CAPITALISM

Permutation
Permutation: do boththeir link arguments assume freemarket
language that the affirmative criticizeslegalization is a way of
activating the radical potential of the alternative
Smith 90
[April 1990, Phil Smith, Toward a radical politics of legalization, Polemcist; pages
10-11; Volume 1, No. 5,
http://www.utwatch.org/archives/polemicist/vol1no5_legalization.html]
Legalization: a radical agenda The growing public furor over drug policy
opens new political space for radical critics. This radical dissent must be
firmly grounded in an overarching critique of late capitalist American
society - the larger context of the War on Drugs. This critique has at its
base a vision of a society founded on economic as well as formal political
democracy, but it must also take into account the anti-authoritarian impluse
deeply ingrained in our society. Get Stoned! This method can't fail! Within such a critique, and given the
authoritarian political project embodied in the War on Drugs, legalization of the use and traffic in illegal drugs
becomes not only thinkable, but also desirable as the most progressive
means of addressing the problem, and as a method of unmasking the
attempt by the late capitalist state to increase its sphere of domination
and hegemony. Bush and Bennett are pushing a project of class domination, racial division, and U.S. militarism. Further, we must note the difference between
recreational drug use and self-destructive drug abuse. No one advocates a nation of junkies; what is is needed is an informed - not propogandized - population that understands both the

The radical position must therefore support drug

education, treatment programs and rehabilitation. But beyond promoting an
enlightened, and responsible attitude toward drugs, radicals must
challenge the Bush-Bennett drug hysteria on the following grounds : The
anti-drug frenzy serves the interest of reactionaries by obscuring the
underlying conditions - based on the economic-political structure - which impoverish our cities and
their residents. As long as the focus is exclusively on "Crack Street," no
one asks why drug abuse is such an attractive alternative to the straight
life. The War on Drugs is racist, both in its genealogy and in its willingness
to sacrifice black and brown communities. Historically, drug laws served as
instruments for oppressing minorities, from the anti-Chinese opium
smoking ban in California, to the hysterical racist propagand
accompanying the criminalization campaigns of the 1910s and 1930s.
Government officials plied an acquiescent mass media with vile propganda
of the "dope-crazed niggers are raping our white women" variety - the
lineal predecessor of the Bush campaign's Willie Horton ads.
pleasures and the dangers of various intoxicants.

AB Turn
The classic leftist position of being for nothing and against
everything will not fly positing issues as structural
institutional problems of neo-liberalism actively downplays the
gratuitous violence that cannot be attributed to economic
forces
Wang 12 (Jackie, Queer wom(y)n of color, Writer for LIES is a new journal spearheaded by a feminist collective based in
multiple cities: Oakland, Baltimore, New York, London, New Orleans, A journal of materialist feminism vol. 1, Against Innocence:
Race, Gender, and the Politics of Safety, http://libcom.org/files/lies-final-download-single-page.pdf)

reluctance to jam Black rage into a white framework is not

an assertion of the political viability of a pure politics of refusal . White
anarchists, ultra-leftists, post-Marxists, and insurrectionists who adhere
to and fetishize the position of being for nothing and against everything
are equally eager to appropriate events like the 2011 London riots for
their (non)agenda. They insist on an analysis focused on the crisis of
capitalism, which downplays anti-Blackness and ignores forms of
gratuitous violence that cannot be attributed solely to economic forces. Like
liberals, post-left and anti-social interpretive frameworks generate political
narratives structured by white assumptions, which delimits which
questions are posed which categories are the most analytically useful . Tiqqun
explore the ways in which we are enmeshed in power through our identities, but
tend to focus on forms of power that operate by an investment in life
(sometimes called biopolitics) rather than, as Achille Mbembe writes,
the power and the capacity to decide who may live and who must die
(sometimes called necropolitics).25 This framework is decidedly white, for it
asserts that power is not enacted by direct relations of force or violence,
and that the capitalism reproduces itself by inducing us to produces
ourselves, to express our identities through consumer choices, to base our
politics on the affirmation of our marginalized identities. This configuration
of power as purely generative and dispersed completely eclipses the
realities of policing, the militarization of the carceral system, the
terrorization of people of color, the institutional violence of the Welfare
State and the Penal State, and of Black and Native social death. While
prisons certainly produce race, a generative configuration of power that
minimizes direct relations of force can only be theorized from a white
subject position. Among ultra-left tendencies, communization theory notably looks beyond the wage
With that being said, my

relation in its attempt to grasp the dynamics of late-capitalism. Writing about Thorie Communiste (TC), Maya
Andrea Gonzalez notes that TC focus on the reproduction of the capital-labor relation, rather than on the
production of value. This change of focus allows them to bring within their purview the set of relations that actually

reframing
may shed light on relations that constitute social life outside the
workplace, it does not shed light on social death, for relations defined by
social death are not reducible to the capital-labor relation. Rather than oppose
class to race, Frank Wilderson draws our attention to the difference between
being exploited under capitalism (the worker) and being marked as
disposable or superfluous to capitalism (the slave, the prisoner). He writes,
construct capitalist social life beyond the walls of the factory or office.26 However, while this

The

absence of Black subjectivity from the crux of radical discourse is

symptomatic of [an] inability to cope with the possibility that the
generative subject of capitalism, the Black body of the 15th and 16th
centuries, and the generative subject that resolves late capitals overaccumulation crisis, the Black (incarcerated) body of the 20th and 21st
centuries, do not reify the basic categories that structure conflict within
civil society: the categories of work and exploitation.27 Historian Orlando
Patterson similarly insists on understanding slavery in terms of social
death rather than labor or exploitation.28 Forced labor is undoubtedly a
part of the slaves experience, but it is not what defines the slave relation .
Economic exploitation does not explain the phenomena of racialized
incarceration; an analysis of capitalism that fails to address antiBlackness, or only addresses it as a by-product of capitalism, is deficient .

AT: Root Cause

Their root cause claims are a tautology - constructing
capitalism as totality is fundamentally apolitical. Analysis
becomes trapped in the theoretical - we should engage in
medium term steps to reduce inequality in the short term.
Bryant 13Professor of Philosophy at Collin College
(Levi, Onto-Cartography, Marx, and Abstraction, http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2013/01/10/ontocartography-marx-and-abstraction/

we ask why is society organized as it is? The maitre answers because of

capitalism! You ask what is capitalism? The maitre responds, the way society is
organized! Its the same loop. You appear to be explaining something and, of course,
everyone gets upset because, well, capitalism is bad. But you havent really
explained anything at all. Youve named the place where a ground should
be, but have not yet provided that ground. So why is this problematic? First and foremost,
its problematic because it transforms capitalism into what Derrida called a spectre.
Capitalism is somehow the cause of everything, but it is also this elusive phlogiston that
is everywhere and nowhere. Capitalism causes everything, without itself
being a material or real agency. The whole problem with ghosts and spectres is
that you cant fight them. We thus end up in a position of theoretical and
practical pessimism. We adopt the moral high-ground because we know that theres this
terrible thing called capitalism that we recognize and that is unjust, but because it is a
purely formal ground we have no idea how to intervene in it. The whole point of
tracing the networks or onto-cartography is to examine how things are actually put together. Capitalism
does not explain, but is what to be explained. Capitalism is the out-come
explained by onto-cartographical explanation (as are many other things), but not the explanatory
principle. In Hegelian terms, we are seeking real, not formal ground. And we only find real ground
by tracing the networks, tracing the assemblages, investigating how
machines actually interact in this historical setting and context. We investigate the work that is
So

involved in producing this social structure and all the entities or machines involved in that rather than assuming it
at the outset. Society

explains nothing, but is what were supposed to

explain. Of course, much of this goes unexplored in the humanities and social sciences because the concept of
entropy is completely absent from their thought and there is almost no concept of work or energy at work in these

There are either concepts or brute material things, but no

work to maintain them. No, the only agency is ideas. This is why Marx had to turn Hegel on his head
he understood fatigue but us academics all forgot that. We forgot that everything is perpetually
disintegrating, subject to entropy, precisely because things require energy
and work. Who among us has written about fatigue save some spare pages in Deleuzes Difference and
Repetition that no one ever notices? Everything quickly became the crystalline idea once again. We worked,
the Marxists first and foremost, to turn Marx on his head and forget all the things he
said about production, energy, work, and so on. We forgot the working day. The
second point is that this multiplies our points of intervention at the level of
practice. This is not a surprise, of course, because those of us in the humanities would
like to think that everything is an idea, a text, a meaning. Then we would be important
and masters of all! We could say everything is Shakespeare! Its curious how we so seldom
explore our own conditions of production, our own sociological conditions
theoretical frameworks.

for our enunciations, our own secondary correlations. We dream of a world, instead, where our interpretive and

knowing how things or machines

are linked in such a way as to produce a particular negentropic social
organization, knowing what actants are involved, we are now in a position
to intervene in those interconnections and feedback loops. Where,
hauntological thought leads us to behave like apes who believe an intervention
consists in saying capitalism sucks! (which really accomplishes nothing beyond the delights of
a beautiful soul that can feel superior to the way in which everyone else is a dupe), we now know how
things are actually linked, why they hold together as they do, why people accept them
(Reich/Spinozas question) while knowing theyre bullshit, and we can engage in
interventions that blow these things up. We might be surprised as to what
leads people to tolerate this bullshit and what organizes things . We might find
conceptual skills are the most important things of all. However,

that the clock yes, I literally mean clocks plays a crucial role or that the length of the working day plays a crucial

we would know nothing about this because we already

know what were going to find at the end of analysis . We already know the
answer. As a result we see without seeing. Yet if we bothered to actually trace networks
and get out of our master-signifiers, we would discover that there are sites of
resistance that we never before imagined because we bothered to trace
the network. Sometimes a student in the first grade doesnt learn not because hes stupid but because he
role or something else besides. But

didnt have glasses, for example. Sometimes its a clock that organizes peoples lives, not a belief. Sometimes it
makes more sense to intervene in clocks or glasses, but you can only know that if you actually trace the networks
or the concrete. Occupy Wall Street got the idea with rolling jubilee. They realized that maybe debt plays a bigger
role in perpetuating capitalism than mistaken ideology or failing to have the right moral values. They then decided
to start buying up that debt and then forgiving it. How many of you 101st keyboard revolutionary commandos have
participated in that?