Tournament: Stanford | Round: 9 | Opponent: LM | Judge: Coyle
Neolib AC
Part One is Framing
The role of the judge is to vote for the debater who best resists neoliberalism.
We have reached a tipping point - legalistic solutions are no longer able to stop the symptoms of neoliberalism. Massive structural violence and extinction are inevitable without a fundamental rethinking of the current system. Farbod 15
( Faramarz Farbod , PhD Candidate @ Rutgers, Prof @ Moravian College, Monthly Review, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2015/farbod020615.html, 6-2)
Global capitalism is the 800-pound gorilla. The twin ecological and economic crises, militarism, the rise of the surveillance state, and a dysfunctional political system can all be traced to its normal operations. We need a transformative politics from below that can challenge the fundamentals of capitalism instead of today's politics that is content to treat its symptoms. The problems we face are linked to each other and to the way a capitalist society operates. We must make an effort to understand its real character. The fundamental question of our time is whether we can go beyond a system that is ravaging the Earth and secure a future with dignity for life and respect for the planet. What has capitalism done to us lately? The best science tells us that this is a do-or-die moment. We are now in the midst of the 6th mass extinction in the planetary history with 150 to 200 species going extinct every day, a pace 1,000 times greater than the 'natural' extinction rate.1 The Earth has been warming rapidly since the 1970s with the 10 warmest years on record all occurring since 1998.2 The planet has already warmed by 0.85 degree Celsius since the industrial revolution 150 years ago. An increase of 2° Celsius is the limit of what the planet can take before major catastrophic consequences. Limiting global warming to 2°C requires reducing global emissions by 6 per year. However, global carbon emissions from fossil fuels increased by about 1.5 times between 1990 and 2008.3 Capitalism has also led to explosive social inequalities. The global economic landscape is littered with rising concentration of wealth, debt, distress, and immiseration caused by the austerity-pushing elites. Take the US. The richest 20 persons have as much wealth as the bottom 150 million.4 Since 1973, the hourly wages of workers have lagged behind worker productivity rates by more than 800.5 It now takes the average family 47 years to make what a hedge fund manager makes in one hour.6 Just about a quarter of children under the age of 5 live in poverty.7 A majority of public school students are low-income.8 85 of workers feel stress on the job.9 Soon the only thing left of the American Dream will be a culture of hustling to survive. Take the global society. The world's billionaires control $7 trillion, a sum 77 times the debt owed by Greece to the European banks.10 The richest 80 possess more than the combined wealth of the bottom 50 of the global population (3.5 billion people).11 By 2016 the richest 1 will own a greater share of the global wealth than the rest of us combined.12 The top 200 global corporations wield twice the economic power of the bottom 80 of the global population.13 Instead of a global society capitalism is creating a global apartheid. What's the nature of the beast? Firstly, the "egotistical calculation" of commerce wins the day every time. Capital seeks maximum profitability as a matter of first priority. Evermore "accumulation of capital" is the system's bill of health; it is slowdowns or reversals that usher in crises and set off panic. Cancer-like hunger for endless growth is in the system's DNA and is what has set it on a tragic collision course with Nature, a finite category. Secondly, capitalism treats human labor as a cost. It therefore opposes labor capturing a fair share of the total economic value that it creates. Since labor stands for the majority and capital for a tiny minority, it follows that classism and class warfare are built into its DNA, which explains why the "middle class" is shrinking and its gains are never secure. Thirdly, private interests determine massive investments and make key decisions at the point of production guided by maximization of profits. That's why in the US the truck freight replaced the railroad freight, chemicals were used extensively in agriculture, public transport was gutted in favor of private cars, and big cars replaced small ones. What should political action aim for today? The political class has no good ideas about how to address the crises. One may even wonder whether it has a serious understanding of the system, or at least of ways to ameliorate its consequences. The range of solutions offered tends to be of a technical, legislative, or regulatory nature, promising at best temporary management of the deepening crises. The trajectory of the system, at any rate, precludes a return to its post-WWII regulatory phase. It's left to us as a society to think about what the real character of the system is, where we are going, and how we are going to deal with the trajectory of the system -- and act accordingly. The critical task ahead is to build a transformative politics capable of steering the system away from its destructive path. Given the system's DNA, such a politics from below must include efforts to challenge the system's fundamentals, namely, its private mode of decision-making about investments and about what and how to produce. Furthermore, it behooves us to heed the late environmentalist Barry Commoner's insistence on the efficacy of a strategy of prevention over a failed one of control or capture of pollutants. At a lecture in 1991, Commoner remarked: "Environmental pollution is an incurable disease; it can only be prevented"; and he proceeded to refer to "a law," namely: "if you don't put a pollutant in the environment it won't be there." What is nearly certain now is that without democratic control of wealth and social governance of the means of production, we will all be condemned to the labor of Sisyphus. Only we won't have to suffer for all eternity, as the degradation of life-enhancing natural and social systems will soon reach a point of no return.
Neoliberal violence is a constitutive feature, not an aberration, of modern liberal society and the root cause of dehumanization. Esposito and Finley 14
(Luigi, Prof Sociology @Barry, Laura, Asst. Prof Sociology and Criminology @Barry, Beyond Gun Control: Examining Neoliberalism, Pro-gun Politics and Gun Violence in the United States, Theory in Action, Vol. 7, No. 2, April )
While recent mass shootings in the U.S., particularly in Newtown, have captured the attention of the nation and the world, it is important to remember that gun violence is not anomalous but rather a normative feature of American life. According to data published by the Centers for Disease Control, guns were used in 11,422 homicides in 2011—that is over 30 people in the U.S. being murdered with a gun every day (CDC 2012). And while it is undeniable that gun violence is related to weak gun controls and a lack of mental health services, what is too often missing from these discussions is a critical understanding of the institutional and ideological forces that create a context in which so many people are willing and ready to kill or harm one another. As this paper has made clear, since the early 1980s, neoliberalism has been a central factor in creating such a context. By encouraging attitudes and behavioral tendencies related to extreme individualism, hypermasculinity, competition, and self-gain, neoliberalism has promoted what Charles Derber (2004, p. 27) has described as a “sociopathic society”— one that is “marked by a collapse of moral order that results from the breakdown of community and the failure of institutions responsible for inspiring moral vision and enforcing robust moral codes.” It is precisely this breakdown of community that has also led to declining levels of empathy (particularly among young people) in the United States for the past 30 years (Zaki, 2012). Indeed, by emphasizing de-regulation and the pursuit of profit/personal gain as the linchpin of freedom, and by normalizing and rewarding self-centered behavior, neoliberalism breeds a society of alienated persons who (perhaps outside the few individuals closest to them) see others as little more than objects. Under these conditions, people become largely “incapable of loving” (Choi and Semm, 2011). As famously described by Erich Fromm (2005, pp. 15-31), when human beings are reduced to “things,” they lose the basic connection and sense of caring that sustains human communities. Furthermore, because materialism is exalted under neoliberalism, people living in a neoliberal market society are encouraged—through a host of institutions including the advertising industry and the entertainment industry—to embrace a hyper-consumer culture that, to a large extent, associates personal success, happiness, and well-being with the purchasing of material possessions. Thus, for example, driving a certain type of car, living in a certain type of house, or wearing a certain brand of clothes are commonly seen as indicators of a person’s worth and status. As discussed by Pérez and Esposito (2010, p. 89) “these things are supposed to tell others, as well as ourselves, whether or not we are successful, respectable, and desirable.” Attaining material things, moreover, involves a constant struggle whereby persons must “outdo’ one another to get the things that they want or need. Others, therefore, are either an impediment to one’s self-serving ends or a means towards fulfilling those ends. The point, however, is that largely because of this cut-throat materialization of social life, anything outside the material realm—including human life itself—is devalued. As discussed by Henry Giroux (2004), outside the most powerful/privileged individuals, human life under neoliberalism becomes largely disposable. It is within this sort of social context that various forms of gun related homicides—including mass shootings—and other forms of violence become predictable outcomes. Another issue to consider that is too often ignored in mainstream discussions of gun violence is how this violence might have a lot to do with a sense of powerlessness that many people feel in a neoliberal market society.
Education is increasingly driven by neoliberal forces – student activism is key to retake the political sphere and democratize elite education against market-driven logic
Williams 15 Jo Williams (Lecturer, College of Education at Victoria University), "Remaking education from below: the Chilean student movement as public pedagogy," Australian Journal of Adult Learning, November 2015 AZ
More than ever the crisis of schooling represents, at large, the crisis of democracy itself and any attempt to understand the attack on public schooling and higher education cannot be separated from the wider assault on all forms of public life not driven by the logic of the market (Giroux, 2003:7) “Fin al lucro en educación, nuestros sueños no les pertenecen” (end profit making in education, nobody owns our dreams 1 ) (slogan of the Chilean student movement, inspired by the French student uprisings of May-June 1968) Over the past four decades, as the economic and ideological depravity of neoliberal policy and its market-driven logic (D. W. Hursh and Henderson, 2011) has been brought to bear on every aspect of education, the very concept of ‘public’ has been negated. Characteristics such as user-pays, competition, assaults on teachers, and mass standardised-testing and rankings, are among the features of a schooling, which is now very much seen as a private rather than public good (Giroux, 2003). The question of public education as a democratic force for the radical transformation of a violently unjust society seems rarely if ever asked, and a dangerous co-option and weakening of the language and practice of progressive pedagogy has occurred to the extent that notions of inclusion and success are increasingly limited to narrowly conceived individualist and competitive measures of market advantage. As Giroux notes “the forces of neo-liberalism dissolve public issues into utterly privatised and individualistic concerns (2004:62), and despite ongoing official rhetoric “the only form of citizenship increasingly being offered to young people is consumerism” (2003:7). Neoliberal education sees students and young people as passive consumers, the emphasis of schooling on learning how to be governed rather than how to govern (Giroux, 2003:7). In such a context the space for a public pedagogy, based on challenging the hegemony of neoliberal ideology and aligned with collective resistance, appears limited at best. And yet, every day people, teachers, students and communities do engage in political struggle, enacting pedagogies that seek to unveil rather than continue to mask the political structures and organisation that ensures power remains in the hands of the few, and at the service of the few, at the expense of the rest of us. Giroux characterises public pedagogies as defined by hope, struggle and a politicisation of the education process. He argues for …a politics of resistance that extends beyond the classroom as part of a broader struggle to challenge those forces of neo-liberalism that currently wage war against all collective structures capable of defending vital social institutions as a public good (Giroux, 2003:14). Central to Giroux’s argument is the need for critical educators to look to, value, and engage in and with social movements as they emerge and develop as sites of resistance. To …take sides, speak out, and engage in the hard work of debunking corporate culture’s assault on teaching and learning, orient their teaching for social change, connect learning to public life and link knowledge to the operations of power (Giroux, 2004:77). He argues that “progressive education in an age of rampant neoliberalism requires an expanded notion of the public, pedagogy, solidarity, and democratic struggle” (Giroux, 2003:13), and that moreover, educators need to work against a “politics of certainty” and instead develop and engage in pedagogical practice that problematises the world and fosters a sense of collective resistance and hope (2003:14). A neoliberal vision of the ‘good citizen’ and ‘good student’ presumes passivity, acceptance of the status quo and an individualistic disposition. Critical pedagogues must seek out and embrace opportunities to support and celebrate collective political action, not only because it develops a sense of social and political agency but also because it constitutes a powerful basis for authentic learning and active and critical citizenship in an unjust world (Freire, 1970). The Chilean student movement stands as one such example of challenging and inspiring counter-practice and a reclaiming of pedagogy as political and public. For ten years students have filled Chile’s streets, occupied their schools and universities, and organised conferences, public Remaking education from below: the Chilean student movement as public pedagogy 499 meetings, political stunts, creative actions and protests. Students and young people have been at the centre of the largest and most sustained political action seen in Chile since the democratic movement of the 80s, which eventually forced out the Pinochet dictatorship. Despite global trends in the opposite direction, the Chilean students have fundamentally influenced a nationwide education reform program constituting significant changes to the existing system which has been described as an extreme example of market-driven policy (Valenzuela, Bellei, and Ríos, 2014:220). Most importantly, they have forced and led a nationwide dialogue on the question of education and social justice in Chile and an interrogation of the current, grossly inequitable and elitist model (Falabella, 2008). This article begins by reviewing the experiences of the Chilean student movement to date and offering a brief explanation of the historical development of the education system it seeks to dismantle. It then considers the movement as an example of public pedagogies, concluding with a discussion of how it might inform notions of radical educational practice and a return of the student and pedagogue as authentic and critical subjects.
Neoliberalism is violent and uses normativity as a shield to hide their lies of oppression. Refuse that ethical criteria and embrace higher education’s true calling.
Giroux 13 (Henry, American scholar and cultural critic. One of the founding theorists of critical pedagogy in the United States, he is best known for his pioneering work in public pedagogy, “Public Intellectuals Against the Neoliberal University,” 29 October 2013, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/19654-public-intellectuals-against-the-neoliberal-university)//ghs-VA
Increasingly, as universities are shaped by an audit culture, the call to be objective and impartial, whatever one's intentions, can easily echo what George Orwell called the official truth or the establishment point of view. Lacking a self-consciously democratic political focus, teachers are often reduced, or reduce themselves, to the role of a technician or functionary engaged in formalistic rituals, unconcerned with the disturbing and urgent problems that confront the larger society or the consequences of one's pedagogical practices and research undertakings. Hiding behind appeals to balance and objectivity, too many scholars refuse to recognize that being committed to something does not cancel out what C. Wright Mills once called hard thinking. Teaching needs to be rigorous, self-reflective, and committed not to the dead zone of instrumental rationality but to the practice of freedom, to a critical sensibility capable of advancing the parameters of knowledge, addressing crucial social issues, and connecting private troubles and public issues. In opposition to the instrumental model of teaching, with its conceit of political neutrality and its fetishization of measurement, I argue that academics should combine the mutually interdependent roles of critical educator and active citizen. This requires finding ways to connect the practice of classroom teaching with important social problems and the operation of power in the larger society while providing the conditions for students to view themselves as critical agents capable of making those who exercise authority and power answerable for their actions. Higher education cannot be decoupled from what Jacques Derrida calls a democracy to come, that is, a democracy that must always "be open to the possibility of being contested, of contesting itself, of criticizing and indefinitely improving itself."33 Within this project of possibility and impossibility, critical pedagogy must be understood as a deliberately informed and purposeful political and moral practice, as opposed to one that is either doctrinaire, instrumentalized or both. Moreover, a critical pedagogy should also gain part of its momentum in higher education among students who will go back to the schools, churches, synagogues and workplaces to produce new ideas, concepts and critical ways of understanding the world in which young people and adults live. This is a notion of intellectual practice and responsibility that refuses the professional neutrality and privileged isolation of the academy. It also affirms a broader vision of learning that links knowledge to the power of self-definition and to the capacities of students to expand the scope of democratic freedoms, particularly those that address the crisis of education, politics, and the social as part and parcel of the crisis of democracy itself. In order for critical pedagogy, dialogue and thought to have real effects, they must advocate that all citizens, old and young, are equally entitled, if not equally empowered, to shape the society in which they live. This is a commitment we heard articulated by the brave students who fought tuition hikes and the destruction of civil liberties and social provisions in Quebec and to a lesser degree in the Occupy Wall Street movement. If educators are to function as public intellectuals, they need to listen to young people who are producing a new language in order to talk about inequality and power relations, attempting to create alternative democratic public spaces, rethinking the very nature of politics, and asking serious questions about what democracy is and why it no longer exists in many neoliberal societies. These young people who are protesting the 1 recognize that they have been written out of the discourses of justice, equality and democracy and are not only resisting how neoliberalism has made them expendable, they are arguing for a collective future very different from the one that is on display in the current political and economic systems in which they feel trapped. These brave youth are insisting that the relationship between knowledge and power can be emancipatory, that their histories and experiences matter, and that what they say and do counts in their struggle to unlearn dominating privileges, productively reconstruct their relations with others, and transform, when necessary, the world around them.
Neoliberalism rips apart communal bonds to maintain the illusion that structural inequalities are individual problems – the impact is systemic victim-blaming, poverty, and violence.
Smith 12 (Candace, author for Societpages, cites Bruno Amable, Associate Professor of Economics at Paris School of Economics) “Neoliberalism and Individualism: Ego Leads to Interpersonal Violence?” Sociology Lens is the associated site for Sociology Compass, Wiley-Blackwell’s review journal on all fields sociological AT
There appears to be a link between neoliberalism, individualism, and violence. In reference to the association between neoliberalism and individualism, consider neoliberalism’s insistence that we do not need society since we are all solely responsible for our personal well-being (Peters 2001; Brown 2003). From a criminological standpoint, it is not hard to understand how this focus on the individual can lead to violence. According to Hirschi’s (1969) social control theory, for instance, broken or weak social bonds free a person to engage in deviancy. Since, according to this theory, individuals are naturally self-interested, they can use the opportunity of individualization to overcome the restraining powers of society. Bearing in mind neoliberalism’s tendency to value the individual over society, it could be argued that this ideology is hazardous as it acts to tear apart important social bonds and to thereby contribute to the occurrence of ego-driven crimes, including violent interpersonal crimes. Such a thought suggests that as neoliberalism becomes more prominent in a country, it can be expected that individualism and, as a result, interpersonal violence within that country will increase. When it comes to individualization, this idea is one of the fundamental aspects of neoliberalism. In fact, Bauman (2000:34) argues that in neoliberal states “individualization is a fate, not a choice.” As Amable (2011) explains, neoliberals have realized that in order for their ideology to be successful, a state’s populace must internalize the belief that individuals are only to be rewarded based on their personal effort. With such an ego-driven focus, Scharff (2011) explains that the process of individualization engenders a climate where structural inequalities are converted into individual problems.
Part Two is the Method
The Left’s resistance to free speech is exactly what neoliberal elites want: a divided working class with internal strife and intelligible goals that can be easily shut down. The 1AC is a criticism of the liberal left’s approach to free speech in favor of a method of historical materialism. Halberstam 16
Jack Halberstam, You Are Triggering me! The Neo-Liberal Rhetoric of Harm, Danger and Trauma, Bully Bloggers, 5/7/16.
What does it mean when younger people who are benefitting from several generations now of queer social activism by people in their 40s and 50s (who in their childhoods had no recourse to anti-bullying campaigns or social services or multiple representations of other queer people building lives) feel abused, traumatized, abandoned, misrecognized, beaten, bashed and damaged? These younger folks, with their gay-straight alliances, their supportive parents and their new right to marry regularly issue calls for “safe space.” However, as Christina Hanhardt’s Lambda Literary award winning book, Safe Space: Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence, shows, the safe space agenda has worked in tandem with urban initiatives to increase the policing of poor neighborhoods and the gentrification of others. Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence traces the development of LGBT politics in the US from 1965-2005 and explains how LGBT activism was transformed from a multi-racial coalitional grassroots movement with strong ties to anti-poverty groups and anti-racism organizations to a mainstream, anti-violence movement with aspirations for state recognition. And, as LGBT communities make “safety” into a top priority (and that during an era of militaristic investment in security regimes) and ground their quest for safety in competitive narratives about trauma, the fight against aggressive new forms of exploitation, global capitalism and corrupt political systems falls by the way side. Is this the way the world ends? When groups that share common cause, utopian dreams and a joined mission find fault with each other instead of tearing down the banks and the bankers, the politicians and the parliaments, the university presidents and the CEOs? Instead of realizing, as Moten and Hearny put it in The Undercommons, that “we owe each other everything,” we enact punishments on one another and stalk away from projects that should unite us, and huddle in small groups feeling erotically bonded through our self-righteousness. I want to call for a time of accountability and specificity: not all LGBT youth are suicidal, not all LGBT people are subject to violence and bullying, and indeed class and race remain much more vital factors in accounting for vulnerability to violence, police brutality, social baiting and reduced access to education and career opportunities. Let’s call an end to the finger snapping moralism, let’s question contemporary desires for immediately consumable messages of progress, development and access; let’s all take a hard long look at the privileges that often prop up public performances of grief and outrage; let’s acknowledge that being queer no longer automatically means being brutalized and let’s argue for much more situated claims to marginalization, trauma and violence. Let’s not fiddle while Rome (or Paris) burns, trigger while the water rises, weep while trash piles up; let’s recognize these internal wars for the distraction they have become. Once upon a time, the appellation “queer” named an opposition to identity politics, a commitment to coalition, a vision of alternative worlds. Now it has become a weak umbrella term for a confederation of identitarian concerns. It is time to move on, to confuse the enemy, to become illegible, invisible, anonymous (see Preciado’s Bully Bloggers post on anonymity in relation to the Zapatistas). In the words of José Muñoz, “we have never been queer.” In the words of a great knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, “we are now no longer the Knights who say Ni, we are now the Knights who say “Ekki-ekki-ekki-ekki-PTANG. Zoom-Boing, z’nourrwringmm.”
Our socialist criticism of the anti free-speech left is key to broader socialist pedagogy and sparking radical resistance to capitalism – multiple warrants. Worker’s Liberty 15
Worker’s Liberty, Universities, capitalism and free speech, 3/18/15, http://www.workersliberty.org/node/24864.
For centuries, university campuses have been, relatively speaking, a haven within capitalist society for free debate and criticism. A high point, for much of the 20th century, was the right which universities in Latin America won to keep the police off their campuses and have university officials elected by staff and students. That began with the University Reform Movement in Córdoba, in northern Argentina, which opposed a focus on learning by rote, inadequate libraries, poor instruction, and restrictive admission criteria, and spread across the subcontinent. The student radicalism which spread across much of the world in 1968 started, in 1964-5, with a Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley. The central avenues through campus had become a lively scene, with street stalls and political gatherings; the university authorities tried to clamp down, and were eventually defeated. Today free debate and criticism on campus is under threat from several angles. The government wants universities to ban speakers from their campuses who would be quite legal elsewhere. University administrations ban meetings, even without government prompting, when they think they might cause trouble or uproar. Campus space is increasingly commercialised and franchised-out, and university bosses try to stop student postering, leafleting, and campaigning affecting the “commercial space”. Student unions are increasingly run by people who think that a spell as student union president will look good on their CV when they apply for a managerial job. University lecturers’ careers depend on how many articles they get published in “leading” (i.e., in almost all fields, orthodox) journals. Over generations of academic turnover, this produces university departments filled with staff who have been selected by capacity to get wordage into those journals, and who in turn will go on to run those journals, oblivious to critiques or alternative approaches. This narrows the range of teaching and debate on courses. Finally, and paradoxically, the shutting-down of debate is sometimes promoted by student activists who consider themselves left-wing. A chief example is the bans on the Socialist Workers Party imposed by Goldsmiths and Edinburgh University student unions, and attempted elsewhere.
Student protests oppose neoliberalism in higher education, translating theory into praxis
Delgado and Ross 16 Sandra Delgado (doctoral student in curriculum studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada) and E. Wayne Ross (Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada), "Students in Revolt: The Pedagogical Potential of Student Collective Action in the Age of the Corporate University" 2016 (published on Academia.edu) AZ
As students’ collective actions keep gaining more political relevance, student and university movements also establish themselves as spaces of counter-hegemony (Sotiris, 2014). Students are constantly opening new possibilities to displace and resist the commodification of education offered by mainstream educational institutions. As Sotiris (2014) convincingly argues, movements within the university have not only the potential to subvert educational reforms, but in addition, they have become “strategic nodes” for the transformation of the processes and practices in higher education, and most importantly for the constant re-imagination and the recreation of “new forms of subaltern counter-hegemony” (p. 1). The strategic importance of university and college based moments lays precisely in the role that higher education plays in contemporary societies, namely their role in “the development of new technologies, new forms of production and for the articulation of discourses and theories on contemporary issues and their role in the reproduction of state and business personnel.” (p.8) Universities and colleges therefore, have a crucial contribution in “the development of class strategies (both dominant and subaltern), in the production of subjectivities, (and) in the transformation of collective practices” (p.8) The main objective of this paper is to examine how contemporary student movements are disrupting, opposing and displacing entrenched oppressive and dehumanizing reforms, practices and frames in today’s corporate academia. This work is divided in four sections. The first is an introduction to student movements and an overview of how student political action has been approached and researched. The second and third sections take a closer look at the repertoires of contention used by contemporary student movements and propose a framework based on radical praxis that allows us to better understand the pedagogical potential of student disruptive action. The last section contains a series of examples of students’ repertoires or tactics of contention that exemplifies the pedagogical potential of student social and political action. An Overview of Student Movements Generally speaking, students are well positioned as political actors. They have been actively involved in the politics of education since the beginnings of the university, but more broadly, students have played a significant role in defining social, cultural and political environments around the world (Altbach, 1966; Boren, 2001). The contributions and influences of students and student movements to revolutionary efforts and political movements beyond the university context are undeniable. One example is the role that students have played in the leadership and membership of the political left (e.g. students’ role in the Movimiento 26 de Julio - M-26-7 in Cuba during the 50’s and in the formation of The New Left in the United States, among others). Similarly, several political and social movements have either established alliances with student organizations or created their own chapters on campuses to recruit new members, mobilize their agendas in education and foster earlier student’s involvement in politics2 (Altbach, 1966; Lipset, 1969). Students are often considered to be “catalysts” of political and social action or “barometers” of the social unrest and political tension accumulated in society (Barker, 2008). Throughout history student movements have had a diverse and sometimes contradictory range of political commitments. Usually, student organizations and movements find grounding and inspiration in Anarchism and Marxism, however it is also common to see movements leaning towards liberal and conservative approaches. Hence, student political action has not always been aligned with social movements or organizations from the political left. In various moments in history students have joined or been linked to rightist movements, reactionary organizations and conservative parties (Altbach, 1966; Barker, 2008). Students, unlike workers, come from different social classes and seemly different cultural backgrounds. As a particularly diverse social group, students are distinguished for being heterogeneous and pluralists in their values, interests and commitments (Boren, 2001). Such diversity has been a constant challenge for maintaining unity, which has been particularly problematic in cases of national or transnational student organizations (Prusinowska, Kowzan, and Zielińska, 2012; Somma, 2012). To clarify, social classes are defined by the specific relationship that people have with the means of production. In the case of students, they are not a social class by themselves, but a social layer or social group that is identifiable by their common function in society (Stedman, 1969). The main or central aspect that unites student is the transitory social condition of being a student. In other words, students are a social group who have a common function, role in society or social objective, which is “to study” something (Lewis, 2013; Simons and Masschelein, 2009). Student movements can be understood as a form of social movement (LuesherMamashela, 2015). They have an internal organization that varies from traditionally hierarchical structures, organizational schemes based on representative democracy with charismatic leadership, to horizontal forms of decision-making (Altbach, 1966; Lipset, 1969). As many other movements, student movements have standing claims, organize different type of actions, tactics or repertoires of contention, 3 and they advocate for political, social or/and educational agendas, programs or pleas.
Our method defies neoclassical assumptions and introduces alternate economic perspectives to liberate marginalized groups. Worker’s Liberty 15-solvency
Worker’s Liberty, Universities, capitalism and free speech, 3/18/15, http://www.workersliberty.org/node/24864.
The process of narrowing This excerpt is taken from a report published in 2014 by critical economics students at Manchester University, and sums up how thought has been narrowed within the lecture halls and seminar rooms. "As little as 15 years ago the Economics Department at Manchester had a considerably wider range of professors who self-identified with different economic paradigms and had very different research agendas. This led to a far more eclectic undergraduate syllabus with modules such as comparative economic theory, comparative economic systems and alternative perspectives on developing economies being available for students to study. The Economics Department has radically changed in composition in the last 15 years and it is these changes that are the root cause of many of the problems we outlined. The Research Excellence Framework (REF) and academic journals have the power to define what is and isn’t economics and within that, what is good economics and bad economics. REF determines how much research funding each university gets and is a label of research prowess. Every four years a panel of leading academic economists grade departments on the basis of individual publications whose academic quality is inferred from the status and ranking of economics journals. The problem is that there are no recognisably heterodox economists on this panel and that the grading is done behind closed doors with only departmental ratings published. The outcome of the REF rating process is to elevate the neoclassical framework to the standard by which all economics research is judged. Departments and individual lecturers are forced to respond to the definitions of economics set by these bodies... Academic economists must work with neoclassical assumptions and methodology if they wish to secure academic tenure and advance within the leading economics departments... As nonmainstream Manchester professors have retired from expanding departments they have been replaced by young recruits who represent a narrow range of mainstream economists who had been published, or were more likely to be published, in the mainstream American journals (Big 5: AER, Chicago etc). This homogeneity puts the Department in the position of not having the capability to teach other schools of thought or history of economic thought. This narrowing process reinforces itself; now many young lecturers and teaching assistants aren’t able to facilitate critical discussions including alternative economic perspectives in tutorials because their economics education has lacked those elements. This monoculture also makes it easier for professors to believe that their way is the only way to do economics or at least that it is the only valid way, which in turn justifies its status as the only kind of economics taught at our university... Non-mainstream economists at Manchester have been stripped of their titles as economists and pushed out to peripheral positions in development studies and suchlike while various kinds of heterodox political economy have taken root in the business school, politics, geography and history departments." UCL votes for free speech By Omar Raii In mid-March University College London students’ union students voted (by a close margin) to support freedom of speech and organisation on campus. The arguments against came not from the right, but from self-defined leftists who argued that it may be necessary from time to time to stop speakers with objectionable views (for example misogynists, supporters of UKIP etc.) from coming on to campus, in order to protect oppressed groups. We replied that freedom of speech is especially important for oppressed groups, who are the most vulnerable when it comes to government censorship. Already the state and university managements are determined to clamp down on any debate that may lead to rowdiness or controversy. Student unions should not add to the censorious atmosphere by banning speakers or societies. The motion noted that “there has been a rise in instances of meetings, debates and publications being suppressed on university campuses, whether by campus authorities, the Home Office/police or sometimes by student unions themselves.... “That for freedom of expression to be genuinely established on campus, it must extend to those whose views may be regarded as objectionable.... “That student unions should generally champion free speech and organisation, and advocate their curtailment only in extreme circumstances, such as when speakers incite violence. “That fascist organising and presence on campus must be opposed and stopped, not because it leads to offensive speech, but because it contributes to violent, organised attacks on students, especially oppressed groups...”
The 1AC’s method works on and against power to break down the system – it allows for disidentification with the institutions of power that solves structural problems. Muñoz 99
José Esteban Munoz Published: 1999 Disidentifications: Queers Of Color And The Performance Of Politics (Cultural Studies of the Americas)
The theory of disidentification that I am offering is meant to contribute to an understanding of the ways in which queers of color identify with ethnos or queerness despite the phobic charges in both fields. The French linguist Michael Pecheux extrapolated a theory of disidentification from Marxist theorist Louis Althusser’s influential theory of subject formation and interpellation. Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” was among the first articulations of the role of ideology in theorizing subject formation. For althusser, ideology is an inescapable realm in which subjects are called into being or “hailed” a process he calls interpellation. Ideology is the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence. The location of ideology is always within an apparatus and its practice or practices, such as the state apparatus. Pecheux built on this theory by describing the three modes in which a subject is constructed by ideological practices. In this schema, the first mode is understood as “identification” where a “good Subject” chooses the path of identification with discursive and ideological forms. “Bad Subjects” resist and attempt to reject the images and identificatory sites offered by dominant ideology and proceed to rebel, to “counteridentify” and turn against this symbolic system. The danger that Pecheux sees in such an operation would be the counterdetermination that such a system installs, a structure that validates the dominant ideology by reinforcing its dominance through the controlled symmetry of “counterdetermination.” Disidentification is the third mode of dealing with dominant ideology, one that neither opts to assimilate within such a structure nor strictly opposes it; rather, disidentification is a strategy that works on and against dominant ideology. Instead of buckling under the pressures of dominant ideology (identification, assimilation) or attempting to break free of its inescapable sphere (counteridentification, utopianism), this “working on and against” is a strategy that tries to transform a cultural logic from within, always laboring to enact permanent structural change while at the same time valuing the importance of local or everyday struggles of resistance. Judith Butler gestures towards the uses of disidentifcation when discussing the failure of identification. She parries with Slavoj Zizek, who understands disidentification as a break down of political possibility, a “fictionalization to the point of political immobilization.” She counters Zizek by asking the following question of his formulations: “What are the possibilities of politicizing disidentification, this experience of misrecognition, this uneasy sense of standing under a sign to which one does and does not belong?” Butler answers: “it may be that the affirmation of that slippage, that the failure of identification, is itself the point of departure for a more democratizing affirmation of internal difference.” Both Butler’s and Pecheux’s accounts of disidentification put forward an understanding of identification as never being as seamless or unilateral as the Freudian account would suggest. Both theories construct the subject as inside ideology. Their models permit one to examine theories of a subject who is neither the “Good Subject,” who has an easy or magical identification with dominant culture, or the “Bad Subject,” who imagines herself outside of ideology. Instead, they pave the way to an understanding of an “disidentificatory subject” who tactically and simultaneously works on, which, and against a cultural form. As a practice, disidentification does not dispel those ideological contradictory elements; rather, like a melancholic subject holding on to a lost object, a disidentifying subject works to hold on to this object and invest it with new life. Sedwick, in her work on the affect, shame, and its role in queer performativity, has explained: The forms taken by shame are not distinct “toxic” parts of a group or individual identity that can be excised; they are instead integral to and residual in the process in which identity is formed. They are available for the work of metamorphosis, reframing, refiguration, transfiguration, affective and symbolic loading and deformation; but unavailable for effecting the work of purgation and deontological closure. To disidentify is to read oneself and one’s own life narrative in a moment, object, or subject that is not culturally coded to “connect” with the disidentifying subject. It is not to pick and choose what one takes out of an identification. It is not to willfully evacuate the politically dubious or shameful components within an identifactory locus. Rather, it is the reworking of those energies that do not elide that “harmful” or contradictory components of any identity. It is an acceptance of the necessary interjection that has occurred in such situations. Disidentification is, to some degree, an argument with psychoanalytic orthodoxies within cultural studies. It does not represent a wholesale rejection of psychoanalysis. Indeed, one’s own relationship with psychoanalysis can be disidentifactory. Rather than reject psychoanalytic accounts of identification, the next section engages work on identification and desire being done in the psychoanalytic wing of queer theory.
Reshaping the way we teach young people is key.
Giroux 11: Henry, Professor and founding theorist of critical pedagogy and he is best known for his pioneering work in public pedagogy, cultural studies, youth studies, higher education, media studies, and critical theory. In 2002 Routledge named Giroux as one of the top fifty educational thinkers of the modern period. “Left Behind? American Youth and the Global Fight for Democracy” Truthout. February 28, 2011.
At the heart of such public spaces is a formative culture that creates citizens who are critical thinkers capable of "putting existing institutions into question so that democracy again becomes society's movement ... that is to say, a new type of regime in the full sense of the term."(43) Young people need to be educated both as a condition of autonomy and for the sustainability of democratization as an ongoing movement. Not only does a substantive democracy demand citizens capable of self- and social criticism, but it also, once again, requires a critical formative culture in which people are provided with the knowledge and skills to be able to participate in such a society. What we see in the struggle for educational reforms in Europe and the Middle East is a larger struggle for the economic, political and social conditions that give meaning and substance to what it means to make democracy possible. When we see 15 year olds battle the established oppressive orders in the streets of Paris, Cairo, London and Athens for a more just society, they offer a glimpse of what it means for youth to enter "modernist narratives as trouble."(44) But trouble here exceeds dominant society's eagerness to view them as a pathology, as monsters and a drain on the market-driven order. Instead, trouble speaks to something more suggestive of a "productive unsettling of dominant epistemic regimes under the heat of desire, frustration or anger."(45) The expectations that frame market-driven societies are losing their grip on young people, who can no longer be completely seduced or controlled by the tawdry promises and failed returns of corporate dominated and authoritarian regimes.
The 1AC’s emancipatory critique is a pre requisite to policy action – alternatives cause serial policy failure – without pure critique neoliberal solutions reproduce the same bad results. Dillon 2k
Assumption-neoclassicla ecnomoics are the correct way
Dillon and Reid 2K — (Michael, Professor of Politics – University of Lancaster, and Julian, Lecturer in International Relations – King’s College, “Global Governance, Liberal Peace, and Complex Emergency”, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, January / March, 25(1))
More specifically, where there is a policy problematic there is expertise, and where there is expertise there, too, a policy problematic will emerge. Such problematics are detailed and elaborated in terms of discrete forms of knowledge as well as interlocking policy domains. Policy domains reify the problematization of life in certain ways by turning these epistemically and politically contestable orderings of life into "problems" that require the continuous attention of policy science and the continuous resolutions of policymakers. Policy "actors" develop and compete on the basis of the expertise that grows up around such problems or clusters of problems and their client populations. Here, too, we may also discover what might be called "epistemic entrepreneurs." Albeit the market for discourse is prescribed and policed in ways that Foucault indicated, bidding to formulate novel problematizations they seek to "sell" these, or otherwise have them officially adopted. In principle, there is no limit to the ways in which the management of population may be problematized. All aspects of human conduct, any encounter with life, is problematizable. Any problematization is capable of becoming a policy problem. Governmentality thereby creates a market for policy, for science and for policy science, in which problematizations go looking for policy sponsors while policy sponsors fiercely compete on behalf of their favored problematizations. Reproblematization of problems is constrained by the institutional and ideological investments surrounding accepted "problems," and by the sheer difficulty of challenging the inescapable ontological and epistemological assumptions that go into their very formation. There is nothing so fiercely contested as an epistemological or ontological assumption. And there is nothing so fiercely ridiculed as the suggestion that the real problem with problematizations exists precisely at the level of such assumptions. Such "paralysis of analysis" is precisely what policymakers seek to avoid since they are compelled constantly to respond to circumstances over which they ordinarily have in fact both more and less control than they proclaim. What they do not have is precisely the control that they want. Yet serial policy failure--the fate and the fuel of all policy--compels them into a continuous search for the new analysis that will extract them from the aporias in which they constantly find themselves enmeshed. 35 Serial policy failure is no simple shortcoming that science and policy--and policy science--will ultimately overcome. Serial policy failure is rooted in the ontological and epistemological assumptions that fashion the ways in which global governance encounters and problematizes life as a process of emergence through fitness landscapes that constantly adaptive and changing ensembles have continuously to negotiate. As a particular kind of intervention into life, global governance promotes the very changes and unintended outcomes that it then serially reproblematizes in terms of policy failure. Thus, global liberal governance is not a linear problem-solving process committed to the resolution of objective policy problems simply by bringing better information and knowledge to bear upon them. A nonlinear economy of power/knowledge, it deliberately installs socially specific and radically inequitable distributions of wealth, opportunity, and mortal danger both locally and globally through the very detailed ways in which life is variously (policy) problematized by it.
Part Three is the Underview
Evaluate T through reasonability with a brightline of structural abuse.
- Brightline solves judge intervention- I have a clear metric to determine abuse and it’s non arbitrary
2. Competing interps leads to a race to the bottom- debaters can always nitpick some minor flaw with an interpretation or suggest a marginal advantage even in the absence of actual abuse. Outweighs:
A. Ensures theory functions as check on abuse- my brightline is key to making sure theory is only run in face of insurmountable abuse, instead of just a strategic tool to win rounds
Academic discourse constructs rules of argumentation that can exclude voices. Prosise 96
T-having a “best” way to engage debate, which excludes voices
(Prosise, Theodore O Masters Candidate, School of Communications, University of San Diego; Miller, Greg R Assistant Professor, School of Communications, San Diego State University; Mills, Jordan P. Masters Candidate, School of Communications, University of San Diego “Argument fields as arenas of discursive struggle” Argumentation and Advocacy; Winter 1996)
The importance of the discursive struggles over the standards that distinguish legitimate and illegitimate forms of expression has also eluded thorough analysis. Critical theorists must recognize the practical discursive struggles of social agents.26 The actual symbolic practices of agents must be understood if we are to analyze how logical types become invested with authority. The establishment of authority may preclude participation in the field and marginalize those who could or should have a say. Field theory is better conceptualized by considering argument fields as social arenas of struggle, accounting for the key elements and factors that make fields dynamic. Toulmin, while recognizing the role of argumentative conflict in the establishment of authority, originally employed an evolutionary model in his explanation of the development of disciplinary fields. In Human Understanding, he argues that forums of competition allow the best warrants of a field to become accepted. The dominant warrants, he believes, did not develop from an "arbitrary authority or contest for power."27 His evolutionary perspective embraces the metaphor of change as progress. Condensing this, Robert Rowland explains, "The theories which best meet a discipline's needs will survive."28 The work of Thomas Kuhn, however, amply demonstrates the limits of such an evolutionary perspective of epistemic development.29 And although Toulmin now would not embrace the container model of knowledge accumulation, the original discussion of fields lacked an emphasis on the dynamics of social struggles for symbolic legitimacy, which may explain the current limitations in understanding how authority is produced and articulated in social space.The shared purposes of social agents also has been offered as a useful descriptor of argument fields. Rowland argues a conception of fields based on the shared purpose of the agents operating within the field.30 Zarefsky summarizes this notion, indicating that "two arguers are in the same field if they share a common purpose, and . . . the arguments they produce will differ in important ways from arguments which derive from a different purpose."31 In short, participants argue over what constitute the "best way" to engage in activities within the area of inquiry.:;2 This conception of fields begins to define a social arena based on an agent's participation in a struggle over the instrumental means and terminal states of a social field. It should be recognized that participants also share in the struggle for scarce resources-be they economic, cultural, political or symbolic.These agents argue over the legitimate perspective on what should constitute a claim to know, so they share in a struggle for epistemic legitimacy. The resolution of this struggle determines what types of argumentative proof are legitimated in the field. Extending from Toulmin's work, many scholars recognize that the symbolic negotiation of authority within social fields is ongoing. Such negotiation requires a discursive struggle in which arguments are presented and then accepted or rejected by the community of participants. 33 Charles Kneupper notes that "social fields are strongly influenced by rhetorical practice in both their continuation and change."34 Furthermore, James Klumpp suggests that "when a community encounters an experience there are normally multiple understandings of it. Through communication the community works out its choice of ways to respond (that is, its definition of the situation) and then sanctions ... appropriate action."35 Social actors categorize events in order to respond to those events in appropriate ways. This categorization is based, primarily, on the language practices of the social field. 36 For example, welfare policies frame cultural myths of an "underclass" and may exacerbate the problems of social members of lower economic status. The connotations associated with the term "underclass," such as chronic laziness, stigmatize members of the group. The policies that are formulated, therefore, are based on the perceived "character" of the members of the underclass, rather than the larger social, historical, and economic causes of their economic status. The implication is that action is often based on the successful symbolic struggles which categorize events, rather than on "good reasons."37 Since new ideas are filtered through taken-for-granted social assumptions, there is a general conservative social orientation toward argument. This helps explain how argument fields are maintained. Craig Dudczak, while recognizing that struggles take place within disciplines, claims that overall participants "maintain general disciplinary assumptions."38 Wenzel writes that "argument fields exhibit a persistence over time"39 and for Charles Willard "fields exist … through the ongoing defining activities" and the "recurring themes in a group's practices." In other words, certain symbolic forms of authority are reproduced and others are limited socially. Certain forms of argumentative support are celebrated and other forms are dismissed, based on the social forms of authority previously established by the agents participating in the field. But fields are not always stable. Postmodern scholars remind us that diversity and differences are the norm. Hence, attention must be paid to the diversity of discursive struggles that challenge traditional forms of social authority. Communities of memory, necessary for social negotiation, are partially established through discursive practices. But within the community, conflict is ever-present. So, what is the relationship between the community and the conflict within the field? Furthermore, what are the implications of the struggle? Hanson argues that the forums of field disputes can serve to "exclude" an individual "from further discussions. " 42 He is certainly correct; however, it is more than just a forum that excludes discourse. The successful symbolic struggle to define social authority excludes individuals and perspectives from participation and consideration in social fields. Despite these contributions, there has been insufficient discussion of the pragmatic struggles in which agents are engaged. The community of argument scholars will be served by a general theory of social fields in order to evaluate particular examples. Over a decade ago, Zarefsky contended that "we need an account of the growth and demise of fields against which we can check individual claims."4:1 What the current discussion lacks, specifically, is a consideration of the role that symbolic struggles of categorization of "appropriate" and "inappropriate" forms of authority plays in the stability and change of a social field's assumptions, which serve as the basis for the subsequent social structuring of practices. Current field theory fails to account adequately for social power and the conflict over scarce symbolic resources at the base of that social power. The study of such struggle is important because it relates to the stability and legitimacy of the dominant forms of discourse. Subsequently, there has been little attention to the real world implications of marginalizing alternative arguments within fields. For example, Nancy Fraser argues that the conceptual framing of social welfare policies excludes meaningful interpretation of social needs from a feminist perspective.44 The social forms of authority surrounding the welfare debate are defined by political "professionals." Consequently, the interpretation of a welfare recipient's "needs" and "interests" are considered primarily from the dominant political perspective. Excluded from the political debate are alternative voices and arguments. Lack of attention to the symbolic means of exclusion, such as this, is troubling. Rhetorical scholars need a theory which can help explain how and why certain arbitrary expressions are celebrated, while others are excluded altogether due to discursive struggles within dynamic social fields. Furthermore, scholars should be encouraged to explore the symbolic means agents employ to challenge traditionally dominant forms of argumentative authority.
