Women as objects of circulation is embedded in the established social order – a shift of “physiological” energy does nothing to address systemic issues and the 1AC’s mechanism further perpetuates this order – only the alt alone can solve

This type of social system can be interpreted as the practical realization of the meta-physical. As the practical destiny of the meta-physical, it would also represent its most fully realized form. Operating in such a way, moreover, that subjects themselves, being implicated in it through and through, being produced in it as concepts, would lack the means to analyze it. Except in an after-the-fact way whose delays are yet to be fully measured ...

This practical realization of the meta-physical has as its founding opera- tion the appropriation of woman's body by the father or his substitutes. It is marked by women's submission to a system of general equivalents, the proper name representing the father's monopoly of power. It is from this standardization that women receive their value, as they pass from the state of nature to the status of social object. This trans-formation of women's bodies into use values and exchange values inaugurates the symbolic order. But that order depends upon a nearly pure added value. Women, animals endowed with speech like men, assure the possibility of the use and circulation of the symbolic without being recipients of it. Their nonaccess to the symbolic is what has established the social order. Putting men in touch with each other, in relations among themselves, women only fulfill this role by relinquishing their right to speech and even to animality. No longer in the natural order, not yet in the social order that they nonetheless main- tain, women are the symptom of the exploitation of individuals by a society that remunerates them only partially, or even not at all, for their "work” Unless subordination to a system that utilizes you and oppresses you should be considered as sufficient compensation... ? Unless the fact that women are branded with the proper narne-of the "father"-should be viewed as the symbolic payment awarded them for sustaining the social order with their bodies?

But by submitting women's bodies to a general equivalent, to a tran-scendent, super-natural value, men have drawn the social structure into an ever greater process of abstraction, to the point where they themselves are produced in it as pure concepts: having surmounted all their "perceptible" qualities and individual differences, they are finally reduced to the average productivity of their labor. The power of this practical economy of the meta-physical comes from the fact that "physiological" energy is trans- formed into abstract value without the mediation of an intelligible elabora-tion. No individual subject can be credited any longer with bringing about this transformation. It is only after the fact that the subject might possibly be able to analyze his determination as such by the social structure. And even then it is not certain that his love of gold would not make him give up everything else before he would renounce the cult of this fetish. "The saver thus sacrifices to this fetish all the penchants ofhis flesh. No one takes the gospel of renunciation more seriously than he."

Fortunately- if we may say so- women/commodities would remain, as simple "objects" of transaction among men. Their situation of specific exploitation in exchange operations-sexual exchange, and economic, social, and cultural exchanges in general-might lead them to offer a new critique of the political economy. A critique that would no longer avoid that of discourse) and more generally of the symbolic system) in which it is realized. Which would lead to interpreting in a different way the impact of symbolic social labor in the analysis of relations of production.

For, without the exploitation of women, what would become of the social order? What modifications would it undergo if women left behind their condition as commodities-subject to being produced, consumed, val-orized, circulated, and so on, by men alone-and took part in elaborating and carrying out exchanges? Not by reproducing, by copying, the "phallo- cratic" models that have the force of law today, but by socializing in a differ-ent way the relation to nature, matter, the body, language, and desire.