Verbatim Mac

AT

AT: Cap Good

Viewing capitalism as good or inevitable is violent and forecloses possibilities for change

Ebert 96 (Teresa, Professor of Humanities at the College of Arts and Sciences at the University at Albany who specializes in Critical and Cultural Theory, Feminist Critique, Marxist Theory and Globalization Theory, “Towards A Red Feminism” https://www.solidarity-us.org/node/2309)//meb

However, most ludic socialist feminists have moved a long way from the struggle to end capitalism. In fact, much contemporary feminism has reached an impasse in which it cannot think the future of humanity outside of capitalism. The empowerment of women is now conceived as possible only by embracing capitalism--by accepting and working within the system rather than transforming it. This is one of the more disturbing aspects of Gayatri Spivak's interview on transnational resistance. Not only does she seem to readily accept "capitalism with a small `d' development" (5)--that is indigenous, low growth capitalism in the Southern theater, a version of Shiva and Mies' "subsistence perspective"--but she repeatedly suggests a form of "enlightened benevolent" giving on the part of capitalist countries of the North. In other words, this ludic socialist, who is not quite antisocialist, becomes preoccupied with what she calls the "unfinishable tug-of-war" between "taking and giving," which "relates to the ethical." (14) Ethics, global philanthropy, becomes the social policy of transnational feminism not only for Spivak but also for many NGOs. Even more common is the reification of capitalism as "market economy," as do Mies and Shiva, in which consumption becomes the main arena of change. There is something of a North/South divide, however, around the "politics of consumption." In the North, as George Yudice points out in his "Civil Society, Consumption and Governmentality," consumption is more an articulation of desires and aspirations; whereas in the South, especially as formulated by NGOs, there is advocacy of a global citizenry of restrained consumption. This call for "voluntary simplicity and consumer liberation," at the core of Mies and Shiva's localizing politics, is a moralistic and anti-historical injunction: liberation from consumption rather than a liberation of desires through consumption. As Mies argues, "the only alternative" to "unending growth and profit" of the "world market system" is "a deliberate and drastic change of lifestyle, a reduction of consumption and a radical change in the North's consumer patterns." (62) This program is not very different from Republican efforts to solve the problem of teen-age pregnancy (which is an economic issue) by moralistic "family values" lectures and injunctions for sexual abstinence. This is social change as volunteerism: "Just say No." It does little, if anything, to radically intervene in the structures of exploitation of capitalism. There are clearly new aspects to late capitalism, which increasingly tries to secure its fundamental relations of profit by deconstructing the state and setting up, in place of the state, what might be regarded as a global civil society. This global civil society is itself mapped out in terms of NGOs, which are used in many ways to secure the interests of global capitalism by displacing class and marginalizing economic policy and practices by sheer entrepreneurship and the free market. It may be necessary to make a distinction here between globalism--which is the privileged term in contemporary left theory--and internationalism, which is the Marxist notion. By emphasizing globalism, contemporary transnational feminism deconstructs the state and establishes a transnational order based on culture--at the center of which is the matter of consumption. This, in other words, is globalism in which transnationality is achieved by the fact that a clerk in Hong Kong listens to the same music and enjoys the same jeans and "GAP clothes" as a teacher in Rumania or a London teenager.

AT: Essentialist

Their act of determining whether or not we’re essentialist blurs class lines and severs the relationship between the local and the global

Ebert 5 (Teresa, Professor of Humanities at the College of Arts and Sciences at the University at Albany who specializes in Critical and Cultural Theory, Feminist Critique, Marxist Theory and Globalization Theory, “Rematerializing Feminism” http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/40404228.pdf)//meb

Essentialism and Contemporary Cultural Theory The move to put essentialism and anti-essentialism at the center of contemporary cultural theory is similar to the move that I described in my discussion of ideology. It is a move to translate social struggle and its materialist understanding into epistemology. Gayatri Spivak's objection is not so much an objection to whether one should, accord- ing to Laclau and Mouffe, be always anti-essentialist as it is an objec- tion to the very logic of such a position. To translate social struggle - which is always over surplus labor - into epistemology is to reit- erate a Hegelian move, at the core of which is the explanation of history by ideas rather than by labor. Therefore, any materialist theory that insists on the primacy of labor over ideas, the primacy of mate- riality over spectrality, is bound to be seen by postmodern theory as essentialist. To be essentialist it seems, therefore, becomes necessary if one believes that a cultural theory must be rooted, in the final in- stance, in making sense of human labor. I am, of course, not saying that cultural theory should end here. What I am saying is that cul- tural theory must always attend to this fundamental human practice, which is the practice of transforming the world through labor. Cul- tural theory accounts for the way this practice is mediated through innumerable cultural series. To insist that such an accounting should always already be anti-essentialist - that is, to always only deal with specific situationalist practices - is to reify micropolitics and, as I have already described, to cut off the relation between micropolitics and its underlying global logic of production. To put it another way, the post- modern debate on essentialism/anti-essentialism is a debate that even- tually aims at severing the relation between the local and the global by positing the global as an essentialist abstraction. This blurs class lines and puts in place of class itself a series of fragmented, seemingly au- tonomous identities (race, gender, sexuality) - it marginalizes human solidarity, which is based on collective labor practices.