1

Topical affirmatives must affirm the normative idea that the United States
Federal Government should establish national health insurance in the United
States
Resolved before a colon reflects a legislative forum
AOS 04
(5-12, # 12, Punctuation The Colon and Semicolon,
http://usawocc.army.mil/IMI/wg12.htm)
The colon introduces the following: a. A list, but only after "as follows," "the following," or a
noun for which the list is an appositive: Each scout will carry the following: (colon) meals for
three days, a survival knife, and his sleeping bag. The company had four new officers: (colon)
Bill Smith, Frank Tucker, Peter Fillmore, and Oliver Lewis. b. A long quotation (one or more
paragraphs): In The Killer Angels Michael Shaara wrote: (colon) You may find it a different story
from the one you learned in school. There have been many versions of that battle [Gettysburg]
and that war [the Civil War]. (The quote continues for two more paragraphs.) c. A formal
quotation or question: The President declared: (colon) "The only thing we have to fear is fear
itself." The question is: (colon) what can we do about it? d. A second independent clause
which explains the first: Potter's motive is clear: (colon) he wants the assignment. e. After the
introduction of a business letter: Dear Sirs: (colon) Dear Madam: (colon) f. The details following
an announcement For sale: (colon) large lakeside cabin with dock g. A formal resolution, after
the word "resolved:"
Resolved: (colon) That this council petition the mayor.

USFG should means the debate is solely about a policy established by

governmental means
Ericson 03
(Jon M., Dean Emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts California Polytechnic U., et al., The
Debaters Guide, Third Edition, p. 4)
The Proposition of Policy: Urging Future Action In policy propositions, each topic contains
certain key elements, although they have slightly different functions from comparable elements
of value-oriented propositions. 1. An agent doing the acting ---The United States in The
United States should adopt a policy of free trade. Like the object of evaluation in a proposition
of value, the agent is the subject of the sentence. 2. The verb shouldthe first part of a verb
phrase that urges action. 3. An action verb to follow should in the should-verb combination. For
example, should adopt here means to put a program or policy into action though
governmental means. 4. A specification of directions or a limitation of the action desired. The
phrase free trade, for example, gives direction and limits to the topic, which would, for
example, eliminate consideration of increasing tariffs, discussing diplomatic recognition, or
discussing interstate commerce. Propositions of policy deal with future action. Nothing has yet
occurred. The entire debate is about whether something ought to occur. What you agree to do,
then, when you accept the affirmative side in such a debate is to offer sufficient and compelling
reasons for an audience to perform the future action that you propose.

Establish means Congress, specifically in the context of national health

insurance
PNHP, 8 Physicians for a National Health Program (3/31, Most doctors support national
health insurance, new study shows.
http://www.pnhp.org/news/2008/march/most_doctors_support.php)
Reflecting a shift in thinking over the past five years among U.S. physicians, a new study shows
a solid majority of doctors 59 percent now supports national health insurance.
Such plans typically involve a single, federally administered social insurance fund that that
guarantees health care coverage for everyone, much like Medicare currently does for seniors.
The plans typically eliminate or substantially reduce the role of private insurance companies in
the health care financing system, but still allow patients to go the doctors of their choice.
A study published in todays Annals of Internal Medicine, a leading medical journal, reports that
a survey conducted last year of 2,193 physicians across the United States showed 59 percent of
them support government legislation to establish national health insurance, while 32
percent oppose it and 9 percent are neutral.

National means maintained by the federal government

Merriam Webster, No Date (National, https://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/national)
Definition of national
1: of or relating to a nation national boundaries the national flag
2: nationalist
3: comprising or characteristic of a nationality
his national accent was plainly audible Elinor Wylie
National: belonging to or maintained by the federal government the National Museum of
American History

Learning about the state isnt the same as being the state heuristics
allow contingent education which no links your offense
Zanotti 14
Dr. Laura Zanotti is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech. Her research and teaching include critical
political theory as well as international organizations, UN peacekeeping, democratization and the role of NGOs in post-
conflict governance.Governmentality, Ontology, Methodology: Re-thinking Political Agency in the Global World
Alternatives: Global, Local, Political vol 38(4):p. 288-304,. A little unclear if this is late 2013 or early 2014 The Stated
Version of Record is Feb 20, 2014, but was originally published online on December 30 th, 2013. Obtained via Sage
Database.
By questioning substantialist representations of power and subjects, inquiries on the
possibilities of political agency are reframed in a way that focuses on power and subjects
relational character and the contingent processes of their (trans)formation in the context of
agonic relations. Options for resistance to governmental scripts are not limited to
rejection, revolution, or dispossession to regain a pristine freedom from all
constraints or an immanent ideal social order. It is found instead in multifarious and
contingent struggles that are constituted within the scripts of governmental
rationalities and at the same time exceed and transform them. This approach questions
oversimplifications of the complexities of liberal political rationalities and of their
interactions with non-liberal political players and nurtures a radical skepticism about
identifying universally good or bad actors or abstract solutions to political problems.
International power interacts in complex ways with diverse political spaces and within
these spaces it is appropriated, hybridized, redescribed, hijacked, and tinkered with.
Governmentality as a heuristic focuses on performing complex diagnostics of events. It
invites historically situated explorations and careful differentiations rather than
overarching demonizations of power, romanticizations of the rebel or the the local.
More broadly, theoretical formulations that conceive the subject in non-substantialist
terms and focus on processes of subjectification, on the ambiguity of power discourses, and
on hybridization as the terrain for political transformation, open ways for reconsidering
political agency beyond the dichotomy of oppression/rebellion. These alternative
formulations also foster an ethics of political engagement, to be continuously taken up
through plural and uncertain practices, that demand continuous attention to what
happens instead of fixations on what ought to be.83 Such ethics of engagement would
not await the revolution to come or hope for a pristine freedom to be regained. Instead, it
would constantly attempt to twist the working of power by playing with whatever cards
are available and would require intense processes of reflexivity on the consequences of
political choices. To conclude with a famous phrase by Michel Foucault my point is not
that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as
bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position
leads not to apathy but to hyper- and pessimistic activism.84

B) Violation

First prep and clash changing the topic post facto manipulates
balance of prep, allows the AFF to cement their prep advantage into an
undefeatable position since it lets them win as long as they used their
infinite time to find quality evidence supporting an ideological
orientation.
Second Politics The affs focus on localized politics cant solvethe
void will be filled by reactionary right wing, turning the aff
Pugh 10 (Jonathan, Newcastle Postcolonial Geographer, The Stakes of Radical Politics
have Changed: Post-crisis, Relevance and the State, Globalizations, March-June, ebsco)
In this polemical piece I have just been talking about how, following an ethos of radicalism as withdrawal from the state, some from the

radical Left were incapable of being able to respond to the new stakes of radical
politics. In particular, they were not found at the state, where the passive public
turned to resolve the crisis. I will now go on to examine how in recent years
significant parts of the radical Left have also tended to prioritise raising awareness
of our ethical responsibilities, over capturing state power. I am going to say that it is important to create this
awareness. However, in an effort to draw attention to the stakes of politics as we find them now, post-2008, I will also point out that we should not place too
much faith in this approach alone. Against the backdrop of what I have just been saying, it is important to remember that while much attention is focused
upon President Obama, in many other parts of the world the Right and fundamentalism are gaining strength through capturing state power. The perception
However, the European Elections of
that the USA has changed is accompanied by a sense of relief among many radicals.

2009, the largest trans-national vote in history, heralded a continent-wide shift to

the Right (and far Right) in many placesin Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, the
Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Estonia,
Lithuania, Luxembourg, Poland, Portgual, Slovenia, Spain, Romania, as just some
examples (Wall Street Journal, 2009). Despite Obamas election and a near depression, neo-liberalism continues to be implemented through a world
spanning apparatus of governmental and intergovernmental organisations, think tanks and trans-national corporations (Massey, 2009; Castree, 2009). The
Albertazzi et al. (2009) draw
power of the Right in countries like Iran, while checked, remains unchallenged by the Left.

attention to how a disconnected Left is leaving power in the hands of the Right in
many other countries nationally, like Italy for example. Reflecting upon contemporary radical politics, the
British Labour politician Clare Short (2009, p. 67) concludes: In the fog of the future, I see a rise of fascistic movements . . . I am afraid it will all get nastier
before we see a rise in generous, radical politics, but I suspect that history is about to speed up in front of our eyes and all who oppose the radicalisation of
fear, ethnic hatred, racialism and division have to be ready to create a new movement that contains the solutions to the monumental historical problems we
currently face. So, the stakes of politics are clear. The Right is on the rise. Neo-liberal ideology is still dominant. How is the Left responding to these stakes? I
have already discussed how some from the radical Left are placing too much faith in civil society organisations that seek to withdraw from the state. I will
Post-crisis, the increasing
now turn to how others have too much faith in the power of raising awareness of our ethical responsibilities.

popularity of David Chandlers (2004, 2007, 2009a, 2009b) work reflects the sense
that radicals too often celebrate the ethical individual as a radical force, at the
expense of wider representational programmes for change. His central argument is
that this leaves radicals impotent . Chandler (2009a, p. 7879) says that many radicals argue that there is nothing passive or
conservative about radical political activist protests, such as the 2003 anti-war march, anti-capitalism and anti-globalisation protests, the huge march to
these new forms
Make Poverty History at the end of 2005, involvement in the World Social Forums or the radical jihad of Al-Qaeda. I disagree;

of protest are highly individualised and personal ones there is no attempt to build a
social or collective movement . It appears that theatrical suicide, demonstrating,
badge and bracelet wearing are ethical acts in themselves: personal statements of
awareness, rather than attempts to engage politically with society. In one way, Chandlers reflective
insight here is not particularly unique. Many others also seem to think that radicals today are too isolated and disengaged (Martin, 2009).5 Neither is it
particularly original to say that there is too much emphasis upon creativity and spontaneity (what Richard Sennett, 2004, calls social jazz), and not enough
upon representational politics. Indeed, go to many radical blogs and you find radicals themselves constantly complaining about how it has become too easy
to sign up to ethical web petitions, email complaints, join a variety of ethical causes, without actually developing the political programmes themselves that
matter. So it is not Chandlers point about radicals being disengaged from instrumental politics that concerns me here. It is his related pointthat there has
been a flight into ethics, away from political accountability and responsibility that I find intriguing. Personal statements of ethical awareness have become
particularly important within radical politics today. It is therefore interesting to note, as I will now discuss, that we have been here before. In his earlier
writings Karl Marx (1982) criticised the German Idealists for retreating into ethics, instead of seizing the institutions of power that mattered for themselves.
Unwilling to express their self-interests politically through capturing power, the
Idealists would rather make statements about their ethical awareness. Such
idealism, along with an unwillingness to be held accountable for political power,
often goes hand in hand. For Marx, it is necessary to feel the weight, but also the responsibility of power. Chandler argues that, just as
when the early Marx critiqued German Idealism, we should now be drawing attention to the pitfalls of the flights to ethics today. He says: In the case of the
German bourgeoisie, Marx concludes that it is their weakness and fragmentation, squeezed between the remnants of the ancien regime and the developing
industrial proletariat, which explains their ideological flight into values. Rather than take on political responsibility for overthrowing the old order, the
German bourgeoisie denied their specific interests and idealised progress in the otherworldly terms of abstract philosophy, recoiling from the consequences
of their liberal aspirations in practice. (Chandler, 2007, p. 717) Today we are witnessing a renewed interest in ethics (Ladi, 1998; Badiou, 2002).
Fragmented, many radicals retreat into abstract ethical slogans like another world
is possible, global human rights, or making poverty history. As discussed above, we are also of course
seeing the return of Kants cosmopolitanism. While I think we should not attack the ethical turn for its values, as many of these around environmental issues
, it is equally important to say that the turn to ethics seems to
and human rights are admirable

reflect a certain lack of willingness to seize power and be held accountable to it. For the
flight to ethics, as it often plays out in radical politics today, seems to be accompanied by scepticism toward representational politics. Continuing with this
theme for a moment, Slavoj Zizek (2008) also sheds some more light upon why ethics (when compared to representational politics) has become so
important to the Left in recent years. He says that many of us (he is of course writing for the Left) feel that we are unable
to make a real difference through representational politics on a larger scale, when it comes to the big political problems of life. Zizek
(2008, p. 453) talks of this feeling that we cannot ever predict the consequences of our acts; that nothing we do will guarantee that the overall outcome of
our interactions will be satisfactory. And he is right to make this point. Today, our geographical imaginations are dominated by a broader sense of chaos and
Global Complexity (Urry, 2003; Stengers, 2005). These ways of thinking, deep in the psyche of many radicals on the Left may be one other reason why so
many have retreated into ethics. When we do not really believe that we can change the world through developing fine detailed instruments, capturing the
state, or predictive models, we are naturally more hesitant. It is better to try and raise ethical awareness instead. Whereas in the past power was something
to be won and treasured, something radicals could use to implement a collective ideology, today, with the risk posed by representation in fragmented
societies, top-down power often becomes a hazard, even an embarrassment, for many on the Left (Ladi, 1998). This is, as I have already discussed, where
Putting what I have just said another
the Right and neo-liberal ideologues are seizing the opportunity of the moment.

way, there is a need to be clear, perhaps more so in these interdisciplinary times

ethics and politics (particularly representational politics) are different. Of course they are
related. You cannot do politics without an ethical perspective. But my point here is that the Right and neo-liberal

ideologues will not simply go away if the Left adopt or raise awareness of alternative
ethical lifestyles. The Right are willing to capture state power, particularly at this
time when the state is increasingly powerful. When we compare the concerted political programme of neo-liberalism, first
developed by Reagan, Thatcher, the IMF, the World Bank, NATO, multi-national banks, and the G20, as just some of many examples, ethical individuals across
But the 2008 crisis, and the response of protests like the
the world offer some counter-resistance.

Alternative G20, demonstrated how weak ethical resistance is in the face of the
institutions of the neo-liberal economy. Another reason for this is because the ethical
individual contributes so much to neo-liberal societies themselves. To explain how, we must briefly
step back. The new social movements of previous decades have, in general, been effectively recuperated by the existing system of capital, by satisfying them
in a way that neutralised their subversive potential. This is how capital has maintained its hegemonic position in post-Fordist societies. Luc Boltanski and
They say the
Eve Chiapello (2005) explain how capitalists have worked with, rather than against, the characteristics of new social movements.

new social movements desire for autonomy, the ideal of self-management, the anti-
hierarchical exigency, and the search for authenticity, were important in developing
post-Fordism. These replaced the hierarchical framework of the Fordist period with new forms of networked control. And so, in this way, we see
that the relationship between new social movements and capital has been productive. In turn, and this is the important point I want to make about the
present moment, clearly the stakes of radical politics have now changed once more. As discussed earlier, it would now seem that post-Fordist society is
Without the neoliberal state, and the
actually more hierarchical and controllable than many previously thought.

publics subordination to its actions, it would not now exist in anything like its
present form. Our subordination to the state has stopped a post-crisis implosion of
neo-liberalism. And this is of course where one of the central characteristics of the
ethical individual has been so productive. Endemic individualism, so dominant in
liberal societies, has been recuperated by the ethical individual who is unwilling to
seize the state. So the salient point here is that the ethical individual is reflective of
the conservative forces in society today.

Third Limits specific topics are key to reasonable expectations for

2Ns. Open subjects create incentives and monopolization of moral high
ground, and picking positions that deny neg ground concessionary or
unpredictable ground is just as bad as no ground at all

Thats key to Agnoism Agonistic forms of confrontation create a

democratic debate space which is the only way to access instrumental
reform and deliberative democracy this flips the aff
Wingenbach 11 (Ed, Notre Dame Government and international studies PhD,
Institutionalizing Agonistic Democracy, pg 190-198)
Third, because Knops ignores the situated source of antagonism and the persistence of hegemony in the construction of meaning he misconceives the problem of subordination and

The objective of agonistic democracy is not to eliminate all relations of

oppression.

domination and oppression; this sort of utopian aspiration leads precisely to the rationalist
exclusions they are at pains to expose. Rather, the goal is to craft conditions under which these relations
can be made visible, and thus contested. The common values that make agonism
possible, and their dominant institutional interpretations, inevitably and explicitly
favor some identities, interests, or other articulations of subjectivity over others. In fact, these
values and their dominant interpretations act to shape subjectivity so that they are seen not as constructions but simply "the way things are." Because Knops assumes the project of
agonism is to eliminate these hegemonic relations of domination, he also assumes that Mouffe needs to establish an unbiased and objective set of criteria by which to identify and
ameliorate these injustices. Hence his claim that her theory ultimately must rely on rationalist arguments. But agonism does not share this aspiration. Instead pluralist agonism
accepts that the inevitability of injustice is the price of democratic plurality, and endeavors to identify practices that render these injustices amenable to contestation.

Agonism hopes to set interpretation against interpretation, identity against identity,

hegemonic claim against hegemonic claim, so that in the perpetual conflict between
citizens the burden of domination shifts and moves. Where Knops sees unbiased consensus on rational principles
eliminating domination, Mouffe sees an elaboration of hegemonic power so thorough as to make the injustices it produces not merely invisible but unthinkable. When Knops concludes
that Mouffe's agonism should be seen as an adjunct to deliberation, one that calls attention to "the erroneous projection of one party's understandings onto another, constraining their
meanings - it is fraught with the possibility of hegemony" (2007, 125), he is mistakenly subsuming agonism into deliberation by eliding the ontological distinctions between the two

Deliberative democracy has faith that careful scrutiny of arguments, rational

accounts.

evaluation of principles, and deliberation oriented toward understanding will produce

an unforced consensus shorn of power, domination, and manipulation. Its
reconstruction of democratic principles is one that aspires to transcend the ambiguity
of the everyday in order to resolve injustice. It takes this possibility as a real one,
because its ontology is fundamentaily committed to the universality of human nature.
Agonistic democrats refuse any such commitments, asserting instead that the
premises of social life are themselves products of humanity, and that the ontology
within which our politics emerges is itself a product of political assertions. No standard can be
found or created that can extract us from this process of meaning creation, and thus all political standards should be understood as both historically constraining (we cannot start
anew) and subject to collective reconstruction (we can act upon our situation by rendering it visible). Nonetheless, Knops's confusion is understandable-how is one to know what this
process of contestation and reinterpretation looks like, absent some institutional suggestions consistent with the particularity of the history that makes agonism attractive? Political
liberalism, modified as I suggested in the last chapter, helps clarify this question. Pluralist agonism requires some shared commitments without which the unavoidably contentious
process of disputing hegemonic interpretations will descend into antagonism. Precisely because the clashes of politics are not oriented toward consensus, and precisely because
democratic engagement always involves challenges with the potential to become explicitly violent (as all challenges are, at some level, hegemonic contestations), some institutional
norms are needed to confine or limit the range of these battles. Agonism proposes that our situated context may provide governing norms that permit the procedures of contestation
to occur, without those same norms becoming idealized or acquiring pseudotranscendent status. We begin from "our" norms, which contain within them some commitment to
fundamental values (liberty/equality), but make the contest over the meaning and implementation of these norms a central aspect of institutional and political debate. Schmittian
violence emerges when contestants cannot perceive a commonality sufficient to justify limitations of the tactics employed. But the commonality that permits these shared limits need
not hold extra-political status. Put differently, the concern of critics of agonism seems to be that the barrier to violence can only be effective if it is itself uncontaminated by the conflicts
it is meant to mediate, or can be sufficiently abstracted from these conflicts as to play a semi-transcendental role. If the boundaries of engagement are recognized as being themselves
in play, then they will lack sufficient purchase to restrain politics. Thus the proposed dichotomy: either agonism will collapse into warfare, or agonism presupposes a hidden extra-
political claim. Emphasizing the post-foundational elements from which agonism derives helps illustrate why this dichotomy can be plausibly refused. This is why the tum to Rawls
(and, to a lesser extent, Habermas) is useful for agonistic democracy. Political liberalism details the way institutional and cultural structures shape and constrain political engagement
without demanding an external anchor. Political liberalism is a situated reconstruction of the emergence of the values of liberal democracy and the operation of those values upon
citizens. It is only the Rawlsian insistence upon a well-ordered society that makes political liberalism appear as a moralized account of democratic politics rather than a situated and
contingent one. As I show in the previous chapter, the effectiveness of the situated norms of liberalism does not, ultimately, depend upon the semi-transcendental status Rawls evokes.

Highlighting
That these values are ours historically, and that they shape our identities and aspirations contingently, provides sufficient status to guide political action.

contingency and inviting citizen engagement in conflicts over the interpretation and application
this

of these values need not weaken their pragmatic significance. It is only dangerous to
expose the contingency of our deeply shared ontopolitical premises if one of those
premises suggests that legitimacy must be derived from criteria not subject to
human agency. It is on this point that agonism captures better than many theories the central insights of democratic theory. To the extent democracy is identified
with individual and collective autonomy from imposed authority, to the extent democracy is identified with individual and collective agency over the terms of social cooperation, and
to the extent democracy is identified with the rights of individuals and collectives to challenge these authorities and those terms, an agonistic account of democracy as situated
historically while engaged in ongoing reconstruction of the contingent but deeply shared values of liberal democracy represents a powerful vision. It shares with other post-
metaphysical theorists, like Habermas and Rawls, an emphasis on the reconstructive aspects of democratic theory, designed to adduce from extant practices and necessary

it pushes these reconstructive projects further

assumptions the best possible description of legitimate democratic politics. But

by demanding that the practices and institutions of democracy itself be engaged in

this reconstruction rather than merely governed by it. Agonistic democracy emerged reactively, offered as an
alternative vision of liberalism, deliberation, and democratic engagement. The emphasis of this work on critique, practices of

identity, contestation of power, exposure of hegemonic interpretations, and so on

depict a vision of democracy that is primarily procedural: democracy reflects practices that take place within the
existing realm of the political. Agonism thus explicitly situates itself within existing institutional forms,

not outside them. Unlike radical democracy, agonistic thinkers propose not a revolution but a
reformation, urging that extant democratic resources be strengthened, democratic
values reinterpreted, and hegemonic structures exposed and contested. To the extent agonism is
transformative, it is transformative from within the horizon of politics from which it emerges. Agonism does not evoke sudden and rapid change in the character of social order.

Over time agonism might lead, directly and indirectly, to dramatic reforms to, and
even revolutionary redesign of, democratic institutions, but that change is inevitably
slow . This makes agonism appear conservative when compared to radical
democracy, as radical democracy takes as its goal the near term transformation and
elimination of social and economic injustice. Agonism aspires to create a democratic
social order that will lead to the amelioration or destruction of injustice, but
recognizes that such injustices are embedded in the context of politics within which
such work occurs and against which organization, mobilization, and resistance must
take place. Agonism does not represent transformation, but it creates democratic conditions out of which
real transformation might arise. To claim that liberalism in its Rawlsian variant represents the best path for agonism is not a capitulation to the
narratives of liberalism and its inevitable injustices, nor an endorsement of chastened conservatism about social change. It is to recognize that transformative politics begins within
existing politics, and that an effective strategy must identify the structures most amenable to that project. Agonism as a political practice demands both the common ontopolitical
framework within which conflict can take place and an institutional framework open to this practice. Political liberalism offers both, without also requiring agonism to shed its
skepticism about foundational or teleological claims. Agonism presupposes active engagement with the situated character of social life in order to grasp our own circumstances
without demanding to be liberated from them. Political liberalism takes these circumstances as the frame from which a governing interpretation of justice emerges; as long as this
conception remains open to further reinterpretation (as it can be once severed from the insistence on stability) political liberalism supports agonistic politics. The objections of Mouffe
and others can be attributed to Rawls's insistence that the governing interpretation of the political embody an overlapping consensus with deep roots in comprehensive moral

the political
doctrines, and which can be invoked to resolve contentious questions of democratic life. But as I demonstrated in the previous chapter,

conception can also be understood as a relatively contingent modus vivendi, subject itself to debate when invoked to
resolve conflict. For Rawls an overlapping consensus is necessary to forestall the sort of deeper public debate and passionate engagement that agonistic democrats
hope to foster. Understanding the political conception as the negotiated but revisable shared interpretation of liberal democratic principles permits both the channeling of passionate
conflict into agonistic engagement and the possibility that the governing interpretation can be itself an object of engagement. In fact, Mouffe makes the same distinction as Rawls
between a political conception ("commitment to principles") and substantive moral doctrines, as does Connolly when he describes the practices of contemporary democratic
citizenship: They embrace their faith at one level, and recoil back upon it at another to come to terms with the obdurate fact that it does not convince millions of others. Sometimes
their own commitment is punctuated with a residual element of uncertainty. That seems noble to me, but perhaps not necessary to deep pluralism. What is needed is pursuit of a
bicameral orientation to citizenship and being, in which you embrace your creed as you bring it into the public realm; and then recoil back without deep resentment on its
contestability to open up negotiating space with others (Schoolman 2008: 316). The agonistic practice so envisioned is strikingly similar to that proposed by Rawls: citizens hold their
own moral doctrines as true and complete, while recognizing that the entrance of this doctrine into the public realm will expose your absolute in its partiality. The bicameralism
Connolly describes mirrors the distinction between comprehensive doctrines and the political conception, with the difference that Connolly does not think that faith is incompatible
with democratic negotiation. Rawls excludes the metaphysical because it undermines the overlapping consensus, which must be minimal in order to be consensual. An agonistic
political liberalism maintains this model without the demand that the passions, ideals, and beliefs of citizens be confined to the private realm. Since the political conception is
recognizably partial, understood as hegemonic, and an explicit subject of political engagement, the line between metaphysical and political need not be policed. What the political
conception does, once generated, is provide a guiding framework within which democratic conflicts can be engaged openly, where a real possible result of that engagement is a
revision of the negotiated interpretation that is the condition of agonistic encounters. Mouffe asserts that "a difficult balance has to be struck between, on the one hand, democracy
understood as a set of procedures required to cope with plurality, and, on the other, democracy as the adherence to values which inform a particular mode of coexistence" (1993: 131
). Political liberalism shorn of the imperative to consensus capture this balance by offering the framework through which democratic societies can manage plurality by articulating a
shared understanding of liberal values, while also permitting this articulation to be contested and revised. Agonism thus forestalls the idea that any democratic institution can claim
substantive legitimacy for its use of power-any act of government is an act of a particular identity or interest acting upon (not implementing) the collective. There are collectively
binding decisions but no collective decisions; the institutional conditions of democratic agonism are much like those described by Dahl's vision of polyarchy, where minorities rule and
liberty is preserved by ensuring that no minority comes to dominate in the name of a fictionalized popular identity. Similarly, Connolly envisages a society "made up of intersecting

This
and independent minorities of numerous types and sorts who occupy the same territorial space and who negotiate an ethos of engagement between themselves" (2000: 92).

is the structural argument for an agonistic liberalism-a competitive environment of

plural identities and interests will tend to undercut any and all claims to overcome
contingency, thus cultivating practices that make visible and contest hegemonic
interpretations. If this can happen within an agonistic cultural order, within a
shared symbolic framework (liberty/equality), exercised by citizens informed by an
ethos of reciprocity and presumptive gratitude (which will, of course, require some material conditions to be maintained), it is likely to
maximize inclusion and minimize domination . Under such circumstances the range of emancipatory visions and contested
democratic norms is likely to be vast. Since the shared interpretation of common principles that permits agonistic participation is itself subject to the same regular challenge and
renegotiation, the mechanism for significant democratic change resides at the heart of agonistic liberalism. And to the extent the experience of living in a society in which peaceful but
passionate negotiation and renegotiation of the inherited values that bind people collectively is likely to shape subjectivity, as post-foundational thinkers and Rawlsian liberals all

the possibilities for dramatic transformation to the ontopolitical grounds of that

suggest,

social order increase as citizens come to see both conflict and reciprocity as living
norms of political life. There is room in this modus vivendi for radical visions of the future, and room for these visions to transform the temporary hegemony
of the political conception of justice. While no political order, liberal or otherwise, can ever attain full transparency, consensus, or inclusion, an institutional commitment to negotiate
and renegotiate terms of agreement that are themselves both the condition of further conflict and themselves subjects of this same conflict offers a vision of political life sufficiently
capacious to render transformative change conceivable. I began thisbook with a discussion ofpost-foundationalism and its implications for politics. Agonistic democracy, I claimed,
offers the account of democratic politics best suited to post-foundational circumstances in which claims to have achieved a stable consensus to guide political action, whether rooted in
truth, nature, identity, morality, rationality, or any other extra-contextual criteria, cannot be sustained. I also argued that the justification for democracy, agonistic or otherwise, does
not derive from the recognition of post-foundational conditions; like any other hegemonic ideal democracy is a situated product of the history within which its dominant position
emerged. That is not to say that convergence on some sort of democratic norms is unlikely, as absent massive coercion or uncommon homogeneity the radical pluralism post-
foundationalism tends to provoke is also likely to undermine claims to authority based upon claims of truth. In the case of western societies with liberal democratic histories, however,
the convergence of post-foundational pluralism and an historical framework that privileges the values of equality and liberty produces circumstances in which democratic institutions
are the unavoidable default for politics. A commitment to liberalism also shapes these historical conditions, so attempts to articulate an appropriate vision of democratic politics that
expresses these situated values and embraces a post-foundational account of meaning must also grapple with the powerful role liberalism plays in the interpretation of democratic

We find ourselves always already inhabiting a

values in western democracies. These constraints are neither optional nor binding.

history of meaning, practice, and identity, and these elements of our being are not
infinitely malleable. They may be transformed, reinterpreted, and eventually even
overcome, but such work begins with recognition of our limitations. Marx, despite his otherwise universalistic commitments, captured these circumstances as clearly
anything in Heidegger's work, writing in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that "men make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they
themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted." The inherited circumstances of western democratic theory include
the powerful presence of liberalism, and a viable theory aspiring to deepen democratic possibilities must grapple with this fact. This commitment to dealing with the world as we find
it helps explain the recurrent frustration with agonism expressed by more radical critics. Because pluralist agonists focus on the situated possibilities inherent to the hegemonic
interpretations and norms already in place and then try to expand these possibilities, they appear to those committed to the complete transformation of contemporary liberalism to be
defending the status quo. Tally makes this argument in his review ofMouffe: The most damning critique of On the Political may be that it winds up reinforcing the status quo ... Indeed,
Mouffe's agonistic politics does not seem very radical at all. Whenever Mouffe addresses practical matters, she uses the language of adversarial or agonistic politics, but evokes tame
and familiar scenes. Mouffe argues for a pluralism that recognizes real differences, but that also ensures that everyone plays by the same rules. "Partisans" who really want to change
the political landscape may not be allowed to participate (2007: 7-8). Vazquez-Arroyo (2004) develops a similar critique of Connolly. There are two problems with this critique, and
addressing each will help clarify why an agonistic pluralism is best cultivated within liberal institutional bounds. First, the critique underestimates the democratic capacities of
liberalism, associating all liberal accounts with a broader indictment of capitalist rationality. Second, the critique fails to account for the situated character of politics, asserting a

liberalism offered by radical theorists represents an

transformative radicalism that agonism rejects. Often the objection to

objection to an idea of liberalism imbricated with existing structures of inequality, a

rationalistic account of individual interests, and the problems of global capitalism. Liberalism thus represents a constellation of
problems against which democratic advocates position themselves. Dietz identifies this view of liberalism as an abstracted enemy of democracy: "The polemic that afflicts so many
current studies of democracy and citizenship is most evident at the level of discourse on liberal ism, where this complex and multifaceted historical phenomenon has become little
more than an ideational enemy, or a suspect to be processed and called forth for 'rebuke'" (1998: 116). But liberalism is as complex and pluralistic as any other major account of

Some aspects of liberal politics

contemporary politics, and both its theoretical and historical specificity should not be elided.

contribute to visions of subjectivity that will generate resentment and oppression,

but elements within these same theories might also be used to mitigate such
pressures . Some versions of liberalism identify closely with capitalism and neo-
liberal aspirations, but others endeavor to identify an economic order consistent
with liberal values without offering any such privilege to markets or competition.
Some versions of liberalism presuppose strong forms of rationality while others are attentive to the variety of ways different identities organize and prioritize their values and actions.
There is no single liberalism, and-democratic theory would do well to be attentive to the range of possibilities available within this plurality. Instead, liberalism "in much
contemporary democratic theory, particularly post-structural and postfoundational work, is taken to embody the flaws of modernity generally and thus becomes the flaw that
democratic theorizing is intended to overcome" (Dietz 1998: 117). But a theory of democracy that takes historicity seriously cannot reduce liberalism to polemic and the dominant
mode of democratic institution to that which is to be overcome. That liberal democracy is in practice and theory flawed is beyond dispute, but if it also lacks any potential to nurture a

If only a rupture and overcoming

more democratic and less flawed practice then there is little hope for post-foundational democratic theory.

can achieve democratic outcomes and democracy will ever be over the horizon of
history, a democratic theory of institutions and engagement rather than resistance
and aspiration is impossible . I hope to have shown by looking carefully at Rawlsian liberalism as a singular and situated example of a particular and
historically viable form of liberalism that the more radical aspirations of democratic theory need not begin and

end with the rejection of the dominant interpretation of democracy within and
against which political action must engage. Agonistic theory can offer an account of
democracy mindful of both the danger and the potential of the liberal hegemony.
Agonism does not envision contestation extending "all the way" down, as it were. The ontopolitical foundations of agonistic

democracy are contingent and revisable , but they cannot be the constant object of
debate . If, as I have tried to argue, a post-foundational politics demands the recognition both of the
contingency of foundations and the situated limits to the range of possible meanings
found in any particular grounds of the political, then an agonistic politics must also
be a bounded politics. Agonism works within historicity in order to expand the
constellation of conceivable conflicts, without rejecting the tragic reality that limits
to inclusion are endemic to politics . Hegemony can be productive or destructive,
democratic or authoritarian, contested or univocal, but hegemony cannot be universal. Post-foundational
politics embraces the inevitability of boundaries and limits , and then works to make
those boundaries as wide as possible without turning debates into ontological
conflicts , conflicts that cannot but be violent as they take place outside the grounds of
shared ontopolitical premises. Calling perspectives that accept the contingent liberal
principles of democratic politics legitimate may seem dangerous, as it implies that
perspectives beyond this consensus are illicit and excluded. And it does so imply. But the language of legitimacy is
unavoidable for post-foundational politics. "Contrary to the dialogic approach, the democratic debate is conceived as a real confrontation. Adversaries do fight -

even fiercely - but according to a shared set of rules, and their positions, despite being ultimately irreconcilable, are accepted as legitimate perspectives" (Mouffe 2005a: 52).

The condition of peaceful democratic agonism is a willingness to accept some set of principles,

interpretations, or procedures as legitimate, even if that legitimacy is understood as

subject to legitimate conflict itself. Pluralist agonism endeavors not to utterly transform the political in order to bring about a new democratic
dawn. Instead, it aspires to deepen, extend, and intensify the democratic capacity for contestation and questioning already latent within the situated norms and hegemonic

At some point the confrontation between principles is so vast that the

articulations of the political.

contest must be antagonistic , and enemies simply cannot recognize one another as legitimate. Political liberalism offers
a set of principles and practices compatible with the type of "conflictual consensus"
agonistic democrats advocate, while also highlighting the historically contingent yet
also ontologically powerful status of these same principles. Post-foundationalism dictates democratic theorizing
both pay close attention to the ontopolitical grounds of any proposed politics and propose ways to preserve the pluralism that inevitably follows from the recognition of contingency.

A theory of agonistic democracy embedded within a modified version of political

liberalism can support institutions capable of addressing both imperatives, and the
institutions it supports are not remarkably different from those envisioned by liberal
theory. The resources necessary for agonistic transformation are present in the political institutions, political culture, and political theory of contemporary democracy.
The modified political liberalism proposed in this book is probably not the only
institutional possibility for agonistic democracy, but its plausibility demonstrates
that institutionalization is neither incompatible with agonistic principles nor
impossible to develop within existing social norms. By situating liberalism explicitly
within a post-foundational ontology, liberalism is transformed in significant ways
and its practices opened up to greater contestation, generosity, and active re-
constitution.

The impact outweighsdeliberative debate models impart skills vital to

respond to existential threats
Lundberg 10 [Christian O., Professor of Communications @ University of North Carolina,
Chapel Hill, Tradition of Debate in North Carolina in Navigating Opportunity: Policy
Debate in the 21st Century By Allan D. Louden, p. 311]
The second major problem with the critique that identifies a naivety in articulating debate
and democracy is that it presumes that the primary pedagogical outcome of debate is
speech capacities. But the democratic capacities built by debate are not limited to speech
as indicated earlier, debate builds capacity for critical thinking, analysis of public claims,
informed decision making, and better public judgment. If the picture of modem political
life that underwrites this critique of debate is a pessimistic view of increasingly
labyrinthine and bureaucratic administrative politics, rapid scientific and technological
change outpacing the capacities of the citizenry to comprehend them, and ever-expanding
insular special-interest- and money-driven politics, it is a puzzling solution, at best, to
argue that these conditions warrant giving up on debate. If democracy is open to
rearticulation, it is open to rearticulation precisely because as the challenges of modern
political life proliferate, the citizenry's capacities can change, which is one of the primary
reasons that theorists of democracy such as Ocwey in The Public awl Its Problems place
such a high premium on education (Dewey 1988,63, 154). Debate provides an
indispensible form of education in the modem articulation of democracy because it builds
precisely the skills that allow the citizenry to research and be informed about policy
decisions that impact them, to sort through and evaluate the evidence for and relative
merits of arguments for and against a policy in an increasingly information-rich
environment, and to prioritize their time and political energies toward policies that matter
the most to them. The merits of debate as a tool for building democratic capacity-building
take on a special significance in the context of information literacy. John Larkin (2005, HO)
argues that one of the primary failings of modern colleges and universities is that they have
not changed curriculum to match with the challenges of a new information environment.
This is a problem for the course of academic study in our current context, but perhaps
more important, argues Larkin, for the future of a citizenry that will need to make
evaluative choices against an increasingly complex and multimediated information
environment (ibid-). Larkin's study tested the benefits of debate participation on
information-literacy skills and concluded that in-class debate participants reported
significantly higher self-efficacy ratings of their ability to navigate academic search
databases and to effectively search and use other Web resources: To analyze the self-report
ratings of the instructional and control group students, we first conducted a multivariate
analysis of variance on all of the ratings, looking jointly at the effect of instmction/no
instruction and debate topic . . . that it did not matter which topic students had been
assigned . . . students in the Instnictional [debate) group were significantly more confident
in their ability to access information and less likely to feel that they needed help to do so----
These findings clearly indicate greater self-efficacy for online searching among students
who participated in (debate).... These results constitute strong support for the effectiveness
of the project on students' self-efficacy for online searching in the academic databases.
There was an unintended effect, however: After doing ... the project, instructional group
students also felt more confident than the other students in their ability to get good
information from Yahoo and Google. It may be that the library research experience
increased self-efficacy for any searching, not just in academic databases. (Larkin 2005, 144)
Larkin's study substantiates Thomas Worthcn and Gaylcn Pack's (1992, 3) claim that
debate in the college classroom plays a critical role in fostering the kind of problem-solving
skills demanded by the increasingly rich media and information environment of modernity.
Though their essay was written in 1992 on the cusp of the eventual explosion of the
Internet as a medium, Worthcn and Pack's framing of the issue was prescient: the primary
question facing today's student has changed from how to best research a topic to the
crucial question of learning how to best evaluate which arguments to cite and rely upon
from an easily accessible and veritable cornucopia of materials. There are, without a doubt,
a number of important criticisms of employing debate as a model for democratic
deliberation. But cumulatively, the evidence presented here warrants strong support for
expanding debate practice in the classroom as a technology for enhancing democratic
deliberative capacities. The unique combination of critical thinking skills, research and
information processing skills, oral communication skills, and capacities for listening and
thoughtful, open engagement with hotly contested issues argues for debate as a crucial
component of a rich and vital democratic life. In-class debate practice both aids students in
achieving the best goals of college and university education, and serves as an unmatched
practice for creating thoughtful, engaged, open-minded and self-critical students who are
open to the possibilities of meaningful political engagement and new articulations of
democratic life. Expanding this practice is crucial, if only because the more we produce
citizens that can actively and effectively engage the political process, the more likely we are
to produce revisions of democratic life that are necessary if democracy is not only to
survive, but to thrive. Democracy faces a myriad of challenges, including: domestic and
international issues of class, gender, and racial justice; wholesale environmental
destruction and the potential for rapid climate change; emerging threats to international
stability in the form of terrorism, intervention and new possibilities for great power
conflict; and increasing challenges of rapid globalization including an increasingly volatile
global economic structure. More than any specific policy or proposal, an informed and
active citizenry that deliberates with greater skill and sensitivity provides one of the best
hopes for responsive and effective democratic governance, and by extension, one of the last
best hopes for dealing with the existential challenges to democracy [in an] increasingly
complex world.

Fourth Agnosticism This is a process of antilogic its what teaches us

to affect power systems and persuade an external audience this
requires the stasis of the topic and understanding the full spectrum of
the controversy this allows the structure of debate to solve the affs
offense
INOUE 5 [ASAO B. INOUE at the time of this writing, Asao held an MA in Rhetoric and Communication from Oregon
State. He is currently an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at Fresno State, focusing on writing assessment
and race studies. This dissertation was approved by Dissertation Chair: Victor Villanueva. Dr. Victor Villanueva received
his PhD in English from the University of Washington in 1986. Since then, he has worked not only as a professor of
rhetoric and writing, but as an Equal Opportunity Program Director, Writing Project Director, a Director of Composition,
twice as Department Chair (at Washington State University and at Auburn University), and Interim Associate Dean THE
EPISTEMOLOGY OF RACISM AND COMMUNITY-BASED ASSESSMENT PRACTICE submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY Department of English May
2005 obtainable via google search This link should work:
https://research.wsulibs.wsu.edu/xmlui/.../2376/.../a_inoue_012205.pdf?]

Gutheries definition of nomos helps us also see the nomos-physis debate as one not solely
about the nature of knowledge, or whether laws and ideals of truth were natural or
derived from social customs. Using the epistemology of racism as a lens to see this debate,
structural reasons and implications of power surface.82 The nomos-physis debate is less
about absolute or relative knowledge and more about where power comes from and how
its assigned. If the teaching of rhetoric was a key to reproducing productive citizens, ones
who would participate in the polis by making laws and societal decisions, then
understanding knowledge and laws as beliefs derived in community through decisions and
debate (rhetoric), backed by the authority of the state (a set of institutions that minister the
authenticity and value of the rhetoric of the polis), meant that other laws not on the books
could be equally valid other bodies could make political decisions, maybe better ones. The
implications to this conclusion are grand: there would be other ways to define a citizen;
ones right to power is unstable; and other laws could be deemed just. At the
epistemological level, accepting nomos means a societys common sense about things is
structured by those in power, those making decisions. Laws and political decisions are no
longer about finding justice and truth, but about maintaining, consolidating, and restricting
power. A nomos-centered rhetoric would mean that the power residing in the body of the
Greek citizen is not inherent, nor is his virtue to know what is just a natural quality. A
citizen is structured politically as powerful and virtuous. In fact, power and virtue would
be, to use Vicos commonsensical notions, verum-factum (established through rhetoric and
laws) and verum-certum (solidified through decisions and acts done and celebrated).
Protagoras had one of the earliest most coherent sophistic philosophies of nomos over
physis, or structured power relationships over inherent power relationships. This affected
the debate over the teachability of arte (discussed later in this chapter). The nomos-physis
controversy and Protagoras position in it is seen in his man-measure doctrine,83 but it can
also be seen in his philosophies on the teaching of rhetoric. Gutherie explains Protagorean
teachings, saying they were practical and based largely on the art of persuasive speaking,
training his pupils to argue both sides of a case. This practice of taking either side in an
argument . . . was founded on theories of knowledge and being which constituted an
extreme reaction from the Eleatic antithesis of knowledge and opinion [episteme and
doxa], the one true the other false (Gutherie 267). The practice of antilogic (taking
either side in an argument) was a heuristic that Protagoras perfected and taught his
pupils because it helped them find success in various contexts and with a variety of
audiences. Rhetorical success, thus, wasnt about finding truth but finding successful and
persuasive arguments. While Protagoras advocates a protreptic function for rhetoric,84
hes less certain that one could know any kind of absolute truth or justice (for the polis),
instead hes more confident in the articulation of persuasive doxa (opinion), supported by
observable nomos; thus, antilogic emphasizes the best that language can offer us in the way
of socially sanctioned knowledge. Its an agnostic view towards truth, but not a hopeless
one, or one that leads to inaction. It is, in a way, a reaction to the need many politicians
and statesmen had in Athens at the time. One could haggle philosophically with others
indefinitely about whats true or right, but for a state to run effectively and efficiently,
decisions need to be made quickly and actions taken from them. In a nomos-centered
world, the appeals that justified the right decisions needed more backing since rhetoric is
more about power relationships and not the articulation of absolute and divine truth,
which could not be questioned. In short, a sophist like Protagoras would be dangerous to
the Greek state and the power relationships it nurtured.
Fifth Activism Identity alone leaves students unprepared to situate
their personal experiences within an institutional framework. This shuts
down discussions of solutions and disempowers students agency.
Political education involving the identification of specific problems and
concrete policy solutions is the best way to support youth activism
Lewis-Charp et al. 6 (Heather Lewis-Charp, Senior Associate and Social Scientist at Social Policy
Research Associates, holds an M.A. in Education Research from the University of California-Santa Cruz, et al.,
with Hanh Cao Yu, Vice President and Senior Social Scientist at Social Policy Research Associates, holds a
Ph.D. in Education Administration and Policy Analysis from Stanford University, and Sengsouvanh
Soukamneuth, Social Scientist at Social Policy Research Associates, holds an M.A. in Education Policy from the
University of California-Los Angeles, 2006 Civic Activist Approaches for Engaging Youth in Social Justice,
Beyond Resistance! Youth Activism and Community Change: New Democratic Possibilities for Practice and Policy
for Americas Youth, Edited by Shawn Ginwright, Pedro Noguera, and Julio Cammarota, Published by
Routledge, ISBN 0415952506, p. 26-29)
Nurturing Collective Forms of Identity We believe that before you go out into the
community and make change, you have to really understand where youre coming from and
understand yourself. This is about identity development, the history of your people, where
your people stand in the bigger picture. Staffer at CAPAY (Coalition for Asian Pacific
American Youth), in Boston, Massachusetts As evidenced by this quote, civic activism
organizations focus on raising awareness and strengthening individuals ability to navigate
and negotiate the challenges they face. In doing so, they seek to make the personal
political among youth from marginalized social groups in the United States. Civic activism
organizations recruit youth from marginalized ethnic, racial, or cultural groups; within our
study, there were organizations focused explicitly on African American, Native American,
Asian American, and gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and questioning (GLBTQ)
identity. There were other organizations that coalesced around larger identity categories,
such as youth of color. We found that there was a clearly defined need for identity support
among the young people within these organizations. Youth we interviewed described that
before joining these groups they had a poor view of themselves, had been ignorant about
their history, and/or had been involved in self-destructive behaviors. For instance, as one
youth explained, When I first realized I was queer I felt really powerless and really scared
of myself. And that was really scary; to be scared of who you are is totally diminishing.
Other youth said that they didnt know there were so many different kinds of Asians,
didnt know about self-hatred, or didnt understand what really happened in the civil
rights movement; schools didnt really give you more than the basics. The need for identity
affirmation, therefore, within these youth populations was particularly strong. It is
important, however, to point out that civic activism organizations moved beyond mere
identity affirmation, gearing their work in such a way as it set the groundwork for a
broader social justice orientation. Most organizations offered critical education on
prejudice and discrimination as an entry point for social justice issues in order to help
youth understand [end page 26] the legacy of oppression and identify present-day
challenges facing their identity group. One organization, for example, believed that the
barriers faced by African American youth are best addressed once youth have considered
the legacy and impact of their own history, including the painful scars left by slavery and
segregation. They encouraged youth to reflect on and heal these scars so that they could
transcend internalized racism and learn to effectively function in society. This approach is
consistent with Watts et al.s argument that African Americans benefit from an
understanding of the social structure of power and privilege. In their struggle against
oppression, African Americans can benefit from a strong sense of self that incorporates
both the cultural and sociopolitical aspects of their African American heritage (2003, p.
188). Civic activism organizations move beyond the exploration of the history of particular
identity groups, seeking to emancipate youth through a process of deep critical analysis
and reflection. Some organizations are intentional about pushing youth out of their
comfort zone by asking that they interrogate their assumptions about themselves, each
other, and about the society around them. One youth captured this aspect of this approach
when he said, I dont think its about being comfortable all the time. Its about learning
different circumstances that make you uncomfortable, where you have to stand up for what
you say, even if its not the majority opinion. Its about getting over the discomfort you feel.
Thus, youth within these organizations are pushed to extend their thinking, to confront
their own biases, and to ask hard questions of the leaders within their communities.
Further, they analyze issues of oppression and consider how their own personal
experiences relate to the struggles of others within and outside of their own community.
This kind of identity support, in turn, creates a sense of purpose in young people to take a
civic activist stance and to work with others in their communities to end various forms of
oppression. Making Social Change Tangible Social change happens at the personal level, at
the gut level, and has to come out of self-interest. People mobilize because their daughter
has asthma and they need to do something about it. Staffer at 21st Century Youth
Leadership Movement, in Selma, Alabama As captured by this quote, the desire for social
change is often rooted in personal needs and experiences, and as such, connection to
collective forms of identity can be a precursor to social action. Civic activism, however, also
[end page 27] depends on the identification of tangible goals for social change, an
articulation of a coherent strategy for reaching those goals, and a belief in the power and
efficacy of groups of people to effect change. Further, we have found that the social
change goals or wins that civic activism groups use to measure their own progress are,
by design, incremental so that youth can remain engaged in the process. These include
press coverage of their issues, the number of people they recruit to attend rallies or events,
and the number of meetings they hold with people in power. Over the course of the study,
civic activism groups achieved some relatively large-scale community wins. These include
one organizations success in closing down a cement plant in their community, anothers
successful defeat of a city council measure to create a daytime curfew for teens, and a third
organizations successful effort to have a sexual harrassment policy created for their school
district. These types of victories fueled young peoples sense of purpose and their belief
that they could make a difference. The following quote from one youth is illustrative of
the sense of enthusiasm and competence that young people within these groups radiated.
We have a big voice. There arent a lot of other youth who are as involved as we are.... But,
were at the point now where we are taken seriously. We earned their respect by the
actions we take. When we were opposing the cement plant, the owner challenged us at a
city council meeting. He told us to be more productive. So, we went out and got 1,000 sig-
natures opposing his plant and that shut him up and impressed the city council people.
Civic activism groups use a variety of strategies to build the capacity of youth leaders to
effect change. One of most universal and potent strategies used by organizing groups is
political education. This approach enables youth to learn about social movements (e.g.,
the civil rights movement), political processes (the electoral process) and current events
(e.g., racial profiling and the effects of 9/11 on immigrant communities). Through political
education, youth organizing groups hope to support critical-thinking skills and develop
values and attitudes that move youth to act against injustice. Political education
sessions often seek to make connections between larger social issues and young
peoples day-to-day lives, and center on such issues as policing, school quality,
environmental justice, and immigrants rights. On one level, youth are seen as experts on
these issues, and they are encouraged to share their experiences as well as compose and
defend their own opinions. On another level, youth are pressed by program leaders to
think about these issues abstractly, on a scale beyond their individual experience,
including a consideration of the international or global characteristics of power and
oppression. From a base of political education, civic activism groups have progressed
toward the development of a clear and manageable community-change [end page 28]
agenda. They have sought, at the most basic level, to empower youth to take leadership on
issues in their lives, emphasizing their role as grassroots leaders within their communities.
The first step in that process is to identify the issues most salient to the youth who
participate in the organization. The second step is to ask youth to actively seek out the
perspectives and concerns of other community members, in an effort to find issues of
broad concern that can serve as the basis for sizable coalitions and collective action. Thus,
the issues that civic activist groups address are reflective of issues that community
members face. The process of listening to and raising awareness about such issues is seen
as a high priority in and of itself. Issues identified as most relevant to youth and their
communities include the lack of recreational spaces, lack of green spaces, environmental
pollution, sexual harrassment in schools, policing and the increased incarceration of youth
offenders, and unfair working conditions. Coaching Strategies for Fostering Lifelong
Activism Without grounding youth in the larger sociohistorical context of social
movements and introducing them to concrete strategies for social change, impassioned
youth would be at a loss to translate their ideas and beliefs into action. Civic activism
groups use a variety of mechanisms or levers (direct actions) for change, including
education, letter-writing campaigns, petitions, public presentations, meetings with people
in power, protests, and boycotts. In taking such approaches to civic engagement, youth
activism groups dispel some of the stereotypes that characterize their work as
oppositional. They emphasize the need to work within the system to the extent possible
(i.e., through participation in decision-making bodies), while always being prepared to
apply pressure from outside the system (i.e., through protests and boycotts). In the words
of one program director, Were clear that being in the system or out isnt important. Its
a strategy thats rooted in systems change that is important. Further, civic activism
groups embrace a philosophy of nonviolent and peaceful activism; they are concerned that
youth develop a social justice orientation that is positive and affirming, because they
believe that this is necessary to sustain social action in the long run. The following quote,
by a staff member at one organization, speaks to this issue: We dont organize out of hate,
but out of loveour love for people. Because hate is very defeating, and can motivate and
charge you to do something about injustices. But [we ask youth], how long is your hate
going to sustain your commitment to social justice? Hence, these organizations promote
spiritual and/or human rights arguments for social justice. In doing so, they seek to strike
a delicate balance, supporting young peoples ability and opportunity to actively question
authority while at the same time enabling youth to resist cynicism that could
potentially lead to social distrust and/or alienation.
 2
Focus on racial violence elides the production relationship that
constituted slaverythat misdiagnosis of the root cause prevents
organizing against capital
Reed, professor of political science University of Pennsylvania, 13
(Adolph, Django Unchained, or, The Help: How Cultural Politics Is Worse Than No
Politics at All, and Why, Nonsite Issue #9, February 25th,
http://nonsite.org/feature/django-unchained-or-the-help-how-cultural-politics-is-worse-
than-no-politics-at-all-and-why)

On reflection, its possible to see that Django Unchained and The Help are basically different versions of the
same movie. Both dissolve political economy and social relations into individual quests and
interpersonal transactions and thus effectively sanitize, respectively, slavery and Jim Crow by dehistoricizing
them. The problem is not so much that each film invents cartoonish fictions; its that the point of the cartoons is to take the place of
the actual relations of exploitation that anchored the regime it depicts. In The Help the buffoonishly bigoted housewife, Hilly, obsessively
pushes a pet bill that would require employers of black domestic servants to provide separate, Jim Crow toilets for them; in Django
Unchained the sensibility of 1970s blaxploitation imagines comfort girls and Mandingo fighters as representative slave job
descriptions. Its as if Jim Crow had nothing to do with cheap labor and slavery had nothing to
do with making slave owners rich. And the point here is not just that they get the past wrong
its that the particular way they get it wrong enables them to get the present just as wrong and so
their politics are as misbegotten as their history. Thus, for example, its only the dehistoricization that makes each films entirely neoliberal (they could have been scripted by Oprah) happy
ending possible. The Help ends with Skeeter and the black lead, the maid Aibileen, embarking joyfully on the new, excitingly uncharted paths their bookan account of the master-servant relationship told from the perspective of the servantshas opened for them. But
dehistoricization makes it possible not to notice the great distance between those paths and their likely trajectories. For Skeeter the book from which the film takes its name opens a career in the fast track of the journalism and publishing industry. Aibileens new path was
forced upon her because the book got her fired from her intrinsically precarious job, more at-whim than at-will, in one of the few areas of employment available to working-class black women in the segregationist Souththe precise likelihood that had made her and other
maids initially reluctant to warm to Skeeters project. Yet Aibileen smiles and strides ever more confidently as she walks home because she has found and articulated her voice. The implication is that having been fired, rather than portending deeper poverty and economic
insecurity, was a moment of liberation; Aibileen, armed with the confidence and self-knowledge conferred by knowing her voice, was now free to venture out into a world of unlimited opportunity and promise. This, of course, is pure neoliberal bull shit, of the same variety
that permits the odious Michelle Rhee to assert with a straight face that teachers defined-benefit pensions deny them choice and thereby undermine the quality of public education. But who knows? Perhaps Skeeter brought with her from the 2000s an NGO to arrange
microcredit that would enable Aibileen to start up a culturally authentic pie-making venture or a day spa for harried and stressed domestic servants. In the Jackson, Mississippi of 1963, no such options would exist for Aibileen. Instead, she most likely would be blackballed
and unable to find a comparable menial job and forced to toil under even more undesirable conditions. Django Unchained ends with the hero and his lady fair riding happily off into the sunset after he has vanquished evil slave owners and their henchmen and henchwomen.
Django and Broomhildawhose name is spelled like that of the 1970s comic strip character, not the figure in Norse mythology, presumably a pointless Tarantino inside jokeare free. However, their freedom was not won by his prodigious bloodletting; it was obtained
within the legal framework that accepted and regulated property rights in slaves. Each had been purchased and manumitted by the German bounty hunter who, as others have noted, is the only character in the film to condemn slavery as an institution. Django is no
insurrectionist. His singular focus from beginning to end is on reclaiming his wife from her slave master. Presumably, we are to understand this solipsism as indicative of the depth and intensity of his love, probably also as homage to the borderline sociopathic style of the
spaghetti western/blaxploitation hero. Regardless, Djangos quest is entirely individualist; he never intends to challenge slavery and never does. Indeed, for the purpose of buttressing the credibility of their ruse, he even countermands his bounty hunter partners attempt to
savethrough purchase, of coursea recalcitrant Mandingo fighter from being ripped apart by dogs. He is essentially indifferent to the handful of slaves who are freed as incidental byproducts of his actions. The happy ending is that he and Broomhilda ride off together and

free in a slavocracy that is not a whit less secure at the moment of celebratory resolution than it was when Django set out on his mission of retrieval and revenge. In both films the bogus happy endings are possible only
because they characterize their respective regimes of racial hierarchy in the superficial terms of
interpersonal transactions. In The Help segregationisms evil was small-minded bigotry and lack of sensitivity; it was more
like bad manners than oppression. In Tarantinos vision, slaverys definitive injustice was its gratuitous and
sadistic brutalization and sexualized degradation. Malevolent, ludicrously arrogant whites owned slaves most
conspicuously to degrade and torture them. Apart from serving a formal dinner in a plantation houseand
Tarantino, the Chance the Gardener of American filmmakers (and Best Original Screenplay? Really?) seems to draw his images of
plantation life from Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind, as well as old Warner Brothers cartoonsand the Mandingo fighters and
comfort girls, Tarantinos slaves do no actual work at all; theyre present only to be brutalized. In
fact, the cavalier sadism with which owners and traders treat them belies the fact that slaves
were, first and foremost, capital investments. Its not for nothing that New Orleans has a
monument to the estimated 20,000-30,000 antebellum Irish immigrants who died constructing
the New Basin Canal; slave labor was too valuable for such lethal work. The Help trivializes Jim
Crow by reducing it to its most superficial features and irrational extremes. The master-servant nexus was, and is, a
labor relation. And the problem of labor relations particular to the segregationist regime
wasnt employers bigoted lack of respect or failure to hear the voices of the domestic servants, or even benighted
refusal to recognize their equal humanity. It was that the labor relation was structured within and
sustained by a political and institutional order that severely impinged on, when it didnt altogether
deny, black citizens avenues for pursuit of grievances and standing before the law. The crucial lynchpin of
that order was neither myopia nor malevolence; it was suppression of black citizens capacities for direct participation in civic and
political life, with racial disfranchisement and the constant threat of terror intrinsic to substantive denial of equal protection and due
process before the law as its principal mechanisms. And the point of the regime wasnt
racial hatred or enforced
disregard; its roots lay in the much more prosaic concern of dominant elites to maintain their political and
economic hegemony by suppressing potential opposition and in the linked ideal of maintaining access to a labor force with
no options but to accept employment on whatever terms employers offered. (Those who liked The Help or found it moving should watch
The Long Walk Home, a 1990 film set in Montgomery, Alabama, around the bus boycott. I suspect thats the film you thought you were
watching when you saw The Help.) Django Unchained trivializes slavery by reducing it to its most barbaric and lurid excesses. Slavery
also was fundamentally a labor relation. It was a form of forced labor regulated
systematized, enforced and sustainedthrough a political and institutional order that
specified it as a civil relationship granting owners absolute control over the life, liberty, and fortunes of
others defined as eligible for enslavement, including most of all control of the conditions of their labor and appropriation of its
product. Historian Kenneth M. Stampp quotes a slaveholders succinct explanation: For what purpose does the master hold the
servant? asked an ante-bellum Southerner. Is it not that by his labor, he, the master, may accumulate wealth?1 That absolute
control permitted horrible, unthinkable brutality, to be sure, but perpetrating such brutality was neither
the point of slavery nor its essential injustice. The master-slave relationship could, and did,
exist without brutality, and certainly without sadism and sexual degradation. In Tarantinos depiction,
however, it is not clear that slavery shorn of its extremes of brutality would be objectionable. It does not diminish the
historical injustice and horror of slavery to note that it was not the product of sui generis, transcendent
Evil but a terminus on a continuum of bound labor that was more norm than exception in
the Anglo-American world until well into the eighteenth century, if not later. As legal historian Robert
Steinfeld points out, it is not so much slavery, but the emergence of the notion of free
laboras the absolute control of a worker over her personthat is the historical anomaly
that needs to be explained.2 Django Unchained sanitizes the essential injustice of slavery by not
problematizing it and by focusing instead on the extremes of brutality and degradation it permitted, to the
extent of making some of them up, just as does The Help regarding Jim Crow. The Help could not imagine a more honest and complex
view of segregationist Mississippi partly because it uses the period ultimately as a prop for human interest clich, and Django
Unchaineds absurdly ahistorical view of plantation slavery is only backdrop for the merger of spaghetti western and blaxploitation hero
movie. Neither film is really about the period in which it is set. Film critic Manohla Dargis, reflecting a decade ago on what she saw as a
growing Hollywood penchant for period films, observed that such films are typically stripped of politics and historical factand instead
will find meaning in appealing to seemingly timeless ideals and stirring scenes of love, valor and compassion and that the Hollywood
professionals who embrace accuracy most enthusiastically nowadays are costume designers.3 That observation applies to both these
films, although in Django concern with historically accurate representation of material culture applies only to the costumes and props of
the 1970s film genres Tarantino wants to recall. To make sense of how Django Unchained has received so much warmer a reception
among black and leftoid commentators than did The Help, it is useful to recall Margaret Thatchers 1981 dictum that economics are
the method: the object is to change the soul.4 Simply put, she and her element have won.
Few observersamong opponents
and boosters alikehave
noted how deeply and thoroughly both films are embedded in the practical
ontology of neoliberalism, the complex of unarticulated assumptions and unexamined
first premises that provide its common sense, its lifeworld. Objection to The Help has been largely of the shooting
fish in a barrel variety: complaints about the films paternalistic treatment of the maids, which generally have boiled down to an
objection that the master-servant relation is thematized at all, as well as the standard, predictable litany of anti-racist charges about
whites speaking for blacks, the films inattentiveness to the fact that at that time in Mississippi black people were busily engaged in
liberating themselves, etc. An illustration of this tendency that conveniently refers to several other variants of it is Akiba Solomon, Why
Im Just Saying No to The Help and Its Historical Whitewash in Color Lines, August 10, 2011, available at:
http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/08/why_im_just_saying_no_to_the_help.html. Defenses of Django Unchained pivot on
claims about the social significance of the narrative of a black hero. One node of this argument emphasizes the need to
validate a history of autonomous black agency and resistance as a politico-existential desideratum. It
accommodates a view that stresses the importance of recognition of rebellious or militant
individuals and revolts in black American history. Another centers on a notion that exposure to fictional black heroes can inculcate
the sense of personal efficacy necessary to overcome the psychological effects of inequality and to facilitate upward mobility
and may undermine some whites negative stereotypes about black people. In either register assignment of social or political
importance to depictions of black heroes rests on presumptions about the nexus of mass cultural
representation, social commentary, and racial justice that are more significant politically than the controversy
about the film itself. In both versions, this argument casts political and economic problems in psychological
terms. Injustice appears as a matter of disrespect and denial of due recognition, and the remedies proposedwhich are all about
images projected and the distribution of jobs associated with their projectionlook a lot like self-esteem engineering. Moreover,
nothing could indicate more strikingly the extent of neoliberal ideological hegemony than
the idea that the mass culture industry and its representational practices constitute a meaningful terrain for
struggle to advance egalitarian interests. It is possible to entertain that view seriously only by ignoring the
fact that the production and consumption of mass culture is thoroughly embedded in
capitalist material and ideological imperatives. That, incidentally, is why I prefer the usage mass culture to describe this
industry and its products and processes, although I recognize that it may seem archaic to some readers. The mass culture v. popular
culture debate dates at least from the 1950s and has continued with occasional crescendos ever since.5 For two decades or more,
instructively in line with the retreat of possibilities for concerted left political action outside the academy, the popular culture side of that
debate has been dominant, along with its view that the products of this precinct of mass consumption capitalism are somehow capable of
transcending or subverting their material identity as commodities, if not avoiding that identity altogether. Despite
the dogged
commitment of several generations of American Studies and cultural studies graduate students who want to
valorize watching television and immersion in hip-hop or other specialty market niches centered on youth recreation and the most
ephemeral fads as both intellectually avant-garde and politically resistive, it should be time to
admit that that earnest disposition is intellectually shallow and an ersatz politics. The idea of popular culture
posits a spurious autonomy and organicism that actually affirm mass industrial processes by
effacing them, especially in the putatively rebel, fringe, or underground market niches that depend
on the fiction of the authentic to announce the birth of new product cycles. The power of the hero is a cathartic trope that
connects mainly with the sensibility of adolescent boysof whatever nominal age. Tarantino has allowed as much, responding to black critics complaints about the violence and copiou s use of nigger by proclaiming Even for the films biggest detractors, I think their
children will grow up and love this movie. I think it could become a rite of passage for young black males.6 This response stems no doubt from Tarantinos arrogance and opportunism, and some critics have denounced it as no better than racially presumptuous. But he is
hardly alone in defending the film with an assertion that it gives black youth heroes, is generically inspirational or both. Similarly, in a January 9, 2012 interview on the Daily Show, George Lucas adduced this line to promote his even more execrable race-oriented live-action
cartoon, Red Tails, which, incidentally, trivializes segregation in the military by reducing it to a matter of bad or outmoded attitudes. The ironic effect is significant understatement of both the obstacles the Tuskegee airmen faced and their actual accomplishments by
rendering them as backdrop for a blackface, slapped-together remake of Top Gun. (Norman Jewisons 1984 film, A Soldiers Story, adapted from Charles Fullers A Soldiers Play, is a much more sensitive and thought-provoking rumination on the complexities of race and
racism in the Jim Crow U.S. Armyan army mobilized, as my father, a veteran of the Normandy invasion, never tired of remarking sardonically, to fight the racist Nazis.) Lucas characterized his film as patriotic, even jingoistic and was explicit that he wanted to create a film
that would feature real heroes and would be inspirational for teenage boys. Much as Django Unchaineds defenders compare it on those terms favorably to Lincoln, Lucas hyped Red Tails as being a genuine hero story unlike Glory, where you have a lot of white officers
running those guys into cannon fodder. Of course, the film industry is sharply tilted toward the youth market, as Lucas and Tarantino are acutely aware. But Lucas, unlike Tarantino, was not being defensive in asserting his desire to inspire the young; he offered it more as a
boast. As he has said often, hed wanted for years to make a film about the Tuskegee airmen, and he reports that he always intended telling their story as a feel-good, crossover inspirational tale. Telling it that way also fits in principle (though in this instance not in practice, as
Red Tails bombed at the box office) with the commercial imperatives of increasingly degraded mass entertainment. Dargis observed that the ahistoricism of the recent period films is influenced by market imperatives in a global film industry. The more a film is tied to
historically specific contexts, the more difficult it is to sell elsewhere. That logic selects for special effects-driven products as well as standardized, decontextualized and simplisticuniversalstory lines, preferably set in fantasy worlds of the filmmakers design. As Dargis
notes, these films find their meaning in shopworn clichs puffed up as timeless verities, including uplifting and inspirational messages for youth. But something else underlies the stress on inspiration in the black-interest films, which shows up in critical discussion of them as
well. All these filmsThe Help, Red Tails, Django Unchained, even Lincoln and Glorymake a claim to public attention based partly on their social significance beyond entertainment or art, and they do so because they engage with significant moments in the history of the
nexus of race and politics in the United States. There would not be so much discussion and debate and no Golden Globe, NAACP Image, or Academy Award nominations for The Help, Red Tails, or Django Unchained if those films werent defined partly by thematizing that

The pretensions to social significance that fit these films into their particular
nexus of race and politics in some way.

market niche dont conflict with the mass-market film industrys imperative of infantilization because
those pretensions are only part of the show; they are little more than empty bromides, product
differentiation in the patter of seemingly timeless ideals which the mass entertainment industry constantly
recycles. (Andrew OHehir observes as much about Django Unchained, which he describes as a three-hour trailer for a movie that
never happens.7) That comes through in the defense of these films, in the face of evidence of their failings, that, after all, they are just
entertainment. Their
substantive content is ideological ; it is their contribution to the
naturalization of neoliberalisms ontology as they propagandize its universalization across
spatial, temporal, and social contexts. Purportedly in the interest of popular education cum entertainment, Django
Unchained and The Help, and Red Tails for that matter, read the sensibilities of the present into the past by divesting the latter of its
specific historicity. They reinforce the sense of the past as generic old-timey times distinguishable from the present by superficial
inadequaciesoutmoded fashion, technology, commodities and ideassince overcome. In The Help Hillys obsession with her pet
project marks segregations petty apartheid as irrational in part because of the expense rigorously enforcing it would require; the
breadwinning husbands express their frustration with it as financially impractical. Hilly is a mean-spirited, narrow-minded person
whose rigid and tone-deaf commitment to segregationist consistency not only reflects her limitations of character but also is
economically unsound, a fact that further defines her, and the cartoon version of Jim Crow she represents, as irrational. The
deeper
message of these films, insofar as they deny the integrity of the past, is that there is no thinkable alternative
to the ideological order under which we live. This message is reproduced throughout the mass entertainment
industry; it shapes the normative reality even of the fantasy worlds that masquerade as
escapism. Even among those who laud the supposedly cathartic effects of Djangos insurgent violence as
reflecting a greater truth of abolition than passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, few commentators notice that he and Broomhilda
attained their freedom through a market transaction.8 This reflects
an ideological hegemony in which
students all too commonly wonder why planters would deny slaves or sharecroppers education
because education would have made them more productive as workers. And, tellingly, in a glowing
rumination in the Daily Kos, Ryan Brooke inadvertently thrusts mass cultures destruction of historicity into bold relief by declaiming on
the segregated society presented in Django Unchained and babbling onwith the absurdly ill-informed and pontifical self-
righteousness that the blogosphere enablesabout our need to take responsibility for preserving racial divides if we are to put
segregation in the past and fully fulfill Dr. Kings dream.9 Its all an indistinguishable mush of bad stuff about racial injustice in the old-
timey days. Decoupled from its moorings in a historically specific political economy, slavery becomes
at bottom a problem of race relations, and, as historian Michael R. West argues forcefully, race relations
emerged as and has remained a discourse that substitutes etiquette for equality.10 This is the
context in which we should take account of what inspiring the young means as a justification for those films. In part, the claim to
inspire is a simple platitude, more filler than substance. It is, as Ive already noted, both an excuse for films
that are cartoons made for an infantilized, generic market and an assertion of a claim to a particular niche within that market. More
insidiously, though, the ease with which inspiration of youth rolls out in this context resonates with three related and disturbing
themes: 1) underclass ideologys narrativesnow all Americans common sensethat link poverty and inequality most crucially to
(racialized) cultural inadequacy and psychological damage; 2) the belief that racial inequality stems from prejudice, bad ideas and
ignorance, and 3) the cognate of both: the
neoliberal rendering of social justice as equality of
opportunity, with an aspiration of creating competitive individual minority agents who
might stand a better fighting chance in the neoliberal rat race rather than a positive
alternative vision of a society that eliminates the need to fight constantly against disruptive
market whims in the first place.11 This politics seeps through in the chatter about Django Unchained in particular. Erin Aubry
Kaplan, in the Los Angeles Times article in which Tarantino asserts his appeal to youth, remarks that the most disturbing detail [about
slavery] is the emotional violence and degradation directed at blacks that effectively keeps them at the bottom of the social order, a place
they still occupy today. Writing on the Institute of the Black World blog, one Dr. Kwa David Whitaker, a 1960s-style cultural nationalist,
declaims on Djangos testament to the sources of degradation and unending servitude [that] has rendered [black Americans] almost
incapable of making sound evaluations of our current situations or the kind of steps we must take to improve our condition.12 In
its
blindness to political economy, this notion of black cultural or psychological damage as
either a legacy of slavery or of more indirect recent origine.g., urban migration, crack
epidemic, matriarchy, babies making babiescomports well with the reduction of slavery and Jim Crow
to interpersonal dynamics and bad attitudes. It substitutes a politics of recognition and a patter
of racial uplift for politics and underwrites a conflation of political action and therapy. With
respect to the nexus of race and inequality, this discourse supports victim-blaming programs of personal
rehabilitation and self-esteem engineeringinspirationas easily as it does multiculturalist respect for difference,
which, by the way, also feeds back to self-esteem engineering and inspiration as nodes within a larger political economy of race relations.
Either way, this is a discourse that displaces a politics challenging social structures that
reproduce inequality with concern for the feelings and characteristics of individuals and of categories of
population statistics reified as singular groups that are equivalent to individuals. This discourse has made it possible (again,
but more sanctimoniously this time) to characterize destruction of low-income housing as an uplift strategy for poor people; curtailment
of access to public education as choice; being cut adrift from essential social wage protections as empowerment; and individual
material success as socially important role modeling. Neoliberalisms triumph is affirmed with unselfconscious
clarity in the ostensibly leftist defenses of Django Unchained that center on the theme of slaves having liberated themselves.
Trotskyists, would-be anarchists, and psychobabbling identitarians have their respective
sectarian garnishes: Trotskyists see everywhere the bugbear of bureaucratism and mystify self-activity; anarchists
similarly fetishize direct action and voluntarism and oppose large-scale public institutions on principle, and
identitarians romanticize essentialist notions of organic, folkish authenticity under constant
threat from institutions. However, all are indistinguishable from the nominally libertarian
right in their disdain for government and institutionally based political action, which their
common reflex is to disparage as inauthentic or corrupt.
Capitalism causes inevitable crises and inequalitythe alternative is a
class-based critique of the systempedagogical spaces are the crucial
staging ground for keeping socialism on the horizon
McLaren, Distinguished Fellow Critical Studies @ Chapman U and UCLA urban schooling
prof, and Scatamburlo-DAnnibale, associate professor of Communication U Windsor, 4
(Peter and Valerie, Class Dismissed? Historical materialism and the politics of difference,
Educational Philosophy and Theory Vol. 36, Issue 2, p. 183-199)

For well over two decades we have witnessed the jubilant liberal and conservative pronouncements of the demise of socialism.
Concomitantly, history'spresumed failure to defang existing capitalist relations has been read by
many self-identified radicals as
an advertisement for capitalism's inevitability. As a result, the chorus
refrain There Is No Alternative, sung by liberals and conservatives, has been buttressed by the
symphony of post-Marxist voices recommending that we give socialism a decent burial and
move on. Within this context, to speak of the promise of Marx and socialism may appear anachronistic, even nave, especially since
the post-al intellectual vanguard has presumably demonstrated the folly of doing so. Yet we stubbornly believe that the chants of T.I.N.A.
must be combated for they offer as a fait accompli, something which progressive Leftists
should refuse to accept
namely the triumph of capitalism and its political bedfellow neo-liberalism, which have worked
together to naturalize suffering, undermine collective struggle, and obliterate hope. We concur
with Amin (1998), who claims that such chants must be defied and revealed as absurd and criminal, and who
puts the challenge we face in no uncertain terms: humanity may let itself be led by capitalism's logic to a
fate of collective suicide or it may pave the way for an alternative humanist project of
global socialism. The grosteque conditions that inspired Marx to pen his original critique of capitalism are
present and flourishing. The inequalities of wealth and the gross imbalances of power that exist today are leading to
abuses that exceed those encountered in Marx's day (Greider, 1998, p. 39). Global capitalism has paved the way
for the obscene concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands and created a world increasingly divided
between those who enjoy opulent affluence and those who languish in dehumanizing conditions and
economic misery. In every corner of the globe, we are witnessing social disintegration as revealed by a rise in
abject poverty and inequality. At the current historical juncture, the combined assets of the 225 richest people is roughly
equal to the annual income of the poorest 47 percent of the world's population, while the combined assets of the three richest people
exceed the combined GDP of the 48 poorest nations (CCPA, 2002, p. 3). Approximately 2.8
billion peoplealmost half of the
world's populationstruggle in desperation to live on less than two dollars a day (McQuaig, 2001, p. 27).
As many as 250 million children are wage slaves and there are over a billion workers who are either
un- or under-employed. These are the concrete realities of our timerealities that require a vigorous
class analysis , an unrelenting critique of capitalism and an oppositional politics capable
of confronting what Ahmad (1998, p. 2) refers to as capitalist universality. They are realities that require something
more than that which is offered by the prophets of difference and post-Marxists who would have us relegate socialism to the scrapheap
of history and mummify Marxism along with Lenin's corpse. Never
before has a Marxian analysis of capitalism
and class rule been so desperately needed. That is not to say that everything Marx said or anticipated has come true, for
that is clearly not the case. Many critiques of Marx focus on his strategy for moving toward
socialism, and with ample justification; nonetheless Marx did provide us with
fundamental insights into class society that have held true to this day. Marx's enduring relevance lies in
his indictment of capitalism which continues to wreak havoc in the lives of most. While capitalism's cheerleaders have attempted to hide
its sordid underbelly, Marx's description of capitalism as the sorcerer's dark power is even more apt in light of contemporary historical
and economic conditions. Rather
than jettisoning Marx, decentering the role of capitalism, and
discrediting class analysis, radical educators must continue to engage Marx's oeuvre and
extrapolate from it that which is useful pedagogically, theoretically, and , most importantly,
politically in light of the challenges that confront us. The urgency which animates Amin's call for a collective
socialist vision necessitates, as we have argued, moving beyond the particularism and liberal pluralism
that informs the politics of difference. It also requires challenging the questionable
assumptions that have come to constitute the core of contemporary radical theory,
pedagogy and politics. In terms of effecting change, what is needed is a cogent understanding
of the systemic nature of exploitation and oppression based on the precepts of a radical political
economy approach (outlined above) and one that incorporates Marx's notion of unity in difference in which people share
widely common material interests. Such an understanding extends far beyond the realm of theory, for the
manner in which we choose to interpret and explore the social world, the concepts and frameworks we use to
express our sociopolitical understandings, are more than just abstract categories. They
imply intentions, organizational practices, and political agendas. Identifying class analysis
as the basis for our understandings and class struggle as the basis for political transformation implies something
quite different than constructing a sense of political agency around issues of race, ethnicity,
gender,

etc. Contrary to Shakespeare's assertion that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, it should be clear that this is not the case
in political matters. Rather, in politics the essence of the flower lies in the name by which it is called
(Bannerji, 2000, p. 41). The task for progressives today is to seize the moment and plant the seeds for
a political agenda that is grounded in historical possibilities and informed by a vision committed to
overcoming exploitative conditions. These seeds, we would argue, must be derived from the tree of radical
political economy. For the vast majority of people todaypeople of all racial classifications or
identities, all genders and sexual orientationsthe common frame of reference arcing across
difference, the concerns and aspirations that are most widely shared are those that are rooted in the common
experience of everyday life shaped and constrained by political economy (Reed, 2000, p. xxvii). While
post-Marxist advocates of the politics of difference suggest that such a stance is outdated,
we would argue that the categories which they have employed to analyze the social are now losing
their usefulness, particularly in light of actual contemporary social movements. All over the globe, there are
large anti-capitalist movements afoot. In February 2002, chants of Another World Is Possible became the theme of
protests in Porto Allegre. It seems that those people struggling in the streets havent read about T.I.N.A., the
end of grand narratives of emancipation, or the decentering of capitalism. It seems as though the
struggle for basic survival and some semblance of human dignity in the mean streets of the dystopian metropoles doesnt permit much
time or opportunity to read the heady proclamations emanating from seminar rooms. As E. P. Thompson (1978, p. 11) once remarked,
sometimes experience walks in without knocking at the door, and announces deaths, crises of subsistence, trench warfare,
unemployment, inflation, genocide. This, of course, does not mean that socialism will inevitably come about,
yet a sense of its nascent promise animates current social movements. Indeed, noted historian Howard
Zinn (2000, p. 20) recently pointed out that after years of single-issue organizing (i.e. the politics of difference), the
WTO and other anti-corporate capitalist protests signaled a turning point in the history of
movements of recent decades, for it was the issue of class that more than anything bound everyone
together. History, to paraphrase Thompson (1978, p. 25) doesnt seem to be following Theory's script. Our vision is informed by
Marx's historical materialism and his revolutionary socialist humanism, which must not be conflated with liberal humanism. For left
politics and pedagogy, a
socialist humanist vision remains crucial, whose fundamental features include
the creative potential of people to challenge collectively the circumstances that they inherit.
This variant of humanism seeks to give expression to the pain, sorrow and degradation of the oppressed, those who labor under the
ominous and ghastly cloak of globalized capital. It calls for the transformation of those conditions that have prevented the bulk of
humankind from fulfilling its potential. It
vests its hope for change in the development of critical
consciousness and social agents who make history, although not always in conditions of their choosing. The
political goal of socialist humanism is, however, not a resting in difference but rather the emancipation of difference at the level of
human mutuality and reciprocity. This would be a step forward for the discovery or creation of our real differences which can only in
the end be explored in reciprocal ways (Eagleton, 1996, p. 120). Above all else, the enduring relevance of a radical
socialist pedagogy and politics is the centrality it accords to the interrogation of
capitalism. We can no longer afford to remain indifferent to the horror and savagery committed by capitalist's barbaric
machinations. We need to recognize that capitalist democracy is unrescuably contradictory in
its own self-constitution. Capitalism and democracy cannot be translated into one another without profound efforts at
manufacturing empty idealism. Committed Leftists must unrelentingly cultivate a democratic socialist
vision that refuses to forget the wretched of the earth, the children of the damned and the victims of the culture of silencea task
which requires more than abstruse convolutions and striking ironic poses in the agnostic arena of signifying practices. Leftists
must illuminate the little shops of horror that lurk beneath globalizations shiny faade; they must challenge the true
evils that are manifest in the tentacles of global capitalism's reach. And, more than this, Leftists must
search for the cracks in the edifice of globalized capitalism and shine light on those fissures
that give birth to alternatives. Socialism today, undoubtedly, runs against the grain of received
wisdom, but its vision of a vastly improved and freer arrangement of social relations
beckons on the horizon. Its unwritten text is nascent in the present even as it exists among the
fragments of history and the shards of distant memories. Its potential remains untapped and its promise needs to be redeemed.
 Case

Unfreedom is relational and fluid not metaphysical or static the entire

history of slave resistance up to and including opposition to Trump, the
multiplicity of black politics, and the multivalence of social change all
prove our argument social death is inaccurate, profoundly
disempowering, and misreads Fanon and marronage produces lines of
flight both within and without civil society
Roberts 17
Neil Roberts, Theorizing Freedom, Radicalizing the Black Radical Tradition: On Freedom as
Marronage Between Past and Future, Theory & Event, Volume 20, Number 1, January 2017,
pp. 212-230, https://muse-jhu-edu.proxy.library.georgetown.edu/article/646858/pdf

This was quite unexpected. For starters, I avowedly push against fundamental premises
on the meaning of marronage established by historians over the last few centuries and
vigorously defended as convention by subsequent historians and anthropologists.9 Two, I
assumed, perhaps with naivet, that scholars in black studies, Caribbean thought,
philosophy, and political theory would be the main ones to wrestle with the text initially.
That we are having this symposium in Theory & Event indicates a chord, however
discordant, has begun to play in the latter field, with the verdict still out on its melody. Ive
also never considered myself a historian, though I agree with others who believe the late
modern mythos of a history/theory binary is erroneous. Theory and history are
mutually reinforcing, not opposing.10 Were never outside of history, and I employ the
historical whenever context to present the theoretical warrants it. To millions, theres an
acute sense of urgency of interpreting this all in the Age of Trump. The worry, or perhaps
downright climate of fear, is that freedom may not only be on the retreat for those living a
216 Theory & Event free life; but that large populations might never be able to experience
what it is to be free. The November 2016 US Presidential election of an undeniable
authoritarian reminiscent of Jefferson Davis who relishes in demonstrating his
authoritarian personality and doesnt distinguish between rule and governance has
national, hemispheric, and global repercussions.11 Struggles and resistance to
authoritarianism and its mob enforcers have started. And more struggles await us. Yet
these obstacles, arduous as they are, arent new. Theyre the story of slaves. Its easy to
forget that, as long as thereve been attempts to contain and suppress the enslaved, slaves
have resisted arbitrary interference, domination, and sovereign power. In addition, the
enslaved have visualized their desired naming, state of society, modes of
constitutionalism, blueprints of freedom (vv architectonics), interactions with self and
others, and non-sovereign ways of being and doing. To reduce the imaginings on
freedom of the enslaved either to negative or positive notions, or to a singularity, is to
misapprehend freedoms contours. Humans are plural and multidimensional, and
freedom is a relational condition comparative in nature. The actions and creativity of
multifaceted individuals and masses in the face of unfreedom have fosteredand
continue to fosterimaginings on alternative visions of freedom. Flight is perpetual,
constant, never static, and subject to contestation, the outcome of which may be
progress or regress. This is hard for some to accept, yet I argue it more accurately reflects
the range of human experiences. But then again, as I wrote in the books fifth chapter,
the absence of a struggle to survive on the landscape would mean that we had never
experienced the process of becoming free in the first place.12 May the lessons of
Freedom as Marronage serve as a resource to reassess the past, evaluate our present plight,
and prepare for what the future holds. Now let me take a step back. 2. How might we
develop a conception of freedom that underscores the historical while revealing the
theoretical and generalizable throughout time and space? How can we reconceptualize
freedom to bridge the gulf between its hegemonic articulations in the two main traditions
in Western thoughtnegative freedom (freedom as non-interference and non-domination)
and positive freedom (freedom as autonomy, self-mastery, generality, and pluralistic
humanism)? How may our rethinking repudiate such notions as positing freedom in
immutable, static terms; account for individual and collective imaginings of the free
life; indict orders of unfreedom, or existence in what Frantz Fanon calls the zone of
nonbeing; and discern the possibility for the realization of revolution? Roberts | On
Freedom as Marronage Between Past and Future 217 I delved into processes of
creolization, conceptions of freedom within and across myriad epochs, and the architecture
of the black radical tradition. The breadth of this tradition is transnational, as scholars
including Angela Davis, June Jordan, Achille Mbembe, Paul Gilroy, Robin Kelley, T. Denean
Sharpley-Whiting, Lewis Gordon, Fred Moten, Oyrnke Oyewm, Carole Boyce Davies,
Hortense Spillers, Christina Sharpe, Walidah Imarisha, and Cedric Robinson have noted,
and it contains perceptive insights into the imagination, the interior and the exterior, and
interstitial experiences.13 I sought, as a consequence, to gain clarity on our understandings
of black politics, radical, and the black radical tradition undergirding how Ive come to
conceive of the free life. Black politics comprises viewpoints, ideologies, and actions
spanning the political spectrum. Scholars in the United States, however, unfortunately
tend to think of black politics in provincially nationalistic or hemispheric terms. In Not in
our Lifetimes, for instance, Michael Dawson defines black politics as African Americans
ability to mobilize, influence policy, demand accountability from government officials, and
contribute and influence American political discourse, all in the service of black
interests.14 Dawson reaffirms this definition in The Future of Black Politics and his Du
Bois Lectures Blacks In and Out of the Left. 15 Such a framing obscures genres of black
visions between past and future. Black politics includes and exceeds the US and the wider
Americas, and there isnt anything intrinsically radical about its various articulations. As
Walter Rodney, Donna Murch, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and Lester Spence note, the
neoliberal turn in black politics, reflections on international development, and black
political economy are reminders of the heterogeneity of black agents opinions on black
interests notwithstanding important areas of issues convergence.16 Black radicalism,
however, describes a political tendency within black politics, not merely its critique. To be
radical is to be left of center and often in recent years to the left of progressivewhich is
a vague classification of a political disposition that at times encompasses the liberal yet is
frequently short of the radical. Just look at which authors The Nation magazine publishes
now compared to the 1990s and before and you get the point. If the radical isnt necessarily
a progressive, then is the radical a militant as Alain Badiou argues?17 Or something else?
In vol. 1 of The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, Garvey writes, Radical is a
label that is always applied to people who are endeavoring to get freedom.18 Garvey,
though, specifies a compelling outlook on the object of the radical instead of defining the
agent. What exactly is a radical? Radical, from the Latin radicalis, originally meant: Of or
relating to a root or to roots.19 Transformations of the term in Middle English, 218 Theory
& Event Middle French, and thirteenth to fifteenth century British English introduced
definitions of radical denoting plant roots, a foundational mechanism, bodily organs,
humors and moisture vital to human life functioning, and roots of a word. The long
eighteenth century, or Age of Revolution, brought about another definitional mutation. Not
only did radical come to refer in mathematics to forming the root of a number or
quantity. For the first time, radical acquired a political valence: change or action,
advocating thorough or far-reaching political or social reform, representing or
supporting an extreme section of a party, and, most importantly for our purposes, Now
more generally: revolutionary.20 Its unsurprising then that Hannah Arendt located the
shift from revolutions astronomical, backward-looking denotation to its modern forward-
looking political meaninga new order of things, a birth, natalityat the same historical
moment that radical obtained a political denotation.21 The repercussions of how Arendt
wrote about this through exploration into the American and French Revolutions but
without reference or analysis of the Haitian Revolution and Arendts overall disavowal of
the agency of slaves are also crucial for us to comprehend. Black radical thought for
centuries has responded to silences as well as the intentional simultaneous
acknowledgments and denials of events.22 The black radical tradition, therefore, may be
understood as a modern tradition of thought and action begun after transatlantic slaverys
advent, concerned centrally with revolutionary politics, and preoccupied with freedom for
the souls of black folk. In Black Marxism, Cedric Robinson furnishes a classic genealogy of
it. A distinguishing feature of Robinsons account is the analysis of racial capitalism and
the extent to which black radical politics and attendant modes of resistance respond to the
phenomenology of unfreedom experienced by blacks in Africa and the African diaspora due
to slavery. Robinson examines Marxist theory, thereby distilling a unique lineage of black
radicals who were also Marxist scholar-activists. Robinsons text culminates in case studies
of three figures: W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, and Richard Wright. Additionally, Robinson
emphasizes movement, situates accurately the traditions transnational character, and
rejects the bifurcation of theory and history, developing theoretical assertions within
meticulously documented historical milieus. While Black Marxism shall remain a vital
tome, it does have limitations. Black women radicals, Marxist and otherwise, receive little
treatment.23 It also contains a useful but all too concise delineation of marronage that
only broaches the surface of its true significance. Subsequent treatises on black feminist
thought and the black radical imagination are essential correctives. More rethinking,
however, is needed. Roberts | On Freedom as Marronage Between Past and Future 219
Exploring marronage philosophy further offers us a way out of these limitations and a
heuristic to radicalize the radical wing of black politics. The radicalization of the black
radical tradition highlights how the lives and lessons of the damns, the enslaved, are
essential bulwarks between past and future for revolutionary change and cultivating
freedom. Acts of marronage in their different types, and inquiry into the liminal and
transitional spaces of slave escape between poles of political imagination, exemplify this.
Freedom is not from-to but rather as. So why marronage and how, as Angela Davis
asks,24 do we know were free? Marronage is a noun that means flight, yet it has the
effect of a verb. The vocabularies of contemporary philosophy and political theory have
been unable to explain the activity of flight and the mechanisms operational in its
occurrence. Furthermore, their overwhelming descriptions of unfreedom and freedom
as static states belie marronages perpetual nature. Marronage defies inertia. The
ongoing act of flight, which transpires in multiple dimensions, encompasses what I
contend are the four interrelated pillars of distance, movement, property, and purpose,
with movement serving as the central fulcrum connecting the others. Whilst facets of these
pillars pertain to the turn to diaspora, diaspora cannot capture their full import. The
framework of diaspora describes flight either in a single direction or the return to a
beginning location in the manner of a boomerang. Yet it assumes transformations
arent occurring both at and between the points and spaces where an agent leaves and
arrives. Additionally, diaspora cant explain genres of fugitivity, evanescent flight, and
intrastate flight focused on attaining the free life via the macro-level reorientation of
state institutions and civil society exemplified by revolutions. If, per one of the polemical
assertions of my theory, all human beings are born enslaved, then, to borrow from The
Matrix and Glissants ruminations on antillanit (Caribbeanness), humans negotiate
distance, movement,

property, and purpose to exit slavery and become free.25 Freedom ossifies in the process
of becoming itself. Freedom results from acts of flight informed by our experiences and
valences of the psychological, physical, social-structural, cognitive, and metaphysical.
Freedom encompasses moments that are episodic, durable, and overlapping. Freedom is, in
short, a condition, not a place. The debate between Afro-pessimists and Afro-optimists is
indicative of two contemporary positions that take seriously the condition of the enslaved
and the question of freedom.26 However, despite differential articulations of their
respective camps and divergent opinions on whether slaves ever avoid, in the language of
Claudia Rankine, the condition of constant mourning,27 Afro-pessimists and Afro-opti- 220
Theory & Event mists startlingly share a fundamental conviction: the belief that slaves
across epochs exist in a state Orlando Patterson prominently calls social death in
which, as a consequence of powerlessness, dishonor, and natal alienation, slaves are said to
lack an inherent capacity for action.28 To be socially dead is to be a living zombie. To be
a racialized slave in late modernity, for instance, is to be a non-agentic being subjected to
relentless antiblackness. A slave can never be free, the logic goes, unless a free agent
grants terms of the free life to the slave. Classic examples are manumission enacted by a
master and emancipation proclamations resulting from a politys decree rather than slave
resistance. The premises of social death are misguided and antithetical to marronage
philosophy. Afro-pessimists and Afro-optimists also mistakenly conflate the notion of
social death with Fanons concept of the zone of nonbeing. Whilst a slaves existence in
the zone is hellish, the zone of nonbeing is an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an
incline stripped bare of every essential from which a genuine new departure can
emerge.29 Experience inside the zone of nonbeing actually furnishes the possibility
for consciousness-raising, individual and collective flight, and the becoming that is
freedom. Acts of marronage demonstrate the intrinsic agency of slaves. Its the degrees
of materialization of purposive movement that in part distinguishes slaves and non-
slaves. Its for these reasons and more why marronage still matters. Discourse on
marronage, which distills the aforementioned, conventionally refers to two forms: petit
marronage (individual fugitive acts of truancy) and grand marronage (isolationist,
autonomous, territorially bounded communities outside the parameters of a regime of
unfreedom). These are models of flight normatively accepted in both extant
anthropological and historical scholarship on maroon societies and archival documents.
Studies on these types of marronage emphasize their manifestation in the Caribbean, Latin
America, and Southeast Asia, but they have been and are still present throughout the
globe, the United States included. The recent National Geographic feature story on the
Great Dismal Swamp and Colson Whiteheads 2016 National Book Award-winning novel,
Underground Railroad, underscore this.30 Underground Railroad issues a searing
portrayal of the protagonist-cum-fugitive slave Cora and the communities and activities
Cora confronts and participates in. The protagonist takes flight from her plantation in
Georgia and traverses the Carolinas, Tennessee, the North, and subsequently a new
frontier, often with the assistance of the underground railroad network. Coras flight
initially is in conjunction with another fellow dreamer and fugitive named Caesar and later
it is in the manner of petit marronage on her own. Grand marronage ossifies when Cora
reaches Indiana farther into the story. Roberts | On Freedom as Marronage Between Past
and Future 221 Whiteheads underground railroad contains elements of Afrofuturism,
particularly in its depiction of the railroad as just that: an actual series of locomotives and
underground stations rather than railroad as metaphor commonly understood. Yet this
makes sense. Robin Kelley remarks in a forum on black art matters and aesthetics of the
black radical tradition that, whilst Afrofuturism is wonderful, it is also a new word for a
longer Black radical tradition of Marronage, seeking out free space, liberated territory.31
Whitehead captures much of this in Coras tale.32 Petit and grand marronage, especially
the second form and the politics of recognition habitually connected to it,33 nevertheless
frequently encounter problems. They dont aim to dismantle at the structural level the
social and political orders of slaveholding polities, thereby remaining unreflective of mass
revolutionary politics seeking to shatter the entire fabric of the state of society. Embarking
on these modes of flight, however, can be linked to revolutionary processes as the
brilliant writings of Frederick Douglass attest, for the psychological, cognitive, and
metaphysical valences of freedom are noteworthy in this regard. Fight versus flight is
often a mantra classifying acts of marronage. I reject this. There are types of flight wherein
the fight to exit regimes of slavery are paramount. Sovereign marronage and sociogenic
marronage are terms Ive coined to denote two other types of flight and models of freedom
that address mass revolutionary politics unencumbered by an individuals wants or
collective isolationist desires. Whereas sovereign marronage posits freedom emanating
from the authority of a sovereign entity such as a lawgiver-political leader and
subsequently trickling down to a mass of people, sociogenic marronage refers to the non-
sovereign forging of freedom by the masses from the bottom up. Sovereign marronage
risks sullying the radicalism of marronage on a mass scale by the very concept of
sovereignty that can stunt the input and visions of everyday people. Sociogenic marronage
reflects the idealized scale and vision of versions of revolutionary politics, and by
extension the most suggestive articulations of politics within the black radical tradition,
devoid of hierarchy and the quest for unanimity sovereign moorings foster. Traditions, we
must remember, still have multiplicities and competing ideals. Modern traditions after
the Treaty of Westphalia operate overwhelmingly within structures of the nation-state.
The nation-state, however, doesnt interrupt marronage. If anything, the nation-state,
with its modern and late modern shortcomings, catalyzes marronage in its fugitive and
longue-dure challenges to statecraft legitimacy. Structures of rule and governance mutate
across time and types of marronage exist prior to, during, and after moments of
transformation. 222 Theory & Event I argue the four types of marronage simultaneously
manifest themselves in the world. Taken as a whole, they allow us to bridge the gulf
between the negative and positive streams of freedom theorizing in Western thought.