Asian oppression has been fueled by the rhetorical flare of being the oriental animal, and the material beatings justified by not the law, but the racial discrimination that bleeds of supremacist exceptionalism.
Yen 00 (Rhoda Yen, writer for the Asian Law Journal, "Racial Stereotyping of Asian and Asian Americans and Its Effect on Criminal Justice: A Reflection on the Wayne Lo Case", January 2000, Asian Law Journal, Vol. 7 No. 1 pg. 18-19, http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1060andcontext=aalj) KVA The yellow peril stereotype influences the way in which law enforcement officers handle crimes committed by Asian Americans both before and after arrest. In cities where Asian gangs are widely feared, police rely on "facebooks" (compilations of photographs of suspects) to arrest Asian Americans. However, some Asian facebooks include photographs of Asian Americans who have no criminal records. 98 Law enforcement officers who rely on the facebook practice likely view Asians as fungible: every young Asian male who fits the physical profile is a potential Chinatown gangster. Such stereotyping is particularly disturbing in light of the fact that white Americans commonly make errors in identifying Asian faces. 99 Not surprisingly, several incidents in California illustrate the disastrous consequences of relying on the facebook practice. During the summer of 1992, police rounded up eight Asian teenagers in Laguna Park, California, to be photographed after an earlier, unrelated incident involving another group of Asians in the park. 00 In January 1993, police officers raided a Japanese American family in Fountain Valley, California, after misidentifying the son, Mark Kanshige, as an attempted murder suspect from a photo dossier.10' The officers forced the entire family outdoors and handcuffed the family members, while they ransacked the house in search of evidence that did not exist. Mark spent six months in jail and was subsequently found innocent by a jury. Also, police officers in Garden Grove, California, illegally detained and photographed three Southeast Asian teenagers, two of whom were honor students, in July 1993.102 The officers accused the girls of being gang members, although police could not offer any reason for the suspicion other than the fact that the girls were wearing baggy pants and appeared to be loitering by a pay phone. In addition, police officers who view Asians as morally inferior may apply tactics of harassment or brutality to dominate Asian suspects. A New York court recently convicted N.Y.P.D. Officer Rolando Baquando of attempted assault of Korean storeowner, Son Tae Kim. Baquadano became enraged when Kim resisted the officer's accusation that Kim had given counterfeit bills to customers. Baquadano charged Kim and his brother with resisting arrest and disorderly conduct, and then proceeded to beat the two men. During the beating, which left Kim and his brother hospitalized, Baquadano called Kim and his brother "f-ing Orientals" and ",animals."'0 3 The yellow peril image increases suspicion against Asian Americans and affects law enforcement initiatives even before the arrest stage. During the summer of 1997, White House security guards denied entry to several Asian Americans with pre-approved security clearances. 0 4 Although the visitors were U.S. citizens and one was a member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, a security guard insisted that their surnames appeared "foreign, you know, Asian, Chinese."' 0' On one occasion, a Secret Service guard changed a visitor's citizenship status from "United States" to "foreign" based solely upon the person's surname.
Thus I advocate for the termination of the police. The U.S. has possessed me and the marginalized communities it tries to eradicate. The resolution I uphold is one that destroys the police and thus destroys their immunity. Welcome to the real Lincoln Douglas resolution, one that reaches the heart of the problem, the mobilization of the micropolitical against the macropolitical.
Giroux 15 - (Henry ~A high-school social studies teacher, positions @ Boston University, Miami University, and Penn State University. Global TV Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. He has published more than 50 books and more than 300 academic articles, and is published widely throughout education and cultural studies literature"The curse of totalitarianism and the challenge of critical pedagogy"~ http://philosophersforchange.org/2015/10/13/the-curse-of-totalitarianism-and-the-challenge-of-critical-pedagogy/) The forces of free-market fundamentalism are on the march ushering in a terrifying horizon of what Hannah Arendt once called "dark times." Across the globe, the tension between democratic values and market fundamentalism has reached a breaking point.~1~ The social contract is under assault, neo-Nazism is on the rise, right-wing populism is propelling extremist political candidates and social movements into the forefront of political life, anti-immigrant sentiment is now wrapped in the poisonous logic of nationalism and exceptionalism, racism has become a mark of celebrated audacity and a politics of disposability comes dangerously close to its endgame of extermination for those considered excess. Under such circumstances, it becomes frightfully clear that the conditions for totalitarianism and state violence are still with us smothering critical thought, social responsibility, the ethical imagination and politics itself. As Bill Dixon observes: ~T~he totalitarian form is still with us because the all too protean origins of totalitarianism are still with us: loneliness as the normal register of social life, the frenzied lawfulness of ideological certitude, mass poverty and mass homelessness, the routine use of terror as a political instrument, and the ever growing speeds and scales of media, economics, and warfare.~2~ In the United States, the extreme right in both political parties no longer needs the comfort of a counterfeit ideology in which appeals are made to the common good, human decency and democratic values. On the contrary, power is now concentrated in the hands of relatively few people and corporations while power is global and free from the limited politics of the democratic state. In fact, the state for all intents and purposes has become the corporate state. Dominant power is now all too visible and the policies, practices and wrecking ball it has imposed on society appear to be largely unchecked. Any compromising notion of ideology has been replaced by a discourse of command and certainty backed up by the militarization of local police forces, the surveillance state and all of the resources brought to bear by a culture of fear and a punishing state aligned with the permanent war on terror. Informed judgment has given way to a corporate-controlled media apparatus that celebrates the banality of balance and the spectacle of violence, all the while reinforcing the politics and value systems of the financial elite.~3~ cur'hegemonyhunters6203 ~Credit: hegemonyhunters6203.~ Following Arendt, a dark cloud of political and ethical ignorance has descended on the United States creating both a crisis of memory and agency.~4~ Thoughtlessness has become something that now occupies a privileged, if not celebrated, place in the political landscape and the mainstream cultural apparatuses. A new kind of infantilism and culture of ignorance now shapes daily life as agency devolves into a kind of anti-intellectual foolishness evident in the babble of banality produced by Fox News, celebrity culture, schools modeled after prisons and politicians who support creationism, argue against climate change and denounce almost any form of reason. Education is no longer viewed as a public good but a private right, just as critical thinking is devalued as a fundamental necessity for creating an engaged and socially responsible populace. Politics has become an extension of war, just as systemic economic uncertainty and state-sponsored violence increasingly find legitimation in the discourses of privatization and demonization, which promote anxiety, moral panics and fear, and undermine any sense of communal responsibility for the well-being of others. Too many people today learn quickly that their fate is solely a matter of individual responsibility, irrespective of wider structural forces. This is a much promoted hypercompetitive ideology with a message that surviving in a society demands reducing social relations to forms of social combat. People today are expected to inhabit a set of relations in which the only obligation is to live for one’s own self-interest and to reduce the responsibilities of citizenship to the demands of a consumer culture. Yet, there is more at work here than a flight from social responsibility, if not politics itself. Also lost is the importance of those social bonds, modes of collective reasoning, public spheres and cultural apparatuses crucial to the formation of a sustainable democratic society. With the return of the Gilded Age and its dream worlds of consumption, privatization and deregulation, both democratic values and social protections are at risk. At the same time, the civic and formative cultures that make such values and protections central to democratic life are in danger of being eliminated altogether. As market mentalities and moralities tighten their grip on all aspects of society, democratic institutions and public spheres are being downsized, if not altogether disappearing. As these institutions vanish – from public schools to health-care centers – there is also a serious erosion of the discourses of community, justice, equality, public values and the common good. One consequence is a society stripped of its inspiring and energizing public spheres and the "thick mesh of mutual obligations and social responsibilities to be found in" any viable democracy.~5~ This grim reality marks a failure in the power of the civic imagination, political will and open democracy.~6~ It is also part of a politics that strips the social of any democratic ideals and undermines any understanding of higher education as a public good and pedagogy as an empowering practice, a practice that acts directly upon the conditions that bear down on our lives in order to change them when necessary. cur-Sam Bosma ~Credit: Sam Bosma.~ At a time when the public good is under attack and there seems to be a growing apathy toward the social contract, or any other civic-minded investment in public values and the larger common good, education has to be seen as more than a credential or a pathway to a job. It has to be viewed as crucial to understanding and overcoming the current crisis of agency, politics and historical memory faced by many young people today. One of the challenges facing the current generation of educators and students is the need to reclaim the role that education has historically played in developing critical literacies and civic capacities. There is a need to use education to mobilize students to be critically engaged agents, attentive to addressing important social issues and being alert to the responsibility of deepening and expanding the meaning and practices of a vibrant democracy. At the heart of such a challenge is the question of what education should accomplish in a democracy. What work do educators have to do to create the economic, political and ethical conditions necessary to endow young people with the capacities to think, question, doubt, imagine the unimaginable and defend education as essential for inspiring and energizing the people necessary for the existence of a robust democracy? In a world in which there is an increasing abandonment of egalitarian and democratic impulses, what will it take to educate young people to challenge authority and in the words of James Baldwin "rob history of its tyrannical power, and illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place"?~7~ What role might education and critical pedagogy have in a society in which the social has been individualized, emotional life collapses into the therapeutic and education is relegated to either a private affair or a kind of algorithmic mode of regulation in which everything is reduced to a desired measurable economic outcome. Feedback loops now replace politics and the concept of progress is defined through a narrow culture of metrics, measurement and efficiency.~8~ In a culture drowning in a new love affair with empiricism and data, that which is not measurable withers. Lost here are the registers of compassion, care for the other, the radical imagination, a democratic vision and a passion for justice. In its place emerges what Francisco Goya, in one of his engravings, termed "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monster." Goya’s title is richly suggestive, particularly about the role of education and pedagogy in compelling students to be able to recognize, as my colleague David Clark points out, "that an inattentiveness to the never-ending task of critique breeds horrors: the failures of conscience, the wars against thought, and the flirtations with irrationality that lie at the heart of the triumph of every-day aggression, the withering of political life, and the withdrawal into private obsessions."~9~ Given the multiple crises that haunt the current historical conjuncture, educators need a new language for addressing the changing contexts and issues facing a world in which there is an unprecedented convergence of resources – financial, cultural, political, economic, scientific, military and technological – that are increasingly used to concentrate powerful and diverse forms of control and domination. Such a language needs to be political without being dogmatic and needs to recognize that pedagogy is always political because it is connected to the struggle over agency. In this instance, making the pedagogical more political means being vigilant about those very "moments in which identities are being produced and groups are being constituted, or objects are being created."~10~ cur'edu At the same time it means educators need to be attentive to those practices in which critical modes of agency and particular identities are being denied. For example, the Tucson Unified School District board not only eliminated the famed Mexican-American studies program, but also banned a number of Chicano and Native American books it deemed dangerous. The ban included Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, and Pedagogy of the Oppressed by the famed Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. This act of censorship provides a particularly disturbing case of the war that is being waged in the United States against not only young people marginalized by race and class, but also against the very spaces and pedagogical practices that make critical thinking possible. Such actions suggest the need for faculty to develop forms of critical pedagogy that not only inspire and energize. They should also be able to challenge a growing number of anti-democratic practices and policies while resurrecting a radical democratic project that provides the basis for imagining a life beyond a social order immersed in inequality, degradation of the environment and the elevation of war and militarization to national ideals. Under such circumstances, education becomes more than an obsession with accountability schemes, an audit culture, market values and an unreflective immersion in the crude empiricism of a data-obsessed, market-driven society. It becomes part of a formative culture in which thoughtlessness prevails, providing the foundation for the curse of totalitarianism. At a time of increased repression, it is all the more crucial for educators to reject the notion that higher education is simply a site for training students for the workforce and that the culture of higher education is synonymous with the culture of business. At issue here is the need for educators to recognize the power of education in creating the formative cultures necessary to both challenge the various threats being mobilized against the ideas of justice and democracy while also fighting for those public spheres, ideals, values and policies that offer alternative modes of identity, thinking, social relations and politics. In both conservative and progressive discourses pedagogy is often treated simply as a set of strategies and skills to use in order to teach prespecified subject matter. In this context, pedagogy becomes synonymous with teaching as a technique or the practice of a craft-like skill. Any viable notion of critical pedagogy must grasp the limitations of this definition and its endless slavish imitations even when they are claimed as part of a radical discourse or project. In opposition to the instrumental reduction of pedagogy to a method – which has no language for relating the self to public life, social responsibility or the demands of citizenship – critical pedagogy illuminates the relationships among knowledge, authority and power.~11~
State power is only as inevitable as long as we think it is. The counterplan is a grassroots struggle against the state.
Martin 90 – research associate in the Dept. of Mathematics, Faculty of Science, Australian National University (Brian, "The State", from Uprooting War, http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/90uw/uw07.html, dml)
What should be done to help transform the state system in the direction of self-reliance and self-management? The problem can seem overwhelming. What difference can the actions of an individual or small group make? Actually, quite a lot. The state system is strong because the actions of many people and groups support it. Most social activists see state intervention as a solution, often the solution, to social problems. What can be done about poverty? More state welfare. What about racial discrimination? Laws and enforcement to stop it. What about environmental degradation? State regulation. What about sexual discrimination? Anti-discrimination legislation. What about corporate irresponsibility or excess profits? Added government controls and taxation, or nationalisation. What about unemployment? state regulation of the economy: investment incentives, job creation schemes, tariffs. What about crime? More police, more prisons, more counsellors. What about enemy attack? More military spending. What about too much military spending? Convince or pressure the government to cut back. The obvious point is that most social activists look constantly to the state for solutions to social problems. This point bears labouring, because the orientation of most social action groups tends to reinforce state power. This applies to most antiwar action too. Many of the goals and methods of peace movements have been oriented around action by the state, such as appealing to state elites and advocating neutralism and unilateralism. Indeed, peace movements spend a lot of effort debating which demand to make on the state: nuclear freeze, unilateral or multilateral disarmament, nuclear-free zones, or removal of military bases. By appealing to the state, activists indirectly strengthen the roots of many social problems, the problem of war in particular. To help transform the state system, action groups need to develop strategies which, at a minimum, do not reinforce state power. This means ending the incessant appeals for state intervention, and promoting solutions to social problems which strengthen local self-reliance and initiative. What can be done about poverty? Promote worker and community control over economic resources, and local self-reliance in skills and resources. What about racial discrimination? Promote discussion, interaction and nonviolent action at a grassroots level. What about environmental degradation? Encourage local communities to re-examine their own activities and to confront damaging practices. What about sexual discrimination? Build grassroots campaigns against rape and the gender division of labour, and mount challenges to hierarchical structures which help sustain patriarchy. What about corporate irresponsibility or excess profits? Promote worker and community control over production. What about unemployment? Promote community control of community resources for equitable distribution of work and the economic product, and develop worker cooperatives as an alternative to jobs as gifts of employers. What about crime? Work against unequal power and privilege, and for meaningful ways of living, to undercut the motivation for crime, and promote local community solidarity as a defence against crime. What about enemy attack? Social defence. What about too much military spending? Build local alternatives to the state, use these alternatives to withdraw support from the state and undermine the economic foundation of military spending. These grassroots, self-managing solutions to social problems are in many cases no more than suggestive directions. Detailed grassroots strategies in most cases have not been developed, partly because so little attention has been devoted to them compared to strategies relying on state intervention. But the direction should be clear: in developing strategies to address social problems, aim at building local self-reliance and withdrawing support from the state rather than appealing for state intervention and thereby reinforcing state power.
THE PROMISE OF THE AMERICAN DREAM IS FUNDAMENTALLY CORRUPT. Belief in a "better America" simply starves critique of the capitalist system that allows black and brown bodies to be shot at will. The myth of reformism, that of the capitalist state, is especially true in the context of the endemic of police brutality
The Internationalist ‘14 The Internationalist, 8-1-2014, "Killer Cops, White Supremacists: Racist Terror Stalks Black America," No Publication, http://www.internationalist.org/killercopswstalkblackamerica1507.html.//KOHS-AG Every time there is an upsurge of popular unrest, the question of the state is posed point-blank. In 2011, leaders of Occupy Wall Street argued that beat cops were part of the "99." Substituting income statistics for class analysis, they blinded demonstrators to the fact that the police are the armed fist of capital. They kept insisting on this (and tried to stop the Internationalists from chanting "We are all Sean Bell, NYPD go to hell") even as cops were arresting hundreds on the Brooklyn Bridge. The populist Occupy "movement" disappeared after a few short months, partly due to coordinated national repression orchestrated from Obama’s Department of Homeland Security, but more fundamentally because protesters did not come to an understanding of the class nature of the capitalist state, and the fact that it cannot be reformed. Similarly with the abrupt collapse of the mass protests against police murder last December. Leftists chant "indict, convict, send the killer cops to jail" misleading protesters into thinking this is possible, although all of U.S. history shows the contrary. In the exceedingly rare case where a cop does time, it will be a slap on the wrist. And when they add "the whole damn system is guilty as hell" they don’t say what that system is. Yet for there to be a real struggle against the systematic racist police murder it is crucial to understand that this is rooted in racist American capitalism. Chants like "we want freedom, freedom – these racist cops, we don’t need ’em, need ’em" suggest that there could be non-racist cops, when the reality is that it is not just a matter of individual attitudes: all police are part of a machine of racist repression. The rhyming reformism serves to mask the stark reality – as revolutionaries from Marx and Engels to Lenin and Trotsky have stressed – that the state enforces the rule of the economically dominant class. "Who do you protect, who do you serve?" scream demonstration leaders as cops beat protesters bloody. For would-be socialists to pose this as a question to the cops, even rhetorically, buys into the lie (emblazoned on LAPD patrol cars) that police supposedly protect and serve "the people." The task of revolutionary Marxists is to tell the truth to the masses, that the police defend the interests of capital. The capitalist-imperialist rulers of the United States enforce their world domination with bloody butchery just as they do inside the U.S. A black U.S. president, Barack Obama, a liberal Democrat, kills Muslims and U.S. citizens with his drones with as little regard for the lives of the oppressed as his Republican predecessor George W. Bush. And their killer cops will keep on killing until their bloody rule is overthrown. Most of the mobilizations against police murder have been led by liberals, black and white, and reformists – that is, leftists who may call themselves socialist and even communist, but whose actual program is only to reform (and thus ultimately uphold) capitalism. While revolutionaries support genuine reforms (from the minimum wage to the right to same-sex marriage), the idea that state repression can be reformed away is characteristic of reformists. One of the problems liberals and reformists face in turning the often massive protests into an ongoing "movement" like the civil rights movement they seek to emulate is the absence of any even remotely credible reform demands. Over the last several decades any number of supposed reforms have been tried and all have failed to even put a dent in the rampant racist police terror. Demilitarize the police? Akai Gurley, Tanish Anderson, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, and most of those murdered by police have been killed by one or two cops on regular patrol. Disarm the police? Impossible in racist capitalist America, but beyond that, Eric Garner and 20 years earlier Anthony Baez were killed by a cop’s bare hands. Dashboard cameras on police cars? When Walter Scott was pulled over in North Charleston on April 4 for a supposed broken taillight, the dashcam showed no such thing – but it didn’t stop him from getting shot in the back and killed by the racist cop. Body cameras on police officers? This is the latest fad. It didn’t stop the shooting of Eric Harris in Tulsa, Oklahoma on April 2, which was recorded by a bodycam, including the remark by the 73-year-old "reserve" cop that he thought he was firing a Taser. A new police chief? Under Republican plutocrat Bloomberg New York had Ray Kelly, under liberal Democrat de Blasio it has Bill Bratton, but the killing doesn’t stop. And now the liberal Democratic City Council has voted to hire 1,300 more cops than under Bloomberg/Kelly. A black police chief? A black mayor? Philadelphia has both, and its "stop and frisk" numbers rival New York’s. More black police? In the case of Baltimore, on top of a black mayor and police chief, almost half the cops are black, but both black and white officers were guilty of Freddie Gray’s murder. New police policies? "Stop and frisk" is now officially "reformed," so now it’s back to "broken windows" – harassing black and Latino youth for minor "quality of life" infractions. Residency requirements? Instead of holing up in white suburbs like Walnut Creek, California or New York’s Rockland County, police will just congregate in cop enclaves like Howard Beach or Eltingville on Staten Island’s South Shore. Community policing? So instead of patrolling poor black and Latino areas in convoys, like Israeli occupation forces in the Palestinian West Bank, they will increase the number of cops in permanent outposts while assigning a few community relations officers to coordinate with church leaders … and the SWAT teams are held in reserve. Civilian review boards? NYC, Philly and Baltimore all have them, and they’re not only utterly worthless in controlling police violence, they actually serve to legitimize it.
The law is unequivocally a tool of capitalist oppression – trying to limit qualified immunity is just one more reform which reinforces this system. The Internationalist 14
The Internationalist, 8-1-2014, "Killer Cops, White Supremacists: Racist Terror Stalks Black America," No Publication, http://www.internationalist.org/killercopswstalkblackamerica1507.html As Karl Marx wrote at the time of the 1871 Paris Commune, under capitalist rule the state cannot serve the interests of the exploited and oppressed, no matter who is in the government or how much pressure is put on it, and the task is not "to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to smash it." Under the Commune, the police were subject to the control of, and was recallable by, the working people – but that was after an uprising that suppressed the former army and police, i.e., destroyed the former state machinery. The idea that the capitalists and their politicians, while still the ruling class, would tolerate control of the police by those it is intended to repress is a total illusion. And those who think that the election of sheriffs makes any difference in their repressive role need only look at the racist sheriff Joe Arpaio in Maricopa County, Arizona, who has been elected again and again. The entire legal system is based on the recognition that the police are the first line of defense of capital. As shown by the refusal of a grand jury to indict the cops who killed Eric Garner, even in the face of irrefutable evidence, the process is rigged to ensure impunity for the police. In Rise of the Warrior Cop, Post reporter Balko points out that, "Under the qualified immunity from civil lawsuits currently afforded to police under federal law, a police officer can’t be sued for mere negligence – or even for gross negligence that results in a fatality." But he admits that of his paltry list of reforms, modifying this immunity is the "least likely to be adopted." This is not some peculiar American or modern invention. Engels in The Origins of the Family notes about even the earliest appearance of the state: "Representatives of a power which estranges them from society, they have to be given prestige by means of special decrees, which invest them with a peculiar sanctity and inviolability." No amount of protest will convince the ruling class to muzzle its uniformed guard dogs, whom it requires to keep the poor and working people down. What’s needed is militant class struggle on a revolutionary program. The Internationalist Group has called for an end to all drug laws. We call for labor/black/ immigrant mobilization against police terror. We have acted to carry this out, with the unprecedented port shutdown to "Stop Police Terror" by Local 10 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in Oakland this past May Day, and the "Labor Against Police Murder" contingent the same day, organized by Class Struggle Workers – Portland. Bringing to bear workers’ power to stop the wheels of commerce could stay the rulers’ hand for a time. At the height of struggle one can also mobilize to get the police and military occupation forces out, as the IG called for in Ferguson last August and again in Baltimore this spring.8 But such actions can only have a temporary effect. Ultimately, there is no solution to racist police brutality under capitalist rule: it is inherent in the system. Racist vigilantes, from George Zimmerman to Dylann Roof, act as auxiliaries. Whether in the form of KKK nightriders and racist sheriffs under Jim Crow, or mass incarceration combined with paramilitary police forces today, supplemented by massacres, American capitalism has always devised a way to keep its black, Latino and now increasingly immigrant wage slaves in thrall. The killer cops aren’t running amok, in contradiction to their assigned task, they’re doing their job to enforce racist "law and order" which is essential to American capitalism, and has been ever since African slaves were brought here in chains. The fact that year after year, from one end of the country to the other, virtually no police are indicted – much less convicted – for killing over 1,000 civilians a year is no accident.
Protests against the police state have failed because they have pushed aside the question of capitalism—the 1AC has a flawed starting point
The Internationalist ‘14 The Internationalist, 8-1-2014, "Killer Cops, White Supremacists: Racist Terror Stalks Black America," No Publication, http://www.internationalist.org/killercopswstalkblackamerica1507.html.//KOHS-AG So despite the mass protests and pious talk of police "accountability," nothing has changed. Whether it is unarmed black men murdered by police, like Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina and Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland, or the nine church-goers shot by a white-supremacist vigilante at a Bible-study session in Charleston last week, it is clear that murderous white racism is endemic in the United States. Soon another particularly egregious case will grab the headlines, and again there will be angry mass protests. Will they peter out or come to an abrupt end as they did last year with nothing to show for it? At most there may be a few cosmetic, symbolic changes like removing the Confederate battle flag, the banner of the Ku Klux Klan terrorists, that flies at state capitols and is part of state flags. But the racist killing will go on and on … unless we put a stop to it. But how? Tens of thousands of young people, black, white, Latino and others, and many older people as well, participated in the mass mobilizations last summer and fall. Over and over they chanted "black lives matter," "hands up, don’t shoot" and "I can’t breathe" – slogans that reflect a sense of anguish and impotence. Many were radicalized by the experience, as they could see that Obama’s America is anything but "post-racial," and the pretense of democracy is a cruel hoax. For that experience of activism not to turn into an exercise in frustration, like the endless antiwar marches that occur every time U.S. imperialism invades another country, it’s vital to draw the lessons of those protests – what they showed about the potential for struggle, but also what they did not, and could not, accomplish, and why not. It requires an understanding of the system of official and semi-official racist violence and murder that has characterized American capitalism ever since it solidified on the bedrock of slavery, and continues today.
Capital undergirds all oppression—-this project of mastery immiserates millions globally and results in extinction through environmental degradation and crisis creation.
Dyer-Witherford 99 (Nick, professor of Library and Info. Sciences at the U of Western Ontario. "Cyber Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism") For capitalism, the use of machines as organs of "will over nature" is an imperative. The great insight of the Frankfurt School—an insight subsequently improved and amplified by feminists and ecologists—was that capital’s dual project of dominating both humanity and nature was intimately tied to the cultivation of "instrumental reason" that systematically objectifies, reduces, quantifies and fragments the world for the purposes of technological control. Business’s systemic need to cheapen labor, cut the costs of raw materials, and expand consumer markets gives it an inherent bias toward the piling-up of technological power. This priority—enshrined in phrases such as "progress," "efficiency," "productivity," "modernization," and "growth"—assumes an automatism that is used to override any objection or alternative, regardless of the environmental and social consequences. Today, we witness global vistas of toxification, deforestation, desertification, dying oceans, disappearing ozone layers, and disintegrating immune systems, all interacting in ways that perhaps threaten the very existence of humanity and are undeniably inflicting social collapse, disease, and immiseration across the planet. The degree to which this project of mastery has backfired is all too obvious.
Neoliberal inequality ensures increases in violence – it produces massive structural increases in stress, anxiety, and frustration while removing social norms and community support – results in normlessness and violence as well as a form of ressentiment from the standards of success imposed by society which is the worst form of self imposed violence
Smith 12(Candace Smith, Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Oklahoma. She completed her M.A. in Sociology from OU in May 2012, "Neoliberalism, Anomie, and Interpersonal Violence: Normlessness Leads to Criminality?", November 20, 2012, http://thesocietypages.org/sociologylens/2012/11/20/neoliberalism-anomie-and-interpersonal-violence-normlessness-leads-to-criminality/) Increasingly, there appears to be a connection between neoliberalism and the development of anomie. Such an association is unsurprising considering that neoliberalism encourages individuals to achieve ever greater success even though such a goal is unrealistic. In response to being blocked from realizing their never-ending aspirations, Merton (1968) argues that people in success-driven societies will feel deprived and frustrated as a divide forms between idealistic ambitions and factual reality. While such a divide has traditionally been the widest in developed capitalist states like the U.S., Passas (2000) contends that the growth of neoliberalism has exacerbated this problem in countries throughout the world. As a result, anomie, or the "withdrawal of allegiance from conventional norms and a weakening of these norms’ guiding power on behavior" has increased on a global scale (Passas 2000:20). Oozing with the anomie brought about by constant strain, neoliberalism can intensify the occurrence of violence as frustrated people struggle to live and to succeed in an unequal society. In response to this idea, it appears that as neoliberalism becomes more prominent in a country, it can be expected that anomie and, as a result, interpersonal violence within that country will increase.¶ When it comes to success-driven societies, both Durkheim (1951~1897~) and Merton (1968) argue that such environments can lead to the development of anomie as a result of the imbalance between societal expectations and realistic opportunities. Both scholars agree that the occurrence of means-ends discrepancies can cause to people to feel highly strained and frustrated. And, as people become increasingly aware of power and economic asymmetries, especially as globalization and neoliberalism become more prominent in a country, this sense of strain and frustration can grow. In response, some may choose to either partially or fully disregard previously internalized societal norms that no longer seem useful. As Passas (2000) explains, this means that conventional norms may lose much of their meaning and/or that they may lose their ability to guide pro-social behavior. Such a loss of norms results in anomie, or normlessness. Unfortunately, individuals dealing with anomie typically have limited options when it comes to turning to the state for help. This is because neoliberal policies have often already done away with many of the welfare programs, forms of assistance, and safety nets that had previously kept individuals afloat (Passas 2000). The loss of the state as form of relief can then further encourage the evolvement of anomie within a society.¶ Considering that anomie results in the full or partial loss of social norms, it is not surprising that anomie can lead to deviance. As Passas (2000) points out, normlessness almost necessitates deviance when legitimate means to success are blocked. Individuals facing such a reality feel less of a need to follow previously internalized social norms and more of a need to engage in deviant activities in order to reach their goals. This desire to succeed at all costs paired with a disregard for social rules can easily result in violence. As an example of this idea, Fullilove et al. (1998) found that the occurrence of a violence epidemic in Washington Heights, a neighborhood in New York City, was the result of growing anomie as the neighborhood disintegrated in the midst of social disarray. Braithwaite et al. (2010) further contend that recent violence in Indonesia was the result of societal-level anomie. Other studies (e.g., Messner and Rosenfeld 1997; Savolainen 2000), too, have indicated that there exists a strong relationship between anomie and violence. These findings are not counterintuitive. It makes sense that when people are feeling strained that their frustration (and the loss of previously held norms against deviance) can transform into acts of violence.¶ In an effort to more clearly articulate this overall premise, consider the case of Russia. As explained by Passas (2000), Russia began to slowly embrace neoliberal policies in the 1980s. By the mid-1990s, these policies had resulted in lifting import and export tariffs, liberalizing prices, removing domestic trade restrictions, minimizing the role of government, and privatizing public property. Hungry for freedom, the Russian populace lapped up these neoliberal ideas as consumptionist ideals replaced previously held socialist goals. Unsurprisingly, this zealous transition from socialism to capitalism brought about many consequences including severe and growing social inequality. Unable to overcome structural obstacles and unable to attain success, Passas writes that strain and frustration resulted in many Russians becoming increasingly anomic. Simultaneously, deviance began to increase as old social norms fell out of favor and the Russian government lost much of its autonomy. In response, rising anomie and deviance resulted in a criminal explosion. Since the collapse of the USSR in 1991, already high levels of homicide have increased dramatically, making Russia one of the world’s hotspots for murder (Pridemore 2002). Chervyakov et al. (2009) further note that, unlike in the USSR, murders in Russia are now much more likely to involve aggravating circumstances like rape or robbery. Bringing these findings together, Collier’s (2005:111) research suggests that violence in Russia after the transition to capitalism "resulted from inequitable distribution of wealth, rapid privatization, ~and~ a fall in real income" as well as the loss of the social safety net and an increase in organized crime. Altogether, Russia is a prime example of how the strain and frustration induced by neoliberalism can lead to anomie and, eventually, to violence.¶ By briefly evaluating the case of Russia, it is hopefully clearer how neoliberalism can directly contribute to anomie and indirectly contribute to violence. By creating incredible amounts of stress for those blocked by society’s goals (Durkheim 1957~1897~; Merton 1968), neoliberalism increases the amount of anomie found within a society. This anomie, research has indicated, can then manifest itself in frustration, deviance, and violence (Messner and Rosenfeld 1997; Fullilove et al. 1998; Savolainen 2000; Braithwaite et al. 2010) just as it has done in Russia (Pridemore 2002; Collier 2005; Chervyakov et al. 2009). Without a doubt, the occurrence of violence furthers the development of anomie in a society. This thus suggests that there exists a non-recursive relationship between anomie and violence in that each variable can exacerbate the negative effects of the other. In an effort to dismantle this relationship, Fullilove et al. (1998) argue that communities need to be improved from within while having structural problems addressed from the outside. Doing so, of course, would require very anti-neoliberal policies which,
The alt is historical materialism, the unique creation of pedagogical space through totalizing analysis is key to breaking down a system of globalization
Rupert and Smith 2 (Mark Rupert is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Syracuse University, Hazel Smith is Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace, "Historical Materialism and Globalisation: Essays on Continuity and Change," p. 2-3)SDL Perhaps ironically, during the last decade when liberal capitalism seemed to have attained a kind of global apotheosis, the study of international relations has witnessed a revival of intellectual traditions associated with the legacies of Karl Marx and his many and Various interpreters. Emailing practices of critical scholarship, the traditions of historical materialism share a set of family resemblances: they aim at dc-reifying the apparently natural, universal, and politically neutral appearances of capitalist social reality, explicitly to resituate those abstract appearances in relation to the processes and social power relations implicated in their production and thereby enable their transformation by the human social agents whose socially productive activity constitutes their condition of existence. Marx suggested that such a transformation might emerge out of the Confluence of Capitalism’s endemic crisis tendencies, the polarization of its class structure and the immisemtion of the proletariat and, most importantly, the emergence of the latter as a collective agent through the realization of its socially productive power, heretofore developed in distorted and self-limiting form under the conditions of concentered Capitalist production. Traditional interpretations of Marx tended towards mechanical and economistic visions in which the crisis tendencies of capitalism played themselves out 'behind the backs' of historical actors. Leninist interpretations re-injected a sense of historical agency into historical materialism, but did so by empowering a vanguard of professional revolutionaries to seize the state and transform social relations in the name of the oppressed. Viewed in the light of either of these interpretations, historical materialism may appear to have been discredited by the apparent robustness of capitalist economies and the failure of the oft-predicted final crisis to arrive, and by the degeneration of the Bolshevik revolution into a profoundly anti-democratic system of one-party rule. But, as contributors to this volume demonstrate, there are resources within the traditions of historical materialism which counteract these regressive tendencies and which offer hope for a more enabling and participatory form of social organization than either liberal capitalism or Soviet-style bureaucratic socialism. These new historical materialisms share a skepticism towards mechanistic or vanguardist visions of social change. Progressive social change need not automatically follow in train behind economic crisis, nor can such Change be enacted or imposed by a revolutionary elite acting in the name of the inert masses of the oppressed. Rather, progresive social change must be produced by historically situated social agents whose actions are enabled and constrained by their social self-understandings. This recognition highlights the practical, material significance of critical analysis. In an era when Soviet-style socialism has collapsed upon itself and liberal capitalism offers itself as the natural, necessary and absolute condition of human social life, the chapters in this volume insist that the potentially emancipatory resources of a renewed and perhaps reconstructed historical materialism are as relevant in today's world as ever.
THE PROMISE OF THE AMERICAN DREAM IS FUNDAMENTALLY CORRUPT. Belief in a "better America" simply starves critique of the capitalist system that allows black and brown bodies to be shot at will. The myth of reformism, that of the capitalist state, is especially true in the context of the endemic of police brutality
The Internationalist ‘14 The Internationalist, 8-1-2014, "Killer Cops, White Supremacists: Racist Terror Stalks Black America," No Publication, http://www.internationalist.org/killercopswstalkblackamerica1507.html.//KOHS-AG Every time there is an upsurge of popular unrest, the question of the state is posed point-blank. In 2011, leaders of Occupy Wall Street argued that beat cops were part of the "99." Substituting income statistics for class analysis, they blinded demonstrators to the fact that the police are the armed fist of capital. They kept insisting on this (and tried to stop the Internationalists from chanting "We are all Sean Bell, NYPD go to hell") even as cops were arresting hundreds on the Brooklyn Bridge. The populist Occupy "movement" disappeared after a few short months, partly due to coordinated national repression orchestrated from Obama’s Department of Homeland Security, but more fundamentally because protesters did not come to an understanding of the class nature of the capitalist state, and the fact that it cannot be reformed. Similarly with the abrupt collapse of the mass protests against police murder last December. Leftists chant "indict, convict, send the killer cops to jail" misleading protesters into thinking this is possible, although all of U.S. history shows the contrary. In the exceedingly rare case where a cop does time, it will be a slap on the wrist. And when they add "the whole damn system is guilty as hell" they don’t say what that system is. Yet for there to be a real struggle against the systematic racist police murder it is crucial to understand that this is rooted in racist American capitalism. Chants like "we want freedom, freedom – these racist cops, we don’t need ’em, need ’em" suggest that there could be non-racist cops, when the reality is that it is not just a matter of individual attitudes: all police are part of a machine of racist repression. The rhyming reformism serves to mask the stark reality – as revolutionaries from Marx and Engels to Lenin and Trotsky have stressed – that the state enforces the rule of the economically dominant class. "Who do you protect, who do you serve?" scream demonstration leaders as cops beat protesters bloody. For would-be socialists to pose this as a question to the cops, even rhetorically, buys into the lie (emblazoned on LAPD patrol cars) that police supposedly protect and serve "the people." The task of revolutionary Marxists is to tell the truth to the masses, that the police defend the interests of capital. The capitalist-imperialist rulers of the United States enforce their world domination with bloody butchery just as they do inside the U.S. A black U.S. president, Barack Obama, a liberal Democrat, kills Muslims and U.S. citizens with his drones with as little regard for the lives of the oppressed as his Republican predecessor George W. Bush. And their killer cops will keep on killing until their bloody rule is overthrown. Most of the mobilizations against police murder have been led by liberals, black and white, and reformists – that is, leftists who may call themselves socialist and even communist, but whose actual program is only to reform (and thus ultimately uphold) capitalism. While revolutionaries support genuine reforms (from the minimum wage to the right to same-sex marriage), the idea that state repression can be reformed away is characteristic of reformists. One of the problems liberals and reformists face in turning the often massive protests into an ongoing "movement" like the civil rights movement they seek to emulate is the absence of any even remotely credible reform demands. Over the last several decades any number of supposed reforms have been tried and all have failed to even put a dent in the rampant racist police terror. Demilitarize the police? Akai Gurley, Tanish Anderson, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, and most of those murdered by police have been killed by one or two cops on regular patrol. Disarm the police? Impossible in racist capitalist America, but beyond that, Eric Garner and 20 years earlier Anthony Baez were killed by a cop’s bare hands. Dashboard cameras on police cars? When Walter Scott was pulled over in North Charleston on April 4 for a supposed broken taillight, the dashcam showed no such thing – but it didn’t stop him from getting shot in the back and killed by the racist cop. Body cameras on police officers? This is the latest fad. It didn’t stop the shooting of Eric Harris in Tulsa, Oklahoma on April 2, which was recorded by a bodycam, including the remark by the 73-year-old "reserve" cop that he thought he was firing a Taser. A new police chief? Under Republican plutocrat Bloomberg New York had Ray Kelly, under liberal Democrat de Blasio it has Bill Bratton, but the killing doesn’t stop. And now the liberal Democratic City Council has voted to hire 1,300 more cops than under Bloomberg/Kelly. A black police chief? A black mayor? Philadelphia has both, and its "stop and frisk" numbers rival New York’s. More black police? In the case of Baltimore, on top of a black mayor and police chief, almost half the cops are black, but both black and white officers were guilty of Freddie Gray’s murder. New police policies? "Stop and frisk" is now officially "reformed," so now it’s back to "broken windows" – harassing black and Latino youth for minor "quality of life" infractions. Residency requirements? Instead of holing up in white suburbs like Walnut Creek, California or New York’s Rockland County, police will just congregate in cop enclaves like Howard Beach or Eltingville on Staten Island’s South Shore. Community policing? So instead of patrolling poor black and Latino areas in convoys, like Israeli occupation forces in the Palestinian West Bank, they will increase the number of cops in permanent outposts while assigning a few community relations officers to coordinate with church leaders … and the SWAT teams are held in reserve. Civilian review boards? NYC, Philly and Baltimore all have them, and they’re not only utterly worthless in controlling police violence, they actually serve to legitimize it.
The law is unequivocally a tool of capitalist oppression – trying to limit qualified immunity is just one more reform which reinforces this system. The Internationalist 14
The Internationalist, 8-1-2014, "Killer Cops, White Supremacists: Racist Terror Stalks Black America," No Publication, http://www.internationalist.org/killercopswstalkblackamerica1507.html As Karl Marx wrote at the time of the 1871 Paris Commune, under capitalist rule the state cannot serve the interests of the exploited and oppressed, no matter who is in the government or how much pressure is put on it, and the task is not "to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to smash it." Under the Commune, the police were subject to the control of, and was recallable by, the working people – but that was after an uprising that suppressed the former army and police, i.e., destroyed the former state machinery. The idea that the capitalists and their politicians, while still the ruling class, would tolerate control of the police by those it is intended to repress is a total illusion. And those who think that the election of sheriffs makes any difference in their repressive role need only look at the racist sheriff Joe Arpaio in Maricopa County, Arizona, who has been elected again and again. The entire legal system is based on the recognition that the police are the first line of defense of capital. As shown by the refusal of a grand jury to indict the cops who killed Eric Garner, even in the face of irrefutable evidence, the process is rigged to ensure impunity for the police. In Rise of the Warrior Cop, Post reporter Balko points out that, "Under the qualified immunity from civil lawsuits currently afforded to police under federal law, a police officer can’t be sued for mere negligence – or even for gross negligence that results in a fatality." But he admits that of his paltry list of reforms, modifying this immunity is the "least likely to be adopted." This is not some peculiar American or modern invention. Engels in The Origins of the Family notes about even the earliest appearance of the state: "Representatives of a power which estranges them from society, they have to be given prestige by means of special decrees, which invest them with a peculiar sanctity and inviolability." No amount of protest will convince the ruling class to muzzle its uniformed guard dogs, whom it requires to keep the poor and working people down. What’s needed is militant class struggle on a revolutionary program. The Internationalist Group has called for an end to all drug laws. We call for labor/black/ immigrant mobilization against police terror. We have acted to carry this out, with the unprecedented port shutdown to "Stop Police Terror" by Local 10 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in Oakland this past May Day, and the "Labor Against Police Murder" contingent the same day, organized by Class Struggle Workers – Portland. Bringing to bear workers’ power to stop the wheels of commerce could stay the rulers’ hand for a time. At the height of struggle one can also mobilize to get the police and military occupation forces out, as the IG called for in Ferguson last August and again in Baltimore this spring.8 But such actions can only have a temporary effect. Ultimately, there is no solution to racist police brutality under capitalist rule: it is inherent in the system. Racist vigilantes, from George Zimmerman to Dylann Roof, act as auxiliaries. Whether in the form of KKK nightriders and racist sheriffs under Jim Crow, or mass incarceration combined with paramilitary police forces today, supplemented by massacres, American capitalism has always devised a way to keep its black, Latino and now increasingly immigrant wage slaves in thrall. The killer cops aren’t running amok, in contradiction to their assigned task, they’re doing their job to enforce racist "law and order" which is essential to American capitalism, and has been ever since African slaves were brought here in chains. The fact that year after year, from one end of the country to the other, virtually no police are indicted – much less convicted – for killing over 1,000 civilians a year is no accident.
Protests against the police state have failed because they have pushed aside the question of capitalism—the 1AC has a flawed starting point
The Internationalist ‘14 The Internationalist, 8-1-2014, "Killer Cops, White Supremacists: Racist Terror Stalks Black America," No Publication, http://www.internationalist.org/killercopswstalkblackamerica1507.html.//KOHS-AG So despite the mass protests and pious talk of police "accountability," nothing has changed. Whether it is unarmed black men murdered by police, like Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina and Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland, or the nine church-goers shot by a white-supremacist vigilante at a Bible-study session in Charleston last week, it is clear that murderous white racism is endemic in the United States. Soon another particularly egregious case will grab the headlines, and again there will be angry mass protests. Will they peter out or come to an abrupt end as they did last year with nothing to show for it? At most there may be a few cosmetic, symbolic changes like removing the Confederate battle flag, the banner of the Ku Klux Klan terrorists, that flies at state capitols and is part of state flags. But the racist killing will go on and on … unless we put a stop to it. But how? Tens of thousands of young people, black, white, Latino and others, and many older people as well, participated in the mass mobilizations last summer and fall. Over and over they chanted "black lives matter," "hands up, don’t shoot" and "I can’t breathe" – slogans that reflect a sense of anguish and impotence. Many were radicalized by the experience, as they could see that Obama’s America is anything but "post-racial," and the pretense of democracy is a cruel hoax. For that experience of activism not to turn into an exercise in frustration, like the endless antiwar marches that occur every time U.S. imperialism invades another country, it’s vital to draw the lessons of those protests – what they showed about the potential for struggle, but also what they did not, and could not, accomplish, and why not. It requires an understanding of the system of official and semi-official racist violence and murder that has characterized American capitalism ever since it solidified on the bedrock of slavery, and continues today.
Capital undergirds all oppression—-this project of mastery immiserates millions globally and results in extinction through environmental degradation and crisis creation.
Dyer-Witherford 99 (Nick, professor of Library and Info. Sciences at the U of Western Ontario. "Cyber Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism") For capitalism, the use of machines as organs of "will over nature" is an imperative. The great insight of the Frankfurt School—an insight subsequently improved and amplified by feminists and ecologists—was that capital’s dual project of dominating both humanity and nature was intimately tied to the cultivation of "instrumental reason" that systematically objectifies, reduces, quantifies and fragments the world for the purposes of technological control. Business’s systemic need to cheapen labor, cut the costs of raw materials, and expand consumer markets gives it an inherent bias toward the piling-up of technological power. This priority—enshrined in phrases such as "progress," "efficiency," "productivity," "modernization," and "growth"—assumes an automatism that is used to override any objection or alternative, regardless of the environmental and social consequences. Today, we witness global vistas of toxification, deforestation, desertification, dying oceans, disappearing ozone layers, and disintegrating immune systems, all interacting in ways that perhaps threaten the very existence of humanity and are undeniably inflicting social collapse, disease, and immiseration across the planet. The degree to which this project of mastery has backfired is all too obvious.
Neoliberal inequality ensures increases in violence – it produces massive structural increases in stress, anxiety, and frustration while removing social norms and community support – results in normlessness and violence as well as a form of ressentiment from the standards of success imposed by society which is the worst form of self imposed violence
Smith 12(Candace Smith, Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Oklahoma. She completed her M.A. in Sociology from OU in May 2012, "Neoliberalism, Anomie, and Interpersonal Violence: Normlessness Leads to Criminality?", November 20, 2012, http://thesocietypages.org/sociologylens/2012/11/20/neoliberalism-anomie-and-interpersonal-violence-normlessness-leads-to-criminality/) Increasingly, there appears to be a connection between neoliberalism and the development of anomie. Such an association is unsurprising considering that neoliberalism encourages individuals to achieve ever greater success even though such a goal is unrealistic. In response to being blocked from realizing their never-ending aspirations, Merton (1968) argues that people in success-driven societies will feel deprived and frustrated as a divide forms between idealistic ambitions and factual reality. While such a divide has traditionally been the widest in developed capitalist states like the U.S., Passas (2000) contends that the growth of neoliberalism has exacerbated this problem in countries throughout the world. As a result, anomie, or the "withdrawal of allegiance from conventional norms and a weakening of these norms’ guiding power on behavior" has increased on a global scale (Passas 2000:20). Oozing with the anomie brought about by constant strain, neoliberalism can intensify the occurrence of violence as frustrated people struggle to live and to succeed in an unequal society. In response to this idea, it appears that as neoliberalism becomes more prominent in a country, it can be expected that anomie and, as a result, interpersonal violence within that country will increase.¶ When it comes to success-driven societies, both Durkheim (1951~1897~) and Merton (1968) argue that such environments can lead to the development of anomie as a result of the imbalance between societal expectations and realistic opportunities. Both scholars agree that the occurrence of means-ends discrepancies can cause to people to feel highly strained and frustrated. And, as people become increasingly aware of power and economic asymmetries, especially as globalization and neoliberalism become more prominent in a country, this sense of strain and frustration can grow. In response, some may choose to either partially or fully disregard previously internalized societal norms that no longer seem useful. As Passas (2000) explains, this means that conventional norms may lose much of their meaning and/or that they may lose their ability to guide pro-social behavior. Such a loss of norms results in anomie, or normlessness. Unfortunately, individuals dealing with anomie typically have limited options when it comes to turning to the state for help. This is because neoliberal policies have often already done away with many of the welfare programs, forms of assistance, and safety nets that had previously kept individuals afloat (Passas 2000). The loss of the state as form of relief can then further encourage the evolvement of anomie within a society.¶ Considering that anomie results in the full or partial loss of social norms, it is not surprising that anomie can lead to deviance. As Passas (2000) points out, normlessness almost necessitates deviance when legitimate means to success are blocked. Individuals facing such a reality feel less of a need to follow previously internalized social norms and more of a need to engage in deviant activities in order to reach their goals. This desire to succeed at all costs paired with a disregard for social rules can easily result in violence. As an example of this idea, Fullilove et al. (1998) found that the occurrence of a violence epidemic in Washington Heights, a neighborhood in New York City, was the result of growing anomie as the neighborhood disintegrated in the midst of social disarray. Braithwaite et al. (2010) further contend that recent violence in Indonesia was the result of societal-level anomie. Other studies (e.g., Messner and Rosenfeld 1997; Savolainen 2000), too, have indicated that there exists a strong relationship between anomie and violence. These findings are not counterintuitive. It makes sense that when people are feeling strained that their frustration (and the loss of previously held norms against deviance) can transform into acts of violence.¶ In an effort to more clearly articulate this overall premise, consider the case of Russia. As explained by Passas (2000), Russia began to slowly embrace neoliberal policies in the 1980s. By the mid-1990s, these policies had resulted in lifting import and export tariffs, liberalizing prices, removing domestic trade restrictions, minimizing the role of government, and privatizing public property. Hungry for freedom, the Russian populace lapped up these neoliberal ideas as consumptionist ideals replaced previously held socialist goals. Unsurprisingly, this zealous transition from socialism to capitalism brought about many consequences including severe and growing social inequality. Unable to overcome structural obstacles and unable to attain success, Passas writes that strain and frustration resulted in many Russians becoming increasingly anomic. Simultaneously, deviance began to increase as old social norms fell out of favor and the Russian government lost much of its autonomy. In response, rising anomie and deviance resulted in a criminal explosion. Since the collapse of the USSR in 1991, already high levels of homicide have increased dramatically, making Russia one of the world’s hotspots for murder (Pridemore 2002). Chervyakov et al. (2009) further note that, unlike in the USSR, murders in Russia are now much more likely to involve aggravating circumstances like rape or robbery. Bringing these findings together, Collier’s (2005:111) research suggests that violence in Russia after the transition to capitalism "resulted from inequitable distribution of wealth, rapid privatization, ~and~ a fall in real income" as well as the loss of the social safety net and an increase in organized crime. Altogether, Russia is a prime example of how the strain and frustration induced by neoliberalism can lead to anomie and, eventually, to violence.¶ By briefly evaluating the case of Russia, it is hopefully clearer how neoliberalism can directly contribute to anomie and indirectly contribute to violence. By creating incredible amounts of stress for those blocked by society’s goals (Durkheim 1957~1897~; Merton 1968), neoliberalism increases the amount of anomie found within a society. This anomie, research has indicated, can then manifest itself in frustration, deviance, and violence (Messner and Rosenfeld 1997; Fullilove et al. 1998; Savolainen 2000; Braithwaite et al. 2010) just as it has done in Russia (Pridemore 2002; Collier 2005; Chervyakov et al. 2009). Without a doubt, the occurrence of violence furthers the development of anomie in a society. This thus suggests that there exists a non-recursive relationship between anomie and violence in that each variable can exacerbate the negative effects of the other. In an effort to dismantle this relationship, Fullilove et al. (1998) argue that communities need to be improved from within while having structural problems addressed from the outside. Doing so, of course, would require very anti-neoliberal policies which,
The alt is historical materialism, the unique creation of pedagogical space through totalizing analysis is key to breaking down a system of globalization
Rupert and Smith 2 (Mark Rupert is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Syracuse University, Hazel Smith is Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace, "Historical Materialism and Globalisation: Essays on Continuity and Change," p. 2-3)SDL Perhaps ironically, during the last decade when liberal capitalism seemed to have attained a kind of global apotheosis, the study of international relations has witnessed a revival of intellectual traditions associated with the legacies of Karl Marx and his many and Various interpreters. Emailing practices of critical scholarship, the traditions of historical materialism share a set of family resemblances: they aim at dc-reifying the apparently natural, universal, and politically neutral appearances of capitalist social reality, explicitly to resituate those abstract appearances in relation to the processes and social power relations implicated in their production and thereby enable their transformation by the human social agents whose socially productive activity constitutes their condition of existence. Marx suggested that such a transformation might emerge out of the Confluence of Capitalism’s endemic crisis tendencies, the polarization of its class structure and the immisemtion of the proletariat and, most importantly, the emergence of the latter as a collective agent through the realization of its socially productive power, heretofore developed in distorted and self-limiting form under the conditions of concentered Capitalist production. Traditional interpretations of Marx tended towards mechanical and economistic visions in which the crisis tendencies of capitalism played themselves out 'behind the backs' of historical actors. Leninist interpretations re-injected a sense of historical agency into historical materialism, but did so by empowering a vanguard of professional revolutionaries to seize the state and transform social relations in the name of the oppressed. Viewed in the light of either of these interpretations, historical materialism may appear to have been discredited by the apparent robustness of capitalist economies and the failure of the oft-predicted final crisis to arrive, and by the degeneration of the Bolshevik revolution into a profoundly anti-democratic system of one-party rule. But, as contributors to this volume demonstrate, there are resources within the traditions of historical materialism which counteract these regressive tendencies and which offer hope for a more enabling and participatory form of social organization than either liberal capitalism or Soviet-style bureaucratic socialism. These new historical materialisms share a skepticism towards mechanistic or vanguardist visions of social change. Progressive social change need not automatically follow in train behind economic crisis, nor can such Change be enacted or imposed by a revolutionary elite acting in the name of the inert masses of the oppressed. Rather, progresive social change must be produced by historically situated social agents whose actions are enabled and constrained by their social self-understandings. This recognition highlights the practical, material significance of critical analysis. In an era when Soviet-style socialism has collapsed upon itself and liberal capitalism offers itself as the natural, necessary and absolute condition of human social life, the chapters in this volume insist that the potentially emancipatory resources of a renewed and perhaps reconstructed historical materialism are as relevant in today's world as ever.
