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Cede the political



2ac – cede the political




The alt fails without pragmatic re-imagination. It’s too depoliticized and cedes power to the conservative right. Instead, we should use the master’s tools to break down the master’s house.


Kreiss and Tufekci 13 - Professor in the School of Media and Journalism and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina AND Assistant Professor University of North Carolina (Daniel and Zeynep, “Occupying the Political: Occupy Wall Street, Collective Action, and the Rediscovery of Pragmatic Politics”, Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologie, 2013, Sage publications)
It is the turn from pragmatic politics and institutional engagement that distinguished Occupy from the Tea Party, the most recent manifestation of a five decade old populist conservative movement. Similar to other manifestations of conservative mobilization (McGirr, 2001; Teles, 2008) the Tea Party adopted a dual orientation toward both symbolic and institutional power. The most recent example is the Tea Party’s populist mobilization around the 2010 midterm elections, which reshaped the internal workings of the Republican Party and redoubled its institutional ability to block much of the president’s agendaincluding what now passes as progressive reform. In conjunction with party elites and conservative media outlets, in 2010 the Tea Party movement drove turnout in the Republican primaries and the midterm elections (Williamson, Skocpol, & Coggin, 2011). After the elections, the Tea Party and its legislative allies created a 62-member caucus in the House and enlisted four members of the Senate to create a voting block that repeatedly eschewed legislative compromise. Even more, Tea Party activists not only drove turnout in the midterm elections, the presence of activists in districts helped hold members to account for the movement’s policy goals (Bailey, Mummolo, & Noel, 2011). In the process, the Tea Party caucus wielded all of the institutional tools at its disposal for the purposes of thwarting the president’s, and often the Republican House leadership’s, agenda. In this, the Tea Party resembles other movements that have taken advantage of political opportunities to open the space for new configurations of institutional politics (Amenta, 2008; McAdam & Tarrow, 2010). The contemporary conservative movement is, in large part, a story of the successful navigation of the twin faces of redemptive and pragmatic politics. Activists who participated in the redemptive mobilization around Barry Goldwater’s candidacy worked to reshape the Republican Party in the years after his defeat (Perlstein, 2001). All of which enabled movement conservatives to seize the political opportunity that Reagan’s candidacy offered. If Goldwater began to unravel the American consensus ideologically, it was Reagan who drew on the movement to wield the levers of institutional power that had effects that ran much deeper than cultural stylings. Reagan dismantled unions, cut taxes on the wealthy, and gutted social service programs. It was Reagan’s electoral victory that forged a radical reimagining of the American state and its obligations to its citizens, and created the institutional forms to hold it in place, from regulatory changes to the reshaping of the judiciary. Conclusion The Occupy movement may now be melting into a sedimentary network (Chadwick, 2007) of activists that will hang together through new media technologies and reconstitute itself around symbolic events in the coming years ― as it did in protest events at the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. This symbolic power will likely prove fleeting given the deinstitutionalized nature of redemptive politics. Deinstitutionalization can certainly be a strength in some contexts, such as the overthrowing of a dictator or the rapid creation and publicizing of a national political movement. But, in the routine workings of pragmatic politics, these organizational qualities are a distinct disadvantage, as secular liberals discovered in their recent defeat in the Egyptian elections. After the initial flare of the movement’s mediated publicity, the political context in the United States has changed to one that requires political organization able to engage and challenge institutional politics to advance an agenda forward. If Occupy is deeply divided about its engagement with pragmatic, institutional politics and fails to build meaningful ties to unions and civil society and advocacy organizations during the president’s second term it will be a wasted opportunity. Occupy’s redemptive energy, for instance, would be well directed towards the organization of a progressive, “Occupy Congress” voting block inside Congress that can hold Democrats to account for its aims. In effect, this strategy would call for using the master’s pragmatic tools to occupy the master’s institutional house. This strategy does not exclude the potential for transforming these institutional tools through a focus on processneither does it disallow the regenerative politics which broader room for self-expression can facilitate. It does, however, call for rethinking the balance between process and durable goals, and between personal and institutional transformation—which in turn can transform the conditions through which individuals ultimately flourish. Nor is this a call for abandoning redemptive politics which can again be mobilized when the institutional levers of power become, as they will inevitably, calcified.

1ar – cede the political




Their alternative is emblematic of the utter failure of the radical left to do anything meaningful – vote aff to recapture the political


Pugh, 10 - Senior Academic Fellow, Director ‘The Spaces of Democracy and the Democracy of Space’ network, Department of Geography, School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University (Jonathan, “The Stakes of Radical Politics have Changed: Post-crisis, Relevance and the State” Globalizations March–June 2010, Vol. 7, Nos. 1–2, pp. 289–301)
1. In the early days of the crisis there was widespread anticipation of change. From the collapse of large banks and public anger at acquisitive capitalists, to the collapse in faith in neoliberal 2 ideologues and political elites, this was a watershed moment for the radical Left. However, given its failure to provide a coherent response to the crisis, many radicals have begun to explore what it means to be of the ‘radical Left’ today (Chandler, 2009a; Smith, 2008; Cox, 2009; Harvey, 2009; Castree, 2009; contributors to Pugh, 2009). Importantly, we are still therefore at a time of opportunity for the Left.

2. The crisis has highlighted the salience of the state, representational and party politics. It has done so because while of course the ‘masses’ have not emerged as a political force, making strong demands of the state, the state nevertheless became, by default, the main institution that the general population left to resolve the crisis.

3. Seizing this opportunity, governments (in Britain, the USA, and across much of the West) have used trillions of dollars of taxpayer money to continue to intervene in the interests of capital and the neo-liberal model. Across Europe, as elsewhere, the Right and neo-liberals get this point, using the economic power of government in recent months to support their causes.

4. Some (clearly not all) on the radical Left have therefore misread the public mood when it comes to the role of the nation state. Despite predictions and aspirations from those civil society organisations that want to withdraw and deterritorialise from the state, most other people, if reluctantly, have moved in the opposite direction.

5. Some radicals had reduced radical politics to living more ethical lifestyles. Their aim is to produce ethical individuals, to raise awareness, not a collective and instrumental political project for the state. This is not providing an effective challenge to the Right and neo-liberals, who as just noted post-crisis are capturing the powerful institutions of politics.

6. Articulate and intelligent, the ‘philosophical militant’ has done much to shift and change our understanding of the world in recent decades. However, the crisis shows that there is a difference between doing philosophy and doing politics. Philosophy does not provide the detailed, tangible, instrumental mechanisms needed today. Some radicals have therefore attached too much importance to their philosophical interventions and critique, making them political acts, in and of themselves.

I do not claim to be able to make intricate connections between these various points in this brief, largely rhetorical paper. They are simply a list to provide food for thought to those engaged with that disparate label that we call ‘the radical Left’. And for those who have perhaps, like me, been shocked at our impotence.

Most People Looked to the State, Not Away From It

As noted, my first point is directed toward those who seek to avoid the salience of the state, representational, and party politics post-crisis. Before the crisis Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) produced what was widely heralded at radical conferences as the Communist Manifesto for the twenty-first century. Sadly for many, the crisis proved it to be incorrect. For while Hardt and Negri (2000, p. 48) were seeking ‘lines of flight’ from territorial government, through the deterritorialised multitude, post crisis most people have, by default, allowed a strong state to address the specificities of the crisis like trade and financial regulation, credit rating, fiscal stimuli, forms of nationalisation, closing down tax havens, and penalising acquisitive capitalists, as just some of many examples. The multitude is not therefore a significant brake on state power. Far from it. It would seem that state power has increased, to intervene in the fine details of unregulated capitalism. In 2009, the organisers of the World Social Forum, one leading civil society organisation, were forced to admit that civil society organisations are ‘not yet strong enough to overcome the problems caused by capitalism’ (Osava, 2009).

AT: individual action good




A retreat to individual ethical acts ends political change – the neg’s alt and framework arguments affirm status quo injustice


Pugh, 10 - Senior Academic Fellow, Director ‘The Spaces of Democracy and the Democracy of Space’ network, Department of Geography, School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University (Jonathan, “The Stakes of Radical Politics have Changed: Post-crisis, Relevance and the State” Globalizations March–June 2010, Vol. 7, Nos. 1–2, pp. 289–301)
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 that the USA has changed is accompanied by a sense of relief among many radicals. However, the European Elections of 2009, the largest trans-national vote in history, heralded a continent-wide shift to the Right (and far Right) in many places—in 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 Obama’s 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 power of the Right in countries like Iran, while checked, remains unchallenged by the Left. Albertazzi et al. (2009) draw 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 now turn to how others have too much faith in the power of raising awareness of our ethical responsibilities.

Post-crisis, the increasing popularity of David Chandler’s (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. 78–79) 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 Make Poverty History at the end of 2005, involvement in the World Social Forums or the radical jihad of Al-Qaeda. I disagree; these new forms 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, Chandler’s 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 Chandler’s point about radicals being disengaged from instrumental politics that concerns me here. It is his related point—that 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 re´gime 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 (Laı¨di, 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 Kant’s cosmopolitanism. While I think we should not attack the ethical turn for its values, as many of these around environmental issues and human rights are admirable, it is equally important to say that the turn to ethics seems to 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 Z ˇ izˇek (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. Z ˇ izˇek (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 (Laı¨di, 1998). This is, as I have already discussed, where the Right and neo-liberal ideologues are seizing the opportunity of the moment.

Putting what I have just said another 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 the world offer some counter-resistance. But the 2008 crisis, and the response of protests like the Alternative G20, demonstrated how weak ethical resistance is in the face of the institutions of the neo-liberal economy.



Pretending that philosophy is politics consigns the left to total irrelevance


Pugh, 10 - Senior Academic Fellow, Director ‘The Spaces of Democracy and the Democracy of Space’ network, Department of Geography, School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University (Jonathan, “The Stakes of Radical Politics have Changed: Post-crisis, Relevance and the State” Globalizations March–June 2010, Vol. 7, Nos. 1–2, pp. 289–301)
It is interesting how this journey came about. It does not need to be rehearsed here, for the readers of this specialist journal, that modern radical philosophers like Foucault, Bergson, Sartre, Lacan, Levi-Strauss, and Derrida fervently opposed the external concepts of Plato or Kant, instead preferring more earthly explanations. Just as abstract concepts were not separated or suspended from ordinary existence by such thinkers, and these radical philosophers no longer competed with kings or sages to represent the Ideal society, so for many radicals philosophy has come to be inscribed within ordinary life (Butler, 2005). In turn, acts of deconstruction and exposing governmentality, psycho- and schizo-analysis, have been invested with a great deal of political significance. As Badiou (2005) points out, the practice of such philosophical militants has come to be seen as political intervention in ‘our everyday lives’ (Foucault, 1983, p. xiv). In making such philosophical interventions, consciously or not, this is how many radical intellectuals pre-crisis shifted our understanding of how radical politics should be done. Rather than providing the details of the Ideal city, setting up a vision and grand narrative, there is instead emphasis upon exposing the relations of power that produce truth and knowledge, and our sense of who we are (from the science to the arts and humanities).

Such interventions are part of a broader trend, increasing the significance of the philosophical militant. To take one example of this, walk into many PhD discussions today and we find the academic telling his or her student to discover themselves through focusing upon their ‘positionality’, to be reflective about the ‘spectator-individual’ relationship they are studying, or to consider the regimes of power that are disciplining them and the subjects they are studying. However, despite the sophisticated philosophies that have been developed in these areas, we are often only left with philosophical interventions, new understandings of how desire and power work in a given context, for example. We pick up the student’s PhD, look for their ‘activism’, often only to find that it is often dominated by their philosophical and ethical reflections. At its worse this can turn into narcissism. It can become a form of ‘me-search’ rather than ‘research’.

This illustrates the broader trend discussed in the last section of my paper (and by Marx, 1982; and Chandler, 2009a). This is that many radicals do not so much want to struggle for positions over power (such as the nation state), giving the details of a new vision of society, as they want to develop new sources of knowledge about how that power becomes manifest—and put critique and self-reflection ‘out there’ for debate. For sure, the gaining of new philosophical consciousness, perhaps through experimental and creative practices, opens up new spaces for debate that could possibly lead into a radical politics. But a space for debate and the raising of awareness is not the same as providing a political solution.

A further example illustrates my point. The radical philosopher Isabelle Stengers has been increasingly influential in recent years. In her ‘cosmopolitical proposal’ Stengers (2005, p. 994) however illustrates the movement away from political solutions, when she says:

How can we present a proposal intended not to say what is, or what ought to be, but to provoke thought, a proposal that requires no other verification than the way in which it is able to ‘slow down’ reasoning and create an opportunity to arouse a slightly different awareness of the problems and situations mobilizing us?

This is, once again, radical politics as a philosophical intervention—an attempt to intervene in ordinary life, to shift our awareness. As Stenger’s says, it does not offer a model for how society should be. To repeat something I said earlier, I am absolutely not saying that this means we should turn our back upon the philosophical militant as a force for radical change. What I am saying is that the 2008 crisis brings home the fact that understanding something differently (including yourself), shifting awareness of problems and situations, is not the same as producing political instruments for change.

To take another example of this, the World Social Forum (WSF) is certainly an important opposition to neo-liberalism, much celebrated by certain parts of the radical Left. Of course it does important political work in many areas (Marcuse, 2005; Ko¨hler, 2005). But here I am concerned with how the WSF also tends to illustrate the ascendancy of radical philosophy as radical politics. This perhaps reflects its status as a forum. As such, the WSF is more about doing the vital job of changing people’s perspective of the world, about making us stop and think about neo-liberalism, Rwanda, and the USA in different ways, through introducing new critical theory and ontology into our vocabularies. It is a place where different people can share experiences, transforming their understanding of the world.

Launched in 2001, at Porto Allegre in Brazil, the WSF has become an annual event. In 2005, 155,000 people attended, and 19 key participants issued the Porto Allegre Manifesto. This said: many progressive people ask themselves: what can we do about what is happening in the world? What can we do in the face of events such as the Rwanda massacre, the hole in the ozone layer, or American interventionism? The answer may seem disappointing: nothing. Because this ensemble of facts that is called ‘the world’ is a construction aimed at the spectator-individual and not to the person in situation. In other words, such a world does not exist outside the discursive presuppositions that constitute it. Hence, we cannot accept such a world without accepting at the same time its presuppositions, without occupying the place of the receiver or spectator-individual. (Manifesto of the Malgre´ Tout Collective, 1995)

The well-known tension within the forum is whether it should seek to influence state policy, or simply be a forum for analysing the ‘ensemble of facts’. Indeed, the Malgre´ Tout, which in September 1995 included radicals such as Alain Badiou, Etienne Balibar, Michael Lo¨wy, and Miguel Benasayag, think that the Left has been ‘corroded by a complete devotion to influencing government policy’ (Manifesto of the Malgre´ Tout Collective, 1995). This set the wrong tone. For 13 years later the actions of the state, not theWSF, have receivedmore attention from most people. In continuing to make this point, it is perhaps helpful to be reminded that Gilles Deleuze also seemed to believe that the stakes of philosophy and politics are different (Reid, unpublished). Philosophy seeks to understand the world. Politics reveals the stakes that people have in a given situation. Pre-crisis, many from the World Social Forum, for example, politicised Deleuze’s ontology of deterritorialisation to justify a certain rejection of the state. There is of course nothing wrong with this per se. Philosophy should be politicised. But Deleuze was clear that we should take the stakes of politics on their own terms when doing so. By saying this I therefore link back to the first point of my essay. Following an ethos of radicalism as withdrawal from the state for a number of decades, many tried to influence the radical Left to move in a particular direction. Tragically, it has therefore not connected with how the stakes of radical politics have changed. Hutton (2009, p. 297) is correct to say that ‘there is a new recognition that states, government and public really matter’. However, since Hutton made this statement I do not think the public matter because the masses are making political demands from the state. This is not how the stakes of radical politics have changed. But precisely because the state is doing incredibly radical things, drawing upon resources of the public, and the public are letting them get away with it. While I am often sympathetic to it as a tool, philosophical critique will only get the Left so far here.




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