Tournament: Strake Jesuit | Round: 1 | Opponent: Westwood Kid | Judge: Martin Sigalow
Dependence upon the state to guarantee intrinsic freedoms such as free speech cedes power to the elites and enables oppression. The state is capitalism’s enforcer – it was built to serve capitalist ruling class interest normalize its oppression.
Harman 06
Chris, editor of International Socialism Journal and, before that, of Socialist Worker, and a leading figure in the Socialist Workers   Party, September 26th, 2006, “The state and capitalism today”, http://www.isj.org.uk/?id=234
The state may AND are capitalist forces.

The constitution is merely a means of reenforcing capitalist power relations.
Avakian ‘10
Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America (Draft Proposal) from the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA Copyright © 2010 by RCP Publications. All rights reserved.
All law has AND its underlying dynamics.

Constitutional rights have been reshaped to serve capitalist interests.
Wood; Ellen Meiksins Wood. Solidarity; Capitalism and Social Rights. May/June 2009.  https://www.solidarity-us.org/node/2150
I’m also pretty AND yes, social work.

Modern conceptions of democracy disguise class oppression- it isn’t control by the people but bourgeois representatives
Wood 98 (Ellen Meiksins Wood, taught political science at Glendon College, York University in Toronto, Canada, “The Retreat from Class A New 'True' Socialism” pgs. 66-68)
Their argument requires AND of social production.

“Liberty” under capitalism is a pacifying illusion – our society’s superficial peace is sustained by capitalist oppression. Our rights only exist when the elites want them to.
Wood ‘09
Ellen Meiksins Wood. Solidarity; Capitalism and Social Rights. May/June 2009.  https://www.solidarity-us.org/node/2150
American Marxist historian and scholar. Wood received a B.A. in Slavic languages from the University of California, Berkeley in 1962 and subsequently entered the graduate program in political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, from which she received her PhD in 1970. From 1967 to 1996, she taught political science at Glendon College, York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
I’m also pretty AND yes, social work.

Class focus must come first – it is the root cause of all oppression.
Kovel 07
Joel Kovel. Prof. of Social Studies @ Bard, 2007. “The Enemy of Nature”, p. 140.
If, however, we ask the question of efficacy, that is, which split sets the others into motion AND we discuss in the next section.

We have an obligation to embrace critical pedagogy.
McLaren et al ‘04
Peter McLaren is a Professor and Gregory Martin and Nathalia Jaramillo are doctoral students, all in the Division of Urban Schooling of the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies @ UCLA. Ramin Farahmandpur is an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Policy, Foundations, and Administrative Studies @ Portland State University “Teaching in and against the Empire: Critical Pedagogy as Revolutionary Praxis” Teacher Education Quarterly 2004 - Volume 31, Number 1.
In creating the conditions for social change AND Because of this, we will settle for nothing less.

Voting negative refuses the affirmative in favor of Historical Materialist Pedagogy. Inequality is sutured by the unequal circulation of capital. Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary moment. Only starting from the structural antagonisms produced by wage labor can lead to transformative politics.
Ebert ‘9 Teresa, Associate Professor of English, State University of New York at Albany, THE TASK OF CULTURAL CRITIQUE, pp. 92-95
Unlike these rewritings AND Instead, the pedagogy of critique is a worldly teaching of the worldly.

Tournament: Strake Jesuit | Round: 3 | Opponent: Alex from Clements | Judge: Becca Traber
The role of the ballot and judge is to reject capitalism and reclaim higher education. 

1. Challenging class focus must come first - cap has infected institutions and status quo modes of other forms of oppression – think private prisons for racist enforcement. Cap should come first because challenging it is necessary for all other oppressive structures – anything else ignores intersections between those oppressions, Ollman  
   So why should people involved in the social movements be interested in Marxism? Well—because most of them/us are also workers (white collar as well as blue collar), and Marxism is invaluable in helping to develop a strategy that serving es their/our interests as workers. Because the other forms of domination from which they/we suffer all have a capitalist component, and Marxism best explains it. Because even those parts of these oppressions that are older than capitalism have acquired a capitalist form and function, so that a Marxist analysis of capitalism is required to distinguish what is historically specific in their operation from what is not. And, lastly, because overturning capitalism is the necessary (though not sufficient) condition for doing away with all forms of domination, including domination over nature, and only a class conscious working class has the numbers (still), the power (potentially), and the interests (always) to bring about a change of this magnitude. Hence, the priority Marxists give to class analysis and class based politics (which does not rule out organizing around other oppressions at specific times for specific purposes). The priority given to class here (not to "the workers" but to "us as workers") has nothing to do with who is hurting more or which form of oppression is more immoral or which dominated group happens to be in motion, and everything to do with what is the adequate framework and vantage point for grasping the specific manner in which all these oppressions are interacting now and how best to get rid of them all. (And this is what Albert caricatures as a "master discourse"). I do not expect that simply making these claims has convinced anyone that they are right, but I hope they help clarify where the real disagreements between Marxist and social movement theorists lie, and, hence, what is worth discussing if we are ever to construct the united movement that is needed to achieve our—yes!—common goals.
   2. Our greatest ethical obligation is to resist capitalism – it’s relevant under any moral theory.
   Constitutional rights have been reshaped to serve capitalist interests.
   Wood
   Ellen Meiksins Wood. Solidarity; Capitalism and Social Rights. May/June 2009.  https://www.solidarity-us.org/node/2150
   I’m also pretty sure that there’s wide agreement — no doubt universal agreement, in an audience like this — that those basic conditions of freedom and dignity include certain irreducible civil liberties and political rights, freedom of speech, freedom of thought and assembly, the right to due process of law, the right to vote, and so on. But in the 21st century, that’s just the beginning of debate about rights. The question for many is whether human rights not only begin with civil and political rights but also end with them. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights established 60 years ago, for instance, talks about economic, social and cultural rights, and fierce debate about it still goes on. Some people, especially in advanced capitalist countries and particularly in the United States, claim that there’s no such thing as economic and social rights. Well, that’s no surprise. There’s no mystery about why governments committed to neoliberal globalization would be especially hostile to ideas of economic, social and cultural rights. Even some who believe in guaranteeing certain basic material and social conditions for everyone don’t want to call them rights. They say that these are just aspirations — that they’re too dependent on available resources and can’t be enforced by the courts in the same way as civil and political rights. Now I could just spend my time here arguing against those people who don’t accept the expanded conception of rights, those who think that rights are by definition civil and political, not economic, social or cultural. I could say that social rights are no more aspirational than are civil and political rights, even when they require more resources. All you have to do is look at countries where people are still struggling for political and civil rights, places where these rights are still very distant aspirations. Or I could argue that the full realization of civil and political rights ultimately depends on certain basic material and social conditions. But I want to make a different point. I want to raise some questions about how we draw these distinctions among various kinds of rights in the first place, and I’m going to suggest that the neat distinctions we draw may be hiding some important realities. Even people who believe in expanding the family of rights tend to talk about economic and social rights as distinct categories which should be added to the list of rights, alongside already existing civil and political rights. They often talk about progress in the achievement of human rights: certain civil liberties were established first in early modern Europe; then there were advances in the right to vote, ending in universal adult suffrage; and since the establishment of widespread political rights, especially since the enfranchisement of working classes, we’ve been fighting for new kinds of rights not recognized before, the rights we call economic, social and cultural. There’s certainly a lot of truth in this way of looking at rights. It makes sense to think of the history of rights as an expansion from political to economic and social rights brought about by painful struggle, which is still far from finished. But looking at it this way also disguises some very important things. In fact, we could just as easily say that the history of rights has been a contraction, not an expansion, of political rights — not an expansion from one set of rights to another but a contraction of political rights to exclude the social and the economic. Political rights have certainly expanded in the sense that they’ve become more universal. More and more people have achieved the right to vote. But at the same time, political rights have contracted in the sense that they now exclude so many aspects of life. There was a time when fewer people had political rights, but the rights they did have had were economic and social powers at the same time. Today, that isn’t true. People with political rights may not have any social or economic power; and that’s one reason we’ve had to invent new kinds of economic and social rights. Let me explain: what I mean. I’ll give you the punch line first: we live today in a capitalist world, and capitalism has completely transformed the meaning of political rights and their relation to economic and social rights. The distinctive relation between political and economic power in capitalism is fundamentally different from anything that existed in the world before the system came into being. Capitalism has created a separate economic sphere with its own rules and its own forms of power; and political rights have been emptied of economic and social content. At the same time, the system has produced a whole new set of social problems. In fact, I think you could say that the very idea of a distinct sphere of social problems belongs specifically to capitalism. The idea of “the social question,” as it came to be called in the 19th century, is very specifically related to the development of capitalism, with its propertyless laboring class. And it’s specifically in the conditions of capitalism that we’ve had to start thinking about social rights, social justice, social citizenship, the social economy, and, yes, social work.
   Public colleges and universities are institutions of capitalism and exploitation. Smith ‘15
   Yves Smith. June 26th, 2015.
   Under the pen name Yves Smith, Susan Webber, the principal of Aurora Advisors Incorporated and author of ECONned, launched the site in December 2006. She focused on finance and economic news and analysis, with an emphasis on legal and ethical issues of the banking industry and the mortgage foreclosure process, the worldwide effects of the banking crisis of 2008, the 2007–2012 global financial crisis, and its aftermath.
   Webber/Smith graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Business School. She had 20 years of experience in the financial services industry with Goldman Sachs, McKinsey and Co., and Sumitomo Bank.3 She has written articles for the New York Times, Bloomberg, and the Roosevelt Institute.
   http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/06/college-is-wildly-exploitative-why-arent-students-raising-hell.html
   Higher education wears the cloak of liberalism, but in policy and practice, it can be a corrupt and cutthroat system of power and exploitation. It benefits immensely from right-wing McCarthy wannabes, who in an effort to restrict academic freedom and silence political dissent, depict universities as left-wing indoctrination centers. But the reality is that while college administrators might affix “down with the man” stickers on their office doors, many prop up a system that is severely unfair to American students and professors, a shocking number of whom struggle to make ends meet. Even the most elementary level of political science instructs that politics is about power. Power, in America, is about money: who has it? Who does not have it? Who is accumulating it? Who is losing it? Where is it going? Four hundred faculty members at New York University, one of the nation’s most expensive schools, recently released a report on how their own place of employment, legally a nonprofit institution, has become a predatory business, hardly any different in ethical practice or economic procedure than a sleazy storefront payday loan operator. Its title succinctly summarizes the new intellectual discipline deans and regents have learned to master: “The Art of The Gouge.” The result of their investigation reads as if Charles Dickens and Franz Kafka collaborated on notes for a novel. Administrators not only continue to raise tuition at staggering rates, but they burden their students with inexplicable fees, high cost burdens and expensive requirements like mandatory study abroad programs. When students question the basis of their charges, much of them hidden during the enrollment and registration phases, they find themselves lost in a tornadic swirl of forms, automated answering services and other bureaucratic debris. Often the additional fees add up to thousands of dollars, and that comes on top of the already hefty tuition, currently $46,000 per academic year, which is more than double its rate of 2001. Tuition at NYU is higher than most colleges, but a bachelor’s degree, nearly anywhere else, still comes with a punitive price tag. According to the College Board, the average cost of tuition and fees for the 2014–2015 school year was $31,231 at private colleges, $9,139 for state residents at public colleges, and $22,958 for out-of-state residents attending public universities. Robert Reich, in his book Supercapitalism, explains that in the past 30 years the two industries with the most excessive increases in prices are health care and higher education. Lack of affordable health care is a crime, Reich argues, but at least new medicines, medical technologies, surgeries, surgery techs, and specialists can partially account for inflation. Higher education can claim no costly infrastructural or operational developments to defend its sophisticated swindle of American families. It is a high-tech, multifaceted, but old fashioned transfer of wealth from the poor, working- and middle-classes to the rich. Using student loan loot and tax subsidies backed by its $3.5 billion endowment, New York University has created a new administrative class of aristocratic compensation. The school not only continues to hire more administrators – many of whom the professors indict as having no visible value in improving the education for students bankrupting themselves to register for classes – but shamelessly increases the salaries of the academic administrative class. The top 21 administrators earn a combined total of $23,590,794 per year. The NYU portfolio includes many multi-million-dollar mansions and luxury condos, where deans and vice presidents live rent-free. Meanwhile, NYU has spent billions, over the past 20 years, on largely unnecessary real estate projects, buying property and renovating buildings throughout New York. The professors’ analysis, NYU’s US News and World Report Ranking, and student reviews demonstrate that few of these extravagant projects, aimed mostly at pleasing wealthy donors, attracting media attention, and giving administrators opulent quarters, had any impact on overall educational quality. As the managerial class grows, in size and salary, so does the full time faculty registry shrink. Use of part time instructors has soared to stratospheric heights at NYU. Adjunct instructors, despite having a minimum of a master’s degree and often having a Ph.D., receive only miserly pay-per-course compensation for their work, and do not receive benefits. Many part-time college instructors must transform their lives into daily marathons, running from one school to the next, barely able to breathe between commutes and courses. Adjunct pay varies from school to school, but the average rate is $2,900 per course. Many schools offer rates far below the average, most especially community colleges paying only $1,000 to $1,500. Even at the best paying schools, adjuncts, as part time employees, are rarely eligible for health insurance and other benefits. Many universities place strict limits on how many courses an instructor can teach. According to a recent study, 25 percent of adjuncts receive government assistance. The actual scandal of “The Art of the Gouge” is that even if NYU is a particularly egregious offender of basic decency and honesty, most of the report’s indictments could apply equally to nearly any American university. From 2003-2013, college tuition increased by a crushing 80 percent. That far outpaces all other inflation. The closest competitor was the cost of medical care, which in the same time period, increased by a rate of 49 percent. On average, tuition in America rises eight percent on an annual basis, placing it far outside the moral universe. Most European universities charge only marginal fees for attendance, and many of them are free. Senator Bernie Sanders recently introduced a bill proposing all public universities offer free education. It received little political support, and almost no media coverage. In order to obtain an education, students accept the paralytic weight of student debt, the only form of debt not dischargeable in bankruptcy. Before a young person can even think about buying a car, house or starting a family, she leaves college with thousands of dollars in debt: an average of $29,400 in 2012. As colleges continue to suck their students dry of every dime, the US government profits at $41.3 billion per year by collecting interest on that debt. Congress recently cut funding for Pell Grants, yet increased the budget for hiring debt collectors to target delinquent student borrowers. The university, once an incubator of ideas and entrance into opportunity, has mutated into a tabletop model of America’s economic architecture, where the top one percent of income earners now owns 40 percent of the wealth.
   This is a link –
   a) Their attempts to prescribe the University ethics perpetuates, condones, and justifies capitalism – the capitalist system is intrinsically amoral and the AC’s glorification of it is complicity with oppression.
   b) Their failure to solve the capitalist element of these institutions means their ethics are skewed by capitalism, so if we win our impacts, this hijacks their framework and makes it a link. Also, dooms their movement to failure because if a university is actively deciding to be capitalist, its “ethical” actions will likely be in favor of capitalist power relations.
   Modern conceptions of democracy disguise class oppression- it isn’t control by the people but bourgeois representatives
   Wood 98 (Ellen Meiksins Wood, taught political science at Glendon College, York University in Toronto, Canada, “The Retreat from Class A New 'True' Socialism” pgs. 66-68)
   Their argument requires that the new democratic discourse - which, as the argument progresses, they increasingly equate with liberal-democratic ideology - must 'construct' as illegitimate and oppressive social relations which would otherwise not be so perceived. The historical meaning and effects of liberal-democratic discourse, however, have been far more ambiguous. We need to be reminded, to begin with, that the idea of democracy has a very long history - something one would never guess from their account. There can be no doubt that modern conceptions of equality have expanded - at least in breadth if not in depth - far beyond the exclusive Greek conception which denied the democratic principle to women and slaves. At the same time, the changes that have occurred in the meaning of democracy have not all been on the side of delegitimizing inequality. Far from it. In fact, one of the most significant dimensions of the 'democratic revolution' is that it marks the dissociation of 'democracy' from its meaning as popular power, rule by the demos. It is precisely for this reason - and not simply because of some general advance in democratic values - that 'democracy' ceased to be a dirty word among the dominant classes. One need only consider the difference between the horror with which the American 'Founding Fathers' regarded 'democracy', and the overweening pride with which their successors have claimed the name of 'democracy' for the political order established by these constitutional founders. The difference cannot simply be attributed to the progress of democratic culture. In a sense the reverse is true - or at least, the founding fathers had a stricter understanding than did later generations of what 'democracy' entailed. For them the word had the same meaning as for the Greeks: direct rule by the people, the people as plebs not as populus (to use a distinction employed by Mouffe and Laclau). or - from the vantage point of the propertied classes - mob rule. By these strict standards, the American republic was not - fortunately, in their view - a democracy (unless it was a 'representative democracy', as suggested by Alexander Hamilton, already signalling a new meaning, explicitly distinguished from popular rule). By the much diluted standards of later generations, children of the 'democratic revolution', the same republic was the most democratic country on earth, and indeed the perfect ideal of democracy. For, while the old meaning of democracy as popular power survived - especially in socialist discourse - the 'democratic revolution' that established liberal democracy also brought with it a new meaning, which had to do not with the substance of popular power but with certain procedural forms and civil liberties. Indeed, by the new standards, the direct exercise of popular power might be perceived as 'anti-democratic'. It must be stressed that democracy in its original meaning always had class connotations - referring precisely to the dominance of the people as plebs. When Aristotle classified the main types of constitution then existing in Greece, he insisted on distinguishing between them not simply on the basis of number but also on the basis of class: 'The proper application of the term "democracy" is to a constitution in which the free-born and poor control the government - being at the same time a majority; and similarly the term "oligarchy" is properly applied to a constitution in which the rich and better-born control the government - being at the same time a minority.'36 His predecessor, Plato, was even more direct. Describing the class war between rich and poor which for him, as for Aristotle, was the source of civil strife, he explains the principle of democracy thus: And when the poor win, the result is a democracy.'37 In its train come wild excesses of freedom and equality ending in anarchy. The new meaning of democracy dissociated it from class connotations as rule by the 'poor. By defining democracy in formal terms not related to the substance of class power, it had the effect precisely of obscuring the very oppressions which the old meaning starkly revealed. Liberal democratic discourse has ever since served not only to delegitimate certain kinds of subordination, but on the contrary, also to mystify and legitimate the relations of class domination and exploitation, indeed to deny their very existence by redefining them as relations between free and equal individuals. What follows from all this is that the differences of meaning among various conceptions of democracy are not simply differences but also to a significant extent antagonisms. Or, to put it more precisely, although there are aspects of liberal democracy that have a general value, the two 'discourses' diverge irreconcilably at the point where they express the conflicting interests of two opposing classes. Liberal-democratic discourse - however progressive it may be in some respects, however much subordinate classes may have appropriated it and even helped to create it by means of their own struggles - serves the class interests of capital by denying the relations of subordination on which capitalist power rests, and by delimiting the sphere in which popular power may operate. The other meaning of democracy, which in its original form reflected the interests of the demos as against those of the propertied classes in Greece, in its modern socialist form expresses the interests of the working class against capital by restoring the meaning of popular power and extending it to the class less organization of social production.
   Class focus must come first – it is the root cause of all oppression.
   Kovel 07
   Joel Kovel. Prof. of Social Studies @ Bard, 2007. “The Enemy of Nature”, p. 140.

If, however, we ask the question of efficacy, that is, which split sets the others into motion, then priority would have to be given to class, for the plain reason that class relations entail the state as an instrument of enforcement and control, and it is the state that shapes and organizes the splits that appear in human ecosystems. Thus class is both logically and historically distinct from other forms of exclusion (hence we should not talk of "classism" to go along with "sexism" and "racism," and "species-ism"). This is, first of all, because class is an essentially man-made category, without root in even a mystified biology. We cannot, in other words, imagine a human world without gender distinctions - although we can imagine a world without domination by gender. But a world without class is eminently imaginable - indeed, such was the human world for the great majority of our species' time on earth, during all of which considerable fuss was made over gender. Historically, the difference arises because "class" signifies one side of a larger figure that includes a state apparatus whose conquests and regulations create races and shape gender relations. Thus there will be no true resolution of racism so long as class society stands, inasmuch as a racially oppressed society implies the activities of a class-defending state." Nor can gender inequality be legislated away so long as class society, with its state, demands the super-exploitation of woman's labor. Class society continually generates gender, racial, ethnic oppressions, and the like, which take on a life of their own, as well as profoundly affecting the concrete relations of class itself. It follows that class politics must be fought out in terms of all the active forms of social splitting. It is the management of these divisions that keeps state society functional. Thus though each person in a class society is reduced from what s/he can become, the varied reductions can be combined into the great stratified regimes of history - this one becoming a fierce warrior, that one a routine-loving clerk, another a submissive seamstress, and so on, until we reach today's personifications of capital and captains of industry. Yet no matter how functional a class society, the profundity of its ecological violence ensures a basic antagonism which drives history onward. History is the history of class society - because no matter how modified, so powerful a schism is bound to work itself through to the surface, provoke resistance (i.e. "class struggle"), and lead to the succession of powers. The relation of class can be mystified without end - only consider the extent to which religion exists for just this purpose, or watch a show glorifying the police on television - yet so long as we have any respect for human nature, we must recognize that so fundamental an antagonism as would steal the vital force of one person for the enrichment of another cannot be conjured away. The state is what steps forward to manage this conflict so that the ruling class gets its way without causing society to fly apart. It is the state's province to deal with class contradiction as it works itself out in numberless ways - to build its armies and use them in conquest (thereby reinforcing patriarchal and violent values), to codify property, to set forth laws to punish those who would transgress property relations, and to regulate contracts, and debts between individuals who play by the rules, to institutionalize police, courts and prisons to back up those laws, or to certify what is proper and right in the education of the young, or the marriage of the sexes, or establish the religions that justify God's ways to mere man, or to institutionalize science and education - in sum, to regulate and enforce the class structure, and to channel the flux of history in the direction of the elites. The state institutionalizes patriarchy as well as class, and hence maintains the societal ground for the gendered bifurcation of nature. Furthermore, inasmuch as the modern state is also a nation-state, it employs the attachment of a people to its land as a source of legitimation, and thus incorporates the history of nature into myths of wholeness and integrity. All aspects of the domination of nature are in fact woven into the fabric by means of which the state holds society together, from which it follows that to give coherence to this narrative and make a difference in it, we have to attend to the state and its ultimate dependence upon maintaining the class structure. All of this is to play a basic role in the unfolding of contemporary ecological struggles, as we discuss in the next section.
Voting negative refuses the affirmative in favor of Historical Materialist Pedagogy. Inequality is sutured by the unequal circulation of capital. Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary moment. Only starting from the structural antagonisms produced by wage labor can lead to transformative politics.
Ebert ‘9 Teresa, Associate Professor of English, State University of New York at Albany, THE TASK OF CULTURAL CRITIQUE, pp. 92-95
Unlike these rewritings, which reaffirm in a somewhat new language the system of wage labor with only minor internal reforms, materialist critique aims at ending class rule. It goes beyond description and explains the working of wage labor and the abstract structures that cannot be experienced directly but underwrite it. Materialist critique unpacks the philosophical and theoretical arguments that provide concepts for legitimizing wage labor and marks the textual representations that make it seem a normal part of life. In short, instead of focusing on micropractices (prison, gender, education, war, literature, and so on) in local and regional terms, materialist critique relates these practices to the macrostructures of capitalism and provides the knowledges necessary to put an end to exploitation. At the center of these knowledges is class critique. Pedagogy of critique is a class critique of social relations and the knowledges they produce . Its subject is wage labor, not the body without organs . An exemplary lesson in pedagogy of critique is provided by Marx, who concludes chapter 6 of Capital, " The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power, " by addressing the sphere within which wages are exchanged for labor power and the way this exchange is represented in the legal, philosophical, and representational apparatuses of capitalism as equal . He provides knowledge of the structures of wage labor and the theoretical discourses that sustain it. I have quoted this passage before and will refer to it again and again. Here is the full version: We now know how the value paid by the purchaser to the possessor of this peculiar commodity, labour-power, is determined. The use-value which the former gets in exchange, manifests itself only in the actual usufruct, in the consumption of the labour-power. The money-owner buys everything necessary for this purpose, such as raw material, in the market, and pays for it at its full value . The consumption of labourpower is at one and the same time the production of commodities and of surplus-value. The consumption of labour-power is completed, as is the case of every other commodity, outside the limits of the market or the sphere of circulation. Accompanied by Mr. Moneybags and by the possessor of labour-power, we therefore take leave for a time of this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in view of all men, and follow them both into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there stares us in the face "No admittance except on business . " Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital is produced. We shall at last force the secret of profit making. This sphere that we are deserting, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labour-power, are constrained only by their own free will. They contract as free agents, and the agreement they come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself. The only force that brings them together and puts them in relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interests of each. Each looks to himself only, and no one troubles himself about the rest, and just because they do so, do they all, in accordance with the pre-established harmony of things, or under the auspices of an all-shrewd providence, work together to their mutual advantage, for the common weal and in the interest of all. On leaving this sphere of simple circulation or of exchange of commodities, which furnishes the "Free-trader vulgaris" with his views and ideas, and with the standard by which he judges a society based on capital and wages, we think we can perceive a change in the physiognomy of our dramatis personae. He, who before was the money-owner, now strides in front as capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his labourer. The one with an air of importance, smirking, intent on business; the other, timid and holding back, like one who is bringing his own hide to market and has nothing to expect but-a hiding. Materialist critique is fundamental to a transformative feminist politics. Through critique the subject develops historical knowledges of the social totality: she acquires, in other words, an understanding of how the existing social institutions (motherhood, child care, love, paternity, taxation, family, . . . and so on ) are part of the social relations of production, how they are located in exploitative relations of difference, and how they can be changed. Materialist critique, in other words, is that knowledge practice that historically situates the conditions of possibility of what empirically exists under capitalist relations of class difference-particularly the division of labor-and, more important, points to what is suppressed by the empirically existing: what could be, instead of what actually is. Critique indicates, in other words, that what exists is not necessarily real or true but only the actuality under wage labor. The role of critique in pedagogy is exactly this: the production of historical know ledges and class consciousness of the social relations, knowledges that mark the transformability of existing social arrangements and the possibility of a different social organization--one that is free from necessity. Quite simply then, the pedagogy of critique is a mode of social knowing that inquires into what is not said, into the silences and the suppressed or the missing, in order to unconceal operations of economic and political power underlying the myriad concrete details and seemingly disparate events and representations of our lives . It shows how apparently disconnected zones of culture are in fact linked by the highly differentiated and dispersed operation of the systematic, abstract logic of the exploitation of the division of labor that informs all the practices of culture and society. It reveals how seemingly unique concrete experiences are in fact the common effect of social relations of production in wage labor capitalism. In sum, materialist critique both disrupts that which represents itself as natural and thus as inevitable and explains how it is materially produced. Critique, in other words, enables us to explain how social differences, specifically gender, race, sexuality, and class, have been systematically produced and continue to operate within regimes of exploitation-namely, the international division of labor in global capitalism-so we can change them. It is the means for producing politically effective and transformative knowledges . The claim of affective pedagogy is that it sets the subject free by making available to her or him the unruly force of pleasure and the unrestrained flows of desire, thereby turning her or him into an oppositional subject who cuts through established representations and codings to find access to a deterritorialized subjectivity. But the radicality of this self, at its most volatile moment, is the radicality of the class politics of the ruling class, a class for whom the question of poverty no longer exists. The only question left for it, as I have already indicated, is the question of liberty as the freedom of desire. Yet this is a liberty acquired at the expense of the poverty of others. The pedagogy of critique engages these issues by situating itself not in the space of the self, not in the space of desire, not in the space of liberation, but in the revolutionary site of collectivity, need, and emancipation. The core of the pedagogy of critique is that education is not simply for enlightening the individual to see through the arbitrariness of signification and the violence of established representations . It recognizes that it is a historical practice and, as such, it is always part of the larger forces of production and relations of production. It understands that all pedagogies are, in one way or the other, aimed at producing an efficient labor force. Unlike the pedagogy of desire, the pedagogy of critique does not simply teach that knowledge is another name for power, nor does it marginalize knowledge as a detour of desire. It acknowledges the fissures in social practices-including its own-but it demonstrates that they are historical and not textual or epistemological. It, therefore, does not retreat into mysticism by declaring the task of teaching to be the teaching of the impossible and, in doing so, legitimate the way things are. Instead, the pedagogy of critique is a worldly teaching of the worldly.
The need to liberate thinking from the hegemony of capitalism makes our alternative a pre-condition for political change.
Johnston interdisciplinary research fellow in psychoanalysis at Emory University, 2004
Adrian, Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society, December v9 i3 p259 page infotrac
The height of Zizek's philosophical traditionalism, his fidelity to certain lasting truths too precious to cast away in a postmodern frenzy, is his conviction that no worthwhile praxis can emerge prior to the careful and deliberate formulation of a correct conceptual framework. His references to the Lacanian notion of the Act (qua agent-less occurrence not brought about by a subject) are especially strange in light of the fact that he seemingly endorses the view that theory must precede practice, namely, that deliberative reflection is, in a way, primary. For Zizek, the foremost "practical" task to be accomplished today isn't some kind of rebellious acting out, which would, in the end, amount to nothing more than a series of impotent, incoherent outbursts. Instead, given the contemporary exhaustion of the socio-political imagination under the hegemony of liberal-democratic capitalism, he sees the liberation of thinking itself from its present constraints as the first crucial step that must be taken if anything is to be changed for the better. In a lecture given in Vienna in 2001, Zizek suggests that Marx's call to break out of the sterile closure of abstract intellectual ruminations through direct, concrete action (thesis eleven on Feuerbach--"The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it") must be inverted given the new prevailing conditions of late-capitalism. Nowadays, one must resist succumbing to the temptation to short-circuit thinking in favor of acting, since all such rushes to action are doomed; they either fail to disrupt capitalism or are ideologically co-opted by it.
Rejecting capitalism is the first step—a refusal to believe in the system can topple empires. Monbiot 04
George Monbiot, Professor of Philosophy at Bristol and Professor of Politics at Keele. Author, columnist, and political activist. “Manifesto for a New World Order.” p. 249
It costs nothing to agree that something should be done; indeed people like us have been accepting this proposition for decades, and waiting for someone else to act on it. Constitutional change will begin only when we reach the more dangerous conclusion that 'I must act'. There have been many occasions over the past few years on which we have won the argument and lost the war. The campaigners who have exposed the injustices of the current global system often succeed in generating a widespread demand for change, and just as often discover that this demand has no outlet. Our opinions, in these circumstances, count for nothing until we act upon them. Until we present a direct constitutional challenge to its survival, or, through such measures as a threatened conditional default, alter the circumstances in which it operates, those who maintain the dictatorship of vested interests will read what we write and listen to what we say without the slightest sense of danger. In 16-19, after recoiling from the satisfaction he felt upon completing one of his revolutionary pamphlets, Gerrard Winstanley noted 'my mind was not at rest, because nothing was acted, and ... words and writings were all nothing. and must die, for action is the life of all, and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing'. This manifesto, and all the publications like it, is worthless unless it provokes people to action. There are several reasons why we do not act. In most cases, the personal risk involved in the early stages of struggle outweighs the potential material benefit. Those who catalyse revolution are seldom the people who profit from it. In this struggle, most of us are not yet directly confronting armed force (though this may well change as we become effective), so the risks to which we expose ourselves and our families are, as yet, slighter than those encountered by other revolutionaries. Nor, of course, are the potential benefits of resistance as obvious, for those activists who live in the rich world, as the benefits of overthrowing Nazi occupation or deposing an indigenous tyrant, or breaking away from a formally constituted empire. While most of the people of the poor world have an acute need to change the circumstances which govern the way they live, the problems the protesters in rich nations contest belong to the second order of concern: we are not confronted by imminent starvation or death through waterborne disease, but by distant wars, economic instability, climate change and the exhaustion of resources; issues which seldom present immediate threats to our survival. But while the proposals in this manifesto offer little by way of material self-advancement to activists in the rich world, there is, in collective revolutionary action, something  which appears to be missing from almost every other enterprise in modern secular life. It arises, I think, from the , intensity of the relationships forged in a collective purpose  concentrated by adversity. It is the exultation which Christians call 'joy', but which, in the dry discourse of secular politics, has no recognized equivalent. It is the drug for which, once sampled, you will pay any price.  All those with agency are confronted by a choice. We can use that agency to secure comfortable existence. We can for ourselves a safe and  use our life, that one unrepeatable product of four billion years of serendipity and evolution, to earn a little more, to save a little more, to win the approval of our bosses and the envy of our neighbours. We can place upon our walls those tombstones which the living erect to themselves: the framed certificates of their acceptance into what Erich Fromm has called the 'necrophiliac' world of wealth and power. We can, quite rationally, subordinate our desire for liberty to our desire for security. Or we can use our agency to change the world, and, in changing it, to change ourselves. We will die and be forgotten with no less certainty than those who sought to fend off death by enhancing their material presence on the earth, but we will live before we die through the extremes of feeling which comfort would deny us. I do not presume to lecture those who have little agency -among them the majority who live in the poor world on how to manage their lives. Over the past five years in many of the countries of the poor world -though this is seldom reported in the West - people have tried to change their circumstances through explosive demonstrations of grief, anger and hope. I have sought, with this manifesto, simply to enhance that hope, by demonstrating that there may be viable alternatives to the systems that subjugate them. But for most of the people of the rich world, and the more prosperous people of the poor world, revolution offers the possibility of freedom from the constraints we impose upon ourselves. Freedom is the ability to act upon our beliefs. It expands, therefore, with the scope of the action we are prepared to contemplate. If we know that we will never act, we have no freedom: we will, for the rest of our lives, do as we are told. Almost everyone has some sense that other people should be treated as she would wish to be. Almost everyone, in other words, has a notion of justice, and for most people this notion, however formulated, sits somewhere close to the heart of their system of beliefs. If we do not act upon this sense of justice, we do not act upon one of our primary beliefs, and our freedom is restricted accordingly. To be truly free, in other words, we must be prepared to contemplate revolution. Another reason why we do not act is that, from the days of our birth, we are immersed in the political situation into which we are born, and as a result we cannot imagine our way through it; we cannot envisage that it will ever come to an end. This is why imagination is the first qualification of the revolutionary. A revolutionary is someone who recognizes the contingency of power. What sustains coercive power is not force of arms, or even capital, but belief. When people cease to believe -to believe in it as they would believe in a god, in its omnipotence, its unassailability and its validity -and when they act upon that belief, an empire can collapse, almost overnight. Those who possess power will surrender it only when they see that the costs -physical or psychological –of retaining it are higher than the costs of losing it. There have been many occasions on which rulers possessed the means of suppressing revolt -the necessary tanks and planes or cannons and cavalry divisions -but chose not to deploy them, because they perceived that the personal effort of retaining power outweighed the effort of relinquishing it. One of the surprises of history is the tendency of some of the most inflexible rulers suddenly to give up, for no evident material reason. They give up because they are tired, so tired that they can no longer sustain the burning purpose required to retain power. They are tired because they have had to struggle against the unbelief of their people, to reassert, through a supreme psychological effort, the validity of their power.