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Observation 1 is the Status QuoGlobal recession has brought capitalism to it’s knees, and it’s imminent collapse is being seen in it’s early stages. The proletariat is realizing the irrationality of global capitalism. This time it’s do or die for the neo-liberals, Literally. International Communist Current 10-28-2008, “1929-2008 - Capitalism is a bankrupt system, but another world is possible: communism!” http://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2008/10/crisis_leaflet

Politicians and economists no longer have the words to describe the gravity of the situation: "at the edge of the abyss", "An economic Pearl Harbor" "A tsunami on the way" "The 9/11 of finance"[1]...only the reference to the Titanic is missing. What exactly is happening? Faced with the unfolding economic storm, a number of agonising questions are being raised. Are we going through a new crash like 1929? How did it come to this? What can we do to defend ourselves? And what kind of world do we live in? Towards a brutal deterioration in our living conditions There can be no illusions on that score. On a planetary scale, in the months to come, humanity is going to see a frightful deterioration of its living conditions. In its recent report, the International Monetary Fund has announced that between now and early 2009 50 countries are going to join the grim list of countries hit by famine. Among them are numerous countries in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and even Asia. In Ethiopia, for example, 12 million people are already officially on the verge of death from starvation. In India and China, these so-called new capitalist Eldorados, hundreds of millions of workers are about to be hit by brutal poverty. In the USA and Europe as well a large part of the population is facing unbearable deprivation. All sectors of activity are being affected. In the offices, the banks, the factories, the hospitals, in the hi-tech sectors, in the car industry, in building or distribution, millions of redundancies are on the cards. Unemployment is about to hit the roof! Since the beginning of 2008 and in the USA alone, nearly a million workers had already been thrown onto the street. And this is just the start. This wave of redundancies means that housing yourself, eating, and taking care of your health is going to be increasingly difficult for working class families. This also means that for the young people of today capitalism has no future to offer them. Those who lied to us yesterday are still lying to us today! This catastrophic perspective is no longer hidden by the leaders of the capitalist world, the politicians and the journalists who serve the ruling class. How could they? Some of the biggest banks in the world have gone bust; they have only survived thanks to the hundreds of billions of dollars, pounds and euros injected by the central banks, i.e. by the state. For the stock markets of America, Asia and Europe, it's a never-ending dive: they have lost $25 trillion since January 2008, or the equivalent of two years of the USA's total production. All this illustrates the real panic that has seized the ruling class all over the world. If the stock markets are crashing today, it's not just because of the catastrophic situation facing the banks, it's also because the capitalists are expecting a dizzying fall in their profits resulting from a massive downturn in economic activity, a wave of enterprises going bust, a recession much worse than all the ones we've seen 1

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over the past 40 years. The principal world leaders, Bush, Merkel, Brown, Sarkozy, Hu Jintao, have gathered together in a series of meetings and ‘summits' (G4, G7, G8, G16, G40) to try to limit the damage, to prevent the worst. A new summit is planned for mid-November, which some see as a way of ‘founding capitalism anew'. The only thing that equals the agitated state of the politicians is the frenzy of the experts of TV, radio and newspapers... the crisis is the number one media story. Why such a barrage? In fact, while the bourgeoisie can no longer hide the disastrous state of its economy, it is trying to make us believe that it's not a question of putting the capitalist system itself into question, that it's a question of fighting against ‘abuses' and ‘excess'. It's the fault of speculators! It's the fault of greedy bosses! It's the fault of tax havens! It's the fault of ‘neoliberalism’! To make us swallow this fairytale, all the professional swindlers are called into action. The same ‘experts' who yesterday were telling us that the economy was healthy, that the banks were solid... are now falling over themselves on the TV screens to pour out new lies. The same people who were telling us that ‘neo-liberalism' was THE solution, that the state had to step back from intervening in the economy, are now calling on the governments to intervene more and more. More state and more ‘morality', and capitalism will be fine! This is the lie they are trying to sell us! Can capitalism overcome its crisis? The truth is that the crisis ravaging world capitalism today does not date from the summer of 2007, with the bursting of the housing bubble in the US. For over 40 years there has been one recession after another: 1967, 1974, 1981, 1991, 2001. For decades unemployment has been a permanent plague, and the exploited have been suffering from mounting attacks on their living standards. Why? Because capitalism is a system which produces not for human needs but for the market and for profit. There are vast unsatisfied needs but they are not solvent: in other words, the great majority of the population does not have the means to buy the commodities produced. If capitalism is in crisis, if hundreds of millions of human beings, and soon billions, have been hurled into intolerable misery and hunger, it's not because the system doesn't produce enough but because it produces more commodities than it can sell. Each time the bourgeoisie gets round this problem by resorting massively to credit and the creation of an artificial market. This is why the ‘recoveries' always pave the way for even bleaker tomorrows, since at the end of the day all this credit has to be reimbursed, the debts have to be called in. This is exactly what is happening today. All the ‘fabulous growth' of the last few years has been based entirely on debt. The world economy was living on credit, and that now it's time to foot the bill, the whole thing collapses like a pack of cards. The present convulsions of the capitalist economy are not the result of ‘bad management' by the political leaders, of speculation by ‘traders' or the irresponsible behaviour of the bankers. All these people have done no more than apply the laws of capitalism and it is precisely these laws that are leading the system towards ruin. This is why the billions and billions injected into the markets by all the states and their central banks will change nothing. Worse! They are only piling debt on debt, which is like trying to put a fire out with oil. The bourgeoisie is only showing its impotence with these desperate and sterile measures. Sooner or later all their bail-out plans

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are abound to fail. No real recovery is possible for the capitalist economy. No policy, whether of the right or the left, can save capitalism because this system is racked by an incurable, fatal illness. Against mounting poverty, solidarity and class struggle! Everywhere we are seeing comparisons with the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930s. The images of those times are still in our memories: endless lines of unemployed workers, soup-kitchens for the poor, factories closing everywhere. But is the situation today identical? The answer is NO. It is much more serious

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Observation 2 is ConsequencesThe bourgeoisie only answer in the face of crisis is war in the attempts to sustain itself. At the brink of economic collapse we will see the beginning of World War 3, and a state of absolute poverty. International Communist Current 10-28-2008, “1929-2008 - Capitalism is a bankrupt system, but another world is possible: communism!” http://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2008/10/crisis_leaflet

The terrible depression of the 1930s led to the Second World War. Will the present crisis end up in a Third World War? The flight towards war is certainly the bourgeoisie's only answer to its insurmountable crisis. And the only force that can oppose this is its mortal enemy, the international working class. In the 1930s, the world working class had been through a terrible defeat following the isolation of the 1917 revolution in Russia and it allowed itself to be dragged into a new imperialist massacre. But since the major struggles that began in 1968, today's

working class has shown that it is not ready to shed its blood on behalf of the exploiting class. Over the last 40 years it has been through a number of painful defeats but it is still standing; and all over the world, especially since 2003, it has been fighting back more and more. The unfolding crisis of capitalism is going to mean terrible suffering for hundreds of millions of workers, not only in the underdeveloped countries but also in the developed ones - unemployment, poverty, even famine, but it is also going to provoke a movement of resistance by the exploited. These struggles are absolutely necessary for putting a limit on the bourgeoisie's economic attacks, for preventing them from plunging us into absolute poverty. But it is clear that they cannot stop capitalism from sinking deeper and deeper into its crisis. This is why the resistance struggles of the working class respond to another need, an even more important one. They allow the exploited to develop their collective strength, their unity, their solidarity, their consciousness of the only alternative that can offer humanity a future: the overthrow of the capitalist system and its replacement by a society that operates on a completely different basis. A society no longer based on exploitation and profit, on production for a market, but on production for human need; a society organised by the producers themselves and not by a privileged minority. In short, a communist society. For eight decades, all the sectors of the bourgeoisie, both right and left, have worked hand in hand to present the regimes which dominated Eastern Europe and China as ‘communist', when they were no more than a particularly barbaric form of state capitalism. It was a question of convincing the exploited that it is futile to dream of another world, that there was nothing on the horizon except capitalism. But now that capitalism is so clearly proving its historic bankruptcy, the struggles of the working class must be animated

Faced with the attacks of capitalism at the end of its tether; to put an end to exploitation, poverty, and the barbarism of capitalist war: Long live the struggles of the world working class! Workers of all countries, unite! more and more by the perspective of a communist society.

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Only a revolution can prevent capitalism’s self-destructions tendencies from destroying humanity World Revolution 10-6-2008, “Bleak prospects for the world economy,” http://en.internationalism.org/wr/318/bleakprospects

The exact pace that these tendencies will work out their logic in the world economy is impossible to foresee. For the moment, despite enormous pressures, the bourgeoisie is aware of the stakes in the current situation and its more lucid segments will do everything in their power to prevent such a disintegration taking place. Nonetheless, it seems possible that we could have reached a point that will have as crucial repercussions in the world economy as the collapse of the Eastern bloc had nearly 20 years ago. They also demonstrate clearly the growing impasse of the entire capitalist system. So far, the world economy has not suffered the spectacular effects of decomposition that have been visible in the social and political spheres. If the economic sphere begins to disintegrate, then all the other self-destructive tendencies of decomposing capitalism will be unleashed on a new and unprecedented scale. The only solution to this growing threat to human civilisation is the conscious dismantling of capitalist society and its replacement with one based on truly human values. The bourgeoisie cannot entertain this as an option while the other classes in society have no alternative vision. Only the working class, the revolutionary proletariat, can destroy this rotting system before it destroys humanity.

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Thus the plan: We demand that the United States Federal Government pass a policy removing all debt.

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Observation 3 is InherencyIn order to bridge the gap between the status quo and Marxism we must go thought a process of transitional demands. The plan is key to exposing the true side of our government, their allegiances are to the people who put money in their pocket, not to the proletariat they are supposed to represent. Arthur Rymer, winter 1999, “The Specter of Economic Collapse,” Proletarian Revolution No. 58, http://www.lrpcofi.org/PR/collapsePR58.html

Decaying capitalism cannot afford any lasting improvements in the masses' living and working conditions. Indeed, it cannot even sustain the miserable levels it currently imposes on billions of people. As we explain in the adjoining article, The Socialist Answer to the Economic Crisis, a world of peace and plenty is possible. The

world economy could be made to produce for the masses' needs and put an end to want and suffering. But for this to be achieved, capitalism will have to be overthrown by workers' revolutions. Mass struggles against the capitalist attacks are inevitable, and revolutionaries look to initiate and further these struggles wherever possible. Because of the depth of the economic crisis, workers will find that their struggles for partial economic demands are not sufficient to resolve the capitalist crisis. Broad political solutions are necessary. But workers will only come to revolutionary socialist ideas through their own experience. For that reason, revolutionaries accompany their explanations of the need for socialism with a program to advance from the masses' immediate struggle toward socialist conclusions. This program would include demands like: * Expropriate the Banks and Big Businesses; * Jobs for All: a Public Works Program to provide decent housing, health care and education for everyone; and a Sliding Scale of Hours to divide all necessary work among all available workers and thus wipe out unemployment; * An Escalating Scale of Wages to raise wages to keep up with increases in the price of goods.

Repudiate the Imperialist Debts!

In countries like the United States where the class struggle is still at a low level, these policies cannot be raised agitation ally for the masses to take them up today. But to prepare for a movement that would be open to such transitional demands, revolutionaries can explain in their propaganda to the most politically advanced workers how these demands can be used in the course of future mass struggles. In many countries, however, from Indonesia to South Africa, where the crisis is already acute and the masses are mobilized, transitional

demands are essential for revolutionaries to use today in seeking to guide the current mass struggles in a revolutionary direction. Still, the crucial issue at this stage for revolutionaries is the misuse of transitional demands as a radical reformist program. To examine this problem further, we will take a closer look at one particular demand, Repudiate the Imperialist Debts! The

demand to reject paying back the massive debts held by the banks is not in the transitional programs of earlier generations of Marxists because it has become a burning issue only in recent decades. Today, state debt is used by the capitalists everywhere as a weapon against workers. In the imperialist countries, national debts are a cover for slashing social services like welfare and education while directing the wealth taxed from the working class into the pockets of the bankers. So we raise the slogan Repudiate the Debt! -- that is, reject debt payments to the banks -- as a demand that all popular leaders should fight for. If these leaders refuse to struggle for this demand, that further exposes their pro-capitalist allegiances and shows workers the need to struggle to seize the wealth of the banks and big industries. The debt crisis is clearest in the case of the neo-colonies of the "third world," which are being bled dry by the imperialists' demands for debt repayments. This year the world's poorest countries have been forced to hand over $750 million a day. Yet even this massive transfer of wealth doesn't reduce the total debt; it simply covers the ever-increasing amount of interest owed, so the total debt actually grows. Thus between 1980, when the debt crisis first exploded, and 1994, the total debt of the world's poorest countries increased by some 250 percent to a total of $2.5 trillion.

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The imperialist vampires are literally sucking the neo-colonies dry. The human costs of this crisis -- in the form of famine, epidemics of treatable diseases and wars over scarce resources -- are barely quantifiable. It is staggering to consider, for example, that while the total cost of meeting basic health, nutrition, education and family planning needs for the whole of Africa is estimated to be $9 billion a year, the governments of sub-Saharan Africa pay the imperialists $15 billion annually in interest. Therefore, revolutionaries should raise the slogan Repudiate the Imperialist Debts as an internationalist demand that workers in the imperialist countries should fight for against the banks and governing parties in their countries. As well, it

A struggle to repudiate the imperialist debts would strike a blow against the capitalist system. If successful, massive amounts of wealth would be freed that could be used to address the masses' needs. The opposition the capitalists would put up against such a struggle would go a long way to proving the need to overthrow them. must be raised as a demand on the neo-colonial governments to expose their refusal to challenge imperialism.

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Observation 4 is Solvency Once the system is exposed for what it really is the working class will realize their alienation. It is only through this process of alienation that the proletariat will rise up against the system and build a new society free of poverty and exploitation International Review 1993, “Communism is not a nice idea, but a material necessity, part III: The alienation of labour is the premise for its emancipation,” No. 70, 3rd Quarter 1993, http://en.internationalism.org/ir/070_commy_03

The alienation of labour is the premise for its emancipation For it must not be forgotten that Marx did not elaborate the theory of alienation in order to bewail the misery that he saw around him, or to present, as did the various brands of 'true' and feudal socialism, human history as nothing but a regrettable fall from an original state of fullness. For Marx the alienation of man was the necessary product of human evolution, and as such contained the seeds of its own supercession: "The human being had to be reduced to this absolute poverty in order that he might yield his inner wealth to the outer world" [17]. But the creation of this vast "outer wealth", this wealth estranged from those who have created it, also finally makes it possible for human beings to emerge from alienation into freedom. As Marx puts it in the Grundrisse: "It will be shown ...that the most extreme form of alienation, wherein labour appears in the relation of capital and wage labour, and labour, productive activity, appears in relation to its own conditions and its own product, is a necessary point of transition - and therefore contains in itself, in a still only inverted from, turned on its head, the dissolution of all limited presuppositions of production, and moreover creates and produces the unconditional presuppositions of production, and therewith the full material conditions for the total, universal development of the productive forces of the individual" [18]. There are two aspects to this: in the first place, because of the unprecedented productivity of labour achieved under the capitalist mode of production, the old dream of a society of abundance, where all human beings, and not just a privileged few, have the leisure to devote themselves to the "total, universal development" of their creative powers, can cease to be a dream and become a reality. But the possibility of communism is not simply a matter of technological possibility. It is above a social possibility linked to the existence of a class which has a material interest in bringing it about. And here again Marx's theory of alienation shows how both in spite and because of the alienation it suffers in bourgeois society, the proletariat will be driven to rebel against its conditions of existence: "The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-estrangement. But the former class feels at ease and strengthened in this estrangement, it recognises estrangement as its own power and has in it the semblance of human existence. The latter feels annihilated in estrangement; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence. It is, to use an expression of Hegel, in its abasement the indignation at that abasement, an indignation to which it is necessarily driven by the contradictions 9

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between its human nature and its conditions of life, which is the outright, resolute and comprehensive negation of that nature" [19]. The theory of alienation is thus nothing if it is not a theory of class revolt, a theory of revolution, a theory of the historic struggle for communism. In the next chapter we will look at the first sketches of communist society that Marx 'deduced' from his critique of capitalist alienation.

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Observation 5 is Framework- the stacked deck of policy debate. A) Link: Current Practice in policy debate cast the judge in the role of a federal policy maker in the pre-eminent capitalist nation State B) Alternative: Embrace the idea of the judge as a critical intellectual not tied to a capitalist ideology which has already decided what is possible and impossible, before the debate has already started. Slavoj Zizek, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies in Ljubljana, 1999, The Ticklish Subject, page 198-201 The best formula that expresses the paradox of post-politics is perhaps Tony Blair's characterization of New Labour as the 'Radical Centre': in the old days of 'ideological' political division, the qualification 'radical' was reserved either for the extreme Left or for the extreme Right. The Centre was, by definition, moderate: measured by the old standards, the term 'Radical Centre' is the same nonsense as 'radical moderation'. What makes New Labour (or Bill Clinton's politics in the USA) 'radical' is its radical abandonment of the 'old ideological divides', usually formulated in the guise of a paraphrase of Deng Xiaoping's motto from the 1960s: 'It doesn't matter if a cat is red or white; what matters is that it actually catches mice': in the same vein, advocates of New Labour like to emphasize

that one should take good ideas without any their (ideological) origins. And what are these 'good ideas'? The answer is, of course, ideas that work. It is here that we encounter the gap that separates a political act proper from the 'administration of social matters' which remains within the framework of existing sociopolitical relations: the political act (intervention) proper is not simply something that works well within the framework of the existing relations, but something that changes the very framework that determines how things work. To say that good ideas are 'ideas that work' means that one accepts in advance the (global capitalist) constellation that determines what works (if, for example, one spends too much money on education or healthcare, that 'doesn't work', since it infringes too much on the conditions of capitalist profitability). One can also put it in terms of the well-known definition of politics as the 'art of the possible': authentic politics is, rather, the exact opposite, that is, the art of the impossible - it changes the very parameters of what is considered 'possible' in the existing, constellation.29 prejudice and apply them, whatever

C) Implications: 1- Topicality is evaluated post-advocacy. The negative must first win that capitalism is good before topicality should be evaluated.

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2- Impact Calculus should be grounded in a dialectical materialist metaphysics. The judge should reject arguments that invert subject-object relation of the base/superstructure. Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, Dept English @ Syracuse, 1994, “The Stupidity that Consumption is Just as Productive as Production,” The Alternative Orange, V 4, Fall/Winter, http://www.etext.org/Politics/AlternativeOrange/4/v4nl_cpp.html The task of this text [1] is to lay bare the structure of assumptions and its relation to the workings of the regime of capital and wage-labor (what I have articulated as “post-al logic”), [2] that unites all these seemingly different text as they recirculate some of the most reactionary practices that are now masquerading as “progressive” in the postmodern academy.

Analyzing the post-al logic of the left is important because it not only reveals how the ludic left is complicit with capitalism but, for the more immediate purposes of this text-ofresponse, it allows us to relate the local discussions in these text to global problems and to deal, in OR – 2’s words, with the “encompassing philosophical issues” [3] that are so violently suppressed y the diversionist uses of “detailism” [4] in these nine text. Whether

they regard themselves to be “new new left,” “feminist,” “neoMarxist,” or “anarchist,” these texts—in slightly different local idioms—do the ideological work of US capitalism by producing theories, pedagogies, arguments, ironies, anecdotes, turns of phrases and jokes that obscure the laws of motion of capital. Post-al logic is marked above all by its erasure of “production” as the determining force in organizing human societies and their institutions, and its insistence on “consumption” and “distribution” as the driving force of the social. The argument of the post-al left (briefly) is that “labor,” in advanced industrial “democracies,” is superseded by “information,” and consequently “knowledge” (not class struggle over the rate of surplus labor) has become the driving force of history. The task of the post-al left is to deconstruct the “metaphysics of labor” and consequently to announce the end of socialism and with it the “outdatedness” of the praxis of abolishing private property (that is, congealed alienated labor) in the post-al moment. Instead of abolishing private property, an enlightened radical democracy—which is to supplant socialism (as Laclau, Mouffe, Aronowitz, Butler and others have advised)—should make property holders of each citizen. The post-al left rejects the global objective conditions of production of the local subjective circumstances of consumption, and its master trope is what R-4 so clearly foregrounds: the (shopping) “mall”—the ultimate site of consumption “with all the latest high-tech textwares” deployed to pleasure the “body.” In fact, the post-al left has “invented” a whole new interdiscipline called “cultural studies” that provides the new alibi for the regime of profit by shifting social analytics for “production” to “consumption.” (On the political economy of “invention” in ludic theory, see Transformation 2 on “The Invention of the Queer.”) To

prove its “progressiveness,” the post-al left devotes most of its energies (see the writings of John Fiske, Constance Penley, Michael Berube, [Henry/Robert] Louis Gates, Jr., Andrew Ross, Susan Willis, Stuart Hall, Fredric Jameson), to demonstrate how “consumption” is in fact an act of production and resistance to capitalism and a practice in which a utopian vision for a society of equality is performed! The shift from “production” to “consumption” manifests itself in post-al left theories through the focus on “superstructural” cultural analysis and the preoccupation not with the “political economy” (“base”) but with “representation”—for instance, of race, sexuality, environment, ethnicity, nationality and identity. This is, for example, one reason for R-2’s ridiculing the “base” and “superstructure” analytical model of classical Marxism (Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy) with an anecdote (the privileged mode of “argument” for the post-al left) that the base is really not all that “basic” To adhere to the base/superstructure model for him/her is to be thrown into an “epistemological gulag.” For the post-al left a good society is, therefore, one in which, as R-4 puts it, class antagonism is bracketed and the “surplus value” is distributed more evenly among men and women, whites and persons of color, the lesbian and the straight. It is not a society in which “surplus value”—the exploitative appropriation of the other’s labor—is itself eliminated by revolutionary praxis. The post-al left’s good society is not one in which private ownership is obsolete and the social division of labor (class) is abolished, rather it is a society in which the fruit of exploitation of the proletariat (surplus labor) is more evenly distributed and a near-equality of consumption is established. This distributionist/consumptionist theory that underwrites the economic interests of the (upper)middle classes is the foundation for all the texts in this exchange and their pedagogies. A good pedagogy, in these text, therefore is one in which power is distributed evenly in the classroom: a pedagogy that constructs a classroom of consensus not antagonism (thus opposition to “politicizing the classroom” in OR-1) and in which knowledge (concept) is turned into—through the process that OR-3 calls “translation”—into “consumable” EXPERIENCES. The more “intense” the experience, as the anecdotes of OR-3 show, the more successful the pedagogy In short, it is a pedagogy that removes the

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student from his/her position in the social relations of production and places him/her in the personal relation of consumption: specifically, EXPERIENCE of/as the consumption of pleasure. The

post-al logic obscures the laws of motion of capital by very specific assumptions and moves—many of which are rehearsed in the texts here, I will discuss some of these, mention others in passing, and hint at several more. (I have provided a full account of all of these moves in my “Post-ality” in Transformation 1.) I begin by outlining the post-al assumptions that

“democracy” is a never-ending, open “dialogue” and “conversation” among multicultural citizen; that the source of social inequities is “power”; that a post-class hegemonic “conversation” among multicultural citizens; that truth (as R-2 writes) is an “epistemological gulag”—a construct of power—and thus any form of “ideology critique” that raises questions of “falsehood” and “truth” (“false consciousness”) does so through a violent exclusion of the “other” truths by, in OR-5 words, “staking sole legitimate claim” to the truth in question. Given

the injunction of the pist-al logica against binaries (truth/falsehood) the project of “epistemology” is displaced in the ludic academy by “rhetoric.” The question, consequently, becomes not so much what is the “truth” of a practice but whether it “works” (Rhetoric has always served as an alibi for pragmatism.) Therefore, R-4 is not interested in whether my practices are truthful but in what effects they might have: if College Literature publishes my texts would such an act (regardless of the “truth” of my texts) end up “cutting our funding?” he/she asks. A post-al leftist like R-4, in short, “resists” the state only in so far as the state does not cut his/her “funding.” Similarly, it is enough for a cynical pragmatist like OR-5 to conclude that my argument “has little prospect of effectual force” in order to disregard its truthfulness. The

post-al dismantling of “epistemology” and the erasure of the question of “truth,” it must be pointed out, is undertaken to protect the economic interests of the ruling class. If the “truth question” is made to seem outdated and an example of an orthodox binarism (R-2), any conclusions about the truth of ruling class practices are excluded from the scene of social contestation as a violent logocentric (positivistic) totalization that disregards the “difference” of the ruling class. This is why a defender of the ruling class such as R-2 sees an ideology critique aimed at unveiling false consciousness and the production of class consciousness as a form of “epistemological spanking.” It is this structure of assumptions that enables R-4 to answer my question, “What is wrong with being dogmatic?” not in terms of its truth but by reference to its pragmatics (rhetoric): what is “wrong” with dogmatism, she/he says is that it is violent rhetoric (“textual Chernobyl”) and thus Stalinist. If I ask what is wrong with Stalinism, again (in terms of the logic of his/her text) I will not get a political or philosophical argument but a tropological description.[5]

3. The nature of solvency should be evaluated outside of preconceived notions of what is and is not politically possible Marta Harnecker, Dir of MEPLA, 2000, “Making the Impossible Possible,” http://www.politicsofhealth.org/main/making_impossible

To think about the construction of forces and the correlation of forces is to change the traditional vision of politics. This vision tends to reduce politics to the struggle over judicial and political institutions and to exaggerate the role of the state. Immediately one thinks of political parties and the fight over the control and orientation of the formal instruments of power.17 The most radical sectors focus all their political action on the conquest of political power and the destruction of the state. The reformists focus on the administration of political power and the exercise of government as the fundamental and sole form of political practice. The popular sectors and their struggles are the ignored colossus. This is what Helio Gallardo calls the “politicism” of the Latin American left.18 2) Overcoming the narrow conception of power To think about constructing forces is also to overcome the narrow vision that reduces the concept of right-wing power to that of the repressive aspects of the state. The power of the enemy is not only repressive but also, as Carlos Ruiz says, constructive, moulding, disciplining. If the 13

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power of the dominant classes were only for the purpose of subjecting the left to censorship, exclusion, obstacles or repression, it would be more fragile. Its strength derives from the fact that, in addition to eliminating those things it doesn’t want, it is capable of creating what it does want: building channels, producing knowledge, rationales and consciousness. It is the power to impose its own way of being seen and of looking at the world.1 To think about how to construct forces is also to overcome the old and deeply rooted mistake of trying to build political forces whether through arms or the ballot box without building social force.20 3) Politics as the art of building social force in opposition to the system The rise of a social force opposing the system is what the ruling classes fear most. That is the source of their narrow conception of politics as the struggle to win positions of power within the institutionalised judicial and political apparatus. For the left, on the other hand, politics must be the art of building social force in opposition to the system. The left must not, therefore, see the people or popular social force as something given that can be manipulated and only needs to be stirred up, but as something that has to be built.21 22

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