaining oppression, rather than seeing that all oppression works to allow the continuation of capitalism by providing it with material benefits. So we hear arguments that men benefit from women's oppression, or that all whites benefit from the oppression of black people. While it's true that non-oppressed groups do not suffer in the way that oppressed people may, it is wrong to think they therefore have some interest in the continuation of oppression. For example, the fact that women in full-time work still earn around 15 percent less than their male counterparts does not allow men's wages to increase further - it simply means it's easier for the bosses to keep all wages down. The best solution to this would be for male and female workers to fight together for decent wages for all. This may be easier said than done for a woman at work being sexually harassed by a male colleague, however. After all, she experiences her oppression through his sexist commetns and gestures. But while he may be the immediate culprit, the causes of oppression run much deeper - they are rooted in capitalism. Socialists have to fight all forms of oppression
7		-through the struggle for class unity. Alienation and distorted notions of freedom and equality also mean that people are not necessarily conscious of their oppression and can lead them to actively embrace some of the worst aspects of it. With the emphasis under capitalism on the individual rather than the social whole, we are made to feel that the worst symptoms of our oppression must be through some fault of our own. Here capitalism steps in to sell us the very "solutions" we need. So we have a whole industry of self-help books in the UK which is estimated to have earned publishers some £60?million in the past five years. In a similar vein, the answer to women not feeling "sexy enough" is to attend pole dancing "fitness classes", or undergo cosmetic surgery. There are even skin-lightening techniques for black people. A divisive system Capitalism works quite hard to ensure we keep believing our main enemy is some other group of ordinary people in society rather than the nature of our distorted relationships under capitalist society. The mass media have to continuously pump out horrific anti-immigrant, anti-traveller, anti single mum propaganda. Capitalism maintains its hold by dividing those workers who collectively could overturn it, and ideology plays a significant role. And this means it has to work to undermine the reality of our lives that actually brings us into constant contact and cooperation with all types of people, whether Muslim, gay, disabled and so on. While many non-Marxists fight with us against oppression, there is often disagreement about our emphasis on the working class as the key agent of change. After all, oppression affects all classes, not just the working class. This means some people believe that the oppressed group itself is the key to overcoming its own oppression. At a recent demonstration at Cambridge University over the visit of former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, one of the chants was "The women united will never be defeated." It's not hard to see why this might seem like common sense to some; after all, every woman can be a victim of sexual assault. But which women are we uniting with? Christine Lagarde, Strauss-Kahn's replacement, is central to the imposition of draconian austerity measures across Europe, driving the living standards of millions of women and men down - something that in turn will increase the pressures on people's lives and place more women at the risk of violence.
8		-Our alternative is to vote negative to refuse to participate in activities which support capitalism. We must hollow out capitalist structures by refusing to invest our energy in reforms and rescue operations
9		-Herod 4. Herod, Columbia University Graduate and Political Activist, 2004 (James, Getting Free, http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/GetFre/06.htm, JC)
10		-It is time to try to describe, at first abstractly and later concretely, a strategy for destroying capitalism. This strategy, at its most basic, calls for pulling time, energy, and resources out of capitalist civilization and putting them into building a new civilization. The image then is one of emptying out capitalist structures, hollowing them out, by draining wealth, power, and meaning out of them until there is nothing left but shells. This is definitely an aggressive strategy. It requires great militancy, and constitutes an attack on the existing order. The strategy clearly recognizes that capitalism is the enemy and must be destroyed, but it is not a frontal attack aimed at overthrowing the system, but an inside attack aimed at gutting it, while simultaneously replacing it with something better, something we want. Thus capitalist structures (corporations, governments, banks, schools, etc.) are not seized so much as simply abandoned. Capitalist relations are not fought so much as they are simply rejected. We stop participating in activities that support (finance, condone) the capitalist world and start participating in activities that build a new world while simultaneously undermining the old. We create a new pattern of social relations alongside capitalist relations and then we continually build and strengthen our new pattern while doing every thing we can to weaken capitalist relations. In this way our new democratic, non-hierarchical, non-commodified relations can eventually overwhelm the capitalist relations and force them out of existence. This is how it has to be done. This is a plausible, realistic strategy. To think that we could create a whole new world of decent social arrangements overnight, in the midst of a crisis, during a so-called revolution, or during the collapse of capitalism, is foolhardy. Our new social world must grow within the old, and in opposition to it, until it is strong enough to dismantle and abolish capitalist relations. Such a revolution will never happen automatically, blindly, determinably, because of the inexorable, materialist laws of history. It will happen, and only happen, because we want it to, and because we know what we’re doing and know how we want to live, and know what obstacles have to be overcome before we can live that way, and know how to distinguish between our social patterns and theirs. But we must not think that the capitalist world can simply be ignored, in a live and let live attitude, while we try to build new lives elsewhere. (There is no elsewhere.) There is at least one thing, wage-slavery, that we can’t simply stop participating in (but even here there are ways we can chip away at it). Capitalism must be explicitly refused and replaced by something else. This constitutes War, but it is not a war in the traditional sense of armies and tanks, but a war fought on a daily basis, on the level of everyday life, by millions of people. It is a war nevertheless because the accumulators of capital will use coercion, brutality, and murder, as they have always done in the past, to try to block any rejection of the system. They have always had to force compliance; they will not hesitate to continue doing so. Nevertheless, there are many concrete ways that individuals, groups, and neighborhoods can gut capitalism, which I will enumerate shortly. We must always keep in mind how we became slaves; then we can see more clearly how we can cease being slaves. We were forced into wage-slavery because the ruling class slowly, systematically, and brutally destroyed our ability to live autonomously. By driving us off the land, changing the property laws, destroying community rights, destroying our tools, imposing taxes, destroying our local markets, and so forth, we were forced onto the labor market in order to survive, our only remaining option being to sell, for a wage, our ability to work. It’s quite clear then how we can overthrow slavery. We must reverse this process. We must begin to reacquire the ability to live without working for a wage or buying the products made by wage-slaves (that is, we must get free from the labor market and the way of living based on it), and embed ourselves instead in cooperative labor and cooperatively produced goods. Another clarification is needed. This strategy does not call for reforming capitalism, for changing capitalism into something else. It calls for replacing capitalism, totally, with a new civilization. This is an important distinction, because capitalism has proved impervious to reforms, as a system. We can sometimes in some places win certain concessions from it (usually only temporary ones) and win some (usually short-lived) improvements in our lives as its victims, but we cannot reform it piecemeal, as a system.¶ Thus our strategy of gutting and eventually destroying capitalism requires at a minimum a totalizing image, an awareness that we are attacking an entire way of life and replacing it with another, and not merely reforming one way of life into something else. Many people may not be accustomed to thinking about entire systems and social orders, but everyone knows what a lifestyle is, or a way of life, and that is the way we should approach it. The thing is this: in order for capitalism to be destroyed millions and millions of people must be dissatisfied with their way of life. They must want something else and see certain existing things as obstacles to getting what they want. It is not useful to think of this as a new ideology. It is not merely a belief-system that is needed, like a religion, or like Marxism, or Anarchism. Rather it is a new prevailing vision, a dominant desire, an overriding need. What must exist is a pressing desire to live a certain way, and not to live another way. If this pressing desire were a desire to live free, to be autonomous, to live in democratically controlled communities, to participate in the self-regulating activities of a mature people, then capitalism could be destroyed. Otherwise we are doomed to perpetual slavery and possibly even to extinction.

EntryDate

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1		-2016-11-22 06:45:30.0

Judge

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1		-Kamil Merchant

Opponent

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1		-St Thomas Academy Visitation Nick Wier

ParentRound

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1		-23

Round

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1		-2

Team

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1		-Westwood Mandavilli Neg

Title

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1		-1 - K - Capitalism

Tournament

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1		-Glenbrooks