This turns the case- wastes resources and energy

(Ruth Wilson, Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics and professor of geography in Earth and Environmental Sciences at The City University of New York, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation)

The careerist, particularist, and luxe modes waste precious intellectual resources and displace energy from where it is most needed. As such, they are to the current era what many institutional “reforms” such as assistant deans for race/gender relations, daycare centers, and ethnic and women’s studies programs were to colleges and universities in the late 1960s and early 1970s: cheap insurance against more expensively redressed claims that the urban university in the United States has, historically and systematically, underdeveloped the neighborhoods where the working poor live in the shadow of the ever-growing master’s house. In the exploitation of the culture of opposition, these modes tend to incorporate into the private sphere of intellectual property (books, conferences, centers) what Mike Davis insists should be the public production of public use values. Thus, it follows that these modes suffer, as they must, from theoretical sloppiness and political dishonesty at the heart of the enterprise. Political dishonesty, because to call one’s work oppositional is not enough. Theoretical sloppiness, because to speak in certain categories—such as “literary geniuses” (Gates) or “cultural capital” (Baker)—is to couple one’s work with that of primary definers such as 1992 Nobel Laureate economist Gary Becker. These definers use such categories to explain away historically specific differentiation (the achievements of racism, machismo, and exploitation) through an appeal to cultural difference alleged to inhere in the oppressed more naturally and less alienably than, say, freedom.