Historical Materialism K - Six Week - EnDI 2010

ENDI 2010 1Historical Materialism K Wave 1

HISTORICAL MATERIALISM K

1NC vs. critical affs...............................................................................................................................2

LINKS:Postmodern/ post-structuralist theory..........................................................................................................6Poststructuralist k of military....................................................................................................................7Rejecting modernity...............................................................................................................................9Hegemony......................................................................................................................................... 11Anti-capitalism................................................................................................................................... 12Imperialism........................................................................................................................................ 14Self-determination...............................................................................................................................15Revolution.........................................................................................................................................16Terrorism.......................................................................................................................................... 17Identity............................................................................................................................................. 18Race................................................................................................................................................ 22Race – History................................................................................................................................25Historical examples..............................................................................................................................26Post-postivism....................................................................................................................................27Language/discourse..............................................................................................................................28China economy...................................................................................................................................29

ALTERNATIVE SOLVENCY: Language / identity..............................................................................................................................31Undermines sovereingty........................................................................................................................32Statism............................................................................................................................................. 33Race............................................................................................................................................... 34Politics........................................................................................................................................... 35Historical materialist epistemology good/alt solves.......................................................................................36

2NC:AT: Marxism bad turns.........................................................................................................................38AT: Communism bad...........................................................................................................................39AT: Global violence decreasing bc of cap...................................................................................................40AT: humanism bad - Rationalism holocaust...............................................................................41AT: Humanism bad – Heidegger....................................................................................................43AT: Fem critique of hist mat..........................................................................................................44AT: Fem – exclusion of gender link................................................................................................47AT: Alt kills environment...............................................................................................................48


1NC VS. CRITICAL AFFS

The affirmative’s rejection of truth claims about the material role of actors and structures in history conflates all knowledge with Enlightenment rationality-this ahistorical viewpoint precludes the most relevant and politicizing modes of analysisPalmer '96 - Canada Research Chair in Canadian Labour History and Canadian Studies @ Trent University (Bryan D., "Old Positions/New Necessities: History, Class, and Marxist Metanarrative," in "In Defense of History," Ed. by E. Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.65-72, RG)

On one level this is not particularly new. But postmodernists/poststruc-turalists have wrapped their antagonism to history in a series of intellectu ally seductive tautologies which beg the fundamental questions of the historical process. Central to this outlook is a refusal of post-Enlightenment systems of rational thought, which are reduced to a form—narration—and a substance—accommodation of bourgeois rule—that relegates such "knowledge" to complicity with various oppressions.2 It is as though poststructuralism, in an immense social reconstruction of the deep historical past, would like to see the entire eighteenth-century Age of Revolution, which was, to be sure, a bourgeois project, jettisoned. In some staggering leap of idealism, it seeks to pole-vault over the class contents and transformations of thought associated with 1776,1789,1792, and the Industrial Revolution, leapfrogging the nineteenth century, the experience of colonial revolt, and the first workers' state (1917). Yet all of these occurred as historical process and have rich narrative structures of meaning in the politics and culture of modern times, from Blake and Beethoven to Marx and Munch to Veblen and Van Gogh. However incomplete the Enlightenment project, compromised as it was in its origins in the bourgeois proclamation of egalitarianism as a property-based legal right rather than a social condition of fulfillment, it was a revolutionary transcen dence of the feudal order, which had been confined for centuries in castelike conceptions of social station and the incarcerating thought of superstition, divinity, and absolutism. It was the purpose of Marxism, as the maturing worldview of the emerging proletariat, to materialize and radicalize Enlightenment rationality, extending its potential not just to this or that privileged sector of society, but to all of humanity. Just as Mary Wollstonecraft took the possibilities inherent in the Enlightenment's Pandora's box of equality and extended her defense of the French Revolution and Thomas Paine's Rights of Man to a feminist articulation of the rights of woman, reaching well past patriarchy's powerful presence in bourgeois thought and practice, so too did Marx build on Enlightenment idealism to construct its oppositional challenge, historical materialism. Poststructuralism allows no such reading of distinctions and developments within Enlightenment thought, condemning all post-En lightenment modes of discourse as hopelessly compromised with the pro ject of subordination. Particularly suspect in current theory is the Enlightenment "metanarra-tive," with its "explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth."3 This obsolete discourse, a supposed product of the modernist crisis of metaphysical philosophy, merely masks the disintegrations of such narratives, and their dispersal into the unstable clouds of postmodernity's lofty discursiveness.4 Postmodernists/poststructuralists thus disavow, in their formalist and ultimatist rejections, divergences of considerable, oppositional importance. They throw out Kant and Hegel as well as Marx, all of whom rely on metanarratives of one sort or another, little consideration being given to the funda mental differences separating such systems of thought. All states are simply states, and hence oppressive, an anarchist might argue (Down with the Bolsheviks!); all wars are to be condemned, asserts the pacifist (We take no sides in Vietnam!); all metanarratives are suspect and compromised, there being no master categories of explanatory authority, proclaims the post-structuralist (Away with all interpretive pests!). In the comment that follows I concentrate on the Marxist "metanarra-tive," an unfulfilled project of radicalizing Enlightenment rationality that much contemporary theory refuses in its repudiation of historical materialism. Marxist metanarrative is rejected, ironically, at precisely the histori cal moment that it is critically necessary , its insistence on reading history in class terms, as a succession of identifiable structures and agencies propelled by material interests, being fundamental to the interpretation of the movement from past to present, especially in the context of contempo rary life, where humanity is more and more connected in the global dimen sions of exploitation and oppression. 5


1NC VS. CRITICAL AFFS

The alternative is historical materialism. Historical materialist analysis is epistemologically superior to post-structuralism-it allows more effective analyses of power and the mobilization of discourses Lapointe, 2007 [Thierry. "Beyond an Historicism Without Subject: Agency and the Elusive Genealogies of State Sovereignty" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association 48th Annual Convention, Feb 28, 2007 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p180176_index.html]

The primary objective of this volume is to bring social history back in IR in order to challenge its ahistorical and essentialist categories as much as its core postulates. As this chapter has shown, it has also been Poststructuralist contention to challenge IR selfimage in shedding light in its theoretical role as a practice of forgetting. Our contention is that despite their significant contributions in challenging the supremacist position of mainstream IR, their method of analysis have impeded their capacity to think about IR in terms of historical process. As I have stressed in the first section, its anti-foundationalist conception of power, its endeavour to analyse power relations on the basis of de-centring of the human subject, and its own historical analysis which focuses solely on moment of epistemic ruptures without adventuring into an explanation of its causes have left us with an image of “history without subject”. If the imperative of thinking about social institutions—sovereignty—in dynamic terms necessitates that we abandon any attempt to fix meanings into rigid definitions, as suggested by Walker, we have to bring back agency at the heart of our theorizing since it is through its historically specific practices that human create and transform—albeit seldom as they have initially planed—their environments. As I have sought to highlight in the second and third part of this chapter, HM may develop better and richer analysis in thinking about the relationship between power relations, institutional and symbolic structures of enunciation in embedding them in a wider geopolitical environment. However, as I have argued, the focus on discourses and symbolic structures without a proper contextualization of the relations and dynamics of power they are an integral part of should be abandoned. Indeed, such method of investigation tends to reify language in giving too much unity to rules/structures of enunciation, which also tends to loose sight of the different ways in which different agents may mobilise discourses—make references to similar symbols and used them in following the same (proper) rules of enunciation—in order to achieve quite distinctive sets of objectives and reproducing quite different set of social practices.

Our critique turns all of their impacts. The alternative is a pre-requisite to an understanding of power as contingent or the use of counterhegemonies as resistance Palmer '96 - Canada Research Chair in Canadian Labour History and Canadian Studies @ Trent University (Bryan D., "Old Positions/New Necessities: History, Class, and Marxist Metanarrative," in "In Defense of History," Ed. by E. Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.65-72, RG)

It is worth reiterating the obvious, since the obvious is precisely what poststructuralism/postmodernism often obfuscates, or even denies. Marx ist and historical materialist criticism of contemporary theory and its insis tence on the politics and historically central practices of class do not rest only on a series of denials. The significance of the knowledge/power cou pling, for instance, which is associated with Foucault, is hardly alien to the Marxist method. Marxism has always been attentive to the relationship of ideas, dominance, and social transformation. Representation, imagery, discourses, and texts can hardly be said to be understated in the theory and practice of historical materialism, which has consistently grappled, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, with the problematized meaning of the base-superstructure metaphor, most evident in the rich body of writing associated with British Marxist historians such as Christopher Hill, Edward Thompson, Rodney Hilton, and V.G. Kiernan, and the tradition of histo-ricized literary criticism associated with Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton.6 Finally, to claim that Marxism is a metanarrative of explanatory importance, resting unambiguously on the causality of productive forces and the determinative boundaries set by fundamentally economic relations, such as class, does not necessitate refusing the significance of other points of self-identification, such as race and gender. What separates Marxism's metanarrative from postmodernist incredulity of all master categories is not, however, this or that particular. Rather, there is a critical parting of the analytic seas in the two traditions' approaches to historical context as a material force, within which all struggles for eman cipation and all acts of subordination take place. Poststructuralism/post-modernism sees history as an authorial creation, a conjuring up of the past to serve the discursive content of the present. Thus the past can only be textually created out of the imperatives of the ongoing instance. In its insistence that history be contextualized in the material world of possibili ties of the past, rather than cut adrift to float freely in the cross-currents of attending to its obscured social relations and situating those corners of suppressed history within the larger ensemble of possibilities that

ENDI 2010 4Historical Materialism K Wave 1were something more than the ideological fiction of the established archival record, attentive as it generally is to the instinctual preservationism of power. Moreover, Marxism's metanarrative tries to be true—believing that such a process can be located, just as it can be obscured or distorted—to the actors of the past, whatever side of the class divide their feet touch down upon. Thus, a major historiographical difference separates the essentially Marxist understanding of class formation, struggle, and consciousness evident in E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963) and Gareth Stedman Jones's poststructurally inclined reading of Chartism in The Languages of Class (1983). Thompson, whose political practice and theory ran headlong into Stalinist and mainstream social democratic containments, explores the opaque nooks and crannies of English popular radicalism,

CONTINUES…


1NC VS. CRITICAL AFFSCONTINUED…uncovering an underground insurrectionary tradition that flew in the face of constituted authority in the opening decades of the nineteenth century, as well as standing in stark revolutionary contrast to the stolid constitutionalism of later generations of working-class reformers and their Fabian historians. This is a long way from Stedman Jones, whose politics of the 1980s had been formed within the conservatizing and hostile drift of the Labour Party away from the working class. He reads Chartism's successes against the politics of mass upheaval in the 1830s and 1840s, seeing in the movement's ideas and actions not the class mobilizations of the time but the hangover of an eighteenth-century politics that somehow distanced itself from the class actualities of the historical context. There is no doubt that Thompson's Making is driven by a commitment to the revolutionary aspirations of the working class, past and present, but that does not undermine his text's authority precisely because it is, for all of its dissident commitments, engaged with the complexities of the material world of the early nineteenth century. Stedman Jones, in contrast, searches for ways to distance himself from the specificities of Chartism's times. The supreme irony is that the "present" of Stedman Jones's text is nothing more than an ideological adaptation to Thatcher's Britain, a displacement of the past that paints a major history of working-class mobilization into a derivative corner of denigration and denial. Thompson's "present," in striking contrast, is a moment of revolution thwarted, a "heroic" challenge that, whatever its failures, remains significant to both the history of the working class and the class content of contemporary left politics.7 It is when postmodernist/poststructuralist readings of history are scruti nized to see how metanarrative is suppressed, resulting inevitably in a particular structuring of past, present, and future, that the costs and content of abandoning metanarrative are most evident. When the French Revolu tion is interpreted, not as a contest between aristocracy and bourgeoisie, mediated by the involvement of the sans-culottes, but as the unfolding symbolic will of a population galvanized as much by imagery as political principle, the condescending class dismissiveness of contemporary histo- riographic fashion is strikingly evident.8 An ironic consequence of postcolo-nial deconstructive writing, with its understandable refusal of the Orientalist metanarrative, and its unfortunate textualization of imperialist plunder and indigenous resistance, is the further silencing of those margi nalized "others," whose differences are celebrated, but whose umbilical link to class formation on a global sale is twisted in the obscured isolations of cultures and countries.9 In the words of David Harvey: Postmodernism has us accepting the reifications and partitionings, actually celebrating the activity of masking and cover-up, all the fetishisras of locality, place, or social grouping, while denying the kind of meta-theory which can grasp the political-economic processes (money flows, international divisions of labour, financial markets, and the like) that are becom ing ever more universalizing in their depth, intensity and reach over daily life.10 Postmodernistic antagonism to metanarrative thus carries with it a particular price tag, one in which the significance of class is almost universally marked down. That this process is embedded less in theory and more in the material politics of the late twentieth century, with their "retreat from class,"11 a withdrawal hastened by new offensives on the part of capital and the state, and conditioned by "actually existing socialism's" Stalinist deformations and ultimate collapse, is evident in one historian's confident statement. Patrick Joyce claims that British history, once explained in terms of class struggle, must now be regarded differently: There is a powerful sense in which class may be said to have "fallen." Instead of being a master category of historical explanation, it has become one term among many, sharing rough equality with these others (which is what I meant by the "fall" of class). The reasons for this are not hard to find. In Britain, economic decline and restructuring have led to the disintegration of the old manual sector of employment, and of what was, mistakenly, seen to be a "traditional" working class. The rise of the right from the 1970s, and the decline of the left, together with that of the trade unions, pointed in a similar direction to that of economic change, towards a loosening of the hold class and work-based categories had, not only on the academic mind, but also on a wider public. Changes going on in Britain were mirrored elsewhere, but the greatest change of all was the disintegration of world communism, and with it the retreat of intellectual Marxism.12 To "deconstruct" such a statement is to expose the transparent crudeness of its content, which bears a disappointing likeness to Time magazine. Even if trends in the 1990s were unambiguously of the sort pointed to by Joyce, it is most emphatically not the case that the analytic meanings of this period of supposed change could be transferred wholesale to a past society quite unlike it—what possible relevance can the fall of a degenerated and deformed set of workers' states (the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, etc.) have on our exploration of the tangible class composition of early nineteenth-century society? Is it not rather unwholesome for supposed intellectuals to be bartering their interpretive integrity in the crass coin of political fashion, their supposedly pristine ideas dripping with the thoroughly partisan politics of a particular historical period? Joyce's words, ironically, confirm rather than undermine historical materialism. As Joyce alludes to the "fall" of class as a product of global restructuring, trade union and left defeat, the implosion of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and the rise of the right, what are we to see but the actual confirmation of "intellectual Marxism?" Did not Marx write that, "The ideas of the ruling class are in eveiy epoch the ruling ideas," and suggest that at moments of "enthusiastic striving for innovation"—which is certainly a characteristic of the postmodern—such ideas might well result in a "more deeply rooted domination of the old routine?"13 Historical materialism would suggest that there is a profound difference between the trajectory of political economy in one epoch, and its attendant ideologies, and the actual social relations of production and contestation in another historical period. Joyce collapses the two. In doing so he does disservice, again, to both past and present. For while his simplified catalogue-like listing of the onward march of left defeat has some resonance in terms of contemporary political economic development, Joyce

ENDI 2010 6Historical Materialism K Wave 1conveniently understates the presence of other dimensions. His accounting is one-sided and distortingly one-dimensional. Yes, to be sure, the Stalinist economies and their ruling castes have, outside of Cuba and (less so) China, taken a headlong plunge into the privatization despotisms of the 1990s, which Marxists from the Trotskyist tradition have been predicting since the publication of The Revolution Betrayed (1937). Against those who saw in the bureaucratic grip of Stalinism a fundamental, if flawed, blockade against the restoration of market relations, Trotsky wrote: "In reality a backslide to capitalism is wholly possible."14 Class politics were dealt a severe blow in the capitalist counterrevolutions and Stalinist implosions of the post-1989 years. Nevertheless, there is no indication that this has lessened the importance of class as an agent of social transformation and human possibility (a master category of metanarrative). Indeed, it will be the revival of class mobilizations that will retrieve for socialized humanity what was lost over the course of the 1990s in Russia and elsewhere, or there will be no gains forced from the already all-too-apparent losses of recent capitalist restorationism. Almost a decade of tyrannical Yeltsin-like Great Russianism and the barbarism of small "nation" chauvinisms should have made it apparent where the politics of national identity lead. Class, as both a category of potential and becoming and an agency of activism, has thus reasserted its fundamental importance. More and more of humanity now faces the ravages of capitalism's highly totalizing, essen-tializing, and homogenizing impulses, and these are currently unleashed with a tragic vengeance as even the once degenerate and deformed workers' states look to the ideological abstractions of the world market for suste nance rather than relying on proletarian powers . Mass strikes now routinely challenge capital and its states, from France to Canada, from Korea to Brazil. Once-Soviet workers, who saw socialism sour in the stale breath of generations of Stalinism, are voting Communist again, whatever the prob-lematic connotations, in the 1990s. At the end of 1995, polls in the advanced capitalist economies of the West CONTINUES…


1NC V. CRITICAL AFFSCONTINUED…almost universally locate society's major discontents in the material failings of a social order that has visibly widened the gap between "haves" and "have-nots," undermining the mythical middle class and depressing the living conditions of those working poor fortunate enough to retain some hold on their jobs. There are no answers separate from those of class struggle, however much this metanarrative of materially structured resistance intersects with special oppressions. Class has not so much fallen as it has returned. It had never, of course, gone anywhere. Identified as simply one of many plural subjectivities, class has actually been obscured from analytic and political view by poststructuralism's analytic edifice, erected at just the moment that the left is in dire need of the clarity and direction that class, as a category and an agency, a structure and a politics, can provide. The legacy of Marxism in general, and of historical materialism in particular, is to challenge and oppose this obfuscation, providing an alternative to such material misreadings, building an oppositional worldview that can play some role in reversing the class struggle defeats and weakening of the international workers' movement that has taken place as capital and the state have been in the ascendant over the course of the last thirty years. Those thinkers who have failed to see the transitory nature of postmodernism/poststructuralism, many of them academic fair-weather friends of Marxism, and have instead invested so much in recent proclamations of their discursively constructed identity politics, may well be among the last to acknowledge the blunt revival of class in the face of contemporary capitalism's totalizing materiality. They will no doubt find some variant of "difference" to cling to, the better to avoid the necessity of engaging subjec tivity and its oppressive objectification under capitalism, where class , in its singular capacity to assimilate other categories of being and congeal varieties of power, rules and is ruled, a metanarrative of exploitation within which all identities ultimately find their level of subordination/domination. This is indeed an old way of looking at the world. But postmodernism/post-structuralism notwithstanding, all that is old is not always without value. As one "Old Man" of Marxism, a lifelong defender of radicalized Enlightenment values, once proclaimed, in a maxim particularly suited to the linked fortunes of materialism's past, present, and future: "Those who cannot defend old positions will never conquer new ones."


LINK: POSTMODERN/ POST-STRUCTURALIST THEORY

Their postmodernism is useless absent a concrete view at historical context Cox '95 - emeritus prof. of pol. sci. @ York Univ. (Robert W., "Critical Political Economy," in "International Political Economy: Understanding Global Disorder," Ed. by Bjorn Hette, p.31-32, RG)

First of all, there is no theory in itself, no theory independent of a concrete historical context. Theory is the way the mind works to understand the reality it confronts. It is the self-consciousness of that mind, the awareness of how facts experienced are perceived and organized so as to be understood. Theory thus follows reality in the sense that it is shaped by the world of experience. But it also precedes the making of reality in that it orients the minds of those who by their actions reproduce or change that reality.Theory is always for someone and for some purpose. We need to know the context in which theory is produced and used; and we need to know whether the aim of the user is to maintain the exist ing social order or to change it. These two purposes lead to two kinds of theory. What I shall call 'problem-solving' theory takes the world as given (and on the whole as good) and provides guidance to correct dysfunctions or specific problems that arise within this existing order. The other kind of theory, which I shall call 'critical' (although I do not thereby affiliate with any particular tendencies that have heretofore adopted that word) is concerned with how the existing order came into being and what the possibilities are for change in that order. The first is concerned with specific reforms aimed at the maintenance of existing structures, the 'second with exploring the potential for structural change and the construction of strategies for change.


LINK: POSTSTRUCTURALIST K OF MILITARY

Poststructuralism’s characterization of the international system by inequalities in military power overlooks historical materialist conditions underlying militarism and war. Lapointe, 2007 [Thierry. "Beyond an Historicism Without Subject: Agency and the Elusive Genealogies of State Sovereignty" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association 48th Annual Convention, Feb 28, 2007 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p180176_index.html]

It becomes clearer, in this context, that hierarchical relations of power in the international system may not solely rest on “objective” inequalities in military might as has been contended. As critical approaches generally argue, these hierarchical relations are themselves shaped through and conditioned by various institutionalised structures of power—material and discursive—that reproduce social relations of domination and subordination between human subjects across time and space. The question of their historical conditions of emergence and transformation appears to be the fundamental one for any critical approach in IR that seeks to avoid what John M. Hobson calls the fallacy of tempo-centrism and chronofetishism (Hobson 2002). Critical scholarship remains deeply divided on the way in which they problematize the relation between power and sovereignty. How to problematise the historical conditions of emergence of discourses and practices of state sovereignty remains a question that still needs to be debated. In this regard, it exists a fundamental line of fracture dividing Poststructuralism and Historical Materialism in their respective ways to theorise the articulation of power relations/dynamics of power with social discourses and social institutions across time and space. This paper seeks to critically explore the way in which Post-Structuralist scholars in IR have approached the question of the historicity of state sovereignty. While acknowledging their contributions in critiquing the a-historical and essentialist foundations of mainstream IR scholarship, it will be argued that the central weakness of Poststructuralism is that by understanding formation and transformation in state sovereignty as expression of shifting discursive paradigms, it tends to evacuate the specific, uneven and differentiated social relations that create the historical conditions for such discourses to emerge. It will be argued that Poststructuralism magnifies the internal coherence of an epistemic paradigm—discursive rules of an historical era—and downplays the variety of ways in which specific discourses can be mobilized to produce, reproduce and transform different sets of social relations of power by human agents across space in a given historical period. Thus, I argue that Poststructuralism eschews an analysis of the historical process of formation and transformation of forms of knowledge/social power in relations with differentiated forms of institutionalized social practices.


LINK: POSTSTRUCTURALIST K OF MILITARY Poststructuralism’s flawed epistemology denies empirical, historical, or cause-and-effect investigations into IR

Lapointe, 2007 [Thierry. "Beyond an Historicism Without Subject: Agency and the Elusive Genealogies of State Sovereignty" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association 48th Annual Convention, Feb 28, 2007 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p180176_index.html]

Thirdly, since the human subject is understood as a mere relay in an endless cobweb of power relations, and given that as such he/she is continuously in a position of being object and subject of power, Poststructuralists have reached the verdict that the human subject must be decentred from our theorizing (Ibid:26; Campbell: 5; Bartelson)5. Poststructuralists explicitly embrace Foucault’s stance on the imperative of forsaking a theorizing of Power based on an analysis of subject’s intentionality (Ibid: 25; Bartelson 1995: 54-58; Kennedy 1979: 274). The analytical framework that is put forward eschews the assumption that power is something that dominant groups or class of human subjects use to subordinate others to their will or by constraining their range of available strategies of actions (Bartelson 1995: 49-53). It must rather proceed from the opposite assumption, which asserts that Power imposes itself on all subjects with the end result of continuously producing them as objects. This strategic model of power as a cobweb of actions upon actions involves an explicit retreat from theorizing social dynamics based on a problematizing of the historically specific ways in which agents develop strategies of power/action to ensure their social reproduction within an institutional context not of their own choosing. In that sense, Poststructuralism celebrates the quite problematic notion of history without subjects (Bartelson 1995: chap.3; Giddens 1993: 232). Lastly, the imperative of decentring the subject—i.e. of developing an ‘history with no subject’—implies forsaking the pretension of “total history” that “(…) attempts to discover the overriding unity or central principle which gives coherence to a civilization or period” (Kennedy1979: 272). As far as language is not merely a mirror of reality for it is constitutive of our perception/experience of it, evidences of the past do not speak for themselves outside the specific discursive formation in which they are an integral part of. Thus, it has been rightly argued that discursive and non-discursive are not discrete “realms” or “spheres” that can be grasped independently from another (Campbell 1998: 6). Quoting Laclau and Mouffe, Campbell stresses that “[w]hat is denied is not that… objects exist externally to thought, but the rather different assertion that they could constitute themselves as objects outside of any discursive condition of emergence” (Cambell 1998: 6). Even though scholars that have adopted such a stance claim to reject the idea of a priority of the “discursive” over the “non-discursive” since one can not exist in abstraction of the other, the methodology developed to cope with the relation between Power and Knowledge often betray an implicit emphasis on the first term of the equation. Indeed the methods of inquiry that has been adopted to deal with this problem— archaeologically and genealogically—ascribe a pivotal role to discourse in the theorizing of IR6. Archaeology has been used as a method to delineate the conditions of emergence of discourses of truth and the specific forms through which knowledges are constituted across time and space (Foucault 1966: 13; Shiner 1982: 288). The inquiry into the conditions of possibility of the positivity of discourses has involved delineating their unity—their regularity—in time and space. The concept of episteme7 encapsulates the idea of unity of discourses in a given time/space. It is defined as :“(…) the totality of relations which can be discovered, for a given period, between sciences when one analyses them at the level of discursive regularities” (Foucault 1972: 191). This is why archaeology focuses exclusively on texts and proceeds through examplificatory history. Genealogy has been developed as a stepping stone to go beyond the archaeological focus on the discursive—the inner functioning, the “system of constraints”, of systems of representation—approached more or less independently from the “non-discursive” (Smart 1982: 128; Palmer 1990: 26-27). Genealogy seeks to delineate the relations of power that make possible the positivity of systems of representation8. It seeks to problematise the way in which a specific economy of discourse is made possible by a constellation of power relations which arise randomly from regionally dispersed sets of social institutions to eventually form a power mechanism (dispositif de pouvoir) (Foucault 1975; 1976; See also Brenner 1994). As Shiner points out: “Genealogy is the analysis of how one constellation of power-knowledge relations is displaced by another; it attends to the breaks that punctuate history” (Shiner 1982: 387). If archaeologists and genealogists aim to delineate, in turn, the conditions of existence of the inner functioning of an economy of discourse, and the constellation of power relations and institutions upon which it rests, they nevertheless categorically deny the possibility of achieving causal explanations as to how and why they are formed and transformed over time (Bartelson 1995; Seigel 1990: 279). In other words, while it stresses discontinuity in time and space, it eschews explanations of the causes of change. The historical process whereby human subjects are involved in the process of “making their own history in a context not of their own choosing”, to paraphrase Marx, is taken out of the realm of possible theoretical investigation. It thereby offers a mode of inquiry that rests upon the primacy of historical contingency. In decentring the human subject from their theorizing of Power/Knowledge—in reducing the human subject to the function of a relay or a symptom of power relations—some critiques have argued that Poststructuralism have not totally managed to brake the fetters of functionalism and to a certain form of “back door determinism” that have plagued for so long social sciences in general (Brenner 1994 ; Palmer 1990; Giddens 1985; 1993: 232; Thompson 1978). This conspicuous absence of human agency in Poststructuralist theorizing of “[…] power and knowledge as constructed discursively, flowing out of and penetrating all realms” (Palmer 1990:27) can easily be found in the forms of theoretical interventions it has given rise to in the field of IR. In their two most significant interventions in furthering critical thinking in IR—which we will be outlined in turn in what follows—Poststructuralist scholars have avoided to think about the historically specific political economy—and complexes of social relations in which human subjects are enmeshed—underpinning the formation and transformations of the Power/Knowledge “nexus”. I will address their contributions in turn in order to highlight some of their strengths, but more to the point what I consider to be the fundamental weaknesses of their analysis: the reification of discourse; a problematic (or conspicuous lack of a) role ascribed to human agency in their contextualizing of evolving meanings taken by state sovereignty in different political discourses; an undifferentiated conception of social power and institutions across time and space; and the emphasis on historical contingency in lieu of historical specificity to explain discontinuities in the organization of political life.


LINK: REJECTING MODERNITY

Rejecting modernity and calculative thought lumps together capitalism’s distinct social relations and dehistoricizes the specific conditions enabling racism, colonialism, and the Holocaust Malik '96 - senior visting fellow at the Department of Political, International and Policy Studies at the University of Surrey (Kenan, "The Mirror of Race: Postmodernism and the Celebration of Difference," in "In Defense of History," Ed. by E. Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.127-131, RG)

By conflating the social relations of capitalism with the intellectual and technological progress of “modernity,” the product of the former can be laid at the door of the latter. The specific problems created by capitalist social relations become dehistoricized. In postructuralist discourse racial theory, colonialism, or the Holocaust are not investigated in their specificity, as products of distinctive tendencies within capitalist society, but are all lumped together as the general consequence of “modernity.” In this way the positive aspects of “modern” society – its invocation of reason, its technological advancements, its ideological commitment to equality and universalism – are denigrated while its negative aspects – the inability of capitalism to overcome social divisions, the propensity to treat large sections of humanity as “inferior” or “subhuman,” the contrast between technological advance and moral turpitude, the tendencies towards barbarism – are seen as inevitable or natural.


LINK: SOVEREIGNTY

Post-structuralist rejections of states, the IR system, and diplomacy obscure the role of sovereignty as a socially and historically situated force—no epistemologically relevant analysis can exist absent an historically materialist approachHalliday ’94 [Fred, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, ‘A Necessary Encounter: Historical Materialism and International Relations’ in Rethinking International Relations (Basingstoke: Macmillan), 47-73]

What these broad concepts of the 'mode of production' and the 'social formation' did entail was that analysis of any area of human acitivity had to be seen in this socio-economic context, and not in abstraction from it. There is therefore no state, no belief, no conflict, no power in general, or independent of this context. By extension, there is no 'international system', or any component activity, be this war or diplomacy, abstracted from the mode of production. Indeed, International Relations is the study of the relations not between states but between social formations. When this insight is applied to the issues of international relations, a definite shift of focus becomes visible. Thus the state is no longer seen as an embodiment of national interest or judicial neutrality, but rather of the interests of a specific society or social formation, defined by its socio-economic structure. How far classes control the state, or are separated from it, has been one of the main issues of dispute within the field. Sovereignty equally becomes not a -60- generic legal concept but the sovereignty of specific social forces. Its history is that of forms of social power and attendant legitimisation within a formation. Security is removed from the distinct theoretical sphere in which it has been placed and becomes the security of specific social groups and for specific socioeconomic reasons. The history of the system is also seen in another light: the modern inter-state system emerged in a context of the spread of capitalism across the globe, and the subjugation of pre-capitalist societies. This socio-economic system has underpinned both the character of individual states and of their relations with each other: no analysis of international relations is possible without reference to capitalism, the social formations it generated and the world system they comprise. 27 The second central theme, embodied in the very term for the paradigm itself, is that of history, and historical determination. In the first instance, Marx argued that history influenced present behaviour. In the phrase he used on one occasion: 'the tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare upon the minds of the living'. But it meant something more than this: Marx argued that the events or character of any society could only be seen in their historical context -- one had to ask how the object of study came about, what the influences, of past events were, and what the impact of the past in shaping the current situation might be. 28 Just as he argued that society had to be seen in its socio-economic context, so he believed that the conditions of generation and a recognition of their contingent location, were central to any analysis. To understand contemporary capitalist society, one had to see how it originated and what the problems and tendencies conditioned by the past were, how it limited what people thought of as being their options, and led them to be influenced, or wholly determined, by passions, illusions, identifications derived usually unwittingly from the past.


LINK: HEGEMONY

Hegemony creates a false universality based on material dominance and falsely conflates this dominance with the natural course of history to create a coherent vision of world order Cox '95 - emeritus prof. of pol. sci. @ York Univ. (Robert W., "Critical Political Economy," in "International Political Economy: Understanding Global Disorder," Ed. by Bjorn Hette, p.43-44, RG)

The question of consumption models is closely linked to the question of hegemony. In the terms I have used, an indicator of hegemony would be a preponderant ontology that tends to absorb or subordinate all others. One intersubjective understanding of the world excludes all others and appears to be universal. It is often said that although United States economic power in the world has experienced a relative decline, the American way of life has never been a more powerful model. An American-derived 'business civi lization' , to use Susan Strange's term, characterizes the globalizing elites; and American pop culture has projected an image of the good life that is a universal object of emulation — a universalized model of consumption. This constitutes a serious obstacle to the rethinking of social practices so as to be more compatible with the biosphere.A counterchallenge to the universalizing of American pop culture is the affirmation of other cultural identities. The most evident, and the most explicitly negating of American culture, is in Islam; but other cultures are also affirming alternative world-views. The hegemonies of the past and present have universalized from one national culture or one tradition of civilization. A post-hegemonic world order would no longer be the global reach of one particular form of civilization. It would contain a plurality of visions of world order.In order to avoid such an order lapsing into mutual incomprehension and conflict, it would be necessary to move beyond a position of pure relativism in order to achieve a kind of supra-intersubjectivity that would provide a bridge across the distinct and separate subjectivities of the different coexisting civilizations.These various traditions of civilization are not monolithic and fixed. They develop dialectically like any historical structure. Change may come both from internal contradictions — for example, gendered power relations and social inequities can be sources of conflict and mutation in all cultures. Change can also come from borrowings and reactions to the practices of other cultures in a world that is becoming ever more closely knit. Selective adaptation rather than homogenization would characterize change in post-hegemonic pluralism.


LINK: ANTI-CAPITALISM

Traditional revolutions are deeply conservatising—a strategy based on consciousness and counter-hegemonies derived from the relationship of subjects to history is necessary to combine political, economic, and ideological struggleMcNally '96 - prof. of pol. sci. @ York Univ. (David, "Language, History, and Class Struggle," in "In Defense of History: Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda," Ed. by E. Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.36-38, RG)

The contradictory character of working class consciousness is a highly dynamic phenomenon. To begin with, there is no homogeneous conscious ness within the working class . Among a single group of workers, some will veer towards near-total acceptance of the ideas of bosses, supervisors, heads of state, and so on, while others will tends towards an almost thorough-go ing opposition to such figures. Between these two positions one will find the majority of workers. But their consciousness will not be fixed. Great events—mass strikes and demonstrations, union drives, and so on—coupled with the organized propagation of oppositional ideas can contribute to significant radicalizations; while defeats, setbacks, and the decline of oppo sitional discourse can have a deeply conservatizing effect.But whatever the existing state of affairs at any one point in time, Gramsci is clear that the contradictory nature of working class consciousness cannot be eliminated. It is an intrinsic feature of capitalist society that the ruling class tries to win ideological consent to its rule (and that such efforts are usually successful to a significant extent), and that the life experiences of workers, their resistance to exploitation and domination, generate practices which do not fit with the dominant ideas and which, in fact, entail an implicit worldview that challenges these ideas. Indeed, one of the crucial functions of a revolutionary socialist party for Gramsci is that it try to draw out and systematize the worldview which is implicit in such practices of resistance. This view enables Gramsci to approach the question of revolutionary politics in terms of the contradictions which pervade the experience, activity, and language of oppressed members of society.Revolutionary politics begins, be argues, with the common sense of the working class. This common sense contains all these, largely implicit, oppositional attitudes. And since socialism, as Marx insisted, is the self-emancipation of the working class, revolutionary ideas cannot be some foreign discourse injected into the working class movement. On the contrary, the connection between revolutionary ideas and the working class must be organic; it is the task of Marxists to show that socialism is the logical and consistent outgrowth of practices of working class resistance. The revolutionary party must thus be a living part of the working class move ment; it must share their experiences and speak their language . At the same time, it must also be the force that generalizes experiences of opposition into an increasingly systematic program, the force which challenges the traditional and dominant ideas inherited by workers (patriotism, sexism, racism, etc.) by showing how they conflict with the interests and aspirations implicit in resistance to exploitation and oppression. Contrary to certain idealist renderings of Gramsci which have made the rounds in recent years, he is insistent that the building of such a mass counter-hegemonic move ment does not take place on a strictly cultural plane or as some rarefied intellectual process of ideological dissent. Counter-hegemonies, he argues, are created through political struggle, movements in which economic resis tance and ideological combat go hand in hand. For the oppressed, in other words, "critical understanding of self takes place therefore through a strug gle of political hegemonies' " (p. 333). And "political parties," he insists, operate as the " historical laboratory " of counter-hegemonic worldviews; they are "the crucibles where the unification of theory and practice, under stood as a real historical process, takes place " (p. 335).


LINK: ANTI-CAPITALISM

The convergence of the state and market is the root cause of global capitalismvan Apeldoorn 2004 [Bastiann, prof of political science at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, “Theorizing the transnational: a historical materialist approach, Journal of International Relations and Development, 2004, 7, (142–176), ebscohost]

It is from this perspective that we may also understand the development of transnational relations into relations of capitalist production.The world market itself generated transnational commercial and financial networks enabling the formation of transnational social forces.How ever, it was only when, expanding from the English state-society complex outwards, capitalism transformed the world market into a capitalist market based on the imperative of continuous expansion and deepening that capitalist social relations started to develop across the boundaries of the newly established territorial units called states. It was therefore only on the basis of this capitalist world market — and the internationalization drive of capital it induced — that a process of transnational (capitalist) class formation could develop (class relations — and hence class formation — presupposing production relations). The coming into existence of a transnational bourgeoisie went beyond earlier transnational structures of socialization inasmuch as it created a transnational space for the exercise and reproduction of capitalist class rule.Such a transnational space first arose in the 18th century in the form of what Van der Pijl (1998: especially chapter 3) has called the Lockean heartland, formed through the expansion of the British state-society complex to include parts of North America and other regions through settler colonies, and in its commercial and political expansion confronting (sometimes resulting in war) so-called Hobbesian contender states.It is thus that through this expansion we can witness — though via many crisis and fits and starts — a gradual widening of the area of state-society complexes subject to the imposition of capitalist discipline and a concomitant (deepening) commodification of social relations. It was with the industrial revolution that this expansionary dynamic of capitalism set in for good.Thi s development reached a new climax when in the 19th century under the Pax Britannica the internationalization of capital deepened and the liberal internationalist fraction of a Anglo-Saxon bourgeoisie became more and more cosmopolitan in outlook.

Questioning economics without attention to the relationship between structures and actors in the political economy fails Cox '95 - emeritus prof. of pol. sci. @ York Univ. (Robert W., "Critical Political Economy," in "International Political Economy: Understanding Global Disorder," Ed. by Bjorn Hette, p.32-36, RG)

The next question is: change in what? What is political economy? I suggest that political economy is different from both political science and economics as they are commonly understood. We sometimes hear international political economy defined as the politics of international economic relations. This suggests an amalgam or rapprochement of the two fields.Yet there is a methodological difference between political science and economics, on the one hand, and political economy, as I would like to define it, on the other. Political science and economics are actor-oriented studies. They take off from some rather fixed assumptions about the framework or parameters within which actions take place — the institutional framework of politics, or the concept of the market. Within these parameters, they can often give quite precise answers to specific questions. Political scientists can analyse political processes within existing structures and possibly give useful advice to politicians about how to gain or retain office or what policy options are feasible in terms of public support. Economists use the relationships derived from the rather abstract concept of a market to predict outcomes under different conditions. Both provide examples of the application of problem-solving theory.Political economy, by contrast, is concerned with the historically constituted frameworks or structures within which political and economic activity takes place. It stands back from the apparent fixity of the present to ask how the existing structures came into being and how they may be changing, or how they may be induced to change. In this sense, political economy is critical theory.Historical structuresThere is, of course, no absolute distinction between actors and structures. It is not a question of sacrificing the one or the other. Structures are formed by collective human activity over time. Structures, in turn, mould the thoughts and actions of individuals. Historical change is to be thought of as the reciprocal relationship of structures and actors. There is a difference, however, between thinking of this actor—structure relationship as a process configuring structural change, and thinking of actions as confined within fixed, given structures in the manner of problem-solving theory.


LINK: IMPERIALISM

Confining discussions of capitalism in IR to imperialism is myopic Halliday ’94 [Fred, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, ‘A Necessary Encounter: Historical Materialism and International Relations’ in Rethinking International Relations (Basingstoke: Macmillan), 47-73]

If realism can detach itself from its cousins -- social Darwinism, racism and Machtpolitik -- so can an interpretive Marxism be distinguished from its instrumental companion. Such a distinction involves above all an examination of what Marx and Engels themselves wrote, and of the work of independent Marxists who, throughout the Leninist and orthodox communist domination of the subject, sought to provide an alternative interpretation to that of the dogmatists. 1 Just as in sociology, history and other social sciences this independent, broadly 'Western', Marxist current has been able to establish a recognised and analytically fruitful body of work, so there exists the potential for it to do so in the realm of IR. It is this claim which the following chapter seeks to explore, with regard to a potential interaction of International Relations and the Marxist tradition. Despite many decades of potential interaction, the establishment of a relationship between historical materialism and the discipline of international relations is still at an initial stage. At various stages in the history of the discipline, there have been surveys of the implications of Marxism for International Relations in which already constituted points of contact have been identified. 2 Since the 1970s a number of writers have advocated further theoretical work, be it the elaboration of a general Marxist approach to International Relations, or the development of domains in which the International Relations discipline, as presently constituted, can strengthen its analytic endeavours by drawing on specific elements within historical materialism. 3 In an innovative and judicious study, Andrew Linklater has examined the implications for IR of 'critical' Marxism, while stressing the constraints which the international system imposes on any emancipatory project. 4 However, in contrast to such other areas of the social sciences as -48- sociology, economics or history, historical materialism has never occupied a secure place within International Relations; there are many who seek to limit its application, be this explicitly, as was the case with those who denied its relevance, such as Martin Wight and Hans Morgenthau, or implicitly, by relegating it to a minor place, or by presenting it in a selective interpretation, such that its pertinence is constricted. 5 This is achieved above all by blocking out the main theoretical questions of Marxism. The fact that IR is almost wholly silent on what for Marxism is the central category of modern social analysis, namely capitalism, is itself indicative. Equally, as discussed in Chapter 8, the degree to which the Cold War embodied not just competing strategic interests, but different socio-economic ones, has been ignored in most IR literature. The sources of this failure lie on both sides of the relationship. International Relations as a discipline has arisen primarily within British and American universities, and as a theoretical derivative of other disciplines in the social sciences. Neither institutional context, nor theoretical influence, have been ones in which Marxism has had a prominent or generally recognised place. On the other hand, historical materialism has not itself developed the theoretical focus needed for a comprehensive and generally intelligible contribution to International Relations. Much of what was produced in the name of Marxism, by communist regimes or those following them, was vulgar polemic, a repetition of certain standard, formulaic, readings of Marxism itself and concentrated around a justification of political interests. The confining of Marxist discussion of the international to the question of 'imperialism', and a one-sided and banal interpretation of the phenomenon at that, was as much the responsibility of those espousing Marxism as of those opposed to it. 6 Those who, within the independent currents of historical materialism, have sought to elaborate a Marxist approach to International Relations have laboured under the theoretical difficulties that confront those who seek to analyse politics, and ideological factors, within the confines of specific states themselves.


LINK: SELF-DETERMINATION

Historical materialist analysis shows that self-determination serves as a shield for imperial actions, justifying violent imperialist invocationKnox ’10 - MPhil/PhD Candidate London School of Economics (Robert J., “The Degradation of the International Legal Order? Th e Rehabilitation of Law and the Possibility of Politics, Bill Bowring,” Historical Materialism Volume 18, Issue 1, EBSCO, RG)

It is not simply the case that Bowring underestimates the degree to which rival positions are genuine attempts at coherence and, as such, all equally ‘legal’. It is also the case that the tenets of Bowring’s own position – revolutionary conservatism – have, at various times, been used to legitimate and promote imperial actions on the world-stage. A particularly useful example in this respect is self-determination. Whilst Bowring is certainly right to note the important role self-determination played in anticolonial struggle, he is curiously silent as to its invocation by various imperialist powers. Th e most obvious example of this in recent times was the Russian invasion of Georgia under the rationale (amongst others) of defending the right to self-determination of Abkhazia’s ethnic Russians. Th is itself is widely viewed as a response to Kosovo’s unilateral declaration (and the attendant support of various world-powers) of independence, itself justifi ed in terms of self-determination.16 One can fi nd further examples of this in Bolivia, where those rich regions led by the Right threatened to secede17 and in claims of Israel’s defenders that its actions can be justifi ed owing to the need for the self-determination of the Jewish people.18 As Tony Cliff noted, Israel frequently appealed to the idea that it was a ‘loyal little Jewish Ulster’ in order to gain support.19 Indeed, the right of humanitarian intervention which Bowring decries has its modern genesis in the right of ‘pro-democratic intervention’ articulated during the Cold War, which was itself rooted in arguments from self-determination.20 Early on in the book, Bowring attempts to cut this off , arguing that: Intervention or interference, however they are characterised, and in the name of whichever honourable motives, have never been – and most certainly are not now – part of the struggle of individuals or collectivities. (p. 6.) But this argument simply cannot work for Bowring. Firstly, because later in the book he positively notes that ‘[t]he USSR . . . found itself obliged to give very considerable material support to self-determination struggles’ (p. 38), this of course included military provision, which must be counted as a form of ‘intervention or interference’. More tellingly, various countries that formed part of the Third-World movement were enthusiastic advocates of military intervention in the name of anticolonialism and self-determination. This can be seen particularly clearly in the case of Goa, which India invaded to liberate from Portugal’s colonial occupation. Here, Indian UN ambassador Jha argued that Article 2(4) of the Charter would not be breached by its invasion of Goa, since the wave of decolonisation had transformed its ambit, such that anticolonial violence could not be counted as aggression.21 Th is argument, both in terms of its content and structure is startlingly similar to Reisman’s. As one can see, there is a direct lineage between the Third World’s invocation of self-determination and the imperialist invocation of ‘humanitarian intervention’.22 It seems diffi cult to argue that these invocations can be meaningfully diff erentiated in law. Whilst their political content could not be more opposed, the abstract nature of legal claims would compel a principled adherent to the law to support both (or at least refrain from criticising the latter on legal grounds). It seems especially diffi cult for Bowring to escape these objections.


LINK: REVOLUTION

Their aff can’t access the revolution – the revolution is not a simple moment in time – their Utopian alternative fails to examine cultural and political history and thus doesn’t achieve true social changeJameson '96 - head of the Lit. program @ Duke (Fredric, "Five theses on actually existing Marxism," April, 1996, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1132/is_n11_v47/ai_18205164/?tag=content;col1, RG)

But such arguments in their turn presuppose the taking of a position on what is surely the central concept in any Marxian "unity-of-theory-and-practice," namely Revolution itself This is the case because it is the untenability of that concept that is the principal exhibit in the post- or anti-Marxian arsenal. The defense of this concept, however, requires a number of preliminary preparations: in particular, we need to abandon to iconology everything that suggests that revolution is a punctual moment rather than an elaborate and complex process. For example, many of our most cherished iconic images of the various historical revolutions, such as the taking of the Winter Palace and the Tennis Court Oath, need to be set aside.Social revolution is not a moment in time, but it can be affirmed in terms of the necessity of change in what is a synchronic system, in which everything holds together and is interrelated with everything else. Such a system then demands a kind of absolute systemic change, rather than piecemeal 'reform," which turns out to be what is in the pejorative sense "Utopian," that is, illusory, not feasible. That is to say that the system demands the ideological vision of a radical social alternative to the existing social order, something which can no longer be taken for granted or inherited, under the state of current discursive struggle, but which demands reinvention. Religious fundamentalism (whether Islamic, Christian, or Hindu), that claims to offer a radical alternative to consumerism and "the American way of life," only comes into significant being when the traditional Left alternatives, and in particular the great revolutionary traditions of Marxism and communism, have suddenly seemed unavailable.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1132/is_n11_v47/ai_18205164/?tag=content;col1

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1132/is_n11_v47/ai_18205164/?tag=content;col1


LINK: TERRORISM

Terrorism is the result of historical and material deprivation, not fundementalism – we have to put it in the context of struggles against Western capitalism Mousseau '3 - Associate prof of IR @ Koc Univ in Istanbul, Turkey (Michael, "Market Civilization and Its Clash with Terror," International Security, 27(3), p.5-29, Project MUSE, RG)

Those on the lowest rung of the economic ladder are the most vulnerable to the negative consequences associated with globalization. Those with the most to lose, however, are patrons and their lieutenants who hold privileged positions in the old clientalist hierarchies. This is why leaders of terrorist organizations frequently come from privileged backgrounds. To maintain the clientalist structure that carries with it higher social status, these leaders seek to rally their client base by appealing to some antimarket ideology. Because it is in a [End ] client's interest to have a powerful patron, leaders attract and maintain followers by demonstrations of strength. In this way, the mass murder of Westerners serves two purposes: It reflects the leader's power, and it taps into widespread antimarket fury. Islam itself is not responsible for the social approval of terror . Patrons fearing the loss of their privileged status—such as Osama bin Laden—find an antimarket ideology useful to attract followers. They manipulate Islam to serve their own ends, just like their counterparts in Europe did a century ago by contorting Christianity to justify terror and mass murder. 51 In fact, Islam emerged in Mecca, the center of sixth-century Mediterranean and South Asian trade, and the Koran stress the market values of universalism, equity, contractual exchange, and a degree of tolerance toward outsiders (non-Muslims). 52 The market economy in this region declined before market norms—and liberal culture—intensified and expanded throughout the Islamic world, but the liberal origins of Islam demonstrate that religion can be interpreted, and manipulated, to suit anyone's purposes. In societies steeped in market values, it is difficult to comprehend how anyone can engage in the mass murder of out-groups, or how anyone can support it. Individuals with market values believe that each person is responsible only for his or her actions. Just as those who are not parties to contracts cannot be made obligated to them, individuals cannot be assumed to be responsible for any and all behavior of other members of their apparent in-group. It therefore seems absurd to blame individuals for the alleged bad behavior of others, and this is the social origin of the presumption of individual innocence in market societies. From the clientalist perspective, in contrast, no one is innocent: Individuals share responsibility for the actions of others within the in-group; if followers do not support their leaders, then they are betraying the entire in-group. From the clientalist perspective, all in-group members are privileged and all out-group members are enemies or, at best, outsiders unworthy of empathy. [End Page 20] A paucity of empathy is necessary for doing harm to, and tolerating the suffering of, all out-group members. This is why international human rights are a concern promoted mostly by market democracies. It is also why widespread social support for both terrorism and sectarian violence frequently arises in developing countries but not in countries with deeply integrated markets. 53 Clientalist values also lie at the core of the social approval of suicidal mass murder. From the market perspective, all behavior should have some immediate utility for the parties to a contract. It is thus difficult to comprehend the efficacy of suicide. But in cultures where the individual is less important than the group and the absence of science increases devotion to insular beliefs, suicide—under conditions of extreme socioeconomic disruption—may emerge as a socially approved way of expressing ultimate loyalty to the in-group. In this way, cultural insularism, characterized by the absence of a market economy, is a necessary condition for the social approval of suicidal mass murder and sectarian violence. Cultural insularism combined with a particular grievance—such as the negative consequences associated with globalization—can create a deadly mix for Americans and other Westerners. Although latent anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism exist throughout much of the developing world, these are most likely to rise to the surface during economic crises—when nascent middle classes lose their status and turn against emerging liberal values. This is what is happening, for example, in Indonesia where the recent collapse of the local currency has eliminated the savings of the middle class, just as hyperinflation devastated the savings of Germany's middle class seventy-five years ago. Recent terrorist acts against Indonesian Christians (as symbols of the West) and Westerners directly (the November 2002 bombing of a disco in Bali) are reminiscent of Germany's middle class turning against those it identified with market values, such as European Jews and the West. The West, in this sense, means market civilization. [End Page 21]

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/international_security/v027/27.3mousseau.html#FOOT53




LINK: IDENTITY

Rejecting identity as a social construction takes it out of historical and social context, making it appear natural and justifying biological theories of race Malik '96 - senior visting fellow at the Department of Political, International and Policy Studies at the University of Surrey (Kenan, "The Mirror of Race: Postmodernism and the Celebration of Difference," in "In Defense of History," Ed. by E. Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.112-117, RG)

"Poststructuralist thinking," sociologists David Bailey and Stuart Hall have argued, "opposes the notion that a person is born with a fixed iden tity—that all black people , for example, have an essential underlying black identity which is the same and unchanging. It suggests instead that identi ties are floating, that meaning is not fixed and universally true at all times for all people, and that the subject is constructed through the unconscious in desire, fantasy and memory." 1 The reminder that our identities are not naturally given but socially constructed is a useful antidote to the idea that human differences are fixed and eternal. But by insisting that society is inherently and irreducibly heterogeneous and diverse, and by rejecting any idea of "totality" that might allow us to see the commonalities or connections among heterogeneous and diverse elements, poststructuralist discourse has undermined its own ca pacity to challenge naturalistic explanations of difference. The paradoxical result , I shall argue, is a conception of identity scarcely different from that of nineteenth-century racial theory. The problem can be seen in the very concept of "anti-essentialism" as understood by postmodernist thinkers. Sociologist Ali Rattansi has described anti-essentialism as a "manoeuvre cutting the ground from conceptions of subjects and social forms as reducible to timeless, unchanging, defining and determining elements or ensemble of elements—'human nature,' for example, or in the case of the social, the logic of the market or mode of production." Rattansi seems at first to define anti-essentialism simply as opposition to an ahistorical understanding of social phenomena, hostile to the idea of timeless or unchanging social forms. But he slides from this rejection of ahistorical explanation to a repudiation of social "determinants" altogether. He rejects any idea that social forms can be explained by reference to forces or pressures like the "logic of the market" or the "mode of production" which permeate and shape the social order, even if these determinants are con ceived as historically specific . A non-essentialist understanding of society is apparently one that denies any unifying patterns or processes among the diverse and constantly shifting fragments that constitute society. In other words, Rattansi identifies anti-essentialism with an insistence on indeter-minacy. In this he reflects much postmodern thinking which finds the meaning of social forms not in relations but in differences. But this kind of indeterminacy is precisely the foundation of ahistorical explanations. How, for instance, can we understand the historical nature of capitalism as a specific social form without identifying the specific determi nants that distinguish it from other social forms, in other times and places? We could argue about whether the "essence" of capitalism should be seen in the logic of the market, in the particular mode of production, in some other aspect, or in some combination of these. But unless we can charac terize the fundamental specificity —the "essence," if you will—of capitalist society, its distinctive "laws of motion" or systemic logic, we cannot distin guish it from other types of societies. How, then, should we analyze race in modern capitalist societies? If we treat race as just an "identity" detached from any specific social determinants, then race becomes not a historically specific social relation but an eternal feature of human society — just as it is in reactionary biological theories of race, in which racial divisions are a natural and permanent necessity. This may seem an odd conclusion to draw from postmodern anti-essentialism, because its roots lie precisely in a hostility to naturalistic explanations of social phenomena, particularly positivism, which reduce social laws to natural laws, treating the laws that govern human relations as quantifiable and permanent, just like the laws of nature. Because the positivist view of society underpinned nineteenth century racial theories, opponents of racial theory have always been hostile to naturalistic theories of society.


LINK: IDENTITY

Social constructivism rejects all causality, undermining any historical analysis of identity Malik '96 - senior visting fellow at the Department of Political, International and Policy Studies at the University of Surrey (Kenan, "The Mirror of Race: Postmodernism and the Celebration of Difference," in "In Defense of History," Ed. by E. Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.112-117, RG)

But in its haste to dispatch naturalistic theories, poststructuralist dis course (and indeed much of modern sociology) takes up arms against not simply naturalistic explanations of society, but against any causal explana tion , or at the very least, any explanation that assigns priority to certain causes over others. Any idea of determination—even in its non-reductionist sense, having to do with what E.P. Thompson often calls the "logic of process" or Raymond Williams (in Marxism and Literature [1978]) describes as "a complex and interrelated process of limits and pressures"—is considered to be essentialist and therefore illegitimate. Postmodern anti-essentialists hold that theory can have no recourse to determinants beyond empirically given phenomena. Essences and forces, whether natural or metaphysical, spiritual or historical, are fictitious. At best social "laws" are convenient fictions that allocate an order to empirical phenomena. At worst they are self-serving illusions which disguise some sinister interest or power. For poststructuralists, then, social phenomena cannot be explained by reference to another property that bestows meaning on them. This kind of anti-essentialism renders all determinate relations contingent, bereft of any inner necessity.3

Poststructuralists deny the concept of an "essential" identity and stress instead "the phenomenon of multiple social identities." As Robin Cohen puts it, "the modern study of identity has ... dished the old 'essentialisms'— for example the Marxist idea that all social identity could essentially be reduced to class identity." Instead it holds that "there are competing claims for affiliation that cannot be reduced to epiphenomena" and that "gender, age, disability, race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, civil status, even musical styles and dress codes" are all "very potent axes of organization and identification."4 The recognition that human beings are subject to conflicting claims and identities is clearly important. The problem arises, however, when all "identities," of whatever form, are treated as equivalent, so that personal lifestyle preferences such as "musical styles" are given the same weight and significance as physical attributes such as "disability" or social products such as race and class, while, at the same time, each identity is conceived in isolation from specific social relations. In fact, there is already a problem in conceiving race or class as an "identity" in the first place. Social relations such as racial oppression become not social relations at all but personal attributes, or even lifestyle choices. When race is equated with "musical styles" or "dress codes," the "social" seems to mean nothing more than a particular decision that any individual may make, and "society" is reduced to the aggregate of individual identities. The consequence of the poststructuralist notion of society is that many contemporary writers treat social distinctions as personal or political choices. There is a scene in Woody Allen's film Bananas, in which our luckless hero, played by Allen, bemoans the fact that he dropped out of college. "What would you have been if you had finished school?" someone asks him. "I don't know," sighs Allen. "I was in the black studies program. By now I could have been black." This seems to be the essence of the contemporary view of identity. As Robin Cohen observes, postmodernists seem to believe that "an individual constructs and presents any one of a number of possible social identities, depending on the situation. Like a player concealing a deck of cards from the other contestants, the individual pulls out a knave—or a religion, or an ethnicity, a lifestyle—as the context deems a particular choice desirable or appropriate." 5 In this spirit an increasing number of writers now view racial division as the result of a deliberately chosen cultural exclusiveness. Winston James, employing Benedict Anderson's notion of an "imagined community," argues that, "Like all nations, nationalities and ethnic groups, Afro-Caribbean people in Britain have erected boundaries in relation to those with whom they identify."6 The suggestion is that Afro-Caribbeans have chosen to establish distinctive cultural patterns, that they have asserted their right to be different, as a way of confirming their "imagined community," of establishing what James calls a "new sense of fellowship." If this were true, however, racism would not be a problem. If we could choose identities in the way we choose our clothes every morning, if we could erect social boundaries from a cultural Lego pack, then racial hostility might be no different from disagreements between lovers of Mozart and those who prefer Charlie Parker, orbetween supporters of different football clubs. In other words, racial differences would not be social relations which exist apart from the preferences of any given individual. They would simply represent prejudices born out of a plurality of tastes. But we know that in reality racial divisions are social relations, that they are not simply the product of personal preferences, and that blackness amounts to more than a semester on a black studies program. It is not Afro-Caribbeans, or any other racialized group, who have "erected boundaries" separating them from the rest of society. These boundaries are socially constructed not just in the sense that they are culturally specific,

ENDI 2010 22Historical Materialism K Wave 1like personal tastes in music or clothes, but in the sense that society has systematically racialized certain social groups and signified them as "differ ent "—as James himself acknowledges when he notes "the powerful centripetal forces of British racism."7 Black youth in Brixton or the Bronx have no more "chosen" their difference than Jews did in Nazi Germany. Certainly oppressed communities have often reacted to racial division by adopting particular cultural forms. In his autobiography, Miles Davis recounts how black jazz musicians in the forties responded to racism by developing bebop as a style that would exclude white players.8 Similarly many Jews today continue to observe Jewish cultural rituals less out of religious faith than in response to anti-Semitism and in memory of the victims of the Holocaust. But such cultural assertion is not the cause of racial identification, it is its product. This is one of the fundamental contradictions at the heart of postmod ernism. Insisting on the "discursive" or "social construction" of all knowl edge and identity, under the cover of "anti-essentialism" it ends by effectively denying determinate historical relations altogether and thus effectively abandons its original principle that identity and the human subject are socially constructed. Poststructuralist discourse reduces (or deconstructs) society to the accidental interaction of individuals and re moves the subject from the terrain of the social . Determinate social relations are reduced to individual, personal attributes or at best to contingent relations between individuals. There can be no "social construction" when the "social" itself has no existence apart from "discursively constructed" individual identities.


LINK: IDENTITY

Anti-essentialist critiques of identity collapse back into themselves and link to all of the disads to positivist epistemology Malik '96 - senior visting fellow at the Department of Political, International and Policy Studies at the University of Surrey (Kenan, "The Mirror of Race: Postmodernism and the Celebration of Difference," in "In Defense of History," Ed. by E. Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.117-121, RG)

The paradox of poststructuralist anti-essentialism, then, is this: it is an outlook that arises from a desire to oppose naturalistic explanations and to put social facts in a social context. But by celebrating indeterminacy and by opposing the idea of totality, all in the name of anti-essentialism, it has undermined its own ability to explain social facts historically. Facts wrenched from their living context are apprehended only in their isolation. The irony is that this methodology resembles nothing so much as the radical empiricism of the positivists, the very theory of knowledge that anti-essen tialism sought to overturn. This is not the place to resolve all the difficult epistemological questions involved in the debate between postmodernism and its critics. Some of these questions are dealt with elsewhere in this book. But we are entitled to ask whether postmodernists can sustain an anti-racist project on the basis of their own, supposedly anti-racist, assumptions. Can their epistemological assumptions support their own professed opposition to racial oppression? How, for example, would they distinguish between a racist history and a non-racist one? On postmodernist premises, each would be valid in its own context. The capacity of postmodernists to challenge racist discourse is undermined by their own belief in the relativity of meaning. If we want to argue that a racist and a non-racist interpretation of history are not equally valid, we are required to choose between them, to decide which is true and which is not, and that means we are obliged to accept that there is some standard against which we can judge them. What postmodernists dismiss as "totalizing" theories do not require us to encompass every possible "fact," as some postmodernists maintain, but they do give us some basis for choosing. Anti-essentialism is supposed to be the very foundation of postmodernist anti-racism, but anti-essentialism as postmodernists define it ends by disabling any anti-racist project. Antiracism, for example, surely requires some commitment to equality. It is certainly true that "equality" is a historically specific idea, which has had different meanings in different social contexts. But the historicity of this idea does not change the fact that a commitment to equality, and especially racial equality, presumes the exist ence of a "human essence ." Without such a common essence, equality among different "identities" or social groups would be a meaningless concept. If humanity did not constitute a single category, if in Foucault's words "Nothing in man—not even his body—is sufficiently stable to act as this basis for self-recognition or for understanding other men,"11 then equality between different human individuals and groups would be as meaningless as equating apples and oranges or, to use Levi-Strauss's analogy in his critique of Sartre, such "different domains" as "natural and irrational numbers."12 The postmodernist might reply that the principle of "difference" implies a truly radical egalitarianism, because it recognizes no standard by which one individual or group can be judged as better than another. But the point is that this principle of difference cannot provide any standards which oblige us to respect the "difference" of others. At best, it invites our indifference to the fate of the Other. At worst, it licenses us to hate and abuse those who are different. Why, after all, should we nor abuse and hate them? On what basis can they demand our respect or we demand theirs? It is very difficult to support respect for difference without appealing to some "total izing," universalistic principles of equality or social justice. We can acknow ledge that the concept of "rights" is historically specific and socially constructed; but any argument in favor of equal rights, in whatever form, invariably brings us back to what postmodernists would call an "essentialist" explanation. Once such explanations, whether natural or social, are excluded, the very idea of equality also becomes subordinate to the "contin gency of prevailing identities." If the appearance of difference is taken at face value, in the absence of any common "essence" beyond or beneath that appearance, then the appearance of difference must be taken as evidence that there are indeed many different categories of humanity and that they have nothing fundamentally in common. This is precisely the method employed by positivist racial theory, which deduced from the appearance of difference (skin color, head form, and so on) the division of humanity into different categories or "races." Of course, contemporary theorists of difference deny that superfi cial biological differences define categorical distinctions, preferring instead to emphasize historical or cultural factors. But cultural formalism is in substance no different from racial formalism. Both move from the apprehension of formal difference to posit the existence of different ontological categories. This is why the anti-essentialist tendencies of poststructuralist thought inevitably puts in question equality itself.


LINK: IDENTITY

Identity politics are commodity fetishism—our alternative is the only way to deal critically with capitalism and other relations of power Wood '7 - prof. of pol. sci. @ York Univ. (Ellen Meiksins, "Democracy Against Capitalism; Renewing Historical Materialism," p.256-263, RG)

In these respects, the new pluralism has much in common with another old pluralism, the one that used to prevail in conventional political science - pluralism not simply as an ethical principle of toleration but as a theory about the distribution of social power. The concept of 'identity' has replaced 'interest groups', and these two pluralisms may differ in that the old acknowledges an inclusive political totality - like the 'political system', the nation, or the body of citizens - while the new insists on the irreducibility of fragmentation and 'difference'. But both deny the importance of class in capitalist democracies, or at least submerge it in a multiplicity of 'interests' or 'identities'. Both have the effect of denying the systemic unity of capitalism, or its very existence as a social system. Both insist on the heterogeneity of capitalist society, while losing sight of its increasingly global power of homogenization. The new pluralism claims a unique sensitivity to the complexities of power and diverse oppressions; but like the old variety, it has the effect of making invisible the power relations that constitute capitalism, the domi nant structure of coercion which reaches into every corner of our lives, public and private. In their failure to acknowledge that various identities or interest groups are differently situated in relation to that dominant structure, both pluralisms recognize not so much difference as simple plurality. This latest denial of capitalism's systemic and totalizing logic is, paradoxically, a reflection of the very thing it seeks to deny. The current preoccupation with 'post-modern' diversity and fragment ation undoubtedly expresses a reality in contemporary capitalism, but it is a reality seen through the distorting lens of ideology. It represents the ultimate 'commodity fetishism', the triumph of'consumer society', in which the diversity of'life styles', measured in the sheer quantity of commodities and varied patterns of consumption, disguises the underlying systemic unity, the imperatives which create that diversity itself while at the same time imposing a deeper and more global homogeneity. What is alarming about these theoretical developments is not that they violate some doctrinaire Marxist prejudice concerning the privileged status of class. The problem is that theories which do not differentiate — and, yes, 'privilege', if that means ascribing causal or explanatory priorities - among various social institutions and 'identities' cannot deal critically with capitalism at all. Capitalism, as a specific social form, simply disappears from view, buried under a welter of fragments and 'difference'.


LINK: RACE

Treating race as a social construction ignores why racism happens in the first place – narratives of specificity like the aff crowd out historical materialist analysis of racial exclusion Young ‘1 - professor of English @ University of Alabama (Robert, “The Linguistic Turn, Materialism and Race: Toward an Aesthetics of Crisis,” Callaloo, 24(1), Winter 2001, pp. 334-345, Project MUSE, RG)

At the moment it is generally accepted that race is a social construction. It is also generally accepted that race has been constructed along an oppressive axis. The consensus is disturbed when one attempts to account for why oppression exists in the first place. The contestations are even sharper when one offers an account of race outside of the prevailing logic of supplementarity. With the postmodern disbelief in metanarrative (Lyotard) and the subsequent skepticism toward concepts, race is seen as a trope, and it is now very difficult to offer conceptual accounts of race. Hence “narratives of specificity” circulate and the experience of race establishes the limit of intelligibility. Within this context I shall attempt to reclaim a concept-based materialist understanding of race. I will argue that race signifies alterity because of the division of labor. In other words race difference operates in the interest of maintaining and justifying surplus extraction.1My argument proceeds in three parts. First I engage the linguistic turn in social theory and foreground the implications for theorizing race. I critique some exemplary instances of poststructuralist accounts of race, and I especially engage the work of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., an influential exponent of continental theory within African-American literary and cultural discourses. I argue that the linguistic turn enables “narratives of specificity” and these narratives displace relational inquiries. Consequently, the specificity of race is disconnected from underlying causal mechanisms.Next, I critically examine Cornel West. West is thought to offer an advance over the idealism in linguistic theory. However, I will show that his “genealogical materialism” does not move us away from the idealism of Gates but ultimately ends up pointing us back to “narratives of specificity.” Once again the “experiential” is privileged and the historical determinate conditions of possibility for such an experience is obscured. By blocking an understanding of the historicity of experience, Gates and West limit intelligibility to the local, and I will show how this leads to very conservative understandings of race.Finally I draw upon Richard Wright’s Black Boy, which offers an effective counter to “narratives of specificity.” Wright also operates at the local level, but he situates it within the global. Wright articulates what I call an “aesthetics of crisis” because he demonstrates that daily life is the site of contradictions for a racially structured and exploitative social order. If race is deployed to maintain and justify an asymmetrical division of labor then its very deployment in daily life exposes the fault line of dominant ideologies. The claims of the Liberal democratic state are contradicted by the daily life of African-Americans. Wright’s “aesthetic of crisis” not only brings into sharp focus the contradictions under capitalism but also locates within daily life a utopian impulse.My reading operates from the modality of critique because critique moves from the immanent logic and situates race and its logic in history, in the global frames of intelligibility that help to reproduce the economic, political and ideological reproduction of a particular social formation. Critique is that knowledge practice that historically situates the conditions of possibility of what empirically exists under capitalist labor relations and points to what is suppressed by the empirically existing—what could be instead of what actually is. For example, a recent United Nations report concludes that the wealth of the seven richest men could completely eliminate world poverty. The satisfaction of human need on a global scale is historically and objectively possible, but this is what is suppressed under the regime of capitalism. It is because of such possibilities that critique is so urgent because critique indicates that what “is” is not necessarily the real/true but rather the existing actuality which is open to alteration. The role of critique in materialist postmodern discourse on race is the production of historical knowledges that mark the historicity of existing social arrangements and the possibility of a different social organization—one that is free from exploitation.Critique, then, is a modality that renders visible the unsaid in order to foreground the operations of power and the underlying socio-economic structure which connect the seemingly disparate events and representations of daily life. In sum, materialist critique disrupts that which represents itself as “natural,” as inevitable, as the way things are, and exposes the way “what is” is historically and socially produced out of social contradictions and hence supportive of inequality. Critique

ENDI 2010 26Historical Materialism K Wave 1presses the social contradictions into (aesthetics of) crisis and consequently critique enables us to not only explain how race operates so we can change it but also to collectively build the emancipatory subjectivities necessary to carry out revolutionary struggle.


LINK: RACE

Material forces of production shape the way we think about race – history has made oppression via race only exist through capitalismYoung ‘1 - professor of English @ University of Alabama (Robert, “The Linguistic Turn, Materialism and Race: Toward an Aesthetics of Crisis,” Callaloo, 24(1), Winter 2001, pp. 334-345, Project MUSE, RG)

In 1985 during the highpoint of poststructuralist theory, Gates’ edited volume “Race, Writing, and Difference” is representative of a deconstructive phase, as the volume aims “to deconstruct, if you will, the ideas of difference inscribed in the trope of race . . .” (6). However by 1990, the postmodernist determinism is too restrictive of agency and in “Critical Remarks” Gates now critiques theory because “it is not much good at exploring the relations between social identity and political agency” (323). Significantly, Gates asserts that “Starting with the recognition that the ‘reflexive actor’ is not simply a given, a subjectivity existing prior to and independent from language, we too quickly decided that its factitious made it an effect of linguistic determination. But that did not follow” (324). Thus the “subject is not only an effect of language but a participant in an articulated realm of social practices that, far from constraining its agency, are its very conditions of possibility” (324). The theoretical suture is made and experience is recuperated and by 1994 we have Gates’ memoir, Colored People—which, incidentally “is not a story of a race but a story of a village, a family, and its friends” (xvi). Gates’ trajectory produces a “narrative of specificity” as the experiential is recuperated. Gates’ discourse blocks an understanding of the determinate relation between race and social and economic structures. Under the poststructuralist erasure of race, it is not surprising that the discursive readings of race would quickly exhaust political/theoretical viability because, as Callinicos points out, “Racism remains one of the main features of the advanced capitalist societies” (“Race and Class”). Callinicos continues: “It [racism] is institutionalized in the systematic discrimination which black people experience in jobs, housing, the education system, and the harassment they suffer at the hands of police and immigration authorities” (3). The postmodernist erasure of race in light of continued racial oppression/exploitation brings to the fore the continued urgency for articulating productive accounts of race. Even on its own liberal terms the erasing of race was “un-ethical” in light of the “experiences” of racially marked subjects. Experience, though, is not self-intelligible and should not be posited as the limit text of the real, as is often done. Experience is a highly mediated frame of understanding. While it is true that a person of color, a woman, or gay person experiences oppression, this experience is not self-explanatory—it has to be situated in relation to other social practices. Experience, in short, only seems local; it is like all cultural and political practices, interrelated to other practices and experiences, and as such its explanation comes from its “outside.” Theory is an understanding of this experience and an explanation of experience. Theory shows that the “difference” (of experience) is itself global, historical, and always determined by the material forces of production. The marking of experience could have been the theoretical occasion to (re)situate race in the larger historical series of the reproduction and maintenance of subjectivities in ideology— the project, for example, of materialist cultural studies. The hegemonic discourses of race, though, are moving away from concept-based inquiries and reifying race/experience and setting the cultural as the limits of intelligibility. See for example a recent special issue of Social Text in which writers such as Howard Winant, Grant Farred, and Lewis Gordon argue the case for “agency,” “self-invention,” and “ethics,” respectively. The limits of such a view are evident in Winant. After positing that “Race remains a mysterious phenomenon” (6), it is not surprising that he cannot find answers to “why society can remain so intensely racialised” (8). He is left with a plea to “develop a racial theory that can find a way . . . to recognize the potentials of human agency” (10). Winant’s text is symptomatic of the idealism pervading discourses of race, but as I have been arguing race is not a “mystery” nor a matter of “bad” attitudes but a (structural) designation and (ideological) legitimation of a subordinated structural position within the relations of production. Thus the transformation of racism is part of the larger struggle to transform the economic enabling conditions of possibility—the regime of wage-labor, which deploys race to maintain and increase necessary profit margins. The systemic location of race, though, is suppressed as a consequence of the postmodernist culturalist bias, and thus there is a political displacement whereby, as Steve Vieux points out, “the focus in postmodern theory has been on oppression, [and] not exploitation” (29). Thus for example, in “What is this ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture,” Stuart Hall is interested in those cultural strategies “that can make a difference and shift the dispositions of power” (24). However, there are limits to symbolic reconfigurations. Even Gates recognizes that “Black people have not been liberated from racism by our writings”(Race 12) and also Gates reveals the limits of ethics: “We accepted a false premise by assuming that racism would be destroyed once white racists became convinced that we were human, too” (Race 12). But even so Gates still asserts that “it is a mistake to hold that to eradicate racism, we must eliminate its most fundamental conditions of possibility” (“Critical Remarks” 327). Of course the most fundamental conditions of possibility of racism, as I have been pointing out, is capitalism—the regime of differential extraction of surplus value from racially marked subjects. The reformism of these discourses is

ENDI 2010 28Historical Materialism K Wave 1very clear and it leads to an absolutely debilitating political practice. If we recognize the limits of writing and other discursive practices and ethical discourses and yet must reject articulating a global transformative project, then what are we left with? What is to be done? In the introduction to a recently edited volume Gates and Appiah seem to suggest that a way out of the aporia is to merely extend the multiplication of identities to “help disrupt the clichéridden discourse of identity by exploring the formation of identities . . .” (Identities 1). For Gates (race) identity is a trope and theorized as a textual matter: “blackness is produced in the text only through a complex process of signification,” thus “There can be no transcendent blackness . . .” (Signifying Monkey 237). As a text, then, blackness always already reinscribes the other as it is the site of intertextuality. If the signifying monkey is a metaphor for repetition with a signal difference and intertextuality, “blackness becomes merely a formal position within the signifying systems. The (liberal) politics of such rhetorical discourse becomes clear when Gates says: “Lest this theory of criticism, however, be thought of as only black, let me admit that the implicit premise of this study is that all texts Signify upon other texts, in motivated and unmotivated ways” (Signifying Monkey xxiv). Put differently, if blackness is difference and all texts are situated within networks of difference, then all texts are in a sense “black,” and black means nothing more than hybridity. Here, then, is the contradiction: Gates is seeking to construct an autonomous and immanent theory of reading (from within African-American literary tradition) but in relying upon poststructuralist principles he is forced to register that every text is inscribed with its other— thus “blackness” now means nothing more than a sign of intertextuality. The historically specific content of “blackness” within oppressive and exploitative U.S. social relations is (formally) emptied out. And to repeat the politics of such a formalist notion erases the historicity of racial violence/oppression and exploitation. As Houston Baker correctly points out, Gates’ view of language/culture/literature suggests that “‘literary’ meanings are conceived in a nonsocial, noninstitutional manner by the point of consciousness of a language CONTINUES…


LINK: RACECONTINUED…and maintained and transmitted, without an agent, within a closed circle of ‘intertextuality’” (101). The meaning of Blackness is historical and material and if there is textual hybridity it flattens out in the social which structures racial hierarchy. Within the racial hegemony of U.S. society, there are no “white” Rodney Kings. While Baker usefully critiques the formalism of Gates, Baker nonetheless absorbs crucial postmodernist principles and as a consequence engages the “economics of slavery” “semiotically” and thus his discourse is founded on a contradiction. Semiotic theory is committed to the notion of the discursive constitution of the real; this is most clearly expressed in Foucault who argued that “discourses . . . as practices . . . systematically form the objects of which they speak” (Archaeology 49). However, at the same time, Baker posits a “transcendental signified”—the “economics of slavery”—which suggests a commitment to materialism and thus an outside to the discursive; and yet this commitment to materialism (a reality independent of human consciousness) is ultimately canceled by his promotion of semiotic theory, which denies notions of historical objectivity. In fact, for Baker, “There is no such thing as an ‘objective’ history” (121) and consequently he must reject what his “economics of slavery” explicitly calls for: materialism. The concern with the mechanics of signification operates to occlude the political economy of signification, and emancipation is reduced to deconstructing and refashioning oppressive signs along a less oppressive axis. In seeking to avoid a “vulgar Marxism,” Baker situates race as a political category. The politics of situating race as a political concept becomes clearer when we foreground the political consequences of such a move. Reading race as a political category leads along the trajectory of political/legal reform (of the status quo) to expand access of the (middle-class) “other” to the surplus. One must bear in mind that this liberal reformism is always already constituted upon the (economic) structure of wage-labor—a formation in which surplus value is extorted from the direct producers. The issue is not so much to allow a few more to have access to the surplus via legislation for middle class blacks but to alter the economic arrangement of society so that the few are not given unlimited access to the surplus at the expense of denying the needs of the many. If the relation between signifier/signified is arbitrary, as Gates and social constructionists point out, then one has to extend the analysis and explain not “how” it works but why “blackness” is assigned such a negative/oppressive signified. If it is not natural, then why such a dehumanized construction? If it is in the text, then why? Or is the text naturally and spontaneously articulating blackness as a negative signified? Of course postmodernists cannot endorse any notions of a naturally articulated negative signified but without theorizing the sociality of such an articulation,—which they are precluded from doing because of an injunction against “totalizing” narratives—metaphysics slips back into the very discourses of constructionism. Cornel West’s intervention is thought to provide a way out of these aporias. Therefore, I want to critically engage one of his recent works, Keeping Faith. Like most sophisticated bourgeois theorists today, West has moved beyond merely assuming, as traditionalists do, that changing biased minds will eradicate racism. More importantly, he has also moved beyond ludic postmodernism’s Derridean arguments (made familiar in, say, Henry Louis Gates’ work) that racism can be dealt with as a “text.” Thus “[u]nlike Derrida and de Man, genealogical materialism does not rest content with a horizon of language” (265).


LINK: RACE – HISTORY Their approach is genealogical at best—it doesn’t take into account historical understandings of the material bodies involved in history and obscures a politicized understanding of raceYoung ‘1 - professor of English @ University of Alabama (Robert, “The Linguistic Turn, Materialism and Race: Toward an Aesthetics of Crisis,” Callaloo, 24(1), Winter 2001, pp. 334-345, Project MUSE, RG)

West adopts instead a variant of ludic postmodern theory: Nietzsche-inspired Foucauldian theories of materialism, not as a mode of production, but as “the specificity of difference.” West argues, for instance, that the very principles anchoring Marxism require the supercession of Marxism: “the principle of historical specificity and the materiality of structured social practices—the very founding principles of Marx’s own discourse—now requires us to be genealogical materialists” (266). Thus West replaces Marxist notions of history, which foreground the class struggle ensuing from exploitative social arrangements, “with Nietzschean notions of genealogy, [and] yet preserves the materiality of multifaceted structured social practices” (265). The material, then, is not understood in relation to the production and extraction of surplus value through the laboring body of the worker, but rather is located in ahistorical notions of the body (266). In West’s conjunction of Marxism and Foucault, the specific socioeconomic context is elided, and he effectively reconstitutes Marxism without historically determinate relations and consequently obscures the laws of motion of capital. West’s reading of the material is an ideological blocking of historical materialism. He argues that genealogical materialism “should be more materialist than that of the Marxist tradition, to the extent that the privileged material mode of production is not necessarily located in the economic sphere” (266). For West, then, “decisive material modes of production at a given moment may be located in the cultural, political, or even psychic sphere” (266). This view is, of course, precisely what the dominant cultural apparatuses promote as they suppress how African-American oppression and exploitation is located within the material domain, the effect of the relations of production. To posit the psychic domain, even potentially as a decisive “mode of production,” erases how this domain is historically constituted and articulated within the prevailing structures of domination. The cultural, political, and psychic spheres are not autonomous domains of the social, but operate ideologically as “domains of support” for prevailing economic structures. Dominant economic practices could not be reproduced without the production of subjectivities, differentially and unevenly, within these domains. Thus, to (re)situate social practices “within the cultural traditions of civilizations” (267) displaces the salient question of why racist practices are part of cultural traditions in the first place. After suppressing this inquiry, West then draws upon existentialism and in so doing situates himself as an ideological agent for the status quo when he argues that, in a frequently quoted formulation: “the major enemy of black survival in America has been and is neither oppression nor exploitation but rather the nihilistic threat— that is the loss of hope and absence of meaning” (see his Race Matters). Why is there “loss of hope”? Such a condition is neither a “natural state of affairs” nor a “state of mind,” but produced and reproduced by exploitative social arrangements. Racism is not really about the “wrong” ideas in people’s heads. Nor is it a category that should be erased because it is without scientific credibility (Appiah) or deconstructed and revealed as arbitrary (Gates). The “experience” of people of color clearly indicates that race has not become obsolete, and, even if arbitrary, we still have to account for the historical adequation between signifier and signified. As I have suggested, a more productive view of race locates it as an economic category that simultaneously designates and legitimates a subordinated positionality within the relations of production, thereby maintaining asymmetrical access to resources. By calling for specificity but erasing global economic structures that inform the local, West participates in narrowing the limits of intelligibility, thus providing a cover for the machinery of exploitation to continue without interrogation.


LINK: HISTORICAL EXAMPLES

Their historical analysis of hegemony and democracy reduces events to abstraction and doesn’t take a materialist approachHalliday ’94 [Fred, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, ‘A Necessary Encounter: Historical Materialism and International Relations’ in Rethinking International Relations (Basingstoke: Macmillan), 47-73]

The place of history in the study of international relations is, as already recognised, an uneasy one. This is both for theoretical reasons, in that International Relations seeks to identify a distinct conceptual terrain for study, and for practical and professional reasons, in that it wishes to distinguish and justify itself by contrast with what is regarded as the ideologised approach of diplomatic history, too often a fetishism of archives and dates. The question of historical origin receives less attention. Where history is present, it is usually either as illustration, or, rather too often, as a means of intimidating the reader with a barrage of examples, evident as much in James Der Derian ( On Diplomacy) as in Martin Wight. The result, however, is that many of the questions considered within International Relations are to a perilous degree abstracted from their historical context. This applies, first, to the lack of historical culture of most of those writing about and studying the subject, so that the proportion and range of reference to history is often absent. Behaviouralism, of course, made a rejection of history one of its central tenets. It applies equally to the abstracting of specific concepts from the historical situation under which they arose. The claim, frequently made and repeated in the literature, that the contemporary British and American states are examples of a peaceful, non-revolutionary, path of development is one striking example of this. The 'expansion' of Western society or of international society was achieved through the subjugation, -62- plunder, and in some cases massacre, of colonial societies. A more recent case is the prevailing discussion of the concept of 'interdependence' and the related issue of 'ungovernability': this almost elides the importance of the particular event that, at the political level, brought this question to the fore, namely the Vietnam War, and its impact on the US political and social systems. 29


LINK: POST-POSTIVISM

Using the contingency of truth to argue that all truth is uncertain undermines historical and social analyses of social phenomenaMalik '96 - senior visting fellow at the Department of Political, International and Policy Studies at the University of Surrey (Kenan, "The Mirror of Race: Postmodernism and the Celebration of Difference," in "In Defense of History," Ed. by E. Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.117-121, RG)

The postmodernist celebration of indeterminacy is reinforced by hostility to universalizing theory, or ideas of totality. Indeed the stress on indeter minacy arises from the belief that we cannot comprehend social reality in any holistic sense. In poststructuralist theory all attempts at grasping social reality as a totality are rejected. All such attempts are "totalitarian," ethno centric, and racist, because they impose a single vision of the world upon what is in fact a plurality. Here, postmodernists fall into another confusion. Their rejection of uni versalism and "totalizing" theories draws on some well-established epistemological principles, which they take to extreme—and illogical—conclu sions. There has long been a widely accepted epistemological convention, even a truism, that "facts" do not present themselves to us unmediated, unaffected by our social experience and without selection or interpretation. This is, of course, even more the case when we are dealing with very complex social "facts" and when powerful ideological factors intervene. For example, by conventional measures of intelligence, African-Americans as a group have a lower I.Q. than white Americans. That is a fact. But what that fact means is not apparent from the fact itself. For some authors, like Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in their infamous The Bell Curve, the difference in I.Q. is an indication that black and white Americans are naturally different in their intellectual abilities. For others it means that I.Q. tests are a poor measure of intellectual ability. For yet others, the difference between the I.Q. scores of black and white Americans is a product of their differential treatment by society. This obvious epistemological point does not necessarily mean that there is no basis for judging one interpretation as better than another. Many— probably most—historians and social scientists have long acknowledged that their knowledge is mediated in various ways; but they have not neces - sarily felt obliged to conclude that there are no standards of historical truth , or plausibility, against which to measure one account of history or social experience in comparison to others. Such people have commonly recognized that there can be different accounts, seen from the perspective of different places, times, or social groups, and that these accounts can even all be valid in relation to the particular experience and needs of those that propound them; but they have not necessarily felt obliged to conclude that there can never be a common standard to adjudicate among these different accounts, no basis for comparing them, or even a common vantage point from which to communicate between them or accommodate them to each other. As E.H. Carr understood: It does not follow that, because a mountain appears to take on different shapes from different angles of vision, it has objectively either no shape or an infinity of shapes. It does not follow that, because interpretation plays a necessary part in establishing the facts of history, and because no existing interpretation is wholly objective, one interpretation is as good as another, and the facts of history are not amenable to objective inter pretation .9 But postmodernists have indeed jumped to such extreme and absurd conclusions. They have seized upon the multiplicities of meaning in order to reject not only common standards of judgment but the possibility of any commensurability between different worlds of meaning. Postmodernism claims to situate "facts" in their specific social and historical context, but that is precisely what it fails to do. The very nature of deconstructionist methodology imposes an eternal framework on its object of investigation. The starting point of poststructuralism is the search for difference. As Derrida has put it, it is futile to ask who or what differs, since difference is prior to any subject.10 But this is to smuggle the conclusion of the investigation into the method. If you set out to find difference in anything and everything, then that is exactly what you will find. If you begin with the premise that there is nothing but difference, then it goes without saying that you will never find commonalities or relations between things that are irreducibly different, let alone totalities in which these different things are linked together. Difference becomes the absolute in history. It plays the "essentialist" role in poststructuralist discourse that Nature played in nineteenth-century positivism.


LINK: LANGUAGE/DISCOURSE

Critiquing the social construction of linguistic meaning and focusing on single words or systems obscures the role of ideology and history in giving language meaning McNally '96 - prof. of pol. sci. @ York Univ. (David, "Language, History, and Class Struggle," in "In Defense of History: Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda," Ed. by E. Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.38-40, RG)

What conclusions can we draw from this brief excursus through some Marxist considerations on language? First, we have seen that Marxism insists upon the unity of life-experience. Language, like consciousness, is not a separate and detached realm of human existence; rather, it is an expressive dimension of that existence. As such, it is permeated by the conflicts, tensions, and contradictions of real life. The new idealism sees none of this. By treating language "as a system of abstract grammatical categories," in Balditm's words, rather than understanding it as "ideologi cally saturated," as "contradiction-ridden, tension-filled," idealism impov erishes our understanding of the relations between language, life, history, and society. The new idealism may claim to understand ideology, conflict, contradiction, and resistance, but it has in a sense gone one step further than the old idealism, not just abstracting language but in effect transform ing society itself into a linguistic system. The word, argues Bakhtin, "enters a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgments and accents, weaves in and out of complex interrelationships, merges with some, recoils from others...." Words and utterances are never neutral; they are always situated, positioned in a context charged with tensions, struggles, conflicts. As "an abstract grammatical system" language maybe considered unitary, a closed object of study. But this is to treat it "in isolation from the uninterrupted process of historical becoming that is characteristic of all living language."Language is thus social and historical . Meanings exist for me only in my relations with others; and these others exist in concrete, structured social relationships. And these social relations themselves are dynamic; they involve struggles over domination and resistance, shifting balances of force and power. Meanings are thus historical as well; they are immersed in a process of "historical becoming" in which relationships are not fixed, and in which past and present interweave in our orientation towards the future.Language does not present me with a single structure of grammatical relations and meanings. On the contrary, my involvement in language entails my immersion in a social and historical field of themes, accents and meanings which are always contested and never closed. The words I choose, the utterances I convey, involve a positioning within that field. There are always alternative ways of expressing and articulating my experiences, my positions, my aspirations. This is what it means when Bakhtin writes that "consciousness finds itself inevitably facing the necessity of having to choose a language."


LINK: CHINA ECONOMY

Criticisms of Chinese market liberalization assume that Western capitalism is the natural historical trajectory for market economies –our historical analysis reveals that marketization is not synonymous with capitalismChase-Dunn ’10 – Professor of Sociology and Director of the University Honors Program, the Institute for Research on World-Systems and Co-director of the Program on Global Studies at the University of California-Riverside, B.A. in Psychology from UC-Berkeley, PhD in Sociology from Stanford University (Christopher, “Adam Smith in Beijing: A World-Systems Perspective,” Historical Materialism, 18(1), Winter, EBSCO, RG)

Arrighi contended that two distinct paths of economic and political development, which he calls ‘capitalism’ and ‘market society’, have allowed some modern national economies to escape the Malthusian trap of population-pressure and economic stagnation. Capitalism is the path that the West followed and market-society is the path that has been followed by China. He also contended that the Chinese Revolution helped to create the conditions under which this kind of market-society and paternalistic state could re-emerge in the decades since Mao’s demise. Arrighi saw the recent rise of China as a progressive development that might help to facilitate the emergence of a more labour-friendly and less environmentally-destructive world-society. Th ere is a lot at stake here. Arrighi was addressing the huge social-scientific and political issues that are brought up by the East/West-comparison and by the continuing decline of US hegemony and the rise of the People’s Republic of China. He produced a compelling world-systemic analysis that specifi es both the similarities and the important structural diff erences between the British hegemonic trajectory of the nineteenth century and US hegemony of the twentieth century. Th e analysis in Adam Smith in Beijing of processes of financialisation, neoliberalism and neoconservative ‘imperial over-reach’ as eff orts to prolong US hegemony, build on Arrighi’s own earlier work and on studies by Robert Brenner and David Harvey.2 Adam Smith in Beijing is dedicated to Andre Gunder Frank and Frank’s infl uence is obvious throughout. Arrighi’s focus on China, and his re-reading of Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Joseph Schumpeter, were inspired by Frank’s last book, Re-Orient, in which Frank tried to overcome Eurocentrism by re-examining world-history from 1400 to 1800.3 Arrighi’s last book not only reconsiders the classics but also made great use of a large corpus of recent scholarship that has been produced by a group of economic historians who were also inspired by Frank (Kaoru Sugihara, Takeshi Hamashita, Bin Wong and Kenneth Pomeranz).4 These close studies of Chinese economic history show that there has been a distinctive and dynamic East-Asian path of development. Th is review will outline the similarities and diff erences between Arrighi’s and Frank’s analyses of the East/West-comparison in world-historical perspective. Arrighi shows that the use of Th e Wealth of Nations as a totem of neoliberal nostrums about the magic of markets, the wonders of capitalist globalisation, and the evils of state-regulation, is based on ignoring much of what Smith actually said. Arrighi’s contrasts of Smith with Marx and Schumpeter produce some very useful ideas for comparisons between the East and the West. Smith’s distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ paths of economic development is used by Arrighi to bolster the notion that China followed the internally-oriented ‘natural’ path of market-society, focusing on labourintensive forms of development and on improving the domestic economy, whereas the capitalist success-stories of the West have focused on capitalintensive development that emphasised foreign trade, drew raw materials from distant colonies and made profi ts based on providing ‘fi nancial services’ to the larger world-economy.5 Smith also focused mainly on the conditions that allowed for national development, whereas Marx, like Th omas Friedman and many of the other breathless portrayers of the wonders of globalisation, assumed a single integrated world-market for capital and labour and a ‘fl at world’ in which global inequalities would soon be reduced by the rapid and even diff usion of capitalist development. Arrighi fi nds Smith giving advice to legislators about the dangers of allowing big capital to dictate state-policies that are not in the interest of the nation as a whole. Smith also focuses on the demographic and geographical features of each national society (the container that is the stateterritory) as constituting important constraints and opportunities for the possibilities for national development. Whereas Marx analysed capitalism in order to provide a theory that would be useful to the workers of the world, Smith intended to provide a theory that would be useful to public-minded leaders of nation-states about the best ways to develop the wealth of their nations. Arrighi does far better than Frank in seeing that there was a substantially independent East-Asian international system prior to the nineteenth century. Frank claimed that there had been a single world-system since the Bronze Age.6 Surely there were some important long-distance eff ects of prestige goods-trade and the diff usion of technologies back and forth across the silkroads in earlier centuries, but Eastern and Western geopolitics and statecraft did not become integrated into a single political-military interaction-network until the European states surrounded and tried to penetrate China in the

ENDI 2010 35Historical Materialism K Wave 1nineteenth century. Before that, there was a substantially separate East-Asian international system. After describing the fi rst Opium War in 1841, Arrighi says: ‘After a disastrous war with Britain (now joined by France), China virtually ceased to be the centre of a relatively self-contained East Asian interstate system’.7 Th e East-Asian international trade-tribute system has been well described in the studies by Takeshi Hamashita.8 China, far larger and more powerful than any other state in the East-Asian system, had called the shots but did not engage in the kind of expansionist and imperialistic behaviour that was so apparent in the relationship between the European powers and their colonies. Arrighi characterises this as a pacifi c system relative to the international system of states in Europe, where interstate warfare was nearly continuous and huge world-wars among the ‘great powers’ broke out whenever hegemony failed. Arrighi contended that the relatively less contentious East-Asian system was a consequence of the more inward oriented and less expansive mode of development in China, but he also admitted that the Chinese state was so large relative to the other states in the system that challenges to Chinese hegemony were not likely to occur and were unsuccessful when they did appear. Japan’s occasional eff orts to become the East-Asian hegemon failed until after the Europeans had brought the Qing Dynasty to its knees. Th e

CONTINUED…


LINK: CHINA ECONOMYCONTINUED…

new East-Asian world-historians argue that there was a dynamic EastAsian model of development that was distinct from that of the West and diff erent from the usual Eurocentric presumptions about a static Asiatic mode of production. Th ey show convincingly that commodity-production, markets and money were highly advanced in China and that some regions within China – South China and the Yangtze river-valley – were especially dynamic in terms of economic development in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Arrighi supported the idea that there was an ‘industrious revolution’ in China in the eighteenth century, in which intensive labour was used to produce commodities instead of replacing labour with machines. Th is kind of market-society was characterised by Mark Elvin as a ‘high level equilibrium trap’ in which capital had little incentive to invest in labour-saving technology because labour was so cheap.9 Arrighi and the new economic historians of East Asia emphasise the upside of this for employment. But this does not explain why the West was able to eclipse China in terms of wealth, technology and military power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Frank had contended that China was the most developed centre of the Eurasian world-system until 1800, and that Europe had abruptly seized the upper hand in the nineteenth century. Frank also argued that the European advantage was unsubstantial and would be a brief interlude that would soon be ended by a new rise of China. But Frank did not do what Arrighi has done, which is to show what it was about the constellation of Chinese institutions that was diff erent from, and superior to, the institutional structures of Europe. Frank contended that the existing evolutionary accounts of the rise of capitalism were Eurocentric nonsense. Instead, he saw a continuous logic of accumulation that was based both on state-power and the ability to make wealth by means of trade and production. According to this view, states and wealthy élites have oscillated back and forth since the Bronze Age between a greater emphasis on state-controlled economies in some periods and a greater emphasis on markets and tradenetworks in others. Th is logic of accumulation did not really evolve. Frank understood it as a great wheel that goes round and round. And, after the 1970s, Frank did not see any possibility of a less exploitative future mode of production. According to Frank, China had been the centre for millennia and the European interlude was brutish but would be mercifully short. He had given up on his earlier conviction that a socialist revolution might produce a new kind of future society. Arrighi’s analysis parts company from that of Frank in a number of ways. Arrighi agreed with Frank that China was more developed in terms of technology and institutions than Europe was until the end of the eighteenth century, but he did not see the European rise as sudden and completely conjunctural. Arrighi’s analysis of the development of capitalism in Europe was evolutionary and began in the fi fteenth century when Genoa, Portugal and Spain combined fi nance-capital with an expansive intercontinental colonial expansion.10 And, while his distinction between capitalism and market-society holds the promise of future progress, it seems to be rather less of a qualitative transformation to a much more egalitarian kind of social system than those that have been depicted as possible by other analysts of capitalism. Arrighi also supported the idea that one of the main explanations of the diff erence between China and the West has to do with the nature of classpower over the state. Th e idea of a capitalist state, in which merchants, industrialists and bankers exert great power over state-policy, was thrown out by Frank as so much Eurocentric baggage. In Th e Long Twentieth Century, Arrighi had characterised the Chinese dynasties as tributary empires that were becoming increasingly commercialised. In Adam Smith in Beijing, he presented the Qing Dynasty as a relatively benevolent welfare-state that was trying to protect peasants from exploitation by local landowners and by merchants. A key diff erence between the Chinese dynasties and the régimes of Europe had to do with the greater infl uence in Europe that capitalists had over state-policy in the leading hegemonic core-states. Arrighi wrote: ‘Th us Smith’s “unnatural” path diff ers from the “natural”, not because it has a larger number of capitalists but because capitalists have greater power to impose their class interest at the expense of the national interest’.11 And he went on to say that, while this was not true for all the European states, it was the situation in those states that were most central in the European system – the hegemons.In Volume 1 of Th e Modern World-System, Immanuel Wallerstein noted a key diff erence between China and Europe in the ‘long sixteenth century’ that had huge consequences.12 He pointed out that China had a central government – a ‘world empire’ that could formulate and enforce a single policy over a very large area, whereas Europe was a ‘world-economy’ that was politically organised as a set of competing core-states. In the same years that the Portuguese King Henry the Navigator was heading abroad, with Genoese support, to circumnavigate Africa for the purposes of outfl anking the Venetian monopoly on East-Indian spices, the Ming Dynasty was abandoning the Treasure Fleet explorations to Africa in order to concentrate on defending the heartland of the middle kingdom from steppe-invaders. Central-Asian steppe-nomads had also repeatedly assaulted Europe, but there was no Emperor of Europe to tell the Portuguese to desist because resources needed husbanding to defend against the Central Asians. Europe had a multicentric interstate-system in which fi nance-capital was beginning to play an important role in directing state-policy,13 while China was turning inward to maintain its centralised tributary empire. It was the weakness and small scale of tributary states in the West after the fall of Rome that allowed capitalism to become the predominant form of accumulation. In China’s case, a strong

ENDI 2010 37Historical Materialism K Wave 1tributary state, run by mandarins and occasionally by semiperipheral conquerors, repeatedly succeeded in confi scating the wealth of those merchants or regional trading dynasts who posed a political threat to the control of the state.14 Arrighi confi rmed that growing European power over China was not primarily due to the cheap prices of European commodities that could knock down all Chinese walls. Most European goods could not compete for the home and rural markets within China even after the European states had forced the Qing régime to let them in. Rather, the major advantage that the Europeans enjoyed was in military technology. Th ough Arrighi contended that the important diff erences between Europe and China were due to the ways in which political and economic institutions were combined, his analysis is not inconsistent with the conclusion that the key question is, ‘Who controls the state?’ In Europe, capitalists came to control, fi rst, city-states, and then, the most successful nation-states. In China, that never happened, though it may be happening now for the fi rst time.


ALT SOLVES – LANGUAGE / IDENTITY

Historical materialism is an indispensable tool for the critical interrogation of language and identity—the affirmative risks being absorbed into the dominant cultural frameFoster '96 - prof. of sociology @ Univ. Oregon (John, "In Defense of History," in "In Defense of History," Ed. by E. Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.185-193, RG)

The weaknesses of postmodernism—from an emancipatory perspective— thus far overshadow its strengths. Missing from Foucault's analysis, like that of postmodernism generally, is any conception of a counter-order to the disciplinary orders described. In the more extreme case of "textual postmodernists"—those postmodernist thinkers like Derrida, as distinct from Foucault, who deny any reality outside the text—the political and historical weaknesses from a left perspective are even more glaring. By undermining the very concept of history—in any meaningful sense beyond mere story-telling—such theorists have robbed critical analysis of what has always been its most indispensable tool.18 The denial within postmodernist theory of the validity of historical cri tique covers up what is really at issue: the denial of the historical critique of capitalism, leading to a convergence between left thought infected by Nietzsche and the dominant liberal "end of history" conception. The danger of such ahistorical or anti-historical views, as E.P. Thompson observed, is that one loses sight not of "reason in history" in some abstract sense, but rather of "the reasons of power and the reasons of money."19 Historical materialism at its best provides a way out of this dilemma. This is not to ignore the fact that Marxism—which has sometimes given rise to its own crude interpretations and historical travesties, as in the case of Stalinism—has frequently been identified with the kind of "totalizations" and "essentialisms" that postmodernist theorists have singled out. As Thompson pointed out in a 1977 essay on Christopher Caudwell, Marxism has sometimes relied on " 'essentialist' tricks of mind," the "tendency to intellectualize the social process"—"the rapid delineation of the deep process of a whole epoch." These are things that the historian (and social scientists in general) should guard against. But to abandon theory and historical explanation entirely in order to avoid "essentialism" and "foun dationalism" is a bit like throwing out the baby in order to keep the bathwater clean. Marx himself provided another model, actively opposing theory (even "Marxist" theory) that purported to be "suprahistorical." In his Theses on Feuerbach, he presented what still ranks as the most thorough- going critique of what he called the "essentialist" conception of human beings and nature. Indeed, historical materialism has long engaged in its own self-critique, precisely in order to expel the kinds of "essentialisms," "positivisms," and "structuralisms" that have intruded on the philosophy of praxis itself—-a self-critique that has produced the insights of theorists like Gramsci, Sartre, Thompson, and Raymond Williams.20 These thinkers distanced themselves from the positivistic "official Marxism" that grew out of the Second International and later turned into a caricature of itself in the form of Stalinism. Yet they held firm to the critique of capitalism and their commitment to the struggles of the oppressed. Moreover, these particular examples tell us that if what has sometimes been called "the postmodern agenda"—consisting of issues like identity, culture, and language —is to be addressed at all, this can only be accomplished within a historical context. And here one might openly wonder with Foucault "what difference there could ultimately be between being a historian and being a Marxist." When placed within a more holistic historical materialist context— ani - mated by the concept of praxis —the problems raised by postmodernism look entirely different. As David McNally says, "Language is not a prison-house, but a site of struggle." What the contributions in this volume have in common is the insistence that issues like language, culture, nationality, race, gender, the environment, revolution, and history itself are only effectively analyzed within a context that is simultaneously historical in character, materialist (in the sense of focusing on concrete practices), and revolutionary. Such analyses do not abandon the hope of transcending capitalism, nor of the notion of human progress as a possible outcome of historical struggles. It is said that Nicholas I, Czar of Russia, issued an order banning the word "progress." Today we no longer believe, in a nineteenth century sense, in automatic human progress, embodying some definite content—the idea that the Czar found so threatening. But this does not mean, as the philosopher Michael Oakeshott contended with respect to political activity in the 1950s, that we "sail a boundless and bottomless sea" that has "neither starting-point nor appointed direction" and that our only task is "to keep afloat on an even keel." History—as centuries of struggle and indeed progress suggest—is more meaningful than that. To abandon altogether the concept of progress, in the more general sense of the possibility of progres sive human emancipation, would only be to submit to the wishes of the powers that be. Such political disengagement by intellectuals on the left in the present epoch could only mean one thing: the total obeisance to capital.21 The irony of post-modernism is that while purporting to have transcended modernity, it abandons from the start all hope of transcending capitalism itself and entering a post-capitalist era. Postmodernist theory is therefore easily absorbed within the dominant cultural frame and has even given rise recently to texts such as Postmodern Marketing, which attempts to utilize the insights of thinkers like Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, and Baudillard to market goods within a capitalist economy. Perhaps

ENDI 2010 39Historical Materialism K Wave 1this will be the final destiny of postmodernist theory—its absorption by the vast marketing apparatus of the capitalist economy, adding irony and color to a commercial order that must constantly find new ways to insinuate itself into the everyday lives of the population. Meanwhile, historical materialism will remain the necessary intellectual ground for all those who seek, not to revel in the "carnival" of capitalist productive and market relations, but to transcend them.22


ALT SOLVES – UNDERMINES SOVEREINGTY

Analyzing sovereign power historically unveils epistemological patterns that pre-cede empirical claims Lapointe, 2007 [Thierry. "Beyond an Historicism Without Subject: Agency and the Elusive Genealogies of State Sovereignty" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association 48th Annual Convention, Feb 28, 2007 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p180176_index.html]

The configurations of relations of power institutionalised by historically specific forms of sovereignty provide, it is our contention, significant clues to understand and explain why agents develop strategies of power and specific forms of rationality rather than others. Furthermore, it provides us with valuable analytical tools to problematise the reasons why a social formation follows a specific institutional trajectory rather than others and why, in such a context, certain patterns of rationality, thoughts and discourses develop rather than others—i.e. the positivity of discourses. Therefore, it also allows for a historicisation of patterns of human rationality/subjectivity. As I will try to point out in last section of this chapter is that all four of these factors identified above were of significant importance in determining the different institutional trajectories followed by France and the HRE in the context of XVI-XVIIth century.

Historical materialism exposes the contingency of nation-states that are otherwise naturalized in IR theory Halliday ’94 [Fred, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, ‘A Necessary Encounter: Historical Materialism and International Relations’ in Rethinking International Relations (Basingstoke: Macmillan), 47-73]

Anyone familiar with the workings of the international system will, in one sense, be aware of this -- the ideological suppression of the origins of the system, a propensity to deny the violence involved in its creation, and the force within international affairs, not least through nationalism, of irrational factors. Thus what Marx said of the role of history in general could be said of any particular country: its domestic and foreign policies, the instincts -61- of its leaders and the responses of its public, the institutions through which policy was conducted, the grievances and fears that drive its population -- all reflected the past to a degree larger than was often admitted. More importantly, as with socio-economic, so with historical determination, Marx also saw these conditioning factors as undermining the appearance which all social events had of being in some way 'natural' or 'eternal': one of the major functions of political socialisation in any society is to make what exists in that society appear as inevitable, and unchangeable. The same is true of the international domain itself, and the attendant forms -nation, state, sovereignty, etc. -- associated with it. Location of these features of a society in the historical context of their origin serves to contradict this appearance of being natural and eternal , as well as to suggest that alternatives are also the more possible.


ALT –SOLVES STATISM

Historical materialism avoids state-centricity and problematizes the relationship of the state to capitalismvan Apeldoorn 2004 [Bastiann, prof of political science at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, “Theorizing the transnational: a historical materialist approach, Journal of International Relations and Development, 2004, 7, (142–176), ebscohost]

In contrast to neo-realism (and to a large extent neo-liberalism as well), in which state power is narrowly conceived as the accumulated material capabilities of the ‘state-as-actor’, historical materialism seeks to examine the social origins of that power. Hence Cox’s (1986: 205, emphasis added) suggestion to ‘consider the state-society complex as the basic entity of international relations.’ Emphasizing the capitalist nature of society, a historical materialist theory of world politics would, as Mark Rupert (1993: 84) phrased it, take ‘as its point of departure the proposition that international politics as we know it is historically embedded in, and internally related to, capitalist social relations.’ What our transnationalist perspective would add to this is the claim that these social relations have from the start been at least partly of a transnational nature, and that through different phases in the history of modern capitalism (though not in a straight upward line) these social relations have increasingly become more transnationalized.


ALT – RACE

The alternative is to reject postmodernist discourse of race and explore the effects daily productive and material forces have on race relations. Only through examining capitalism can we understand why the aff impacts happen in the first place.Young ‘1 - professor of English @ University of Alabama (Robert, “The Linguistic Turn, Materialism and Race: Toward an Aesthetics of Crisis,” Callaloo, 24(1), Winter 2001, pp. 334-345, Project MUSE, RG)

Postmodernists reunderstand the subject, not as the rational cause of social meaning, but rather the effect of the articulation of various discursive practices. Roland Barthes makes this point clear in S/Z when he says, “ I is not an innocent subject, anterior to the text, one which will subsequently deal with the text as it would an object to dismantle or a site to occupy. This ‘I’ which approaches the text is already itself a plurality of other text, of codes which are infinite or, more precisely, lost” (10). Michel Foucault also points up the constructedness of the subject when he argues that: “The individual is not a pregiven entity which is seized on by the exercise of power. The individual, with his identity, is the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces” (73-74). Perhaps the classic poststructuralist view of the subject, though, is found in Jacques Derrida. For Derrida, “The subject (in its identity with itself, or eventually in its consciousness of its identity with itself, its selfconsciousness) is inscribed in language, is a ‘function’ of language, becomes a speaking subject only by making its speech conform . . . to the system of the rules of language as system of differences, or at very least by conforming to the general laws of difference” (15).The view of the subject as a language construct has framed postmodern discourses of race. For example, Henry Gates argues that “Race has become a trope of ultimate, irreducible difference between culture . . . [and thus] Race is the ultimate trope of difference because it is so very arbitrary in its application” (Race 5). In the Signifying Monkey Gates develops his project of investigating rhetorical structures and privileges the mechanics of the meaning-making process and foregrounds the “materiality” and “willful play” of the signifier (59). Thus for Gates “blackness is produced in the text through a complex process of signification” and therefore “There can be no transcendent blackness, for it can not and does not exist beyond manifestations in specific figures” (237).Theorizing race as text has led to proclamations, such as the one by Anthony Appiah, that race is a fiction: “The truth is that there are no races” (Appiah 35). The politics of such a discourse is perhaps clearest in Kobena Mercer’s essay “‘1968’: Periodizing Politics and Identity,” where he, too, recognizes the meaninglessness of race and marks how “the [race] signifier itself became the site for the making and remaking of meanings” (430). Thus politics becomes a matter of semiotic freedom and democracy is seen as a “struggle over relations of representation” (Mercer 429) and not the relations of production. In short, what is offered as emancipation is not equal access to economic resources but the pleasure of disrupting dominant and oppressive meanings. While such discursive intervention is important, especially for an historically marginalized group, it is urgent to recognize that social change will come about not by emancipating signs from totalities but by displacing the relations of production, for although the relations of production do not evade, they nevertheless always exceed the fate of signs.Not only do such postmodern discourses reify culture, in what Kenan Malik calls “cultural formalism,” but in their anti-totality move and privileging of the logic of indeterminacy postmodernists suppress notions of causality. Postmodern discourses of race merely assert the constructedness of the (race) sign and bracket the political economy of race, and consequently the text is set as the limit of intelligibility. In arguing for the “constructed-ness” of race but locating it textually there is a theoretical problem in accounting for the textual inscription of race or its extra-textual effects in daily life under capitalism (and we must account for extratextual effects because for people of color it is a matter of life and death).Postmodernists are unable to explain why race has acquired its oppressive social meaning in the first place and across various localities—that is race is a translocal articulation. Reading race as essentially constructed but not accounting for its production, race is mystified and metaphysics is reintroduced; in fact, in a recent symposium on race and racism Howard Winant asserts that “Race remains a mysterious phenomenon”(7). Race is not a mystery as it operates today as a material practice in marking racially coded subjects for differential levels of surplus extraction and violence and it has an historical emergence. As Alex Callinicos indicates, “Racism as we know it today developed during a key phase in the development of capitalism as the dominant mode of production on a global scale—the establishment during the 17th and 18th centuries of colonial plantations in the New World using slave labour imported from Africa to produce consumer goods such as tobacco and sugar and industrial outputs such as cotton for the world market” (11). As Eric Williams succinctly put it, “Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery” (7).While most postmodern discourses have moved away from ontologically based inquiries, a recent essay by Linda Alcoff attempts to (re)configure race as an “ontological” category. Her intervention opens the possibility for foregrounding the nexus between race and materialism. This possibility is quickly closed down as her discourse moves away from

ENDI 2010 43Historical Materialism K Wave 1materialism and thus for Alcoff “Race is a particular, historically and culturally located form of human categorization . . .” (7). The question again is why? Why is race a form of human categorization? And is race identity really a matter of language games? And are these games essentially self-originating and autonomous? Of course not. These “games” are always already situated within and the effect of the prevailing economic / political /cultural /ideological conditions. As Malik points out “Racial differentiation emerges out of real social and economic mechanisms” (10), and they are not ontologically pre-given.In other words, this human categorization is an historical articulation of racialized division of labor structuring asymmetrical access to surplus. Alcoff reduces thought about the real to the real itself and this articulates an empiricist idealism. Therefore what is really at stake here is not so much the question of ontology and the related question of objectivity—which puts one on the road to materialism—as much as it is the articulation of what Roy Bhaskar has called the “epistemic fallacy” and consequently the recuperation of experience. One must remember Alcoff’s original concern was not only to “validate hybrid identity or hybrid positionality against purist, essentialist accounts” but also to “take into account the full force of race as a lived experience” (9). Of course, as I also pointed out earlier, it is politically urgent to mark such experiences but an ontological reinscription of race reifies race and as such disables a transformative project—a project aimed at negating the deployment of race as a structure for exploitation. Under way, then, is the alliance of postmodern discourses, which de-essentializes identity, with this humanist identity. These two apparently antagonistic discourses are actually colluding in suppressing the political economy of race. The trajectory—from the postmodernist constructed identity to the humanist subject—may be clearly mapped out in a series of works by Gates.


ALT SOLVES: POLITICS

An account of how social forms emerge historically reveals the process through which state actors gain legitimacy – the affirmative reduces politics to technics

Edkins 1999 [Jenny, Senior Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Wales Aberystwyth, Postructuralism and International Relations: Bringing the Political Back In, p. 3-4]In any formation of a new state, there are clearly events that would be described as part of "politics" in the narrow sense of the word that are nevertheless significant. But these maneuvers taking place in "politics" do not provide an account in themselves of how one social form rather than another emerges from a period of contestation and struggle. To achieve an understanding of the latter, we need a "political" analysis that examines mutations of the social or symbolic order and how a new model of society is created. In the case of the move to totalitarianism in the USSR, for example, Lefort argues that key to the whole process is that at the level of fantasy "what is being created is the model of a society which seems to institute itself without divisions, which seems to have mastery of its own organization, a society in which each part seems to be related to every other and imbued by one and the same project of building socialism."13 In other words, what is significant in the exitmination of totalitarianism is how a new symbolic ideal of society, with forms of legitimation, was instituted, and how this model works as fantasy. An analysis of "the political" in the broader sense would involve an account of how such models of the social are articulated and how they work. Zizek summarizes the distinction made by Lefort and Laclau as one between "Politics" as a separate social complex, a positively determined sub-system of social relations in interaction with other sub-systems (economy, forms of culture ... ) and the "Political" [le politiquel as the moment of openness, of undecidability, when the very structuring principle of society, the fundamental form of social pact, is called into question-in short, the moment of global crisis overcome by the act of founding a "new harmony."14 Once it is decided (by wars, revolutions, and the like) that legitimate authority resides, for example, with a particular state form, what follows is the bureaucratic technique of governance elaborated through recognized expertise and endorsed in the continuance of the state form through the regular, ritual replacement of the placeholders of authority, whether by elections in a democracy or through the rules of succession in a monarchy or dictatorship. As Max Weber has argued, bureaucracy succeeds because of its technical efficiency, and once in place it is difficult to remove.15 It replaces the need for political decisions: Actions can be determined on purely technical grounds.


HIST MAT EPISTEMOLOGY GOOD/ALT SOLVES

Our alternative epistemology makes the socionomic a meaningful part of international relations and exposes the problematic assumptions of their behavioral and categorical models Halliday ’94 [Fred, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, ‘A Necessary Encounter: Historical Materialism and International Relations’ in Rethinking International Relations (Basingstoke: Macmillan), 47-73]

This prominence of classes as analytic tools has two immediate consequences for International Relations. First, it invests the major conflicts of international politics with a distinct socioeconomic character. Though it may be untrue to say, paraphrasing Marx, that all the history of International Relations has been one of class struggle, it has certainly been a major and at times decisive component. The competitive spread of the European empires, the outbreaks of the two world wars, the gold standard crisis of 1931, the OPEC price rises of 1971-73, the disputes over trade and interest rates within the Atlantic Alliance in the early 1980s, US-Japanese trade conflict in the 1990s -- all now appear as, in broad -63- terms, part of conflict between capitalist ruling classes, between old established capitalist powers and their new rivals, the latter produced by the development of capitalist social relations within their own countries. Many of the disputes that have marked twentieth century history became inter-imperialist and intercapitalist disputes, beyond their specific national, geographic and historical characteristics: as already noted, this issue of conflict between great powers, not the dynamics of 'North-South' relations was the main question addressed by Lenin and others, in the debate on imperialism before the First World War. Secondly, in this light, the debates that have flourished within International Relations for so long appear to be founded on some questionable premises. Since the state is not an independent entity, but is rather located in a particular socio-economic and class context, the debate on whether the state is losing power to non-state actors changes character. For the question now becomes not whether the state has recently, i.e. since 1945 or 1970, lost preeminence to non-state actors but how far the 'non-state' actors who have always affected the power and character of the state act through the state or through other channels. These non-state actors, i.e. classes, have always been there, but have exercised their power in a variety of ways. The question of how far the boundary between domestic and international politics has broken down also acquires a different significance; in capitalism classes have always operated internationally, from the bankers and trading companies of the sixteenth century onwards, and have in turn been affected domestically by changes in the international economic and political situation. 31 The primacy of classes therefore serves in a dual sense to place in question the concept of the 'nation-state': it shows, first, that the state itself is, to a considerable extent, a function of wider social forces, and secondly that the impermeability of domestic politics is an appearance which conceals a permanent, underlying, internationalisation of political and economic factors. In Marx's own writings, there is an interesting tension on this issue: his political instincts led him to emphasise the international character of the proletariat, the working class, and their aspiration and ability to organise on an international basis against their class enemies; yet his theory contained within it another suggestion, namely that it was not the working class, but the bourgeoisie, who -64- were the most international, since their education and culture on the one hand, and their very economic interests on the other, were such as to lead them to act more and more internationally. The subsequent history of capitalism has, as much as anything, been one in which the internationalisation of the ruling class has proceeded as fast as, or even faster than, that of the working class -- hence, as Jeff Frieden, Stephen Gill, Kees van der Pijl and others have shown, the EC (European Community), the Trilateral Commission, the Group of 7 and many others are examples of transnational élite coordination, for the better management of the economy, both national and international.


HIST MAT EPISTEMOLOGY GOODHistorical materialism rethinks security as an historical and sociological problem and debunks the supposed neutrality of realist theories of IRHalliday ’94 [Fred, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, ‘A Necessary Encounter: Historical Materialism and International Relations’ in Rethinking International Relations (Basingstoke: Macmillan), 47-73]

If this tenet of historical materialism is extended to the international, then it suggests that the central concern of International Relations becomes not security, and the actions of the nation-state directed to defending and enhancing it, but rather conflict, and the ways in which this is generated, conducted, and resolved. Underlying the myriad events of international affairs lies social conflict, within and across frontiers, the pursuit of wealth and economic power as the source of these manifold events. 33 Taking the historical determination of specific states into account, it becomes necessary to enquire whence these came, or, more precisely, out of what historical conflicts they emerged. The most apparently pacific of states may have issued from extremely bloody pasts -- the superficially tranquil Netherlands has a history replete with revolution, invasion and sanguinary internal strife. The currently smooth workings of democracy in Germany or Japan betray the fact that this political system was imposed but two generations ago through foreign military intervention. The sudden arrival of close to one hundred new states on the world scene in the period since 1945 is often adduced merely as a numerical addition, a complicating or diluting expansion, of an otherwise continuous states system: the fact that this process was a result of intense conflicts, between colonies and colonial power and, as a major precondion, derived from the weakening of the colonial empires in the Second World War, receives less than its appropriate share of attention. Marx was aware of this in his writings on the mid-nineteenth century: writing on the challenge to the five-nation balance of power, the pentarchy, he warned of the presence of a sixth great power, revolution. Thus, the dominant problem of twentiethcentury international politics is seen by conventional international relations theory as being that of security: but for much of that period it can equally be seen as having been that of containing inter-capitalist conflict on the one hand, and social revolution on the other. In other words, the management of social conflict is the issue that has most concerned politicians and academic analysts of foreign policy alike. 34 As Arno Mayer has shown, an apparently neutral international event like the Versailles Peace Conference of -66- 1919 was preoccupied with the issue of counter revolution and containing disorder. Marx was mistaken to invest revolution with the mystical and deterministic overtones that came to be associated with it, and equally wrong to believe that some radically different and emancipated society would emerge from such upheavals: but he was right to see social conflict, over ownership, power, resources, as a central feature of politics, and to ask how such conflict underlay the apparently autonomous world of political strife and international conflict. This he was able to do, in part, by introducing the materialist and historical contexts. When it is said that the pursuit of international politics is one of 'order' one has to ask 'order' for whom, and in whose interests? Similarly, when it is said, as by Hedley Bull, that international society is 'anarchical', this both recognises and avoids the question: it recognises it in so far as it acknowledges that there is conflict and that it is endemic to the international system, but it avoids it, in so far as it denies that there is an underlying source of this conflict, beyond the states system, and locates the coherence of the system only at the level of the mechanisms, or so-called 'institutions', evolved to manage this conflict. But the assertion of anarchy conceals the fact that this superficially incoherent conflict is itself the product of factors that are definable and intelligible, even if they cannot be controlled as the principal actors would like. Moreover, for Marxism, it is above all not the anarchy of the states system but that of the market and of capitalism itself that is determinant. 35


AT: MARXISM BAD TURNS

Their Marxism bad turns are unresponsive. Our alternative is historical materialist analysis not revolution, and Marxism itself is in a constant state of flux so their turns are reductive and ignore Marxist contributions to IR theory Halliday ’94 [Fred, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, ‘A Necessary Encounter: Historical Materialism and International Relations’ in Rethinking International Relations (Basingstoke: Macmillan), 47-73]

It is not possible to claim that the intellectual instruments for such an encounter are simply at hand, waiting to be utilised. Marxism, as a theoretical approach, remains in evolution: while there is much that it has encompassed in the one hundred and fifty years of its existence, there is also much that remains unanalysed, as there is that is contradictory, outdated, confused within its corpus. In this it is no different from other approaches, be these liberalism or conventional economics. The work of analysing international relations is to a considerable extent in the future, its components not present in the works of historical materialists who have written to date. Yet that such an endeavour is possible and can yield a new, comprehensive, paradigm can be asserted, for two general reasons. First, as is evident from its impact in other social sciences, historical materialism is a comprehensive general theory of political, social and economic action, one that claims to be able to encompass all major fields of social action within its scope. It is indeed the most sustained attempt to provide a comprehensive theory of society elaborated in the past century. Its impact has already been evident in some areas of social science: in economics, history, sociology, to name the three most evident. The fact that it has not yet been accorded a comparable place in International Relations, and has not yet responded proportionately to the -55- challenges of the discipline, is a result of the specific obstacles, theoretical and historical, already outlined. Many conceptual aspects of historical materialism contain potential for International Relations, and can be applied to the international as other theories have been. As we have seen in Chapter 1, International Relations has derived an immense amount, indeed the majority, of its theoretical tools from other disciplines in the few decades of its existence: from the Chicago school theory of power, through behaviouralism, rational action theory, the first influences of law and philosophy, and conflict theories, functionalism and now 'critical' theory, the influence upon it of other branches of the social science are evident. The scope for such a theoretical enrichment from historical materialism, even where as with history or sociology this enrichment is based on work not directly related to International Relations, is considerable. Secondly, within its corpus even as presently constituted, historical materialism has produced a body of literature pertaining to the conventional agenda of International Relations, and way beyond the specific interpretation of 'structuralism' that was recognised in the late 1970s: on war, violence, the state, international conflict, transnational economic issues, the development of the international system itself. The attempt by Marxists in the period 1900-20 to theorise the international system around the concept of 'imperialism', by which they meant inter-state strategic rivalry, is one of the most ambitious and creative ever made. Since the 1970s another considerable body of literature on international issues has been produced under the influence of Marxism: apart from copious studies of imperialism, there have been the world system theories of Wallerstein, the debates on Cold War, and analyses of inter-capitalist relations. Wallerstein's work posits a very different history of the international system to that of orthodox IR: while covering roughly the same historical period, from 1500 to the present. The Wallersteinian approach emphasises the role of economic relations in constituting the system, as distinct from the political and diplomatic analysis of realism; it stresses the creation of hierarchy where the other focuses on the formation of an international 'society', equal at least in juridical claims, and it seeks to link the process of international conflict to internal social and political change, in -56- contrast to realism's denial of the relevance of the internal. 18 At the same time, Wallerstein's work has, from within historial materialism, generated substantial criticism: as a theory that lays too much stress on circulation rather than on production, as a somewhat naive espousal of 'anti-systemic' forces even when these are themselves oppressive, as resting on too one-sided and 'dependency'-theory-oriented explanation of imperialism.


AT: COMMUNISM BAD

Historical materialism is distinct and insulated from the history of poor communist appropriations of its theory of history Halliday ’94 [Fred, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, ‘A Necessary Encounter: Historical Materialism and International Relations’ in Rethinking International Relations (Basingstoke: Macmillan), 47-73]

To argue for the recognition of the relevance of historical materialism in the aftermath of the Cold War and the collapse of the communist system may, at first sight, appear perverse, if not forlorn. Yet such an endeavour is possible not only in spite of, but in certain respects because of, that turn of events. At the most straightforward level, the pertinence of historical materialism as an explanatory system has never been dependent upon the success of dictatorial movements that claimed to speak in its name, any more than has capitalism relied on the success of the authoritarian, racist and belligerent regimes that it produced. The evolution, separate from and in conflict with official communism, of independent Marxism over most of the twentieth century is evidence enough of that. But beyond this consideration lies the possibility that historical materialism may prove to be just as relevant as it ever was as an explanatory system, and one that, in origin and development, takes as its starting point and focus of analysis precisely that phenomenon that now more than ever dominates the world, namely capitalism. Marxism was wrong to assert the imminence of a revolutionary alternative to capitalist society, and it consistently underrated the potential for change, and improvement within capitalism. As we shall see in Chapter 10, the claim that capitalism inevitably leads to war may turn out to be itself historical, a reflection on states that were not yet fully democratic. But its twin claims, that the mode of production provides the context for the analysis of political phenomena, national and international, and that the capitalist system is riven with conflicts, dangers and failures, grounded in these socio-economic factors, would seem to be as valid today as they ever were.


AT: GLOBAL VIOLENCE DECREASING BC OF CAP

The global is the wrong scale at which to measure inequality, violence, and the value to life. Their research methodologies are based on failing theories of international political economy Walker 2002 [RBJ, professor of political science at the University of Victoria, “International/Inequality,” International Studies Review, Vol. 4, No. 2, International Relations and the New Inequality (Summer, 2002), pp. 7-24, jstor]

Moreover, until relatively recently at least, most analyses of capitalism as a globalizing dynamic with a capacity to dis- solve and recast all existing discriminations and jurisdictions offered some account of its articulation within the political categories and institutions of the modem state. This articulation has been most frequently cast in functional terms, capital being understood as having political needs that could be performed by modern states that were, consequently, only relatively autonomous, and with only a limited capacity to wrestle capitalism into some sort of accommodation with other values. While one of the strengths of this form of analysis was to show that there is a relation between the inequalities produced by capitalism as a globalizing dynamic and inequality within any specific jurisdiction, it remained the case that analysis tended to affirm the political distinction between the domestic and the international. More recently, of course, international political economy has begun to give way to various kinds of global political economy. The distinction may not say very much about the changing character of capitalism as a form of economic life, but it certainly poses massive problems for those seeking to understand the political implications of contemporary shifts in the relation between capitalism and the modern state. The official statistics still measure patterns of capital accumulation and distribution in statist categories. States no doubt have an interest in keeping it this way. It is far from clear, however, that global inequalities are best measured on an international scale. Two basic modes of inclusion/exclusion, then, and two basic tensions between a formal claim to equality and a quasi-legitimate acknowledgment of a vertical hierarchy.


AT: HUMANISM BAD - RATIONALISM HOLOCAUST

Belief in humanism is key to all emancipatory struggles- the wholesale rejection of humanism and arguments about rationalism causing the Holocaust treat people as ahistorical subjects and denies humanity to non-Western OthersMalik '96 - senior visting fellow at the Department of Political, International and Policy Studies at the University of Surrey (Kenan, "The Mirror of Race: Postmodernism and the Celebration of Difference," in "In Defense of History," Ed. by E. Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.121-127, RG)

Whether liberal or Marxist, underlying all humanistic strands is a belief in human emancipation—the idea that humankind can rationally transform society through the agency of its own efforts. Indeed, no emancipatory philosophy is possible without a humanist perspective, for any antihuman-istic outlook is forced to look outside of humanity for the agency of salva tion —if earthly salvation is possible at all. Antihumanistic strands developed from the Enlightenment on, largely in opposition to the idea of rational human emancipation. Just as there have been a number of different strands of humanism, so there have been a number of different strands of antihumanism, ranging from the conservatism of Burke, the Catholic reaction of de Maistre, to the nihilism of Nietzsche and the Nazism of Heidegger. All rejected Enlightenment rationalism and the idea of social progress because they despaired of the capacity of humankind for such rational progress, a despair that was in general an expression of either fear of or contempt for the masses, who were seen as irrational, atavistic, and a threat to civilized society. Antihumanism rejected ideas of equality and human unity, celebrating instead difference and divergence and exalting the particular and the "authentic" over the universal. Antihumanism developed therefore as a central component of elite theories. In the postwar era, however, antihumanism came to represent a very different tradition—the liberal, indeed radical, anticolonialist and antiracist outlook. In the hands of such critics of Western society as Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Louis Althusser, among others, antihumanism became a central thread of structuralist and poststructural ist theories , and a key weapon in the interrogation of racist and imperialist discourses. Even Jean-Paul Sartre, in his famous preface to Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, wrote that "Humanism is nothing but an ideology of lies, a perfect justification for pillage; its honeyed words, its affectations of sensibility were only alibis for our aggression." Elsewhere he claimed that ."Humanism is the counterpart of racism: it is a practice of exclusion."17 How did a philosophical outlook which originated within conservative anti-emancipatory politics, and which was a key component of racial theory, become a central motif of radical antiracist, anti-imperialist doctrines? And how did philosophers such as Nietzsche and Heidegger, whose work had previously been seen as paving the way for twentieth century racist and fascist ideologies, become icons of antiracist discourse? There were two main strands to postwar radical antihumanism. One developed out of anticolonial struggles, the other through Western (and in particular French) academic philosophy and was subsequently elaborated by the "new social movements" such as feminism and environmentalism. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon gave voice to the rage of colonial peoples against their inhuman treatment at the hands of the imperialist powers. The humanist idea of "Man," wrote Fanon, which lay at the heart of the Western post-Enlightenment tradition, was achieved through dehumanizing the non-Western Other. Europeans only became human, Fanon suggested, by denying humanity to their colonial Other. To maintain a belief in humanism while treating non-European peoples as animals, Europeans declared that non-Europeans were in fact subhuman. Herein lay the source of racial theory in humanism. At the same time, argued Fanon, humanists salved their consciences by inviting the subhuman colonial Other to become human by imitating "European Man." The category "human" is empty of meaning, the critics asserted, because it is ahistorical. The invocation of a common human nature hides the fact that human nature is socially and historically constructed. According to the anthropologist James Clifford, "[I]t is a general feature of humanist common denominators that they are meaningless, since they bypass local cultural codes that make personal experience articulate." When humanists assert the universality of human nature, what they are really talking about are the particular human values expressed in European society. Third world critics, however—and some European critics like Sartre too— did not reject humanism in its entirety. Fanon, for instance, recognized that the contradiction lay not in humanism itself but in the disjuncture between the ideology of humanism and the practice of colonialism: All the elements of a solution to the great problems of humanity have, at different times, existed in European thought. But Europeans have not carried out in practice the mission which fell to them, which consisted of bringing their whole weight to bear violently upon these elements, of modifying their arrangement and their nature, of changing them and, finally, of bringing the problem of mankind to an infinitely higher plane.19 Fanon called therefore for a new humanism stripped of its racist, Eurocentric aspects: Let us decide not to imitate Europe; let us combine our muscles and our brains in a new direction. Let us try to create the whole man, whom Europe has been incapable of bringing to triumphant birth.20 For Fanon, then, the humanist idea of "the whole man" was key to emancipation. Despite the critique of Western humanism as a camouflage for the dehumanization of non-Western peoples, humanism remained a central component of the ideology of third world liberation struggles of the postwar era, virtually all of which drew on the emancipatory logic of universalism. Indeed, Western radicals were often shocked by the extent to which anticolonial struggles adopted what the radicals conceived of as tainted ideas. As Claude Levi-Strauss noted ruefully, the doctrine of cultural relativism "was challenged by the very people for whose moral benefit the anthropologists had established it in the first place." The willingness of third world radicals to maintain at least a residual support for a humanistic outlook stemmed from their continued engagement in the project of liberation. Postwar radicals in the West, however, increasingly rejected humanism, not simply in its guise as a cover for racism and colonialism but in its entirety. For postwar European

ENDI 2010 51Historical Materialism K Wave 1intellectuals the most pressing problem was not that of establishing the ideological foundations of liberation struggles but rather of coming to terms with the demise of such struggles in Western democracies. Western intellectuals had, on the one hand, to excavate the social and intellectual roots of the Nazi experience, an experience that more than any other weighed upon the European intellectual consciousness in the immediate postwar period; and on the other, to explain why the possibilities of revolutionary change, which had seemed so promising in the early part of the century, appeared to have been extinguished. For many the explanation seemed to lie in some deep-seated malaise in European culture. Postwar radicals asked themselves why it was that Germany, a nation with deep philosophical roots in the Enlightenment project and a strong and vibrant working class movement, should succumb so swiftly and so com pletely to Nazism. The answer seemed to be that it was the logic of Enlight - enment rationalism itself and the nature of democratic politics that had given rise to such barbarism. As Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer put it in their seminal work, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, "Enlightenment is totalitarian."22 Adorno and Horkheimer develop the two motifs—a critique of Enlightenment rationality and social progress, on the one hand, and of mass society, on the other—which became central themes of the Frankfurt school and which were to become immensely influential in shaping postwar discourse. The idea that the Holocaust—and indeed all Western barbarism—had its roots in Enlightenment rationalism and humanism became a central tenet of postwar radicalism. The Enlightenment ambition of mastering nature, of setting humanity above nature, inevitably had destructive consequences for humanity itself. A humanity which could enslave nature was quite capable of enslaving fellow human beings. As David Goldberg has put it, "Subjugation ... defines the order of the Enlightenment: subjugation of nature by human intellect, colonial control through CONTINUES…


AT: HUMANISM BAD – RATIONALISM HOLOCAUST CONTINUED…physical and cultural domination, and economic superiority through mastery of the laws of the market."23 Mastery of nature and the rational organization of society, which in the nineteenth century was seen as the basis of human emancipation, now came to be regarded as the source of human enslavement. The idea that technological and social progress could be the cause of barbarism has led many critics to find evidence not simply of humanism but the whole project of "modernity" behind the Holocaust. Zygmunt Bau-man has suggested that the Final Solution was the "product" not the "failure" of modernity and that "it was the rational world of modern civilisation that made the Holocaust thinkable": The truth is that every ingredient of the Holocaust—all those many things that rendered it possible—was normal ... in the sense of being fully in keeping with everything we know about our civilisation, its guiding spirit, its priorities, its immanent vision of the world—and of the proper ways to pursue human happiness together with a perfect society.24 Bauman's argument that the Holocaust became thinkable only in the conditions of modernity may fall short of actually blaming that horror on Enlightenment principles of rationality; but his hint that "civilisation" itself may have been responsible for the barbarism of the "Final Solution" is made explicit by Richard Rubinstein who (in a phrase approvingly quoted by Bauman) argues that the Holocaust "bears witness to the advance of civilisation": The world of death camps and the society it engenders reveals the progressively intensifying night side of Judeo-Christian civilization. Civilization means slavery, wars, exploitation, and death camps. It also means medical hygiene, elevated religious ideas, beautiful art, and exquisite music. It is an error to imagine that civilization and savage cruelties are antithesis... Both creation and destruction are inseparable parts of what we call civilization.25 This comes very close to saying not just that modernity makes death camps possible but that it makes them necessary and inevitable. This proposition is deeply questionable in many ways, but for our purposes, the first question that comes to mind is this: what does it mean to suggest that barbarism is a product of civilization? To suggest that "the advance of civilization" inevitably leads to "slavery, wars, exploitation, and death camps" can only mean that barbarism is an ineradicable part of human nature. Yet is this not to posit a concept of a human nature that is as ahistorical as that supposedly held by humanists? Condemning civilization as forever imbricated with inhumanity is certainly an argument that sits uneasily with a critique of humanism which claims that an ahistoric notion of "Man" has been used to deny humanity to the West's Others. To argue that humanism and rationalism (or "modernity") are the causes of the Holocaust is to turn logic on its head. The discourse of race was a product not of Enlightenment universalism and humanism but of its deg radation . Scientific racism was not the application of science and reason to the question of human difference but the use of the discourse of science to give legitimacy to irrational, unscientific arguments. The "Final Solution" was implicit in the racial policies pursued by the Nazis. To engage in mass extermination it was necessary to believe that the objects of that policy were less than human. But to say that it was a rationally conceived plan is to elevate the prejudices of the Third Reich to the status of scientific knowl edge—in other words to accept as true the very claims of racial discourse.


AT: HUMANISM BAD – HEIDEGGER

Heidegger’s rejection of humanism is just an excuse for his Nazism—their argument historically justifies a violent pastMalik '96 - senior visting fellow at the Department of Political, International and Policy Studies at the University of Surrey (Kenan, "The Mirror of Race: Postmodernism and the Celebration of Difference," in "In Defense of History," Ed. by E. Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.127-131, RG)

The irony in this is that the critique of totalitarianism is in substance a reworking of the nineteenth century critique of Enlightenment rationalism and of mass society pursued by philosophers such as Nietzsche and Heidegger, whose work flowed from the hostility of the intelligentsia to equality and mass democracy. Arendt's theory of totalitarianism carries over the main themes of Heidegger's thought in its anti-mass character, its incipient anti-rationalism, and in particular its hostility to the Enlightenment as the embodiment of both. The idea of the authoritarian personality, and of the masses as the "refuse of all classes," has close parallels with the themes of crowd psychology, such as those expounded by Gustav LeBon.29 Both are a cry against what Heidegger called the "anonymity of the They: an endless etcetera of indifference and always-the-sameness ... the domination of the indifferent mass ... that destroys all rank and every world-creating impulse of the spirit."30 The antihumanist belief that the technical forms of modernity arising from human mastery of nature underlay the implementation of the Holocaust are also taken from Heidegger. Agriculture is now a mechanised food industry; in essence it is no different from the production of corpses in gas chambers and death camps, the embargoes and food reductions to starving countries, the making of hydrogen bombs.31 Compare Heidegger's analysis, above, of the barbarism of the twentieth century with a sociological interpretation of the same, from Edmund Still-man and William Pfaff: There is more than a wholly fortuitous connection between the applied technology of the mass production line, and its vision of universal material abundance, and the applied technology of the concentration camp, with its vision of a profusion of death.32 I find it odious that scholars can in all seriousness equate mass extermi nation with the production of McDonald's hamburgers or of Ford Escorts, or make a comparison between technology aimed at improving the material abundance of society and political decisions taken to annihilate whole peoples and destroy entire societies. But what is interesting is that the second quote, from Edmund Stillman and William Pfaff, comes from a liberal interpretation of the Holocaust, while the first quote, from Heidegger himself, comes from an apologia for his Nazi past. Heidegger had been an active member of the Nazi Party until 1943. After the war he attempted to rehabilitate his reputation, and in the document Rectoral Addresses—Facts and Thoughts he marshaled the arguments which he hoped would distance him from the Third Reich. The key piece of evidence for the defense was the assertion that Nazism was simply another manifestation of the spirit of modernity. According to Heidegger there existed a "universal will to power within history, now understood to embrace the planet," and that "everything stands in this historical reality, no matter whether it is called communism, fascism or world democracy." It is a telling measure of the degree of confusion in postwar theory when liberal and Nazi explanations of the Holocaust can barely be pried apart. Heidegger's ideas, which originally sought to articulate national socialism, went on, through the totalitarian thesis, to shape the interpretation and critique of fascism after its defeat. The antihumanism of Heidegger and his fellow thinkers became a central theme of poststructuralist and postmod - ernist discourse, of colonial discourse analysis, and of the theories of difference and cultural pluralism. There is more than a touch of irony in considering how, through the rehabilitation of antihumanist thinkers such as Heidegger and Nietzsche, the rejection of barbarism should preserve the very prejudices that gave rise to it.


AT: FEM CRITIQUE OF HIST MAT

Historical materialist analysis is a precondition to meaningful feminist critique—their arguments are mired in privilege and maintainince of the status quoStabile '96 - associate prof. in the Dept. of Mass Comm @ Univ. of Wisconsin (Carol A., "Postmodernism, Feminism, and Marx: Notes from the Abyss," in "In Defense of History," Ed. by E. Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.144-, RG)

The defense of "rights," abstracted from historical, political, and eco nomic contexts, has weakened feminist politics and contributed to a general sense that feminism serves only narrow and privileged interests. Historical materialism offers the possibility of coalitions based on a broader understanding of the exploitative nature of capitalist relations of produc tion, enlisting women and men in struggles against family violence, further cuts to already severely diminished social programs, and, moreover, against the system that benefits from these ills. Furthermore, it proposes that women's liberation—if it is to include all women—is incompatible with capitalism. Historical materialism has the advantage of offering the kind of self-re-flexivity—so lacking in postmodernism and contemporary feminism—that I've tried to underscore in this essay. It at once forces us to understand our theories, our practices, and our positions in relation to the dominant structure of power, and provides a much more effective basis for an under standing of the positions of both women and men within multinational capitalism and of contemporary shifts in these positions. Consider, for example, the debate about "family values." The conventional feminist argument is that the New Right's call for a return to family values is simply a backlash. On the one hand, this backlash is said to represent an attempt to reinstate a traditional version of the nuclear family in order to force women out of the labor force and back into the home. On the other hand, it is seen as a measure of the effectiveness of the feminist movement, insofar as women now have the "choice" of working. What disappears from view in these analyses is the fact that economic conditions have forced upon middle class women the dubious advantage of working one or more full-time jobs in addition to domestic labor, and that this social change benefits capitalism, and not individual men. Poor and working class women (many of them women of color) have long worked outside the home, although few of them would call their alienated and often desperate labor a matter of "choice." What is being represented as a gain for women simply means that middle class women are now being compelled by the necessities of capital ism to make the "choice" that has traditionally been available to poor and working class women. To argue that the debates about family values are intended to force women back into the domestic sphere overlooks the fact that there can be no return to the traditional nuclear family because it is no longer economically feasible. To argue that these debates about family values were provoked by feminist successes is to accept the ideological mystification that treats the economic mandates of capitalism as if they were free life-style "choices." I would like to believe that feminists are, in fact, committed to revolutionary social change, but there's another, less pleasant possibility to contemplate—one that points to the dangers of ignoring class position. It could be that many who call themselves feminists are interested only in maintaining their own class privilege or in gaining celebrity status. From that point of view, Marxism is a serious threat not only because it represents a challenge to the theoretical foundations of a postmodern feminism, but also because it reveals the historical, material, and class foundations of certain forms of knowledge. It is fairly clear how women such as Katie Roiphe, Naomi Wolf, and Camille Paglia use feminism as a marketing strategy to promote their books, images, and careers, instead of promoting equality and social justice. But as long as so many feminists refuse to acknowledge their own privilege and the ways in which we all "benefit" from the exploitation of less-privi leged women and men, feminism in general will be in danger of becoming a professional strategy rather than a political project.


AT: FEM CRITIQUE OF HIST MAT

Feminist analysis is incoherent and unmeaningful without historical materialism—our alternative is the only way to avoid the race to the bottom of competing claims to oppression—their worldview perpetuates capitalismStabile '96 - associate prof. in the Dept. of Mass Comm @ Univ. of Wisconsin (Carol A., "Postmodernism, Feminism, and Marx: Notes from the Abyss," in "In Defense of History," Ed. by E. Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.144-, RG)

In the end, the media spectacle tells us nothing at all about what people want or how they identify. Few, in fact, can afford to blur the division between reality and fiction during a time in which reality bears so little resemblance to its media representations. Those who continue to believe in the possibility of revolutionary social change cannot abandon a belief in the power of critical consciousness and the tools that enable people (particularly those facing an unstable economic future) to make sense of their situation and learn how best to fight against it, and not simply make their peace with it. If feminist analyses are to maintain any claim to analytic and political coherence (not to mention efficacy), then we need to understand better how the projects some of us promote—postmodernist, feminist, or some combination thereof— may actually feed into and reinforce capitalism. By repudiating the very categories of analysis that might enable under standing, these projects obscure our own positions within relations of systemic exploitation and preempt any project of social transformation.Instead of seeing the fragmentation of identities as a cause for celebration, we should try to understand how identity has been transformed into a commodity for those with the capital to consume it, and how the capitalist system has worked (and will continue to work) against the organization of socialist politics. In place of an identity politics that serves only to pit groups against one another in a never-ending litany of competing claims to oppres sion , we need a more cogent understanding of the systemic nature of oppression. We need to consider the extent to which the politics of identity represents not a challenge to, but a product of, the system, a manifestation of market segmentation and the commodification of identity produced by the globalization of capital as a world system. For what appear to be oppositional strategies may very well turn out to be the symptoms of oppression.


AT: FEM CRITIQUE OF HISTORICAL MATERIALISM

Historical materialist analysis is key to understanding intersecting systems of oppression-class analysis makes this possibleStabile '96 - associate prof. in the Dept. of Mass Comm @ Univ. of Wisconsin (Carol A., "Postmodernism, Feminism, and Marx: Notes from the Abyss," in "In Defense of History," Ed. by E. Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.141-144, RG)

Given this more direct experience of economic realities, academics today, and feminists in particular, should find a critical analysis of capitalism especially compelling, since the contradictions confronting them are be coming ever more evident. But in the academy, it has become a kind of intellectual common sense to dismiss Marxism and its methods in toto as "totalizing" (because it seeks to explain society through an analysis of its mode of production—capitalism), "reductive" (because economic structures are said to shape legal, political, and cultural structures), or "univer salizing " (because class is said to shape consciousness). A main feminist critique has been that women and female labor were excluded from analysis. These knee-jerk responses have become so pervasive that it is no longer necessary to explain what "totalizing," "reductive," or "universalizing" mean—in fact, they are just understood. For a younger generation of schol ars, whose formative political experiences have been in various feminist movements, the rejection of Marxist-oriented political activism is based on a set of myths about the masculinist virulence inherent in Marxism . How justified is this rejection of Marxism? Let's look at the three main charges leveled against it by many feminists: that it is "reductive," that it is too "universalistic," and that it fails to consider female labor. On the first point, the general claim is that historical materialism reduces structures of oppression to class exploitation, thereby ignoring or minimizing sexism, racism, and homophobia. While it is certainly true that historical material ism places relations of production at the foundation of society, there is nothing simple or reductive about how these relations structure oppres sions . Rather, historical materialist analyses, instead of examining only one form of oppression—like sexism, racism, or homophobia—would explore the way they all function within the overarching system of class domination in determining women's and men's life choices. Sweatshop workers in New York City, for example, experience sexism and racism in quantitatively and qualitatively different ways than do middle class women. The racism directed at poor African-American youths occurs in a different context than that directed at African-American women in the academy. This is not to claim that the latter forms of oppression do not exist or are inconsequential, but by situating both forms within the material context and historical framework in which they occur, we can highlight the variable discriminatory mechanisms that are central to capitalism as a system.

Rejecting our supposed universalism leaves no tools for fighting oppression and makes any change piecemeal Stabile '96 - associate prof. in the Dept. of Mass Comm @ Univ. of Wisconsin (Carol A., "Postmodernism, Feminism, and Marx: Notes from the Abyss," in "In Defense of History," Ed. by E. Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.141-144, RG)

The charge of "universalism" is closely related to that of reductivism. This objection starts with the critique of modernity (including Marxism) on the grounds that its conceptions of truth, reason, and justice (in fact, its conception of "humanity" itself) are too universalistic, too insensitive to the many differences among human beings. This critique has been valuable in challenging capitalism's oppressive uses of concepts like "justice" and "reason," or the destructive applications of science and technology in the name of rationality and progress. But at the same time, it poses some serious problems for feminists. First, if there can be no standards of truth, justice, or reason, we cannot appeal to them as criteria of judgment or action. In fact, postmodernists, including postmodern feminists, have often been criticized on the grounds that, without the kind of standards they are so swift to reject, they themselves can have no basis for supporting or justifying resistance to oppression. Second, the possibility of opposition to oppression is also undermined by the presumption that the common interests among human beings are so narrow and fleeting that any politics beyond the most particularistic and narrow forms of resistance are impossible. Accordingly, people can struggle against "power" (defined provisionally and contingently) only through single-issue politics, and the best that can be hoped for is piecemeal reform. Since power can no longer be located or identified, since "real" unifying interests are a colonizing fiction, a part of a uniformly oppressive

ENDI 2010 57Historical Materialism K Wave 1Enlightenment worldview (to which Marxism also belongs), then an organized opposition is neither feasible nor desirable. Politics, let alone revolution, is reduced to a turf war among "discourses."


AT: FEM – EXCLUSION OF GENDER LINK

The exclusion of gender as a category of analysis doesn’t take into account economic changes that make historical materialism a better way of understanding gender inequality Stabile '96 - associate prof. in the Dept. of Mass Comm @ Univ. of Wisconsin (Carol A., "Postmodernism, Feminism, and Marx: Notes from the Abyss," in "In Defense of History," Ed. by E. Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.141-144, RG)

The third charge against historical materialism—that it has excluded female labor from its analysis—has always been debatable.3 While it may be true that women's unpaid domestic labor wasn't systematically inte - grated into classical Marxist analyses of the mode of production (although both Marx and Engels discuss the sexual division of labor), from the 1970s on there have been Marxist revisions of this concept, particularly within anthropology and economics. In addition, while anti-essentialist feminists have been swift to appropriate and revise poststructuralist theories (that either neglect gender or deal with it in profoundly sexist ways) in order to further analyses of gender, only Marxism seems to be singled out for rejection on the grounds of this alleged omission. At any rate, the development of contemporary capitalism has to some extent made this question moot. With the increased blurring between the public and private spheres, the heightened commodification of previously unpaid female labor (care of the elderly, child care, cooking, cleaning, etc.), and the wholesale entry of middle class women into the labor force, women's conditions are more obviously determined by relations of production in a very Marxist sense. Non-Marxist feminism, with its lack of attention to relations of production, is beginning to look far more inadequate than even the most gender-blind Marxism in explaining the conditions of women.


AT: ALT KILLS ENVIRONMENT

Their evidence assumes Marxism. We’re not the revolution – just an epistemological critique of the affirmative

And, Marxism calls for avoiding ecological devastation Foster '96 - prof. of sociology @ Univ. Oregon (John, "Marx and the Environment," in "In Defense of History," Ed. by E. Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.144-160, RG)

What was clear from Marx's analysis was that humanity and nature were interrelated, with the historically specific form of production relations constituting the core of that interrelationship in any given period. As he wrote in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of1844, Man lives from nature, i.e., nature is his body, and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die. To say that man's physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.9 Far from being mere worshipers of productivism, Marx and Engels were two of its foremost critics. As the young Engels wrote in 1844, "To make the earth an object of huckstering—the earth which is our one and all, the first condition of our existence—was the last step toward making oneself an object of huckstering." Under capitalism all natural and human relationships, Marx argued, have been dissolved into money relationships. Rather than a society ruled by "callous 'cash-payment'" and by the necessity for continual increases in productivity, he looked forward to a social order that would promote the many-sided development of human capacities and the rational human relation to the nature of which we are a part. The further growth of human freedom, he wrote in the final part of the third volume of Capital, consists in "socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their material interchange with nature and bringing it under common control, instead of allowing it to rule them as a blind force." The human community, Marx believed, can no more free itself from the need to control its interaction with nature than it can free itself from the need to take into consideration the natural conditions of human existence. Yet rational control of the relation between nature and humanity is inher ently opposed to the mechanistic domination of nature in the interest of the ever increasing expansion of production for its own sake. In a society of freely associated producers, Marx argued, the goal of social life would not be work and production, in the narrow forms in which they have been understood in possessive-individualist society, but the all-around develop ment of human creative potential as an end in itself, for which "the shor erring of the working-day is a basic prerequisite." This would set the stage for the achievement of a realm of freedom in which human beings would be united with each other and with nature.10 The realization of these conditions, Marx recognized, necessitated a radi cal transformation in the human relation to nature. With the elimination of private ownership of land and the development of a society of freely asso ciated producers, global sustainability in the relationship to nature would become feasible for the first time. Pointing to the imperative of protecting the globe for future generations Marx stated: From the standpoint of a higher economic form of society, private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite as absurd as private ownership of one man by another. Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and like boni patres familias [good fathers of families], they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition.11 It was the proper purpose of agriculture, Marx argued, "to minister to the entire range of permanent necessities of life required by the chain of successive generations"—in contradiction to "the whole spirit of capitalist production, which is directed toward the immediate gain of money." There was thus a direct conflict between capitalism's short-sighted expropriation of the earth's resources and the longer term character of truly sustainable production. Economic advance in a society of freely associated producers, Marx insisted again and again, would have to occur without jeopardizing the natural and global conditions upon which the welfare of future generations would depend. This is precisely the definition now given to the concept of sustainable development, most famously in the Brundtland Commission report, Our Common Future, which defined it as "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."12 Although Marx did not concentrate on the ecological critique of capitalism in his writings—no doubt because he thought that capitalism would be replaced by a society of freely associated producers long before such problems could become truly critical—his allusions to sustainability indicate that he was acutely aware of the ecological depredations of the system. Central to his concerns in this respect was the effect of capitalist industrialization on the degradation of the soil. The best known passage in this regard, from Capital, vol. I, is to be found in the section on "Large-Scale Industry and Agriculture," which constitutes the final, culminating part of Marx's key chapter on "Machinery and Large-Scale Industry" (on the effects of the Industrial Revolution). There Marx argues: All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is progress towards ruining the long-lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country proceeds from large-scale industry as the background of its development, as in the case of the United States, the more rapid is this process of destruction. Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker.13 These were not casual or isolated comments but reflected careful study of the work of the German agrarian

ENDI 2010 60Historical Materialism K Wave 1chemist Justus von Liebig, often known as the founder of soil chemistry. Until the early 1860s, Marx thought that the progress of capitalist agriculture might be so rapid that it would outpace industry. By the time he wrote Capital, however, his studies of the work of Liebig and other agronomists had convinced him otherwise. "Large landed property," he explained in the conclusion to his most important chapter on capitalist agriculture ("The Genesis of Capitalist Ground Rent"), reduces the agricultural population to a constantly falling minimum, and confronts it with a constantly growing industrial population crowded together in large cities. It thereby creates conditions which cause an irreparable break in the coherence of social interchange prescribed by the natural laws of life. As a result, the vitality of the soil is squandered, and this prodigality is carried by commerce far beyond the borders of a particular state (Liebig). Large-scale industry and large-scale agriculture under capitalism thus had the same results: both contributed to the ruining of the agricultural worker and the exhaustion of "the natural power of the soil." The "moral of history," Marx observed, is that the capitalist system works against a rational agriculture, or that a rational agriculture is incompatible with the capitalist system (although the latter promotes technical improvements in agriculture) and needs either the hand of the small farmer living by his own labor or the control of the associated producers. For Marx "the rational cultivation of the soil as eternal communal property" was "an inalienable condition of the existence and repro - duction of a chain of successive generations of the human race." 14 Marx and Engels did not confine their discussions of ecological limits to the issue of the soil, but also explored numerous other issues of sustainabil-ity, in relation to forests, rivers and streams, the disposal of waste, air quality, environmental toxins, etc. "The development of culture and industry in general," Marx wrote, "has ever evinced itself in such energetic destruction of forests that everything done by it conversely for their preservation and restoration appears infinitesimal." With regard to industrial waste, he argued for "economy through the prevention of waste, that is to say, the reduction of excretions of production to a minimum, and the immediate utilization of all raw and auxiliary materials required in production."15

Historical Materialism K - Six Week - EnDI 2010

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