Marx Supplement - Michigan 7 2024 BDKLS

Marx Neg Supplement
Notes
This is a negative supplement to help answer the Marx aff the K lab. It contains some additional evidence that can be used to beat the case, as well as some K links or pics that apply. This should be used in conjunction with the already existing files, such as the K Aff Neg, the k answer updates, and any neg files already put out.
Thanks to Zoe, Sophia, Smaritha, Ryan, Julia, Hermes, Eric, Aidan, Abel, and Aaron for their help with the K neg supplement files.
Folk Politics K
1nc
The aff’s opposition to governmentality makes solvency impossible. Affirmation produces catharsis, but cements inequality---rejection is key
Smulewicz-Zucker 15 – Professor of Philosophy @ Baruch College CUNY
(Gregory, “The Treason of Intellectual Radicalism and the Collapse of Leftist Politics,” LOGOS, Winter edition)
Radical politics in contemporary western democracies finds itself in a state of crisis. When viewed from the vantage point of social change, a progressive transformation of the social order, political radicalism is found wanting. This would seem to go against the grain of perceived wisdom. As an academic enterprise, radical theory has blossomed. Figures such as Slavoj Žižek openly discuss Marxism in popular documentaries, new journals have emerged touting a radical “anti-capitalism,” and whole conferences and sub-fields are dominated by questions posed by obscure theoretical texts. Despite this, there is a profound lack in substantive, meaningful political, social, and cultural criticism of the kind that once made progressive and rational left political discourse relevant to the machinations of real politics and the broader culture. Today, leftist political theory in the academy has fallen under the spell of ideas so far removed from actual political issues that the question can be posed whether the traditions of left critique that gave intellectual support to the great movements of modernity – from the workers movement to the Civil Rights movement – possess a critical mass to sustain future struggles. Quite to the contrary, social movements have lost political momentum, they are generally focused on questions of culture, shallow discussions of class, and are generally obsessed with questions of identity divorced from the questions of material forms of oppression rather than on the great “social question” of unequal distributions of economic and political power which once served as the driving impulse for political, social and cultural transformation. As these new radical mandarins spill ink on futile debates over “desire,” “identity,” and illusory visions of anarchic democracy, economic inequality has ballooned into oligarchic proportions, working people have been increasingly marginalized, and ethnic minority groups are turned into a modern “coolie” labor force. This has been the result, we contend, of a lack of concern with real politics in contemporary radical theory. Further, we believe that this is the result of a transformation of ideas, that contemporary political theory on the left has witnessed a decisive shift in focus in recent decades – a shift that has produced nothing less than the incoherence of the tradition of progressive politics in our age. At a time when the left is struggling to redefine itself and respond to current political and economic crises, a series of trends in contemporary theory has reshaped the ways that politics is understood and practiced. Older thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida, and newer voices like Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, David Graeber and Judith Butler, among others, have risen to the status of academic and cultural icons while their ideas have become embedded in the “logics” of new social movements. As some aspects of the recent Occupy Wall Street demonstrations have shown, political discourse has become increasingly dominated by the impulses of neo-anarchism, identity politics, post-colonialism, and other intellectual fads. This new radicalism has made itself so irrelevant with respect to real politics that it ends up serving as a kind of cathartic space for the justifiable anxieties wrought by late capitalism, further stabilizing its systemic and integrative power rather than disrupting it. These trends are the products as well as unwitting allies of that which they oppose. The transformation of radical and progressive politics throughout the latter half of the twentieth and the early decades of the twenty-first centuries is characterized by both a sociological shift as well as an intellectual one. A core thesis has been that the shift from industrial to post-industrial society has led to the weakening of class politics. But this is unsatisfying. There is no reason why class cannot be seen in the divisions of mental and service labor as it was with an industrial proletariat. There is no reason why political power rooted in unequal property and control over resources, in the capacity for some to command and to control the labor of others as well as the consumption of others ought not to be a basic political imperative. To this end, what we would call a rational radical politics should seek not the utopian end of a “post-statist” politics, but rather to enrich common goods, erode the great divisions of wealth and class, democratize all aspects of society and economy, and seek to orient the powers of individuals and the community toward common ends. Indeed, only by widening the struggles of labor and re-thinking the ends of the labor movement – connecting the struggles labor to issues beyond the workplace, to education, the environment, public life, issues of racial and gender equality, culture and the nature of the social order more broadly – can we envision a revitalization of a worker’s movement, one that would have no need of the alienated theory of the new radicals.[1] But this is merely one fringe expression of what we see as a corrupted, simplified and de-politicized “new” radicalism. Once grounded in the Enlightenment impulse for progress, equality, rationalism, and the critical confrontation with asymmetrical power relations, the dominant trends of radical political thought now evade the concrete nature of these concerns. The battles that raged in the 1980s and 1990s between postmodernists and defenders of modernity – while serving as a harbinger of the contemporary split between the radical theorists divorced from reality and those who seek to establish anti-foundationalist conceptions of democratic discourse – were attached to a strong sense that the future of rationalism and radical politics hung in the balance. Today’s radical intellectuals do not feel compelled to defend their arguments or respond to their critics. Their purported radicalism becomes all the more opaque when the coherence of their claims is called into question. A concern for an exaggerated subjectivity, identity politics, anti-empirical theories of power, an obsession with “difference” – all serve to deplete the radical tradition of its potency. Radical intellectuals now formulate new vocabularies, invent new forms of “subjectivity,” and concoct new languages of discourse that only serve to splinter forms of political resistance, consigning radicalism to the depths of incoherence and (academic success notwithstanding) political irrelevance. Indeed, the disintegration of the great radical movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – from the labor movement to the Civil Rights movement – has detached philosophical thinking from the mechanisms of power and political reality more broadly. The result has been – despite the ironic new turn toward “anti-philosophy” – the conquest of politics by poorly constructed philosophy. Abstraction has been the result, as well as a panoply of shibboleths that have only served to sever “radical” thought from its relevance to contemporary politics and society. It seems to us that the survival of the tradition of rational, radical political and social criticism pivots on a confrontation with these new academic trends and fads.
The impact is global existential crises driven by the worst excesses of neoliberal exploitation
Srnicek and Williams 15 – *PhD in IR @ LSE, **PhD student at the University of East London, presently at work on a thesis entitled Hegemony and Complexity
(Nick and Alex, “Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work,” Kindle Book)
Less politically radical than horizontalism, though no less ubiquitous, is localism. As an ideology, localism extends far beyond the left, inflecting the politics of pro-capitalists, anti-capitalists, radicals and mainstream culture alike, as a new kind of political common sense. Shared between all of these is a belief that the abstraction and sheer scale of the modern world is at the root of our present political, ecological and economic problems, and that the solution therefore lies in adopting a ‘small is beautiful’ approach to the world. 69 Small-scale actions, local economies, immediate communities, face-to-face interaction – all of these responses characterise the localist worldview. In a time when most of the political strategies and tactics developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries appear blunted and ineffectual, localism has a seductive logic to it. In all its diverse variants, from centre-right communitarianism70 to ethical consumerism, 71 developmental microloans, and contemporary anarchist practice, 72 the promise it offers to do something concrete, enabling political action with immediately noticeable effects, is empowering on an individual level. But this sense of empowerment can be misleading. The problem with localism is that, in attempting to reduce large-scale systemic problems to the more manageable sphere of the local community, it effectively denies the systemically interconnected nature of today’s world. Problems such as global exploitation, planetary climate change, rising surplus populations, and the repeated crises of capitalism are abstract in appearance, complex in structure, and non-localised. Though they touch upon every locality, they are never fully manifested in any particular region. Fundamentally, these are systemic and abstract problems, requiring systemic and abstract responses. While much of the populist localism on the right can easily be dismissed as regressive macho fantasy (for example, secessionist libertarianism), sinister ideological cover for austerity economics (the UK Conservative Party’s ‘Big Society’) or downright racist (the nationalist or fascist blaming of immigrants for structural economic problems), the localism of the left has been less thoroughly scrutinised. Though undoubtedly well-meaning, both the radical and mainstream left partake in localist politics and economics to their detriment. In what follows we will critically examine two of the more popular variants – local food and economic localism – which in very different areas exemplify the problematic dynamics of localism in general.
The alt is to reject the aff’s localism in favor of a leftist governmentality
Smulewicz-Zucker 15 - Professor of Philosophy @ Baruch College CUNY
(Interview by Devon Douglas-Bowers, “Questioning the Left: An Interview with Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker and Michael J. Thompson,” The Hampton Institution, http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/questioning-the-left.html#.VmTzZN8rJE4)
You write early in the article that "Today, leftist political theory in the academy has fallen under the spell of ideas so far removed from actual political issues[.]" Do you think that this is a failing that is solely in the academy? It seems that it is a widespread failure by the left as a whole, that they are more focused on the theoretical than anything that is truly concrete. We agree that the problem is not solely with the academy. It is important to look at the academy because the kind of work that is done in the academy is, in part, often a reflection of what people think they can achieve on the ground. The main issue seems to be that moral revulsion has supplanted the critique of social mechanisms that produce the problems that outrage people. It is also important to stress that moral revulsion is not a substitute for, nor an equivalent of, political action and political strategy. The key, as we see it, is to understand that politics is about shaping not only the mentality of citizens and the norms of culture, but more crucially about organizing the legitimate power of the state to enforce laws that prevent social injustice and expand the horizon of social justice. This requires understanding the mechanisms of politics, of elections, of the law, of constitutional interpretation, and so on. The contemporary left has abandoned these concerns and has instead decided to view them as attributes of a system that needs to be rejected. This is simply absurd and, in our view, anti-political. We also think that there is a problem with what theory has become. The only reason that a cleavage has developed between theory and practice is because the function of theory has been abandoned. It is important to recognize that what is now touted as theory is not actually theory. Theory plays a vital role in diagnosing and critiquing concrete political problems. People like Zizek and Badiou do not have theories. Their work is so convoluted and self-referential that there is no link to the concrete. It masquerades as theory. They are able to create their own fan clubs and say whatever they want because they purposefully construct so-called theories that allow them to evade critical evaluation. Esotericism has become a virtue unto itself. From this standpoint, the aversion to theory is understandable. So-called theory has become a world for the initiated. This is a distortion of theory. It is merely the flipside of a society that can dismiss evolution as "only a theory."
2nc at: perm/no link
We don’t need an alt—critiquing the aff’s individual focus is sufficient
Smulewicz-Zucker 15 – Professor of Philosophy @ Baruch College CUNY
(Gregory, “The Treason of Intellectual Radicalism and the Collapse of Leftist Politics,” LOGOS, Winter edition)
In many ways this is the very product of the system they shallowly critique. The class basis of the new radicalism no longer sounds in key with working people; no longer is it the expression of organic intellectuals. With no movement to attach to, no working class politics to inform their political sensibilities, theory becomes a fetish. Exploitation and domination are real problems, but the words lose their meaning if they are not attached to concrete referents. This is a disservice to the exploited and dominated. It is to place them – as Bertolt Brecht wrote at the conclusion of the film version of his Threepenny Opera – back in the dark. They retain their ignominious invisibility. Radical theory should illuminate present social relations. Sadly, millennial Marxists only fetishize it. This purported revival of Marxian politics is not a revolt by the generations raised during the conservative Reagan revolution and economic complacency of the Clinton-era’s credit economy. Their Marxism is the product of the sensibilities cultivated by late capitalism. It’s facile and unreflective cant a mere sound-byte radicalism ready-made for and by a cultural consciousness mauled by Facebook and Twitter.
The thinkers we have mentioned and their ideas have had a disintegrating effect on the nature of progressive politics the critique of which ought to lead us toward a more lucid, more compelling account of what progressive political and social criticism ought to be able to achieve. The basic purpose of this effort should be to indict a style of theory and thinking that has become so esoteric and self-referential that it has divorced itself from the historic concerns of progressive politics: from remedying inequality, confronting forces eroding our public goods, or challenging the entrenched power of political and economic elites. Whether it is a rampant irrationalism, a rejection of any sense of realism in politics, naïve anti-statism, theories of power and oppression that have no empirical basis, or simply an incoherent, confused set of texts upon which one can project and read whatever one wants, this new radicalism has been able to seduce a generation into an understanding of politics that privileges an abstract, self-regarding “politics” over the concrete analysis of power and a politics based on the public good.
We believe that the appeal of these thinkers and ideas is symptomatic of a crisis in progressive politics – a crisis that cannot be simply solved. We hope that a new self-critique of the left by the left can lead to a more rationally informed, more realistic account of the nature and import of real politics and radicalism’s role in transforming it. Our fear is that the proliferation of these theories and the ideas that they make common will penetrate so deeply that an effective, politically relevant left will all but collapse. To renew radical political theory along rational lines will require much work, but we believe it begins with critique. With this in mind, we hope that those who encounter these new radical mandarins will reflect more critically on the false self-confidence of their ideas and political prescriptions, and realize that another, more satisfying and productive tradition of radicalism once existed and is once again possible.
Mutual exclusivity—the aff and alt are 2 distinct, exclusive approaches to politics—folk localism eschews complex mapping
Williams & Srnicek 13 - PhD student at the University of East London, PhD candidate in International Relations at the London School of Economics
(Alex, and Nick, http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/)
1. We believe the most important division in today’s left is between those that hold to a folk politics of localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism, and those that outline what must become called an accelerationist politics at ease with a modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology. The former remains content with establishing small and temporary spaces of non-​capitalist social relations, eschewing the real problems entailed in facing foes which are intrinsically non-​local, abstract, and rooted deep in our everyday infrastructure. The failure of such politics has been built-​in from the very beginning. By contrast, an accelerationist politics seeks to preserve the gains of late capitalism while going further than its value system, governance structures, and mass pathologies will allow.
Catharsis—the aff is a performative victory that drains energy from broader political movements—proves the perm fails by funneling energy into cathartic individual responses
Smulewicz-Zucker 15 - Professor of Philosophy @ Baruch College CUNY
(Interview by Devon Douglas-Bowers, “Questioning the Left: An Interview with Gregory Smulewicz-Zucker and Michael J. Thompson,” The Hampton Institution, http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/questioning-the-left.html#.VmTzZN8rJE4)
Expand upon the statement: "This new radicalism has made itself so irrelevant with respect to real politics that it ends up serving as a kind of cathartic space for the justifiable anxieties wrought by late capitalism further stabilizing its systemic and integrative power rather than disrupting it." What exactly do you mean by this? Also, couldn't some push back and argue that in many ways, this new radicalism is disruptive, as can be seen by the Black Bloc, activists fighting against the Keystone XL pipeline, and those who engage in direct action? This was not meant as a critique of those who participate in direct action. Direct action becomes the only means for combatting injustices when concrete political programs fade away. What is worrying is the way direct action has supplanted political strategy much in the sam

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