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Biopolitics abstracts away the historical and material basis of oppression which makes challenging capitalism impossible --- starting with the class relation is key.
Cotter 16—Professor of English at William Jewell [Jennifer, “The New Class Common-Sense: Biopolitics, Posthumanism, and Love,” in Cotter, K. DeFazio, R. Faivre, A. Sahay, J. Torrant, S. Tumino, &, R. Wilkie (eds.) All Too (Post)Human: The Humanities after Humanism, Lexington Books, p. 15-18]
As class contradictions have sharpened with the intensification of the crisis of profitability in global capitalism, cultural theory in the North Atlantic retreats further and further into spiritual explanations and resolutions of material contradictions. Rather than confronting the relationship of the poverty of workers around the world, the concentration of wealth into fewer hands, increases in unemployment and economic insecurity, the commodification of all aspects of life subordinating them to production for profit, and the deepening alienation of workers to class relations founded on exploitation in production, contemporary cultural theory has abandoned examining the social, the historical, and the material basis of these questions in production relations. Instead, it is turning to immaterial, affective, and spiritual explanations and resolutions of material contradictions and ideologically translating capitalism and exploitation into ontological conditions of life as such.
The Biopolitical Turn, or, Disappearing Class from Life under Capitalism
It is in the aforementioned context that cultural theory in the global North has embraced what Christian Marazzi calls "the biopolitical turn of the economy" -an increasing turn to "biopolitics" as a means to explain and address the social and economic contradictions in capitalism now. 1 At the core of biopolitical theory is a substitution of "life" -particularly the spiritualist concept of a creative "life-force" or what Hemi Bergson calls elan vital-for the historical and material relations of the dialectical praxis of labor and class as explanations of the material basis of contradictions in capitalism now and their transformation. In other words, central to biopolitics is a cultural spiritualism which ideologically translates historical and material relations into a transhistorical and autonomous power of life- a mystical vitalism - and posits this spiritual vitalism as the basis of bringing about new social relations. This new "spiritualism" of life is offered in a variety of articulations in contemporary cultural theory, from writings that overtly address theories of biopower and biopolitics as in the writings of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (Commonwealth), Giorgio Agamben (Homo Sacer), Maurizio Lazzarato, and Antonella Corsani, among others, to the transspecies posthumanist writings of Derrida (The Animal That Therefore I Am), Agamben (The Open), and Donna Haraway (When Species Meet). These biopolitical theories claim to address a range of material problems that are the effect of production for profit in capitalism: from the encroachment of commodity relations into all aspects of life, including the private ownership of strands of DNA and whole species of plants and animals; to the degradation of the environment in the interests of profit; to economic crisis; to the extension of the working day; to the subordination of love and sexuality to production for profit; to the estrangement of workers from social wealth ... Yet, at the same time, biopolitical theories abstract these problems from their origins in class relations and exploitation. In place of addressing the material conditions and relations that have given rise to these problems, biopolitical theories posit an "other-world" and an "other-worldly life" -a concept of spiritual life that is prior to, constitutive of, transcendent of and/or outside of the historical and social relations of capitalism - as the basis of a new "common" beyond the material contradictions of capitalism.
The spiritualization of life in biopolitical theories, to be clear, is represented as a new form of materialism. The substitution of "life" for "class" in biopolitical theories draws from Foucault's theory of "bio-power" in which he argues that "modem man is an animal whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question." 2 "Bio-power," Foucault contends, is a regime of power that, rather than ruling by threat of death, produces life through the disciplining of bodies, the regulation of populations, and through the "technologies of the self" in which bodies come to bind themselves to identities produced through sovereign power. In fact, Foucault posits "bio-power" -the instrumental disciplining of bodies such that they come to experience their own subjection as the norm of life and source of pleasure-rather than the exploitation of labor, as the material basis of capitalism. Capitalism, Foucault contends, is not possible without "bio-power": "bio-power was without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism; the latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production." 3 According to Foucault, "There is no binary and all encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled at the root of power relations." 4 In this view there is "no regulative mechanism" of power relations. Instead, in Foucault's cultural imaginary of power, "power is everywhere ... because it comes from everywhere." 5
In this narrative, an explanatory critique of power as the effect of class relations of capitalism - relations between exploiter and exploited -is regarded as part of a binary metaphysics of power which discursively imposes a regime of truth (power/knowledge) onto what is actually, so the story goes, an ineffably and mysteriously plural, diffuse, and amorphous multiplicity of forces. On the one hand, life is assumed to spontaneously produce a discursive proliferation of meanings (knowledges) that then discipline and contain it. On the other hand, life is regarded as an ineffable and plural opacity that resists all conceptual explanation. The subjection of bodies is reduced to a contingent, "spontaneous" and aleatory effect of "life" as such or the sheer fact of living. This makes it appear as if "power over life" comes not from structural relations of exploitation, but from a non-structural, amorphous, cultural plurality- a cultural democracy of power from below to which all have access by virtue of living that is "everywhere."
Foucault's theory of bio-power is not a form of materialism but a form of cultural spiritualism. When Foucault argues that "bio-politics" is at the root of capitalism, he dehistoricizes "the machinery of production" into which he claims bodies are "inserted." The existence of "the machinery of production" -or a "controlled insertion" of bodies-is itself the effect of the dialectical praxis of labor. This is because power is not an autonomous, trans-historical life force nor is it an ineffable diffuse plurality beyond historical and conceptual explanation, but an effect of definite historical and material conditions and relations. Power, in other words, rests upon material conditions of production. Whether or not the society has the power to end starvation or to condemn the majority of the laboring population to a lifetime of starvation, has to do with the level of development of its material conditions of production-its forces of production-and the social relations of production (the labor and property relations) that determine the social ends and interests toward which labor is put. This is another way of saying that power is the historical and material effect of labor in the form of property. In a society in which property is privately owned, power is the capacity of the ruling class to "command over the surplus-labor" of workers in production. 6 At the root of power relations is an antagonistic class relation: the antagonism between owners of the means of production and workers who only own their labor to sell in order to survive and are exploited. The binary of class is historical and material, not, at root, discursive: class binaries are not the effect of nature, God, nor are they the effect of "Western metaphysics," "discursive construction," "binary thinking," or conceptualization, but the effect of private ownership of the means of production.
Foucault's theory of power does the ideological work of capital by concealing and inverting the structural relations of class in capitalism. In place of the material transformation of structural relations of capitalism, Foucault advocates "resistance" within-a change in the discursive and cultural regimes and a re-valuing of "life" -as the basis of a "different economy of bodies and pleasures." 7 This amounts to the updating of the culture of capitalism as the limit of change while the needs of the masses for material abolition of exploitation is dismissed as a reactionary nostalgia for the impossible-what Foucault dismisses as "The 'right' to life ... beyond all the oppressions." 8 Changing the cultural values of life and regarding this as constituting material change-i.e., as an end in itself becomes a means to ideologically update power relations without fundamentally transforming them.
Capitalism explains how modern biopower works
Elina Penttinen 2k Globalization, Bio-power and Trafficking in Women, Paper prepared for IPSA RC 19 workshop on “Globalization, Democratization and Gender” To be presented 1 August 2000, (Aug. 2012) VK
Globalization of the world-economy has altered the ways in which bio-power is produced and implemented. Thus, also the rationalization of bodies has taken different forms and especially different scope in the global-age than during the development of modern capitalism. The bio-power of globalized world-economy overrides the nation-state as the primary determinant of the government of individualization and produces a new totalizing and individualizing global and globalized governmentality, which subjectifies individuals directly. What ties together the governmentality of modern capitalism and the governmentality of the globalized world economy is the underlying regime of truth, grounded in liberalist notions of the individual. The governmentality of the global capitalism ties the individual by the rationalization of the subject according to labor, capacities and innovation for the mass-production and mass-consumption processes. The liberalist ideology that is the grounds of neo-liberalist global governance of corporate capitalism is driven and institutionalized by a new transnational class, multilateral institutions and state managers (Axtman 1998, Rupert 1997). These institutions set global rules influencing national policy-making and aiming to construct a free-trade based world market system, which for some may seem, more a system of neo-constitutionalism (Gill 1995) or a system of bureaucratization that erodes national sovereignty in the face of corporate elites, and for the benefit of transnational capital (for discussion see; Rupert 1997).
Their focus on power mistheorizes how power operates and trades off with a Marxist approach to politics.
Adam Katz 00 , English Instructor at Onodaga Community College. 2000. Postmodernism and the Politics of “Culture.” Pg. 105 ]
Postmodern cultural studies also rewrites the category of materiality to refer to local practices and, ultimately, the body. For example, postmodern cultural studies theorist John Fiske, while defining the material in terms of economic constraints, at the same time argues for an understanding of materiality as the absence of any possibility for abstraction, of any distancing from the products of culture. “­Culture,” he says, “is inescapably material: distantiation is an unattainable luxury. The culture of everyday life is concrete, contextualized, and lived, just as deprivation is concrete, contextualized and lived” (1992, 155). Since he identifies the material with the lived experience of everyday life in the face of oppression and with the construction of an individualized environment that makes survival and resistance possible, ­he goes on to locate materiality in the body: “The body and its specific behavior is where the power system stops being abstract and becomes material” (162). For this reason, he considers it important to develop a “bottom-up” (165) notion of subjectivity, as op­posed to those theories in which contradictions in subjectivity “are traced back to the complex elaborations of late capitalist societies” (161). ­This, I argue, excludes the possibility of understanding materiality in terms of the systemic connections between specific practices. It reduces subjectivity to the local contexts in which individualized modes of life are constructed, and it refuses any theory that does not involve “the development of the ability to experience as far as possible from the inside other people’s ways of living” (159). In this case, of course, it becomes impossible to theorize the world market or capitalist class domination, since these would be considered abstract categories that cannot be inside anyone’s way of living.­
Subjectivity
The 1AC’s focus on subjectivity is counter-revolutionary because it obscures the sociopolitical context that produces subjects and only amounts to individualized resistance.
Hardt and Negri, 17 [Michael Hardt is an American political philosopher and literary theorist. Hardt is best known for his book Empire, which was co-written with Antonio Negri AND Antonio "Toni" Negri is an Italian Spinozistic-Marxist sociologist and political philosopher, best known for his co-authorship of Empire and secondarily for his work on Spinoza, “Assembly,” 2017, Oxford University Press]
Neoliberal governance, as we argued earlier together with Foucault and Brown, is a governing rationality that cannot be understood merely in terms of its general economic policies: the privatization of public services and industries, the deregulation of markets and firms, the destruction of labor unions, and so forth. Neoliberalism must be grasped also in terms of the production of subjectivity, that is, the creation at all levels of society of individual entrepreneurial subjects, homines economici, who, in turn, continually reproduce the neoliberal world. This recognition could easily lead to despair: how can we resist neoliberalism, let alone create alternatives to it, if our own subjectivity is produced by it and permeated by its rationality? There seems to be nowhere outside neoliberalism we can stand.
Power, however—and neoliberal power is no exception—is not organic or unitary but is always defined by relationship and antagonism. Foucault himself explains that power is a structure of “actions brought to bear upon possible actions; it incites, it induces, it seduces, it makes easier or more difficult; in the extreme it constrains or forbids absolutely; it is nevertheless always a way of acting upon an acting subject or acting subjects by virtue of their acting or being capable of action. A set of actions upon other actions.”26 Resistance is always present in power from the beginning, as is the potential for rupture. The processes of subjection, then, and the production of subjectivities that are functional to power are themselves both precarious and shot through with resistances and alternative potentials. Subjectivity, in other words, is not a given but a terrain of struggle.
The potential for resistances and alternatives to neoliberalism emerged in our analyses above perhaps most clearly in the context of social production. The fact that capital functions increasingly through processes of the extraction of the common, that instead of directly organizing productive cooperation as it does in the factory it captures value produced on the social terrain through processes from which it is distant, indicates that the circuits of social production and, in particular, the organization of productive cooperation are relatively autonomous from capital. That is one factor that has allowed finance, which is always distant from the scene of production, to become the predominant apparatus of capture. This migration of capital away from the scene of social production, moreover, is irreversible. Capital is not able to organize directly the plural field of subjectivities who produce socially in cooperation and communication in part because those subjectivities and the values they produce overflow capitalist systems of measure. Faced with this reality, the abilities of capital and neoliberal administration to measure, codify, and reproduce subjectivities and values in a hierarchical schema become tenuous. But any attempt by capital to dictate directly the cooperation of social subjectivities, just like its attempts to enclose the common as private property, risks reducing productivity and diminishing profits. Capital cannot get too close or it will strangle the life force on which its own survival depends. We do not mean for this analysis of the capitalist extraction of the common and the relatively autonomous processes of cooperation in social production to suggest that antineoliberal and non-neoliberal subjectivities already exist and are simply waiting to be emancipated. We mean for it simply to confirm that a battle over the production of subjectivity is possible—an asymmetrical combat between the capitalist technologies of measure and the immeasurable, overflowing forces of enlarged social production and reproduction, which reside in and produce the common.
To combat neoliberalism requires first a destituent project. We must not only challenge the processes of emptying the public and the capitalist right to extract and privatize the common but also demystify and combat the neoliberal processes of subjection. How can we sabotage and block the gears of the machines that produce and reproduce neoliberal subjectivity? This battle is possible because we are inside the productive project dominated by capital. It is not paradoxical for us to take what is power for capital—subjection—as an occasion for destituent subjectivation. In line with the Marxist tradition of subversion, this means, on one hand, that capitalist subjection is always forced to individualize productive subjects and, on the other, that the subjects put to work can discover in their own activities that they are not merely individuals but also have the potential to act together. To make sense of this being-together one must sabotage the capitalist project, not only blocking capitalist machines but also destroying ideological and material mechanisms of the organization of labor and society, along with their individualist subjection.
To this destituent endeavor needs to be added a constituent project of subjectivation, that is, in the language we used earlier, the construction of machinic assemblages to produce alternative subjectivities. How can the common be reappropriated by the multitudes that produce it? How can plural subjectivities construct and manage autonomously their own cooperative social relations? The struggle opens here to unhinge social cooperation from not only its direct exploitation but also the mechanisms of financial extraction. It is a matter of stripping cooperation from command—simple to say, difficult to do. Control and resistance, commodity production and capacities for innovation: these are some of the terms of the asymmetry between subjection and subjectivation, and the passage from destituent to constituent action.
One way forward at this point is to adopt the standpoint of existing subjects, specifically to take guidance from the agents of social production who, subjected to the command of finance capital, nonetheless manage to organize resistance and even projects of liberation. From the social struggles we need to learn, argues Pe

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