K

Standardized tests are the symptom – not the diagnosis. The current emphasis on
education as a means to get a good paying job means standardized tests will just get
replaced by another capitalist creation.
Bianco 15 (Marcie Bianco, November 15th, 2015, “America’s reliance on standardized tests is creating a generation of
intellectual infants,” https://qz.com/550017/americas-reliance-on-standardized-tests-is-creating-a-generation-of-intellectual-infants/)
GA
*bracketed for gendered language
Over the past 10 years, students have acquired an increasingly myopic view of their studies,
specifically in college. For these young [folk] men and women, their secondary school existence
seems to have fashioned them into GDP quotients. Their public schools and their teachers’
careers are reliant on standardized testing performance. In this environment, educational
experience is a commodity exchange.
Instead of wanting to create civic-minded individuals, we’ve reconceived the purpose of
education in terms of being productive laborers.
Simply put, too much of the American education system has been bastardized by capitalism.
Over the past 15 years, the pervasive justification for education—at least for funding it at a
federal level—has been construed in economic terms. College, we’re told, is supposed to
prepare us for work. Instead of wanting to create civic-minded, thoughtful and autonomous
individuals, we’ve reconceived the purpose of education in terms of being productive laborers
and making the most money.
In the classroom, where students understand education as this kind of commodity exchange,
there is a belief that paying for a course should guarantee an A grade. In my experience,
approximately 95% of my students are concerned about their grade average because they’re
worried about landing a good job. It is rare to come across a student who takes a literature
course or a writing course (I teach both) because they want to learn how to think critically or to
communicate their thoughts in clear, cogent prose.
In both my literature and composition courses, students beg for the “right answer,” and want to
know if, when writing their papers, they are on the “right track.” They have the most difficulty
thinking of thesis statements, because this demands that they rely on their own thoughts rather
than the answer provided to them in a book. They want to give the “right” answer from another
source. They are scared and reluctant to use the first-person pronoun when writing essays,
which to me intimates that they do not trust their own thoughts.
Their call for the ballot in the face of violence is a tactic of representation that hyper-
politicizes debate in lieu of a specific recommendation for action
ANON 17
(#Alt-Woke Manifesto is the work of ANON. We are a collective of “Other.” Some of us are sex workers, some immigrants, many of us queer.
There are even a few privileged white cucks amongst us. Nevertheless, ANON is largely the work and brainchild of People of Color (PoC). Our
social disciplines are as varied as our identities, from journalists to dominatrixes. ANON are the intellectual cousins of #BlackLivesMatter
divorced from liberalism http://tripleampersand.org/alt-woke-manifesto/ cVs)

The moderate Left misappropriated theoretical terms and concepts, divorced from any actual theory.
Identity politics, despite its origins in academia, flourishes best on social media — it’s the most accessible concept for moderate liberals to
grasp. “Well, if identity is only a game, if it is only a procedure to have relations, social and sexual-pleasure relationships that create new
friendships, it is useful. But if
identity becomes the problem of sexual existence, and if people think that they
have to ‘uncover’ their ‘own identity,’ and that their own identity has to become the law, the principle,
the code of their existence; if the perennial question they ask is ‘Does this thing conform to my
identity?’ then, I think, they will turn back to a kind of ethics very close to the old heterosexual virility. If we
are asked to relate to the question of identity, it must be an identity to our unique selves. But the relationships we have to have with ourselves
are not ones of identity, rather, they must be relationships of differentiation, of creation, of innovation. To be the same is really boring. We
must not exclude identity if people find their pleasure through this identity, but we must not think of this identity as an ethical universal rule.”
— Michel Foucault, “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity” (1984) Identity politics became an albatross, however. Both the
moderate
and radical were too eager to evangelize oppressed identities. There was no room for discussion, no
place for debate. Call outs, clap backs, and other reality tv patois replaced dialectics. Representation is
the de facto litmus of society’s progress for the moderate liberal — society appeared more inclusive and
diverse because “Orange is the New Black” has a female lead and a multiethnic supporting cast. They
inhabit a never ending, curated echo chamber of think pieces, listicles, notifications, and retweets.
Everyone within their algorithmic ghetto shares their sentiments about society. The algorithm makes their small corner seem
far more vast than it actually is, and as a result, the moderate extends this myopia to society at large. The
moderate midwifed the birth of the Alt-Right through bipartisan compromises. Moderate liberals are basically content to vest trust in their
vaunted Democratic Party as it slides further to the right, thereby underpinning a level of discourse friendly to the far-right. It’s worth
remembering that the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries were a period of diehard cooperation between liberals and
conservatives in crafting today’s authoritarianism. Neoconservatism provided socio-political planning that complemented a neoliberal
economic agenda. This is why the radical Left blames liberals as well as conservatives for “command and control policing”, mass surveillance
and this century’s rationale for endless warfare. Moderate liberals provided and adopted theoretical frameworks that
explained away structural oppression but retained an appearance of caring about racism and equality
across intersecting spectrums of gender and sexuality. This was an obvious farce that mystified progress
and the far right took advantage of this because they actually suffered no serious political setbacks.
Liberalism provided an incubator for the alt right to form by mollifying actual demands for change. “If
politics without passion leads to cold-hearted, bureaucratic technocracy, then passion bereft of analysis risks becoming a
libidinally driven surrogate for effective action. Politics comes to be about feeling of personal
empowerment, masking an absence of strategic gains.” — Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, “Inventing the Future” (2015)
And, both teams agree the problem is capitalism – that means the role of the ballot is
to vote for whoever proposes the most effective strategy for combatting the harms of
the 1ac.
Neoliberal capitalism will produce extinction – the system reproduces crises that
depoliticize the left, undermine futural thought, and postpone its demise – the impacts
are environmental collapse, endless war, the rise of fascism, and endless structural
violence.
Shaviro 15
(Steven Shaviro is an American academic, philosopher and cultural critic whose areas of interest include film theory, time, science fiction,
panpsychism, capitalism, affect and subjectivity. He earned a PhD from Yale in 1981. “No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism”
https://track5.mixtape.moe/qdkkdt.pdf cVs)

The problem may be summarized as follows. Capitalism has indeed created the conditions for general prosperity and
therefore for its own supersession. But it has also blocked, and continues to block, any hope of realizing
this transformation. We cannot wait for capitalism to transform on its own, but we also cannot hope to
progress by appealing to some radical Outside or by fashioning ourselves as militants faithful to some
“event” that (as Badiou has it) would mark a radical and complete break with the given “situation” of
capitalism. Accelerationism rather demands a movement against and outside capitalism—but on the basis of tendencies and technologies
that are intrinsic to capitalism. Audre Lord famously argued that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the
master’s house.” But what if the master’s tools are the only ones available? Accelerationism grapples with this
dilemma. What is the appeal of accelerationism today? It can be understood as a response to the particular social
and political situation in which we currently seem to be trapped: that of a long-term, slow-motion
catastrophe. Global warming, and environmental pollution and degradation, threaten to undermine
our whole mode of life. And this mode of life is itself increasingly stressful and precarious, due to the
depredations of neoliberal capitalism. As Fredric Jameson puts it, the world today is characterized by
“heightened polarization, increasing unemployment, [and] the ever more desperate search for new
investments and new markets.” These are all general features of capitalism identified by Marx, but in neoliberal society we
encounter them in a particularly pure and virulent form. I want to be as specific as possible in my use of the term “neoliberalism” in order to
describe this situation. I define neoliberalism as a specific mode of capitalist production (Marx), and form of governmentality (Foucault), that is
characterized by the following specific factors: 1. The dominating influence of financial institutions, which facilitate transfers of wealth from
everybody else to the already extremely wealthy (the “One Percent” or even the top one hundredth of one percent). 2. The privatization and
commodification of what used to be common or public goods (resources like water and green space, as well as public services like education,
communication, sewage and garbage disposal, and transportation). 3. The extraction, by banks and other large corporations, of a surplus from
all social activities: not only from production (as in the classical Marxist model of capitalism) but from circulation and consumption as well.
Capital accumulation proceeds not only by direct exploitation but also by rent-seeking, by debt
collection, and by outright expropriation (“primitive accumulation”). 4. The subjection of all aspects of life to the
so-called discipline of the market. This is equivalent, in more traditional Marxist terms, to the “real subsumption”
by capital of all aspects of life: leisure as well as labor. Even our sleep is now organized in accordance with the imperatives
of production and capital accumulation. 5. The redefinition of human beings as private owners of their own “human capital.” Each person
is thereby, as Michel Foucault puts it, forced to become “an entrepreneur of himself.” In such circumstances, we are
continually obliged to market ourselves, to “brand” ourselves, to maximize the return on our “investment” in ourselves. There is never enough:
like the Red Queen, we always need to keep running, just to stay in the same place. Precarity
is the fundamental condition of
our lives. All of these processes work on a global scale; they extend far beyond the level of immediate
individual experience. My life is precarious, at every moment, but I cannot apprehend the forces that
make it so. I know how little money is left from my last paycheck, but I cannot grasp, in concrete terms,
how “the economy” works. I directly experience the daily weather, but I do not directly experience the
climate. Global warming and worldwide financial networks are examples of what the ecological theorist Timothy
Morton calls hyperobjects. They are phenomena that actually exist but that “stretch our ideas of time and space, since they far outlast
most human time scales, or they’re massively distributed in terrestrial space and so are unavailable to immediate experience.” Hyperobjects
affect everything that we do, but we cannot point to them in specific instances. The chains of causality are far too complicated
and intermeshed for us to follow. In order to make sense of our condition, we are forced to deal with difficult abstractions. We
have to rely upon data that are gathered in massive quantities by scientific instruments and then collated through mathematical and statistical
formulas but that are not directly accessible to our senses. We find ourselves, as Mark Hansen puts it, entangled “within networks of media
technologies that operate predominantly, if not almost entirely, outside the scope of human modes of awareness (consciousness, attention,
sense perception, etc.).” We cannot imagine such circumstances in any direct or naturalistic way, but only through the extrapolating lens of
science fiction. Subject to these conditions, we live under relentless environmental and financial assault. We
continually find ourselves in what might well be called a state of crisis. However, this involves a paradox. A
crisis—whether
economic, ecological, or political—is a turning point, a sudden rupture, a sharp and immediate moment
of reckoning. But for us today, crisis has become a chronic and seemingly permanent condition. We live,
oxymoronically, in a state of perpetual, but never resolved, convulsion and contradiction. Crises never
come to a culmination; instead, they are endlessly and indefinitely deferred. For instance, after the
economic collapse of 2008, the big banks were bailed out by the United States government. This allowed
them to resume the very practices—the creation of arcane financial instruments, in order to enable relentless rent-seeking—that
led to the breakdown of the economic system in the first place. The functioning of the system is
restored, but only in such a way as to guarantee the renewal of the same crisis, on a greater scale,
further down the road. Marx rightly noted that crises are endemic to capitalism. But far from threatening the system as Marx hoped,
today these crises actually help it to renew itself. As David Harvey puts it, it is precisely “through the destruction
of the achievements of preceding eras by way of war, the devaluation of assets, the degradation of
productive capacity, abandonment and other forms of ‘creative destruction’” that capitalism creates “a
new basis for profit-making and surplus absorption.” What lurks behind this analysis is the frustrating sense of an impasse.
Among its other accomplishments, neoliberal capitalism has also robbed us of the future. For it turns everything
into an eternal present. The highest values of our society—as preached in the business schools—are novelty, innovation, and
creativity. And yet these always only result in more of the same. How often have we been told that a minor software update “changes
everything”? Our
society seems to function, as Ernst Bloch once put it, in a state of “sheer aimless infinity and
incessant changeability; where everything ought to be constantly new, everything remains just as it
was.” This is because, in our current state of affairs, the future exists only in order to be colonized and
made into an investment opportunity. John Maynard Keynes sought to distinguish between risk and genuine uncertainty. Risk is
calculable in terms of probability, but genuine uncertainty is not. Uncertain events are irreducible to probabilistic analysis, because “there is no
scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability whatever.” Keynes’s discussion of uncertainty has strong affinities with Quentin
Meillassoux’s account of hyperchaos. For Meillassoux, there is no “totality of cases,” no closed set of all possible states of the universe.
Therefore, there is no way to assign fixed probabilities to these states. This is not just an empirical matter of insufficient information;
uncertainty exists in principle. For Meillassoux and Keynes alike, there comes a point where “we simply do not know.” But today, Keynes’s
distinction is entirely ignored. The
Black-Scholes Formula and the Efficient Market Hypothesis both conceive the
future entirely in probabilistic terms. In these theories, as in the actual financial trading that is guided by them (or at least
rationalized by them), the genuine unknowability of the future is transformed into a matter of calculable,
manageable risk. True novelty is excluded, because all possible outcomes have already been calculated and paid for in terms of the
present. While this belief in the calculability of the future is delusional, it nonetheless determines the way that financial markets actually work.
We might therefore say that speculative finance is the inverse—and the complement—of the “affirmative speculation” that takes place in
science fiction. Financial speculation seeks to capture, and shut down, the very same extreme potentialities that science fiction explores.
Science fiction is the narration of open, unaccountable futures; derivatives trading claims to have accounted for, and discounted, all these
futures already. The
“market”—nearly deified in neoliberal doctrine—thus works preemptively, as a global practice of what Richard
Grusin calls premediation. It seeks
to deplete the future in advance. Its relentless functioning makes it nearly
impossible for us to conceive of any alternative to the global capitalist world order. Such is the condition
that Mark Fisher calls capitalist realism. As Fisher puts it, channeling both Jameson and Žižek, “it’s easier to imagine the end of the
world than the end of capitalism.”
The alternative is to affirm the form of the party—against the subjective atomization
of contemporary politics, only a vertical form of organization aimed at transformation
of constituted structures of power can actualize change
Dean and Mertz ‘16 (Jodi and Chuck, Donald R. Harter ’39 Professor of Humanities and Social
Sciences @ Hobart and William Smith Colleges and Host at This is Hell!, “The JFRP: For a New
Communist Party,” aNtiDoTe Zine 1/23/16, https://antidotezine.com/2016/01/23/for-a-new-
communist-party/)
CM: Great to have you on the show.¶ Let’s start with Occupy. What, to you, explains the impact that the Tea Party had on Republicans, relative
to the impact that Occupy seems to have had on the Democratic Party? All of the sudden there were “Tea Party Republicans.” There weren’t
“Occupy Democrats.”¶ JD: That’s a good point. The
Tea Party took the Republican Party as its target. They decided that their goal
was going to be to influence the political system by getting people elected and basically by trying to take over part of
government. That’s why they were able to have good effects. They didn’t regard the mainstream political
process as something irrelevant to their concerns. They thought of it as something to seize.¶ The
problem with many—but not all—leftists in the US is that they think the political process is so corrupted that
we have to completely refuse it, and leave it altogether. The Tea Party decided to act as an organized militant force, and
too much of the US left (we saw this in the wake of Occupy) has thought that to be “militant” means to refuse and
disperse and become fragmented.¶ CM: So what explains the left turning its back on the collective action of a political party? It
would seem like a political party would fit into what the left would historically want: an apparatus that can organize collective action.¶ JD:
There are multiple things. First, the fear of success: the left has learned from the excesses of the twentieth century.
Where Communist and socialist parties “succeeded,” there was violence and purges and repression. One reason the
left has turned its back is because of this historical experience of state socialism. And we have taken that to
mean that we should not ever have a state. I think that’s the wrong answer. That we—as the left—made a
mistake with some regimes does not have to mean that we can never learn.¶ Another reason that the left
has turned its back on the party form has been the important criticism of twentieth century parties that
have been too white, too masculine, potentially homophobic; parties that have operated in intensely
hierarchical fashion. Those criticisms are real. But rather than saying we can’t have a party form
because that’s just what a party does, why not make a party that is not repressive and does not
exclude or diminish people on the basis of sex, race, or sexuality?¶ So we’ve got at least two historical problems that
have made people very reluctant to use the party. I also think that, whether or not you mark it as 1968 or 1989, the left’s embrace of
cultural individualism and the free flow of personal experimentation has made it critical of discipline and
critical of collectivity. But I think that’s just a capitalist sellout. Saying everybody should just “do their own
thing” is just going in the direction of the dominant culture. That is actually not a left position at all.¶ CM:
So does identity politics undermine collectivism? And did that end up leading to fragmentation and a weakening
of the left? Because there are a lot of people we’ve had on the show—and one person in particular, Thomas Frank—who say that there is
no left in the United States.¶ JD: First I want to say that I disagree with the claim that there is no left. In fact, I think that “the left” is that group
that keeps denying its own existence. We’re always saying that we’re the ones who don’t exist. But the right thinks that we exist. That’s what is
so fantastic, actually. Did you see the New York Post screaming that Bernie Sanders is really a communist? Great! They’re really still afraid of
communists! And it’s people on the left who say, “Oh, no, we’re not here at all!”¶ The left denies its own existence and it denies its own
collectivity. Now, is identity politics to blame? Maybe it’s better to say that identity
politics has been a symptom of the
pressure of capitalism. Capitalism has operated in the US by exacerbating racial differences. That has to be
addressed on the left, and the left has been addressing that. But we haven’t been addressing it in a way that recognizes how
racism operates to support capitalism. Instead, we’ve made it too much about identity rather than as an element in
building collective solidarity.¶ I’m trying to find a way around this to express that identity politics has been important
but it’s reached its limits. Identity politics can’t go any further insofar as it denies the impact of
capitalism. An identity politics that just rests on itself is nothing but liberalism. Like all of the sudden everything will be
better if black people and white people are equally exploited? What if black people and white people
say, “No, we don’t want to live in a society based on exploitation?”¶ CM: You were saying that the left denies its own
collectivity. Is that only in the US? Is that unique to the US culture of the left?¶ JD: That’s a really important question, and I’m not sure.
Traveling in Europe, I see two different things. On the one hand I see a broad left discussion that is, in part, mediated through social media and
is pretty generational—people in their twenties and thirties or younger—and that there’s
a general feeling about the problem
of collectivity, the problem of building something with cohesion, and a temptation to just emphasize multiplicity. You
see this everywhere. Everybody worries about this, as far as what I’ve seen.¶ On the other hand, there are countries whose political culture has
embraced parties much more, and fights politically through parties. Like Greece, for example—and we’ve seen the ups and downs with Syriza
over the last two years. And Spain also. Because they have a parliamentary system where small parties can actually get in the mix and have a
political effect—in ways that our two-party system excludes—the European context allows for more enthusiasm for the party as a form for
politics.¶ But there’s still a lot of disagreement on the far left about whether or not the party form is useful, and shouldn’t we in fact retreat and
have multiple actions and artistic events—you know, the whole alter-globalization framework. That’s still alive in a lot of places. CM: You
mentioned the structure of the US electoral system doesn’t allow for a political party to necessarily be the solution for a group like Occupy. Is
that one of the reasons that activists dismiss the party structure as something that could help move their agenda forward?¶ JD: We
can
think about the Black Panther Party as a neat example in the US context: A party which was operating not
primarily to win elections but to galvanize social power. That’s an interesting way of thinking about what else parties can
do in the US.¶ Or we can think about parties in terms of local elections. Socialist Alternative has been doing really neat
work all over the country, organizing around local elections with people running as socialist candidates not within a mainstream party. I think
that even as we come up against the limits of a two-party system, we can also begin to think better about local and regional elections. ¶ The left
really likes that old saw: “Think Globally, Act Locally.” And then it rejects parties—even though politicalparties are, historically,
forms that do that, that actually scale, that operate on multiple levels as organizations.¶ That we have a two-party
system makes sense as an excuse why people haven’t used left parties very well in the US, but that doesn’t have to
be the case.¶ And one more thing: there is a ton of sectarianism in the far left parties that exist. Many still fight
battles that go back to the twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, and haven’t let that go. That has to change. We don’t need that kind of
sectarian purity right now.¶ CM: You ask the question, “How do we move from the inert mass to organized activists?” You mention how you
were at Occupy Wall Street; you write about being there on 15 October 2011 as the massive crowd filled New York’s Times Square. And you
mention this one young speaker, and he addresses the crowd; they’re deciding if they should move on to Washington Square Park or not,
because they need to go somewhere where there are better facilities. You then quote the speaker saying, “We can take this park. We can take
this park tonight. We can also take this park another night. Not everyone may be ready tonight. Each person has to make their own
autonomous decision. No one can decide for you. You have to decide for yourself. Everyone is an autonomous individual.Ӧ Did that kind of
individualism kill Occupy Wall Street from the start?¶ JD: Yeah, I think so. A lot of times I blame the rhetorics of
consensus and horizontalism, but both of those are rooted in an individualism that says politics must begin
with each individual, their interests, their experience, their positions, and so on. As collectivity forms—
which is not easy when everyone’s beginning from their individual position—what starts to happen is
that people start looking for how their exact experiences and interests are not being recognized.¶ I think
that the left has given in too much to this assumption that politics begins with an individual. That’s a liberal
assumption. Leftists, historically, begin with the assumption that politics begins in groups. And for the left in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the operative group is class. Class is what determines where our political
interests come from.¶ I try to do everything I can in the book to dismantle the assumption that politics, particularly left
politics, should begin with the individual. Instead I want people thinking about how the individual is a fiction, and a
really oppressive fiction at that. And one that’s actually, conveniently, falling apart.¶ CM: You write about Occupy Wall Street having
been an opening but having had no continuing momentum. You mention that the party could add that needed momentum. That’s one of the
things that parties can do. The structure of the party can continue momentum and keep the opening alive.¶ When
you say that a party could be a solution for a movement like Occupy, you don’t mean the Democratic Party, do you?¶ JD: I’ve got a lot of layers
on this question. My first answer is that no, I really mean the Communist Party. My friends call this “Jodi’s Fantasy Revolutionary Party” as a
joke, because the kind of Communist Party I take as my model may not be real, or may have only existed for
a year and a half in Brooklyn in the thirties. And I don’t mean the real-existing Communist Party in the US now, which still exists
and basically endorses Democrats.¶ My idea is to think in terms of how we can imagine the Communist Party again as a
force—what it could be like if all of our left activist groups and small sectarian parties decided to come
together in a new radical left party.¶ So no, I don’t envision the Democratic Party as being that. That’s not at all what I have in
mind. I’m thinking of a radical left party to which elections are incidental. Elections might be means for organizing, but
the goal isn’t just being elected. The goal is overthrowing capitalism. The goal is being able to build a
communist society as capitalism crumbles.¶ Second, it could be the case—as a matter of tactics on the
ground in particular contexts—that working for a Democratic candidate might be useful. It could be the case
that trying to take over a local Democratic committee in order to get communist/socialist/radical left candidates elected could also be useful.
But I don’t see the goal as taking over the Democratic Party. That’s way too limited a goal, and it’s a goal that
presupposes the continuation of the system we have, rather than its overthrow.¶ CM: But how difficult would it
be for a Communist Party to emerge free of its past associations with the Soviet Union? Can we even use the word “communist” or is it
impossibly taboo?¶ JD: We have to recognize that the right is still scared of communism. That means the term is still powerful. That means it
still has the ability to instill fear in its enemies. I think that’s an argument for keeping the word “communism.”¶ It’s also amazing that close to
half of Iowa participants in the caucuses say that they are socialist. Four or five years ago, people were saying socialism is dead in the US. No
one could even say the word. So I actually think holding on to the word “communism” is useful not only because our enemies are worried about
communism, but also because it helps make the socialists seem really, really mainstream, and that’s good. We don’t want socialism to seem like
something that only happens in Sweden. We want it to seem like that’s what America should have at a bare minimum.¶ One last thing about
the history of communism: every political ideology that has infused a state form has done awful things. For the
most part, if people like the ideology, they either let the awful things slide, or they use the ideology to criticize the awful things that the state
does. We can do the same thing with communism. It’s helpful to recognize that the
countries we understand to have been
ruled by Communist Parties were never really communist—they didn’t even claim to have achieved
communism themselves. We can say that state socialism made these mistakes, and in so doing was betraying
communist ideals.¶ I don’t think we need to abandon these terms or come up with new ones. I think we need to use the power that they
have. And people recognize this, which is what makes it exciting.¶ CM: You write, “Some contemporary crowd observers claim the crowd for
democracy. They see in the amassing of thousands a democratic insistence, a demand to be heard and included. In the context of
communicative capitalism, however, the crowd exceeds democracy.¶ “In the 21st century, dominant nation-states exercise power as
democracies. They bomb and invade as democracies, ‘for democracy’s sake.’ International political bodies legitimize themselves as democratic,
as do the contradictory and tangled media practices of communicative capitalism. When crowds amass in opposition, they pose themselves
against democratic practices, systems, and bodies. To claim the crowd for democracy fails to register this change in the political setting of the
crowd.”¶ So are crowds today, the protesters today, opposed to democracy? Or are they opposed to the current state of, let’s say,
representative democracy?¶ JD: Let’s think about our basic environment. By “our,” now, I mean basically English-speaking people who use the
internet and are listening to the radio and live in societies like the United States. In our environment, what we hear is that we live in democracy.
We hear this all the time. We hear that the network media makes democratic exchange possible, that a free press is democracy, that we’ve got
elections and that’s democracy.¶ When
crowds amass in this setting, if they are just at a football game, it’s not a political
statement. Even at a march (fully permitted) that’s registering opposition to the invasion of Iraq, for example, or
concern about the climate—all of those things are within the general environment of “democracy,” and they don’t oppose
the system. They don’t register as opposition to the system. They’re just saying that we want our view
on this or that issue to count.¶ But the way that crowds have been amassing over the last four or five years—Occupy Wall Street is
one example, but the Red Square debt movement in Canada is another; some of the more militant strikes of nurses and teachers are too—has
been to say, “Look, the process that we have that’s been called democratic? It is not. We want to change that.” ¶ It’s not that we are anti-
democratic. It’s that democracy is too limiting a term to register our opposition. We want something more. We want actual
equality. Democracy is too limiting. The reason it’s too limiting is we live in a context that understands itself as “democratic.” So democracy
as a political claim, in my language, can’t “register the gap that the crowd is inscribing.” It can’t register real division or opposition. Democracy
is just more of what we have.¶ CM: We are so dependent. We use social media so much, we use Facebook so much, we use so many of these
avenues of what you call communicative capitalism so much. How can we oppose or reject this system without hurting ourselves and our ability
to communicate our message to each other? Can we just go on strike? Can we become the owners of the means of communicative
production?¶ JD: One of the ways that Marxism historically has understood the political problems faced by workers is our total entrapment and
embeddedness in the capitalist system. What makes a strike so courageous is that workers are shooting themselves in the foot. They’re not
earning their wage for a time, as a way to put pressure on the capitalist owner of the workplace.¶ What does that mean under communicative
capitalism? Does it mean that we have to shoot ourselves in the foot by completely extracting ourselves from all of the instruments of
communication? Or does it mean that we change our attitude towards communication? Or does it mean that we develop our own means of
communication?¶ There’s a whole range here. I’m not a Luddite. I don’t think the way we’re going to bring down capitalism is by quitting
Facebook. I think that’s a little bit absurd. I think what makes more sense is to think of how we
could use the tools we have to
bring down the master’s house. We can consolidate our message together. We can get a better sense of
how many we are. We can develop common modes of thinking. We can distribute organizing materials
for the revolutionary party.¶ I don’t think that an extractive approach to our situation in communicative media is the right one. I think
it’s got to be more tactical. How do we use the tools we have, and how do we find ways to seize the means of communication? This would
mean the collectivization of Google, Facebook, Amazon, and using those apparatuses. But that would probably have to be day two of the
revolution.¶ CM: Jodi, I’ve got one last question for you, and it’s the Question from Hell, the question we might hate to ask, you might hate to
answer, or our audience is going to hate the response.¶ How much did the narrative that Occupy created, of the 99% and the 1%, undermine a
of collectivity? Because it doesn’t include everyone…¶ JD: Division is crucial. Collectivity is never everyone. What this narrative
did was produce the divided collectivity that we need. It’s great to undermine the stupid myth of American unity,
“The country has to pull together” and all that crap. It’s fantastic that Occupy Wall Street asserted collectivity through
division. This is class conflict. This says there is not a unified society. Collectivity is the collectivity of us
against them. It produced the proper collectivity: an antagonistic one.
 Case
Framework - we’re cool with their framing – use that in combination with our ROTB
to determine the winner of this round. No new ROTB in the 1ar – that’s key for
fairness because I only get one speech to respond to a new ROTB in the 1ar that they
can go all in on the 2ar.
And, presume neg – the aff proposes no method for solving their impacts. There’s no
impact to voting aff.
 Contention 1 – Discrimination and Diversification
We control the root cause debate. Capitalism explains discrimination---imperialism
necessitated the racialization of different populations to create hierarchies that
suppress labor---racism is conducive to profitability---differences became engrained
because socio-geographic spaces became associated with certain people.
Camfield 16—Associate Professor of Labour Studies & Sociology at University of Manitoba and a PhD
in Social and Political Thought at York University [David, “Elements of a Historical-Materialist Theory of
Racism,” Historical Marxism, Vol. 24, Issue 1, 2016, p. 31-70, Emory Libraries]

The key question in dealing with the persistence of racism is not how racial oppression is reproduced, though it is vital to be able to show
this in order to avoid falling into functionalism; 124 racism is reproduced in a myriad of ways in various situations, as has been demonstrated in
detail by anti-racist researchers. Nor is it a question of locating a ‘material basis’ for racism, since such a framing of the problem assumes that
racism is an ideology rather than a social relation. Rather, the question is
why does racial oppression remain a major feature
of matrices of social relations in the contemporary world?

Some criticalrace analysis, influenced by poststructuralism, does not go beyond identifying the pervasiveness of ‘race
thinking’ – as Sherene Razack puts it, ‘a structure of thought that divides up the world between the deserving
and the undeserving according to descent’. 125 While this phenomenon is both real and significant, naming it does not explain
the persistence of racism in a way satisfactory to defenders of any kind of materialism. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva offers a materialist explanation
that is widely shared among contemporary anti-racist researchers:

Racial structures remain in place for the same reasons that other structures do. Since actors racialised as ‘white’ – or as members of
the dominant race – receive material benefits from the racial order, they struggle (or passively receive the manifold wages of
whiteness) to maintain their privileges. In contrast, those defined as belonging to the subordinate race or races struggle to change
the status quo (or become resigned to their position). Therein lies the secret of racial structures and racial inequality the world over.
They exist because they benefit members of the dominant race. 126

This explanation has more than a grain of truth to it, as I will argue. However, it is
inadequate because it fails to identify any
connection between specific features of capitalism and the persistence of racism or to make
distinctions about who benefits from racism and how. But some historical materialists deny that this kind of explanation
has any validity whatsoever. Callinicos argues that ‘the Marxist claim’ is that ‘the forces and relations of production, a complex set of historically
developed and changing powers, explain relations of domination.’ 127 There
are two problems with this approach. The first is
that it equates an explanation of the origins of a form of oppression with an explanation of its
persistence. I believe that the genesis of racial oppression can be explained by historical analysis of forces
and relations of production. However, as Mills argues, ‘genealogy does not necessarily translate into continuing causal pre-
eminence’. 128 The second is that it treats forms of oppression as generating no properties that contribute to
their own persistence. However, there is considerable evidence that they do. This is why Esch and Roediger contend that
‘understanding racism necessitates a separate and distinct perspective on power relations beyond the terms of class’. For example, they
suggest that ‘racist acts are sometimes or maybe often acts of racial empowerment, rather than of class disempowerment’ 129 – an insight that
many Marxist accounts of racism and white workers do not acknowledge because they lack a concept of racial privilege. While it is better to
treat such acts as often being about both ‘racial empowerment’ and ‘class disempowerment’ rather than one or the other, Esch and Roediger’s
point about the limits of treating racism as explicable solely with reference to the forces and relations of production is clear. In their spirit, I
suggest that racism’s persistence today can be explained as flowing from three deeply-rooted features of contemporary society that are
interwoven in reality but analytically distinguishable: imperialism, the profits of racism, and efforts to defend or enhance racial privilege.

Imperialism

Imperialism is an essential dimension of the capitalist mode of production. The system develops in an
uneven and combined manner both in time and space, with ‘spatial cycles of development at one pole and
underdevelopment at another’. 130 This is a consequence of differential profits, which can lead to ‘a self-
reinforcing process that gives rise to privileged concentrations of high-productivity capital’. 131 The
ensuing domination of the globe by capitalist imperialism has been interwoven with racism almost
from its inception. 132 A result of this fact has been histories in which, as Susan Ferguson has argued,

People become [negatively] racialised insofar as they are associated. . . with other socio-
geographic spaces. The ‘other,’ of course, is relative – and determined largely by the historical configuration
of geo-political and social relations. . . . So while people are necessarily ‘territorialised’ by matter of their birth (we are all
born and live somewhere), they are only racialised as a function of how their location figures in the
broader socio-geo-political ordering of capitalism. 133

Today imperialism reproduces, Winant writes, ‘a worldwide pattern of employment discrimination, violence,
morbidity, impoverishment, pollution, and unequal exchange’. This is ‘a global system of social
stratification’ that ‘correlates very well with racial criteria the darker your skin is, the less you earn; the
shorter your life span, the poorer your health and nutrition, the less education you can get.’ 134 Even if we
set aside the contentious issue of unequal exchange and assert the huge importance of class divisions within imperialised countries, 135
Winant’s correlation still matters. Even when explicitly racist ideology is absent today, imperialism
reproduces ‘an already
racialised structural distribution of property and economic power . . . which is the product of the long
history of global racialised dispossession’. 136 Moreover, imperialism today frequently operates in ways that treat the
populations of imperialised countries as different in inherent and unalterable ways. This makes their oppression by imperialism racial in
character. While in the twenty-first century the differences used to mark imperialised populations are not always posited explicitly as ones of
inferiority, imperialised populations are in practice routinely treated as essentially culturally deficient. This
can be seen in the neoliberal ideology of international development’s depiction of the people of
imperialised countries as mired in irrational culture. 137 The treatment by imperialist state officials of
Muslims and Arabs as essentially pre-modern, religious and irrational is another case in point. 138 Such
racialised imperialist practices and ideologies are also influential within the borders of imperialist countries; they powerfully condition
how state managers structure immigration controls and politically administer the portions of their
populations who have migrated from imperialised countries or who are descended from such migrants
or enslaved ancestors. 139 This in turn has a broad influence on the ideological environment in advanced capitalist countries.
The Profits of Racism

The mediation of capitalism by racism almost from its very beginning 140 that was registered in the preceding paragraph can also be seen in the
history of how production has been socially organised. The massive use of racialised African slavery and Asian indentured migrant labour was
succeeded in the twentieth century by new flows of immigration from imperialised countries. Today these flows increasingly involve migrants
from imperialised countries engaging in unfree or highly precarious wage labour. As Ferguson and David McNally note,

What is unique about the neoliberal period, therefore, is not that [negatively] racialised labour-power is appropriated from the
peripheries of the global system. That has been a constant of the capitalist mode of production. Instead, the
key
development has been the massive expansion of the global labour reserve as a result of the
most accelerated and extensive processes of primitive accumulation in world history. 141

Across the history of capitalism, then, employers have often dealt with working classes stratified by racial
hierarchies (and simultaneously by divisions rooted in patriarchal and other forms of oppression), which they have frequently cultivated
directly or indirectly. 142 They have done so and often continue to do so in large part because racism is conducive to higher
profitability. This is true in a number of ways. First, a workforce divided by racism is less able to resist managerial
control, which allows employers to extract more effort from workers. Second, labour-market
competition among workers divided by racism can result in workers placed lower in a racial hierarchy
being willing to work for lower wages and/or in ways preferred by employers than workers ranked
above them in the racial order. 143 This can extend to workers at the bottom of a racial hierarchy being
willing to take jobs that other workers are unwilling to do because the work is seen as so undesirable. It
is possible for employers to successfully ‘use race as a sorting mechanism in their pursuit of increased
productivity’, with particular skills or capacities linked to specific racial groups, thereby reducing training costs. 144 Finally, the
weakening of the social power of the working class (not simply solidarity at the point of production) by racism
facilitates capitalist profitability. 145 It is admittedly easier to argue convincingly that the existence of racism contributes to profit-
making than to show that this in part actually explains the contemporary perpetuation of racial oppression; the latter is important in order to
avoid functionalist explanations of racism’s persistence. Nevertheless, the frequency with which employers use perceived racial identity as a
sorting mechanism in dealing with job applications and play workers off against each other along racial lines lends support to this claim. So too
does the widespreadopposition of capitalists and their political advocates to measures that would substantially
improve the bargaining power of racially oppressed workers in labour markets, such as granting
citizenship or permanent-resident status to non-status migrants and those with temporary residency rights and
instituting effective anti-racist reforms to employment law. 146
 Contention 2 – Capitalism
The aff concludes neg – Foster 2011 – the card is mis-tagged. We’ll read it back on
them rehighlighted.
Capitalists seek to control the labor force through SUBORDINATION
Foster 2011 John Bellamy (editor of Monthly Review, professor of sociology at the University of Oregon,
and author ) Independent Socialist Monthly Review, “Education and the Structural Crisis of Capital,”
April 11, 2011 https://monthlyreview.org/2011/07/01/education-and-the-structural-crisis-of-capital/

Bloomberg was not alone among billionaires attracted to school reform in this period. In the twenty-first
century era of monopoly-finance and information capital, the conviction arose in higher corporate
circles that education could now be managed fully along scientific-technical and financial lines, making it
possible to: (1) gain control of the labor process of teachers, (2)subordinate schooling to the creation of
a more differentiated and routinized labor force, and (3) privatize public education (or as much of it as
can be seized without meeting serious resistance). In the digital age, bureaucratization, tracking, and
testing were seen to be feasible as never before.
 Contention 3 – Democracy
The aff concludes neg again – Rubin, Kazanjian 11 explains the root cause of
education’s shifting focus is capitalism, not standardized tests.
Capitalism’s influence in education molds students to be conforming, capitalist
laborers – capitalism is the root cause of the diversion away from a focus on making
students good citizens. The problem lies in the way curriculums are structured – not
solely standardized tests. Also, the card is talking about end of year standardized
tests from NCLB – not standardized tests considered by college admissions.
Rubin, Kazanjian 2011 Daniel Ian Rubin (Phd at New Mexico State University), Christopher John
Kazanjian (Phd in Curriculum and Instruction from New Mexico State University). “Just Another Brick in
the Wall”: Standardization and the Devaluing of Education.” Journal of Curriculum and Instruction (JoCI).
November 2011.

Standardization and curriculum alignment (also called curriculum narrowing) can be defined as a
method of educational quality control (Wraga, 1999) where the “process of teaching and learning is
predetermined, pre-paced, and pre-structured. There is little room for originality or creativity on the
part of teachers or students [and] specific, correct answers are elicited to specific, direct questions”
(Mahiri, 2005, p. 82). Therefore, in order to pass the required yearly “high stakes” standardized exams
required by No Child Left Behind (NCLB, 2001), the process of teaching is increasingly becoming “teacher
proof” (Crocco & Costigan, 2007) in school districts across the country. This educational practice
continues to destroy the notion of a critical, engaging, and self-reflective education in this country
(Giroux, 2010). There is decreasing potential for individuality and creativity in education today since,
“Increasingly, classrooms are places in which teachers and students act out the script given to them by
someone else, neither teachers nor students ask the questions that matter, and learning is equated with
passing a test” (Hursh, 2008, p. 3). Due to NCLB (2001), both students and teachers end up losing in this
era of teaching to the test (Hampton, 2005; McNeil, 2005). Students are treated like little automatons
expected to spit out information at will, as their enjoyment for learning continues to diminish (Berry,
2009). They are seen as nothing more than “empty vessels to fill with prescribed knowledge” (Sleeter,
2005, p. 21), which will be tested at a later date. This model of learning does not help students acquire
knowledge and become more independent and critical human beings; it only sets them up to become
the next generation of unquestioning capitalist workers (Bauman, 2010; Giroux, 2009a; Hill, 2005, 2006;
Leonardo, 2004; Lugg, 2007).