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1

Civil rights rely on a very individualistic notion of the subject. This is the underpinning of capitalismMollow 4 writes1

Treating disagreements about identity politics in terms of a divide between conservatives and progressives, Siebers ignores the ongoing arguments about this topic within the Left. For example, Wendy Brown suggests that "identity politics is partly dependent upon the demise of a critique of capitalism" (59). Thus, while disability scholars and activists are right to insist upon employment accommodations, a more radical analysis would also contest an economic system in which resources are distributed on the basis of the amount and type of work that one does. Only a sustained class analysis can address the reality that, in a capitalist economy, many people with disabilities—as well as some nondisabled people—will never be able to work enough to rise above poverty level, regardless of what workplace accommodations they secure. [9] The limitations of identity politics as a means of social transformation are addressed in Marx's essay, "On the Jewish Question," which is also concerned with the relationship between capitalism and

the rights claims of a minoritized group—European Jews seeking civil rights, or "political emancipation." [10] "Political emancipation," Marx writes, "certainly represents a great progress. It is not,

indeed, the final form of human emancipation, but it is the final form of human emancipation within the framework of the prevailing social order" (35). Civil rights are limited, according to Marx, because they do not "go beyond egoistic man, man as he is, as a member of civil society; that is, an individual separated from the community, withdrawn into himself, wholly preoccupied with his private interest" (43). A parallel might be drawn between Marx's "egoistic man" and the figure of the narcissist as described by Siebers; narcissists, according to Siebers, are accused of "social withdrawal," or "turn[ing] away from society in favor of self-gratification" (TO 40). [11] But whereas Siebers argues that an accusation of narcissism "isolates one member of the community as completely different from everyone else," Marx employs the concept of egoism in a radically different way (TO 48). This can be seen in his discussion of Bruno Bauer's analysis of "the Jewish question," which Marx adduces at the beginning of his article. Bauer accuses the European Jews of egoism, charging them with prioritizing their own liberation over universal human emancipation: "you Jews are egoists if you demand for yourselves, as Jews, a special emancipation. You should work . . . as men, for the emancipation of mankind" (26; emphasis in the original). Bauer's characterization of the Jews as "egoists" functions in much the same way that Siebers claims accusations of narcissism do; that is, Bauer's charge is "designed to isolate the one from the many" (MM 167). Marx, however, rejects Bauer's analysis, emphasizing that "religious narrowness" is by no means confined to Jewish people; the state, and by extension, its citizens, whether Christian, Jewish, or

atheist, are tacitly religious, he argues. This is because the bourgeois subject's freedom is merely theoretical, abstracted from the constrained conditions of his

material life, much as the Christian believer's spiritual elevation depends upon his material debasement. Marx thus uses a concept similar to narcissism to highlight limitations of what might today be called identity politics; but he does so in a way that is distinctly different from the

phenomenon Siebers describes. Rather than isolating one individual or group by describing it as narcissistic, Marx defines all of civil life in modern society as egoistic.

The aff’s blind acceptance of the State encourages complicity in colonialist oppression of Indigenous peoples. Henderson 982

The colonizers argued that the existence of the prerogative treaties in the law of nature and nations had no bearing on the status of Indian nations in international or domestic law. 97 They took the view that Indigenous peoples were “savages” or “barbarians” rather than sovereign nations. They used the ideas of the artificial man-state and law as command to create colonial assemblies and to begin their quest for self-rule and responsible government.

Typically, the colonial ideology arose as resistance to the prerogative treaties entered into by the Crown. Relying on European fears of Indigenous savages living in the state of nature, the colonizers immunized the colonial order from reconstruction by the European homeland by threatening “nihilism.” They stressed the

Hobbesian savagery of Indigenous society in the state of nature rather than the existing compacts

with the The Context of the State of Nature 27imperial Crown. They then used the ideology of the state of nature to justify using brute force and terror to maintain their artificial context, and they used colonial laws to justify the process. Colonial thought ignored the political and legal meaning of the covenants of the treaty commonwealth. Some writers have argued that the historical agreements with Indigenous nations and tribes were mere agreements or contracts, not “treaties,” and as such were respected only out of the honour and generosity of the European sovereign or state. This argument disregards the importance of history and custom in international law and adopts a post hoc colonial and racist theory that is completely inconsistent with the primacy of consensual obligations in international law. Colonial thought used the theory of the state of nature to incapacitate actual state practices in international law. The colonizers then constructed alternative theories and artificial histories to justify colonization. The colonizers circumvented and undermined the principle of treaty commonwealth and reinscribed the state of nature on the

1 Anna Mollow. “Identity Politics and Disability Studies: A Critique of Recent Theory.” Spring 2004. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=mqr;c=mqr;c=mqrarchive;idno=act2080.0043.218;rgn=main;view=text;xc=1;g=mqrg2 “The Context of the State of Nature,” James (Sakej) Youngblood Henderson. 1998.

http://www.ubcpress.ca/books/pdf/chapters/reclaimingind/chap1.pdf

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Indigenous nations. They then created new forms of dominion and oppression. The colonizers created a legal order and

consciousness around the sovereign or state, that great fictitious entity of

Eurocentric thought by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else, especially Indigenous peoples and their resources.

Traditionally, Europeans have dominated and oppressed other peoples under a mandate from God or nature and a notion of sovereignty or rule from above. For example, Judeo-Christian biblical writings are a chronicle of the exploitation of the weak by the more powerful, of a minority ruling a majority because of the majority’s alleged human frailties. Just as the Jewish peoples have endured their oppression, Indigenous peoples have survived the path of their holocaust and the subtle and innovative brutality of modern consciousness. 99 AfroCaribbean psychiatrist Frantz Fanon has defined colonized people as “every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality ... [which] finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country. The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards. He becomes white as he renounces his blackness, his jungle.” 100 The tensions between cultures and languages, the inferiority complex, the assimilative choice are all elements of the subtle brutality of colonization. The evidence

used in justifying colonization was limited, and knowledge that would have undermined the strategy was ignored. Indeed, copious evidence existed that the Indigenous peoples of North America were not savage. 101 The

colonizers manipulated descriptions of Indigenous peoples to show them as “without subordination, law, or form of government,” and there were increasing efforts “to civilize this barbarism, to render it susceptible of laws.” 102 Anthropologist Margaret Hodgen has rejected the concept of the savage and has challenged attempts to identify American savagery with classical antiquity or with older versions of savagery in European thought: “So much is certain: it was not because of the validity of the correspondences cited ... The number of plausible likenesses elicited ... were at best relatively few and usually trivial ... [and] they were offset, and the conclusions derived from them were neutralized, by an overwhelming body of divergences which were seldom mentioned, much less assembled for comparison of relative proportions.” 103 The large kinship confederations to be found in North America were simply disregarded. Political and legal philosophers went so far as to change evidence to conform to their theories. For example, they identified Aboriginal cultures with a lack of progress despite powerful evidence to the contrary. When they did recognize the ability of these cultures to change, they attributed it to Aboriginal imitation of European culture. 104

That’s an additional link to cap—cap is the root of colonialism—best empirical evidence proves it’s a one-way streetMaurice Smiley 9, "Abstract: Root Cause of Colonialism", December 11, mauricesmiley.blogspot.com/2009/12/there-is-little-doubt-that-colonialism.htmlThere is little doubt that colonialism has changed the face of the planet and continues to affect postcolonial societies in a number of different ways. Fusing of cultures, religion, economics, and language are but of few of the results of postcolonialism. Some societies have adapted markedly well while others

have fallen into abject poverty, civil war, social unrest, and in extreme cases extinction. Regardless of the outcomes, this essay

examines the texts we have read throughout the semester in an effort to determine the underlying reason ,or the "why", for colonialism in the first place . The answer is undoubtedly capitalism.¶ In examining colonial Europe, the common thread found in examining the question of why colonialism happened can be seen clearly in Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness", Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart", and V.S. Naipaul's "The Mimic Men". These novels

show how the Europeans used various pretexts for rationalizing the colonization of other countries, in order to pave the way for private enterprise to make money .¶

Looking into more recent history, Ha Jin's story, "After Cowboy Chicken Came to Town" shows how America, a postcolonial society itself, uses capitalism as a means of spreading culture and values to other countries. Future evidence of capitalism's role in colonialism can be examined in the Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age". In "The Diamond Age", we see a future "globalized" world that is controlled by tribes instead of countries. In examining the relationship between the tribes and globalization, we see evidence that the most successful tribes are really technology

corporations who's citizens are members of the corporate culture.¶ Pundits may argue that there were other reasons for colonialism, such as religion , and that cap italism played a secondary role . Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies", Diamond provides evidence through historical facts that the driving force behind colonialism was completely based on cap italism . Further evidence can be found in Juan

Gonzalez's "Harvest Empire" where he explores the history behind Spanish colonialism and provides compelling evidence that colonialism is rooted in capitalism.

3 impacts.

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(a) Resisting capitalism is our ultimate ethical obligation. Status quo modes of thought only serve to legitimize the system. Zizek and Daly 4 write3

For Zizek it is imperative that we cut through this Gordian knot of postmodern protocol and recognize that our ethico-political responsibility is to confront the constitutive violence of today’s global capitalism and its obscene naturalization / anonymization of the millions who are subjugated by it throughout the world. […] [Full text available] In this way, neo-liberal ideology attempts to naturalize capitalism by presenting its outcomes of winning and losing as if they were simply a matter of chance and sound judgment in a neutral market place. Capitalism does indeed create a space for a certain diversity, at least for the central capitalist regions, but it is neither

neutral nor ideal and its price in terms of social exclusion is exorbitant. That is to say, the human cost in terms of inherent global poverty and degraded ‘life-chances’ cannot be calculated within the existing economic rationale and, in consequence, social exclusion remains mystified and nameless (viz. the patronizing reference to the ‘developing world’). And Zizek’s point is that this mystification is magnified through capitalism’s profound capacity to ingest its own excesses and negativity: to redirect (or misdirect) social antagonisms and to absorb them within a culture of differential affirmation.

(b) Capitalism is the root cause of oppression—oppression is a tool of the capitalist class to maintain large profits and undercut solidarity against the systemMyers 9 writes4

Capitalism is a system based on exploitation. For Marxists, this has a precise scientific meaning. Capitalists take for themselves the monetary values created by or belonging to other people — usually workers, but also small farmers and, to varying degrees, small shop owners and nominally independent tradespeople. This value is what their capital consists of. But exploitation does not exhaust the harmful effects that capitalism has on the

rest of the world. Capitalist society also invents many forms of oppression, as well as perpetuating many inherited from earlier forms of social organisation. Oppression is the systematic imposition of inferior conditions of life on particular groups of people. Members of an oppressed group may be discriminated against economically, socially and/or politically. Sometimes oppression has an economic impact; in some way, it increases the capitalists’ ability to exploit. An

obvious example is discrimination against women or against a national or racial minority. The victims of

such discrimination often receive lower wages than other workers, so this oppression adds directly to capitalists’ profits. Capitalists gain a slightly more indirect economic benefit from militarism and war. Two world wars in the 20th century occurred primarily because the capitalists of the major imperialist countries were competing for colonies and semi-colonies, to monopolise the profits from them. Today capitalists are risking making the planet uninhabitable for much of the human race because behaving differently might reduce their profits. Political motives Capitalism also maintains oppressions in which profits are at most a very secondary consideration. The economic benefits that capitalists seek from war and militarism are less significant than their political role. The military forces maintained by imperialist countries like Australia are an ever present threat to the peoples of the underdeveloped countries: “Step too far out of line, don’t do as you’re told, and you’ll have a fight on your hands (in which we hold all the weapons)”. These forces are also the ultimate guarantee of capitalists’ power in their own country: that is, they are intended for

use against their own working people if they get too far “out of line”. Capitalists have to maintain a variety of oppressions because they are a very small minority in any society. If the exploited majority were to act together to put an end to exploitation, they could very easily overcome the capitalists. For this reason, the capitalists have a very strong vested interest in preventing the

exploited majority from getting used to the idea of working together — on almost anything. Oppression has a political function for

capitalism if it sets one section of the exploited against another section. Male union members who think that a woman’s “real” place is at home won’t build a strong union. Parents who are concerned about their children going to school with immigrant children won’t be raising demands on the government to provide better education for everyone. People who think that a neighbouring country’s religion is dangerous to them won’t resist their own government’s militarism. Solidarity Socialism is about human liberation: from exploitation, and from all forms of oppression. There is a parody view — sometimes held by some socialists — that socialists therefore believe that victims of oppression should put off the struggle for their own liberation until “after the revolution”, at which point the new socialist government will put everything right. Such an attitude misses the essential point: we will never escape capitalism without uniting in action the great majority of the working people, who are now mostly

3 Slavoj Zizek and Glyn Daly, Conversations with Zizek, 2004 page 14-164 Allen Myers. “Why capitalism needs oppression.” Direct Action for Socialism in the 21st Century. September 15th, 2009. http://directaction.org.au/issue15/why_capitalism_needs_oppression

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disunited and often at loggerheads with each other because of discrimination and oppression. So fighting for socialism necessarily means fighting to help the oppressed overcome their oppression now, not in some distant future. This is the meaning of “solidarity”: “We are with you because your future is also our future”. Anything else allows the capitalists to continue keeping us divided and unable to consistently confront our real enemy: them.

(c) Humans are species-beings; this is an ontological reason to reject capitalism. Civil rights in a capitalist system will never ensure human dignity, so the aff can’t solve their impacts.Hudson 8 writes5

Though in Agamben’s analysis bare life often seems only negative, an absence or a void, the positive potential in the concept might be more clearly conveyed by placing it in conversation with Marx. In many ways, bare life seems to be the negative iteration of Marx’s early definition of species-being and may provide a clearer understanding of what species-being might become. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Marx distinguishes between human being and mere animal being on the basis of free production: “The animal is immediately identical with its life-activity. It does not distinguish itself from it. It is its life-activity. Man makes his life-activity itself the object of his will and of his consciousness. He has conscious life-activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. Conscious life-activity directly distinguishes man from animal life-activity.”29 Like

Ferry, Marx suggests that self-consciousness allows human beings to separate themselves

from the immediacy of instinct. Yet, in contrast to Ferry’s anti-natural, rootless, and

steadfastly individualistic [hu]man, Marx suggests that human beings are likewise

“species-beings,” characterized by social organization as well as free, conscious production rooted in interaction with nature and with each other. It is because humans can produce freely and consciously, beyond what is immediately necessary for their natural life (the drives of self-preservation and reproduction), that they are different from other animals.30 This conscious activity takes place within the realm of the natural world, for humans act on and transform nature. Species-being is not merely another name for human nature, nor does it simply indicate the biological characteristics that make any animal a member of a species.

Humans are species-beings because they not only produce what is necessary for their

own existence but also because they understand themselves as members of a species, enabling them to produce socially, in concert with one another. They produce not only goods but concepts: species do not “exist” in nature but in the human imagination. That the human being is a species-being is important, because it is clear that the cost of species-being is alienation from nature; the ability to look on nature as the raw material for human creative expression allows for a level of freedom, but it also isolates humanity from the longed-for harmonious unity with the Nature of deep ecology. Alienation from nature is a rupture that cannot be wholeheartedly celebrated; but the result, at least potentially, is the full development of human capacities for creative production beyond the satisfaction of individual needs.31 As in Agamben, Marx suggests that the harmony of the human animal with nature is lost, but in its place is the potential for the universality and fellow feeling of species-being.32 Species-being thus both describes what the human is by definition as a member of the species Homo sapiens and describes the human potential to be something more: a true humanity based in the whole of human society rather than merely its particulars as nations or individuals, and including both the natural and the conceptual life of human beings. This

potential is shaped by social forms. Under capitalism, human beings are alienated not only

from nature but from the potential to reconcile with nature that is the foundation of species-being. Commodities confront us as alien forces rather than as expressions of human creative potential. In producing commodities, the worker also produces the social relations of commodification, under which labor itself is a commodity. The free, creative production that would allow us to become true species-beings becomes the force under which we must labor in order to

live — that which frees us from the unconscious life-activity of the animal world becomes that which enslaves us. Alienated labor under capitalism requires human beings to produce in order to maintain and

reproduce themselves, like animals. The alienation from nature that provides the basis for human freedom is shaped into a

second nature that creates a new realm of necessity and self-preservation. Human beings are pitted against one another in the struggle for survival, producing competition and

antagonism rather than universal freedom. That which is to have distinguished us from animals is obliterated: “For the starving man, it is not the human form of food that exists, but only its abstract being as food; it could just as well be there in its crudest form, and it would be impossible to say wherein this feeding-activity differs from that of animals.”33 We are again captivated by our environment, failing to see it for what it is: a product of human social and economic organization rather than an immutable force. It is capitalism that blurs these boundaries rather than sovereignty. But the reduction of human potential to animal needs is not the worst that faces workers. Man returns to living in a cave, which is now, however, contaminated with the mephitic breath of plague given off by civilization, and which he continues to occupy only precariously, it being for him an alien habitation which can be withdrawn from him any day — a place from which, if he does not pay, he can be thrown out any day. For this mortuary he has to pay. … Light, air, etc. — the simplest animal cleanliness — ceases to be a need for man.34 Marx suggests that capitalism does not merely strip human beings of the capabilities that make them unique in the animal world but denies them even the basic dignity of other animals. At the same time that humans produce commodities and the social conditions of the exchange economy, they produce concepts that bolster these conditions.

Human rights granted by contract with the nation become abstract concepts that have little bearing on the material lives of unfree citizens. The civil liberties promised by the nation are a fiction ; stripping them away is a mere formality when the worker is already little more than bare

5 Laura Hudson. “The Political Animal: Species-Being and Bare Life.” Volume 23, No. 2: History, Subjectivity. Spring 2008. http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/the-political-animal

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life. This state of affairs is an inversion of his previous position; it is now ironically the animal in nature that is more free than the human in “free” society. The formal freedom granted to human beings under liberal democracy leaves them destitute, lacking any recourse to lord or law, and entraps them in a second nature just as driven by the needs of self-preservation as the natural world of animals.

The alternative is to reject the aff’s conception of civil rights in favor of human rights in a socialist system.Capitalism causes inevitable crises, inequality, and dehumanization. Pedagogical spaces are the crucial staging ground for keeping socialism on the horizon.McLaren 4 writes6

For well over two decades we have witnessed the jubilant liberal and conservative pronouncements of the demise of socialism. Concomitantly, history's presumed 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 naïve, 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 people—almost half of the world's population—struggle 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 time—realities 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

6 McLaren, Distinguished Fellow – Critical Studies @ Chapman U and UCLA urban schooling prof, and Scatamburlo-D’Annibale, 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)

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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 today—people of all ‘racial

classifications or identities, all genders and sexual orientations’—the 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 haven’t 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 doesn’t 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) doesn’t 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 silence—a 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 ‘globalization’s’ shiny façade; 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.