Tournament: HW | Round: 9 | Opponent: x | Judge: x
K – Neoliberalism
1NC – Neolib K
The claim that free speech leads to democratic debate and social progress is a neoliberal myth – the AFF’s faith in the free exchange of ideas displaces a focus on direct action and re-entrenches multiple forms of oppression. Instead, the alternative is to reject the AFF’s neoliberal framing of speech and direct pedagogy to focus on direct action against oppression.
Tillett-Saks 13 Andrew Tillett-Saks (Labor organizer and critical activist author for Truth-Out and Counterpunch), Neoliberal Myths, Counterpunch, 11/7/13, http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/11/07/neoliberal-myths/ LADI
In the wake of the Brown University shout-down of Ray Kelly, champion of the NYPD’s racist stop-and-frisk policy and racial profiling in general, the debate has resurfaced. Rather than talking past the anti-protestors’ arguments, they need to be addressed directly. The prototypical argument in denouncing the protestors is not a defense of Ray Kelly’s racism. It is twofold: First, that a free-flowing discourse on the matter will allow all viewpoints to be weighed and justice to inevitably emerge victorious on its merits. Second, that stopping a bigot from speaking in the name of freedom is self-defeating as it devolves our democratic society into tyranny. The twofold argument against the protestors stems from two central myths of neoliberalism. The argument for free discourse as the enlightened path to justice ignores that direct action protest is primarily responsible for most of the achievements we would consider ‘progress’ historically (think civil rights, workers’ rights, suffrage, etc.), not the free exchange of ideas. The claim that silencing speech in the name of freedom is self-defeating indulges in the myth of the pre-existence of a free society in which freedom of speech must be preciously safeguarded, while ignoring the woeful shortcomings of freedom of speech in our society which must be addressed before there is anything worth protecting. Critics of the protest repeatedly denounced direct action in favor of ideological debate as the path to social justice. “It would have been more effective to take part in a discussion rather than flat out refuse to have him speak,” declared one horrified student to the Brown Daily Herald. Similarly, Brown University President Christina Paxson labeled the protest a detrimental “affront to democratic civil society,” and instead advocated “intellectual rigor, careful analysis, and…respectful dialogue and discussion.” Yet the implication that masterful debate is the engine of social progress could not be more historically unfounded. Only in the fairy tale histories of those interested in discouraging social resistance does ‘respectful dialogue’ play a decisive role in struggles against injustice. The eight-hour workday is not a product of an incisive question-and-answer session with American robber barons. Rather, hundreds of thousands of workers conducted general strikes during the nineteenth century, marched in the face of military gunfire at Haymarket Square in 1886, and occupied scores of factories in the 1930’s before the eight-hour work day became American law. Jim Crow was not defeated with the moral suasion of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speeches. Rather, hundreds of thousands marched on Washington, suffered through imprisonment by racist Southern law enforcement, and repeatedly staged disruptive protests to win basic civil rights. On a more international scale, Colonialism, that somehow-oft-forgotten tyranny that plagued most of the globe for centuries, did not cease thanks to open academic dialogue. Bloody resistance, from Algeria to Vietnam to Panama to Cuba to Egypt to the Philippines to Cameroon and to many other countries, was the necessary tool that unlocked colonial shackles. Different specific tactics have worked in different contexts, but one aspect remains constant: The free flow of ideas and dialogue, by itself, has rarely been enough to generate social progress. It is not that ideas entirely lack social power, but they have never been sufficient in winning concessions from those in power to the oppressed. Herein lies neoliberal myth number one—that a liberal free-market society will inexorably and inherently march towards greater freedom. To the contrary, direct action has always proved necessary.
We have reached a tipping point – neoliberalism is no longer able to control its spiral into disaster. 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) LADI
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.
A radical pedagogical stance is key – anti-capitalist movements can be effective, but critical consciousness is a necessary prerequisite.
Peter Mclaren 4, Education and Urban Schooling Division prof, UCLA—and Valerie Scatamburlo-D'Annibale; University of Windsor, Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 36, No. 2, 2004, www.freireproject.org/articles/node2065/RCGS/class_dismissed-val-peter.10.pdf. LADI
These are the concrete realities of our time—realities that require a vigorous class analysis, an unrelenting critique of capitalism and an oppositional politics capable of confronting what Ahmad (1998, p. 2) refers to as ‘capitalist universality.’ They are realities that require something more than that which is offered by the prophets of ‘difference’ and post-Marxists who would have us relegate socialism to the scrapheap of history and mummify Marxism along with Lenin's corpse. Never before has a Marxian analysis of capitalism and class rule been so desperately needed. That is not to say that everything Marx said or anticipated has come true, for that is clearly not the case. Many critiques of Marx focus on his strategy for moving toward socialism, and with ample justification; nonetheless Marx did provide us with fundamental insights into class society that have held true to this day. Marx's enduring relevance lies in his indictment of capitalism which continues to wreak havoc in the lives of most. While capitalism's cheerleaders have attempted to hide its sordid underbelly, Marx's description of capitalism as the sorcerer's dark power is even more apt in light of contemporary historical and economic conditions. Rather than jettisoning Marx, decentering the role of capitalism, and discrediting class analysis, radical educators must continue to engage Marx's oeuvre and extrapolate from it that which is useful pedagogically, theoretically, and, most importantly, politically in light of the challenges that confront us. The urgency which animates Amin’s call for a collective socialist vision necessitates, as we have argued, moving beyond the particularism and liberal pluralism that informs the ‘politics of difference.’ It also requires challenging the questionable assumptions that have come to constitute the core of contemporary ‘radical’ theory, pedagogy and politics. In terms of effecting change, what is needed is a cogent understanding of the systemic nature of exploitation and oppression based on the precepts of a radical political economy approach (outlined above) and one that incorporates Marx’s notion of ‘unity in difference’ in which people share widely common material interests. Such an understanding extends far beyond the realm of theory, for the manner in which we choose to interpret and explore the social world, the concepts and frameworks we use to express our sociopolitical understandings, are more than just abstract categories. They imply intentions, organizational practices, and political agendas. Identifying class analysis as the basis for our understandings and class struggle as the basis for political transformation implies something quite different than constructing a sense of political agency around issues of race, ethnicity, gender, etc. Contrary to ‘Shakespeare’s assertion that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,’ it should be clear that this is not the case in political matters. Rather, in politics ‘the essence of the flower lies in the name by which it is called’ (Bannerji, 2000, p. 41). The task for progressives today is to seize the moment and plant the seeds for a political agenda that is grounded in historical possibilities and informed by a vision committed to overcoming exploitative conditions. These seeds, we would argue, must be derived from the tree of radical political economy. For the vast majority of people today—people of all ‘racial classifications or identities, all genders and sexual orientations’—the common frame of reference arcing across ‘difference’, the ‘concerns and aspirations that are most widely shared are those that are rooted in the common experience of everyday life shaped and constrained by political economy’ (Reed, 2000, p. xxvii). While post-Marxist advocates of the politics of ‘difference’ suggest that such a stance is outdated, we would argue that the categories which they have employed to analyze ‘the social’ are now losing their usefulness, particularly in light of actual contemporary ‘social movements.’ All over the globe, there are large anti-capitalist movements afoot. In February 2002, chants of ‘Another World Is Possible’ became the theme of protests in Porto Allegre. It seems that those people struggling in the streets haven’t read about T.I.N.A., the end of grand narratives of emancipation, or the decentering of capitalism. It seems as though the struggle for basic survival and some semblance of human dignity in the mean streets of the dystopian metropoles doesn’t permit much time or opportunity to read the heady proclamations emanating from seminar rooms. As E. P. Thompson (1978, p. 11) once remarked, sometimes ‘experience walks in without knocking at the door, and announces deaths, crises of subsistence, trench warfare, unemployment, inflation, genocide.’ This, of course, does not mean that socialism will inevitably come about, yet a sense of its nascent promise animates current social movements. Indeed, noted historian Howard Zinn (2000, p. 20) recently pointed out that after years of single-issue organizing (i.e. the politics of difference), the WTO and other anti-corporate capitalist protests signaled a turning point in the ‘history of movements of recent decades,’ for it was the issue of ‘class’ that more than anything ‘bound everyone together.’ History, to paraphrase Thompson (1978, p. 25) doesn’t seem to be following Theory’s script. Our vision is informed by Marx's historical materialism and his revolutionary socialist humanism, which must not be conflated with liberal humanism. For left politics and pedagogy, a socialist humanist vision remains crucial, whose fundamental features include the creative potential of people to challenge collectively the circumstances that they inherit. This variant of humanism seeks to give expression to the pain, sorrow and degradation of the oppressed, those who labor under the ominous and ghastly cloak of ‘globalized’ capital. It calls for the transformation of those conditions that have prevented the bulk of humankind from fulfilling its potential. It vests its hope for change in the development of critical consciousness and social agents who make history, although not always in conditions of their choosing. The political goal of socialist humanism is, however, ‘not a resting in difference’ but rather ‘the emancipation of difference at the level of human mutuality and reciprocity.’ This would be a step forward for the ‘discovery or creation of our real differences which can only in the end be explored in reciprocal ways’ (Eagleton, 1996, p. 120). Above all else, the enduring relevance of a radical socialist pedagogy and politics is the centrality it accords to the interrogation of capitalism. We can no longer afford to remain indifferent to the horror and savagery committed by capitalist's barbaric machinations. We need to recognize that capitalist democracy is unrescuably contradictory in its own self-constitution. Capitalism and democracy cannot be translated into one another without profound efforts at manufacturing empty idealism. Committed Leftists must unrelentingly cultivate a democratic socialist vision that refuses to forget the ‘wretched of the earth,’ the children of the damned and the victims of the culture of silence—a task which requires more than abstruse convolutions and striking ironic poses in the agnostic arena of signifying practices. Leftists must illuminate the little shops of horror that lurk beneath ‘globalization’s’ shiny façade; they must challenge the true ‘evils’ that are manifest in the tentacles of global capitalism's reach. And, more than this, Leftists must search for the cracks in the edifice of globalized capitalism and shine light on those fissures that give birth to alternatives. Socialism today, undoubtedly, runs against the grain of received wisdom, but its vision of a vastly improved and freer arrangement of social relations beckons on the horizon. Its unwritten text is nascent in the present even as it exists among the fragments of history and the shards of distant memories. Its potential remains untapped and its promise needs to be redeemed.
Link – Right to Free Speech
The AFF’s assumption of a property right to free speech assumes an overly idealistic notion of society that ignores economic barriers and is a product of the neoliberal myth that individuality should be protected at all costs.
Tillett-Saks 13 Andrew Tillett-Saks (Labor organizer and critical activist author for Truth-Out and Counterpunch), Neoliberal Myths, Counterpunch, 11/7/13, http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/11/07/neoliberal-myths/ LADI
Yet there are many critics of the protestors who do not claim Ray Kelly’s policies can be defeated with sharp debate. Instead, they argue that any protest in the name of freedom which blocks the speech of another is self-defeating, causing more damage to a free society by ‘silencing’ another than any potential positive effect of the protest. The protestors, the argument goes, tack society back to totalitarian days of censorship rather than forward to greater freedom. The protestors, however well intentioned, have pedantically thwarted our cherished liberal democracy by imposing their will on others. The premise of this argument is neoliberal myth number two—that we live in a society with ‘freedom of speech’ so great it must be protected at all costs. This premise stems from an extremely limited conception of ‘freedom of speech’. Free speech should not be considered the mere ability to speak freely and inconsequentially in a vacuum, but rather the ability to have one’s voice heard equally. Due to the nature of private media and campaign finance in American society, this ability is woefully lopsided as political and economic barriers abound. Those with money easily have their voices heard through media and politics, those without have no such freedom. There is a certain irony (and garish privilege) of upper-class Ivy Leaguers proclaiming the sanctity of a freedom of speech so contingent upon wealth and political power. There is an even greater irony that the fight for true freedom of speech, if history is any indicator, must entail more direct action against defenders of the status quo such as Ray Kelly. To denounce such action out of indulgence in the neoliberal myth of a sacrosanct, already existing, freedom of speech is to condemn the millions in this country with no meaningful voice to eternal silence. Every few years, an advocate of oppression is shouted down. Every few years, the protestors are denounced. They are asked to trust open, ‘civil’ dialogue to stop oppression, despite a historical record of struggle and progress that speaks overwhelmingly to the contrary. They are asked to restrain their protest for freedom so to protect American freedom of speech, despite the undeniable fact that our private media and post-Citizens United political system hear only dollars, not the voices of the masses. Some will claim that both sides have the same goal, freedom, but merely differ on tactics. Yet the historical record is too clear and the growing dysfunctions in our democracy too gross to take any such claims as sincere. In a few years, when protestors shout down another oppressive conservative, we will be forced to lucidly choose which side we are on: The oppressors or the protestors. The status quo or progress.
Link – Marketplace of Ideas
The AFF’s notion of the marketplace of ideas is neoliberal rhetoric designed to strengthen corporate power.
Whatler 13 Stuart Whatley, Speak for Yourself: A Meditation on the Marketplace of Ideas, Los Angeles Review of Books, 10/4/13, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/speak-for-yourself-a-meditation-on-the-marketplace-of-ideas/#! LADI
The very notion of a “marketplace of ideas” tracks exactly with neoliberalism’s rising star. This can be seen through Nexis searches of the term, as well as through Google’s n-gram book search between 1800 and 2008. Since first breaking into common usage with a couple dozen mentions in the 1970s, its appearances have increased exponentially decade by decade in books, newspapers, journals, and similar forms of media to the point that it is now published hundreds of times every year. Though use of the phrase actually declined very slightly in books between 2000 and 2008 (not to any degree of significance), it increased in news media year by year over the same course of time — especially between 2008 and 2012. While public policy can be altered and reversed from one administration or congress to another, the fideistic embrace of market vocabulary across political divides indicates that it has become more deeply embedded — instead of being the subject of political debate, it designates the coordinates of what is debatable as politics. It did not take until the 1970s for the “marketplace of ideas” to develop, but it did take that long for it to really become prevalent. Before then it had mainly been the subject of legal opinions, notably in Oliver Wendell Holmes’s 1919 Abrams v. United States dissent. The law scholar Ronald Collins points out that Holmes used the metaphor, if not the exact phrase, when he wrote, “The ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas — that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.” For his part, Holmes was influenced by John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, which in turn drew from John Milton’s Areopagitica, which asked, “Who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?” With Holmes as the more direct line of inspiration, the actual words would come to form decades later in other free speech and free press court opinions, including United States v. Rumely (1953) and Lamont v. Postmaster General (1965). In the latter, Justice William Brennan opined that, “The dissemination of ideas can accomplish nothing if otherwise willing addressees are not free to receive and consider them. It would be a barren marketplace of ideas that had only sellers and no buyers.” Back to the early 1970s: big business was a beleaguered beast, feeling the need to counter the popular social movements of the previous decade, and found it prudent to press-gang the “marketplace of ideas” into its service. After a series of crises in capitalism — stagflation, the collapse of Bretton Woods, the 1973 Oil Shock — the solution eventually proffered was even more capitalism. Which is to say, the failure of postwar Keynesian fiscal and monetary policies to turn the economy around led in time to a loss of faith in their effectiveness and to the ouster of leftward-leaning leaders Jimmy Carter and James Callahan. When the recessionary waves did eventually subside, the timing allowed for Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to dance on their predecessors’ political graves, accredit their own success to market fundamentalism, and move forward full bore with its implementation through tax cuts and financial deregulation. As Reagan later declared on the New York Stock Exchange floor, “We’re going to turn the bull loose.” And so, the “marketplace of ideas” began to appear for the first time in the mainstream press — most notably in reports quoting corporate public relations professionals in defense of their respective industries. To take one early example, in a July 1975 U.S. News and World Report interview titled “Why Business Has a Black Eye,” Alexander B. Trowbridge, president of a corporate advocacy organization called the Conference Board, addressed questions about the lugubrious public favorability of big business: We businessmen have to get out individually into this marketplace of ideas. We have to be far more involved in our communities. We have to be in closer touch with the groups of people with whom we have close contact — our employees, out stockholders, the community leaders in places where we have our plants and offices, and our customers and suppliers. We need to do a better job not only in supporting them with better products, but in explaining the workings of our business system and what makes it all tick. A March 1976 Newsweek article by Michael Ruby and Gretchen Browne titled “Oil: The Mobil Manner” followed, reporting on a full-page advertisement taken out by Mobil in response to a critical NBC News documentary about gasoline prices. According to Mobil’s vice president of public affairs, Herbert Schmertz, “The ad was an effort to participate in the market-place of ideas” (Schmertz’s line would be quoted again two years later in a Harvard Business Review story by Louis Banks, titled “Taking on the Hostile Media”). Such participation, the reporters note, had become a trend of late. And it would only continue, to the point where even Jimmy Carter invoked the metaphor in an unwittingly ironic 1977 statement, declaring Voice of America independent from State Department propagandizing: The agency must not operate in a covert, manipulative or propagandistic way … Under this administration, Voice of America will be solely responsible for the content of its news broadcasts — for there is no more valued coin than candor in the international marketplace of ideas. While it’s unclear how much of this was a consciously cooperative effort on the part of business and pro-market advocates, it was, regardless, in keeping with the corporate PR strategy of the time — what sociologists David Miller and William Dinan have labeled the “third wave of corporate political activism.” That wave rode from the late 1960s through the 1970s, and saw vast and rapid expansion in corporate lobbying, the founding of numerous business-funded think tanks (including the Heritage Foundation, an early influence on the Reagan presidential platform), and increased media involvement on the part of businesses across the board. According to Miller and Dinan, a collective corporate strategy was effectively launched in a private August 1971 memo from corporate lawyer (and later Supreme Court justice) Lewis F. Powell Jr. to US Chamber of Commerce Education Committee chairman Eugene B. Sydnor Jr., in which Powell wrote: “It is time for American business — which has demonstrated the greatest capacity in all history to produce and to influence consumer decisions — to apply its great talents vigorously to the preservation of the system itself.”
