Download historical materialism k

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1NC vs. critical affs .............................................................................................................................................................................................. 2
LINKS:
Postmodern/ post-structuralist theory .............................................................................................................................................................. 6
Poststructuralist k of military ............................................................................................................................................................................. 7
Rejecting modernity ............................................................................................................................................................................................. 9
Hegemony.............................................................................................................................................................................................................11
Anti-capitalism ....................................................................................................................................................................................................12
Imperialism ..........................................................................................................................................................................................................14
Self-determination ..............................................................................................................................................................................................15
Revolution ............................................................................................................................................................................................................16
Terrorism ..............................................................................................................................................................................................................17
Identity ..................................................................................................................................................................................................................18
Race........................................................................................................................................................................................................................22
Race – History ......................................................................................................................................................................................................25
Historical examples ............................................................................................................................................................................................26
Post-postivism .....................................................................................................................................................................................................27
Language/discourse ............................................................................................................................................................................................28
China economy ....................................................................................................................................................................................................29
ALTERNATIVE SOLVENCY:
Language / identity .............................................................................................................................................................................................31
Undermines sovereingty ...................................................................................................................................................................................32
Statism ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................33
Race ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................34
Politics ....................................................................................................................................................................................................................35
Historical materialist epistemology good/alt solves ...................................................................................................................................36
2NC:
AT: Marxism bad turns .....................................................................................................................................................................................38
AT: Communism bad ........................................................................................................................................................................................39
AT: Global violence decreasing bc of cap ....................................................................................................................................................40
AT: humanism bad - Rationalism  holocaust .............................................................................................................................................41
AT: Humanism bad – Heidegger ......................................................................................................................................................................43
AT: Fem critique of hist mat .............................................................................................................................................................................44
AT: Fem – exclusion of gender link .................................................................................................................................................................47
AT: Alt kills environment ...................................................................................................................................................................................48
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The affirmative’s rejection of truth claims about the material role of actors and structures in
history conflates all knowledge with Enlightenment rationality-this ahistorical viewpoint
precludes the most relevant and politicizing modes of analysis
Palmer '96 - Canada Research Chair in Canadian Labour History and Canadian Studies @ Trent University (Bryan D., "Old
Positions/New Necessities: History, Class, and Marxist Metanarrative," in "In Defense of History," Ed. by E. Meiskins Wood &
John Foster, p.65-72, RG)
On one level this is not particularly new. But postmodernists/poststruc-turalists
have wrapped their antagonism to history in a series of
intellectually seductive tautologies which beg the fundamental questions of the historical process. Central to this outlook is a
refusal of post-Enlightenment systems of rational thought, which are reduced to a form—narration—and a substance—
accommodation of bourgeois rule—that relegates such "knowledge" to complicity with various oppressions .2 It is as though
poststructuralism, in an immense social reconstruction of the deep historical past, would like to see the entire eighteenth-century
Age of Revolution, which was, to be sure, a bourgeois project, jettisoned. In some staggering leap of idealism, it seeks to pole-vault
over the class contents and transformations of thought associated with 1776,1789,1792, and the Industrial Revolution, leapfrogging the
nineteenth century, the experience of colonial revolt, and the first workers' state (1917). Yet all of these occurred as historical
process and have rich narrative structures of meaning in the politics and culture of modern times , from Blake and Beethoven to Marx
and Munch to Veblen and Van Gogh. However incomplete the Enlightenment project, compromised as it was in its origins in the
bourgeois proclamation of egalitarianism as a property-based legal right rather than a social condition of fulfillment, it was a
revolutionary transcendence of the feudal order, which had been confined for centuries in castelike conceptions of social station
and the incarcerating thought of superstition, divinity, and absolutism. It was the purpose of Marxism, as the maturing
worldview of the emerging proletariat, to materialize and radicalize Enlightenment rationality , extending its potential not just to this or
that privileged sector of society, but to all of humanity. Just as Mary Wollstonecraft took the possibilities inherent in the Enlightenment's Pandora's box of
equality and extended her defense of the French Revolution and Thomas Paine's Rights of Man to a feminist articulation of the rights of woman, reaching well
past patriarchy's powerful presence in bourgeois thought and practice, so too did Marx build on Enlightenment idealism to construct its
oppositional challenge, historical materialism. Poststructuralism allows no such reading of distinctions and developments within
Enlightenment thought, condemning all post-Enlightenment modes of discourse as hopelessly compromised with the project of
subordination. Particularly suspect in current theory is the Enlightenment "metanarra-tive," with its "explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the
dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth."3 This obsolete discourse, a
supposed product of the modernist crisis of metaphysical philosophy, merely masks the disintegrations of such narratives, and their dispersal into the unstable
clouds of postmodernity's lofty discursiveness.4 Postmodernists/poststructuralists thus disavow, in their formalist and ultimatist
rejections, divergences of considerable, oppositional importance. They throw out Kant and Hegel as well as Marx, all of whom
rely on metanarratives of one sort or another, little consideration being given to the fundamental differences separating such
systems of thought. All states are simply states, and hence oppressive, an anarchist might argue (Down with the Bolsheviks!); all wars
are to be condemned, asserts the pacifist (We take no sides in Vietnam!); all metanarratives are suspect and compromised, there being
no master categories of explanatory authority, proclaims the post-structuralist (Away with all interpretive pests!). In the comment that
follows I concentrate on the Marxist "metanarra-tive," an unfulfilled project of radicalizing Enlightenment rationality that much contemporary theory refuses in
its repudiation of historical materialism. Marxist metanarrative is rejected, ironically, at precisely the historical moment that it is
critically necessary, its insistence on reading history in class terms, as a succession of identifiable structures and agencies
propelled by material interests, being fundamental to the interpretation of the movement from past to present, especially in
the context of contemporary life, where humanity is more and more connected in the global dimensions of exploitation and
oppression.5
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The alternative is historical materialism. Historical materialist analysis is epistemologically
superior to post-structuralism-it allows more effective analyses of power and the mobilization of
discourses
Lapointe, 2007 [Thierry. "Beyond an Historicism Without Subject: Agency and the Elusive Genealogies of State
Sovereignty" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association 48th Annual Convention, Feb
28, 2007 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p180176_index.html]
The primary objective of this volume is to bring social history back in IR in order to challenge its ahistorical and essentialist categories as much as its core
postulates. As this chapter has shown, it has also been Poststructuralist contention to challenge IR selfimage in shedding light in its theoretical role as
a practice of forgetting. Our contention is that despite their significant contributions in challenging the supremacist position of mainstream IR, their
method of analysis have impeded their capacity to think about IR in terms of historical process . As I have stressed in the first
section, its anti-foundationalist conception of power, its endeavour to analyse power relations on the basis of de-centring of
the human subject, and its own historical analysis which focuses solely on moment of epistemic ruptures without
adventuring into an explanation of its causes have left us with an image of “history without subject”. If the imperative of
thinking about social institutions—sovereignty—in dynamic terms necessitates that we abandon any attempt to fix
meanings into rigid definitions, as suggested by Walker, we have to bring back agency at the heart of our theorizing since it
is through its historically specific practices that human create and transform—albeit seldom as they have initially planed—
their environments. As I have sought to highlight in the second and third part of this chapter, HM may develop better and richer analysis in
thinking about the relationship between power relations, institutional and symbolic structures of enunciation in embedding
them in a wider geopolitical environment. However, as I have argued, the focus on discourses and symbolic structures without a
proper contextualization of the relations and dynamics of power they are an integral part of should be abandoned . Indeed,
such method of investigation tends to reify language in giving too much unity to rules/structures of enunciation, which also
tends to loose sight of the different ways in which different agents may mobilise discourses —make references to similar symbols
and used them in following the same (proper) rules of enunciation—in order to achieve quite distinctive sets of objectives and reproducing quite different
set of social practices.
Our critique turns all of their impacts. The alternative is a pre-requisite to an understanding of
power as contingent or the use of counterhegemonies as resistance
Palmer '96 - Canada Research Chair in Canadian Labour History and Canadian Studies @ Trent University (Bryan D., "Old
Positions/New Necessities: History, Class, and Marxist Metanarrative," in "In Defense of History," Ed. by E. Meiskins Wood &
John Foster, p.65-72, RG)
It is worth reiterating the obvious, since the obvious is precisely what poststructuralism/postmodernism often obfuscates, or even denies. Marxist
and
historical materialist criticism of contemporary theory and its insistence on the politics and historically central practices of class
do not rest only on a series of denials. The significance of the knowledge/power coupling, for instance, which is associated with
Foucault, is hardly alien to the Marxist method. Marxism has always been attentive to the relationship of ideas, dominance, and
social transformation. Representation, imagery, discourses, and texts can hardly be said to be understated in the theory and
practice of historical materialism, which has consistently grappled, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, with the problematized meaning of the
base-superstructure metaphor, most evident in the rich body of writing associated with British Marxist historians such as Christopher Hill, Edward Thompson,
Rodney Hilton, and V.G. Kiernan, and the tradition of histo-ricized literary criticism associated with Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton.6 Finally, to claim
that Marxism is a metanarrative of explanatory importance, resting unambiguously on the causality of productive forces and the
determinative boundaries set by fundamentally economic relations, such as class, does not necessitate refusing the significance
of other points of self-identification, such as race and gender. What separates Marxism's metanarrative from postmodernist incredulity of all
master categories is not, however, this or that particular. Rather, there is a critical parting of the analytic seas in the two traditions' approaches
to historical context as a material force, within which all struggles for emancipation and all acts of subordination take place.
Poststructuralism/post-modernism sees history as an authorial creation, a conjuring up of the past to serve the discursive
content of the present. Thus the past can only be textually created out of the imperatives of the ongoing instance. In its insistence that history be
contextualized in the material world of possibilities of the past, rather than cut adrift to float freely in the cross-currents of
attending to its obscured social relations and situating those corners of suppressed history within the larger ensemble of
possibilities that were something more than the ideological fiction of the established archival record, attentive as it generally is to
the instinctual preservationism of power. Moreover, Marxism's metanarrative tries to be true—believing that such a process can be located, just as it
can be obscured or distorted—to the actors of the past, whatever side of the class divide their feet touch down upon. Thus, a major historiographical difference
separates the essentially Marxist understanding of class formation, struggle, and consciousness evident in E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working
Class (1963) and Gareth Stedman Jones's poststructurally inclined reading of Chartism in The Languages of Class (1983). Thompson, whose political practice and
theory ran headlong into Stalinist and mainstream social democratic containments, explores the opaque nooks and crannies of English popular radicalism,
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uncovering an underground insurrectionary tradition that flew in the face of constituted authority in the opening decades of the nineteenth century, as well as
standing in stark revolutionary contrast to the stolid constitutionalism of later generations of working-class reformers and their Fabian historians. This is a long
way from Stedman Jones, whose politics of the 1980s had been formed within the conservatizing and hostile drift of the Labour Party away from the working
class. He reads Chartism's successes against the politics of mass upheaval in the 1830s and 1840s, seeing in the movement's ideas and actions not the class
mobilizations of the time but the hangover of an eighteenth-century politics that somehow distanced itself from the class actualities of the historical context.
There is no doubt that Thompson's Making is driven by a commitment to the revolutionary aspirations of the working class, past and present, but that does not
undermine his text's authority precisely because it is, for all of its dissident commitments, engaged with the complexities of the material world of the early
nineteenth century. Stedman Jones, in contrast, searches for ways to distance himself from the specificities of Chartism's times. The supreme irony is that the
"present" of Stedman Jones's text is nothing more than an ideological adaptation to Thatcher's Britain, a displacement of the past that paints a major history of
working-class mobilization into a derivative corner of denigration and denial. Thompson's "present," in striking contrast, is a moment of revolution thwarted, a
"heroic" challenge that, whatever its failures, remains significant to both the history of the working class and the class content of contemporary left politics.7 It
is when postmodernist/poststructuralist readings of history are scrutinized to see how metanarrative is suppressed, resulting
inevitably in a particular structuring of past, present, and future, that the costs and content of abandoning metanarrative are
most evident. When the French Revolution is interpreted, not as a contest between aristocracy and bourgeoisie, mediated by the
involvement of the sans-culottes, but as the unfolding symbolic will of a population galvanized as much by imagery as political
principle, the condescending class dismissiveness of contemporary histo-riographic fashion is strikingly evident.8 An ironic
consequence of postcolo-nial deconstructive writing, with its understandable refusal of the Orientalist metanarrative, and its unfortunate
textualization of imperialist plunder and indigenous resistance, is the further silencing of those marginalized "others," whose
differences are celebrated, but whose umbilical link to class formation on a global sale is twisted in the obscured isolations of
cultures and countries.9 In the words of David Harvey: Postmodernism has us accepting the reifications and partitionings, actually celebrating the
activity of masking and cover-up, all the fetishisras of locality, place, or social grouping, while denying the kind of meta-theory
which can grasp the political-economic processes (money flows, international divisions of labour, financial markets, and the like) that are
becoming ever more universalizing in their depth, intensity and reach over daily life. 10 Postmodernistic antagonism to metanarrative thus
carries with it a particular price tag, one in which the significance of class is almost universally marked down. That this process is embedded less in theory and
more in the material politics of the late twentieth century, with their "retreat from class,"11 a withdrawal hastened by new offensives on the part of capital and
the state, and conditioned by "actually existing socialism's" Stalinist deformations and ultimate collapse, is evident in one historian's confident statement. Patrick
Joyce claims that British history, once explained in terms of class struggle, must now be regarded differently: There is a powerful sense in which class may be
said to have "fallen." Instead of being a master category of historical explanation, it has become one term among many, sharing rough equality with these others
(which is what I meant by the "fall" of class). The reasons for this are not hard to find. In Britain, economic decline and restructuring have led to the
disintegration of the old manual sector of employment, and of what was, mistakenly, seen to be a "traditional" working class. The rise of the right from the
1970s, and the decline of the left, together with that of the trade unions, pointed in a similar direction to that of economic change, towards a loosening of the
hold class and work-based categories had, not only on the academic mind, but also on a wider public. Changes going on in Britain were mirrored elsewhere, but
the greatest change of all was the disintegration of world communism, and with it the retreat of intellectual Marxism.12 To "deconstruct" such a statement is to
expose the transparent crudeness of its content, which bears a disappointing likeness to Time magazine. Even if trends in the 1990s were unambiguously of the
sort pointed to by Joyce, it is most emphatically not the case that the analytic meanings of this period of supposed change could be transferred wholesale to a
past society quite unlike it—what possible relevance can the fall of a degenerated and deformed set of workers' states (the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, etc.)
have on our exploration of the tangible class composition of early nineteenth-century society? Is it not rather unwholesome for supposed intellectuals to be bartering
their interpretive integrity in the crass coin of political fashion, their supposedly pristine ideas dripping with the thoroughly partisan politics of a particular
historical period? Joyce's words, ironically, confirm rather than undermine historical materialism. As Joyce alludes to the "fall" of class as a product of global
restructuring, trade union and left defeat, the implosion of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and the rise of the right, what are we to see but the actual
confirmation of "intellectual Marxism?" Did not Marx write that, "The ideas of the ruling class are in eveiy epoch the ruling ideas," and
suggest that at moments of "enthusiastic striving for innovation"—which is certainly a characteristic of the postmodern—such
ideas might well result in a "more deeply rooted domination of the old routine?"13 Historical materialism would suggest that there is a
profound difference between the trajectory of political economy in one epoch, and its attendant ideologies, and the actual social
relations of production and contestation in another historical period. Joyce collapses the two. In doing so he does disservice, again, to both
past and present. For while his simplified catalogue-like listing of the onward march of left defeat has some resonance in terms of contemporary political
economic development, Joyce conveniently understates the presence of other dimensions. His accounting is one-sided and distortingly one-dimensional. Yes, to
be sure, the Stalinist economies and their ruling castes have, outside of Cuba and (less so) China, taken a headlong plunge into the privatization despotisms of
the 1990s, which Marxists from the Trotskyist tradition have been predicting since the publication of The Revolution Betrayed (1937). Against those who saw in the
bureaucratic grip of Stalinism a fundamental, if flawed, blockade against the restoration of market relations, Trotsky wrote: "In reality a backslide to capitalism is
wholly possible."14 Class politics were dealt a severe blow in the capitalist counterrevolutions and Stalinist implosions of the post-1989 years. Nevertheless, there
is no indication that this has lessened the importance of class as an agent of social transformation and human possibility (a master category of metanarrative).
Indeed, it will be the revival of class mobilizations that will retrieve for socialized humanity what was lost over the course of the 1990s in Russia and elsewhere,
or there will be no gains forced from the already all-too-apparent losses of recent capitalist restorationism. Almost a decade of tyrannical Yeltsin-like Great
Russianism and the barbarism of small "nation" chauvinisms should have made it apparent where the politics of national identity lead. Class, as both a
category of potential and becoming and an agency of activism, has thus reasserted its fundamental importance. More and more
of humanity now faces the ravages of capitalism's highly totalizing, essen-tializing, and homogenizing impulses, and these are
currently unleashed with a tragic vengeance as even the once degenerate and deformed workers' states look to the ideological
abstractions of the world market for sustenance rather than relying on proletarian powers. Mass strikes now routinely challenge capital
and its states, from France to Canada, from Korea to Brazil. Once-Soviet workers, who saw socialism sour in the stale breath of generations of Stalinism, are
voting Communist again, whatever the problematic connotations, in the 1990s. At the end of 1995, polls in the advanced capitalist economies of the West
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almost universally locate society's major discontents in the material failings of a social order that has visibly widened the gap between "haves" and "have-nots,"
undermining the mythical middle class and depressing the living conditions of those working poor fortunate enough to retain some hold on their jobs. There are
no answers separate from those of class struggle, however much this metanarrative of materially structured resistance intersects with special oppressions. Class
has not so much fallen as it has returned. It had never, of course, gone anywhere. Identified as simply one of many plural subjectivities, class has
actually been obscured from analytic and political view by poststructuralism's analytic edifice, erected at just the moment that
the left is in dire need of the clarity and direction that class, as a category and an agency, a structure and a politics, can provide.
The legacy of Marxism in general, and of historical materialism in particular, is to challenge and oppose this obfuscation, providing an
alternative to such material misreadings, building an oppositional worldview that can play some role in reversing the class
struggle defeats and weakening of the international workers' movement that has taken place as capital and the state have been in
the ascendant over the course of the last thirty years. Those thinkers who have failed to see the transitory nature of
postmodernism/poststructuralism, many of them academic fair-weather friends of Marxism, and have instead invested so much in
recent proclamations of their discursively constructed identity politics , may well be among the last to acknowledge the
blunt revival of class in the face of contemporary capitalism's totalizing materiality . They will no doubt find some variant
of "difference" to cling to, the better to avoid the necessity of engaging subjectivity and its oppressive objectification under
capitalism, where class, in its singular capacity to assimilate other categories of being and congeal varieties of power, rules and is ruled, a
metanarrative of exploitation within which all identities ultimately find their level of subordination/domination . This is indeed an
old way of looking at the world. But postmodernism/post-structuralism notwithstanding, all that is old is not always without value. As
one "Old Man" of Marxism, a lifelong defender of radicalized Enlightenment values, once proclaimed, in a maxim particularly suited to the linked fortunes of
materialism's past, present, and future: "Those who cannot defend old positions will never conquer new ones."
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Their postmodernism is useless absent a concrete view at historical context
Cox '95 - emeritus prof. of pol. sci. @ York Univ. (Robert W., "Critical Political Economy," in "International Political
Economy: Understanding Global Disorder," Ed. by Bjorn Hette, p.31-32, RG)
First of all, there
is no theory in itself, no theory independent of a concrete historical context. Theory is the way the mind works to
understand the reality it confronts. It is the self-consciousness of that mind, the awareness of how facts experienced are
perceived and organized so as to be understood. Theory thus follows reality in the sense that it is shaped by the world of
experience. But it also precedes the making of reality in that it orients the minds of those who by their actions reproduce or
change that reality.
Theory is always for someone and for some purpose. We need to know the context in which theory is produced and used; and we need to
know whether the aim of the user is to maintain the existing social order or to change it. These two purposes lead to two kinds of theory.
What I shall call 'problem-solving' theory takes the world as given (and on the whole as good) and provides guidance to correct
dysfunctions or specific problems that arise within this existing order . The other kind of theory, which I shall call 'critical' (although I do not
thereby affiliate with any particular tendencies that have heretofore adopted that word) is concerned with how the existing order came into being and what the
possibilities are for change in that order. The first is concerned with specific reforms aimed at the maintenance of existing structures, the 'second with exploring
the potential for structural change and the construction of strategies for change.
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Poststructuralism’s characterization of the international system by inequalities in military power
overlooks historical materialist conditions underlying militarism and war.
Lapointe, 2007 [Thierry. "Beyond an Historicism Without Subject: Agency and the Elusive Genealogies of State
Sovereignty" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association 48th Annual Convention, Feb
28, 2007 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p180176_index.html]
It becomes clearer, in this context, that hierarchical
relations of power in the international system may not solely rest on “objective”
inequalities in military might as has been contended. As critical approaches generally argue, these hierarchical relations are
themselves shaped through and conditioned by various institutionalised structures of power—material and discursive—that
reproduce social relations of domination and subordination between human subjects across time and space. The question of their
historical conditions of emergence and transformation appears to be the fundamental one for any critical approach in IR that seeks to avoid what John M.
Hobson calls the fallacy of tempo-centrism and chronofetishism (Hobson 2002). Critical scholarship remains deeply divided on the way in which they
problematize the relation between power and sovereignty. How to problematise the historical conditions of emergence of discourses
and practices of state sovereignty remains a question that still needs to be debated . In this regard, it exists a fundamental line of
fracture dividing Poststructuralism and Historical Materialism in their respective ways to theorise the articulation of power
relations/dynamics of power with social discourses and social institutions across time and space . This paper seeks to critically
explore the way in which Post-Structuralist scholars in IR have approached the question of the historicity of state sovereignty. While acknowledging their
contributions in critiquing the a-historical and essentialist foundations of mainstream IR scholarship, it will be argued that the central weakness of
Poststructuralism is that by understanding formation and transformation in state sovereignty as expression of shifting
discursive paradigms, it tends to evacuate the specific, uneven and differentiated social relations that create the historical
conditions for such discourses to emerge. It will be argued that Poststructuralism magnifies the internal coherence of an epistemic
paradigm—discursive rules of an historical era—and downplays the variety of ways in which specific discourses can be mobilized to
produce, reproduce and transform different sets of social relations of power by human agents across space in a given
historical period. Thus, I argue that Poststructuralism eschews an analysis of the historical process of formation and
transformation of forms of knowledge/social power in relations with differentiated forms of institutionalized social
practices.
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Poststructuralism’s flawed epistemology denies empirical, historical, or cause-and-effect
investigations into IR
Lapointe, 2007 [Thierry. "Beyond an Historicism Without Subject: Agency and the Elusive Genealogies of State
Sovereignty" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association 48th Annual Convention, Feb
28, 2007 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p180176_index.html]
Thirdly, since the human subject is understood as a mere relay in an endless cobweb of power relations, and given that as such he/she is continuously in a
position of being object and subject of power, Poststructuralists have reached the verdict that the human subject must be decentred
from our theorizing (Ibid:26; Campbell: 5; Bartelson)5. Poststructuralists explicitly embrace Foucault’s stance on the imperative of forsaking a
theorizing of Power based on an analysis of subject’s intentionality (Ibid: 25; Bartelson 1995: 54-58; Kennedy 1979: 274). The analytical
framework that is put forward eschews the assumption that power is something that dominant groups or class of human
subjects use to subordinate others to their will or by constraining their range of available strategies of actions (Bartelson 1995:
49-53). It must rather proceed from the opposite assumption, which asserts that Power imposes itself on all subjects with the
end result of continuously producing them as objects. This strategic model of power as a cobweb of actions upon actions
involves an explicit retreat from theorizing social dynamics based on a problematizing of the historically specific ways in
which agents develop strategies of power/action to ensure their social reproduction within an institutional context not of
their own choosing. In that sense, Poststructuralism celebrates the quite problematic notion of history without subjects (Bartelson
1995: chap.3; Giddens 1993: 232). Lastly, the imperative of decentring the subject—i.e. of developing an ‘history with no subject’—implies forsaking the
pretension of “total history” that “(…) attempts to discover the overriding unity or central principle which gives coherence to a civilization or period”
(Kennedy1979: 272). As far as language is not merely a mirror of reality for it is constitutive of our perception/experience of it, evidences of the past do
not speak for themselves outside the specific discursive formation in which they are an integral part of. Thus, it has been rightly argued that discursive and
non-discursive are not discrete “realms” or “spheres” that can be grasped independently from another (Campbell 1998: 6). Quoting Laclau and Mouffe,
Campbell stresses that “[w]hat is denied is not that… objects exist externally to thought, but the rather different assertion that they could constitute
themselves as objects outside of any discursive condition of emergence” (Cambell 1998: 6). Even though scholars that have adopted such a stance claim to
reject the idea of a priority of the “discursive” over the “non-discursive” since one can not exist in abstraction of the other, the methodology developed to
cope with the relation between Power and Knowledge often betray an implicit emphasis on the first term of the equation. Indeed the methods of inquiry
that has been adopted to deal with this problem— archaeologically and genealogically—ascribe a pivotal role to discourse in the theorizing of IR6.
Archaeology has been used as a method to delineate the conditions of emergence of discourses of truth and the specific forms through which knowledges
are constituted across time and space (Foucault 1966: 13; Shiner 1982: 288). The inquiry into the conditions of possibility of the positivity of discourses
has involved delineating their unity—their regularity—in time and space. The concept of episteme7 encapsulates the idea of unity of discourses in a given
time/space. It is defined as :“(…) the totality of relations which can be discovered, for a given period, between sciences when one analyses them at the
level of discursive regularities” (Foucault 1972: 191). This is why archaeology focuses exclusively on texts and proceeds through examplificatory history.
Genealogy has been developed as a stepping stone to go beyond the archaeological focus on the discursive—the inner functioning, the “system of
constraints”, of systems of representation—approached more or less independently from the “non-discursive” (Smart 1982: 128; Palmer 1990: 26-27).
Genealogy seeks to delineate the relations of power that make possible the positivity of systems of representation8. It seeks to problematise the way in
which a specific economy of discourse is made possible by a constellation of power relations which arise randomly from regionally dispersed sets of social
institutions to eventually form a power mechanism (dispositif de pouvoir) (Foucault 1975; 1976; See also Brenner 1994). As Shiner points out:
“Genealogy is the analysis of how one constellation of power-knowledge relations is displaced by another; it attends to the breaks that punctuate history”
(Shiner 1982: 387). If archaeologists and genealogists aim to delineate, in turn, the conditions of existence of the inner
functioning of an economy of discourse, and the constellation of power relations and institutions upon which it rests, they
nevertheless categorically deny the possibility of achieving causal explanations as to how and why they are formed and
transformed over time (Bartelson 1995; Seigel 1990: 279). In other words, while it stresses discontinuity in time and space, it eschews
explanations of the causes of change. The historical process whereby human subjects are involved in the process of
“making their own history in a context not of their own choosing”, to paraphrase Marx, is taken out of the realm of possible
theoretical investigation. It thereby offers a mode of inquiry that rests upon the primacy of historical contingency. In
decentring the human subject from their theorizing of Power/Knowledge—in reducing the human subject to the function of
a relay or a symptom of power relations—some critiques have argued that Poststructuralism have not totally managed to
brake the fetters of functionalism and to a certain form of “back door determinism” that have plagued for so long social
sciences in general (Brenner 1994 ; Palmer 1990; Giddens 1985; 1993: 232; Thompson 1978). This conspicuous absence of human agency
in Poststructuralist theorizing of “[…] power and knowledge as constructed discursively, flowing out of and penetrating all
realms” (Palmer 1990:27) can easily be found in the forms of theoretical interventions it has given rise to in the field of IR. In
their two most significant interventions in furthering critical thinking in IR—which we will be outlined in turn in what follows—Poststructuralist scholars
have avoided to think about the historically specific political economy—and complexes of social relations in which human subjects are enmeshed—
underpinning the formation and transformations of the Power/Knowledge “nexus”. I will address their contributions in turn in order to highlight some of
their strengths, but more to the point what I consider to be the fundamental weaknesses of their analysis: the reification of discourse; a problematic (or
conspicuous lack of a) role ascribed to human agency in their contextualizing of evolving meanings taken by state sovereignty in different political
discourses; an undifferentiated conception of social power and institutions across time and space; and the emphasis on historical contingency in lieu of
historical specificity to explain discontinuities in the organization of political life.
ENDI 2010
Historical Materialism K
9
Wave 1
LINK: REJECTING MODERNITY
Rejecting modernity and calculative thought lumps together capitalism’s distinct social relations
and dehistoricizes the specific conditions enabling racism, colonialism, and the Holocaust
Malik '96 - senior visting fellow at the Department of Political, International and Policy Studies at the University of Surrey
(Kenan, "The Mirror of Race: Postmodernism and the Celebration of Difference," in "In Defense of History," Ed. by E.
Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.127-131, RG)
By conflating the social relations of capitalism with the intellectual and technological progress of “modernity,” the product of
the former can be laid at the door of the latter. The specific problems created by capitalist social relations become
dehistoricized. In postructuralist discourse racial theory, colonialism, or the Holocaust are not investigated in their specificity, as
products of distinctive tendencies within capitalist society, but are all lumped together as the general consequence of
“modernity.” In this way the positive aspects of “modern” society – its invocation of reason, its technological advancements, its
ideological commitment to equality and universalism – are denigrated while its negative aspects – the inability of capitalism to
overcome social divisions, the propensity to treat large sections of humanity as “inferior” or “subhuman,” the contrast between
technological advance and moral turpitude, the tendencies towards barbarism – are seen as inevitable or natural.
ENDI 2010
Historical Materialism K
10
Wave 1
LINK: SOVEREIGNTY
Post-structuralist rejections of states, the IR system, and diplomacy obscure the role of
sovereignty as a socially and historically situated force—no epistemologically relevant analysis
can exist absent an historically materialist approach
Halliday ’94 [Fred, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, ‘A Necessary Encounter:
Historical Materialism and International Relations’ in Rethinking International Relations (Basingstoke: Macmillan), 47-73]
What these broad concepts of the 'mode of production' and the 'social formation' did entail was that analysis of any area of
human acitivity had to be seen in this socio-economic context, and not in abstraction from it. There is therefore no state, no
belief, no conflict, no power in general, or independent of this context. By extension, there is no 'international system', or any
component activity, be this war or diplomacy, abstracted from the mode of production . Indeed, International Relations is the
study of the relations not between states but between social formations. When this insight is applied to the issues of
international relations, a definite shift of focus becomes visible. Thus the state is no longer seen as an embodiment of
national interest or judicial neutrality, but rather of the interests of a specific society or social formation, defined by
its socio-economic structure. How far classes control the state, or are separated from it, has been one of the main issues of dispute within the field.
Sovereignty equally becomes not a -60- generic legal concept but the sovereignty of specific social forces. Its history is that
of forms of social power and attendant legitimisation within a formation. Security is removed from the distinct
theoretical sphere in which it has been placed and becomes the security of specific social groups and for specific
socioeconomic reasons. The history of the system is also seen in another light: the modern inter-state system emerged in a context of the spread of
capitalism across the globe, and the subjugation of pre-capitalist societies. This socio-economic system has underpinned both the character
of individual states and of their relations with each other: no analysis of international relations is possible without
reference to capitalism, the social formations it generated and the world system they comprise . 27 The second central theme,
embodied in the very term for the paradigm itself, is that of history, and historical determination. In the first instance, Marx argued that history influenced
present behaviour. In the phrase he used on one occasion: 'the tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare upon the minds of the living'. But
it meant something more than this: Marx argued that the events or character of any society could only be seen in their historical context -- one had to ask
how the object of study came about, what the influences, of past events were, and what the impact of the past in shaping the current situation might be. 28
Just as he argued that society had to be seen in its socio-economic context, so he believed that the conditions of generation and a recognition of their
contingent location, were central to any analysis. To understand contemporary capitalist society, one had to see how it originated and what the problems
and tendencies conditioned by the past were, how it limited what people thought of as being their options, and led them to be influenced, or wholly
determined, by passions, illusions, identifications derived usually unwittingly from the past.
ENDI 2010
Historical Materialism K
11
Wave 1
LINK: HEGEMONY
Hegemony creates a false universality based on material dominance and falsely conflates this
dominance with the natural course of history to create a coherent vision of world order
Cox '95 - emeritus prof. of pol. sci. @ York Univ. (Robert W., "Critical Political Economy," in "International Political
Economy: Understanding Global Disorder," Ed. by Bjorn Hette, p.43-44, RG)
The question of consumption models is closely linked to the question of hegemony. In the terms I have used, an indicator of hegemony
would be a preponderant ontology that tends to absorb or subordinate all others. One intersubjective understanding of the world excludes all
others and appears to be universal. It is often said that although United States economic power in the world has experienced a
relative decline, the American way of life has never been a more powerful model. An American-derived 'business civilization', to
use Susan Strange's term, characterizes the globalizing elites; and American pop culture has projected an image of the good life that is
a universal object of emulation — a universalized model of consumption. This constitutes a serious obstacle to the rethinking of
social practices so as to be more compatible with the biosphere.
A counterchallenge to the universalizing of American pop culture is the affirmation of other cultural identities. The most evident, and the most
explicitly negating of American culture, is in Islam; but other cultures are also affirming alternative world-views. The hegemonies of the past
and present have universalized from one national culture or one tradition of civilization. A post-hegemonic world order would
no longer be the global reach of one particular form of civilization. It would contain a plurality of visions of world order.
In order to avoid such an order lapsing into mutual incomprehension and conflict, it would be necessary to move beyond a position of pure relativism in order
to achieve a kind of supra-intersubjectivity that would provide a bridge across the distinct and separate subjectivities of the different coexisting civilizations.
These various traditions of civilization are not monolithic and fixed. They develop dialectically like any historical structure.
Change may come both from internal contradictions — for example, gendered power relations and social inequities can be sources
of conflict and mutation in all cultures. Change can also come from borrowings and reactions to the practices of other cultures
in a world that is becoming ever more closely knit. Selective adaptation rather than homogenization would characterize change
in post-hegemonic pluralism.
ENDI 2010
Historical Materialism K
12
Wave 1
LINK: ANTI-CAPITALISM
Traditional revolutions are deeply conservatising—a strategy based on consciousness and
counter-hegemonies derived from the relationship of subjects to history is necessary to combine
political, economic, and ideological struggle
McNally '96 - prof. of pol. sci. @ York Univ. (David, "Language, History, and Class Struggle," in "In Defense of History:
Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda," Ed. by E. Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.36-38, RG)
The contradictory character of working class consciousness is a highly dynamic phenomenon. To begin with, there is no
homogeneous consciousness within the working class. Among a single group of workers, some will veer towards near-total acceptance
of the ideas of bosses, supervisors, heads of state, and so on, while others will tends towards an almost thorough-going
opposition to such figures. Between these two positions one will find the majority of workers. But their consciousness will not be fixed. Great
events—mass strikes and demonstrations, union drives, and so on—coupled with the organized propagation of oppositional
ideas can contribute to significant radicalizations; while defeats, setbacks, and the decline of oppositional discourse can have a
deeply conservatizing effect.
But whatever the existing state of affairs at any one point in time, Gramsci is clear that the contradictory nature of working class consciousness
cannot be eliminated. It is an intrinsic feature of capitalist society that the ruling class tries to win ideological consent to its rule
(and that such efforts are usually successful to a significant extent), and that the life experiences of workers, their resistance to exploitation
and domination, generate practices which do not fit with the dominant ideas and which, in fact, entail an implicit worldview that
challenges these ideas. Indeed, one of the crucial functions of a revolutionary socialist party for Gramsci is that it try to draw out
and systematize the worldview which is implicit in such practices of resistance . This view enables Gramsci to approach the question of
revolutionary politics in terms of the contradictions which pervade the experience, activity, and language of oppressed members of society.
Revolutionary politics begins, be argues, with the common sense of the working class. This common sense contains all these, largely implicit,
oppositional attitudes. And since socialism, as Marx insisted, is the self-emancipation of the working class, revolutionary ideas cannot be some foreign discourse
injected into the working class movement. On the contrary, the connection between revolutionary ideas and the working class must be
organic; it is the task of Marxists to show that socialism is the logical and consistent outgrowth of practices of working class
resistance. The revolutionary party must thus be a living part of the working class movement; it must share their experiences
and speak their language. At the same time, it must also be the force that generalizes experiences of opposition into an increasingly
systematic program, the force which challenges the traditional and dominant ideas inherited by workers (patriotism, sexism, racism,
etc.) by showing how they conflict with the interests and aspirations implicit in resistance to exploitation and oppression . Contrary
to certain idealist renderings of Gramsci which have made the rounds in recent years, he is insistent that the building of such a mass counterhegemonic movement does not take place on a strictly cultural plane or as some rarefied intellectual process of ideological
dissent. Counter-hegemonies, he argues, are created through political struggle, movements in which economic resistance and
ideological combat go hand in hand. For the oppressed, in other words, "critical understanding of self takes place therefore through a
struggle of political hegemonies'" (p. 333). And "political parties," he insists, operate as the "historical laboratory" of counterhegemonic worldviews; they are "the crucibles where the unification of theory and practice, understood as a real historical
process, takes place" (p. 335).
ENDI 2010
Historical Materialism K
13
Wave 1
LINK: ANTI-CAPITALISM
The convergence of the state and market is the root cause of global capitalism
van Apeldoorn 2004 [Bastiann, prof of political science at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, “Theorizing the transnational: a
historical materialist approach, Journal of International Relations and Development, 2004, 7, (142–176), ebscohost]
It is from this perspective that we may also understand the development of transnational relations into relations of capitalist production.The
world
market itself generated transnational commercial and financial networks enabling the formation of transnational social
forces.How ever, it was only when, expanding from the English state-society complex outwards, capitalism transformed the
world market into a capitalist market based on the imperative of continuous expansion and deepening that capitalist social
relations started to develop across the boundaries of the newly established territorial units called states . It was therefore only
on the basis of this capitalist world market — and the internationalization drive of capital it induced — that a process of
transnational (capitalist) class formation could develop (class relations — and hence class formation — presupposing production relations).
The coming into existence of a transnational bourgeoisie went beyond earlier transnational structures of socialization inasmuch as it created a transnational
space for the exercise and reproduction of capitalist class rule.Such a transnational space first arose in the 18th century in the form of what Van der Pijl
(1998: especially chapter 3) has called the Lockean heartland, formed through the expansion of the British state-society complex to include parts of North
America and other regions through settler colonies, and in its commercial and political expansion confronting (sometimes resulting in war) so-called
Hobbesian contender states.It is thus that through this expansion we can witness — though via many crisis and fits and starts — a
gradual widening of the area of state-society complexes subject to the imposition of capitalist discipline and a concomitant
(deepening) commodification of social relations. It was with the industrial revolution that this expansionary dynamic of capitalism set in for
good.Thi s development reached a new climax when in the 19th century under the Pax Britannica the internationalization of capital deepened and the
liberal internationalist fraction of a Anglo-Saxon bourgeoisie became more and more cosmopolitan in outlook.
Questioning economics without attention to the relationship between structures and actors in the
political economy fails
Cox '95 - emeritus prof. of pol. sci. @ York Univ. (Robert W., "Critical Political Economy," in "International Political
Economy: Understanding Global Disorder," Ed. by Bjorn Hette, p.32-36, RG)
The next question is: change in what? What is political economy? I suggest that political
economy is different from both political science and
economics as they are commonly understood. We sometimes hear international political economy defined as the politics of
international economic relations. This suggests an amalgam or rapprochement of the two fields.
Yet there is a methodological difference between political science and economics, on the one hand, and political economy , as I
would like to define it, on the other. Political science and economics are actor-oriented studies. They take off from some rather fixed assumptions
about the framework or parameters within which actions take place — the institutional framework of politics, or the concept of the market.
Within these parameters, they can often give quite precise answers to specific questions. Political scientists can analyse political processes within existing
structures and possibly give useful advice to politicians about how to gain or retain office or what policy options are feasible in terms of public support.
Economists use the relationships derived from the rather abstract concept of a market to predict outcomes under different
conditions. Both provide examples of the application of problem-solving theory.
Political economy, by contrast, is concerned with the historically constituted frameworks or structures within which political and
economic activity takes place. It stands back from the apparent fixity of the present to ask how the existing structures came into
being and how they may be changing, or how they may be induced to change. In this sense, political economy is critical theory.
Historical structures
There is, of course, no absolute distinction between actors and structures. It is not a question of sacrificing the one or the other. Structures
are formed by collective human activity over time. Structures, in turn, mould the thoughts and actions of individuals. Historical change is to be thought
of as the reciprocal relationship of structures and actors. There is a difference, however, between thinking of this actor—structure relationship as
a process configuring structural change, and thinking of actions as confined within fixed, given structures in the manner of problem-solving theory.
ENDI 2010
Historical Materialism K
14
Wave 1
LINK: IMPERIALISM
Confining discussions of capitalism in IR to imperialism is myopic
Halliday ’94 [Fred, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, ‘A Necessary Encounter:
Historical Materialism and International Relations’ in Rethinking International Relations (Basingstoke: Macmillan), 47-73]
If realism can detach itself from its cousins -- social Darwinism, racism and Machtpolitik -- so can an interpretive Marxism
be distinguished from its instrumental companion. Such a distinction involves above all an examination of what Marx and Engels themselves
wrote, and of the work of independent Marxists who, throughout the Leninist and orthodox communist domination of the subject, sought to provide an
alternative interpretation to that of the dogmatists. 1 Just as in sociology, history and other social sciences this independent, broadly 'Western', Marxist
current has been able to establish a recognised and analytically fruitful body of work, so there exists the potential for it to do so in the realm of IR. It is this
claim which the following chapter seeks to explore, with regard to a potential interaction of International Relations and the Marxist tradition. Despite
many decades of potential interaction, the establishment of a relationship between historical materialism and the discipline of international relations is still
at an initial stage. At various stages in the history of the discipline, there have been surveys of the implications of Marxism for International Relations in
which already constituted points of contact have been identified. 2 Since the 1970s a number of writers have advocated further theoretical work, be it the
elaboration of a general Marxist approach to International Relations, or the development of domains in which the International Relations discipline, as
presently constituted, can strengthen its analytic endeavours by drawing on specific elements within historical materialism. 3 In an innovative and
judicious study, Andrew Linklater has examined the implications for IR of 'critical' Marxism, while stressing the constraints which the international
system imposes on any emancipatory project. 4 However, in contrast to such other areas of the social sciences as -48- sociology, economics or history,
historical materialism has never occupied a secure place within International Relations; there are many who seek to limit its application, be this explicitly,
as was the case with those who denied its relevance, such as Martin Wight and Hans Morgenthau, or implicitly, by relegating it to a minor place, or by
presenting it in a selective interpretation, such that its pertinence is constricted. 5 This is achieved above all by blocking out the main theoretical questions
of Marxism. The fact that IR is almost wholly silent on what for Marxism is the central category of modern social analysis,
namely capitalism, is itself indicative. Equally, as discussed in Chapter 8, the degree to which the Cold War embodied not just
competing strategic interests, but different socio-economic ones, has been ignored in most IR literature. The sources of this
failure lie on both sides of the relationship. International Relations as a discipline has arisen primarily within British and American universities, and as a
theoretical derivative of other disciplines in the social sciences. Neither institutional context, nor theoretical influence, have been ones in which Marxism
has had a prominent or generally recognised place. On the other hand, historical materialism has not itself developed the theoretical focus
needed for a comprehensive and generally intelligible contribution to International Relations. Much of what was produced in the
name of Marxism, by communist regimes or those following them, was vulgar polemic, a repetition of certain standard, formulaic, readings of Marxism
itself and concentrated around a justification of political interests. The confining of Marxist discussion of the international to the
question of 'imperialism', and a one-sided and banal interpretation of the phenomenon at that, was as much the responsibility of those
espousing Marxism as of those opposed to it. 6 Those who, within the independent currents of historical materialism, have sought to elaborate a
Marxist approach to International Relations have laboured under the theoretical difficulties that confront those who seek to analyse politics, and
ideological factors, within the confines of specific states themselves.
ENDI 2010
Historical Materialism K
15
Wave 1
LINK: SELF-DETERMINATION
Historical materialist analysis shows that self-determination serves as a shield for imperial
actions, justifying violent imperialist invocation
Knox ’10 - MPhil/PhD Candidate London School of Economics (Robert J., “The Degradation of the International Legal
Order? Th e Rehabilitation of Law and the Possibility of Politics, Bill Bowring,” Historical Materialism Volume 18, Issue 1,
EBSCO, RG)
It is not simply the case that Bowring underestimates the degree to which rival positions are genuine attempts at coherence and, as such, all equally ‘legal’. It is
also the case that the tenets of Bowring’s own position – revolutionary conservatism – have, at various times, been used to legitimate and promote imperial
actions on the world-stage. A particularly useful example in this respect is self-determination. Whilst Bowring is certainly right to note the
important role self-determination played in anticolonial struggle, he is curiously silent as to its invocation by various imperialist
powers. Th e most obvious example of this in recent times was the Russian invasion of Georgia under the rationale (amongst others) of
defending the right to self-determination of Abkhazia’s ethnic Russians. Th is itself is widely viewed as a response to Kosovo’s
unilateral declaration (and the attendant support of various world-powers) of independence, itself justifi ed in terms of selfdetermination.16 One can fi nd further examples of this in Bolivia, where those rich regions led by the Right threatened to secede17 and in claims of
Israel’s defenders that its actions can be justifi ed owing to the need for the self-determination of the Jewish people.18 As Tony
Cliff noted, Israel frequently appealed to the idea that it was a ‘loyal little Jewish Ulster’ in order to gain support.19 Indeed, the right of humanitarian
intervention which Bowring decries has its modern genesis in the right of ‘pro-democratic intervention’ articulated during the
Cold War, which was itself rooted in arguments from self-determination.20 Early on in the book, Bowring attempts to cut this off , arguing
that: Intervention or interference, however they are characterised, and in the name of whichever honourable motives, have never been – and most certainly are
not now – part of the struggle of individuals or collectivities. (p. 6.) But this argument simply cannot work for Bowring. Firstly, because later in the book he
positively notes that ‘[t]he USSR . . . found itself obliged to give very considerable material support to self-determination struggles’
(p. 38), this of course included military provision, which must be counted as a form of ‘intervention or interference’. More tellingly,
various countries that formed part of the Third-World movement were enthusiastic advocates of military intervention in the name of
anticolonialism and self-determination. This can be seen particularly clearly in the case of Goa, which India invaded to liberate
from Portugal’s colonial occupation. Here, Indian UN ambassador Jha argued that Article 2(4) of the Charter would not be breached by its invasion of
Goa, since the wave of decolonisation had transformed its ambit, such that anticolonial violence could not be counted as aggression.21 Th is argument, both in
terms of its content and structure is startlingly similar to Reisman’s. As one can see, there is a direct lineage between the Third World’s
invocation of self-determination and the imperialist invocation of ‘humanitarian intervention’.22 It seems diffi cult to argue
that these invocations can be meaningfully diff erentiated in law. Whilst their political content could not be more opposed, the abstract nature of legal claims
would compel a principled adherent to the law to support both (or at least refrain from criticising the latter on legal grounds). It seems especially diffi cult for
Bowring to escape these objections.
ENDI 2010
Historical Materialism K
16
Wave 1
LINK: REVOLUTION
Their aff can’t access the revolution – the revolution is not a simple moment in time – their
Utopian alternative fails to examine cultural and political history and thus doesn’t achieve true
social change
Jameson '96 - head of the Lit. program @ Duke (Fredric, "Five theses on actually existing Marxism," April, 1996,
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1132/is_n11_v47/ai_18205164/?tag=content;col1, RG)
But such arguments in their turn presuppose the taking of a position on what is surely the central concept in any Marxian "unity-of-theory-and-practice," namely
Revolution itself This is the case because it is the untenability of that concept that is the principal exhibit in the post- or anti-Marxian
arsenal. The defense of this concept, however, requires a number of preliminary preparations: in particular, we need to abandon to iconology
everything that suggests that revolution is a punctual moment rather than an elaborate and complex process. For example, many of
our most cherished iconic images of the various historical revolutions, such as the taking of the Winter Palace and the Tennis Court Oath, need to be set aside.
Social revolution is not a moment in time, but it can be affirmed in terms of the necessity of change in what is a synchronic
system, in which everything holds together and is interrelated with everything else. Such a system then demands a kind of absolute systemic
change, rather than piecemeal 'reform," which turns out to be what is in the pejorative sense "Utopian," that is, illusory, not feasible. That is to say
that the system demands the ideological vision of a radical social alternative to the existing social order, something which can no
longer be taken for granted or inherited, under the state of current discursive struggle, but which demands reinvention. Religious
fundamentalism (whether Islamic, Christian, or Hindu), that claims to offer a radical alternative to consumerism and "the American way of life," only comes
into significant being when the traditional Left alternatives, and in particular the great revolutionary traditions of Marxism and communism, have suddenly
seemed unavailable.
ENDI 2010
Historical Materialism K
17
Wave 1
LINK: TERRORISM
Terrorism is the result of historical and material deprivation, not fundementalism – we have to
put it in the context of struggles against Western capitalism
Mousseau '3 - Associate prof of IR @ Koc Univ in Istanbul, Turkey (Michael, "Market Civilization and Its Clash with Terror,"
International Security, 27(3), p.5-29, Project MUSE, RG)
Those on the lowest rung of the economic ladder are the most vulnerable to the negative consequences associated with
globalization. Those with the most to lose, however, are patrons and their lieutenants who hold privileged positions in the old clientalist hierarchies. This is
why leaders of terrorist organizations frequently come from privileged backgrounds. To maintain the clientalist structure that
carries with it higher social status, these leaders seek to rally their client base by appealing to some antimarket ideology. Because it
is in a [End Page 19] client's interest to have a powerful patron, leaders attract and maintain followers by demonstrations of strength. In this
way, the mass murder of Westerners serves two purposes: It reflects the leader's power, and it taps into widespread antimarket
fury. Islam itself is not responsible for the social approval of terror. Patrons fearing the loss of their privileged status—such
as Osama bin Laden—find an antimarket ideology useful to attract followers. They manipulate Islam to serve their own ends, just like
their counterparts in Europe did a century ago by contorting Christianity to justify terror and mass murder. 51 In fact, Islam emerged in Mecca, the center of
sixth-century Mediterranean and South Asian trade, and the Koran stress the market values of universalism, equity, contractual exchange, and a degree of
tolerance toward outsiders (non-Muslims). 52 The market economy in this region declined before market norms—and liberal culture—
intensified and expanded throughout the Islamic world, but the liberal origins of Islam demonstrate that religion can be
interpreted, and manipulated, to suit anyone's purposes. In societies steeped in market values, it is difficult to comprehend how anyone can engage
in the mass murder of out-groups, or how anyone can support it. Individuals with market values believe that each person is responsible only
for his or her actions. Just as those who are not parties to contracts cannot be made obligated to them, individuals cannot be assumed to be responsible for
any and all behavior of other members of their apparent in-group. It therefore seems absurd to blame individuals for the alleged bad behavior
of others, and this is the social origin of the presumption of individual innocence in market societies . From the clientalist perspective,
in contrast, no one is innocent: Individuals share responsibility for the actions of others within the in-group; if followers do not
support their leaders, then they are betraying the entire in-group. From the clientalist perspective, all in-group members are privileged
and all out-group members are enemies or, at best, outsiders unworthy of empathy . [End Page 20] A paucity of empathy is necessary for
doing harm to, and tolerating the suffering of, all out-group members. This is why international human rights are a concern promoted mostly by market
democracies. It is also why widespread social support for both terrorism and sectarian violence frequently arises in developing
countries but not in countries with deeply integrated markets. 53 Clientalist values also lie at the core of the social approval of
suicidal mass murder. From the market perspective, all behavior should have some immediate utility for the parties to a contract. It is thus difficult to
comprehend the efficacy of suicide. But in cultures where the individual is less important than the group and the absence of science
increases devotion to insular beliefs, suicide—under conditions of extreme socioeconomic disruption—may emerge as a socially
approved way of expressing ultimate loyalty to the in-group. In this way, cultural insularism, characterized by the absence of a market
economy, is a necessary condition for the social approval of suicidal mass murder and sectarian violence. Cultural insularism
combined with a particular grievance—such as the negative consequences associated with globalization—can create a deadly
mix for Americans and other Westerners. Although latent anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism exist throughout much of the developing world,
these are most likely to rise to the surface during economic crises—when nascent middle classes lose their status and turn
against emerging liberal values. This is what is happening, for example, in Indonesia where the recent collapse of the local currency has eliminated the
savings of the middle class, just as hyperinflation devastated the savings of Germany's middle class seventy-five years ago. Recent terrorist acts against
Indonesian Christians (as symbols of the West) and Westerners directly (the November 2002 bombing of a disco in Bali) are reminiscent of Germany's middle
class turning against those it identified with market values, such as European Jews and the West. The West, in this sense, means market civilization. [End Page
21]
ENDI 2010
Historical Materialism K
18
Wave 1
LINK: IDENTITY
Rejecting identity as a social construction takes it out of historical and social context, making it
appear natural and justifying biological theories of race
Malik '96 - senior visting fellow at the Department of Political, International and Policy Studies at the University of Surrey
(Kenan, "The Mirror of Race: Postmodernism and the Celebration of Difference," in "In Defense of History," Ed. by E.
Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.112-117, RG)
"Poststructuralist thinking," sociologists David Bailey and Stuart Hall have argued, "opposes the notion that a person is born with a fixed
identity—that all black people, for example, have an essential underlying black identity which is the same and unchanging. It suggests
instead that identities are floating, that meaning is not fixed and universally true at all times for all people, and that the subject is
constructed through the unconscious in desire, fantasy and memory." 1 The reminder that our identities are not naturally given
but socially constructed is a useful antidote to the idea that human differences are fixed and eternal . But by insisting that society
is inherently and irreducibly heterogeneous and diverse, and by rejecting any idea of "totality" that might allow us to see the
commonalities or connections among heterogeneous and diverse elements, poststructuralist discourse has undermined its own
capacity to challenge naturalistic explanations of difference. The paradoxical result, I shall argue, is a conception of identity
scarcely different from that of nineteenth-century racial theory. The problem can be seen in the very concept of "anti-essentialism" as
understood by postmodernist thinkers. Sociologist Ali Rattansi has described anti-essentialism as a "manoeuvre cutting the ground from conceptions of subjects
and social forms as reducible to timeless, unchanging, defining and determining elements or ensemble of elements—'human nature,' for example, or in the case
of the social, the logic of the market or mode of production." Rattansi seems at first to define anti-essentialism simply as opposition to an ahistorical
understanding of social phenomena, hostile to the idea of timeless or unchanging social forms. But he slides from this rejection of ahistorical explanation to a
repudiation of social "determinants" altogether. He rejects any idea that social forms can be explained by reference to forces or pressures
like the "logic of the market" or the "mode of production" which permeate and shape the social order, even if these
determinants are conceived as historically specific. A non-essentialist understanding of society is apparently one that denies any unifying patterns or
processes among the diverse and constantly shifting fragments that constitute society. In other words, Rattansi identifies anti-essentialism with an insistence on
indeterminacy. In this he reflects much postmodern thinking which finds the meaning of social forms not in relations but in differences.
But this kind of indeterminacy is precisely the foundation of ahistorical explanations. How, for instance, can we understand the historical nature of
capitalism as a specific social form without identifying the specific determinants that distinguish it from other social forms,
in other times and places? We could argue about whether the "essence" of capitalism should be seen in the logic of the market,
in the particular mode of production, in some other aspect, or in some combination of these. But unless we can characterize the
fundamental specificity—the "essence," if you will—of capitalist society, its distinctive "laws of motion" or systemic logic, we cannot
distinguish it from other types of societies. How, then, should we analyze race in modern capitalist societies? If we treat race as
just an "identity" detached from any specific social determinants, then race becomes not a historically specific social
relation but an eternal feature of human society—just as it is in reactionary biological theories of race, in which racial
divisions are a natural and permanent necessity. This may seem an odd conclusion to draw from postmodern anti-essentialism, because its roots lie
precisely in a hostility to naturalistic explanations of social phenomena, particularly positivism, which reduce social laws to natural laws, treating the laws that
govern human relations as quantifiable and permanent, just like the laws of nature. Because the positivist view of society underpinned nineteenth
century racial theories, opponents of racial theory have always been hostile to naturalistic theories of society.
ENDI 2010
Historical Materialism K
19
Wave 1
LINK: IDENTITY
Social constructivism rejects all causality, undermining any historical analysis of identity
Malik '96 - senior visting fellow at the Department of Political, International and Policy Studies at the University of Surrey
(Kenan, "The Mirror of Race: Postmodernism and the Celebration of Difference," in "In Defense of History," Ed. by E.
Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.112-117, RG)
But in its haste to dispatch naturalistic theories, poststructuralist
discourse (and indeed much of modern sociology) takes up arms against not
simply naturalistic explanations of society, but against any causal explanation, or at the very least, any explanation that assigns
priority to certain causes over others. Any idea of determination—even in its non-reductionist sense, having to do with what E.P. Thompson
often calls the "logic of process" or Raymond Williams (in Marxism and Literature [1978]) describes as "a complex and interrelated process of limits and
pressures"—is considered to be essentialist and therefore illegitimate . Postmodern anti-essentialists hold that theory can have no recourse to
determinants beyond empirically given phenomena. Essences and forces, whether natural or metaphysical, spiritual or historical, are fictitious. At best social
"laws" are convenient fictions that allocate an order to empirical phenomena. At worst they are self-serving illusions which disguise some sinister interest or
power. For poststructuralists, then, social phenomena cannot be explained by reference to another property that bestows meaning
on them. This kind of anti-essentialism renders all determinate relations contingent, bereft of any inner necessity .3
Poststructuralists deny the concept of an "essential" identity and stress instead "the phenomenon of multiple social identities."
As Robin Cohen puts it, "the modern study of identity has ... dished the old 'essentialisms'— for example the Marxist idea that all social identity could essentially
be reduced to class identity." Instead it holds that "there are competing claims for affiliation that cannot be reduced to epiphenomena" and that "gender, age,
disability, race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, civil status, even musical styles and dress codes" are all "very potent axes of organization and identification."4 The
recognition that human beings are subject to conflicting claims and identities is clearly important. The problem arises, however, when all "identities,"
of whatever form, are treated as equivalent, so that personal lifestyle preferences such as "musical styles" are given the same
weight and significance as physical attributes such as "disability" or social products such as race and class, while , at the same time,
each identity is conceived in isolation from specific social relations. In fact, there is already a problem in conceiving race or class
as an "identity" in the first place. Social relations such as racial oppression become not social relations at all but personal attributes ,
or even lifestyle choices. When race is equated with "musical styles" or "dress codes," the "social" seems to mean nothing more than
a particular decision that any individual may make, and "society" is reduced to the aggregate of individual identities. The
consequence of the poststructuralist notion of society is that many contemporary writers treat social distinctions as personal or
political choices. There is a scene in Woody Allen's film Bananas, in which our luckless hero, played by Allen, bemoans the fact that he dropped out of
college. "What would you have been if you had finished school?" someone asks him. "I don't know," sighs Allen. "I was in the black studies program. By now I
could have been black." This seems to be the essence of the contemporary view of identity. As Robin Cohen observes, postmodernists seem to believe
that "an individual constructs and presents any one of a number of possible social identities, depending on the situation. Like a
player concealing a deck of cards from the other contestants, the individual pulls out a knave—or a religion, or an ethnicity, a lifestyle—as the
context deems a particular choice desirable or appropriate." 5 In this spirit an increasing number of writers now view racial division as the result of
a deliberately chosen cultural exclusiveness. Winston James, employing Benedict Anderson's notion of an "imagined community," argues that, "Like all nations,
nationalities and ethnic groups, Afro-Caribbean people in Britain have erected boundaries in relation to those with whom they identify."6 The suggestion is that
Afro-Caribbeans have chosen to establish distinctive cultural patterns, that they have asserted their right to be different, as a way of confirming their "imagined
community," of establishing what James calls a "new sense of fellowship." If this were true, however, racism would not be a problem. If we could choose
identities in the way we choose our clothes every morning, if we could erect social boundaries from a cultural Lego pack, then
racial hostility might be no different from disagreements between lovers of Mozart and those who prefer Charlie Parker, orbetween
supporters of different football clubs. In other words, racial differences would not be social relations which exist apart from the preferences
of any given individual. They would simply represent prejudices born out of a plurality of tastes. But we know that in reality racial
divisions are social relations, that they are not simply the product of personal preferences , and that blackness amounts to more than a
semester on a black studies program. It is not Afro-Caribbeans, or any other racialized group, who have "erected boundaries" separating them from the rest of
society. These boundaries are socially constructed not just in the sense that they are culturally specific, like personal tastes in music or
clothes, but in the sense that society has systematically racialized certain social groups and signified them as "different"—as James
himself acknowledges when he notes "the powerful centripetal forces of British racism."7 Black youth in Brixton or the Bronx have no more "chosen" their
difference than Jews did in Nazi Germany. Certainly oppressed communities have often reacted to racial division by adopting particular
cultural forms. In his autobiography, Miles Davis recounts how black jazz musicians in the forties responded to racism by developing bebop as a style that
would exclude white players.8 Similarly many Jews today continue to observe Jewish cultural rituals less out of religious faith than in response to anti-Semitism
and in memory of the victims of the Holocaust. But such cultural assertion is not the cause of racial identification, it is its product. This is
one of the fundamental contradictions at the heart of postmodernism. Insisting on the "discursive" or "social construction" of
all knowledge and identity, under the cover of "anti-essentialism" it ends by effectively denying determinate historical relations
altogether and thus effectively abandons its original principle that identity and the human subject are socially constructed.
Poststructuralist discourse reduces (or deconstructs) society to the accidental interaction of individuals and removes the subject
from the terrain of the social. Determinate social relations are reduced to individual, personal attributes or at best to contingent relations between
individuals. There can be no "social construction" when the "social" itself has no existence apart from "discursively constructed"
individual identities.
ENDI 2010
Historical Materialism K
20
Wave 1
LINK: IDENTITY
Anti-essentialist critiques of identity collapse back into themselves and link to all of the disads to
positivist epistemology
Malik '96 - senior visting fellow at the Department of Political, International and Policy Studies at the University of Surrey
(Kenan, "The Mirror of Race: Postmodernism and the Celebration of Difference," in "In Defense of History," Ed. by E.
Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.117-121, RG)
The paradox of poststructuralist anti-essentialism, then, is this: it
is an outlook that arises from a desire to oppose naturalistic explanations
and to put social facts in a social context. But by celebrating indeterminacy and by opposing the idea of totality, all in the name
of anti-essentialism, it has undermined its own ability to explain social facts historically. Facts wrenched from their living context are
apprehended only in their isolation. The irony is that this methodology resembles nothing so much as the radical empiricism of
the positivists, the very theory of knowledge that anti-essentialism sought to overturn. This is not the place to resolve all the
difficult epistemological questions involved in the debate between postmodernism and its critics. Some of these questions are dealt with elsewhere in this book.
But we are entitled to ask whether postmodernists can sustain an anti-racist project on the basis of their own, supposedly anti-racist, assumptions. Can their
epistemological assumptions support their own professed opposition to racial oppression? How, for example, would they distinguish between a racist history
and a non-racist one? On postmodernist premises, each would be valid in its own context. The capacity of postmodernists to challenge racist
discourse is undermined by their own belief in the relativity of meaning . If we want to argue that a racist and a non-racist
interpretation of history are not equally valid, we are required to choose between them, to decide which is true and which is not,
and that means we are obliged to accept that there is some standard against which we can judge them. What postmodernists dismiss as
"totalizing" theories do not require us to encompass every possible "fact," as some postmodernists maintain, but they do give us some basis for choosing.
Anti-essentialism is supposed to be the very foundation of postmodernist anti-racism, but anti-essentialism as postmodernists
define it ends by disabling any anti-racist project. Antiracism, for example, surely requires some commitment to equality. It is certainly true
that "equality" is a historically specific idea, which has had different meanings in different social contexts. But the historicity of this idea does not
change the fact that a commitment to equality, and especially racial equality, presumes the existence of a "human essence."
Without such a common essence, equality among different "identities" or social groups would be a meaningless concept. If humanity did not constitute a single
category, if in Foucault's words "Nothing in man—not even his body—is sufficiently stable to act as this basis for self-recognition or for understanding other
men,"11 then equality between different human individuals and groups would be as meaningless as equating apples and oranges or, to use Levi-Strauss's analogy
in his critique of Sartre, such "different domains" as "natural and irrational numbers."12 The postmodernist might reply that the principle of "difference" implies
a truly radical egalitarianism, because it recognizes no standard by which one individual or group can be judged as better than another. But the point is that this
principle of difference cannot provide any standards which oblige us to respect the "difference" of others. At best, it invites our indifference to the fate of the
Other. At worst, it licenses us to hate and abuse those who are different. Why, after all, should we nor abuse and hate them? On what basis can they demand
our respect or we demand theirs? It is very difficult to support respect for difference without appealing to some "totalizing,"
universalistic principles of equality or social justice. We can acknowledge that the concept of "rights" is historically specific and
socially constructed; but any argument in favor of equal rights, in whatever form, invariably brings us back to what
postmodernists would call an "essentialist" explanation. Once such explanations, whether natural or social, are excluded, the very idea of
equality also becomes subordinate to the "contingency of prevailing identities." If the appearance of difference is taken at face value, in the
absence of any common "essence" beyond or beneath that appearance, then the appearance of difference must be taken as evidence that there are indeed many
different categories of humanity and that they have nothing fundamentally in common. This is precisely the method employed by positivist racial theory, which
deduced from the appearance of difference (skin color, head form, and so on) the division of humanity into different categories or "races." Of course,
contemporary theorists of difference deny that superficial biological differences define categorical distinctions, preferring
instead to emphasize historical or cultural factors. But cultural formalism is in substance no different from racial formalism . Both
move from the apprehension of formal difference to posit the existence of different ontological categories. This is why the anti-essentialist tendencies
of poststructuralist thought inevitably puts in question equality itself .
ENDI 2010
Historical Materialism K
21
Wave 1
LINK: IDENTITY
Identity politics are commodity fetishism—our alternative is the only way to deal critically with
capitalism and other relations of power
Wood '7 - prof. of pol. sci. @ York Univ. (Ellen Meiksins, "Democracy Against Capitalism; Renewing Historical Materialism,"
p.256-263, RG)
In these respects, the
new pluralism has much in common with another old pluralism, the one that used to prevail in conventional
political science - pluralism not simply as an ethical principle of toleration but as a theory about the distribution of social power .
The concept of 'identity' has replaced 'interest groups', and these two pluralisms may differ in that the old acknowledges an inclusive political
totality - like the 'political system', the nation, or the body of citizens - while the new insists on the irreducibility of fragmentation and 'difference'. But both deny
the importance of class in capitalist democracies, or at least submerge it in a multiplicity of 'interests' or 'identities'. Both have the effect of denying the systemic
unity of capitalism, or its very existence as a social system. Both insist on the heterogeneity of capitalist society, while losing sight of its increasingly global power
of homogenization. The new pluralism claims a unique sensitivity to the complexities of power and diverse oppressions ; but like the
old variety, it has the effect of making invisible the power relations that constitute capitalism , the dominant structure of
coercion which reaches into every corner of our lives, public and private. In their failure to acknowledge that various identities or interest groups are
differently situated in relation to that dominant structure, both pluralisms recognize not so much difference as simple plurality. This latest denial of
capitalism's systemic and totalizing logic is, paradoxically, a reflection of the very thing it seeks to deny. The current
preoccupation with 'post-modern' diversity and fragmentation undoubtedly expresses a reality in contemporary capitalism, but it
is a reality seen through the distorting lens of ideology. It represents the ultimate 'commodity fetishism', the triumph of'consumer
society', in which the diversity of'life styles', measured in the sheer quantity of commodities and varied patterns of consumption, disguises
the underlying systemic unity, the imperatives which create that diversity itself while at the same time imposing a deeper and more global homogeneity.
What is alarming about these theoretical developments is not that they violate some doctrinaire Marxist prejudice concerning the privileged status of class. The
problem is that theories which do not differentiate — and, yes, 'privilege', if that means ascribing causal or explanatory priorities - among
various social institutions and 'identities' cannot deal critically with capitalism at all. Capitalism, as a specific social
form, simply disappears from view, buried under a welter of fragments and 'difference' .
ENDI 2010
Historical Materialism K
22
Wave 1
LINK: RACE
Treating race as a social construction ignores why racism happens in the first place – narratives of
specificity like the aff crowd out historical materialist analysis of racial exclusion
Young ‘1 - professor of English @ University of Alabama (Robert, “The Linguistic Turn, Materialism and Race: Toward an
Aesthetics of Crisis,” Callaloo, 24(1), Winter 2001, pp. 334-345, Project MUSE, RG)
At the moment it is generally accepted that race is a social construction. It is also generally accepted that race has been
constructed along an oppressive axis. The consensus is disturbed when one attempts to account for why oppression exists in the
first place. The contestations are even sharper when one offers an account of race outside of the prevailing logic of
supplementarity. With the postmodern disbelief in metanarrative (Lyotard) and the subsequent skepticism toward concepts, race is seen as a trope, and it is
now very difficult to offer conceptual accounts of race. Hence “narratives of specificity” circulate and the experience of race establishes the
limit of intelligibility. Within this context I shall attempt to reclaim a concept-based materialist understanding of race. I will
argue that race signifies alterity because of the division of labor. In other words race difference operates in the interest of
maintaining and justifying surplus extraction.1
My argument proceeds in three parts. First I engage the linguistic turn in social theory and foreground the implications for theorizing race. I critique some
exemplary instances of poststructuralist accounts of race, and I especially engage the work of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., an influential exponent of continental
theory within African-American literary and cultural discourses. I argue that the linguistic turn enables “narratives of specificity” and these
narratives displace relational inquiries. Consequently, the specificity of race is disconnected from underlying causal mechanisms.
Next, I critically examine Cornel West. West is thought to offer an advance over the idealism in linguistic theory. However, I will show that his “genealogical
materialism” does not move us away from the idealism of Gates but ultimately ends up pointing us back to “narratives of specificity.” Once again the
“experiential” is privileged and the historical determinate conditions of possibility for such an experience is obscured. By blocking an understanding of the
historicity of experience, Gates and West limit intelligibility to the local, and I will show how this leads to very conservative understandings of race.
Finally I draw upon Richard Wright’s Black Boy, which offers an effective counter to “narratives of specificity.” Wright also operates at the local level,
but he situates it within the global. Wright articulates what I call an “aesthetics of crisis” because he demonstrates that daily life is the site of
contradictions for a racially structured and exploitative social order. If race is deployed to maintain and justify an asymmetrical division of
labor then its very deployment in daily life exposes the fault line of dominant ideologies . The claims of the Liberal democratic state are
contradicted by the daily life of African-Americans. Wright’s “aesthetic of crisis” not only brings into sharp focus the contradictions under
capitalism but also locates within daily life a utopian impulse.
My reading operates from the modality of critique because critique moves from the immanent logic and situates race and its logic in history,
in the global frames of intelligibility that help to reproduce the economic, political and ideological reproduction of a particular
social formation. Critique is that knowledge practice that historically situates the conditions of possibility of what empirically exists
under capitalist labor relations and points to what is suppressed by the empirically existing—what could be instead of what actually is. For example, a
recent United Nations report concludes that the wealth of the seven richest men could completely eliminate world poverty. The
satisfaction of human need on a global scale is historically and objectively possible, but this is what is suppressed under the
regime of capitalism. It is because of such possibilities that critique is so urgent because critique indicates that what “is” is not necessarily the real/true but
rather the existing actuality which is open to alteration. The role of critique in materialist postmodern discourse on race is the production
of historical knowledges that mark the historicity of existing social arrangements and the possibility of a different social
organization—one that is free from exploitation.
Critique, then, is a modality that renders visible the unsaid in order to foreground the operations of power and the underlying
socio-economic structure which connect the seemingly disparate events and representations of daily life. In sum, materialist
critique disrupts that which represents itself as “natural,” as inevitable , as the way things are, and exposes the way “what is” is
historically and socially produced out of social contradictions and hence supportive of inequality. Critique presses the social
contradictions into (aesthetics of) crisis and consequently critique enables us to not only explain how race operates so we can
change it but also to collectively build the emancipatory subjectivities necessary to carry out revolutionary struggle.
ENDI 2010
Historical Materialism K
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Wave 1
LINK: RACE
Material forces of production shape the way we think about race – history has made oppression
via race only exist through capitalism
Young ‘1 - professor of English @ University of Alabama (Robert, “The Linguistic Turn, Materialism and Race: Toward an
Aesthetics of Crisis,” Callaloo, 24(1), Winter 2001, pp. 334-345, Project MUSE, RG)
In 1985 during the highpoint of poststructuralist theory, Gates’ edited volume “Race, Writing, and Difference” is representative of a deconstructive phase, as the
volume aims “to deconstruct, if you will, the ideas of difference inscribed in the trope of race . . .” (6). However by 1990, the postmodernist determinism is too
restrictive of agency and in “Critical Remarks” Gates now critiques theory because “it is not much good at exploring the relations between social identity and
political agency” (323). Significantly, Gates asserts that “Starting with the recognition that the ‘reflexive actor’ is not simply a given, a subjectivity existing prior
to and independent from language, we too quickly decided that its factitious made it an effect of linguistic determination. But that did not follow” (324). Thus
the “subject is not only an effect of language but a participant in an articulated realm of social practices that, far from constraining its agency, are its very
conditions of possibility” (324). The theoretical suture is made and experience is recuperated and by 1994 we have Gates’ memoir, Colored People—which,
incidentally “is not a story of a race but a story of a village, a family, and its friends” (xvi). Gates’ trajectory produces a “narrative of specificity” as the
experiential is recuperated. Gates’ discourse blocks an understanding of the determinate relation between race and social and
economic structures. Under the poststructuralist erasure of race, it is not surprising that the discursive readings of race would
quickly exhaust political/theoretical viability because, as Callinicos points out, “Racism remains one of the main features of the
advanced capitalist societies” (“Race and Class”). Callinicos continues: “It [racism] is institutionalized in the systematic discrimination
which black people experience in jobs, housing, the education system, and the harassment they suffer at the hands of police and
immigration authorities” (3). The postmodernist erasure of race in light of continued racial oppression/exploitation brings to the
fore the continued urgency for articulating productive accounts of race . Even on its own liberal terms the erasing of race was “un-ethical” in
light of the “experiences” of racially marked subjects. Experience, though, is not self-intelligible and should not be posited as the limit text of the real, as is often
done. Experience is a highly mediated frame of understanding. While it is true that a person of color, a woman, or gay person experiences oppression, this
experience is not self-explanatory—it has to be situated in relation to other social practices. Experience, in short, only seems local; it is
like all cultural and political practices, interrelated to other practices and experiences, and as such its explanation comes from its “outside.” Theory is an
understanding of this experience and an explanation of experience. Theory shows that the “difference” (of experience) is itself global,
historical, and always determined by the material forces of production . The marking of experience could have been the theoretical
occasion to (re)situate race in the larger historical series of the reproduction and maintenance of subjectivities in ideology— the project, for
example, of materialist cultural studies. The hegemonic discourses of race, though, are moving away from concept-based inquiries
and reifying race/experience and setting the cultural as the limits of intelligibility . See for example a recent special issue of Social Text in
which writers such as Howard Winant, Grant Farred, and Lewis Gordon argue the case for “agency,” “self-invention,” and “ethics,” respectively. The limits of
such a view are evident in Winant. After positing that “Race remains a mysterious phenomenon” (6), it is not surprising that he cannot find answers to “why
society can remain so intensely racialised” (8). He is left with a plea to “develop a racial theory that can find a way . . . to recognize the potentials of human
agency” (10). Winant’s text is symptomatic of the idealism pervading discourses of race, but as I have been arguing race is not a “mystery” nor a matter
of “bad” attitudes but a (structural) designation and (ideological) legitimation of a subordinated structural position within the
relations of production. Thus the transformation of racism is part of the larger struggle to transform the economic enabling
conditions of possibility—the regime of wage-labor, which deploys race to maintain and increase necessary profit margins. The
systemic location of race, though, is suppressed as a consequence of the postmodernist culturalist bias, and thus there is a political
displacement whereby, as Steve Vieux points out, “the focus in postmodern theory has been on oppression, [and] not exploitation ” (29).
Thus for example, in “What is this ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture,” Stuart Hall is interested in those cultural strategies “that can make a difference and shift
the dispositions of power” (24). However, there are limits to symbolic reconfigurations. Even Gates recognizes that “Black people have not been
liberated from racism by our writings”(Race 12) and also Gates reveals the limits of ethics: “We accepted a false premise by assuming that racism would
be destroyed once white racists became convinced that we were human, too” (Race 12). But even so Gates still asserts that “it is a mistake to hold that to
eradicate racism, we must eliminate its most fundamental conditions of possibility” (“Critical Remarks” 327). Of course the most fundamental
conditions of possibility of racism, as I have been pointing out, is capitalism—the regime of differential extraction of surplus
value from racially marked subjects. The reformism of these discourses is very clear and it leads to an absolutely debilitating
political practice. If we recognize the limits of writing and other discursive practices and ethical discourses and yet must reject articulating a global
transformative project, then what are we left with? What is to be done? In the introduction to a recently edited volume Gates and Appiah seem to suggest that a
way out of the aporia is to merely extend the multiplication of identities to “help disrupt the clichéridden discourse of identity by exploring the formation of
identities . . .” (Identities 1). For Gates (race) identity is a trope and theorized as a textual matter: “blackness is produced in the text only through a complex
process of signification,” thus “There can be no transcendent blackness . . .” (Signifying Monkey 237). As a text, then, blackness always already reinscribes the
other as it is the site of intertextuality. If the signifying monkey is a metaphor for repetition with a signal difference and intertextuality, “blackness becomes
merely a formal position within the signifying systems. The (liberal) politics of such rhetorical discourse becomes clear when Gates says: “Lest this theory of
criticism, however, be thought of as only black, let me admit that the implicit premise of this study is that all texts Signify upon other texts, in motivated and
unmotivated ways” (Signifying Monkey xxiv). Put differently, if blackness is difference and all texts are situated within networks of difference, then all texts are in a
sense “black,” and black means nothing more than hybridity. Here, then, is the contradiction: Gates is seeking to construct an autonomous and immanent
theory of reading (from within African-American literary tradition) but in relying upon poststructuralist principles he is forced to register that every text is
inscribed with its other— thus “blackness” now means nothing more than a sign of intertextuality. The historically specific content of “blackness”
within oppressive and exploitative U.S. social relations is (formally) emptied out. And to repeat the politics of such a formalist
notion erases the historicity of racial violence/oppression and exploitation . As Houston Baker correctly points out, Gates’ view of
language/culture/literature suggests that “‘literary’ meanings are conceived in a nonsocial, noninstitutional manner by the point of consciousness of a language
CONTINUES…
ENDI 2010
Historical Materialism K
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Wave 1
LINK: RACE
CONTINUED…
and maintained and transmitted, without an agent, within a closed circle of ‘intertextuality’” (101). The meaning of Blackness is historical and material and if
there is textual hybridity it flattens out in the social which structures racial hierarchy. Within the racial hegemony of U.S. society, there are no “white” Rodney
Kings. While Baker usefully critiques the formalism of Gates, Baker nonetheless absorbs crucial postmodernist principles and as a consequence engages the
“economics of slavery” “semiotically” and thus his discourse is founded on a contradiction. Semiotic theory is committed to the notion of the discursive
constitution of the real; this is most clearly expressed in Foucault who argued that “discourses . . . as practices . . . systematically form the objects of which they
speak” (Archaeology 49). However, at the same time, Baker posits a “transcendental signified”—the “economics of slavery”—which suggests a commitment to
materialism and thus an outside to the discursive; and yet this commitment to materialism (a reality independent of human consciousness)
is ultimately canceled by his promotion of semiotic theory, which denies notions of historical objectivity . In fact, for Baker, “There is
no such thing as an ‘objective’ history” (121) and consequently he must reject what his “economics of slavery” explicitly calls for:
materialism. The concern with the mechanics of signification operates to occlude the political economy of signification, and emancipation is reduced to
deconstructing and refashioning oppressive signs along a less oppressive axis. In seeking to avoid a “vulgar Marxism,” Baker situates race as a political category.
The politics of situating race as a political concept becomes clearer when we foreground the political consequences of such a move. Reading race as a
political category leads along the trajectory of political/legal reform (of the status quo) to expand access of the (middle-class)
“other” to the surplus. One must bear in mind that this liberal reformism is always already constituted upon the (economic) structure
of wage-labor—a formation in which surplus value is extorted from the direct producers. The issue is not so much to allow a few more to have access to the
surplus via legislation for middle class blacks but to alter the economic arrangement of society so that the few are not given unlimited
access to the surplus at the expense of denying the needs of the many. If the relation between signifier/signified is arbitrary, as Gates and
social constructionists point out, then one has to extend the analysis and explain not “how” it works but why “blackness” is assigned such a negative/oppressive
signified. If it is not natural, then why such a dehumanized construction? If it is in the text, then why? Or is the text naturally and spontaneously articulating
blackness as a negative signified? Of course postmodernists cannot endorse any notions of a naturally articulated negative signified but
without theorizing the sociality of such an articulation,—which they are precluded from doing because of an injunction against
“totalizing” narratives—metaphysics slips back into the very discourses of constructionism. Cornel West’s intervention is thought to provide a way out of
these aporias. Therefore, I want to critically engage one of his recent works, Keeping Faith. Like most sophisticated bourgeois theorists today, West has moved
beyond merely assuming, as traditionalists do, that changing biased minds will eradicate racism. More importantly, he has also moved beyond ludic
postmodernism’s Derridean arguments (made familiar in, say, Henry Louis Gates’ work) that racism can be dealt with as a “text.” Thus “[u]nlike Derrida and de
Man, genealogical materialism does not rest content with a horizon of language” (265).
ENDI 2010
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Wave 1
LINK: RACE – HISTORY
Their approach is genealogical at best—it doesn’t take into account historical understandings of
the material bodies involved in history and obscures a politicized understanding of race
Young ‘1 - professor of English @ University of Alabama (Robert, “The Linguistic Turn, Materialism and Race: Toward an
Aesthetics of Crisis,” Callaloo, 24(1), Winter 2001, pp. 334-345, Project MUSE, RG)
West adopts instead a variant of ludic postmodern theory: Nietzsche-inspired Foucauldian theories of materialism, not as a mode of production, but as “the
specificity of difference.” West argues, for instance, that the very principles anchoring Marxism require the supercession of Marxism: “the principle of historical
specificity and the materiality of structured social practices—the very founding principles of Marx’s own discourse—now requires us to be genealogical
materialists” (266). Thus West replaces Marxist notions of history, which foreground the class struggle ensuing from exploitative
social arrangements, “with Nietzschean notions of genealogy, [and] yet preserves the materiality of multifaceted structured social
practices” (265). The material, then, is not understood in relation to the production and extraction of surplus value
through the laboring body of the worker, but rather is located in ahistorical notions of the body (266). In West’s conjunction
of Marxism and Foucault, the specific socioeconomic context is elided, and he effectively reconstitutes Marxism without historically determinate relations and
consequently obscures the laws of motion of capital. West’s reading of the material is an ideological blocking of historical materialism. He
argues that genealogical materialism “should be more materialist than that of the Marxist tradition, to the extent that the
privileged material mode of production is not necessarily located in the economic sphere” (266). For West, then, “decisive material
modes of production at a given moment may be located in the cultural, political, or even psychic sphere ” (266). This view is, of
course, precisely what the dominant cultural apparatuses promote as they suppress how African-American oppression and
exploitation is located within the material domain, the effect of the relations of production . To posit the psychic domain, even
potentially as a decisive “mode of production,” erases how this domain is historically constituted and articulated within the
prevailing structures of domination. The cultural, political, and psychic spheres are not autonomous domains of the social, but
operate ideologically as “domains of support” for prevailing economic structures. Dominant economic practices could not be
reproduced without the production of subjectivities, differentially and unevenly, within these domains. Thus, to (re)situate social
practices “within the cultural traditions of civilizations” (267) displaces the salient question of why racist practices are part of
cultural traditions in the first place. After suppressing this inquiry, West then draws upon existentialism and in so doing situates himself as an
ideological agent for the status quo when he argues that, in a frequently quoted formulation: “the major enemy of black survival in America has been and is
neither oppression nor exploitation but rather the nihilistic threat— that is the loss of hope and absence of meaning” (see his Race Matters). Why is there “loss of
hope”? Such a condition is neither a “natural state of affairs” nor a “state of mind,” but produced and reproduced by exploitative social arrangements. Racism is
not really about the “wrong” ideas in people’s heads. Nor is it a category that should be erased because it is without scientific credibility (Appiah) or
deconstructed and revealed as arbitrary (Gates). The “experience” of people of color clearly indicates that race has not become obsolete,
and, even if arbitrary, we still have to account for the historical adequation between signifier and signified . As I have suggested, a
more productive view of race locates it as an economic category that simultaneously designates and legitimates a subordinated
positionality within the relations of production, thereby maintaining asymmetrical access to resources. By calling for specificity
but erasing global economic structures that inform the local, West participates in narrowing the limits of intelligibility, thus
providing a cover for the machinery of exploitation to continue without interrogation.
ENDI 2010
Historical Materialism K
26
Wave 1
LINK: HISTORICAL EXAMPLES
Their historical analysis of hegemony and democracy reduces events to abstraction and doesn’t
take a materialist approach
Halliday ’94 [Fred, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, ‘A Necessary Encounter:
Historical Materialism and International Relations’ in Rethinking International Relations (Basingstoke: Macmillan), 47-73]
The place of history in the study of international relations is, as already recognised, an uneasy one . This is both for theoretical
reasons, in that International Relations seeks to identify a distinct conceptual terrain for study, and for practical and professional reasons, in that it wishes
to distinguish and justify itself by contrast with what is regarded as the ideologised approach of diplomatic history, too often a fetishism of archives and
dates. The question of historical origin receives less attention. Where history is present, it is usually either as illustration, or,
rather too often, as a means of intimidating the reader with a barrage of examples , evident as much in James Der Derian ( On
Diplomacy) as in Martin Wight. The result, however, is that many of the questions considered within International Relations are
to a perilous degree abstracted from their historical context . This applies, first, to the lack of historical culture of most of those writing about
and studying the subject, so that the proportion and range of reference to history is often absent. Behaviouralism, of course, made a rejection of history one
of its central tenets. It applies equally to the abstracting of specific concepts from the historical situation under which they
arose. The claim, frequently made and repeated in the literature, that the contemporary British and American states are
examples of a peaceful, non-revolutionary, path of development is one striking example of this. The 'expansion' of Western
society or of international society was achieved through the subjugation, -62- plunder, and in some cases massacre, of
colonial societies. A more recent case is the prevailing discussion of the concept of 'interdependence' and the related issue of 'ungovernability': this
almost elides the importance of the particular event that, at the political level, brought this question to the fore, namely the Vietnam War, and its impact on
the US political and social systems. 29
ENDI 2010
Historical Materialism K
27
Wave 1
LINK: POST-POSTIVISM
Using the contingency of truth to argue that all truth is uncertain undermines historical and social
analyses of social phenomena
Malik '96 - senior visting fellow at the Department of Political, International and Policy Studies at the University of Surrey
(Kenan, "The Mirror of Race: Postmodernism and the Celebration of Difference," in "In Defense of History," Ed. by E.
Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.117-121, RG)
The postmodernist celebration of indeterminacy is reinforced by hostility to universalizing theory , or ideas of totality. Indeed the
stress on indeterminacy arises from the belief that we cannot comprehend social reality in any holistic sense . In poststructuralist
theory all attempts at grasping social reality as a totality are rejected. All such attempts are "totalitarian," ethnocentric, and racist,
because they impose a single vision of the world upon what is in fact a plurality . Here, postmodernists fall into another confusion. Their
rejection of universalism and "totalizing" theories draws on some well-established epistemological principles, which they take to
extreme—and illogical—conclusions. There has long been a widely accepted epistemological convention, even a truism, that
"facts" do not present themselves to us unmediated , unaffected by our social experience and without selection or interpretation. This is, of course,
even more the case when we are dealing with very complex social "facts" and when powerful ideological factors intervene. For example, by conventional
measures of intelligence, African-Americans as a group have a lower I.Q. than white Americans. That is a fact. But what that fact means is not apparent from
the fact itself. For some authors, like Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in their infamous The Bell Curve, the difference in I.Q. is an indication that black
and white Americans are naturally different in their intellectual abilities. For others it means that I.Q. tests are a poor measure of intellectual ability. For yet
others, the difference between the I.Q. scores of black and white Americans is a product of their differential treatment by society. This obvious
epistemological point does not necessarily mean that there is no basis for judging one interpretation as better than another .
Many— probably most—historians and social scientists have long acknowledged that their knowledge is mediated in various ways;
but they have not necessarily felt obliged to conclude that there are no standards of historical truth, or plausibility, against which to
measure one account of history or social experience in comparison to others. Such people have commonly recognized that there can be different accounts, seen
from the perspective of different places, times, or social groups, and that these accounts can even all be valid in relation to the particular experience and needs
of those that propound them; but they have not necessarily felt obliged to conclude that there can never be a common standard to adjudicate among these
different accounts, no basis for comparing them, or even a common vantage point from which to communicate between them or accommodate them to each
other. As E.H. Carr understood: It does not follow that, because a mountain appears to take on different shapes from different
angles of vision, it has objectively either no shape or an infinity of shapes . It does not follow that, because interpretation plays a
necessary part in establishing the facts of history, and because no existing interpretation is wholly objective, one interpretation is
as good as another, and the facts of history are not amenable to objective interpretation.9 But postmodernists have indeed jumped
to such extreme and absurd conclusions. They have seized upon the multiplicities of meaning in order to reject not only common standards of
judgment but the possibility of any commensurability between different worlds of meaning. Postmodernism claims to situate "facts" in their specific social and
historical context, but that is precisely what it fails to do. The very nature of deconstructionist methodology imposes an eternal framework
on its object of investigation. The starting point of poststructuralism is the search for difference . As Derrida has put it, it is futile to ask
who or what differs, since difference is prior to any subject.10 But this is to smuggle the conclusion of the investigation into the method. If you set out to
find difference in anything and everything, then that is exactly what you will find . If you begin with the premise that there is nothing but
difference, then it goes without saying that you will never find commonalities or relations between things that are irreducibly different, let alone totalities in
which these different things are linked together. Difference becomes the absolute in history . It plays the "essentialist" role in
poststructuralist discourse that Nature played in nineteenth-century positivism.
ENDI 2010
Historical Materialism K
28
Wave 1
LINK: LANGUAGE/DISCOURSE
Critiquing the social construction of linguistic meaning and focusing on single words or systems
obscures the role of ideology and history in giving language meaning
McNally '96 - prof. of pol. sci. @ York Univ. (David, "Language, History, and Class Struggle," in "In Defense of History:
Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda," Ed. by E. Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.38-40, RG)
What conclusions can we draw from this brief excursus through some Marxist considerations on language? First, we have seen that Marxism insists upon
the unity of life-experience. Language, like consciousness, is not a separate and detached realm of human existence; rather, it is an
expressive dimension of that existence. As such, it is permeated by the conflicts, tensions, and contradictions of real life. The new
idealism sees none of this. By treating language "as a system of abstract grammatical categories," in Balditm's words, rather than
understanding it as "ideologically saturated," as "contradiction-ridden, tension-filled," idealism impoverishes our understanding
of the relations between language, life, history, and society. The new idealism may claim to understand ideology, conflict,
contradiction, and resistance, but it has in a sense gone one step further than the old idealism, not just abstracting language but
in effect transforming society itself into a linguistic system.
The word, argues Bakhtin, "enters a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgments and
accents, weaves in and out of complex interrelationships, merges with some, recoils from others...." Words and utterances are never
neutral; they are always situated, positioned in a context charged with tensions, struggles, conflicts. As "an abstract grammatical system" language
maybe considered unitary, a closed object of study. But this is to treat it "in isolation from the uninterrupted process of
historical becoming that is characteristic of all living language."
Language is thus social and historical. Meanings exist for me only in my relations with others; and these others exist in concrete, structured
social relationships. And these social relations themselves are dynamic; they involve struggles over domination and resistance,
shifting balances of force and power. Meanings are thus historical as well; they are immersed in a process of "historical
becoming" in which relationships are not fixed, and in which past and present interweave in our orientation towards the future.
Language does not present me with a single structure of grammatical relations and meanings. On the contrary, my involvement in
language entails my immersion in a social and historical field of themes, accents and meanings which are always contested and
never closed. The words I choose, the utterances I convey, involve a positioning within that field. There are always alternative ways of expressing and
articulating my experiences, my positions, my aspirations. This is what it means when Bakhtin writes that "consciousness finds itself inevitably facing the
necessity of having to choose a language."
ENDI 2010
Historical Materialism K
29
Wave 1
LINK: CHINA ECONOMY
Criticisms of Chinese market liberalization assume that Western capitalism is the natural
historical trajectory for market economies –our historical analysis reveals that marketization is not
synonymous with capitalism
Chase-Dunn ’10 – Professor of Sociology and Director of the University Honors Program, the Institute for Research on
World-Systems and Co-director of the Program on Global Studies at the University of California-Riverside, B.A. in Psychology
from UC-Berkeley, PhD in Sociology from Stanford University (Christopher, “Adam Smith in Beijing: A World-Systems
Perspective,” Historical Materialism, 18(1), Winter, EBSCO, RG)
Arrighi contended that
two distinct paths of economic and political development, which he calls ‘capitalism’ and ‘market society’,
have allowed some modern national economies to escape the Malthusian trap of population-pressure and economic stagnation.
Capitalism is the path that the West followed and market-society is the path that has been followed by China . He also contended that
the Chinese Revolution helped to create the conditions under which this kind of market-society and paternalistic state could reemerge in the decades since Mao’s demise. Arrighi saw the recent rise of China as a progressive development that might help to
facilitate the emergence of a more labour-friendly and less environmentally-destructive world-society. Th ere is a lot at stake here.
Arrighi was addressing the huge social-scientific and political issues that are brought up by the East/West-comparison and by the
continuing decline of US hegemony and the rise of the People’s Republic of China . He produced a compelling world-systemic analysis that
specifi es both the similarities and the important structural diff erences between the British hegemonic trajectory of the nineteenth century and US hegemony of
the twentieth century. Th e analysis in Adam Smith in Beijing of processes of financialisation, neoliberalism and neoconservative ‘imperial over-reach’ as eff orts to
prolong US hegemony, build on Arrighi’s own earlier work and on studies by Robert Brenner and David Harvey.2 Adam Smith in Beijing is dedicated to Andre
Gunder Frank and Frank’s infl uence is obvious throughout. Arrighi’s focus on China, and his re-reading of Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Joseph Schumpeter,
were inspired by Frank’s last book, Re-Orient, in which Frank tried to overcome Eurocentrism by re-examining world-history from 1400 to 1800.3 Arrighi’s last
book not only reconsiders the classics but also made great use of a large corpus of recent scholarship that has been produced by a group of economic historians
who were also inspired by Frank (Kaoru Sugihara, Takeshi Hamashita, Bin Wong and Kenneth Pomeranz).4 These close studies of Chinese economic
history show that there has been a distinctive and dynamic East-Asian path of development. Th is review will outline the
similarities and diff erences between Arrighi’s and Frank’s analyses of the East/West-comparison in world-historical perspective. Arrighi shows that the use of
Th e Wealth of Nations as a totem of neoliberal nostrums about the magic of markets, the wonders of capitalist globalisation, and the evils of state-regulation, is
based on ignoring much of what Smith actually said. Arrighi’s contrasts of Smith with Marx and Schumpeter produce some very useful ideas for comparisons
between the East and the West. Smith’s distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ paths of economic development is used by
Arrighi to bolster the notion that China followed the internally-oriented ‘natural’ path of market-society, focusing on
labourintensive forms of development and on improving the domestic economy, whereas the capitalist success-stories of the
West have focused on capitalintensive development that emphasised foreign trade, drew raw materials from distant colonies and
made profi ts based on providing ‘fi nancial services’ to the larger world-economy.5 Smith also focused mainly on the conditions that
allowed for national development, whereas Marx, like Th omas Friedman and many of the other breathless portrayers of the wonders of globalisation,
assumed a single integrated world-market for capital and labour and a ‘fl at world’ in which global inequalities would soon be
reduced by the rapid and even diff usion of capitalist development. Arrighi fi nds Smith giving advice to legislators about the dangers of
allowing big capital to dictate state-policies that are not in the interest of the nation as a whole . Smith also focuses on the demographic
and geographical features of each national society (the container that is the stateterritory) as constituting important constraints and opportunities
for the possibilities for national development. Whereas Marx analysed capitalism in order to provide a theory that would be useful to the workers of
the world, Smith intended to provide a theory that would be useful to public-minded leaders of nation-states about the best ways to develop the wealth of their
nations. Arrighi does far better than Frank in seeing that there was a substantially independent East-Asian international system prior to the nineteenth century.
Frank claimed that there had been a single world-system since the Bronze Age.6 Surely there were some important long-distance eff ects of prestige goods-trade
and the diff usion of technologies back and forth across the silkroads in earlier centuries, but Eastern and Western geopolitics and statecraft did
not become integrated into a single political-military interaction-network until the European states surrounded and tried to
penetrate China in the nineteenth century. Before that, there was a substantially separate East-Asian international system. After
describing the fi rst Opium War in 1841, Arrighi says: ‘After a disastrous war with Britain (now joined by France), China virtually ceased to be
the centre of a relatively self-contained East Asian interstate system’.7 Th e East-Asian international trade-tribute system has been well
described in the studies by Takeshi Hamashita.8 China, far larger and more powerful than any other state in the East-Asian system, had
called the shots but did not engage in the kind of expansionist and imperialistic behaviour that was so apparent in the
relationship between the European powers and their colonies. Arrighi characterises this as a pacifi c system relative to the international system of
states in Europe, where interstate warfare was nearly continuous and huge world-wars among the ‘great powers’ broke out whenever
hegemony failed. Arrighi contended that the relatively less contentious East-Asian system was a consequence of the more inward
oriented and less expansive mode of development in China , but he also admitted that the Chinese state was so large relative to the other states in
the system that challenges to Chinese hegemony were not likely to occur and were unsuccessful when they did appear. Japan’s occasional eff orts to become the
East-Asian hegemon failed until after the Europeans had brought the Qing Dynasty to its knees. Th e
CONTINUED…
ENDI 2010
Historical Materialism K
30
Wave 1
LINK: CHINA ECONOMY
CONTINUED…
new East-Asian world-historians argue that there
was a dynamic EastAsian model of development that was distinct from that of the
West and diff erent from the usual Eurocentric presumptions about a static Asiatic mode of production. Th ey show convincingly that
commodity-production, markets and money were highly advanced in China and that some regions within China – South China and
the Yangtze river-valley – were especially dynamic in terms of economic development in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries .
Arrighi supported the idea that there was an ‘industrious revolution’ in China in the eighteenth century, in which intensive labour was
used to produce commodities instead of replacing labour with machines. Th is kind of market-society was characterised by Mark
Elvin as a ‘high level equilibrium trap’ in which capital had little incentive to invest in labour-saving technology because labour
was so cheap.9 Arrighi and the new economic historians of East Asia emphasise the upside of this for employment. But this does not explain why the
West was able to eclipse China in terms of wealth, technology and military power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries . Frank
had contended that China was the most developed centre of the Eurasian world-system until 1800, and that Europe had abruptly seized the upper hand in the
nineteenth century. Frank also argued that the European advantage was unsubstantial and would be a brief interlude that would soon be ended by a new rise of
China. But Frank did not do what Arrighi has done, which is to show what it was about the constellation of Chinese institutions that was diff erent from, and
superior to, the institutional structures of Europe. Frank contended that the existing evolutionary accounts of the rise of capitalism were Eurocentric nonsense.
Instead, he saw a continuous logic of accumulation that was based both on state-power and the ability to make wealth by means
of trade and production. According to this view, states and wealthy élites have oscillated back and forth since the Bronze Age
between a greater emphasis on state-controlled economies in some periods and a greater emphasis on markets and
tradenetworks in others. Th is logic of accumulation did not really evolve. Frank understood it as a great wheel that goes round and round. And, after the
1970s, Frank did not see any possibility of a less exploitative future mode of production. According to Frank, China had been the centre for millennia and the
European interlude was brutish but would be mercifully short. He had given up on his earlier conviction that a socialist revolution might produce a new kind of
future society. Arrighi’s analysis parts company from that of Frank in a number of ways. Arrighi agreed with Frank that China was more developed in terms of
technology and institutions than Europe was until the end of the eighteenth century, but he did not see the European rise as sudden and completely
conjunctural. Arrighi’s analysis of the development of capitalism in Europe was evolutionary and began in the fi fteenth century when
Genoa, Portugal and Spain combined fi nance-capital with an expansive intercontinental colonial expansion.10 And, while his
distinction between capitalism and market-society holds the promise of future progress, it seems to be rather less of a qualitative
transformation to a much more egalitarian kind of social system than those that have been depicted as possible by other analysts of capitalism. Arrighi also
supported the idea that one of the main explanations of the diff erence between China and the West has to do with the nature of classpower over the state. Th e
idea of a capitalist state, in which merchants, industrialists and bankers exert great power over state-policy, was thrown out by Frank as so much Eurocentric
baggage. In Th e Long Twentieth Century, Arrighi had characterised the Chinese dynasties as tributary empires that were becoming increasingly commercialised. In
Adam Smith in Beijing, he presented the Qing Dynasty as a relatively benevolent welfare-state that was trying to protect peasants from exploitation by local
landowners and by merchants. A key diff erence between the Chinese dynasties and the régimes of Europe had to do with the greater infl uence in Europe that
capitalists had over state-policy in the leading hegemonic core-states. Arrighi wrote: ‘Th us Smith’s “unnatural” path diff ers from the “natural”,
not because it has a larger number of capitalists but because capitalists have greater power to impose their class interest at the
expense of the national interest’.11 And he went on to say that, while this was not true for all the European states, it was the situation in those
states that were most central in the European system – the hegemons.
In Volume 1 of Th e Modern World-System, Immanuel Wallerstein noted a key diff erence between China and Europe in the ‘long sixteenth century’ that had huge
consequences.12 He pointed out that China had a central government – a ‘world empire’ that could formulate and enforce a single
policy over a very large area, whereas Europe was a ‘world-economy’ that was politically organised as a set of competing corestates. In the same years that the Portuguese King Henry the Navigator was heading abroad, with Genoese support, to circumnavigate Africa for the purposes
of outfl anking the Venetian monopoly on East-Indian spices, the Ming Dynasty was abandoning the Treasure Fleet explorations to Africa in order to
concentrate on defending the heartland of the middle kingdom from steppe-invaders. Central-Asian steppe-nomads had also repeatedly assaulted Europe, but
there was no Emperor of Europe to tell the Portuguese to desist because resources needed husbanding to defend against the Central Asians. Europe had a
multicentric interstate-system in which fi nance-capital was beginning to play an important role in directing state-policy,13 while
China was turning inward to maintain its centralised tributary empire . It was the weakness and small scale of tributary states in the West after
the fall of Rome that allowed capitalism to become the predominant form of accumulation. In China’s case, a strong tributary state, run by mandarins
and occasionally by semiperipheral conquerors, repeatedly succeeded in confi scating the wealth of those merchants or regional
trading dynasts who posed a political threat to the control of the state. 14 Arrighi confi rmed that growing European power over China was not
primarily due to the cheap prices of European commodities that could knock down all Chinese walls. Most European goods could not compete for
the home and rural markets within China even after the European states had forced the Qing régime to let them in. Rather, the major advantage that
the Europeans enjoyed was in military technology. Th ough Arrighi contended that the important diff erences between Europe and China were due to the ways
in which political and economic institutions were combined, his analysis is not inconsistent with the conclusion that the key question is, ‘Who controls the
state?’ In Europe, capitalists came to control, fi rst, city-states, and then, the most successful nation-states. In China, that never
happened, though it may be happening now for the fi rst time.
ENDI 2010
Historical Materialism K
31
Wave 1
ALT SOLVES – LANGUAGE / IDENTITY
Historical materialism is an indispensable tool for the critical interrogation of language and
identity—the affirmative risks being absorbed into the dominant cultural frame
Foster '96 - prof. of sociology @ Univ. Oregon (John, "In Defense of History," in "In Defense of History," Ed. by E. Meiskins
Wood & John Foster, p.185-193, RG)
The weaknesses of postmodernism—from an emancipatory perspective— thus far overshadow its strengths. Missing from
Foucault's analysis, like that of postmodernism generally, is any conception of a counter-order to the disciplinary orders
described. In the more extreme case of "textual postmodernists"—those postmodernist thinkers like Derrida, as distinct from Foucault, who deny any reality
outside the text—the political and historical weaknesses from a left perspective are even more glaring. By undermining the very
concept of history—in any meaningful sense beyond mere story-telling—such theorists have robbed critical analysis of what
has always been its most indispensable tool.18 The denial within postmodernist theory of the validity of historical critique covers up
what is really at issue: the denial of the historical critique of capitalism, leading to a convergence between left thought infected
by Nietzsche and the dominant liberal "end of history" conception. The danger of such ahistorical or anti-historical views, as E.P.
Thompson observed, is that one loses sight not of "reason in history" in some abstract sense, but rather of "the reasons of power
and the reasons of money."19 Historical materialism at its best provides a way out of this dilemma . This is not to ignore the fact that
Marxism—which has sometimes given rise to its own crude interpretations and historical travesties, as in the case of Stalinism—has frequently been identified
with the kind of "totalizations" and "essentialisms" that postmodernist theorists have singled out. As Thompson pointed out in a 1977 essay on Christopher
Caudwell, Marxism has sometimes relied on " 'essentialist' tricks of mind," the "tendency to intellectualize the social process"—"the rapid delineation of the
deep process of a whole epoch." These are things that the historian (and social scientists in general) should guard against. But to abandon theory and
historical explanation entirely in order to avoid "essentialism" and "foundationalism" is a bit like throwing out the baby in order
to keep the bathwater clean. Marx himself provided another model, actively opposing theory (even "Marxist" theory) that purported to be
"suprahistorical." In his Theses on Feuerbach, he presented what still ranks as the most thorough- going critique of what he called the "essentialist" conception of
human beings and nature. Indeed, historical materialism has long engaged in its own self-critique, precisely in order to expel the kinds
of "essentialisms," "positivisms," and "structuralisms" that have intruded on the philosophy of praxis itself —-a self-critique that has
produced the insights of theorists like Gramsci, Sartre, Thompson, and Raymond Williams. 20 These thinkers distanced themselves from the positivistic "official
Marxism" that grew out of the Second International and later turned into a caricature of itself in the form of Stalinism. Yet they held firm to the critique of
capitalism and their commitment to the struggles of the oppressed. Moreover, these particular examples tell us that if what has sometimes been called
"the postmodern agenda"—consisting of issues like identity, culture, and language—is to be addressed at all, this can only be
accomplished within a historical context. And here one might openly wonder with Foucault "what difference there could ultimately be between being
a historian and being a Marxist." When placed within a more holistic historical materialist context—animated by the concept of
praxis—the problems raised by postmodernism look entirely different . As David McNally says, "Language is not a prison-house, but a site of
struggle." What the contributions in this volume have in common is the insistence that issues like language, culture, nationality, race, gender, the environment,
revolution, and history itself are only effectively analyzed within a context that is simultaneously historical in character, materialist (in the sense of focusing on
concrete practices), and revolutionary. Such analyses do not abandon the hope of transcending capitalism, nor of the notion of human progress as a possible
outcome of historical struggles. It is said that Nicholas I, Czar of Russia, issued an order banning the word "progress." Today we no longer believe, in a
nineteenth century sense, in automatic human progress, embodying some definite content—the idea that the Czar found so threatening. But this does not mean,
as the philosopher Michael Oakeshott contended with respect to political activity in the 1950s, that we "sail a boundless and bottomless sea" that has "neither
starting-point nor appointed direction" and that our only task is "to keep afloat on an even keel." History—as centuries of struggle and indeed progress
suggest—is more meaningful than that. To abandon altogether the concept of progress, in the more general sense of the possibility of
progressive human emancipation, would only be to submit to the wishes of the powers that be . Such political disengagement by
intellectuals on the left in the present epoch could only mean one thing: the total obeisance to capital.21 The irony of post-modernism is that while purporting to
have transcended modernity, it abandons from the start all hope of transcending capitalism itself and entering a post-capitalist era. Postmodernist theory is
therefore easily absorbed within the dominant cultural frame and has even given rise recently to texts such as Postmodern Marketing, which attempts
to utilize the insights of thinkers like Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, and Baudillard to market goods within a capitalist economy. Perhaps this will be the final
destiny of postmodernist theory—its absorption by the vast marketing apparatus of the capitalist economy, adding irony and color to a commercial order that
must constantly find new ways to insinuate itself into the everyday lives of the population. Meanwhile, historical materialism will remain the
necessary intellectual ground for all those who seek, not to revel in the "carnival" of capitalist productive and market relations,
but to transcend them.22
ENDI 2010
Historical Materialism K
32
Wave 1
ALT SOLVES – UNDERMINES SOVEREINGTY
Analyzing sovereign power historically unveils epistemological patterns that pre-cede empirical
claims
Lapointe, 2007 [Thierry. "Beyond an Historicism Without Subject: Agency and the Elusive Genealogies of State
Sovereignty" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association 48th Annual Convention, Feb
28, 2007 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p180176_index.html]
The configurations of relations of power institutionalised by historically specific forms of sovereignty provide , it is our
contention, significant clues to understand and explain why agents develop strategies of power and specific forms of
rationality rather than others. Furthermore, it provides us with valuable analytical tools to problematise the reasons why a
social formation follows a specific institutional trajectory rather than others and why, in such a context, certain patterns of
rationality, thoughts and discourses develop rather than others—i.e. the positivity of discourses. Therefore, it also allows for a
historicisation of patterns of human rationality/subjectivity. As I will try to point out in last section of this chapter is that all four of these
factors identified above were of significant importance in determining the different institutional trajectories followed by France and the HRE in the context
of XVI-XVIIth century.
Historical materialism exposes the contingency of nation-states that are otherwise naturalized in
IR theory
Halliday ’94 [Fred, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, ‘A Necessary Encounter:
Historical Materialism and International Relations’ in Rethinking International Relations (Basingstoke: Macmillan), 47-73]
Anyone familiar with the workings of the international system will, in one sense, be aware of this -- the ideological
suppression of the origins of the system, a propensity to deny the violence involved in its creation, and the force within
international affairs, not least through nationalism, of irrational factors. Thus what Marx said of the role of history in general
could be said of any particular country: its domestic and foreign policies, the instincts -61- of its leaders and the responses
of its public, the institutions through which policy was conducted, the grievances and fears that drive its population -- all
reflected the past to a degree larger than was often admitted. More importantly, as with socio-economic, so with historical determination,
Marx also saw these conditioning factors as undermining the appearance which all social events had of being in some way
'natural' or 'eternal': one of the major functions of political socialisation in any society is to make what exists in that
society appear as inevitable, and unchangeable. The same is true of the international domain itself, and the attendant
forms -nation, state, sovereignty, etc. -- associated with it. Location of these features of a society in the historical context of
their origin serves to contradict this appearance of being natural and eternal, as well as to suggest that alternatives are also
the more possible.
ENDI 2010
Historical Materialism K
33
Wave 1
ALT –SOLVES STATISM
Historical materialism avoids state-centricity and problematizes the relationship of the state to
capitalism
van Apeldoorn 2004 [Bastiann, prof of political science at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, “Theorizing the transnational: a
historical materialist approach, Journal of International Relations and Development, 2004, 7, (142–176), ebscohost]
In contrast to neo-realism (and to a large extent neo-liberalism as well), in which state power is narrowly conceived as the
accumulated material capabilities of the ‘state-as-actor’, historical materialism seeks to examine the social origins of that
power. Hence Cox’s (1986: 205, emphasis added) suggestion to ‘consider the state-society complex as the basic entity of international relations.’
Emphasizing the capitalist nature of society, a historical materialist theory of world politics would , as Mark Rupert (1993: 84)
phrased it, take ‘as its point of departure the proposition that international politics as we know it is historically embedded in,
and internally related to, capitalist social relations.’ What our transnationalist perspective would add to this is the claim that these social
relations have from the start been at least partly of a transnational nature , and that through different phases in the history of modern
capitalism (though not in a straight upward line) these social relations have increasingly become more transnationalized.
ENDI 2010
Historical Materialism K
34
Wave 1
ALT – RACE
The alternative is to reject postmodernist discourse of race and explore the effects daily
productive and material forces have on race relations. Only through examining capitalism can we
understand why the aff impacts happen in the first place.
Young ‘1 - professor of English @ University of Alabama (Robert, “The Linguistic Turn, Materialism and Race:
Toward an Aesthetics of Crisis,” Callaloo, 24(1), Winter 2001, pp. 334-345, Project MUSE, RG)
Postmodernists reunderstand the subject, not as the rational cause of social meaning, but rather the effect of the articulation of
various discursive practices. Roland Barthes makes this point clear in S/Z when he says, “ I is not an innocent subject, anterior to the text, one which will
subsequently deal with the text as it would an object to dismantle or a site to occupy. This ‘I’ which approaches the text is already itself a plurality of other text,
of codes which are infinite or, more precisely, lost” (10). Michel Foucault also points up the constructedness of the subject when he argues that: “The
individual is not a pregiven entity which is seized on by the exercise of power. The individual, with his identity, is the product of
a relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces” (73-74). Perhaps the classic poststructuralist view of
the subject, though, is found in Jacques Derrida. For Derrida, “The subject (in its identity with itself, or eventually in its consciousness of its identity with itself,
its selfconsciousness) is inscribed in language, is a ‘function’ of language, becomes a speaking subject only by making its speech conform . . . to the system of the
rules of language as system of differences, or at very least by conforming to the general laws of difference” (15).
The view of the subject as a language construct has framed postmodern discourses of race. For example, Henry Gates argues that “Race has become a
trope of ultimate, irreducible difference between culture . . . [and thus] Race is the ultimate trope of difference because it is so very arbitrary in its
application” (Race 5). In the Signifying Monkey Gates develops his project of investigating rhetorical structures and privileges the mechanics of the meaningmaking process and foregrounds the “materiality” and “willful play” of the signifier (59). Thus for Gates “blackness is produced in the text through a complex
process of signification” and therefore “There can be no transcendent blackness, for it can not and does not exist beyond
manifestations in specific figures” (237).
Theorizing race as text has led to proclamations, such as the one by Anthony Appiah, that race is a fiction: “The truth is that there are no races” (Appiah 35).
The politics of such a discourse is perhaps clearest in Kobena Mercer’s essay “‘1968’: Periodizing Politics and Identity,” where he, too, recognizes the
meaninglessness of race and marks how “the [race] signifier itself became the site for the making and remaking of meanings” (430). Thus politics becomes a
matter of semiotic freedom and democracy is seen as a “struggle over relations of representation” (Mercer 429) and not the relations of production. In short,
what is offered as emancipation is not equal access to economic resources but the pleasure of disrupting dominant and oppressive meanings. While such
discursive intervention is important, especially for an historically marginalized group, it is urgent to recognize that social change will come about not by
emancipating signs from totalities but by displacing the relations of production, for although the relations of production do not evade, they nevertheless always
exceed the fate of signs.
Not only do such postmodern discourses reify culture, in what Kenan Malik calls “cultural formalism,” but in their anti-totality move and privileging of the logic
of indeterminacy postmodernists suppress notions of causality. Postmodern discourses of race merely assert the constructedness of the
(race) sign and bracket the political economy of race , and consequently the text is set as the limit of intelligibility. In arguing for the
“constructed-ness” of race but locating it textually there is a theoretical problem in accounting for the textual inscription of race
or its extra-textual effects in daily life under capitalism (and we must account for extratextual effects because for people of color it is a matter of
life and death).
Postmodernists are unable to explain why race has acquired its oppressive social meaning in the first place and across various
localities—that is race is a translocal articulation. Reading race as essentially constructed but not accounting for its production, race is mystified and
metaphysics is reintroduced; in fact, in a recent symposium on race and racism Howard Winant asserts that “Race remains a mysterious phenomenon”(7). Race
is not a mystery as it operates today as a material practice in marking racially coded subjects for differential levels of surplus
extraction and violence and it has an historical emergence . As Alex Callinicos indicates, “Racism as we know it today developed during
a key phase in the development of capitalism as the dominant mode of production on a global scale—the establishment during
the 17th and 18th centuries of colonial plantations in the New World using slave labour imported from Africa to produce
consumer goods such as tobacco and sugar and industrial outputs such as cotton for the world market ” (11). As Eric Williams
succinctly put it, “Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery” (7).
While most postmodern discourses have moved away from ontologically based inquiries, a recent essay by Linda Alcoff attempts to (re)configure race as an
“ontological” category. Her intervention opens the possibility for foregrounding the nexus between race and materialism. This possibility is quickly closed down
as her discourse moves away from materialism and thus for Alcoff “Race is a particular, historically and culturally located form of human categorization . . .” (7).
The question again is why? Why is race a form of human categorization? And is race identity really a matter of language games? And
are these games essentially self-originating and autonomous? Of course not. These “games” are always already situated within and the effect
of the prevailing economic / political /cultural /ideological conditions. As Malik points out “Racial differentiation emerges out of real social and
economic mechanisms” (10), and they are not ontologically pre-given.
In other words, this human categorization is an historical articulation of racialized division of labor structuring asymmetrical access
to surplus. Alcoff reduces thought about the real to the real itself and this articulates an empiricist idealism. Therefore what is really at stake here is not so
much the question of ontology and the related question of objectivity—which puts one on the road to materialism—as much as it is the articulation of what
Roy Bhaskar has called the “epistemic fallacy” and consequently the recuperation of experience. One must remember Alcoff’s original concern was not only to
“validate hybrid identity or hybrid positionality against purist, essentialist accounts” but also to “take into account the full force of race as a lived experience”
(9). Of course, as I also pointed out earlier, it is politically urgent to mark such experiences but an ontological reinscription of race reifies
race and as such disables a transformative project—a project aimed at negating the deployment of race as a structure for
exploitation. Under way, then, is the alliance of postmodern discourses, which de-essentializes identity, with this humanist
identity. These two apparently antagonistic discourses are actually colluding in suppressing the political economy of race. The
trajectory—from the postmodernist constructed identity to the humanist subject—may be clearly mapped out in a series of works by Gates.
ENDI 2010
Historical Materialism K
35
Wave 1
ALT SOLVES: POLITICS
An account of how social forms emerge historically reveals the process through which state
actors gain legitimacy – the affirmative reduces politics to technics
Edkins 1999 [Jenny, Senior Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Wales Aberystwyth, Postructuralism and
International Relations: Bringing the Political Back In, p. 3-4]
In any formation of a new state, there are clearly events that would be described as part of "politics" in the narrow sense of
the word that are nevertheless significant. But these maneuvers taking place in "politics" do not provide an account in
themselves of how one social form rather than another emerges from a period of contestation and struggle. To achieve
an understanding of the latter, we need a "political" analysis that examines mutations of the social or symbolic order and how a
new model of society is created. In the case of the move to totalitarianism in the USSR, for example, Lefort argues that key to the whole process is
that at the level of fantasy "what is being created is the model of a society which seems to institute itself without divisions,
which seems to have mastery of its own organization, a society in which each part seems to be related to every other and
imbued by one and the same project of building socialism."13 In other words, what is significant in the exitmination of
totalitarianism is how a new symbolic ideal of society, with forms of legitimation, was instituted, and how this model works
as fantasy. An analysis of "the political" in the broader sense would involve an account of how such models of the social
are articulated and how they work. Zizek summarizes the distinction made by Lefort and Laclau as one between "Politics" as a separate social
complex, a positively determined sub-system of social relations in interaction with other sub-systems (economy, forms of culture ... ) and the "Political"
[le politiquel as the moment of openness, of undecidability, when the very structuring principle of society, the fundamental form of social pact, is called
into question-in short, the moment of global crisis overcome by the act of founding a "new harmony."14 Once it is decided (by wars, revolutions, and
the like) that legitimate authority resides, for example, with a particular state form, what follows is the bureaucratic technique of
governance elaborated through recognized expertise and endorsed in the continuance of the state form through the regular,
ritual replacement of the placeholders of authority, whether by elections in a democracy or through the rules of succession in a monarchy or
dictatorship. As Max Weber has argued, bureaucracy succeeds because of its technical efficiency, and once in place it is difficult to
remove.15 It replaces the need for political decisions: Actions can be determined on purely technical grounds .
ENDI 2010
Historical Materialism K
36
Wave 1
HIST MAT EPISTEMOLOGY GOOD/ALT SOLVES
Our alternative epistemology makes the socionomic a meaningful part of international relations
and exposes the problematic assumptions of their behavioral and categorical models
Halliday ’94 [Fred, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, ‘A Necessary Encounter:
Historical Materialism and International Relations’ in Rethinking International Relations (Basingstoke: Macmillan), 47-73]
This prominence of classes as analytic tools has two immediate consequences for International Relations . First, it invests the
major conflicts of international politics with a distinct socioeconomic character. Though it may be untrue to say, paraphrasing Marx,
that all the history of International Relations has been one of class struggle, it has certainly been a major and at times decisive component. The competitive
spread of the European empires, the outbreaks of the two world wars, the gold standard crisis of 1931, the OPEC price rises of 1971-73, the
disputes over trade and interest rates within the Atlantic Alliance in the early 1980s, US-Japanese trade conflict in the 1990s -- all now
appear as, in broad -63- terms, part of conflict between capitalist ruling classes, between old established capitalist powers
and their new rivals, the latter produced by the development of capitalist social relations within their own countries. Many of
the disputes that have marked twentieth century history became inter-imperialist and intercapitalist disputes, beyond their specific national, geographic and
historical characteristics: as already noted, this issue of conflict between great powers, not the dynamics of 'North-South' relations was the main question
addressed by Lenin and others, in the debate on imperialism before the First World War. Secondly, in this light, the debates that have
flourished within International Relations for so long appear to be founded on some questionable premises . Since the state is
not an independent entity, but is rather located in a particular socio-economic and class context, the debate on whether the
state is losing power to non-state actors changes character. For the question now becomes not whether the state has recently, i.e. since 1945
or 1970, lost preeminence to non-state actors but how far the 'non-state' actors who have always affected the power and character of the state act through
the state or through other channels. These non-state actors, i.e. classes, have always been there, but have exercised their power in a
variety of ways. The question of how far the boundary between domestic and international politics has broken down also
acquires a different significance; in capitalism classes have always operated internationally, from the bankers and trading
companies of the sixteenth century onwards, and have in turn been affected domestically by changes in the international
economic and political situation. 31 The primacy of classes therefore serves in a dual sense to place in question the concept
of the 'nation-state': it shows, first, that the state itself is, to a considerable extent, a function of wider social forces, and
secondly that the impermeability of domestic politics is an appearance which conceals a permanent, underlying,
internationalisation of political and economic factors. In Marx's own writings, there is an interesting tension on this issue: his political
instincts led him to emphasise the international character of the proletariat, the working class, and their aspiration and ability to organise on an
international basis against their class enemies; yet his theory contained within it another suggestion, namely that it was not the working class, but the
bourgeoisie, who -64- were the most international, since their education and culture on the one hand, and their very economic interests on the other, were
such as to lead them to act more and more internationally. The subsequent history of capitalism has, as much as anything, been one in which the
internationalisation of the ruling class has proceeded as fast as, or even faster than, that of the working class -- hence, as Jeff Frieden, Stephen Gill, Kees
van der Pijl and others have shown, the EC (European Community), the Trilateral Commission, the Group of 7 and many others are examples of
transnational élite coordination, for the better management of the economy, both national and international.
ENDI 2010
Historical Materialism K
37
Wave 1
HIST MAT EPISTEMOLOGY GOOD
Historical materialism rethinks security as an historical and sociological problem and debunks
the supposed neutrality of realist theories of IR
Halliday ’94 [Fred, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, ‘A Necessary Encounter:
Historical Materialism and International Relations’ in Rethinking International Relations (Basingstoke: Macmillan), 47-73]
If this tenet of historical materialism is extended to the international, then it suggests that the central concern of
International Relations becomes not security, and the actions of the nation-state directed to defending and enhancing it, but
rather conflict, and the ways in which this is generated, conducted, and resolved . Underlying the myriad events of
international affairs lies social conflict, within and across frontiers, the pursuit of wealth and economic power as the source
of these manifold events. 33 Taking the historical determination of specific states into account, it becomes necessary to enquire whence these came,
or, more precisely, out of what historical conflicts they emerged. The most apparently pacific of states may have issued from extremely
bloody pasts -- the superficially tranquil Netherlands has a history replete with revolution, invasion and sanguinary internal
strife. The currently smooth workings of democracy in Germany or Japan betray the fact that this political system was
imposed but two generations ago through foreign military intervention. The sudden arrival of close to one hundred new
states on the world scene in the period since 1945 is often adduced merely as a numerical addition, a complicating or
diluting expansion, of an otherwise continuous states system: the fact that this process was a result of intense conflicts,
between colonies and colonial power and, as a major precondion, derived from the weakening of the colonial empires in the
Second World War, receives less than its appropriate share of attention . Marx was aware of this in his writings on the mid-nineteenth
century: writing on the challenge to the five-nation balance of power, the pentarchy, he warned of the presence of a sixth great power, revolution. Thus ,
the dominant problem of twentiethcentury international politics is seen by conventional international relations theory as
being that of security: but for much of that period it can equally be seen as having been that of containing inter-capitalist
conflict on the one hand, and social revolution on the other. In other words, the management of social conflict is the issue that has most
concerned politicians and academic analysts of foreign policy alike. 34 As Arno Mayer has shown, an apparently neutral international event
like the Versailles Peace Conference of -66- 1919 was preoccupied with the issue of counter revolution and containing disorder .
Marx was mistaken to invest revolution with the mystical and deterministic overtones that came to be associated with it, and equally wrong to believe that
some radically different and emancipated society would emerge from such upheavals: but he was right to see social conflict, over ownership, power,
resources, as a central feature of politics, and to ask how such conflict underlay the apparently autonomous world of political strife and international
conflict. This he was able to do, in part, by introducing the materialist and historical contexts. When it is said that the pursuit of international politics is
one of 'order' one has to ask 'order' for whom, and in whose interests? Similarly, when it is said, as by Hedley Bull, that international society is 'anarchical',
this both recognises and avoids the question: it recognises it in so far as it acknowledges that there is conflict and that it is endemic to the international
system, but it avoids it, in so far as it denies that there is an underlying source of this conflict, beyond the states system, and locates the coherence of the
system only at the level of the mechanisms, or so-called 'institutions', evolved to manage this conflict. But the assertion of anarchy conceals the
fact that this superficially incoherent conflict is itself the product of factors that are definable and intelligible, even if they
cannot be controlled as the principal actors would like. Moreover, for Marxism, it is above all not the anarchy of the states
system but that of the market and of capitalism itself that is determinant. 35
ENDI 2010
Historical Materialism K
38
Wave 1
AT: MARXISM BAD TURNS
Their Marxism bad turns are unresponsive. Our alternative is historical materialist analysis not
revolution, and Marxism itself is in a constant state of flux so their turns are reductive and
ignore Marxist contributions to IR theory
Halliday ’94 [Fred, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, ‘A Necessary Encounter:
Historical Materialism and International Relations’ in Rethinking International Relations (Basingstoke: Macmillan), 47-73]
It is not possible to claim that the intellectual instruments for such an encounter are simply at hand, waiting to be utilised. Marxism,
as a theoretical
approach, remains in evolution: while there is much that it has encompassed in the one hundred and fifty years of its
existence, there is also much that remains unanalysed, as there is that is contradictory, outdated, confused within its corpus.
In this it is no different from other approaches, be these liberalism or conventional economics. The work of analysing international relations is
to a considerable extent in the future, its components not present in the works of historical materialists who have written to date. Yet that such
an endeavour is possible and can yield a new, comprehensive, paradigm can be asserted, for two general reasons . First, as is
evident from its impact in other social sciences, historical materialism is a comprehensive general theory of political, social and
economic action, one that claims to be able to encompass all major fields of social action within its scope. It is indeed the
most sustained attempt to provide a comprehensive theory of society elaborated in the past century. Its impact has already
been evident in some areas of social science: in economics, history, sociology, to name the three most evident. The fact that it has not yet been accorded a
comparable place in International Relations, and has not yet responded proportionately to the -55- challenges of the discipline, is a result of the specific
obstacles, theoretical and historical, already outlined. Many conceptual aspects of historical materialism contain potential for
International Relations, and can be applied to the international as other theories have been. As we have seen in Chapter 1, International Relations has
derived an immense amount, indeed the majority, of its theoretical tools from other disciplines in the few decades of its existence: from the Chicago school
theory of power, through behaviouralism, rational action theory, the first influences of law and philosophy, and conflict theories, functionalism and now
'critical' theory, the influence upon it of other branches of the social science are evident. The scope for such a theoretical enrichment from historical
materialism, even where as with history or sociology this enrichment is based on work not directly related to International Relations, is considerable.
Secondly, within its corpus even as presently constituted, historical materialism has produced a body of literature pertaining
to the conventional agenda of International Relations, and way beyond the specific interpretation of 'structuralism' that was
recognised in the late 1970s: on war, violence, the state, international conflict, transnational economic issues, the
development of the international system itself. The attempt by Marxists in the period 1900-20 to theorise the international system around the
concept of 'imperialism', by which they meant inter-state strategic rivalry, is one of the most ambitious and creative ever made. Since the 1970s
another considerable body of literature on international issues has been produced under the influence of Marxism: apart
from copious studies of imperialism, there have been the world system theories of Wallerstein, the debates on Cold War, and
analyses of inter-capitalist relations. Wallerstein's work posits a very different history of the international system to that of orthodox IR: while
covering roughly the same historical period, from 1500 to the present. The Wallersteinian approach emphasises the role of economic relations in
constituting the system, as distinct from the political and diplomatic analysis of realism; it stresses the creation of hierarchy where the other focuses on the
formation of an international 'society', equal at least in juridical claims, and it seeks to link the process of international conflict to internal social and
political change, in -56- contrast to realism's denial of the relevance of the internal. 18 At the same time, Wallerstein's work has, from within historial
materialism, generated substantial criticism: as a theory that lays too much stress on circulation rather than on production, as a somewhat naive espousal of
'anti-systemic' forces even when these are themselves oppressive, as resting on too one-sided and 'dependency'-theory-oriented explanation of imperialism.
ENDI 2010
Historical Materialism K
39
Wave 1
AT: COMMUNISM BAD
Historical materialism is distinct and insulated from the history of poor communist
appropriations of its theory of history
Halliday ’94 [Fred, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, ‘A Necessary Encounter:
Historical Materialism and International Relations’ in Rethinking International Relations (Basingstoke: Macmillan), 47-73]
To argue for the recognition of the relevance of historical materialism in the aftermath of the Cold War and the collapse of the communist system may, at
first sight, appear perverse, if not forlorn. Yet such an endeavour is possible not only in spite of, but in certain respects because of, that turn of events. At
the most straightforward level, the pertinence of historical materialism as an explanatory system has never been dependent upon
the success of dictatorial movements that claimed to speak in its name, any more than has capitalism relied on the success
of the authoritarian, racist and belligerent regimes that it produced. The evolution, separate from and in conflict with
official communism, of independent Marxism over most of the twentieth century is evidence enough of that. But beyond this
consideration lies the possibility that historical materialism may prove to be just as relevant as it ever was as an explanatory
system, and one that, in origin and development, takes as its starting point and focus of analysis precisely that phenomenon
that now more than ever dominates the world, namely capitalism. Marxism was wrong to assert the imminence of a
revolutionary alternative to capitalist society, and it consistently underrated the potential for change, and improvement
within capitalism. As we shall see in Chapter 10, the claim that capitalism inevitably leads to war may turn out to be itself
historical, a reflection on states that were not yet fully democratic. But its twin claims, that the mode of production provides
the context for the analysis of political phenomena, national and international, and that the capitalist system is riven with
conflicts, dangers and failures, grounded in these socio-economic factors, would seem to be as valid today as they ever
were.
ENDI 2010
Historical Materialism K
40
Wave 1
AT: GLOBAL VIOLENCE DECREASING BC OF CAP
The global is the wrong scale at which to measure inequality, violence, and the value to life. Their
research methodologies are based on failing theories of international political economy
Walker 2002 [RBJ, professor of political science at the University of Victoria, “International/Inequality,” International
Studies Review, Vol. 4, No. 2, International Relations and the New Inequality (Summer, 2002), pp. 7-24, jstor]
Moreover, until relatively recently at least, most
analyses of capitalism as a globalizing dynamic with a capacity to dis- solve and
recast all existing discriminations and jurisdictions offered some account of its articulation within the political categories
and institutions of the modem state. This articulation has been most frequently cast in functional terms, capital being understood as having
political needs that could be performed by modern states that were, consequently, only relatively autonomous, and with only a limited capacity to wrestle
capitalism into some sort of accommodation with other values. While one of the strengths of this form of analysis was to show that there
is a relation between the inequalities produced by capitalism as a globalizing dynamic and inequality within any specific
jurisdiction, it remained the case that analysis tended to affirm the political distinction between the domestic and the
international. More recently, of course, international political economy has begun to give way to various kinds of global political
economy. The distinction may not say very much about the changing character of capi- talism as a form of economic life,
but it certainly poses massive problems for those seeking to understand the political implications of contemporary
shifts in the relation between capitalism and the modern state . The official statistics still measure patterns of capital
accumulation and distribution in statist categories. States no doubt have an interest in keeping it this way . It is far from
clear, however, that global inequalities are best measured on an international scale. Two basic modes of inclusion/exclusion,
then, and two basic tensions between a formal claim to equality and a quasi-legitimate acknowledgment of a vertical hierarchy.
ENDI 2010
Historical Materialism K
41
Wave 1
AT: HUMANISM BAD - RATIONALISM  HOLOCAUST
Belief in humanism is key to all emancipatory struggles- the wholesale rejection of humanism and
arguments about rationalism causing the Holocaust treat people as ahistorical subjects and
denies humanity to non-Western Others
Malik '96 - senior visting fellow at the Department of Political, International and Policy Studies at the University of Surrey
(Kenan, "The Mirror of Race: Postmodernism and the Celebration of Difference," in "In Defense of History," Ed. by E.
Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.121-127, RG)
Whether liberal or Marxist, underlying all humanistic strands is a belief in human emancipation—the idea that humankind can
rationally transform society through the agency of its own efforts. Indeed, no emancipatory philosophy is possible without a
humanist perspective, for any antihuman-istic outlook is forced to look outside of humanity for the agency of salvation—if earthly
salvation is possible at all. Antihumanistic strands developed from the Enlightenment on, largely in opposition to the idea of rational human emancipation. Just
as there have been a number of different strands of humanism, so there have been a number of different strands of
antihumanism, ranging from the conservatism of Burke, the Catholic reaction of de Maistre, to the nihilism of Nietzsche and the Nazism of Heidegger. All
rejected Enlightenment rationalism and the idea of social progress because they despaired of the capacity of humankind for such rational progress, a despair that
was in general an expression of either fear of or contempt for the masses, who were seen as irrational, atavistic, and a threat to civilized society.
Antihumanism rejected ideas of equality and human unity, celebrating instead difference and divergence and exalting the
particular and the "authentic" over the universal . Antihumanism developed therefore as a central component of elite theories. In the postwar era,
however, antihumanism came to represent a very different tradition—the liberal, indeed radical, anticolonialist and antiracist outlook. In the hands of such
critics of Western society as Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Louis Althusser, among others, antihumanism became a central
thread of structuralist and poststructuralist theories, and a key weapon in the interrogation of racist and imperialist discourses. Even Jean-Paul
Sartre, in his famous preface to Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, wrote that "Humanism is nothing but an ideology of lies, a perfect justification for pillage; its
honeyed words, its affectations of sensibility were only alibis for our aggression." Elsewhere he claimed that ."Humanism is the counterpart of racism: it is a
practice of exclusion."17 How did a philosophical outlook which originated within conservative anti-emancipatory politics, and which was a key component of
racial theory, become a central motif of radical antiracist, anti-imperialist doctrines? And how did philosophers such as Nietzsche and Heidegger, whose work
had previously been seen as paving the way for twentieth century racist and fascist ideologies, become icons of antiracist discourse? There were two main
strands to postwar radical antihumanism. One developed out of anticolonial struggles, the other through Western (and in particular French) academic
philosophy and was subsequently elaborated by the "new social movements" such as feminism and environmentalism. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon gave
voice to the rage of colonial peoples against their inhuman treatment at the hands of the imperialist powers. The humanist idea of "Man," wrote Fanon, which
lay at the heart of the Western post-Enlightenment tradition, was achieved through dehumanizing the non-Western Other. Europeans only became human,
Fanon suggested, by denying humanity to their colonial Other. To maintain a belief in humanism while treating non-European peoples as animals, Europeans
declared that non-Europeans were in fact subhuman. Herein lay the source of racial theory in humanism. At the same time, argued Fanon, humanists salved
their consciences by inviting the subhuman colonial Other to become human by imitating "European Man." The category "human" is empty of meaning, the
critics asserted, because it is ahistorical. The invocation of a common human nature hides the fact that human nature is socially and historically constructed.
According to the anthropologist James Clifford, "[I]t is a general feature of humanist common denominators that they are meaningless, since they bypass local
cultural codes that make personal experience articulate." When humanists assert the universality of human nature, what they are really talking about are the
particular human values expressed in European society. Third world critics, however—and some European critics like Sartre too— did not reject humanism in
its entirety. Fanon, for instance, recognized that the contradiction lay not in humanism itself but in the disjuncture between the ideology of humanism and the
practice of colonialism: All the elements of a solution to the great problems of humanity have, at different times, existed in European thought. But Europeans
have not carried out in practice the mission which fell to them, which consisted of bringing their whole weight to bear violently upon these elements, of
modifying their arrangement and their nature, of changing them and, finally, of bringing the problem of mankind to an infinitely higher plane.19 Fanon called
therefore for a new humanism stripped of its racist, Eurocentric aspects: Let us decide not to imitate Europe; let us combine our muscles and our brains in a
new direction. Let us try to create the whole man, whom Europe has been incapable of bringing to triumphant birth. 20 For Fanon, then, the humanist idea of
"the whole man" was key to emancipation. Despite the critique of Western humanism as a camouflage for the dehumanization of non-Western peoples,
humanism remained a central component of the ideology of third world liberation struggles of the postwar era, virtually all of which drew on the emancipatory
logic of universalism. Indeed, Western radicals were often shocked by the extent to which anticolonial struggles adopted what the radicals conceived of as
tainted ideas. As Claude Levi-Strauss noted ruefully, the doctrine of cultural relativism "was challenged by the very people for whose moral benefit the
anthropologists had established it in the first place." The willingness of third world radicals to maintain at least a residual support for a humanistic outlook
stemmed from their continued engagement in the project of liberation. Postwar radicals in the West, however, increasingly rejected humanism, not simply in its
guise as a cover for racism and colonialism but in its entirety. For postwar European intellectuals the most pressing problem was not that of establishing the
ideological foundations of liberation struggles but rather of coming to terms with the demise of such struggles in Western democracies. Western intellectuals
had, on the one hand, to excavate the social and intellectual roots of the Nazi experience, an experience that more than any other weighed upon the European
intellectual consciousness in the immediate postwar period; and on the other, to explain why the possibilities of revolutionary change, which had seemed so
promising in the early part of the century, appeared to have been extinguished. For many the explanation seemed to lie in some deep-seated malaise in
European culture. Postwar radicals asked themselves why it was that Germany, a nation with deep philosophical roots in the
Enlightenment project and a strong and vibrant working class movement, should succumb so swiftly and so completely to Nazism. The
answer seemed to be that it was the logic of Enlightenment rationalism itself and the nature of democratic politics that had
given rise to such barbarism. As Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer put it in their seminal work, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, "Enlightenment is
totalitarian."22 Adorno and Horkheimer develop the two motifs—a critique of Enlightenment rationality and social progress, on the one hand, and of mass
society, on the other—which became central themes of the Frankfurt school and which were to become immensely influential in shaping postwar discourse.
The idea that the Holocaust—and indeed all Western barbarism—had its roots in Enlightenment rationalism and humanism became a central tenet of postwar
radicalism. The Enlightenment ambition of mastering nature, of setting humanity above nature, inevitably had destructive
consequences for humanity itself. A humanity which could enslave nature was quite capable of enslaving fellow human beings.
As David Goldberg has put it, "Subjugation ... defines the order of the Enlightenment: subjugation of nature by human intellect, colonial control through
CONTINUES…
ENDI 2010
Historical Materialism K
42
Wave 1
AT: HUMANISM BAD – RATIONALISM  HOLOCAUST
CONTINUED…
physical and cultural domination, and economic superiority through mastery of the laws of the market."23 Mastery of nature and the rational organization of
society, which in the nineteenth century was seen as the basis of human emancipation, now came to be regarded as the source of human enslavement. The idea
that technological and social progress could be the cause of barbarism has led many critics to find evidence not simply of humanism but the whole project of
"modernity" behind the Holocaust. Zygmunt Bau-man has suggested that the Final Solution was the "product" not the "failure" of modernity and that "it was
the rational world of modern civilisation that made the Holocaust thinkable": The truth is that every ingredient of the Holocaust—all those many things that
rendered it possible—was normal ... in the sense of being fully in keeping with everything we know about our civilisation, its guiding spirit, its priorities, its
immanent vision of the world—and of the proper ways to pursue human happiness together with a perfect society.24 Bauman's argument that the Holocaust
became thinkable only in the conditions of modernity may fall short of actually blaming that horror on Enlightenment principles of rationality; but his hint that
"civilisation" itself may have been responsible for the barbarism of the "Final Solution" is made explicit by Richard Rubinstein who (in a phrase approvingly
quoted by Bauman) argues that the Holocaust "bears witness to the advance of civilisation": The world of death camps and the society it engenders reveals the
progressively intensifying night side of Judeo-Christian civilization. Civilization means slavery, wars, exploitation, and death camps. It also means medical
hygiene, elevated religious ideas, beautiful art, and exquisite music. It is an error to imagine that civilization and savage cruelties are antithesis... Both creation
and destruction are inseparable parts of what we call civilization.25 This comes very close to saying not just that modernity makes death camps
possible but that it makes them necessary and inevitable. This proposition is deeply questionable in many ways, but for our purposes,
the first question that comes to mind is this: what does it mean to suggest that barbarism is a product of civilization? To suggest that "the advance of
civilization" inevitably leads to "slavery, wars, exploitation, and death camps" can only mean that barbarism is an ineradicable
part of human nature. Yet is this not to posit a concept of a human nature that is as ahistorical as that supposedly held by
humanists? Condemning civilization as forever imbricated with inhumanity is certainly an argument that sits uneasily with a
critique of humanism which claims that an ahistoric notion of "Man" has been used to deny humanity to the West's Others. To
argue that humanism and rationalism (or "modernity") are the causes of the Holocaust is to turn logic on its head. The discourse
of race was a product not of Enlightenment universalism and humanism but of its degradation. Scientific racism was
not the application of science and reason to the question of human difference but the use of the discourse of science to give
legitimacy to irrational, unscientific arguments. The "Final Solution" was implicit in the racial policies pursued by the Nazis. To
engage in mass extermination it was necessary to believe that the objects of that policy were less than human. But to say that it
was a rationally conceived plan is to elevate the prejudices of the Third Reich to the status of scientific knowledge—in other
words to accept as true the very claims of racial discourse .
ENDI 2010
Historical Materialism K
43
Wave 1
AT: HUMANISM BAD – HEIDEGGER
Heidegger’s rejection of humanism is just an excuse for his Nazism—their argument historically
justifies a violent past
Malik '96 - senior visting fellow at the Department of Political, International and Policy Studies at the University of Surrey
(Kenan, "The Mirror of Race: Postmodernism and the Celebration of Difference," in "In Defense of History," Ed. by E.
Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.127-131, RG)
The irony in this is that the critique of totalitarianism is in substance a reworking of the nineteenth century critique of Enlightenment rationalism and of mass
society pursued by philosophers such as Nietzsche and Heidegger, whose work flowed from the hostility of the intelligentsia to equality and mass democracy.
Arendt's theory of totalitarianism carries over the main themes of Heidegger's thought in its anti-mass character, its incipient anti-rationalism, and in particular
its hostility to the Enlightenment as the embodiment of both. The idea of the authoritarian personality, and of the masses as the "refuse of
all classes," has close parallels with the themes of crowd psychology, such as those expounded by Gustav LeBon.29 Both are a cry against what
Heidegger called the "anonymity of the They: an endless etcetera of indifference and always-the-sameness ... the domination of the indifferent mass ... that
destroys all rank and every world-creating impulse of the spirit."30 The antihumanist belief that the technical forms of modernity arising from
human mastery of nature underlay the implementation of the Holocaust are also taken from Heidegger. Agriculture is now a
mechanised food industry; in essence it is no different from the production of corpses in gas chambers and death camps, the
embargoes and food reductions to starving countries, the making of hydrogen bombs .31 Compare Heidegger's analysis, above, of
the barbarism of the twentieth century with a sociological interpretation of the same, from Edmund Still-man and William Pfaff: There is more
than a wholly fortuitous connection between the applied technology of the mass production line, and its vision of universal
material abundance, and the applied technology of the concentration camp, with its vision of a profusion of death.32 I find it
odious that scholars can in all seriousness equate mass extermination with the production of McDonald's hamburgers or of
Ford Escorts, or make a comparison between technology aimed at improving the material abundance of society and political
decisions taken to annihilate whole peoples and destroy entire societies . But what is interesting is that the second quote, from
Edmund Stillman and William Pfaff, comes from a liberal interpretation of the Holocaust, while the first quote , from Heidegger himself,
comes from an apologia for his Nazi past. Heidegger had been an active member of the Nazi Party until 1943. After the war he
attempted to rehabilitate his reputation, and in the document Rectoral Addresses—Facts and Thoughts he marshaled the arguments which he hoped would
distance him from the Third Reich. The key piece of evidence for the defense was the assertion that Nazism was simply another
manifestation of the spirit of modernity. According to Heidegger there existed a "universal will to power within history, now understood to embrace
the planet," and that "everything stands in this historical reality, no matter whether it is called communism, fascism or world democracy." It is a telling measure
of the degree of confusion in postwar theory when liberal and Nazi explanations of the Holocaust can barely be pried apart. Heidegger's ideas, which originally
sought to articulate national socialism, went on, through the totalitarian thesis, to shape the interpretation and critique of fascism after its defeat. The
antihumanism of Heidegger and his fellow thinkers became a central theme of poststructuralist and postmodernist discourse, of
colonial discourse analysis, and of the theories of difference and cultural pluralism. There is more than a touch of irony in
considering how, through the rehabilitation of antihumanist thinkers such as Heidegger and Nietzsche, the rejection of
barbarism should preserve the very prejudices that gave rise to it.
ENDI 2010
Historical Materialism K
44
Wave 1
AT: FEM CRITIQUE OF HIST MAT
Historical materialist analysis is a precondition to meaningful feminist critique—their arguments
are mired in privilege and maintainince of the status quo
Stabile '96 - associate prof. in the Dept. of Mass Comm @ Univ. of Wisconsin (Carol A., "Postmodernism, Feminism, and
Marx: Notes from the Abyss," in "In Defense of History," Ed. by E. Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.144-, RG)
The defense of "rights," abstracted from historical, political, and economic contexts, has weakened feminist politics and
contributed to a general sense that feminism serves only narrow and privileged interests . Historical materialism offers the
possibility of coalitions based on a broader understanding of the exploitative nature of capitalist relations of production,
enlisting women and men in struggles against family violence, further cuts to already severely diminished social programs, and,
moreover, against the system that benefits from these ills. Furthermore, it proposes that women's liberation—if it is to include all
women—is incompatible with capitalism. Historical materialism has the advantage of offering the kind of self-re-flexivity—so
lacking in postmodernism and contemporary feminism—that I've tried to underscore in this essay. It at once forces us to understand our
theories, our practices, and our positions in relation to the dominant structure of power, and provides a much more effective
basis for an understanding of the positions of both women and men within multinational capitalism and of contemporary shifts
in these positions. Consider, for example, the debate about "family values." The conventional feminist argument is that the New Right's call for a return to
family values is simply a backlash. On the one hand, this backlash is said to represent an attempt to reinstate a traditional version of the nuclear family in order
to force women out of the labor force and back into the home. On the other hand, it is seen as a measure of the effectiveness of the feminist movement, insofar
as women now have the "choice" of working. What disappears from view in these analyses is the fact that economic conditions have forced upon middle class
women the dubious advantage of working one or more full-time jobs in addition to domestic labor, and that this social change benefits capitalism, and not
individual men. Poor and working class women (many of them women of color) have long worked outside the home, although few
of them would call their alienated and often desperate labor a matter of "choice." What is being represented as a gain for
women simply means that middle class women are now being compelled by the necessities of capitalism to make the "choice"
that has traditionally been available to poor and working class women. To argue that the debates about family values are intended to force
women back into the domestic sphere overlooks the fact that there can be no return to the traditional nuclear family because it is no longer economically
feasible. To argue that these debates about family values were provoked by feminist successes is to accept the ideological mystification that treats the economic
mandates of capitalism as if they were free life-style "choices." I would like to believe that feminists are, in fact, committed to revolutionary social change, but
there's another, less pleasant possibility to contemplate—one that points to the dangers of ignoring class position. It could be that many who call
themselves feminists are interested only in maintaining their own class privilege or in gaining celebrity status. From that point of view,
Marxism is a serious threat not only because it represents a challenge to the theoretical foundations of a postmodern feminism,
but also because it reveals the historical, material, and class foundations of certain forms of knowledge. It is fairly clear how women
such as Katie Roiphe, Naomi Wolf, and Camille Paglia use feminism as a marketing strategy to promote their books, images, and careers, instead of promoting
equality and social justice. But as long as so many feminists refuse to acknowledge their own privilege and the ways in which
we all "benefit" from the exploitation of less-privileged women and men, feminism in general will be in danger of
becoming a professional strategy rather than a political project.
ENDI 2010
Historical Materialism K
45
Wave 1
AT: FEM CRITIQUE OF HIST MAT
Feminist analysis is incoherent and unmeaningful without historical materialism—our alternative
is the only way to avoid the race to the bottom of competing claims to oppression—their
worldview perpetuates capitalism
Stabile '96 - associate prof. in the Dept. of Mass Comm @ Univ. of Wisconsin (Carol A., "Postmodernism, Feminism, and
Marx: Notes from the Abyss," in "In Defense of History," Ed. by E. Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.144-, RG)
In the end, the media spectacle tells us nothing at all about what people want or how they identify. Few, in fact, can afford to
blur the division between reality and fiction during a time in which reality bears so little resemblance to its media
representations. Those who continue to believe in the possibility of revolutionary social change cannot abandon a belief in the
power of critical consciousness and the tools that enable people (particularly those facing an unstable economic future) to make
sense of their situation and learn how best to fight against it, and not simply make their peace with it. If feminist analyses are
to maintain any claim to analytic and political coherence (not to mention efficacy), then we need to understand better
how the projects some of us promote—postmodernist, feminist, or some combination thereof—may actually feed into and
reinforce capitalism. By repudiating the very categories of analysis that might enable understanding, these projects obscure our
own positions within relations of systemic exploitation and preempt any project of social transformation.
Instead of seeing the fragmentation of identities as a cause for celebration, we should try to understand how identity has been
transformed into a commodity for those with the capital to consume it, and how the capitalist system has worked (and will
continue to work) against the organization of socialist politics. In place of an identity politics that serves only to pit groups
against one another in a never-ending litany of competing claims to oppression, we need a more cogent understanding of the
systemic nature of oppression. We need to consider the extent to which the politics of identity represents not a challenge to, but
a product of, the system, a manifestation of market segmentation and the commodification of identity produced by the
globalization of capital as a world system. For what appear to be oppositional strategies may very well turn out to be the
symptoms of oppression.
ENDI 2010
Historical Materialism K
46
Wave 1
AT: FEM CRITIQUE OF HISTORICAL MATERIALISM
Historical materialist analysis is key to understanding intersecting systems of oppression-class
analysis makes this possible
Stabile '96 - associate prof. in the Dept. of Mass Comm @ Univ. of Wisconsin (Carol A., "Postmodernism, Feminism, and
Marx: Notes from the Abyss," in "In Defense of History," Ed. by E. Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.141-144, RG)
Given this more direct experience of economic realities, academics today, and feminists in particular, should
find a critical analysis of capitalism
especially compelling, since the contradictions confronting them are becoming ever more evident. But in the academy, it has
become a kind of intellectual common sense to dismiss Marxism and its methods in toto as "totalizing" (because it seeks to explain society
through an analysis of its mode of production—capitalism), "reductive" (because economic structures are said to shape legal, political, and cultural structures),
or "universalizing" (because class is said to shape consciousness). A main feminist critique has been that women and female labor were
excluded from analysis. These knee-jerk responses have become so pervasive that it is no longer necessary to explain what
"totalizing," "reductive," or "universalizing" mean—in fact, they are just understood. For a younger generation of scholars,
whose formative political experiences have been in various feminist movements, the rejection of Marxist-oriented political
activism is based on a set of myths about the masculinist virulence inherent in Marxism. How justified is this rejection of Marxism? Let's
look at the three main charges leveled against it by many feminists: that it is "reductive," that it is too "universalistic," and that it fails to consider female labor.
On the first point, the general claim is that historical materialism reduces structures of oppression to class exploitation, thereby
ignoring or minimizing sexism, racism, and homophobia. While it is certainly true that historical materialism places relations of
production at the foundation of society, there is nothing simple or reductive about how these relations structure oppressions.
Rather, historical materialist analyses, instead of examining only one form of oppression—like sexism, racism, or
homophobia—would explore the way they all function within the overarching system of class domination in
determining women's and men's life choices. Sweatshop workers in New York City, for example, experience sexism and
racism in quantitatively and qualitatively different ways than do middle class women . The racism directed at poor African-American youths
occurs in a different context than that directed at African-American women in the academy. This is not to claim that the latter forms of oppression do not exist
or are inconsequential, but by situating both forms within the material context and historical framework in which they occur, we can
highlight the variable discriminatory mechanisms that are central to capitalism as a system .
Rejecting our supposed universalism leaves no tools for fighting oppression and makes any change piecemeal
Stabile '96 - associate prof. in the Dept. of Mass Comm @ Univ. of Wisconsin (Carol A., "Postmodernism, Feminism, and
Marx: Notes from the Abyss," in "In Defense of History," Ed. by E. Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.141-144, RG)
The charge of "universalism" is closely related to that of reductivism. This objection starts with the critique of modernity (including Marxism) on
the grounds that its conceptions of truth, reason, and justice (in fact, its conception of "humanity" itself) are too universalistic, too
insensitive to the many differences among human beings. This critique has been valuable in challenging capitalism's oppressive uses of concepts
like "justice" and "reason," or the destructive applications of science and technology in the name of rationality and progress. But at the same time, it poses some
serious problems for feminists. First, if there can be no standards of truth, justice, or reason, we cannot appeal to them as criteria of
judgment or action. In fact, postmodernists, including postmodern feminists, have often been criticized on the grounds that, without the kind of
standards they are so swift to reject, they themselves can have no basis for supporting or justifying resistance to oppression.
Second, the possibility of opposition to oppression is also undermined by the presumption that the common interests among
human beings are so narrow and fleeting that any politics beyond the most particularistic and narrow forms of resistance are
impossible. Accordingly, people can struggle against "power" (defined provisionally and contingently) only through single-issue politics,
and the best that can be hoped for is piecemeal reform . Since power can no longer be located or identified, since "real" unifying interests are a
colonizing fiction, a part of a uniformly oppressive Enlightenment worldview (to which Marxism also belongs), then an organized opposition is neither feasible
nor desirable. Politics, let alone revolution, is reduced to a turf war among "discourses."
ENDI 2010
Historical Materialism K
47
Wave 1
AT: FEM – EXCLUSION OF GENDER LINK
The exclusion of gender as a category of analysis doesn’t take into account economic changes
that make historical materialism a better way of understanding gender inequality
Stabile '96 - associate prof. in the Dept. of Mass Comm @ Univ. of Wisconsin (Carol A., "Postmodernism, Feminism, and
Marx: Notes from the Abyss," in "In Defense of History," Ed. by E. Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.141-144, RG)
The third charge against historical materialism—that it has excluded female labor from its analysis—has always been debatable.3 While
it may be true that
women's unpaid domestic labor wasn't systematically integrated into classical Marxist analyses of the mode of production
(although both Marx and Engels discuss the sexual division of labor), from the 1970s on there have been Marxist revisions of this concept,
particularly within anthropology and economics. In addition, while anti-essentialist feminists have been swift to appropriate and
revise poststructuralist theories (that either neglect gender or deal with it in profoundly sexist ways) in order to further analyses of gender,
only Marxism seems to be singled out for rejection on the grounds of this alleged omission . At any rate, the development of
contemporary capitalism has to some extent made this question moot. With the increased blurring between the public and
private spheres, the heightened commodification of previously unpaid female labor (care of the elderly, child care, cooking, cleaning, etc.),
and the wholesale entry of middle class women into the labor force, women's conditions are more obviously determined by
relations of production in a very Marxist sense . Non-Marxist feminism, with its lack of attention to relations of
production, is beginning to look far more inadequate than even the most gender-blind Marxism in explaining the
conditions of women.
ENDI 2010
Historical Materialism K
48
Wave 1
AT: ALT KILLS ENVIRONMENT
Their evidence assumes Marxism. We’re not the revolution – just an epistemological critique of
the affirmative
And, Marxism calls for avoiding ecological devastation
Foster '96 - prof. of sociology @ Univ. Oregon (John, "Marx and the Environment," in "In Defense of History," Ed. by E.
Meiskins Wood & John Foster, p.144-160, RG)
What was clear from Marx's analysis was that humanity and nature were interrelated, with the historically specific form of
production relations constituting the core of that interrelationship in any given period . As he wrote in the Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts of1844, Man lives from nature, i.e., nature is his body, and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die. To say that man's physical
and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.9 Far from being mere worshipers of
productivism, Marx and Engels were two of its foremost critics. As the young Engels wrote in 1844, "To make the earth an object of
huckstering—the earth which is our one and all, the first condition of our existence—was the last step toward making oneself an object of huckstering." Under
capitalism all natural and human relationships, Marx argued, have been dissolved into money relationships. Rather than a society ruled by "callous 'cashpayment'" and by the necessity for continual increases in productivity, he looked forward to a social order that would promote the many-sided development of
human capacities and the rational human relation to the nature of which we are a part. The further growth of human freedom, he wrote in the final part of the
third volume of Capital, consists in "socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their material interchange with nature and bringing it under
common control, instead of allowing it to rule them as a blind force." The human community, Marx believed, can no more free itself from the
need to control its interaction with nature than it can free itself from the need to take into consideration the natural conditions
of human existence. Yet rational control of the relation between nature and humanity is inherently opposed to the mechanistic
domination of nature in the interest of the ever increasing expansion of production for its own sake . In a society of freely
associated producers, Marx argued, the goal of social life would not be work and production, in the narrow forms in which they have
been understood in possessive-individualist society, but the all-around development of human creative potential as an end in itself, for which "the
shor erring of the working-day is a basic prerequisite." This would set the stage for the achievement of a realm of freedom in which human beings would be
united with each other and with nature.10 The realization of these conditions, Marx recognized, necessitated a radical transformation in
the human relation to nature. With the elimination of private ownership of land and the development of a society of freely associated producers, global sustainability in the relationship to nature would become feasible for the first time . Pointing to the imperative
of protecting the globe for future generations Marx stated: From the standpoint of a higher economic form of society, private ownership of the globe by single
individuals will appear quite as absurd as private ownership of one man by another. Even a whole society, a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies
together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its usufructuaries, and like boni patres familias [good fathers of families], they must hand it
down to succeeding generations in an improved condition.11 It was the proper purpose of agriculture, Marx argued, "to minister to the entire range of
permanent necessities of life required by the chain of successive generations"—in contradiction to "the whole spirit of capitalist production, which is directed
toward the immediate gain of money." There was thus a direct conflict between capitalism's short-sighted expropriation of the earth's resources and the longer
term character of truly sustainable production. Economic advance in a society of freely associated producers, Marx insisted again and again, would have to occur
without jeopardizing the natural and global conditions upon which the welfare of future generations would depend. This is precisely the definition now given to
the concept of sustainable development, most famously in the Brundtland Commission report, Our Common Future, which defined it as "development that meets
the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."12 Although Marx did not concentrate on
the ecological critique of capitalism in his writings—no doubt because he thought that capitalism would be replaced by a society of freely associated
producers long before such problems could become truly critical—his allusions to sustainability indicate that he was acutely aware of the
ecological depredations of the system. Central to his concerns in this respect was the effect of capitalist industrialization on the degradation of the soil.
The best known passage in this regard, from Capital, vol. I, is to be found in the section on "Large-Scale Industry and Agriculture," which constitutes the final,
culminating part of Marx's key chapter on "Machinery and Large-Scale Industry" (on the effects of the Industrial Revolution). There Marx argues: All progress
in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a
given time is progress towards ruining the long-lasting sources of that fertility. The more a country proceeds from large-scale industry as the background of its
development, as in the case of the United States, the more rapid is this process of destruction. Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and
the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker.13
These were not casual or isolated comments but reflected careful study of the work of the German agrarian chemist Justus von Liebig, often known as the
founder of soil chemistry. Until the early 1860s, Marx thought that the progress of capitalist agriculture might be so rapid that it would outpace industry. By the
time he wrote Capital, however, his studies of the work of Liebig and other agronomists had convinced him otherwise. "Large landed property," he explained in
the conclusion to his most important chapter on capitalist agriculture ("The Genesis of Capitalist Ground Rent"), reduces the agricultural population to a
constantly falling minimum, and confronts it with a constantly growing industrial population crowded together in large cities. It thereby creates conditions
which cause an irreparable break in the coherence of social interchange prescribed by the natural laws of life. As a result, the vitality of the soil is squandered,
and this prodigality is carried by commerce far beyond the borders of a particular state (Liebig). Large-scale industry and large-scale agriculture under capitalism
thus had the same results: both contributed to the ruining of the agricultural worker and the exhaustion of "the natural power of the soil." The "moral of
history," Marx observed, is that the capitalist system works against a rational agriculture, or that a rational agriculture is incompatible with the capitalist system
(although the latter promotes technical improvements in agriculture) and needs either the hand of the small farmer living by his own labor or the control of the
associated producers. For Marx "the rational cultivation of the soil as eternal communal property" was "an inalienable condition of
the existence and reproduction of a chain of successive generations of the human race." 14 Marx and Engels did not confine their
discussions of ecological limits to the issue of the soil, but also explored numerous other issues of sustainabil-ity, in relation to forests, rivers and streams, the
disposal of waste, air quality, environmental toxins, etc. "The development of culture and industry in general," Marx wrote, "has ever evinced itself in such
energetic destruction of forests that everything done by it conversely for their preservation and restoration appears infinitesimal." With regard to industrial
waste, he argued for "economy through the prevention of waste, that is to say, the reduction of excretions of production to a minimum, and the immediate
utilization of all raw and auxiliary materials required in production."15